The app for independent voices
After reading Bateson’s mediocre and meandering Mind and Nature (1979), I tried reading Ross Ashby’s mathematics-heavy and famous (within the space) An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Unfortunately, I found it unreadable - the British empiricist tradition he's working in is to reduce to what can be measured, formalize what can be formalized, while treating everything else as outside the domain of rigorous inquiry, which is structurally incompatible with a framework that treats somatic resonance as a primary epistemological track and that operates through structural analysis of qualitative phenomena.
The specific limitation of the mathematical reduction approach is that it can model the feedback loop but not what's flowing through it. Ashby formalizes that a system regulates itself against disturbance, that variety in the regulator must match variety in what's being regulated (his Law of Requisite Variety is a useful concept in the book, i.e. the principle is that a regulator can only control a system to the degree that the regulator's own variety matches or exceeds the variety of disturbances the system faces) but the formalism is blind to the qualitative content of what's being regulated and why.
Applied to my framework, the talmudic/kabbalah system which the upper elites uses to maintain control is precisely because its interpretive variety - pilpul's infinite flexibility at the application level - matches or exceeds the variety of situations they face, while the fixed doctrinal base keeps the regulator's own internal variety constrained enough to remain coherent. The Lurianic system is a high-variety regulator operating against a high-variety environment, which is what Ashby's law predicts would be necessary for sustained control. The competing Christian framework's lower interpretive variety - the privatio boni's binary of good and evil, the more rigid doctrinal base - produces lower regulatory capacity against complex environments, which maps onto my structural argument about why the Kabbalistic framework outcompetes Christian frameworks for elite purposes.
Bateson provided the map-territory epistemology and the logical types connection. Ashby provides Requisite Variety, but there is diminishing returns to this exercise. I do have Wiener’s also mathematics heavy Cybernetics and Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind to read on this track, although I suspect I may find more resonance in second order, less mathematics focused cybernetics writers such as Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana, where the observer is included in the system.