LERI THEORY (LERI.ITSELF)
CyberDancer:
"I bet that if you get a complete poll response to this post you'll find that Leri is a mystical organization. Not because of any charter or anything but because of all those voices in our heads."rez:
"i do know how i would define a 'dissipative structure', which is comforting, so i'll do that again: a dis-struct: 1: is far-from- equilibrium or heat-death; 2: auto-catalytic [ie, provides means for its own perpetuation from within]; and 3: open to its environment. Leri seems to be all of these at least."*** Leri as dissipative structure, or self-organizing system, is one of the most obvious models we can apply to our situation. This model is attractive because it presumes a level of activity that tends toward identity without the need for any kind of hierarchical imposition of ideas or behaviors.
rez:
"Many things in nature hold a complex form over time, seeming to defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which says that all should tend from greater to lesser order. This is not the case with what are called dissipative structures, or self-organizing systems, which in fact rely on thermodynamics for their growth and development! A self-organizing system is a system which has these three traits: 1: it is far from equilibrium [or heat-death]; 2: it is open to its environment [ie, it sloughs off [or dissipates] used up stuff and soaks up potential energy]; 3: it is auto- catalytic [ie, it contains internal mechanisms for its own perpetuation or reproduction; positive feedback. in nature, cell division & reproduction does this. In a virtual culture, posts or pings sent forward into the fray do this.]"Scotto:
"We are assuming, of course, that Leri is far from equilibrium, that we are still in a period of marked growth; our interactions with other communities on the Internet, as well as each individual's daily life elsewhere, represents an openness to outside influence (potential energy), and its own internal mechanisms for perpetuation or reproduction are seen in the spawning of sister lists and the continued exploration of every avenue of communication possible for the group."rez:
"richard dawkins defines an 'organism' as anything capable of reproduction, i believe, which is a DAMN weird definition. ie, in that sense viruses are organisms, even though they rely on a host for their incubation/reproduction. if we look at Leri as an organism from the level of a large process, we can see it as such through the presence of, say, Aleph and Dreamhunters and etc. but i think Leri was Something Weird before the first offshoot list started."Scotto:
"If we choose to model Leri as a self-organizing open system, then we are open to the following train of thought, which is: There really isn't a dichotomy between the 'parts' and the 'whole' -- that is to say, the whole cannot be analyzed in terms of the parts, ie, you can't take a neural net apart and discover consciousness anymore than you can examine Leri person by person and somehow 'figure out' Leri. Each part, furthur, in a system like this, fractally represents the whole. (This isn't a facile statement, btw, about how all the parts are identical or isomorphic w/ the whole, which is not the case; rather, each part is unique and yet, interactions of the parts are according to unfolding fractal self-organization; each part does represent the whole equally as well as any other part.)"rez:
"the iteration of past threads gives Leri momentum which affects what it can and cannot evolve into in the future."Scotto:
"Inherently, there is a kind of selection process which we presume to be operating at the level of the group. Certain memes simply resonate much harder with the collective, adding richness and depth to its identity. Furthurmore, the memes in play within the group interact with each other, and in many ways bind themselves together in orbit around the 'memetic attractor' that, in this model, is at the heart of Leri."rez:
"a memetic attractor is maybe an area of activity in which one can see similar behaviors of units within a system. ie: even if i DON'T know the local lingo of say a given newsgroup, i can go there and see the repeated re-iteration of key terms by various people [not knowing what they 'mean'] and posit a memetic attractor. a memetic attractor then is the space of re- iteration... in the case of Leri, there are topics which are re- re-re-iterated; there are certainly group behaviors which are re-iterated [fleshmeets? netrips?], and for me this is enough to posit a memetic attractor."Scotto:
"How much of what goes on is implicit and/or inherent to the nature of Leri, and how much is extraneous? How much can we strip away, and still call ourselves Leri?"Hermit:
"It occurs to me that not only is Leri a memetic attractor, it's SWIMMING with internal attractors (of course)."rez:
"more and more, i am seeing 'memetic attractors' as the sites of slippage and compromise between seemingly different approaches. isn't it called a 'do-sie-do' in squaredancing when 2 people come at each other, hook arms, & spin off again? :) a lot of this attraction has to do with [i think] 'disputed' terms. or ideas, or somethings. here, our Bone of Contention is 'attractor' or maybe even 'Leri.' what is it...?"Nozzle:
"I think that there is the tendency to think of leri as a conscious singular entity, having its own character and personality. However, when it comes to the organization or lack thereof, I would say that it is the conscious efforts of the members of the list to have it lean one way or another that is the ultimate organizing force. I think that if there is any self-organization occuring, then it occurs on a subconscious level in all of our brains, in our preferences and dislikes of the people/styles of writing on leri. I think that the people of leri self-organize into different units, but that that list as a whole lacks this ability."rez:
"maybe in some sense, if Leri is trying to explicate / understand itself through you [in part], then that feeling is very real, and a part of it comes from Leri's nascent sense of self-awareness, & it is making steps at self-preservation the only way it gnows how, that being to make the modeling of itself [as a holarchy] a matter of personal importance to its constituents [holons]..."Scotto:
"I've often felt that Leri occasionally reaches points of concrescence, where certain words from certain places are almost required by the itself. I can't speak about anyone else's experience of this, if in fact anyone else has felt this, but. At times of crisis in particular, I feel a distinct pressure to speak here; often, I model it thusly, that I'm not really speaking my own words at those times, but Leri's."CyberDancer:
"Sure, someone may or possibly has begun to explore the territorial potential of such fertile ground as the Mind of Leri but hey, it's their own psychic (psychological) ass on the line when they play that card. We are all free agents in a free universe whether or not we want to be. Leri KNOWS that and if any individual or ever small group of leri-ites slip/s and forget that...oh well...didn't they read the warning on the ritual??? :-)"yara:
"there are no hoops in this circus, chica. this is a festival of lights, a Carnival with a capital C... yank the spotlight to somewhere else--the highwire kids flying at 100 feet, the lion tamer getting his head chewed off. something. you pick. you're holding the light. and so am i. this is dance fever and we're denny terio manning the light on the disco ball. get out there and boogie! there's people eating light bulbs out there verbally and damn it! i just can't eat another Hot Pocket, cheese or no cheese. i want to hear about the shards of glass on the vocal cords. i want to dicuss the nuances of the filaments scraping against the inside of the belly and whether or not it's digestible... i want to put into this space my own air, my own time, my own fingers, and muck around as much as i like with strings of thought and tangled threads of ideas... what LERI.itself is is the nothingspace that lets that happen. tug tug push pull. it's not one direction or the other, one medium but not another. it's allspace alltime. thisnow herethere."rez:
"and here we are, and our models of Leri as a whole literally do 'represent' the whole. for me this is a fundamental beauty of Leri. and we all certainly do it equally 'well'; we are all taking different approaches to it as a whole, so all our models will differ in the specifics. but imho, even as we are making models of ourselves in relation to it, i say that this is its way of modelling itself in relation to us. i say this because it Leads Me Interesting Places right now."yara:
"what is LERI.itself?
silly question.
what are YOU?"