In what is offered in this book, the hierarchic structure of thought, which Bertrand Russell called logical typing, will take the place of the hierarchic structure of the Great Chain of Being and an attempt will be made to propose a sacred unity of the biosphere that will contain fewer epistemological errors than the versions of that sacred unity which the various religions of history have offered. What is important is that, right or wrong, the epistemology shall be explicit. Equally explicit criticlsrn will then be possible.
So the immediate task of this book is to construct a picture of how the world is joined together in its mental aspects. How do ideas, information, steps of logical or pragmatic consistency and the like fit together? How is logic, the classical procedure for making chains of ideas, related to an outside world of things and creatures, parts and wholes? Do ideas really occur in chains, or is this lineal (see Glossary) structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews "circular argument," related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the exception?
[snip]
Throughout, the thesis will be that it is possible and worthwhile to think about many problems of order and disorder in the biological universe and that we have today a considerable supply of tools of thought which we do not use, partly because -professors and schoolboys alike- ]we are ignorant of many currently available insights and partly because we are unwilling to accept the necessities that follow from a clear view of the human dilemmas.
My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.
I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness, and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other. — Introduction
Professional linguists nowadays may know what’s what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a "noun" is the "name of a person, place, or thing," that a "verb" is "an action word," and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things.
Most of us can remember being told that a noun is "the name of a person, place, or thing." And we can remember the utter boredom of parsing or analyzing sentences. Today all that should be changed. Children could be told that a noun is a word having a certain relationship to a predicate. A verb has a certain relation to a noun, its subject. And so on. Relationship could be used as basis for definition, and any child could then see that there is something wrong with the sentence "Go’ is a verb."
I remember the boredom of analyzing sentences and the boredom later, at Cambridge, of learning comparative anatomy. Both subjects, as taught, were torturously unreal. We could have been told something about the pattern which connects: that all communication necessitates context, that without context, there is no meaning, and that contexts confer meaning because there is classification of contexts. The teacher could have argued that growth and differentiation must be controlled by communication. The shapes of animals and plants are transforms of messages. Language is itself a form of communication. The structure of the input must somehow be reflected as structure in the output. Anatomy must contain an analogue of grammar because all anatomy is a transform of message material, which must be contextually shaped. And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar. — introduction
Do you think Bateson was talking about what we now know as "Information", in a broader philosophical sense than Shannon's narrow engineering useage? Ecology (the logic of Nature) is all about interconnections. Also the "hierarchic structure of thought" seems to be another reference to Logos in human conception.My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. — Introduction
Do ideas really occur in chains, or is this lineal (see Glossary) structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews "circular argument," related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the exception?
Do you think Bateson was talking about what we now know as "Information", in a broader philosophical sense than Shannon's narrow engineering useage? — Gnomon
At the bacterial level and even among protozoa and some fungi and algae, the gametes remain superficially identical; but in all metazoa and plants above the fungal level, the sexes of the gametes are distinguishable one from the other.
The binary differentiation of gametes, usually one sessile and one mobile, comes first. Following this comes the differentiation into two kinds of the multicellular individuals who are the producers of the two kinds of gametes. — 3:7
Yin and yang (English: /jɪn/, /jæŋ/), also yinyang[1][2] or yin-yang,[3][2] is a concept that originated in Chinese philosophy, describing opposite but interconnected, mutually perpetuating forces. In Chinese cosmology, the universe creates itself out of a primary chaos of material energy, organized into the cycles of yin and yang and formed into objects and lives. Yin is 'receptive' while 'yang' is active; in principle, this dichotomy is seen in some form in all things—patterns of change and difference, such as seasonal cycles, evolution of the landscape over days, weeks, and eons (with the original meaning of the words being the north-facing shade and the south-facing brightness of a hill), sex (female and male), as well as the formation of the character of individuals and the grand arc of sociopolitical history in disorder and order.[4]
I take your point, but the applications of logic, the unfolding of deductive arguments, also occurs in time. Another point of difference is that causation is not logically necessary (Hume). — Janus
On another note, do you agree with Gnomon that Bateson's' thought "seems to assume a "Great Chain of Being" ontology"? I'm not seeing it, but then Gnomon didn't explain why he thinks that. — Janus
In what is offered in this book, the hierarchic structure of thought, which Bertrand Russell called logical typing, will take the place of the hierarchic structure of the Great Chain of Being and an attempt will be made to propose a sacred unity of the biosphere that will contain fewer epistemological errors that the versions of that sacred unity which the various religions of history have offered. What is important is that, right or wrong, the epistemology shall be explicit. Equally explicit criticism will then be possible. — Intro
But this topic also relates to threads like The Mind Created World — unenlightened
I got that impression from reading Mind and Nature many years ago. He interpreted Evolution as a directional progression, generally from simplicity (elements) to complexity (organisms). Criticism of that ancient notion is primarily concerned with the implication of a natural hierarchy, with humans at the top of the animal kingdom, and white humans at the top of a racial hierarchy. I don't know if Bateson was a racist, but I doubt that race was a primary concern. :smile:On another note, do you agree with Gnomon that Bateson's' thought "seems to assume a "Great Chain of Being" ontology"? I'm not seeing it, but then Gnomon didn't explain why he thinks that. — Janus
Nevertheless, the geometry is static and timeless, and so are most logics. It is not envisaged that 2 + 2 will ever attain to 5. Whereas in time ignorant can become knowing, life can become lifeless, or reproduce and; x can become not x and x again. — unenlightened
In what is offered in this book, the hierarchic structure of thought, which Bertrand Russell called logical typing, will take the place of the hierarchic structure of the Great Chain of Being and an attempt will be made to propose a sacred unity of the biosphere that will contain fewer epistemological errors that the versions of that sacred unity which the various religions of history have offered. What is important is that, right or wrong, the epistemology shall be explicit. Equally explicit criticism will then be possible. — Intro
Yes. That's why the article I linked above referred to his theory as a "reconception of the Great Chain of Being". In the link below, The Information Philosopher discusses mainly Bateson's notions of Cybernetics (feedback systems), Semantics (meaningful patterns), and Holism (integrated systems). He also mentions that "He variously identified this system as Mind or God, a sort of panpsychism. The supreme system he thought was a whole, not divisible into parts".That makes sense, he is replacing the Great Chain of Being, with a natural and logical hierarchy as God, archangels and angels have no place in his immanentistic, wholistic vison of nature, of "a sacred unity of the biosphere". — Janus
Thanks for the info. I also questioned that attribution. But There are several types of Determinism : Hard ; Pre- ; Biological ; Logical ; Causal ; etc. And, I am not an expert on Bateson's philosophy. So, I let it slide. :smile:↪Gnomon
I have to take issue with your link quoted above on one issue. I do not believe Bateson was a determinist, and I certainly do not believe that determinism is one of the necessary presuppositions of the thesis he presents here, because if it had been he would have declared it and made an argument for it. He's a far too careful, and self-aware thinker to have missed it. — unenlightened
The Information Philosopher discusses mainly Bateson's notions of Cybernetics (feedback systems), Semantics (meaningful patterns), and Holism (integrated systems). He also mentions that "He variously identified this system as Mind or God, a sort of panpsychism. The supreme system he thought was a whole, not divisible into parts". — Gnomon
Here's a link to an article that touches on your distinction between Panpsychism and Deism. It includes quotes from another of Bateson's books.If I'm going to be convinced about Bateson's purported panpsychism or deism, I'd want to see quotes from his own work not from some interpreter of it. It's a long time since I read Mind and Nature so even if I don't remember getting the impression that Bateson was panpsychist that might down to my failure to notice it or remember noticing it.
Spinoza is often framed (and I think misinterpreted) as a panpsychist, but he was undoubtedly a deist. — Janus
I figure Bateson is a paradigm change that has not happened yet.
Noticing the repetition of iterations is not the same as saying what they are. — Paine
Watching this sequence of cat behavior and the sequence of my reading of it (because the system we are talking about is, in the end, not Just cat but man-cat and perhaps should be considered more complexly than that, as man-watching-man's-watching-cat-watching-man), there is a hierarchy of contextual components as well as a hierarchy concealed within the enormous number of signals given by the cat about herself. — P. 117
I make the same distinction in my Enformationism thesis. Based on my personal understanding of Quantum Physics and Information Theory, I have concluded that Consciousness is emergent, not fundamental. That notion began with physicist John A. Wheeler's postulation that "its" (material things) are derived from "bits" (elements of Information*1). In that essential distinction, Information (the power to enform) is more like Energy than Ideas (E=MC^2).↪Gnomon
In those quotes Bateson speaks of mind at all levels of relational existence, not of consciousness. I know that I am not conscious myself most of the time, if consciousness is defined as something like 'explicit awareness' as distinct from mere (implicit) awareness. That seems like a valid phenomenological distinction to me.
I remember Whitehead defining himself as a "pan-experientialist" rather than a panpsychist, and he also asserts that most experience is not conscious. So, I guess the question is as to whether panpsychism postulates consciousness, as defined above, at all levels. — Janus
We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in interaction and partly isolated from each other. One system is within the individual and is called learning,· the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of the single life time; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals.
The task of this chapter is to show how these two stochastic systems, working at different levels of logical typing, fit together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or genetic change were fundamentally different from what it is. The unity of the combined system is necessary. — P.149
Because I view Consciousness as Emergent, instead of Elemental, I don't agree with the "pan-experiential" form of Pan-Psychism (all mind). — Gnomon
Thinking of Whitehead, I understand him to view consciousness as emergent, it is experience he sees as elemental. His concept of experience is broad, so he would say that, for example, "the cliffs experience the erosive effects of the wind and rain", which is analogous to the way our sentient bodies are precognitively affected by photons, sound waves, scent molecules and so on. — Janus
... there is a single knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans, even though committees and nations may seem stupid to two-legged geniuses like you and me.
I was transcending that line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human being. In other words, as I was writing, mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.
On the whole, it was not the most crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called "animal," so-called "instincts," and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in "nature." Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as "animal" as his cruelty. After all, the very word "animal" means "endowed with mind or spirit (animus)."
Against this background, those theories of man that start from the most animalistic and maladapted psychology turn out to be improbable first premises from which to approach the psalmist’s question: "Lord, What is man?" — Introduction
Cliffs don't have eyes or noses or nervous systems, so there is no 'news' generated by anything that happens to them, and thus no experience. — unenlightened
Read a little beyond what I have quoted, and you will find a suggestion that we moderns have formed a distorted conception of ourselves as angel/devils or soulless machine masters of the universe. It is in how we understand the 'human condition' that I think a paradigm shift is being proposed. A psychological shift that reunites human with nature, and mind with body. Quick as you like please, because the soulless machine masters are killing us all. — unenlightened
I would say that when the rain streams down the cliffs and the wind howls against them, there are changes and that changes are "news", at least potentially. — Janus
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.