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Rob Ebsary and Gregory Bateson
Posted by Tony on 5th July 2009 at 23:09:52
Back in the early days of PICA Pty Ltd when we were still trying to be a development company before desktop publishing opportunities squeezed us into the third party distribution business model, Rob Ebsary connected with us at a trade show. Before long he was heading up a small development team working on a Mac OS port of Sun's Network-extensible Window System (NeWS).

As with Keith Henson who we were to meet through his a parallel NeWS porting project in San Francisco, I connected with Rob at many levels. He was particularly keen on Maturana's conception of autopoiesis, the idea of a system maintaining identity by continuing to produce itself, which my colleague Bill Hall uses in his work on organisation knowledge management.

Twenty years ago, Rob was even more keen on Gregory Bateson's views, but it took me years to get around to reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind and until now to tackle Mind and Nature. It was clear to me after the first book that Bateson's diversified life experience gave him a better understanding of how the world works than anybody else has managed to record. Whole pages of the 30 year old second book say precisely what I would want a wider world to know today.

Rob eventually found himself a niche within the pioneering Social Ecology department that evolved as Hawkesbury Ag College morphed into the University of Western Sydney. I caught up with him there while working on some of our education technology policy consultancies in the 1990s, but when I went looking for him again via the net in the early naughties, his UWS colleague Vladimir Dimitrov informed me that Rob had passed away, maybe as much from the loneliness that this deep understanding can bring if you let it as from the pipe that was never far from his lips.

So the challenge remains as to how we might get younger, brighter people started on this journey without the default price of negotiating two personal crises that was identified in Marcia Salner's 1986 paper that I often refer to. I remain hopeful that outcomes of my current round of cellular automata research will have a role to play in making emergence easier to properly internalise, maybe even the difference that makes a difference.

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