Self-Organization/Free Will

Harrison Owen owenhh at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 19 13:21:56 PST 2001


At 12:11 PM 11/19/01 -0900, Julie wrote:


>Is anyone else wondering whether there is a link between what we mean by
>"self-organization" and what we mean by "free will?"   Clarification about
>the similarities and/or differences between these two concepts would help
>me understand this conversation more fully.

We could get into terrible philosophical run-about detailing with the
peculiarities of the dialectical relationship of freedom and determinism.
But the simple take, so far as I am concerned is that freedom is meaningful
only in relation to determinism, and visa versa. So -- Free Will only
exists in a context which in turn determines our degrees of freedom. Thus I
am "free" to jump off a wall, if I choose to do so. I am not free to fly to
a tall branch. My freedom is determined by the gravity rich context in
which I live. And I would suggest that the same sort of thing is true with
self-organization. If (as I think) self-organization is the prior (primal)
condition of organizations, I am free to cooperate with it or seek to
dominate it -- but I can't avoid it. Make sense?

ho

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-469-9269
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh

OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu
Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20011119/0290327a/attachment-0017.htm>


More information about the OSList mailing list