Dear Organlearners,
Charlie Saur <csaur@remc8.k12.mi.us> writes:
>Thanks for writing this post. I too have followed (at times fairly
>fuzzily if that's a word) At's writings with true and total interest.
>So much of these exchanges happen at what I label a "tacit"
>level (grin). Maybe because I "get" some of it and can apply it
>- maybe not.
Greetings Charlie,
Being aware of the tacit level of knowledge is already a great advancement
in the management of learning. A person's tacit knowledge is that
knowledge which the person has AND which that person SELF had never before
articulated in words or expressed by any other means. A person usually
recognise his/her tacit knowledge when ANOTHER person articulates it. But
this recognition does NOT cause the tacit knowledge of the person to
emerge into formal (objective) knowledge because the person has NOT
articulated it self. The impaired essentialities in this case which
prevent the emergence are "becoming-being" (liveness) and
"identity-categoricity" (sureness).
Many people are contented with having much tacit knowledge without letting
it emerge into formal knowledge. They can usually offer one or more VALID
reasons why they do not articulate their tacit knowledge. But I want to
give them one important reason why they should try to do it. It is the
back action of the higher order emergent (in this case formal knowledge)
on the lower substrate (in this case tacit knowledge). The general nature
of this back action is to enrich the lower order substrate. I have once
explained it in terms of learning (higher order emergent) and creating
(lower order substrate).
Another example consists of LI's (Learning Individuals) and LO's (Learning
Organisations). The back action of an organisation when it becomes an LO
is to enrich the learning of its individual members. The ramifications of
this back action for the learning of a nation are very important. When a
nation becomes an LO, it makes the expenditure of the national budget on
education worthwhile. On the other hand, when a nation cannot emerge into
a LO, much of the money spent on education goes down the drain.
Consider my country South Africa as an example. Apartheid was designed and
practiced to protect the imported emergences of western civilisation among
the local white people. This protectionism was based on impairing all of
the seven essentialities. Thus it did not promote locally such emergences
among white people and actually prevented such emergences among black
people. This gives us a clue what was so hideous about the ideology of
apartheid -- it was designed and practised to impair the seven
essentialities. The word apartheid itself means keeping people apart
forever -- impairing of sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness and otherness.
We are now five years into the New South Africa. Black people, having
apartheid itself as the icon, are united in their condemnation of
apartheid while white people, having lost apartheid as the icon, are
dispersed even though most of them now also condemn apartheid.
Unfortunately, by using apartheid as an icon rather trying to understand
WHY apartheid was such a hideous ideology, the majority of black and white
people keep on impairing the seven essentialities in their new policies.
As a result the peoples of South Africa are just as far away from emerging
into nationhood as five years ago. Two consequences are that crime has
risen to some of the highest levels of the world while education is
heading for the bottom. These two consequences are the main reasons why
close to million of South Africans (mostly white) have immigrated to other
parts of the world the past five years.
Why dont South Africans perceive what made apartheid such a hideous
ideology, namely the impairing of the seven essentialities? I have to take
partly the blame because of not promoting awareness to them enough
locally. But in trying to do so I have hit a solid wall. If people are not
sensitive enough to the dynamics of entropy production such as chaos,
bifurcations, order and digestions, they are even less senstive to the
mechanics of entropy production which entails the seven essentialities
because the mechanics as form are emergent to the dynamics as content.
Are South Africans really so little senstive to the seven essentialities?
One of the seven essentialities is wholeness. When this essentiality is
advanced to the detriment of the other six, we may call it holism. The
South African Jan Smuts, a general, prime minister, botanist and
philosopher, is the father of holism. If South Africans were to come more
aware of wholeness, they should certainly have to read more about what Jan
Smuts had to say about holism (wholeness). However, his writings on holism
remains to be closed book for most South Africans. Copies of his book
"Holism and Evolution" in the libraries of the two major universities in
Pretoria are seldom stamped by the date when the borrowed book has to be
handed back. This date stampings happen once or twice a year -- far too
little for the principal book on wholness
>What I would like to see, or add to your thoughts here is that
>we look at a way to develop application-type stories to this
>discussion. It would help me a great deal to hear examples of
>how to apply the seven essentialities in "real life" so I can
>begin to redirect my thinking a bit at a time. Or maybe
>develop a "lesson plan" where we can focus on one application
>at a time...any thoughts?
Charlie, I comprehend clearly what your problem is. But we have to
understand the problem as much as possible before we can find a solution
for it. The problem of the seven essentialities is that they require a
very complex and abstract level of thinking. Humans have a number of ways
to sidestep such a problem like using mental models and reductionism. We
must take care not to side step the problem. This can be done by trying to
understand how learning happens and the nature of its outcome, namely
knowledge. I have written before that learning in the sense of
irreversible self-organisations results in four successive emergent levels
of knowledge, namely the experential, tacit, formal and sapient levels.
Thus, if we want to have a thorough grib on the seven essentialities, we
must begin with our OWN experiences. This is why I often have to fall back
on my own experiences as a South African to illustrate the seven
essentialities. This makes me a bad teacher because I should rather have
used your own experiences to guide your emergence through the four levels
of knowledge -- but I know so little about your experiences. My best
remedy under such circumstances is to encourage you to guide your learning
self, beginning with your own experiences.
Here is something which you can do, but DONT publish the results in public
because of possible misunderstandings (immergences), especially since they
concern the seven essentialities which make the difference between
emergences and immergences. When some fellow learner contributes something
to our continuing dialogue on the LO and you "violently" disagree with it,
do not disregard it and skip to the next contribution. Employ the entropy
production which the reading of it resulted into effectively. Study that
contribution very carefully in terms of each of the seven essentialities.
Try to find out which essentiality was impaired to such an extent that you
disagreed so much on it.
My experience is that in the majority of cases the disagreement was indeed
an impaired essentiality. My experience is also that sometimes to my
surprise I discover that the essentiality is not impaired in the other
person, but in myself. This discovery generates strong mixed emotions in
myself. I am happy that I am learning something new, but I am also mad at
myself for being such a fool previously. These strong mixed emotions are
the reason why I recommed not to publish your results publically. When the
impairing is in the other person, that person will feel just like you.
Many of us can benefit from self critique, but few if us can handle
critique coming from others.
>I too hope At is well...CS
Thank you Charlie for your kind words. I am learning fast to manage my
condition. Last Saturday evening I suggested to my family that I will
treat them on "pannekoek met 'n kaas en spinasie vulsel" -- a flat
pancake, covered with a cheese and spinach stuffing. My family loves such
vegetable stuffed pancakes, although the traditional way of eating them is
to cover them with a mixture of sugar and ground cinnamon. But sugar in my
diet has become a poison and I even have to cut on starch. I myself ate
two pancakes and soon afterwards had to go to bed, feeling very tired. I
should have noticed the typical diabete symptoms, but I thought I was
phsyically tired because I worked hard that day at my nursery.
The next morning I got up very early to get ready for Sunday and church. I
ate a remaining pancake without even any stuffing. An hour later I felt
miserable again. I then realised what it was. To make sure I checked the
glucose level of my blood -- it was 8.7, the first time in three weeks
above the maximum for a normal person, namely 8.0. (It should vary
between 4 and 8 with 6 as the average value.) The pancake mixture contains
cake flour, eggs and milk. It was the first time since I beacme ill that I
have eaten anything which contains cake flour, the most highly "refined"
form of ground wheat. Refined starch is now evidently as poisonous to me
as refined cane sugar. (Since my illness I have eaten starch only in the
form of rye bread or a small potato which had no ill effect on me.) The
lack of wholeness and otherness aggrevated my diabetic condition, itself
an immergence.
We call cake flour a highly "refined" form of wheat flour. But are we not
bluffing ourselves with the word "refined"? The actual meaning of the
"refined" is that wheat flour results into cake flour when subjected to a
severe process of APARTHEID. All parts of the wheat kernel have been
removed by sifting, except that part which was crushed by the rollers of
the mill into a ultra finely divided powder. Apartheid is definitely
poisonous to us -- even the apartheid in our foods.
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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