Organizing retrospective 15

This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective.

What has happened? What needs to be done?
This week, I have read Robert Rosen’s Essays on Life Itself. Here is my book review. What makes this book relevant for this series is that Rosen asserts that organisms and human systems are very much alike.¹ Rosen reviews some 2,500 years of mathematical history, culminating in the attempts to reduce mathematics to algorithms. He claims – on mathematical grounds – that organisms aren’t computable! They aren’t (finite-state) machines. The machine metaphor is false!² My hypothesis is that deeper generative orders for organizing aren’t computable either.

There are some interesting similarities between David Bohm’s notions of implicate vs. explicate orders, and the notions of genotypes vs. phenotypes in biology. Phenotypes are what we directly can see about organisms, while genotypes are the causal bases of the phenotypes. Hence, phenotypes are explicate, while genotypes, in some sense, are implicate. It would have been very interesting to get David Bohm’s view on the computability of implicate orders. Robert Rosen has a reference to David Bohm,³ but I don’t know if David Bohm was familiar with Robert Rosen’s work.

I have also been reading Flourishing Enteprise by Chris Laszlo, Judy Sorum Brown, et al. during the week. This is an unusual book in that it directly adresses beliefs and assumptions.

• I will write a book review of Flourishing Enterprise next week.
• I will also start reading Future Sense by Malcolm Parlett.

What was good? What can be improved?
I’ve spent much time reading books, gathering information, and writing book reviews. It’s necessary, but I need to spend more time on creative thinking and writing. However, I feel inhibited doing this kind of work in English.

• I will start experimenting with writing in Swedish (which is my native language). I’m sure I’ll be able to express some of the thoughts in English once they have been born.

Notes:
¹ Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 324.
² Ibid., pp. 295, 298–299.
³ Basil J. Hiley and F. David Peat, Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul), pp. 327–341.

Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts