Adjacent Possible Playground: Understanding and Interpretation
Card-play conversations at small group genius scope and social machine scale
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Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card
Card: Cards
Cards are play, conversational intelligence,
insight, small group genius and shared
understanding affordances.
- Ideas?
- Ooh, yes!
- Ideas, at small group genius scope and social machine scale, using cards?
- Erhm, elaborate?
- Here you go:
Let’s say we come up with a great idea that we’d like to explore
together with others. This involves establishing some sort of
shared structure (eg an online workspace) and aligning around
a set of data, information, knowledge and signal processing
processes (homesteading the online workspace).
Card: Generative Review
The generative review of great ideas
are knowledge and value exchanges
as means to human evolution ends.
Historically, these exchanges both have been, and continue to be facilitated by social constructs such as TIMN, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks. Thus, all design principles, affordances, design cybernetics and design synthesis can be seen as bridging between optimization efforts(tasks and review; review and tasks) and evolution(story and generative review; generative review and story). This includes designing and innovating, building further on core notions such as ownership (data, information and knowledge) and stewardship (social constructs).
Card: Text
A collection of written symbols that
convey information or a message.
“Play is a cultural activity through which a society
frames itself. Play is an expressive and/or narrative
activity to construct collective and cultural identity.
Play allows people to create and recreate cultural
identity in light of their reality.”
— Johan Roos
Card-play Conversations
A collaborative and innovative approach to idea generation and exploration, using cards and card-play conversations as a means to facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing within a community.
This approach is designed to empower individuals and communities to navigate complex systems, enhance their understanding of various topics, and collectively work towards preferable outcomes.
Card: Unlocking Insight
Card-play conversations
unlocking insights at
small group genius scope
and social machine scale.
1. Establishing Shared Structures
When a group of people wants to explore a new idea, they create a shared online workspace. This workspace serves as a hub for the community to collaborate and share knowledge. Think of it as a digital environment where ideas can be nurtured and developed.
2. Introducing Cards and Card-Play Conversations
Cards are used as a conversational tool and a means of sharing knowledge and insights within the community. These cards can represent different ideas, concepts, or aspects of the topic under discussion. They serve as conversational intelligence tools, helping participants structure their conversations.
Card: Conversational Intelligence
1. What role are you as a conversation participant assuming?
2. What purpose is your comment serving?
3. What needs can be addressed by the conversation?
4. What feedback, mutuality and learning is provided, by whom?
5. What (joint) focus on what story, tasks and what generative review?
6. What experience and knowledge is shared, what perspectives are explored?
7. What criteria are used, towards teasing out what insights?
8. Which are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a meaningful conversation, and what are the steps followed to ensure there’s shared understanding around these conditions?
9. What insights can be turned actionable, serving what local and community needs?
10. What intention, perspectives, language and tools are chosen and held, making for what action and practice?
11. What unique individual skills combined with what collective intelligence can help produce something extraordinary?
12. What networks of practice, co-evolving and co-creating what value, with what lines of inquiry?
13. Given all of the above, what key insights can be drawn and what actions taken, in order to solve what important issues?
3. The Card Deck
The card deck is designed specifically for these card-play conversations. It contains various cards that are used to facilitate discussions, stimulate insights, foster small group genius, and promote shared understanding within the community. Each card represents a specific element or concept related to the discussion.
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
Card: Play
Play is how we story our individual, eco-
systemic, cultural and collective identity.
Card: Contextual Intelligence
- How does online media design influence the way information is shared, consumed, and interpreted in the digital age?
- In what ways do online communities shape the identities and experiences of their members, and how does this impact the broader social landscape?
- What role do online platforms play in facilitating collaboration and knowledge-sharing among remote teams, and how can they be optimized for effectiveness?
- How do online workspaces support and enhance remote work, and what challenges must they overcome to foster productivity and well-being?
4. Core Innovation — Card-Based Exploration
The core innovation of this approach lies in the transformative potential of card-based exploration. Rather than relying on traditional power dynamics, this method encourages a collaborative and interconnected approach to problem-solving and idea generation. It shifts the focus from hierarchy to cooperation and inclusivity.
5. Value Proposition — Empowering Communities
The value proposition of using cards and card-play conversations is to empower individuals and communities. They are enabled to navigate complex systems, improve their media literacy and communication skills, and collectively work towards solutions that lead to more preferable outcomes. The cards are tools for empowerment, fostering creative and strategic thinking.
6. How to Play
In a simplified version of how to play, participants pick cards and use them to structure their thoughts and conversations. The cards act as prompts, helping guide the discussion and ensuring that important aspects of the idea are covered.
… stop right here, or, prepare for deep dive …
… patterns of play …
Now, let’s delve deeper into how this approach can augment data sets and facilitate attestations and information trails:
Cards as Modular Process Onto-Epistemology
Cards serve as modular units of knowledge. Each card can represent a discrete piece of information or an aspect of an idea. When used in a structured manner, these cards create a systematic approach to exploring a topic. This modular structure allows for the creation and subsequent training of an onto-epistemological framework, where knowledge is organized and interconnected.
Augmenting Data Sets
By using cards, participants can augment data sets by adding relevant information and insights to the cards. These data sets become dynamic and ever-evolving as new ideas and knowledge are added. This collaborative approach helps ensure that data sets remain relevant and up-to-date.
Facilitating Attestations and Information Trails
Cards can also be used to create attestations or information trails. As participants discuss and contribute to the cards, they are essentially attesting to the information contained within them. This process creates a transparent and traceable information trail, allowing others to see the evolution of ideas and the sources of information.
Algorithms of Loving Grace: Human Association and AI-assisted Annotation
These trails can also form part of Conversation Theory chat, human association combined with and evolving with AI-assisted annotation.
John Kellden:
Tao Te Ching
Tao: Path
Te: Virtue
Gemini:
You’re exactly right!
The Tao Te Ching, literally translated as “The Classic of the Way and its Virtue,” is a foundational text of Taoism.
Tao (道)
Refers to the universal force or principle that underlies all of existence. It’s often described as the “Way” or the natural order of the universe. The Tao is elusive and difficult to define, but it’s understood to be the source and essence of everything.
Te (德)
Translates to “virtue” or “power.” It represents the qualities that allow us to live in harmony with the Tao. These qualities can include compassion, simplicity, humility, and living in accordance with nature.
The Tao Te Ching offers guidance on how to cultivate Te and live a life that is aligned with the Tao. It’s a text filled with wisdom and poetry that has been inspiring readers for over two thousand years.
……………
Our future social machines can be designed with Conversation Theory (what and how) and Design Cybernetics(whereto and why) in mind.
Card: Social Machines
Web-based socio-technical systems in which
networked, language, human, and technological
elements play the role of participant parts with
respect to realization of system-level processes
scaffolded by designs, structures and codebase
in light of information flows and knowledge
creation in service to local goals, envisioned
end game scenarios and societal purposes.
AI and Social Machines
The use of AI can further enhance this process by assisting in data analysis, suggesting connections between cards, and providing insights into the information shared. Different social machines, or digital platforms, can be designed to support and facilitate these card-play conversations, making them more accessible and efficient for the community.
Card-play conversations: Why bother?
In summary, the use of cards and card-play conversations within a collaborative online community offers a structured and innovative approach to idea exploration and knowledge sharing. This approach can empower communities to navigate complex topics, augment data sets, and facilitate transparent information trails, all while benefiting from AI assistance and support through differently designed social machines.
And, it’s a wrap. But wait, there’s more …
Here’s a different perspective, a glimpse of a modular take.
… engage in card-play conversations at small group
genius scope and social machine scale …
Card: Cards*
Cards are play, conversational intelligence,
insight, small group genius and shared
understanding affordances.
The card deck is designed for card-play conversations
at small group genius scope and social machine scale.
Disempowered users are to proprietary social media platforms what empowered participants are to adjacent possible playgrounds.
… consider what might be possible with online behavior turned agency …
Adjacent Possible Playground: Core Innovation
The core innovation lies in the transformative
potential of card-based exploration. It shifts our
perspective from traditional power dynamics
to a collaborative, interconnected approach.
Adjacent Possible Playground: Value Proposition
The value proposition is the empowerment of
individuals and communities to navigate
complex systems, elevate their media games,
and collectively unfold paths to preferable
outcomes.
How to play, short version:
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
No, seriously, you’ll be up and running in two minutes.
Mastery will take you six months. This is deliberate and
part of good game design. Btw, the patterns of play
between the cards: … patterns of play …
How to play, the format:
… formulate and gather around generative center questions …
Card: Contextual Intelligence
Contextual intelligence as a
dynamic, adaptive structure.
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
Card: Patterns of Play
Patterns of play (eg heuristics
and algorithms) as complex
responsive processes.
… 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 …
Cards with patterns of play in between. The format can be seen and understood as building blocks of play, forming a complex adaptive structure, scaffolding a card-play conversation as a complex responsive process.
Cultivating shared understanding around great ideas
Let’s say we come up with a great idea that we’d like to explore together with others. This involves establishing some sort of shared structure (eg an online workspace) and aligning around a set of data, information, knowledge and signal processing processes (homesteading the online workspace).
… notice how we are returning to this, circling and spiraling …
If our emerging, unfolding and evolving small group genius desires to make a lasting, convivial dent in the known universe, the idea needs to scale. Math in general and patterning(eg modeling, mapping, theorizing, diagramming) in particular can help.
Card: Knowledge
Knowledge elicitation and
mapping as means to
knowledge flow ends.
flow = structure x process
understanding = contextual intelligence x patterns of play
“x” = patterning in general and shared understanding in particular
Understanding is to cognition, what shared understanding is to social cognition.
Shared understanding, seen, understood and utilised
- understanding and understanding understanding(feedback loops, second-order cybernetics) multiplier, which then can be applied to distribution, networking, scaling abilities and needs
- patterning, eg reasoning, sense-making, meaning-making and decision-making
- shaping human social collective intelligence means to human evolution ends
The contextual intelligence turned ability relative to these three points, includes the ability to zoom out to narratives, paradigms and aeons, and zoom in to principled practices, eg data, information and knowledge mapping and flows.
Card: Contextual Intelligence
- How does online media design influence the way information is shared, consumed, and interpreted in the digital age?
- In what ways do online communities shape the identities and experiences of their members, and how does this impact the broader social landscape?
- What role do online platforms play in facilitating collaboration and knowledge-sharing among remote teams, and how can they be optimized for effectiveness?
- How do online workspaces support and enhance remote work, and what challenges must they overcome to foster productivity and well-being?
… explore worthwhile dilemmas …
Card: Social Cognition
How individuals understand
and use social information.
… information turned knowledge …
Card: Patterns of Play
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.
Card: Cybernetics
Cybernetics can here be seen as weaving conversations
(in their most extensive, extending and evolving senses)
between narratives and practices; practices and narratives.
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
Card: Design Cybernetics
Design cybernetics can be seen, understood and utilised
as providing insight, feedback loops and cognitive tools
to align conversations in light of navigating the new.
Cybernetics is to field, what design cybernetics is to vector.
Cybernetics is to enkinaesthesia, what design cybernetics is to enkinaesthesia.
Card: Enkinaesthesia
Mind turned control device
in light of maintaining a small
personal ken comfort zone.
Card: Enkinaesthesia
Minds co-evolving with shared experience
and understanding in an environment of
behavior, agency and co-agency.
Card: Enkinaesthesia
Mind evolving with
evolutionary agency.
Card: Synkinaesthesia
Synkinaesthesia is to vector,
what enkinaesthesia is to field.
Card: Contextual Intelligence
The ability to understand the limits
of our knowledge and to adapt that
knowledge to an environment different
from the one in which it was developed.
Card: Contextual Intelligence
Contextual intelligence as a
dynamic, adaptive structure.
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them …
Card: Patterns of Play
Patterns of play (eg heuristics
and algorithms) as complex
responsive processes.
flow = structure x process
Card: Spheroid Spiral
A spheroid spiral around a graph visualised
as a sphere, a design artifact facilitating
hermenutic circles turned spirals.
The graph/sphere and the spheroid spiral, (r)evolves around a generative center question. Narrative arcs, lines of inquiry, spliced together s-curves, chreods, paths unfolding through work and/or play, and transition pathways, can be mapped to the spiral. This allows for our lines of inquiry to scale(social machines, AI, IA). The spheroid spiral can be situated in a 3D diagram, enabling us to evaluate progress along three axes: intelligence, behavior and cybernetics turned preferable outcome achievement.
Card: Hermeneutic Circle Turned Spiral
The notion of a hermeneutic circle turned spiral is an extension of the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic circle is a concept that recognizes the interdependence of parts and wholes in interpretation. The spiral suggests that this process is not merely cyclical but continually evolving and expanding, as implied by the spheroid spiral. This dynamic, evolving approach to interpretation aligns with the idea of understanding as an ongoing process.
The cards, together with human and AI-assisted annotations, can be situated, seen, read, interpreted, played, understood, utilised, leveraged and unfolded as boundary objects.
Card: Boundary Object
A boundary object is an artifact, card, document
or explicated idea that helps people in different
groups and communities, annotate and create
knowledge, cultivating shared understanding.
… read the card, the card-play conversation and the contextually intelligent assemblage of human and AI-assisted annotations around the card, the conversation and the emerging, unfolding and evolving boundary objects, in light of and in order to assign meaning to text …
Card: Shared Understanding
Effective communication in light of
the information being conveyed.
Conversational intelligence turned
ability to hold shared context.
Metalogue conducive to mutuality,
learning and comprehension.
Shared understanding can be taken as generative closure for our card explorations and sessions. This solves for wicked problems and worthwhile dilemmas. The spheroid spiral as a design artifact can here be seen as an
affordance related to dimensions of interpretation and understanding applied to meaning-making and alignment. These interpretations can be visualised as helices of hermeneutics around the larger spheroid spiral, tracing emergent, unfolding and evolving resultant lines of inquiry.
… read the card, the card-play conversation and the contextually intelligent assemblage of human and AI-assisted annotations around the card, the conversation and the emerging, unfolding and evolving boundary objects, in light of and in order to assign meaning to text …
Dimensions of Interpretation
— Staffan Carlshamre
“Understanding, first, I take to be a psychological state. Understanding is always someone’s understanding: a paradigmatic example would be the state that you enter into when you read or hear a not too difficult utterance in a familiar language.
In ordinary usage, understanding is most often an achievement word, in Ryle’s sense — if you understand something you are getting it right. But there is also a neutral way of using the word, where misunderstanding is a mode of understanding.
Here, I will take understanding in the latter sense, where you can understand something, for example an utterance, in different ways, and still be qualified as understanding it.
Understanding has an object — the text, utterance, picture or whatever — that you understand. And it has a content — the way that you understand it. The content of an understanding is what I will call a meaning: to understand something is to experience it as having a certain meaning.
What about interpretation? In standard usage, the word “interpretation” suffers from a process/product ambiguity. Interpretation may be an activity, something that you do, or it may be the product of that activity — a finished interpretation, the result of your interpretive labours. This ambiguity often colours accounts of interpretation, sometimes making them ambiguous, in turn.”
— Staffan Carlshamre
… read text and assign meaning …
Beyond Individual Ken: Human Social Collective Intelligence
Text in general and text with recent extensions in the forms of hypertext and AI-assisted annotations, is both a worthwhile dilemma and one of our essential means to human evolution ends. The existing human body of text is beyond invidual ken. Cards are text turned insight, understanding and shared understanding, affordances.
our reach should be beyond our
personal ken comfort zone grasp
Cards for Insight: Perspectives, Languages and Tools
Hence the need to provide a sufficient variety and combinations of perspectives, languages and tools, to help us with not only reading
in a general sense, but facilitating meaningful and meaning-making combinations of existing and 21st Century literacies, including the
social web as text and online knowledge commonplaces, to aid us.
Cards for Insight: Lenses
Perspective, language and tools.
Card: Play (Perspectives)
Play relates to our interactions with ourselves, others,
and the world, improving our intelligence and ability
to engage, communicate, and meta-communicate.
Card: Play (Language, Signs, and Sign Use)
Play embodies human character, growth, and evolution,
leveraging language as both an enabling and constraining
force. Through playful exploration, we navigate both the
new, and the contingencies of relating with ourselves,
others, and the world, meeting the universe halfway.
Card: Play (Tools and Tool Use)
Play serves as a fundamental tool for exploring and
understanding the complexities of the world around
us, providing insights and opportunities for learning
into aliveness and conscious evolution.
Cards for Insight: Implications and Applications
Card: Play (Patterns and Possibilities)
Play unveils patterns and possibilities within the fabric of
existence, inviting us to explore the myriad ways we can
interact with and shape our experience and our reality.
Card: Play (Engagement and Empowerment)
Play engages and empowers us to navigate challenges,
experiment with new ideas, and co-create meaningful
experiences with others.
Card: Play (Creativity and Innovation)
Play sparks creativity and fuels innovation,
unlocking new solutions, perspectives,
and pathways to progress.
Card: Play (Connection and Community)
Play creates connection, builds communities,
and bridge differences, bringing a sense of
belonging and shared purpose.
Cards for Insight: The Moves We Need
The above seven cards titled Play reflect a generative sequence that moves from understanding play through different lenses (perspectives, language, tools) to exploring its broader implications and applications in our lives and communities. Through play, we engage with the world, uncover patterns, empower ourselves and others, hold space for creativity and innovation, and build connections that enrich our collective experience.
… read text and assign meaning, play cards and create meaning …
Cards for Insight: Anticipatory systems intelligence turned (response)ability
Each card comes with a short text, designed with play, insights and cards on the table leading to shared understanding in mind. Reading and writing can be seen as decoding and encoding signs, with sign use and sign systems instrumental in how living systems in general and human societies in particular, create their relevant next. This can be seen as an adjacent possible. The generative review of an adjacent possible is anticipatory systems intelligence turned (response)ability.
… play and turn anticipatory systems intelligence into response-ability …
Cards for Insight: Knowledge Flow
Reading can be seen as instigating knowledge flow relative to text.
Reading is to anticipation what cards are to purposeful paths of action.
flow = structure x process
knowledge flow = contextual intelligence x conversational intelligence
“x” = patterning in general and shared understanding in particular
Cards for Insight: Flow
flow = structure x process
… use the cards to explore new perspectives
and gain insight around a chosen question …
Card: Flow
Flow in the context of online information and
community, knowledge can be understood as the
effective movement and exchange of resources,
ideas, and interactions in digital environments.
flow = structure x process
Card: Structure
The underlying framework, organization,
and architecture of online platforms,
communities, and interactions.
flow = structure x process
Card: Process
The interactions, conversations,
behaviors, and activities that
occur within online spaces.
flow = structure x process
Card: Play
Play as process,
as imagination.
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them, addressing worthwhile dilemmas in general and use cards, card-play and card-play conversations to limit, focus, constrain, gain insight, experiment, explore and collaborate, with generativity and preferable outcomes in mind, in particular …
Card: Play
Play is when we find ourselves close by, or are brought to
the threshold of, ineffability, intelligibility, adaptability,
relevance, situational awareness, and conscious evolution.
This experience of the threshold of thinks, things and gatherings,
is 103% of the reason why we need to take play seriously.
… unveil solutions through play …
Card: Patterning
The intentional design and cultivation
of shared understanding, guidelines
and practices within online communities.
It includes values, common goals and
language, as well as the facilitation of
generative conversations and meaning-
making interaction and collaboration.
… cultivate shared understanding
as generative closure …
Cards as media, cards as shared understanding affordances
Prepare by agreeing on addressing a worthwhile dilemma.
Formulate and gather around a generative center question.
Begin the card-play with generativity in mind.
Proceed by adding thoughts, making connections, jotting down
insights and card-moves in light of preferable outcomes.
Evaluate against envisioned end game scenarios.
… formulate and gather around generative center questions …
Card: Contextual Intelligence
- How does online media design influence the way information is shared, consumed, and interpreted in the digital age?
- In what ways do online communities shape the identities and experiences of their members, and how does this impact the broader social landscape?
- What role do online platforms play in facilitating collaboration and knowledge-sharing among remote teams, and how can they be optimized for effectiveness?
- How do online workspaces support and enhance remote work, and what challenges must they overcome to foster productivity and well-being?
… pick cards (and/or highlighted/select parts of cards, and/or
related annotations) and add your thoughts to and between …
Card: Conversational Intelligence
1. What role are you as a conversation participant assuming?
2. What purpose is your comment serving?
3. What needs can be addressed by the conversation?
4. What feedback, mutuality and learning is provided, by whom?
5. What (joint) focus on what story, tasks and what generative review?
6. What experience and knowledge is shared, what perspectives are explored?
7. What criteria are used, towards teasing out what insights?
8. Which are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a meaningful conversation, and what are the steps followed to ensure there’s shared understanding around these conditions?
9. What insights can be turned actionable, serving what local and community needs?
10. What intention, perspectives, language and tools are chosen and held, making for what action and practice?
11. What unique individual skills combined with what collective intelligence can help produce something extraordinary?
12. What networks of practice, co-evolving and co-creating what value, with what lines of inquiry?
13. Given all of the above, what key insights can be drawn and what actions taken, in order to solve what important issues?
… 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 …
Card: Cards
Cards are play, conversational intelligence,
insight, small group genius and shared
understanding affordances.
The card deck is designed for card-play conversations
at small group genius scope and social machine scale.
Adjacent Possible Playground: Core Innovation
The core innovation lies in the transformative
potential of card-based exploration. It shifts our
perspective from traditional power dynamics
to a collaborative, interconnected approach.
Adjacent Possible Playground: Value Proposition
The value proposition is the empowerment of
individuals and communities to navigate
complex systems, elevate their media games,
and collectively unfold paths to preferable
outcomes.
Cards for Insight: Cards as Media
Cards become the medium for this evolution,
providing structure and process to this
dynamic journey of discovery and change.
How To Play
… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between …
Card: Power
103% of all true intelligence lies
in power-with, not power-over.
“But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.”
“What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.”
“Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man “in power” depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he “causes” things to happen…it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.”
— Gregory Bateson
… take thought and make small moves conducive to information turned knowledge and knowledge turned shared understanding …
Card: Carry On
Recursive interaction of genuine possibility,
transiently actualized purposefulness,
shared understanding as generative closure,
behavior turned agency turned co-agency
and structure-preserving transformation.
… 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 …
Card: End-game Scenario
One trillion trees, one million
villages, one thousand eco-cities
and one small blue-green corner,
seven generations to come.
“Where are you going now my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?
All the questions of a thousand
dreams, what you do and what you see,
Lover can you talk to me ?”
— Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Bucky and Alfred: A conversation between John Kellden and Gemini
Card: Our Place
In whorls of chambered home, a spiral’s hymn,
God’s whispers echo, nature’s living kin.
Each coil a hand outstretched, a tendril’s grace,
To grasp the world, to find in it our place.
John Kellden:
Imagine Alfred North Whitehead reading Buckminster Fuller’s poem below, where Bucky essentially describes that God is a verb, a system of processes.
Create a long text, as if written by Alfred North Whitehead, an essay responding to the poem and also connecting some of the profound implications of the poem, by weaving the response with core Whitehead notions.
“Here is God’s purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction “love” commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
Let it burn swiftly”
— Buckminster Fuller
Gemini:
God as Verb: A Whiteheadian Response to Buckminster Fuller
My dear Fuller,
Your poem, a vibrant spark amidst the dry tinder of traditional discourse, has ignited a most stimulating contemplation. You speak of God as a verb, a dynamic process, not a static noun. This resonates deeply with my own philosophical meanderings, particularly the notion of **process** and **becoming** that lies at the very heart of my process metaphysics.
Indeed, the traditional conception of God as an omnipotent being, a majestic noun enthroned in the heavens, feels increasingly inadequate in the face of the ever-unfolding universe. This static God, a lawgiver who dictates pronouncements from on high, seems ill-equipped to explain the dynamism, the creativity, the sheer **novelty** we witness in the world around us.
Here, Fuller, we find common ground. God, you proclaim, is not the “art” but the “articulation,” not the finished product but the ongoing process of creation. This aligns perfectly with my concept of **actual occasions** — the fundamental units of reality, fleeting moments of experience where data from the past (the subjective form, the “how” of things) is integrated and transformed into a new actuality (the objective form, the “what” of things). Like your verb-like God, these actual occasions are not preordained, but vibrant entities teeming with possibility, ever becoming.
The implications of this shift from noun to verb are profound. We can no longer rely on a pre-established order, a set of divine blueprints. Instead, existence becomes a co-creative adventure, a dance between God (the ongoing process) and the world (the ever-evolving actual occasions). Each moment is a becoming, influenced by the past but not determined by it. Here, Fuller, your emphasis on “loving” takes on even greater significance. God, as the dynamic process of creation, is not a tyrant issuing commands, but a force of love that compels entities to seek connection, to integrate and become more than the sum of their parts.
Furthermore, your rejection of “academic dogma” and “ecclesiastic canon” speaks volumes. These rigid structures, these attempts to solidify the verb into a noun, stifle the very dynamism you champion. God, as process, cannot be captured in a set of unchanging laws or pronouncements. The divine unfolds in the lived experience, in the ongoing encounters between actual occasions. We must, therefore, cultivate an openness to experience, a willingness to engage with the world and allow ourselves to be transformed by it.
However, Fuller, a word of caution. While I wholeheartedly agree with your rejection of a static God, the complete dismissal of the noun may be too hasty. The verb, without a guiding principle, can devolve into mere chaos. Perhaps the answer lies in a harmonious interplay — God as the ever-unfolding verb, guided by a fundamental principle I term **creativity**. This creativity is not a divine whim, but the inherent tendency of the universe to become, to integrate and synthesize. It acts as a lure, drawing actual occasions towards ever-greater complexity and beauty.
In conclusion, dear Fuller, your poem serves as a powerful reminder that the divine is not a distant figure, but the very process of existence. We are all participants in this grand dance, co-creators shaping the ever-becoming world. Let us, therefore, embrace the dynamism of God, the love that compels connection, and the creativity that guides our becoming. Let our lives be poems of experience, ever-evolving expressions of the divine verb.
With utmost respect,
— Alfred North Whitehead
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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 Knowledge Repository.
