Two gaps in my reading when it comes to my “Psybernetic” Systems Thinking subject matter, Fritjof Capra and Gregory Bateson.
Bateson was obviously involved in post-WWII “Macy” developments in Cybernetics, but I skipped reading him so far thanks to his unpromising (to me) association with Margaret Mead, critiqued by Dennett, and a feeling more green-ecological than eco-systemic? It’s not that I doubt the quality of his thinking, I simply doubt it holds any more than I now hold in 2025 thanks to the other thinkers I’ve read? [Library of unread books, etc. If I’m wrong, put me right, etc.]
Capra, I had read “The Tao of Physics” and “Turning Point” as one thread of my discovery of Eastern analogies to the received wisdoms of fundamental materialist physics, but had only recently noticed Capra’s systems-focussed works being cited by other Systems Thinkers.
I picked-up a copy of Capra’s “Uncommon Wisdom – Conversations with Remarkable People”, partly because it used the word Wisdom in its title and partly because I noticed Bateson was one of those remarkable people. Two birds, one stone. (The book is an auto-biographical summary of his life and people experiences that led to his “Tao of Physics” thinking and his “Systems View of Life”.)
I’m only skimming selectively before returning it to my reference shelves, because I really have other writing priorities right now, but I have captured a few notes:
Firstly biographically, Capra really was a hippie, unlike Watts and Pirsig, anti-establishment alternative drop-out lifestyle over and above his physics PhD. He was actually at Imperial College London overlapping me by one year in 1974/75 just as his “Tao of Physics” was being completed and published. I had friends in the Physics department adjacent to mine in Aeronautics on Prince Consort Road, wonder if they knew his professor P.T. Matthews? And Big Sur, Esalen, Haight-Ashbury, Taoist Buddhism, the Dance of Shiva, Watts, Suzuki, Castaneda, Krishnamurti, Hesse, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lennon’s “Imagine”, the lot before that.
“Freedom from the known”
Several Heisenberg meetings, Tagore influence and positive endorsement of the “ToP” – Heisenberg and Schrödinger got it as already long known. Chew and Bohm – no physical foundation other than systems. (Doesn’t connect with information processing? No “metaphysics”.)
Bateson himself and his “Self Organising Universe” were Capra’s inspiration for his “The Systems View of Life”.
“Mind as a systems phenomenon.”
Oh yes. (And therefore with some level of mind in any living organisation / ism before specialised brains.) The Bateson syllogism.
He has the Zen (Taoist) approach to planning. Having in mind things worth doing, but only actually doing them opportunistically when an encounter with a person or situation arises and connects to that dot, rather than any actual “scheduling”.
He met with R.D. Laing author of “The Divided Self”. Again, I’ve not read this popular work, but McGilchrist references Laing’s technical work on Schizophrenia.
Talking about the drugs scene, and LSD experiences in particular, some things that seem so obvious to me, that I wonder how it can be written as a “convincing” discovery: That the effect is to catalyse, reinforce or emphasise thought patterns that are already somewhere in the subconscious of the subject and not defined by the substance itself, so actual experiences are different for different people. Like, how could it be otherwise? Meta in kind.
Back on the shelf. Writing to do.
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