| Title | : | Mind and Nature |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1572734345 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781572734340 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1979 |
Mind and Nature Reviews
-
A potentially transformative book if you are interested in learning how evolutionary processes shape the mind!
As one of the first cyberneticists, Bateson shows how the mind consists of a series of relationships, and goes on to point out that any instance of these same relationships in nature (such as in a plant or animal) may also be said to exhibit mind. Although at times his ideas may seem to be on the verge of religious or New Age thought, especially with his references to Shiva and the aesthetic of the world, Bateson is first and foremost a scientist, and his ideas are grounded very firmly in scientific principles, as he explains them in the first chapter. It is my understanding of his work that he would oppose psychology, cognitive science, and any other discipline that seeks to understand the world in terms of rigid cause-and-effect, because he prefers to describe the world in terms of feedback loops. This forms the basis for his philosophy of the ecology of mind.
Fair warning, this book reads more as a collection of musings than straight-up philosophy or science. He wrote this as a collection of observations, so sometimes the flow of the argument gets a little sidetracked. All the same, in my opinion this is a great book and has been the source of many great conversations for me!
I would recommend this book to people who are interested in philosophy of science and its intersection with philosophy of mind. -
Worth comparing to Godel, Escher, Bach in substance. Bateson often veers from subject to subject, but he is a rigorous and clear writer, and an excellent expositor. The point of this book is not 'Mind and Nature,' but rather certain ways of thinking about Mind and Nature. Bateson is explicit about this book being epistemology, meta-science rather than science.
Bateson implicitly draws from several different thinkers and their ideas, the ones I picked up were Wiener's cybernetics, Russell's Principia Mathematica, Buddhist psychology and epistemology (most notably its antiessentialist stance, empiricism, and the idea of mind as aggregate), and logical positivism. Seeing these influences helps to see how grounded this book is intellectually.
The last chapter, a dialogue between the author and his daughter, veers into obscurity, but I suppose the point Bateson is trying to make is the difficulty of thinking about how to think properly about big, vague ideas like consciousness and aesthetics. This is the worst part of the book.
I found the discussion of stochastic systems in biology both excellent and inspirational--I'm interested in mutator genes, and Bateson's writing highlights the possibility for feedback between trait and process, in this case, mutation rate and evolution.
I highly recommend this book for scientists and other empiricists making sense of the world. Bateson's point that logic is a poor model for the world, with reference to Epimenides' paradox "All Cretans are liars" (since Epimenides was a Cretan), is identical to the point made in a recent essay in Nature on gene networks entitled 'This title is false' by Mark Isalan and Matthew Morrison. Bateson's influence lingers.
If you're interested, this is the essay I mentioned:
Nature 458, 969 (23 April 2009) | doi:
10.1038/458969a
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/... -
I liked Bateson's premise that the world is aesthetic, and his definition of aesthetic is "responsive to the pattern which connects."
Here's what I wrote in my
blog about it...
...Bateson discusses the wider knowing which he described as "the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities." His point was that we humans notice the starfishes, but we don't notice the glue that holds the starfishes and the rest of the world together.
So why does it matter whether we're aware of this background context that creates the space for the starfishes, streams and forests? Because the background is what makes them possible. Think about an empty container--it's the space within the container that makes it useful. We love our houses, but it's the space within the house that makes it a house. The Tao Teh Ching says, "While the tangible has advantages, it is the intangibles that makes it useful."
According to Bateson and many other writers, thinkers, and scholars, this background or wider knowing is aesthetic. Back in the early 1800s, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also claimed that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic. We live in the midst of a large aesthetic space, and we don't typically notice it (much less honor it for its wisdom.)
Bateson describes a time when he was teaching a class of "young beatniks" at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Bateson showed them a starfish and asked them, "How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it?" Bateson tells us that this was an aesthetic question that he posed to the students.
Bateson later writes, "Is this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?'" The ultimate unity, Bateson argues, is aesthetic. -
Bateson was a great thinker who emphasized that logic and quantity are inappropiate devices for describing organisms, and their interactions and internal organisations. Reading Mind and Nature during the 80s I felt affirmed in my intuition that it splits us inside if we separate Mind from Nature. He showed how patterns connect, how they are not static but dance in a rhythm of repetition. He showed how information spreads inside a system and controls growth and differentiation. This is as seminal work that influenced many other fields in science and the humanities. System-therory in family therapy and Gestalt, for example, and cybernetics as a study. He always pointed to context. His ideas should be applied to how children learn about connectivity. Bateson is one of my heroes.
-
Subject matter: how to think about thinking when thinking, or something along those lines; confusing, I know. There's so much ground covered in this book that I'm still making sense out of everything, howbeit I'm glad to finally be through with it (as in: glad to not have dropped it half-way)! This book was quite the challenge, which I think will account for why I enjoyed it as much as I did, there's a considerable amount of abstract stuff for pondering (I should've read the glossary at the end first now that come to think about it) that for the most part I had been wishing an upgrade on RAM for my brain to aid in the processing. Bateson seems to explain his ideas very thorougly, I personally like that a lot, even when at times he's so thorough that I find myself going off course, which I think ain't as bad as it is interesting. Smarter people than me would surely be even more delighted to read this "almost mystic work", I imagine.
-
I may very well have to read this again sometime soon. The scope of this book is astounding. It starts out as a primer on how to think, redefining epistemology along the way in an attempt to enable the reader to think in cybernetic circuits of calibration and feedback, form and process.
Bateson seeks to tease out "the pattern that connects", a pattern of patterns, the meta-pattern that connects all living things. The pattern that connects us. It's all a bit fuzzy, but it'll definitely make you think. It'll take some brain power, too. -
A thought-provoking thinker, but alas a terrible writer. He tends to start out with some ambitious claim (e.g. having solved the mind/body problem), and when he would have to prove it, digresses into something else. Maddening. On the other hand, he is exploring how mind and (not in this book) consciousness might be explained as emerging from matter - which I am inclined to believe is what is actually happening myself, without of course being able to properly explain much further.
-
This is an essential reading for everyone interested in the formal study of epistemology. The work of a visionary.
-
Bateson’s writing is thick and often obscure.
Bateson adopts “a Platonic view.” In the beginning was the Idea and the corporeal universe is a spinoff of this, the truly real. This in my mind is problematic. The Platonic world may or may not be true. We don’t know, but not knowing is different from an assertion that it exists. And to say that the corporeal world is its spinoff creates a non-material causal force so that the material world is subsidiary to and derived from Ideal Reality. Presumably, a purpose of this Bateson book is to establish the existence of this spiritual (non-material) causal force. He sets the stage by referencing Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being (1936). For Lovejoy, the world starts from a timeless Supreme Mind (Logos), from which a certain deductive logic flows. Here, Bateson says, Lovejoy recasts the second law of thermodynamics to say that the more perfect can never be generated by the less perfect. That, for Bateson, logically, must be true because Lovejoy starts from the Perfect and everything flows from there, dissipating with less and less fidelity to the Ideal. But, Bateson notes, standard evolutionary theory moves exactly in the opposite direction (from the less perfect to the more perfect): from single cells to multi-cells, from simple to complex life forms, culminating with humans and their minds. (*)
Though Bateson does not deviate from Lovejoy in spirit, he opts for a Lamarckian alternative that flips Lovejoy around. Mind is immanent in life from the beginning. Mind is still the corporeal embodiment of Idea, but Bateson has replaced Lovejoy’s “transcendent Logos” with Lamarck’s immanent mind. Lamarck accommodated evolutionary theory’s notion of progressive transformation (“evolution”) and, hence, the perfect could flow from the imperfect. Yet Lamarck still could adhere to the Platonic view that life, through mind, could direct its own transformation. “By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformation,” Bateson writes, Lamarck "escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (which we would call ‘evolution’) which started from infusoria (protozoa) and marched upward to man and woman.”
Though Lamarck (and Darwin himself had significant Lamarckian elements) is at odds with the dominant neo-Darwinian theory of today, this for Bateson is where the Platonic Ideal becomes corporeal. Where Lamarck has the organism changing itself to meet survival necessities, neo-Darwinian theory says this cannot be true because the capacity is fixed in the genes: In this view, from the beginning, at birth, an organism has or does not have what it takes to survive. But, drawing from C.H. Waddington, Bateson believes this neo-Darwinian viewpoint does not do justice to the evolutionary process. Yes, especially for the less complex life forms, fixed instinct largely governs the adaptive process but Bateson says there are learning and behavioral (and structural) changes due to the feedback loops with the environment. This is Bateson’s cybernetic emphasis. It’s Waddington’s epigenesis (“becoming is built upon the status quo”). Piaget, who draws heavily from Waddington, says flexibility is built into the genes themselves which allows for learning and adjustment in behavior within the limitations of the instinctual program (even amoebas, Piaget notes, learn, based on feedback from the environment). And, all of this, summarized, is to say, how mind (logos) is immanent in all organic matter, and how life reaches its culmination (perfection) in the human mind where it is free of most or all instinctual constraints. The human mind, Bateson believes, is best equipped to form truth (perfection) from the trial and error of all stochastic (random) processes: It constantly self-corrects to get to (biological) adaptation, (scientific) truth, (aesthetic) beauty and (perfection) the Good.
Whereas the Greeks (Aristotle) had teleological process (where the final cause pulls everything to itself), Bateson may have lodged teleology inside through his notion of immanence, though this is not clear. If Aristotle’s final cause didn’t, in fact, get caught up in Platonic logos, it seems plausible that Bateson is Aristotelian, in which case, Idea would be embodied in the corporeal world via mind. Life is a directed process, controlled by itself, directed toward adaptation.
If this is roughly what Bateson is saying in this book, I am, with one exception, in agreement. Genetic determinism (life has the necessary trait[s] at birth) does seem overly restrictive. There does seem to be room for modification of behavior based on feedback from the environment, i.e., a flexibility on how to respond exists again, as Piaget argued, at the lowest levels of life, with humans via mind having the greatest flexibility. But, what doesn’t change is the ideal of adaptation. This is the survival standard that is built into life itself. It has subsidiary ends that vary between species (regarding how behavior and the body structures that make that behavior possible form), and what objects are relevant to its survival (both what is needed and what is a danger to it).
This distinction between the goal of life (survival-replication-adaptation) and how life survives and what objects are necessary are frequently conflated and confuse the discussion. Whereas goals are fixed, objects and the behavior that link objects to goals are varied. They change through time. So, in a way, Lovejoy may have been right all along in this sense: Adaptation is the Ideal and in that sense evolution is merely the means to fit the ideal (adaptation). The idea (adaptation) is the eternal fixity of the Ideal on earth. Change and transformation are merely the means to the End. They are how life maintains itself in and through time. There is, in other words, a progression toward perfection (adaptation), i.e., evolution is the flow of the less perfect to the perfect. (**)
Where Lovejoy and Bateson are wrong, though, is that they place the final cause in an external realm, the Platonic Idea, whereas I would say that this is a totally unnecessary importation. However it got started, life is perfectly capable by itself to follow the adaptive process. And here, we are back to a modern neo-Darwinian theory. Those best equipped, including those with flexibility to both initiate (act on and in) and respond to threats and harm, survive; those that are not so well equipped die.
* And often, Hegelian type philosophical theory picks it up from there: Thought, too, evolves, progressively, to become the Absolute.
**As all living beings partake of this idea and the process for obtaining it, Bateson sees a “sacred unity of the biosphere.” As he states it, “Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful. We have lost the core of Christianity. We have lost Shiva, the dancer of Hinduism whose dance at the trivial level is both creation and destruction but in whole is beauty. We have lost Abraxas, the terrible and beautiful god of both day and night in Gnosticism. We have lost totemism, the sense of parallelism between man’s organization and that of the animals and plants. We have lost even the Dying God.” -
Patterns that connect. One frequently hears phrases such as everything in the world is connected to everything else but rarely do we find much in the way of discussion. Gregory Bateson was the epitome of the multidisciplinarian. He could not be pigeonholed in any particular field of study but he could recognize the most significant aspects of each and demonstrate how they all connect together.
I must admit here that he is far and away beyond my own level of comprehension. I must continually reread and reassess every time I read any of his works. This includes the dialogues Catherine Bateson published (my copy is currently buried in a storage shed). I have not seen the film produced by Nora Bateson, but would love to someday. -
Bateson begins with a list of basic scientific presuppositions that "every schoolboy should know", n further epistemological foundations are laid in two later chapters, one on the importance of combining different perspectives, of having "multiple versions of the world", and the other on different types of relationship. This material is used as the basis for tackling three major topics: finding explicit criteria for the existence of "mind"; examining parallels between learning n evolution as stochastic processes; n constructing a general purpose epistemological schema, a zig-zag between form and process. New perspective:)
-
I had just read Wittgenstein's Tractatus before I read this, so I thought it intriguing, the appearance of a ladder, climbing levels of logical type... definitely a thought provoking read, for thinking about thinking that is. He is still relevant on the topic of stagnant educational institutions and epistemology too. Talk it over with a friend. As Bateson says: “[...] two descriptions are better than one.” (therein lies the difference...)
-
this is a very dense book on a very abstract set of concepts, but well worth reading if you're at all interested in evolutionary biology and the idea of what "mind" might be. some of bateson's creative flourishes (especially the final chapter) are a little weird, and explain why his work is also popular in decidedly less scientific arenas, but the core idea that evolution and mind can be considered as logical analogues and as stochastic processes is a good one.
-
Un libro un po' difficile da leggere ma assolutamente geniale, idealmente da affiancare a "Gödel, Escher, Bach" per chi sia interessato a riflettere sul funzionamento della mente. Io ho trovato Bateson un po' più difficile di Hofstadter, però può dipendere dalla mia formazione scientifica - probabilmente gli umanisti avranno l'opinione opposta.
-
One of the seminal thinkers of systems theory (once called cybernetics) compares the process of evolution to the process of learning. I listened to recordings of Bateson's talks given at Esalen around the time he was writing this. Francisco Varela picked up where Bateson left off.
-
Fascinating way to view the criteria of mind to better understand processes, moires, and thought pattern. This was required reading in college in one of my very favorite classes created by a professor who won national awards for his curriculum.
-
There's nothing like it in the world. What a gentle, thoughtful, poignant, and careful disassembly of the world around us. And an equally careful reassembly. If you are willing to apply it, there are new worlds to be experienced on every page.
-
This is one of the most influential books in my life.
-
Professor Bateson lays out a transformative dialogue for maeta-relfection.
-
Critical thinking
-
To me, this book is a primer on how to think. I read it when it first was published, and believe it really changed me.
-
So I lent my mother Anathem. After reading it she gave me this book to read.
-
i guess i am at a turning point in my relationship with cybernetics, because i found this book pretty tiresome. it’s easy (and cool, i guess) to come up with big-brain poetico-scientific paradigms which explain things in exciting new terms. the hard part is to make them useful. i don’t even mean in a tactical, socio-political way. i mean: what is the point of a book like this besides offering a new way of framing things? what does it offer besides the pseudo-philosophical pleasure of putting things in elegant terms? bateson only rarely shifts from a philosophical register to a way of speaking which is primarily or even secondarily concerned with how people actually live their lives. there is a part of the book when he is talking about how what we call “crime” is treated by societies as a self-identical set of behaviors rather than a pattern of responses to environmental circumstances. rather than punishing the behaviors, he suggests, “[the criminal] should be suffering for particular ways of organizing action.” what does that mean? your guess is as good as mine. my reaction to the batesonian paradigm would actually be that no one should suffer, because “crime” and “criminals” are effects of socio-environmental systems rather than individual problems or evils to be stamped out. but instead all bateson can really offer is a re-framing of the problem. there is no imagined solution that would look any different from “suffering.”
for the most part, though, the book is never this concrete. he is constantly trying to galaxy brain the reader into understanding his ideas about the relationship between logical types, evolution, and mind. my reaction to all of this, as i read it, was: “sure.” i kept thinking to myself, what is the benefit of a book like this? to me—and maybe i’m being uncharitable because i was a little bit bored—the primary end goal of the book is to make other Big Brain Boys (like Rollo May, who blurbed the book) go, “wow, i’ve never thought about it that way before. i’m going to think about this differently now.” isn’t that the height of narcissism? this book puts no tools in my toolbox. i can’t work with this stuff. all i can do is sit back and say, “that Gregory Bateson sure came up with a cool way of framing the question of consciousness.”
i want to read less stuff like this going forward. it is completely ahistorical, apolitical, and offers me nothing with which i can respond to the teetering of human life and the upsurge of fascism around the world. a john grisham novel has more critical and historical potential than this, because at least a book like that is aiming to be understood and appreciated by more than approximately 250 people currently living in the world. at this point i’m being too hard on GB. oh well. -
I first read this 40 years' ago, and was much influenced. Re-reading I can only partially see why. It is written in that showy way, designed, it seems to me now, more to bamboozle than to enlighten, more to show how erudite the author is than to bring the reader to the same level. On the other hand, I can see that it appealed to the young-me that was beginning a life-long journey, thinking about the relationship between brains, which are part of nature, shaped by evolution, and minds, which are what brains do, hence, indirectly, also shaped by evolution. It appealed to the young-me who was thinking about mental representations, about homologies and analogies. Still, I'm not sure I can recommend this book.
