RE: [unrev-II] Cultivating the Songlines of the Noosphere

From: Gil Regev (gil.regev@epfl.ch)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 00:48:18 PDT

  • Next message: Jack Park: "[unrev-II] Fwd: BBC program 'Future Fantastic' on brain-cyberspace interface"

    Jack,

    Thanks a lot for this link.2 things attracted my attention in this quote:

    1. Noosphere in the title of the paper
    The search for Noosphere in google produces some 10k hits. The first being:
    http://www.technoetic.com/noosphere/
    Quote:
    No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic
    affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and
    constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that
    passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise
    than collectively."
    - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
    (The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)

    2. Sir Geoffrey Vickers is mentioned in the text
    For more on Vickers check out the really good article written by Errol
    Smythe at http://mis.commerce.ubc.ca/smythe/weick.pdf. Smythe compares
    Vickers with Weick both of whom have views of human organizations which do
    not conform to the current (rather positivist) conventional wisdom in
    Information Systems which views organizations as goal-seeking entities. For
    more on this subject there's Peter Checkland's Sue Holwell's recent book
    "Information, Systems and Information Systems" Wiley, 1998.
    Quote:
    Vickers "rejected the idea of goal-seeking as a basis for human motivation
    and hence of regulation, putting him immediately at odds with the mainstream
    of decision theorists. 'In describing human activity, institutional or
    personal, the goal-seeking paradigm is inadequate. Regulatory activity, in
    government, management or private life consists in attaining or maintaining
    desired relationships.through time or in changing and eluding undesired
    ones' (Checkland and Casar 1986, p.16). 'The goals we seek are changes in
    our relations or in our opportunities for relating; but the bulk of our
    activity consists in the 'relating' itself'' (Vickers 1983, p.33). If the
    system serves to regulate its state through time then goal-seeking makes
    little sense as a mechanism, if a 'goal' is taken to be an 'end'. A focus on
    ends does not capture the essence of an ongoing process that serves to
    regulate the state of a system over time. The important distinction is that
    regulation calls for continuous processes whereas goal-seeking implies
    discrete time periods. Vickers felt that the majority of human regulative
    action was 'norm-seeking' and that it could not be resolved into
    'goal-seeking'"

    Gil

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Jack Park [mailto:jackpark@thinkalong.com]
    Sent: jeudi, 19. juillet 2001 20:09
    To: unrev-II@yahoogroups.com
    Subject: [unrev-II] Cultivating the Songlines of the Noosphere

      This strikes me as important to bootstrapping and to constructivist
      learning, which, in some sense, is what bootstrapping is all about.

      http://www.uia.org/uiadocs/noospher.htm

      "The gathering of people in Budapest was effectively the first attempt to
      give form and relevance to the archetypal "policy-making" encounter
      explored in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi and other less known works (cf
      Alan Dean Foster: Game Players of Zan). The concern was to build an
      alliance of art, literature and spirituality in response to the challenge
      of both human survival and evolution, whether individual or collective.
      The distinguishing feature of the gathering was the manner in which
      insights from the process of artistic creativity were embodied in the
      organization and processes of the event -- considered as the "material"
      constraining and inspiring the artistic possibilities of the moment. The
      intent was to use the gathering itself to engender an "elixir of
      transformation" from which wider society could benefit. This could only be
      done by acting with presence in the moment to give appropriate form to
    what
      could be more widely shared.
      The gathering acknowledged the trap of conventional meetings in which
      representatives of various perspectives make presentations in an effort to
      design and colonize the future of others who cannot be present. The
    failure
      to creatively manifest new behaviour and organization in such meetings has
      been reflected in the subsequent failure of their work in responding to
    the
      challenges of wider society. Recognizing that a "A trap is a function of
      the nature of the trapped" (Geoffrey Vickers), the transformative
    challenge
      was seen to lie in co-creating in the present. Instead of seeking to avoid
      this trap, the meeting sought to integrate the behaviours associated with
      the trap into new understanding.
      Explanations of such a catalytic event are themselves misleading traps.
    Any
      such attempt -- as an ex-planation --effectively displaces the focus of
      attention out of the grounded plane of the present moment from which it
      derived both its essential meaning and its wider significance. How indeed
      does art both carry the insights of the spirit and entrain more fruitfully
      transformative behaviour -- and the social and conceptual organization to
      sustain it?
      The diversity of perspectives present in the configuration of insights
      assembled at Budapest was therefore a challenge to any understanding of
      what was occurring. Any understanding depended upon the capacity of the
      attentive individual to integrate this diversity into a meaningful pattern
      whose nature necessarily transcended those perspectives. The
    transformative
      effect of the gathering lay in the manner in which a participant's
      awareness was entrained by the interference effects, harmonies and
      oppositions that gave structure to that configuration of perspectives.
      The "effect" of the gathering on wider society lay in the transformation
    it
      engendered in those who subsequently endeavoured to understand what had
      occurred in the light of the various "products" that appeared to emanate
      from the gathering. In several senses, it was the meeting itself that was
      both "the message" and a transformative catalyst."

      PREAMBLE
      PERSPECTIVES AND SOUNDINGS
      Musical perspective
      Singing perspective
      Dramatic perspective
      Kinaesthetic perspective
      Poetic perspective
      Artistic perspective
      Gastronomic and olfactory perspective
      Humour perspective
      Magical perspective
      Weaving perspective
      Geometric perspective
      Angelic perspective
      Alchemical perspective
      Spiritual exercise perspective
      META-DISCIPLINE: DISCIPLINING THE DISCIPLINES
      SONGLINES AND INTERFERENCE HARMONICS
      Aesthetic frameworks
      Challenge of human survival
      Substituting aesthetic organization for economic organization
      Songlines of the noosphere
      Aesthetics of differences
      COMPREHENDING THE LANGUAGE OF PATTERN SHIFTING
      Limitation of vision-based metaphors
      References

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