Dear Organlearners,
I wrote:
> >Happiness is a quality which humans experience when they have
> >participated in an emergence. Emergences can happen in the material world
> >or the abstract world. An emergence happens when a lower order gives rise
> >to a new higher order. This emergence cannot happen without saturating
> >the lower order with chaos. Unfortunately, this very chaos may also lead
> >to immergences. Thus we may call the point of saturation of chaos also a
> >bifurcation point. In other words, our happiness as an adjoint of
> >emergences cannot be separated from our sadness as an adjoint of
> >immergences.
To which Shaun Gilly <shaun.gilley@fanb.com> replied in LO15537
> At, you appear to be referring to Illya Prigogine's work on dissipative
> structures. I'm wondering where/how you learned of this. What did you
> read or hear? I'd like to know more about this.
Shaun, much of it is based on my own experiences and dilligent research.
Allow me to tell a little bit of my own history:
Four years after my birth (1944) in South Africa as a white Afrikaner,
Apartheid was formally introduced (1948) as government policy. This
policy was a major entropy producing force in the lives of most South
Africans, black and white.
In the second year of my studies at the Potchefstroom University for
Christian Higher Education, I experienced the strange urge not to
specialise. I graduated cum laude with a BSc (1965) in physics, chemistry
and mathematics although the usual requirement was only two major
subjects. I then obtained a MSc (1967) in physics cum laude. During the
last few months of that study I was greatly disturbed by the mechanistic,
conservative, reversible, closed and esoteric state into which physics had
evolved. I again experienced a strange urge, this time to get off the bus
of traditional physics which I believed was heading for disaster.
I decided to continue my studies in physics and chemistry, but in a field
which was much closer to the daily lives of my fellow humans. Providence
stepped in: a research post was advertised for a soil scientist (physics
and chemistry) at the Agricultural Institution of the Highveld Region in
Potchefstroom. I was appointed. The next twelve months of intense study
on all the relevant literature in a well equipped library was more
surprising than I had even hoped for. Much was already known, but very
little could be fitted into the theoretical framework of traditional
physics and chemistry. The surprise soon became a depression -
traditional physics and chemistry were of little use.
I then began to scan the basic and engineering sciences for an indication
of a framework. I went from library to library, trying to find something
in the haystack. It appeared as if not even the rudiments of a framework
existed. Then early in the middle of 1969, I took into my hands the book
Introduction to Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics by Ilya Prigogine (1962).
In a few minutes I recognised the rudiments of the theoretical framework
which I needed. The complex, adaptive nature of soils, seemingly dead to
the ignorant observer, depended on entropy production (dissipation).
Entropydissipation (production) became a close companion of my life for
the next 30 years.
While assembling the known and seemingly unrelated truths about soil
science in the framework provided by irreversible thermodynamics, I had my
first experience of a paradigm shift. It surprised me that whereas I saw
so much promise in dissipative systems, there were no other specialists on
it in South Africa. In conversations with colleagues at the Institute and
the University, I became intensely aware of the lack of interdisciplinary
communication. In my contact with ordinary farmers and their problems, I
became similarly aware how disempowered they were to solve their problems.
Many of those problems concerning soils, plants and animals existed merely
because of ignorance to the nature of a complex, adaptive, dissipative
system.
At that stage (1971) even Prigogine had not yet began publishing his work
on the self-organisation of dissipative systems for which he was awarded
the Nobel Prize (chemistry, 1976). I simply had to struggle on my own on
this wierd course in a sanctioned country as a Afrikaner, a nation which
was treated as the skunk of the world.
As if this was not enough, I also became extraordinarily aware of the
hopelessness of Apartheid which had been designed to empower at least the
white people. I began to observe how it disempowered people of all races
in South Africa, whites in a spiritual sense and blacks in also a material
sense. Nobody seemed to realise that they could act as complex, adaptive
systems based on entropy production. I commenced with a diploma in higher
education. I hoped to become empowered by it, but I became increasingly
frustrated by it - creativity and adaptation played no role in it! (I did
not expect entropy production to play a role in education. That discovery
eluded me for another 12 years.) The chaos in me was building up to
breaking point.
Fortunately for me, I also became a desert wolf. I have learnt (as a
complex, adaptive system) how to live in the in the harsh environment of a
desert as a Bushman (San). This jumping beyond the edge of civilisation
helped much to heal my spirit. I also started a small, part time nursery,
growing succulent plants from seeds, exporting some of them to Europe. I
was often delighted how my knowledge of soil as complex adaptive system
helped me to grow more than 2500 succulent species of 10 different
families from deserts all over the world!
Then in 1982-83 I made a fantastic EMPIRICAL discovery. The law of entropy
dissipation (production) does not only apply to material world, but also
to the abstract world. I knew I was to take over where Ilya Prigogine's
(1980) "From Being to Becoming" (W H Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-1107-9) stops.
In that book he explains how entropy dissipation (production) in any
material system (inanimate or biological) leads to the evolution of its
structure. To understand his work in the present Newtonian-Darwinian era,
an immense paradigm shift is required: MATERIAL EVOLUTION has a much more
definite cause than at most probable, mechanical events followed by
natural selection - the cause is entropy production.
I knew that something much more encompassing than the Newtonian paradigm
shift was to happen. The Newtonian shift itself was indeed extraordinary.
Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of mechanics, the law of gravitation
and infinitesimal calculus once he had realised (discovered) that heavenly
and earthly bodies follow the same basic mechanical laws. I was beginning
to realise that the world of the brain and the world of the mind were not
completely disjunct, but that they also follow a common pattern - the Law
of entropy dissipation. I then began to experience a transformation of
consciousness. At first my personal emergences happened slowly and usually
after many immergences, but they gradually accelerated.with less preceding
immergences.
One of these emergences which was purely bliss, was when I realised that
emergences do not happen automatically, but that they were highly
contingent. There were so many contingencies involved that each emergence
become extremely complex. By that time I have just completed another
"crazy" project which nobody else seemed to understand, namely to discover
patterns common to material exemplars and abstract exemplars of
creativity. I selected the chemical system as the material exemplar and
the mathematical system as the abstract exemplar. I discovered seven
corresponding patterns. Then the idea emerged that these seven
corresponding patterns may just be the contingencies I was looking for. I
began to test these seven patterns phenomenologically for their
essentialness in as many different emergences which I could think of. In
each case each pattern proved to be a phenomenological essentiality!
> You also mentioned discovering seven things essential to all emergences,
> and mentioned that variety is one of these seven essentialities. What are
> the other six essentialities?
I will now list them, which is actually the wrong thing to do. Each
essentiality is itself incredibly complex, so much so that one word cannot
ever summarise what the essentiality is about. For example, if you think
about the word organisation (or similarly chemistry, politics, life,
creativity, reality), you will never consider this word to represent a
simple concept. Likewise, never try to think of any essentiality as a
simple concept with a linear application.
Thus I will use a dichotomous name for each essentiality to STRESS its
inherent COMPLEXITY. I will also give in brackets names which may be more
familiar to you and which defintely play a role in that essentiality.
1) Being-becoming (structure-process)
2) Identity-categoricity (sureness, competancy, detail)
3) Associativity-monadicity (network, web, wholeness, holism)
4) Connect-beget (fruitful, bijection, effective, incorporation)
5) Quantity-limit (measurement, complementary uncertainty)
6) Quality-variety (management, heterogenous, fractal, lateral)
7) Open-paradigm (freedom, novel, innovative, inclusive)
When thinking of all these essentialities, each one very complex, then I
can understand why so many present authorities on complexity theory claim
that emergences are mysterious, probablistic, unfathomable, unpredictable,
etc. I would have done the same, were it not for my transformation of
conciousness. But every paradigm shift enable us to understand things of
which we were completely ignorant before that shift. If we are ignorant to
the fact that love emerge when we become whole again, which entails the
unison of brain and mind, then the most important paradigm shift has not
yet taken place. Thus we will remain ignorant of many other things.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>