"Regeneration is the essence of life's self-organisation" Fritjof Capra & Daniel Wahl in dialogue
Channel: Daniel Christian Wahl
Date: 2023-03-17

Well, this was another one of those 'special moments' when I get to have a chat with someone who is in good part responsible for me embarking on a different path than marine mammal biology and behavioural neuroscience some 30 years ago and who's writing led me to do a Masters in Holistic Science because I knew Fritjof taught there in person.

Fritjof Capra and I met at Schumacher in 2002, and many times since. This is the latest in a series of conversation with him that I recorded for the Voices of the ReGeneration series. This is my favourite one. We had such fun on March 16th, 2023.

We speak about:

Regeneration as the essence of life's self organisation

Regeneration at the cellular, organ, individual, and ecosystems scale

Regeneration as life's inherent impulse of "the exploration of novelty"

How health and resilience is not 'maintain level work' in all cases (ie bounce back) and how a salutogenic understanding of health and  transformative resilience as the third dimension of resilience (after persistence and adaptive capacity). ... and how this relates to phase-shift or changing attractor in complexity theory

We talked about Ilya Prigogine's important work and his famous 'islands of coherence' - how the second law of thermal dynamics hold while life generates increases in 'order/complexity' as a neg-entropic or syntropic process

The work about Brian Goodwin on complexity science as a mathematician and biologists ... the shift from prediction and control to appropriate participation ... how complex dynamic systems are unpredictable but that does not mean they are not intelligible ... 

The 'emergence of life', the 'emergence of cognition', the 'emergence of consciousness' ... the spiritual view of many wisdom traditions and the 'systems view of life'

A Science of Quality and the role of 'sensing, feeling and intuiting' in science and as reliable pathway to insight and wise action

CG Jung's 'Four Ways of Knowing', Maturana & Varela's 'Santiago Theory of Cognition', Leonardo Da Vinci 's dynamic biology, Goethe's Zarte Empirie, Gregory Bateson, Poincare, Mandelbrot, Darcy Thompson 'On Growth and Form', Goethe's metamorphosis 

... living in an through relationship and life as networks within networks ...

and even got to Fritjof's work with the late Hazel Henderson on the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth in economic and natural systems - the shift from the exponential to the logistic curve (as a litmus test for the survivability of the human story).

I told you we had fun. Enjoy! ... and don't forget that the Capra Course is a gift worth giving to yourself and others. I have done it twice.