It took centuries for people to embrace the zero. Now it’s helping neuroscientists understand how the brain perceives absences
I'm not sure of the original article in which I saw the reference, but I looked it up and read it: "Psychology and Nothing - Recognizing and learning from absence, deletion and nonoccurrence are surprisingly difficult. Animals and people, it seems, accentuate the positive" - a 1991 issue of American Scientist.
This then led me to ask other questions about how we construct our understanding of the world and ourselves, and the role that "absence, deletion and nonoccurrence" plays in both. Who would I be if any number of counterfactuals - things that didn't happen - had actually happened in my life? This is, of course, a common kind of question to ask oneself.
But if scientific psychology was noticing that the brain is wired in various ways relative to nothing, this surely must play a role, and a profound role, in a great deal of our lived experience. And if this is the case, how do nothing, absence, nonoccurrence, etc., show up in history, memory, self-identity, politics and thinking generally?
Just like with master psychological functions like critical thinking, creativity or introspection, if we were habituated to the existence of absences, nothing, and so forth, would this possibly have a transformative affect on our function in the world?
With these kinds of thoughts percolating around my head (and not in any kind of systematic manner), I was then prepared to notice the significance of the work by Otto Laske, a theorist/practitioner of dialectical thought as a tool for analyzing organizations and people.
See his eye-opening Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer, and Measuring Hidden Dimensions: The Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults, 2nd edition. I would include these texts as required reading for progressive leaders.
For example, Laske identifies a fallacy that's no doubt commonplace: the idea that context is identical with what we currently know. This is simply a more specified restatement of the general self-evident observation that our understanding of the world is limited. However, it's amazing how often we tend to forget this in practice, even in contexts in which we think we're being systematic.
Or, there's "the fallacy to suppose that everything in the real world can be described in purely positive terms, that is, disregarding that it is, so to speak with Bhaskar (1993), pervaded by absences, such as potentials that have not yet been seen or materialized, and lies that have not yet been undone." p. 54 in Dialectical Thinking
I'm not familiar enough with the systems thinking literature to evaluate Laske's contribution, but I've personally (FWIW) never encountered another writer that deals as directly with these absences as Laske and how to apply this type of thinking in the real world.
