Judging in LOs LO22615

AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:19:27 +0200

Replying to LO22573 --

Dear Organlearners,

This new jump in the dialogue came form the old topic "Systems Thinking
and Personality Types LO22573"

Jan Lelie <janlelie@wxs.nl> writes

>Judging/perceiving is one of the MBTI-orientations. Some
>people prefer judging, they value closure, clear limits,
>simplicity and try to do things the right way. Other people
>prefer perceiving, value spontaneity, flexibility, complexity
>and try to make some fun. I know i prefer to perceive, but
>sometimes envy people who can make fast judgements.
>I think we cannot avoid do both, both are as important,
>depending on the situation.

Greetings Jan,

Not so fast please. Let us go deeper in to the action of Judgement.

You write "judging/perceiving". Is judging and perceiving the same thing?
Are they synonyms of each other? Are they closely related to each other in
any other sense than being synonyms? Are they related merely in the sense
that they are parts of a whole? Do they have no relationship at all?

You write "Some people prefer judging ... do things the right way"? Is
this judging or ensuring? In other words, are judgement and sureness the
same thing? Synonyms? Intimately connected? Distantly connected?
Unconnected?

Think of a game with a referee. The referee follows the game second by
second. Sometimes the referee blows the whistle to stop the game. Some
penalty is given upon which the game starts again. Is the whole game the
judging, or is the judging only some part of it? Which part?

You write "[i..] sometimes envy people who can make fast judgements". Did
you mean judgements or did you mean decisions? Would you like a court of
law to make fast judgements, or would you prefer it to first become sure?

What is the relationship between judgement and creativity? Does judgement
apply to both constructive and destructive creativity? Is destructive
creativity not the essence of judgement?

>Sometimes we encounter very judicious people, like
>Humpty Dumpty who pays his words for their meaning,
>sometime we encounter very easy going people, who will
>even invent words and languages. Everybody has his or
>hers dialect (do i hear dialog?).

Judgement, judicious, ... are derived form the Latin word "juge"=law.
There are two ways at which can look at the law -- think back two thousand
years ago.

Way of Romans: The law prescribe all what must happen. Everything not
prescribed by law is illegal and must be stopped. -- Roman Law

Way of Low People: The law prescribe only what must not happen and thus be
stopped. Everything not precribed by law is lawful and thus may happen. --
Common Law

(By the way, your surname Lelie, as my surname De Lange, indicates that we
might be descendants of people in the Low Countries during those days. You
live in the Netherlands which is part of those Low Countries. Modern Dutch
Law is a fantastic synthesis of Roman-Common Law.)

Do the Roman Law and the Common Law offer the same view on human culture?
Or are the complementarities of each other? How will judging be in terms
of the one or the other?

How do people think about the language which they speak -- in the Roman
fashion or in the Low fashion?

>Like personality types, we prefer certain words and
>constructions in language. I like to visualize, you see - and
> construct long sentences. Others write short bits.
> Must write seriously.

Is it not also like unique personality profiles? Let me put a question to
all those on the list who had to work with other people in terms of their
writings. Is it possible for you, when given one written piece of the many
writing people whom you ARE dealing with, to identify the writer from the
writing?

>Because we became dispersed, we developed different
>languages, learned to think and create new cultures.
>Every day we pay the price of theses benefits: war, famine,
>fights, violence.

Do the destructive immergences happen because of diversity, or because
people cannot handle diversity? How much do destructive immergences
contribute to diversity?

Does diversity lead to only destructive immergences and not also
constructive emergences? How much do constructive emergences contribute to
diversity?

>Please don't let me be misunderstood, i'm just a simple
>soul who's intention are good: i agree with you about the
>complexities in nature. Yes, i think that every being is
>unique, complexity arises from repeatingly repeating the
>same rule.

Jan, like a "blind person can see", I can see that you have good
intentions. I have to be like a "seeing person who cannot perceive" to
find bad intentions in you. Did you know that blind persons can "see"? Ask
them to tell you about it!

What a very, very deep thought you have expressed by writing "complexity
arises from repeatingly repeating the same rule". So what will the rule
itself be? Is it a being, or a becoming, or both. Think of life itself
which has two rules: heredity and catalysis.

>Perhaps, yes and no. Sometimes we classify in order to
>simplify, to reduce. I like classification that give rise to
>complexity, not to design things, but to be able to talk and
>think about them and appriciate their beauty, seeing new side
>of things.

Like with law (Roman or Common), we can have the same kind of thing with
classification. What kind of thing? Let us see.

Roman Law - what must become, all other becomings
excluded from a creative life. Is this not a form of
one-to one-mapping?
Common Law - what must not become, all other becomings
included in a creative life. Is this not a form of
one-to-many-mapping?

The following is a reflection merely on my own classification experiences
in chemistry, soils, botany, psychology, education and languages.

Most people use the classification as a one-to-one-mapping. Here the
"classification system" (the first "one" in the mapping) and the
"unclassified system" (the first "one" in the mapping which is the diverse
system to become classified ) may be called isomorphic images ("iso"=same,
"morphe" =form). I would rather call them aged or equilibrated images.

The few other people use the classification as a one-to-many-mapping. Here
the "classification system" (the "one") and the "unclassified system"
(the "many") are not isomorphic images. The "one" is a youthful or
non-equilibrated projection rather than image of the "many".

>Well, thinking is a rather recent invention - i think - and
>one of the complications is that this thinking is, in my
>view, creative - it creates ideas, feelings, concepts, rules,
>cultures - AND reactive - it needs to control, to judge, to
>conquer.

Jan, thanks for the laughing which "Well, thinking is a rather recent
invention - i think" caused.

Yes, I agree with you. Thinking has brought a new "thrusting" into
Creation. Its like the tail of a fish. You call it "creative". But the
fish also needs a head to control its movement. You call it "reactive".
Whether we call them creative/reactive, tail/head, heart/mind,
ramjet/feedback, first-order-maximization/second-order-minimzation, we
have something very, very, very important here for LOs which we must
contemplate on and keep in our dialogue.

If God will, I want to make a contribution on it. I plan to call it
"Boosted creativity and thereafter", but any fellow learner who are
impatient enough is free to jump into this thing. Actually, I want to
encourage it.

But again, I want to question you on the inclusion of judge in the
"reactive" side.

Let me take a simple example why these questioning is so important to me.
Newton's Law of Gravitation, since then reformulated by Einstein in his
General Theory of Relativity as "space-time curvature", is a universal. Up
to today not one single exception to this great law, irrespective of the
ways in which Newton or Einstein have formulated it, was ever found. It
can also be shown that when this law gets broken, its effects will
ramificate through to all the other laws of the physical world. Thus
there is no reason anymore to have a "physics judge" which will seek
every exception and its ramifications to this great law of the physical
world.

The gravitation (Newton) - curvature (Einstein) Law concerns the physical
world. Let us think of all the laws of the spiritual world, supposed,
restricted, personal, unlawful and every other kind of law. Let us assume
that for some reason or other we are not able to discover/perceive that
there is indeed a law similar to the gravitation-curvature law in the
sense that it had not, has no and will have no exception either. Not
knowing anything about this law may be a reason for judging, but once
knowing this law undo the very reason for judging, finding the exception
and its ramifications.

I know this great spiritual law. I insist emphatically that I know very
little of it, but already enough of it to know that I desire at least two
things: to love unconditionally and to stop with judgements. To increase
my knowledge of these two things, I have to question them persistently. I
hope you do not mind my questioning.

>Woman probably have other prewired routines.

Does "prewired routines" not mean "behaviour following at least one
spiritual law which cannot be broken"?

Do we have one spiritual law for males and another spiritual law for
woman?

>Don't get me wrong - i say we have to accept that we're
>violent and brutal, but that doesn't mean we have to act
>accordingly.

I know. I say it just differently -- creativity is destructive and
constructive.

>On the other side, that is the nice thing about this time
>period: we're creating a new culture. And culture, a new
>complex culture, will emerge. So i agree with you: we
>create the creator of creation.

As I see it, we are in the middle of an astounding unprecedented
bifurcation in the history of Homo sapiens. If only we can get wise to the
fact that the name bifurcation means a forking event -- the two tooths of
the fork being constructive emergence and destructive immergence. We may
try for the craddle but we may end up in the grave.

How much has judgement to do with this? Can a baby in the womb make the
judgement: I have to live and thus be born or I have to die (inside or
outside the womb)?

>>Why does humankind want to demonstrate that it is
>>different from the rest of Creation and the Creator?
>>Such a demonstration will result in eternal damnation,
>>the only outcome possible for this demonstration
>>because it is a one-to-one-mapping.
>
>Now this is a judgemental remark. You can not know
>whether this will be the case. However, i like the Faustian
>implications.

I do know what judgement does. It looks back into the past rather than
forward into the future. It is different to Creation which follows the
arrow of time which the Creator has created into Creation. Now, any
observation on judgement may look like a judgement since it concerns
judgement. But whether it is really judgemental, we will have to compare
it to the arrow of time. If this observation tries to reverse the arrow of
time, then it is indeed judgemental.

>Talking about Genesis, isn't the metaphor there that we're
>evicted from Paradise the moment we ate from the tree of
>wisdom? The moment we become conscious, we realize
>(another word for creating by thoughts!) we're vulnerable,
>we're mortal and we feel responsible for our choices. Also
>a nice paradox: if we hadn't been eating from the apple,
>we wouldn't have known.

Until last year I believed tradition that Adam and Eve were expelled
because they sinned against the law of God.

OK. with the next I once again make myself open to certification.

Then in one night in November I woke up and got up to go to the toilet. As
I began walking, a voice said to me "What do you think happened in
Paradise?" I was not startled by the voice, nor by the nature of the
question. It was like any question which my granddaughre Jessica would
put to me. I did my things, went back to bed, thinking what the answer
would be, and soon were in sleep again.

The next morning when I woke up, I remembered the question. Strangely
enough I also realised that I now know the answer which tradition never
told me.

Adam and Eve were led by the serpent to judge whether God meant what He
said. They judged that He did not and thus ate the forbidden fruit. They
and humankind after them gained in knowledge, not because they ate the
forbidden fruit, but because it was part of the mission which they
received from God muc earlier. So they if they did not gain knowledge from
eating the forbidden fruit, did they gain anything else except some fruit?
I would not know because the document In Genesis (as well as the one in
the Gilgamesh Epic) do not say more. But did they lose anything? Yes,
their innocence to remain in dialogue with God. That is why He expelled
them from Paradise because there humans can live when in dialogue with
God, not when avoiding such dialogue.

Judgement kills dialogue.

>>This is not how light works. Light destroys shadows. It is
>>an object which cast a shadow by preventing the light to
>>propagate further than the object. God is light which
>>propagates through all Creation, except when humans
>>place themselves as objects in the path. Perhaps they
>>like their shadows more than the light. Sadly, they have
>>to cast that shadow in the rest of Creation.
>
>I choose to live with my shadow. Living also implies to cast
>a shadow.

How true. It is exactly the case when the source of light is hard,
pointed, spreading light symmetrical into al directions in a linear
fashion. This is what the sun does on clear days.

But happens when the source of light is soft, coming from many points,
spreading into al directions depending on the diversity of textures of the
objects it comes from? Do, for example, your body make a shadow on evenly
overcasted days?

Life is about hard and soft things, about making shadows and not makin
shadows. When I walk in the dessert, sometimes a spider, scorpion or
lizard will run along me in my shadow just to get a little bit of relief
from the scorching sun. It is then when I feel very close to God, knowing
that He has also made a Shadow under which I can move along.

>AHA! But now in think i understand you're resistance
>against personality types. Perhaps, had i lived under
>apartheid, i would have experienced the negative aspects
>of typing personalities also and would we strongly
>opposed them.

Jan, as for me, I became sensitive to the destructive effect of typing
personalties in my first year as a teacher. In those years I was still
thinking of apartheid as a necessity, eventhough with some bad outcomes.

Since then I have learned to see how destructive typification is also in
organising small, but poly-ethnic, communities and not merely on a grand
scale such as in apartheid.

If you want to make me furious, tell me that I have TO TEACH by putting
each learner into a certain box. I am not and will not be a Zoo keeper.

>Irreversible self-organising system is one side of each
>human being. While doing this, from this self-organising,
>a second part emerges: "irreversibly creating self-organising
>systems" - for instance learning organisartions and
>compuetr nerworks. We've been bootstrapped to create
>complexities

Yes, from the organ to the organism and from the organism to the organon.

>Well, you're special - i'm special too -, but i wouldn't opt for
>species. Funny, i see people as a language, you as a word.
>You see one being as a species, i only see special speci-mens.
>Did we cross paths or do we walk in the same direction,
>looking to different sides?

Sadly, there are many biologists to whom a name such as "Karash rick" (the
first part is the name of the genus beginning with a capital letter, the
second part is the name of the species beginning with a small letter) is
but merely one simple thing, simpler than even the two words naming it, so
simple that it means nothing to them.

But the authentic biologist would immediately know that even the name
"Karash rick" is not enough -- it has to be

"Karash rick" XYZ (ABC)

where ABC is the person who first described the species validly and XYZ
the last person who have tried to put the species in the genus which maps
best onto the species. The ABC is fixed, except for ignorance. The XYZ
changes from time to time, except for ignorance. Thus ABC fulfill the role
of being and XYZ the role of becoming.

When trying to find out more about ABC and XYZ, one discovers that the
species is not a single specimen, but a whole collection of specimens of
which only a few came to the eyes of biologists. The specimens of the
species acts as the language of the species. If you think that I do not
know the language (specimens) of the word (species), come and visit me and
let me read from the language to you. I am not an arm chair botanist. I go
to the specimens in habitat and walk between them. I do not gaze only at a
few dead copies of them on the herbarium sheets.

The problem, I think, is that we think differently whereas we assume that
we think the same. We cannot assume that we think the same -- we have to
establish that as fact. How? By using the dialogue.

So, in the case of
"Karash rick" XYZ (ABC)
I will try very hard to find out more about the ABC
and XYZ! I suspected, for example, that in the ABC
physics played a role. So I set out to falsify that
speculation. I failed because of what he once wrote
himself.

>I hope you don't mind my spelling errors - however,
>some are deliberate.

The same here. I stay far away from Microsoft Office and all its tools -
spell checker included. I once had a hard disk crash because of a virus. I
do not want it to happen ever again. I use Outlook Express which does not
want to connect with WordPerfect's Spell Checker. So much for the
connectivity of Windows applications.

Best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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