I was both moved and provoked by Neil Theise’s unsettling/comforting/unsettling keynote at the SustainableBrands coneference in San Diego last week. (Only my second face-to-face with real humans conference since the Covid thing began!) So of course I invited him to join us for this month’s Living Between Worlds conversation for possiblity. I’ve uploaded it to YouTube and you can watch it now.
Neil is an MD, Zen Buddhist, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium, and author of Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being.
As Maria Popova wrote in The Marginalian, Neil “endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts ‘as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything’.”
Among his many juicy insights, Neil offers four features of the complex adaptive systems in which we are embdedded and which we are—which do what they do bottom up not top down, behaving as though planned but not:
- Numbers matter.
- Negative feedback loops prevail.
- Interactions are local, without global sensing (despite the human illusion).
- A low level of randomness is essential.
Which led to many questions, including, “what does planning look like when emergence makes planning impossible?”
I was glad for the chance for a deeper conversation with him about what that all means for the challenges of sustainability, regeneration, and the world we want—and to be able to share it with you. Have a look, see where the conversation went, and let me know:
- What, if anything, shifted for you while absorbing this conversation?
- What, if anything, is showing up differently in your life?
“Because people are hungry for meaningful conversations that move worlds.
Let’s have some!”
In solidarity,
Gil