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i'm going to be kind of um invoking a little bit of my father today and uh and my father along with his father like to make words
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my father made a few different words one was the word schismogenesis which is a nice big chunky mouthful he also coined the term double bind and
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talked about trans contextual process and there were several and his father before him coined the term genetics so i kind of figured that that gives me permission to make up new words i don't
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know if i'm right about that but but it's okay to make up new words especially when you come to a place where there's no way to describe the thing you're talking about um and this is a really interesting
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problem with language right so so what is authorized by language in terms of what concepts can be can be actually validated and and in
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fact valued by the society and the community so um i've been working with this thing that i call warm data for the about 10 years now and the concept of warm data is that it's
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um it's trans contextual information so it's information that is moving between the different contexts of our daily lives
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i'll give you an example so my my mother's 92 and when she was little the doctor would come to her house and when the doctor came in her house the doctor could actually see
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is it warm in here no it's actually freezing um is it is there food is it clean is there love is it are they is there humor is there right there's a lot of other information besides those
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details that provided the facts of whatever malady she happened to have a rash a flu whatever so that when the doctor responded to that even though that information wasn't
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on the clipboard it was actually in the doctor and it happened in the communication it was implicit it was unseen it was there it was absolutely there but it wasn't there
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in terms of what you could look back and find in the in the transcript so i've been working with this for quite a while and one of the things that has come up is that i
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i find that these groups that i'm working with have these profound shifts but i can't actually say what they are and it seems that for each person
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whatever is is taking place is very personal and they may leave the session and they might go quit smoking or they might get in touch with a friend they haven't talked to in 12 years or they might you know
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quit their job or they might see something in their job that's possible that they never saw before but all of these shifts are produced in a way that i couldn't quite describe which is um really not very convenient
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when you're trying to write grant proposals or explain to people why what you're doing is worth doing especially in the in the conditions of life that we live in now where there's a kind of urgency toward
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change that's pushing for very explicit predetermined deliverable goals um and what i am actually witnessing is a kind of deep shift of premises that
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then shifts everything so i think to myself this is interesting what do we call this and around that same time i got a call from my daughter you know leave it to your kids and she said you know mom it's
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just that all the problems we're dealing with in the world right now are insidious and um you know it came up last night siva was talking about the insidiousness
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of the facebook problem and and this was an unlocker for me of what what does it mean for something to be insidious so i looked it up and i started to
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explore and it turns out that insidious is defined and i think this is from the you know the oxford on the internet not the original but um that there's proceeding in a gradual
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subtle way but with very harmful effects in other words there's something that's that's gathering combining in an unseen way that's leading to danger okay so we talk about things being
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insidious like racism is insidious corruption is insidious addictions are insidious cancer can be insidious there's lots of examples of things that are insidious but what would the
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opposite of that be because in some ways this pattern of how things are combining in gradual unseen ways is a really important piece
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and in fact life is actually happening in that way so so what would it look like if we had a word that was talking about this gradual unseen coalescence
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but it was pointing more toward vitality um than toward the danger of insidiousness now just to be very clear i i'm pretty sure that that that in my thinking here this afani
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poesis word could um be a way to describe this now making a new word is fun um first thing i had to do of course was start contacting lance so lance is in on
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this and um and we were playing around with various greek roots and which way do you put them and how does it work and you know trying to figure it out and we kept bumping into these questions like is it
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invisible is it hidden is it is it is it what is it what are we trying to say and finally i came across this root afanis
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in greek which means unseen and poesis which you're probably familiar with from autopoesis among other things which is becoming um and so a possible definition of a
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founding oasis could be an unseen coalescence toward vitality uh and but you've got to be careful with this because is the unseen coalescence that what's
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happening or are things coalescing and becoming unseen and and i think both of those things are taking place um i'll explain that more in a moment but back to the word because a word's
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not a word till you can taste it um we see this root uh afanees in words like fantasy in phantom in um in
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diaphanous that's a beautiful word uh and and of course you know poesis from from matarana and varela's work and so somehow what we're talking about
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is that it's possible to have a kind of diaphanous poetry be uh a prerequisite of vitality um so that that makes me feel good i like
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that idea that there's diaphanous poetry is necessary an unseen coalescence toward vitality uh or a coalescence of experience becoming unseen
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so there are things that we experience and we have seen them we were there i got on the bus i didn't have the money the bus driver let me get on anyway
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um and then later on i had an experience and i crossed the street because i wanted to ask the policeman what time it was or how to get directions i go to the pharmacy and i buy band-aids and they're the same color as my skin
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what i don't what i haven't noticed is the way in which those experiences are coalescing into a a way of seeing myself in the world
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and i might then say no no no i'm not racist i don't i'm not racist i know i'm not racist but i have these unseen coalescent
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experiences and they form premises that i'm not aware of but are are part of who who i am accidentally um and so this is why we have to be
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careful with ar are they seen or unseen um so so some things i think we we see and then we don't see them later on the reason that i'm really interested in this is because it's
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for me coming to a question of really what where how do we make change like where is the change uh there's a lot of people out there doing diligent work trying desperately
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in various ngos to create change in a world and you know we've been actually watching this for 50 years now and it's not actually changing anything so where is the change
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um so this is for me um here's a quote from my dad i told you i was going to invoke him but my question is does evolution require something like a process of iphonic
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oasis is there a necessary zone of the unseen that would allow for the possibility of evolution so my dad says i was laying down a very very elementary ideas about epistemology
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that is about how we can know anything in the pronoun we i of course included the starfish and the redwood forest the segmenting ed egg and the senate of the united states okay and in the anything which these
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creatures variously know i included how to grow a five-way symmetry how to survive a forest fire how to grow and still say the same shape how to learn how to write a constitution
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how to invent it drive a car how to count to seven above all i included how to evolve because it seemed to me that both evolution and learning must fit the same
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formal regularities or so-called laws how does an organism know how to evolve okay so there must be some sort of process that requires that
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it be unseen otherwise what you would have is the organism continuing to do what it does with its familiarness okay the earthworm keeps earthworming and the redwood tree keeps redwood treeing
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and there wouldn't be change so those familiar processes those familiar interactions and communications become a kind of of of
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of luck right but in order to actually have evolution things have to stay the same enough to stay alive but they have to keep changing because if they don't change they die
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so where's the shift how do you how do you tend to that kind of change so for me um what became clear is that this is uh a
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a a an exploration of trans contextual uh process this picture is just here to keep you entertained [Laughter]
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and trans contextual is a beautiful word that my father used to describe the ways in which living systems occupy multiple contexts simultaneously and that when you say something the the
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greeting of a friend is it's not just the greeting of a friend whatever it is that's happening it's not just that and nothing more um it's it could be the the beginning of autumn it could be that you haven't talked to that person in 10 years it
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could be all sorts of things right so there's all kinds of contextual things happening in every interaction and that to begin to play into that um i
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have been looking at the work of charles saunders pierce and then my dad around abductive process and charles sanders pierce and my dad described abductive process a little bit differently but i
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think in ways that are are very compatible especially in the study of afani poaces and pierce talked about it in terms of uh the sort of the generation of a
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hypothesis and so that you would have a understanding of knowledge in one context and that would give you something to hypothesize into a new context with right you hear a piece of music for the
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first time you've never heard it before but you have heard music so you take what you know and you plant it and you pull from that my father described abductive process a little differently he talked about it in terms of how one
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context actually becomes a description of another so in aphanipoesis what you have happening here is that there is a
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a a question of what are those conditions those prerequisites those presuppositions that are what has submerged that gives rise to the possible hypothesis what is
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it possible to hypothesize is the question what has submerged because by the time things have already emerged there's been lots of submergence the iphone oasis has been taking place
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for a long time so getting to this question of how things are changing how does a organism actually know how to evolve um and
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recognizing that there is a a very important realm of that which is unseen um so for me this is uh exciting because um it's the first time that i've
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actually been able to make a case for why it's important to have conversations that have unseen results that there are actually changes taking place that are not seeable and they shouldn't
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be seeable there's no need to extract them measure them describe them let those things keep coalescing let them keep shifting i think my time is up
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so i'll stop there but thank you very much [Applause]
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