Steve Smith wrote at 03/19/2013 01:20 PM: > I am glad that you *also* appreciate the list's freewheeling style and > seek more engagement in a broader sense (if I read you correctly). > Maybe this discussion will help encourage a broadening in the > participation...
I don't think of it so much as freewheeling. I think of it more as a compulsion. Owen's persistent attempts to find a homunculus inside Google is a better example than brain farts for a better definition of time. And it goes back to what I was trying to say in the last e-mail. We (humans, actors, initiators of causal chains of events) have only a SINGLE effector available to us: twitch. We spastically twitch about because that's the only thing we can do. The resulting patterns are NOT caused by any intelligence, plan, goal, objective, belief, intention, etc. within the actor. The resulting patterns are an artifact of the collection of actors twitching about in the open universe surrounding us. It's only in hindsight ... or with an epiphenomenal or finitely limited attention span that we "recognize" patterns and, post-hoc, impute intelligence, plans, objectives, etc. onto some arbitrarily sliced out kernel of the pattern. ---- Given that, I explain running forward with our own reality-disconnected systems of assumptions as life's imperative: we twitch and we just keep twitching. We just wiggle and squirm about in our own juices until some other wiggling squirming process changes the juices in some happenstance way. So, when you're quaffing pints with that guy who just won't shut up about, say, football, then you can see him for what he is: a twitch with few degrees of freedom. He must twitch and football is all he has to twitch about! -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Shallow men believe in luck ... Strong men believe in cause and effect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
