Entropy production in the spiritual world LO23274

J.C. Lelie (janlelie@wxs.nl)
Fri, 19 Nov 1999 12:34:58 +0100

Replying to LO23262 --

Dear At and fellow travellers, strangly attracted to this oasis,

Thank you for your mail. "i love to learn, but i hate to be taught" and
you nicely sailed between this Scylla and Charibdis. You talked your walk.
Find the foma.

Please correct me if i'm wrong, but are you implying that "a bald
adoption - of your ideas - would be counterproductive, interfering with
the basic intent of creating a conscious involvement rather than a new
paradigmatic dogma?" (I'm quoting from McWinney's "Paths of Change", i
just had to reach for his book). I have experienced the resistance of
teachers for propagating a new dogma - fearing their learnings may end
up as a dogma (they do, but that is not the point). I get the impression
that you're willing and able to light the fire and does so by
stimulating us to kindle our own.

"So, in essence, the implementation must be a self-pratice in the
acceptance of diversity and, at the same time, support to the commitment
experienced by the participants to a change." We're talking third order
change here, a change in which we transcende paradigms and realities, a
change after which we can choose our stories, our realities and our
creations.

A shift which would imply that we become responsible for our choice of
being (self-awareness) - something most of us (well, i was) have been
taught to evade because it might involve experiencing pain (spleen). Not
only do we try to evade the pain in learning - because it is painful,
learning hurts - but also, we try to protect others from it - especially
those we care for. (my daughter is called Titia, she is 12 years now and i
support her in learning. For me it is difficult to see how must trouble
this learning causes her, even while the methods here in The Netherlands
have improved remarkedly).

That connects to the ideas by Peter Block, that an organisation tends to
take away responsibilities for choice in exchange of a pay-check (we pay
you in order not to think for yourself, this is obvious for the readers of
Adams' Dilbert(tm)). So in that way single order learning is
institutionalized, creating a situation in which second order learning
becomes even more painful. This is topped off by an explicit theory that
says we're open for learning and an implicit theory, shown by the ways of
behaving, that says: "no we're not open". Double binding.

Side line: most people consider the Dead Parrot Sketch Monty Python's
best. I personally like the Cheese Shop more; now i can see why.

Now, when you want to implement third order learning in that situation,
the lash back could be even more serious, WWIII (but we do not know that
for sure - or worse - it is already happening, we're already at war, a
world wide war of which the actual conflicts are just symptoms. Am i
addressing fellow guerilla's or something?).

Second side line: is it not that on the brink of transformation, systems
tend to become chaotic? Is this human world in chaos, altough painful for
every individual, a tell-tale sign of the possibility of transformation?

And at the same time, while implementing third order learning, you can not
use the "classical teachings" altough they are imbedded inside this
learning - like classical physics within the realm of quatum and
relativity. Hmm, i can see for myself now, now only to get things in
focus.

> I also have initiated dialogues on many seemingly unconnected topics, but
> eventually it will become clear how they all are directly related to the
> demonstration.

There are no unconnected topics, they just hide their connections.

> The one group (the smallest in numbers) went so far as to work openly from
> "it is" rather than "what if".

I say: "I sometimes feel like the person who said that (s)he doesn't want
to belong to a circle that wants to have heirme as a member".

> Another group (somewhat larger) often wrote to me in private.

> The third group (slightly larger) undertook open excursions in the
> dialogues of the list in some aspect related to "entropy production" which
> seemed to be connected closely to their own specialities. But as soon as
> VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY on "entropy production" moved away from their own
> specialities, they stopped with excursions from the view point of "entropy
> production". It can mean many things. But I think that most of them feel
> very much like group two in strange waters.
>
> The fourth group, not even bigger, but perhaps as small as the first
> group, considered the voyage as a waste of time.
>
> The fifth group is much larger than all the other four groups together.
> They did not write to the list on "entropy production" and the immense
> web it entails, nor to me in private.
>
> This fifth group is homogenous only in one thing -- not taking part in the
> dialogue on the web of "entropy production". ...snip...
> I often thought of them as chameleons.
> There is a saying in Africa that the chameleon is the wisest of all
> animals because its eyes are always moving, observing, so that it has no
> time for even making a noise or moving a limb.

I imagine that they talk, not by talking but by walking. Beside, life
sucks, it sucks in time and attention.

> Are we
> sufficiently aware of evolution, not merely of biological organisms, but
> also of organisations and reality in general?

We don't have to, that is "the invisible hand of evolution". But, mind
you, it is a blind hand and we're just an outrageous disaster. And, now we
are aware of evolution, we started to evolutionise ourselves.

The main issue with a paradigm shift is the people raised within the old
paradigm. Never underestimate the force of habbit. The other day i was
reading about the quaeste of Paul Ekman regarding the universitality of
emotions. Charles Darwin (CD) - my second name is Charles, so i'm somewhat
biased - had already shown that emotions are universal, shared even with
animals. And yet, because of the misuse of the ideas of evolution by
fascists and others ("survival of the fittest", not even coined by CD) in
the period between the wars, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others
somehow decided to prove that emotional expressions belong to a culture, a
way of communicating thoughts and feeling, are learned and are not
universal. It took Paul years to disprove this and his ideas were never
accepted by Mead and Bateson. So it took "us" almost 100 years to
understand, to accept, the teaching of CD. We now realize that the
concepst of evolution have nothing to do with the respect of others -
including animals.

The paradigm shift in learning will also take at least 100 years, because
after a certain time, "the window of opportunity to learn" is closed,
irreversibly. I think i just was lucky that somehow i taught myself second
order learning and am able to perceive third order learning - altough i
feel unable to teach it.

> We know (or ought to know) how the world was and how people thought and
> behaved before Newton announced his Law of Gravitation (for the entire
> physical world).

I cannot even try to imagine a pre-Newtom world. I was probably processing
mud at the time.

> Perhaps the period of time for your experiences is too short to make any
> definite pattern out of them. So let us look at history again. Two and a
> half centuries after Newton, in world very much changed, Einstein
> announced his Special Theory of Relativity (1900). In it he created a new
> language to look at the physical world. He made a remarkable deduction
> that matter is a form of energy as if energy has become frozen. He soon
> realised that Bequerel's discovery of radioactivity was one of the most
> significant events of the century just left behind. Few noticed this
> opinion.

I noticed this opinion. I even noticed that second order learning is
noticing opinions of the few. A discovery is usually right under your
nose, but habits prevent you from noticing.

> But did humankind think differently? Did the flapping of butterfly's wings
> take effect immediately? No. With its traditional thinking almost the
> entire of humankind was at war (WWI). After that war one general named Jan
> Smuts warned that the peace would not last because it did not honoured the
> dignity of the conquered. Smuts had the experience to know what he was
> speaking about. In 1900 when Einstein formulated his Special Theory,
> Smuts' own country (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek) was at war with Great
> Brittain while he was a general in it. That Brittish-Boer (BB) war was in
> many respects a culmination of destructions based on the creativity of
> humankind during the two centuries since Newton.

"I managed to mention the war only one time and got away with it"

> Not surprisingly, in went also E = mc^2. One of the first to
> realise this development was Smuts in collaboration with Bohr.

Now I didn't know that. I'm a big fan of Niels Bohr, whish my third name
was Niels.

> What struck Einstein is that for this person there was not any more
> an abyss between the physical and spiritual worlds -- they were merely the
> two sides of the same coin called reality.

There never was an abyss between the physical and spiritual worlds: it is
taught, learned, accepted, normal behaviour, just like the flat earth, the
flogiston and the aether.

My guess would be that the reasoning behind these teachings was that our
parents and elders wanted us to belong to a group, a network, a tribe, a
people, one nation. In order to survive in the savanne we have to
co-operate, communicate, trust laws and make commitments. So learning
was/is also used to learn wrong, not so wrong and harmlessly wrong (-->
!FOMA! <--) ideas just to be sure that you would remain inside the group,
that the group accepted you as a member (remember) because the group would
care for you when your parents are gone (to heaven) only if you have the
same ideas. See the cat? See the craddle?

> The second thing is that this
> person did offer like Darwin a reason for this one-to-many-mapping of
> species, physical or spiritual. But unlike Darwin it depended on a
> property of all the systems rather than the peculiarities of the system
> itself. This property was identified as wholeness. Einstein realised that
> this wholeness was the very driving force (which he called "unification")
> of his own "wild efforts"!
>
> Who was the author of "Holism and Evolution"? Jan Smuts. In 1948 he lost
> the general election in South Africa to a party who formulated apartheid
> as their ideology and policy. He was devastated. Few realise why.
> Apartheid was designed directly in opposition to holism -- once again the
> two ways, contructive or destructive -- once again the majority following
> the destructive way, but now believing naively that it was a most
> constructive way!

So: I guessed correctly: wholisme had to evolve from apartheid.

> Firstly, Newton's original discovery, all subsequent discoveries of
> physical laws including the LEC (Law of Energy Conservation) as well as
> LEP (Law of Entropy Production) and Einstein's magnificant reformulation
> of Newton's law, were made from the paradigm of simplicity. Perhaps it is
> possible to make discoveries of spiritual laws also from this paradigm,
> but I do not believe so. I believe, based on my own experiences and thus
> tacit, formal and sapient knowledge evolving from it, that discoveries of
> spiritual laws will be made from the paradigm of complexity. All empirics
> are related to our sense organs of which we become conscious through our
> paradigms.
>
> This brings me to my second note. Pasteur knew from several personal
> experiences that novel discoveries are made only by minds sufficiently
> prepared for it. There is no hope for the unprepared mind to make a
> breakthough discovery by chance. This Pasteurian pattern is even
> reflected in the instruments which we use to extend our sense organs so as
> to make profound empirical discoveries. The age of making novel
> discoveries with simple instruments like a ruler, a mass balance or a
> thermometer is closing. Simplicity cannot prepare us for complexity. Allow
> me to explain.
>
> My youngest daughter Ilse-Marie is experiencing this truth. She is
> working as a chemical analyst in an pharmaceutical institute. Both
> analytical chemistry and pharmacology are complex disciplines. She uses
> complex instrumentation like mass spectrometers and chromatographs. To set
> up, for example, a HPLC (High Pressure Liquid Chromatograph) takes the
> better part of a day before reliable measurements can be made.
>
> Ilse-Marie works from the paradigm of complexity. I have coached her on
> the tacit dimension to do so. She still lives in our house and I thus have
> many opportunities to do so. But the boss (CEO) of the institute works
> from the paradigm of simplicity. I have never met her boss and never had
> any influence on this person (except through Ilse-Marie ;-). Often, in
> less than an hour after a sample was handed to the analysts, the boss will
> be asking for results. The effect is disastrous. Empirics go haywire.
> Spirituality declines. Employees are caught up in destructive conflicts.
> Consultants aggrevate the problems. Reality becoming shattered into a
> zillion pieces. Almost every day Ilse-Marie surprises me with her coping
> of this situation.
>
> My third note is on the novelty of the empirical demonstration. How much
> deviation from the common, standard and tradition are we willing to accept
> so as not to shut our eyes for such a novelty? Consider, for example, the
> use of chromatographic evidence in a court of law. The repeatability of
> chromatography has already been established for a couple of decades before
> courts of law accepted chromatographic data as evidence too. In other
> words, when a new order does emerge from chaos as a result of "entropy
> production", are we willing to accept any emergence as a new order?
>
> >Then, just one more preliminary (I have even a higher
> >standard for scientific "laws" than that they be merely
> >empirically verifiable) and that is that any scientist, by
> >following the described procedure, can replicate the results
> >claimed. This means, in the case of spiritual matters, that
> >you may not require that I be "of the faith" in order to
> >"experience" what you describe. So, if you have "a way
> >to demonstrate empirically that a law of entropy production
> >happens in the spiritual world," it must not require religious
> >faith from the scientist who wishes to understand or replicate
> >its demonstration.
>
> Thanks John for formulating it so clearly. Yes, faith will not play a
> role, although some experience in complexity will be necessary. But since
> experience and experiments all belong to the empirical facet of the
> discovery, this Pasteurian necessity of experience to become conscious of
> what the empirical demonstration will be "saying" need not be too great a
> problem. I have worked hard with my "torrent of words" to help you
> preparing for it.
>
> However, there is one tacit assumption which you have made and which I now
> have to articulate. I have often worked that as a theme in my
> contributions so as to give fellow learners experience in this assumption.
> You have used the word "scientist" in the singular form. Perhaps you have
> assumed that all empirical discoveries may be made by "learning
> individuals". For example, in LO23181 you wrote "I think that it's
> difficult to understand organizational learning as anything other than
> individuals' learning if one identifies the only outcome of learning to be
> "knowledge." "
>

Have to stop now - lunch.

> It is like the job of an optician in physics. One photon of light can
> never set up a diffraction pattern.

I think a photon not only can, but even will and must, cooperating with
itself.

With kind regards - met vriendelijke groeten,

Jan Lelie

-- 

Drs J.C. Lelie CPIM (Jan) LOGISENS - Sparring Partner in Logistical Development Mind@Work est. 1998 - Group Resolution Process Support Tel.: (+ 31) (0)70 3243475 or car: (+ 31)(0)65 4685114 http://www.mindatwork.nl and/or taoSystems: + 31 (0)30 6377973 - Mindatwork@taoNet.nl

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