¶ Star Events
Index Entry
Star Events:
“Thinking is the consideration of different experiences, inherently separate sets of events, and trying to find out what their relatedness is. Each one is a star. How many stars does it take to develop a geometry of outwardness and inwardness? What is the minimum number of stars to divide the universe into outwardness and inwardness? I find it takes a minimum of four. You can’t do it with three. Four very clearly has an outsideness and an insideness. This is what we call the tetrahedron which has these four stars and these six sets of interrelatedness. This comes in very interestingly in mathematics with the generalization that you don’t have to worry too much about the shape, but the four stars are the minimum which we can really have for an important thought. If I discover only three stars in a thought, there must be at least a fourth star lurking somewhere in the constellation. In fact, I discover that all the number of stars that could possibly be related are always subdivisible by four. The mathematics shows this up very clearly as complexes of tetrahedra. Tetrahedron becomes the minimum thinkable set, the minimum reconsiderable set, and it turns out to be the fundamental increment out of which all thoughts are constructed.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #2, pp.67-68, 2 Jul’62
