Re: Competition & Cooperation LO1487

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Thu, 1 Jun 1995 20:45:35 +0059 (EDT)

Replying to LO1450 --

Yeah, me too. It leads me off in some strange directions, this report
from Mr. Girard. The most immediate step is that I see, once again (this
is something I learn several times a day), how our human realities and
even our practices are multidimensional, fractal. As you point out, it's
so easy to set the two concepts "cooperation" and "competition" off at
opposite ends of a (putative) "measurement scale", and then "quantify"
specific behaviors and behavioral patterns on this scale... when in fact
every real interaction is an effectively infinite nesting of such
attributes as these. Let us pick out some concrete behavior that looks
competitive rather than cooperative; in detail, analysed, it turns out to
have some cooperative components. Attending to one of these, and
analysing it, we can expect (on my view) to find in turn some competitive
features AT A DIFFERENT SCALE. That's why I wind up staring at Mandelbrot
images and Julia sets in my spare time. Back in the sixties my friends
stared at incandescent light bulbs or TV snow.

--
Regards
     Jim Michmerhuizen
     jamzen@world.std.com
--------------------------------------------------- ---------------------
. . . . . There are more different kinds of people in the world . . . . .
 . . ^ . .             than there are people...                . . . . .

On Wed, 31 May 1995, Robert Becker wrote:

> Fascinating. I had never thought of that kind of relationship. Without > really thinking, I had accepted a spectrum--competition at one end; > cooperation at the other. But competition as micro and cooperation as > macro fits my concept of universal process and interrelationships. Down > goes another seeming inconsistency in my philosophical underpinings. How > wonderful. [quote of prev msg trimmed by your host]