Ecology of Mind: A Cybernetic Approach To Planetary Problems

Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, author and director of the Bateson Institute. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Nora about her work and that of her father Gregory Bateson, who was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Bateson’s notion of 'double bind,' for instance, helps to see how solutions we design on one level of a system (say, the use of pesticides to solve food shortage) directly form an existential threat on a different level (destruction of soil microbiome). Expanding on her father’s work, Nora Bateson introduced the concept of ‘warm data’: information about the interrelationships within a complex system, which are contextual, relational, and multi-perspectival. And she argues that to avoid double binds we need to work with warm data, which is about meaning, instead of trusting solutions that come out of the syntactic reasoning of AIs. The Bateson Institute: https://batesoninstitute.org/ Publications of Nora Bateson and Gregory Bateson: https://internationalbatesoninstitute.wikidot.com/ Nora Bateson’s books: Combining (2021) : https://www.triarchypress.net/combining.html Small Arcs of Larger Circles, Framing through other patterns​ ( (2016) https://www.triarchypress.net/small-arcs.html Chapter marks: 00:00 Introduction 04:18 What is an ecology of mind? 05:58 Mind according to Gregory Bateson 07:44 On the boundaries of mind 09:32 Gregory Bateson’s work on cybernetics 12:20 How we treat existential problems like a broken car 15:37 Schismogenesis: how relationships break 18:48 How to recognize planetary feedbacks 21:26 What our widespread use of the word “to” illustrates 25:38 The implicit assumptions we pass on intergenerationally 28:06 Nora’s childhood with a father who didn’t buy into societal frames 32:05 The thing is not the thing… 33:17 What is a double bind? 40:11 Nora reads her poem “Mamma Now” 45:54 Our materialist approach to the polycrisis: meeting problems vs. matching problems 56:32 What is warm data? 59:40 Our “cold data” treatment of problems 1:01:53 Warm Data Labs 1:09:17 How do you get people to understand complexity? 1:11:47 — (no chapter title provided) 1:14:55 Nora’s critique of transhumanism 1:19:00 How to make it practical 1:26:49 Asking not “Who am I?” but “Who can I be when I’m with you?” 1:33:06 On Hardy’s lifeboat thought experiment 1:37:59 Signal vs. noise in how we think about problems 1:39:30 How to communicate warm data and complex systems thinking 1:43:00 Are you hopeful? Footage used under fair use policy: @DeepBlueDiscovery: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gnC_5VmuIB4 ‘Cybernetics’ (1990), Dir. Edward Newstead): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeKxBkpXCBs Copyright © 2025 Essentia Foundation. All rights on interview content reserved.