Private Round Table: Elasticity, Plasticity, Rigidity & Phase Transitions

I am currently working on a new research project on resilience in a system perspective. This is based on the assumption that the inner interconnections of a system components can result in the system flexibility, change or rupture in response to variations or disruptions in its habitat. We are planning to analyse data from several human interactions and see results. This plan would produce publications and a public event to be defined.

Refreshing return of haikus in the West

from Ezra Pound

In a station of the metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

Petals on a wet, black bough

to Mark Harris

Deep snow

in a dream I find

her password in

The private round table has been successful!

We agreed to set up a project on Open Science Framework called The Resilience Sandbox. We will use this virtual sandbox to share data (the sand) and toys (data analysis techniques). All about systems’ flexibility, plasticity and rigidity. And, about how systems can react to challenges, rebound, learn or be destroyed. How correlation and variance of subsystems and variables affect resiliency.

Chimaera States as Multiple Selves

Considering chimaera states in humans, and their interactions, brings naturally to consider that they represent selves, sub-personalities. Our verbal self is not exactly our non-verbal self, and they are not exactly our body expressing emotions and performing basic vital functions. This is the natural evolution of science based embodied mind evidence in research and amplified by our metaphors and theoretical framework. Let’s follow the intuition of two enlightened women and writers. Our identity, subjectivity, is based on the interplay of multiple selves and the way they can manage to reach harmony and intentionality.

“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a whole, whereas I was made of multitude of selves, of fragments.”

― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin

“Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves—how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.”

― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh