25 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
    1. Our entire operating system needs to be regenerated and rebooted. That is exactly what happens when successful islands of coherence are prototyped, explored, and scaled to generate ecosystems of coherence

      Amen. This is the focus of Me2We2All- amplifying aliveness through more skillful connected learning and adaptation.

    2. Our learning systems must change from teaching for testing toward education for human flourishing in ways that activate our deep capacities for co-sensing and co-creating the emerging future (which is a multi-country initiative that we at the Presencing Institute are just launching with the OECD and their high pe

      Bingo a

    3. I have seen plenty of islands of coherence over the years that never translated into uplifting any of the larger systems.In order to generate change, islands of coherence need to be connected — with each other and with those that are not yet fully formed. Those connections can be made with the help of generative holding spaces that weave the islands into an ecosystem of coherence and that realign attention, intention, and agency at the scale of the whole.

      "Linking islands of coherence into connected competence"

    4. When a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.

      Opportunity for action/impact based on connecting and enactivating our own, feasible islands of coherence.

      "Connecting local coherence into competence greater than"

    5. What’s missing obviously is a viable third option that would disrupt and transform the status quo by leaning into and operating from an awareness of the emerging future

      Active inference is natural (and mathematical) way to describe and model the predicted landscape and adapt to the emergent surprise

    6. regulating the change we want to see — toward bottom-up: co-generating and embodying the change we want to see. Instead of government being the primary instigator of societal change, businesses, civil society, and leaders across institutions must learn how to work together, how to organize around shared awareness and intentions across many institution and sector boundaries. Obviously, the choice is not either-or. But the primary emphasis of change making may shift toward building collective capacity for bottom-up cross-sector innovation, for organizing around shared intention.

      Amen.

    7. two sources of legitimacy. One is the democractic process. That’s the one that Western thinking tends to focus on. But the other one is the quality of results.

      Love this! Too often the hunt for consensus gets in the ways of the other form of legitimacy - competence.

    8. What did many of these progressive movements end up doing? Creating new cultural norms and new government regulations. Many of them mark important accomplishments and progress. Some of them are perhaps a bit over the top. But what’s often missing? The perspective of the makers, the frontline professionals who must operate inside ever-growing straightjackets of regulation and bureaucracy

      Great critique. Enactivating change management through "corrective standards and regulation" distorts surprising moments from opportunities for distributed learnign into a compliance checklist for heirarchy

    9. also on the deeper conditions of social soil

      Presencing Institute's U-theory is one approach to co-sensing and co-cultivating the relational soil. Prosocial.world 's ACT matrix is a great tools for setting up for co-compassing forward. See here for demo --> https://www.sociocracyforall.org/activating-collective-resilience-and-intimacy-michael-lennon-kathleen-walsh-loubna-echabbi/

  2. Oct 2024
    1. Evolution therefore involves an increasing complexification of both the hardware (material-biological organisation) and software (cognitive capabilities) of life.

      The prediction of greater complexity arises from Free Energy Principle and Active Inferencen not Evolution.

    2. Evolutionary competition between species selects for living systems which can maximise the efficiency with which they harness and dissipate energy in harmony with environmental conditions. At every new stage of this process, life is navigating its relationship with earth in an evolutionary dance between its hardware and software.The X-curve at the

      I like his attempt to use evolution-related vocabulary to frame his narrative; he has a different intuition of Friston's free energy principle than myself. my understanding of friston does not depend of evolution-related memes for its dynamics

    3. Life can therefore be understood as an energy-dissipating system that contributes to increasing entropy in the universe by extracting ‘free energy’ in the environment and dissipating it as heat, all as efficiently as possible through paths of least energy.

      Perhaps another way to describe what is happening instead of "energy-dissipation" is "Life translates 'free (random) energy' into patterns which can persist and evolve into meta-patterns and so on"

      Or "Emergence arises from patterns able to form & self-sustain in the presence of continuous dynamics (energy) "

    4. Life can therefore be understood as an energy-dissipating system that contributes to increasing entropy in the universe by extracting ‘free energy’ in the environment and dissipating it as heat, all as efficiently as possible through paths of least energy. Through millions of years of evolution, this has driven living systems - from cells to the biosphere - to increase in complexity, resulting in higher forms of energy

      Surprised to see Karl Friston (who identified the Free Energy Principle) has yet to be mentioned anywhere so far.

    5. In The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life, theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University argues that life can be defined as an astounding combination of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. The ‘hardware’ is a configuration of matter which harnesses energy from its environment with surprising efficiency and dissipates it as waste back into the environment. The ‘software’ consists of the complex information structures – such as the genetic coding – by which that configuration of matter and energy is organised and instructed to self-reproduce.

      Beautifully summarized. I was introduced to this "biophysics of intelligence" lens by the podcast Machine Learning Street Talk's interview of Karl Friston. https://youtu.be/V_VXOdf1NMw? The first 10 minutes are particularly of interest to technologists interested in the future of AI beyond LLMs (e.g. chat gpt)

    6. planetary phase shift

      Conceptually interesting . Skeptical that the precision of understanding and mechanisms from physics and chemistry apply as precisely to planetary dynamics as he suggests, but this claim is a logical inference derived from the free energy principle as posited by Karl Friston

    1. An Active Inference Model of Collective Intelligence

      Short explanation of a Model for collective intelligence based upon the socio-cognitive traits of individual members Active Inference

  3. Sep 2024
    1. The increased organization of productive activity meant the increased experience of the transformative power of labor as well as a surplus of intellectual labor for reflecting upon the meaning, value, and use of work.

      Curious claim: monasteries were the first social institutions where synergies from coordinated labor and coordinated reflection (intellectual surplus) led to productivity and innovation benefits which benefited the culture in outsized manners.

    2. The social body was thus marked by a severe and tightly maintained division between a small fraction of a propertied class free from the need to labor and the rest, “free” or unfree, whose lives were consumed by laboring for another.

      Was the "enslavement of labor" more about the depriving those doing work from the right to receive (or negotiate to receive) shared surplus? Or was it about the labor? It seems the systemic problem arises less from labor and more from distorting (obstructing) the negotiation of compensation / distribution of surplus &/or the practice of more holistically-oriented mutualism across, within and beyond the with members and the natural place where they are.

    3. The task, then, is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor according to its own ratio of perfection, i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities for the infinite and eternal."

      I wonder if the author has explored non-Christian Western perspectives e.g. Judaism perspective on the role of labor in among "the Chosen People"?

    4. Labor’s valorization thus emerged from recognition precisely in and through a religious form that implied labor was itself an intrinsic salvific act.

      This idea of "labor as salvation" (as practiced in northern Europe and its colonies) strikes me as a perfectly Protestant notion, rather as something emerging from the older monastic traditions of Christiandom

    5. This labor can be put at the service of human society, the life of the non-human, and if you are so inclined, in service to the very Ground of Being.

      What he is describing as "labor transformed", I call "creativity"

    6. the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms.

      ?! Instead of "redefining labor" perhaps "liberating (or amplifying) creativity" is closer to where the author is going?

    7. as formative in the creation of new forms of human consciousness

      Alt description? - memetic evolution of subjectivity?

    8. post-literate

      Rather than "post-literate" perhaps "insta-literate" (shorter attention) or "mem-iteracy" (or "memetic fluency") instead text-centric communicational fluency?