12:48, Thursday 25 Nov., 2004 Link

Two | The In Our Time research page on Zoroastrianism also gives this quote, from "De Iside et Osiride" (2nd century): Life and the cosmos... are compounded of two opposite principles and of two antithetic powers, one of which leads by a straight path to the right, while the other reverses and bends back. For if nothing comes into being without a cause, and if good could not provide the cause of evil, then nature must contain in itself the creation and origin of evil as well as good.

Hoffmeyer talks about fate and freedom. And there's canalisation/calcification and.. whatever the other one is [that's Delanda?]. It's like push and pull, meshwork and arboreal, digestion/uttering (this is a unfolding/folding pattern: dna to organism to dna, soundwaves to cortex/word to thought). These aren't always the same pairings (more)--they're different according to whether we're looking at timelike or spacelike systems, and how things are historically formed, and so on. But what's common is that they turn into each other, and there are these two, these two forces, wills, that are part of but separate from one another. This is what yin and yang is about: Not that there are two things, one called yin and one called yang, but that there's a meta description: that we always have two tendencies, a yin-role and a yang-role, that these roles are always analogous to yin and yang, and they always become one other. It's a how-it-works understanding as fundamental as entropy, manifesting in all kinds of ways.

Three | In fact, reading the description of Zoroastrianism wills, the aspects of god, again, I can see what people have been getting at, these past millennia.

There's the haecceity, the isness, the Bestund, the standing reserve, that's one thing: the world. This comes into being by some act of revealing or unfolding, or calcification of flow.

Second there are the wills, or the spirits, the patterns of becoming. These are not the lines of flight, but the condensations the lines of flight weave. The aspect of flowering, the aspect of tumbling. The texture, the weave, the grain of the way the world flows; that which buffets us from side-to-side, chance, Murphy's Law, inevitability: god. That which inhabits all, is in us and of us, the emergent properties that are actually somehow separate.

Then there is the transformer, the director, the transistor; the hinge, the difference that makes a difference, the journey, the surface between two insides: the coyote. And the coyote represents not just the human - the chooser - but the knot in the wood, the stone that you trip on, the butterfly that causes the hurricane. The coyote is the kybernetes, the steersman, the gardener.

These are the three, orthogonal to the yin-yang, which is a way of seeing inside each of these three densities and how they interact (the yin-yang is a metawill, one among several). Popper's three worlds of knowledge? More like: The lord, the son, and the holy ghost. The object, sign, interpretant. Time to reevaluate the symbol, index and icon triad as aspects of god, perhaps.