Ancient Wisdom 4: The Three And Four-Fold Orders

Continuing the Ancient Wisdom series, this talk covers two more tools for learning how to learn: The Three-Fold Order - from "progressive", to "conservative" to "laissez-faire". The Four-Fold Order examples of "spring, summer, autumn, winter" in the Ancient World or "input, process, output, feedback" in modern technology.

Transcript

So the threefold is something that turns up a lot in, And again, These are all just tools in the ancient world. And this is one that a lot of times, Especially in political and social spectra, You see this movement from the, What we call the progressive, The encouragement, The fostering of constructive qualities. You think of a culture that would encourage through offering patents for discoveries or offering prizes for creativity or outlets for creativity. It's encouraging the society and the individuals to say, You know, Foster those constructive elements of ourselves and of the culture. The so-called conservative is either, Is grounding those progressive, But also saying, Okay, We also want to restrain the lesser qualities or things that might be destructive, The individual or the society. While then in a third, The sort of laissez-faire, That French phrase, It means just let it happen. You see that those are qualities that we, We just allow to flow. And so in my everyday life, If I use this threefold order, I'm going to, There's, When I'm mastering discipline, Say, And when I'm trying to understand what's going on, Then what I have to offer people, Then I'm going to say, Okay, I want to develop those constructive qualities. The conservative will restrain the lesser ones, But the laissez-faire will say, And by the way, I have stuff that I don't know how I'm this good at this, But I'm going to just let that happen. In the Federalist, Now called the Federalist Papers, James Madison has a famous quote, If people were angels, I just modified that, If people were angels, No government would be necessary. Well, That's the laissez-faire piece, You know, That there are progressive approaches to the government, There are conservative approaches. And then there's the, If we emphasize the highest qualities which you run into in, Say, Native cultures, Jean Wellfish ran into that in her study of Pawnee, For instance, It was practically, And others ran into that, European travelers coming here with certain indigenous cultures, That they were so focused on cultivating the highest qualities that no governments or laws were necessary there. The fourfold order was kind of made famous by Leibniz in the 16th, 1700s, A German philosopher, And he started talking about input, Process, Output, And feedback. And of course, When we have these self-organizing machines, Like the temperature in this room, Right? So the input is going to be, I come in and set my thermostat, And say I set it to 71, And I came in, It was 66. And then the process starts of heating it up, And says, Okay, It's 68, Is that working? And the output and the feedback said, Nope, We're looking for 71. So keep it going until it moves the temperature of the room up to 71. And this fourfold order was symbolized in the ancient world where you did have four seasons, You didn't have them all places, By the input was spring, New life, So process of summer, Growing that life. The output is autumn, This is reflecting on that, And seeing how that's developed now that it's mature. And then winter, Reflecting on the whole process, And then setting us back up for spring. Well, This idea that we go through things, The easiest way to see it is to say, Let's use this as a tool, Let's use the seasons as a tool, And think about, Say, A relationship, Professional relationship, Romantic relationship, And ask yourself, What was the spring of that? What was the summer of that? What was the autumn of that? And what was the winter of that? And what you notice is your mind describes it much more effectively than if somebody just said, Hey, How'd that relationship go? And so this is what a tool does. You don't need the thing to talk about the relationship, It's not absolutely necessary, But it can be a useful tool if you're thinking, Yeah, This is how it started, That was the spring, And this is when it's heightened in the summer, And then when it started to have this mature in the autumn and in the winter of it. And that can be true for projects or anything. And so people in the ancient world would use it that way. In modern scientific times, It was Planck who pointed this out, Max Planck, The Nobel Prize winner for quantum theory, That what we really need is we need to start with a worldview before we have our hypotheses and our theories, Which then we test and experiment. And that experiment goes back to, What does this mean for my worldview? What Planck was concerned about was people were only doing process to output. I have a theory, I'm experimenting, It proves my theory. No, It doesn't, It can't, Planck said. You have to have a worldview within which it makes sense. You're just gonna have theories fighting with each other all the time, Which was what was happening in new physics, By the way. You get the picture of, I'm not gonna mention who it was, One physicist was, These two physicists were visiting each other and one physicist had a cold, Was lying in bed and trying to recover. And the other was sitting over his bedside saying, Look, My theory is right. Yeah, You should really do this. And the guy would say, Can we talk about this after I feel better? And they're just fighting over these theories. And Planck, Kind of the grandfather of quantum theory, Came in and said, In his famous essay, Where Is Science Going? Said, Look, We have to establish a worldview, A new worldview, And that's used to creative imagination. The reason has no place there. And in this case, It was shifting from a machine to a consciousness worldview. And then our hypotheses and theories will start to make sense. Our experiments will have a bigger context. And then what the experiment tells us is, What does this mean for my worldview? Because in the philosophy of science, What's going on right now is we have this idea, Which is not scientific at all, That I have a theory and my experiment proves the theory. No, It doesn't. That's not the way philosophy of science has worked historically. That's why we have great science, Then we have pathetic science. And any scientist will tell you that. Heisenberg was complaining about it in his books. And you see, If you listen to the Einstein debate, People, You get the same thing. What you have is saying, No, You have to have the philosophical piece of the worldview. And remember, These old scientists, Like Heisenberg said, What we did in our teens was, We walked in the mountains and discussed philosophy, Like Hegel and things like, I don't know about you, But when I was a teenager, I didn't walk in the mountains and discuss Hegel. I was talking with the guys about our girlfriends and sports and sending me, I mean, These guys had this big philosophical and the women too, Had this big philosophical sense and new physics. And so they said, It's a whole philosophy of life, This worldview, And the experiments, The theories and the experiments then develop that worldview, Which is why Heisenberg referred to science as a method of approximation. That's the way our lives are. We keep thinking, I'm trying to prove what's true here. Much easier way to live is use this tool and say, No, I'm expanding my worldview. That's the answer, That's the path.