Entropy LO19727

John Zavacki (jzavacki@greenapple.com)
Tue, 3 Nov 1998 05:05:55 -0500

Replying to LO19683 --

John Gunkler says:

>Living things create order from disorder, they are "self organizing" --
>for example taking the disorder of a chemical soup and creating the
>orderliness of DNA. In fact Schroedinger writes: "Thus the device by
>which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of
>orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually
>sucking orderliness from its environment."

Thank you, John, for reminding me of that. I have always believed that
the human is the anti-entropic device, the provider of feedback and feed
forward, the controller, orderer, improver of systems. When we
misunderstand the language of control (as in control systems) and
eliminate reference to it for its political correctness or the excitement
of abandonment to entropic devices (change for the sake of change?) we
lose track of our goal, which is to constantly and forever improve the
systems within our sphere of influence.

John Zavacki
jzavacki@greenapple.com

-- 

"John Zavacki" <jzavacki@greenapple.com>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>