Abstract
In 1969, IBM hired the pop Zen guru Alan Watts to teach its engineers about the spiritual dimensions of the new science of information. The celebrated author of The Way of Zen and The Joyous Cosmology tells his students that the findings of Gestalt psychology, neuroscience and various Eastern religious practices suggest that we learn not by the mechanical dissection of our environments, but through organic pattern recognition. Our encounters with the world are less like an eighteenth century industrial machine which processes functions in sequence, and more like a photographic plate, which comes together all at once, as a whole organic process.1