January 23, 2006 - 17:25
Projects:
Thanks, all, for rich conversation ... and apologies for not getting the timing quite right, building toward some things without leaving time to wrap them fully. It was in fact part and parcel of the rich conversation, with several issues becoming clearer in my mind as we talked through them. Here, in any case, is the bottom line, as it emerged ....
The diversity of things that come together in/around the topic of emergence might in principle be related in three somewhat different ways
- a random assembly of mysterious things that one might hope will be illuminated by emergence
- a set of different mysterious things that have some apparent similarities and hence might follow similar rules that operate in different circumstances (eg being "distributed organization")
- a set of things that are in fact related to one another in the sense that each gives rise to another in a series of successive emergences (from physics to living things to "story tellers", as I suggested toward the end)