"The interaction is certainly stimulating and a better way to spend an
hour than watching the latest OJ Simpson update or whatever is the current
fad focus of the local media where you all live. As Fernando Flores would
say " Look for distinctions..." and ifyou find none then you are wasting
your time (if not your brain)."
Keith, I agree with the importance which You and Flores put on making
distinctions. To me it also relates to your earlier comment about many of
our conversations in the list are attempts to get our contexts aligned
(so-called conversations for orientation by Flores), because we are
interpreting the meanings of our terms differently from different domains
of discourse. I am particularly sensitve to this now that I am immersed
in a language-culture (French in Geneva) in which 4 years of Canadian high
school and 4 decades of cereal box reading does not really help all that
much. The reason seems to be that most words from both languages derive
each from an enormous framework of distinctions which are made in each
culture's experience. In order to really learn French, I cannot merely
perform 1 to 1 translations with my intellect, but rather have to live a
different set of distinctions and associate the language with experience.
Which gets me to my 1st point. Is there any way we can speed up the
conversations for orientation exchanges so we can get to the heart of
matters, or is it that there is a lot of value in the intellectual
cultural sharing in its own right?? Or is there an organic and on-going
re-framing of our habitual distinctions happening?? Back in Adelaide we
implemented an e-mail reader which enabled people to track conversations
for action, for clarification and for orientation on a voluntary basis (in
contrast to the coerced tracking of conversations for action which Flores'
software the Co-ordinator imposed). Unfortunately, the programmer jumped
to more lucrative activities before we could put it into actual usage.
Now the last point which relates to whether there are better things to do
in life besides InterNet surfing.. the so-called "Get a Life criticism."
Swapping the passive ingestion of a mass media for an interactive and
participative, even creative pastime of List exchanging is an obvious
improvement in quality of life. What I was wondering, was more along the
lines that personally I have exchanged almost an hour a day of my time for
the List, displacing my "real work" which brings in money, and various
degrees of interactions with my kids and maintaining a household (I work
out of my home.), hence, I am really not sure that this sort of
intellectual stimulation is good for my life... After all, is there not
another level to making distinctions, i.e. clearly noticing the what is in
each other's heart rather than what is in each other's intellects??
I seem to recall Humberto Maturana (one of Flore's Chilean teachers??)
making this point..
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Doug Seeley: CompuServe 100433,133... Fax: +41 22 756 3759
InterDynamics Pty. Ltd. (Australia) in Geneva, Switzerland
"Integrity is not merely an ideal; it is the only reality."