Welcome to this initial incarnation of my Emergence Guild. It is likely that what is here will change drastically as time moves forward, so please don’t be surprised if you come back and things are radically different. For the moment, i’m playing with this wordpress hosting option (mainly because it’s so inexpensive (and because i’m such a cheapskate)). But my plan is to eventually purchase a VPS (or perhaps a google cloud VM instance?) so that i’ll have more options with regard to hosting options (i also really want to host my own public git repo (instead of relying on github (which used to be interesting, but is no longer (to me anyhow) now that MS owns it))).
So there’s a bit of a “preamble” @ this page which it’s possible could help clarify things a bit more for those of you who’re reading this.
But as i compose this on 2021 ‘star wars day’, this website is less than a full month old. i’m sort of surprised that, once the option is now available for me, that i’m not rushing to flesh it out, and create/upload content. But i guess that this sort of makes sense. In that i don’t yet have a completely clear vision about what i’m eventually going to try to do here. Which is not to say that i don’t have a lot of different ideas about things i might do here. But (as is obviously very apropos), i’m doing my best to let stuff emerge rather than to force it.
At some point in the future, i do have dreams of gathering other like-minded folk with me in order to try to create a true Emergence Guild. Right now i envision that likely happening over @ the dot org URL. Having spun this dot com instance up first though, i think that for the most part i’ll be trying to use this domain and this wordpress platform to share my own personal emergence. Unlike a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, i am framing my own emergence as an ongoing process with no specific end-goal. Which is to say that i’m hoping to keep continually emerging until i die…
@ some point in the (hopefully not too distant?) future, i do hope to make enough progress personally that i’ll then be fully ready to take on the task of facilitating and encouraging collaboration with others on various endeavors. For me, language is quite important. i like the word endeavor a lot more than i do some other possible options i might choose, like project or task.
While i do not consider myself a domain expert when it comes to complexity and/or complex systems, i am very much a super-interested layperson regarding the set of related topics which make up the “field” of complexity science. My hope is to use lessons learned by others far smarter than me about the nature of non-linearity, feed-forward & feedback loops, multi-dimensional effects within and across ‘scales’, and other phenomena which are now known to be features of systems complicated enough to resist modeling via reductionist science. Especially emergence.
Contingency is of course the key. In practice, this means that there is almost never any ability to successfully predict the future behavior of a complex system in response to any specific perturbation, whether one might attempt to “apply” (or “induce” if you prefer?) change, or just be aware of a “parameter” (or several) which may not be static. The way i qualified the statement i just made is because in very short-term time windows, it may seem like prediction is possible, but (at least in my opinion) it will always be an open question as to whether the particular system under study will stabilize in the predicted configuration, or (much more likely) respond in one or more of a myriad of other ways.
So the system that is me (charlie derr), is one that i have some degree of control over, though perhaps not as much as i think/thought.
There’s a lot of history that i’ve written about in a fair amount of detail elsewhere, but to really start here in the present, i’ve been under the care of a wonderful shrink (who i will not name publicly at this time) for almost a year. As i continue to engage in fairly intensive weekly 1 hour psychotherapy sessions with her, i’m really discovering a whole bunch of amazing shit about myself that explains so much of my behavior as well as the way i tend to react to stimulus of various sorts. Understanding is of course just the first step. Making changes in how i think, respond, interact, and/or process will likely end up being quite a challenge (if the little bit i’ve tried to accomplish prior to the present is any indication).
But there’s nothing for it. Just have to keep practicing. Introspection, identification of and learning from emotions, as well as doing my best to understand how my past life experiences have shaped my mind, brain, soul, body and spirit are the main things i’m trying to concentrate on at the moment. But of course patterns ingrained over decades of use will not submit to remapping without any resistance…
For the moment, instead of beginning to utilize the blog feature here, i’m slowly building out more top-level pages. Here are links to them: