What Am I Not Reading?

Made it clear since the turn of the year that I am positively avoiding reading to concentrate on the writing with mental breaks embodied through live performance interludes and walks in the wild(ish) outdoors. I just posted a diary of planned in-person interludes – in the side-bar if you’re on a tablet or PC, in the footer if you’re on your phone – largely to get a grip on how many I’m committing to. If you want to talk in person, you’ll know where to find me.

My writing agenda is as wide as this blog is long-lived, with 2 or perhaps 3 well-defined projects in hand, but one single item has become a stumbling block – a conversation killer – to establishing the language needed to be taken seriously by the intended audience. I’ve tagged that blockage #MoreThanScience in several dialogues, with ISSS members, with Dave Snowden, with Teesside-SitP and with others. Essentially, if we don’t value resources that are not scientific, don’t recognise that there is more to understanding (and acting in) the world than scientific knowledge and processes, then we’re letting the world down badly. Few would actually deny understanding that, but I am always left with so then WHY? label everything we do as science or sciences – systems science, complexity science, social sciences generally? It denies, or at least disadvantages by obscuring, use of non-scientific contributions in the languages of wisdom, love, intuition et al. Another instalment of that conversation in a following post, where I can rephrase my assertion as a negative question that ought to be easier to answer. I think I understand those motivations “why?” and would really love to move the dialogue on to challenging my own motivations and objectives in erecting that #GoodFence

Although I am indeed not actually reading any new material right now, I am nevertheless noticing new materials reminding me of old materials generally and this long-standing stumbling block in particular. Impossible to ignore. These for example:

Carlo ROVELLI – Last night someone (Sean Brady) referred to Carlo Rovelli’s (2020) “Helgoland” as a surprise to discover 5 years after publication. I reviewed it in early 2021 – it remains an excellent recommended read for anyone in this systems space – and as well as Mach (Vienna Circle) and Nagarjuna (Buddhist) links, led me through Bogdanov from systems thinking in general to systems as a specific discipline at Hull CSS and then to ISSS contacts and back to earlier INCOSE sources.

(I’ve been immersed in “systems thinking” for the whole of this 25 year research project because I was immersed in it my entire career since the late 1970’s – but it was only through contact with Anatoly Levenchuk and Rob Black as INCOSE advocates that I noticed since 2010 the wider formality of “Systems” in day-job contexts, in parallel with my “Psybertron” research, and the Rovelli / Mach / Bogdanov trigger as recently as 2020/21 above made it the explicit / active topic of my research. There are so many global “systems” initiatives in every topic area from general management to wider business, government and civil society that I can’t list them, so apart from my ISSS membership, I effectively treat Ben Taylor as the hub or custodian of the network of systems networks of over 40,000 people.)

Jean-Pierre DUPUY – The same is true of Jean-Piere Dupuy’s (2009, MIT Edition) “On the Origins of Cognitive Science” – a republication of his (2000) “Mechanisation of the Mind” with a new preface following the death of Heinz von-Foerster. Another highly recommended read. Having lent my copy to the local pub book club, I recovered the 2009 edition to read the new preface – pushing the agenda that continues as my own.

First referenced and part-reviewed here:
“Dupuy Completion” (2002)
Most recent mention here:
“Psybernetic Cognition” (2025)

(All systems are dynamic but those involving (evolved / emergent) life are distinct even if not dichotomous #GoodFences, and where that living complexity includes humanity, the human condition (after Arendt) is more to do with love ^(**) than science. Rehabilitating the initial failure of Cybernetics with the more humanistic Macy-Conferences interpretation originally intended by Wiener, Bateson, Varela, Foerster and more – something I’ve tagged #Psybernetics in recent years – systems thinking where the psychological complexity of humanity and the ecosystems we inhabit, are a given.)

Sara IMARI-WALKER (ASU / Santa Fe) – I obtained her (2024) “Life As No-One Knows It – the Physics of Life’s Emergence”^(*). (Been a fan recently of her active research work, as well as Paul Davies, Jessica Flack, Lee Cronin, Kevin Mitchell and more.) On the shelf for a future read, but the blurbs and the initial “What is Life?” opening also reflecting on the possibility, rejected by Dupuy and Arendt above, that the living may be no different to the dead – that “Life does not exist.” – as she puts it.

Onwards and upward.

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(*) “No-One Knows” is of course the spur for my underlying agenda – what does it mean to know anything? And, it’s also the Josh Homme title / lyric / chorus of a QOTSA number – seeing the connection? (Also the connection from Hull-CSS to ISSS via Dennis Finlayson at a local gig. Small world.)

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Post Note: And an admission, I did this weekend also choose to re-read to completion “Leonard and Hungry Paul” (2019) by Ronan Hession, by independent publishers Bluemoose Books. Very good, gently funny study on life, love, family and friendship. No funerals and one wedding, maybe. (PS – never did find out explicitly why Hungry Paul has that name. Presumably his older sister’s nick-name for him from his time as a needy infant, but never even mentioned, unless I missed it?)

(**) For “Love” – see also “Getting Back to We”

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