Re: or more simply, is there order?
Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Oct 03, 2008; 4:30am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Wittgenstein-tp1133169p1140821.html
PH wrote
" I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself"
NT replies:
Oh good lord! I cannot allow myself to go along with this statement. First, as a behaviorist, I am not sure what it means to talk to oneself. Second, I have no idea what the validator of such a statement would be.
No, I think that only people who have been understood by [some] others can claim to have made sense. Otherwise, made sense to whom? That is why it is so maddening to speak and not be understood.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 10/2/2008 8:18:37 PM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Yes,
such is the disappointment of life! However
we do, I believe, have words that would be quite meaningless even to ourselves without some sort of experience in common. I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself
but am still also driven to explore those subjects which I can only really understand by way of the give and take of examining the physical world people seem to experience in common. Since nearly everything in my mind makes complete sense, as I make it so, anything that doesnt seems to have a good chance of being something not in my mind. Thats sort of a technique.
I also find a consistent predictability to not being able to make very good sense of anything that grows exponentially. I see loops of events that get somewhere that I cant trace, and have found that very helpful in identifying things that are out of body in that sort of actual physical sense, but lead me to think about the distributed networks of things they connect which I cant make much sense of. However, they still seem to be of the kind of thing not located in my mind, but located in the physical world of common experience, identifiable, but not explainable? Does that work, is that right ?
Phil
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Phil Henshaw Hath Spoken Thus:
==>Look, I know this audience is not made of fools, and not deaf and dumb, and probably not disinterested in change, so I have to figure your inability to connect with my approach to constructing a science of change for natural complex systems must be that you find no door between your methods and mine. <==
Nick Thompson hath replied:
I have struggled to understand you over the years and just .... can't. Others have said the same of me.
Perhaps "connection" is too high a standard. Certainly "AUDIENCE" is too high a standard. We are not all here, quietly attentive, waiting for ANYbody's message. There is no "we" here.
The older I get, the rarer communication between actual human beings seems to be. We talk to our gods; we talk to our college mentors; we talk to our long dead parents, we reproduce the values of those who have tortured us in our past. However, talking to EACH OTHER is pretty unusual. And hearing one another is rarer still.
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
To: [hidden email]
Sent: 10/2/2008 5:56:08 AM
Subject: or more simply, is there order?
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org