re: system as subjects

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 08 May 96 13:11:56 EDT

God bless those irreducible differences! or what's an Other for?

-- but my interest also lies in whether we can usefully imagine
the differences between me and thee to be _of a similar sort_
in some respects, to the differences between me/thee/us and
a larger whole which includes us...

Having just read a bit more on this in Luhmann, a key element of
the logic has to do with whether the environment is taken as
something that does or does not include us ... Luhmann's view
follows more the cybernetic tradition (in its later Varela form),
and makes the environment a unity by virtue of the unity of
the system for which it is an environment ... but with this
logical connection, the environment is then otherwise defined
so as to exclude the system-under-focus. My own view is that
one needs to define a super-system (vs. sub-system) which
includes both the first-order system (me) and its Varela-style
'environment', and it is in terms of the emergent properties
of this joint, higher-order system that we can best understand
the me-thee, me-it, or us-environment relation. The difference
is subtle, but one that makes a difference. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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