Brendan Graham Dempsey in conversation with Francis Heylighen, published on Metamodern Meaning on 7 November 2026. Audio and video, approximately 68 minutes.

Heylighen outlines a proposed ‘Third Story’ of the universe, based on self-organising evolution, following mythic-traditional and modern-mechanistic accounts. The conversation covers metasystem transitions, consciousness, AI, meaning, and the relationship between increasing complexity and value.

Listen or watch: The Third Story of the Universe w/ Francis Heylighen.

Read Heylighen’s own writing at The Self-Organizing Universe. His Substack develops his account of complexity, evolution, and emergent organisation across physics, biology, psychology, society, and technology.

SCiO UK Virtual Open Meeting – November 2026 | SCiO – Systems and Complexity in Organisation

Arseny Krasikov’s VSM Renderer is a TypeScript library for drawing interactive Viable System Model diagrams in applications. Built with Konva, it supports nested systems, navigation between recursion levels, individually selectable communication channels, zooming, panning, and click interactions.

The repository includes documentation and a browser demonstration. The package is published as @captador/vsm-renderer under the EUPL-1.2 licence.

Read the documentation and source code · Try the browser demonstration.

The related VSM7 project, developed by Krasikov with Mark Lambertz, supports organisational design using the VSM. See its website for current access and registration. Lambertz’s VSM7 walkthrough explains the project’s origins and its adaptation of Martin Pfiffner’s seven-step design method; the walkthrough was previously shared on SysCoI.

Mark Lambertz’s restaurant simulation for learning Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, published on Intelligent Organisations on 17 October 2026.

Participants organise a fictional hospitality business, work through an eventful week, and examine their decisions using a VSM diagram laid out on the floor. The exercise explores operational autonomy, coordination, recursion, and the relationship between current operations and future possibilities.

Lambertz credits Allenna Leonard with the original storyline.

Read ‘Pasta Lasta’ and the facilitator guidance · Download the facilitator handout (PDF).

Related: VSM7 walkthrough, Lambertz’s developing software project based on an adaptation of Martin Pfiffner’s seven-step VSM design method. Previously shared on SysCoI on 17 August 2026. The source-code repository describes the software as a mockup under active development.

Two connected works by Gabriel Burstein and Constantin Virgil Negoita explore Kabbalah’s Tree of Life as a model for relationships between cognition, emotion, and action.

Foundations of a postmodern cybernetics based on Kabbalah (2011)

The authors propose a cybernetics grounded in the Tree of Life, interpreting its structure through feedback, hierarchical control, multi-valued logic, and category theory. Their aim is to model cognitive, emotional, and practical activity within a common framework for human and social systems.

Published in Kybernetes, 40(9/10), pp. 1331–1353. Read the paper on ResearchGate. DOI: 10.1108/03684921111169422.

A Kabbalah System Theory Modeling Framework for Knowledge Based Behavioral Economics and Finance (2014)

This chapter develops the earlier proposal for economics and finance. Burstein and Negoita combine their three-level model with emotional intelligence and Michael Polanyi’s account of tacit and explicit knowledge. They use system dynamics to explore how knowledge and emotional biases could enter economic models, including asset pricing.

Chapter 2 in Computational Models of Complex Systems, edited by Vijay Kumar Mago and Vahid Dabbaghian, Intelligent Systems Reference Library, volume 53, pp. 5–23. Read the chapter on ResearchGate. Publisher’s record. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01285-8_2.

Systems Thinking Ontario’s 148th meeting explores Indigenous knowledge, cognitive justice, and what different understandings of reality mean for systems thinking and design.

Herman Piʻikea Clark discusses Makawalu, a Hawaiian approach to seeing through multiple eyes. Roberto Pires considers how participatory futures work could help societies recognise different knowledge systems. David Ing moderates.

Wednesday 18 November 2026, 18:30 EST (Toronto) / 23:30 GMT (UK). The session ends at 20:15 EST, which is 01:15 GMT on Thursday 19 November.

Hybrid: OCAD University, 205 Richmond Street West, Room 115, Toronto, and online via Microsoft Teams. Register through Guild for attendance details and online access.

Price is not stated on the event page; check with the organiser.

Event and registration · Full programme and suggested reading

John A Challoner’s November 2026 paper, Causal Assembly Theory: Assembly and Disassembly as Causal Processes, examines how entities become components of systems, how organised participation is maintained, and how systems change or break apart. His account connects these processes to physical interactions, transfers, and constraints.

The related free, self-paced General Systems Theory course now lists modules 92–106 on causal assembly. These follow the Foundational Causality paper and modules 81–91 covered here in August.

• Causal Assembly Theory: Assembly and Disassembly as Causal Processes, Version 8 (PDF)
• EFGST papers collection
• General Systems Theory course, including modules 92–106
• Earlier SysCoI coverage: Foundational Causality and modules 81–91

Discovering network resilience formulas with symbolized reinforcement learning | Nature Communications

Second Law Studio

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Vibrating material organises itself into a single rhythm – University of Birmingham

https://ludos.benjaming98765.chatgpt.site

https://rsorourke.substack.com

https://rsorourke.com

Life finds a way: Emergence of cooperative structures in adaptive threshold networks – ScienceDirect