I just came home from a wonderful 17k run. Today is a brillant late summer day, round about 18°C, windy, the light so smooth, birches and beeches gleaming softly, the horizon appearing behind a decent veil of haze.
It’s a very hilly area here around Wiesbaden, Germany. Most people are reluctant to climb up hills, but I love it. I was born and raised in the Austrian Alps. In case of doubt I shall always choose the path up. I rarely meet somebody on this profiled course which is ideal to let the thoughts drift. Of course, my thoughts centred blogging, they tossed and turned the term »modulation«, Harry’s remark to present more analytical data etc….

When I grew up, I learned at school that if you want to define whatsoever thing, be it concrete or abstract, you are never allowed to use the term you would like to define within your definition. Circular closure was forbidden by logic. Later, at the University, I came across the term infinite regress which is a philosophical technical term that refers to the dilemma of circularity. I grew older and I got more and more irritated and uncomfortable with the paradigm of linearity that dominates our Western world. All of us have internalized it in a way that we confound it with the only possible view on reality. I read the well-known book »Goedel, Escher, Bach« by Douglas Hofstadter. The whole book deals with the omnipresent traps of forbidden circularities and the question of how to dissolve this pivotal issue that characterizes occidental philosophy, science and everyday life.
Bertrand Russell the very famous mathematician became desperate by trying to solve this problem in his »principia mathematica«. He failed. Linearity forces you into metaphysics, it forces you to introduce meta-levels if you want to avoid circularity.

The vicious circle, yeah, definitely, it has to drive you crazy. If you cannot accept circular causalities, if you try to dissolve closed loops and feedack situations, one has to despair, go nuts and eventually end up in a nuts house. We live in a cirucular world. Biology is all about circularity and interdependency, and it is biology and medicine who deny the strongest, almost fanatically. Are they afraid to loose solid grounds, as we are afraid to loose our base we securely live on since centuries?

From the day on, when I started to accept circularity and circular interdependency as basic principle of the world’s organization I live in, life became much easier for me. »Vicious circles« became an integral part of reality, and thus, I decided for myself to call them creative circles instead of vicious, for me the better way to find my way around in this world.
I owe this comprehension to three wonderful minds and personalities: Irun Cohen http://www.iruncohen.ws/, Henri Atlan, philosopher and biologist who did great research work on complexity and autopoietic systems, and Heinz von Förster http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm, one of the founders of cybernetics in 30ies of the last century. I have to consider myself lucky to have met them personally.

Our biestmilch universe, how it exists and how it is structured today is partly due to these encounters that tought me so much. If you pay a visit to our site http://www.biestmilch.de/matrix-leben.html then you find yourself in a world that is mostly located beyond linearity and the classical analytical approach of natural science.
This is why biestmilch is so bizarre to many of you. But how else to explain a complex substance in complex world?