Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology Reviews

• 
  Roberto

  
  Apprendere come apprendere
  
  Gregory Bateson, antropologo, sociologo, psicologo, filosofo, è stato quasi una figura di culto in campo scientifico, per il gran numero di risultati ottenuti in vari campi del sapere. Questo saggio, il suo scritto più importante, racchiude gran parte della sua produzione e delle sue riflessioni su genetica, fisica, biologia, psicologia, psichiatria, linguaggio, comunicazione, epistemologia e sociologia.
  
  Cosa è l’ecologia della mente? Bateson riteneva che non si può disgiungere l'individuo dall'ambiente circostante, in quanto la sua sopravvivenza è legata all'armonia del rapporto individuo/ambiente. Mente ecologica è quindi per Bateson una mente in perfetto equilibrio con l’ambiente.
  
  "Quale struttura connette il granchio con l’aragosta, l’orchidea con la primula e tutti e quattro con me? E me con voi? E tutti e sei con l’ameba da una parte e con lo schizofrenico dall’altra?"
  
  La mente si può comprendere solo comprendendone le relazioni tra i singoli processi, quali l'apprendimento, la memoria, il linguaggio etc..
  Bateson esclude categoricamente la coscienza da questi processi, perché essa è stata inventata per separare le funzioni intellettuali da quelle "sentimentali", per distinguere l'ordinato e razionale dal disordinato e passionale. Questo dualismo è proprio l’ostacolo alla visione ecologica della mente.
  
  "Una certa mamma, quando il suo bambino ha mangiato gli spinaci, lo premia di solito con un gelato. Di quali ulteriori informazioni avreste bisogno per essere in grado di predire se il bambino: a) giungerà ad amare o a odiare gli spinaci; b) ad amare o a odiare il gelato; c) ad amare o a odiare la mamma?"
  
  Il volume è composto di sei parti molto diverse tra di loro ma che hanno una logica comune e contiene un numero sorprendente di teorie diverse, una più interessante dell’altra, solo in apparenza distinte tra loro. Possiamo trovare parti che parlano di comunicazione, di apprendimento, di schizofrenia, di alcolismo, di guerra fredda, della cultura degli abitanti di Bali, della struttura del gioco.
  
  Provo a dare solo dei piccolissimi esempi di concetti sui processi contenuti nel libro.
  
  Un tipico processo di interazione è dato dalla cosiddetta "schismogenesi". Se due gruppi di persone si comportano in modo che "se mostri i muscoli, io mostro i miei", possiamo osservare una escalation di comportamenti incontrollati che può generare problemi di notevole entità; tipici processi schismogenetici (tipici delle società molto competitive) sono la corsa agli armamenti e la guerra fredda.
  Per questa ragione un sistema ecologico deve contenere meccanismi di regolazione che possano garantire l’equilibrio riportando il sistema allo stato stazionario.
  Questi meccanismi di regolazione, secondo Bateson, consistono nello scambio di informazioni attraverso la comunicazione, strumento fondamentale attraverso cui si realizzano le connessioni tra i sistemi.
  
  La comunicazione umana avviene in due modi, quello verbale per lo scambio delle informazioni e quello tramite il linguaggio del corpo per lo scambio dei messaggi metacomunicativi. Sono proprio questi ultimi che ci consentono di inquadrare i messaggi che arrivano, se in senso letterale o metaforico, reale o fantastico, veritiero o simulato, ecc.
  Immaginiamo ad esempio un messaggio aggressivo fatto per gioco, oppure delle parole offensive dette ridendo, o semplicemente la minaccia, l’inganno, l’umorismo, la fantasia, la metafora, la poesia e l’arte.
  
  Per Bateson l’incapacità di interpretare il "genere" dei messaggi altrui è la base della sua teoria sulla schizofrenia. Secondo tale teoria la schizofrenia è il risultato di modelli comunicativi sbagliati esistenti nella famiglia, quasi sempre nel rapporto madre-figlio. In pratica questa teoria vede due messaggi contrastanti che usano i due livelli comunicativi, verbale e metacomunicativo, tra loro contraddittori. L’individuo (il bambino) si trova prigioniero di due ordini dei quali l’uno nega l’altro, situazione che provoca un profondo senso di angoscia, frustrazione e depersonalizzazione.
  
  "Un giovanotto che si era abbastanza ben rimesso da un accesso di schizofrenia ricevette in ospedale una visita di sua madre. Contento di vederla, le mise d'impulso il braccio sulle spalle, al che ella s'irrigidì. Egli ritrasse il braccio, e la madre gli domandò:«Non mi vuoi più bene?». Il ragazzo arrossì, e la madre disse ancora: «Caro, non devi provare così facilmente imbarazzo e paura dei tuoi sentimenti».
  Il paziente non poté stare con la madre che per pochi minuti ancora, e dopo la sua partenza aggredì un'inserviente e fu messo nel bagno freddo".
  
  Bateson individua nell’apprendimento, o meglio in quello che lui chiama deutero-apprendimento, ossia l'apprendere come apprendere, la causa principale della psicosi. Senza questo, gli individui non sono in grado di capire il flusso degli eventi e il tipo di messaggi ricevuti. E' attraverso il deutero-apprendimento, quindi, che si forma il carattere.
  
  E' un libro difficile questo, ostico, non immediato. Non ci stupisce perché fa molte domande; ci stupisce perché fa molte domande strane e diverse.
  Una grandiosa esperienza di lettura, che insegna a pensare diverso, scritto da un pensatore in netto anticipo sui tempi.
  Mai entusiasmato tanto.
• 
  Sean

  This is the most difficult to grasp page turner I´ve ever read. Every other page blew my mind and each essay builds off the previous ones so that by the end you have some idea of what he´s talking about. I can´t say I understood the biology aspect of his essay on reduplicated limbs in beetles and amphibians but he managed to get his point across. This book has made me really interested in cybernetics and systems theory - I think a second reading is in order to solidify the concepts though.
• 
  Ami Iida

  the book is very, very thick.
  Text incorporates the contents such as schizophrenia and double bind.
  
  The first chapter is a memo.
  This helps to think the idea of things. I like it very much.
  it is the precious book for Psychiatry and Cultural anthropology.
• 
  Alexander

  Anthropologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, biologist. Just a few of the names traveled under by Gregory Bateson in this magnificent collection of essays. More than just an eclectic romp through disparate fields of knowledge however, they attest instead to Bateson's grand and unified vision of the universe, one in which art and science, logic and dreams, pathology and sociology are all threaded through with the same cosmic weave. As the man himself writes, "the would-be scientist who knows nothing of the basic structure of science and nothing of the 3000 years of careful philosophic and humanistic thought about man - who cannot define either entropy or a sacrament - had better hold his peace rather than add to the existing jungle of half-baked hypotheses".
  
  Entropy and sacrament. To want to dive headlong into expositions of both is just the demand issued by Bateson to any reader who would approach this book. As to exactly what the aforementioned weave is made out of, it's not easy to say. Informed by an elaborate synthesis of systems and communication theory, cybernetic ideas and logical analysis, the essays here play out like an album of repeated refrains, overlapping and allusive, yet decidedly distinct at every point. Whether it be a theory of alcoholism or an approach to schizophrenia, a discussion on Balinese painting or a dialog on dolphins, through each runs the current of Bateson's singular worldview, one as richly complex as it is encyclopedic.
  
  So one can see, I hope, why it's hard to say exactly what this book is 'about'. Still, if I had to pick a refrain at random, one that particularly stands out is Bateson's emphasis on the importance of context. Across the many diverse investigations here, context plays a crucial role in determining exactly 'what' is being investigated. Both Bateson's theories of play and learning, for instance, depend crucially on how context figures into each, while elsewhere, Bateson's stress on the 'organism-plus-environment' as the unit of natural selection (rather than the organism alone) preempt, by an order of decades, the findings of modern developmental systems theory. And all of this is to say nothing of Bateson's other thematic refrains on the importance of difference, relation, information and mind!
  
  Of all the things to be said of Bateson's work then, being of narrow concern certainly isn't one of them. If anything, the problem runs in the opposite direction, as tellingly relayed by Bateson's own experience with one of his students: "At the end of the session, one resident came up. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that the others were all leaving, and then said rather hesitantly, “I want to ask a question.” “Yes.” “It’s—do you want us to learn what you are telling us?” I hesitated a moment, but he rushed on with, “Or is it all a sort of example, an illustration of something else?” “Yes, indeed!” ...But an example of what?". Had Bateson not had the modesty, he might have answered: 'of the universe at work'.
• 
  John

  It's one of the most unique books I've ever read; a real mind-opener. Bateson attempts to include and connect diverse fields from Cybernetics, Philosophy and Sociology. The resulting brew is a heady and thought-provoking mix of ideas that are not presented elsewhere in popular science, as far as I know.
• 
  Alvaro de Menard

  The preface ominously compares Bateson to psychedelics and religious experiences: "People did not simply agree or disagree with him; they were bewildered or intoxicated." His approach is described as "holistic" and "qualitative". Wikipedia tells us that "Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems."
  
  Any one of the above would send my bullshit detector sirens blaring. All of them together is a dire omen indeed.
  
  Bateson is exactly the kind of hack those characterizations indicate, a mountebank of the highest order. Here's how he describes his approach:
  
  

  
  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.
  
  My mystical view of phenomena contributed specifically to build up this double habit of mind—it led me into wild “hunches” and, at the same time, compelled more formal thinking about those hunches. It encouraged looseness of thought and then immediately insisted that that looseness be measured up against a rigid concreteness.

  
  
  I have no issue with this: as long as you properly test your ideas, it doesn't matter how mystical their origin is. But unfortunately it's not an accurate description of Bateson's attitude. It's true, he starts out with a "mystical view of phenomena"—but the "rigid concreteness" never appears. At best he manages a scientific aesthetic, without any of the substance.
  
  This collection of essays is just filled with a series of wild, baseless pronouncements on a bewildering array of topics: Bateson jumps from von Neumann's game theory to William Blake to learning and meta-learning to schizophrenia to anthropology to evolution to Freud to "the epistemology of cybernetics" to consciousness, all the time hinting that there is some sort of profound Grand Correspondence between them. But he never articulates it because no such correspondence actually exists.
  
  Why are so many cranks attracted to the topic of schizophrenia?
  
  Between the egregious neologisms (deuterolearning, schismogenesis) and unfounded assertions you'll find an endless series of moronic deepities like this one:
  
  

  
  I personally do not believe that the dolphins have any-thing that a human linguist would call a “language.” I do not think that any animal without hands would be stupid enough to arrive at so outlandish a mode of communication.
  

  
  
  Toward the end of the penultimate section the book drops even the pretense of rigour and just devolves into hippie ramblings about environmentalism and LSD, which feels like a fitting conclusion.
• 
  Norman Orr

  I bought this book because of the title. In the Preface to my Master's thesis in 1969, I described the investigative process I used for the thesis as an "ecology of thought," so the title caught my attention. The most interesting part of Bateson's book, for me, was the Metalogues. For years I thought about writing a metalogue, but knew I couldn't get it right. However, in 2008, during an extremely emotionally-laden experience, I realized I could write a metalogue about that experience, and I have a number of metalogues in draft of a book for which I'm currently seeking a publisher. I have recently read most of G. Bateson's other writings, and also some of his daughter, Catherine's, writing. Further, I discovered while doing that reading that Gregory's father, William, was the co-author of the textbook in genetics that I had used while in college. Obviously, I have a great fondness for the Batesons. Read this book for the metalogues alone and you won't be disappointed.
• 
  Marts (Thinker)

  See some amazon reviews and discussions on this title:
  http://www.amazon.com/Steps-Ecology-M...
  
  It is also availble in pdf:
  http://www6.ufrgs.br/horizon/files/te...
• 
  DM

  E o lectura destul de specifica. A fost relativ complicat pentru mine sa o citesc, probabil pentru ca o citeam in engleza, sau pentru ca debordeaza de notiuni de antropologie. Recunosc ca inca nu am citit-o integral , ci doar bucatile care ma interesau, dar perseverez. Mi-au placut foarte mult metalogurile, de fapt le-am citit de cateva ori, pentru a reusi sa invat algoritmul dat de autor care-mi va fi de ajutor in dialogurile cu copii mei.
  Cartea isi merita cu siguranta titlul. Fara sabloane. Gandire pura.
• 
  Andrew

  Thoughtful essays on a broad-ranging set of subjects, ranging from anthropology to psychology to ecology, all of them with an underpinning theme of cybernetics. Not the easiest of reads, and at times very systems-theoretical, but consistently interesting. For fans of people like Douglas Hofstadter, Bateson is probably going to be a must-read, and for those like myself, who have only the faintest understanding of cybernetics as a discipline, it was an interesting introduction.
• 
  Aussiescribbler Aussiescribbler

  Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist amongst many other things. His central project was the application of systems theory or cybernetics (defined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”) to the fields of anthropology, psychology, history and ecology. This collection of academic papers and public lectures presents his thinking over the period from 1935 until 1971. The title is a description of his aim. Just as ecology is the study of the interrelationship between living things in natural systems in search of an understanding of what allows those systems to persist as healthy functioning wholes, Bateson is operating according to the belief that the problems of society and the functioning of the natural world can only be understood by achieving “an ecology of mind” in which ideas fit together in an integrated system.
  
  Some of the papers in this book make for challenging reading. Bateson is asking us to consider a different framework for viewing the world, to think outside the box. The box being our deeply ingrained misperceptions about the world. Living things, including ourselves, are systems which exist within larger systems. These systems are interconnected wholes within which all parts are in dynamic relationship with each other. Nothing can truly be understood out of context, and no change in the system can occur without change to the whole system.
  
  I found some of the abstract concepts to which Bateson introduced me a little hard to wrap my head around at times, but it is worth the effort. This book left me wondering why systems theory, particularly as Bateson applies it to learning and communication, is not taught in high school. Surely being able to understand how we think and communicate and the principles which determine our relationships with others are crucial to our ability to successfully manage life.
  
  But there is a reason why concepts so useful are not widely appreciated. They would represent a revolution, because faulty thinking goes to the very roots of our society. A mass breakout of sanity in the populations of the world would shake every aspect of our culture and economic activity to the very core. It would be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an adventure into the unknown.
  
  Part I : Metalogues
  
  “A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject,” Bateson explains. These are conversations between himself and his young daughter which playfully examine important ideas. One which I found particularly thought provoking was “What is an instinct?” in which Bateson points out that concepts like “instinct” and “gravity” are “explanatory principles” - “…an hypothesis tries to explain something but an explanatory principle — like ‘gravity’ or ‘instinct’ — really explains nothing. It’s a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”
  
  Part II : Form and Pattern in Anthropology
  
  Bateson did research on indigenous cultures in New Guinea and Bali, the latter work in collaboration with his wife Margaret Mead. From these studies he identified the phenomena of “schismogenesis” in contact between different cultures, a phenomena which also applies to relationships between individuals.
  
  This is a kind of negative feedback loop in which the behaviour of one individual or group toward another elicits the kind of response from the second which elicits more of the same from the first. Schismogenesis can take a symmetrical form - in which each individual or group has similar aims and are competing with each other - or a complimentary form in which there is a relationship of difference between the two, such as dominance and submission or exhibitionism and spectatorship.
  
  A simple example is an arms race. One country builds some nuclear weapons, so another country builds some so there is a deterrent against the first country using theirs against them. The first country views this as threatening, so they build more of their own, and so on. The negative feedback leads to a world endangered by a plethora of nuclear weapons.
  
  It is easy to see how relevant an understanding of these kinds of processes is. Marriage breakdown is no doubt generally the result of some form of schismogenesis. Little irritating behaviours which illicit irritating behaviours from the other party which perpetuate the phenomena, gradually escalating until the relationship becomes untenable.
  
  Or consider relationships between subcultures within our society. The prejudices of one group against another group can inspire retaliatory behaviour which reinforces the prejudice, etc., etc. One need only look at the behaviour of people of opposing political beliefs on the internet to see how this plays out.
  
  Part III : Form and Pathology in Relationship
  
  What particularly attracted me to reading Bateson was his double bind theory of schizophrenia.
  
  I don’t suffer from this condition myself, but I have experienced a bipolar psychotic breakdown as a result of finding myself in a double bind. A double bind is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I was in a position where I put all of my faith in someone who insisted on the importance of honesty. Honesty is a strong conscientious principle for me, so I agreed with this. But when I expressed honest criticism of this individual, I was told I was “deluded”. When I pretended to be sorry for what I said, i.e. I lied, I was warmly rewarded. It was important to me to be honest and I wanted to please the person who asked me to be honest, but I had to lie to please him. As a result of this relationship I ended up becoming delusional, being locked up in a mental hospital and becoming so depressed I needed shock therapy.
  
  So I can relate to Bateson’s accounts of people who end up suffering schizophrenia as a result of demands made of them by a parent giving mixed messages. A mother feels anxious about affectionate contact with the child and backs away from him when he shows natural affection. Unable to face such feelings in herself, she compensates with overt declarations of love. The child doesn’t know what to base his behaviour on - the withdrawal or the pretence of warm feelings. This is a very simplistic description of a situation Bateson analyses in great detail.
  
  There is a strong connection between what he has to say here and both R. D. Laing’s work on psychosis and the family and Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about the effect that the neuroses of adults have on children.
  
  Bateson also gives a fascinating explanation for the cryptic verbal communication often exhibited during schizophrenic psychosis.
  
  Schizophrenia has a genetic basis, and Bateson gives consideration to the implications of this for identifying a predisposition for the “covert” schizophrenia betrayed by the parent and the “overt” schizophrenia which arises in their child.
  
  Part IV : Biology and Evolution
  
  Bateson scolds biologists and boards of education for “empty-headedness” in their battle with Creationists, pointing out that it is important for students to know about the evolution of understanding of evolution in order to properly recognise the problem of explanation it is trying to solve, and there is something to be appreciated in the way that the Book of Genesis framed the question : “Where does order come from?”
  
  “In modern terms, we may say that this is the problem implicit in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a ‘random’ event”.
  
  He also explores the implications of somatic change for evolutionary theory. Somatic change is adaption to an environment. If people go to live at a high altitude, at first they pant to deal with the thin air, but over time their lung capacity increases and breathing becomes easier.
  
  Can this kind of adaptation end up as a genetic change?
  
  Lamarck’s theory involving inheritance of acquired characteristics was discarded, but Bateson hypothesises that a random mutation may come after somatic change which gives the organism survival advantage by allowing what had been achieved by greater effort to be achieved without that effort.
  
  In order to survive an organism’s body has to be flexible to change, so if giraffes’ necks get gradually longer due to beneficial mutations which have survival advantage, their hearts will also have to be pumping more blood. This change in the demands on the heart is a somatic change. But at a later stage another random mutation may increase the size of giraffe hearts, this mutation having survival advantage because it reduces the effort needed and makes the giraffe more flexible to meet other challenges. In this way inheritance of acquired characteristics might appear to occur, even though it is not what is really happening.
  
  In discussing dolphin language, Bateson points out that animal communication is all about relationship. In developing our own language, we humans acquired the ability to talk about specific things, and so our communication with each other about relationship is mostly conveyed by subtext and body language. Dolphins don’t have our body language repertoire, since they don’t have facial expressions or hands, so he surmises that dolphin language is a very complex, sophisticated language of relationship.
  
  PART V : Epistemology and Ecology
  
  Cybernetic explanation, Bateson tells us, is focused not on explaining why something is, but why something else isn’t. Natural selection is a perfect example. It explains the process of change in species by looking at how other outcomes were eliminated as unfit.
  
  Everything is looked at as potential information. There is redundancy in information to the extent that a message can be conveyed without some of that information being present. For instance if I type “sh*t”, the missing letter doesn’t stop you from knowing what I mean. Information can provide the form of something, redundancy within that form and the restraint that makes it that form and not another. All else “is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”
  
  How is it that we are an expression of a self-regulating balanced ecological system, and yet we are psychologically out-of-balance and bringers of chaos to that larger system? Bateson re-examines the Adam and Eve myth to see if we can learn something about how the conscious purpose for which we have such an advanced capacity compared to other animals has set us against nature — our own deeper nature and nature as a whole — and how it produces a projection by which we blame either ourselves or the system - “I have sinned” or “God is vengeful.”
  
  To address this dilemma we need to bring the unconscious into consciousness. Bateson sees art as particularly important in this process. He touches on the use of psychedelics, but with some scepticism. “What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.”
  
  He points out a great error in Darwin’s account of evolution, and that was to present the individuals or their family lines or the subspecies as the units of survival. The unit should actually be thought of as individual plus environment or family line plus environment etc., because those who destroy their environment end up destroying themselves.
  
  Similarly we can’t understand mind if we see it as contained simply in the brain of the individual. The concept of “mind” has to be flexible according to what we wish to explain. It is the realm of ideas. An idea is ���a difference which makes a difference.” The ideas we perceive through our senses are parts of the whole which is our mind at that moment.
  
  But Bateson expresses the view that, just as there is a global ecosystem of which all subsystems and all species and all individuals are a part, so there is a larger Mind of which all of our minds are a part. “This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”
  
  Part VI : Crisis in the Ecology of Mind
  
  What are the harmful ideas which dominate our culture?
  
  “(a) It’s us against the environment.
  (b) It’s us against other men.
  (c) It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.
  (d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.
  (e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”
  (f) Economic determinism is common sense.
  (g) Technology will do it for us.”
  
  We need to think in terms of flexibility, Bateson insists. New technologies can allow us to support increases in population, but the more we push the limits of the system and the more we depend on such technologies, the less flexibility we have. The same thing applies for individuals, our ability to survive and to thrive depends on our flexibility, the ease with which we can change our thinking and our behaviour in the light of changing realities.
  
  Steps to An Ecology of Mind is a book overflowing with profound thinking about what really matters. I only wish it were less relevant today than it was when it was first published.
• 
  Lysergius

  Organised as a collection of relatively short essays, this has a legitimate claim to be the outstanding book of the 20th century for anyone interested in change, systems thinking, ecology, epistemology, organisations, therapy and more. Be warned - it can be very hard in places, but the effort is worth it. 'Form, Substance and Difference', 'Conscious Purpose versus Nature' and 'The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication' are absolutely central texts for anyone considering how we need to respond to the current world crisis. Other key papers include 'The cybernetics of "Self": A theory of alchoholism' and 'Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero Learning'.
• 
  Geoffreyjen

  Just finished rereading this text, for the fourth time. This time I was rereading it as part of an online conversation about both this book and his daughter,
  Nora Bateson’s wonderful book
  Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns (see
  https://www.infiniteconversations.com... for details). The conversation lasted 20 weeks, and each 2 hour session was recorded, making for a fascinating public record of the experience. Bateson’s ideas are as important today as they were when he wrote these essays, more so, I believe. These papers have dated very little. And the group reading experience was awesome - many of the chapters present difficulties to fully assimilate, as the ideas can be unusual and quite complex and nuanced. I read this first when I was just beginning my career as a scientist, and this year I am retiring, so this reading caps the first one. Throughout my career, I drew on Bateson’s ideas and understandings, hence the re-readings along the way. But on this reading I was once again struck by how rich his writing is, how many important insights are to be found in these pages, as well as how relevant these ideas are to the world today.
• 
  Matija

  A dense heap of loosely connected ideas, opinions and non sequuntur without logical progression written for the ultimate goal of establishing "intellectual stature". Never has my rating of a book been at such odds with the Goodreads rating for such a popular book, especially given my keen interest in at least half of the subjects listed in its title. I am baffled by a slew of positive reviews which leave me wondering if we've all been perusing the same text. I tried reading closely through the first third, then skimmed through the middle and finally read random bits and passages from the final third and I'm none the wiser for any of it. A tremendous let-down.
• 
  Marijn Meijles

  A very nice book because it not only deals with the ideas of the author on cybernetics and life in general but it also includes numerous applications of those ideas to wildly different subject areas.
  
  This gives you a good understanding of his way of thinking, which is truly unique. He has the uncanny ability to come up with explanations and ideas which seem deceptively simple but which are totally not common or easy to come up with.
  
  These are the best ideas. I would encourage everybody to read this book. It will change your thinking.
• 
  Julie

  Dense. Took me months to slowly read through it. There are some interesting concepts and fragments to pull out and think about, but you have to be willing to sieve for them. It think it would be best read in a group setting.
• 
  Yang

  Shortcut: Play with the metalogues he included in Part I; don't jump it off!
  
  Certainly I should not have expected an articulation of a sort of paradoxical thinking in concentrated anthropological idioms from a free thinker as broadly recognized by labels of anthropologist, social scientist, psychologist, linguist, evolutionary ecologist, semiotician and cyberneticist as Gregory Bateson! The point of a paradox is the multiple ways of reading it and the multiple forms it may turn up here and there. When Bateson identified points of location (whether it be play, deutero-learning or learning to learn, the double theory, slash-mark transcontextual marker etc.)to unfold his ideas, or to be sure, his fun projects of probing into forms, patterns, and ideas rather than substances and physical effects of forces, he certainly did not mean these were the only way of talking about the "things" he wanted his readers to pay attention to, as if "the only way to get a pig roasted were to burn the house down!" Therefore, when he stepped into the issue of evolution, he was not interested in the problem of the evolution of biology but the evolution of an ecology. When he said humans adapt to the environment, he was trying to see humans (including the human world of ideas) as part of an ecology in which a brick wall between the object and the subject should have already broken down. The "messages" that have remained public renders an ecology a higher level in terms of logical typing; and such "messages" are encoded in levels untroubled by the uncanny human consciousness. Anyway, he followed the route walked by Berkeley and Larmarck rather than that of Newton and Darwin.
  
  
• 
  Simone

  Mind-blowing. Teoria dos conjuntos, teoria dos jogos e dos tipos, e outras ideias cibernéticas, aplicadas à mente humana e à natureza. É como uma versão fala-sério de todos aqueles livros e filmes charlatães que você conheceu sobre fronteiras ciência-arte-religião (como "What the Bleep Do We Know/Quem somos nós?"), tentando formular uma epistemologia tão honesta quanto possível. Esse livro é a grande fonte não citada do século XX - tem coisas dele em Derrida (differánce), DFW (double bind) e Culler (transcontextualidade). Leiam imediatamente, vocês não vão se arrepender.
• 
  Sam

  Gregory Bateson connects up seemingly disparate research areas to explore cultural relationships. Although this is an academic read, it has much relevance to our daily lives and covers a wide expanse of topics and threads. Another attractive feature of this book is that it was written decades ago and has informed much philosophy and contemporary cultural theory. Reading this helps explain some of the madness of authors like Deleuze and Guattari.
• 
  Jeanine Marie Swenson

  An intellectual challenge, this autobiographical account of the different chapters (quite literally) of Dr. Gregory Bateson's life illuminates the legacy of one of the greatest systemic thinkers of the 20th century. I also liked the touching foreword by his daughter (also a great family therapist in her own right) Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson.
• 
  Maya

  This book is an intellectual challenge, I think I may have to read it a couple of times still to get everything I need from it.
  
  Bateson is a great thinker and opens up many doors that need to be full explored.
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  Bradley

  Playfully brilliant! I came across this book by reading Deleuze (there is a rather long footnote about the double-bind in several of his books) and this shocked me by its use of humor, something very few 'serious' scholars are supposed to do...then again, I enjoyed this book immensely.
• 
  TK Keanini

  You will read this book 5 or 6 times and still get something new out of it. It is very dense and it will uncompress in your head until it is about to explode.
• 
  Dylan

  Well written, expansive, very exciting. Highly recommended.
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  see
  Form, Substance and Difference
  A Theory of Play and Fantasy
• 
  Jesse

  It's been too long since I finished this book -- three solid months, maybe more -- and its effects on my thought processes have tragically faded. I do remember the general sense of a liberated mind that came with finishing Bateson's book, and on the basis of that alone, I feel confident maxing out the stars in this review.
  
  Not that the book gave me a complete solution to the universe. That's best left to philosophers who are more... inspirational in tone, I guess you would say. If Bateson's work was liberating, it was simply because it gave me access to Bateson's way of thinking, a new set of intellectual tools, and this in itself is a rare accomplishment. Too often, when books of ideas try to explain everything, they just end up repeating your intuitions and flattering them in a very forgettable way.
  
  Bateson essentially gave birth to "cybernetics" as a methodology, and that's what this book is about: cybernetics, demonstrated across a wide range of disciplines, all of which Bateson meaningfully engaged with. He moves from biological speciation to dolphin communication, he spends a good deal of time on therapy and cognitive dissonance, and he makes forays into theories of language, scientific method, and Western history.
  
  As Bateson covers these topics, we get to see the world as he does: as a place where outcomes and patterns underlie causes and effects, and where objects and qualities are only the shallowest manifestation of a deeper causal structure. He makes a rigorous practice of seeing all domains in terms of information, and he is always challenging frames and bringing attention to the assumptions and contexts that make interactions meaningful.
  
  Even now, I'm finding that I'm enjoying this exercise, going back to Bateson and trying to remember what felt so fresh and exotic about his thought. I've spent enough time on the indulgence, though. For my last word, I'd like to point out something important: you can read summaries of Bateson's ideas as much as you want, and they'll sound clever, but without falling deep into his actual essays and his language, you won't get the optimal experience that he stands to provide. When you've read enough of these and put effort into understanding them, you really do start to find your way into a different sort of thinking about the world, even if it's just temporarily, as a welcome guest.
  
  The writing can be dry and scientific. The essays deserve to be read slowly, and they may require a bit of domain-specific research, which can all be had on Wikipedia. If you can deal with those drawbacks, then I fully recommend you read as much of Steps to an Ecology of Mind as you can.