Since I first started reading At's posts in 1996, I've increasingly looked
forward to the next, one after another, all this time slowly digesting the
dialogue and ideas, and integrating many of them. My relationship to this
community, as I understand it, largely has been commensual, although in
personal messages and in a couple of posts over the years to the list, I
have tried to make it mutual by giving encouragement or offering an
observation/question.
Having just read some of At's comments about community and commutation,
I've decided to share my current questioning to the list rather than
sitting on it to wait as previously would have been more likely with me.
These were 1996 comments I've been reading because I have gone back to the
archive more systematically to read At's posts; and this time with both my
OED and American Heritage dictionaries open and taking notes. It's been
equally the delight as reading them the first time!
Today I think I have begun to sense the back-action, change affect
inhering to At's choice and use of the word "commutation." My one
dictionary refers to the commutation of alternating current in electricty
and the "back-formation from commutator."
At or others, with your chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, and
mathematics backgrounds, (at your convenience and if it interests you) can
you help me pull this together? I thought I more or less understood the
production of alternating current, but I sense there may be more in this
"back-formation from commutator" in electricity than previously I
understood.
At has suggested commutation is necessary to emergence, and this makes
intuitive sense to me. Emergence, as I understand it, involves
commutation resulting (contingently) in ordinate change.
In mathematics, however, one definition of "commutative" defines
commutative as "independent of order." a x b = b x a. I look forward to
re-reading the dialogue that I vaguely remember having to do with matrices
of color. At this point, however, I wonder what I am missing to
understand the relationship between the mathematical commutative property
and emergence.
I also wonder At, are any of your CBT chemistry units available or
accessible to someone so far away as me?
All thanks and best wishes,
Dan Chay
chay@alaska.net
--Heidi and Dan Chay <chay@alaska.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>