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cats rule
nogutsnoglory blog- Netdynam 2.0
- More email newsletters July 2, 2014
- new language annotation software June 25, 2014
- Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism June 25, 2014
- ye olde net… June 25, 2014
- re the big data explosion June 10, 2014
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If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite variety in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. [Charles Darwin (1859) On the Origin of Species]
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“It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.” James Madison -
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it. -Benjamin Franklin - Flowing Data
- IO9
- How much snow has the United States seen this year? March 6, 2015How much snow has the United States seen this year? The New York Times has a set of composite photos showing snow cover from 2013, 2014, and 2015. Two things stand out: one is the photos for the Northeast, which shows the thicker more snow this year. The other is the disappearance of snow from […]
- How Close Was The Simpsons To Figuring Out the Mass of the Higgs Boson? March 6, 2015Given the time it happened and, you know, that he's a cartoon, the answer is that Homer Simpson did come pretty close to figuring out the mass of the Higgs Boson before scientists did. Read more...
- If They Can't Move Their Abdomen, Mantises Can't Jump March 6, 2015This slow motion clip of a jumping praying mantis is by Gregory Sutton, one of the authors of a study on how these insects manage to precisely target and hit their jumps. They need to be able to move their abdomen, hind legs, and front legs. Just one immobilized, like in the clip, and things […]
- RIP Harve Bennett, Who Resurrected Star Trek On the Big Screen March 6, 2015Harve Bennett, who produced four Star Trek movies, The Mod Squad, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman died on Wednesday at the age of 84. It was because of Bennett that Wrath of Khan became a classic, and he should be remembered forever as one of heroes of science fiction.Read more...
- New NASA Findings Suggest Mars Was Once Home To A Giant Ocean March 6, 2015A vast, ancient ocean reaching depths of more than one mile may have once occupied close to half of Mars' northern hemisphere, NASA scientists reported today.Read more...
- How much snow has the United States seen this year? March 6, 2015
- Make Blog
- Reviews: Getting Started with Arduino, Flora, CNC, and More Books March 6, 2015
- Interview: Egypt’s Maker Movement Gears Up for Cairo Faire March 6, 2015
- Etched Brass Hellraiser Puzzle Box Prop Is Easy and Beautiful March 6, 2015
- Reviews: MicroView, Navio Autopilot Shield and More Boards March 5, 2015
- Extreme Cardboarding: The Superman Snow Shovel March 5, 2015
- Weird Universe
Category Archives: Gregory Bateson
The Hand
Page 1 with two of the five questions in the short form H&HAS we’re testng right now.
I recommend you take your hand home and take a look at it when you get there — very quietly, almost as part of meditation. And try to catch the difference between seeing it as a base for five parts and seeing it as constructed of a tangle of relationships. Not a tangle, a pattern of the interlocking of relationships that were determinants of its growth. And if you can really manage to see the hand in terms of the epistemology that I am offering you, I think you will find that your hand is much more recognizably beautiful as a product of relationships than as a composition of countable parts. In other words, I am suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceiving, and, second, that if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be like to look at the world with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with the concepts that the biologists don’t look at. You will meet with beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world that you as a living creature live in.
…Of course natural history can be taught as a dead subject. I know that, but I believe also that perhaps the monstrous atomistic pathology at the individual level, the national level, and the international level — the pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live — can only in the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature that make up the beauty of nature. Gregory Bateson
This is a deceptive juxtaposition. In noting as much, I would guess almost all my given juxtapositions have an element of deception concealed in my secret intention!
plus, bonus:
Our apelike ancestors’ hands were surprisingly like ours, say scientists
Posted in adult learning, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson, psychology, self-knowledge
Tagged cybernetics, palmistry, post-palmistry
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Something Like a Scout
I finally took the Kolb Educator Role Profile.
This result, schematically presented above, is fuzzily right inasmuch as the KERP is able to capture some of the qualities of me–who in the normative sense of the term educator is not an educator–yet, is an educator-of-a-sort. What kind of sort?
This raises the question of how to get at the term for my sort. Perhaps, it’s best to ask the subjects of whatever it is that qualifies and names what I do. I do aid experience-based transformative learning. Yet, there isn’t a clear educator’s role in what I do, except, the learning relationship is certainly educative.
Here’s my Kolb LSi 4.0 “kite.” (My own sense is that it presents–something like–my genre of experiential learning style because as a visual and musical experimenter the kites which would correspond to those contexts would look radically different.)
In my one-on-one learning collaborations, I’m an intuitive, experienced re-worker.
Mindfulness exploits the fact that two key points of leverage in managing the unexpected are expectations and categories. People who persistently rework their categories and refine them, differentiate them, update them, and replace them notice more and catch unexpected events earlier in their development. That is the essence of mindfulness. – Karl Weick
Where is mindfulness located in the Experiential Learning Cycle of David A. Kolb?
David A. Kolb’s experiential learning cycle helps me channel my introspective sense of my role:
feelandwatchwatchingandthinkandwatchandfeelandwatchandthinkanddo
In the literature and movies of the American Frontier the scout is usually depicted as a roughly clad eccentric who leaves the safety of the settlement and reappears unpredictably, bringing a mixture of firsthand reports, rumors, and warnings about the wilderness ahead—together with a tantalizing collection of plant specimens, animal skins, and rock samples, not all of which are fool’s gold. At first the settlers find the scout’s help indispensable; but once their community begins to consolidate he becomes a figure of fun; and finally, after respectability has set in, he is a positive embarrassment. Yet their premature respectability is vulnerable. When the settlement is struck by drought, the scout’s nature lore leads the settlers to hidden springs of underground water, but once the crisis is past, respectability reemerges, and the scout is ridden out to the town line.Within the world of the American behavioral sciences, Gregory Bateson has always had the scout’s ambiguous status.
The Charm of the Scout Philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin reviewing Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Gregory Bateson) in The New York Review of Books, 1980 – also included in Rigor & Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson
It occurs to me my clearest educator’s role is instantiated as the central aspect of my self-education. Ironically, the KERP captures my autodidactic approach.
(I dislike the term coach.) I’m a bit of a guide and a scout. I told Ken, “I’m sort of a Virgil-like figure.”
Sort of a hybrid?
DeBate Son
Nora Bateson with her father
I. Ding an Sich
Perhaps the largest question in epistemology is: How can we know anything if we cannot know the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself? Or, another way of putting it: If we cannot know the Ding an sich, do we know the natural world at all?
Gregory tended to say that we know images of the world, not the world itself. An epistemology of mediate realism says that we do not know our images of the world, but we know the world itself through our images of it. Gregory cannot come to an epistemology of mediate realism because he has no developed theory of refer- ence, no theory of intentionality or ‘aboutness.’
Let’s parse this problem more finely than Gregory did. The notion of the Ding an sich goes back to the scholastic philosophers of the 13th century who used the phrase in se vs. quoad nos, a pair of philosophical jargon terms that are understood in relation to each other. Any being or entity that is understood quoad nos is under- stood as it relates to us. We might say that the sun is a disk, quoad nos, as far as we are concerned, i.e., from our point of view. But the sun is a sphere in se, in itself, i.e., not relative to any particular observer.
But there is a subtlety here that must be examined.
When we use the phrase ‘in itself’, in se, an sich, we seem to mean the object or event without its relationships to other things. But the question is, is any object or event real without its relationships to other things?
Of course there is a difference between the relationship to a perceiver, i.e., the causal relationships that trigger perceptions, and the relationships that a thing has altogether, the sum of its relationships to everything (as Kant and Bateson point out). But, is it not the case that we organisms perceive objects and events by means of the relationships that the objects and events have to other things?
The white egret is seen at dusk by virtue of the characteristic way light relates to the molecular patterns of its feathers. The crow is harder to see at dusk and may be missed entirely – because of the characteristic way its feathers absorb rather than reflect streams of photons. We perceive the mass of a paperweight by holding it in our hand. This perception is possible due to the attraction, the relationship, between the paperweight and the mass of the earth. Our perception of the mass of the object is due to the intrinsic gravitational relationship between it and the earth.
It is due to their relationships with other things that objects are able to be per-ceived by organisms with senses. But the fact that material objects have relation- ships to each other: reflectivity, resistance, momentum, gravitational mass, chemical reactivity, vibratory speed, resonance, etc, is not extrinsic to them. It is intrinsic. To think any other way is to imagine an essence, as in the Aristotelian/scholastic tradi- tion, an essence which is different from and mentally separable from the perceiva- ble ‘accidents,’ color, texture, shape, reflectivity, etc. This philosophy of essentialism has been left behind, undermined by scientific evidence during the 20th century.
Therefore, any thing in itself is a thing with its relationships. The idea of a thing without its relationships to other things is clearly just an idea. Such a thing cannot exist in the real world. It is an abstraction of the mind. So, we must conclude that the thing in itself, the Ding and sich, has relationships. And it is precisely through (by means of) these relationships that the perception and thus cognition of the object occurs. Therefore, we can know/perceive the thing-in-itself, but of course, indirectly, through the medium of the senses and central nervous system.
The philosophical texts that have for centuries claimed that the thing in itself cannot be known are the result of a trick of words, a subtle assumption that the real things out there are somehow stripped of their relationality. As we have seen, a little reflection shows that this is absurd. The relationality of things in the world is intrin- sic to what they are in themselves. Therefore, any Ding an sich that cannot be known only exists in our minds. The Ding an sich that cannot be known is precisely not a real thing in the world, but a mental construct, a figment of the conceiving mind. All Dinge an sich in the concrete world can in principle be known. Yes, known as Dinge an sich, as things in themselves.
However, they cannot be known directly, i.e., immediately, because nothing can be known without the mediation of the nervous system. But still they can be known in themselves, that is in their intrinsic relationships, through relationships that are inseparable from their intrinsic qualities, characteristics.
II. Conclusion
There were a few linked issues that are both relevant to his work and linked to each other that Gregory did not address, amidst the very large number that he did. Along with aboutness and reference which he did not work on, there was action. At an informal seminar not long before his death I asked him to speak to a philosophy of action. He responded, ‘Well, you know I have never been much for action.’ I suggested, then, that he might speak to a philosophy of non-action. He looked at me, and remained silent.
These issues of intentionality and action go together. As I have pointed out, his blind spot about action led him to miss the role of the direct access the hands have to the territory. In describing the man with the axe, he focused on the circuit of dif- ferences, i.e., the creatural aspect, not the ability of the pleromic axehead to directly change the territory.
We know the territory is there beyond our maps because it resists us. It resists our efforts to do things and our efforts to know things. But it does not resist absolutely.
The interaction of hand work and mind work has given us virtually all the under- standings of nature that the sciences have offered. Each year, each decade we know more – not just a little more, but much more. Although it is true that the interaction of the pleromic hand and creatural mind brings our images into a closer fit with the territory only asymptotically, the clear evidence of continually improved and improving knowledge due to their interaction is the ultimate warrant for realism.
Chapter 3 What Connects the Map to the Territory?
Tyrone Cashman – A Legacy for Living Systems Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics Springer, Jesper Hoffmeyer Editor) – fulltext pdf
Cashman, one of the moving forces behind wind energy in California, in the full essay provides one of the most singularly coherent advances of Bateson’s incomplete epistemology.
Am I Understood?
The total self-corrective unit which processes information , or, as I say,’thinks’ and ‘acts’ and ‘decides’, is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’; and it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the thinking system and the ‘self’ as popularly conceived. – Gregory Bateson
The Cyclical process of Action Research – The Contribution of Gilles Deleuze — G.F. Bertini
It’s All In the Head
Me & a Head, next door, late Summer, 2013
PATIENT: Doctor, doctor, I’ve lost my memory?
DOCTOR: When did it happen?
PATIENT: When did what happen?
(Ahlberg and Ahlberg, 1982: 90)
Gregory Bateson: Epistemology, Language, Play and the Double Bind
Edmond Wright (Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
Posted in adult learning, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson
Tagged Anthropoetics, Edmund Wright
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Around and Round, and Never Off the Surface
Ask yourself: what kinds of “whats” express your own depth? Your depth is, what?
To which problem do you go to first, the problem of ‘what is the what,’ or, the problem of, what is depth in terms of my depth?
from: www.counterbalance.org/
Alternately, can you read the meta-problem backward? In which case, one would identify the ends which are the ramifications of the varieties of the result of: what depth is a deep what? Then you argue your answers from these end results.
(Apologies to Dr. Seuss.)
M.C.EScher
Short cut: make a list of all your accomplishments on any given day. Circle the deep accomplishments. Justify your choices. Elaborate the terms of justification. Deepen the terms of justification.
Model makers around the end of the nineteenth century realised that their models’ translucent and airy forms could make real what till then might have seemed invisible abstractions: their faith rested in the possibility of turning geometry into artefacts. So, at Goettingen and other major research centres in mathematics, students were encouraged to contemplate, handle and design ever more exotic forms as part of their training in the realities of higher geometry. In 1882 their master, the mathematician and entrepreneur Felix Klein, designed a three dimensional form which seemed to have but one surface – it came to be known as the Klein bottle. At least as interesting as its formation is its dependence on the malleable materials of which it is made. The plasticity of glass and related substances was decisive for many of the great scientific advances of a century ago, for by manipulating and twisting such substances into elegant and manageable form, technicians were able to design objects which not only helped make abstractions real, but also aided the scientists of microphysics and the subatomic world perform trials which first showed the existence of rays which could penetrate matter and particles smaller than atoms: radiation tubes, radiometers, cathode ray instruments. The magnificent glass works of the labs and workshops of the Belle Epoque showed the world how it was made. Anish Kapoor, Unconformity & Entropy
See: Imperatives for unbiased holistic education: the Klein bottle, a universal structure: an archetypal image Melanie Purcell, Department of Philosophy, University of Newcastle, PDF
What is Radical Recursion?
Steven M. Rosen, Departments of Psychology and Philosophy (Emeritus) College of Staten Island/City University of New York
META-LOGUE
Paul Ryan: Gregory, the insistence that you have that the map is not the
territory. Okay. Axiomatic in terms of a way of approaching things.
Gregory Bateson: That’s old Korzybski, right.
P: Yes. As I understand it, this axiom is an insurance that logical
typing not be confused.
G: The territory not to be confused with the map. Right. Don’t eat the
menu card.
P: Now, in the Kleinform that I’m working with, there are times in
which the map becomes the territory and the territory becomes the
map. One part would be explained by being contained by two other
parts.
G: Right.
P: And in that instance we could call that the territory to be explained.
G: Wait a minute. So you draw the pictures. But these are not pictures
of something. These are pictures about something.
P: There’s no something as far as I can tell.
G: Oh, then, I don’t know what you’re at. I’m stuck again. Well, I can
say what I understood you to be at. At wanting to describe,
what shall we say, a process of embryology. And within the embryology,
there would be relations such that there would be whatever it is,
these sort of descriptive statements you’d need to make about the
embryology. And they would be related, as these three parts of the
kleinbottle are related to each other. It would then be suitable to
map them onto a Klein bottle. That’s not what you’re at.
P: No, no…it’s not.
G: Then I got you wrong. And I was so proud of myself. I thought I
was getting…( Laughter)
P: I feel it’s close, somehow, but…Let me try it this way. This is not
propositional. The intelligence here is not propositional.
G: The intelligence of no tautology in the end is propositional.
P: I didn’t realize that about logical types. There’s more flexibility
there than I’d thought. (excerpt: Metalogue: Gregory Bateson, Paul Ryan PDF
I’ve been pondering this subject: how a person abdicates depth by instrumentalizing their activities to such a great degree that all their means no longer connect to depth. (Yes, what is depth?) In a sense, what happens is those means merely are the set-up for the consumption of the next means. Uroboros.
The test for this is the enfolded question: what is my deep what?
May depth only be supported by content and identity? (This is a meta-question. Does any justification obtain this tautology: ‘The best of what I do reflects what I do best.’)
Is there nothing deeper than me at my best, doing my best?
Imaginal Cybernetics, the Demonic Daemon, Deep Play
Part One of Two
First you pour the water in the pool. Then you dive.
I’ve dived into the recent hours of intense creative dialog with Ken Warren. We’re preparing our presentation cum performance at The Society for Analytical Psychology of Western New York on December 12.
I’ll get to its description in a moment. First, let’s wander.
Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective, Charles Francois, Systems Research Sciences and Behavioral Systems Research Sciences, #16
In short, directed at the above from 1999, Blow that shit up. Ken and I discuss our stuff, and we very seriously marry our paired, then dancing, intuitions. I could identify and then name and then post the essential contexts that inform our brotherly shamanism–and this would interest me more than him–yet most of those contexts are deliberately unstable.
Why? “inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines,” souls.
We’ve been playing very hard in the overlap of our entangled sensibilities. We also play in the medial space described by the overlap, but, this medial space is outside our ‘pure’ overlap. Near where it’s bounded by the overlap we understand each other, but as our intuitions drift farther away from the overlap, or as our individual impulse reconnoiters closed to the unsharable territory in the other person’s homeland, he or I become tourists.
Yes, the medial aspects cross too. (Ken might attend to this using astropsychology, where I might propose a matrix of classification.) Still, the more one of us leaves behind both our home experience and the means that implicate our individual understanding of our, by definition, non-mutual experience, the more we traverse the medial boundary away from our core and toward the other person’s core.
Why do I mention this sort of map? For one thing, it’s a good example of third order social cybernetics, a framework I am in the process of hatching.
The two of us know something about what goes on betwixt us in our co-creative conversations. And we know that much just comes up from out of some nowhere, from the, as Ken would say, foamy depths.
What we know on our own obviously is a differential knowing, it regards my knowing being different than his knowing. That is not a trivial point. At the same time, we all the time drag one another into the medial territory for the purpose of revealing the so-called second-to-third orders ‘secreted’ there in the borderlands. The borderlands are where the action is!
Here’s the call for our program.
Repairing the Opposites, Doubling Stars, Turning Swine Into Pears
An experiential and imaginal exploration of relationship as individuation and daring-doWhat is any human system of relationship in relationship to, and contextualized by?
Is there deep value available in transforming important partnerships, friendships, and, pairings into sites for adventure?
How does activation of the Trickster archetype revitalize the approach of the single, yearning person?Using experiential learning, archetypal inquiry, and deep astrology, the principles of IN4tuity present an evening’s worth of games centered on the participatory psyche and sparking self-knowledge. Ken Warren and Stephen Calhoun use analytical psychology to bridge esoteric and cybernetic expertise. Their wild blend on this special evening aims to animate a circus of interactive exploration and discovery. Come prepared to play. Come ready to capture an epiphany or two about you and one other, even if the one other has not yet been met.
Pear. In Greek and Roman mythology, pears are sacred to three goddesses: Hera (Juno to the Romans), Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), and Pomona, an Italian goddess of gardens and harvests.
The ancient Chinese believed that the pear was a symbol of immortality. (Pear trees live for a long time.) In Chinese the word li means both “pear” and “separation,” and for this reason, tradition says that to avoid a separation, friends and lovers should not divide pears between themselves.
In Christianity, the pear, rarely used except in paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, symbolizes the fruit of Mary’s womb. St. Augustine remembered his first sin to be when he stole a pear. His original sin was mimetic with regard to the original sin in The Garden of Eden.
Stephen Calhoun is the principal of squareONE: experiential toolmakers. He recently became one of four worldwide learning partners of Experience-based Learning Systems, and, he is a founding member of the Experiential Learning Community of Practice.
Kenneth Warren is the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. BlazeVox recently published his selective history of American poetry: Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012.
I created the program in this way: 100% intuition, spontaneously, on a hunch. By 100% intuition I mean, following loosely from psychologist John Beebe: 50% extroverted intuition, and 50% introverted intuition; and by the latter I additionally mean, unconscious/occulted/demonic and of unknown origins.
Next step, to discuss with Ken what it is that is interesting to us both, and so find our hook in this 100% mutual intuitive build, a co-creation now consisting of half conscious and half unconscious interests brought together from our two different sides.
I am just about ready to adjust the program’s call to reflect what it is we will actually try to pull up, and pull off. Up to this point, Ken and I haven’t discussed my original program intuition at all.
What we have been discussing is the birth of romantic relationship, the initial soulful foray toward another soul, and, the paradoxical status of self-knowledge in both the light and dark zones of initial (and initiatory,) relating.
131. But if thou shut up thy Soul in the Body, and abuse it, and say, I understand nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of the Sea, I cannot climb up to Heaven, I know not who I am, I cannot tell what I shall be: What hast thou to do with god? for thou canst understand none of those Fair and Good things, and be a lover of the body and Evil.
132. For it is the greatest Evil, not to know God.
133. But to be able to know, and to will, and to hope, is the straight way, and Divine way, proper to the Good, and it will everywhere meet thee, and everywhere be seen of thee, plain and easy, when thou dost not expect or look for it; it will meet thee waking, sleeping, sailing, travelling, by night, by day, when thou speakest, and when thou keepest silence.
Part One of Two
Missed-Understood and the Web of Hypotheses
This video counts as keeper in my quest for laser-focused riffs on adult development lasting less than ten minutes.
The one qualification I would offer about managing conversations is: be aware of what happens if you idealize the structural and intentional features of a conversation. It seems to me all deep conversations come to be managed in their real time trajectory. From my perspective, discernment and shaping of conversational intentions (of any party to the conversation,) may engage third order repertoires. This seems to me to be part of the system and meta-system of conversational communication. It’s okay.
On the other hand, this may also be rationalizing on my part!
“Not-knowing refers to the belief that one person cannot pre-know another person or his or her situation or what is best for them. It refers to the intent and manner with which the coach thinks about and introduces his or her believed knowledge and expertise (what they think they might know). Knowledge and expertise (e.g., whether from research, experience, or theory) are tentatively offered as food for thought and dialogue and remain open to challenge and change.”Harlene Anderson, h/t C.Visser
Harlene Anderson bio from Taos Institute.
Harlene Anderson, Ph.D., is founding member of the Houston Galveston Institute, the Taos Institute, and Access Success. She is recognized internationally as being at the leading edge of postmodern collaborative practices as a thinker, consultant, coach, and educator. She takes her tools — her insights, her curiosity, her engaging conversational style, her leadership skills and her keen interest — to help professionals turn theory into new and often surprising possibilities for their clients, students, and organizations. She embodies her own belief in learning as a lifelong process — inviting, encouraging and challenging people to be inquisitive, creative, authentic, and open to the ever-present possibilities for newness in others — and in themselves.
Harlene Anderson and Dr. Harold A. Goolishian developed collaborative therapy as a postmodern approach to creative and solution-based communication. A core component of postmodern collaborative therapy is that the relationship between therapist and client is one of equals; the therapist is not in a position of authority over the client. Instead, therapy is viewed as a partnership that allows the therapist and client to combine their expertise. There is a strong emphasis on becoming comfortable with uncertainty, including the therapist’s own uncertainty. The therapist avoids the use of jargon, and makes notes readily available to the client. Clients are encouraged to actively participate in the process by providing feedback on the process itself, for example, and loved ones in the client’s life are not stigmatized or viewed as harmful. Instead, they too are invited to participate in the therapeutic process.
Sweetly Focused Nora Bateson
What a great two minutes!
Nora Bateson’s soulful approach to her father’s work, to his way of understanding, strikes me as being beautifully personal, ingratiating, and, most crucially, precisely formulated so as to provide a warm introductory gateway to his legacy.
The following videos help frame her brilliant film about her father, An Ecology of Mind. The interviewers are different, and there is some repetition, yet Ms. Bateson is so much deeply her father’s daughter that I find her views enchanting.
The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer. (Gregory Bateson)
According to the popular image of science, everything is, in principle, predictable and controllable; and if some event or process is not predictable and controllable in the present state of your knowledge, a little more knowledge and, especially, a little more know-how will enable us to predict and control the wild variables.
This view is wrong, not merely in detail, but in principle. It is even possible to define large classes or phenomena where prediction and control are simply impossible for very basic but quite understandable reasons. Perhaps the most familiar example of this class of phenomena is the breaking of any superficially homogeneous material, such as glass. The Brownian movement (see Glossary) of molecules in liquids and gases is similarly unpredictable.
If I throw a stone at a glass window, I shall, under appropriate circumstances, break of crack the glass in a star-shaped pattern. If my stone hits the glass as fast as a bullet, it is possible that it will detach from the glass a neat conical plug called a conic of percussion. If my stone is too slow and too small, I may fail to break the glass at all. Prediction and control will be quite possible at this level. I can easily make sure which of three results (the star, the percussion cone, or no breakage) I shall achieve, provided I avoid marginal strengths of throw.
But within the conditions which produce the star-shaped break, it will be impossible to predict or control the pathways and the positions of the arms of the stars.
Curiously enough, the more precise my laboratory methods, the more unpredictable the events will become. If I use the most homogeneous glass available, polish its surface to the most exact optical flatness, and control the motion of my stone as precisely as possible, ensuring an almost precisely vertical impact on the surface of the glass, all my efforts will only make the events more impossible to predict.
If, on the other hand, I scratch the surface of the glass or use a piece of glass that is already cracked (which would be cheating), I shall be able to make some approximate predictions. For some reason (unknown to me), the break in the glass will run parallel to the scratch and about 1/100 of an inch to the side, so that the scratch mark will appear on only one side of the break. Beyond the end of the scratch, the break will veer off unpredictably.
Under tension, a chain will break at its weakest link. That much is predictable. What is difficult is to identify the weakest link before it breaks. The generic we can know, but the specific eludes us. Some chains are designed to break at a certain tension and at a certain link. But a good chain is homogeneous, and no prediction is possible. And because we cannot know which link is weakest, we cannot know precisely how much tension will be needed to break the chain.
6. Divergent Sequences Are Unpredictable
II Every School Boy Knows
Mind & Nature (Gregory Bateson)
Any form of certainty we find along the way is probably transitional. (Nora Bateson)
Nora Bateson from AURA on Vimeo.
Nora Bateson’s film (Amazon DVD) An Ecology of Mind, A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson–it’s wonderful– Web Site | An Ecology of the Mind (on Facebook)
Department of Anthropology Indiana University: Gregory Bateson biography
Posted in creative captures, Gregory Bateson, psychological anthropology, science
Tagged context, Nora Bateson, patterns, systems
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Cat Spat
[Gregory Bateson] The first definite step in the formulation of the hypothesis guiding this research occurred in January, 1952, when I went to the Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco to look for behavioral criteria which would indicate whether any given organism is or is not able to recognize that the signs emitted by itself and other members of the species are signals. In theory, I had thought out what such criteria might look like?—that the occurrence of metacommunicative signs (or signals) in the stream of interaction between the animals would indicate that the animals have at least some awareness (conscious or unconscious) that the signs about which they metacommunicate are signals.
I knew, of course, that there was no likelihood of finding denotative messages among nonhuman mammals, but I was still not aware that the animal data would require an almost total revision of my thinking. What I encountered at the zoo was a phenomenon well known to everybody: I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat. It was evident, even to the human observer, that the sequence as a whole was not combat, and evident to the human observer that to the participant monkeys this was ?“not combat.?”
Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of meta-communication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ?“this is play.?”
(4) The next step was the examination of the message ?“This is play,?” and the realization that this message contains those elements which necessarily generate a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type -a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement. Expanded, the statement ?“This is play?” looks something like this: ?“These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.?”
We now ask about the italicized words, ?“for which they stand.?” We say the word ?“cat?” stands for any member of a certain class. That is, the phrase ?“stands for?” is a near synonym of ?“denotes.?” If we now substitute ?“which they denote?” for the words ?“for which they stand?” in the expanded definition of play, the result is: ?“These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be de-noted by those actions which these actions denote.?” The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.
According to the Theory of Logical Types such a message is of course inadmissible, because the word ?“denote?” is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous. But all that we learn from such a criticism is that it would be bad natural history to expect the mental processes and communicative habits of mammals to conform to the logician?’s ideal. Indeed, if human thought and communication always conformed to the ideal, Russell would not in fact could not have formulated the ideal.
(5) A related problem in the evolution of communication concerns the origin of what Korzybski,62 has called the map-territory relation: the fact that a message, of whatever kind, does not consist of those objects which it denotes (?“The word `cat?’ cannot scratch us?”). Rather, language bears to the objects which it denotes a relationship comparable to that which a map bears to a territory. Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized)63 rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events. It is therefore appropriate to look for the evolution of such metalinguistic and/or meta-communicative rules at a prehuman and preverbal level.
It appears from what is said above that play is a phenomenon in which the actions of ?“play?” are related to, or denote, other actions of ?“not play.?” We therefore meet in play with an instance of signals standing for other events, and it appears, therefore, that the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication.
(6) Threat is another phenomenon which resembles play in that actions denote, but are different from, other actions. The clenched fist of threat is different from the punch, but it refers to a possible future (but at present nonexistent) punch. And threat also is commonly recognizable among non-human mammals. Indeed it has lately been argued that a great part of what appears to be combat among members of a single species is rather to be regarded as threat (Tinbergen,64 Lorenz,65).
(7) Histrionic behavior and deceit are other examples of the primitive occurrence of map-territory differentiation. And there is evidence that dramatization occurs among birds: a jackdaw may imitate her own mood-signs (Lorenz66), and deceit has been observed among howler monkeys (Carpenter,67). [excerpt: 4.2 A Theory of Play and Fantasy, Steps to An Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson]
Posted in adult learning, cats, Gregory Bateson
Tagged communications, meta-communications, theory of communication
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Meta Plus Recursion (and a topos for truthiness)
The idea of a universally shared source of truth called ‘reason’ or ‘human nature’ is, for us pragmatists, just the idea that such discussion ought to be capable of being made conclusive. We see this idea as a misleading way of expressing the hope, which we share, that the human race as a whole should gradually come together in a global community, a community which incorporates most of the thick moral- ity of the European industrialized democracies. It is misleading because it suggests that the aspiration to such a community is somehow built into every member of the biological species.This seems to us pragmatists like the suggestion that the aspiration to be an anaconda is somehow built into all reptiles, or that the aspiration to be an anthropoid is somehow built into all mammals. This is why we pragmatists see the charge of relativism as simply the charge that we see luck where our critics insist on seeing destiny. We think that the utopian world community envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations and the Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights is no more the destiny of humanity than is an atomic holocaust or the replacement of democratic governments by feuding warlords. If either of the latter is what the future holds, our species will have been unlucky, but it will not have been irrational. It will not have failed to live up to its moral obligations. It will simply have missed a chance to be happy. -Richard Rorty (Introduction, Philosophy and Social Hope)
Thank you Google for allowing me to search for the paragraph I need from A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Peter Harries-Jones.)
Richard Rorty’s argument for the boundless description and explanation that is pragmatically resolved as a matter of these being true enough as a matter of being useful enough, is related to commission–as long as commission is flexible enough to denote: useful. Even if this stretches the similarity too far, the Batesonian epistemology is partly concerned with the rightness in doing. Crucially: the abductive reason is adequate and commensurate for the purpose of supposing usefulness for Bateson, James, Dewey, and Rorty.
(Richard Rorty, in A World Without Substances and Essences (1994) argues for a crisp eliminativist, anti-essentialist monism not contemplated by Bateson at all. The two monists had different senses of what is possibly ecological.)
Bonus:
Two Pragmatic Moral Universes: James vs. Dewey and Rorty by Scott Segrest (SSRN)
Dewey and Rorty On Truth by Alexander Kremer (pdf)
Foucault and Rorty on Truth and Ideology: A Pragmatist View from the Left by Chandra Kumar (pdf)
Rabbit Holes
Enactivist Grid – a form for a heuristic inquiry
I’ve been reviewing current so-called Integral literature over the last few weeks, but it was Ken who had much earlier got me going back toward that development dynamic when I toppled over ‘into it’ in the intellectual sense from our discussing Giegerich’s critique of classical Analytical Psychology.
I’m not an Integralist. Understanding in a meta-systems sense that the best and the lesser are sometimes necessarily retained, and, transcend-and-include turns out to be an arbitrary imposition if it then, at times, results in the baby following promptly the bathwater, highlights the fundamental points of distinction between my messy/rigorous viewing site and the seemingly reductive AQAL territories.
I note as much when I peruse the neatly reductive diagrams that have been recently multiplying; and most strike me initially to be graphical, intellectual kitsch. But then I get out my scraper.
I’d be very interested in scratching beneath the surface of the presumably poetical ” ‘live eros,’ springing forth from chaos.”
What a human system apparently is (to a degree mediated by a, or several, or all domains,) is what he or she entails, and what he or she can possibly entertain, and, so, what I and you feel, and, that which I and you may create from the, my/your, our, current entailment, and, also, how future potentials are foresight worthy. In a nutshell, this is a (my own,) provisional perspective that, at least and as far as I do foresee, is able to encompass just about any ol’ additional perspective which could be tossed toward it, at it, into it, or, even land neatly and dynamically as a tangent, and with enough energy in such a circuit to cause further differentiation and a foundation for adaptation or sudden evolution.
Development is often non-linear.
Horizon is the root of horizontal.
We, you and I, are able to discuss the future. (Maybe this is among the most singular human features.)
The Map never gets close, and that it gets closer is an illusion provided by what I term the sunk perspective. In noting this, at the same time, all sorts of adventurous turns may tumble out of the dynamical interplay caused by being gripped and enthused by the current sunk perspective! Such perspectives then become relativized–and this is may be much different than being transcended and included.
Someday my squaring of radical empiricism and human (or social,) cybernetics will fall down the hole too.
If you should speak and try a hundred ways to express it,
‘Tis useless; the mystery becomes no clearer. …
A horse of wood is useless on dry land,
It is the special conveyance of voyagers by sea.
Silence is this horse of wood,
Silence is the guide and support of men at sea.
This Silence which causes you annoyance
Is uttering cries of love audible to the spiritual. (Rumi)
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FALLACY by Wolfgang Giegerich
One conception of the psyche that one can get from studying Jung’s work, above all the work of early Jung, is that the psyche has a clear- cut orderly structure that can be presented in the geometric forms of concentric circles (the ego as the center, surrounded first by the realm of consciousness, then of the personal unconscious and finally of the collective unconscious) or of a cone (with different layers, the deepest of which would be that of the collective unconscious whereas the tip would represent the ego) as well as in the imaginal form of personified figures (ego, persona, shadow, anima/animus, self). To this conception, Jung’s psychological typology with its compass-like representation of the four orientation functions fits very neatly. The crux of this conception is that it starts out from the human person. The human being is here the container or vessel of the soul and accordingly also the horizon of psychology A psychology based on this fantasy clearly operates with the division between man and world, subject and object, inner and outer, psychology and physics and feels competent for only half of this divided whole.
Psychology’s belonging to one side manifests for example in the concept of “extraversion” and in the “object-level” method of dream interpretation. Psychology is here what goes on inside the human person, which is why I speak of the anthropological fallacy. This fallacy is of course by no means a specialty of (the early) C. G. Jung. It is, and has been, the generally accepted, conventional idea about psychology ever since there has been a scientific discipline by this name, an idea that seemed so natural, so self-evident that it was not felt to be in need of any argumentative justification.
In depth psychology the anthropological fallacy had the practical consequence that the individual was urged to turn inwards and, in the case of Jungian analysis, to develop his or her self and to strive for his or her wholeness. Not only the “individuation process,” but Jung’s adamant emphasis on the individual as “the measure of all things” (CW 10, par.523) and “the makeweight that tips the scales” (par. 586) affirmed and highlighted this concentration on the person. It is true, Jung repeatedly insisted that “individuation” and his psychological stance in general does not exclude, but include, the world. But such a semantic statement does not undo the underlying structure or syntax of this thinking, namely that it irrevocably starts out from a human being who has the world (“external reality”) outside and vis-a?-vis himself. Even synchronicity as the meaningful coincidence of an inner and an outer event still has the anthropological conception of psychology as its background and precisely by trying to overcome the opposition of psychology and physics in the direction of the idea of unus mundus once more confirms the anthropological stance.
A serious consequence of this methodological standpoint is that the soul is logically relegated to second rank, as much as it may be prioritized, semantically and emotionally. The human being is here the substrate or actual substance and the psyche is merely one of the attributes of this substrate.
But the human being as the substrate personality is not itself the topic of psychology. It lies outside psychology’s field of vision. Psychology’s topic is the soul, is psychic life (which, however, often manifests in people). The moment psychic life is defined as being the life of the substrate personality, psychology has the task of exploring something (namely, psychic life), whose actual substantial reality (namely, the human being) is pre-supposed as lying outside (“pre-”) its own precincts of competence and responsibility…. The soul, not the person, is what I have to focus on.
Posted in adult learning, analytic psychology, Gregory Bateson, speculations, William James
Tagged Humberto Maturana, Ken Wilber
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Being Unreasonable About Reasoning
Schematic Reasoning
Deduction
Induction
Abduction
Analogical reasoning
Cause-and-effect reasoning
Comparative reasoning
Conditional reasoning
Criteria reasoning
Decompositional reasoning
Exemplar reasoning
Modal logic
Traditional logic
Pros-vs-cons reasoning
Set-based reasoning
Systematic reasoning
Syllogistic reasoning
wxcerpted from:
Reasoning in every day life
Michal Vince
Department of Applied Informatics Comenius University in Bratislava Slovakia
January 24, 2011
–
Recently, I’ve been thinking about abduction. Also, I’ve been observing, introspecting, and reflecting on how modalities seem to assemble and blend and, to borrow from the Churchlands, join the cascade. Then, I wished to see what else might join a listing of the modes of reasoning. I shall now add to that list.
Conformative Reasoning
Reformative Reasoning
Design Reasoning
Instrumental Reasoning
Metaphoric Reasoning
Reference-point Reasoning
Tautological Reasoning
Heuristical Reasoning
Intuitive (Hunch) Reasoning
Musical Reasoning
Semiotic Reasoning
Schematic Reasoning
Kinesthetic Reasoning
Connotative Reasoning
Classificatory Reasoning
Antimonial Reasoning
Prototype Reasoning
Improvisational Reasoning
Contemplative Reasoning
Ecstatic Reasoning
Transitive Reasoning
Memetic Reasoning
Exemplar-ordinated Reasoning
As A Kite (or Plane) Flies
“There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.” -Gregory Bateson
Incarnate in a human body paradoxically aware of itself as a sign of the body–self-conscious as one body and will, thing represented and representation–the originary human person comes into being. I am a body, totally incarnate; but incarnation means that I must be ironically aware of my spirit and will as things separate from my body. Originary Human Personhood, Andrew Bartlett, Anthropoetics, v16.2
This [second] ++stage begins at the moment when the child receives from outside the example of codified rules, that is to say, some time between the ages of two and five. But though the child imitates this example, he continues to play either by himself without bothering to find play-fellows, or with others, but without trying to win, and therefore without attempting to unify the different ways of playing. In other words, children of this stage, even when they are playing together, play each one “on his own ” (everyone can win at once) and without regard for any codification of rules. This dual character, combining imitation of others with a purely individual use of the examples received, we have designated by the term Egocentrism. – Jean Piaget
Posted in Gregory Bateson, nature, play, psychological anthropology
Tagged anthropology
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A Batesonian sign
Also, for me, understanding this is the prime first order insight. What system is my being/doing mostly being-doing in? Consequence: the traffic is me; the traffic ‘over there’ is an extension of me, etc.
The bike won’t free you!
The advice aimed to promote biking is a second order directive, yet, until the differentiation of constituents of traffic is made explicit, these given constituents are identical with respect to how each is related to traffic.
Four Square Matrix – Metaverse Four Square
The explanation for this Four Square Matrix is below.
(I’ve been exploring the format of the Four Square Matrix for over five years on the squareONE Explorations blog: Revisiting the Matrix Part 1 / Class of ’72 / Periodic Table of Visualization, And More / More Matrices / The Acid Test / Matrices – Stacked / Slowing Down to Better Problem Solve)
(SOURCE) To construct our scenario set we selected two key continua that are likely to influence the ways in which the Metaverse unfolds: the spectrum of technologies and applications ranging from augmentation to simulation; and the spectrum ranging from intimate (identity-focused) to external (world-focused).
• Augmentation refers to technologies that add new capabilities to existing real systems; in the Metaverse context, this means technologies that layer new control systems and information onto our perception of the physical environment.
• Simulation refers to technologies that model reality (or parallel realities), offering wholly new environments; in the Metaverse context, this means technologies that provide simulated worlds as the locus for interaction.
• Intimate technologies are focused inwardly, on the identity and actions of the individual or object; in the Metaverse context, this means technologies where the user (or semi-intelligent object) has agency in the environment, either through the use of an avatar/digital profile or through direct appearance as an actor in the system.
• External technologies are focused outwardly, towards the world at large; in the Metaverse context, this means technologies that provide information about and control of the world around the user.
These continua are “critical uncertainties”—critical because they are fundamental aspects of the coming Metaverse, and uncertainties because how they will emerge, their relative and absolute development in various contexts, is yet to be seen.
Combining the two critical uncertainties gives four key components of the Metaverse future:
Virtual Worlds
Mirror Worlds
Augmented Reality
Lifelogging
These four scenarios emphasize different functions, types, or sets of Metaverse technologies. All four are already well into early emergence, yet the conditions under which each will fully develop, in particular contexts, are far from clear.
The source document at Metaverseroadmap.org provides the context and additional provocation. This would be most compelling for students of the history of technology, and socio-anthropologists interested in modernity and post-modernity. Download the PDF available there for the full view of the working group.
Revisiting the 2×2 Matrix – Part 1.
What I term a ‘four square,’ or matrix, derives in modern times from The Boston Consulting Group’s Growth-Share Matrix. I devise my own four squares and collect any others I encounter. At times the 2×2 Matrix in either its ‘cross’ or ‘four squares’ versions have done duty in my work to help depict human situations. For example, I have employed the following one and used it as the basis for a learner to reflect upon the challenge of having it both ways.
MDFI Matrix aka Dr. Puck’s Problem Solver
Such visual devices have come to be known as 2×2 Matrix. The essential book on the use of the 2×2 Matrix in business, The Power of the 2×2 Matrix, presents authors Alex Lowy and Phil Hood’s understanding of the tool’s value as an aid to decision making. 
They write:
2 × 2 Thinking is inherently and profoundly transcendent in nature. Two people face an identical problem differently: one sees an insurmountable problem, while the other perceives options and opportunities. Systems thinker Jamshid Gharajedaghi calls these two approaches either-or versus both-and. Confronted by tough choices, the either-or reaction is to feel trapped and obliged to pick one or the other. The both-and response draws us automatically to a new and different perspective, where it is possible to search for ways to reframe the problem or use conflicting factors in the solution.
The Institute for Manufacturing at The University of Cambridge describes the matrix yet misses two central capabilities, the use of the 2×2 Matrix to plot values, and, the implicit relational dynamic given in the identification of what in this description is termed characteristics.
A two by two matrix is a useful tool for initial sorting of qualitative data.
The axes should be chosen so that, e.g., the data with the most desirable characteristics will fall into the upper left quadrant and the least desirable in the lower right quadrant. While groups may be unable or unwilling to assign absolute values to qualitative data, they usually find it relatively easy to come to a consensus as to which quadrant something belongs in.
Generally, the two by two matrix is a useful tool for categorising things that can be reduced to two simple variables, particularly when quantitative information is unavailable and qualitative judgements must be made.
It enables a rapid clustering (or separating) of information into four categories, which can be defined to suit the purpose of the exercise. It is particularly useful with groups as a way of visibly plotting out a common understanding or agreement of a subject.
2×2 Matrices I’ve found, from the growing collection:
Inscrutible Robotics Matrix
Unsatisfying to me, “Management Matrix”
I devised the following to depict the tension of oppositions betwixt four entangled philosophical themes.
The 2×2 Matrix is a very Batesonian device too. I haven’t beta tested a workshop during which learners build a view of their self (or what-have-you,) using the format, yet, it seems a good idea!
art à l’état brut
Yippie, my nominee for the most consistently the most Batesonian tv show of all time returns Community March 15.
Now, if you look at our conventional communication with one another, what you find is that we weave these logical types with incredible complexity and quite surprising facility. We even make jokes, and these may be difficult for a foreigner to understand. Most jokes, both canned and spontaneous, and nearly anywhere, are weavings of multiple logical types. Kidding and hazing similarly depend upon the unresolved question whether the kid-ee can identify that this is kidding. In any culture, the individuals acquire quite extraordinary skill in handling not only the flat identification of what sort of a message a message is but in dealing in multiple identifications of what sort of a message a message is. When we meet these multiple identifications we laugh, and we make new psychological discoveries about what goes on inside ourselves, which is perhaps the reward of real humor. (p 148)
This seems to be a method of exploring the implicit themes in thought or in a relationship. The method of exploration involves the use of messages which are characterized by a condensation of Logical Types or communicational modes. A discovery, for example, occurs when it suddenly becomes plain that a message was not only metaphoric but also more literal, or vice versa. That is to say, the explosive moment in humor is the moment when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and re-synthesis. Commonly, the punch line compels a re-evaluation of earlier signals which ascribed to certain messages a particular mode (e.g., literalness or fantasy). This has the peculiar effect of attributing mode to those signals which had previously the status of that higher Logical Type which classifies the modes. (p154)\Steps to An Ecology of Mind; Gregory Bateson
* art à l’état brut. . .All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists. (Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act)
Posted in Gregory Bateson
Tagged COmmunity (tv show), Gregory Bateson, the screen, web media
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“I Talked My Way Into It”
Anthropologist Nicholas Conard (left) and filmmaker Werner Herzog examine artifacts from the Chauvet caves in southern France
Werner Herzog’s new film, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, joins my favorite filmmaker to a subject that has fascinated me since I was a kid. Herzog, as he puts it, “talked his way into the Chauvet Cave” in France. With a three man crew and a lightweight 3D camera, the documentarian, shot his film about the beginning of human graphical artistry. Trailer at bottom of page for film on Herzog’s web site. For a Herzog film, significant buzz.
Interview at Scientific American
Podcast and article at NPR
Review by Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian.OK
Another documentary has just gone into very limited release, and I guess I’m going to have to be patient. An Ecology of the Mind is about the great systems thinker, anthropologist, and, multi-disciplinary investigator Gregory Bateson. He was, and his thinking is, second-to-none as a main source of my own outlook and ingredient for my own undisciplined poking around, and, research. His daughter Nora is the filmmaker…and it’s about time.
From the same page where I purloined this photo is a review and the trailer.
The hardest saying in the Bible is that of St. Paul, addressing the Galatians: “God is not mocked,” and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to plead that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that “If I didn’t, somebody else would have.” The processes of ecology are not mocked.
On the other hand, surely the mountain lion when he kills the deer is not acting to protect the grass from overgrazing.
In fact, the problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically “good” direction is itself an ecological problem. We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always and inevitably a part of it.
Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology—that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system.
We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion—he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.
I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop—and as they are developed by the (ecological) process of their propagation.
If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans them-selves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
The closing page from Bateson’s Steps to An Ecology of the Mind; my emphasis.
Posted in Gregory Bateson
Tagged anthropology, critical culture, Gregory Bateson, thought leader, Werner Herzog
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Reduced Bateson Set: III. Set Up; Actuality Matters
(I continue musings which exemplify what I’m musing about. This is the set up to my presenting a schema, the Reduced Bateson Set, I can use to interpret my experience of other person’s presentation of information. Caveat: I am entertaining here an informal perspective. My eventual goal is to connect this perspective with further musings on adult learning.)
Although it may count as one of my most abstruse attempts at communicating complex, ‘softly’ phenomenological discoveries about the exchange of knowledge between persons, between human systems of awareness, the previous post in this series nevertheless entertains several main points. Its first point was that seemingly simple systems of human action do not yield answers to simple questions. The second point was these unanswerables are apparently due to incapacities in both formal and heuristic means for deriving answers and making accurate predictions. The third point was that in a discussion among persons who bring into the discussion differing perspectives and approaches, this discussion productively can happen irrespective of pertinent differences found or implicit in individual perspectives and/or approaches.
Here’s a mundane example. Your car needs a repair. You take it to the mechanic and discuss its ill symptoms. The mechanic sketches some possible causes. You don’t know much about how cars work. The mechanic does know how cars work. Yet, you have a discussion about what’s possibly wrong with your car. In this example, you and the mechanic share the assumption you the car owner do not need to know how a car works, as a condition for having the discussion. However, if you say to yourself, “I really don’t know what he’s talking about since I don’t know how a car works,” then it would be the case that you hold a different assumption. In fact, this different assumption could prove to be decisive. Still, you and the mechanic can have a discussion.
I’m not qualifying, in setting out this example, whether this kind of a discussion is a good or bad kind of discussion. The suggestion is: these kinds of discussions are common.
Another example. A friend once shared a description of their spirituality. The key element of the description was their belief in a single God. I asked my friend if he understood this God to be the God of All. We clarified that I was asking whether this singular God could be defined as being behind or above ‘everything’. He put it that his definition of God could be reduced to a complex proposition:
“God is first, God is last, God is in relation to all phenomena.”
I asked my friend,
“Then your God is also the God the other Abrahamic faiths believe in?”
He had never pondered this. We talked it over, with me suggesting the following implication of the proposition.
“If there is a God of All, then this God is also in relation to those who do not believe in this God.”
On one hand, in this example I’m striving to understand a very fundamental feature of his proposition, while, on the other hand, there’s no reason we could not have discussed his spirituality without attending to the proposition in this particular way. I don’t have to know how his God works to engage in a discussion about his God.
Another example. If I remember correctly, Ludwig Wittgenstein sharply criticizes the method of Freudian analysis by pointing out that the psychoanalyst chooses the element in the analysand’s chain of association that is of psychoanalytic, and potentially curative, interest. Well, by what right understanding of how the psyche works is this a fruitful intervention? The analysand, in this example, is taking symptoms to a different kind of mechanic.
In the same vein, I can discuss Jung’s analytic psychology without entering into this discussion the very basic assumption that holds that there is no substantial empirical evidence able to demonstrate the implicit understanding that each and every human psyche in actuality reflects the structural model given by Analytic Psychology. On one hand, this is a big problem at the level of foundational assumptions, on the other hand it doesn’t have to subvert a fruitful discussion.
I’m sensitive to foundational assumptions. Often hidden, nonetheless these basic assumptions are related to the content of most common kinds of discussions. (‘Discussion’ here is used also as shorthand for many other kinds of communicative acts.) It was fascinating in 2008 as the financial crisis unfolded to read and discuss what different people thought were its causes. That discussants had no substantial idea about how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are actually operationalized in the system of finance does not prevent peoples’ productive discussion about possible causes.
For example, at times in my work life I’ve been told what a marketing plan is to be. I often choose to overlook the plan’s mistaken (to me) assumptions about what are the facts (of mechanics, or operations, or contingencies in the market,) so I can proceed to my role in the plan. The plan doesn’t really make sense, yet this does not prevent discussing it. This doesn’t mean my view is correct. This only means I believe it to be correct given unexamined, or presumptive, or, missing, or, poorly formed, assumptions, suppositions, assertions of factitude, etc..
Obviously, the following point is not profound. Discussions may implicate assumptions which could be part of the discussion, but are not brought into the discussion. Some assumptions could disrupt the discussion, yet these same assumptions are not entertained in the discussion.
Discussions, etc., have consequences. The auto mechanic goes fishing. The inept marketing plan unfolds. Deadly force is unleashed on Iraq even though the assumption that there are WMD is mistaken. The rationales for the Iraq war constitute a series of mistaken assumptions which yielded mountains of productive discussion, even given that assumptions implicit within these discussion were abject.
The Reduced Bateson Set provides, among its six factors, a factor for analysis of whether or not a presentation of knowledge or understanding both depends on, and is informed by, an accurate estimation of what is actually materially, (or positively,) true as a matter of spoken or unspoken knowledge or understanding.
