Program
The schedule is subject to last-minute changes, but is intended to be finalized.
Thursday
Thursday 6pm: Opening Ceremonies, everyone
Thursday 7pm: Thursday dinner, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Thursday 8pm: Intro to Fluidity Forum, Matt Arnold
Friday
Friday 8:30am: Friday breakfast, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Friday 9am: Play vs. Games, Patrick Day
Friday 10am: How to Find the Gradient, Harry Gao
Friday 11:30am: Competitive-rules Five in a Row is Pretty Hardcore, Alexis Wu
Friday 1pm: Friday lunch, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Friday 2pm: Awakening Dialogues, Part 1: Introduction to Clear-Hearted Awareness, Tim Batdorf
Friday 3:30pm: Awakening Dialogues, Part 2: Introduction to Emotional Transformation, Tim Batdorf
Friday 5pm: Which Connections Are Worth Pursuing?, Kristin Ho
Friday 6pm: Friday dinner, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Friday 7pm: Feeling Pun-ny: Hit Me with Your Best Thought, Neight
Friday 7pm: The Sentencing Game, Norman
Friday 8pm: Occult Frameworks: Tricks and Spells as Models, Jim Leach
Friday 9pm: Mediplaytion: A Somatic Meditation Experience, Carrie Day
Friday 9pm: The Story of Fluidity Forum’s Renju Set, Alexis Wu
Saturday
Saturday 8:30am: Saturday breakfast, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Saturday 9am: How Scientists Know: The Case for Intelligent Design, Bruce Webber
Saturday 10am: Rapture and Bliss Born of Seclusion: Jhana Meditation, Laura
Saturday 11am: The Arc of Relational Sovereignty, Patrick Day
Saturday 12pm: An Hour with Jess, Jess (@frideswyth)
Saturday 1pm: Saturday lunch, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Saturday 2pm: Embodied Epistemology: What Your Body Knows Before You Can Explain It, Neight
Saturday 3pm: 4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity, Norman
Saturday 4pm: Malicious Perspectives, Brandon Watson
Saturday 5pm: Lightning Talks, anyone
Saturday 6pm: Saturday dinner
Saturday 7pm: Game Night!, anyone
Saturday 7pm: Karaoke, Kara Bradley and Carrie Day
Sunday
Sunday 10am: Coffee Ritual, Matt Arnold
Sunday 11am: Sunday brunch, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Sunday 12pm: Why Do People Like Sad Stories?, Phil Getz
Sunday 1pm: How to Give a Shit about Clothing Without Giving a Shit about Fashion, Harry Gao
Sunday 2pm: If Anyone Publishes This, No One Takes Us Seriously: The Journeys and Tribulations of the Chinese Translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Alexis Wu and Kristin Ho
Sunday 3pm: Closing Reflections, everyone
Items And Exhibits
Oil painting, Kara Bradley
“The Garden of Nebulosity”, Patrick Day
Vegetable tray, Ann Gemlich
Thursday
Opening Ceremonies
Thursday, 6:00pm to 6:50pm, Basement, everyone
The intention is to cohere as a group, and set the norms of the weekend. We will gather in the enclosed parking lot in the back, and process together to be seated. Bring an object to present to the group and place on the table for the weekend; there are more instructions in the email you received.
Thursday dinner
Thursday, 7:00pm to 7:50pm, First Floor Living Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Taco bar
Intro to Fluidity Forum
Thursday, 8:00pm to 9:50pm, Basement, Matt Arnold
A survey of ideas that combined to inform the design of Fluidity Forum.
Friday
Friday breakfast
Friday, 8:30am to 8:50am, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Bagels, hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, granola bars
Play vs. Games
Friday, 9:00am to 8:50am, Basement, Patrick Day
We like to play games, but how is “play” different from “games”? That distinction may be at the heart of something much bigger: our declining ability to imagine, experiment, connect, and create possibilities beyond the world as it is?
Drawing on ideas from psychology, neuroscience, and social theory, this talk explores what happens when play gives way to rules, structure, productivity, and systems of control—and asks what might be at stake when our capacity to play begins to disappear.
How to Find the Gradient
Friday, 10:00am to 10:50am, Basement, Harry Gao
It’s always a very intimidating prospect to encounter a brand new domain. When you don’t know anything, how do you push through the fear of failure? Simple maxims like “don’t be afraid, just try” or “be yourself, follow your heart” aren’t enough. This talk will draw from the gradient landscape model to argue that the most crucial aspect of learning is not knowledge transfer, but developing your own internal judgement.
Competitive-rules Five in a Row is Pretty Hardcore
Friday, 11:30am to 12:50pm, First Floor Living Room, Alexis Wu
Go players may think of gomoku as not much besides a simple and shallow kids’ game that happens to be played with Go equipment, and this reputation is not exactly undeserved. After all, vanilla-rules gomoku, just like Connect Four, is a solved PSPACE-complete m,n,k-game in which, provided optimal play from both players, the first player always wins. But did you know that a society of enthusiasts in Japan have been patching the rules of gomoku since 1892, introducing handicaps for the first player and devising opening constraints that balance the game to the point that contemporary AI can’t solve it? Did you know that the resulting professional, competitive-rules variant of this silly little game, which can be played with paper and pencil if you wanted to, is as strategically complex and dynamic as chess? Let’s play some renju. After all, it’s still nowhere near as daunting as Go.
Friday lunch
Friday, 1:00pm to 1:50pm, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Lunch meats and hummus
Awakening Dialogues, Part 1: Introduction to Clear-Hearted Awareness
Friday, 2:00pm to 3:20pm, First Floor Living Room, Tim Batdorf
This two-part experiential workshop introduces participants to a practical contemplative process adapted from the Mondo Zen tradition for the Fluidity Forum community. Through meditation, embodied inquiry, playful dialogue, and direct experience, participants will explore how awareness, emotion, language, and identity shape the way we meet ourselves, one another, and the world.
In Part 1, participants will be guided into a direct exploration of spacious, compassionate awareness—the capacity to listen, notice, and relate before habitual stories, opinions, and reactions take over. Using simple meditative practices and enigmatic inquiry questions, we will investigate what becomes possible when identity softens, presence deepens, and awareness becomes more available in real time.
Awakening Dialogues, Part 2: Introduction to Emotional Transformation
Friday, 3:30pm to 4:50pm, First Floor Living Room, Tim Batdorf
Building on the foundation of Clear-Hearted Awareness, Part 2 explores how reactive emotional patterns can become doorways into deeper intelligence and care. Participants will learn to slow down the emotional process, recognize the deeper truth underneath emotional reactions, and practice transforming habitual reactivity into conscious, compassionate response.
Which Connections Are Worth Pursuing?
Friday, 5:00pm to 5:50pm, Basement, Kristin Ho
Established disciplines develop their own norms for evidence, justification, interpretation, explanation, and method. When claims travel across disciplines, they encounter different standards for what warrants belief. Yet many important questions do not respect disciplinary boundaries, and systems thinkers must synthesize across them without collapsing inquiry into unconstrained speculation.
This workshop asks: when a claim draws on multiple disciplines, what epistemic obligations come with it? How can ideas travel farther than our evidence without confusing exploratory speculation with warranted assertion? What are we entitled to think, and what are we entitled to claim? As speculation becomes interpretation, hypothesis, explanation, or assertion, how should our obligations change?
Participants will generate a cross-domain claim, interrogate its evidentiary and methodological foundations, and revise it in response. Together, we will prototype a practical tool for auditing speculative cross-domain claims and calibrating the difference between fruitful speculation and justified assertion across contexts, methods, and epistemic standards.
Friday dinner
Friday, 6:00pm to 6:50pm, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Pasta bar
Feeling Pun-ny: Hit Me with Your Best Thought
Friday, 7:00pm to 7:50pm, Basement, Neight
You’re invited to explore impact, sensation, communication, and consent through embodied experience, observation, or both.
This consent-forward session treats impact as a form of communication: a place where force, sensation, agency, intention, trust, and interpretation meet. Together, we’ll create a framework, a metaphorical sandbox, for exploring a collection of meaningful implements, each offering a vocabulary for how sensation can communicate and how intended messages can differ from those received.
We’ll consider the space between intention, experience, and understanding. What makes impact feel playful, intimate, challenging, connective, or meaningful? How does our relationship with an object shape our experience of it? What can consent make possible beyond establishing what is allowed?
Participants may engage, observe, or explore at their own level of involvement. Your body remains yours throughout. Drawing on more than two decades of consensual impact experience, this session centers intentionality, communication, and relationship, not intensity for its own sake.
A brief “please don’t try this at home”:
Some of the implements in this session may look dangerous. A few of them actually are. They can cause injury when used improperly, and some may be capable of causing significant injury.
What you will see is being presented within a deliberately structured environment and informed by more than two decades of experience with consensual impact. Please do not interpret demonstration as a tutorial for unsupervised experimentation. Professional experience, preparation, context, and consent matter.
You don’t need to touch anything, receive anything, or prove anything. Observation is a valid form of participation, and you remain free to change your mind at any point. Likewise, being present does not constitute consent to being touched or involved.
The Sentencing Game
Friday, 7:00pm to 7:50pm, First Floor Living Room, Norman
The Sentencing Game is a cooperative verbal creativity game in which participants work together to construct silly and/or profound and/or surprising sentences. It is a game that I learned from one of my best friends that the two of us play frequently. I like to try it out in different groups of people—I think the sorts of sentences created and the way they evolve say a lot about the culture and character of the group.
Occult Frameworks: Tricks and Spells as Models
Friday, 8:00pm to 8:50pm, Basement, Jim Leach
Mental frameworks are metaphors we use to relate stuff we don’t know to stuff we think we know. Most of these models are boring. This presentation will ransack a couple occult practices, callously disregard their metaphysical rationales and play around to see what utility or delight they might provide.
Mediplaytion: A Somatic Meditation Experience
Friday, 9:00pm to 9:50pm, Basement, Carrie Day
Step out of your head and back into your body through a playful blend of guided meditation, intuitive movement, music, connection, and laughter. Play invites you to release self-judgment, awaken your curiosity, and reconnect with the part of you that knows how to be spontaneous, expressive, and fully alive.
Come exactly as you are. No dance experience. No meditation experience. No need to get it “right.”
Just breathe. Move. Play. And remember yourself.
The Story of Fluidity Forum’s Renju Set
Friday, 9:00pm to 9:50pm, First Floor Dining Room, Alexis Wu
This one’s for all the artisanal craft and material culture nerds here. Unconferences and a signature board game set accessible around-the-clock at the venue go hand-in-hand: Lighthaven’s Go board certainly attracts a well-deserved throng of fans every LessOnline, for instance. Well, Fluidity Forum, for some reason, has a renju set consisting of
· genuine Yunzi Go stones made in Yunnan Province, China from two proprietary blends of powdered local mountain rocks and semi-precious minerals that have been molten, sintered, hand-poured, and allowed to cool and resolidify
· two solid jujube wood Go-stone bowls
· one 2.5-inch-thick, 15-by-15-row renju board made of one single piece of spruce wood
How did we come to possess this? Who out there are even still making these things? Does aesthetic pleasurability alone justify shelling out money for such fancy, traditional equipment in this day and age when just about anything can be played on computers?
Saturday
Saturday breakfast
Saturday, 8:30am to 8:50am, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Bagels, hard-boiled eggs
How Scientists Know: The Case for Intelligent Design
Saturday, 9:00am to 8:50am, Basement, Bruce Webber
How do scientists know what they know? It depends on the domain. Experimental sciences test repeatable predictions in the lab; historical sciences, such as geology, paleontology, and cosmology, can’t rerun the past. They reason by abduction: inference to the best explanation, asking which hypothesis best accounts for the evidence we have. I’ll apply that method to the origin of biological information at the start of life, weighing chance, necessity, and intelligence as candidate causes, and asking where intelligent design fits as a competing hypothesis, not a conclusion to defend.
Rapture and Bliss Born of Seclusion: Jhana Meditation
Saturday, 10:00am to 10:50am, Basement, Laura
I will discuss the jhanas, which comprise the type of meditation most often advocated by the Buddha and most often practiced by his monks. They offer perhaps the most intense pleasure available to humans. I will discuss my own experiences with the jhanas, explain some different views/controversies around them (both within and beyond Buddhism), detail their benefits and limits, and offer some advice on how you might get started with them (which will include pointing you to real teachers as I am not one!).
The Arc of Relational Sovereignty
Saturday, 11:00am to 11:50am, Basement, Patrick Day
We live in a world that constantly demands performance, pushing us to protect ourselves through automatic defenses like compliance, conflict avoidance, and emotional concealment. While these adaptations are intelligent responses to environments that have not earned our trust, they can eventually trap us if they stop being a choice.
This talk outlines a developmental pathway: moving from Guarded Relating (understanding our protective armor without shame) through Liberated Relating (practicing boundaries, vulnerability, and repair inside intentional sanctuaries) and finally into Sovereign Relating. True relational sovereignty is not permanent vulnerability or permanent defensiveness; it is the freedom to read the field around you and consciously choose how to meet the world. Discover how to carry your sanctuary within you and confidently decide when to protect, when to open, and when to challenge the status quo.
An Hour with Jess
Saturday, 12:00pm to 12:50am, First Floor Dining Room, Jess (@frideswyth)
An emergent discussion circle facilitated by Jess. The floor will open with the following question: “What have you been thinking about lately?”, and we will go from there. Jess is happy to weigh in on topics of interest, especially Kegan, meaningness, and spirituality or to simply facilitate the discussion to ensure everyone who wants to speak has some time to do so.
Saturday lunch
Saturday, 1:00pm to 1:50pm, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Continue your discussions with Jess over vegetarian chili!
Embodied Epistemology: What Your Body Knows Before You Can Explain It
Saturday, 2:00pm to 2:50pm, First Floor Living Room, Neight
We often think of knowledge as something we can explain: facts, theories, models, and ideas. But some knowledge exists before we have words for it.
This experiential session explores embodied knowing: the knowledge expressed through movement, perception, timing, balance, intuition, habit, and physical interaction with the world.
Through simple exercises and shared reflection, we’ll explore the boundary between knowing about something and knowing it through your body. What does your body notice before your conscious mind catches up? How does experience become knowledge without necessarily becoming language? And what happens when we try to translate something we know into something we can explain?
4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity
Saturday, 3:00pm to 3:50pm, Basement, Norman
I will be talking about two related books that I read in 2025, 4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity. These books both share the theme of escaping from the grind of our contemporary productivity culture, viewing life from a different perspective, living in the present, and prioritizing what’s truly important.
Malicious Perspectives
Saturday, 4:00pm to 4:50pm, Basement, Brandon Watson
What happens when viewpoints aren’t just misguided, but deliberately poisonous?
The big lie is a propaganda technique that’s a staple of authoritarian movements from Nazi Germany to Jim Crow to MAGA. Where the aim isn’t to persuade, but to manufacture an unreality where truth itself is besides the point. It’s a deliberate scorched Earth campaign against the epistemic commons that allows us to have functional disagreements. Worse still, it paves the way for real-world violence.
The difficulty in responding to it has everything to do with nebulosity. We absorb and adapt viewpoints without necessarily understanding where they came from, or what they’re intended to accomplish. The name of the game is proportionality—applying situationally appropriate responses that scale with culpability.
To that end, we’ll explore why we’re vulnerable to these manipulation tactics, how to spot them in the wild, and what to do about them.
Lightning Talks
Saturday, 5:00pm to 5:50pm, Basement, anyone
Everyone and anyone gets to present on whatever they’re interested in, with a strict time limit of five minutes apiece.
Saturday dinner
Saturday, 6:00pm to 6:50pm, First Floor Dining Room
Pizza from Shield’s
Game Night!
Saturday, 7:00pm to 10:50pm, First Floor Dining Room, anyone
Euchre! Chess! Renju! Zendo! Hanabi! Mouse-trap Jenga! Come play while folks on the other floor are singing karaoke—or hop freely between the two floors to your heart’s content.
Karaoke
Saturday, 7:00pm to 10:50pm, Second Floor Living Room, Kara Bradley and Carrie Day
The best kind of karaoke session: nothing but a speaker, two microphones, a big screen, and a computer with access to YouTube, all connected to one another. No languages, genres, or provenances off-limits! Come sing while folks on the other floor are gaming around the dinner table—or hop freely between the two floors to your heart’s content.
Sunday
Coffee Ritual
Sunday, 10:00am to 10:50am, Basement, Matt Arnold
A Monty Python-esque high church parody ritual. The Pope of Coffee shall blesspresso the Holy of Holies: the most theatrical brewing method ever devised. The acolytes will serve the Holy Liquid unto the congregation, who shall raise the sacrament to the east, and in unison, recite the litany “God, I needed that!” A blend of café’ths such as Press-byterian, Buzzentine, Sipiscopal, the Latte Day Saints, and even Atheismericano.
Sunday brunch
Sunday, 11:00am to 11:50am, First Floor Dining Room, Jane, Pete Mueller, and Carrie Day
Egg casserole
Why Do People Like Sad Stories?
Sunday, 12:00pm to 12:50am, Basement, Phil Getz
A talk in three parts:
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an empirical refutation of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, showing that tragedy is cognitive (the content that makes a thing tragedy is the specific arguments made in it, not a generic plot structure);
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a review of scientific literature on why people like sad or frightening experiences; and
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a review of what readers say about why they like sad stories.
How to Give a Shit about Clothing Without Giving a Shit about Fashion
Sunday, 1:00pm to 1:50pm, Basement, Harry Gao
Caring about clothing supposedly means caring about vanity and attention: what your clothes “say about you,” what identity you’re signaling. For me, clothing was much more approachable once I started exploring what my clothes can do for me, not just for others to look at. Getting curious about material properties, cut and construction, climate and moisture control. Not just performance and hiking gear—everyday casual clothing has a remarkable amount of depth when you look at it from this angle.
BRING A GARMENT if you’d like to discuss it!
If Anyone Publishes This, No One Takes Us Seriously: The Journeys and Tribulations of the Chinese Translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Sunday, 2:00pm to 2:50pm, Basement, Alexis Wu and Kristin Ho
It started with a Facebook post from Duncan Sabien (of MIRI) asking for friends of friends fluent in both Mandarin and English and experience in literary translation. Help us look over the Chinese translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies that’s been provided to us by the publishing press in China that we contracted with, he said.
Upon receiving the PDF, the 17 of us who signed up entered a 48-hour-long panic. “This thing is barely readable”, sayeth one of the emails Alexis sent to Duncan. Find out how our team of 17-dwindled-to-nine ended up authorized to produce the forthcoming officially-recognized version of (supposedly) the most important foreign-language translation of (supposedly) the most important book of this decade.
Featuring discussions on competing philosophies in literary translation, the systemic negligence and misaligned incentives running rampant in the Mainland Chinese publishing industry, and the overwhelming pro-AI, pro-accelerationist sentiments prevalent in China.
Closing Reflections
Sunday, 3:00pm to 3:50pm, Basement, everyone
What was it like to be this group?
Items And Exhibits
Oil painting
no set time and location, throughout the forum, Kara Bradley
A combination of the Flammarion engraving and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Christina lays on a verdant prairie, with a gorgeous leafless tree behind her which spreads out against the sky. With terror and awe, Christina lifts the curtain at the edge of the world to view the celestial spheres of the Flammarion engraving. Inspired by an acrylics painting found on Twitter, fully re-rendered in oil paints on 24″ × 30″ canvas.
“The Garden of Nebulosity”
no set time and location, throughout the forum, Patrick Day
“The Garden of Nebulosity” is a radical subversion of form consisting of two abstract ceramic pieces that interrogate the ontological friction between the absolute and the relative. This sculpture was created by the artist known as Σοφία and is currently on loan to the Fluidity Forum from The Consortium for Trans-Temporal Art in Zurich. Σοφία is an enigmatic and deeply reclusive contemporary artist whose identity remains entirely shrouded in mystery.
Vegetable tray
no set time and location, throughout the forum, Ann Gemlich
I will obtain and prepare assorted vegetables in snack type format as convenience food for forum attendees to enjoy.