Two Dimensional Thread Space

More subtle parameters regarding the cognitive significance of the historical event (starvation, climate change, religious conflict, etc) which make the story, as far as our cultural history and evolution of consciousness (CHEC) curriculum is concerned, and its central theme of cultural ecology, are the most important coordinates for our purposes here. So, we are going to overlook domains and geography at this point, and go straight to the subtle parameters: threads and complexity. The latter will be developed shortly.

As threads are very numerous, and we wish to have a simple and intuitive geometric model in which to represent them, we have sought a way to compress the many dimensions of high-fidelity thread space into a low dimensional context. And our simplest and most useful model is one-dimensional: a circle or square, like the zodiac, around which are located four categories of thread, each containing two subcategories of threads, which correspond (in a pedagogical interpretation) to the multiple intelligences of Howard Gardner. This is the fourfold thread model proposed by William Irwin Thompson in his memo of April, 1999.

To this one-dimensional thread model, we have added another subtle parameter of an historic event, complexity, which comes from the mathematical theory of complex dynamical systems. Its intuitive meaning is a measure of the complexity in the dynamics of a complex system -- for example, the number of interacting species in an ecosystem. Its pedagogical interpretation is the difficulty of learning and understanding the event.

The fourfold thread model and the complexity parameter combine as the angular and radial measure of a polar coordinate system. That is, the category (or multiple intelligence) of a thread determines a position around the periphery of a square or circle, let's say clockwise from top-dead-center, and the complexity determines a distance from the center. These coordinates, angle around the periphery and distance from the center, determine a geometric point in a two-dimensional square or circle, which is the representative of the thread in this model.