permaculture

["souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>]

Aloha indeed and firstly, God (please insert unmoved mover, objective
arbiter or omniscient of choice) forbid that I should be thought slipshod in
my reading;


>Aloha,
      >> What we do is what we are, what we become?  That is Marx.

>If you're taking the above from my post, it's incorrect. What I posted
>was:

>"*HOW we do* what we do is who we are becoming."

>The what we do is relatively irrelevant - the becoming is in the *how*
>we do whatever it is we do.


"What we do is what we are, what we become?", is the reduction of Nick's
final sentence;

        >Mark is one who understands that here is a profound correlation
between techne evolution and the evolution of consciousness.

It is not reading but writing, the complex attribution of quotes and the
physical presence of that attribution through indents on email lists that I
have not yet learnt.  Rest assured John, we are at one regarding the primacy
of how over what. It is how we dally along the path and not to what the path
leads that matters.  This ultimately carries the weight of our life.

Secondly, Richard Dawkins of 'The Selfish Gene' infame, 'the "meme" guy',
does indeed reify the gene; I called it a 'category mistake' after Gilbert
Ryle.  But then, what's in a word?

Thirdly;

        >My question is:  what are the consequences of a particular manner
of explaining?

What's in a word? Everything!
We should tend words as we do gardens, for when we use words we say
something.  Words are seeds, plants and their fruits, meaning.  Take care
what and how you sow if you would reap a rich harvest.  Is it not Nick's
torrential words that broke my dormancy: 'aye, 'tis the work of the devil.'
Bollocks!  It is the surging life, the endless flow of invention in his
words that affects. His words are the seeds within the clay ball scattered
without discrimination.  It is for Nature/Language (the capitals suggest
reification) to unlock their inexorable growth.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming

Souscayrous


-----Original Message-----
From: John Schinnerer [mailto:eco_living@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 9:22 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: Out of Control - living systems and observation

Aloha,

--- Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org> wrote:
> >> "We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk
> of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology . . ."
> > No 'big brain' of coast or plain, mountain or savannah would make
> such an elementary category mistake of attributing human compulsions
to 'life'.
>
> Call it poetic license.

Well, we could and do call it that, but we humans tend to forget that
we're "just calling it that" and live as though it really were that,
which may get messy and/or ugly at some point (as some of us see it,
anyhow).

>Life "acts" as if it has agency,

I can say that I observe "life" (whatever that is - "living systems"
might be more appropriate) acting this way.  IMO it would be a
fundamental mistake for me to say that "it" is a "property" or
"quality" of life - that 'life' "has" 'agency'.

Simple experiment:  get some "dead" things that were once "living"
(bugs, birds, small rodents, seashells, or Bateson's original crab and
lobster).  Get a few people together and come up with a convincing
argument to persuade someone (for example, someone from outer space who
has never seen a single living earth creature before) that what they
are looking at was once a living creature.  In the process, notice all
your implicit assumptions about how you know what you know and others
know (or not) what they know...

As quantum physics (and apparently Kevin Kelly too ;-) has noticed,
finally catching up with lots of ancient sages and mystics, observer
and observed are not separate.

So it appears to me that Kelly clearly contradicts himself - he
reiterates the ancient "all is one" theme, implying he understands that
observer and observed are not separate, and then he separates them,
attributing properties or qualities to some "it" he calls "Life" as
though they/it did in fact exist separate from his observing.

It's the same basic mistake the "meme" guy makes, can't remember his
name - reifying (making a "thing" out of) a relating, a "no-thing," and
then talking about "it" or "them" as though they were somehow
independent of him as observer.  This can be seen as (note the
awareness of observing) the root of lots of human tangles since
forever.  It can also be explained countless other ways.

My question is:  what are the consequences of a particular manner of
explaining?

> just as it appears
> to me that ecosystems, in their succession from pioneer to maturity,
> "subjugate"  (yuck--how about [moving up the scale of
> anthropocentrism]
> ameliorate, take advantage of, or harness) the wild pulses of wind
> and rain and blasting sun, using living tissue to damp large
> fluctuations into
> gentle, more predictable rhythms that can be harvested and channeled
> into usable form. That looks almost like intention to me. Life "uses"
> matter, energy, and flow to enlarge its reach and build more life.

As Toby points to here, perhaps the consequences of saying we observe
"subjugation" are quite different from saying we observe "amelioration"
(which I find preferable to "harness" or "take advantage of").  And
even "wild...wind and rain" and "blasting sun" are our projections of
our experiences onto our observings.  To a desert plant the "blasting
sun" might be as the caress of a warm tropical breeze is to me; to a
ridgetop tree the "wild...wind and rain" might be as a wonderful
massage in a warm room is to me.  Or not.

A highly noun-centric language such as English does not make explaining
relatings any easier, either... ;-o


=====
John Schinnerer, MA
--------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
Food - Shelter - Community
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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