Big Intelligence Primer
School will never be the same again
During early school experiences we learn what we're supposed to think and, largely in reaction that, how to think. How would your journey be different today had you learned how to think not as a reactive state but as a fundamental tool for Being -- and Becoming?
Welcome to the place where you can reorient toward that very goal, how to think non-reactively, and embark on a journey I call Big Intelligence.
This course is for you if you are interested in both conceptualizing and embodying a wider view of intelligence. You will enjoy this course if you:
* Like to dive into the occasional Big Question
* Are interested in reality shifts such as perceiving more meta phenomena
* Have analytic capacity and enjoy conceptual puzzles
* Recognize that lack of structure when seeking shared meanings (how will we ever think this through together?) vexes interdisciplinary projects, organizational collaborations, and change-seeking movements of all kinds
* Are skeptical about the prospects for "Big Intelligence" given current systems of knowledge
In addition to learning how to engage from a place of intelligent relating in any area, you'll find out about the wisdom from naturally emergent systems that helps us contemplate first-hand experiences (including learning) of all sorts from multiple perspectives. Supported by ample use of metaphor, you'll gain critical vocabulary and improve your awareness of how general awareness, reality modeling, and meaning-making are key factors in influencing not just intelligence but anything we wish to relate to intelligently and in a real way.
This beginning course is geared towards the tricky business of recognizing how being entrained by what to think interferes with how to think. After all, we're doing it backwards! In all, this journey of re-schooling, or learning how to think, unlocks intelligent experience as relational at its core.
Course material is video-based, with lectures that incorporate information slides and whiteboard. Supplemental print materials accompany a number of the lectures. The first talk is audio only.
** Lecture development is active and ongoing now with discussion areas open at all times and new material being announced.
As of March 2019, this course has been moved to my site MichelleMcGee.com/learn
Your Instructor
Michelle is a pioneer in the field of intelligent relating. The tools she uses engage familiar, experiential vocabulary to unlock your connection to what is both real and possible about yourself, existence as a whole, and systems of all types and scales. She is faithful to existence as a real, complex relational (shared) experience that is supremely true in its very Being.
As developer of ONT, a root ontology in database form, and Novel View, a dynamic model of the universe as a complex emergent system, she is deeply committed to contemplative practices that meaningfully blend experience and complexity. She believes it is through existentially attuned information tools that we will achieve the living balance needed to navigate the technological age with aplomb.
Her background, including 18 years in higher ed, is in biology, related technologies, and instruction. She is also an autodidact in complex systems, theoretical physics and cosmology, nonlinearity and chaos theory, psychology and neuroscience, and a wide array of religious faiths and philosophical disciplines. She publishes trans-disciplinary works that challenge intellectual norms. This is her first course and bridges how new intellectual norms can be used to build experiential rapport.
A formal martial artist, she is drawn in her free time to improvisational dance, harmony with sound, the lab of the kitchen and East Indian cuisine, and being in and loving the outdoors. She lives in Vermont (USA), is married, and has two children.