Harder House

Subject: Autopoiesis and Maturana's "What is Sociology?"

When: Friday, December 1st, 2017

  4:00-4:30  Informal discussion
  4:30-5:00  Intro/presentation and questions
  5:00-5:30  Talking Circle
  5:30-6:00  Diverse & Energetic discussion

Where: Harder House (S.W. 10th & Market, Portland), Room 104

CSS Colleagues,

Last month's discussion of entropy dissipation as a possible discriminant between living and non-living systems meandered back to self-referential systems and lead Milt to forcibly assert that we should (finally) address autopoiesis head on. We are lucky to have a local, Dennis Sandow of https://reflexus.org/, give us a short introduction primed by Maturana's article "What is Sociology?" , after which we'll digest it with a talking circle.

When: Friday, May 5th, 2017

  4-4:30 informal discussion
  4:30-5:30 main discussion
  5:30-6 informal discussion

This month, we'll be discussing fish schools and, in particular, the relationship between individual behaviors and the resulting attributes of the collecive. Here's the primary paper we'll be discussing:

From behavioural analyses to models of collective motion in fish schools

Ugo Lopez, Jacques Gautrais, Iain D. Couzin and Guy Theraulaz

http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/09/26/rsfs.2012.0033

Here is a couple of (inadequate) videos.

Without "emergence": Fish Schools | BLUE WORLD ACADEMY https://youtu.be/KkkgZWlBcSE

With "emergence": How do schools of fish swim in harmony? - Nathan S. Jacobs https://youtu.be/dkP8NUwB2io

The CSS group will meet informally at Harder House 104 at 4pm on 10/7/16, and begin discussion of this month's article at 4:30. We start wrapping up the discussion at 5:30 and continue more informally until 6pm.

The reading for the October discussion is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225 . We recommend reading (or at least trying to read) the article beforehand so that you'll be prepared to participate meaningfully in the discussion. This is true even if the article seems to be "over your head." Trying to understand a challenging topic can be very worthwhile.

But even if you are not able to do the reading, you are still welcome to come to the discussion, meet new friends, and just listen if that's your preference.