TOP Quarterly Update #15: 23 January 2015

Dear Member

In the initial 30 years of working on the Taxonomy, I valued depth above everything. I felt it was important, or even absolutely essential, that I penetrated deeply into the specialized topic under scrutiny, excluding all else.

That was a how a simple recognition of 5 different forms of purpose then led to finding two higher levels, then forced an analysis of ethical choice, then led to the use of ethical rules, then forced a distinction between spontaneous natural moral institutions and deliberately developed ethical codes, which then took me into how values were realized in society, and then to a classification of organisations. Many years later, these findings enabled the work on politics and paved the way for identifying in detail how values were relevant to producing goodness.

At every stage in that inquiry, I dug ever deeper, found subtle and not so subtle differences that commonly cause confusion, and strove to concentrate on just one topic at a time. I wanted to get an idea as clearly discriminated and as well formulated as humanly possible. The result was extraordinarily granular detail-far beyond what most people normally desire or even what most social science seems to expect.

In the last few years, I have found myself withdrawing from such work. Perhaps it is age. Or laziness. It seems just too hard and too lengthy now for me to master multiple literatures. Whatever the reason, I find myself valuing and striving for breadth. I want to grasp the story of the Taxonomy as a whole.

Current Studies

At present I am working simultaneously on over 20 frameworks. Not out of choice, but due to the nature of the inquiry.

I feel the urge to understand structural hierarchies. This strange and wonderful pattern appears all over the Taxonomy. I have worked on several in depth in different parts of the architecture: there is creativity within the Root Complex (RsH); realizing values in a Primary Hierarchy (PsH6); expectations of employment from a Spiral (PH'1CsH), and organizing management in a Q-expansion (PH'5QsH2).

I decided to combine my inquiry with the initiative to refine names and so started with the 7 Primary Structural Hierarchies. I immediately realized that I had to widen my net and go beyond the 7 Primary Structural Hierarchies themselves to examine the 7 Primary Hierarchies and their Trees which originate the pattern, and also the 7 Trees which operate the pattern. Add it up, toss in the Root set and you get about 25 frameworks. Actually there are more. Recent work has clarified that all Trees exist in two forms: the objective requirement (i.e. what is requisite) for the issue and your personal approach to it.

Some of these frameworks have had an enormous amount of time and effort spent on them, others have had rather little. In any case, I need a rather large wall because it has to have about 50 A4 pages arranged sensibly so as to give me the overview I require.

When I valued depth and specialization, I was preoccupied with accurately representing how things are and naming in a way that aided communication as well as inquiry. I was attempting to tell the truth - the whole truth - and nothing but the truth. Truth was the driving and inspiring ultimate value.

Strangely I found that elements were more straightforwardly named than frameworks, which often resisted easy naming.

Now that I value breadth and am ready to crack the code of the frameworks, I find myself preoccupied with something else: consistency in naming and coherence in the names of related frameworks. For example: All names of primary hierarchies need a similar form, surely. And the name of a Tree that originates a structural hierarchy must surely fit with the name of the Tree that operates it.

Do all the frameworks emerging from a Root Level tell a story that works? Are the names, in the final analysis, beautiful? Beauty has become the driving and inspiring ultimate value.

Of course, it was impossible not to see and marvel in those earlier days that Truth had a strange Beauty. Now it is impossible not to see and marvel that ugly names mean error and clumsiness means wrong thinking. So out of a love of Beauty comes Truth.

Posting Experience-PH4

In the last letter, I told you about my re-working of the PH ’4 Identity Development Approaches. These are now renamed as the PH ’4 Methods for Mental Stabilization and I have made some progress. The first half of the material has already been posted here.

Most of the Approaches required little more than a re-orientation. Only one method was seriously adrift and that was Sensory Existence (L ’1). I had previously described its reality as 'physical' when I should have said 'socio-physical'. I had missed out the importance of regular positive contacts—congratulations, birthday wishes, welcoming, greetings &c—and any excuse for a party or celebration. This is the world of networks, social media, Facebook and Twitter. It had always felt rather alien to me, and now I am starting to understand why.

Very soon I will be posting the TET development which became possible with proper naming. The axes are handling others (X-axis) and handling mental states (Y-axis). The diagonals distinguish 3 methods based on self-assertion from the other 4 based on external confirmation. As you might expect, the various TET comparisons have revealed a range of additional intriguing features and natural pairings of methods.

My next challenge here is to clarify the Spiral-PH'4C. It is some sort of maturational process. However, being part of THEE, it must be a much more thoughtful and determined form of self-development than the maturation visible as children grow up. Simple observation suggests that infant and child development follow the Typology numbering. Yet, as you are aware, the Spiral ordering is quite different. This is strange and presents a puzzle.

Progress on Dualities

The nature of dynamic dualities as found in Trees has been solved. It is clear that it represents the tension between yourself and your environment, social and/or physical. This tension, sometimes rising to overt conflict, is present whenever we attempt to do anything. The particular way this is described naturally looks different in Trees from different topics, but the underlying phenomenon is unmistakable.

What has not yet been solved is: why does this duality fuse in some Centres, but remain distinct in others.

More recently, I had a breakthrough in oscillating dualities following my investigations in the world of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

It seems increasingly probable that the taxonomy lies in, or in close relation to, the PAG, periaqueductal grey matter, which is a midline structure within the midbrain. This is the location of primary process affective centres producing emotional behaviours. Highly specific neural systems have been identified mainly through direct brain stimulation and lesion studies in rodents and other mammals. The adjacent VTA, Ventral Tegmental Area, has been identified as controlling energized and enthusiastic seeking-expectancy behaviour. If VTA outflows are bilaterally damaged, a mammal loses all capacity to do anything and will die without intensive care. I tentatively conjecture that the VTA is the source of Action-RL1 or perhaps of Willed Endeavour generally.

These notions were only possible because I was fortunate to come across the lifetime neuroscience researches of Jaak Panksepp, a rare scientist ready to ascribe and research emotions in animals. The 7 emotion-based instinctual neural systems, as he presents them, appear to be related to the Root Levels. They are especially relevant to my postulated psychosocial pressures which not only drive the Root Levels but are found everywhere in the architecture via taxonomic projections.

Check out this brief informal interview for Prof. Panksepp's personal research story. Then turn to his magisterial books summarizing affective neuroscience, but only if the subject interests you as much as it does me.

I now think the oscillating duality corresponds to the functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres: the right cortex controls odd-numbered elements and the left cortex controls even-numbered elements. Previously, I had rejected such speculations as crude biological reductionism. But not now.

This proposition raises more questions, not least in regard to my midbrain hypothesis above.

It seems to me that integration of the Taxonomy's holistic hierarchies would have a physiological meaning, perhaps akin to perceptual rivalry where slow oscillation is the norm.

In most of the hierarchies, it appears that the oscillation cannot reverse. However, forced reversals of the duality do commonly occur in that basic form: the Primary Hierarchy. This would mean neural transmissions that should go to the right cerebral hemisphere become forcefully diverted to the left hemisphere, and vice versa.

But how does this link to the PAG hypothesis? By some wonderful coincidence, an old colleague of mine, Jack Pettigrew FRS, has concluded in his 2001 paper in Brain and Mind that the slow oscillation of cerebral-cortical dominance in perceptual rivalry is being driven from the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) of the midbrain—which, as noted above, is where Action-RL1 probably lies and right next to the PAG! Can that be just a coincidence? I don't think so.

My plan to conceptualize the Taxonomy as a whole is slowly coming to fruition, helpfully aligning with and partially guided by tentative evolutionary hypotheses. I trust that I will be far enough long by my next Quarterly Letter to tell you about it.

Meanwhile I wish everyone a healthy and enjoyable 2015.

Till next time, take care,

Warren

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