A talk for managing through the difficult, uncertain, and unexpected times delivered from the perspective of Edgar Morin's work and personal experience. I am excited to share it. #complexity It is on Substack as a video & podcast and is now available on Spotify. www.gregoryvig.com/p/incidentops

A brief piece on human dimensions intersecting w/influence A short (5-minute) essay beginning a miniseries on positively, ethically, and realistically influencing others and the challenges found there while interacting with human dimensions, starting with vision. #Maturana www.gregoryvig.com/p/wine

"Technology can be lived...as a value in which all is subordinated to the pleasure lived through doing it.... Technology becomes an addiction whose presence those addicted wish to justify through rational arguments founded on the historical reality of its great expansion in modern times" -Maturana

"Machines differ from living systems...in their reference. The organization of machines... always has an alloreferential domain of interactions....Living systems, as a result of their basic circular organization...have a self-referred domain of interactions" - Maturana, on AI, 1970

“That beyond death nothing should arise, and that beyond death there should be only death.....Because death is death and life without death is only emptiness” –Humberto R. Maturana.

"Language does not describe a preexisting world, but creates the world about which it speaks" - Winograd & Flores.

Just need to repost this again. Greatest productivity hack you can ever do, and good for peace of mind at the same time. Just Create Everything else will follow. Yes, really.

Hello everyone. This morning, I lectured on the complexity of incident operations from a natural hazards perspective, largely through the work of Morin, my own experiences, and Maturana. This talk had been in development for a while & Morin took it over the finish line Patreon: tinyurl.com/2tmj49bn

Happy to report the Journal of Emergency Management has accepted my paper! "Transitioning From Biological Networks To Participation In Social Networks Through Emotion And Sensorimotor Activity." A paper on resilience and adoption. A page and a quarter brief communication turned 11-page article.

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

Like Maturana was openly critical about, drawing relations between non-intersecting domains is the stuff of shadow theaters. I am seeing this happen in the wildfire technology space, where comparisons are being made across domains that have nothing to do with one another. That is not helpful.

“Never before in the history of humanity have the responsibilities of thinking weighed so crushingly on us. Thinking about tragedy has itself become tragic” - Morin & Kern

Announcing my next online lecture titled "Complexity and Incident Response Operations" on July 9. An exploration of incident response from the perspective of brilliant complexity researcher (& philosopher) Edgar Morin & insights from my experience. See you there! complexoperations.eventbrite.com

I listened to this recently and found it generally informative. Almost enough to make me want to reexamine a few of his titles at the local book store. Almost.

As a photographer, get weird and arty when there's bad lighting or the entire band faces their back to the crowd. I had the most fun taking photos of Dragged Into Sunlight at Damnation Fest 2024! Dragged Into Sunlight | Damnation Fest 2024 #metalsky #livemusicphotography #photography

A loop of Dragged Into Sunlight playing at the Marquis in Denver set to "Totem of Skulls" a few weeks ago. Absolutely amazing experience! Hard to believe we were able to see them. Inspirational for sure.

Forgot to add some additional pictures from inside the book.

A little fun along the way. I finished my manuscript, my wife formatted it, and we had it printed. Edits will follow, but I thought I would commemorate this major milestone in the book writing process. Now, to find someone to publish it. It's been a great experience so far.

Good to see Capra's work is still in circulation. His work receives mixed reviews, but his writing as a science historian is amazing (and I have to say the implications of this account are often inspired). All of these would be great to own, but the not pictured Systems View of Life is fantastic!

"Human beings can talk about things because they generate the things they talk about by talking about them" - Dr. Humberto R. Maturana

Working on a Community Risk Reduction project and needed someone to work with to get it the rest of the way. Thinking it needs the rare quantitative layer of meaning integrated into a free from fully intractable space.

From the book Neuroscience. I am slowly getting my head around phase locking as a metaphor for understanding managing complex response resources. I am slowly getting there, but it still taunts me. One day at a time.

"There is a sense of increasing disorder, chaos, and crisis on a global scale. Never before has there been a greater need for a truly planetary perspective-a perspective jit once political ecological, philosophical, & ethical on the vital crises with which humanity is currently faced" - Morin.

I am struggling to find hour-long presentations on technology overly useful. For some, I am sure they are incredibly beneficial. However, for me, it is hard to see the value in someone else demonstrating a technology to you for an hour. I would love to hear how it was designed and why.

Thinking about Hotshot seasons from as far back as 18 years. We had it good. Red bags, line gear, tools, personal stuff, and the clothes on our backs and boots on our feet. It was simple: Cut line, cut line, cut line, burn, cut line back to back. We had it all and it was great! Photo from Zaca Fire

Oannès: I, the First Consciousness of Chaos, Arose from the Abyss to Harden Matter, to Regulate Forms (Oannès: Moi, la première conscience du chaos, j'ai surgi de l'abîme pour durcir la matière, pour régler les formes) (plate XII)... http://www.moma.org/collection/works/30111

"The world is present inside our minds, which are inside the world" - Morin

Along with Fry (2009), this is essential reading for design programs but all grad. education. Design cuts across all fields as design "is the materialization of preferred futures" - @camerontw.bsky.social . Anyone concerned with bringing something new into existence should understand this narrative.

I'm wondering if anyone has anything to say about "phase locking," or synchronization getting "locking" between different areas of the brain, and also with external stimuli, mainly audio and a little visual. Looking for clarification. Saw it in Mind in Life by @evanthompson.bsky.social

"Anything said is said by an observer." ---Humberto Maturana, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959)

Humberto Maturana an interesting definition of Corruption: "all those acts which do not validate the system we want to validate". Lots of behavior makes a lot more senses when ya think about it like that lol

Francisco Varela on what music can do to you. "It is as if the body is brought into position."

"We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form." George Spencer-Brown (1969) #DifferenceMaker #EnactingSystemsTheory

Cybernetics as a field is so poorly known our joke when asked what we study we'd say, "Freezing Dead people" as most had at least heard about cryogenics, lol. Given your interest you might want to look into research on autopoetic entities. Humberto Maturana and Francis Varela. Their work is dense.

Maturana: You have just repeated your lecture in short. Searle: You’ve just repeated your question only this time more obscurely. (Humberto Maturana and John Searle having a very normal one. Santiago, Chile, 1990)

Of course Stafford Beer and Chili leads you to Humberto Maturana as well as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (who burned all his unpublished work after the three's foundational joint paper was published "What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain").

“But because we've trained all our intelligence to ignore complexity, and because we put all our intelligence into suppressing complexity, our intelligence fails in the face of complexity.” Edgar #Morin 🔄

Now playing (12:25 PM PST): "Chronicle of a Summer" (1961) By Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin Runtime: 91 min.

"The tunnels are not endless, the probable is not the certain, and the unexpected is always possible." French philosopher Edgar Morin is 103!🙏 Repost. Accidentally deleted. www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

Today is publication day! A new edition of Francisco J. Varela's (long hard-to-obtain) 1979 classic Principles of Biological Autonomy in a new annotated edition by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson, with a Foreword by Amy Cohen Varela. mitpress.mit.edu/978026255140...

"We must break the habit of judging cultures according to their technological performance" - Morin.

This is my best design studies work yet. A 25-minute read walking first through 2 styles of music composition that lead to 2 unique design styles. This essay involved a trip to a local design exhibit, autopoiesis, networks & emergence. I hope you will check it out. www.gregoryvig.com/p/cassette6

Little bit of editing left and a conclusion! I'm really excited to put this book in front of publishers. Any advice?

When thinking of my design rational, ideology, and style, I find it hard to do better to do much better than this. It covers a lot. I would have to add some work from Fry, of course, but this sentiment so clearly captures some of my prominent thoughts on design.

Listened to this once on bandcamp last year and bought it. Great to have in the collection. I do not know all that much about it, other than that it is by @garymundy99.bsky.social and released in 1982 and was BF2. I would be interested in learning more about it. It was also released in 2010.

Gave a talk from my own platform today as conferences are too far apart. A strategic, philosophical, and theoretical talk on wildfire-adapted community change. Great discussion! Thanks to those who came for participating, asking questions, and sharing ideas. There will be others!

"A table is that that arises as I put a plate upon it”, I am not being peculiar, I am showing the operational condition that brings forth a table being aware that the table is not a table by itself. Once...I have brought forth the table, tableness, I can speak of tables as if they existed"- Maturana

This is my second time using autopoiesis as a metaphor this year, and I am finding it useful. This perspective on the theory can be traced back to Maturana's description in 2011. I used autopoiesis at the end of a few slides on place for one last perspective pertaining to wildfire-adaptation.

Had a great time at Independent Bookstore Day!