Replying to LO31121 --
Dear Leo and LO,
Leo, you write, in Mind meandering around essentialities LO31121
>What questions me now is if the word quality is well chosen. Is
>another term not available? Couldn't essentiality 6 be changed in:
>variety-uniformity (otherness).
>For me this way of describing nr. 6 enhances my understanding better.
>'Quality' was for me a too much strange attractor.
It may be that when intuiting, thinking, talking and doing around At's
Seven E's we need to distinguish, for our better understanding, what
is the Essentiality and what is essential. I see for example
'becoming' as essential ( an essential of the dual complementary pair
becoming-being) to the Essentiality called Liveness.
That might be a mute point...
I have been going back to very early, first month (?) of At's sharings
of his ideas here. I came upon LO10662 among the earliest i could
find. It might be a valuable thing to go back that far and track any
variables in At's own development of his thinkings ;-) I've pasted it
in for convenience of threading meanings here.
As for your preference for 'variet-uniformity'...that does not 'work'
for me;-)...but i see ;-) what you mean - i' d prefer
''variety-uniqueness''...and it contains the same 'uni' element.
"I myself can draw on many experiences in which the degree of a
system's wholeness expressed the system's complexity."
Here i see (i se[ns]e) what I know anyway...(he is) an artist who has
spent much time communing (with()in) deep nature...deep human nature
as deep nature brings it about...and at such moments, maybe while
beholding-beheld ;-) by just such (variety-uniqueness?) a two thousand
year old tree, as might be the 'birfurcation' tree in my latest pdf
(dem flugel)...i now have, swirling like so many scattered wishing
bones from some fast encroaching wasteland, a poem. This poem has an
eye at the centre of a votex. This vortex is drilling up and down,
from the core of the earth to the heavens and all and every between
the two points all is charged and spiinniiiiing furiously ;-) (and
yes, of course, there is an angel at the core)
caught NOW by a lashing tail of that, i'm looking away and words arise
"...I really am sorry, ' he wrote ' that you are fall'n out with your
Spiritual World. You say that i want someone else to Elucidate my
Ideas...But you ough to know....(snip for brevity ;-) ......"And I
know that This World is a world of IMAGINATION & Vision. I see
Everything I paint in This World, But Every body does not see alike.
..Snip to save more time and space..." the tree which moves some to
tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a green thing that stands
in the way....But to the Eyes of the Man of IMagination, Nature is
Imagination itself...to me this World is All One..."
(((tears fill THIS eye...sotto voce..."Andrew, Greetings. Joy is an
adjoint to emergences at the edge of chaos..."))))
Perhaps dear Leo, At and Will'm have grown to see this World uniquely?
Hope that helps with the journey...
Love,
Andrew
Definition of complexity LO10662
Wed, 23 Oct 1996 10:30:00 GMT+2
Replying to LO10606 (Frank) and LO10621 (Michael):
Michael's idea that complexity is the collection of states a system
can evolve into, lets me think of Stafford Beer's definition of
complexity. (I want to thank Keith Sandrock of Johannesburg for
pointing Beer to me.) Beer proposed 'variety' as a measure of a
systems complexity.
I find Beer's proposition very enticing. However, I fear that if I
accept Beer's proposition as the definition, I will be shooting myself
in the foot. Should the definition of complexity not be a little bit
complex itself? In other words, is it possible to express complexity
in a simple (noncomplex) manner?
I consider creating to be more encompassing than learning. In other
words, to learn is to create. Thus a Learning Organisation (LO) has to
be Creative System (CS), but CSs need not to be LOs. Furthermore, I
prefer to think of variety as an essentiality of creativity and thus
learning. This means that if an organisation (system) is deficient in
its 'variety', its creativity and thus its learning becomes impaired.
If we apply Beer's connection between variety and complexity, then it
appears that an essentiality of creativity (variety) is a measure of
complexity. Now let us think of other essentialities of creativity. Do
they also measure a system's complexity? Let us study one example.
David Bohm believes that 'wholeness' is essential to creativity. Let
us assume that 'wholeness' is indeed an essentiality of creativity. Is
there any sense in proposing 'wholeness' as a measure of a system's
complexity? This proposition opens up an exciting complementary view
to Beer's as well as Michael's propositions. I myself can draw on many
experiences in which the degree of a system's wholeness expressed the
system's complexity.
Let us assume for some mysterious reason that there are seven
essentialities of creativity of which 'wholeness' and 'variety' are
two of them. If the other five essentialities act the same way in
measuring any system's complexity, then we can think of system's
complexity as a manifold with seven folds in the dimension of
essentiality. How many dimensions are there in creativty? I believe
that there are only two diemnsions. If this is the case, does the
other dimension also have a manifold?
I feel that the above about the defintion of complexity is more than
enough for now. It is probably becoming too complex at this stage.
However, in conclusion I want to ponder over one other essentiality of
creativity.
Arthur Koestler considered 'bisociativity' to be essential to
creativity. In other words, let us assume that the ability to make a
'connection' between dissimilar things is another essentiality of
creativity. Can we comprehend 'connection' as another measure of
complexity? Again I see wonderful opportunities.
Too summarise: 'variety', 'wholeness' and 'connection' are three (of
seven) properties with which we can define the complexity of an LO.
The degrees of 'variety', 'wholeness' and 'connections' may be used to
measure or express the complexity of an LO.
At de Lange
[End of Andrew's quote of At's message]
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