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Old 03-05-2008, 11:18 PM   #23
Erick Mead
 
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Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,619
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Re: Nature of ki

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote: View Post
Erick, I've said this before and I'll say it again.
And miss my point again and again....

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote: View Post
When I did an in-service for the Physical Therapy school of the University of Colorado, we touched on some of these things and no one had any great problem grasping the concepts, even though they are pretty odd. If your suggestion is that those professors of kinesiology, etc., must talk in terms of angular momentum, you're way off base. The only person who seems to be requiring and mandating a certain form of description for these things is you.
You either cannot or will not see what I am trying to accomplish. Of course, kinesiologists do not have to get what you are talking about -- in hands-on terms -- in the terms I am discussing. I never said that, and I don't train that way, either. I think that way, but thinking and training are complements -- not substitutes.

Nor do they have to address it in terms of angular momentum for their purposes, which are far more limited and much more practical in nature. They can leave it to simplistic analogies like vectors, springs or whatever other learning model you present them with to imagine the dynamic. Fine. That's pedagogy -- not physics.

But the concept of Ki aspires (and has done since before the time of Christ) to address physical phenomena in terms that are beyond what kinesiologists deal with, including things that we call heat radiation, sound, force, friction, among many others in our reductive analytical pantheon.

If Ki is a real observation about the universe (and three thousand years of successfuly APPLIED Chinese empirical observation strongly suggests that it is) then it necessarily maps onto our scheme of understanding in a coherent manner -- even if that mapping is a little different that the more common analytical conventions we more typically use to describe the different subsets of the same things. There are many allowable conventions within umbrella of physical description. I am just trying to find the correct or closest convention that fits the shape of Ki as it is used, perceived and described. And in finding that mapping we may be able to end a lot of these POINTLESS rathole debates so as at least agree on the ACTUAL thing we are actually talking about -- in terms that do not depend on how one reads the hanzi, assuming one can.

That is all. Please enjoy the rest of the kinesiology seminar, now in progress.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.