There is a generalized history circulating on the Internet and in academic papers that Gregory Bateson was so wedded to first-order cybernetics that he did not fully appreciate the significance of Spencer Brown and the recursive logic that Spencer Brown introduced. It therefore fell upon Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana to take up the logical aspects of recursive forms in their conceptualization of autopoiesis, and make the big leap forward. Today, Maturana and Varela are often cited as the originators of the recursive view. In a sense this is correct. Varela did take up the mathematics of recursive forms over many years and Bateson did not. But the belief that they won the debate with Bateson over recursion (Dell, 1985, Capra, 1996) is suspect. This column will take the position that at minimum, the actual situation is far more complex, moreover there are good reasons for Bateson’s hesitancy in embracing the mathematics of recursion.

The Cambridge (UK) Declaration on Consciousness, proclaimed on July 7, 2012 at a Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, states that there is natural intelligence, and by implication, mind in nature. The declaration marks a significant shift from portraying animal agency through a mechanistic lens. Many years before Bateson had argued that the key to eliminating animal-human dualism lies in an understanding of communication processes, that is, recognition and investigation of an implicate order without which animate existence would not survive. The first part of this article will discuss how communication yields real world patterns to which natural intelligence responds. Bateson is supported in this argument by Ruth Garrett Millikan, the founder of Biosemantics, who also demonstrates how the grasping of natural signs in recursive relational patterns generates meaningful interactions. The second part of this paper concerns mapping of multiple levels of organic existence and how a notion of heterarchical order is linked to communication processes in and between these multiple levels. This important switch of reference stems from Bateson transposing Warren McCulloch’s ideas about distributed memory. Bateson transforms McCulloch’s technical (computer-oriented) insight into a means for mapping redundancy in levels of communication feedback. Recent publications by scholars influenced by Bateson’s approach explain how communication processes coordinate non-transitive distribution of multiple layers of organization into heterarchies rather than hierarchies (Bruni & Giorgi, 2015, 2016). They show why the importance of the notion of heterarchy, with its dynamic synchronicity, has grown in recent years, especially in respect of the way in which genetics interrelates to microbiotic, epigenetic and environmental levels of organization. In addition, Nomura, Murunaba, Tomita, & Matsuno (2018) argue that synchronicity requires an altered understanding of temporality in the plant kingdom. An important addition to our understanding of time concerns the inter-subjective timing of organisms, as they negotiate localized coordination. The perspectives of inter-subjective time is one which extends beyond its usual correlates of subjectivity and objectivity, and modifies these perspectives that, until now, have fostered dualism. A final consideration is Bateson’s move to diminish dualism through an understanding of holographic coding. Its resonance of downward causation permits communication to be informative in the whole econiche, so permitting re-entry of ecosystemic form in order to resist fragmentation and competition among its parts (Harries-Jones, 2016a). Wohlleben (2016) provides an empirical example of this Gaia-like performance.

Key words: analog-digital consensus, circadian clocks, heterarchy, holographic coding, intersubjective time, millikan’s natural signs, proto-cognitive appraisal, redundancy, synchronicity