Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!demon!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
References: <1994Sep26.114409.4876@oracorp.com> <Cwv4GJ.8qy@spss.com> <CwyFA4.3zx@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <CwyupB.2Ax@spss.com> <Cx5Lxn.H41@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 15:25:16 +0000
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There is a huge literature on how intuition about complex subjects can be
made accessible and explicit to a team. It is the fundamental set of activities
which underpin corporate strategy formation and, as such , is the basis of a 
multi billion dollar global industry. Many of us make our living from inducing
teams to (effectively) knowledge engineer themselves, externalise that
knowledge and then render it geenrally accessible to the organisation as
a whole, embodied in another metaphor. *Reality*, that most ephemeral of
brand images, is there to the degree to which it is useful to deem it to be 
there.

George Bush's "vision thing" would have been - had he possessed it - a "folk 
wisdom" exteriorisation of an inner intuition which would have been formed by 
immensely complex processes of learning, symbol manipulation and introspection. 
Firms are able to innovate because their staff possess a shared intution as to 
the primary challenges which face the organisations. Mice evade owls through 
the use of similar intuitive skills. Exceptionally rare in nature and reality 
are the types of process which people seem to regard as being "real": the 
interaction of clearly defined cogs in well understood clockwork. We may care
to think about biochemistry in terms of metabolic flows and the dance of 
carbons in katabolism: fine, spendid, predictaive, real - but not a full 
picture of what is happening *right now* in this individual cell, here under 
the microscope. Everything has blurred edges and abiguity and the big, shiny 
symbols that we use to explain the core elements of the process to ourselves 
are, when seen in their hoem environment, as dishreveled as a film star caught 
draining the sump.

Stop posing silly word-based dichotomies, therefore: reality is not like 
anything, it just is. We grope at bits of it, as blind men feel an elephant.
Or, as the old lady screamed when she saw an elephant for the first time, 
parked in her garden and eating her cabbage: 
  
 "Bruce, Bruce - get your gun 'cause there's this huge *thing* in the yard and 
  it's pulling up all my cabbages with its big darn' tail"
 "What's it doing with them?" he shouted.
 "If I told you what it was doing with the cabbages you would wash my 
  mouth out with soap..!"

Reality is what manages our behaviour. We can change both, to a degree.

 _________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
