Quora answer: What was your dissertation about?
Emergent Design
Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design
http://about.me/emergentdesign
Schemitization is the projection of an a priori ordering before experience which is a posteriori. Kant thought that we projected Space and Time and the Categories prior to all experience and that is why we thought causality for instance was out there in nature. Causality is a concept we need in order to define Freedom, which we imagine as a-causal. Anyway General Schemas Theory looks at science and art and tries to ferret out all the projected patterns that are a priori. Evidently no one has had this idea before in our tradition. Not sure why. Anyway in my Dissertation I try to use the fact we are schematizing in REM Dreams, Fantasy, Mundane Consciousness, and Hypnogogic Dreams, but in each differently to anchor four points of view that appear in Meta-novels like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind which are Author, Reader, Character, Narrator, and these four are the fundamental viewpoints on any design which is just a prior schematization of something artificial we might seed to create with emergent properties. This is a quick summary. My point above is that it is vision and sound that we use for this at a distance orientation, and that touch, smell and taste are not at a distance in the same way. Smell operates at a distance but it is not orienting. But sound and vision are orienting. Touch is orienting only to the immediate connected environment directly adjacent to the person. Taste is not orienting at all. So if we were to rank the senses in terms of orienting as a characteristic we would see them as follows:
Vision most orienting
Sound
Touch ———– only directly adjacent things
Smell
Taste least orienting
Normal REM like dreams are odd because we feel touch in them, but we are also normally outside our bodies looking on in dreams, and so although we are touching in dreams we are distanced from it. In Hypnogogic Dreams on the other hand we are inside our bodies usually trapped with the vision coming toward us, when we cannot move, and we directly feel the tension between the space we are in and that of the Hypnogogic vision. So in Hypnogogic dreams orientation is very strong, but what comes at us in the vision normally does not actually reach us before we wake up.
In normal consciousness we are engaged in the world completely immersed in it and relating and orienting to actual concrete objects, usually at a distance. In Fantasy, Imagination, we are withdrawn from the world in trance (Objectivity is the inverse of this state, also a fantasy, but that there is a viewpoint on the objects that is absolute, i.e. from the objects themselves.) In fantasy we are focused inwardly, in trance, but schematizing that which we imagine, and disengaged from the objects around us in the mundane world.
In all of these states of consciousness we are schematizing, but from different points of view that show up in the meta-novel as Author, Reader, Character, and Narrator. My argument is that schematization is very deep and consciousness naturally gives us at least four point of view on it as ways we relate to the schematization, and we draw on all four of those in the process of Design, and I call that cooperative borrowing on phenomenological viewpoints a Quadralectic, basing it on the ideas of Hegel from Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit which also has those points of view implicitly within it but where he explicitly develops Dialectics and Trialectics (Work). Peirce develops Hegels ideas of Trialectics into his principles First, Second, Third which is in his philosophy and is the basis for understanding semiotics.
See http://www.quora.com/Why-arent-there-smells-in-dreams/answer/Laszlo-B.-Tamas/comment/579127?__snids__=27394737#comment579270