The Shape of Knowing - The Cynefin Co

Description not evaluation - The Cynefin Co

One of the things I am enjoying at the moment is the way a lot of things are coming together conceptually.   It happens like this when you develop or repurpose knowledge from different sources.  Individual practices and ideas make sense in their own right.  Then you read more, practice more, and the various origins […]

The Alien Space of Science: Sampling Coherent but Cognitively...

Scientific discovery is constrained not only by what is true, but by what is cognitively available to the researchers currently exploring a field. Many directions are coherent in light of the...

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere

The brain's 7D sandcastles could be the key to consciousness | New Scientist

We’ve glimpsed mind-bending geometric structures that fleetingly encode our thoughts, memories and feelings – and could solve the greatest mystery of all

Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere | Antikythera

That is, the faculty of recollection and foresight? Until recently, I would argue, our planet was amnesiac. That is, no part of it was reflectively aware of the place of the present relative to the established past nor the expected future. But then peculiar animals emerged, capable—no matter how imperfectly—of cooperation, abstraction and invention. In the last blink of geologic time, through the collaboration of these animals with their increasingly cunning artifacts, this state of planetary amnesia has faltering begun being cured. That is, through our artifacts, our planet is becoming aware of its own unfolding biography. In our fallible attempts to model our world—alongside our growing legion of sensors—The Earth system has developed a way of recollecting its deepest past and tracking the changing complexities of its present so as to forecast its furthest future.

Is this the meaning of life? | John Stewart

John Stewart: Developments in evolutionary theory suggest we have a central role to play in the future of the universe

Complexity Explorables

A collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields....

The Meaning of Life Revealed!

Evolutionary theory answers one of the most profound and fundamental questions human beings have ever asked themselves, a question that has plagued reflective minds for as long as reflective minds have existed in the universe: Why are we here? The question was answered in 1859 by Charles Darwin, and the answer can be stated in just six words...

The Triadic Mind: How Language Reveals the Limits of Human Cognition

Languages are the most complex symbolic systems humans have ever created. Yet children acquire them effortlessly, without formal…

Intelligence as a planetary scale process

Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species. We explore ways in which the concept may prove useful for three distinct domains: Earth Systems and Exoplanet studies; Anthropocene and Sustainability studies; and the study of Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). We argue that explorations of planetary intelligence, defined as the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at a planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems, can prove a useful framework for understanding possible paths of the long-term evolution of inhabited planets including future trajectories for life on Earth and predicting features of intelligentially steered planetary evolution on other worlds.

Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences

Scientists seek to understand the causes of observed phenomena. Beliefs that they have succeeded are based on understanding that is rarely or possibly never complete, and varies in depth and quality. Most often scientists believe they understand more than they do, making their belief an illusion. This illusion then persists in explanations scientists provide in print, in talks, or in discussions. The illusion that a scientist has a valid and complete explanation tends to be magnified when the data are well described by mathematical and computer simulation models due to the precision of such models and their ability to predict well; prediction does not imply causality, but gives the illusion that it does. The first part of this essay supports the case for the universality of partial and incomplete levels of understanding by showing the difficulty of reaching a deep level of understanding for even a simple analysis and model that most scientists use and believe they understand: linear regression. The second part highlights some implications of the existence of many levels of understanding and explanation, and their use by scientists for design, testing, analysis, and theory development. It discusses the way that deduction and induction depend on the levels of understanding and the implications of the illusion that a scientist’s understanding is deep. It makes a case that the many incomplete levels of understanding affect, often unwittingly, the ways scientists design experiments, test theories, comprehend, communicate, and teach.

The Origins Of <br>‘Planetary Realism’ And <br>‘Whole Earth’ Thinking | NOEMA

There is no escaping an interconnected world.

Summary: Thinking in Systems (by Donella H. Meadows)

The main argument of the book:  Everything in this world is made of systems. While we cannot fully understand systems, we can observe them…