Sense-making with the dialogue LO30106

From: janlelie@pi.net
Date: 04/17/03


Replying to LO30096 --

Replying to LO30096 --

Greetings to you too, At, and dear reader,

Having at least five senses, making them useful seems the best i can do.

In my opinion, sense-making seems the essence of concious living. I am
therefor i think (= make sense) - or "sum ergo cogito".

The feeling of sense-making "is" however paradoxical (you must
"dividualise" to become self-aware: make a split between your individual
being and your mind, and at the same time continu to function as one).
This generates an interior dialogue - this is why i like the title -
everybody has. A kind of noise in your head, a constant chattering, the
stuff dreams are made of. These whispers, thoughts, ideas - let's call
them expectations - have to be checked against the world out-there. To
experience, to see, to feel, to check if they make sense. We have
developed -or achieved, or have been rewarded with - the ability to share
our thoughts through language. Language, I've read, might have been
developed to cope with larger groups (and to impress the members of the
opposite sex). Socialising, organising pressurred us into talking, writing
and reading. So sense-making has become an inividual as well as a social
activity. We are therefor we organize. Dialogue, being no longer an
individual experience, no longer a "monologue interieur", has become a
LO-list.

Part of the sense-making experience are making - or having - expectations
(aka socially constructed reality). Whenever there is a difference between
expectations and sensed reality we have - what i've been taught - a
problem. A problem is just the difference between expected reality and
sense-made reality. Usually we try to change the latter. Most of the times
it works, because we've become very smart in sense-making, we had too.
So when this doesn't work, we try harder. Some of the times it works,
sometimes not. In my opinion we've solved all primary problems ("what
shall we eat today?" - we're no longer food ourselves - "where can we
sleep tonight?" - we're no longer obliged to look for cover - "how do we
get off-spring?" - ok, well, this is still a problem) and are left with
only social, secondary problems: how can we live ethically. The past
centuries - and still - we've been trying to solve that problem as a
primary problem.

Creativity - at least, this is how i frame your words - works the other
way around: the awareness of a problem shows us too what and how we create
which expectations, how we construct them and share them. We can "solve"
them by shifting, changing the expectations, reframe them. However we are
so used to solve problems by changing sensed-reality, by change-making,
that we not even call changing expectation solving problems.

I have been thinking about this problem for a very long time now. I assume
that what blocks us from - more - creative problem solving - is this a
contradictio in terminis ? - is the addition of emotions, feelings to
problems. I sense that we add emotions to problems by default, because
emotions help us to make quick decisions and learn from experience.
Feelings and emotions cannot be wrong (perhaps also not right, but we've
already passed that station), they just "are". At this time, these
expectations have become "personal", we somehow have incorporated them
into our being. A problem might then not only be perceived as a difference
between expectations and reality, but also as a personal, an individual
state. Into the dialogue we introduce an individual aspect, a personal
aspect. This is - in my opinion not wrong, only natural, but in its
consequence counter-productive. It blocks us from some relational aspects
we need to "make the creative change".

I'm afraid this doesn't sound too clear. I'll come back to it later.

Jan Lelie

>I was surprised that never before I articulated this
> creativity <=> changing expectations
> Eventually i dared
>to explain it in my own theory of creativity, namely that creativity is
>one of the outcomes of entropy production.
>
>I would like you fellow learners to tell of your own stories in making
>sense with an open dialogue.

-- 

janlelie@pi.net

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