A business professional recently asked me to define “Ecology-of-Mind”…
Hi Brian,
Nice blog comment. I am not familiar with Google wave yet but it sounds interesting. I am very interested in further understanding your thoughts about how we can work with technology that helps us to realize and represent our true self more effectively to others while helping us in the “yearning” area to work and communicate more effectively with others on our team or that have a common interest or goal. Many of today’s social networking site like facebook and myspace currently fall short in this key department but I’m sure they will all evolve based on user feedback.
What is your definition of “Ecology of Mind”?
Grant,
In a complex nutshell (sorry) my interpretation of “Ecology-of-Mind” as a movement that affects each of us personally, our families, society, why and how we make money in the future, etc… concerns a framework bounded by three synergistic assumptions-as-realities:
1) The design and the development of technology is innately motivated by the design and function of the human brain.
2) This motivation is founded on our innate and natural need for a certain Mind-to-Mind and Minds-to-Minds and Mind-to-Minds quality of human connection and working and life relationships… that “quality” that motivates the mind to create technology to better connect each of us to the other as potent partnerships and collectives thereof. A “naturally harmonic ecological system of minds”, a certain optimal global connectivity as human tapestry exists today, everyday and right now. This “EcoMind potential” is constantly and innately motivated to discover and produce fuller and more amazing human synergies – sooner, with less friction or barrier, more often, and maintain each for its fullest natural time.
3) The only element of the equation gone under-developed is us, our innate Self. The idea of a human being living their natural gifts from the get go. Not what we have done or do now but what we are born to do. This is the question we are considering now as a system of minds, led unknowingly by a world of minds, as we create technologies and software that helps us better known and see our innate, natural, real or TruSelf. A scary proposition really. Imagine if you failed at being all of you?
This is “The Great Yearning” we all have as a sentient a species. To be part of a potent web of meaningful work and people to do it with… to be unique and make a significant difference with our gifts, our nature, our Self.
This is, I believe, the most fundamental of all forces of human nature – outside of more essential human needs for food and shelter – to YOUniquely create and to do so with others. To evolve. The path is not without curves or obstacle.
An Ecology-of-Mind, if it were real, would demand the discovery, creation, nurturing, effective management and quality of human synergy founded on the clarity of each gifted human Self within the system.
It is the technology, software really, that moves us to insights and action about our Self that is my work…
We haven’t a clue really because we have yet to see this quality of human resonance and human connectivity and purposeful work output in action.
Those of us that have been on great teams know… they have been searching for the fix ever since, but it is more than this. Our awareness of our gifts is a huge step. Heck, an awareness of the fact that we have insights at the moment of insight itself is a huge shift in consciousness.
The proof of novelty. If I asked you to describe your innate and natural Gifts… you would be stuck.
The day you can and everyone else can – and we find that this way of objectively defining our innate Self’s is the new foundation of our dynamic and evolving online Profile – is the day we are connecting in ways we could not even imagine. And I imagine, it is this same day that we are all, as a world of people, resting a bit easier.
To date we have focused on all the various forms of ecology in the last 30 years, especially the last 10 years, all but the one most important to a truly self-sustaining and prosperous humanity. The Ecology-of-Mind is that last undiscovered country, natural resource gone unmanaged, fully developed, smartly maintained and fully funded.
It has been coming and will be coming now more like a Tsunami… big huge swells of evolving change.
Written by JohnBrian
October 15, 2009 at 11:08 am
Posted in "Ecology of Mind" Movement - Defined, New Social Movements, New Technologies
Tagged with ah-ha, aha, confluence, creativity, define, eco mind, eco systems, ecological, ecology of mind, emergence, evolution, evolving, evolving patterns, global convergence, human evolution, human mind, human-systems developmental, individual evolution, individuality, innovation, interpretive Self, mind, representations, self creative, self generative, self representations; social connectivity, social networking, social networking metric, social science, social systems, socnet metrics, synchronicity, synchronistic, system evolution, the churchill club, uniqueness
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Ecology of Mind 
It’s interesting to see how the concept ‘ecology of mind’ has changed…the phrase as used by Gregory Bateson, its originator, must have been 1975 or earlier, is very different from the way you are using it in your post. For Bateson, “minds” are self-regulating systems that process difference, i.e. they show mental characteristics, and the way these systems interact constitutes an ecology…some survive longer than those that do not survive quite as long, etc. Your definition seems to be entirely divorced from that conceptual framework.
Veronika Dikoun
June 19, 2011 at 12:00 am
Hello Veronika, Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
In reply allow me to point to the opening Wikipedia quote on the “metalogues” as they relate to the original “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” by Gregory Bateson:
“‘The book begins with a series of metalogues, which take the form of conversations with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. The metalogues are mostly thought exercises with titles such as “What is an Instinct” and “How Much Do You Know.'”
My work speaks directly to the questions of “instinct” but I use the terms “gifts and dispositions” speaking to the innate and natural basis of an individual human “Self.” The interpretive defining of our “Self” over one’s lifetime, which I see as a form of micro-evolutionary process, is IMHO the next phase is bringing ecology-of-mind into the world as a tangible and action-able living process for human beings in everyday life. Without coherence of Self, based on our innate-ness, there is little human synergy in the eco-system called mind. Without human synergy there is very little expressed potential and therein value… there is, in effect, very little humanity in this ecosystem of minds. My work focuses on the self-generation of innate synergies and the objectifiable and daily-living value in the human-being ecosystem filled with uniquely disposed and gifted human minds.
Next, “How Much Do You Know” is very much aligned with the same question. I see my work as merely a natural extension and necessary augmentation of Bateson’s with a focus on neuropsychology as an underpinning influence as well as quantum physics, namely the work of Karl Pribram and David Bohm added to that of Bateson. Bateson was fully aware of Pribram and Bohm’s work in the mid-to-late 70’s on “Holonomy”, and yet choose for whatever reason not to include this in the development of his own thinking which is interesting as the parallels are striking. But this is not unusual as you may know among academics. The work in “autopoiesis” by Maturana and Varella is also a founding body of knowledge within my own evolutionary-process-models and thinking.
Bateson’s work also occurred in parallel with that of Maturana and Varella and their “originating” ideas on autopoiesis or self-regulating biological systems (“within” systems self-regulation and self-creation): Varela, Francisco J.; Maturana, Humberto R.; & Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. Biosystems 5 187–196. One of the original papers on the concept of autopoiesis. I use the autopoietic thinking quite a bit in my own process. Maturana and Varela had no issues with seeing the natural connection to Pribram and Bohm’s work in Holonomy. I am simply working at taking the next step and applying this to human beings directly.
There is a natural evolution to all things in terms of our understanding and this evolution should lead us to better apply the early work from the abstract to the daily living and this process can take many human generations of time to become “real” within the thinking and acting lives of humanity. In the meantime the work is further defined and grows with knowledge from other fields as well as with the social-psychological evolution that occurs in parallel, e.g. social media, mobile, etc.
For me, it is about distinction but only so far as this is the basis for human complementarity; and the awareness of uniqueness which in turn produces within and between each of us natural resonances. These innate human resonances are the foundations to powerful human synergies between individuals and groups, company’s and countries and so on. Indeed, in the end, all of my work points to the evolution of human and social synergy, a form of more coherent wholeness over generations of time and I see this as where have been going since the emergence of our frontal lobes.
JohnBrian
June 24, 2011 at 8:34 am