🚀 go-pugleaf

From: David Petraitis <davidp@mare.ch>

At 21:09 11/05/96 -0400, you wrote:
>From: Danny Choriki <dchoriki@igc.apc.org>
>
>hey folks,
>
>interesting thread...

>data -> information  =3D all the world is a data point which become
>information when you start selecting out specific data to answer a
>question or solve a problem.
>
>(To David Frampton, my reading of Bateson, on information as "what
>makes a difference" is of a data point in the environment that has a
>higher salience or relevance to the individual than the other data
>points around it.  For example, a taxi cab with someone getting out
>of it is more important when you want to go home than when you
>yourself are getting out of a taxi.  What is relevent is important,
>but it is the next step is really critical to this discussion about
>education versus learning.)

Just going to input on a few of the points here.
The hierarchy is as I remeber it for a twenty-something year ago semiotics
course with Reinhardt Lettau in San Diego in which we used Bateson:
difference, distinction,  dialectic, paradox.

Differences occur everywhere in nature. It requires something else to *make*
the distinction. In biology there is a *something else* that makes a
distinction among the differences that occur which we call natural
selection. In human intercourse it is a subject that makes a distinction.
The question is (not yet) of what is the relevance of this or that
difference to this subject. It is simply that the gestalt formed out of the
field of differences pouring in.

After the distinction is made then the dialectic comes in (i hate that word
but that's what I remember it was called in the course %^). This is where
the subjectivity of the perceiver comes into play and creates the gestalt
from the information, develops the internal decisions with respect to the
perception and chooses.=20

The paradox bit came in as the person becomes aware that the decisions with
respect to each dilaectic do not *resolve* anything, but set into motin a
new series of differences. Unending cycles tend to boggle human minds. Short
circuits result in perceptions/conceptions that leap out of the paradox.
(perhaps going beyond wisdom in Danny's steps to something akin to
enlightenment?)

Perhaps the end of education should be seen to be altogether more spiritual
than it is perceived by people who say "Oh, I'm just a teacher..."

Regards,
David Petraitis
Mar=E9 Conseil
Marketing and Re-engineering
ch. Sous les Roches
1264 St-Cergue, Switzerland
Telephone: +41-22-360-3181

DavidP@mare.ch
http://www.mare.ch/