Ruminations on Context

Surely, if nothing else, the growth and development of information technologies and the social and societal reorganization they have engendered have taught us that some quantum of information neither guarantees that truth has been discovered nor that a lie has been spoken. Bits of information are nothing more than the dots of an image made from halftones.  

Even larger chunks of it are nothing more than shape shifting patterns, illusions that flip, like a Necker cube, from one perspective to another.  An old women or a young one?  A gun or a map of the United States?  Context and perspective, what is figure and what is background, the internal focus of your minds eye, these are what determine how any element of information is interpreted. 

The circumstances of a momentary perception are but a drop in the stream of incoming sensory data.  Add to this the notion that our memory is a huge interconnected and tessellated hierarchy of overlapping patterns — think of those Persian geometric designs on the walls and ceilings of tombs and temples,

or of Escher prints where figure and ground shift and fantastical images are seen that appear to defy gravity or the basics of three dimensionality itself. 

Now, expand these limited examples, scale them up to the size and capacity of an individuals memory, all of their felt experience, all of the boundaries, patterns merged and patterns differentiated, all of this, like the astronomers night sky, available for inspection, the breadth or narrowness of your unconscious mind’s focus a key element in the search for a match, for some recognition of where to look, what contexts, what patterns to hone in on.  Your mind continuously performing an interior galactic search for what is figure, what is ground, …what is meaningful. 

Astrology was one of the earliest known attempts to try and organize the night sky into meaningful aggregates of information.  Symbolic representations of earthly forms such as people and animals where used to connect the dots into patterns.  

Astronomers subsequently recorded the apparent movements of the stars and planets, creating from
these observations a theory of the heavens. First, a theory in which the perspective hinged on seeing everything as if the earth  were at the center, the heavenly objects rotating around it.  

Later, a more heuristic theory evolved which allowed for more accurate predictions of the movements of these heavenly bodies.  This theory placed the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun, in time, was seen in the context of a galaxy of star systems. 

That the sun rises in the eastern sky and sets in the west did not change. But the context in which this information was viewed was essential to its interpretation. Our experience is steeped in the contexts provided to us.  First by our our parents, who themselves interpreted their experience using contexts framed by their parents; and then by the cultures we live in and communicate with,  a history of cultural transmission over distances and across time.  Information not in a vacuum, but embedded within a rich and varied kaleidoscope of contexts.  At the time and place of our birth and throughout our lives, nothing we experience is isolated from, or independent of, context; context which is used to interpret our experience, give it meaning, and create future expectations for our current and future selves.