Connecting conversations - come out, join the bigger you and play

I rarely came across a stranger, who could as accurately describe my feelings and aspirations, by expressing his own, as Michael Dubois did in his blog entry on "Co-Intelligence. The part and the whole".

"What if some of us did know or at least had the requisite pieces of the whole of understanding for what to do and how to do it? How would we recognize a workable way among all the competing philosophies and strategies and schemes? And if we did recognize a workable way out of our mess, how would we communicate it?"

"This is what is haunting me every day now. I seem to be understanding more and more of what is happening, and what we will need to do now and in the very near future. And the interesting thing for me is that the main feature of this understanding is that it is a partially complete piece of a much larger whole, and that whole is all of us. In other words, I don’t have the answer, and I never will, but I am an intrinsic part of the answer. I am a node of the collective intelligence that literally MUST awaken from its dormancy. I feel now like a piece of the Big Hologram. I have the whole vision inside me, but it must be united with the whole visions that are inside everyone else or it’s worthless and doomed. And I’m beginning to wake up to how this will work or die trying."

Fortunately, not only we are still alive but there are more and more of us "beginning to wake up to how this will work."

Relationships enabled by the 4-fold ecosystem

This is a message as a comment on my earlier post of today on the 4-fold ecosystem of the CI field from David Beatty who has just asked me by email to post it for him because our spam-protecction software prevented him from doing it himself. (I guess, we will junk our "junkstopper," now that the new version of Movable Type, our blog software can provide stronger protection.) Here comes David:

George,

I appreciated the 'hey, look-at-this' note a few minutes ago. Long time since we have had a conversation.
A 4 element structure is a very rich structure. I will limit myself to pointing out the relationships that a 4-fold enables.

1) You have the 'purity' of each of the four elements A B C D (which can also be subdivided, of course.)

2. You have the combos of the 4 elements AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD If you wish, you can also consider these as simultaneous, separate operating pairs, AB/CD, AC/BD, AD/BC,

3. You have the dynamism of the 3's ABC, ABD,ACD,BCD,. Since a characteristic of 3 is the dynamic nature, you can read each trio as one of three forms. e.g. ABC ACB BAC BCA, CAB, CBA. reflecting the difference that comes when you consider first position as impulse, second position as reception, and third position as interactive product. (see J.G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, Vol.2, Ch.27,28 for more) If this dynamism is useful, (often is) that gives you 4 triads, each of which has 6 dynamic states.

4. And you have the 'whole' of all four creating a state of affairs.

Thus, while the four form does look simple, the importance of the choice of the most potent 4 terms is clear. (or maybe, it also indicates that our language of terms is a short-form code for much more complexity. (4/38ths!)

No wonder intelligence must be collective, continuously-changing, and self-reflective!!

regards

David B

The 4-fold ecosystem of CI - an inquiry into our survival

There are two questions that frequently keep me awake in the night or wake me up in the morning. This morning, they did it again. They are:

• Shall we have the collective will and capacity to absorb the complexity of the impending crisis of crises, also known as the "perfect storm," or shall we not, and be defeated by it?

• If the winning scenario is to prevail, what it will take to make it so?

This morning, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together and asked for this blog entry.

It seems that our best hope for developing an adequate response to the perfect storm is in the collective intelligence of an ecosystem comprised of four fields:

1. Rigorous, scientific research on large-scale CI that provides coherent frameworks and methodologies for building successful prototypes of complex CI systems

2. Such social innovations as deliberative democracy, peer-to-peer, and open source, coupled and supported by the best theories and practices of whole system change and large-group interventions

3. A post-metaphysical, evolutionary spirituality embedded in the great story, an inspiring context, the wisdom of which can support practitioners on all four fields

4. Advanced and emerging technologies for collaborative knowledge development and coordination, which can power of up the thought and action of CI researchers, social activists, and initiators of applying them to every area of social life

The graphics and text above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

What does this potential ecosystem need, right now, to become real?