Saturday, October 28, 2006

Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind

Bateson, Gregory. Steps To An Ecology of Mind. 1972. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2000.

Steps To An Ecology of Mind is a collection of lectures and essays from Bateson's career, ranging widely in topics from philology and evolution, to genetics and anthropology. Bateson is generally interested in deep structures and patterns (rather than substances); though it's difficult to synthesize, his concern with form and epistemology surface repeatedly in his work. If a larger point can be summarily gleaned from this collection, it involves the dramatic changes to epistemology wrought by cybernetics and information theory.

In select pieces, Bateson is especially forthright about this "Epistemology of Cybernetics" (this, a subsection in his essay on "A Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism" (309)). In "Epistemology of Cybernetics," Bateson discusses a phenomenon that resembles distributed cognition in which mind, his term of terms, coalesces in brain, body, and environment: "Similarly, we may say that 'mind' is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system--man plus environment" (317). To explain this concept, Bateson uses the example of a man cutting a tree with an axe. The total system of "tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree" "has the characteristics of immanent mind" (317).

These ideas are most germane to the exam on tools-in use: ecologies and affordances. They receive further elaboration and clarification an essay near the end of the book called "Form, Substance, and Difference" (454), in which Bateson seeks out ways to discuss "organism plus environment" (455). He contends that epistemology has shifted because of cybernetics and information theory, and that rather than turning to hard science for explanations of human psychology and behavior (458), we must understand the co-adaptive complex systems of the human individual, the society, and the ecosystem (435). In this chapter, he notes that the relationship between thought and emotion (469) must be revisited in light of his view of epistemology. Also, in the end-note, he mentions that mind includes actions and tools (473). Here are two of the more pithy quotations that connect the chapter to methodological delineations (the limits of systems) and the scalability of mind (its multiple rings of immanence):

• "The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable" (465).
• "The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. 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" (467).

Key Terms: ecology of mind (xxiii), ecology of ideas (xxiii), metalogue (1), outlines (27), analogy and homology (80), "feel" of culture (81), ethos and cultural structure (83), deutero-learning (167), transcontextual (272), feedback loops (274), governor (316), territory and map (455)

"The questions which the book raises are ecological: How do ideas interact? Is there some sort of natural selection which determines the survival of some ideas and the extinction or death of others? What sort of economics limits the multiplicity of ideas in a given region of the mind? What are the necessary conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystem?" (xxiii).

"In fact, the phenomenon of context and the closely related phenomenon of 'meaning' defined a division between the 'hard' sciences and the sort of science which I was trying to build" (xxv).

"I stressed the fact that 'data' are not events or objects but always records or descriptions or memories of events or objects" (xxv).

"Be that as it may, the central--but usually not explicit--subject matter of the lectures which I used to give to psychiatric residents and of these essays is the bridge between behavioral data and the 'fundamentals' of science and philosophy; and my critical comments above about the metaphoric use of 'energy' in the behavioral sciences add up to a rather simple accusation of many of my colleagues, that they have tried to build the bridge between form and substance. The conservative laws for energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance.
Within the body of fundamentals, that half which deals with form has been dramatically enriched in the last thirty years by the discoveries of cybernetics and systems theory. This book is concerned with building a bridge between the facts of life and behavior and what we know today about the nature of pattern and order" (xxxii).

"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" (75).

"All biological systems (organisms and social or ecological organizations of organisms) are capable of adaptive change. But adaptive change takes many forms, such as response, learning, ecological succession, biological evolution, cultural evolution, etc., according to the size and complexity of the system which we choose to consider" (274).

"The weaving of contexts and of messages which propose contexts--but which, like all messages whatsoever, have 'meaning' only by virtue of context--is the subject matter of the so-called double-bind theory" (276).

"Thus, in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the whole" (316).

"In a word, schizophrenia, deutero-learning, and the double bind cease to be matters of individual psychology and become part of the ecology of ideas in systems or 'minds' whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of participant individuals" (339).

"Similarly, from the cybernetic point of view, a word in a sentence, or a letter within the word, or the anatomy of some part within an organism, or the role of a species in an ecosystem, or the behavior of a member within a family--these are all to be (negatively) explained by an analysis of restraints" (406).

"All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints--is noise, the only possible source of new patterns" (416).

"Occasionally actual pieces of the external environment--scraps of potential nest-building material, 'trophies,' and the like--are used for communication, and in these cases again the messages usually contribute redundancy to the universe message plus the relationship between the organisms rather than to the universe message plus external environment" (424).

"I refer to the 'semipermeable' linkage between consciousness and the remainder of the total mind. A certain limited amount of information about what's happening in this larger part of the mind seems to be related to what we may call the screen of consciousness. But what gets into consciousness is selected; it is a systematic (not random) sampling of the rest" (438).

"The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment" (457).

Posted by Derek Mueller at October 28, 2006 4:42 PM to Tools-in-use