Dear Organlearners,
Terry Priebe <insight@de-sa.com> writes:
>I found there were two ways I could interpret your closing. First,
>that we have a choice to be constructive or destructive with our
>energy. Second, that learning takes time and while we're in the
>process of learning, we're not able to deal with the human
>condition as well as we could if - if we had more learning. The
>second interpretation is a call for action, an urgency to improve
>our learning prowess so that we can, indeed, improve our
>understanding and capability for right action.
>
>Given that we've talked before about the "dwell time", that time
>required for the seven essentialities to exist so that emergence
>occurs, are you suggesting the need to minimize this dwell time
>through learning or are you suggesting something else?
Greetings Terry,
Thank you very much for this important question. You may call it "dwell
time", I may call it "creation time" and others may call it anything else,
but our tacit knwoledge on it is one of our most important posessions.
Allow me to tell about the following practical incident. In our local
congregation, we have six Bible study groups. The one for people with a
full time job to which I belong, has 14 members. We are functioning as a
LO for almost four years now. It took us almost three years to work
through the book of Revelations. We are now studying the epistle of James.
After three months we have covered only 19 verses of chapter 1. Why?
I, like the rest of the group and the Holy Spirit, make sure that we do
not go to the next verse if we are not finished with our learning on the
present verse. I have not told the group anything about the art (theory
and practice) of LOs. I have not told them anything about my own viewpoint
on entropy production, creativity and learning. I am not even the leader
of the group -- it is Ben van Wyk. The main goal of my own contribution is
to facilitate their learning (emergent and digestive). When it seems as if
we are near the end of our study of a verse, I study their body language
closely. When anybody shows any signs of a high entropy production before
a bifurcation or after it (such as in the adjoints of emergences, namely
happiness, curiosity and hope), I know that we are not yet finished. Hence
I try to continue with the learning within that person until I am sure
that he/she has reached internal equilibrium.
About four weeks ago one of the members, Niek Nel, prayed at the end of
the session as follows: "Dear Lord, thank you for making it possible to
work so SLOWLY through this Bible book." I wanted to laugh of joy. Perhaps
I should have laughed. Luckily I prayed before Niek because if I had to
pray after him, I dont know what would have happened. After our prayers,
everybody laughed -- Niek also. He managed to get in the last word: "I was
never so serious before in my whole life." We all agreed.
Unfortunately, we also felt very sad because we lost four (two couples)
members of the group because of this very issue. They left the group for
one and only one reason -- our "dwell time" on each verse. We found out
that they saw no need for it because nowhere else in their lives did they
ever experienced it before.
Terry, the role of time is fundamentally important to all our creative
activities as well as its emergents such as learning and believing. When
I speak of the role of time, I do not mean a time schedule or roster in
which specific activities must be fit in, come hell or high water. I also
do not mean the description of a process in terms of time as a parameter.
I mean by the role of time the actual conversion of free energy to change
the organisation of the future through entropy production, swinging from
close to equibrium to the edge of chaos and back. This "changing of the
organisation of the future" is even what happens in our clocks, but only
in a linear manner. Without the production of entropy using sources of
free energy, we would not have been able to measure time or even to create
anything else. This is why my defintion for creativity is as follows:
creativity is the result of entropy prodution.
Thus, when I think of time, I often use the expression "the creative
course of time".
Ilya Prigogine laments the fact that time has become the forgotten
dimension of physics and chemistry. Apart from using it as a descriptive
parameter, physicists and chemists have no other use for it. I can say the
same for the humanities in general and education in particular. Do the
following experiment. Go to the library and browse through at least fifty
books on education covering the didactics on the entire spectrum from
pedagogics (education of the child) to androgogics (education of the
adult), from fomal to informal education, from continuous to continual
education and from every corner of the world. Look at their indexes and
study what they have to say about the role of time in education, other
than as a "descriptive paramater" or "captive measure".
>I thank both you and Winfried for this stimulating discussion.
Thank you for your kind words. Winfried (Deijmann from the Netherlands and
not Dressler from Germany) and I do not speak exactly from the same mouth.
But what I appreciate very much from him, is his willingness to paint the
rich picture -- showing that time is more than something to be measured by
a clock. This much we definitely do have in common. Time is something to
be experienced so that our tacit knowledge on it can develop.
Yes, it is true that we have a choice in how to use our free energy for
either destructive or constructive purposes. Now that you have my
decription of the Digestor, you ought to realise that I have two major
asymptotes for constructive processes in mind: the emergences from
bifurcations at the edge of chaos (where entropy production is high) and
the growth from digestions close to equilbrium (where the entropy
production is low). Likewise we have two asymptotes for destrcutive
processes, namely the immergences from bifurcations and the retrogression
from digestions. In the case of digestions the self-organising system
becomes the prey rather than acting as predator.
Since the bifurcation at the edge of chaos results in a change of order, I
usually call them "ordinate bifurcations". Likewise it is also possible to
think of acting as predator or prey in digestions close to equilbrium as
bifurcations. In this case I tend to think of them as "congruent
bifurcations" since no change in order happens, but only a growth or
retrogression in the existing orders.
Now in both these symptotes (ordinate bifurcations at the edge of chaos or
congruent bifurcations close to equibrium) the seven essentialities
liveness, sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, sparseness, otherness and
openness play a paramount role in the outcomes of these bifurcations. The
outcomes will be either constructive when the essentialities are "mature
enough" for such a bifurcation or destructive when they are impaired ("too
immature").
Whatever the case (ordinate or congruent), time plays an important role in
differentiating between the two possible outcomes: destructive or
constructive. It is as if time summarises by one stroke the combined
influence of all seven essentialities. Constructive processes are always
slower (taking longer time) than than their destructive counterparts. Why?
The constructive process leads to more complexity in organisation. Thus
more entropy has to be produced to change the complexity of organisation
constructively.
In a world in which most humans are coersed to act faster, you can imagine
what effect this "race against time" has on the decisions of people. They
are experiencing more and more the "destructively creative course of
time". It causes a sick interested within them for its final outcome,
namely death. They will pay for anything to read or listen to when it
concerns death. They will clog up a buzzy highway to stare at blood,
intestines and limbs scattered all over after an accident.
Winfried described an example he uses in which people can experience the
"constructively creative course of time". If we want to proceed "towards a
new experience of time", we have to work towards constructive creativity.
Up to now people have assumed that creativity is per defintion
constructive. It is nothing of the sort. The sooner we realise that
creativity can have either a constructive or destructive outcome, the
better for us.
One of the most profound outcomes of constructive creativity in humans is
learning. Here I take a definitive stand point. Destructive creativity
often does not lead to learning. In secular issues people usually do not
learn to destruct -- they merely copy someone else's destruction. However,
when people are confronted with the second order emergent of creativity
(learning is the first order emergent), namely believing, then they can
activelly learn to destroy. Thus the seven essentialities which played
such a decisive role in their constructive learning can again be defied.
The result of this is devastating -- they become inhumane, doing
horrendous things which defy the imagination.
When going from learning to believing, the "dwell time" becomes even
greater where more complexity is involved. I can personally speak of some
spiritual emergences which took more than twenty years to happen. I have
spoken to others (not only from the Christian religion) about it and after
explaining to them what I mean by "complex spiritual emergences", giving
examples of my own life, they usually agree, citing examples from their
own lives.
Terry, thank you very much for reminding us about "dwell time" or whatever
we may want to call it. If we do not experience this "constructively
creative course of time" in addition to looking at our watches, keeping up
with schedules, will we be able to resist in becoming inhumane? Will we be
able to make the right kind of decisions? What do you fellow learners
think?
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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