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any reentrant structure might have its own form of consciousness. “Plexus,” at
the third level of recursion in figure 6.22, refers to various nervous plexuses,
concatenations of nerve nets, that can be physiologically identified within
the body. Beer regards these as homeostat-like controllers of physiological
functions. At the same time, he imputes to them their own form of “infosettic
consciousness,” remarks that it “is not implausible to identify the six 'spiri-
tual centres' which the yogi calls chakras with plexus activity in the body,”
and finally asserts that “knowledge
of the existence
of infosettic consciousness
within the other five chakras [besides the chakra associated with brain] is
possible to the initiate, as I attest from yogic experience myself” (Beer 1994b,
247). With this move Beer deeply intertwines his management cybernetics
and his spirituality, at once linking the subtle yogic body with physiological
cybernetic structures and endowing the recursive structure of the VSM with
spiritual significance, this double move finding its empirical warrant in Beer's
meditational practice.
Beer then moves up the levels of consciousness. At the fourth level of fig-
ure 6.22 we find “cerebrum,” the level of individual consciousness, which
Beer identifies in the subtle body with Ajna, the sixth chakra. Then follow
four levels having to do with social groupings at increasing scales of aggrega-
tion. “Neighbourhood” refers to the small groups of individuals that come
together in syntegration, and “it must be evident that the theory of recursive
consciousness puts group mind forward as the fifth embedment of conscious-
ness, simply because the neighbourhood infoset displays the usual tokens of
consciousness” (Beer 1994b, 248). From this angle, too, therefore, syntegra-
tion had a more than mundane significance for Beer. Not simply an apparatus
for free and democratic discussion, syntegration produces a novel emergent
phenomenon, a group mind which can be distinguished from the individual
minds that enter into it, and which continues the spiritually charged sequence
of levels of consciousness that runs upward from the neuron to the cerebrum
and through the yogic chakras. At higher levels of social aggregation, up to
the level of the planet, Beer also glimpses the possibilities for collective con-
sciousness but is of the opinion that practical arrangements for the achieve-
ment of such states “work hardly at all . . . there is no cerebrum [and] we are
stuck with the woeful inadequacy of the United Nations. The Romans did
better than that” (249).
The ninth level of figure 6.22, “cosmos,” completes the ascent. Here the
mundane world of the individual and the social is left entirely behind in yogic
union with “cosmic consciousness,” accessible via the seventh chakra, Saha-
shara, the thousand-petaled lotus. And Beer concludes (255):
