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In 1968, Gregory Bateson hosted a conference on 'the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation'. In his conference paper, he warned that human conscious purpose distorts perception in a way that obscures the systemic ('cybernetic') nature of both self and environment. The ensuing years have paid little attention to his analysis of both the observer and the environment as cybernetic systems whose systemic natures are dangerously opaque to human purposive thought. But his analysis is sounder than ever on the basis of scientific developments of the last 40 years. Recent adaptive systems formulations in ecological theory have underscored how ecological systems, because of their systems nature, can be vulnerable to the unintended consequences of human actions. Modern neuroscience has also delineated many of the limitations of conscious thinking Bateson warned us against. In fact, a new work on the cerebral hemispheres has pointed to epistemological biases, characteristic of the left hemisphere in particular, that fit Bateson's portrait of the biases of conscious purpose. It seems that Bateson's 42-year-old warning was prescient and relevant to our predicament today.

PurposeTo construct, from Bateson's social ideas ranging from Naven to the 1979 Mind and Nature, a Batesonian sociocybernetics.Design/methodology/approachThe paper considers Bateson's ideas about the delineation of systems by the observer, as they were taught to his classes in the 1970s and as they were expressed in the so‐called first, 1936 Epilogue to Naven, and shows how these ideas led Bateson to a skeptical, anti‐reificationist social cybernetics.FindingsBateson de‐emphasized system boundaries, instead seeing systems as creations of the observer and as arbitrary cuttings of a continuous web of cybernetic processes.Research limitations/implicationsBateson's argument in Naven, a work originally published in 1936 and partially based in a sociological tradition which also forms some of the roots of Luhmann's thought, is surprisingly relevant to contemporary issues in second‐order cybernetics and sociocybernetics.Practical implicationsBateson's skepticism about reification, and emphasis on the observer's role in the construction of system boundaries, can point a way for sociocybernetics to address those cybernetic systems which do not fit Luhmann's or Maturana's strict criteria for autopoiesis.Originality/valueThis paper attempts to show the sophistication and relevance of Bateson's social thinking to the field of sociocybernetics.

This article is written as a multisided dialogue intended to present a number of ideas about power. Some of these ideas are my own, expressed in a kind of evolutionary idiom of adaptation though they were partly developed in reaction to Foucault (and are far more indebted to Foucault and cybernetics than to contemporary evolutionist thinking). There is a deep irony in that my way of thinking is primarily rooted in the cybernetic anthropology of Gregory Bateson; however, he was deeply sceptical of the concept of power. My personification of him in this dialogue, as ‘Bateson’, demonstrates this scepticism and brings into the discussion other relevant ideas of his. The third participant in the dialogue, Mary Midgley, is included because her consideration of Hobbes’ ideas leads us to consider yet another, probabilistic, way of thinking about power.