Turtles (short)

[Artur Silva]

Masud Sheikh <masheikh at cogeco.ca> wrote: HO wrote:
"Or put rather bluntly - there is no such thing as a non-self-organizing
system. There are only some mildly deluded folks who think they did the
organizing. Outrageous for sure, and possibly a break with reality, but that
is pretty much where I found myself."

I believe the statement "there is no such thing as a non-self-organizing
system" is true for living systems, but not for non-living systems. For
instance, in any "organization" there are systems of people, who find that
the best team-building may be done around the coffee machine or bar, rather
than in a classroom, teaching "teamwork". There are other systems (e.g. the
financial reporting system) that are non-living. Both the living and
non-living systems interact with - and impact - each other.

Let me stop here, and invite others to join in


Masud - thanks for taking the lead on this.

Harrison - there are two things that I don't understand in this last post and in some others from you. I think I have already referred to this, but let's go again.

1. You refer often to Kaufman's conditions for self-organization. Clearly those conditions are NOT current and they occur only in special situations. So it seems to me that there is a contradiction between your references to those conditions and your persistent affirmations that "there is not such thing as a non-self-organizing-systems". Can you clarify your thoughts about this please?

2.  I agree with Masud that the statement is true for "living systems". So when we consider the humans as part of an ecosystem we can see them as a "living systems". But human organizations are not only "living material". Masud gave an example with the financial system, but there are others. An organization is a mix of living people with objects, rules, procedures, hierarchies, etc that are not "living" in the biological sense. Those rules and procedures inhibit, in my opinion, their being "living systems". That's is precisely the reason why we talk about opening the space - the fact that quite often in organizations and even in communities the space is pretty closed. Any comments?

Artur








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