Oh surely Nick, I'm sorry. I can't seem to tell when I should explain, as I'm writing, that a kind of 'dripping' irony is intended. If you think of 'making sense' making a self-consistent explanation, my question is whether that automatically requires you to misunderstand things that work because of their inconsistencies, like environments. When you only look at information from the past that isn't going to change, in your own mind where there are no alternate perspectives or differing value judgments to deal with, the illusion of 'making sense' of everything often does appear work. Sometimes I catch myself and think of it as a lot of 'patches' to hide the inexplicable parts. and even try to look back under them.
It would be nice to aim for think inclusively rather than exclusively, and find what all the points of view have in common rather than only the last one standing after severe criticism. One thing that pushes me in that direction is noting when things can be expected to *become* inconsistent, and diverge on some presently unobservable path, for either general or specific reasons. Perhaps this exchange is an example of 'talking past each other'. in making the same point. The mental machine does such a deceptively good job of rendering snap judgments the seem to make so much sense to be conclusive, pure satisfying certainty, maybe that itself should be thought of as inexplicable too! I guess what I've been trying to raise as a subject is the kinds of evidence in a system that signal that it is about to become in a way that is inconsistent with itself. and that's the systems issue that growth induced collapse is a small part of, the prior signs of approaching change, that I find interesting. Phil From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 12:30 AM To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? PH wrote " I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself" NT replies: Oh good lord! I cannot allow myself to go along with this statement. First, as a behaviorist, I am not sure what it means to talk to oneself. Second, I have no idea what the validator of such a statement would be. No, I think that only people who have been understood by [some] others can claim to have made sense. Otherwise, made sense to whom? That is why it is so maddening to speak and not be understood. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Henshaw <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning <mailto:friam@redfish.com> Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 10/2/2008 8:18:37 PM Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Yes,. such is the disappointment of life! However. we do, I believe, have words that would be quite meaningless even to ourselves without some sort of experience in common. I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself. but am still also driven to explore those subjects which I can only really understand by way of the give and take of examining the physical world people seem to experience in common. Since nearly everything in my mind makes complete sense, as I make it so, anything that doesn't seems to have a good chance of being something not in my mind. That's sort of a technique. I also find a consistent predictability to not being able to make very good sense of anything that grows exponentially. I see loops of events that get somewhere that I can't trace, and have found that very helpful in identifying things that are 'out of body' in that sort of actual physical sense, but lead me to think about the distributed networks of things they connect which I can't make much sense of. However, they still seem to be of the kind of thing not located in my mind, but located in the physical world of common experience, identifiable, but not explainable? Does that work, is that right ? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Phil Henshaw Hath Spoken Thus: ==>Look, I know this audience is not made of fools, and not deaf and dumb, and probably not disinterested in change, so I have to figure your inability to connect with my approach to constructing a science of change for natural complex systems must be that you find no door between your methods and mine. <== Phil, Nick Thompson hath replied: I have struggled to understand you over the years and just .... can't. Others have said the same of me. Perhaps "connection" is too high a standard. Certainly "AUDIENCE" is too high a standard. We are not all here, quietly attentive, waiting for ANYbody's message. There is no "we" here. The older I get, the rarer communication between actual human beings seems to be. We talk to our gods; we talk to our college mentors; we talk to our long dead parents, we reproduce the values of those who have tortured us in our past. However, talking to EACH OTHER is pretty unusual. And hearing one another is rarer still. Take care, nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Henshaw <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: The Friday Morning <mailto:friam@redfish.com> Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 10/2/2008 5:56:08 AM Subject: or more simply, is there order?
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