Since the Systems conference in Hull 24/26 March, I’ve been following-up many contacts & references, as well as planning whether or not to attend several future events over the coming summer. As a consequence I have dozens of browsers open and, after closing as many as were temporary, I’m left with a bunch of reading bookmarks:
Systems Thinking / Systems Writing? – I have a draft follow-up to my initial conference reflections “Of Elephants and Icebergs“, based on the notes I took, elaborating on the initial reflections I posted on LinkedIn.
Visual metaphors are often good conversation starters, but their content reifies well beyond their true, but limited, ontological and epistemic value in the real world. And being simple visual aide-memoires, they are #Dysmemic and spread their simple – but wrong – messages farther and wider than any actual good nuanced information can achieve. It will probably never see the light of day in its current form, since the more I added the more it looked like an outline and chapter headings of one of the books I’m trying to write – so I put my efforts there instead. Thanks to Stephen McCartney for the kick up the backside π
Iain McGilchrist – A couple of things happened that caused me to share McGilchrist references (and Solms references) concerning their integrations of neuroscience with psychology & psychiatry. The Objective with the Subjective, scientists take note.
One was my continued search for a copy of McGilchrist’s (1982) “Against Criticism“ – still no luck outside the British Library – but I keep hitting this contemporary (1984) review / critique of it, so I thought I better save the link and read it one day.
The other was a post from Ben Taylor on Mastodon – a comprehensive and pragmatic systems thinker (and practitioner) I have lots of time for – where he suggested he shared an opinion of McGilchrist with Decoding the Gurus – Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne discussing McGilchrist. Sadly, I’ll not be able to stick the whole two hours since the opening 10/15 mins is ad-hominem smearing by association as they joke about him between themselves and belittle his qualifications and experience, and his Oxford-don-ish leather furniture in oak-panelled rooms in his Isle-of-Skye retreat from his decades-long intellectual efforts.
They claim to have read both his books Master & Emissary and Matter With Things, though only as prep for this dialogue apparently. Almost all their chat is about recent interviews, especially with a range of “spiritually interested” parties. Ben smells “slippery pseudoscience” and can’t therefore trust McGilchrist, even though he’s not read McGilchrist either. But he’s trusting those two babbling chimps π ?
My response was to suggest starting in good faith with the good science and professional credentials at face value – the science is thoroughly referenced – and recognise that there is more than science here too. In my own most comprehensive review – and indeed in his own pre-publication editorial reviewers – his chapter “The Sense of the Sacred” was highlighted as content that might get negative reactions from his scientific audience. I’ll say! There’s been tons of dialogue about God and McGilchrist since. In summary Iain’s work is “good science” where it’s science, and “more than science” where it’s not, but nowhere is it “pseudoscience”.
Systems Thinking follow-up from Birmingham 2025 – Chris Chase shared a post from a few years ago, and we chatted in a FB-Messenger channel, about the work of Barry Kort being used by Eric Rangell. “Burnt Umbrage” being the name of Kort’s Google Knol. I latched onto it because there was a strong thread on emotions in learning being a matter of “Cognition, Affect and Learning” rather than “rationality” – echoing exactly Mark Solms and the idea that knowing and wilful consciousness is “affect all the way down”. (As with McGilchrist – scientists need to “Cross the Rubicon” with Solms to see the value of the subjective non-science aspects as beyond objective science, but not pseudoscience.)
Arithmocracy β Anthony βTasβ Tasgal – a link from LinkedIn (I’ve lost) referred to the idea that one problem is that maths, arithmetic particularly, is too easy and therefore dominates any more subtle human values in our collective decision-making. Where I started 26 years and more ago. The memetic problem – #Dysmemics – amplified by short-form / speed-of-light media comms. Story-telling over rational processes.
Daniel Ari Friedman – Before Pragmatism Had a Name: William Blake’s “America A Prophecy” Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology. Daniel of ISSS 2025/DC Systems Knowledge Base etc AND of the “Active Inference” Institute – incidentally based on the work of Solms’ collaborator Karl Friston. The best current systems thinkers are pragmatists in the respectable sense of the word.
Pirsig-related author Edward Brennan made contact regarding his book “Just Exactly Perfect”. The RPA may review, but I may obtain and read anyway?
Pirsig and Root Cause – no idea where I spotted this, but the “Root Cause” phrase jumped pout at me alongside the Pirsig interest. The point in “(Complex Adaptive) Systems Thinking” is that there is no such thing as a root cause in any causal chain when we are dealing with complex (adaptive, living, human, eco) systems, all causes being emergent.
And last but by no means least – my hero – Dan Dennett. A 2026 MIT Press collection of papers on the topic of “Real Patterns in Science and Nature” after Dennett (who died in 2024).
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[Desktop Cleared!]
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