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Figure 6.22. “Theory of recursive consciousness.” Source: S. Beer, beyond Dispute:
the invention of team syntegrity (New York: Wiley, 1994), 253, fig. 14.2.
however, that this truncation had much significance for Beer personally; it
seems highly likely that the VSM's recursive structure was always spiritually
charged in Beer's imagination—that again in this respect the mundane and
the spiritual were continuous for Beer. And in Beyond Dispute , the trunca-
tion was explicitly undone, as shown in figure 6.22, displaying nine levels of
recursion, running from individual neurons in the brain, through individual
consciousness (“cerebrum”), up to Gaia and the cosmos. Chapter 14 of Be-
yond Dispute is a fascinating cybernetic-political-mystical commentary on
these different levels, and I can follow a few threads as illustrations of Beer's
thought and practice.
One point to note is that while the labeling of levels in figure 6.22 is secular,
at least until one comes to “Gaia” and “cosmos,” Beer's discussion of them is
not. It is distinctly hybrid, in two senses. On the one hand, Beer accepts current
biological knowledge of the nervous system, as he did in developing the VSM,
while, at the same time, conceptualizing it as a cybernetic adaptive system;
on the other hand, he synthesizes such biological knowledge with esoteric,
mystical, characteristically Eastern accounts of the subtle body accessible to
the adept. The connection to the latter goes via a cybernetic analysis of con-
sciousness as the peculiar property of reentrant structures. 66 The human brain
would be the paradigmatic example of such a structure (containing an astro-
nomical number of reentrant neuronal paths), but Beer's argument was that
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