"Bateson was introduced to the ideas of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. 'A further and more compelling argument in favor of the circular...view of functional systems is to be found in the fact that any other view would drive us to belief in a "first cause" or in some sort of teleology-in fact we should have to accept some fundamental dualism in nature which is philosophically inadmisible.'(G.Bateson, Naven, P 117)" from Gregory Bateson, the Legacy of a Scientist.
"At Princeton in 1944 a second meeting was held, attended by engineers, physiologists, and mathematicians. The excitement felt by members of this diverse group led one of them, Warren McCulloch, to arrange another conference for the spring of 1946."McCulloch later invented the first neural net model.
"The conferees were primarily concerned woth feedback processes 'in' the human nervous system. But now, McCulloch and Fremont-Smith beckoned others of wider interests: The English ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the German biologist Heinrich Kluever, the German Psychologist Kurt Lewin, the American philosopher F.S.C Northrup, the American information theorist Claude E. Shannon. the American learning theorist Donald G. Marquis, and the German engineer Heinz von Foerster. 'The idea was to get together a group of modest size', Wiener recalled in 1948, which would include some twenty participants from various diciplines, 'and to hold them together for succesive days in allday series of informal papers, discussions and meals together, until they had the opportunity to thrash out their differences and make progress in thinking along the same lines.'The Macy Conferences went into these ideas in depth:
"Wiener and Von Neumann led the way in differentiating the difference betwen 'analogical' and 'digital' coding, discussing circuits, servomechanisms, positive and negative feedback, the measurement of information and its relation to entropy, binary systems, Vno Neumann's theory of games, Bertrand Russel's theory of logical types, 'pathological' ocillations (yes-no-yes-no-yes, etc.) in a computer confronted by a Russellian paradox, and the notion that communication systems depend upon 'information' and not 'energy'. "
Gregory Bateson, The Legacy of a Scientistby David Lipset
"This following article is of a conversation between Stewart Brand, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and was originally published in the CoEvolution Quarterly, June 1976,...After the war they both were involved in starting the somewhat famous Macy Conferences (1947-53) that invented cybernetics. This interview begins with their joint recollection of that critical period." System theory, Bateson, and Mead
In her introduction to Angels Fear, Mary Catherine Bateson writes, "A great many people, recognizing that Gregory was critical of certain kinds of materialism, wished him to be a spokesman for an opposite faction, a faction advocating the kind of attention they found comfortable to things excluded by atomistic materialism: God, spirits, ESP, "the ghosts of old forgotten creeds." Gregory was always in the difficult position of saying to his scientific colleagues that they were failing to attend to critically important matters, because of methodological and epistemological premises central to Western science for centuries, and then turning around and saying to his most devoted followers, when they believed they were speaking about these same critically important matters, that the way they were talking was nonsense. . . Gregory wanted to continue to speak to both sides of our endemic dualism . . ." The Pattern Which Connects: About Gregory Bateson
Bateson and Neuro Linguistic Programming
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