The ArtScience symposium "Systems At Play: In the Noosphere", takes place at CLEA from October 4-7, 2023. It welcomes talks and "embodied models of emergence" in the form of live games, scores, presentations, conversations, small algorithmic performances and collective experiments, in all media, connecting to one or more of the following themes:
The Technosocial Dilemma and the Crisis of Meaning
To understand the relevance today of the Noosphere and the Third Story it can be helpful to consider them in relation to the so-called ‘crises of meaning’ and the ‘technological dilemma’.
Today many individuals are struggling with anxiety, depression and meaninglessness, while suicide rates are increasing in many parts of the world. The causes are complex and numerous. People struggle to grapple with a volatile, uncertain, complex world with a highly ambiguous interpretation or future. Traditional religious sources of meaning have been overshadowed by scientific materialism, in turn leaving us with a picture of an aimless universe. Constant technological upheaval, with technology which often seems to be utilising us more than we are utilising it, overwhelming information, disinformation, rampant consumerism, social isolation, and serious concerns about the environment.
In every corner, there is a lack of coherence between our meaning-making systems, our environment, and our fellow man.
The Noosphere provides a hopeful and complimentary counterpart to the narrative of the Anthropocene. While the Anthropocene emphasises rupture, crises, and the negative impact of human society upon the biosphere, the story of the formation of the Noosphere emphasises the evolution of mind and culture, pointing the way towards transformation, and promise. The story of the formation of the Noosphere is the story of homo sapiens’ and other agent’s meaning systems coming into greater coherence with one another.
The Third Story of The Universe
The Third Story of the Universe is an initiative of The Human Energy Project, to which CLEA is an active contributor. The Third Story of the Universe offers a narrative tool to help bring our meaning systems into greater coherence with one another, and presents a profound cosmic interpretation of our species' current juncture in history. This emergent narrative diverges from the strict interpretations of religions, myths and wisdom traditions, (the First Story), while it endeavours to retain their inherent wisdom and significance. Simultaneously, it contrasts with prevailing scientific viewpoints stripping the universe of meaning and purpose (the Second Story), while maintaining the insights offered by non-reductionist systems science.
New Connective Stories for Humanity
Story-telling and imagination are key to the Third Story. Ultimately whilst we can understand the Noosphere intellectually, perhaps, more than anything, we need shared imagination to really access the Noosphere together.
How can we make use of the narrative compression of play, theatre, mythology, and storytelling to distil complex information into compact compelling narratives? How do we create the conditions for ‘jumps of imagination’ through play, metaphor, and story-telling that we cannot make through science alone. E.g. a group of children come together to make up a game called ‘Noosphere’, yielding surprising results.
The symposium invites you to imagine all manner of new connective stories for humanity.
We invite novel methods of story-telling and world-building, especially those which synthesise different kinds of information, or which combine the knowledge of people from different backgrounds and disciplines. Such as immersive theatre, live action roleplay, story-telling games, linear and non-linear modes.
The Systems At Play in the Noosphere
The science of the Noosphere, studies self-organising, emergent systems, 4E cognition, the origins of goal directedness, and forms of distributed and collective cognition. In summary, these are formed of complex dynamic relations between many agents, each other, and their environment. This gives rise to emergence, a ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’ -
This helps explain, for example, how a swarm of birds, a market, or indeed the Noosphere, comes to come into coherence, and so have 'a life of its own', an emergent collective mind or spirit, in a way - Just as in the Noosphere.
Play, particularly ‘free play’, or ‘infinite play’, is also self-organising, and also, often, about coming into coherence. It shares the same structure of complex dynamic relations between many agents, each other, and their environment giving rise to emergence.
Since play is a complex adaptive system at a human level, it generates relationships, and therefore, community, trust, belonging, engagement, freedom (though each other), and life-meaning, very quickly.
What practices can we imagine, therefore, which leverage our innate sense of play into an innate sense of self-organisation and emergence; and thereby, intuitively bring the science of the Noosphere into coherence with our embodied interpersonal knowledge and playful creative nature? Making it easier to understand, more fluid and creative, perhaps?
Play exemplifies the 4E cognitive science of the Noosphere. Meaning-making is not just confined to your head or mine, nor is it only received through narratives, but is deeply intertwined in the relationships with our bodies, our physical environment, each other, and our technology through Embedded, Embodied, Extended, and Enactive cognition. As we play in our environment, we receive feedback, adjust, and act again. In play, we are continuously adjusting to our environment and to each other. We are embedded in a context, using our bodies (embodiment), often extending cognition using toys or tools, engaging in active exploration (enaction).
In learning how to become Noosphere together, we welcome all embodied, playful, artistic or psychotechnological collective practices that help us to collectively learn to be a system together.
In understanding such systems, often the relationships and processes that connect things deserve as much, if not more, attention than the things themselves. As a compliment to the objective science of the Noosphere that helps us to understand structure and process, play, and other such practices, can help to draw our attention to the specific sensual and emotional quality of systems and relationships: How do they feel, how to they smell, what happens when we interact with them? The asymmetries, the provocative, absurd and tangential connections, and buzzing aliveness of relationship is all information that helps to understand the nature of systems and of the Noosphere.
We therefore especially welcome experiments that embody system dynamics, enhancing collective proprioceptive understanding and help to develop the awareness of how it feels, and, the skills required, to navigate, moment-to-moment, as an ‘agent’ in a system interacting with other ‘agents’ and our environment. Through which we can learn to experience the feeling of self-organisation from within the system of which we are a part, and simultaneously, the awareness of being co-constitutive of the superorganism
Collective Intelligences / More-than-Human Intelligences / Ritual
Just as self-organising systems are intelligent, play is intelligent too. And vice-versa.
Indeed - self-organisation at a human level, collective intelligence, and collective play are so deeply analogous to be almost synonyms.
What playful experiments in distributed cognition and collective intelligence might we therefore devise?
By bringing play, and other transjective practices, into a space of dialogue with systems science, we may bridge the objective and the subjective via the transjective and glimpse into the deep truth of our systemic identity.
What games, rituals, and other practices of shared imaginal augmentation might we create to come into a collective transjective connection with (‘summon?’) a distributed hyperobject, like the Noosphere?
How can we enter into a state of play with the Noosphere? How do we recognise its animacy, its aliveness, how do we let it speak to us, or through us?
Collective practices like play are also the experience of emergence together, of our being something more than the sum of our parts. Another term for being more than oneself may be transcendence, a possible requisite of sense of meaning. The Noosphere thus leads the way to a reenchantment of the world through its connection, emergence, transcendence and aliveness - in a way which is non-superstitious and coherent with both mythology and science.
What stories, rituals, or forms of play can you imagine emerging from these synergies?
How do we become the Noosphere together, not just as an idea, but as a living, breathing entity?
Further Information
For further information encourage you to visit the Human Energy Project (video channel) to learn more about the Noosphere and see how you would like to contribute to this network of ideas.
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