Re: or more simply, is there order?
Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Oct 03, 2008; 2:14pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Wittgenstein-tp1133169p1142075.html
Oh surely Nick, I’m sorry. I can’t
seem to tell when I should explain, as I’m writing, that a kind of ‘dripping’
irony is intended. If you think of ‘making sense’ making
a self-consistent explanation, my question is whether that automatically
requires you to misunderstand things that work because of their inconsistencies,
like environments. When you only look at information from the past
that isn’t going to change, in your own mind where there are no alternate
perspectives or differing value judgments to deal with, the illusion of ‘making
sense’ of everything often does appear work. Sometimes
I catch myself and think of it as a lot of ‘patches’ to hide the
inexplicable parts… and even try to look back under them.
It would be nice to aim for think inclusively rather than
exclusively, and find what all the points of view have in common rather than only
the last one standing after severe criticism. One thing that
pushes me in that direction is noting when things can be expected to *become*
inconsistent, and diverge on some presently unobservable path, for either
general or specific reasons. Perhaps this exchange is an example of
‘talking past each other’… in making the same point.
The mental machine does such a deceptively good job of rendering snap judgments
the seem to make so much sense to be conclusive, pure satisfying certainty, maybe
that itself should be thought of as inexplicable too!
I guess what I’ve been trying to raise as a subject is the
kinds of evidence in a system that signal that it is about to become in a way
that is inconsistent with itself… and that’s the systems
issue that growth induced collapse is a small part of, the prior signs of approaching
change, that I find interesting.
Phil
From: Nicholas Thompson
[mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 12:30 AM
To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
" I too also find I
make my best sense when talking to myself"
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.
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
doesn’t seems to have a good chance of being something not in my
mind. That’s 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 can’t 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 can’t 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?
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