spin a coin with me...

Take a moment to experiment with me. Spin a penny on a wooden surface, such as a table or desktop. Another coin would probably work, but use a penny if you can get your hands on one.

Usually this is accomplished by perching the edges of the coin betwixt thumb and forefinger (of the favored dexterityHand)...and then quickly turning the thumb outward, and finger (in a sort of mimic of a finger-snapping motion) inward while releasing the coin. This would be clockwise movement...at least...with the rightHand.

It’s interesting (meaning secretly useful) that it is often extremely difficult to describe the complex dexterity of hand-and-finger motions in text of any sort. Even person to person, this is and has long remained one of the most difficult things to learn and transmit — this ‘very personal’ knowledge relating to ‘complex integrations of hand and finger movement’. Writing is such a skill, and it is probably amongst our first complex experiences (and trials) with this domain in our own persons. The thing that makes it useful, is that if we can see what was difficult during the many ladder-steps of the cognitive development of our species (hopefully in the correct order of precedence and value simultaneously) we can utilize this perspective to vastly more adeptly understand our tools of understanding — and the dangers and opportunities inherent in their deployment as well as our agreement with them.

But back to the coin. I’m going to presume you can get it to spin, at least a bit. Once you’ve managed to get it to spin, experiment in order to try to produce the longest and most stable standing spin.

While you’re experimenting, watch what happens as the spin ‘declines’ toward its most likely outcome: the coin laying flat against the surface it’s on.

As the coin’s spinRate drops, its spin begins to warp, and thus the ‘pole’ of the spin begins to cycle ever more dramatically toward its lower bound, and (we presume) eventual stillness.

As this proceeds, you are seeing and hearing an example of a kind of scalar phenomenon: the coin’s spin will change speed, duration, and other features in phases that riseGrow in one domain as they shrinkFall in another. This happens in something like a spiral, which is a rounded or perhaps more organic example of a set of scalar leaps. Each ‘ring’ in the spiral would represent ‘a scale’. The addition of hearing to what you are seeing makes this a ‘scalar’ model, since there are two entire domains in which this is occurring, sight and sound, and they are synchronously demonstrating each domain’s expressions — generating a third domain of expression. We could go on...but we’ll stop the loop there for now. Notice that the whole process, regardless of how we divide or direct our perspective — is a single thing. It is not essentially, in itself divisible — though we might agree upon allowing a division between a coin in motion, and a coin not in obvious (local) motion.

As the coin’s momentum and vectors of momentum change, the speed of its spin is also changing. Due to the contact of the coin’s edge and the surface, tones are emitted from the coin (while in motion), and amplified to some degree by the surface. As the spin decays, the baseTone and the harmonics emitted by the coin undergo a series (or smooth set of transitions) of leaps toward higher pitches — in part because more of the edge of the coin is in contact with the table, and the rate of spin/wobble is increasing as the velocity falls.

Try this experiment a few times, and then try it with your eyes closed. Listen to the changing sound as the spin decays toward stasis.

As an aside, I might ask you to wonder a few things about this event — presuming your’re experiencing it with an attentive awareness. Which of you cells is unaffected by the event? Can we really say there is a group or assembly with(in) you — or a scale of participant — which is entirely unperturbed by your experience with the coin and it’s endless connectivities and echoes of reFlection?

Our classical understandings would lead us to believe that all realistically useful observations about this event cease with the cessation of the coin’s movement. We can no longer see or hear anything, and our common logics demand that since no evidence is available, we must generally (and sometimes thoroughly) disregard our speculations on the matter. There is an interesting paradox here, however. This is actually a portion of the human imagination demanding that all other portions be silenced, and that none other than itself shall be authorized. The interesting thing about this is that observation, interpretation, and models of logic or even metaphor cannot be assembled without imagination. Foundationally, all of language, communication and science — all of human ideation — is utterly imaginary.

So bearing this in mind, we might ask what happened to the energy we imparted to the coin, and all of those sounds emitted during spin, and decay. Immediately we realize that in the domains of the extremely tiny — it is going to be exceptionally difficult to imagine the cessation we clearly see evident before us in the (potentially final) stillness of the coin.

But is the coin that rang so musically only moments ago still with(in) and around us? How many participants at how many scales were ‘disturbed’ by the vibration and general connectivity emerging from our coin-spin? How fast is that ‘set of participants (at every possible scale)' growing while we read or think about it?

When will the echoes in the media that the coin was in contact with utterly cease to be present or active through echo of connectivity? At which scale of size should we define cessation? Only the one we are commonly used to? Only those which our scientific instruments can pretend to test? How many scales should we examine? In how many domains?

We begin to see an invitation to further cognitive scalarity, which is really the result of our response to the novelty inherent in the spinning-coin toy we are crafting together. We can see that change and signaling and reception of momentum happen in many domains. We commonly attend the physical to some degree — or at least some shaved portions of it — but what happened to the movement in your mind that was your experience of reception of sound and relation with the coin as it sang or fell? How many ‘particles’ of you were touched, at how many scales, and did they then touch others? Just how significant is this little coin, once we’ve spun it a few times?

The answer is not an answer. It’s an experience — and if you were born human, you were born to seek, explore, and express it — in every possible domain.

With(in) such experience, you will have contact with sentiences so different from anything we understand that there is no record of them outside the annals of what we commonly consider experiential anomaly.

If we can translate what we learn from the spinning of the coin to the realm of our relations with metaphor — we get the opportunity to explore one of our most common and most inaccessible of birthrights: cognitive scalarity — a game of connectivity beyond anything our human stories have accurately conserved.

Games of this nature lead to experiential access a living library older than the Sun. Directly. With nothing more than a ‘way of thinking about things’. This library is more amazing, useful, and powerful than all the knowledge humans and their machines could ever hope to produce or otherwise assemble.

You were born with a library card.

My mission is to see you get to the door, and to insure you meet the librarians — with or without me.

o:O:o

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