A look at a few lifelike systems that share the essential characteristics of being Self-organisaing and Adaptive as context for ongoing series of Water and Words presentations. Includes links to other parts of the deeper understanding building around this plus additional reading .

1. Larger than Life
exploring the wider context of the
Self-organising, Adaptive
component of the SUPERVENIENCE project
Tony Smith
Kororoit Institute
Melbourne Emergence Meetup/Zoom
Thursday 13th October 2022

3. Tonight’s presentation adds context to the Water & Words series,
trying not to replicate finer details from that series while providing
a more general perspective on Self-organising, Adaptive systems.
Earlier candidate titles which provide useful hints:
• Here Now Succession Process Traces Time Causation?
• Dynamic encodings in condensed matter
• Maintaining interesting isolates through cosmological timescales
The original lead pic (at left) illustrates trackside Succession.
Its successor (next slide) features patterns of Life and Death.
Both versions of the SUPERVENIENCE index card flag a need to
reconcile our sense of time passing with vital pattern recognition.
Whatever we call it, this topic needs to provide a bridge between a
more generalised understanding of Emergence and live examples,
building on recognition that everything that matters is Emergent.
We should start with a sample of current reading which provokes
deeper reexamination of viable pathways beyond authoritarianism,
following that with notes from the journey to date into complexity:
• Born into low diversity demanded by colonial commercialisation
• Exploring the potential of openly networked online communities
• 1982-2012 ever deepening understanding of complex systems
• Retirement freedom for rich reengagement with natural world
• Tyson Yunkaporta exposes indigenous comfort with complexity
Speeding from anthropocentric colonialism to valuing all Life, then
recognising similar self-organising and adaptation in many Lifelike
forms, do we continue to prioritise biological forms of replication or
accommodate indigenous understanding of natural continuity?
• From paternalistic hegemony to expansionist human rights
• Adopting relevant locality of Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Earth
• Recognising sentience in many animals, more in other kingdoms
• Seeing beyond anthropocentric biases to population knowledge
• Legal fictions’ place in a world of synergistic assemblages

4. Self-organising, Adaptive
Basic section on supervenience, emergence and
complex systems went through a few iterations

5. Both versions of the index card included these
points about time and traces:
“While we make productive use of treating
time as a dimension, this may have been
overplayed in ideas like the Block Universe.
“We live in the here and now, though life
developed pattern recognition based on traces
that persist in condensed matter which DNA
and neuronal networks dynamically encode.”
Subsequent examination suggests expanding
attention into the Larger than Life world
starting with the stigmergic traces we were
introduced to via Mark Elliott’s thesis.

6. Two of the local PhD authors noted in May’s Water presentation for other reasons
Lynne Kelly’s opening
contribution to Margo
Neale’s Songlines series is
but one of the lines of
research her well accepted
interpretation of
monumental architecture’s
role in transition to agrarian
settlement, including
teaming up with American
genetic researchers focused
on genetic support for
hominid language.
Mark Elliott’s practical
guide to challenges of
productive collaboration
provides a useful reminder
that any transition to likely
collaborative successors to
habituated adversarial and
authoritarian approaches
to decision making will not
be easy, without
referencing his thesis focus
on stigmergic
collaboration.
Two heavy duty philosophy tomes sharing reading rotation slot due to chapter length
Whitehead’s Magnum
Opus suggested as an
introduction to Process
Philosophy which needs to
be read with awareness to
the dynamic state of the
physical sciences in those
early days of triumph of
the two most predictively
accurate physical theories
which had just emerged:
relativity and quantum
field theory.
Posthumanism
synthesises themes on
what comes next/after
humans, drawing on
recent and contemporary
literature and media, with
unsurprising references to
science fiction,
disproportionate focus on
vampires, and optimism
that we may yet rediscover
the vitality of synergistic
connectivity.

7. Two explorations of places that mostly are out of sight beneath water and earth
Patrick Nunn’s Submerged
Lands surveys mythical and
validated lands which have
oft supposedly disappeared
beneath the waves, with
particular emphasis on
smaller islands whose rise
and fall can be tectonic, all
to help mentally prepare the
reader for the magnitude of
challenges that will flow
from climate change.
Robert Macfarlane’s
Underland follows scary
adventurous attractions
of exploring subterranean
passages evacuated by
humans in our quest to
dominate the landscape
in war and peace and by
running water dissolving
sedimentary strata long
ago laid down beneath
deep ocean waters.
Two books that inspire monthly international Zooms with hundreds of participants
The 50th anniversary of
the publication of this
foundational text from the
prehistory of complex
systems theory, key
concepts of which are
being reexamined in a
series led by Nora
Bateson, from her father
Gregory’s famous Double
Bind to the ever contested
disparity between the map
and the territory.
Jeremy Lent’s Deep
Transformation Network
tries hard not to
understate the magnitude
of the challenges we are
facing but sometimes has
trouble throwing off the
expectation of finding
some way to return to an
assumed comfort zone
that never really was and
is now far from any viable
path.

8. Newest additions to train reading cycle deliver critical facts in captivating prose
Dutch East India
Company genocide in
Banda is the foundational
story of capitalism as they
did a swap of the British
claim on the Banda island
of Run with the then New
Amsterdam/Manhattan,
so beginning using
corporations to handle
empires’ dirty work. Fifth
chapter digs into Oz-like
tragedy of American
colonialism.
George Monbiot’s opening
chapter on the sub/
microscopic population of
soil alone is more than
worth getting the book for,
before even thinking
about his wider
contributions since
Poisoned Arrows
introduced us to the
absorption of West Papua.
Second chapter starts with
great summary of complex
systems.
Next: unrepresentative selection of self-organised, adaptive entities that are Larger than Life
Illustrated:
Clouds
Storms
Rivers
Forests
Waves
Landscapes
Homework:
Flames
Fires
Stars
Tribes
Cities
Traditions

9. On gate duty for weeding on Kensington bank, cloud appeared

10. which kept its shape as it moved into the blue, recording a few minutes as it developed more
complexity then found more minutes to take a few steps and gain some wider perspective

11. 3 September 2015 screen grab via
https://earth.nullschool.net
which animates global wind circulation close to real time

12. Cumberland River after the peak of the 5 January 2022 flood

13. Flight 8 January 2021 so we could see the forest from the trees

14. Ocean waves self-organise and adapt on their own timetables

15. Industrial scale meddling diverts storms and estuarine bars

16. Born into low diversity demanded by colonial commercialisation

17. School started with boys who looked sufficiently like me, albeit a year older
With extended family standing in for absent parents, avoid sleeping around
Term in Baddaginnie opened cracks, before high school changed landscape
But it took many years to fully accept the privilege demanding unpacking
Being right felt too good not to ignore how wrong it could all too often be
Walking in wide open doors to many comfort zones was never questioned
Failure to gain traction with critical proposals raised unexpected questions

18. Exploring potential of openly networked online communities
Shown Crowther & Woods’ original Colossal Cave
adventure while working of a private contract
Engaged to design back end system for the planned
first Australian public online information service
Put two and two together, seeing potential for what
others developed as Multi-User Dungeons
which quickly morphed into text-based Public
Information Communications & Access system
then coupled with the Macintosh user interface
became a business proposal chasing funding
before we had the internet to learn of them, but
soon met some Americans further down that track*
the gory details of which formed my MSc research/
edutech 1995 consultancy report Why The Web?
*Had totally missed Ted Nelson’s paper at 1980 Melbourne World Computer Conference, any online trace of which now appears lost.

19. Why The Web
Mobilising minds
Our notion of progress, be it in biological evolution, social systems or technology, can be
seen to be largely coincident with increasing mobilisation of mind.29 From the first
primitive eyes which enabled equally primitive brains to act in response to events at a
distance, to the eyes of our space probes bringing us close up pictures of the outer planets;
and from the first act of parental nurturing by one of our presumably reptilian ancestors,
to the latest educational multimedia title on CD-ROM; minds have extended their reach in
leaps and bounds. The story I have told here is about what appears to be the greatest and
fastest leap of all, from Varella et al’s Embodied Mind to the capabilities for individual
human minds to reach instantly all over this planet, via virtual places which are the
products of similar minds.
This leap has been building throughout more than a century of new technologies, but until
very recently we have had to share the eyes and accept the schedules through which we
might look around the world through television programming. The telephone system
allows us to talk to and, in recent years, to exchange document images with other
individuals around the world, but stripped of the rich interactive context that is available
to those communicating in a shared physical space. However, we can now be certain that
the imminent joining of the global hypermedia Web to a networked collaborative space
will enable our minds to reach anywhere the Internet reaches, to see anything that other
individuals have made available, and to communicate with whoever we might encounter
in this rich collaborative context.

20. • Scientific American promotes cellular automata and emergence
• First gatherings with professional interest in complex systems
• Study of simpler systems as proxies for depth of Life and Mind
• Separability of order and chaos, and Stephen Wolfram’s Class 4
• Marcia Salner’s two crisis route to understanding systems theory
• Second Law of Thermodynamics focuses Evo-Devo Universe
• Discover emergent growing order accelerating spread of chaos
1982-2012 ever deepening understanding of complex systems
The intellectual battleground that may soon decide the legacy of a lot more
than humans is between those who have bought the extractive myth that
rapidly growing order is good, and those that have come to appreciate the
nuanced indigenous understanding of more chaotic ecological interplay
between at times exponentially growing and other times declining forms.

21. Retirement freedom for rich reengagement with natural world

22. Tenth day post Jan 2021 flood revealed how it reconfigured

23. Tyson Yunkaporta exposes indigenous comfort with complexity
Having devoted a Meetup to Sand Talk
in early 2020 before jumping into our
Ecosystems Decline submission and
saying a lot more therein re Tyson’s
exploration of aboriginal comfort with
complexity, mentioned a few more
recent connections between Tyson and
other well informed commentators in
our April “Words” presentation, and
since then have become even more
intrigued by the number of times he
gets spontaneous mentions in some of
the key groups I try to stay across.
Meanwhile Tyson’s Other Others
podcast continues to introduce far
more interesting guests than anyone
else could keep up with while his
Deakin colleague Yin Paradies has
been presenting to appreciative local
audiences re the need for decolonising.

24. Quote used in early 2020 presentation:
One student in particular develops a high level
of understanding of pattern thinking that he
can apply to most problems. In another session,
he is present on an excursion to a beach that is
eroding into the sea and must be fortified with
concrete and sandbags to protect the buildings
and property there. The children are asked to
design an engineering solution to the problem.
It seems as though this boy is not engaging with
the task. He stands under a clump of she-oak
trees and stares out at the sea while the others
draw and build models of walls and spits and
elaborate engines. A non-compliant student,
looks like. Misbehaving. Maybe I should punish
him, humiliate him in front of his peers until he
complies with the work task. He is not
achieving outcomes. Not delivering against
performance indicators to close the gap. I walk
over and ask him what is going on. ‘Well, it’s all
fucked,’ he says. Maybe I should pull him up for
inappropriate language. Instead I ask him what
he means.
He talks about what he’s learnt from Pop Noel
about the she-oak trees and underground
freshwater flowing beneath them where they
grow like that on the coast.
He points out those flows into the sea and tracks the
subtle movements of the sand out there in the tides
and currents, tracing the pathways of constant
motion all along the coast, infinite white grains swept
up and deposited on new beaches in cycles of
cleansing and renewal. He points out a spit in the
distance that has been built to block that flow and
keep the sand on one beach for its residents, noting
that new sand can’t be deposited here now because of
it. He mentions dozens of other constructions like
this along the coast, and the dredging of sand further
out to sea to deposit on the beaches and maintain
them as real estate and public facilities.
Then he turns around and points at the buildings,
observing that they are mostly made out of concrete,
which is made mostly out of sand, much of which is
dredged from the ocean floor leaving holes and
gouges in the seabed that fill up with sand again. That
the sand moves around in its cycles, but never makes
it back to the beach. Or worse, the seabed slumps into
those holes and the beach then collapses further into
the sea. ‘You can build all the levies you like, but
those fuckin’ buildings are gunna go back into the sea
where they came from.’
Well. As I always say, if you want to find the next
generation of great thinkers, look in the detention
room of any public school.

25. Connected concretions
stud Artillery Rocks on
the Great Ocean Road
“a hard compact mass of matter formed by the precipitation of mineral
cement within the spaces between particles found in sedimentary rock”

26. From paternalistic hegemony to expansionist human rights
This is neither the time nor the place to inventory even a
sample of the anthropocentric institutions which have
emerged as we imagined we Anglos were taking control.
Drawing on foundations from the Middle East, Ancient
Greece, and Roman Empire, European centres and their
offshore offshoot clung to a suite of cultural prejudices,
far from the comprehension of animist and indigenous
cultures around the world, to say nothing of the more
persistent and populous cultures across fertile Asian lands.
European traditions may not have been alone in limiting
political visibility to propertied males as despotic regimes
became untenable, peaking with English enclosure laws.
The rise of monetary accounting, with its intrinsic
oversimplification of value increasing social mobility of the
careless, led to pressure to bloat male participation in politics.
Heroic struggles gradually eroded sexual and racial
exclusions, though legacies remain while judgemental
prejudices are eroded and near every human is made safe.
Humans assuming we should have special rights (and
outsource violence) has allowed some of us to see some
of the consequent issues, but too late to deflect them?

27. SUPERVENIENCE Project’s index
image for The Two-edged Sword
looking at the riches and desolation
of our over-dependence on language,
here doubly appropriate because of
ancient traditions and momentary
prejudices on conspicuous display.

28. Adopting relevant locality of Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Earth
When and where was it first recognised that
our own Sun might be just another star?
Anaxagoras from Athens was the first person
known to have suggested that the Sun is just
a star up close, around 450 BC.
Confirming observations by Friedrich Bessel
and William Huggins either side of 1850.
Before that creation stories were all about
our preposterous planet, then by 1930 we’d
found a universe full of other galaxies.
Proselytising religions quickly expanded the
scope of their myths, ignoring speed of light.
Some of God’s scribes persisted with an even
more incredible timetable for our creation.
But might there still be an unknowable role
for a non anthropocentric creator of Earth to
pull together everything under the moon?

29. Open your eyes, your mind, your senses
and see The Water ever thinking,
ever feeling the tug of the moon
as It cycles with warmth from the sun,
engages with capricious air,
grapples with more solid earth,
harmonises Its ripples and swells,
nurtures and inspires Its children.
The Water seeps deep to sate plants
and mycorrhiza that they may fruit
generously, deeper to sculpt caves.
It flies from treetops and crashing waves
carrying seeds for Its own condensation
to drip and drizzle, storm and flood,
or to insulate with crystal blanket.
It flows and flutters long strands of kelp
making home for endless variety.
The Water has ever shaped earth's surface
transporting and grading sediment,
lately armed with round rocks and logs
to jeopardise engineered intrusions.
It is drawn to the mountains
to retrace Its remembered flow to the sea,
dumping sediment wherever flow slows.
The Water is ever exploring possibilities
like no other, though as all should aspire.
Flowing more gently, It braids or pulses.
It stabilises into clathrate or permafrost.
Flowing frozen, It pulverises rock.
The Water maintains our beaches,
rivers, wetlands, and cloud cover.
Electromagnetically active, The Water
knows what It is doing, what It has done
on this lucky laboratory planet
within countless minuscule chambers
across unbroken billions of annual spins
following Its likes, Its dislikes, and Its
hydrophilic and hydrophobic reactions.
The Water created and fosters Life.
The Water is never pure, but a generous
host and source of joy to all It touches.

30. Recognising sentience in many animals, more in other kingdoms
The biggest news of the new millennium goes far beyond the anthropocentric
political economy to recognition that other life forms have minds of their own,
a view assisted by social media sharing of emotive interactions and revelation
of narrowly specific genetics underpinning hominid linguistic extravagance.
We had been looking at the systemic necessities to function as a mobile animal
and deeper at the basic bird because of their diversity and local accessibility,
before eusocial insects, mother trees, mycorrhizal fungi, soil ecosystems and
more demanded a bigger picture, made urgent by industrialised disruption.
Relevant studies had been going on for decades before wider human cultural
awareness helped them suddenly get to
a scale where the bigger picture could
be integrated.
The subsequent question then became
whether spider thinking might involve
their web as a perception and memory
assistant analogous to human info tech
where speculation about Artificial
General Intelligence continues to run
far ahead of deliverables alongside
substantial progress in pattern
recognition and learning systems.

31. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (with truncated preamble points)
On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists,
neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational
neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological
substrates of conscious experience and related behaviours in human and non-human
animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability
of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about
their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:
• The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving…
• The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures…
• Birds appear to offer, in their behaviour, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a
striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness…
• In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a
disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing…
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude
an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-
human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological
substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours.
Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in
possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human
animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including
octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

32. Seeing beyond anthropocentric biases to population knowledge
From our Ecosystems Decline submission:
Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild, released March 2020,
makes the case in copious detail, via three iconic
species, that wild animal populations are as much a
unit in Life’s quest to prosper and persist as are species
and ecosystems, each continuing population finding
and maintaining ways of making a living in their
particular environment, the boundaries of which are
not always spatial. Over the last quarter century, I've
taken increasing notice, early on developing a concept
of “verbal blindness” which helps me understand how
the human facility for our particular form of linguistic
representation leaves much that is going on in the
world unseeable. As has been famously shown with the
reintroduction of Wolves to Yellowstone National Park,
the establishment or the disappearance of a keystone
population can transform the workings of the whole
local ecosystem. Of course that leaves an open question
as to what patterns of working are most desirable?
Given the mostly negative impacts of industrialised
society on colonised ecosystems, we should at least
accept that as a general principle increased diversity is
good. That all translates into a strong recommendation
to focus on the viability of local populations of even
common species to support the persistence and
hopefully regeneration of endangered ecosystems.

33. 50,000 nest Straw-necked Ibis colony on Mud Island post 1990

34. Should we maintain a line in the sand between things
verifiably found in the territory of nature and those just
made up through creative mappings in human language?
There is no doubt that many things we can see as “just
made up” within the human project have developed into
genuinely complex systems, Self-organising and Adaptive.
There is also no doubt that many of the hopes and plans
we have been infected with have failed to deliver anything
within sight of once confident expectations.
It can be easy to get lost in a maze of dubiously claimed
equivalences, especially those which demand human
witness on a planet let alone in a universe far bigger.
Many changes we have adapted to during our lifetimes
have been profound yet our peers are as likely to clamour
for a return to business as usual, which was when?
The great privilege we have enjoyed has been facilitated
by monstrous extraction and externalisation while
demanding we continue to drive the consumer treadmill.
In a mid 19th century moment of Anglosphere transition,
Dickens’s Oliver Twist simply asked “Please Sir, can I
have some more?” and landed in a nest of thieves.
Legal fictions’ place in a world of synergistic assemblages

35. Life
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36. Reflections!
Questions?

37. Embedded Links
10 https://vimeo.com/760723178 recording a few minutes
11 https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/
orthographic=-216.64,-38.15,2612
https://earth.nullschool.net
(Melb centric link)
18-19 http://meme.com.au/papers/WTW/ Why The Web?
19 http://meme.com.au/papers/WTW/notes.html#note29 (Endnote) 29
20 https://vimeo.com/225496441 Discover emergent growing order
accelerating spread of chaos
22 https://www.slideshare.net/ynotds/hydropowered-geomorphology Jan 2021 flood
23 https://www.slideshare.net/ynotds/sand-talk-review-and-
discussion-229220542
devoted a Meetup to Sand Talk
https://www.slideshare.net/ynotds/what-do-words-know April “Words” presentation
https://anchor.fm/tyson-yunkaporta Tyson’s Other Others
25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concretion concretions
27 https://www.slideshare.net/ynotds/supervenience-how-emergent-
minds-and-money-seize-power-over-matter
SUPERVENIENCE Project
(initial version)
30 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-017-1069-7 spider thinking
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/spider-
brain-spider-brain/528153/
(via)
31 https://fcmconference.org/img/
CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
The Cambridge Declaration on
Consciousness
32 http://meme.com.au/EDKI/ Ecosystems Decline submission

38. Vale Peter Haffenden
30 March 1946–14 October 2022
long time director of Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West
developer of local historical exhibitions including
continuing aboriginal presence
the Maribyrnong River: Pobblebonk
VVP grasslands: Volcano Dreaming
legacies of armaments manufacture
community activist
supporter of artists
Western Metro Group of Historical Societies
Grassy Plains Network
mentor to many
deepest sympathy to Kerrie Poliness and Phoebe Haffenden
(their recent photo)

39. Historic Arundel Road Trestle Bridge
September 1907–14 October 2022
pictured 29 September 2021
Lost its southern approach earlier in the flood
well before its central spans were taken out
by a floating container come loose from a farm
with video captured by Jackson Elliott
and posted to Brimbank Community Fb Group