AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Finally got around to the WS Cybernetics patreon episode and they namechecked me first thing, and the first topic is the intention (or lack therof) in meditation.
Cool to be namechecked! I think there's a bit of confusion around the meaning of "cybernetics", which can refer to a specific interdisciplinary field that thrived in the 1940s-1960s but is now largely moribund, or the more general transformation of society by electronic and digital technology, which started off before then and of course is still going strong. These aren't the same thing although they are of course closely related.
I learned recently that the field of artificial intelligence was created and named partly to put some distance between the founders and cybernetics (not sure if the differences were personal or intellectual, probably both). The cybernetics movement may have been just too weird for academia and all that sweet military funding.
The stuff about purpose in meditation
Cybernetics proper is more about self-control; how do organisms or systems autonomously control themselves.
Cybernetics as a weird science – too weird, which is why it sort of died off.
I dislike the conflation of cybernetics with technology, although maybe that's a lost cause. Like the example of Mark Zuckerberg screwing around the meaning of "friend" – I've written about this Omniorthogonal: Engineers of Human Souls and agree there is something creepy and awful going on there, and you can blame tech if you want, but I think its wrong to blame cybernetics.
Bateson was all about importing cybernetics into the human realm. He is mentioned in episode.
Humans are machines, sorry. Or – rather, they are machines in part and we should celebrate and investigate that part.
I was wondering when you guys would talk about the difference between JFM Catholicism and Zen in relation to the self.