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Introduction

If you follow this website to the end, I hope you will feel that it's message is fairly straight forward, maybe even self evident, but in order to arrive at this point it is necessary to look at some principles from Systems thinking and Computer Science. We will also be taking a few detours through Psychology and Religion.

These seemingly disparate fields often have striking correlations. For instance Behaviourist Psychology and Buddhist Philosophy are talking about the exact same phenomena, yet Behaviourists and Buddhists never talk to each other. Again many Therapies have the same aims and the same values and yet because of the convoluted and jargon ridden language they use it is almost impossible to see the comparisons. In order to appreciate the similarities and connections one has to reveal something of the principles that lie behind all these disciplines.

It seems that progress can only be made if a common description can be derived that is applicable in all fields. This description cannot rely on the jargon filled or parochial approaches of each individual field, but needs to be derived from a separate and less value-laden discipline such as the engineering sciences.

Even thirty years ago the notion of being able even to look at these apparently contrasting disciplines as some sort of whole field of knowledge would have been considered impossible, not to say ridiculous. The emerging discipline of 'Systems Thinking' or 'Systems Modeling’ has been, since the 30's and 40's, gradually making this notion acceptable, but it is only within the last two decades that Systems Science has become rigorous enough to possibly enable a robust model of human awareness to be formulated.

To this end this site is divided up into three main sections, The Easy  Bit, The Hard Bit and The Interesting Bit.

The Easy Bit

This starts with an historical summary of previous attempts to draw up an integrated picture of human experience / awareness and gives you a feel for where we are going with this. We describe seven levels of awareness which make up the core of our model. However, it is only by understanding how information flows between these levels that we get a proper picture of their function. This is where the hard bit comes in.

The Hard Bit

This introduces various concepts and theories about how complex systems, such as a human, develop and control their functions and how the role of information exchange is crucial to this.

The Interesting Bit

The Interesting Bit documents the explanatory uses of this model when applied to some currently confusing phenomena, and discusses where to go next with our new model of human awareness.

It is possible to miss out the hard bit and still understand the terms that are employed in the interesting bit. It is also possible to miss out the hard bit and still be stimulated or entertained by what comes after.

This site attempts to define the key processes that when blended make up human awareness, and which when fully blended may allow us to become ‘Wholly Human’. It is the first phase of the creation of a logically consistent and predictive model which if sufficiently rigorous may be algebraically defined and/or computer simulated.

We shall discuss something of this modeling process next. Or you could just skip to The Easy Bit.

W. Ross Ashby 1903 -1972

Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.

His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential.