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their edges, themselves inflected by discussions at one further remove. And
by the third iteration these inflections are traveling around the geometrically
closed figure, and there is the possibility that an earlier contribution returns
“to hit its progenitors in the back of the neck” (Beer 1994b, 13). This is what
Beer meant by reverberation: ideas travel around the icosahedron in all direc-
tions, being transformed and becoming progressively less the property of any
individual and more that of the infoset as a whole. At the end of the process,
each vertex has arrived at a final statement of importance (FSI), and these
FSIs are the collective product of the syntegration (Beer 1994b, 32-33).
Thus, in outline, the form of the syntegration process, and to put a little
flesh on what the products of such a process can look like, we can look briefly
at a syntegration held in Toronto in late 1990 (Beer 1994b, chap. 6). “The
group who came together were recruited mainly by word of mouth. . . . Thus
the Infoset was assembled in an unusually arbitrary way: we may call it such
a unity only because of its members all being drawn to the heading on the
poster: 'What Kind of Future do You Want?' ” (87). The first three of the SIs
constructed at the start of the syntegration were: 'God is a verb not a noun,'
'Each child spontaneously desires to develop responsibilities commensurate
with its abilities,' and 'Censorship is a personal issue.' ” In Beer's précis, the
first three of the FSIs, the products of the syntegration, were (97-98)
1.
Local Empowerment
: the need to push decision making downwards, especially
in the case of abolishing nuclear war.
2.
Law and Government
: the move from ownership to stewardship, control to
guardianship, competition to cooperation, winners and losers to winners alone.
3.
How to Make World Peace
: sovereign individuals acknowledge and accept the
responsibility of a (human) world social contract, towards environmental pro-
tection, security, and evolution of the planet.
What can we say about this example? First, it shows that syntegration can be a
genuinely dynamic and open-ended process: the SIs and FSIs were in no sense
contained in the original topic; they evidently emerged in the syntegration
itself. But what about the statements of importance themselves? They hardly
come as singular revelations, at least to scholars interested in such matters,
but, as Beer put it, “it could not be claimed that the FSIs . . . embodied major
new discoveries, although they may have done for some present. . . . [But]
they are hardly banal” (97).
This and similar experiences in other syntegrations led Beer to remark that
“amongst many others I have often claimed that in planning it is the process
