Field notes, essays & experiments
16 pieces
- Read more: Nagle and Your Inner Voice
I've been thinking about self criticism and the inner voice at the same time I started reading Michael's manuscript. During the Pandemic, he felt like my older brother, a deep inquirer into the human psyche, wrestling to channel his voice to inspire our culture with a full humanity. That culture was on a different channel and we each held the dissonance in our own way. Beneath all those conversations, even the misattunements and disagreeable words, we wrestled to find a path through the absurdity.
- Read more: Social Agency
Wake up!
- Parents everywhere
Read more: Assemblage- Read more: Men
What principles shall we uphold as men?
Read more: AI SOC[This Article is a WIP]
At Louie.ai we have been deep in builder mode, researching and developing the next generation of security automation.
Building AI tools, while using AI tools, it is becoming clear that the nature of knowledge work is changing.
Melissa Valentine's ethnographic research shows that AI systems don't replace roles, they restructure the flow of information in an organization.
What can we expect from
Read more: FilmI will definitely expand this, for now let me note a few of my heroes.
Persona (Ingmar Bergman) — for the subtle drama of the human face
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky), as Nagle said, "How did he know!" (What it was like to be a spirit guide)
Tree of Life, captures somehow impermanence
- Read more: Group Intelligence
I participated deeply in Joe Hudson's leadership trainings from 2017–2019, and as a part of that did two sequences of 18 months cohorts. We had an amazing enjoyable time, but the part that really stuck with me was experiencing a group developing into a self leading organism. It's said that the Guru speaks through the group, and many times I had the distinct experience that the group was living through us as a holographic benevolent over mind.
This experience was predicated on trust and over time, Joe could allow himself to be led by the collective, once the principles were established.
Read more: PsycheHere we bring forth all of our tools of epistemology and fall short.
To bring to bear the best of our human capacities, we might look to every lens, to rehabilitate old scientific paradigms, to look from the viewpoint of the ancients, the moderns, the artists and the mathematicians.
Of course much has transpired since Carl Jung wrote, and yet I do find him to be a great inspiration. He was a medical doctor, and took the his practice using the best empirics of which he knew, yet at the same time with an occult inquiry dove into his own inner world, discovering in his wild imagination, factors that his careful empirics could barely hold, until late in life he would reveal the depth of his mysticism.
- Read more: Connect
Methods from network science to aid decisions in a complex world
Read more: ExteroceptionAt the height of defi summer, with four billion $ in it's vaults, Yearn demonstrated what a small self organizing team could do to reinvent finance as we have known it. Could we scale the DAO way and reinvent capitalism itself?
Read more: InteroceptionSomatic psychotherapy emphasizes body sensations, but what are they really? How might we differ or share these experiences and their significance? How do they evolve over time, and can the tools of data science help us navigate this world of feelings?
While filming this emres session, I was on a remote zoom session in a class of 15 people. The practitioner was projected opposite me as a sort of god like figure with his gray beard and sky blue background.
The session begins with a memory trace, as the client I narrate, in the present moment, what happened, at the point of activation, the practitioner stops me and we begin the protocol.
- Close eyes, Connect with sensation, do nothing, let change
That's it!
For ~2 minutes I feel my sensations, speaking them out loud so the practitioner can guide me to continue allowing the sensations to change.
What these images show is a rather typical evolution, at first the memory trace evokes a somatic reaction, but as we spend time present with the feelings they resolve into pleasure and openness.
This whole setup was in the basement of Encyclopedia/People/Michael Nagle's house, in retrospect it is funny because he had a whole world of experience in this very thing, I think he was entertaining me, or perhaps deferring to my pride a bit in not totally schooling me on the subject. While he was knowledgeable in many practices, the one he would go back to time and again was Organic Intelligence a very gentle approach to healing. (He did tell me, people tend to identify with the first practice community they receive)
To the motivation of this experiment -- to illuminate the unseen.
- Read more: Affect
Influenced by Dave Snowden's anthro complexity and the group work of Joe Hudson.
The organizational challenge of modern society is how to coherently meet the ethical and existential challenges of the poly crisis. Inspired by biology, where we see effective coordination across many orders of magnitude, shows that this is possible and sets the standard from which we can know we have good principles.
There is no final universal answer. The motifs and techne of multiscale organization are our human heritage. But we must reinvent them to meet 21st century challenges.
Bridging the micro and the macro, seamlessly will be the name of the game. As COVID‑19 showed us, events at the smallest physical scale have cascading consequences across every level of the planetary system. While it maybe novel to human intellectual tradition to cope with these problems, the very function of the immune system is to coordinate action across the orders of magnitude of a human body.
Read more: Death MeditationIn 2019 I was a part of the team facilitating the final retreat for 40 people in a 18 month leadership program.
The final retreat was self organizing, and we dove into planning a weekend themed with death/rebirth. To me the symbolism and drama of death was alluring, and so I focused on elaborating that aspect of it.
At the time, Covid was latent in the casual fabric of our reality, but we didn't know. Encyclopedia/People/Michael Nagle, who I would spend the pandemic with, and I were just deepening our friendship. For the retreat, he helped me work out my ideas, and brought into the mix his own subtle genius.
In the years since, he lost his father to Covid and then developed metastatic cancer which took his life two years after the diagnosis, two years in which he deepened his beautiful engaged way of life.
I can't honestly say the content below helped me face loss or grieving. Yet, I know for sure that the relationships I developed in co-creating that weekend were the ones that have sustained and inspired my living, and that the practice of embracing life in it's terrible beauty is a guiding principle of my life.
Read more: Human FactorPreviously at app.thehumanfactor.ai
Read more: Video ChatDuring COVID‑19, Radu and I started building a web frontend for new video chat, As we built it Sage joined the team working on product.
We've had a number of gatherings on the platform, was online as Game Board. We had our first big gathering as a part of an online festival, where hundreds of people joined the chat over the course of a weekend, having as many as 20 online at one time.
The architecture was developed to support customization, and it is possible to use an online editor, through firebase to update the chat space in real time.
Read more: Diagrams of the mindSelf Model / External Model / World Model
When thinking about cognitive systems, it is customary to invoke diagrams. It's a tradition amongst intellectuals with a deep history before science even, we make these attempts to signify the structure and aspects of what is.
Minds are organized in this way, with a self inside, a world outside and the relational experience that mediates within the middle. Whether looking at biological cells, vertebrates or social systems - these patterns of organization reoccur across scales.
Above Chris Field's uses the markov formalism to describe quantum systems. And below, Rutger Goekoop's research illustrates how these systems compose across scales into modular networks of control hubs.
This is the basic organization of the human nervous system: efferent / afferent nerves: inputs / outputs and what mediates between the internal and external? That is the content of our experience.