Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

[Turtle]

I received a copy of R. Buckminster Fuller's seminal work, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, today by post. In this thread I intend to explore his exploration from cover-to-cover, word-by-word, drawing-by-drawing.
Over my delight to even have a copy, I find the one that came is a first printing hardcover with dust jacket & originally a library book in Belmont California. As best I can tell, the book is no longer in print, but I also see many used copies available online.

If my reading of Homer et al is any indication, this may take a couple of years. Fear not, as all fall biting the dust. ..........

YouTube - Synergetics: Explorations in the...

* online version

[Racoon]

Noice Turtle

Looks good.

I like me some Bucky-balls

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Racoon

Noice Turtle

Looks good.

I like me some Bucky-balls

There will be a 'little' quiz.

Today I received by post, Synergetics 2, the companion work that came out in 1979. Another pleasant surprise as it is also a first printing hardcover from a library.

Notably from Synergetics 2 there is this from Fuller's collaborator:

Originally Posted by E. J. Applewhite

Synergetics 1 & Synergetics 2 are separate volumes only because of their bulk and the chronology of their composition. They in fact comprise a single integral work. ...

Synergetics 1 is 876 pages; Synergetics 2 is 592 pages.

I will post a report on the dust-jacket info in the next day or so.

[Turtle]

The Synergetics 1 dust jacket review by Saturday Review writer Norman Cousins is full of promise that has never materialized. Cousins includes quotes from several luminaries. Pullitzer Prize winning historian Samuel Eliot Morrison predicts Synergetics "Will become one of the classics of science, along with Darwin's The Origin of Species." Sir Arthur C. Clarke says, "It will be a source of endless inspiration and stimulus to those engaged on the most urgent task of our time - the effort to save Spaceship Earth." Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock claims, "Synergetics will surely go down as one of the memorable works of the decade."

The Synergetics 2 dust jacket author is not identified, but gives this synopsis: "Using an inspired combination of geometrical logic and metaphysics from familiar human experience, he invites the reader on a trip through a four-dimensional Universe where concepts as diverse as entropy,Einstein's relativity equations, and the meaning of existence become understandable to the lay reader."

Cleary, Synergetics failed to meet these promises. I believe this is in part due to Fuller's writing style, but also due to an over-estimation of lay-readers. I get the further impression that the professional readers did/do not understand Fuller's geometry because they didn't take the time to study it, and probably more so from having their attention on their own specialty rather than any disdain for Fuller.

Next up, I'll look at the introductions, prefaces, etcetera before we plunge into the guts of Synergetics.

[Turtle]

In persuing the 2 books and comparing to the online version, it looks to me that they are combined in the online format. Even though first published in 1975 & 1979, Synergetics is a compilation of some 50 years of Bucky's work. My copy of Synergetics 2 contains reproductions of some of Fuller's original hand drawings from 1948, and I think that's important to note in putting Synergetics in an historical context.

In regard to the work's dedication, introductions, & prefaces, I find Fuller's own words sufficient to quote, and leave the rest to you other readers.

Originally Posted by Buckminster Fuller: Synergetics: p.xxi

Author's Note on the Rationale for Repetition in This Work
It is the writer's experience that new degrees of comprehension are always and only consequent to ever-renewed review of the spontaneously rearranged inventory of significant factors. This awareness of the processes leading to new degrees of comprehension spontaneously motivates the writer to describe over and over again what-to the careless listener or reader-might seem to be tiresome repetition, but to the successful explorer is known to be essential mustering of operational strategies from which alone new thrusts of comprehension can be successfully accomplished.

To the careless reader seeking only entertainment the repetition will bring about swift disconnect. Those experienced with the writer and motivated by personal experience with mental discoveries-co-experiencing comprehensive breakthroughs with the writer-are not dismayed by the seeming necessity to start all over again inventorying the now seemingly most lucidly relevant.

Universe factors intuitively integrating to attain new perspective and effectively demonstrated logic of new degrees of comprehension that's the point. I have not forgotten that I have talked about these things before. It is part of the personal discipline, no matter how formidable the re-inventorying may seem, to commit myself to that task when inspired by intuitive glimpses of important new relationships-inspired overpoweringly because of the realized human potential of progressive escape from ignorance.

R. Buckminster Fuller's SYNERGETICS

Here again, the link to the cover page of the online version of Synergetics: >>R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics

[Turtle]

Operational Note: I have no schedule planned here, and I likely couldn't keep it if I did. I do plan however to go cover to cover & follow Fuller's directions & order. I am quoting bits I find salient, but I invite you to post on my errors or omissions as you see them, and only request you not skip ahead.

Before we get to the body of the work, Fuller gives a final introduction titled "The Wellspring of Reality". It runs 7 pages in hardcover; xxv to xxxii. Here is the online link, and from that section, I find these following points essential to what follows. >> R. Buckminster Fuller's SYNERGETICS

Originally Posted by Fuller

General systems science discloses the existence of minimum sets of variable factors that uniquely govern each and every system. ...

Originally Posted by Fuller

The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. ...

Originally Posted by Fuller

The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand. ...

Originally Posted by Fuller

But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected-like it or not-life is but a dream. ...

[Michaelangelica]

I am here
connection is a bit slow for video
And user is a bit slow (too much Queensland Rum)

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

I am here
connection is a bit slow for video
And user is a bit slow (too much Queensland Rum)

Welcome & no worries. The video is only me plopping the book down & leafing through it; nothing of the subject there to miss. My previous posts contain links to each section I have read & discussed and you can catch up the reading there.

To clarify my earlier operational note on requesting you-all not skip ahead, I mean only to ask to please not post on a section I have not introduced yet here in the thread. You may of course read ahead as you like or not.

While I could claim a purely altruistic motive for the thread, I am doing this for my own understanding as much as anything. I'm counting on you-all to get at the bits I get wrong or fail to bring forward.

Here's the online version of Synergetics again from the cover page start. Enjoy. >> R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics

[Turtle]

In review:

Leading Fuller's 'Moral of the Work' on page xix, he admonishes "Dare to be naive." I think I've got that covered () and my naivete is on full display in post # 6 by way of the passages I quoted from the 7 page 'Wellspring of Reality'. Naively I thought I could with my bias separate the 'hard' geometry/science from the 'soft' metaphysics, but that is exactly what Fuller explains/demonstrates as erroneous.

Returning to the Wellspring then: pg xxv

Originally Posted by Fuller

There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity. With this objective, we set out on our review of the spectrum of significant experiences and seek therein for the greatest meanings as well as for the family of generalized principles governing the realization of their optimum significance to humanity aboard our Sun circling planet Earth.
...
We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience. Holding within their definition, we define Universe as the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping experiences. An aggregate of finites is finite. Universe is a finite but nonsimultaneously conceptual scenario. ...

One way to amp up your naivete when confronting new information such as this, is to take the approach of not needing to immediately believe what you are sensing, but simply learn it.

Back to the Wellspring, and a core metaphysical generalization that Fuller uses to bridge thinking & geometry, and further assert/demonstrate that there is no divison of 'hard' & 'soft'. >> R. Buckminster Fuller's SYNERGETICS

Originally Posted by Fuller

It follows that the more specialized society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind, which are intuitively beamed toward the brain, there to be received only if the switches are "on." Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles. Again we see how society's perverse fixation on specialization leads to its extinction. We are so specialized that one man discovers empirically how to release the energy of the atom, while another, unbeknownst to him, is ordered by his political factotum to make an atomic bomb by use of the secretly and anonymously published data. That gives much expedient employment, which solves the politician's momentary problem, but requires that the politicians keep on preparing for further warring with other political states to keep their respective peoples employed. It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which humans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life support for all. Thus humanity's specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians. ...

Originally Posted by Fuller

Whatever else life may be, we know it is weightless.

Fuller works his way to that statement, gives it, and works away from it. Whether he says so explicitly here or not, this is a generalized principle an axiom. He combines it with another generalization a few paragraphs later. >>

Originally Posted by Fuller

The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles.

Off I go thens.........

[coberst]

Turtle

Thanks for the heads up. I have checked with my favorite library and they do have a copy of this book. I shall check it out in the next few days and join in.