mike,
the wonderful thing about your messages is that they are so cryptic that one
can interpret them almost anyway one chooses although I know there's a
message in there and i suspect I know what you're saying, but . . . white
noise ? ? ?
anyway, your question about "perfect coordination" reminded me of a passage
from the Ken Kesey novel "Sometimes a Great Notion" that describes how the
four members of the Stamper family worked as a team cutting timber and
getting it down into the river (Oregon you know) . . . Kesey's description
of the harmony with which they worked, the perfect coordination is so
great!! it could well be considered a literary example of the kind of
supra-individual group "cognition" that i've seen written about vis a vis
air traffic controllers, but an amazing description, compares the Stampers
cutting timber to the John Coltrane Quartet . . . I don't have the book
anymore, actually read back many years ago -- summer of '68 when I had been
removed from circulation due to draft difficulties --- anyway I'll look for
it and post the passage when I find it. It could almost be considered an
elegy of activity theory.
I can see how perfect discoordination might apply here but not the opposite.
Been thinking a lot lately about the possibilities on the statement: In the
(right/wrong) place at the (right/wrong) time. Seems like a wonderful
heuristic for traditional logic because it clearly distinguishes the merely
contrary from the truly contradictory.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 9:04 AM
Subject: isolation experiments
>
> Paul and Alfred--
>
> Strange that the conversation should take this turn. It moves squarely
> into what I teach about, but have not written about vis a vis
> communication, coordination/discoordination, and consciousness.
>
> Right, deprive humans of meaningful stimulation by floating them in
> warm tanks filled with white noise. In a few days at most they cannot
> add 2 and 2.
>
> I would call that perfect discoordination, ramdomness.
>
> What about the other extreme, perfect coordination? We know what happens
> in these circumstances from experiments fixing images on retinas--
> the visual world disappears to replaced by a gray, uniform field.
>
> In the book of laughter and forgetting, where all these topics
> are themed and varied, Pascal is quoted as saying that "life is
> lived between the infinitely large and infinitely small." Yep,
> temporally too.
> mike
>
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