Significance of Domain Name (URL)

of the Cognitive Fusion Reactor (ITER-8)

- / -

The web address of this site (the URL) is designed to challenge easy assumptions about this initiative. Use of the prefix "un-" (www.un-iter8.org) may therefore be variously understood as:

• stressing the value of a contrarian approach by also implying the merit of a "negative capability", in contrast to uncritical contemporary emphasis on "positive" approaches -- thereby raising the question of the insights to be gained from a project that is in every sense the contrary of the efforts of ITER to frame the challenge of "energy" in terms of nuclear fusion to the exclusion of other forms of energy, especially those of a psycho-social variety
• highlighting the widespread challenge of dysfunctional forms of "cognitive fusion" -- in a period when premature judgement and groupthink has had disastrous consequences in curtailing the emergence of subtler insight
• introducing a healthy degree of self-mockery as a corrective to unfruitful presumption
• emphasizing the possibility of moving beyond the "iteration" characteristic of repeating behavioural patterns without learning from them
• provocatively implying that the initiative is in some way related to those of the United Nations -- whether or not a United Nations of the future should indeed be specifically associated with some such approach to psycho-social energy
• implying a conventional static form of "union" -- when the intention is rather to favour understandings of union as characterized by continuing emergence from a dynamic process of "flow", a fundamental characteristic in deriving energy from "fusion"

An alternative URL (www.u-iter8.org), associated with this site, makes the point that in a very important sense it is within, or through, the individual that sustainable forms of psycho-social energy must ultimately be derived -- rather than through the collective achievements of technology as currently understood.