But it does give me an idea: Hallelujah Chorus flashmobs in airport security. Do they want to subject you to an enhanced grope-down? Start singing the Hallelujah Chorus and see who joins in…

And they retail for $8,450.00, although you can get a reconditioned pair for about 5k.

But that is only the beginning of the story.

Under the ‘Most Helpful Customer Reviews’, a reviewer named “Whisper” wrote a review which 1,469 of 1,479 people found helpful:

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.

For the rest of his sci-fi epic of satirical cynicism; you need to visit Amazon.

AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable - UST plugs 8' (2.44m) pair

Please do two things:

1) Click whether the review was helpful to you. It certainly was to me – completely transforming my state in a moment’s distraction.

By clicking you will help to maintain it as the top review for the item.

2) Scroll down to the bottom of the product page and there you will see ‘Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed’.

Note that one of the items is: “Male Testicular Exam Model Anatomy by Lake Forest Anatomicals…” please click through the link to maintain its place as well.

Whisper puts his message into a creative and funny form. And who would have thought that fiction could be used as a vehicle for the message “Don’t buy the cable”… well, some of y’all would. What was it Milton Erickson said about his friend John…?

I take my hat off to Whisper and all of those who have made the Amazon negative review into a creative act and a thing of beauty, instead of ugliness or mean-spiritedness.

But that’s not why I hope you’ll look at the promotional video for a film about her: It’s her spirit and her refusal to hate or be embittered that is extraordinary. I’m going to use some squishy, ill-defined words to describe her and I do it because I feel that to speak about “attitudes” or “mind-set” or some other modish psychological language would be demeaning. She is extraordinary and she deserves poetry rather than definition.

"I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times - including my husband, my mother and my beloved son. Yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate."

She doesn’t accomplish this through denial or amnesia (indeed, she is still bright and articulate, self-caring and living an outward-facing life). She does it through her music, and sharing with others. She does it because she knows that despite the attempt to exterminate her and everything she loved; that the only way that evil could win was if she gave in to despair and oppression; that “hatred first eats the soul of the hater”. Despite the horrors and the deaths and the reality of the attempts to utterly exterminate her people; her joy in life, and focus on what is good and beautiful, and her willingness to share, are demonstrations that the evil that created the Holocaust has failed in fulfilling its ultimate desire, beyond genocide, which was to crush the spirit as well as the bodies of those deemed undesirable.

Jewish Europeans bore the greatest portion of the Holocaust, but the exterminations extended to other groups as well. In addition to killing approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population of central Europe[1]; the Nazis systematically exterminated their political opponents, religious objectors (and the Jehovah's Witnesses, specifically), Romani “gypsies”, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war and numerous Soviet and Polish civilians, the physically and mentally impaired. The point here is that the Authoritarian/Totalitarian mindset is not satisfied with control of the body; they want the mind and soul as well. When the jackboot comes down; it is to the head and not the heart. Any difference in body, mind or feeling; any difference must be controlled or crushed but their final satisfaction only occurs when the spirit is degraded and destroyed.

When Alice Herz-Sommer still plays music with joy, or you listen to what she has to say and consider it; it is an on-going victory. She is a demonstration of the indomitability of the human spirit. Conditions could take everything from her; but her spirit is more than intact.

"I have had such a beautiful life. And life is beautiful, love is beautiful, nature and music are beautiful. Everything we experience is a gift, a present we should cherish and pass on to those we love".

Here is the first part of a BBC Radio interview with Alice Herz Sommer made when she was 103 years old.

BBC Radio: Alice Herz Sommer Interview (Part I)

And this was filmed for the Guardian:

Holocaust survivor Alice Hertsommer playing piano

Alice Dancing Under The Gallows - Official Promo

Thanks to my dear friend Carl Silverman for the link to the film promotion. And, while we’re here, Carl and his wife Hillary have a lovely two bedroom gite in Aquitaine, south-western France, near the town of Duras, available for hire… and very reasonably priced it is too, considering all that goes with it. If you want to stay in the French countryside, yards from a beautiful lake, eating organic produce and enjoying the fruits of Bordeaux; get in touch with Carl… tell him I sent you…

http://www.frenchconnections.co.uk/en/accommodation/property/154313?&start_year=2011#availability-calendar

NLP did not emerge from a purple cloud one afternoon wholly-formed and without influence or precedent. Although the discipline itself has gone far from some of its influences; the marks of great men and women are still there. I suppose, for many, the names associated with NLP extend only to the co-creators and a few voices on the internet and, no doubt, many of the philosophical influencers of the discipline would disown the link but there is a considerable list, including: Thomas Kuhn, Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and Ernst von Glasersfeld, amongst many others.

This past weekend, Ernst von Glasersfeld died at the age of 93. He is best known for formulating an approach to epistemology (the study of Knowledge – what “it” is, how it is acquired, and how we know what we know) called Radical Constructivism, with Heinz  von Foerster (also father of Second Order Cybernetics). A short-form explanation is probably best left to von Glasersfeld (“EvG” from now on). Here are the first few paragraphs from his 1989 paper, ‘Constructivism in Education’:

Constructivism is a theory of knowledge with roots in philosophy, psychology, and cybernetics. It asserts two main principles whose application has far-reaching consequences for the study of cognitive development and learning as well as for the practice of teaching, psychotherapy, and interpersonal management in general. The two principles are:

(1) knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject;

(2) the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality.

To accept only the first principle is considered trivial Constructivism by those who accept both, because that principle has been known since Socrates and, without the help of the second, runs into all the perennial problems of Western epistemology.

The present flourishing of Constructivism owes much to physics and the philosophy of science (Hanson, Kuhn, Lakatos, Barnes) and the concomitant interest in the sceptical core of 18th-century empiricism. Constructivism has as yet only an implicit relation with the constructivist approach to the foundations of mathematics (Lorenzen, Brouwer, Heyting).

[…]

Glasersfeld, E. von (1989) Constructivism in Education. In: T. Husen & T. N. Postlethwaite, (ed.) International encyclopedia of education, Supplement Vol. 1. Oxford/New York: Pergamon Press, 162–163.

As EvG notes, point one of his definition is not controversial and generally accepted by the mainstream (it’s almost a truism) but point two is where the fun starts. EvG is suggesting that knowledge is not ‘about’ or ‘of’ a presumed “real world” at all, but expresses arrangements and relationships within our experiential maps and understandings, in order to better adapt to that experience (it’s tough one to get, I know). The phrase “ontological reality” refers to a presumed, objective and fundamental, “out there (somewhere)” reality, which we may or may not be able to know without referring to a subjective experiencer. It’s a big deal because the way in which one argues the toss, creates basic rules for thinking – it influences every other consideration, further down-stream.

“Radical Constructivism does not deny a world beyond our experiential interface, but it denies the possibility of knowing it.”

[…]

“Constructivists must be unwavering agnostics with regard to ‘existence’ because, like Berkeley, they cannot conceive of what that word should mean outside the domain of experience. Whatever may lie beyond experience is inaccessible to human reason. But this is no denial of ontological reality; nor does it deny that artists and mystics may intuitively participate in an ulterior ‘reality’. Constructivism merely holds that such a reality cannot be known rationally. The construction of our experiential reality is never ad lib, but subject to constraints - and in many cases we are unable to decide whether the constraints we meet are due to inconsistencies in our construction or constitute impediments of the unknowable.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Answers

Some critics have tried to class Radical Constructivism as solipsism (one can prove nothing beyond one’s own existence) but EvG explicitly and elegantly refutes both the criticism AND solipsism, repeatedly. In a sense, EvG goes beyond most skeptics and empiricists – he was a kind of super-skeptic without cynicism, but one who was equally skeptical of claims to unquestionable certainty by either mystics or rationalists.

Another simply inappropriate “criticism” is the notion that Radical Constructivism says “anything goes!” Far from it, Radical Constructivism is not relativist nor fake-egalitarian (“everyone’s opinion is equal to anyone elses’ opinion”). von Glasersfeld’s offered the concept of “viability” – how well our concepts work pragmatically in terms of how we relate to the world, others, etc. – “validation” or “invalidation” arise by comparing the ends achieved with intents. In other words, there is knowledge, ideas and concepts that are more viable than others but you have to specify context, and as importantly, its limitations with regards to tangible results. He certainly gave the critics heartburn…

The relevance of this cuts across every activity where we might presume to know what is real, what is factual, what is figurative or imaginary and, specifically, to any activity we might engage in while serving or working with others. The Constructivist viewpoint and EvG’s later Radical Constructivist philosophy influenced the development of NLP. I’ll show you a bit further on a few of the direct links to NLP catechism but, for the moment, let’s take the Constructivist principle out to the level of “fighting words”.

From a constructivist viewpoint, science doesn’t study “things as they really are” but how humans are able to code their experience using certain specific game rules and extensions (theories, instruments, etc.) and, it is a very important activity. Science studies through human minds and bodies, with the tools that human minds and bodies have available or that we create, NOT “what is really out there”; but what humans can do with their experience – it’s the “knowing” of “out there” and the axiomatic presumption of a knowable, objective reality that Constructivists question.

Thus, from a Constructivist viewpoint, no theory, evidence, belief, assertion, etc. exists without context, culture or references. The cultural and funding processes in pursuit of scientific enquiry are impactful and even determining in some cases of what can be studied and how the studies are performed (results cannot be abstracted from processes). Thomas Kuhn pointed to “generational effects” of orthodox denial of new scientific “paradigms” – in other words, “inter-subjective” processes make up a big part of how science is “done” and whether (and when) conclusions are accepted, and not necessarily the “truth” or “validity” of what is presented as evidence. “Science” as a presumed, objective, “out there” and non-subjective method are merely claims – beliefs, if you will – but existing only inter-subjectively. There ain’t no proof (yet) that science studies beyond what a human mind can perceive and fit within schemas which are social in origin, and experiential in nature. As I said… fighting words (for some).

In case anyone gets the wrong idea that EvG was anti-science (he was strongly in the scientific “camp”, as it were); in the video below, he kicks the mystics in the slats (gently), while at the same time, wanting to understand what they are on about:

Introduction to Radical Constructivism

Now, to an NLP link. I first encountered EvG’s work at around the same time I was introduced to NLP in the early 80s. Radical Constructivism caught my attention for its implications for learning and how it occurs and the differences between training, teaching and other forms of education.

Radical Constructivism suggests that knowing is actually doing – the process is where it’s at – as “Knowledge” does not exist outside of individuals and “communication” is not a transmission or transportation of a something from one person into another (cf. Information Theory), but it is evocation of concepts, images, and ideas through experiences, and the concepts, images and ideas are re-constructions or re-presentations and modifications of earlier constructs within the individual.

The emphasis is on “calling out” – my students from the past 10 years will see this within the methods I use. Creation-in-the-moment of significance and discovery of principles, rather than explanations presented as fait accompli; applying principles and discovering results rather than following endless recipes. For me, to turn NLP merely into a series of procedures and procrustean “solutions” is to disable the student and degrade the method – get inside the method and work it from there – that’s one practical implication that von Glasersfeld’s work has had for me.

Ernst von Glasersfeld on teaching and radical constructivism

Anyway, NLPers, does this remind you of anything?:

“Heinz von Foerster had a knack for statements that sounded paradoxical. In fact, they made a lot of sense when they were unpacked. At the very beginning of our joint recollections in “Wie wir uns erfinden”, a book we published together a few years ago, he said for example: “It’s the listener, not the speaker, who determines the meaning of an utterance.”

EvG, The Constructivist View of Communication

Many of the more gnomic utterances in the list of NLP presuppositions that you find in any manual come from somewhere. There are a few that come direct from the writings of Radical Constructivist thinkers.

Here’s one for the more advanced students. In Radical Constructivism, Cause and Effect (statements or implications thereof) tell of the perception of constraints – and are usually presumed to be invariants (for my students, think of this in the context of the Meta Model – Universals | Modal Operators | Cause & Effect). Here von Glasersfeld ups the ante significantly, pushing the search for invariants to the notion of Self (the highlighting is mine):

"As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them.

If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours."

– Ernst von Glasersfeld - p.p.186-7: ‘Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self.’ [1970]

There’s much to think about in his work and, although the going is heavy at times; his work has the capability to change how you think about yourself and the world. But don’t just take my word for it; check his work out for yourself. A good place to start is:

An Introduction to Radical Constructivism

For pretty much all the rest, go to the Radical Constructivism Homepage here.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917 – 12 November 2010); I didn’t get a chance to thank him personally but his work had a formative influence on my thinking. Rest in peace, esteemed teacher.

In discussion with Tom we’ve decided to move the blog to this site and I will give it a bit more NLP focus than in its previous incarnation – but not too much. Some of the coolest things are happening outside of the niche reality of NLP and, in terms of development, I believe one needs to cast the net wide, in order to “seize the possibilities”. Furthermore, it’s by exposure to things that aren’t in our usual realm of activities that we grow. More or less occasionally, I’ll put extended articles about something that may be way off of your radar in the blog – give things a chance, go off-piste once in awhile – you never know; you might find something unexpected that makes a difference to you.

In the private blog, we had very civil conversations, even when we disagreed – everyone was known and there was no hiding behind anonymous handles. My hope is that we can maintain some of that quality in the conversations we have here. I’m not a fan of the idea of every web site being the Wild West – each of us can choose where we want to play and, if we don’t like the “house rules”; we can go somewhere else.

If you have something to add to the conversation, please do. Let’s see if we can make this little web destination a place that’s interesting without being overbearing; a place were everyone comes and goes feeling good. I’ll leave the sheriffing to the webmaster.

Michael