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Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
Book by Gregory Bateson
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Gregory Bateson
72 books213 followersGregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe. In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory/cybernetics to the social/behavioral sciences, and spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in various fields of science. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Angels Fear (published posthumously in 1987) was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
October 26, 2019
A potentially transformative book if you are interested in learning how evolutionary processes shape the mind!
As one of the first cyberneticists, Bateson shows how the mind consists of a series of relationships, and goes on to point out that any instance of these same relationships in nature (such as in a plant or animal) may also be said to exhibit mind. Although at times his ideas may seem to be on the verge of religious or New Age thought, especially with his references to Shiva and the aesthetic of the world, Bateson is first and foremost a scientist, and his ideas are grounded very firmly in scientific principles, as he explains them in the first chapter. It is my understanding of his work that he would oppose psychology, cognitive science, and any other discipline that seeks to understand the world in terms of rigid cause-and-effect, because he prefers to describe the world in terms of feedback loops. This forms the basis for his philosophy of the ecology of mind.
Fair warning, this book reads more as a collection of musings than straight-up philosophy or science. He wrote this as a collection of observations, so sometimes the flow of the argument gets a little sidetracked. All the same, in my opinion this is a great book and has been the source of many great conversations for me!
I would recommend this book to people who are interested in philosophy of science and its intersection with philosophy of mind.
As one of the first cyberneticists, Bateson shows how the mind consists of a series of relationships, and goes on to point out that any instance of these same relationships in nature (such as in a plant or animal) may also be said to exhibit mind. Although at times his ideas may seem to be on the verge of religious or New Age thought, especially with his references to Shiva and the aesthetic of the world, Bateson is first and foremost a scientist, and his ideas are grounded very firmly in scientific principles, as he explains them in the first chapter. It is my understanding of his work that he would oppose psychology, cognitive science, and any other discipline that seeks to understand the world in terms of rigid cause-and-effect, because he prefers to describe the world in terms of feedback loops. This forms the basis for his philosophy of the ecology of mind.
Fair warning, this book reads more as a collection of musings than straight-up philosophy or science. He wrote this as a collection of observations, so sometimes the flow of the argument gets a little sidetracked. All the same, in my opinion this is a great book and has been the source of many great conversations for me!
I would recommend this book to people who are interested in philosophy of science and its intersection with philosophy of mind.
May 6, 2009
Worth comparing to Godel, Escher, Bach in substance. Bateson often veers from subject to subject, but he is a rigorous and clear writer, and an excellent expositor. The point of this book is not 'Mind and Nature,' but rather certain ways of thinking about Mind and Nature. Bateson is explicit about this book being epistemology, meta-science rather than science.
Bateson implicitly draws from several different thinkers and their ideas, the ones I picked up were Wiener's cybernetics, Russell's Principia Mathematica, Buddhist psychology and epistemology (most notably its antiessentialist stance, empiricism, and the idea of mind as aggregate), and logical positivism. Seeing these influences helps to see how grounded this book is intellectually.
The last chapter, a dialogue between the author and his daughter, veers into obscurity, but I suppose the point Bateson is trying to make is the difficulty of thinking about how to think properly about big, vague ideas like consciousness and aesthetics. This is the worst part of the book.
I found the discussion of stochastic systems in biology both excellent and inspirational--I'm interested in mutator genes, and Bateson's writing highlights the possibility for feedback between trait and process, in this case, mutation rate and evolution.
I highly recommend this book for scientists and other empiricists making sense of the world. Bateson's point that logic is a poor model for the world, with reference to Epimenides' paradox "All Cretans are liars" (since Epimenides was a Cretan), is identical to the point made in a recent essay in Nature on gene networks entitled 'This title is false' by Mark Isalan and Matthew Morrison. Bateson's influence lingers.
If you're interested, this is the essay I mentioned:
Nature 458, 969 (23 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/458969a
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...
Bateson implicitly draws from several different thinkers and their ideas, the ones I picked up were Wiener's cybernetics, Russell's Principia Mathematica, Buddhist psychology and epistemology (most notably its antiessentialist stance, empiricism, and the idea of mind as aggregate), and logical positivism. Seeing these influences helps to see how grounded this book is intellectually.
The last chapter, a dialogue between the author and his daughter, veers into obscurity, but I suppose the point Bateson is trying to make is the difficulty of thinking about how to think properly about big, vague ideas like consciousness and aesthetics. This is the worst part of the book.
I found the discussion of stochastic systems in biology both excellent and inspirational--I'm interested in mutator genes, and Bateson's writing highlights the possibility for feedback between trait and process, in this case, mutation rate and evolution.
I highly recommend this book for scientists and other empiricists making sense of the world. Bateson's point that logic is a poor model for the world, with reference to Epimenides' paradox "All Cretans are liars" (since Epimenides was a Cretan), is identical to the point made in a recent essay in Nature on gene networks entitled 'This title is false' by Mark Isalan and Matthew Morrison. Bateson's influence lingers.
If you're interested, this is the essay I mentioned:
Nature 458, 969 (23 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/458969a
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...
August 27, 2017
I liked Bateson's premise that the world is aesthetic, and his definition of aesthetic is "responsive to the pattern which connects."
Here's what I wrote in my blog about it...
...Bateson discusses the wider knowing which he described as "the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities." His point was that we humans notice the starfishes, but we don't notice the glue that holds the starfishes and the rest of the world together.
So why does it matter whether we're aware of this background context that creates the space for the starfishes, streams and forests? Because the background is what makes them possible. Think about an empty container--it's the space within the container that makes it useful. We love our houses, but it's the space within the house that makes it a house. The Tao Teh Ching says, "While the tangible has advantages, it is the intangibles that makes it useful."
According to Bateson and many other writers, thinkers, and scholars, this background or wider knowing is aesthetic. Back in the early 1800s, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also claimed that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic. We live in the midst of a large aesthetic space, and we don't typically notice it (much less honor it for its wisdom.)
Bateson describes a time when he was teaching a class of "young beatniks" at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Bateson showed them a starfish and asked them, "How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it?" Bateson tells us that this was an aesthetic question that he posed to the students.
Bateson later writes, "Is this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?'" The ultimate unity, Bateson argues, is aesthetic.
Here's what I wrote in my blog about it...
...Bateson discusses the wider knowing which he described as "the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities." His point was that we humans notice the starfishes, but we don't notice the glue that holds the starfishes and the rest of the world together.
So why does it matter whether we're aware of this background context that creates the space for the starfishes, streams and forests? Because the background is what makes them possible. Think about an empty container--it's the space within the container that makes it useful. We love our houses, but it's the space within the house that makes it a house. The Tao Teh Ching says, "While the tangible has advantages, it is the intangibles that makes it useful."
According to Bateson and many other writers, thinkers, and scholars, this background or wider knowing is aesthetic. Back in the early 1800s, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also claimed that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic. We live in the midst of a large aesthetic space, and we don't typically notice it (much less honor it for its wisdom.)
Bateson describes a time when he was teaching a class of "young beatniks" at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Bateson showed them a starfish and asked them, "How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it?" Bateson tells us that this was an aesthetic question that he posed to the students.
Bateson later writes, "Is this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?'" The ultimate unity, Bateson argues, is aesthetic.
May 21, 2012
Bateson was a great thinker who emphasized that logic and quantity are inappropiate devices for describing organisms, and their interactions and internal organisations. Reading Mind and Nature during the 80s I felt affirmed in my intuition that it splits us inside if we separate Mind from Nature. He showed how patterns connect, how they are not static but dance in a rhythm of repetition. He showed how information spreads inside a system and controls growth and differentiation. This is as seminal work that influenced many other fields in science and the humanities. System-therory in family therapy and Gestalt, for example, and cybernetics as a study. He always pointed to context. His ideas should be applied to how children learn about connectivity. Bateson is one of my heroes.
July 14, 2022
Is an organism a certain kind of idea that the environment has about itself? What does that even mean? Is intelligence, like evolution, a structure ratcheted up via trial and error process? Where does intelligence reside? In the brain? In the organism? In the genome that describes it? In the whole system that describes the genome? And what is it exactly that evolves? Is it really a collection of organisms evolving together interdependently, or do the relations between them describe a context that evolves?
It turns out that when you begin to examine evolution, intelligence, biology, and society through the lens of Cybernetics, Systems and Information Theory, it takes you on a bizarre journey straight through the looking glass, where nothing, including yourself, is anything like what you supposed it to be. And this difference in view just might be very, very important. From what it means to live to what it means to die and everything in between is suddenly, shockingly transformed.
It's difficult for me to review this book without conflating it somewhat with Bateson's Steps To An Ecology Of Mind, which I was two essays shy of finishing when I first picked up Mind and Nature. Both are brilliant and, in my view, indispensable. But I'm not sure if I could have read Mind and Nature with sufficient eyes without also having read Steps. It's almost a trope to endorse a visionary work by stating that it ought to be required reading but, this, above all else, should be required reading. I am utterly and forever changed by Bateson's work.
If you've read Mind and Nature and not felt the entire world start to sway queasily beneath your feet, read again or read more of Bateson, because I guarantee that you haven't understood. Bateson hacks away at, not just Occidental society, but the Occidental Self, the entire conception of the human identity so fundamental to our everyday thinking. Bateson's ideas should come with a warning. This book won't just make you think or cause you to question, it will cause you to become deeply, deeply frustrated on many levels. And you will suffer from the kind of loneliness that comes from having a knowledge and worldview that is rarely sharable.
After being exposed to Bateson's reality, you'll naturally feel an urge to relate those ideas to the people in your life, and especially to those you care about. And as you try to talk to them you'll begin to feel a kind of despair over the uselessness of words. It's then that you'll gain an appreciation for what it must have taken to write this book and to tackle this subject. I know that Bateson essentially devoted his life to thinking about it and trying to communicate it, and I don't know if it can ever be done better than what he managed.
There are many complicated ideas which are difficult to convey succinctly simply because they require much building up of concepts. The ideas in this book are not those. There are, perhaps, an infinite number of arbitrarily complex ideas that can be constructed atop the ready-made concepts familiar to us all. But the core ideas contained in this book are not among them. There is a new kind of understanding demanded. Before that new understanding can be built, the very foundations of thought must be reworked. And after you've done all of that and you've intellectually understood, all your intuitions will still be wrong, and you'll know that they're wrong, and you'll know that it will take years of contemplation to gain the correct intuitions, and that having those new intuitions will put you at odds with society and perhaps enable you to do nothing more than to simply know truth. That is a difficult thing to ask of yourself, let alone to ask of others.
It turns out that when you begin to examine evolution, intelligence, biology, and society through the lens of Cybernetics, Systems and Information Theory, it takes you on a bizarre journey straight through the looking glass, where nothing, including yourself, is anything like what you supposed it to be. And this difference in view just might be very, very important. From what it means to live to what it means to die and everything in between is suddenly, shockingly transformed.
It's difficult for me to review this book without conflating it somewhat with Bateson's Steps To An Ecology Of Mind, which I was two essays shy of finishing when I first picked up Mind and Nature. Both are brilliant and, in my view, indispensable. But I'm not sure if I could have read Mind and Nature with sufficient eyes without also having read Steps. It's almost a trope to endorse a visionary work by stating that it ought to be required reading but, this, above all else, should be required reading. I am utterly and forever changed by Bateson's work.
If you've read Mind and Nature and not felt the entire world start to sway queasily beneath your feet, read again or read more of Bateson, because I guarantee that you haven't understood. Bateson hacks away at, not just Occidental society, but the Occidental Self, the entire conception of the human identity so fundamental to our everyday thinking. Bateson's ideas should come with a warning. This book won't just make you think or cause you to question, it will cause you to become deeply, deeply frustrated on many levels. And you will suffer from the kind of loneliness that comes from having a knowledge and worldview that is rarely sharable.
After being exposed to Bateson's reality, you'll naturally feel an urge to relate those ideas to the people in your life, and especially to those you care about. And as you try to talk to them you'll begin to feel a kind of despair over the uselessness of words. It's then that you'll gain an appreciation for what it must have taken to write this book and to tackle this subject. I know that Bateson essentially devoted his life to thinking about it and trying to communicate it, and I don't know if it can ever be done better than what he managed.
There are many complicated ideas which are difficult to convey succinctly simply because they require much building up of concepts. The ideas in this book are not those. There are, perhaps, an infinite number of arbitrarily complex ideas that can be constructed atop the ready-made concepts familiar to us all. But the core ideas contained in this book are not among them. There is a new kind of understanding demanded. Before that new understanding can be built, the very foundations of thought must be reworked. And after you've done all of that and you've intellectually understood, all your intuitions will still be wrong, and you'll know that they're wrong, and you'll know that it will take years of contemplation to gain the correct intuitions, and that having those new intuitions will put you at odds with society and perhaps enable you to do nothing more than to simply know truth. That is a difficult thing to ask of yourself, let alone to ask of others.
March 3, 2016
Subject matter: how to think about thinking when thinking, or something along those lines; confusing, I know. There's so much ground covered in this book that I'm still making sense out of everything, howbeit I'm glad to finally be through with it (as in: glad to not have dropped it half-way)! This book was quite the challenge, which I think will account for why I enjoyed it as much as I did, there's a considerable amount of abstract stuff for pondering (I should've read the glossary at the end first now that come to think about it) that for the most part I had been wishing an upgrade on RAM for my brain to aid in the processing. Bateson seems to explain his ideas very thorougly, I personally like that a lot, even when at times he's so thorough that I find myself going off course, which I think ain't as bad as it is interesting. Smarter people than me would surely be even more delighted to read this "almost mystic work", I imagine.
April 5, 2010
I may very well have to read this again sometime soon. The scope of this book is astounding. It starts out as a primer on how to think, redefining epistemology along the way in an attempt to enable the reader to think in cybernetic circuits of calibration and feedback, form and process.
Bateson seeks to tease out "the pattern that connects", a pattern of patterns, the meta-pattern that connects all living things. The pattern that connects us. It's all a bit fuzzy, but it'll definitely make you think. It'll take some brain power, too.
Bateson seeks to tease out "the pattern that connects", a pattern of patterns, the meta-pattern that connects all living things. The pattern that connects us. It's all a bit fuzzy, but it'll definitely make you think. It'll take some brain power, too.
June 2, 2012
A thought-provoking thinker, but alas a terrible writer. He tends to start out with some ambitious claim (e.g. having solved the mind/body problem), and when he would have to prove it, digresses into something else. Maddening. On the other hand, he is exploring how mind and (not in this book) consciousness might be explained as emerging from matter - which I am inclined to believe is what is actually happening myself, without of course being able to properly explain much further.
July 21, 2015
This is an essential reading for everyone interested in the formal study of epistemology. The work of a visionary.
April 4, 2024
Бейтсон – ученый широкого профиля: лингвист, антрополог, биолог, философ, занимался и психиатрией (разработал концепцию «двойного послания» как причины шизофрении), и кибернетикой. Эта книга – его способ объединить все эти науки, найти общий паттерн всего живого и его отличие от неживого, и понять, что такое разум. Написано ясным языком, но довольно художественно – не настолько, как «Эшер, Гедель, Бах», но чувствуется, что в то же время и человеком, так же широко смотрящим на науку.
У меня после книги осталось в голове несколько новых концепций и я понял наконец смысл некоторых слов (в частности, «эпистемология» и «стохастический») – но главное, конечно, ощущение, что с тобой разговаривает очень умный человек, который старается объяснить в относительно короткой книге все, что он понял за свою жизнь.
Ссылка: https://monoskop.org/images/c/c3/Bate...
Цитаты:
«A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it (no doubt in his best Fortran), "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machi nes do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:
THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY»
«There seems to be something like a Gresham's law of cultural evolution according to which the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists.»
«1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts of the same individual to give first-order connections.
2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar relations between parts (i .e. , to give second-order connections).
3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.
We have constructed a ladder of how to think about - about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects. My central thesis can now be approached in words: **The pattern which connects is a metapattern**. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns whhh connect.»
«At more complex levels, the whole mass of interlocking processes called life may be involved in keeping our object in a state of change that can maintain some necessary constants, such as body temperature, blood circulation, blood sugar, or even life itself.
The acrobat on the high wire maintains his stability by continual correction of his imbalance.»
«It is surprising to find how rare are cases in the nonorganic world in which some A responds to a difference between some B and some C. The best example I can think of is the case of an automobile traveling over a bump in the road. This instance comes close, at least , to meeting our verbal definition of what happens in processes of perception by mind.»
«My own expectation is that when the almost totally unknown realm of processes whereby DNA determines embryology is studied, it will be found that DNA mentions nothing but relations. If we should ask DNA how many fingers this human embryo will have, the answer might be, "Four paired relations between (fingers)." And if we ask how many gaps between fingers, the answer would be "three paired relations between (gaps)." In each case, only the "relations between" are defined and determined.»
«THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED»
«Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the random. In the computer, this will be random-number generator which will ensure that the "seeking," trial and-error moves of the machine will ultimately cover all the possibilities of the set to be explored»
«It is necessary to understand that right and left cannot be defined and that you will meet with a lot of trouble if you try to define such words. If you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that left is defined as "distinctive epithet of the hand which is normally the weaker". The dictionary maker openly shows his embarrassment.»
«DAUGHTER: I think you are talking nonsense , Daddy. I don't see you as the only intelligent lemming taking notes on the self-destruction of the others. It's not like you-so there. Nobody is going to buy a book by a sardonic lemming .»
У меня после книги осталось в голове несколько новых концепций и я понял наконец смысл некоторых слов (в частности, «эпистемология» и «стохастический») – но главное, конечно, ощущение, что с тобой разговаривает очень умный человек, который старается объяснить в относительно короткой книге все, что он понял за свою жизнь.
Ссылка: https://monoskop.org/images/c/c3/Bate...
Цитаты:
«A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it (no doubt in his best Fortran), "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machi nes do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:
THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY»
«There seems to be something like a Gresham's law of cultural evolution according to which the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists.»
«1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts of the same individual to give first-order connections.
2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar relations between parts (i .e. , to give second-order connections).
3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.
We have constructed a ladder of how to think about - about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects. My central thesis can now be approached in words: **The pattern which connects is a metapattern**. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns whhh connect.»
«At more complex levels, the whole mass of interlocking processes called life may be involved in keeping our object in a state of change that can maintain some necessary constants, such as body temperature, blood circulation, blood sugar, or even life itself.
The acrobat on the high wire maintains his stability by continual correction of his imbalance.»
«It is surprising to find how rare are cases in the nonorganic world in which some A responds to a difference between some B and some C. The best example I can think of is the case of an automobile traveling over a bump in the road. This instance comes close, at least , to meeting our verbal definition of what happens in processes of perception by mind.»
«My own expectation is that when the almost totally unknown realm of processes whereby DNA determines embryology is studied, it will be found that DNA mentions nothing but relations. If we should ask DNA how many fingers this human embryo will have, the answer might be, "Four paired relations between (fingers)." And if we ask how many gaps between fingers, the answer would be "three paired relations between (gaps)." In each case, only the "relations between" are defined and determined.»
«THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED»
«Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the random. In the computer, this will be random-number generator which will ensure that the "seeking," trial and-error moves of the machine will ultimately cover all the possibilities of the set to be explored»
«It is necessary to understand that right and left cannot be defined and that you will meet with a lot of trouble if you try to define such words. If you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that left is defined as "distinctive epithet of the hand which is normally the weaker". The dictionary maker openly shows his embarrassment.»
«DAUGHTER: I think you are talking nonsense , Daddy. I don't see you as the only intelligent lemming taking notes on the self-destruction of the others. It's not like you-so there. Nobody is going to buy a book by a sardonic lemming .»
January 27, 2021
Bateson’s writing is thick and often obscure.
Bateson adopts “a Platonic view.” In the beginning was the Idea and the corporeal universe is a spinoff of this, the truly real. This in my mind is problematic. The Platonic world may or may not be true. We don’t know, but not knowing is different from an assertion that it exists. And to say that the corporeal world is its spinoff creates a non-material causal force so that the material world is subsidiary to and derived from Ideal Reality. Presumably, a purpose of this Bateson book is to establish the existence of this spiritual (non-material) causal force. He sets the stage by referencing Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being (1936). For Lovejoy, the world starts from a timeless Supreme Mind (Logos), from which a certain deductive logic flows. Here, Bateson says, Lovejoy recasts the second law of thermodynamics to say that the more perfect can never be generated by the less perfect. That, for Bateson, logically, must be true because Lovejoy starts from the Perfect and everything flows from there, dissipating with less and less fidelity to the Ideal. But, Bateson notes, standard evolutionary theory moves exactly in the opposite direction (from the less perfect to the more perfect): from single cells to multi-cells, from simple to complex life forms, culminating with humans and their minds. (*)
Though Bateson does not deviate from Lovejoy in spirit, he opts for a Lamarckian alternative that flips Lovejoy around. Mind is immanent in life from the beginning. Mind is still the corporeal embodiment of Idea, but Bateson has replaced Lovejoy’s “transcendent Logos” with Lamarck’s immanent mind. Lamarck accommodated evolutionary theory’s notion of progressive transformation (“evolution”) and, hence, the perfect could flow from the imperfect. Yet Lamarck still could adhere to the Platonic view that life, through mind, could direct its own transformation. “By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformation,” Bateson writes, Lamarck "escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (which we would call ‘evolution’) which started from infusoria (protozoa) and marched upward to man and woman.”
Though Lamarck (and Darwin himself had significant Lamarckian elements) is at odds with the dominant neo-Darwinian theory of today, this for Bateson is where the Platonic Ideal becomes corporeal. Where Lamarck has the organism changing itself to meet survival necessities, neo-Darwinian theory says this cannot be true because the capacity is fixed in the genes: In this view, from the beginning, at birth, an organism has or does not have what it takes to survive. But, drawing from C.H. Waddington, Bateson believes this neo-Darwinian viewpoint does not do justice to the evolutionary process. Yes, especially for the less complex life forms, fixed instinct largely governs the adaptive process but Bateson says there are learning and behavioral (and structural) changes due to the feedback loops with the environment. This is Bateson’s cybernetic emphasis. It’s Waddington’s epigenesis (“becoming is built upon the status quo”). Piaget, who draws heavily from Waddington, says flexibility is built into the genes themselves which allows for learning and adjustment in behavior within the limitations of the instinctual program (even amoebas, Piaget notes, learn, based on feedback from the environment). And, all of this, summarized, is to say, how mind (logos) is immanent in all organic matter, and how life reaches its culmination (perfection) in the human mind where it is free of most or all instinctual constraints. The human mind, Bateson believes, is best equipped to form truth (perfection) from the trial and error of all stochastic (random) processes: It constantly self-corrects to get to (biological) adaptation, (scientific) truth, (aesthetic) beauty and (perfection) the Good.
Whereas the Greeks (Aristotle) had teleological process (where the final cause pulls everything to itself), Bateson may have lodged teleology inside through his notion of immanence, though this is not clear. If Aristotle’s final cause didn’t, in fact, get caught up in Platonic logos, it seems plausible that Bateson is Aristotelian, in which case, Idea would be embodied in the corporeal world via mind. Life is a directed process, controlled by itself, directed toward adaptation.
If this is roughly what Bateson is saying in this book, I am, with one exception, in agreement. Genetic determinism (life has the necessary trait[s] at birth) does seem overly restrictive. There does seem to be room for modification of behavior based on feedback from the environment, i.e., a flexibility on how to respond exists again, as Piaget argued, at the lowest levels of life, with humans via mind having the greatest flexibility. But, what doesn’t change is the ideal of adaptation. This is the survival standard that is built into life itself. It has subsidiary ends that vary between species (regarding how behavior and the body structures that make that behavior possible form), and what objects are relevant to its survival (both what is needed and what is a danger to it).
This distinction between the goal of life (survival-replication-adaptation) and how life survives and what objects are necessary are frequently conflated and confuse the discussion. Whereas goals are fixed, objects and the behavior that link objects to goals are varied. They change through time. So, in a way, Lovejoy may have been right all along in this sense: Adaptation is the Ideal and in that sense evolution is merely the means to fit the ideal (adaptation). The idea (adaptation) is the eternal fixity of the Ideal on earth. Change and transformation are merely the means to the End. They are how life maintains itself in and through time. There is, in other words, a progression toward perfection (adaptation), i.e., evolution is the flow of the less perfect to the perfect. (**)
Where Lovejoy and Bateson are wrong, though, is that they place the final cause in an external realm, the Platonic Idea, whereas I would say that this is a totally unnecessary importation. However it got started, life is perfectly capable by itself to follow the adaptive process. And here, we are back to a modern neo-Darwinian theory. Those best equipped, including those with flexibility to both initiate (act on and in) and respond to threats and harm, survive; those that are not so well equipped die.
* And often, Hegelian type philosophical theory picks it up from there: Thought, too, evolves, progressively, to become the Absolute.
**As all living beings partake of this idea and the process for obtaining it, Bateson sees a “sacred unity of the biosphere.” As he states it, “Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful. We have lost the core of Christianity. We have lost Shiva, the dancer of Hinduism whose dance at the trivial level is both creation and destruction but in whole is beauty. We have lost Abraxas, the terrible and beautiful god of both day and night in Gnosticism. We have lost totemism, the sense of parallelism between man’s organization and that of the animals and plants. We have lost even the Dying God.”
Bateson adopts “a Platonic view.” In the beginning was the Idea and the corporeal universe is a spinoff of this, the truly real. This in my mind is problematic. The Platonic world may or may not be true. We don’t know, but not knowing is different from an assertion that it exists. And to say that the corporeal world is its spinoff creates a non-material causal force so that the material world is subsidiary to and derived from Ideal Reality. Presumably, a purpose of this Bateson book is to establish the existence of this spiritual (non-material) causal force. He sets the stage by referencing Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being (1936). For Lovejoy, the world starts from a timeless Supreme Mind (Logos), from which a certain deductive logic flows. Here, Bateson says, Lovejoy recasts the second law of thermodynamics to say that the more perfect can never be generated by the less perfect. That, for Bateson, logically, must be true because Lovejoy starts from the Perfect and everything flows from there, dissipating with less and less fidelity to the Ideal. But, Bateson notes, standard evolutionary theory moves exactly in the opposite direction (from the less perfect to the more perfect): from single cells to multi-cells, from simple to complex life forms, culminating with humans and their minds. (*)
Though Bateson does not deviate from Lovejoy in spirit, he opts for a Lamarckian alternative that flips Lovejoy around. Mind is immanent in life from the beginning. Mind is still the corporeal embodiment of Idea, but Bateson has replaced Lovejoy’s “transcendent Logos” with Lamarck’s immanent mind. Lamarck accommodated evolutionary theory’s notion of progressive transformation (“evolution”) and, hence, the perfect could flow from the imperfect. Yet Lamarck still could adhere to the Platonic view that life, through mind, could direct its own transformation. “By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformation,” Bateson writes, Lamarck "escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (which we would call ‘evolution’) which started from infusoria (protozoa) and marched upward to man and woman.”
Though Lamarck (and Darwin himself had significant Lamarckian elements) is at odds with the dominant neo-Darwinian theory of today, this for Bateson is where the Platonic Ideal becomes corporeal. Where Lamarck has the organism changing itself to meet survival necessities, neo-Darwinian theory says this cannot be true because the capacity is fixed in the genes: In this view, from the beginning, at birth, an organism has or does not have what it takes to survive. But, drawing from C.H. Waddington, Bateson believes this neo-Darwinian viewpoint does not do justice to the evolutionary process. Yes, especially for the less complex life forms, fixed instinct largely governs the adaptive process but Bateson says there are learning and behavioral (and structural) changes due to the feedback loops with the environment. This is Bateson’s cybernetic emphasis. It’s Waddington’s epigenesis (“becoming is built upon the status quo”). Piaget, who draws heavily from Waddington, says flexibility is built into the genes themselves which allows for learning and adjustment in behavior within the limitations of the instinctual program (even amoebas, Piaget notes, learn, based on feedback from the environment). And, all of this, summarized, is to say, how mind (logos) is immanent in all organic matter, and how life reaches its culmination (perfection) in the human mind where it is free of most or all instinctual constraints. The human mind, Bateson believes, is best equipped to form truth (perfection) from the trial and error of all stochastic (random) processes: It constantly self-corrects to get to (biological) adaptation, (scientific) truth, (aesthetic) beauty and (perfection) the Good.
Whereas the Greeks (Aristotle) had teleological process (where the final cause pulls everything to itself), Bateson may have lodged teleology inside through his notion of immanence, though this is not clear. If Aristotle’s final cause didn’t, in fact, get caught up in Platonic logos, it seems plausible that Bateson is Aristotelian, in which case, Idea would be embodied in the corporeal world via mind. Life is a directed process, controlled by itself, directed toward adaptation.
If this is roughly what Bateson is saying in this book, I am, with one exception, in agreement. Genetic determinism (life has the necessary trait[s] at birth) does seem overly restrictive. There does seem to be room for modification of behavior based on feedback from the environment, i.e., a flexibility on how to respond exists again, as Piaget argued, at the lowest levels of life, with humans via mind having the greatest flexibility. But, what doesn’t change is the ideal of adaptation. This is the survival standard that is built into life itself. It has subsidiary ends that vary between species (regarding how behavior and the body structures that make that behavior possible form), and what objects are relevant to its survival (both what is needed and what is a danger to it).
This distinction between the goal of life (survival-replication-adaptation) and how life survives and what objects are necessary are frequently conflated and confuse the discussion. Whereas goals are fixed, objects and the behavior that link objects to goals are varied. They change through time. So, in a way, Lovejoy may have been right all along in this sense: Adaptation is the Ideal and in that sense evolution is merely the means to fit the ideal (adaptation). The idea (adaptation) is the eternal fixity of the Ideal on earth. Change and transformation are merely the means to the End. They are how life maintains itself in and through time. There is, in other words, a progression toward perfection (adaptation), i.e., evolution is the flow of the less perfect to the perfect. (**)
Where Lovejoy and Bateson are wrong, though, is that they place the final cause in an external realm, the Platonic Idea, whereas I would say that this is a totally unnecessary importation. However it got started, life is perfectly capable by itself to follow the adaptive process. And here, we are back to a modern neo-Darwinian theory. Those best equipped, including those with flexibility to both initiate (act on and in) and respond to threats and harm, survive; those that are not so well equipped die.
* And often, Hegelian type philosophical theory picks it up from there: Thought, too, evolves, progressively, to become the Absolute.
**As all living beings partake of this idea and the process for obtaining it, Bateson sees a “sacred unity of the biosphere.” As he states it, “Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful. We have lost the core of Christianity. We have lost Shiva, the dancer of Hinduism whose dance at the trivial level is both creation and destruction but in whole is beauty. We have lost Abraxas, the terrible and beautiful god of both day and night in Gnosticism. We have lost totemism, the sense of parallelism between man’s organization and that of the animals and plants. We have lost even the Dying God.”
April 22, 2018
This book is built on the opinion that we are parts of a living world.[1] Bateson offers the phrase the pattern which connects as another possible title for the book.[2] He writes that we have been trained to think of patterns as something fixed. It is easier and lazier that way, but it is all nonsense. The right way to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily a dance of interacting parts.[3]
Logic and quantity turn out to be inappropriate for describing organisms, their interactions, and internal organization. There is no conventional way of explaining or even describing the phenomena of biological organization.[4] We are ignorant about available insights and unwilling to accept the necessities that follow from a clear view.[5] There is a strong tendency to invoke quantities of tension and energy to explain the genesis of pattern. Bateson believes that all such explanations are wrong.[6]
The whole book is based on the premise that mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated parts. Wholes are constituted by such combined interaction.[7] Bateson believes that mental process always is a sequence of interactions between parts. He doesn't believe that elementary particles are minds in themselves,[8] but he also admits that he is not up to date in modern physics.[9] Contrary to Bateson I do believe that elementary particles have proto-minds. An elementary particle, like an electron, is in David Bohm's ontological interpretation of quantum theory a spatio-temporal entity, which has a proto-mental quality.[10]
Bateson is very influenced by cybernetic thought. It's true that nature is full of circular processes, but a cybernetic system is not a living system. What if mind is immanent, not in the interaction of parts, but in nature itself? It's a simple idea which opens up an entirely new paradigm of thought.
Notes:
[1] Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Hampton Press, 2002), p.16.
[2] Ibid., p.7.
[3] Ibid., p.12.
[4] Ibid., p.19
[5] Ibid., p.20.
[6] Ibid., p.49.
[7] Ibid., p.87.
[8] Ibid., p.86.
[9] Ibid., p.93.
[10] Paavo Pylkkänen, Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2007), p. 204.
Logic and quantity turn out to be inappropriate for describing organisms, their interactions, and internal organization. There is no conventional way of explaining or even describing the phenomena of biological organization.[4] We are ignorant about available insights and unwilling to accept the necessities that follow from a clear view.[5] There is a strong tendency to invoke quantities of tension and energy to explain the genesis of pattern. Bateson believes that all such explanations are wrong.[6]
The whole book is based on the premise that mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated parts. Wholes are constituted by such combined interaction.[7] Bateson believes that mental process always is a sequence of interactions between parts. He doesn't believe that elementary particles are minds in themselves,[8] but he also admits that he is not up to date in modern physics.[9] Contrary to Bateson I do believe that elementary particles have proto-minds. An elementary particle, like an electron, is in David Bohm's ontological interpretation of quantum theory a spatio-temporal entity, which has a proto-mental quality.[10]
Bateson is very influenced by cybernetic thought. It's true that nature is full of circular processes, but a cybernetic system is not a living system. What if mind is immanent, not in the interaction of parts, but in nature itself? It's a simple idea which opens up an entirely new paradigm of thought.
Notes:
[1] Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Hampton Press, 2002), p.16.
[2] Ibid., p.7.
[3] Ibid., p.12.
[4] Ibid., p.19
[5] Ibid., p.20.
[6] Ibid., p.49.
[7] Ibid., p.87.
[8] Ibid., p.86.
[9] Ibid., p.93.
[10] Paavo Pylkkänen, Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2007), p. 204.
April 21, 2010
this book rests at the strange nexus of the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Douglas Hofstadter, and is presented to us within a framework of biology with an ultimate concern for the institution of education. just trying to parse these referents is difficult, and the book does well at keeping a handle on the far more difficult task of putting forward what can only be called a philosophy based on the necessary implications of putting all these things into a pile and looking at it from just the right angle. obsessively focused on entropy and negentropy, the theory relies on the concept of stochastic process to springboard a science discussion into the reaches of philosophy. like all texts of either discipline, it often seems needlessly repetitive, giving perhaps too many examples or applications of any new idea. still, this is a fascinating read.
September 29, 2012
Patterns that connect. One frequently hears phrases such as everything in the world is connected to everything else but rarely do we find much in the way of discussion. Gregory Bateson was the epitome of the multidisciplinarian. He could not be pigeonholed in any particular field of study but he could recognize the most significant aspects of each and demonstrate how they all connect together.
I must admit here that he is far and away beyond my own level of comprehension. I must continually reread and reassess every time I read any of his works. This includes the dialogues Catherine Bateson published (my copy is currently buried in a storage shed). I have not seen the film produced by Nora Bateson, but would love to someday.
I must admit here that he is far and away beyond my own level of comprehension. I must continually reread and reassess every time I read any of his works. This includes the dialogues Catherine Bateson published (my copy is currently buried in a storage shed). I have not seen the film produced by Nora Bateson, but would love to someday.
Read
February 6, 2013Bateson begins with a list of basic scientific presuppositions that "every schoolboy should know", n further epistemological foundations are laid in two later chapters, one on the importance of combining different perspectives, of having "multiple versions of the world", and the other on different types of relationship. This material is used as the basis for tackling three major topics: finding explicit criteria for the existence of "mind"; examining parallels between learning n evolution as stochastic processes; n constructing a general purpose epistemological schema, a zig-zag between form and process. New perspective:)
August 24, 2011
I had just read Wittgenstein's Tractatus before I read this, so I thought it intriguing, the appearance of a ladder, climbing levels of logical type... definitely a thought provoking read, for thinking about thinking that is. He is still relevant on the topic of stagnant educational institutions and epistemology too. Talk it over with a friend. As Bateson says: “[...] two descriptions are better than one.” (therein lies the difference...)
October 30, 2013
this is a very dense book on a very abstract set of concepts, but well worth reading if you're at all interested in evolutionary biology and the idea of what "mind" might be. some of bateson's creative flourishes (especially the final chapter) are a little weird, and explain why his work is also popular in decidedly less scientific arenas, but the core idea that evolution and mind can be considered as logical analogues and as stochastic processes is a good one.
December 15, 2017
Un libro un po' difficile da leggere ma assolutamente geniale, idealmente da affiancare a "Gödel, Escher, Bach" per chi sia interessato a riflettere sul funzionamento della mente. Io ho trovato Bateson un po' più difficile di Hofstadter, però può dipendere dalla mia formazione scientifica - probabilmente gli umanisti avranno l'opinione opposta.
October 17, 2008
One of the seminal thinkers of systems theory (once called cybernetics) compares the process of evolution to the process of learning. I listened to recordings of Bateson's talks given at Esalen around the time he was writing this. Francisco Varela picked up where Bateson left off.
January 10, 2014
Fascinating way to view the criteria of mind to better understand processes, moires, and thought pattern. This was required reading in college in one of my very favorite classes created by a professor who won national awards for his curriculum.
March 18, 2014
There's nothing like it in the world. What a gentle, thoughtful, poignant, and careful disassembly of the world around us. And an equally careful reassembly. If you are willing to apply it, there are new worlds to be experienced on every page.
April 9, 2007
This is one of the most influential books in my life.
February 23, 2008
Professor Bateson lays out a transformative dialogue for maeta-relfection.
August 26, 2008
Critical thinking
October 15, 2008
To me, this book is a primer on how to think. I read it when it first was published, and believe it really changed me.
November 2, 2008
A great scientist's introduction to epistemology.
Currently reading
May 1, 2009So I lent my mother Anathem. After reading it she gave me this book to read.
March 11, 2013
Little over my head.
Read
July 13, 2022i guess i am at a turning point in my relationship with cybernetics, because i found this book pretty tiresome. it’s easy (and cool, i guess) to come up with big-brain poetico-scientific paradigms which explain things in exciting new terms. the hard part is to make them useful. i don’t even mean in a tactical, socio-political way. i mean: what is the point of a book like this besides offering a new way of framing things? what does it offer besides the pseudo-philosophical pleasure of putting things in elegant terms? bateson only rarely shifts from a philosophical register to a way of speaking which is primarily or even secondarily concerned with how people actually live their lives. there is a part of the book when he is talking about how what we call “crime” is treated by societies as a self-identical set of behaviors rather than a pattern of responses to environmental circumstances. rather than punishing the behaviors, he suggests, “[the criminal] should be suffering for particular ways of organizing action.” what does that mean? your guess is as good as mine. my reaction to the batesonian paradigm would actually be that no one should suffer, because “crime” and “criminals” are effects of socio-environmental systems rather than individual problems or evils to be stamped out. but instead all bateson can really offer is a re-framing of the problem. there is no imagined solution that would look any different from “suffering.”
for the most part, though, the book is never this concrete. he is constantly trying to galaxy brain the reader into understanding his ideas about the relationship between logical types, evolution, and mind. my reaction to all of this, as i read it, was: “sure.” i kept thinking to myself, what is the benefit of a book like this? to me—and maybe i’m being uncharitable because i was a little bit bored—the primary end goal of the book is to make other Big Brain Boys (like Rollo May, who blurbed the book) go, “wow, i’ve never thought about it that way before. i’m going to think about this differently now.” isn’t that the height of narcissism? this book puts no tools in my toolbox. i can’t work with this stuff. all i can do is sit back and say, “that Gregory Bateson sure came up with a cool way of framing the question of consciousness.”
i want to read less stuff like this going forward. it is completely ahistorical, apolitical, and offers me nothing with which i can respond to the teetering of human life and the upsurge of fascism around the world. a john grisham novel has more critical and historical potential than this, because at least a book like that is aiming to be understood and appreciated by more than approximately 250 people currently living in the world. at this point i’m being too hard on GB. oh well.
for the most part, though, the book is never this concrete. he is constantly trying to galaxy brain the reader into understanding his ideas about the relationship between logical types, evolution, and mind. my reaction to all of this, as i read it, was: “sure.” i kept thinking to myself, what is the benefit of a book like this? to me—and maybe i’m being uncharitable because i was a little bit bored—the primary end goal of the book is to make other Big Brain Boys (like Rollo May, who blurbed the book) go, “wow, i’ve never thought about it that way before. i’m going to think about this differently now.” isn’t that the height of narcissism? this book puts no tools in my toolbox. i can’t work with this stuff. all i can do is sit back and say, “that Gregory Bateson sure came up with a cool way of framing the question of consciousness.”
i want to read less stuff like this going forward. it is completely ahistorical, apolitical, and offers me nothing with which i can respond to the teetering of human life and the upsurge of fascism around the world. a john grisham novel has more critical and historical potential than this, because at least a book like that is aiming to be understood and appreciated by more than approximately 250 people currently living in the world. at this point i’m being too hard on GB. oh well.
April 28, 2021
wow. this was a journey. I both kind of disliked and loved this classic, 90% and 10% of the time, respectively.
90%: maybe the word dislike is too harsh, but, well, for some reason much of the material didn't really resonate with me. this was mostly the "nature" part, and it could be that i found the reasoning a bit outdated, or maybe I just didn't understand it well enough (it's really not an easy read). but my assumption is rather that, due to my focus on nonduality for quite some time and this being the first "science" book I read in a while, the reasoning here was too materialistic for me, despite the few mentions of eastern mystical traditions. he starts the book by outlining his premises, but i actually couldn't quite agree on many of them. it seems that through the focus on nonduality my thinking has changed, and, compared to two or so years ago, i'm less turned on by hyper-intellectual and -abstract materialist-science ideas but rather by simplicity, humility, practicality, and, if abstract (i still love it), then in a way that still points to the more immediate experience. but, well, i still found some beautiful and profound ideas in here. anyway, i'm curious to see how i will react to other scientific reads. i'm ready to dive into the east-west-connection...
10%:... but then i read the last chapter - the q&a about the "so what". wow - there we have it all, and there I found the love, the honest appreciation. this last chapter is the punchline and i finally realized that the whole book is kind of a joke... a big, serious, highbrow, but actually really lowbrow joke. a cosmic joke - oh how i love it! I thought that this is enough bateson for me, but the last chapter convinced me of the opposite: this was an (admittedly hard to swallow) appetizer!
ps: love is always stronger. and yes, this book is a western scientific-philosophical attempt to arrive at a worldview of nonduality, and i am really grateful for that
90%: maybe the word dislike is too harsh, but, well, for some reason much of the material didn't really resonate with me. this was mostly the "nature" part, and it could be that i found the reasoning a bit outdated, or maybe I just didn't understand it well enough (it's really not an easy read). but my assumption is rather that, due to my focus on nonduality for quite some time and this being the first "science" book I read in a while, the reasoning here was too materialistic for me, despite the few mentions of eastern mystical traditions. he starts the book by outlining his premises, but i actually couldn't quite agree on many of them. it seems that through the focus on nonduality my thinking has changed, and, compared to two or so years ago, i'm less turned on by hyper-intellectual and -abstract materialist-science ideas but rather by simplicity, humility, practicality, and, if abstract (i still love it), then in a way that still points to the more immediate experience. but, well, i still found some beautiful and profound ideas in here. anyway, i'm curious to see how i will react to other scientific reads. i'm ready to dive into the east-west-connection...
10%:... but then i read the last chapter - the q&a about the "so what". wow - there we have it all, and there I found the love, the honest appreciation. this last chapter is the punchline and i finally realized that the whole book is kind of a joke... a big, serious, highbrow, but actually really lowbrow joke. a cosmic joke - oh how i love it! I thought that this is enough bateson for me, but the last chapter convinced me of the opposite: this was an (admittedly hard to swallow) appetizer!
ps: love is always stronger. and yes, this book is a western scientific-philosophical attempt to arrive at a worldview of nonduality, and i am really grateful for that
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