Gregory Bateson's early approach objected to mechanistic theoretical abstractions replacing informants' own appraisals of their culture. Cybernetics increased his opposition to linear appraisal of evidence, for all social and biological organization is nonlinear. Outcomes feed back recursively to beginning points, a process that changes initial conditions. This recursive (looplike) interaction triggers a multilevel field of perceptual and communicative difference in living systems, permitting learning to occur, an epistemological stance that accords with current complexity theory. Later, Bateson defined a living unit as “organism-plus-environment,” an interactive totality that transforms dualist epistemology of “mind” separated from nature, and fosters their transdisciplinary study.