Turtles (short)

[Marty Boroson]

Dear friends:

I am new to the list and this is my first post, but I am a great fan of turtles and so must jump in.

For me, I have to ask who or what is the "self" that is self-organizing?  If this self is really Self (ie. God or Spirit or Brahman or whatever you'd like to call it) then surely everything in creation is indeed Self-organizing, and included in this are so-called non-living systems.  Everything is part of an emergent order.  (This is just another way of saying ... turtles all the way up!)

Of course if you look at any part of the whole (financial systems, Iraq, the US, you, me) things can seem fairly closed from time to time.  But if you look at the deeper whole, I don't know if anything is ever closed or if "we" ever "open" a space.  Maybe we just give it a nudge, when it is already on the verge of realization, helping it to see that it can be open, because it is already open.  


Marty Boroson
Devon, UK
www.becomingme.com


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Artur Silva 
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU 
  Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2005 3:15 PM
  Subject: Re: Turtles (short)


  Masud Sheikh <masheikh at cogeco.ca> wrote: 
    HO wrote:
    "Or put rather bluntly - 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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