I think, by now, you all know, I find a problem on both the semantic and
syntactic level with the concept of unlearning. There have been examples
given of adaptive and generative behaviors under the label unlearning. Art
says:
> anyone care to join me, I've got a feeling there's some really interesting
> landscape just around the corner...
>
> and BTW, the link to phil's 'historical channeling in complex adaptive
> systems' is that this channelling can be considered to be happening in a
> search space/possibility space/fitness landscape.
>
> also BTW, it seems to me that in order to understand the complex systems
> in complex adaptive systems, we MUST use several overlapping metaphors [as
> I have done in this post] or we run the risk of missing important aspects
> of the system as whole...
I took a ride to Principia Cybernetica, reread Weiner's "Human Use of
Human Beings" and finally said to myself, unlearning is not a word
signifying a psychological reality, it is a metaphor for multiple things,
ergo, I accept it. One of the notions I ran across, which I believe is of
value to the unlearning thread is that of metasystem transition. Systems
have multiple personalities, depending on which subsystem they're
interacting with. We humanoids are systemic, the linguistic subsystem
changes on socio-contenxtual cue. The tactile subsystem....
So, we deal with a metasystem, which deals with multiple levels of control
(don't you just hate that word). The transitional states are really a
part of what we're talking about here. Unlearning is transition, from a
set of general behaviors to a special behavior which responds to the same
set of response in a different way. Metanoia may well be one of these
transitions, from system to metasystem. I'm not done yet, but can't bet
much more out tonight without more reflection.
-- jzavacki@wolff.com John Zavacki The Wolff Group 800-282-1218Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>