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October 24, 2007

" If our world is a living system of systems"

Sofia Bustamante wrote:

> If our world is a living system of systems (holistically embedded), then the base concept of ecology must have biological connotations...

I love both the depth of her insight and what it inspired me to see:

YES! Our world is a living system of systems. It is alive, expanding and contracting, dancing on the edge off chaords, between "nothingness and eternity."

Sofia continued:

> And aspects like finance, social, environmental factors need be considered within this context.

YES, again! And when more of us understand, feel, and relate to them as living systems, we may even inspire the awakening of their sentience, who knows. Just imagine…

Continue reading "" If our world is a living system of systems"" »

February 7, 2007

Collective intelligence as integral capacity

Tom Atlee wrote in an email message:

> A capacity usually involves both being and doing. It manifests
> through doing, but usually requires some form of being.
>
> Intelligence manifests largely through solving problems. If you
> can't solve problems of some type, most people wouldn't say you were
> very intelligent.
>
> Intelligence is bigger than 'problem solving', but that's sort of a
> core standard.
>
> Solving problems involves being able to see clearly, decide what's
> relevant, reflect on it, not be prejudiced in ways that block your
> ability to do these things, etc. These things are as much about
> being as doing.
>
> Does one "apply" one's intelligence, or just "use" it?
>
> Here's how I think about CI:

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August 6, 2006

Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier

Radical Evolution.jpg

I've just finished reading an amazing book by Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor at of the Washington Post, titled "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human."

Garreau presents three scenarios of the future: the "Heaven" of technological optimists, like Ray Kurzweill, the "Hell" of technological pessimists, like Bill Joy; and the "Prevail" scenario of people like Jaron Lanier who doesn't believe in technological determinism and thinks that:

"Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways."

The quotes below are from "Radical Evolution".

Continue reading "Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier" »

September 28, 2005

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."

Yet, the movement of "collective intelligence" is still largely invisible to itself, in spite the half million webpages using that term. "The 'movement' isn't lots of people carrying signs in the street. It is the motion of the living social body, in this case, as it is waking up." -- Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute.

It is awakening as we connect our conversations, seeking the answers, the new capabilities that only together we can be. I don’t know why but that reminds me of a cartoon showing a little girl hugging every little comrades of her in the kindergarten, and in the last picture, she says, “because God has only my arms to hug them all.”

The creative impulse of the universe that is trying to come through in our 1-on-1 conversations really needs us, each of us, to connect the fragments of meaning perceived individually and in pairs, into a bigger picture of coherent landscape and action. It is both humbling and inspiring to realize that there are important messages coming from the noetic field, which have more enfolded complexity than any individual mind/consciousness could fully contain and absorb.

It is humbling because our personally-focused self-sense can’t grasp the higher, impersonal sense of self, in which it is extended to the collective that became, from an evolutionary perspective, the basic unit of cognition and intelligence.

It is also inspiring, if we hear it as a knock on our door by evolution (towards higher complexity and integration), which says, hey come out, join the bigger you and play.

Knock... knock... do you hear it?