Steps to An Ecology of Mind

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Cybernetics Gregory Bateson

Notes

1971 PREFACE

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my generation — the generation born since Hiroshima

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The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads (the Indochinese war is wrong, we are destroying our ecosystem and therefore ourselves, whether we believe it or not), but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.

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But sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense.

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There is no guarantee that the new ideas will be an improvement over the old.

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The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool.

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This second way out—thinking things through and taking as lit- tle as possible on faith— is the more difficult.

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1987 PREFACE

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he was trying to define the nature of the interface between the realm of mind and physical reality,

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He was one of a group of thinkers working toward an understanding of communications,

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causal role of ideas, messages, differences.

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unsettling ideas are dealt with as the oyster deals with the bit of grit, packaged in soothing ways, smoothed over.

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The risk today is the premature claim of understanding, the premature application.

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FOREWORD

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I therefore have to thank many people and institutions for backing me, at times when I did not consider myself a good bet.

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INTRODUCTION

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propose a new way of thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of ideas which I call "minds."

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The questions which the book raises are ecological:

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I have often been impatient with colleagues who seemed unable to discern the difference between the trivial and the profound. But when students have asked me to define that difference, I have been struck dumb.

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every year the question would arise after three or four sessions of the class: "What is this course all about?"

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a difference between my habits of thought and those of my students sprang from the fact that they were trained to think and argue inductively from data to hypotheses but never to test hypotheses against knowledge derived by deduction from the fundamentals of science or philosophy.

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"data" are not events or objects but always records or descriptions or memories of events or objects. Always there is a transformation

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no data are truly "raw,"

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For the sake of politeness, I call these "heuristic" concepts; but, in truth, most of them are so loosely derived and so mutually irrelevant that they mix together to make a sort of conceptual fog which does much to delay the progress of science.

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the line between tautological truths and empirical generalizations is not sharply definable,

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The "laws" of probability cannot be stated so as to be understood and not be believed, but it is not easy to decide whether they are empirical or tautological; and this is also true of Shannon's theorems in Information Theory.

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About fifty years of work in which thousands of clever men have had their share have, in fact, produced a rich crop of several hundred heuristic concepts, but, alas, scarcely a single principle worthy of a place in the list of fundamentals.

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There is, among all scientists, a high value set upon prediction, and, indeed, to be able to predict phenomena is a fine thing. But prediction is a rather poor test of an hypothesis,

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the multiplication of dormitive hypotheses is a symptom of excessive preference for induction,

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in scientific research you start from two beginnings, each of which has its own kind of authority: the observations cannot be denied, and the fundamentals must be fitted. You must achieve a sort of pincers maneuver.

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better hold his peace rather than add to the existing jungle of half-baked hypotheses.

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faulty educational system which makes professional scientists out of men who care little for the fundamental structure of science.

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it is simply not true that the fundamentals of sci- ence began in induction from experience,

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The problem of the origin and nature of matter is summarily dismissed.

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The conservative laws for matter and energy are still separate from the laws of order, negative entropy, and information.

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Orde is seen as a matter of sorting and dividing. But the essential notion in all sorting is that some difference shall cause some other difference at a later time.

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Closely linked with the sorting and dividing is the mystery of classification, to be followed later by the extraordinary human achievement of naming.

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both cultures alike assume a fundamental division between the problems of material creation and the problems of order and differentiation.

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they have tried to build the bridge to the wrong half of the ancient dichotomy between form and substance. The conservative laws for energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance.

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Part I: Metalogues

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Metaloque: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?

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isn't that a funny thing—that everybody means the same when they say "muddled" but every-body means something different by "tidy."

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there are more ways which you call "untidy" than there are ways which you call "tidy."

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they make it look like that in the movies by doing the whole thing backwards. They put the letters all in order to spell DONALD and then they start the camera and then they start shaking the table.

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Metalogue: Why Do Frenchmen?

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But are they exchanging information? And, if so, what information? D: Sure—when you come in from fishing, and I ask you "did you catch anything?" and you say "nothing," I didn't know that you wouldn't catch anything till you told me.

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the messages which we exchange in gestures are really not the same as any translation of those gestures into words.

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Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious

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if we both spoke logically all the time, we would never get anywhere. We would only parrot all the old cliches that everybody has repeated for hundreds of years.

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a child with building blocks is mostly very serious about his "play."

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The difference between a game and just playing is that a game has rules.

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we might have rules which would stop us from getting into muddles—as long as we obeyed them.

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"What sort of order should we cling to so that when we get into a muddle we do not go mad? " It seems to me that the "rules" of the game is only an-other name for that sort of order.

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the whole point of the game is that we do get into muddles, and do come out on the other side, and if there were no muddles our "game" would be like canasta or chess—and that is not how we want it to be.

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If it were like chess or canasta, I could tell you the rules, and we could, if we wanted to, stop playing and discuss the rules. And then we could start a new game with the new rules. But what rules would hold us between the two games? While we were discussing the rules?

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Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?

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it's only from answers to the wide questions that I know which detailed questions to ask. But we counted them all alike. I don't know.

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D: I wanted to find out if I could think two thoughts at the same time. So I thought "It's summer" and I thought "It's winter." And then I tried to think the two thoughts together. F: Yes? D: But I found I wasn't having two thoughts. I was only having one thought about having two thoughts. F: Sure, that's just it. You can't mix thoughts, you can only combine them. And in the end, that means you can't count them. Because counting is really only adding things together. And you mostly can't do that.

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Metalogue: Why Do Things Have Outlines?

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Just angry at the general mushiness of how people act and think—and how they preach muddle and call it tolerance.

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muddle is something to get angry about.

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I mean, suppose the croquet lawn was bumpy, or the balls were a funny shape, or the heads of the mallets just wobbly instead of being alive, then the people could still learn and the game would only be more difficult—it wouldn't be impossible. But once you bring live things into it, it becomes impossible.

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it's just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really unpredictable things in the world. To think that we try to make laws as though people were quite regular and predictable.

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Or do they make the laws just because people are not predictable, and the people who make the laws wish the other people were predictable?

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Metalogue: Why a Swan?

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I evidently do not know what the word "sort of" means.

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it is not one of these statements but their combination which constitutes a sacrament. The "pretend" and the "pretend-not" and the "really" somehow get fused together into a single meaning.

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Metaloque: What Is an Instinct?

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Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology

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Culture Contact and Schismogenesis

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T h e us e s of s uc h s y st e ms of c at e g o ri e s . In general it is unwise to construct systems of this sort until the problems which they are designed to elucidate have been clearly formulated;

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our immediate need is not so much the construction of a set of categories which will throw a light on all the problems, but rather the schematic formulation of the problems in such a way that they may be separately investigable.

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been influenced by the sort of questions which administrators ask of anthropologists—

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the scientific formulation of the problems of con-tact will not follow these lines. It is as if in the construction of categories for the study of criminology we started with a dichotomy of individuals into criminal and noncriminal

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we must expect that any single trait of a culture will prove on examination to be not simply economic or religious or structural, but to partake of all these qualities according to the point of view from which we look at it.

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we should consider under the head of "culture contact" not only those cases in which the contact occurs between two communities with different cultures and results in profound disturbance of the culture of one or both groups; but also cases of contact within a single community. In these cases the contact is between differentiated groups of individuals,

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Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Material

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he had always a hankering after the problems of pattern and symmetry, and it was this hankering and the mysticism that in-spired it that I picked up and which, for better or worse, I called "science."

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whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; when-ever we start insisting too hard upon "operationalism" or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.

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so far as opposition, control, etc. between the clans was concerned, the relations between them were reasonably symmetrical, and further, as to the question of differentiation between them, it could be shown that, though there were considerable differences, these followed no serial pattern.

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In our society, fission tends to be heretical (a following after other doctrines or mores), but in Iatmul, fission is rather schismatic (a following after other leaders without change of dogma).

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I was especially interested in studying what I called the "feel" of culture, and I was bored with the conventional study of the more formal details.

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When I am faced with a vague concept and feel that the time is not yet ripe to bring that concept into strict expression, I coin some loose expression for referring to this concept and do not want to prejudge the issue by giving the concept too meaningful a term. I therefore dub it hastily with some brief concrete colloquial term—generally Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin—I will speak of the "stuff" of culture, or "bits" of culture, or the "feel" of culture.

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first the loose thinking and the building up of a structure on unsound foundations and then the correction to stricter thinking and the substitution of a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass. And that, I believe, is a pretty fair picture of how science advances,

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tie knots in their handkerchiefs whenever they leave some mat-ter unformulated

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Morale and National Character

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the experimental conditions are not, in fact, the same for both groups; that the stimulus value of any circumstance depends upon how that circumstance stands out against the background of other circumstances in the life of the subject,

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in presuming that character, as well as circumstance, must be taken into account, we are not multiplying entities beyond necessity; we know of the significance of learned character

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to me, inconceivable that two differing groups could exist side by side in a community with-out some sort of mutual relevance between the special characteristics of one group and those of the other.

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No longer content to say, "Germans are submissive," or "Englishmen are aloof," we shall use such phrases as "dominant- submissive" when relationships of this sort can be shown to occur.

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We shall not describe varieties of character by defining a given character in terms of its position on a continuum between extreme dominance and extreme submissiveness, but we shall, instead, try to use for our descriptions some such continua as "degree of interest in, or orientation toward, dominance- submission."

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For British morale Dunkirk was a stimulus, not a depressant.

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It seems that in the case of Germany, the submission end of the pattern is masked, so that overt submissive behavior is almost as strongly tabooed as it is in America or England. In place of submission, we find a sort of parade-ground impassivity.

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Bali: The Value System of a Steady State

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Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art

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Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem for humanity is the quest for grace.

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the communication and behavior of animals has a naivete, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man's behavior is corrupted by deceit—even self-deceit—by purpose, and by self-consciousness. As Aldous saw the matter, man has lost the "grace" which animals still have.

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man is as if displaced sideways and lacks that grace which the animals have and which God has.

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the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called "consciousness" and the other the "unconscious." For the attainment of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason.

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In what form is information about psychic integration contained or coded in the work of art?

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"Meaning" may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and "restraint,"

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an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark.

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The essence and raison d'etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by "restraint."

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"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."

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all organisms must be content with rather little consciousness, and that if consciousness has any useful functions whatever (which has never been demonstrated but is probably true), then economy in consciousness will be of the first importance. No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

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In the case of an iceberg, we may guess, from what is above surface, what sort of stuff is below; but we cannot make the same sort of extrapolation from the content of consciousness.

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mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct.

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Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate;

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the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies re-turn to plague the inventor.

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love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.

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Only the violinist who can control the quality of his notes can use variations of that quality for musical purposes.

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Comment on Part II

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Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship

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Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning

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The governors and the scientists alike (not to mention the commercial world) see human affairs as patterned upon pur- pose, means and ends, connation and satisfaction.

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if we go on . defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life."

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With the best intentions in the world, he may train children to spy upon their parents in order to eradicate some tendency prejudicial to the success of his blueprint, but because the children are people they will do more than learn this simple trick—they will build this experience into their whole philosophy of life;

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The road to hell can also be paved with bad intentions, though well-intentioned people find this hard to believe.

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A Theory of Play and Fantasy

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human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction.

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the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers.

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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."

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the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication.

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Finally, in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the "metaphor that is meant," the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than "an outward and visible sign, given unto us." Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs.

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Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia

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He is unable to pick up the more abstract labels which we are most of us able to use conventionally but are most of us unable to identify in the sense that we don't know what told us what sort of a message it was. It is as if we some-how make a correct guess. We are actually quite unconscious of receiving these messages which tell us what sorts of message we receive.

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We all have some difficulty in deciding sometimes whether a dream was a dream or not, and it would not be very easy for most of us to say how we know that a piece of our own fantasy is fantasy and not experience.

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putting me in the position of having apologized when in fact I had not. That is, she took my message and reclassified it.

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Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia

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The Double Bind

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Our hypothesis does not invoke a single traumatic experience, but such repeated experience that the double bind structure comes to be an habitual expectation.

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The relationship was intense enough so that the victim was in doubt how the information would be used, and he therefore responded literally. This is characteristic of anyone who feels "on the spot," as demonstrated by the careful literal replies of a witness on the stand in a court trial. The schizophrenic feels so terribly on the spot at all times that he habitually responds with a defensive insistence on the literal level when it is quite inappropriate, e.g., when someone is joking.

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The convenient thing about a metaphor is that it leaves it up to the therapist (or mother) to see an accusation in the statement if he chooses, or to ignore it if he chooses.

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The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia

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Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia

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Double Bind, 1969

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Clearly there are in the mind no objects or events—no pigs, no coconut palms, and no mothers. The mind contains only transforms, percepts, images, etc., and rules for making these transforms, percepts, etc. In what form these rules exist we do not know, but presumably they are embodied in the very machinery which creates the transforms. The rules are certainly not commonly explicit as conscious "thoughts."

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The explanatory world of substance can invoke no differences and no ideas but only forces and impacts. And, per contra, the world of form and communication invokes no things, forces, or impacts but only differences and ideas.

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It seems that both those whose life is enriched by trans- contextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a "double take." A falling leaf, the greeting of a friend, or a "primrose by the river's brim" is not "just that and nothing more."

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habits are notoriously rigid and their rigidity follows as a necessary corollary of their status in the hierarchy of adaptation. The very economy of trial and error which is achieved by habit formation is only possible because habits are comparatively "hard programmed,"

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each of the first fourteen sessions was characterized by many futile repetitions of whatever behavior had been reinforced in the immediately previous session. Seemingly only by "accident" did the animal provide a piece of different behavior.

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The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication

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we shall commit an error in formal discourse if we count the class of chairs among the items within the class of nonchairs. Inasmuch as no class can be a member of itself, the class of nonchairs clearly cannot be a nonchair.

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But in the real world (or at least in our descriptions of it), there is always time, and nothing which has been can ever be totally negated in this way. The computer which encounters a para- dox (due to faulty programming) does not vanish away.

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The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism

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Comment on Part III

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Part IV: Biology and Evolution

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On Empty-Headedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education

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consider how a man's spirit must take a different shape if he believes that all sorting in the universe is due to an external agent, or if, like the Iatmul and modern scientists, he sees that the potentiality for order and pattern is immanent throughout this world.

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how Mind was invoked as an explanatory principle all through the Middle Ages and how Mind later became the problem.

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The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution

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Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication

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A Re-examination of "Bateson's Rule"

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The technical term "information" may be succinctly de-fined as any difference which makes a difference in some later event.

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Comment on Part IV

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Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

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Cybernetic Explanation

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cybernetic explanation is always negative. We consider what alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of those few which could, in fact, occur.

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If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints,

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Is there a difference between "being right" and "not being wrong"?

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The question is not trivial and the answer is both subtle and fundamental: choices are not all at the same level.

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it is logically possible for the evolutionary system to make something like positive choices.

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We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'etre of communication,

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in a wider universe, i.e., that defined by the point of view of the observer, this no longer appears as a "transmission" of information but rather as a spreading of redundancy.

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A pattern, in fact, is definable as an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree such guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection.

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If then we say that a message has "meaning" or is "about" some referent, what we mean is that there is a larger universe of relevance consisting of message-plus-referent, and that redundancy or pattern or predictability is introduced into this universe by the message.

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regarding each step in a communicational sequence as a transform of the previous step.

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Redundancy and Coding

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We may, I think, state categorically that man's verbal system is not derived in any simple way from these preponderantly iconic codes.

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As scientists, we are concerned to build a simulacrum of the phenomenal universe in words.

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Conscious Purpose versus Nature

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You may regret that organisms have this explosive characteristic, but you may as well settle for it. The creatures that don't are out.

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What is true of the species that live together in a wood is also true of the groupings and sorts of people in a society, who are similarly in an uneasy balance of dependency and competition.

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We therefore have to settle for very limited consciousness, and the question arises: How is the selecting done?

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Medicine ends up, therefore, as a total science, whose structure is essentially that of a bag of tricks. Within this science there is extraordinarily little knowledge

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Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short- cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom

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On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.

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Emergency is present or only just around the corner; and long-term wisdom must therefore be sacrificed to expediency, even though there is a dim awareness that expediency will never give a long-term solution.

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humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy.

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We do not live in the sort of universe in which simple lineal control is possible.

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Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation

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It may well be that consciousness contains systematic distortions of view which, when implemented by modern technology, become destructive

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Over time, the system becomes de-pendent upon the continued presence of that original external impact whose immediate effects were neutralized by the first order homeostasis.

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When the question of repeal was raised, it was expectable that certainly the bootleggers and possibly the police would be in favor of maintaining Prohibition.

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that more or less arbitrary line which delimits the individual and defines a logical difference between "reward" and "punishment."

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a population of healthy individuals cannot be directly limited by the available food supply.

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In principle, the homeostatic controls of biological systems must be activated by variables which are not in themselves harmful.

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consciousness has feedback into the remainder of mind and so an effect upon action. But the effects of this feedback are almost unknown

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the content of the screen of consciousness is systematically selected from the enormously great plethora of mental events. But of the rules and preferences of this selection, very little is known.

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there must exist a systematic (i.e., nonrandom) difference between the conscious views of self and the world, and the true nature of self and the world.

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It may be essential for wisdom that the narrow purposive view be somehow corrected.

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the power ratio between purposive consciousness and the environment has changed rapidly in the last one hundred years, and the rate of change in this ratio is certainly rapidly increasing with technological advance. Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment—with the very best of conscious intentions.

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threatens to isolate conscious purpose from many corrective processes which might come out of less conscious parts of the mind.

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Form, Substance, and Difference

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if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself.

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The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.

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the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.

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What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are the things that get onto a map. But what is a difference?

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when you enter the world of communication, organization, etc., you leave behind that whole world in which effects are brought about by forces and impacts and energy exchange. You enter a world in which "effects"—and I am not sure one should still use the same word— are brought about by differences.

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the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact.

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in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts.

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select certain facts out of the piece of chalk, which then become, in mod-ern terminology, information.

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an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk.

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Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which be-come information.

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what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference,

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able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy.

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travel which is energized at every step by the metabolic energy latent in the protoplasm which receives the difference, recreates or transforms it, and passes it on.

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it is a semantic error, a misleading metaphor, to say that what travels in an axon is an "impulse." It could correctly be called "news of a difference."

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We commonly think of the external "physical world" as somehow separate from an internal "mental world." I believe that this division is based on the contrast in coding and transmission inside and outside the body.

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What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. The territory is Ding an sich and you can't do anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum.7 All "phenomena" are literally appearances.

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The analyst of the creatura will note that the whole system is a sense organ which is triggered by temperature difference. He will call this difference which makes a difference "information" or "negative entropy." For him, this is only a special case in which the effective difference happens to be a matter of energetics. He is equally interested in all differences which can activate some sense organ. For him, any such difference is "negative entropy."

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The creatura is thus the world seen as mind,

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Every effective difference denotes a demarcation, a line of classification, and all classification is hierarchic. In other words, differences are themselves to be differentiated and classified.

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the differences immanent in the territory become differences immanent in the map.

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In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought.

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The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

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The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable.

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identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival

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I now localize something which I am calling "Mind" immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure.

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The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system.

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This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God"

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Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind in-wards to include the whole communication system within the body—the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind out-wards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger.

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as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.

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Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a rea- soned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."

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It is told of Johann Sebastian Bach that when somebody asked him how he played so divinely, he answered, "I play the notes, in order, as they are written. It is God who makes the music." But not many of us can claim Bach's correctness of epistemology

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We live in a strange epoch when many psychologists try to "humanize" their science by preaching an anti-intellectual gospel. They might, as sensibly, try to physicalize physics by discarding the tools of mathematics.

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Comment on Part V

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I see the mental as a function only of complex relationship.

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Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

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From Versailles to Cybernetics

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"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer."

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This is what mammals are about. They are concerned with patterns of relationship,

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the important question about history is: Has the bias or setting been changed?

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[The Treaty of Versailles] was one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization.

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total demoralization of German politics.

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From the demoralization of Germany, we, too, became demoralized.

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How is it for the middle generation of the house of Atreus? They are living in acrazy universe.

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If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience.

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The general good smells of hypocrisy to the rising generation.

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All these separate developments in different intellectual centers dealt with communicational problems, especially with the problem of what sort of a thing is an organized system.

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the name is not the thing named,

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there is some temptation to obey the computer. After all, if you follow the computer you are a little less responsible than if you made up your own mind. But if you do what the computer advises, you assert by that move that you support the rules of the game which you fed into the computer.

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The result is a system in which the rules of international interaction become more and more rigid.

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The question is not what is the best thing to do within the rules as they are at the moment. The question is how can we get away from the rules

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Pathologies of Epistemology

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When you say you "see" me and put up your hand in an innocent way, you are, in fact, agreeing to certain propositions about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it.

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You and I are able to get along in the world and fly to Hawaii and read papers on psychiatry and find our places around these tables and in general function reasonably like human beings in spite of very deep error. The erroneous premises, in fact, work. On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit,

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As with honey, the falsification gets around; and each thing you try to wipe it off on gets sticky, and your hands still remain sticky.

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Since about 1943 when I saw the experiment, I have worked to practice living in the world of truth instead of the world of epistemological fantasy; but I don't think I've succeeded.

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This is the epistemological base for information theory. The unit of in-formation is difference. In fact, the unit of psychological in-put is difference.

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essential minimal characteristics of a system, which I will accept as characteristics of mind:

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operate with and upon differences.

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closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted.

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energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.

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self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway.

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Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs.

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Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.

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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.

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In a way, it was all nonsense, but it made more sense than most of what we do today, because the natural world around us really has this general systemic structure and therefore is an appropriate source of metaphor to enable man to under-stand himself in his social organization.

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Struggle may be good for your soul up to the moment when to win the battle is easy.

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we are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong.

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The very fact that I am monologuing to you—this is a norm of our academic subculture, but the idea that I can teach you, unilaterally, is derivative from the premise that the mind controls the body.

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They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is non-sense. What is true is that the idea of power corrupts.

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The Roots of Ecological Crisis

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to relieve the symptoms without curing the disease is wise and sufficient if and only if either the disease is surely terminal or will cure itself.

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the world became addicted to what was once an ad hoc measure and is now known to be a major danger.

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population explosion is the single most important problem facing the world today.

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For bet-ter or for worse, we have tampered with the death rate, especially by controlling the major epidemic diseases and the death of infants. Always, in any living (i.e., ecological) system, every increasing imbalance will generate its own limiting factors as side effects

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the imbalance has gone so far that we cannot trust Nature not to overcorrect.

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There are also many thousands of businessmen and even legislators who wish they could change but feel that it would be unsafe or not "common sense" to do so.

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Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization

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the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment

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Either man is too clever, in which case we are doomed, or he was not clever enough to limit his greed to courses which would not destroy the ongoing total system. I prefer the second hypothesis.

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There shall be a matching between the flexibility of people and that of the civilization.

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shall be limited in its transactions with environment. It shall consume unreplaceable natural re-sources only as a means to facilitate necessary change

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must depend upon the energy income which Spaceship Earth derives from the sun.

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When, under stress, a variable must take -a value close to its upper or lower limit of tolerance, we shall say, borrowing a phrase from the youth culture, that the system is "up tight"

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to be up tight in respect to one variable commonly means that other variables cannot be changed without pushing the up-tight variable. The loss of flexibility thus spreads through the system. In extreme cases, the system will only accept those changes which change the -tolerance limits for the up-tight variable. For example, an overpopulated society looks for those changes (increased food, new roads, more houses, etc.) which will make the pathological and pathogenic conditions of overpopulation more comfortable. But these ad hoc changes are precisely those which in longer time can lead to more fundamental ecological pathology.

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eating up of flexibility in response to stresses of one sort or another

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he must first recommend whatever will give the system a positive budget of flexibility; and on the other hand, the people and institutions with which he must deal have a natural propensity to eat up all available flexibility.

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Social flexibility is a resource as precious as oil or titanium and must be budgeted in appropriate ways,

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flexibility is to specialization as entropy is to negentropy.

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Flexibility may be defined as uncommited potentiality for change.

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an acrobat on a high wire. To maintain the ongoing truth of his basic premise ("I am on the wire"), he must be free to move from one position of instability to another, i.e., certain variables such as the position of his arms and the rate of movement of his arms must have great flexibility, which he uses to maintain the stability of other more fundamental and general characteristics.

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it is difficult to control by law those basic ethical and abstract principles upon which the social system depends.

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it is rather easy to write laws which shall fix the more episodic and superficial details of human behavior.

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the law is surely not the appropriate method for stabilizing the fundamental variables. This should be done by the processes of education and character formation

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Essential biological functions are not controlled by lethal variables, and planners will do well to note this fact.

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Courses which offered short-term advantage have been adopted, have become rigidly programmed, and have begun to prove disastrous over longer time.

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The phenomenon of habit formation sorts out the ideas' which survive repeated use and puts them in a more or less separate category. These trusted ideas then become available for immediate use with-out thoughtful inspection, while the more flexible parts of the mind can be saved for use on newer matters.

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habit formation tends to remove the idea from the field of critical inspection.

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frequency of validation of an idea within a given segment of time is not the same as proof that the idea is either true or pragmatically useful over long time. We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.

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the system as a whole tends to "expand" into any area of unused freedom.

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the variable which does not change its value becomes ipso facto hard programmed.

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We try to prohibit certain encroachments, but it might be more effective to encourage people to know their freedoms and flexibilities and to use them more often.

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the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans them-selves,

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