Dear Nick,
So how did it go? I had to make a decision, and I wasn't sure of the
time or place for emergence--so I spent the day at the inaugural
national organizing meeting of the Slow Money Movement at the Santa Fe
Farmers Market. It was---awesome! I have a deep interest in
transformational social movements, especially when they are likely to go
viral as this one will.
Thanks for your note. Please keep me in the loop.
Merle
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
All,
The emergence seminar met at Downtown Subscription this afternoon and
survived a hailstorm, so I am feeling pretty perky about it. Next
week, we will read The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism by Brian
P. McLaughlin. British Emergentism is charming to read about. It
is all so innocent, upbeat , hierarchical, and /Victorian. /The great
and stable hierarchy of nature. You can almost think of the Queen
herself as the last and greatest emergent
phenomenon. In McLaughlin's essay, we learn, for instance, that the
term, emergent, arose as a contrast to the term resultant ... as in
the addition of vectors. When the result of the interaction of two
forces was different from the resultant, you had an emergent. See:
it's all so simple! I hope that others will join us from afar in
reading this source. I have written the author, who teaches at
Rutgers, to ask him to supply a pdf of the essay for me to make
available for our discussion on the the condition that we would make
that discussion available to him in some way, but he has not written
back. If anybody knows him and would plead our case, I would be in
their debt.
A few of you have asked that we might change the time to later. I am
going to hang tough for one more week because of the Ulam lectures,
but after that we might consider a later time. I am a bit reluctant
to make it a beer thing, because I want people sharp, but we shall see.
Thanks all,
Nick
PS. I have a xerox copy of the article if anybody local would like it.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu <mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
