Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Spontaneous Order Conference

I am back from the spontaneous orders conference, and it was great. It was good to be able to talk to people who see the world in a similar fashion. There was the question if -- and feeling that -- what we were doing was the beginning of a paradigm shift. I hope so. If so, it has a long lead-in tail going back before WWII with Bertalanffy, Polanyi, Prigogine, and Hayek. Most at the conference came from a Hayekian tradition, but we had people like me influenced by people like Baertalanffy, Prigogine, Frederick TUrner, J. T. Fraser, Stuart Kauffman, and the chaos theorist, and even a person involved in systems robotics, taking the computer systems approach. Of the 19 people there, I think 4-5 knew Fred Turner personally. He's an underground influence that needs to be brought above ground. I'm going to be revising my paper and submitting it to the journal they are beginning. I will be making links to that journal as it comes up.

As I think through some of these ideas, I'll try to talk about those ideas here. Of course, I will always be talking through the subtle shifts in world view that occur whenever I learn something new.

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