Transcending the apparent incoherence of the Sustainable Development Goals

Systemic Coherence of the UNs 17 SDGs as a Global Dream (Part #2)

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Dreamtime? Understood as an influential "global dream", there is a charming irony to the sense in which the SDGs are experienced as disparately remembered elements of a "Dreamtime" -- a coherent hyperreality. The irony lies in the manner in which the Dreamtime of the early peoples of Australia is deprecated from the reality of a conventional perspective. As in that instance, those for whom the "SDG Dreamtime" is significant struggle to relate it to the perspective of those who have "woken up" -- and vice versa. For the "a-woke", the much invoked set of "human values" can also be seen in this light.

Any such framing as a collective dream then merits comparison with other dreams which have variously lost their original coherence, including Communism, Socialism, Nazism, and Capitalism. Are calls by leadership for countries to be "great again" to be seen as evoking variants of this mode? In this light the Great Reset, currently proposed so enthusiastically by some, might well be understood as a new dream. Its articulation is however perceived by many as so nebulous and entangled in conspiracy that it could held to be a a dark dream -- a collective nightmare (Peter Koenig, The WEF's Great Reset: euphemism for a WWIII scenario? Global Research, 27 April 2021; Kevin Smith, Deleting the Reset: the imminent struggle ahead, OffGuardian, 29 April 2021).

How will the SDGs and the Great Reset engage with each other -- as dreams -- given the complicity of the United Nations in both? Could the set of SDGs also be perceived as a nightmare by some? Such an intepretation could wll follow from any focus on the "horse-trading" origins of the SDGs.

Processes? Another way to understand the SDGs as currently experienced is in the light of the so-call "Belgian compromise" in decision-making, as explored from a cybernetic perspective (Principia Cybernetica). Complex issues are settled by conceding something to every party concerned, through an agreement that is usually so complicated that nobody completely understands all its implications. In spite of the apparent inefficiency of these settlements, the compromises do work in practice, because they stop the existing conflicts, and thus allow life to go on without fights or obstructions.

This argument does not focus on the possibility explored in what follows, namely that there are largely unrecognized forces in play which enable forms of coherence essentially beyond conventional understanding. Social cycle theory currently focuses on cycles of 70 to 100 years (Kondratiev wave, Technology life cycle, Hegemonic stability theory). Less evident is their relevance to the rise and fall of empires of the past over even longer periods (Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: perspectives on individual, social, and civilizational change, 1997; Sohail Inayatullah, Epistemes and the Long Term Future, Metafuture, 2002).

The process can also be explored in terms of enantiodromia, namely the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time from a cultural historical perspective (William Irwin Thompson, From Nation to Emanation: Planetary Culture and World Governance, 1982).

Hidden forces? More relevant to this argument is the challenge to the comprehension of the forces in play, as argued by management cybernetician Stafford Beer using an adaptation of Le Chatelier's Principle as applied to social systems):

Reformers, critics of institutions, consultants in innovation, people in short who "want to get something done", often fail to see this point. They cannot understand why their strictures, advice or demands do not result in effective change. They expect either to achieve a measure of success in their own terms or to be flung off the premises. But an ultra-stable system (like a social institution)... has no need to react in either of these ways. It specializes in equilibrial readjustment, which is to the observer a secret form of change requiring no actual alteration in the macro-systemic characteristics that he is trying to do something about. (The cybernetic cytoblast - management itself, Chairman's Address to the International Cybernetic Congress, September 1969)

Rather than any such obstructive counterforce, a reverse effect of significance to emergence and evolution could be hypothesized. This would be readily named as "angelic" -- engendering coherence -- in contrast to the "demonic" forces to which reference is now so frequently made at every level of society. The religious framework aside, these evoke hypotheses regarding psychosocial dynamics of higher dimensionality than are conventionally recognized -- possibly commensurate with the explanations of reality by fundamental physics in terms of 10 to 26 extra dimensions. Any Gaia paradigm could well call for understanding in such terms. Is humanity effectively constrained into coherence by unconscious systemic forces beyond conventional awareness -- through a corollary to Beer's Le Chatelier's Principle?

Psychoanalysis of civilization? As a "collective dream" however, there is the further charm to the possibility that its elusive elements -- as recalled in a waking mode -- invite "interpretation" much as is the practice of psychoanalysis. How might a psychoanalytic approach to global civilization interpret the SDG dream? Aspects of this understanding are explored separately (Dreamables, Deniables, Deliverables and Duende, 2015).

With respect to the 17 SDGs, the argument here is somewhat consistent with the exploration of the "dream" of the renowned theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Throughout his life Pauli was preoccupied with the question of why the fine-structure constant, a dimensionless fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137. This preoccupation gave rise to a long-lasting exploration with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, as has been extensively documented by Arthur I. Miller (137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession, 2010; Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, 2009) and by Remo, F. Roth (Return of the World Soul, Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality [unus mundus], 2012).

Prime number closure? Intended as they are to change the world, it is only a mathematician who could comment on the coherence of a prime number set of 17 SDGs in changing the world -- in the light of the coherence of a 17-fold set of equations held to have had a similar function, as claimed by Ian Stewart (In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 equations that changed the world, 2012).

The quest in what follows is for greater understanding of the coherence of 17-fold patterns. Both Stewart and his colleague Marcus du Sautoy (The Music of the Primes, 2003) note the unsuspected role of the 17-fold "wallpaper group". This is seemingly one of the very rare ways in which the 17-fold set of UN Goals might be recognized as coherent (Anna Nelson, et al, 17 Plane Symmetry Groups; Frank A. Farris. Creating Symmetry: the artful mathematics of wallpaper patterns, 2015).

A second related possibility is the fact that only 17 distinct sets of regular polygons (triangles, squares and hexagons) can be packed in combinations around a point (Counting how many regular polygons combinations can form 360 degrees around a point, Math StackExchange, 2019). Understood as a tesselation, this is otherwise expressed in terms of the 17 possible ways that a pattern can be used to tile a flat surface with a common single vertex. Used separately the three polygons make a total of 3

A third lead to any intuited sense of 17-fold coherence in 4 dimensions is offered in by the 64 convex uniform 4-polytopes of which 5 are polyhedral prisms based on the Platonic solids and 13 are polyhedral prisms based on the Archimedean solids. One is however duplicated with the cubic hyperprism (namely a tesseract), reducing the set to 17.

Neuronal connectivity in the global brain? Seemingly unrelated to the abstractions of mathematics are the results of recent neuroscience research of the Blue Brain Project which indicate the remarkable possibility of cognitive processes taking up even up to 11-dimensional form in the light of emergent neuronal connectivity in the human brain:

For most people, it is a stretch of the imagination to understand the world in four dimensions but a new study has discovered structures in the brain with up to eleven dimensions - ground-breaking work that is beginning to reveal the brain's deepest architectural secrets...The appearance of high-dimensional cavities when the brain is processing information means that the neurons in the network react to stimuli in an extremely organized manner. It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates. (Blue Brain Team Discovers a Multi-Dimensional Universe in Brain Networks, Frontiers Communications in Neuroscience, 12 June 2017) [emphasis added]

As noted above, it can then be argued that intuitively, and without recognizing the fact, that there is a form of resonance between the "global brain" -- however unconscious its operations -- and its external manifestations like the SDGs. However this resonance can then be understood as deriving from the unexplored higher dimensional organization of the SDGs as discussed in what follows.

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