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Anthropology at the most fundamental level
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Profile Information
- Hometown:
- Fresno
- About Me:
- Although I am a physicist, at least in my first professional incarnation, I had reasons for becoming interested in why humanity has not yet been able to create durable and socially relevant societies. The main reason for that, as I saw it, is that in contrast to the hard sciences, in the human domain the best we can resort to is “effective objectivity through collective subjectivity”, which is due to the observer/observed conundrum, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. I was not ready, however, to accept this as the final verdict without further thought under the premise that all of Nature is internally consistent and as such subject to potential discovery.
I then developed a new methodology of disciplined inquiry which led me to find a (living) bio-proxy – so named because it yielded Findings at a phenomenological level that held across the spectrum of all organisms, fauna included, and thus, and by default, to humans, each manifesting in a species-specific manner. Observed individual and collective human behavioral variables thus emerged as integral as seen from the bio-proxy frame of reference. That eliminated me as the human observer of the human species, breaking that conundrum, at least for the purposes of my thesis.
One species-independent commonality could be traced to the workings of Entropy as an equilibrium-seeking behavior, and pursuing this line proved to be fertile in terms of the common behavioral driving mechanism. When applied to some basic and known human behavior it held. I then sought to apply this mechanism to define design criteria for social/societal systems. That too turned out to be successful, although in this phase I know that I added my own views, at least at times, and in instances that I can recognize as subjectively ‘contaminated’. This led to the conclusion that such systems can be designed in alignment with fundamental natural driving forces of human behavior and as such potentially lead to more stable designs and outcomes. In essence, public policy can be informed by referring to an objective frame of reference that is integral to all of Life and thus Nature itself rather than referring to unstable mental constructs as they have been throughout human history.
The potential implications of that work are that Anthropology, at its most fundamental level, offers in the human domain the utility that physics now offers us with respect to how we employ the inanimate driving forces of Nature to create the technologies we have become dependent upon. Sociology then, basically, can be seen as concerning itself with the topological consequences of the morphological foundation Anthropology may offer. Perhaps this implies a closer approximation to what Auguste Comte envisioned 150 or-so years ago.
- Area(s) of Training
- other
- Area(s) of Expertise
- Physics, cybernetics
- Most Recent Degree
- MS
- Current Area of Employment
- retired
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