Towards New Ways of Knowing Order
Registration is by permission only.
This week in Meaning Lab, we ask: What is order truly for?
Early humans peered through nature’s chaos, discovering—through imagination and mind—a patchwork of regularities: the movement of clouds, the life cycles of animals, the rhythm of seasons. The urge to “make sense” by juxtaposing events, patterns, and data belongs to our very nature; it is instinct, memory, and the birth of abstraction. Yet the leap from recognizing fragments of order to imagining a cosmos governed by it is radical—it springs from an idea rather than mere experience.
As complexity science wrestles anew with questions of pattern and underlying coherence, and as modern generative AI confronts us with new forms of apparent order, we must ask: Does technology reveal, mimic, or subvert the deeper logic of the universe? Like Mandelbrot’s fractals—where clouds are not spheres and coastlines are never circles—the order we find is both obvious and astonishing. It is a child’s truth and a radical revelation.
How do these questions reshape our collective understanding of the world’s structure? How might we evolve our models to account for both technical regularity and existential meaning?
This conversation invites systems thinkers, philosophers, technologists, and creative leaders to probe the idea and evolution of order. We draw from etymology, complexity theory, and debates in AI to ask—what does order mean now and how do our efforts to make sense transform the imaginary whole?
What Is Meaning Lab?
This is a play-space and interdisciplinary think-tank involving a small group of technologists, researchers and startup founders from the Consorvia ecosystem who explore various aspects of an announced concept, thinking and creating together on a range of relevant problems and provocations.
Our conversation is framed as a Bohm Dialogue, fostering a free flow of meaning among participants. In this open and exploratory space, participants are encouraged to suspend judgment of themselves and others, attending closely to their feelings and thoughts. Unlike debates aimed at winning arguments, this method prioritizes collective awareness and the unfolding of shared meaning over arriving at a fixed conclusion.
Format & Logistics 90-minute Meaning Lab for up to 15 participants Facilitated in true open-source style Season 1 of Meaning Lab Beta - early participation is a chance to shape the evolving program