Website review: GREGORY BATESON: The Centennial
Voidoid discovered this in Evolution
•2 reviews since Dec 6, 2004
evolution, cybernetics, philosophy
•edge.org/3rd_culture/bateson04/bateson04_inde...
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meatbot rated 8 weeks ago- Gregory Bateson, which whom I haven't read much of yet, seems to really Jive with my understanding and experiences. He's a mostly under-appreciated intellectual with plenty of essays and ideas yet to be discovered and utilized by the general populace. "Bateson presents a new approach based on a cybernetic epistemology: "The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by 'God,' but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology."" "Bateson defies simple labeling, easy explanation. People have problems with his work. He talks of being an explorer who cannot know what he is exploring until it has been explored." From what I can tell he is describing what may be Memes right here:
"Any descriptive proposition," he says, "which remains true longer will out-survive other propositions which do not survive so long. This switch from the survival of the creatures to the survival of ideas which are immanent in the creatures (in their anatomical forms and in their interrelationships) gives a totally new slant to evolutionary ethics and philosophy. Adaptation, purpose, homology, somatic change, and mutation all take on new meaning with this shift in theory."- Gregory Bateson, which whom I haven't read much of yet, seems to really Jive with my understanding and experiences. He's a mostly under-appreciated intellectual with plenty of essays and ideas yet to be discovered and utilized by the general populace. "Bateson presents a new approach based on a cybernetic epistemology: "The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by 'God,' but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology."" "Bateson defies simple labeling, easy explanation. People have problems with his work. He talks of being an explorer who cannot know what he is exploring until it has been explored." From what I can tell he is describing what may be Memes right here:
- KingBoy rated 23 months ago
- 'The bridge between map and territory is difference. It is only news of difference that can get from the territory to the map, and this fact is the basic epistemological statement about the relationship between all reality out there and all perception in here... Difference, out there, precipitates coded or corresponding difference in the aggregate of differentiation which we call the organism's mind. And that mind is immanent in matter... Difference, you see, is just sufficiently away from the grossly materialistic and quantitative world so that mind, dealing in difference, will always be intangible, will always deal in intangibles, and will always have certain limitations because it can never encounter what Immanuel Kant called the Ding an Sich, the thing in itself. It can only encounter news of boundaries - news of the contexts of difference... We work hard to make sense, according to our epistemology, of the world which we think we see. Whoever creates an image of an object does so in depth, using various cues for that creation, as I have already said in discussing the Ames experiments. But most people are not aware that they do this, and as you become aware that you are doing it, you become in a curious way much closer to the world around you. The word "objective" becomes, of course, quite quietly obsolete; and at the same time the word "subjective," which normally confines "you" within your skin, disappears as well.' The late great Gregory Bateson, one of my distant mentors, in a letter to John Brockman on the development of his epistemology. Bateson was a pioneering thinker in such diverse fields as philosophy, evolution, anthropology, ontogeny, psychotherapy, systems and cybernetics. His ideas are quite involved, but unusually lucid given their ambition.
