Shared by https://x.com/male_leo_xxvi in a cybernetics chat

Why we don’t get complexity: Stafford Beer, ‘requisite variety’ and systems thinking. Claire Hartnell. https://open.substack.com/pub/clairejhartnell/p/why-we-dont-get-complexity-stafford?r=slo6&utm_medium=ios

Machine Intelligence is not Artificial – Part 7. Sean Manion. https://seanmanion.substack.com/p/machine-intelligence-is-not-artificial-d42?r=slo6&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Syst. Neurosci., 24 March 2022

Volume 16 – 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

Michael Levin 1,2*

1. Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States

2. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States

Abstract
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. TAME provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can increase during evolution. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale up cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. Considering classical and recent data from the perspectives of computational science, evolutionary biology, and basal cognition, reveals a rich research program with many implications for cognitive science, evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full

The Cybernetics Thought Collective (Digital Surrogates) | Digital Collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library https://digital.library.illinois.edu/items/82eaef70-29ac-0136-4d81-0050569601ca-d

On Our Own Terms: Systems change through Lived Experience Leadership. Morgan & Co. https://morganandco.au/project/on-our-own-terms/

Systems Practice as a Practice of the Middle Voice. Philippe Vandenbroeck. https://philippevandenbroeck.medium.com/systems-practice-as-a-practice-of-the-middle-voice-f89d81509e1e

Conceptual understanding is a myth – by Greg Ashman

https://substack.com/home/post/p-198345707

As launched on LinkedIn:

🔥 THE LAST REDOUBT OF COMPLEXITY THEORY is now live.

道 · 愛 · 革命 — The Way · Revolutionary Energy · Transformation of Things

📖 Full paper (HTML) → https://lnkd.in/eEQy_cKu

(6) Post | LinkedIn

Links to

https://markdownham88-crypto.github.io/the-last-redoubt-redux

[I have no way of evaluating this right now – it may be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius!]

[On day when I was in (virtual) attendance at a service for Oliver Westall (my dad’s best and lifelong friend: https://portal.lancaster.ac.uk/intranet/news/article/oliver-martin-westall-acss-frhists and evidently a truly good man) at Lancaster University, it can as a shock to hear of the death of Peter Checkland]

Søren Kerndrup gives a lovely and very fitting tribute here: In Memoriam: Peter Checkland (1930–2026)

(1) Post | LinkedIn

Here is Checkland himself, appropriately at the OR Society, from 2081:

A nice tribute to (more than) 50 years of Soft Systems Methodology (also OR Society):

https://www.theorsociety.com/ORS/ORS/Publications/Magazines/IOR/July-2025/SSM_Checkland.aspx

Systems explained, by Checkland also fittingly, on the OU website):

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/leadership-management/systems-explained-peter-checkland

A nice short summary of his ‘journey’:

His piece Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective

A piece I came across he wrote in 2021 [another echo of a world that is leaving us: my dad was a big Trad jazz man]

And other references here on syscoi.com – surprisingly tangential but perhaps illustrating his ‘background status’ in recent years, despite enormous influence [similarly, he has never been central to my personal thinking or practice – not explicitly, though implicitly hugely important]

Main article:

https://abaz786.substack.com/p/the-hand-that-thinks

On LinkedIn, Abdul posted/asked

New piece on Substack: The Hand That Thinks – complexity, causality, and the gap nobody manages.

Most critiques of complexity frameworks stop at the critique. This one tries to go further.

The argument in brief:
1) Senge’s famous line – “cause and effect are not closely related in time and space” – is self-defeating. It uses the reductive model to critique the reductive model.

2) Cynefin and Jackson’s SOSM and CSP are genuine advances. But even the most sophisticated pluralism, when organised as a process of methodological selection, leaves one question insufficiently examined: what kind of observer is doing the selecting?

3) Complexity is not a property of situations. It is a relational quantity – it exists between a system and a describing observer. Change the observer and you change the complexity.

4) Almost no methodology makes explicit the distinction between organising models (neurological – VSM, SSM, CSH) and structural models (anatomy and physiology – Enterprise Architecture, Agile, Organisational Design). The gap between them is where most transformation fails.

5) That gap cannot be managed with a one-off consultancy engagement that hands over to a unitary IT delivery. It must be perpetual. That is what the hashtag#ViableOperatingModel is designed to do.

Along the way: Maturana and Varela, Kauffman on Constraint Closure, Beer’s Triple Index, Gell-Mann on complexity as a relational quantity and a pragmatist reframing of what it means to develop as a practitioner.

And a Yorkshire verdict on where we currently find ourselves.

hashtag#EnterpriseArchitecture hashtag#DataMesh

The Hand That Thinks

Whilst general feedback is always welcome, I am especially interested in informed reactions to the specific hypotheses:

1) The organising model vs structural model distinction, how it could hold in practice
2) The Hand That Thinks metaphor as a way into the VSM
3) Complexity as a relational quantity and its dual implication for developing both situation and observer
4) The Systemic Performance Surface (not a dashboard) as the instrument that makes perpetual mediation operational
5) Domain-based VSM as a foundation for Data Mesh architecture

I am keen to follow up in individual conversations. This is not about right or wrong, or defending a particular approach. It is about developing understanding together.

I will tag a few people, who I believe are in the know, will push back, add to, or redirect where needed. These are people who live theory in practice and vice versa. If it helps a few others along the way, all the better.

WILL RUDDICK
MAY 16, 2024

(3) Cybernetics – Viable Systems Model – by Will Ruddick

April 19, 2022

Applying Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model to Decentralized Organization

[A good example of how ‘systems practice’ means many different things to different people. I would say this is a good example of many of the most important lineages present in what is generally called ‘systems change’]

How might we go about visualising lineages of systems practices?
A couple of years ago, us two – Saskia Rysenbry and Laura Winn – working together at the School of System Change – spent a few months in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the swirling energy of a post-cyclone summer season, we started to visually explore our understanding of how different currents of systems change thinking had come about, the lineages they have formed, and where the tools and frameworks of this field situate themselves in wider origins of practice. The image we created – beautifully drawn by Saskia – has now had the chance to be socialised with multiple groups of people, and we would like to share it more widely.

Lineages of Systems Practices – School of System Change

https://www.schoolofsystemchange.org/blog/lineages-of-systems-practices

Hannes Rollin

Nov 21, 2023

A Brief Introduction to Ultrastability | by Hannes Rollin | Medium