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. My draft post 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 😉
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. Read it. It’s only one page of a multi-page review – and it engages in the kind of analytical critique the book is “against” 🙂
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 🙂 ?
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”.
[PS: Ben followed-up with comments on Mastodon, so I owe him further replies.]
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 — Anthony ‘Tas’ 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. I’ve ordered the Blake originals (America & Europe) and started on Daniel’s paper – all 83 pages(!) – it starts:
The Unlikely Dialogue Between Prophecy and Empiricism
At first glance, William Blake (1757–1827)—the visionary poet-painter who conversed with angels, denounced Newton, and declared “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”—seems utterly remote from the hard-headed philosophy of action and inference that Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey launched in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an ocean away and a half-century after Blake’s death. Blake was a Romantic mystic; the pragmatists were post-Darwinian naturalists. Blake attacked empiricism as “Newton’s sleep”; the pragmatists embraced “the empiricist attitude.”[Peirce, 1877] Blake prophesied in illuminated etchings; Peirce formalized in symbolic logic.And yet the distance collapses under examination. Both Blake and the pragmatists mount a sustained assault on the same philosophical target: the spectator theory of knowledge—the Cartesian-Lockean picture of the mind as a passive mirror or dark chamber receiving impressions from an external world. For Blake, this is the sin of Urizen, the tyrannical Reason-God who “closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”[Blake, 1790] For Dewey, it is the core error of Western philosophy from Plato to positivism, the assumption that knowing is contemplating rather than doing. For Peirce, it is the fatal conceit of Cartesian foundationalism—pretending “to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”[Peirce, 1877]
This manuscript argues that Blake’s visionary epistemology and American Pragmatism share not merely superficial affinities but deep structural convergences across six qualitative dimensions:
- Inquiry as Active Engagement
- Truth as Living Process
- Experience as Transaction
- The Social Constitution of the Self
- Anti-Representationalism
- Synergetics and Pragmatic Geometry
[Pirsigians see ourselves as following the James / Dewey / Peirce US pragmatist tradition – against that “church” of the “tyrannical god of reason”. I’ve got my enlightened modern reading of Blake from Jacob Bronowski. Fascinating.]
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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PS – BIG HISTORY – Another piece of homework – promised reading, left dangling on WhatsApp:
Big History is a movement that started (in 2011) after my own research journey, and which had passed me by until last year when some Pirsig enthusiasts noted shared interests in applying thinking to our 21st C existential problems. All good.
“Short-termism” in socio-eco-economic decision-making is well recognised problem, but of course “evolution” as the basis of all long-term change processes – understanding how things change going forward and how things came to be the way they are – “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” – are givens here, from the 20th century.
Dennett and “Darwin’s dangerous idea” throughout cosmo-bio-socio evolution has always been the driver, and The Long Now already prompted thinking of dates in terms of long future timescales- beginning of infinity – for sustainable practices and possible futures. (And of course, Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality is already framed on levels of evolution from physics through biology to the socio-intellectual.)
So what is there in Big History that’s different or distinct from what we’re all already doing? What’s new / what have we missed?
Big History was coined in 1989 by David Christian, but it was mid to late 2000’s that his talks were picked-up by Bill Gates and from 2011 it was a project, a funded foundation focussing on school education. That had passed me by.
I started by reading Christian’s (2018) “Origin Story” – from Big Bang to socio-economic globalisation and … what next. Not surprisingly cover blurbs from Gates and Rovelli – but not (Long Now’s) Eno? As I say, ever since Darwin, most popular science authors have told the same story – the history of almost everything, anyone?
My critique of Origin Story is really one of omissions – covers the stories you’d expect in the history of “Life, the Universe and Everything”. Douglas Adams does get one mention, but just a joke from “The Restaurant and the End of the Universe”, Carl Sagan too, but being American, there’s no Ken Clark (Civilisation) or Jacob Bronowski (Ascent of Man). When it comes to science and psychology, it’s very very thin and 20th century. Not found anything to recommend it so far.
Anyway, apparently what I should be reading is the latest work of Barry Rodrigue:
Big History—A Study of All Existence
Part 1: (2022) A World Connected
and
Part 2: (2023) Toward Global Symbiosis
(Barry Rodrigue also blogs more general interest material.)
Bookmarked!
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Another tangled collection of links:
As much as anything, it’s the timing of various connections here, rather than the content per se. I rave about Dennett, McGilchrist and Solms, but have several other sources that get many mentions, even if I’ve not mentally recorded them stacking up over the years.
A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s (1944) “What is Life?”, I was prompted by reading Daniel Friedman (above) to pick-up Schrödinger’s (1954) “Nature and the Greeks” and his (1961) “Science and Humanism” (He died 4 Jan 1961?). (Interestingly that spans the early Macy conference cybernetics and systems activities, but he wasn’t personally part of that.) Fascinating in itself.
Next to Schrödinger on the shelf was Bob Ulanowicz (2009) “A Third Window” – a name I remembered but couldn’t recall reading / reviewing the book and indeed there is no note of me reading it here in the blog, despite several mentions of Ulanowicz. So I picked it up to read last night.
It includes a glowing and detailed Foreword by Stuart Kauffman of (2008) “Reinventing the Sacred” which I did write about. Ulanowicz and Kauffman very much aligned on the emergent “more than reductionism” agenda. No mention of Ulanowicz anywhere by McGilchrist and just a single mention of Kauffman (an old 1995 paper) in (2021) TMWT. But not in his chapter “The Sense of the Sacred”. Kauffman mentions “non-ergodic” in his Ulanowicz foreword. It was Kauffman that promoted Ergodicity as a hidden concept in his 2017 Edge Question contribution –my first foray into (non-)ergodicity. I do need to re-read both Kauffman and Ulanowicz!
But the nagging doubt was I had Ulanowicz references before all of this. It will take some digging through old references and internet link-rot, but it was Nobel-prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson (and Henry Stapp) writing about Eastern alternatives to fundamental physics, right back to 2001 in Cambridge which led me back to Pirsig / ZMM references – even though they didn’t explicitly reference him AND which first referenced and put me onto investigating some Ulanowicz papers (2001/2). Mind boggling.
95% of my research was established in those first few post-9/11 months of 2001 and 2002 and here I am in 2026 with only the blog to show for it! Onwards and upward.
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