Self Organization and Ecology

This article will focus on the Self Organization (nonlinearity, iteration, recursiveness, spontaneity, self regulation) aspect of the Ecology and Epistemology component for New Learning with Dr. Fred Wood. I intend to present some views of various authors, which exemplify Fritjof Capra's ecological systems thinking: that a living system is a web of interrelationships. After briefly representing a few theories of social systemic aspects of self-organization, I will talk about a non-contingent social action plan—a dialogue proposal by Dr. David Bohm and colleagues—and a contingent social action plan as described in Stafford Beer's Beyond Dispute: The Invention Of Syntegrity. In the Chapter "Chaos and Transformation Implications of Nonequilibrium Theory for Social Science and Society," The Evolutionary Paradigm (ed. Laszlo, 1991), David Loye summarizes a brief history of self organization with a definition by Prigogine.

Hovering over these, and all other fields is general systems theory, which has attempted to detect commonalties of structure and dynamics across fields from its early statement by von Bertalanffy, and later development by Boulding, Miller, Laszlo and others, Here is the central investigation of the "self organizing capacity of all open systems—of "living systems" in Miller's terms. While a system "appears as irregular or chaotic on the macrocosmic scale , it is , on the contrary, highly organized on the microcosmic scale," Prigogine notes. 54, p.141 In other words, self -organizing is the capacity of open and living systems, such as we live in and we ourselves are, to generate their own forms from inner guidelines rather than the imposition of form from outside.

Another definition of self organization is given by Brian Goodwin in "Life the Excitable Medium" from his book How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution Of Complexity (1994). He gives several examples of excitable mediums: the Fucus, "The Beloussov Zhabotinsky reaction" and the cellular slime mold.

What they have in common is the emphasis on self organization the capacity of these fields to generate patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions telling them what to do, as in a genetic program these fields are called excitable mediums. These systems produce something out of nothing." (51 )

Goodwin then quotes the philosopher Whitehead" the whole spectacle of evolution is this creative advance into novelty."

Brian Goodwin mentions the work of Stuart Kauffman of the Sante Fe Institute. Kauffmann questions the view of Neo-Darwinism, which focuses on selection as the primary source of biological order, and the essentially survival mechanics of organisms. Kauffmann's view is that they get order for free, he questions whether there is a rich source of emergent order that is available for free in complex systems of the type encountered in biology, wherein many units interact in simple ways. His book The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution, documents his work in the field of theoretical biology where networks of genes interact within cells.

In the chapter "Self-Organization and Adaptation in Complex Systems" Kauffman writes:

"First of all, contrary to our deepest intuitions, massively disordered systems can spontaneously "crystallize" a very high degree of order. Much of the order we see in organisms may be a direct result not of natural selection, but of the natural order selection was privileged to act on. Second selection achieves complex systems capable of adaptation. Moreover, I shall suggest that there are general principles characterizing complex systems to adapt. They achieve a "poised" state near the boundary between order and chaos, a state which optimizes the complexity of tasks the systems can perform and simultaneously optimizes evolvability."

And he summarizes: "Whatever else you mark to note and remember in this book, note and remember that our intuitions about the requirements for order in very complex systems have been wrong, vast order abounds for selection's further use, and that complex systems exhibit spontaneous order."

Kauffman states a second and bold possibility: adaptive evolution may turn out to be a general principle, but as of yet it is a working hypothesis. The article "Antichaos and Adaptation" published in the Scientific American August, 1991 is the best summation that I've seen of Kauffman's work.

I was first introduced to the notion of self organization by Eric Jantsch at the 1976 World Game held by Buckminster Fuller in Philadelphia, PA. Jantsch was a former physicist, who turned to management with the aim of introducing Prigogine's work to the Social Sciences, when he taught at the University California, Berkeley. Jantsch introduced us to Ilya Prigogine's view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in microscopic physics. He conveyed to the participants at this World Game that what seems to be disorderly is actually orderly and eventually this is manifested by a new form when a threshold is reached. Creativity emerges far from equilibrium; in other words this order emerges from fluctuations.

The physicist Fritjof Capra mentioned in passing that his own book The Web Of Life (1996) is an attempt to continue along the lines of Jantsch's The Self Organizational Universe (1981), and therefore I will try to capture physicist Fritjof Capra's current views about self organization in the chapter "Models Of Self-Organization." He contends that "although the theoretical aspects of systems theory have yet to become coherent, the system's models have lead to breakthroughs in nonlinear mathematics." Capra views ecology as a web of interrelationships and argues that

"the key to a comprehensive theory of living systems lies in the synthesis of these two very different approaches: the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern): "structure involves quantities while pattern involves qualities. "These qualities represented in a pattern of organization has as its most important property that it is a network pattern, that "the first and most obvious property of any network is its nonlinearity—it goes in all directions." Feedback moving in circular pathway results in the capability to acquire self regulation. For example, a community's mistake making can be self-corrected, self-regulated, and self-organized." (82.) Consequently, Capra finds "self organization has emerged as perhaps the central concept in systems view of life," and conjectures that the "pattern of life... is a network pattern capable of self organization."

In his chapter "Deep Ecology—A New Paradigm," Capra contrasts the old hierarchical paradigm of power by domination over others with the new paradigm, the network, which he contends is the central metaphor of the concept of ecology, where power means being influenced by others. Here is his representation of the two paradigms (p. 10):

Capra traces the history of the early pioneers who researched this area in the field of cybernetics, and mentions researchers McCulloch and Pitts. They discovered rules for the logic necessary to construct networks, and cybernetician Ross Ashby was the first to describe the nervous system as self organizing. Capra says that

"Heinz von Foerster's work contributed to the field of self-organization; his key contribution about the concept of order, perhaps was instrumental in setting up the stage for the next set of insights in this probe over the question of the self-organization as proposed by these researchers Ilya Prigogine, Herman Haken and Manfred Eigen, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela who have developed the latest models of self organization.

"The first important difference between the early concept of self-organization in cybernetics and the more elaborate later models is that the latter include the creation of new structures and new modes of behavior in the self-organizing process.... A second common characteristic of these models of self-organization is that they all deal with open systems operating far from equilibrium....The third characteristic... is the nonlinear interconnectedness of the systems components."...

"self organization is the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior in open systems far from equilibrium, characterized by internal feedback loops and described mathematically by nonlinear equations."

Later in this chapter Capra points out that Maturana and Valera define autopoiesis (self making) " as a network of production processes, in which the function of each component is to participate in the production or transformation of other components in the network." Capra then quotes their "In a living system," from The Tree Of Knowledge where they explain the product of its operation is its own organization." Capra underscores that Maturana and Valera contend that autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems. "The clear description between structure and organization makes it possible to integrate structure -oriented models of self-organization into a coherent theory of living systems."

Capra then proceeds to talk about " Lovelock's view of —the idea that the planet earth as a whole is a living, self-organizing system—the most surprising and beautiful expression of self-organization. " The key to Lovelock's view is the process of self-regulation. In 1978 I was introduced to microbiologist Lynn Margulis's work, who has co credit with Lovelock for the Gaia hypothesis, at the World Game (Buckminster Fuller's grand strategy to make the world work for everyone). This event was held at the Towards Tomorrow Fair at The University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She showed us a vivid animated color slide show, where purple-looking bacteria inside a termite were eating the wood inside the termite's gut. She then went on to conjecture that the mitochondria, the power house of oxygen production in the cell, might have evolved from bacteria symbiotically. Eventually Lovelock and Margulis met, and from their mutual dialogue were able to, as Capra states it: "identify a complex network of feedback loops that—so they hypothesized—bring about the self-organization of the planetary system: "the outstanding feature of these feedback loops is that they link together living and nonliving systems." Capra gives the example of carbon dioxide where there is a symbiotic relationship between rocks and microorganisms. "According to Gaia theory, the excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is removed and recycled by a vast feedback loop which involves rock weathering as a key ingredient." Capra posits that this is equivalent to Manfred Eigen's hypercyle hypothesis of catalytic cycles.

"Gaia theory links life in a systemic way, bringing together geology, microbiology, atmospheric chemistry, and other disciplines where practitioners are not used to communicating with each other. Lovelock and Margulis challenged the conventional view that those are separate disciplines, that the forces of geology set the conditions for life on Earth and that the plants and animals were mere passengers who by chance found just the right condition for their evolution."

Lovelock went on to devise an elegant mathematical model called "Daisyworld" which demonstrates the likely possibility of the represented Gaia metaphor to the satisfaction of the mechanistic biologists and other detractors. Capra says of Lovelock's work: "The net result of these highly complex models is that the small temperature fluctuations that were present in the original daisyworld model have flattened out, and the self-regulation becomes more and more stable as the model's complexity increases."

Capra's statement that Gaia is a self-regulating system has been articulated by earlier systems thinkers. Systems Ecologist Howard Odum in his chapter "Summary: The Unity of Living Systems" from Ecology and General Systems: An introduction to Systems (1994), talks about the theoretical history of self-regulation in the section page 97:

Homeostasis Of The Earth

The holistic concepts that the biosphere is homeostatically self-regulating are old views that receive restatements and clearer understanding as science of environmental systems progresses. For example, see:

Fechner (1872) stability principle

Henderson (1913) Fitness of environment

Lotka (1922a, b) Self-regulating material cycles; maximum power principle

Smuts (1926) Holism

Kostitzin (1935) Evolution of atmosphere

Vernadsky (1944) Noosphere

Hutchinson (1948) Teleological mechanisms

Odum (1951, 1955,

1970) Selection of earth cycles for stability and for maximum power; evolutionary control of climate

Lovelock (1972) Gaia hypothesis that the biosphere is self organized for life

I cite Who Is Afraid Of Schrodinger's Cat? All the New Science Ideas you Need to Keep up with the New Thinking (Zohar et. al. , 1997) as a book designed for people who are not scientifically oriented. It carefully defines autopoiesisis:

"Autopoietic systems are able to maintain their complex internal organization even under changing conditions. Whole systems of feedback loops, iteration and other nonlinearities; autopoiesis's focus is not on matter structure, but on organization itself. Autopoietic systems are holistic; their existence is an expression of their overall meaning within the human body; The immune system is an example of an autopoietic system, other examples given are ecologies, cities, and Human societies." (59.)

I should briefly summarize an address, "Ethics and Second Order Cybernetics" by Heinz von Foerster, one of the earlier pioneers in self-organization from [Stanford Humanities Review (1995). ] Von Foerster began by referring to different interpretations of cybernetics by his colleagues. He mentions Gregory Bateson's view: "Cybernetics is a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness and information", and also mentions a definition by Stafford Beer, who he calls a managerial wizard: "Cybernetics is the science of effective organization." Finally, von Foerster states Gordon Pask's definition "the Science of defensible metaphors." In the ethics section of his talk, von Foerster claims he learned from studying Wittgenstein's philosophy that ethics cannot be articulated, but must reside in the action itself. He argues that "in the language of discourse, ethics would be wise to remain implicit so that the language does not degenerate into moralization, " and goes on to say that "ethics has two invisible sisters that allow her to remain unseen. One is Metaphysics, and the other is Dialogics." He feels that metaphysics is invoked whenever we decide upon undecidable questions. An example that he gives of this is in his contention regarding the question about the origin of the universe: "nobody was there to watch it." Hence from this interplay of ethics and metaphysics is construed, "the idea of always acting so as to increase the number of choices..."Dialogics reaches out for the other... this is the root of conscience; here Ethics invisibly manifests itself through Dialogics."

Peter Corning in this research paper "Synergy and Self-Organization in the Evolution of Complex Systems"(1995) talks about the value of synergy in terms of evolution. Corning contends that synergetic effects of various kinds has been a major source of creativity in evolution. The American Heritage Dictionary (1991) defines synergy this way:

1. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

2. Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect [from Greek sunergia, cooperation, and from sunergos, working together].

Here is an eloquent statement by English Poet Alexander Pope on the value of Synergy:

From Nature's chain whatever link you strike Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike

An Essay On Man

Many of the authors that I have been citing talking have been represented in Corning's research paper. He states that "the future lies with self-determination—that is information-based, purposive innovations. And it can safely be predicted that new forms of synergy will play a central role in shaping our future evolution as a species, for good or ill."

The Chapter "Not Politics but, Ecology, " in J. R. Vallentyne's Limnology Now ; A Paradigm Of Planetary Problems (ed. Margalef, 1994), represents in Vallentyne's unique way the contention of Capra and other previously mentioned researchers that the central metaphor of ecology is the network. Vallentyne, also known as "Johny Biosphere," begins with a statement by renowned ecologist Ramon Margalef:

It is a basic property of nature from the point of view of cybernetics, that any exchange between two systems of different information content does not result in a partition or equalizing of the information, but increases the difference. The system with the more accumulated information becomes still richer from the exchange. "

From ["Perspectives in Ecological Theory "] Margalef's (1968).

Margalef's position is about the ethical problem facing humanity. The "haves" of this world are more organized than the "have-nots"; their organization tends to engulf the less organized. Consequently the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Valentyne then posits that ethical awareness might emerge to change this situation. On the question of ethics, Johnny Biosphere writes that "charters that attempt to write in ethics are contrived and that ethics are best identified "when they are", not when they are described or written about." Vallentyne gives what Ramon Margalef characterized as an ecological "sermon": "the biosphere has become the minimum unit of concern even in the political arena of decision-making." To his way of thinking the beginning was the signing of a Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between Canada and the United States in 1978. The main change was when the ecosystem became the unit of measure for solving political problems. He goes on to say that "a Biosphere approach is emerging as many ecosystem problems, especially those of atmosphere, cannot be solved regionally or locally. The Biospheric approach to problem solving is one that is of a global scale." "Johnny Biosphere" goes on to give his rationale for why the Ozone is part of the BIOSPHERE, which he feels needs to be capitalized, as he follows the guidelines of the journal, Environment Conservation. He contends that the term ECOSPHERE is synonymous with BIOSPHERE.

Valentyne says that it is his concern that ecology as science and ecology in personal practice are both needed, if humanity is going to live according to principles that will avoid the disruption of ecosystems. He points out that the main difference between the ecosystemic approach and the BIOSPHERIC approach is that the ecosystems are open with respect to matter (more nearly so), and the BIOSPHERE is closed with respect to matter.

In contrast the concern of the environmental approach, is external to the human population, while the BIOSPHERIC approach includes humanity. One of the most arrogant examples of this "ego-systems" view was the title of the September 1989, issue of Scientific American: "Managing Planet Earth."

As I see it, he is trying to make the point that wholistic interactions are the essence of this metaphor of BIOSPHERE, while environmentalists tend to focus on the components without valuing the context of the Whole; consequently this problem leads to fragmentation that is counterproductive to the qualitative endeavors of all parties in the long run. Valentine maintains that the main stumbling block to a concerted effort by humanity to work together is the sovereignty principle, which states that in the final analysis nations have the right to do whatever they want to ensure their survival. As far as resolving this dilemma, John BIOSPHERE posits here that ecology works best at arms length from politics, and does not think that governments on any level can realistically represent Biospheric interests. He proposes a bottom up solution, which to him means a holistically oriented education that is life-long and begins with parents around the time of the child's inception.

Based on his experience as an educator in Canada and the United States, Valentyne noticed a turning point in Humanity around 1988, and especially in children who are now the driving force in eliciting a change to more ecologically responsible behavior. He sums up the article by saying that the current popular notion of ecology is difficult to distinguish from religion and quotes William James:

"Let empiricism once become associated with religion as hitherto under some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irrelgion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin. "

The ecologist Eugene Odum proposes in his last statement within the epilogue of his book Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support Systems (Sinauauer Associates, 1993).

The Bottom Line

"When ecology and economics can be merged and when ethics can be extended to include environmental as well as human values, then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. Accordingly bringing together the "E's" is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future."

Paul Werbos talks about self organization in his chapter "Self-Organization:

Reexamining the Basics," from Origins: Brain and Self Organization (ed. Karl Pribram, 1994). Werbos writes that "all of our science has been built on the efforts to answer only four basic questions." In an abbreviated summation these would be: What is reality?, What is the universe?, What is life?, What is mind or intelligence? Only a small amount of funding for "basic" scientific research is directed towards systematic strategic efforts to find new and deeper answers to these questions . "What is life, Why and where does it exist, and how does it work?", questions a theory of self-organization. He says what is needed is a coordinated venture with all of the rigor and imagination involved within a polytrophic approach to learning. As of yet no such unified theory exists for the field as a whole.

Perhaps a synthesis represented by the aforementioned authors will lead to an insight that contributes to a coherent systems theory which, Fritjof Capra says has yet to emerge.

For the next part of this paper my aim is to reflect on my personal experience in the initiation and participation of Bohmian Dialogue, and then to talk somewhat about Stafford Beer's work on Team Syntegrity. However, I would like to briefly mention the proposals about autopoiesis, as it applies to social systems, of theorists Maturana and Valera, Niklas Luhman, and cybernetician Gordon Pask. These perspectives could be construed to be related to the proposals of Bohmian Dialogue and Beer's Team Syntegrity. On my part there is no intention to go into similarities and differences of Bohmian Dialogue and Beer's Team Syntegrity

In The Tree Of Knowledge , Maturana and Valera, state "make it a task to be aware of what is implied in this unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing." They define structural coupling as a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems. They propose that "Social Coupling belongs to the domain of Consciousness and Mind; the domain of discourse that we generate becomes part of our domain of existence and constitutes part of the environment in which we conserve identity, and adaptation."

"Sociologist Niklaus Luhman talks about Autopoiesis in this article "What Is Communication" (1986). Essentially Luhman is refining social systemic theory, arguing that autopoiesis evolved from self-organization and general systems theory, or the cybernetics of self-referential systems. The main thrust in his exploration is that the meaning of communication is generalized within a network of communication. At this point Luhman's work is controversial, but perhaps as he continues to refine his theory an understanding will emerge that could be useful.

Gordon Pask, whom I cited above as defining cybernetics as the science of defensible metaphors, has written a paper published in Systems Research, "Heinz von Foerster's Self Organization the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories" (1996). Pask has developed a perspective called Conversation theory. The tenets of the theory were developed from the merger of social psychologists and cyberneticians. Pask extends the Self-Organizational definitions of structural and social Coupling that were just cited above into his own the probe about the question of consciousness. Conversation theory is about A's view of B and visa versa; and getting to know about each others differences and similarities. Pask asserts that a refined meaning emerges. This reflects among other issues reflects on a hermeneutic seal that posits conversation. These conversations can be objectified; Pask defines objective as itself reference and in Sociocybernetics (Vol. 2, 1978 ) writes: "Conversation Theory itself is about conceptual processes, about intellect and imagination (not, for example, about a non-existent "pure cognition", nor about a non-existent "pure knowledge" devoid of a theorist or expositor or progenitor). It is concerned with consciousness, it does challenge the absolute character of a distinction between an external observer (practitioner) and a participant ( a member, or group of members of society). It does, for all its insistence upon coherence or agreement, support ( in fact demand) a proper calculus of analogical reasoning, and forms of abduction or innovation ( rather than deduction and induction) akin to the schemes proposed by Koestler (1964) or Schon (1963)." Pask goes on to say that conversation will transform the meaning of scientific activity and usher in a new age when science subsumes art and politics. Gordon Pask methodology could be one approach to examining the question of recursiveness, iteration and emergence, which ensues in Bohmian Dialogue or Beer's Team Syntegrity.

Introduction to Bohmian Dialogue

Since I have already talked in detail about the contentions of Dr. David Bohm and colleagues earlier in my contextual essay, I will give a summation and then represent Bohm's last statement On Dialogue (ed. Lee Nichol, Routledge, New York 1996).

Regarding some of the details of the participatory group's dynamics, This dialogue group, which has been ongoing every other week for three years in Eugene, Oregon, meets in a circle where language becomes the means used to explore thought and its limitations. See Thought As a System (David Bohm, 1992 ).

This group has no formal agenda and is leaderless without a facilitator.

Bohm proposed that as a result of the events that could ensue from his dialogue process, intelligence would touch and dissolve fragmentation, thus contributing to the harmonization of individual, social, and cosmic dimensions of the human being. A proprioception (self awareness) would emerge between the participants. One of the consequences of this collective proprioception via this dialogue process would be an awakened attentiveness to the undue use of thought, thus revealing and releasing creative insight about the collective human predicament. In Bohm's view a lack of creative insight is preventing humanity from living in a sane and secure manner.

On Dialogue is the most comprehensive documentation to date of the process David Bohm referred to simply as "dialogue." ..."Perhaps most importantly, dialogue explores the manner in which thought—viewed by Bohm as an inherently limited medium, rather than an objective representation of reality — is generated and sustained at the collective level." In his Foreword pp. ix. Bohm introduces the value of sustaining this dialogue experience.

"Experience has shown that if such a group continues to meet regularly, social conventions begin to wear thin, and the content of sub-cultural differences begins to assert itself, regardless of the topic du jour. This emergent friction between contrasting values is at the heart of dialogue, in that it allows the participants to notice the assumptions that are active in the group, including one's own personal assumptions." (ix)

Bohm proceeds to talk about the dialogue experience as moving in a nonlinear and recursive manner.

"Even then, the creative potential of the dialogue—its capacity to reveal the deeper structures of consciousness—depends upon sustained, serious application by the participants themselves.

"We find here a pivotal definition: dialogue is aimed at the understanding of consciousness per se, as well as exploring the problematic nature of day-today relationship and communication. This definition provides a foundation, a reference point if you will, for the key components of dialogue: shared meaning; the nature of collective thought; the pervasiveness of fragmentation; the function of awareness; the microcultural context; undirected inquiry; impersonal fellowship; and the paradox of observer and observed."

Another important point about Bohmian Dialogue is stated by Nichol.

"As Bohm himself emphasized, however, dialogue is a process of direct, face to face, encounter, not to be confused with endless theorizing and speculation. In a time of accelerating abstractions and seamless digital representations, it is this insistence on facing the inconvenient messiness of daily, corporeal experience that is perhaps most radical of all...

"As the very nature of thought is to select limited abstractions from the world, it can never really approach the "ground of our being"—that which is unlimited. Yet at the same time, human beings have an intrinsic need to understand and relate to the "cosmic dimension" of existence."

To address this apparent disjuncture in our experience, Bohm proposes that attention, unlike thought, is potentially unrestricted and therefore capable of apprehending the subtle nature of the "unlimited." While the language of such exploration is necessarily metaphorical and inferential, Bohm nonetheless insisted that sustained inquiry into the nature of consciousness and the "ground of being" is essential if we are to have some prospect of bringing an end to fragmentation in the world. It was his firm belief that this fragmentation is rooted in the incoherence of our thought processes, not in immutable laws of nature. (Foreward: xvii).

Reflections & Notes of Work in Progress

As I am looking in at some old notes that I am reviewing on the dialogue meetings in Eugene, Oregon, I find my recollection somewhat bemusing. Did I really survive this experiment? It wasn’t easy for me to endure some of the trials and tribulations. Why had I decided on trying to initiate a Bohmian Participatory Dialogue Group in Eugene, Oregon? As I had been in and out of the area since 1971, I was familiar with the territory and had conveyed my intent to try this idea out to a few people. They told me that if I initiated a group that they would participate.

Rob Firth, Robert Krohnen, and Doug Goswam agreed to help me out with the logistics of advertising and finding a meeting place. Robert Firth helped me with locating a place for the meeting. Krohnen helped place my advertising ideas (paraphrase of David Bohm's rationale for Participatory Dialogue) in a word processor. As I needed to begin somewhere, I put in an ad for 17 dollars in the most widely read alternative newspaper in Eugene: What's Happening. Since Doug Goswam worked at Kinkos, we were able to duplicate copies at discount prices. The two Robert’s and I met to discuss tactical issues involved with launching this dialogue project. Robert Krohnen brought up his experience in a men’s group. He seemed to feel that there was an ethical need to disclose an intent of confidentiality to the participants. Eventually I did what he suggested both verbally and in writing.

We reserved the E. W. E. B community room and our stay there lasted about 10 months. The building was located by the Willamette River which flows through Oregon in a northerly direction.

Eventually I found other venues, most of which were free of cost. The Other Paper Talking Leaves , Oregon Peaceworker, and The EMU Sudent Newspaper were the main places for outreach. Besides the logistics of advertising and locating meeting places, I worked on contingency plans for location change in the case of cancellations. This eventuality of meeting places being canceled happened twice. Once I located the Koinonia Christian Interfaith Center and they happily accommodated us. I also took it upon myself to call, reminding people about the time and place of the dialogue meeting. I would leaflet the ads we designed in various ways. For example, I would post them on bulletin boards at various locations: The University Of Oregon and health food stores. I was soon to learn how competitive bulletin boards are. A lot of the lingo in Eugene, Oregon is vintage 60's "New Age" and the people can be quite rude. I advertised at several places; two of them, The Oasis health food store, and The L&L market were to no avail. People would put their own ads over my dialogue ad as if it was not there! Eventually I designed my ad to be palm-sized, but as a result the message was diluted to meaninglessness. In retrospect it seems that word of mouth worked best.. The reason we had the good fortune of getting close to a year of access to community rooms at the E. W. E. B. is that someone in the office had made a mistake.

We were finally notified that only one room per year was allowed per organization, after we had been meeting every other Thursday for almost a complete year. This bit of information was conveyed to Rob Firth at the beginning of the new year and I eventually located a meeting room at the Student Union at The University of Oregon.

The operational aspects of the dialogue meeting begins with sitting in a circle every two weeks and participating in an exchange of meaning, mainly transmitted by the utterance of words that are related about some issue or event that is coming from the experiencing within the group of a greater whole. Although each individual expresses an idiosyncratic view, it seems that consciousness, if you will, comes in and directs the general drift of the conversation, usually in some way that is uncanny. One argument is that the iterations build into a field that transcends the limits of the repetitive go-around both in the content of the language and the process. Both content and process "drift" are subtle, and from where I was sitting it was this unanalyzablity, that appeared to be the essence of the group process. There are usually three periods of silence: in the beginning of the dialogue, in the middle, and at the end. It could be that what we call the silent (ambient noise) intervals is the immanent and transcendent meeting the verbal and nonverbal; this recursive pattern phases into another approach that emerges from the synthesis of this iteration.

When I began this. It appeared a substantive question whether I was clouding the experience of no agenda, leader, and facilitator by writing about this for a school program but apparently no one felt critical. Periodically I have gone back to the dialogue group and I have not had anyone say anything negative about this.

Lately I have been thinking about some of my mistakes which might have been handled differently. When I was informed that Axle was calling around to people saying that he wanted to form another group, because he felt someone was exercising too much control, I could have immediately called him back and asked him to clarify. But at that time I was subscribing to the notion of keeping the meeting an impersonal fellowship. My intent in passing a phone list around to the group was solely to remind people of the meeting. In addition I thought that this would contribute to other people taking initiative for keeping this group going.

After the meeting was over it was interesting how people tried to solicit or offer their opinion on aspects of each meeting. They would talk about whether they were satisfied with the meeting and after twelve sessions I was pleasantly surprised that many of the same participants were attending regularly.

The split came at meeting number twelve. I was speculating, that yes, I could have handled this meeting in another way, but after I considered the differences in the personalities (especially a dominant personality like Axel), it was inevitable that a split-up took place. It is a curiosity to me that the group kept going on after that 12th meeting. On the 12th meeting "Mystic" Faith began participating. She is still bemused by the stereotype that some of the members have of her and three years later she is still attending and dukiing it out with the rationalist (my description) Dante who has been another regular participant. On the thirteenth meeting Johann, a former physicist, came in and he has participated regularly as this group goes past the three year mark.

Written December 7, 1996

If it is via praxis (action) that we learn from this dialogue experience, does this mean that we can play with concepts? The Socratic scholar Gregory Vlastos (1991) says mockery was an important aspect of the Greek Dialogue. The Greeks had developed this Irony in a way that contributed to creative insight. One of the main aims for this Bohmian Dialogue experiment is to see if we can touch into the creative realm at the individual , social cultural, and cosmological levels.

In an article by Alfonso Montouri, "Creativity, Chaos and Self- Renewal" (World Futures, 1991) he talks about creative individual's ability to adapt to ambiguity and synthesize irreversible differences. Montouri quotes creativity researcher Frank Barron's psychological view on originality. "measures as to be equivalent to the capacity for producing adaptive responses which are unusual." Barron suspects that besides tolerance for ambiguity, other characteristics are: complexity of outlook, independence of judgment, and androgyny; , i.e. , Arthur Koestler's view that each individual is a Holon.

Bill Bent, who attended a Buddhist dialogue group in Portland, Oregon tells me that the dialogue group of Buddhists, with whom he had been meeting with for over a year, would run into problems. If he was not getting along with somebody, he would befriend this person to try to understand what it was about this person that produced difficulty. The idea being that the resistance, which you are experiencing about someone else, is a conditioning that is within you. By dialoguing with this person it might be possible to gain insight into this conditioning.

When I began to participate in this dialogue group, I was examining Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato in Robert Sullivan's Political Hermeneutics: The Life Of Early Gadamer (1989). It is Gadamer’s view that Plato was a realist who learned as he went by the process of dialogue.

Here is an example of two different personalities in this dialogue group:

Dante talks about his seminar experience at the University of Oregon, for example, he is constantly harping about the rhetoric of science; the character profile of Faith is one where she quotes the mystical tradition, for example, Alice Bailey & Manly Hall. Faith espouses the virtues of this tradition, which is a contradistinction to Dante who is a self professed rationalist, but even with him , as with all of us, there comes a point where the merging of the consciousness process brings the immanence and transcendence of it all into a different phase. Even if it is momentary, the consequences of the shift brings in the likely possibility of seeing another view.

Quite often after the meeting some specific backscatter between participants is vibrantly antagonistic to its adversarial other. As the process of the dialogue meeting unfolds the subject matter moves into another set of players who engage in their own kind of tangles. That is, synergetic development of facilitation from the organic process of no-set-prescribed-view, other than the intention to explore thought and its meaning; that via the format of meeting in a circle with varying people to see what may happen. This difficult process of renouncing the dominator and leader in each one of us makes it possible for organic growth from the process of the praxis of the tacit dimension as suggested by Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension . Perhaps the Naturalistic Epistemology of Guba and Lincoln (1994) will renew the work of Michael Polanyi.

To those of you reading this, who have not been involved in this dialogue process, one of the difficulties is tuning into and making coherent distinctions from the various cues that ensue from the ebb and flow of the content and process which is undividable. It is futile to describe the ebb while the group is in a knot that wavers from tangle to tango. There is a tendency to avoid the self references of the other participant(s). The movements in time are not measurable to ordinary thresholds of sensorial meaning or perceptionally-created (constructed) reality.

This could be one reason why there is so much small-group fraternizing (chatting) after the group breaks up. I made an attempt to civilize this back-scatter collusion mode, as it were, was by inviting whoever wanted to be my guest to a night of nachos and drinks at the nearest available restaurant. It was interesting that in retrospect this move on my part was to no avail. The necessity for the group to have an impersonal fellowship became evident to me. Eugene is a small town, and it was not uncommon to meet other members of the dialogue group (including former participants) at some coffee shop or social event. When we met we usually mulled over what had gone on and often we commented on who was unaware, or the most eloquent, or the most boring.

Written December 11, 1996

Looking back now it seems safe to say that the way I was affected in these by weekly meetings was a lot more subtle than I could have realized.

In Ecological Understanding (1994): in the chapter "The Nature of Understanding," the authors talk about different modes of understanding that represent three important and contrasting ways humans make sense of the diversity of experience. They say these modes of understanding are via science, faith, and art. I am taking the view that this approach of dialogue is more like art, where according to the authors of this book the expression that falls out from the singular experience thorough the personal interpretation is supported by the communities from the value of its creativity. The scientific view draws conclusions from the rigor ensuing from the scientific methodology; the views that comes from Religious belief are not the approach that I am taking with this experience of dialogue. The Religious and the Scientific views are not exclusive in this dialogue experience. For example, there are participants in this group who have religious beliefs and others who were former scientists. This does not mean that this experience could not therefore be approached via the scientific or faith mode of understanding.

Here is an example of the thought pollution that Bohm mentioned in his book with Mark Edward's: Changing Consciousness. They talk about the need to clear thought pollution which is going on upstream, as well as,--let's say--, ecological issues down stream. The statement is something to the effect that we can't see the stars because the lights of Las Vegas are blinding us. In other words, the analogy of thought as smog pollution. In Bohm and Edward's view, examining the conundrums of thought upstream is a priority issue. In one of the beginning dialogue meetings it was pointed out to me that I had not been listening to what was said, and I acknowledged that what they said was true. It was a painful feeling that emerged. Because I was caught in the act and told so candidly by two other people at the same time, I keep going back to that experience. Is this an example of the smog pollution analogy that David Bohm brought up that could be a collective as well as individual phenomena?

That the group has survived onto three years could mean that they have so much ego invested that they would rather die than let go, or it could mean that some kind of a learning has gone on between these people. No doubt it would depend on who you talked to and what mood they were in. It seems Faith the mystic and Dante the rationalist are still at it. In a personal communication while having dinner with Faith, a statement was made that she was working on Dante. What she meant by that is that when he puts his foot in his mouth saying something that Faith construes as too intellectual from a rational academic point of view she will come at him and the group with her view on what dialogue is supposed to be about. There is no uniformity in this group yet there has been a consensus in the group to keep the meetings going..

Written on Friday December 13, 1996

Received an E-mail from Don Factor about his view of Praxis (learning as we go) It is like work experience. Is the memory of what went on in dialogue an accurate depiction or portrayal of the events? Of course not; and further more, it is only a slanted view based on the limits of what I felt significant to annotate on that given night. The idea behind the notes is to give a drift of the content so that I might be able to examine this process of consciousness leading things around which is so elusive. Indeed, it is the ineffable that is one of the organizing principles in this circle of dialogue, what else can you say about your own hermeneutics or phenomenology of what is going on ?

Several times we have not worked together coherently. At one meeting someone wanted the light off; it is interesting that we had to go through a long wind-bagged oration about whether the light be on or off. In retrospect I think it was about somebody wanting to be the leader. A rationale for wanting to be the leader is the assumption that the respective individual's view has insight in-to what is going on.

Why do people succumb to authority and not do their own thinking? I am sure that there is a wealth of literature out there about this question.

Here is an example of a conscious attempt to be tentative about a nonnegotiable assumption that came up in a meeting: "If I hear a voice playing false, is it a voice playing?" What I mean by this is that I am hearing something that I react to for some reason, and it sounds to me as if the person is not being truthful. Or is this a way to play? For example, the notion of Walt Whitman’s "If I contradict myself it is because I am multitudes." The acceptance of another view is an expansion of your circle, and the aim is to cultivate an inquiring form of acceptance, rather than a blind one. One needs to be wary of the limitation of observation, as it emerges in the dialogue by the process of holding our thoughts in "suspension".

Psychotherapist Yalom's description of the dynamics of group process is apt. For example, after ninety minutes people get tired and in the beginning of the dialogue people warm up slowly.

Written on Monday December 16, 1996

Make sure to mentions Yalom’s description of what is going on in the dialogue group. Scan in the dialogue questions at Schumacher and then go to the dialogue display Invitation To A Participatory Dialogue and then mention the dialogue advertisements, where I advertised, and how much it cost. Maybe I can scan in the picture of me at Schumacher College; also maybe the art work that was done by David Gilbert. And the satirical play the group performed chanting Bohm like ohm.

It is my understanding that Bill Isaacs and Peter Senge, who are at M. I. T., are training facilitators using some of the inspiring ideas that they got from Dr. David Bohm. The jury is out on whether or not any non-contingent dialogues have emerged from their training classes at Universities and with their clients in the business world. In a personal communication with me, Don Factor, who worked with David Bohm on the bugs of this dialogue approach, conveyed de Mare's view of their work.

Don Factor communicated this statement to me by E mail (Donald Factor 08.29 PM 8/10/94 Re: Message From Internet) "By the way, de Mare shared something of this view. He said to me one evening with a sly giggle, "You know dialogue is very subversive."

I too took this view, figuring that Bill Isaacs and all the other professionals would (unwittingly) open the door for the forces of chaos and complexity to enter into the systems and, like one of Prigogine's disippative systems, shake things up and bring about some kind of cleansing. But so far, this doesn't seem to have occurred.

In the meeting with others it becomes apparent to me that the private thoughts I have about this dialogue meeting are transformed just by being in the circle. The meetings are at the most two and a half hours, yet it is interesting to note, that there is transcendence from the ordinary world of daily living. For a while anyway. Maybe this could explain why so often people are reluctant to want to leave the wrapped-up-in-tangle-of-the-tango-of-the muddle-of-the-mouths. Is this a myth of a meandering from the tale told twice to the mind and body? Is the flow of variation that goes on in the group any different from the daily grind of living?

The homogeneic aspect of traditional tribes made it quite clear that living and survival were wrapped into the circle. What I find challenging in this circle is that in the life we live now, it is brief touchdown with a diverse bunch of people. When these meetings began I was depressed over the fact that there was not much of a diversity of people from different cultural backgrounds, but on reflection significant numbers of people in USA are interbred and diverse.

Another way that I could have looked at this question of, "What is this consciousness that is going on with this experience of dialogue in this setting." , is to agree with Sheldrake's argument that the M-fields from the past are tuning us into this circle, or that within the circle we do tune into these fields. This Morphic field notion is obviously a speculative one..

Henri Bortoft, who has taught philosophy of science and physics, in an article "Goethe's Holistic Science" writes:

"It is interesting in this connection that in the last interview he gave (New Scientist, 27 February, 1993), David Bohm said that he thought the division between art and science was temporary, and that he expected some day that they would merge. Such a union would give an alternative to the present emphasis on mathematics in science." Colquhoun and Ewald have shown very clearly one way in which such a merging of science and art can be achieved.

Mae -Wan Ho a colleague of theoretical biologist Brian Goodwin talks about the implications of Quantum Coherence at the global and local levels in relationship to the question of wholeness in her book The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms.

Why do we talk about certain subject matter? Each person is coming in with their experience. Jameson, who is a post modern theorist ( introduced to me by Dante), says there is a false play of consciousness that abounds in Humanity.

The movement between conversations seem to demand a thread of continuity, but there is no rule that we must stay on the theme. The suspension and listening with emerging guidelines, which aims at equality by the participants might be a compass from which this demand to sustain varying themes derives. The group explores the suitability of the themes within the context of the dialogue as each issue comes up. Interestingly enough, there will be individuals in the group who do not feel that we are close to being on themes. This is a typical kind of retort; just about every dialogue meeting, about two thirds of the way into the meeting, process and content with varying contexts weave in and out of each other in a convoluted manner. The dynamics of the 90 minutes or two and a half hours causes a variation of intense moments, and this idiosyncratic mess seems to be something that we thrive on. Maybe because when we are in this circle, the main difficulty is of literally being in a circle face to face, and to have to eventually say something about something.

Written on December 17, 1996

Kant the professor set the rule, and demands that we follow his topic. For example, at a dialogue meeting, Kant asked that we roll a ball around. Hence this procedure went around until the fourth go around. It was Axel’s turn and he refused to comply, and responded that we had to use our minds to figure out these questions coming up in the group. At a later meeting Kant requested that we turn the lights out. Was this a symbolic act of protest revealing that there is a torque in the group, a battle for control? Perhaps this was part of the necessary exploration that comes out of an experiment of this sort?

Commentary On Process Of Dialogue

As usual, the beginning moves slowly with an interval of no talking, almost as if people were feeling each other out. What the meaning is or the logic of this processing indicates that what is going on is elusive; it seems as if it were the ineffable coming in, to lead the conversations that are about to begin. Sometimes the beginnings have been awkward, but other times it seemed as if there were a preordained set of meanings that were meant to be probed.

It is difficult to be as unmediated as possible in the articulation of one's thoughts and feelings. Once the tone of the meeting had been set, it was difficult to enter in on the conversation and change the dialogue into another mode. At some of the meetings it seemed that there was a demand to inquire into a universal theme and find the commonalties and the differences of the themes. The views of each participant kept the content forever varying. The mystic and the rationalist rifts seemed to be one of the main dynamics that kept the meeting flowing with diverse views. Ambiguously, the dynamics were facilitated by whoever had the best skills at guiding the phases of the process, especially when the meetings were getting too polarized.

Sometimes I sensed multi-facilitated skills that this group had developed. Someone would keep the flow of the discourse in a relatively harmonious tract and yet he or she would beg to differ and politely, succinctly, sometimes in a laconic manner, parley. Most of us seemed to have picked up the skill of handling limited time in a very artful way.

Finally, the tiredness at the end, and the returning again to the ordinary living of life. Why does ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes seem like forever?

I had called Mario Cayer who is from Quebec, Canada at Schumacher College in 1992. He finished his dissertation on An Experience of Bohmian Dialogue. Mario interviewed different participants who had been practicing the proposal of David Bohm and colleagues. He asked some very interesting questions, and separated the reason people dialogue into five different categories: 1. Conversation, 2. Inquiry, 3. Participative process, 4. Collective meditation, 5. Creation of shared meaning.

Bohm's Dialogue And Action Science: Two Different Approaches (1993) is an earlier paper by Mario that made excellent distinguishements between the apparently different tack organizations like M. I. T have taken with Bohm's On Dialogue I will now lead into a game that uses facilitation in a very interesting way.

Team Syntegrity

Stafford Beer's Beyond Dispute The Invention Of Team Syntegrity is about a game that uses principles that are nonhierarchal and aspire to the ideals of participatory democracy. He uses facilitation for the coordination of the decisions made between the participants in what he calls an infosett. Beer got the idea of using the icosahedron from Richard Buckminster Fuller, who stated that "All systems are polyhedral." (It is interesting to note that he stopped using the term polyhedral at the end of his life. As I recall he changed to the term "systems enclosure." Could it be that he had come upon similar realizations about recursion and iteration to those of Stafford Beer)? At any rate, the organization called Team Syntegrity has a member for each of the 30 edges in the polyhedra; and as I understand it, the participant is active in two parts of the project and works with two groups of five. As the icosahedron is self-organizing and stable each person is not too far away from each other. Consequently the communication paths maximize the potential for participation with a role exchange that is different from the usual hierarchical "boss" modality. Visual geometrical models are helpful to get an idea about the recursion that emerges when organizations use this structure. As it is difficult to field a 30 person team, Beer' s colleagues have found a way to play this game with fewer people.

He begins his book with a dedication to the open mind and a statement from the bible:

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is a folly and shame unto him.

Book of Proverbs 18: 13 (King James)

My suspicion is that this game needs to be played a few times in order to get an understanding. The logistics of syntegration are complex. The techniques of syntegration have adapted the ideas of George Kelly's Theory of Personal Constructs. The group is given three options for any decision, whatever the decision may be. The facilitator's role is to lead the discussion with the object of determining a dimension of perception which is related to understanding the Infoset's unity of purpose. Each group debate has a polarity and the process of debate discloses this realization. The discriminatory authority lies with the infoset 30 people, who meet according to the syntegration protocol—face to face. The value of syntegration as a technique has been demonstrated only in face to face situations. Immediacy and contiguity could be the two main values of syntegration. What the group really thinks is decided as a result of the self-organization group process. The Kelly grid is used and this contributes to the process of interpersonal adjustment and structural reverberation. There is usually a limit of about three iterations to come up with answers. An example of a polarity given is an ethical pole and a pragmatic pole. The experience of debate between the players lies within this context of the sharing of ideas. Beer contends that the minds of the Infoset ought to be focused on the totality of what he calls the Hexadic Reduction.

Once again I will say that the best way to get a sense of what any of this means is to play this game. The essence of this notion of participatory democracy is the aim of creating a subtle and communal process to achieve the final result. The rationale of the use of George Kelly's constructs is to disentangle arguments. Often people use the same words to mean different things. The Kelly grid helps the group decide what it means by its design. Apparently the main idea is that people construe their worlds by making distinction between opposites; the key thing Kelly noticed is that similarity among people did not depend on having had the same experiences, but in interpreting their different experience according to the same criteria. Kelly contended that people use only 20 or 30 basic distinctions to evaluate all the people and events in their lives.

Beer points out that 12 topics and six grids is quite a common pattern used in many settings.

In "The Dynamics Of Icosahedral Space", (Chapter 12), Arthur Young is mentioned as having said that seven is the largest number that can be interconnected in subsets of three. The more interesting statement by Young that caught my eye was that the two different circularities of the torus make it possible to have separateness and connectedness in universe at the same time.

Stafford Beer goes on to talk about the nature of group consciousness: "the mutual awareness of members of a social group of each other and of the groups identity." Beer proposes what he calls an infosettic consciousness. Using the Popperian criteria of falsification, he asserts that if it exists infosettic consciousness would make the infoset more competent than its components. He seems to be probing the question of shared consciousness and cites examples of its existence; and he closes the chapter saying that shared illusion is the basis of all human epistemology. As far As I am concerned the most interesting statement in this chapter was the commentary about an unschooled Indian mathematician who died at 32, Srinivasa Ramanuja. He said, "An equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God."

In Beer's Chapter 14," The Concept of Recursive Consciousness," Beer talks about his conversation with Warren McCulloch about this life long quest: "There Is just one Question I would like to answer. What is a number that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number?" Beer says that it is neurocybernetics or its associated epistemology on which consciousness (whatever it is) depends. He highly recommends Brain Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness by Charles Laughlin. The book is currently out of print. Stafford Beer says that the principle of recursion has been invoked throughout this book. Recursion is the notion of systems embedded within each other.

These embedments are not objectively governed; they emerge from the recognition of process that have special meaning to us. Beer says structure is attention to processes and goes on to describe different layers of embedments, Beer agrees with scientists who posit that consciousness has a location.

I will not go on to talk about the other layers of Stafford Beer's Theory Of Recursive Consciousness. But as I close, I want to repeat that Beer said some interesting things about the infosettic consciousness of professions. He says that most professions adhere to stereotypes that are necessarily out of date and they become surrogates for social reality. He claims after quoting Sir Geoffrey Vickers, "the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped", that this is the human predicament. The most interesting statement by Beer in this fourteenth chapter is the concept of a devise that can adapt to unexpected perturbation, insofar as the new perturbations are outside the range of familiar experience; such a device is capable of ultrastability." ; this is exemplified by the principle of Life Long Learning.

In the chapter "Self Reference In Icosahedral Space" Beer talks about the ancient symbol of ouroborus to describe the concept of closure, pointing out that it is necessary to include the concept of recursion and iteration for a notion of consciousness to ensue. He read the work Principia Mathemathica by Whitehead and Russell when he was 17, and learned that all language is subjective. He says that when using "a protracted predicate" , which can never acquire a subject, the expression can not result in paradox, therefore it is possible to say nothing. There is only a state of mind reflecting on its own activity. These arguments are examples of recursion and iterativeness, and are what Beer calls reverberative. After quoting the neurophysiological evidence for consciousness, he states that awareness is best described as self-awareness; that consciousness is a reflection of its own activity.

Beer sums up by saying that "the best uses for syntegrations are for appropriate activities to mark beginnings, midpoints and ends for temporary organizations."

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Self Organization and Ecology... by Nick Consoletti