Replying to LO25513 --
Dear Organlearners,
Joy Vatsyayann ("Pixie Delite") <pixie_delite@hotmail.com> writes:
>Not writing in particular to any discussion chain but adding
>an observation from threads every now and then.
>
>I see that a lot of chemsitry and physics is used in a lot of
>the cases and theories present.
>
>But really - can everything be scientifically explained in life?
>Has life really reduced to a tame, monitored event within the
>restrictions and parameters of an experimental environment
>with limits and boundaries. Is it just as easy as mixing water
>with some great chemical? Or is there another dimension as
>it were to what existence is all about?
Greetings Joy,
Thank you for the topic which allowed me both. I hope your own thoughtful
experiment will give you enough to contemplate.
As for me, I will not try to explain life with chemistry or physics. It
will be for me like explaining a chicken in terms of its two legs. But
sometimes I will have to relate some behaviour of the chicken to its the
walking. Avoid speaking of its legs and see how far we will get.
Furthermore, amputate the two legs of a chicken and see what remains for
the chicken to do ;-)
There is also another thing which I want to draw your attention to, again
using the chicken as metaphor. There are some organs connecting the entire
body of the chicken (except the feathers, skin and nails). Two such organs
are the vasculary system and the neurological system. Is it not the same
with our Systems Thinking? Are there not some things spanning the entire
system along all its levels and divisions? What about concepts like
"creativity" and "free energy"?
There is also a third thing which I want to draw your attention to by
using the embriology of the chicken as metaphor. Chickens come by eggs. A
freshly laid agg has few distinctive features. As it is subjected to
breeding conditions, an embrio begins to develop in the egg white. What
was originally plasmodial began to take distinctive features, increasing
in complexity hour after hour. Is it not the same with our Systems
Thinking? Should we freeze the embrio at some stage of its development to
avoid its further complexification? What do we want, a frozen embrio or a
living chicken?
>Is it just me or is it really that obvious that those of us who
>have 'science' backgrounds find it hard to look outside the
>pond just like all british decendents find comfort in finding a
>word in the Oxford (in pommy accent) Dictionary????
I really had to smile at this one. I think I have refered more on our dear
LO-dialogue to dictionaries than all other fellow learners together.
Whether I tell you what I have learned or not, I have to consult the
dictionaries many times a day to find the best possible English word for
what I know either tacitly, or already formally, but articulated in my own
mother tongue Afrikaans. I am not comfortable with English and will never
become comfortable because it is not my mother tongue.
In my youth I actually hated the British people and their language for
what they did to my own people during the British-Boer War (1899-1902). I
will not go into the attrocities of concentration camps and burnt earth
intended to win a war at all costs. I read their language, but I often
despised it like the rest of their culture. Fortunately, God brought peace
to my heart and it helped me to make peace with these immensely
destructive immergences of the past.
>Is explaining the reason why i cry through a mathematical
>and/or physics equilibirum really necessary? It can be done
>but is it necessary.
Can something be necessary without understanding its necessity? I think
not. We may think that food is necessary without needing to understand its
necessity. It shows how mediocre our understanding is. Every year
extremely unfortunate people are born who are refered to as vegetables
because of a lack of compassion. These completely, mentally disabled
people understand nothing. Have we ever looked them in the eyes? Have we
ever gave them a hug? Have we ever connected with such human showing never
any response? They do not even know that they have to eat food to live.
Were it not for some caring people who understand the necessity of food,
they would have died of starvation.
>Remember the usefulness of theory is determined by its
>purpose. If the only purpose it solves is one human showing
>their superiority from the ability to indimidate on the basis of
>extenisve and drowning equational dialogue - one has to hault
>and wonder what is being achieved that is of meaning to all in
>terms of learning. After all that is what we are all here for aren't
>we?
What is the purpose of a theory? Allow me to inform you about my own
understanding. Wholeness is essential to all evolution. Wholeness has the
associativity pattern X*Y*Z to it. Here X, Y and Z are parts of a whole in
the sense that X and X have to commute through Y which can thought of as
the mediator/facilitator/counseler/midwife/mentor/tutor/mouthpiece/...
When I think of a theory (how strange it may seem to you all) it it is in
the sense of associativity pattern
me * theory * rest-of-universe
The theory is a mental image of mine. I use it as a MEDIATOR with which I
commute with the rest of the universe as far as it is possible. I
capitalise the "mediator" because the theory as a MENTAL entity can easily
become rigid as a Mental Model. In that case the theory is not a mediator
any more, but a shield (constraint) which I then use to avoid reality.
The theory is not the only kind of mediator which I make use of. I can
also make use of a model. Another kind of mediator is the metaphor. I
have illustrated its mediation above with the chicken as example. Stories
can also be wonderful mediators under the right conditions. But the most
valuable kind of mediators for myself is what I call the "elementary
sustainers of creativity". The LO-dialogue (thought-exchanging) is one of
five such sustainers which I have managed to identify so far. I have
informed fellow learners during the course of time on them. The LO-dialoue
is the one we we use most frequently on this list. The thoughts which we
exchange with each other as information, mediates each of us with parts of
the rest of the universe.
Your very topic concerns another elementary sustainer, namely
exemplar-exploring.
Like you I am also sensitive to the fact that as a theory or any other
mediator like the dialogue allows us more commuting with the rest of the
universe, the more intimidating that mediator becomes and the more
precarious our own creativity becomes. How will we care for our own
creativity as well as that of fellow learners?
One way is to seek a labile equilibrium (homeostasis or rheostasis) by
forcing a constraint/border between us and the complexity of the mediator.
This is for me the spirit of reductionism. By forcing such a labile
equilibrium, we make it far more difficult, if not impossible, to produce
entropy fast enough so as to reach the edge of chaos where bifurcations
happen. Thus we seriously restrict our creativity when needed to emerge
into novel concepts.
Another way is to manage the very intimidation of the mediator. I have
shared a couple of years ago with fellow learners information on a model
which I self make use of. I call it the Digestor and you will find some
dialogue (sometimes close to the edge of chaos ;-) on it in the
LO-archives. To be able to employ the Digestor to its full advantage, we
need the capacity to make constructive emergences to strengthen ourselves
as well as to make creative collapses once a Digestor has served its
purpose. Yes, the face of intimidation changes as anything else too.
Yesterady it was a lion, today it is a baboon and tomorrow it will be a
snake. (Baboons, apart from being very clever, are also very dangerous
because of their fangs and extrem agility. Many times leopards, one of the
so-called "big five" of African game, have found this out with fatal
surpise.)
>Science is yet another tool to understand what is around
>and within us but not the ONLY tool. The Universe and what
>is will always be superset and science a subset. You know
>why? Because science is nothing but an extrapolation of
>human thought and resolution of the information and signals it
>embibes from around it. Thus it is fundamentally flawed like
>the thought transcribed into communication (from another string
>i replied to recently on communication and language).
Many years ago as a high school teacher I observed a devestating learning
disability among many pupils. It was the Mental Model that "I am a failure
and whatever I do is erronous". The spiritual "free energy" of such
pupils were usually very low so that they had little capacity for learning
and even living. They seldom could learn from their "errors" so as to
improve on a previous attempt untill they got it right. They were
completely addicted to rote learning and even in that they behave
disorientatedly like junkies.
I had to use all my wits to get them going. I created a saying which helped
many of them to get alive again:
. Where we work we will make some errrors, but
. only when all those arrors have been corrected
. will our work finally be done.
However, I was deeply under the impression that this Mental Model
was not something which they created for themselves so as to avoid
learning, but that it crept into their minds unawarely. Two decades later
I took a remarkable book in my hand of the philosopher David Stove
-- "Popper and thereafter". In it he gives a remarkable account of what
he calls "fallibalism" and through brillaint analysis traces back to sir
Karl Popper as the originator of it.
It is one thing to know "fallibalism" and where it has originated, but it
is another thing how to avoid crashing into "fallibalism" and rather
follow the course of spiritual evolution (which includes authentic
learning). The key to maintaining this spiritual evolution is to
understand that whatever is essential to this evolution has to evolve too.
Should anything essential to spiritual evolution have not self reached the
requisite level of complexity, then the spiritual evolution itself will
not shift to the next level of complexity. Wholeness, for example, is
essential to spiritual evolution as especially Jan Smuts, Karl Jung and
David Boehm have pointed out. Thus it means that wholeness has to
complexify too as well as our understanding of wholeness.
>Science is NOT what is out there and around us but our
>interpretation of it and hence only defined within the parameters
>of our limitations. One cannot try to seek the truth by using a
>tool that is limited by our thought in itself.
Perhaps we can compare our mental health with our body health. Food and
excercise are necessary for both. We cannot live on one kind of food when
it does not contain all the essential components of nutrition. And even
should it contain all components in the correct daily requirements, the
monotony of such food will soon make us stop eating.
Science is for me one of the mental foods which I have to take in to keep
myself mentally healthy. It has some essential nutitrion components which
cannot be found elsewhere. It also lack some other essential nutrition
components. Neither the "anorexia on science" nor "obesity on science"
will do me any good.
>Ok. i end this here as i know many will pounce upon
>these like pumas on a hunt. Beware Joy! he he me a
>vewy vewy wassicilly wabbit we is!
>
>What did i have for lunch i wonder. somethings obviously
>ruffled my guts :)
>
>Forgive me for being so forward and nonsensical. But hey
>I am not alone! Acceptance is step one to learning aint it?
I am informing you fellow learners what, how and why it is with me. I do
it on the strength and value of the Learning Organisation. I am not
telling you what, how and why it should be with you. (See "Work and Free
Energy") Should I transgress your spontaneity in such a manner, I care
nothing for your own authentic learning. Yet I have to live with the fact
that people more than often confuse information given by me on my own
knowledge as a judgement on their mentality, rather as some aid to their
own learning, not to accept, but to question.
I often think that this fact is because English is not familiar to me like
my own mother tongue. But the same thing happens when speaking in my far
more familiar mother tongue too. I take consolation from the historical
fact that great teachers who self carefully avoided judgements became the
targets of most severe judgements. This is the cross which every teacher
acting as midwife for authentic learning has to bear.
I myself avoid acceptance as a step to learning. Actually I question
everything as far as I go. For a long time it caused immense anguish in my
religious life too. I come from a religious community in which faith is
considered as accepting articles of faith as facts since their truth
cannot be questioned by any means. After many years God opened my eyes in
Scripture to what has become a most important article of faith to me. I am
invited to question God incessantly so to learn more and more about the
Love. How silly I was for so many years, I thought by myself. As a teacher
I knew through the example set by Job, Socrates, Jesus and many others as
well as the many pupils which I have helped to this insight that
questioning is a most powerful way to learn about any facet of Creation.
What a devastating Mental Model I had that God does not want me to
question the Creator as I am allowed to question Creation.
There are two things which I have learned about questioning itself which
are most helpful to me. The first is that a question never probes the
void. The mere emergence of the question indicates that some part of the
answer is known because this part is used to formulate the question.
Making sure what is known is not simple because it involves all levels of
my spirituality. For example, on the level of knowledge, it involves
experience, intuition (tacit knowledge), expressed knowledge and wisdom.
It needs an exploration into my whole spirituality which requires extreme
honesty with myself. Once I have a fair idea what I knew when I had been
formulating the question, I also have advanced far in answering that
question. I am now deeply under the impression that asking and answering a
question is a profound manifestation of my spiritual evolution.
The second is the inevitable s**t which will hit the fan. Yesterday a
young man (member of this list too) and I had a delightful LO-dialogue of
more than 5 hours. He told me among other things how early in high school
he was often struck by all the s**t whenever his question struck the fan.
I told him how I had experienced the same with mere one advantage. I had
read far more books than him (by the end of high school I have read every
book in all the local libraries and from friends which I could lay may
hands on) since he focussed more on sport than harmonising it with reading
and other activities. Thus I knew by the very vibes which a person was
sending to be self ready for ducking when I asked my question. Sometimes I
ducked too late, but I could not blame any body else than me for not being
prepared enough.
Its most dangerous to ask another person a question, how innocent or
objective that question might be, when that question is also related to a
constraint in the spiritual evolution of that person self. Commands are
almost as dangerous. I think that it is because of the incomplete nature
of questions and commands. I have made some experiments with some people
who write in declarative sentences about incompleteness in the sense of
Goedel and Turing, asking me for my comments As long as I use declarative
sentences things stay relatively calm. It is because declarative sentences
are complete when compared to questions and commands. Also, it is because
people have learned to work with such "complete fragments" -- to avoid
painting the rich picture -- to avoid seeking the context of a declarative
sentence -- to live with mental paratheid as if it is the most natural and
healthy thing to do.
But as soon as I ask a question or make a request which obviously concern
the topic, yet unobtrusively also connects to a constraint or Mental Model
in the person's thinking, it is like the fan chopping and spraying a
question into s**t. Nevertheless, once a spirit of Team Learning has
emerged and thereafter these potentially dangerous questions are asked as
an intregal part of the LO-dialogue, they lose all their danger. For
example, during yesterday's dialogue, I asked this young man some
questions which would have otherwise had been extremely dangerous.
I wonder why people still ask questions when not making sure that they do
it in the safe environment of a Learning Organisation. I wonder why people
still ask questions when not prepared in advance to duck when that
question hits the fan.
But most of all, I do not wonder any more why so many people have stopped
asking questions, whether they are able to duck the s**t when that
question hits the fan or not. Of all kinds of mammals, primates have
evolved the furthest in loosening and emptying the bowels when confronted
by danger like a predator. I have observed several times self how baboons
can do it in a couple of seconds. Some marvelous physiology is operating
here, thinking of all the changes which have to happen in such a short
time. Were it not for a dramatic rise in "entropy production" by way of
adrenalin, little of it would have been possible. There is not a sadder
sight for sore eyes than a leopard sulking away when a baboon answers its
predation (question ;-) with turning its "fan" towards the leopard.
Revulsion is stronger than hunger.
[A rhinocerous can do it too, but it takes several minutes to make the
preparations. Furthemore, it is not a shower, but actually a ray which can
reach a distance of several meters. It can also securely aim the ray at a
target as small as a rabbit ;-) So, whenever anyone encounters a
rhinocerous. I would advise to look for that telling maneuver of the body.
A couple of seconds remain to flee back into a safe distance. Tortoises
can do it too. Since they are so slow moving, they need this kind of
protection. So what about willfully slow learners also?]
Since humans have the capacity to image almost every physical phenomenon
with language, they even managed to image what the primates do to protect
themselves from emminent danger. The sad thing for humans is that
questions have also become dangerous because of the gradual replacement of
authentic learning by rote learning. This replacement leads to a
degeneration of Homo sapiens into Homo ignoro.
Let me share some intimate story with you which only my dear wife knows
of. Whenever as a teacher my midwifery has to lead pupils, students or
even fellow learners through a particular nasty stretch of authentic
learning, my bowel loosen and empty too. It seems as if I cannot free
myself from the primate within me or shut off its genes. Sometimes I have
to get up several times during night to rush for a better place. She
sometimes remember with a smile what happened one night several years ago.
I was under the impression that my students would write a serious test the
next day. So the next day, somewhat bleak of what the primate did to me,
the students informed me that the test was scheduled for the following
week. I had to experience the whole ordeal again -- that was one bad
mistake.
>Joy Vatsyayann
>Bsc Phys.(Hons), BSc Biology (Genetics Major),
>PGDip. Management Systems,
>Masters in Management Systems (current)
Joy, have you ever wondered how much correspondence there are between
genetics and Systems Management? Do the genes (DNA and RNA) of a cell not
manage the cell as a system? Does the management of a cell (as has been
gradually uncovered by science) and the management of a human system have
really nothing in common? Do you like to divide knowledge in fragments and
work with any fragment as a discipline on its own?
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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