Replying to LO25868 --
Dear Organlearners,
Greetings to you all,
I quoted Fred Nickols <nickols@att.net> writing:
>>Merry Christmas, At. Read the damn books
>>and tell us what you think.
It was not my intention to let Fred suffer once again for something which
he apologised and which I did not even noticed because of the Merry
Christmas before it. My intention was to bring that word "damn" under the
spotlight of learning.
By the way Rick, I intend to do a Learning Condensate only on the book
Tacit Dimension -- I cannot wait to get that book in my hands again.
The word "damn" probably comes (Funk and Wagnall) from the Latin
"damno"=condemn or "damnum"=loss. As such it seems to have nothing in
common with learning. However, my own mother tongue Afrikaans suggests an
extraordinary connection. I think that Dutch and German also supports this
connection.
Our word for damn is "verdoem" with root "doem". Yet our word for the '
day of condemnation ' is "oordeelsdag" (' day of judgement '). But should
we translate this "oordeelsdag" into English, we would use the word
doomsday! It comes from the OE word "domesdaeg". The first part "domes" of
this composite noun is a noun -- plural -- derived from the adjective
dumb. In fact, we have dumb="dom" for Afrikaans and still speak of a bunch
of dump persons as the "dommes". This dumb="dom" is used for anybody who
cannot learn or did not learn.
It is as if long ago in the ancient Germanic languages the words
"dom"=dumb and "doem"=doom were derived from the same protogermanic root.
A person without learning -- a dumb person -- easily becomes subjected to
destructive immergences -- a doomed person. I have stressed several times
in the past that when judgement enters the dialogue, further learning in
that dialogue usually stops. Now we have a collary from the ancient past
-- dumb and doom go hand in hand. I feel that essential to our humaneness
is our resonsibility to care for the person lacking in learning. Perhaps
the person cannot ever learn because of a serious psychological disorder.
Perhaps something which can be overcome prevents that person to learn.
Whatever the case, should we not care, than our lack of caring is
commiting that dumb person to doom.
Fred, it is most interesting that in the indexes of neither "Meaning" nor
"Personal Knowledge" of Michael Polanyi (MP) the word "training" is taken
up. One would be inclined to offer as reason that MP operates in the UK
culture rather than the US culture. Furthermore, when we look up the word
"learning", it is not even included in the index of "Meaning". Although it
is included in the index of "Personal Knowledge", readings of where it is
used refer almost without exception to "animal learning" (behaviourist
studies) and "child learning"! I was surprised that I did not previously
became aware that he stressed knowledge far more than learning.
The three exceptions are most interesting the following:
Under the heading "The re-interpretation of language" (pp 104 - 117) he describes
his break with the traditional theories of language. On p106 he writes:
. To learn a language or to modify its meaning
. is a tacit, irreversible heuristic feat; it is a
. transformation of our intellectual life, originating
. in our own desire for greater clarity and coherence,
. and yet sustained by the hope of coming by it
. into closer touch with reality.
because of, as he calls it, our "intellectual uneasiness" (p107).
[I have explained many times that "irreversible" and "entropy production"
is one an the same thing. It took an Ilya Prigogine to formalise
(articulate) "irreversibility" in terms of entropy producing force-flux
pairs -- earning him a Nobel Prize! What was tacit to all scientists and
engineers for almost a century since the days of Carnot finally became
articulated during the last years of MP self. This "intellectual
uneasiness" I would now articulate by entropic forces acting in the mind,
as I have done several times in our LO-dialogue.]
On 203 he writes that conviviality or the tacit sharing of knowing underlies
every single act of articulate communication. He then eloborates on this
communication, writing on p206 the following (which also has been offered
to our dialogue by Ray Evans Harrel not so long ago):
. All arts are learned by intelligently imitating the way
. they are practised by other persons in whom the
. learner places his confidence. To know a language
. is an art, carried by the tacit judgements and the
. practice of unspecified skills.
He writes further on p206:
. A true communication will take place if, and only if,
. these combined assumptions of authority and trust
. are in fact justified.
But how to justify them? Somewhere else (I could not find that text again) he
writes that these tacit judgements used in articulations are based on the
"maxims or rules of art".
[Please notice that I have stressed in the past on our LO-dialgue that
confidence in the teacher (rather than the teacher sponsoring a safe
learning environment and inviting the learner to even question the
teacher) as well as habitual imitation (rather than the teacher knowing by
doing and also acting as a catalyst) are detrimental to what I consider as
authentic learning. Unjustified confidence and habits rather result in
rote learning. Does MP suggest that authority and trust are justified by
the tacit "maxims or rules of art"?]
On p369 under the heading "Learning and Induction" he defines learning
specifically as knowledge gained by experience. He begins with the
empirics of animal learning and then proceeds to learning machines which
employ these empirical findings by means of inductive logic. He then
criticises this development as highly ambiguous and a clumsy imitation of
the actual processes involved. He identifies the cause for this ambiguity
as the strive towards an impersonal, objective practice of learning
(training). He then proceeds to write under the heading "Superior
Knowledge" involving the passions and ideals of humankind formulated by
its great men and embodied in its tradition the following on p377:
. Such is man's relation to his ideals: he can
. know them only by freely following them.
What does this "freely following them" mean? Surprisingly, MP is tacit on
it in "Personal Knowledge" (1957). However, at then an advanced aged in
"Meaning" (1969) he spends the entire last chapter of it on "The Free
Society". It is as if he planned the entire series of lectures (on which
the book is based) to culminate in this most extraordinary chapter. He
mentions (p200) that there are myriads of problems, knotty difficultires,
in maintaining the "enclaves of free activity in society". He stresses
that the term "freedom" is ambigious. Nevertheless, he then cautiously
begin to paint a rich picture of freedom as something complex, involving
things like:
* abscence of external restraint,
* liberation from personal ends,
* free contribution to the tasks of society,
* self-assertion,
* unforced devotion to spiritual values as truth,
. justice and beauty,
* the spontaneous development of ordered wholes
. rather than corporate orders,
* plan and control in terms of present (and not past
. or future) knowledge,
* persuasion rather than "brainwashing" so as to
. foster a self-organising change of mind
* allowing for complementarities like liberal and
. conservative,
* learn to understand free society and thus
. tolerate rather than destroy it.
Fred, I have enjoyed this last chapter very much. (I have not read
"Meaning" before.) Three things in it have surprised me. Firstly, he is
painting a rich picture on "free society" rather than trying to define it
in a traditional manner. Secondly, many of the facets of "free society"
which he mentions, I have also mentioned in my "Free Energy and Work --
The Dance of LEP on LEC". The rest I can easily work into that
contribution. Thirdly, except for one minor note, he is completely silent
on "entropy production" (i.e irreversibility, dissipation). But he is not
silent on what he calls "minimization of potential energy", something
which we can learn from Quantum Mechanics.
He begins to write on this "minimization of potential energy" from p172. He
begins with the following delightful sentence:
. The fact is, therefor, that every living organism is a
. meaningful organisation of meaningless matter and
. that it is very highly improbable that these meaningful
. organisations should all have occured entirely by
. chance.
On p175 he suggest a "gradient of meaning" and "gradient of shapes" to be
operative just like the gradient operative in the minimization of
potential energy. On p179 he writes that science does not have any reason
why a "meaningful world" cannot exist. But conversely, prerequisite for
scientists to talk about a "meaningful world", they need $a$ language to
do so. He stresses the indefinite "a" rather than the definite "the" by
giving several examples. He then concludes that this particular chapter is
not to convert someone metaphorically to a particular dogma, but
. "....directed towards unstopping our ears
. so that we may hear a liturgical summons
. should one ever come our way."
O how I love this sentence, even with the word "liturgical" in it. Its now
used according to its once Latin meaning of a "recipe for organising a
public gathering". But the Romans took that word from the Greeks to give
it a meaning according to their own culture, namely that of a prescribed
administration.
The older Greek word was "leitourgia" which is made up from
"leitos"=-public and "ergon"=work. This word was used by the Greeks
especially in the sense of "rendering any public service for the sole
benefit of the public". The writer of the book Hebrews in the New
Testament who knew Greek much better than Paul or even Luke, uses this
word (or derivations from it) several times in his complex Greek prose:
. Heb 1:7, 1:14, 8:2, 8:6, 9:21, 10:11
Luke uses it in :
. Luk 1:23, Act 13:2
and Paul uses it in
. Rom 13:6, 15:2, 15:16, 2Col 2:17, Phi 2:25, 2:30
It seems for me from the context of this chapter that Michael Polanyi used
this word in its deeper meaning like the writer of the book Hebrews.
I am perplexed by one thing. MP was not only a philosopher, but also by
profession a "physical chemist". A physical chemist has to work with
several disciplines (like logic, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics,
intrumentation, chemical analysis and chemical synthesis) as well as be
fairly knowledgable on several subjects as a whole (like mathematics,
physics, geology and biology in addition to chemistry) to be practical
rather than merely theoretical. Furthermore, there is one quantity which a
physical chemist uses more than any other quantity, namely the "gibbs free
energy G". It is strange that MP foresees in this "minimization of
potential energy" a possible future as a language for expressing meaning,
but not in the "minimization of Gibbs free energy".
What I have been calling the "free energy" F of any system, is Helmholz's
removal of the unique restriction which Gibbs on purpose and immense
insight placed on his "free energy" G so as to make it beneficial under
the circumstances in which chemists usually operate. It is a restriction
which people outside chemistry ought not to be bothered about.
Nevertheless, the "free energy" F of a system is nothing else than the
whole of all the potential energies in all the forms of energy. It is, as
I articulate it, that part of any system's total energy E not locked up to
maintain its present organisation and thus entropy as the measure of such
organisation. Furthermore, the "gradient" of the "free energy" F results
in nothing else than the entropic forces and/or entropic fluxes which I so
often had written about, driving you fellow learners up the wall ;-)
Why did MP not made any reference to "free energy" F? Perhaps the answer
is in the only one reference he makes to "entropy" in both books. On p143
of "Meaning" in the chapter "Truth of Myths" he writes that predicting the
"topography of the particles of any system" so as to know that system
completely is already restricted by the immense difficulty in the
computations needed to do so. (Yes, teach student in physical chemistry
computations of entropy based on actual measurements to become aware that
what is easy for a few is most complicated for the vast majority ;-) He
then says that even the very idea is also fraud:
. ".... since we would not know what probability
. (i.e., entropy) to attribute to any particular
. section of the topography."
Based on this one reference alone to entropy, which is actually unfair, I
could say that the Mental Model of entropy as a measure of probability
(and hence chaos because the peculiar way in which probability is defined
makes the most probable systems also chaotic systems) had even MP as its
victim. MP would seek for much more sureness than what the claimed
"entropy<=>probability" interpretation allows for. Thus he would discard
any role to be played by entropy based on such an interpretation.
However, should one question for some or other curious reason the
"evolution of all interpretations of entropy", it is most striking that
all these extraordinary different interpretations became gradually replace
by the "entropy<=>chaos" one as the seemingly "fittest to survive".
Fittest to survive? Or the very last interpretation according to some deep
underlying pattern in which chaos precedes immediately the unprecedented
emergence of a novel order?
Another reason why I like this last chapter also very much, is that the
way in which MP paints the "free society", could easily be adapted to
paint "society as a learning organisation"! Harry Prosch who helped MP
(then in old age) to publish a series of lectures (given in the US at the
universities of Chicago and Texas), adapting some of MP's older
publications to make the whole coherent, wrote the following at the end of
the Preface of "Meaning".
. Most of all I thank Michael Polanyi himself for
. the opportunity extended to me to work in close
. association with a man whose breadth and depth
. of mind leave one with a sense of respect
. approaching awe and whose work must certainly be
. destined to leave an indelible mark upon the direction
. thought will take as it moves on toward the
. twenty-first century.
Did Harry Prosch felt tacitly the excitement of the approaching birth of
the concept of a Learning Organisation -- the epitome for "The free
society"? How would we know? 1974 is not 1990 because some evolution lies
in between. It seems that MP's last years were filled with a deep
contemplation on what he called the "tacit sharing of knowing". Did Peter
Senge commit the impossible by articulating it as the "learning
organisation"? Its no wonder that Polanyi's thoughts were so many times a
subject of our LO-dialogue.
Polanyi's thoughts are one thing -- pictures. Polanyi's thinking becomes
another thing -- the movie. I want to suggest to fellow learners (MP would
perhaps wrote "gently persuade") that we bear both the pictures and movie
in mind. Polanyi was after all a physical chemist. Some of them make
movies out of pictures rather than pictures out of the complex movie
called LIFE. Polanyi and Prigogine are two clear examples.
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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