Texas Tech University
Box 43092
Lubbock, TX 79409 3092



Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 08:09:34 -0700


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

Subject:   Notes to New World Order Section 1

Rod:

These are some notes I am appending to the first section of the New World Order Paper. I am presently going back through it, section by section, and jotting down ideas as I go along. Needless to say, this is all in the spirit of "for what it's worth".

I include section 1 first so that you will see just where my comments fit in. So skip down the page until you come to the double line which I use to indicate the end of the passage in the paper and the beginning of my comments.

[NWO Section 1... ]

  1. ARISTOTLE HAS A POWERFUL MESSAGE; BUT IS THERE TIME TO LISTEN?

    In 400 B.C., Aristotle complained that the youth of his day lacked diligence and respect for their elders. This generational worry came to mind recently when visiting a museum in Salt Lake City. The curator explained that in the late 1800s a farmer, untrained in the arts, created a series of magnificent tapestries to depict the story of the Mormon trek across the continent. He was inspired by complaints that the youth of his day did not know the heroic effort by their elders to build a new community. The farmer-turned-artist traveled the territory showing his tapestries at public events. People awed by the artful pictures, also, listened to stories of hard won experience, as diaries of those who had accomplished the feats shown in the tapestries, were read aloud at these events.

    The lessons of life take time to listen and learn .

    Today, we call this "Getting everyone on-board!" "Communicating!"

    Powerful technology enables people to tell their story farther and faster than in earlier times. Yet, despite constant calls, meetings, faxes, email, movies, television and radio, indeed an...

    Information Highway

    ...communication remains the challenge of the ages. CEOs, managers, political leaders, engineers, media pundits, educators and experts from every field daily cry out the classic line from the 1970s movie "Cool Hand Luke."

    What we have here is a...


    FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE!


    Why hasn't a quantum leap in information improved communication?

    Why doesn't more information result in better performance instead of misunderstanding, mistakes, frustration and losses?

    Aristotle made another observation that offers a solution, if only we have time to listen...

    The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold!


Comments by Ransdell begin just below...


I would insert here the example of the telephone game

I would then add to this that Aristotle's principle is a powerful half-truth. The full truth is that this tendency to chaos, which is very real, is counter-acted in human life by the tendency of a living being, considered as a process in constant change across time, to compensate continually for error. If it weren't for this, our condition would be hopeless.

But this tendency is efficient only to the extent that the process maintains a constant overall unity given by a goal state toward which it is striving. This in turn supposes that the life-process is informed throughout by communication, which is what enables the whole to benefit from what occurs in a part of it.

-- The apparent paradox in this is that communication seems to be at once the cause of the problem and the solution to it.

This means that there must be an important distinction to be drawn between types of communication: communication of the sort which produces disintegration -- works against efficiency by producing chaos -- and communication which counteracts this and results in efficiency and success relative to the inherent goals of the life process.

-- You can then explain that it is communication self-controlled by a metric that is fed back into the process itself that makes for efficiency and success, and communication which lacks this which tends towards chaos.

-- Although it might not be the best place to include the following consideration, it should be included somewhere in the overview: The tendency to disintegration illustrated by the telephone game should not be regarded simply as something bad, bur rather as something having its own special role to play in the overall process.

-- Why? Because the spontaneous tendency to deviation is at the same time the source of all creativity. New ideas occur by chance. What makes a new idea a creative factor is that the deviation is taken advantage of as presenting a possibility, which in the context of a process structured as an inquiry, can mean a possible solution. In other words, spontaneity can be and should be exploited as the basic resource for the production of hypotheses about a solution.

-- If, however, there is no inquiry structure to draw upon then the possibility is not only of no value but is actually a negative factor because it simply functions in the service of disintegration, as illustrated in the telephone game.

-- Consider email in this connection. You do recognize that it can have a role to play in management but in your analysis it appears chiefly in a negative light, inducing more and more distraction, etc. This is true, of course, when there is no overall control of it which exploits what it provides, which is, among other things, the input of new ideas at the most basic level. What you need is to be able to emphasize the potential value of email, which is not that it provides more and more information but that it provides, among other things, the spontaneous introduction of new ideas and perspectives which a well-designed management plan will exploit as possible contributions to solutions.

-- There can be much wastage when it comes to entertaining new possibilities. Indeed, there must be a lot of wastage, a lot of possibilities introduced which just aren't pertinent or feasible and are immediately discarded. But this wastage is more than compensated for if it also produces an idea that makes a strong contribution toward the solution of a problem. What is a good idea worth? It is impossible to say, isn't it, since a single idea can sometimes make the difference between success and failure.

-- Overall efficiency can require inefficiency: the aim is not to make everything efficient but rather to make the overall process efficient, and there should be a recognition of the importance of playfulness, spontaneity, and waste in certain aspects of the process.

-- There is, by the way, much backing for this both in Peirce and in the later development of cybernetic theory, and I think there must be a lot to draw upon in computer science to this effect, too, which would show up in game simulations in particular but elsewhere as well.

-- I am not certain of this but I seem to recall that Norbert Wiener even demonstrated that in all self-controlled cybernetic systems sophisticated enough to be of any interest the factor of pure chance must be introduced in order to make the feedback correction cycle work. What happens otherwise is that the corrective response gets out of control and a disastrous oscillation of increasing overcompensation occurs.

-- As I said initially, I don't know whether it is best to introduce this consideration about the uses of spontaneous deviation at this point or later in the presentation, though it might be a good idea to introduce it in a very abbreviated way that does not distract the reader from the line of thought you are developing but at the same time gives a hint of something interesting to be developed in detail later.

Sincerely,

Texas Tech University
Dept of Philosophy

Joe Ransdell

Joseph Ransdell ransdell@door.net Joseph.Ransdell@ttu.edu 806 742-3275 Home: 806 797-2592 http://www.door.net/arisbe (Peirce Gateway website) http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm