User:Inge Hoonte/Steps to an ecology of mind

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an ecology of mind ; with a new foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, edition 2000.

Foreword, written by his daughter in 1999 after his death in 1980. Explains that the collection was on its way to defining a new science. Linking various patterns, forging relationships between seemingly disparate discourse. Interaction & creative imagination. Bateson was part of the group of scientists who founded cybernetics, sponsored by the Macy Foundation. Joint-published a book with Margaret Mead. He was part of that group that supported the terror of WWII... By inventing new thought processes and technologies to defeat the Germans, they paved a way for expansion into Cold War & Vietnam. [link to article from Witte Raaf: Turing also burdened by this, and who knows, maybe Pynchon as well?]

"It was not clear for many years, even to Gregory, that his disparate, elegantly crafted and argued essays, the "steps" of this title, were about a single subject. But by the time he began to assemble the articles for this book, he was able to characterize that subject, the destination of forty years of exploration, as "an ecology of mind." The remaining decade of his career was spent describing and refining his understanding of that destination and trying to pass it on."

Essays written for different audiences. He was seen as a pioneer and specialist by people in separate professional communities. Examples of wider concerns. He characterized himself more by his WAY of thinking, thinking outside of the boxes of disciplines. And more in general semantics, systems theory, and throughout the 60s, social engagement, toward studying mental phenomena, consciousness, and the world of ideas.

PART V & VI --> posed epistemology on ecology and society to affect integrative changes. In the 70s, the last decade of his life, he gave lectures composed of several ideas in essays, to try and bridge the gap in his thinking. Others helped him further the steps toward the ecology of mind. He also wrote two more books to advance this discipline, the ecology of mind.

Read: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979. He "argued that the ecology of mind is an ecology of pattern, information, and ideas that happen to be embodied in things--material forms. A science which limits itself to counting and weighing these embodiments is likely to arrive at a very distorted understanding." A mind to him is composed of multiple organic and non-organic, material parts that allow for process and pattern. Mind is not separable from body. Opposed to materials, mind isn't defined by a boundary; consciousness is only partially present (HOW?).

The mental system can recognize pattern from random elements, this causes evolution and learning. Patterns that connect are based on analogy. In his last articles, recognition of the world around us is a response to pattern detection, a kind of knowing, leading to respect for our integration into nature. His thoughts on evolution, biology, change, integrates how we learn, and evolve, and adapt to change, and cultural growth. Still very current when related to recent new interest in sustainability.

Bateson ordered the book in particular trains of thought,but really it's mostly chronological, as he progresses and grows and develops in various disciplines, which enrich and inform each other: a trajectory.

STORY AS A FORM OF THOUGHT. RECONSTRUCTION OF PATTERNS OF THOUGHT LEAD TO CHANGE.

Epistemology = the study of knowledge. How do we know things. Bateson concerned with processes of knowing: "perception, communication, coding, and translation." He added a level, the relationship between knowledge and the person knowing the knowledge: "the knower and the known," in which knowledge loops back "as knowledge of an expanded self." Learning as an endless loop! He's not that into prediction in science (as appears in a later article in the book) because it depends on simplification of data and selective attention. ANd also warned against short-term solutions that worsen the problem over time (esp. apparent in ecology), and our habit to look only at part of the problem, or species, instead of how one is intertwined in a network of cause and affect.

[To do: reread & annotate Metalogues, and Part V/VI)