Inspiration

I'm grateful you made time and glad you resonated. I just finished the series .. and am experiencing A LOT of internal resonance & dissonance.

He releases episodes far apart but they are all gems. His latest episode (a segment from a collaboration with other history podcasters) is probably the best 25 minutes I've heard ever:

Why were there Japanese people in an Israeli airport killing Puerto Rican Christians to support Arabs who hated Jews?

Your framing of this as a generative process reminded of Robert Pirsig's explorations in Lila. If I were to put it in terms of "generative process", Pirsig, I believe, would say that you are witnessing several simultaneous unfolding processes that are intertwined in both inter-dependent and oppositional relationships. Pirsig's framework includes 5 "ethical realms": inorganic, organic, social, intellectual, and dynamic.

eg: http://iamronen.com/blog/2010/05/02/reading-lila-morals-ideas-kill-societies/

Discernment between these "levels" is needed to comprehend the wholeness of such complex historical processes.

Absolutely, with lots of second and third order effects between them. The podcast makes a first approach in that sense, but I do not think that it is a kind of process you can design/predict in advance but one you can interpret afterwards...

DISCO Elements DAOs with purpose and egalitarian orientation

The DISCO Elements are quite relevant for our project, but I want to point out the value accounting approah, which could inform some of our early conversations on the convinience or not of a sort of "scorecard" https://disco.coop/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DisCO_Elements_v1-3.pdf

"Ancient Art "One Stroke Painting"

"Ancient Art "One Stroke Painting" reborn in this Dragon by Keisuke Teshima". Ealborating from @Ronen Hirsch's comments at Discord, some ideas to take into account when thinking on generative process that look simple:

-The importance of technique, the need to develope the skill
-The importance of the right tool/resources
-The problem of being mentally stuck in modern Western approaches
-The often neglected wisdom of tradition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZFHiixUU5k

Yok Hui novel approach to group-based privacy in online communities

Yuk Hui has many intersting insights, and some practical proposals we may consider. In this video (min. 30 aprox) explains this paper, in which he presents an interesting "framework for group-based privacy preserving recommender systems".

I dreamed about you all last night. Coming here to mark it in our digital record :)

In the dream, @Ronen Hirsch and I were in my office with Nico; Ronen was holding him while I was getting set up on Discord for a call with @Toni Blanco and @Josh Fairhead . Toni had double booked himself and was letting us know he was running late trying to get out of his other meeting. Ronen was very sweet and nurturing with Nico. That's all I remember ... but I'll say that it felt really inspiring to wake up this morning with y'all's co-presence in my space.

I have been deeply moved by this beautiful dream ❤️

this arrived at and went through my heart ...

Open source alternative to Clubhouse

Sergio pointed me to this open source tool that is emerging as alternative to Clubhouse. It is only sync audio interaction based, but. https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/ll2bwq/jam_an_open_source_clubhouse_w_webrtc/
https://jam.systems/

Origami - Religious Conversion

Yesterday I shared this video on Discord with a reluctant recommendation. I specifically pointed to the last part of the conversation where a notion of "religious conversion" came up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3qCtw7MPR0

@Alex Rodriguez ingested the video and asked about the possible resonance with our work .... and in response to that, I took a huge word-dump on discord :) I'd like to try to capture this interaction here and hopefully with more conciseness and clarity.

I recalled this quote from Nature of Order:

A descriptive program, like a blueprint or a plan, describes an object in some detail, whereas a generative program describes how to make an object …

consider Origami … by folding a piece of paper in various directions, it is quite easy to make a paper hat or a bird from a single sheet. To describe in any detail the final form of the paper with the complex relationships between its parts is really very difficult, and not of much help in explaining how to achieve it. Much more useful and easier to formulate are instructions on how to fold the paper …

Origami provides, at least in my mind, a wonderful metaphor for "religious conversion" ... as in "the piece of paper goes through a religious conversion" ... and it does not by "envisioning a bird" but by going through a sequence of simple (even mechanistic!) transformations.

You do not need to know what the origami bird will look like. Heck, you don't even need to know you are making a bird. If you follow the correct sequence of transformations you will arrive at a bird. Almost anyone can follow the same sequence and arrive at a bird.

Most conversations I encounter today seem to gravitate towards imaginal/envisioning = describing what the bird looks like (what is the new normal? what is the meta-crisis? etc.). In contrast, I am hoping that our work will lead to sequences that anyone can follow that will lead to new ... birds :) That is what I mean when I talk about practice. Keep practicing ... regularly ... with others ... and let's see what arises FROM the practice.

Practice, in this context, is not a means to an end ... the notion of "utility" should be flushed out of it ... practice for the sake of practice ... because you are drawn to it, because it inspires you, because it nourishes you. Similar to something @Toni Blanco wrote a while back in the context of our work: every gathering, every Loomio thread, every discord interaction should be rewarding in and of itself ... regardless of what we "achieve" together.

... so much for conciseness :)

This resonates to me in many levels.

As for the primacy of practices, let me copy/paste from this conference paper I presented 4 years ago and that became seminal of the Pantheon Framework, in which I counterbalance the idea of cosmovision (worldview) with the idea of cosmopraxis:

Therefore, a new imaginary of generating, making, doing, working, producing, giving, gifting, reciprocating, nurturing, receiving, assimilating and exchanging takes over the scarcity centered imaginary of the Leviathan, that dominates our Western societies (Rawlinson, 2016). Those that want to orient their productive project towards a Pyhle might learn from those communities that counterbalance the common worldview imposed by ruling imagined communities (Anderson, 2016) or any other mode of governance relationship, with a cosmopraxis; a “network of practices where people learn – and are taught – to be very attentive, we could say ritually attentive, to what the ongoing timespace brings about, again and again” (Munter and Note, 2009: 87)

I would add to your connection of practice and conversion to the link I made in the same paper of "practicing" and "experimenting":

This is reflected as well in the idea of experimenting. When looking at the relationship between experimenting and becoming, it should be noted that the concept “experimenting” fluctuates in between two semantic fields, although the on-line Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes that the second one is “obsolete” (Anon, 2015). The first is related to the word “test”, and it is already present in Aristotle and his discussion of induction: after experimenting different particulars we can construct the universal. Then we know that what we expected to be is, or not. This is how we understand “to experiment” from Galileo onwards: to test and – hopefully – confirm our expectations. The second is related to the word “experience”. It draws back to the Stoic tradition, in which we experience something when it disrupts our opinions or expectations (Almarza-Meñica, 1985). The experience change the experimenter; makes her become something different. For Gadamer, who following Hegel rescued the original Stoic meaning of the word experience, “the cumulative nature of such experience is an instance of Bildung (formation and learning through experience) and is, as such, a living process of becoming (Werden)” (Davey, 2016, emphasis mine). As Gadamer wrote:

"Experience stands in an ineluctable opposition to knowledge and to the kind of instruction that follows from general theoretical or technical knowledge. The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience. That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences” (Gadamer, 2004: 350).

As for religion; I see things a bit different. For a start, I strongly recommend as a source of inspiration this talk/conversation On religion that Derrida close to his death (here at the bottom of the page, in two mp3), in which he summarizes "That's why being a believer, even a mystic believer, and being an atheist is not necessarily a different state of affairs". Please; if you pay attention to it, you will see that Derrida has nothing to do with what people as Ken Wilber wrongly disregard as "radical relativism of the green meme".

I am also very fond of the book Food, Sex, and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, in which the author challenges the idea that religion is about believing in god, instead of what religious people do. I quote from the introduction (I bought the e-book, so let me know if you want to have a look):

religion has everything to do with the relationships that constitute, form and enliven people in everyday activities in this material world. In particular, it is human relationships with other species that are the key to understanding real world religion. It is possible that religion began as a kind of interspecies etiquette – especially when members of one species needed to eat members of another. Religion continues today when people eat or do not eat together, when they engage or do not engage in sexual activities, when they include or exclude strangers in their communities

So yes, I think the metaphor of religion conversion is very relevant.

Finally, an anecdote regarding the Jewish religion and practice, (a religion I would not mind to convert to, see note below). In Catalan there is an expression: "Do Saturday" meaning for doing the deep house cleaning tasks of the week. It comes back to five centuries ago, when all the jew population was forced either to leave the lands of the Catholic Kings or to convert to Christianity. Since some Jews tried to stay and hide their religious practices, actual converts used to do the "cleaning" of the house very openly and noticeable every Saturday, so neighbours could check they were not respecting the Sabbath.

Note: I like religions, precisely because of their rituals/practices. I would not mind to convert to any "all-embracing religion" in which you can find virtually all the political spectrum, as happens in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Paganism, Atheism and so on. I have been tempted actually to convert to all of them in some point of my life but I finally did not do it because of convenience. Which means that I would do it anytime for convenience :-)

Thank you @Toni Blanco :) That was almost too academic for me ... but the resonance came through :) I will try to make space for Derrida ... but can't promise I will be able to ingest it.

I very much like the idea of "ritually attentive" ... it feels like 1) what I most try to be and 2) what I most want to experience from others and 3) what most disappoints me when it i absent which is often the case).

I appreciate you liberating the word "religion" from its seemingly obvious frame. For me, religion begins when private rituals become collectivized, regulated, and enforced! I am OK with rituals, not OK with religious structures - physically (eg: churches) or socially (eg: norms and institutions).

Having been born Jewish, and raised in the intensity that is Israel (including a short time in the military), and having one set of grandparents who escaped Germany before WWII and one set of grandparents who were Holocaust survivors ... AND having married a non-Jewish woman (a VERY informative experience/experiment) ... I have come to inhabit an intuitive and established distrust of religion. In this context, I, personally, am OK pouring out the baby with the bath water ... and I do sometimes wonder and feel if because of that I have lost some (needed?) access to a kind of grounding that comes from established rituals. Yoga fills that gap ... to some extent.

I think I totally get you. I always think in me and religion without the actual intermediation of institutions, an existing long tradition in all major religions (of course minority, and institutionally problematic). Regarding the need of rituals (that you nicely fill with yoga), I wonder if you know the works of Alain de Botton (I guess this Ted Talk may be an introduction).

As for Derrida, that is a different story. I would give a chance to the talk. As I remember it, and opposed to his writing, is quite accessible and warm. He was a young atheist (of Jewish background) with a philosophical project of dismantling metaphysics, only to find that it was not possible to do such thing. So there you have him, as an old man, answering with lots of love to the questions of three religious scholars (of different religions) that are using his work for deconstructing their religions. Derrida has been told several times (and he has no problem with it) that certain lines of Buddhism developed his philosophical project in a most radical way (here a scholar link for @Alex Rodriguez).

2 Origami Videos :)

unfolding folding complexity

applied to science:

I very much like the idea of "ritually attentive" ... it feels like 1) what I most try to be and 2) what I most want to experience from others and 3) what most disappoints me when it i absent which is often the case).

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” – Simone Weil

Just sharing this excerpt/link here as I see it as relevant to the context of "value objects". This text uses Lila as a foundation for "a metaphysics of value". An exploration that may seem interesting to @Ronen Hirsch perhaps?

Taking Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.

• https://www.opencapital.net/papers/ifnotglobal.htm

Collaborating for a Pattern Language definition/mining

The other day I stumble upon this document (when I was looking for an unrelated information!). Beyond of the particular pattern language, I found interesting the collaborative process described to define it (Methodology of pattern mining).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lVimpU5-cM45R6xqr4t6ryevLp03z7Yc/view

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