Angels Fear Revisited: Gregory Bateson's Cybernetic Theory of Mind Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Abstract

Gregory Bateson intended his posthumous book Angels Fear as an approach to the scientific explanation of natural phenomena in the living world based on cybernetics that would not be so narrowly mechanistic that it triggers a fundamentalist reaction. This issue is newly urgent in the contemporary context of global religious conflict, resurgent fundamentalism, and the intelligent design debate. A redefinition of mind in terms of process and organization sufficient to analyze both evolution and learning, and an application of the Russellian theory of logical types to explanatory systems are central to his approach.