Gregory Bateson Sentences

Now let us consider for a moment the question of whether a computer thinks. I would state that it does not. What ‘thinks’ and engages in ‘trial and error’ is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference istransmitted. They are not boundaries of the thinking system. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.

But if you accept self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought or mental process, then obviously there is "thought" going on inside the man at the autonomic level to maintain various internal variables. And similarly, the computer, if it controls its internal temperature, is doing some simple thinking within itself.

Now we begin to see some of the epistemological fallacies of Occidental civilization. In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid-nineteenth-century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line o 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.

If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind.

This identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but ethical.

It means, you see, that I now localize something which am calling "Mind" immanent in the large biological system -- the ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure... the very meaning of "survival" becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit.

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And 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 the 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. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured, This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the INdustrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty of thirty years before the logical reductio ad adbsurdium of our old positions destroys us.

When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying "Milk!" Rather, she is saying something like "Mama!" Or, perhaps still more correctly, we would say that she is asserting, "Dependency! Dependency!" The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. It is the necessity for this deductive step which marks the difference between preverbal mammalian communication and both the communication of bees and the languages of men.

What was extraordinary - the great new thing - in the evolution of human language was not the discoery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship. Indeed, this discovery, though it has been achieved, has scarcely affected the behavior even of human beings. If A says to B, "The plane is scheduled to leave at 6:30," B rarely accepts this remark as simply and solely a statement of fact about the plane. More often he devotes a few neurons to the question, "What does A's telling me this indicate for my relationship to A?" Our mammalian ancestry is very near the surface, despite recently acquired linguistic tricks.

Be that as it may, my first expectations in studying dolphin communication is that it will prove to have the general mammalian characteristic of being primarily about relationships.

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.

Unaided consciousness must always tend towards hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies return to plague the inventor.

If you use DDT to kill insects, you may succeed in reducing the insect population so far that the insectivores will starve. You will then have to use more DDT than before to kill the insects which the birds no longer eat. More probably, you will kill off the birds in the first round when they eat the poisoned insects. If the DDT kills off the dogs, you will have to have more police to keep down the burglars. The burglars will become better armed and more cunning... and so on.

That is the sort of world we live in - a world of circuit structures - and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e. a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.

The question has been: Does the work of art tell us about what sort of person made it? But if art, as suggested above, has a positive function in maintaining what I called "wisdow", i.e. in correcting a too purposive view of life and making the view more systemic, then the question to be asked of the given work of art becomes: What sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art?

The question becomes dynamic rather than static.

is this the guy that wrote about sociopaths?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind#Part_III:_Form_and_Pathology_in_Relationship

If A says to B, "The plane is scheduled to leave at 6:30," B rarely accepts this remark as simply and solely a statement of fact about the plane. More often he devotes a few neurons to the question, "What does A's telling me this indicate for my relationship to A?"

This just crossed my mind moments ago, though I was A, and A. was B.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind

that seems to be a recurring thing 4 u

seven billion people can't be wrong

war with apes is imminent

Gregory Bateson: You see the fantastic thing is that in 1856, before the publication of the Origin of Species, Wallace in Ternate, Indonesia, had a psychedelic spell following his malaria in which he invented the principle of natural selection. He wrote to Darwin and he said, ‘Look, natural selection is just like a steam engine with a governor.’ The first cybernetic model. But then he only thought he had an illustration, he didn’t think he’d really said probably the most powerful thing that’d been said in the 19th Century.

Margaret Mead: Only nobody knew it.

B: Nobody knew it. And there it is, still in the text. Nobody picked it up. Well, there was the machinery, the governor itself. There was the mathematics of the machine with the governor, which was done by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, because nobody knew how to write a blueprint for these bloody things - they would go into oscillation. Then there’s Claude Bernard about 1890 with the milieu interne - the internal matrix of the body, control of temperature, control of sugar, and all that.

Stewart Brand: Which later became homeostasis?

B: Which later became homeostasis in Cannon.6 But nobody put the stuff together to say these are the formal relations which go for natural selection, which go for internal physiology, which go for purpose, which go for a cat trying to catch a mouse, which go for me picking up the salt cellar. This was really done by Wiener, and Rosenblueth and McCulloch and Bigelow. And who really put the truth through, I don’t know, do you?

M: No. Wiener and McCulloch were first partners in this thinking, and then became rivals when McCulloch went to MIT. As long as McCulloch stayed at Illinois and Wiener at MIT they were working right together. With both of them at the MIT they became totally alienated, and then Walter Pitts got involved. He was the youngest member of the group.

B: Oh god, he was so clever. You’d set him a problem, you know, and he would reach up to his hair and take a couple of strands, and he would say, ‘Well, now, if you say that, you see, um, no then, you see,’ and he’d work it all out with his hair.

M: He was a very odd boy.

related thread: Surely You're POLL-ing, Mr Feynman (Best HAIR in PHYSICS)

I suspect they think it is all a sort of entertainment and hope to come out at the end feeling refreshed. Believe me, John, that is not at all what it is about.

Anybody who really reads and notices what is said and after several readings begins to understand it, will come out in dispair and nearer to tears than laughter.

http://www.oikos.org/m&nschoolboy.htm

"Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa."

Unaided consciousness must always tend towards hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies return to plague the inventor.

this feels very relevant to me atm

if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.

basic error propagates itself

In the early days of cybernetics, we used to argue about whether the brain is, on the whole, an analogic or a digital mechanism. That argument has since disappeared with the realization that description of the brain has to start from the all-or-nothing characteristic of the neuron. At least in a majority of instances, the neuron either fires or does not fire; and if this were the end of the story, the system would be purely digital and binary. But it is possible to make systems out of digital neurons that will have the appearance of being analogic systems. This is done by the simple device of multiplying the pathways so that a given cluster of pathways might consist of hundreds of neurons, of which a certain percentage would be quiet, thus giving an apparently graded response. In addition, the individual neuron is modified by horomonal and other environmental conditions around it that may alter its threshold in a truly quantitative manner.

I recall, however, that in those days, before we had fully realized the degree to which analogical and digital characteristics might be combined in one system, the discussants who argued to and fro on the question of whether the brain is analogic or digital showed very marked individual and irrational preferences for one or the other view. I tended to prefer hypotheses stressing the digital; whereas those more influenced by physiology and perhaps less by the phenomena of language and overt behavior tended to favor the analogic explanations.

In the theory of histroy, Marxian philosophy, following Tolstoi, insists that the great men who have been the historic nuclei for profound social chance or invention are, in a certain sense, irrelevant to the changes they precipitated. It is argued, for example, that in 1859, the occidental world was ready and ripe (perhaps overripe) to create and receive a theory of evolution that could reflect and justify the ethics of the Industrial Revolution. From that point of view, Charles Darwin himself could be made to appear unimportant. If he had not put out his theory, somebody else would have put out a similar theory within the next few years. Indeed, the parallelism between Alfred Russel Wallace's theory and that of Darwin would seem at first sight to support this view.*

But, of course, it does matter who starts the trend. If it had been Wallace instead of Darwin, we would have had a very different theory of evolution today. The whole cybernetics movement might have occurred 100 years earlier as a result of Wallace's comparison between the steam engine with a governor and the process of natural selection... It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future. The Marxian error is a simple blunder in logical typing, a confusion of individual with class.

* The story is worth repeating. Wallace was a young naturalist who, in 1856 (three years before the publication of Darwin's Origin), while in the rain forests of Ternate, Indonesia, had an attack of malaria and, following delirium, a psychedelic experience in which he discovered the principle of natural selection. He wrote this out in a long letter to Darwin. In this letter he explained his discovery in the following words: "The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction sure to follow." (Reprinted in Darwin, a Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman, W.W.Norton, 1970).

Relationship is always a product of double description. It is nonsense to talk about "dependency" or "aggressiveness" or "pride," and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person... the relationship comes first; it precedes.

Only if you hold on tight to the primacy and priority of relationship can you avoid dormitive explanations. The opium does not contain a dormitive principle, and the man does not contain an aggressive instinct.

If you want to talk about, say, "pride," you must talk about two persons or two groups and what happens between them. A is admired by B; B's admiration is conditional and may turn to contempt. And so on. You can then define a particular species of pride by reference to a particular pattern of interaction.

The same is true of "dependency," "courage," "passive-aggressive behavior," "fatalism," and the like. Allp characterological adjectives are to be reduced or expanded to derive their definitions from patterns of interchange, i.e., from combinations of double description.

Can the towel folding video be innately informative and relaxing or does it require a viewer?

It takes two to know one

http://www.gravitosardinha.com/blogs/11/uva-symposium-aims-to-revive-the-ideas-of-gregory-bateson

two towels?

war with apes seems immanent

crikey

/imminent (like I'm going to begin spellchecking now)

A joke is a Double Bind, but some of them aren't funny... the Bread-and-Butterfly has wings of bread and butter and a head made of a lump of sugar. Alice says, 'What does it live on?' The answer is, 'Weak tea with cream in it.' At this point she begins to perceive a difficulty: its head will dissolve in its food. So she says, 'What happens if it can't get any?' And the Gnat, who's acting as guide, says, 'It dies.' Alice says, 'That must happen rather often.' The Gnat says, 'It always happens.'

isn't "funny" also a product of double description?

The effect of hearing someone say "Wanna hear the funniest joke ever?" on your response to the joke

http://www.baumgart.org/computer_bums_lite.pdf

An absence is as significant as a presence
You may write an angry reply to a letter you didn't receive

>http://www.baumgart.org/computer_bums_lite.pdf

drat, I didn't even check to confirm that the Bateson story was included in this pdf, but it's just Brand's article on video games / the internet circa 1974, not the Bateson interview. Still an amazing article; I'm old enough to remember my dad talking about how someday everyone was going to have a Dynabook

I'm old enough to remember my dad taking community college classes to learn Fortran. He did not talk about it much. He talked more about how the tank game that came with the Atari was really boring. When we set our tanks to be invisible, the action or lack thereof was reminiscent of a Batesonian double bind.

emulation of 1962 Spacewar videogame running on PDP-1 - http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/index.html

[From Brand's Cybernetic Frontiers:]

The classic Bind. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Why do you only say that when I ask you?" The bouquet is elicited and then destroyed.

Gregory: "Then there is the more subtle case in which the rug is not switched. Shall we say a loving action is insisted upon by the recipient. The case in which A makes a spontaneous affectionate move towards B, and B grabs it. Which remarkably quickly destroys the relationship. Because the message is delivered into the frame in which it had to be delivered, it becomes a meaningless message. It doesn't mean any more than the smile of the porpoise, which smiles because he can't change his face."

I can hear it. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Thankyou." The bouquet, by being elicited, dismisses itself.

related

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/ANTICOMMUNI.html

hahahah I wondered if you were going to post that here.

Long ago, in 1949, when psychiatrists still believed in lobotomy, I was a new member of the staff of the Veterans Administration Mental Hospital at Palo Alto. One day one of the residents called me aside to see the blackboard in our largest classroom. A lobotomy meeting had been held there that afternoon and the board was still unerased.

This was thirty years ago, of course, and nothing of the sort could happen today, but in those days lobotomy meetings were great social occasions. Everybody who had had anything to do with case turned up -- doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and so on. Perhaps thirty or forty people were there, including the five-man "Lobotomy Committee," under the chairmanship of an outside examiner, a distinguished psychiatrist from another hospital.

When all the tests and reports had been presented, the patient was brought in to be interviewed by the outside commissioner.

The examiner gave the patient a piece of chalk and told him, "Draw the figure of a man." The patient went obediently to the blackboard and wrote: DRAW THE FIGURE OF A MAN

The examiner said, "Don't write it. Draw it." And again the patient wrote: DON'T WRITE IT DRAW IT

The examiner said, "Oh, I give up." This time the patient revised the definition of the context, which he had already used to assert a kind of freedom, and wrote in large capital letters all across the blackboard:

VICTORY

I love this thread

Gregory Bateson PDFs

http://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr3/pdf/VOLUME1NR3_art02.pdf