Inclusional arboriculture- from the top

[Amelanchier]

Ok - how about the metaphor involving a cup of coffee?

 

Hot coffee + cold room + time = cold coffee + imperceptivley warmer room.

 

That is the way of the current universe. Entropy is simply a measure of the state of the energy within the system - when the energy is focused in one point of the room (the coffee cup) the entropy is low. It increases as the coffee cools and the room warms until they are the same temperature. When they reach this point, the entropy has been maximised.

 

The problem for life is that maximum entropy equals death if not oblivion. Because we occupy a vanishing small proportion of our universe, the balancing of our hot coffee (you, me, cacti, jenson interceptors & tapeworms) with the cold empty vastness of the room within which we live (space, dark matter, stupid massless particles that haven't even got names) is both inevitable and absolute.

 

Life bucks this trend towards maximising entropy. Life is like hot coffee that stays hot. It therefore resists the 'flow'. It does this by creating order; replicating, mutating and evolving from simple unicellular beasties into Oaks, Dolphins and Mosquitos.

 

As I said, self organisation can be seen in natural processes. Shake your cereal box and the bigger bits come to the surface (gravitational sieveing). Pool and ripple formation in rivers. Ice spikes freezing water. My bloody beach cusps. Sand dune formation.

 

Even more self-organisation can be seen in flocking animals, social insects and traffic, but it always arises from simple processes - and it never lasts forever. Its fragile.

 

Why does the predator pick the easiest prey? When you've got a mountain to climb, you pick the easiest route. You're still climbing a mountain though and when you get to the top, entropy wins anyway.

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

So what you base your argument on is the inevitablity of entropy, the very simple fact that the universe on completion of its expansion, will inevitably contract and implode again?

 

That is the truth, and as with entropy, one cannot cheat the forces of the universe/cosmos, BUT that isnt something that is in contradiction to inclusive thinking?

[Amelanchier]

Alan is saying that all things are linked and not to be seen as stand alone entities. I think most people see this for themselves. People know that a tree takes nourishment from the soil and returns this to the earth when it dies etc etc.

 

What Allan talks about which takes this one step further is a flow of ‘something’ which links things in some more fundamental way. He also talks about links that are beneficial or natural when things are looked at as a whole and not necessarily harmful as when viewed in conventional ways.

 

I agree entirely. I've never met anyone who resists the idea that fungi might be beneficial to trees as part of a cycle of life. However, I suspect Alan has (back in the day), and I wonder if this might have coloured this particular view.

[Amelanchier]

That is the truth, and as with entropy, one cannot cheat the forces of the universe/cosmos, BUT that isnt something that is in contradiction to inclusive thinking?

 

Ah. Didn't say it was. I was picking up on your idea that life's 'flow' follows the path of least resistance and showing that it doesn't.

 

Would anything be contradictory to inclusive thinking? Can anything falsify Inclusionality?

Edited August 18, 2010 by Amelanchier

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

I agree entirely. I've never met anyone who resists the idea that fungi might be beneficial to trees as part of a cycle of life. However, I suspect Alan has (back in the day), and I wonder if this might have coloured this particular view.

 

are you saying that you think Alan at some stage viewed fungi as "negative"? and that his new found fervour might have been "coloured by this"

 

if so, I can tell you now without consulting him, absolutley not!

[Albedo]

I agree entirely. I've never met anyone who resists the idea that fungi might be beneficial to trees as part of a cycle of life. However, I suspect Alan has (back in the day), and I wonder if this might have coloured this particular view.

 

I think he has too, I think he's trying to academic-icise something that's unacademic-iseable:001_smile:

 

If your cup of coffee could fuel itself with food like life does, it would defeat entropy like life does. Don't get the leap to the universe and everything tone.

 

Edited August 18, 2010 by Albedo
typo

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Mr sorensen, Im too tired to contemplate it but Im sure all this is far from as constructive as you are more than capable of?

 

Now ive got to go back to the begining, AGAIN and remind myself what i was trying to say/do/ oh I dont know, i lost the plot trying to work out why entropy was the inclusional anti christ

[Amelanchier]

are you saying that you think Alan at some stage viewed fungi as "negative"? and that his new found fervour might have been "coloured by this"

 

if so, I can tell you now without consulting him, absolutley not!

 

Nope I meant that Alan has probably met people who have...

 

If your cup of coffee could fuel itself with food like life does, it would defeat entropy like life does. Don't get the leap to the universe and everything tone.

 

 

That is one of the pitfalls of metaphors. Even if the coffee could feed itself and generate its own heat - the room would warm up til the food ran out. Entropy wins.

 

Mr sorensen, Im too tired to contemplate it but Im sure all this is far from as constructive as you are more than capable of?

 

Now ive got to go back to the begining, AGAIN and remind myself what i was trying to say/do/ oh I dont know, i lost the plot trying to work out why entropy was the inclusional anti christ

 

But haven't we had fun?

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Argh yes, thats where I was going!

 

The inclusional approach to understanding organism-environmental neighbourhood seeks to recognise and account for distinctive possibilities without defining them into hard and fast categories or separating organisms out of context as discrete objects. Instead of imposing unnatural boundaries as definitive limits to the fixed frameworks of objective terms of reference, it works with natural, variably fluid boundaries as the dynamic framing for its open-ended focus on co-creative evolutionary processes of energy flow. Correspondingly:-

1. It involves truly impartial evaluation of natural energy flows coming from all angles and not biased to one side and/or another. Individuals, populations and communities are all included as distinct but not discrete identities flowing into and out from one another.

2. It is fully contextual, inclusive of the ecological neighbourhood that inter-organism relationships form in and transform. It takes into account, instead of seeking to ignore the ‘three-body problem’.

3. It is dynamic, accounting for continually changing circumstances in limitless space. The macrocosm dynamically includes and flows into the microcosm as the microcosm dynamically includes and flows out to the macrocosm, without finite end or beginning.

4. It is evolutionarily inclusive of receptive space as a vital presence, and so is realistically non-prescriptive and open to possibility. Evolutionary ‘learning’ generates complexity and variety through improvisational processes that incorporate past heritage and future possibility into present expression. The true craft of the practitioner who works with these processes is similarly improvisational and context-dependent, not rigidly prescriptive.

 

Whatever your waffling about tony i dont get your point, but this is mine, this is where I will progress my "personal" practice of arboriculture, because this is the only realistic way, a way true to nature.

[Albedo]

Tony's rule, .... attack the argument not the person... applies at all times.

 

You have trees to cut tommorrow hamma, I have some logs to shift where I dropped/sectioned a whole big tall dead sycy into a 6 foot wide space, (still haven't bought a new camera) and I think tony has reports to write.

 

And I'm trying to watch Big Brother:blushing:

 

Edit: posted at same time H so I appear to have ignored your post or been flippant, not intended

Edited August 18, 2010 by Albedo