Category: Life
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Cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems
Here is how Elisabet Sahtouris defines ecosophy and why she thinks that cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems: Ecosophy “… I give the word ‘ecosophy’ (oikos + sophia = oikosophia) the meaning it would have had in ancient Greece, had it come into use there: Ecosophy: wisely run household of human affairs or,…
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Alfie Kohn on love, motivation, and self-esteem
Alfie Kohn is the author of Punished by Rewards, which is a book about the damaging effects of rewards. Here are his thoughts on motivation, love, and self-esteem (my emphasis in bold): Motivation “When we deal with people who have less power than we do, we’re often tempted to offer them rewards for acting the…
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Carol Black on the wildness of children
Carol Black writes the following in On the Wildness of Children (my emphasis in bold): When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry. … But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust. … The same people who do not see themselves as “above” nature but…
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There is another way
Here’s an excerpt (my emphasis in bold) from Russel Means’s most famous speech in 1980.1 There’s something deeper than just a rejection of Marxism from this radical. He has an entirely different worldview compared to all “isms”: “… Newton … “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences … Descartes did the same thing with culture.…
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Life-nurturing vs. life-depleting behaviors
The environment within which people work is key to the organization’s success. Life-nurturing conditions contribute to high creativity and productivity, while life-depleting conditions contribute to apathy and low productivity. Life-nurturing behaviors 1 Life-depleting behaviors 2 Listening Controlling Understanding Punishing Trusting Regulating Sharing Telling Clarifying Shaming Judging Rationalizing Notes: 1 These are some of the behaviors…
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The dancing rainbow within
Mae-Wan Ho’s new book Living Rainbow H2O is dedicated to the dancing rainbow within, which is made possible by the water that makes up all organisms. 1 Mae-Wan Ho writes (my emphasis in bold): “The organism is thick with coherent activities on every scale, from the macroscopic down to the molecular and below. I call…
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The organism is wildly uncontrollable and unpredictable from the outside
The organism is wildly uncontrollable and unpredictable from the outside. From the inside, of course, you know what you are doing. You know that your actions are not random or arbitrary. And … if you are a perfectly happy human being, you would feel absolutely spontaneous and free. — Mae-Wan Ho 1 Notes: 1 Quote…
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Victoria Safford on freedom
You know, we do it every day. Every morning we go out blinking into the glare of our freedom, into the wilderness of work and the world, making maps as we go, looking for signs that we’re on the right path. And on some good days we walk right out of our oppressions, those things…
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Mae-Wan Ho on the autonomy of organisms
Mae-Wan Ho, is best known for her pioneering work on the physics of organisms and sustainable systems. Here’s what she writes on the autonomy of organisms in her book The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms (in italics, my emphasis in bold): Organisms are never simply at the mercy of their environments on…
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Norm Hirst on a life-itself science
Prologomena of Life-itself Science by Norm Hirst at The Autognomics Institute is an introduction (or prologue) to a life-itself science. Below are some axioms from the paper: All life is connected All living entities are autonomous All living entities are complex All living entities are self-referential Self-referential implies self-observation and awareness Living entities survive by…