In contradistinction to pattern, which is connected to notions of order, redundancy, and organization, entropy refers to disorder, randomness, and muddle.

A class is a different logical type, a higher level of abstraction, than the members it classifies: The class of “all books” is itself not a book; the name of a thing is itself not a thing, but a classification of it.

Considering cybernetics to be “the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years,”10

In a sense Bateson plays host to the other two, despite the fact that he never wrote about Oriental philosophy and had serious reservations about the whole enterprise of therapy. Common to all three is an awareness of, and a sensitivity to, levels of context and meaning, and an understanding of how these levels interconnect in intricate and often

The Taoists and Buddhists were perhaps the first to recognize that in the marking of a difference, the boundary that separates the two sides of the created distinction necessarily connects them.

Douglas Flemons is, in fact, a practicing Taoist, a systemic therapist, and a cybernetic epistemologist (not to mention that he is also an accomplished juggler!).