the late environmentalist, author, & philosopher
Published as Chapter 16 of The Way: An Ecological Worldview, originally published in 1992. This text is taken from the revised and enlarged edition, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998. « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » “In animal and human behaviour, trials are not chosen randomly.” Keith Oatley “Learning takes place not simply [...]
Or “Many paths to nonsense: information theory applied to the living world”. Will the proliferation of information technology really help us to solve the important issues we face today, or will it simply add to our already mounting problems? Goldsmith argues (in 1982) that the impending development of the internet and resulting “information revolution” will [...]
Scientists and philosophers – many of them sympathetic to the ecological movement – have seized on the Second Law of Thermodynamics and hailed it as the key to unravelling the secrets of the universe. But can the behaviour of the natural world really be understood through the law originally formulated to explain the workings of [...]
Appendix 10 of The Stable Society: its structure and control: Towards a Social Cybernetics, Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK, 1978 « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » If perception were a purely ‘mechanical’ process, environmental data would provide one with a very different image of the environment from that which we in fact ‘perceive’. This tends [...]
Appendix 8 of The Stable Society: its structure and control: Towards a Social Cybernetics, Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK, 1978. « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » The empiricist thesis is demonstrably false and that empiricism, or its modern version, logical positivism, should still be taught as gospel in our universities is truly scandalous. A few [...]
Appendix 9 of The Stable Society: its structure and control: Towards a Social Cybernetics, Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK, 1978 « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » Models or hypotheses are postulated. However, this does not convey very much information on the actual process involved; no more, in fact, than to say that they are simply [...]
Appendix 12 of The Stable Society: its structure and control: Towards a Social Cybernetics, Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK, 1978 « previous chapter · contents It cannot be denied that those scientific disciplines dealing with the simplest type of behaviour, in particular physics, have been extremely successful. However, as physics has developed, it has become ever less [...]
Appendix 11 of The Stable Society: its structure and control: Towards a Social Cybernetics, Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK, 1978. Originally published as “Subjective classifications and their definition” in The Ecologist Vol. 3 No. 1, as part of the Towards a Unified Science series. « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » Processes occurring at a relatively [...]
