Classification:
[Intellectual Memoir, Economics and Philosophy
BIO026000
PHI000000
PHI019000
BUS069030
PSY008000]
Précis: TITLE
“Thoughtwork;
A Personal History of An Idea”
By
John M Frazier
(220 pages)
Foreword - (15 pages)
[Appendix A
“Dopamine, Connectivity, and Arousal”]
Prologue - (20 pages) (Epiphany)
Part 1 - (50 pages)(Appendix A Applied)
A Mind in Becoming (25 pages)
Intellectual Deprivation (25 pages)
Part 2 - (66 pages)(The Genesis of Idea)
From Book to Book to Book
Foundation (18 pages)
Language and Reality (24 pages)
Analytical Frame (24 pages)
Part 3
A Mind in Being (25 pages)
A Complete Idea for a Theory
(10 pages)
American Linguistic Instrumentalism
(15 pages)
[Appendix B
“American Linguistic Instrumentalism”]
Part 4 (Appendix B Applied)
A Construct Derived (25 pages)
The Robot Political Economy (15 pages)
A Generation or Two Away (10)
[ Appendix C
“Robot Economics”]
Part 5
A Regimen That Gets It Done
(25 pages)
Physical (5 pages)
Intellectual (5 pages)
Creative (5 pages)
Nutritional (5 pages)
Conclusion (5 pages)
Synopsis:
Formative Years -
He was a child of the mountain which was one of the holy mountains of the Apaches. He grew up on its ancient volcanic vents in the foothills near copper mines and smelters fighting the dullness engendered by lead and sulphur in his brain. He read and processed everything in sight, cereal boxes, newspapers, and especially the Encyclopedia Britannica Jr..
The heat was oppressive. The sulphur smoke laid across the hills and gullies like a poisonous fog. The child sat on the floor of the small living room of the frame company house before the black and white television with his All About books scattered around him reading and keeping an eye on the TV, hungry for mental stimulation, desperate to keep his synapses popping against the enervation that followed upon exposure to the noxious fumes.
He lived his boyhood that way beneath the damp air of the swamp cooler, reading in order to survive as a sentient being. His childhood was a scene out of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, sulphur tinted hills, lead behavioral problems and all.
As he matured, he spent time on the family ranch, on the other side of the mountain, away from the smoke and other people's anxiety, detoxing from both and reading the collection of Great Works he found in the ranch house. He spent long summer days between chores and gardening and wrangling perched along the huge limbs of the ancient orange trees in the irrigated orchard, reading Tolstoy, Edgar Allen Poe, Dostoevsky and more.
Then, as a teenager, it was back to town on the upwind side of the smelter, away from the poisonous pall of smoke. He did not question the existence of the smelter, as an aunt, who had grown up in the town during the Depression when the mines were closed, said about the noxious fumes, ‘It smells like food to me’.
He simply assumed that it was the current market price of industrialism.
He was not well served in his individuality by his immediate social surround, understandably, and the bad fit put a chip in his shoulder, understandably. He didn't qualify for major scholarships but a National Merit letter of commendation and a tuition and fees scholarship to Arizona State University set him on his way to a more sophisticated social surround and, with any luck, a better fit, behavioral problems and all.
The Life of the Mind -
The college bookstores were his haunt, Sartre, Camus, Veblen, and Joyce. The college theatre fascinated him, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. His behavioral problems, those were the days of leaded gasoline in the Valley inversion, grew worse. He felt the oppression of information overload, of neurasthenia. He took a year off and went back to Apacheria, helping to stake out control points for a new mine while on a survey crew. He discovered Thoreau and Wordsworth on those wild hills. It was a detox and an education.
He returned to Arizona State, married and now mature, and set to the work of the mind, studying Aristotle's Poetics in multiple translations in a hermeneutic exercise seeking the voice and intent of that towering intellect.
The air was dripping lead still in the early seventies and in his new role as a serious student he incurred another bout of neurasthenia, of information overload. He hired on as a surveyor building the new mine and he was off on the Exercise as he called it. Every mine in Arizona was being expanded and every smelter rebuilt to EPA standards. He didn't mind hard work and he was paid well so it was all very enjoyable, New York strips, Cabernet Sauvignon, piles of sauteed mushrooms and the sports cars, Fiats, Porsches, and Triumphs. It was a time of close horizons as he worked himself out of a job, no thought of children, moving from place to place. He detoxed and healed his brain, playing in the dirt of construction, then committed to the life of the mind, divorced, and went back to college, this time the University of New Mexico with its excellent linguistics department and began to pursue intellectual excellence in the pursuit of original thought.
From book to book to book -
Foundation,
Aristotle - De Anima
The great mind states that there is potential and actuality in all reality.
Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason
This critique implies that the brain is not a blank slate but a heterogeneous mass of a priori structures and writhing connected synapses estimating reality.
Language and Reality,
Claude Shannon - Mathematical Theory of Communication
This theory reduces linguistically to the idea that information is a reduction in uncertainty.
Wolfgang Köhler - Dynamics in Psychology
This discusses the idea that perception reduces to a kaleidoscope of figures and grounds frozen in instants, Gestalts.
Benjamin Lee Whorf - Language, Thought, and Reality
This is a linguistic theory that language influences both the perception and communication of reality.
Analytical Frame,
Thomas S Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
This is a model of Theory, (inspiring) Apparatus, and (generating) Data,
which implies that when the theory changes, the facts change.
René Thom - Structural Stability and Morphogenesis
This treatment of Catastrophe Theory describes fold curves as a continuous model of a discontinuity.
The Idea for a Theory,
I originated a construct from a superficial synthesis of these works as an idea for a theory. American Linguistic Instrumentalism is a construct of a mildly plastic reality defined within rigorous boundaries by use of ordering engines and ‘puzzling’, optimizing surround and fit into holistic gestalts and generating meaning. The mind may or may not work this way but an AI driven robot might well do so.
A Derived Construct,
Robot Economics -
This scheme derived from the application of the theory to hypothesize the use of fees upon robot labor and tariffs upon unregistered robot labor production to maintain aggregate demand and the legitimacy of the value calculus, money.
A Regimen That Works,
The regimen that sustained this decades-long synthesis combines physical maintenance (cycling, outdoor work), intellectual discipline (structured reading protocols), creative output (writing as integration), and strategic stimulation (occasional cigars and espresso, proper nutrition) to achieve maximum effective cognition without excessive burnout.
Author's Biography -
John M. Frazier grew up in Arizona copper country, where lead and sulfur pollution drove him to compulsive reading as cognitive survival. He studied English and Philosophy at Arizona State University, Psychology and Linguistics at the University of New Mexico, and earned a B.S. in Operations Management from Missouri State University (200+ credit hours across disciplines).
For two decades he worked as a construction surveyor throughout the Southwest, an experience that grounded his philosophical work in the practical realities of measurement, optimization, and fit. During this time he pursued independent study in philosophy, linguistics, information theory, and catastrophe theory, integrating disparate disciplines into an original framework.
He writes on philosophy and economics at his blog Thinkerfeller and has published fiction on Kindle Vella. He has a novella, Chances, published on Amazon. Thoughtwork represents four decades of synthesis—from childhood survival reading through sustained intellectual work to the formalization of American Linguistic Instrumentalism and its application to contemporary economic challenges.
He still lives in Arizona.
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