goodwillgood LO31101

From: ACampnona@aol.com
Date: 06/09/04


Replying to LO31099 --

dear JZ and LO

JZ wrote,

>i do not see you,
>Andrew, a thing very different than saying 'i see you' to one of
>my friends. this academic need of western man to find new words,
>to find more complexity in places where there is none makes me
>fear for knowledge, for intellectuality. can you read Baudelaire
>and understand all of the innuendo?

I can read Baudelaire - but ;-) my French language was corrected the
other day, as i was walking along a river bank (canal) by a companion
;-)....playfully i'd said in response to some remark, "je voir!" and i
was carefully correctly by my companion ..." you can't say that and
have it mean what you think it means, because literally speaking the
French do not say ''i see!' they say ' je comprendre' in English 'i
understand'

That memory now invokes or evokes another, with Francis in rural SW
France...i was in the field one chilly autumn morning and he came down
the track on his c. 1957 tractor, rosy cheeks and something like a
skinny maggot on his lip, his 'roll-up' , i called out..."Francis, je
voudrais le bois, il fait froid aujourdhui...." ( roughly translated
as '"Francis, i'd like (the) some wood, it is cold today."....He
stopped, got off the tractor, smiled the smile of a man who knows
something his friend does not,... yet, puts his arm on my shoulder,
twists me around to look at the copse on the other side of the lake
and said..." Monsieur, le bois!"

That memory evokes the friendship with Michael Leyton (never met in
first person flesh) of Rutgers (called for papers here recently - this
months digest)...i believe, and may stand corrected for it, that he
defines ''complexity'' as ''added value''. In his book of some 600
pages, on page 569 he talks about complexity in summary writing

"COMMONLY HELD BELIEFS ABOUT PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR:

 1 Satisfying a primary drive - i.e. achieving a primary goal -
reduces the drive. For example, eating reduces hunder.
 2 Perception and behavior serve the echievement of goals; i.e. they
are secondary (italicised) to the achievement of goals.
 3 Perception and behaviour attempt to achieve goals by the most
efficient paths.
 4 Successful paths, i.e. those that obtain goals and so so
efficiently, are repeated.

So entrenched are these beliefs that, in most behavioral research, the
beliefs have been largely unchallenged. However, the in 1950's, a body
of research began to emerge that tested whether these beliefs were
actually valid. Their research demonstrated the existence of a poweful
phenomenon - that animals search for complexity - and the phenomenon
seriously undermines the above beliefs, as we shall see..."

Symmetry, Causality, Mind Michael Leyton, MIT Press

i did once reer [refer?] to the research in question here, maybe a
google will find it...

Maybe if anyone wants to delve more we can talk about it. I took away
from my encounter with Michael's work and dialogues the sense that the
most fundamental ;-) need of man is to increase his complexity and his
understandings ;-) of Complexity. To me this is perhaps about man's
capacity for play and error, something inhering...man is evolving
toward something very perfect. I know it is hard to understand.
Perhaps that is the mistake in the first place.

Here is a quoted snatch of a letter i wrote last week, another memory
from c. 1997..." Andrew, thanks for the images (my children have
looked at them now)...of the apple blossom he picked it up, looked and
said - It is perfect, one could change nothing, and ther are angels in
it. - my daughter then looked at it, bringing the image (of the same
apple blossom) close to her nose and smelled it!!!" ['Apple Blossoms'
lithograph suite, detail, Len McComb c 1978)

JZ i literally have to leave the house to go to York, we can return to
this later?

love,

andrew

-- 

ACampnona@aol.com

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