Isle of Lyngvi

I call my worldview Pragmatic Phenomenology. Phenomenology is a scientific or analytic approach to reality as embedded in subjective consciousness. A pragmatic philosophy is one that endeavours after functionality or affect rather than truth. Pragmatic Phenomenology then is a self rigorously pursuing subjective functionality. Pragmatic Phenomenology does not seek merely to observe reality from the subjective lens but to adjust and change the subjective experience of reality to ends decided upon by the individual. This approach is justified by its usefulness. That is to say we aren’t looking to see if some believe or approach is ultimately true but rather looking to see if it is justified by its use.

As a Pragmatic philosophy we don’t build a theory and then find the practice. Instead we start in action and refine the practice through what we call theory. Theory arises out of action and informs it. We start our acts of theorizing already engaged in actions to maintain and improve the conditions of our experienced existence. For this purpose the test we apply to information is not whether it is ultimately true but rather are we justified to believe it by its usefulness. If we assume a particular belief are our actions in relation to it successful?

Reality is the result of a process of perception and interpretation. We can never know from our subjectively embedded position what exists as really true. We only know what we perceive, how this affects us and how what we perceive is affected by us. We are only ever in contact with the noemata or targets of mentation. In this context it can be just as useful to alter the noematic contents of our awareness or the noetic process of our awareness as it is to attempt to alter what is normally considered external reality. External reality is experienced as a special sort of mental content.

We have through a process of pragmatic exploration formed a distinction between the physical and the mental but we only ever experience either as mental content. The distinction between external reality and internal experience can not be concluded to be true from this fact but rather that this distinction is useful. The usefulness of this assumption is not necessarily absolute but rather is useful in some applications. A noetic process that does not assume a distinction between internal and external sensations could still be useful and therefore justified for certain situations.

A primary part of this process of exploration is the formation of distinctions. Language is predicated on the formation of distinctions. If you have two different words you are forming a distinction between what those words are used with. Generally this is an indication that you mean the two words refer to different objects in the physical world. Sometimes the two worlds refer to the same object but what has shifted is the connotation. In the case of connotation the distinction is not between the objects but between how you think about the objects.

Connotative differences denote a distinction between different noetic processes. For an example consider the difference between a ‘slut’ and a ‘sexually liberated woman’, both words can be used to refer to the same woman but the distinction is in how we are thinking about or judging that woman. This formation of distinctions in response to experience is theory emerging out of action.

This matter of connotative distinctions crosses over into another meaning of pragmatic, the linguistics subcategory of pragmatics. Pragmatics investigates language’s ability to communicate through implicature and the speaker’s ability to use language to get things done rather than strictly looking at communication as communication. Pragmatics looks at what language is used to accomplish rather than assuming it is always pure communication.

The Phenomenological concept of intentionality is that the processes of mind are pointed at or acting on some mental object. This mental object could be a thought, feeling or sensation that we normally distinguish as external to ourselves. There is no reason to conclude that we can’t point a noetic process at another noetic process. This meta-cognition is a powerful tool of Pragmatic Phenomenology.

The system of distinctions that you have formed in the process of exploration and through education is what Kenneth Burke calls the terministic screen. The terministic screen forms the assumptions that guide our mental processes. Placing the distinctions that form our terministic screen as the target of our intentionality would be a way to quickly and powerfully affect our experiences. Some things are divided only because we think they are and by changing the distinctions you have shifted your ability to act on things. Other times making a distinction allows you to increase your options for dealing with them.

On thing to realize while you examine the distinctions that your terministic screen is made of is that every distinction represents a choice. Every distinction was a choice made for a purpose, a solution to a particular existential challenge. The conditions of that particular choice may no longer be in effect. There may be more sophisticated distinctions that you could use now given your greater experience to pull from in navigating your existence.

Pragmatic Phenomenology is the study of the subjective, the intersubjective and the experiential world from a perspective embedded in subjectivity and in terms of functionality and goal achieving. While the mental frame work of Pragmatic Phenomenology is relatively easy to establish, the actual practice would be a highly personal unfolding. This process of exploration is such that the act of exploration opens up further territory to explore. That is, the start is well known but the end point is individual and possibly unknowable.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke

While I don’t necessarily fall under the aegis of the term pantheist I do tend to see life or intelligence at play all over the place. I tend to posit a kind of emergent intelligence in systems of sufficient complexity. The city itself is certainly complex enough for emergent properties to take on a semblance of intelligence. Additionally traffic takes on this kind of complexity. The different kinds of interacting components in the system of traffic includes cars, the roads, traffic lights, the weather conditions, pedestrians crossing streets, and so forth. Traffic is a system that communicates in terms of speeds and timing. Clearly if Traffic has an awareness it does not think in human terms.

Delays can propagate very quickly through the system. As each car slows earlier in sequence than the one in front of it the car at the end of a line must brake quickest and go slowest. If any car brakes later in sequence than the one in front of it it crashes into it. This slow down tends to be more total. Groups of cars will also tend to clump and group as close together as possible while avoiding impacts and then a gap and another clump.

Reading the traffic system is largely going to be about the behaviour of cars. Looking at the speed they are traveling, looking at the relative density and clumpiness of the traffic flow. Most lights are relatively fixed features ignoring the pedestrian controlled crossing. To start working with Traffic you start by watching it. Find a place where two busy streets interact or maybe where the regular road system meets the highways. Watch it. Watch it at various times of day so that you see varying repeated patterns. Learn to feel the difference between rush hour, weekdays, weekends, and the middle of the night. Find other places to watch traffic from. Look for what stays the same what changes depending on changes in time or location. What you are trying to do is internalize the language of the streets. Don’t try to look for words, traffic may not be speaking at that high of level of complexity. Try to learn how to feel the MOOD of traffic. Not the mood of people in traffic but the mood of the beast itself.

Once you feel like you can read the mood of traffic its time to try to talk to it. In order to talk to it you need to place yourself where you can have an effect on it and read the reaction. My suggestion is a pedestrian controlled traffic light that changes rather quickly. The quicker it changes the closer you can control the timing. As the effect of your triggering the crossing will create delays behind the cars that stop for the light, you can watch for the changes where you are. I do suggest you cross the street if you used the signal. It seems disrespectful to do otherwise and you don’t wish to draw ire from people in the cars you have stopped. Try to vary the timing of your signaling. Spend all day there saying hi. Look for patterns and differences in the effect or response to your signal.

Another way to talk to traffic is to get in a car and enter the system. This allows for much richer signaling on your part than the binary switch of the crosswalk. However this places you as much more subject to the system of traffic. If you have gotten the attention of the traffic dragon, if you have angered the beast this might be a dangerous time for you. My suggestion is to drive around the streets with no direction or schedule in mind. This will allow you to see a wider range of street conditions and frankly if traffic has noticed you, getting to anywhere on time may be difficult. During this time it might be a good idea to use the car only for communicating with traffic and use public transportation if you need to get anywhere.

Up to this point we’ve been acting as if all cars are the same. Common sense tells us of course that they are not. Emergency vehicles are an interesting special case, they have greater effect on traffic conditions than it generally has on them because the law legislates that other vehicles must get out of their way. However, the emergency vehicles can be summoned by traffic when a vehicular collision occurs. Another special case is that of public transit vehicles. They have a set path through the networks of roads and should in general have a consistent effect on the traffic around them and could operate as a system clock to show how much the traffic is slowing down their predictable circuits.

The traffic dragon has millions of little sense organs, they are called drivers. The nervous system of car drivers includes the ability to recognize certain types of vehicles and to discern colours. Try watching traffic for certain colour or colour combinations. The more you watch traffic the more you will see intelligent acts of sortilege. Creations of patterns that you can read and interpret.

The purpose of the foregoing work was to build up an adequate model of traffic behaviour in your brain. Once you have done this there are many other ways to access the traffic entity. An important step to take is to start acting or thinking about traffic as if it is a person or person like. The reason for this is we have much more brain circuitry available when we are thinking about people or people like things than we do if we seem them as inanimate. Asperger’s Syndrome folk may find the other way around easier. For an assistance for reading the mood of the roads, is to after looking at the conditions visualize the face and body language the traffic dragon would be making. In general it will be easier to read the mood of this visualization than the streets themselves. If you have built up an adequate model of traffic operations in your brain, you will find your traffic face to give you very useful information.

Traffic Dragon Image by Ray Carney