Author: Psybertron

What exactly is woke? (And more to the point, why are some people anti-woke enough to label others as woke? A pox on both their houses I say.)

Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.

Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.

Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.

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Frankly, woke used non-pejoratively, just means politically correct in 20th C language. It picked-up the label woke by analogy of younger people being awakened to some suppressed social, freedoms and rights issue behind otherwise everyday life activities, that they hadn’t previously noticed. And from being awoken to the issue, those people often become sensitive to actively noticing and raising the issue at relevant opportunities thereafter.

One quarter of our way through the 21st C most of those issues fall under the DEI and Identity Politics umbrellas, where as well as Race, ethnicity and colour, Gender, sex and sexuality, diversity extends to any kind of socio-cultural or neuro-diversity. As well as actively noticing the issues the woke naturally become active campaigners on behalf of diverse groups identifying with them.

So far so good, diverse people have diverse needs and individual rights like everyone else, and majorities need reminding of both their explicit and implicit ignorance of diversity issues in both language and action. So far, no different to good old political correctness, it’s about taking care and being seen to take care, when dealing with larger public groups which invariably contain diverse minorities.

The problem arises with the labelling and with campaigning where the latter inevitably demands snappy acronyms and symbolic labelling and the maximising of common interests by joining forces with other potentially suppressed diversity groups.

As originally with political correctness, there is the risk that by focussing on the diversity elements and their needs and rights, the primary purpose of the original activity gets downgraded, overlooked and lost / hidden behind the PC/Woke language. We risk losing sight of the original purpose and the needs of the wider enterprise or public. Potential tyranny of a minority, multiple minorities. Those with interests in and responsibilities for satisfying the majority needs, and recognising the needs of the diverse minorities, quite rightly question the details and validity of the diversity needs where they conflict, add cost and risk or otherwise disadvantage the majority need. Balancing multiple different needs is necessarily a point of contention and compromise, so care – mutual care – is needed in agreeing detail.

When campaigning meets careful management, especially in our electronic-social-mediated times, the nuances of agreeing detail get drowned out by the sloganising of the issues. One cultural right on one side meets one objective fact on the other and finer but relevant details can’t get a hearing. For this reason, those pointing out the downsides of of any given diversity interpretation label their opponents as woke and take up the binary opposite anti-woke position.

Both are stoking a binary war instead of carefully resolving detail to mutual satisfaction. And let’s not forget there are actually many different issues under that “diversity” heading.

Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.

Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.

Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.

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Post Note: Andrew Neil in The Mail

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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 (1975) “The Tao of Physics” and (1982) “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 had also read, but forgotten, his (2003) “Hidden Connections” – from my period in Cambridge, judging by the bookmark – I think it was this read that led me to see his work as stating lots of stuff that already seemed “given” to me, including lots of “Systems Approach” references. Ho hum.]

This week, I picked-up a copy of Capra’s (1988) “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 – literally next door – 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, the whole kit and kaboodle, 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” (**).

[(**) I’m confused now, because the book with that title is a 2014 book co-authored with Luisi. Was he referring to his 1996 “Web of Life” by that Systems title in 1988 – “makes extensive reference to the work of Maturana, Varela, Prigogine and Bateson”? (*) And “Self-Organising Universe” (1980) is by Jantsch, which makes general acknowledgement to Bateson amidst all the other great-and-goods of systems, as well as having a Chapter 8 based extensively on Bateson (1972) “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”. Need to read Capra’s Bateson chapter again.]

Anyway …

“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 paper(s) 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, release, invoke, reinforce or emphasise thought patterns that are already somewhere in the subconscious psyche 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.

Reading Capra’s (1988) and (2014) works will have to wait.
Ditto Bateson’s (1972)
Ditto Jantsch’s (1980) – PDF Downloaded (Subtitle … evolution as an “emerging paradigm” – Q – Has Dennett referenced Jantsch?
Not that I can see … oh my!)
Add to that list!

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A recurring issue for Psybertron – something that runs quite deep in all binary divisions, and taxonomic divisions ARE all binary many times over (#GoodFences) – is one very specific division, that between the sexes.

Differences are not dichotomous, total, forever, never the twain shall meet. Differences are simply significant distinctions we need to be able to make to even talk about them. In the sex / gender case we undoubtedly share 99.99% of our humanity and everything that goes with that including rights and freedoms of opportunity and the like (and share probably 99.90% with the animal world, and maybe 99.00% with living things generally). But differences that are nevertheless significant enough to care about and understand as properly as possible?

(And no this isn’t a post about the “LGBTQI+” trans-gender wars, those biological-sex and socio-cultural-gender distinctions.)

This is about two very important distinctions that get overlooked because it’s been easier to deny popular misconceptions – that are therefore equally easily mis-used – than it is harder to share understanding of nuanced but valuable truths.

Men / Males and Women / Females ARE different, and 
Left-Brains and Right-Brains ARE different, therefore
Male-Brains/Minds and Female-Brains/Minds ARE different
and their distinctions / relationships ARE significant.

And I say valuable, because such differences are a source of requisite variety in both the meme-pool of ongoing human affairs and in the gene-pool of future human evolution.

A healthy mixture beats artificial uniformity any day.
Vive La Difference(s) because they are a Good Thing.

Anyway, the latest published research on brain & sex differences opens with a simple statement:

“Sex differences in human brain anatomy have been well‑documented, though remain significantly underexplored …”

People steer clear of considering real (and well-documented) facts out of a politically-correct (aka Woke in the 2020’s) fear of unintended misrepresentation and misunderstanding. This one is doubly problematic because BOTH left-right-brain differences AND sex-differences are involved and there’s a lot of popular mythical debunking flak to avoid in order to make any progress with either, let alone both.

Critical Debunking is so much easier than Progressive Creativity.
#Dysmemics #PartOfTheProblem

The significance in the latest paper, is that one of the significant sex differences highlighted is in the scale of the corpus-callosum white-matter permissively communicating between the brain halves. A very old finding reinforced by the latest research.

Hat tip to Kevin Mitchell for the latest link, a biologist specialising in evolutionary brain-mind-agency development. And Iain McGilchrist who having chosen one difficult left-right brain hill to die on (sacred naturalism), has nevertheless also correctly referenced the sex differences in this area, Dennett too.

(Previously on Psybertron? Search “Vive La Difference”)

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Preamble, I mentioned in both the 2024/25 deck-clearing and previously in my project-summary, that the significance of Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind” was much greater than I’d given credit, and actually suggested it was a good introduction to the whole.

For me, it was the first time (back in 2002) I’d heard of the 1946-onwards Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and systems thinking generally. Apart from being knocked-out by the introductory chapters making explicit the idea that implicit, humanistic aspects of knowledge were at least as important as the objective, mechanistic forms, and that Cybernetics was rooted in human governance following two world wars (despite increasing association of the word with feedback control and computer / internet technologies generally.)

The quotes about “literature as superior knowledge” and about the significance of the “foggie froggies” (ie the post-modernists) reinforced my already new-found born-again-reader drive and led to self-identifying as PoPoMo (post-post-modernist), once I’d given the PoMo’s head-space.

To this day, I discover, the ASC (American Society for Cybernetics) have Dupuy as their main source for proceedings on the Macy conferences.

Anyway, the point of this post, having had the conversation above over book-club-books in the pub, I thought I’d bring in my copy (covered in notes) or maybe obtain a new copy for the bar.

Turns out, as well as my copy being covered in notes – hard-back (2000) “New French Thought” translation of the (1994) French original, not only is it out of print, but used copies command collector prices. Whatever happens I don’t want to lose my copy.

There was a later (2009) MIT Press paperback edition, also unobtainable new, used or remaindered, under £30 including shipping. Anyway I bought a copy for the club.

Apart from the switching of title & subtitle between those two editions …

Title <> Subtitle: On the Origins of Cognitive Science.
Subtitle <> Title: The Mechanization of the Mind.
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1994)
Translator:   M.B. DeBevoise (2000)
MIT Press edition: (2009)

… the only difference I could find was an additional preface by the author, and an updated dedication following the death in 2002 of Heinz von Foerster, an important source acknowledged by Dupuy in the original.

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I captured the new preface:

 

 

I’m part of the X/Twitter “Community Note” community – I think I’ve mentioned it’s becoming a bit of a farce – a 3-way battle between factions with “No Note Needed” (NNN) as part of the faction naturally siding with the original poster. Net result is effectively random / binary / populist outcomes – so I don’t waste too much time on it these days, like all good ideas, being gamed degenerately , BUT …

One set of such recent battles obviously involves the utterly crass utterances of Musk. His defenders say – but it’s just his opinion, NNN, he has rights, Freeze Peach, etc.

What these people miss, like the off-the-spectrum-autistic Musk himself, is that truth is made of a lot more than (objective) facts. Dialectic – logical objective argument – is only a formalised sub-set of rhetoric, good or bad. A bad idea with a simple message and powerful reach can be much more dangerous & degenerate, than any factual inaccuracy.
#Dysmemics
#PartOfTheProblem

See (Civilised) Rules of Engagement

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Disclaimer:

Yeah, yeah, I know that particular fire in the embedded image, has no direct relation to Musk (Trusk-minus-Trump) or Tesla, but it serves here to illustrate that Trusk is, as they say, “a dumpster fire”. (It is, of course, nevertheless very deeply relevant in a complex systems view.)

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Watched a 2001 film tonight on Netflix that I’d never heard of until it popped-up. Starring Jack Nicholson and an “ensemble” cast of Hollywood’s great and good – Harry Dean Stanton, Helen Mirren, Micky Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave. Sean Penn as producer and director with music by Hans Zimmer. What’s not to like?

But I didn’t know any of that, other than the Jack Nicholson lead role, until I selected it. The reason it caught my eye as I scrolled over available recommendations was that I noticed The Pledge (the film) was based-on a book by Swiss-German author Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Dürrenmatt is an exception to my pre-2001 experience of barely ever reading anything other than technical, popular science or news material, before I became a born-again devourer of fiction, classical and philosophical. Dürrenmatt’s “Die Physiker” (The Physicists) was a set text drama when I did Germanic Studies as a minority subject along with my Aeronautical Engineering degree major way back in 1974-77. The play was mixed in with other German language, culture and history syllabus, but it (and the tutor, now I think of her) made an impression that obviously stuck with me. Shortly after I embarked on this Psybertron research and writing project in 2001 (9/11) I picked-up and re-read Die Physiker in early 2002. it was relevant to my agenda for the obvious science vs morals content. And I’ve probably reviewed and mentioned it again another 10 times on my travels. It didn’t occur to me that Dürrenmatt had written anything more that had made it into English translation, and I’d never looked.

Die Physiker is a fictional drama based on patients known as Newton, Einstein and Möbius in a private mental institution / sanitorium, the first two because they are presumably schizophrenic patients with imagined identities. The third is presumed feigning his madness in order to lock himself away with the maddening guilt of physics having enabled the atomic bomb, with the realised ambiguity that he is in fact being locked in a secure institution by society for that same reason. (The sanitorium being called Les Cerisiers always put me in mind of Chekhov. Some big names played the main roles in an RSC 1963 production of the 1962 translation of the 1961 original.)

The Pledge (the book) is a quite different earlier work originally published in 1958 and first translated in 1959. The 2001 film screenplay is an adaptation, transposed from Switzerland to northern Nevada (rural small-towns around Reno NV). Very Scandi-noir watching it in 2025 and very evocative of Fargo ND given the harsh winters and the Scandinavian character names. As the Wikipedia notes suggest the detective – Jack Nicholson a “three-time loser with women” – does in effect solve the crime he has pledged justice for the victim’s family, despite the crime happening on the day of his retirement party. But his eventual failure to actually achieve the denouement, identify and bring the serial criminal to justice, is really just a series of bad choices and accidental events both relevant and incidental. Eventually after suffering ongoing accusations of madness in his obsession with keeping his promise, he really is driven mad by his failure. A requiem (in 1958) for the detective stories that are so common place today that involve elaborately constructed “whodunnit” ambiguity and mis-direction of multiple suspects and motives, etc. Gruesome the crimes and creepy the detective’s association with the actual and potential victims, relatives and witnesses, despite never doubting his sincere intentions – you must know you look madly obsessive and appear creepy even though we know you’re not – but a very well done psychological drama. Recommended.

I must seek out more Dürrenmatt works
(and add to the endless reading list).

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The whole Islamophobia / anti-Semitism debacle – is definitively racism either / both ways. Race itself is biologically ill-defined as a concept but it is nevertheless real. In same way Islam-ism / Juda-ism obviously have a social / intellectual angle around the religion itself vs freedoms of belief and religion and the cultural inheritance of societal values, most interactions and responses are bio-socio-physical. Racism and nationalism / national-identity especially when the topic is acts of violence and war. “Semites” of course are / were and Arab ethnic tribal name anyway, before being conveniently used to tag Judaism in recent decades.

It’s obviously compounded when the nation-states – like Iran & Afghanistan – involve non-Secular / Theocratic governments or other states harbour other deeper long-standing conflicts. Not just freedoms of belief and religion impinging upon the rights and freedoms of others, but imposition of one set of values and beliefs by physical means. Ironically, Israel the refuge of Zionism, and neighbouring Lebanon, has one of the most secular, liberal and tolerant cultures in honouring freedom of alternative religious belief (and practice).

Another issue on the other side is expectations about punishment, sanctions and sentencing when laws against violence are applied. The other side of that coin being merely the practical limitations, incentives and priorities of legally enforcing such measures. Complex to say the least and never entirely rational / objective / scientific. (eg Anyone who keeps their nose-clean during incarceration rightly expects to serve only a portion of their sentence. Prisons would be ungovernable otherwise.)

Obviously these are all topical again thanks to fuckwits – autistic simpletons – like Musk wading in on the UK “Grooming Gang” scandals (and New Year’s terrorist atrocities) – without the slightest hint of understanding any such complexity, nor even any signs caring about fellow humanity. Competitive tweeting / retweeting / disagreeing & community-noting binarily for or against either or both simplistic positions – “virtue-signalling” or indeed populist voting on such a basis – is purely degenerative. Worsening rather than solving any of any number of entangled issues. #PartOfTheProblem

If civilised intelligent people – especially those that claim to be on the side of free-thought and rationality in opposition to religious dogmatism and bigotry (and violence, against especially women) cannot see the need nor make the effort to disentangle the complexity of issues before rejecting or supporting any position, then there is no hope. With the impending imposition of “Trusk”, on UK, European and Middle-East politics as well as the US, it looks like this incoherent degeneracy is about to define 2025. Such incoherence can’t end well.

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I’ve promised myself several times I wouldn’t fall for inventing a new word for my work. There’s nothing new under the sun, and definitions – even evolving definitions – of existing words, are more about usage than constraining definitions. So long as your usage is clear, no need to get hung up on definitions or new words with their own subtly new definitions. [Definitions is a whole #GoodFences essay.] It’s all footnotes to Plato anyway.

One of the losing battles I face – there are many, and in fact #LosingBattles is another core topic in itself – is with the word Cybernetics. No matter how much I point out that the coining of the term at the 1946-onwards Macy conferences, was about its humanistic application to systems of complex global human governance following the disaster(s) of two world wars, everybody hears mechanistic / scientistic computer automation and feedback control. Of course their approaches were always about applying best known science and developing technologies to such problems – why wouldn’t we? – but as CP Snow (and JP Dupuy) would remind us any solution needed to work across both cultures – a third culture integrating the humanistic and the scientistic. Which is another footnote to Plato in itself.

With the massive successes and the progressive domination of every-day 21st century life with computing technologies since 1950’s, the Cyber prefix – as in Cyberspace – is now firmly associated in all minds with those physical technologies (even though it was never the intent of the likes of Wiener and Bertalanffy – it / they were always about self-governance of living systems, and from the original Greek, Cybernetics = Kybernetes = Governance. Another footnote to Plato).

I mused not so long ago – having stumbled upon Psybertron as a name encapsulating my agenda when I started this blog in 2001 – that I had also effectively coined the term Psybernetics as my take on the original intent of cybernetics, emphasising not just the governance but also the mental source of such governance in not just living systems, but consciously intelligent evolving living systems, like us and our ecosystems. Several orders more complex than any mechanistic machine-like system. [Hence the whole topical agenda on how complexity defines the nature of intelligent systems, and the nature of consciousness and intelligence themselves, real or artificial.]

So, before we get ahead of ourselves, I shall be using Psybernetics to refer to the explanations and behaviours of complex living systems that explicitly involve minds. As scientifically as possible, wherever possible of course, but nevertheless with the acknowledgement that minds are more than science.

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Previously:

Musing on using Psybernetics as a term – Feb 2024

First mention of Psybernetics – a couple of weeks earlier – Jan 2024

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2024 was a whole year consisting almost entirely of a single aside from my intended research and writing agenda. (Cut to the chase for 2025 Priorities?)

It was the 50th anniversary of publication of Robert Pirsig’s ZMM – his seminal “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. Helping to found the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA), getting it up and running on-line and supporting various #ZMM50th events became all-consuming. I say almost because I did also try to tie-in “more than science” working with the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISSS) thanks to their annual conference event originally timed to dovetail with the #ZMM50thRide. Sadly the eventual timings didn’t work out so I ended up supporting both whilst having to fund the time and money for two separate US trips. No other conferences and, apart from the odd weekend break, zero holidays and only one other foreign trip – a few days of paid and expensed Systems Engineering consulting in Q4. Interesting for its own technical content and useful in providing some unanticipated funds for the unplanned additional expenses. Still, incidentally, with a few hours follow-up to complete. One job to finish for the RPA commitments too – an update to the Pirsig Biographical Timeline.

But Pirsig was only ever one string to my bow. An important introduction to philosophy generally and to “the timelessly recurring philosophical division between the explicit / objective / classic / conceptual / dialectical and the implicit / intuitive / romantic / embodied / rhetorical”. His Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) was an original monist framing and a useful framework to this day. There’s been 50+ years of evolution of science and philosophy (and politics) since Pirsig’s magnum opus, with even better explanatory theories of how Pirsig’s physical > biological > social > intellectual level relations actually work and how his Zen Quality take on immediate “radical-empirical” experience still represents the moral imperative for our attention to the world beyond science. Not by coincidence, “more than science” remains the outstanding follow-up item from the ISSS workshop that very much contributes to my ongoing research and writing project. Sadly Pirsig didn’t – and only a few Pirsig scholars did – engage with other philosophers and scientists beyond the Greeks into the 21st century. Time waits for no man.

the timelessly recurring philosophical division:

between the
explicit / objective / classic / conceptual / dialectical
“science” for short

and the
implicit / intuitive / romantic / embodied / rhetorical
“wisdom” for short

So, apart from the 3 commitments above …

• • • Update to the Pirsig Biographical Timeline
    • Consolidating output from the ISSS “more than science” session.
    • Clarifying responses to my systems consulting customer.

… I’m back on the original agenda.

As ever I have  several open issues to read or file for future reference – lots of open / barely-read / un-reviewed pieces to bookmark – in the post-notes below.

However, last years project priorities pretty much remain this years.

Original 2022 Version – Writing Progress – for 2023

1. 1. 1. The Position – (T – Outline) a statement of what I believe, in brief.
      2. The Thesis – (T) the whole formal “how and why” development of that.
      3. Good Fences – an essay on one corollary of the whole.
      4. Sacred Naturalism – an essay on another corollary of the whole.
      5. Primary Sources – an acknowledgement of the main originators.
      6. Time and Tide – (F) a fictional narrative inspired by the whole.

Updated Nov & Dec 2023 “Resolution” – for 2024

… to prioritise my own deliverables.
T – Maybe the priority is “T” (The Technical Text)
F – which may contribute not only to “F” (The Fictional Narrative) but years of prior research and writing into
D – a potentially shorter version of “D” (The Doctoral Thesis)?
P – My involvement in “P” (The Robert Pirsig Association) can only be short-term / part-time.

Priorities Now – Dec 2024 – for 2025

Priority #1

• • T – my Technical Thesis, probably still in parts:
    • OT – Outline / summary of my starting position
      • “My Project” (recent summary)
      • RP – Research (PhD) Proposal (already draft 4)
      • PS – Personal Statement (already published)
    • ST – Specific topics deserving of individual chapter / essays
      (Good Fences, More Than Science, Sacred Naturalism, etc.)

Priority #2

• • F – the (pen-named auto-)fictional novel

Priority #3

• • • Pirsig / RPA – Timeline update + only a supporting role
    • Conferences (UK Only in 2025)
      • ISSS-2025 (Birmingham) follow-up to DC-2024 above.
      • HTLGI-2025 (Hay-on-Wye) – as the name says 🙂
      • OxfordLitFest-2025 (Oxford) McGilchrist et al
    • TS-SitP – local attendee / participation only
    • Other pub, blog & social-media dialogues.

END

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Post Notes:

Bookmarking the following:

• • Ben Taylor’s Systems Thinking Reading List.
  • Simon Wardley’s “Wardley Maps” generally.
  • Which reminds me, the Dave Snowden / Cynefin “more than science” dialogue.
  • Nicole Rust’s readings of Francis Crick and Kevin Mitchell.
  • Stephen Mumford’s readings of Russell’s metaphysics.
    (See previously …)
  • Engaging with Birkbeck, London CCCM?
  • A critical reading of Michael Levin’s Mind “Technology” project?
  • RL Kuhn’s Taxonomy of Consciousness Explanations.
  • Drucker’s 1994 letter to Bill Emmott at The Economist.
  • Completing a tabulation of the Macy “Humanist” Cybernetics topics.
    (And here at the ACS. Ditto a re-reading of Dupuy)
  • How Cyber did for Cybernetics – NOT – “relating to computers, computer networks, or technology” (Cyber-Space).
  • Naturalised Teleology.
  • Brian Goodwin (Edge 1997) – New Science of Qualities.
  • Gabrielle Bammer and Jean Bolton on Science & Subjectivity.
  • Oikophobia – The tendency to criticise things closer to home (yourself, your group, the current government of your own country, say) rather than bigger shared things.
  • Turtles all the way down? Recurring metaphysical question of course, but just a link to the long and wide history of the cosmic turtle.
  • And a whole load of half-read / un-reviewed books that will have to wait:
    • “Leonard and Hungry Paul” – Ronan Hession
      (Half read, very good, small independent publisher, made only a few project-relevant notes)
    • “New Finnish Grammar” – Diego Marani
      (Completed and reviewed, not fully absorbed into the project.)
    • “The Mechanisation of the Mind” – Jean-Pierre Dupuy
      (So relevant I absolutely have to do a thorough re-read. Mentioned in ACS bookmark above and already a core part of the project. The original now a collectors’ item. Later edition using the original subtitle “The Origins of Cognitive Science” also very expensive text, even second hand, no Kindle etc – but a highly recommended read.)
    • “Queen of Sorrow” – Yvonne (YD) Jones
      (Read completely. A wartime “love story” focussing mainly on the resourcefulness of the women and girls. Located around Trieste / Italy – same as Finnish Grammar above, which sparked picking it up – and locally around Redcar (NE Yorkshire / East-Cleveland coast. Not reviewed yet because the otherwise gripping trajectory is strangely incomplete / unsatisfactory / inconclusive despite being full length and difficult to describe without being a spoiler. Presumably intended as the first in a series – leave ’em wanting more? And I can talk to the author – in the pub – before I publish any more.)
    • “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women” and “Mothers, Fathers and Others” by Siri Hustvedt.
      (Received as Christmas presents off the reading list – thanks again Robbie – but in the pending pile. Intriguing author, a rave reviewer of Solms, read one piece on Kindle and made notes – but the rest will have to wait.)
    • “Myself and More Important Matters” – Charles Handy
      (Some catching-up to do on an author that was influential ~40 years ago.)
    • “A Confederacy of Dunces” – John Kennedy Toole
      (A cult book with a weird tragic history and an even weirder plot / narrative / accent. Known in the bar book-club, but no recollection where I picked-up the reference. Strange to start reading at New Year 2024/25 given the New Orleans Canal Street & Bourbon Street locations. Definitely about “what’s wrong with the world / putting it to rights” but will have to wait to complete.)
    • “Uncommon Wisdom” – Fritjof Capra
      (Read some of his work early in my project – eg “Tao of Physics” and his film “Mindwalk” but mostly overlooked his work because although his stuff was “right” it wasn’t that original – See Pirsig and Talbot and Josephson – and his style was a bit more sensational-journalistic to my UK eyes. At least part of my being too dismissive too soon with Capra will have been my conflating his “Turning Point” (on which “Mindwalk” is based) with Gladwell’s “Tipping Point”. Received but not read “Uncommon Wisdom” but still early work, because he is much referenced more recently in the Psybernetics (systems thinking) context. Uses the word “wisdom” of course.)
  • All back on the shelf. See LIFO Reading.

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Post-Post-Notes

As part of putting to bed all the open links above, I had a couple that were themselves fairly closely linked to each other. Not the first time I’ve mentioned these, but worth capturing together in one place.

At the 1946-onwards “Macy Conferences” as well as all the people who were or became the great and the good of Cybernetics and Complex Systems Thinking – including Heinz von Foerster – was almost the only philosopher outside the Greeks that Pirsig makes specific reference to being influenced by – F.S.C. Northrop – before he started his own writing project.

Dupuy, who wrote about the more humanist balance of the Macy conferences is a much-used resource in that ASC Macy link above. Dupuy wrote “The Mechanisation of the Mind” and I read the 2000 NFT English translation first-edition and his dedication was “for” Foerster who had been a significant source for Dupuy and formed an important introduction for me. Foerster died in 2002 and the subsequent 2008(?) “The Origins of Cognitive Science” MIT Press edition (same text with new preface and the title / sub-title flipped round) is dedicated in his memory.

At the 1995 “Einstein Meets Magritte” conference organised by Francis Heylighen where Pirsig was one of the plenary speakers so were Heinz von Foerster, Ilya Prigogine and Francisco Varela.

(The Tucson “Science of Consciousness” conferences started the same year, and split the European and USA attendees – more detail.)

As recently as last year (2024), Francis Heyligen – organiser of that Einstein Meets Magritte” conference – produced this paper “Curiosity, Awe and Wonder: the Emotions that Open Our Mind” which drew this peer-review comment:

“It’s brilliant. I have no suggestions for improving it.
Heylighen is breaking into an area with tremendous potential. We’ve been rejecting these emotions as secondary, as epiphenomenal, since Galileo. Heylighen expands the scientific investigation with a much broader and deeper epistemology. With his high standing in the science world, the impact of his article will be significant. The only suggestion I have for the author is to write more articles in this vein. This direction is both rare and important.”

(Hat tip Michel Bauwens @mbauwens on X/Twitter.)

(Lots of common / relevant reference sources in that paper, though sadly, no Pirsig, no McGilchrist, no Northrop, no Dennett …)

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