[igravious]

Would you also consider then:

_The Laws of Form_ by George Spencer Brown,

Anything about logic by Gotthard Günther :) (He's a rare bird.)

_Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living_ by Maturana and Varela

Anything by Niklass Luhmann about social systems: the economy, mass media, art, functional differentiation, … He was a student of Talcott Parsons

Norbert Wiener, _Cybernetics: Or Control And Communication in the Animal and the Machine_ and _The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society_

_An Introduction to Cybernetics_ by W. Ross Ashby

McCullogh and Pitts (You mention Minsky but not these dudes.) _A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity_

Basically, most of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberneticist

? :)

[alankay1]

Sure. Just to remind that the list was for people in business -- they were quite intelligent, had college degrees, but were not well read or "broad". They were very goal-oriented, and I think they did not use school or college for "general education". I tried to pick books that would be assessable and useful for them.

A lot of the books you mention were listed in the Whole Earth Catalog, and were favorites at PARC.

Especially "Laws of Form".

And some of the other "Cybernetics" circle books (Bateson et al was part of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, etc.) Both Maturana and Varela were around in those times as well.

Minsky was a huge fan of Warren McCullogh and Walter Pitts.