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Why We Need To Quit ‘Fixing’ The World: A Cybernetic Approach To Planetary Challenges

Essentia Foundation | November 20, 2025



Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, author and director of the Bateson Institute. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Nora about her work and that of her father Gregory Bateson, who was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Bateson’s notion of ‘double bind,’ for instance, helps to see how solutions we design on one level of a system (say, the use of pesticides to solve food shortage) directly form an existential threat on a different level (destruction of soil microbiome).

Expanding on her father’s work, Nora Bateson introduced the concept of ‘warm data’: information about the interrelationships within a complex system, which are contextual, relational, and multi-perspectival. And she argues that to avoid double binds we need to work with warm data, which is about meaning, instead of trusting solutions that come out of the syntactic reasoning of AIs.

The Bateson Institute: https://batesoninstitute.org/

Publications of Nora Bateson and Gregory Bateson: https://internationalbatesoninstitute.wikidot.com/

Nora Bateson’s books:
Combining (2021) : https://www.triarchypress.net/combining.html
Small Arcs of Larger Circles, Framing through other patterns​ ( (2016) https://www.triarchypress.net/small-arcs.html

Chapter marks:
00:00 Introduction
04:18 What is an ecology of mind?
05:58 Mind according to Gregory Bateson
07:44 On the boundaries of mind
09:32 Gregory Bateson’s work on cybernetics
12:20 How we treat existential problems like a broken car
15:37 Schismogenesis: how relationships break
18:48 How to recognize planetary feedbacks
21:26 What our widespread use of the word “to” illustrates
25:38 The implicit assumptions we pass on intergenerationally
28:06 Nora’s childhood with a father who didn’t buy into societal frames
32:05 The thing is not the thing…
33:17 What is a double bind?
40:11 Nora reads her poem “Mamma Now”
45:54 Our materialist approach to the polycrisis: meeting problems vs. matching problems
56:32 What is warm data?
59:40 Our “cold data” treatment of problems
1:01:53 Warm Data Labs
1:09:17 How do you get people to understand complexity?
1:11:47 — (no chapter title provided)
1:14:55 Nora’s critique of transhumanism
1:19:00 How to make it practical
1:26:49 Asking not “Who am I?” but “Who can I be when I’m with you?”
1:33:06 On Hardy’s lifeboat thought experiment
1:37:59 Signal vs. noise in how we think about problems
1:39:30 How to communicate warm data and complex systems thinking
1:43:00 Are you hopeful?

Footage used under fair use policy:
@DeepBlueDiscovery: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gnC_5VmuIB4
‘Cybernetics’ (1990), Dir. Edward Newstead): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeKxBkpXCBs

Copyright © 2025 Essentia Foundation. All rights on interview content reserved.

Written by Essentia Foundation

Comments

This post currently has 42 comments.

  1. @LambBasted

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Why can't transhumanism be a rapture? You find out what parts of the brain are involved in creating a sense of boundary – work well under way. Then you make a brain chip that eliminates sense of ego boundary while maintaining other functions – as demonstrated by a whole bunch of non-dual and enlightened types. Then you give everyone the chip and humanity enters heaven on Earth, maybe tazing them and strapping them down if they are unwise enough not to want it – because ego is contagious like a virus. And lo swords into ploughshares and a New Earth. The New Earth is a symbiotic relationship between carbon and silicon life forms. Solved!

  6. @Malarkeydo

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Absolutely fascinating conversation. I've already listened to it twice, and probably will again. Incredible perspective to consider.

    Thank you for bringing these types of discussions to the internet.

  7. @casey2806

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    When discussing complexity, Nora emphasises the difficulty of dealing with it. – It is all one. I frequently think of what we know and believe in science. The chair I am sitting on is 99% empty space. The Earth travels around the Sun. There are things that we know to be true, and yet our experience is otherwise. So why not we are connected, we are all one, but we experience seperation. We can't explain it, but there are many things we know to be true, but our experience would clearly suggest otherwise. Why not some of these other issues, like we are connected?

  10. @STUNGBYSPLENDOR

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    In practice Warming Data for 5 years. Starting with confinement. One day at a time. Unravels everything, everywhere, everyone.

    Warming Data, as Nora says, it's not a plan. It's a nourishing. Of dark soil. And deep ocean. NeuroAffectiCognitive relational intergenerational KINTSUGI & JUJITSU.

    Paraphrasing Alice on wonder- land :

    "How in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle". She notes, "It's no use going back to even a moment ago, because I was a different person then".

  12. @ketunpoika

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    The cost of creating an individualised being that would succeed in individualistic society is relationships to the past, and the future.

    This… this sentence crystallises so beautifully something extremely important. Something that I have been aware of and felt, but not been able to articulate.

    Thank you for this interview. To both of you.

  13. @Hawkeye-z7g

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    I'm sorry, but I can't handle it. Nora Bateson knows all the exact right things to say…. And? I can't handle the deep discussion about problems without presentation of appropriate solutions anymore. I've had enough. If anyone wants to talk solutions, they are absolutely abundant.

  15. @kevinlennonmusic

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Astonishing discussion. Inspiring, lucid, supremely wise. I had never heard of Nora before this video but I feel she has already become a beacon in the dark for me. A true teacher. A bringer of hope. Thank you thank you 🙏🏼❤

  21. @brendafosmire6519

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Nora Bateson is a wonderful commentator of these much needed expanded view of the human being and what it should or could mean to live on earth is all about.

    Warm data (vs cold data) to me sounds similar to Federico Faggin’s statements that real life is quantum and therefore cannot be captured as data. Warm data is interwoven and complex such that measuring or observing it changes it – quantum.

    This discussion was wonderful.

  22. @MattyP62618

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Sorry this one has lost me, it seems very much to be commiting the naturalistic fallacy, especially when Hans seems to inply that the use of pesticides post WW2 was in the main a bad thing. I think this modern worship of nature in the phenomenal sense isn't a good thing, or healthy. As Hobbes said, life in nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", which is absolutly still the case if one actually looks at the phenomenal natural world. I think as idealists, we should look to overcome nature, not take a step back and beatify it.

  23. @masterpep7218

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    A lot of profound thoughts that definitely work in real life for those who have discovered them for themselves.
    I can strongly relate to the parent-child communication and shortcomings there, much of this is cultural and inherited, so there is a blindness to the faults that are ingrained in what is taught through the generations.
    I also fully agree with the concept of the "double bind" dilemma and that one needs to get out of vicious circles by shifting the paradigm fully. You definitely cannot solve lasting problems with the very tools that created them.
    Some people are more lucky though by having outside help, others are hampered by either their echo chambers or simply because they don't have the resources to get out of a rat race.
    But for sure once awareness emerges, a lot of doors can open.
    I also think that when people are able to break through the habit of this double-bind "Stockholm syndrome" (which it often is, since people love to play victim as that takes away the responsibility to break through the routine), they realise how much more life has to offer and this can improve quality of life substantially, as it is liberating to feel empowered and having climbed out of a proverbial pit (or dead end street).

  25. @lukeskywalker7461

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Another double bind: The harder you work, the better the outcomes. The better the outcome, the more work is given to you. The more work is given to you, the more difficult it is to accomplish work tasks well, which leads to hard work leading to poor outcomes.

  27. @dtcarrick

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Dear Community,

    I would be grateful if someone could help me understand how to integrate this understanding with the Free Energy Principle of Karl Friston, such that in answer to the question of "where is the edge of the tree", can we use a Markov blanket to say "here is the boundary".

    I wonder if I'm misunderstanding that they're not in contradiction.

  29. @janet9513

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Deep meadowing has emerged from transcendence (meditation, stilling of the mental noise, and presence) in my experience. Thank you for this wonderful conversation. The double bind of our western so called civilised lives is dire.

  34. @bipolargamechanger

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    Great conversation. Eugenics will be happening in Canada March 2027. Medical assistance in dying for mental illness only. This will spread through the world and exterminate many people who live primarily through warm data. The sensitives who are crippled by a world based on reductionism. This will accelerate the polycrisis. Disposing of people will increase the stigma that anyone who isn’t “functional” should just die by MAiD.

  39. @oneom8158

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    This whole word isn't a noun, just like all its components, the world is in reality, a worlding… Noun as such never existed nor will it ever, because it would put a full stop to life as it is, wouldn't it… There's no existence, just existing. Now to figure out your place it it, is truly the whole game of this human life… lifing… so nothing nor anyone is alive, we are all just aliving.

  41. @gealdyrtheta6938

    November 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm

    There was a video you guys posted not long ago but I think it was removed, about remote viewing and psychic phenomenon, will it come back anytime soon?😢 I got super interested, didn't finish watching and then it was gone😢

Comments are closed.

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