something else, it could seem to not exist. How do you explain the very
> -----Original Message-----
> From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of Steve Smith
> Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:48 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness
>
> Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is
> relatively
> robust and self-healing.
>
> Russ Abbott wrote:
> > Richard Feynman said that "Science is what we have learned about how
> > not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." To the extent that
> > it achieves that goal, science works even without individual
> > self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have
> created
> > a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without
> > having to depend on individual subjective honesty.
> >
> > For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each
> > other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written
> > that, it seems to me that "honesty with oneself" is not a bad
> > definition of "self-awareness." Another way of putting it is that
> > self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our
> > subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition.
> >
> > Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness
> > in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways
> science
> > is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be
> known
> > about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in
> > particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it
> > does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest
> > -- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest.
> > There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected.
> >
> > I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about
> > the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and
> > governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an
> > interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so
> > successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on
> > individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else?
>
>
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