[OSList] Self Organizing vs. Physics & Entropy... Who wins?

Sun Feb 16 12:50:43 PST 2014

Peggy!  

You said exactly what I was trying to say, but you said it so much more elegantly than I did!  Thanks for capturing the idea in so much more accessible form!

John

On Feb 16, 2014, at 11:35 AM, Peggy Holman wrote:

> I’ve been doing some writing on complexity and ran into a relevant quote from Prigogine and Stengers. It’s in the section below from the chapter I’m writing:
> 
> A Changing World View
> What is it like when your peer’s assumptions about how the world works seem fine to them, yet your own path turns up nothing but contradictions? Such is the fate of those who are poised to re-invent the world.  The prevailing wisdom just doesn’t fit your data. And the implications…they could change everything.
> 
> The cultural narrative when this story begins is often called “Newtonian” or “classical science”.  This body of knowledge dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  “They pictured a world in which every event was determined by initial conditions that were, at least in principle, determinable with precision.  It was a world in which chance played no part, in which all the pieces came together like cogs in a cosmic machine (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. xiii).” It was the perfect metaphor for the rising Industrial Age.  And it still influences the dominant approaches to leadership, strategic planning and “change management” (the name itself a misnomer through the lens of complexity) today.
> 
> As Wheatley characterizes it: “we have broken things into parts and fragments for so long and have believed that was the best way to understand them, that we are unequipped to see a different order that is there, moving the whole. (Wheatley M. J., 1992)“  (p. 41) British physicist David Bohm captures this dilemma when he says, ‘The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is an illusion and cannot do other than lead to conflict and confusion’. (Wheatley M. J., 1992, p. 24)” 
> 
> Early in the nineteenth century, a few scientists were running into that confusion.   Contradictions defied explanation. For example, thermodynamics indicated that if the universe was a machine, it was running down.  Yet Darwin’s followers found that biological systems were actually running up, becoming more organized. The complex whole exhibited properties that could not be readily explained by understanding the parts (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).
> 
>  
> 
> Peggy
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
> Peggy Holman
> Journalism that Matters
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> 
> Enjoy the award winning Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 12, 2014, at 6:30 AM, Sharon Joy Kleitsch <kleitsch at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
>> It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I was introduced to syntropy – the pull of life. I had found entropy to be depressing, but had accepted it. Funny, how it had not occurred to me that both/and is part of life.
>> 
>> Then I listened to the webinar sponsored by the International Consciousness Research Lab (formerly PEAR with their 30 years of consciousness research, where the Global Consciousness Project birthed.) http://www.icrl.org
>> 
>> Antonella Vannini and Ulisses di Corpo  introduced us to "Syntropy: The Energy of Love”. (It may still be on the ICRL web site.) Antonella and Ulisses agreed to join us in an action research project to demonstrate how love can transform a community. In our case, St Petersburg FL.
>> 
>> If you would like to join me and The Connection Partners down this rabbit hole, check out http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/  http://noosphere.princeton.edu/  http://www.psyleron.com 
>> 
>> One of our fellow explorers is taking a course in Sacred Economics at Unity of Tampa. They spent a session on syntropy. Here’s what Sigrid shared:
>> 
>> 	"This is the incredible we powerpoint I mentioned:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDA836rOW00&feature=youtu.be
>> 
>> 	"The discussion about the heart being the center of the consciousness in the body: Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini - West and East: Entropy versus Syntropy?
>> 
>> 	"And the journal that has all these incredible articles: http://www.sintropia.it/journal.htm"
>> 
>> We have found these explorations too much fun to miss. 
>> 
>> Besides, indicators are that are theories are working. We live in a ‘territory' filled with flow and synchronicity. We even find that this field of love (we call it the heart field) travels with us, so they keep showing up everywhere.
>> 
>> You don’t have to wait for the fair to go on wild rides!
>> 
>> Who wants to play?
>> 
>> Happy Valentine’s Day!
>> 
>> Sharon Joy Kleitsch
>> The Connection Partners, Inc
>>     -  linking people, resources and ideas
>> St Petersburg FL 33701
>> Kleitsch at verizon.net
>> 727-550-9660
>> 
>> 
>> From: John Watkins <johnw536 at mac.com>
>> Reply-To: World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>
>> Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 at 12:45 AM
>> To: World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>
>> Subject: Re: [OSList] Self Organizing vs. Physics & Entropy... Who wins?
>> 
>> Lucas,
>> 
>> This is a great question you raise!  It seems that our universe operates by several intriguing principles.  In general, it seems to be true that overall entropy increases (but I think the final conclusions on that one are still not available to us).  But the strange and really cool thing is, it does so by increasing order in some sub-systems.  So, the big bang happens, and if entropy were the total picture, we would never have had any matter at all.  All that energy would merely have dissipated into all that expanding space.  But something happened that caused the swirls of chaotic energy to begin to coalesce into sub atomic particles, then particles, then atoms, then molecules, then stars and eventually planets and life and us.  It seems that inherent in chaos is the emergence of patterns that result in orders, and orders then recursively develop themselves into complexity.  One of the coolest things is the way that established patterns become autopoietic, that is, they take in energy, sort the energy into that which helps them recreate themselves at a higher level of organization, and then they excrete the rest of the energy back into the broader system.  That is one definition of entropy, but the intriguing thing is that the excreted energy does not just go all random; it actually gets used in the emergence of other new orders.  So.  Classical thermodynamics does explain all this, but it does so without recourse to complexity theory.  Complexity theory helps us understand how new orders emerge from open systems in far from equilibrium states.  I take Open Space to be one of those sorts of far from equilibrium states settings for the emergence of new orders.
>> 
>> John
>> 
>> On Feb 11, 2014, at 8:19 PM, Lucas Cioffi wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi All, 
>>> 
>>> I read that "Open Space works because self-organization works."  But I remember from physics class that disorder (entropy) in the Universe is always increasing, so when the order of something increases (such as during OS), the order of something else must decrease.
>>> 
>>> Paraphrased from Wikipedia: 
>>> "The second law of thermodynamics states that in general the total entropy of any system (the disorder, randomness, or our lack of information about it) will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system."
>>> 
>>> So when participants organize themselves during Open Space does something else become disorganized?  Or is it that all the disorder created (by consuming the muffins, coffee, fuel, paper, electricity, etc) always outweighed by the order created by the self-organization?
>>> 
>>> For what it's worth, below is an interesting thread I found from the list archives from a few years ago that mentions entropy...
>>> 
>>> Lucas Cioffi
>>> Charlottesville, VA
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: John Watkins <johnw536 at mac.com>
>>> Date: Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:25 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [OSList] Designing an OS way
>>> To: Artur Silva <arturfsilva at yahoo.com>, World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>
>>> Cc: "76066.515 at compuserve.com" <76066.515 at compuserve.com>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Artur,
>>> 
>>> The term "open systems" comes from thermodynamics, especially from Prigogine and Stengers, who also refer to them as "dissipative" systems.  It does not mean open to change; it means open in the sense of importing "energy" from outside itself and excreting "energy" back into the surrounding system.  Such systems are most often self-organizing and self-recreating (autopoiesis).  They "sort" energy into that which will help them recreate themselves and that which will not, and they dissipate the rest, creating, paradoxically, internally order and externally more entropy.  Bureaucracies are actually great examples of open systems in this regard.
>>> 
>>> John
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