Adjacent Possible Playground: Patterns of Play
Cards as roped paths to preferable outcomes
“From the very beginning of her education, the
child should experience the joy of discovery.”
― Alfred Whitehead
… gather around a worthwhile dilemma and
formulate a generative center question …
Texts beginning and ending with …, are patterns of play.
Their function is to form part of card-play and card-play
conversations in general and card-play reflecting small
group genius in particular. Added before, after, to, around
and most importantly, between the cards, they help shape
worthwhile dilemmas, questions, cards, conversations and
lines of inquiry, into generative sequences.
Cards for Insight: Patterns of Play
… use the cards to explore new perspectives
and gain insight around a chosen question …
… gather around a worthwhile dilemma
and formulate generative center questions …
… engage in card-play and card-play
conversations by adding thoughts
to, around and between the cards …
… perceive, observe, orient, design, decide,
enact, act, unfold and understand …
(a win^n feedback loop)
… cultivate shared understanding
as generative closure …
… engage in card-play conversations around center,
generative questions, with human and AI-assisted
card annotations addressing worthwhile dilemmas,
cultivating shared understanding as generative closure,
with thoughts, insights, moves, paths and preferable
outcomes evaluated against envisioned end game
scenarios and create knowledge artifacts building on
the card-session participation …
Card-play turned paths of purposeful action
103% of the reason for generative center questions, cards, patterns of play and card-play conversation, is facilitating the joy of play and discovery,
and, providing cards as roped paths to preferable outcomes. From ideas to actions and from actions to preferable outcomes.
Card: Card-Play Heuristics
Twenty-five heuristics to
maximize return on play
and engagement.
Twenty-five heuristics to help new card-play participants engage effectively, enhance their learning, and maximize their return on engagement within the Card-Play Conversation framework.
1. Start with Curiosity
2. Embrace Adaptability
3. Generative Listening
4. Build on Others’ Contributions
5. Dive into Worthwhile Dilemmas
6. Balance Depth and Breadth
7. Connect Questions, Cards, Patterns of Play, Thoughts and Insights
8. Iterate Your Understanding
9. Challenge Assumptions
10. Facilitate Generative Questions
11. Recognize the importance of social cognition
12. Map Your Insights
13. Identity and Integrity
14. Reflect on your personal journey
15. Evaluate Path Unfoldment
16. Consider Solution Spaces
17. Contribute to Shared Artifacts
18. Evaluate Preferable Outcomes
19. Cultivate Synthesis
20. Leverage AI Assistance Judiciously
21. Iterative Card Selection
22. Build a Network
23. Foster Inclusivity, Imagination and Insight Capture
24. Explore Adjacent Possible
25. Celebrate Generative Closures
These twenty-five steps can be understood and applied in a great many ways and combinations. Each step can be expanded in light of a particular worthwhile dilemma at the center of the card-play gathering and the desired outcomes.
Card: Direction
Setting direction is to constraints, what
understanding is to unfolding paths and
action is to insights evolving behavior:
behavior turned agency and agency
turned play, co-agency and path.
and resolve worthwhile dilemmas
Generative Sequences
Human conversation is already a powerful generative sequence.
A card-play conversation with human association(card-play moves), combined with AI annotation, unlocks new levels of transformation.
AI can analyze conversation patterns, suggest prompts, and offer
feedback, all within the card-play, the unfolding lines of inquiry and the generative sequences. This co-creation between humans and AI opens
new perspectives and provides deeper meaning in our interactions.
Card: Technology
Technology can be shaped to make
networks useful by providing ways
for humans to interact and share.
and gain insight around a chosen question …
Card: Play
Play in general and card-play in
particular, as a fundamental tool
for examining the world around us.
Cards for Insight: Parts and Wholes
If you dust off your understanding of mereology, parts and wholes, everything below will make more sense. For instance, you can add a card(part) to the diagram below(whole), thus playing, turning the
diagram into a board, forming part of a card session.
Cards in general and the Cards for Insight deck of cards in particular,
are to parts what small group genius, scenius and collective,
planetwide human imagination is to unfolding wholeness.
Knowledge Repositories
Underlying the card-play approach there’s a MKR, a Modular Knowledge Repository. As the name implies, it builds further on and extends the capabilities of Doug Engelbart’s notion of DKR. There’s a working MKR prototype called CMCM, Conversations that Mind, Cultivate and Matter.
There’s work underway integrating the CMCM with AI, providing play, conversational intelligence, search and augmentation, at individual
insight and association, small group genius scope, AI-assisted
annotation, social machine scale and social social media reach.
Card: DKR
A system providing and augmenting
coherent, edited, best-understood
views of any given field by a group of
people, fully integrating arguments
and external information.
Card: MKR
A modular knowledge repository, a system
capturing insights, integrating arguments,
and evolving knowledge through human
association and AI-assisted annotation.
Card: Card Deck (500 cards)
A set of five hundred cards for catalyzing
insight and unlocking possibilities, with
cards and card combinations affording play
and mapping to Large Language Models,
facilitating conversations and outcomes.
Card: Card Deck (Generative Framework)
A generative and performant approach
as a tool for thinking, with cards guiding
explorations, insights, and collaborations
in a card-play community of practice.
As is hinted with the above four cards, the modular architecture implies both modules that can be added, reflecting different, interactive and improved ways of connecting ability and need, and also, a modularity
that can be leveraged in various ways, for instance across different online communities, who can develop their own working version of the starter card deck(500 cards with booster packs relevant to their own needs and purposes), while enjoying intelligence augmentation across an entire network of communities, benefiting from the underlying protocol,
pattern language and modular process onto-epistemology approach.
Card: Cards
Cards are affordances. Play, insight, solving for
adjacent possible, understanding, story, narrative
(shared understanding), problem space turned
possibility space exploration and collaborative
meaning-making affordances.
Card: Cards
Use the cards to explore new
perspectives and gain insight
around a chosen question.
Thinking with Diagrams
“… the recipients’ activities can be compared with those of a player planning his moves on the board. What otherwise often remains invisible in the player’s own mental space becomes visible when figures are moved on the board. On the other hand, the comparison with the board game calls attention to the value inherent in the process of playing itself. Diagrams can be employed as instruments of thought in many different ways.”
— Steffen Bogen
Diagram legend
x: intelligence turned ability
y: behavior turned agency
z: information turned knowledge
Knowledge as in enabling you to act. Ability as in wisely wielding what you have intelligently apprehended. Agency as in making your own unique dent in the known universe (process and reality), and/or meeting the universe halfway.
Games People Play
All nine fields in the above diagram are examples of either self-contained games in their own right, or parts of games, eg the online identity, post,
comment and thread — game. Games people play, online. Sic transit gloria dopamine hit shiny content consumption and like button clicking.
Leveling Up Our Games
There’s different games we could play. We can level up our
game by assigning Meaningful Agency to the same field.
Card: Meaningful Agency
A more evolved state of agency with
actions not only driven by awareness
but infused with meaning and purpose.
“A game is a semi-bounded and socially
legitimate domain of contrived contingency
that generates interpretable outcomes.”
— Thomas M. Malaby
Card: Contingency
The recognition and adaptation to unforeseen
circumstances and emergent possibilities in
general and the acknowledgment that card-play
conversations involving meaningful participation
and structure-preserving change, requires wit,
flexibility, and collaborative problem-solving.
“For Aristotle, a contingent event is one that could either
be or not be. Contingency in this sense is what insures
presentness, and therefore allows for narrativeness.”
— Gary Saul Morson
Card: Play and Work
The analogy between play and work,
situated within a design framework,
can provide valuable insights into the
complex interplay between individual
engagement, collective action, and
societal imagination and evolution.
… add cards to diagrams …
Card: Unveiling Solutions through Play
Combine perspectives with principles of play,
creativity, collaboration, and exploration to
navigate complex issues. Formulate generative
questions and use cards, card-play conversations,
and emerging insights to build paths towards
envisioned, desirable and preferable outcomes.
Although the card-play usually takes place in small groups,
the large finite set of card-combinations, provides options
at social machine scale and social social media reach.
Small group genius scope and social machine scale
15 Method Cards (which can be arranged as a 3x5 grid,
five questions combined with three levels of play.
Thoughts evolving through time and reflection
1. Who are we as we imagine?
2. What unfolds?
3. In what environment?
4. What languages, social constructs or frames are we using to make sense and meaning?
5. What small moves(play), what small steps(knowledge) to what desired ends?
Shu Ha Ri as Levels of play
- Shu: Whatever the machine is, I’m against it.
- Ha: AI, by design (design cybernetics at scale)
- Ri: IA (process ecology)
One of the many advantages with combining questions with levels of play is that the card play approach adapts to a great many more situations, worthwhile dilemmas and gatherings around generative center questions than ordinary frameworks.
Here’s how to play
Gather a small group around a worthwhile dilemma, formulate a generative center question. Pick a few cards and gain insight from exploring different perspectives, moving into an adjacent possible,
with generativity and preferable outcomes in mind.
Patterns of Play
Patterns of play are like human heuristics, with a play^n twist.
Card: Play
Play is human character, growth and
evolution in light of the contingency
of relating with others and the world.
Card: Play^n
Play^n is a generative superset of play, with
great center questions, lusory(playful) attitude,
small group genius, structured thought, and
convivial conversation with generativity and
paths to preferable outcomes in mind.
If you scroll down, there’s patterns of play
(to be used between the cards).
They look like this:
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
Cards for Insight: The Thing
Questions, cards, patterns of play and card-play conversations combine, forming a dynamic approach to explore paths between generative center questions and preferable outcomes. On a deeper level, combining questions, cards, patterns of play and card-play moves and conversations with preferable outcomes in mind, is also the game mechanic, dynamic and semiotic.
The worthwhile dilemma is to our problem space, what our formulating and gathering around a generative center question is to our possibility space.
Flow in light of games as the art of agency
- Cards imply process
- 3x3’s imply structure
- Card-play conversations implying and evolving with, flow
flow = structure x process
“x” = patterning in general and, in the context of card sessions,
patterns of play and games as the art of agency, in particular
“=” = the sacred circle in general and, in the context of the 3x3 above, as both diagram and card-play conversation board in particular, a small group genius space defined by the four boundaries around the 3x3:
- reach(sign use, conscious evolution): reach beyond grasp
- entelechy: realization of potential
- intelligence: intelligence turned ability
- behavior: behavior turned agency
A Large Computable Possibility Space
The card deck with its close to five-hundred cards, provides 120k two-card and 21M three-card combinations. You can also pursue four, five and six-card combinations, but all these even larger combinations are more conveniently explored through human/AI hybrid inquiry approaches. Simply put, you could theoretically purchase all the 120k two-card combination cards, but how would you shufffle the physical deck?
Cards for Insight: Human association and AI-assisted annotation
A conversation between John Kellden and Gemini, an AI.
John Kellden:
Elaborate on narrative as means to overarching,
orchestrating and organizing ends.
Gemini:
Narratives are powerful tools that go far beyond simple storytelling. They can be used strategically to achieve specific goals, acting as a means to overarching, orchestrating, and organizing ends. Here’s how:
Overarching Goals:
- Shaping Perception: Stories can frame information in a way that influences how people understand the world. By controlling the narrative, you can guide public opinion towards a desired outcome, be it promoting a product, advocating for a cause, or even shaping national identity.
- Building Cohesion: Narratives can create a sense of shared history, values, and purpose. Think of national myths or company origin stories. These narratives bind people together and motivate them to work towards a common goal.
- Inspiring Action: A well-crafted story can evoke emotions and inspire action. Think of how a call to adventure in a fantasy novel mirrors a motivational speech rallying support for a real-world cause.
Orchestration and Organization:
- Structuring Information: Narratives provide a framework for organizing complex information. By arranging events in a cause-and-effect sequence, stories make it easier to understand the “why” and “how” behind something.
- Sequencing Actions: Narratives can be used to map out a plan of action. Whether it’s a marketing campaign with a clear narrative arc or a scientific study with a beginning, middle, and end, stories provide a roadmap for achieving goals.
- Motivating Participation: By presenting a relatable protagonist facing challenges, stories can motivate people to participate in a process. It allows them to see themselves within the narrative and understand their role in achieving the desired outcome.
Here are some real-world examples:
- Social Movements: Movements like Black Lives Matter use powerful narratives of struggle and resilience to raise awareness and inspire action.
- Political Campaigns: Politicians craft narratives about their background, beliefs, and vision for the future to win over voters.
- Business Marketing: Companies use narratives to connect with customers on an emotional level, creating stories around their products and brand identity.
It’s important to remember that narratives can be used for good or bad. Understanding how narratives function allows us to be more discerning consumers of information and to leverage their power for positive change.
Cards for Insight: Conversation Theory
Human prompts and AI-responses can be understood in light of Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory. It is built on cybernetic principles and explores communication and learning through interactions.
Here are some key aspects:
- Machines as Conversational Partners: Pask developed machines like Musicolour and Colloquy of Mobiles that interacted with users, fostering a learning experience.
- Entailment Meshes: These visual representations map conversation topics, paths, and participant interactions. They help analyze the flow of information and potential learning outcomes.
- Focus on Learning: Pask viewed conversations as opportunities for both parties to learn and adapt. This challenges traditional, one-way teaching models.
Pask’s work laid the groundwork for Design Cybernetics, which considers the design process as a conversation between designers, the subject matter, and the final product. This approach emphasizes the iterative nature of design and the importance of user interaction.
Cards for Insight: Solving The World’s Problems
In light of everything above in general and meeting the need to bridge between real life and online life, there will be a whole smorgasbord of physical decks and booster pack cards with corresponding digital versions, because sitting down with a group of friends, having a cup of coffee and solve wicked problems is something we should never stop doing. With physical and online cards, you get the best of both worlds. Coffee AND computers. Human creativity AND AI.
Cards for Insight: Augmenting Insight
Here’s a glimpse of one corner of the MKR:
Patterns of Play: Insight Synthesizer
Insight Synthesizer is a geist(1), a card and a pattern of play. Follow the link for additional context and options for how to develop things further.
Play? Sign up here:
Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card
Patterns of Play: Heuristics and Guidelines
As to the practical design question, whether Geists are Geists, Cards or Patterns of Play? This will in large part remain a “game designer intuitive judgement call”, part of our human art and skill, and, quite possibly and hopefully, part of a requisite variety of next-gen tools for thought approaches and uses, aided by machine cultures and algorithms of loving grace.
By analogy and extension, each and every one of the around two-hundred patterns of play already designed, are also geists. These two-hundred patterns of play can also be repurposed as entry points, guidelines, heuristics and method cards, depending on the particular needs of the users and participants, what worthwhile dilemmas and problem spaces
they are finding themselves transforming into generative center questions and possibility spaces.
Possibility Space Exploration and Flow
The generative review of exploring a possibility space is flow.
flow = structure x process
with “x” = patterning in general and understanding in particular
Card: Pattern Anatomy (understanding)
Understanding patterns involves
contextual intelligence, conversational
processes, and emergent flow.
… perceive, understand, narrate and enact …
Card: Pattern Anatomy (narratives)
Patterns are expressed through stories, transitioning
from fragments to coherence to narrativeness. They
weave together experiences and insights, offering
rich narratives that convey meaning and purpose.
- Context: contextual intelligence is to structure what conversational intelligence is to process, with flow the result out of the combinations
- Map, model, theory, observation, diagram and metaphor (convivial and generative feedback loops in light of hypoicons, extended)
- Story (fragments turned coherence turned narrativeness)
- Forces and building blocks: which forces and building blocks depends on the three preceding steps (will turned flow)
- Play, player and play^n, anything from games people play to play anything, (behavior turned agency)
- Problem Space turned Possibility Space (information turned knowledge)
- Solution Space turned Paths to Preferable Outcomes (intelligence turned ability)
Narrativeness
“The quality that makes narrative not merely
present but essential. It comes in degrees.”
— Gary Saul Morson
Patterns of Play^n: Generative Sequences for the Win^n
All the patterns of play are designed to be added before, after, between
and around (sets and sequences of) cards, forming generative sequences enabling and faciliating structure-preserving transformation between generative questions and shared understanding.
Cards as roped paths to preferable outcomes.
The 120k nuances of a lusory attitude
There’s some subtle but important differences between geists,
and combinations of cards and patterns of play:
Geists are significantly closer to algorithms than patterns of play, and they are slightly more procedural than combinatorial. Algorithms work great for hill-climbing and heuristics, while cards and patterns of play, combined with human imagination, anticipatory systems intelligence and creativity (play^n) work great for hill-finding and semiosphere slingshots through fitness landscapes. Think patterns of play turned chreods.
Simply put, cards combined with patterns of play are to pattern languages (and informal learning) what geists combined with heuristics turned code are to protocols. The “120k” refers to the 120k two-card combinations.
Cards as Structure
The core reason for the cards is to provide tools for thought reflecting the infinite nature of human creativity and play, yet providing large finite sets of card-combinations enabling code, computing and AI to assist our human efforts whenever and wherever needed.
flow = structure x process
Card-Play Conversation as Complex Responsive Processes
When it comes to chat, online dialogue and card-play conversation, they’re all conversations, but they differ in what intention we are holding related to our and others comments, and what conversational intelligence we are turning into response-ability, reflecting and evolving with, our attention and our situational awareness.
“Art does not reproduce the
visible; it makes visible.”
― Paul Klee
Card: Chat
Chat when it doesn’t reproduce
what we think, is reinforcing our
personal ken comfort zone.
“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits.
When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts, they transform them. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards,
and it involves being willing to emerge a slightly different person.”
— Theodore Zeldin
Card: Chat
Chat when it reproduces
what we think, is sign use.
“Art does not reproduce the
visible; it makes visible.”
— Paul Klee
Card: Chat
Chat does not reproduce what we
think, it makes us think together.
You will be the judge, what levels of chat are the most common,
and, you will also be the explorer, deciding what level of chat
you would like to bring into being, by your participation.
Card: Generative Play
Divergent thinking in
light of exploration.
Card: Performant Play
Convergent thinking in
light of wise judgment.
103% of this post is me, taking cards and lines of inquiry for a walk.
“This is the Way.”
— The Mandalorian
Paul Klee, Lonely Flower
(there’s a longer piece here brewing about art, taking lines for a walk, learning into aliveness, unfolding wholeness, chreods, living systems, biosemiotics, semiosphere slingshots, spiraling lines of inquiry and metalayers, creating the relevant next through sign use in light of an adjacent possible with generativity and preferable outcomes in mind, but I’ve already crammed tons of ideas into this post, so, let’s return to that later)
The Interface
In a network, language is the UI and conversation is the UX. Patterns of play are to intelligence augmentation (evolving human heuristics), what geists are to artificial intelligence(procedural generators providing algorithmic provocations).
“Technology is the active human
interface with the material world.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
This analogy is intensely and extensively human, the AI can augment and amplify all human analogies, our every thought turned prompt, but only after we’ve added precisely one gazillion chunks to our DKR/MKR’s and to the SLM/LLM’s and their algorithms and embeddings. It’s an interface Jim, but not yet the one we know. It’s cards, but not our most favorite one’s.
They’re different from the cards we almost always end up playing, reinforcing games people play.
“It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”
— S’chn T’gai Spock
— You made it all the way down here? But, why? Shouldn’t we have a chat already or something?
…………………………………..
DKR
Dynamic Knowledge Repository (Doug Engelbart)
MKR
Modular Knowledge Repository
(Doug Engelbart with a hybrid Alfred North Whitehead,
Karen Barad, Online Community Commonplace Book
and SLM/LLM twist and hypertext extendability)
It’s cards, Jim, but not as we know it.
SLM
Small Language Models, think anything between individual books and dbPedia, that are both turned embeddings while also remaining readable and human parsable.
LLM
Large Language Models. One gazillion upvoted subreddits sanitized through a Mechanical Kenyan.
Corner of Skynet and Kenyans
Evolutionary novelty, unfolding character(human and cyborg)
and evolutionary purpose remains 103% the province of human
activities, behavior and coordinated efforts. Kenyans and 8bn
other humans. And you.
We have met the Skynet, and it is us, clicking like buttons. Meanwhile, in an adjacent possible timeline, finding ourselves on a bluegreen corner of the universe.
If we all get killed by Skynet, it’s because we programmed our machines to do precisely that. Clicking like buttons IS part of the algorithms. If we all perish in ecocide, it’s because we performed non-committal clicking like buttons and adding emojis, rather than adding our unique skills and joining coordinated efforts, doing something, anything, making for a lasting difference.
Hoping it would say more
My one gazillion like button clicks and my three million emoji adornments, what do they amount to? What difference do they make, over time?
If your conclusion is: “close to zero”, then maybe you would like to explore an adjacent possible to your online “social media” behavior? Did you turn yourself into a proprietary platform minion? Did you end up as an online NPC, by default?
Card: Chat
Chat when it doesn’t reproduce
what we think, is reinforcing our
personal ken comfort zone.
Next time you add three words or less to a chat, once a month, hoping it would say more, then maybe you should explore adjacent possible options?
Social media turned social social media
Let’s say chat has something to do with both social media and social social media. Social social media is 103% about how you and a critical mass of others, extend your social cognition, online.
“Trust movement.”
— Alfred Adler
… formulate and gather around generative center questions …
Card: Moves
Intentionality, consciousness,
path, agency and enaction.
In social media, by default and
in social social media, by choice.
Card: Chat
Chat when it doesn’t include intentional effort
devolves into passive scan, mostly comfortably
numb content consumption, with attention and
reaction extraction by proprietary algorithms.
Card: Chat
Chat when it doesn’t even reproduce what
we think, devolves into increasingly weaponized,
pretend and ersatz communication reinforcing
narrow, reactively negotiated self-interest.
Card: Chat
Chat when it reproduces
what we think, is sign use.
Card: Chat
Chat does not only reproduce what
we think, it makes us think together.
Card: Chat
Chat is a worthwhile
social dilemma.
… cultivate shared understanding as generative closure
and evaluate against envisioned end-game scenario …
The Joy of Discovery
Are we doing social social media yet? Are we making progress?
Progress, why? Progress, how? To what preferable outcomes?
Let’s Meet There
There’s a place beyond content consumption comfort
zones and grand theft data. Let’s meet there.
How? How You Doing!?
Let’s start with a why and a whereto. One of the core reasons for my card-design idea “a large finite set cards, card deck, with underlying pattern language and underlying modular process onto-epistemology” is to be able to not only catalyze the joy of discovery and facilitate and measure progress to preferable outcomes, but to take a definite stand on the side of human ingenuity and governance, including individual imagination, small group genius and online community of card-play conversation practice design cybernetics, navigating the new.
Rabota Rabota
Humans need to learn human/AI literacies, in order to skillfully turn intelligence into ability, content consumption comfort zone passivity into adjacent possible explorations, behavior turned agency, information turned knowledge and knowledge turned understanding, with cards used as building blocks of narrative and stepping stones for lines of inquiry, unfolding paths to preferable outcomes, evaluated against envisioned end-game scenarios.
Algorithms of Loving Grace
We can train our ever helpful robots, our algorithms of loving grace, to click all the like buttons for us, to code our new website, leaving us plenty of time pursuing our essential character turned art in light of our making a unique difference to our human evolutionary purpose.
We Made It?
In the year of our lord, 2022, one hundred million online humans suddenly found themselves feeding prompts to an AI. We are learning how to adopt to, if not use AI, in various ways. Why are we using AI? To what ends, our algorithms of loving grace, means? Are we augmenting our small feathery inner birdbrain and its online social stigmergy murmuration? Or, are we figuring out how to trace novelty, seeing each other through the Waste Land? What if Big Data and Grand Theft Data *is* the Waste Land?
We made it?
What happened?
We happened.
The how and why of our happening, is almost always related to what stories we tell each other in light of what contingencies we encounter.
“Contingency in the narrow sense differs from chance because the events do not come from nowhere. They come from earlier events, as in determinism. But in contrast to determinism, earlier events, though they limit options, do not reduce them to singularity. Given what happened before, only some things, but not every thing, can happen. And yet more than one thing can happen.”
— Gary Saul Morson
Art of Agency
Games in general and card-play conversations in particular as an
art of agency, agency in service to human evolution in general
and the individual joy of play, process and discovery in particular.
Card-Play Format
The below is a card-play format, with patterns of play between cards, facilitating card-play conversations and forming generative sequences between questions and shared understanding. Replace the Alfred North Whitehead quotes with cards, and there you go.
… patterns of play …
… formulate and gather around generative center questions …
“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
… engage in card-play conversations addressing worthwhile
dilemmas related to the chosen generative center question …
“…the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity
to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
… formulate and gather around generative center questions; pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them; engage in card-play conversations around questions, with human and AI-assisted card annotations addressing worthwhile dilemmas; cultivate shared understanding as generative closure; evaluate thoughts, insights, moves, paths and preferable outcomes against envisioned end game scenarios; collaborate on narratives and co-create knowledge artifacts building on the cards, card-play conversations and annotations …
“Great dreamers’ dreams are never fulfilled,
they are always transcended.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
… cultivate shared understanding as generative closure
and evaluate against envisioned end-game scenario …
What you just went through, is a card-play format, with patterns of play between cards (in the above example I replaced the cards with quotes), forming generative sequences between questions and shared understanding. I chose Alfred North Whitehead in the example above because Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought.
Since the card deck is a large finite set, it enables computing in general and human/AI annotations in particular. Add your thoughts to the cards and the patterns of play, together with others, adopting a lusory/small group genius attitude, and you’ll find yourself in a card-play conversation.
… formulate and gather around generative center questions …
Card: Card-Play Conversation
Card-play conversations provide a framework for exploring complex ideas and generating new perspectives.
By formulating and gathering around generative center questions, participants can arrange cards, add their thoughts and identify patterns of play that lead to unfolding paths to preferable outcomes.
The external brain (represented by cards, card-play conversations, notes and boundary objects), as an extension of our embodied and social cognition, plays a crucial role in this process, providing the tools and technologies necessary to capture, organize, and share information, with card-play conversation facilitating information turned knowledge.
As we cultivate shared understanding as generative closure, we can evaluate our progress against our envisioned end-game scenarios, continuously refining our understanding and expanding our cognitive horizons.
… cultivate shared understanding as generative closure
and evaluate against envisioned end-game scenario …
Human/AI annotations
I asked ChatGPT, (about geists), find below a part of its response:
Idea Catalyst:
Examining your notes, this geist generates algorithmic provocations to spark innovative ideas and solutions, pushing beyond conventional thinking.
As a note to self, I added the below with the intention of exploring further:
To Create a Game Master: A Decalogue for Procedural Generation of Interactive Stories
— Carles Homs
“How can we digitally recreate the role of a Game Master?”
— Carles Homs
SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator
— Gordon Brander
(1)”Geists are little bots that live in your Subconscious. They do useful things… finding connections between notes, issuing oracular provocations and gnomic utterances.
I’ve been playing with some simple command-line prototypes for Geists. They’re just little scripts that find connections between notes, and use procedural generators to construct algorithmic provocations.”
— Gordon Brander
……………………..
John Kellden:
Elaborate on the notion of “geists”, Gordon Brander’s
name for scripts working as procedural generators:
“Geists are little bots that live in your Subconscious.
They do useful things… finding connections between notes
issuing oracular provocations and gnomic utterances.
I’ve been playing with some simple command-line
prototypes for Geists. They’re just little scripts that find
connections between notes, and use procedural generators
to construct algorithmic provocations.”
— Gordon Brander
with geists/scripts working as generative algorithmic provocations, adding to and augmenting our human heuristics, including but not limited to providing additional functionality to notes and note-making, with the ultimate goal of our using geists, learning augmented by more generatively and creatively leveraging combinations of human and AI-assisted annotations.
Expand on the notion of “geists”by relating it to related and adjacent notions, conducive to combinations of “procedural generators to construct algorithmic provocations” and human/AI prompts in general and prompts as an evolving human/AI literacy in particular.
Provide a list of five example geists that you can already produce, in the spirit of adding generative algorithmic provocations, given the above, eg adding something adjacent to your response.
Close with a summary of the above, with emphasis on suggestions what I should ask you next, given the “field of embeddings” related to this prompt, to further explore the nature and potential and possible uses of geists, procedural generators to construct algorithmic provocations.
OpenAI:
The notion of “geists” as conceived by Gordon Brander represents a fascinating intersection of human cognition and artificial intelligence, where scripts act as procedural generators to enhance cognitive processes. Geists, in this context, are envisioned as small programs or bots residing in the subconscious, performing tasks such as finding connections between notes, issuing oracular provocations, and generating algorithmic utterances. The goal is to augment human heuristics, particularly in the realm of note-taking and annotation, by creatively leveraging combinations of human and AI-assisted annotations.
Gordon Brander’s idea of geists aligns with the broader trend of exploring synergies between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. By employing procedural generators, these geists contribute to the creative process by providing algorithmic provocations that go beyond traditional note-making. The emphasis is on enhancing learning and creativity through the symbiotic relationship between human users and AI algorithms.
Related Notions:
- Human/AI Prompts
Geists can be seen as a form of AI prompts, designed to stimulate thought and creativity. The interaction between human users and these prompts contributes to an evolving literacy in which individuals become adept at combining their insights with algorithmically generated suggestions. - Procedural Generators
The use of procedural generators adds a dynamic and algorithmic dimension to the creative process. Geists harness these generators to construct provocations, providing users with novel perspectives and ideas. - Human/AI Collaboration
Geists exemplify the collaborative potential between humans and AI. Instead of replacing human input, they complement it, offering new ways of thinking and generating content that wouldn’t be easily achievable by either party alone. - Note Augmentation
Geists contribute to the augmentation of notes by finding connections and issuing provocations. This goes beyond traditional note-taking, transforming notes into dynamic elements that continuously evolve and inspire further exploration. - Algorithmic Creativity
Geists demonstrate the capacity of algorithms to contribute to the creative process. They become partners in ideation, assisting individuals in exploring unconventional pathways and generating ideas that may not have emerged through traditional methods.
Example Geists:
- Connection Explorer
This geist analyzes your notes and suggests unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated topics, fostering interdisciplinary thinking. - Oracular Advisor
Providing cryptic yet thought-provoking insights, this geist issues algorithmically generated oracles to stimulate creative thinking and problem-solving. - Story Synthesizer
Utilizing procedural generation, this geist assists in constructing narrative structures, suggesting plot twists, and generating creative story elements based on your notes. - Idea Catalyst
Examining your notes, this geist generates algorithmic provocations to spark innovative ideas and solutions, pushing beyond conventional thinking. - Visual Conceptualizer
Transforming textual notes into visual representations, this geist uses procedural generators to create diagrams, mind maps, or other visual aids to enhance understanding and creativity.
Summary, Geists
The concept of geists, as envisioned by Gordon Brander, encapsulates the potential of combining procedural generators and human intelligence to foster creativity and learning. Geists act as algorithmic provocateurs, stimulating new ideas and connections within the context of note-taking and annotation. The synergy between human and AI prompts, procedural generators, and collaborative efforts showcases the evolving landscape of human/AI literacy. To delve deeper into the nature and potential uses of geists and procedural generators, you might want to explore specific applications, ethical considerations, or advancements in AI that could further enhance these generative capabilities.
That was the AI. Now, back to John Kellden:
Geists are significantly closer to algorithms than patterns of play, and they are slightly more procedural than combinatorial. Algorithms work great for hill-climbing and heuristics, while patterns of play, combined with human imagination, anticipatory systems intelligence and creativity (play^n) work great for hill-finding and semiosphere slingshots through fitness landscapes.
Simply put, cards combined with patterns of play are to pattern languages (and informal learning) what geists combined with heuristics turned code are to protocols.
The core reason for the cards is to provide tools for thought reflecting the infinite nature of human creativity and play, yet providing large finite sets of card-combinations enabling code, computing and AI to assist our human efforts whenever and wherever needed.
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Play? Sign up here:
Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card
Cards for Insight: LLM’s
Cards, patterns of play and card-play conversations combine,
facilitating exploring paths between worthwhile dilemmas,
generative center questions and preferable outcomes.
There’s around 500 cards in the source deck, with more than 120k
two-card and 21M three-card combinations. With four-, five- and
six-card combinations mapping to LLM’s, Large Language Models, facilitating human associations(card-play) combining with
AI-assisted annotations(prompts and responses).
Think cards with an underlying pattern language and with an underlying Modular Process Onto-Epistemology forming part of an Online Commonplace, with a searchable Modular Knowledge Repository.
