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Five Dimensional Thinking
Introduction
It may be that our thinking is evolving from two, three or four dimensional thinking to five dimensional thinking. What is meant by that is whenever you see a description or analysis of something divided into say three or four categories, then there may well be a more accurate or complete description if the subject is re-analysed under five categories. Try this: Any space is occupied by one of five states: solid, liquid, gas, nothing (vacuum), or life A good example of this is in sustainable business objectives (bottom lines). It is currently three dimensional - profit, social, environmental (the triple bottom line). Tease out the social bottom line into three - contribution to quality of life, increasing the knowledge pool and contributing to employee development as a person - now you have five. Try looking at any analysis that has been divided up into three subject areas. One might be the common dimensions - length, width, height - are there two more dimensions? (time is considered as the fourth dimension), or a better definition of this subject?
Look at how often five categories appear in analyses of subjects - is this coincidental? You might ask - Why not recategorize them into 7 or any other number? Is this important? A very interesting article on the number five can be found at the link The Figure Five. The article displays an amazing interconnectivity and rationality with the application of the number five. A Summary:
Five is the quintessential number – it appears in all major religions and philosophies around the world in many forms. It permeates nature, math, art, literature and music. The pentagram is a widespread sacred symbols used in Ancient and modern times throughout almost all cultures of the world. The sacred nature of five is attested to by one ancient philosopher who wrote, "All things happen in fives or are divisible by or are multiples of fives. I find the law of fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."
Some examples: The world is made up of five main land masses: Antarctica, Americas, Eurasia, Africa, Australiaand five main water masses: The Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean The five senses - hear, see, feel, touch, taste The hand - look at how the four fingers and thumb are so different from each other yet can achieve so much working together! The big five personality traits The five subtheories of the overall evolutionary theory are as follows: 1. Evolution as such: The world is not constant or recently created but is steadily changing and organisms are changed over time. 2. Common descent: All organisms or species can be traced back to a single origin of life on Earth. 3. Multiplication of species: The great diversification of species can be explained by the geographical isolation of species that gradually evolve into new species. 4. Gradualism: Evolutionary change takes place through the gradual change of populations over extremely long periods of time, not by the sudden appearance of new individuals, species, or types. 5. Natural selection: Evolutionary change comes about by the appearance of an abundant variation of genetic material in each succeeding generation. Those individuals who inherit variations well suited for adapting to a particular environment survive. Principles of Evolutionary Psychology (from Wikipedia) Have a look at the book 'The Five Ages of Man' by Gerald Heard 1963: Main contents: The Psychological Social Story of Man ( the five crises)1. The preindividual (Coconscious man) 2. The protoindividual (Heroic, self assertive man)3. The midindividual (Ascetic, self accusing man)4. The total individual (Humanic, self-sufficient man)5. The postindividual (Leptoid man) Evolutionary psychology is a hybrid discipline that draws insights from modern evolutionary theory, biology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, and paleoarchaeology. The discipline rests on a foundation of core premises. According to David Buss, a prominent researcher in the field, these include:
- Manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms, information processing devices housed in the brain, in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger their activation.
- Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating such complex organic mechanisms.
- Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over deep evolutionary time.
- Selection designed the information processing of many evolved psychological mechanisms to be adaptively influenced by specific classes of information from the environment.
- Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and integrated with each other to produce manifest behavior.
Similarly, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the founders of the field, offer these five foundational principles of evolutionary psychology:
- The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
- Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.
- Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry
- Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.
- Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.[4]
The personal psychology of man (The five ordeals)1. Birth2. Childhood3. Adolescence4. First maturity5. Second maturity The Development of Initiations (The five mysteries)1. Rebirth (Earth)2. Catharsis (Water)3. Inspiration (Air)4. Illumination (Fire)5. Transformation (Electricity) Five Attributes of the Omega Point Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man states that the Omega Point must possess the following five attributes. It is:
- Already existing.
Only thus can the rise of the universe towards higher stages of consciousness be explained.
- Personal – an intellectual being and not an abstract idea.
The complexification of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more personalization, of which human beings are the highest attained form in the universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. Teilhard expressly stated that in the Omega Point, when the universe becomes One, human persons will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. This is because the Omega Point unites creation, and the more it unites, the more the universe complexifies and rises in consciousness. Thus, as God creates the universe evolves towards higher forms of complexity, consciousness, and finally with humans, personality, because God, who is drawing the universe towards Him, is a person. (God is only a person in the sense as it is in yourself - you are God if you feel and are conscious of the needs of all others on the planet)
- Transcendent.
The Omega Point cannot be the result of the universe's final complexification of itself on consciousness. Instead, the Omega Point must exist even before the universe's evolution, because the Omega Point is responsible for the rise of the universe towards more complexity, consciousness and personality. Which essentially means that the Omega Point is outside the framework in which the universe rises, because it is by the attraction of the Omega Point that the universe evolves towards Him.
- Irreversible, that is, attainable.
Plato's Timaeus posits the existence of a fifth element (corresponding to the fifth remaining Platonic solid, the dodecahedron) called quintessence, of which the cosmos itself is made. The five main cultures African (contented), European (inquiring?), Mid Eastern (fatalistic) Eastern (harmonious), Western (dominating) The five emotions - happy, sad, angry, peaceful and fearful The five intelligences social, sexual, physical, mental and emotional The five freedoms move, speak, disagree, emote, think The five justices universal, worldly, societal, human-human, personal Look at the historical significance of the Pentacle, the Pentagram, and the Order of the Eastern Star. The five laws of evolution by natural selection:
1. Evolution occurs. Unlike mathematical species, such as triangles or square, biological species change from one kind to another.
2. Multiplication of species. Species split into daughter species, or bud off different types of decendant.
3. Natural selection. In any generation, the relatively few individuals who survive, owing to a particularly well adapted combination of inherited characteristics, give rise to the next generation; and the combination of characteristics of the surviving subset of the generation may be different from the combination of characteristics of the generation as a whole.
4. Gradualism. Evolutionary change occurs through gradual change of populations. (Note that current discussions of `sudden' or `episodic' evolution refer to periods of time that are certainly `gradual', except by comparison to the even longer time scales that some have presumed.)
5. Common descent. All currently living organisms are descended from a single ancestor.
The two dimensional leap of assumption - cause and effect thinking When something happens (an effect) we look around for a cause or to blame something or someone. This is two dimensional thinking. When we decide what the single cause factor is or who is to blame, quite often we can be wrong or not correct enough. When a systemic failure occurs we are lost, i.e we can not logically pin blame solely on any one thing. Systems (or multi-dimensional) thinking in this context gets away from single cause or blame and looks deeper into causes and effects. Causes and effects are connected by reasons. Can we associate the following? Newton - two dimensionsEinstein - three dimensionsMaxwell - four dimensionsKaluza - five dimensions?
Exerpt from Theodore Kaluza's biography:
Kaluza's ideas involved the introduction of a fifth dimension and, although he has been criticised for introducing this as a purely mathematical idea, his work is important and was explored by others. He says in this paper that his theory possessed:-
... virtually unsurpassed formal unity ... which could not amount to the mere alluring play of a capricious accident.
The unifying feature of this theory was that it unified Einstein's theory of gravitation and Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. As Kaku writes
... this unknown scientist was proposing to combine, in one stroke, the two greatest field theories known to science, Maxwell's and Einstein's, by mixing them in the fifth dimension.
Kaluza is remembered for this in Kaluza-Klein (named after the mathematician Oskar Klein) field theory, which involved field equations in five-dimensional space. The theory, initially a popular topic of research, quickly lost favour with the introduction of quantum mechanics. However have alook at : http://relativity.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrr-2004-2&page=articlesu10.html
Could the fifth dimension be Relativity?
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