Dear organlearners,
Winfried Dressler <winfried.dressler@voith.de> writes:
> I wished At's injunctions could be formulated as simple as Galilei's, when
> he explained what to do to see a Jupiter moon. But still Galilei was
> accused to have a (heretic) mental model - a false model which he,
> Galilei, claimed to be more true than just a mental model. The argument
> against Galilei was fully supported by the world view ("truth") of that
> time.
I once, about eight yers ago, asked the following "dirty" question in
a class of roughly 150 first year chemistry students.
"What is Galileo Galilei famous for?"
Their silence shocked me like Alan Bloom of "The closing of the
American mind" fame.
I do not know if the following metaphor will help.
Galilei said that if you want to understand what happens with the planets,
make the sun the centre and not the earth. I am merely adding that we have
to think about the sun, the earth and the other planets and .....
Emergences do not happen automatically. That we all know. They happen
contingently. Even the Bible tells us so. The contingency is complex
because it is a manifold many patterns. One way to describe this manifold,
is to develop it into the "seven essentialities". Another way to describe
this manifold, is to tell enough jokes. Seriously!
Many jokes are related to the mechanics of bifurcations (emergences and
immergences). Others are related to the dynamics of bifucrations.
For example, Scot's recent joke:
> Two caterpillars saw a beautiful butterfly flit by
> and the one caterpillar turned to the other and said:
> "You'll never get me up in one of those things!"
The punch line of the joke is to confront you with your tacit knowledge of
bifurcations in partcular and creativity in general. The laughter is the
first manifestation of the entropy so produced as chaos of becoming. The
punch line in Scot's joke is to remind you that a bifurcation results into
either an emergence or an immergence.
Good leaders know that jokes make followers more creative. Better leaders
know why jokes make followers more creative.
I am not infatuated with "entropy" and "entropy production" as technical
terms. I merely want to use them so that you can learn what "dissipative
systems" is about. I can easily "translate" them into the metaphors of the
world of photography. Then I will use events from this world to point to
the structures and processes in LOs. It has happened a number if times on
this list, Ben Compton playing an active role.
The difference between "entropy" and "entropy production" is like the
difference between a photograph (entropy) asn a movie (entropy
production). Have you ever wondered why we have never used a single
photograph as a metaphor on the list? Now you know why living systems are
not called entropic systems, but dissipative (entropy producing) systems.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
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