I want to cultivate a better, more principled understanding of how ecologies function—both “ecologies of mind” in the bateson sense (cf Gregory Bateson - Steps to an Ecology of Mind, but also natural ecologies. One of the books I’ve been reading to inform this is Biocivilisations.
- 2nd law of thermodynamics - “The second law may be formulated by the observation that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, as they always tend toward a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. An increase in the combined entropy of system and surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, often referred to in the concept of the arrow of time.” (Wiki)
- Biodiversity (and technodiversity), see the recently published Cybernetics for the 21st Century:
The foundation of ecology is diversities, since it is only with biodiversities (or the co-existence of multiple species, including all forms of organisms, even bacterial) that the ecological system can be conceptualized. To discuss the ecology of machines, we will need a different notion in parallel to biodiversity, which I call technodiversity.
From Gregory Bateson - Steps to an Ecology of Mind:
- Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits.
- “Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs.” (Foxman and Bateson, 1973, p. 502)
- Let us con sider for a moment the question of whether a computer thinks. I would state that it does not. What “thinks” and engages in “trial and error” is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines be tween man, computer , and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are line s across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. They are not boundaries of the thinking system. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.
- our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop —and as they are developed by the (ecologi cal) process of their propagation.
- “If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.” (Foxman and Bateson, 1973, p. 525)