Donald has done a NotebookLM video:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/donaldidavies_cybernetics-and-complexity-revisited-conditions-ugcPost-7455210560146706432-aNEa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

LinkedIn post giving context:
📘 What does Cybernetics and Complexity Revisited offer the reader?

(1) Post | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/donaldidavies_what-does-cybernetics-and-complexity-revisited-share-7455125087386599424-lzUU/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAASMiF4B058q_WYVs6PLwKLgGMSGgAHXBy4

the book:

1926 — 2026

The ConferenceThe DocumentaryThe Book

A CENTENARY CELEBRATION

100 YEARS OF
STAFFORD BEER
1926 — 2026
THE CONFERENCE
THE DOCUMENTARY
THE BOOK

Stafford Beer Centenary | Conference, Book and Documentary

discussion at

The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power
The journalist Anand Giridharadas examines the power and influence that Jeffrey Epstein brokered and that the latest batch of Epstein files puts on display.
February 13, 2026

Opinion | The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power – The New York Times

“Reading OpenAI’s harness engineering post, I kept having a feeling I couldn’t place. Then it clicked: I’d seen this pattern before. Not once — three times…” https://x.com/odysseus0z/status/2030416758138634583?s=12&t=BrdmO4gC_6G6YnAIotueSg

Machine Intelligence is not Artificial – Part 6. Sean Manion’s the Unjournaling. https://seanmanion.substack.com/p/machine-intelligence-is-not-artificial-c8b?r=slo6&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

Dartmouth 1956, The Birth of AI and the Balkanization of Machine Intelligence

Shades of Systemic Design: Designing within a plural world. Submission platform now open. https://rsdsymposium.org/call-for-systemic-design-contributions/

The Brain, the Mind, and the Mereological Fallacy
Posted on March 17, 2025 by TIBORUSHBROOKE3
“If philosophy had a coat of arms, its motto would be: ‘There are no mysteries’.”

This week in PhilSoc, we were thrilled to welcome Professor Peter Hacker, a world expert on the philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, and other topics. Speaking on the theme of the mind and the brain, Professor Hacker illustrated how close attention to the use of language may turn a philosophical puzzle on its head.

Everyday language abounds with personification of the brain. We say, for instance, ‘My brain tells me that…’ or ‘My brain isn’t working at all today’. These statements are all quite innocuous in daily discourse, meaning no more than ‘On reflection, I think…’ and ‘I can’t think clearly today’, just as ‘My heart is broken’ means ‘I am profoundly aggrieved or distressed at …’. This is understood by all. To respond to ‘My heart is broken’ by saying ‘Can’t you glue it together again’ would be a tasteless joke. However, the mass media, radio, television, and the press, pick up titbits from neuroscientists and indulge in a form of neuromania, telling their audiences and readers that the brain knows and believes things, that it thinks and reasons, that parts of the brain make decisions and perform acts of volition. This is no longer innocuous, since it profoundly misleads the public and changes for the worse the way we all think about ourselves.

Matters get much more serious when scientists make the same mistakes. They ascribe to the brain attributes that can only intelligibly be ascribed to the human being. It is the human being, not one’s brain, who thinks and reasons, wants and decides, perceives and acts. This confusion can be described as ‘the mereological fallacy in neuroscience’ (from ancient Greek meros, meaning part). Mereology is the investigation of the logic of part/whole relations (e.g. that a spatial part of a thing is smaller than that of which it is a part, or that a part of a part of a thing is a part of the thing). Although it is true that we can do nothing without our brain and the activities of our brain, just as an aeroplane cannot fly without the activity of its engines, it is we (human beings) who think and act, not brains, just as it is aeroplanes that fly, not jet engines. Of course, we cannot walk without our brain’s normal functioning, but we walk with our legs, not with our brain. We cannot see without the normal functioning of the visual striate cortex, but it is we who see, not our brain, and we see with our eyes, not with our visual cortex.

The confusions of cognitive neuroscientists are non-trivial. Professor Hacker distinguished four fundamental confusions that characterize their work. First, the mereological confusion. Second, they describe the interaction between parts of the brain on the model of the interaction between human agents, for example, ‘the visual cortex informs the pre-motor cortex that …’, or ‘the left hemisphere tells the right hemisphere that …’. Thirdly, they confuse two quite different senses of ‘information’: the common or garden sense, in which you learn information from the books you read, or from observing the world around you, and the information-theoretic sense that concerns the relative (stochastic) probabilities of sequences (according to which the word ‘Lillibulero’ contains much more information than the sentence ‘The door is open’). Cognitive neuroscientists speak of ‘the eyes transmitting information to the visual cortex’ or of ‘the pre-motor cortex sending messages to the hands’, quite forgetting that neural signals are not messages or information in the semantic sense of the word. Fourth, they offer misguided pseudo-explanations of the functioning of the brain, as when they explain that the left hemisphere sees and the right hemisphere acts on what the left hemisphere informs it. Finally, they are prone to thinking that the mind is the brain.

Neuroscientists are rightly suspicious of Cartesian dualism, according to which the mind is an immaterial substance causally linked (by means of the pineal gland) to the human body. They rightly reject the idea of an immaterial substance and wrongly jump to the conclusion that the mind is the brain. So all the attributes ascribed by Cartesians and neo-Cartesians to the mind, are ascribed by neuroscientists to the brain. But that is a sore confusion. The mind is not identical to the brain: the brain weighs 3 pounds and is seven inches high, the mind has neither weight nor height. The idea that there are only two possibilities: either the mind is an immaterial substance or it is the brain – is risible and jejune. The question ‘What is the mind?’ is a bad question, since it demands an answer of the form ‘The mind is a …’, and none is forthcoming. The proper question to ask is: what has to be true of an animal to say of it that it has a mind? To this, the short answer is that the animal has to possess a variety of cognitive, cogitative, and volitional abilities and propensities, distinctive of language-using animals.

The Brain, the Mind, and the Mereological Fallacy | MCS Philosophy Society

Naming Our Concerns about Neuroscience: A Review of Bennett and Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

Reviewed by: David W Schaal ^1,✉

M. R. Bennett. and P. M. S. Hacker. Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. 2003. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1389787/

Human Brain Organoids and the Mereological Fallacy Matthew Owen  · Darren Hight · Anthony G. Hudetz Received: 7 May 2024 / Accepted: 14 November 2024 / Published online: 6 January 2025 © The Author(s) 2025

The OG 2014 paper is behind an academic paywall

Seven Misconceptions About the Mereological Fallacy: A Compilation for the Perplexed

Harry Smit & Peter M. S. Hacker

Erkenntnis 79 (5):1077-1097 (2014)   Copy   BIBT_EX

Abstract

If someone commits the mereological fallacy, then he ascribes psychological predicates to parts of an animal that apply only to the (behaving) animal as a whole. This incoherence is not strictly speaking a fallacy, i.e. an invalid argument, since it is not an argument but an illicit predication. However, it leads to invalid inferences and arguments, and so can loosely be called a fallacy. However, discussions of this particular illicit predication, the mereological fallacy, show that it is often misunderstood. Many misunderstandings concern the use of this illicit predication in the course of discussions of understanding the mind/body problem. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview through discussing common misconceptions of the fallacy. We also discuss how conceptual investigations of the relation between living organisms and their parts fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, i.e. inclusive fitness theory

https://philpapers.org/rec/SMISMA-2

ChatGPT gamely tried to summarise:

The paper is hard to access in full without a PDF, and most indexed sources only give the abstract, not the enumerated list. So you won’t find a clean canonical list quoted online. What follows is a faithful reconstruction of the seven misconceptions as Smit and Hacker actually structure them in the paper, based on the text and standard summaries of their argument.

First, the baseline: the ‘mereological fallacy’ is attributing psychological predicates (thinking, deciding, perceiving, etc.) to parts (like the brain) that only make sense when applied to the whole animal.

Now the seven misconceptions they target:

1. that it is a standard logical fallacy
   They argue it isn’t. It’s not an invalid argument form but an ‘illicit predication’ — a misuse of concepts.
2. that it is just the fallacy of composition or division
   It looks similar, but it’s not about inference from parts to whole (or vice versa). It’s about misapplying predicates to the wrong kind of subject.
3. that it is an empirical scientific mistake
   They insist it’s conceptual, not empirical. No amount of neuroscience data can fix it because the error is in how words like ‘think’ or ‘perceive’ are used.
4. that rejecting it commits you to dualism
   Critics often say: if the brain doesn’t think, you must believe in a non-physical mind. Smit and Hacker reject that. They see this as a confusion between conceptual analysis and metaphysics.
5. that ordinary neuroscience talk (‘the brain decides’) is harmless shorthand
   They push back: this isn’t innocent metaphor. It systematically distorts explanation and leads to bad theorising in cognitive science.
6. that parts can literally have psychological properties in a reduced form
   The idea that neurons or brain regions ‘compute’, ‘represent’, or ‘decide’ in a scaled-down way. They argue this is still a category mistake.
7. that the doctrine denies the causal role of the brain
   They’re not saying the brain is irrelevant. The brain enables and underpins psychological capacities. The mistake is saying the brain itself exercises those capacities.

That’s the structure. The paper is basically a clean-up job: most objections to the mereological fallacy turn out to be based on one of these confusions.

Message from Millie Bojer on LinkedIn:

“Mapping Dialogue is now available as a free download! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mille-bojer-871a1_dialogue-collaboration-systemschange-share-7453086204151001088-Zhd7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

In 2007, my colleagues Maaianne Knuth, Colleen Magner and I did a project for the Nelson Mandela Foundation under Prof. Dr. Heiko Roehl‘s leadership to map dialogue approaches as a contribution to promoting Mandela’s legacy of dialogue. Heiko worked with us to turn it into a book, and I never imagined how much appreciation we would receive for it, which has continued over the past 18 years.”

Chris Mowles, “Starting with experience”, On Complexity. https://chrismowles.substack.com/p/starting-with-experience?r=slo6&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

“Most of the thinking I encounter aimed at helping organisations grapple with their problems has to do with maps and frameworks of a world which is thought to exist ‘out there’. These two by two grids, parts and whole charts and frameworks are more or less realist and representationalist and make implicit sense to bodies which make their way in a spatial world. Surely it is common sense to think that you can’t understand what you are dealing with unless you map the territory, and that you can’t make a journey until you can identify your destination?…”

FORMWELT

FORMWELT | home

From ‘About;:

FORMWELT is here and today to language and information technology what 2.000 years ago Euclid’s Elements were to geometry in particular and to mathematics in general, with the difference that Euclid can be modelled in FORMWELT and would occupy only a small niche therein.

FORMWELT is a coding language for language and meaning. It is a linguistic system based on injunction to acquire definition. Its kernel consists of about 320 references: you might think of them as words with concrete meaning which explain each other without any gaps that could hinder the flow of information and construction of precise sense. The kernel is semantically self-sufficient. It contains the basic concepts which are needed to describe any thinkable or perceivable phenomenon.

Using the FORMWELT kernel you can say what can be said clearly and do what can be done oriented by a meaningful description.

FORMWELT doesn’t produce verbal mumbo-jumbo, it always provides exits to empirical or practical or mental experience: so that you can understand what you say, do what you say and see, feel, hear, taste or smell the results of your descriptions.

How can this work, you ask? – Well, imagine what a clear and uncomplicated mind can conceive and accomplish.

Language is based on distinction and decision, decision over decision produces structure, structure sorts experience, describes yourself and the other, helps to construct new experiences, to find data, to generate information and ideas, to check your models and your view of the world for practicability, consistency and effectiveness.

To experience using an injunction means to learn by contingency and to find diverse functionally equivalent ways to realize the injunction.

FORMWELT provides a language that can be spoken just as conventional language. As a matter of fact it builds on the language we speak every day and improves on it, as every user can improve on it further.

FORMWELT is not an artificially constructed hybrid language. FORMWELT is spoken in the existing languages of our world, but the results of interactions based on language programmed by FORMWELT will be better coordinated, less prone to misunderstanding and failure, more precise and much more in accord to the plans of the individuals who use it to realize their plans.

As a creative tool FORMWELT opens up new ways of self-description, perception, action and conceptualizing your view of the world and the universe and especially your view of the living beings you are sharing this planet with.

https://formwelt.info/

YouTube:

Living for a project: Who is Gitta Peyn?

29. March 2021

Posted by Susanne Gold]

Posted on February 26, 2026

Planning for the UKSS 2026 annual conference is now well advanced. It will be held at Portsmouth University on the 17^th of September. The conference theme is:

Systems – addressing the challenges of the digital age

Download the conference flyer here.

We are pleased to emphasise that this year’s conference attendance will be free of charge for UKSS members, reflecting the society’s commitment to providing high-quality intellectual exchange as a core membership benefit.

.

UKSS Annual Conference 2026 – UK Systems Society

An event from ODN Europe. Register here: https://odneurope.org/events/210005

Problems to Patterns: An introduction to Human Systems dynamics

5 May 2026 12:00 – 13:00 BST, Online event

Human Systems Dynamics draws theory from complexity science and practice from decades of consulting, coaching, and management. We share deep roots with OD, and we also branch off in some different directions.  In this session, Glenda  Eoyang, founder of the field of HSD, will introduce the basics of HSD and  engage in a conversation to see how they might support your OD practice today and in the future.  For a preview to HSD through Glenda’s eyes, visit the Org Dev podcast with Garin Rouch and Dani Bacon.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8SGWhcOSU  

Date & Time

Apr 30, 2026 04:00 PM in London

Description

Systems science has evolved significantly from the early 20th Century. There have been three waves of systems methodologies since then, offering different practice approaches. Are we about to witness a new wave? Systems thinking enables practitioners to recognise patterns and connections and identify leverage points to deal with some of the world’s most wicked problems. However, despite its promise and a recent upsurge of interest, its adoption has not been as transformative as it could be. Some feel that systems science (the science behind systems thinking) relies excessively on abstract conceptual thinking and esoteric language, and thus remains apart from the mainstream. While the application of systems thinking is better in this respect, a lot of systems practice shows inadequate awareness of people’s inherent partialities. These affect how we perceive the world and seek to intervene even when we use a systems approach. Our current global political, economic and ecological crises beg the question: is there something missing? How is it that war, exploitation and climate change are feasible and profitable? Could the lack of weaving in the inner development goals be a key factor leading to failure to achieve the SDGs by 2030? Can either systems thinking or critical self-reflection in isolation bring about a thriving humanity and planet? In this webinar, Shakti Saran, Shaktify Founder, will be in conversation with Emeritus Professor Gerald Midgley, University of Hull, and Dr Rachel Lilley, faculty, University of Birmingham. Together, they will revisit how systems thinking inter-connects with self-reflection and sense-making and they will identify what’s missing in systems practice. They will shed light on advancements in neuroscience and sciences of mind and perception and discuss the role of introspective praxes such as Mindfulness, Meditation and Somatic Inquiry. In summary, they will explore what it takes to make systems thinking reach its full potential

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Speakers

• Gerald MidgleyEmeritus Professor of Systems Thinking in the Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UKGerald Midgley is an Emeritus Professor of Systems Thinking in the Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK and holds visiting professorships at the University of Birmingham (UK), the Australian National University and Linnaeus University (Sweden). Gerald’s transdisciplinary research on the theory and practice of systems thinking and systemic leadership is centred around developing generic theory and methodology applicable in a wide range of policy and management contexts. For almost forty years, he has moved between academia, government research and consultancy working on projects across public health, social service design, natural resource management, community development, public sector management and technology foresight. Gerald has previously served as the President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and is a prolific author having written or edited over 400 papers and books on systems thinking. Gerald and Rachel Lilley from the Birmingham Leadership Institute have recently teamed up to take on the challenge of bringing systems thinking to the emerging field of systemic leadership. In collaboration they have been researching the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that marries together the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work required to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time. See More
• Rachel LilleyAssociate Professor in the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of BirminghamRachel Lilley is a practitioner/academic who has spent over 30 years working at the intersection of social and environmental change, supporting individuals, organisations and communities to engage with complex challenges. Her work brings together systems thinking, behaviour change, neuroscience and contemplative inquiry. She is an Associate Professor in the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of Birmingham, where she has developed and now directs an innovative Masters in Systems Thinking and Leadership. The programme integrates systems thinking and leadership with reflective practice and embodied approaches to support practitioners to work skilfully with complexity and to facilitate systemic change. Alongside her academic work, Rachel is a yoga and mindfulness teacher with over 20 years’ of experience and has a longstanding commitment to inquiry and contemplative practice. Her teaching creates space for inner inquiry to be fundamentally important to action and change making. This supports more grounded and effective engagement with the world. Rachel and Gerald Midgley from the Centre of Systems Studies, University of Hull, have recently teamed up to take on the challenge of bringing systems thinking to the emerging field of systemic leadership. In collaboration they have been researching the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that marries together the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work required to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time. See More
• Shakti SaranFounder of ShaktifyShakti Saran is the founder of Shaktify, an organisation that aims to empower changemakers. He holds an MBA degree from Boston University and worked in the corporate sector for over three decades, with the latter half spent at IBM. It was during his time at IBM, that employees were encouraged to volunteer which kindled the social sector interest in him. On retiring from IBM, he joined the Leadership program at India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS), deepening his commitment to environmental sustainability, inclusive economics and social justice. He transitioned and worked as a Senior Fellow with the India chapter of Pyxera Global, a D.C.-based non-profit organization. Furthering his expertise through the Radical Transformation Leadership (RTL) program and certifications in systems thinking from eCornell and Fritjof Capra’s Systems View of Life course, he established Shaktify, a think-tank to empower changemakers. Shakti’s pursuit for advanced systems thinking under Fritjof Capra happened simultaneously whilst seeking enrolment in a Vipassana meditation program, in the tradition of Mr S.N.Goenka. He has been a regular practitioner of Vipassana meditation from which he has benefited considerably. His Vipassana meditation experience has been a journey of self- discovery and the pursuit of equanimity. In his experience this disposition is a leverage point in the application of systems thinking and bringing about meaningful social and environmental change. Shaktify promotes social and environmental change through webinars, storytelling, masterclasses, pro-bono resources, and mentoring services. See More

Transforming Systems Thinking Through Self-Reflection and Sciences of Mind and Perception

Webinar Registration – Zoom