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

The impression I have is that his conception of pattern would be closer to information redundancy and thus compressibility. I say that because he talks about symmetry and serial repetition and such.

But in information terms he already wants to include the way that the development of an organism produces new information, both in the way particularly recursive definitions can produce complexity from simplicity, and practically in the way tree rings record the weather.

My understanding of Shannon is that his notion of information is distinguished from 'noise' by a 'receiver'. Here, the organism as receiver is trying always to detect a message in the environment, and the pattern recognised is the message understood. But the receiver is also part of the pattern.

Slow, or lazy? We allow ourselves to be distracted from important matters by trivialities. — Pantagruel

If you confuse slowness and laziness, you will not do well with this topic. Laziness is the virtue that drives progress: by making things easier, more can be done. Slowness, in this context, is the difficulty of changing one's mind when appropriate.

When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure logic cannot tolerate. An ordinary buzzer circuit will serve as an example, a single instance of the apparent paradoxes generated in a million cases of homeostasis throughout biology. The buzzer circuit (see Figure 3) is so rigged that current will pass around the cir­cuit when the armature makes contact with the electrode at A . But the passage of current activates the electromagnet that will draw the arma­ture away , breaking the contact at A . The current will then cease to pass around the circuit, the electromagnet will become inactive, and the
armature will return ro make contact at A and
If we spell out this cycle onto a causal sequence, we get the following:

If contact is made at A, then the magnet is activated.
If the magnet is activated, then contact at A is broken.
If contact at A is broken, then the magnet is inactivated.
If magnet is inactivated, than contact is made.

This sequence is perfectly satisfactory provided it is clearly understood that the if . . . then junctures are causal. But the bad pun that would move the ifs and thens over into the world of logic will create havoc:
If the contact is made, then the contact is broken. If P, then not P.
The if . . . then of causality contains time, but the if . . . then of logic is timeless. It follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality . — Mind and Nature

This, in case anyone wonders, is why my next reading thread is

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

We are suffering from a prisoners dilemma. If only prisoners could learn a little solidarity... but alas we all have to learn it at once and some of us are a little slow. Leaders are particularly slow, because they are always looking back to see if everyone is following.

Update.

I'm not doing a thread on 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind', after all, I'm going for 'Mind and Nature' instead.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

Since I mention this thread in my op, I feel it is polite to mention my new thread here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

Bateson is a really original thinker, and goes some way, I think, towards resolving the difficulties being expressed here.

Ladies, if you find the natural hierarchy oppressive and resent your physical inferiority, try the new 9 mm Equaliser. No more need to rouse your man from his drunken stupor to defend you from the invading hordes. Technology has come to the rescue. Let your finger do the slaughter with the Smith and Wesson Equaliser. Suitable for wimps and cripples of all genders.

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

How many threads would this little quote feel at home in? Anywhere that idealism and realism is an issue, or being and nothingness. But this comes out of a detailed and down to earth consideration of the relations between various life-forms. A whole thread just on this would not be amiss.

————————————————————

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

Here again is a whole thread's worth of meat to pick over, and again I have left out the careful biological considerations that provoke and support the ideas. Children's (mis)education in grammar, is related to undergraduate education in anatomy and a pattern is displayed that relates them, and offers a better way of educating and a better way of thinking and a better way of looking at definitions an meanings - another topic that comes up here regularly.

"And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar."

And this is the tertiary pattern of the pattern that connects.

Let us consider agriculture for a moment and give the hunter-gatherers a break. Whether it consists of domesticated livestock controlled by nomads, or land controlled improved and cultivated for crops or for livestock, agriculture involves an investment of labour that creates 'property'. And as soon as there is substantial property, the inheritance of property becomes an issue.

Now the obvious "natural" system of inheritance would be matrilineal, since there is rarely any question as to who the mother of a child is. By contrast, paternity is very dubious. Paternity can only be assured by the strictest regulation of female sexual contacts.

So in order for a patrilineal system of inheritance to exist, male control of female sexuality is essential. At this point systematic gendered power has to arise, and one of the major ways such power can be maintained is by representing itself as 'natural', 'God's will', the only possibility, and 'good'. The op covers all of these points of representation, and amounts to a standard defence of the subjugation of women.

I might be reading too much into your post. — Jamal

Yes. On my part I was momentarily struck by a superficial connection between my rather feeble involvement here and my more engaging reading matter. But if others are also making the connection, there might be something significant to it.

You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge.

But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention.

Speaking of books I haven't read, I just came to this fragment, and thought of this unhappy thread. Make of it what you can:

Context and relevance must be characteristic not only of all so­ called behavior (those stories which are projected out into "action"), but also of all those internal stories, the sequences of the building up of the sea anemone. Its embryology must be somehow made of the stuff of ' stories. And behind that, again, the evolutionary process through mil­ lions of generations whereby the sea anemone , like you and like me, came to be--that process, too, must be of the stuff of stories. There must be relevance in every step of phylogeny and among the steps.
Prospero says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and surely he is nearly right. But I sometimes think that dreams are only fragments of that stuff. It is as if the stuff of which we are made were to­tally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what; Plotinus meant by an "invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?"

https://monoskop.org/images/c/c3/Bateson_Gregory_Mind_and_Nature.pdf

I was going to make a thread on "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", but I think I'll try this book instead.

Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin: — Jamal

Sure, but please try and find a book you somewhat like, next time. :razz:

:lol: Thanks, but no thanks. Nature, History and Science programs have all the excitement I need.

But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity? — Jamal

I guess it is one of those sanctimonious Malcolm Muggeridge type "I'm going into all this in great detail for your education and improvement" type indulgences. But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way.

I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest we may have crossed a tipping point. The September temperature anomaly is "unprecedented".

https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-september-2023-unprecedented-temperature-anomalies#:~:text=September%202023%20global%20temperature%20was,1900%2C%20the%20preindustrial%20reference%20period.

Scrolling down past the temperature graphs, we come to the Antarctic sea ice graph. It looks scary.

Antarctic sea ice extent remained at a record low level for the time of year. 
Both the daily and monthly extents reached their lowest annual maxima in the satellite record in September, with the monthly extent 9% below average. 

That's 9% less reflective sea ice and 9% more dark absorbent open water as we head towards the Antarctic Summer.

I might be wrong, I hope I'm wrong. But pull your boat well up the beach next year.

:cheer:

The enactivists look at subject-object, organism-environment this way:
The organism interprets its world — Joshs

All very interesting, but I am more interested in how the boundary is formed; the 'dash' between organism and environment. You say, "the organism interprets..." and one assumes therefrom that the environment does not interpret. So there is an action before the act of interpretation, which is the act of self identification, that has to happen for there to be a separate world to interpret.

My belief is that the Israelis want peace and their enemies do not. — tim wood

My belief is that most everyone wants peace on their own terms. If only you slaves would bow and acknowledge my just rule and obey me, I would want peace myself, but since you insist on claiming equality and independence, I am obliged reluctantly to show you the error of your ways.

Crash is boring while telling a story that is not boring—there’s a lot of crazy shit happening. — Jamal

So crazy shit becomes boring when normalised. Maybe the world needed to be appraised of this. Like how porn in general becomes ever more explicit, and ever more extreme, as the breaking of each taboo becomes normalised. Eventually, megadeath, or the vaginal evisceration of a woman is just as dull as another wank. I remember the good old days when playing doctors and nurses was excitingly transgressive.

It's not an Earth shattering insight: when you're tired of Crash, you're tired of death. That's about how good it can possibly be, I think: a demonstration of the banality of evil.

Except that scientific method eschews the notion of there being intelligible forms, per se. — Wayfarer

I don't think it does. Equations are forms; Classificatory systems are forms. They use another language is all.

The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and identifies it as a particular something. — Aquinas

This translates in my mind into a description of the scientific method. The sensitive stage becomes the gathering of data and experimentation, and the intellectual stage is theorising and hypothesis forming.

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. — Thompson

"Affect" looks to be functioning here as the objectification of subjectivity. and I think it can help me in this context to clarify what I see as an important distinction between subjectivity and perspective.

Perspective seems to correspond to the form of the rock; the rock has a form, and that gives rise to any subject necessarily having a particular perspective on the rock. Whereas the 'affect' of an organism is the internally generated sense of its own being. The yeast cell defines itself and delimits itself as sugar in, CO2 or Alcohol out.

A subject locates itself as an entity, and its perspective arises from its location. But such a definition of self is necessarily permeable and incomplete. It's affect is its response to its environment as well as its response to itself. ( I am a farmer, teacher, philosopher, scientist an interactor of some sort with the environment...)

So when one starts to speak of colonial species and social species, there is potential for conflicted identification as between the cell and the colony; the conflict we experience as morality. Bees are the original suicide bombers, and greater love hath no bee, than to lay down his life for his hive. Is the hive the environment of the individual bee, or is the beekeeper or the bear the environment of the hive?

It becomes apparent to the environmentalist that the distinction that forms the subject is as real and as vague as the distinction of a weather system. the subject is a temporary vortex that is always part of a larger system to which it is accountable, and into which it dissolves. Forms arise and dissolve and all things must pass.

Well i'm not very interested in your reality, so I'll leave it there, thanks.

In the above statement, I have mentioned that there is a truth that is absolute, but the realities are different based on the recognition of the truth by each entity according to its cognitive structure.
The reality is the manifestation of truth in the cognitive systems of beings, and not the violation of God's uniqueness as truth, and the contradiction between the unique truth and different realities. — Ali Hosein

But all that's just your reality. How do we know it's the truth?

Perhaps you have not noticed, but you are on a roundabout of positivity here, because you have not made room in your own reality for falsehood.

Some people think God is real, and some people think God is unreal, and they are all correct?
@unenlightened

Regarding God, in my opinion, God is beyond reality and objective realities are manifestations of God, God is the truth, and objective realities are manifestations of truth.

In this context, Spinoza's view is significant.
He believed that everything that exists is in God and nothing can exist or be imagined without God. He also believed that God is the internal cause of all things.
Of course, this does not mean that I completely agree with Spinoza's point of view. — Ali Hosein

Are you saying they are all incorrect? You seemed to be saying earlier that everyone has their own reality, and they can be different. Now there seems to be one God and reality is in Him, and if that is the truth as you say, then all the other realities must surely be false.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/children-displaced-climate

They did the maths, so you don't have to. 43 million children - and presumably quite a few adults too. We need more walls and higher walls. This is obviously a conspiracy.

"It's only just begun."

Indeed. I think it might be a mistake to think perspective emerges at life in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I agree with that, and already said so.

From the map, if it is a contour map, one can construct elevations along a sightline and thus reconstruct the perspective at any point in any direction.

I therefore conclude that perspective is not personal (as Banno points out if we swap places, we swap perspectives), but a feature of topography. — unenlightened

And when perspective is extended as metaphor to include psychological dispositions and expertise and limitations of the senses, and social limits, these can each be located case by case.

But you seem to conflate subjectivity with mental life as perspective. What I am saying is that subjectivity is prior to mental life of even the most primitive sort. I am I suppose heading towards that problematic definition of life — as being its own subject - that which is self-defining. The yeast cell responds differentially to the environment in a way that constitutes and gives significance to its own boundary for its own continuation. Sugar in; carbon dioxide out.

We don't think corporations and states have their own mental life, but they do seem able to posses knowledge and priorities that differ from the sum of their members' knowledge and desires (e.g. when the US security apparatus "didn't know what it knew" re: 9/11, but later uncovered this through intentional reflection). And the existence of such knowledge/priorities entails perspective and a form of aboutness, even though the first person "aboutness" appears to be absent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an interesting one. Institutions are made of living beings, but might have archival memories. But it is a repetition at the human level of colonial organisms like siphonophorae and complex insect colonies such as ants and bees. In such cases there are aspects behaviour that are individual, and aspects that are functions of the larger 'social organism'.

If we talk about simple organisms, like the single celled amoeba making judgements, we get ridiculed. This in clearly nonconventional, simple organism do not make "judgements", by conventional use of the term. But if this is not form of "judgement", then on what principles are we going to attempt to understand this "selective response"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Something I only discovered in the writing is that subjectivity is necessarily prior to awareness rather than the result thereof. It is of course a judgement by the organism in relation to itself as to whether a substance in the environment is beneficial or harmful to ingest. I don't know if others have looked at this, but it does seem to turn some thinking about awareness and consciousness rather on its head.

I take consciousness to be the awareness of awareness, and perhaps awareness is the judgement of judgement, and judgement is the first responsive action, and the first judgement is the distinguishing of the organism from the environment by the organism itself. (If anyone has been following my thread on the Laws of Form, they will probably notice its influence.)

. Logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, harmony and counterpoint, balance and perspective, can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself. Thus the relation of logic to mathematics is seen to be that of an applied science to its pure ground, and all applied science is seen as drawing sustenance from a process of creation with which it can combine to give structure, but which it cannot appropriate

I am strongly reminded of Pirsig, here, when he talks about 'quality'. (Which is a fair candidate for the first distinction.) there's a bit in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about how one judges the quality of an essay first, and forms the criteria for what 'makes a good essay' from the good essays rather than the other way round. And then, the English professor, it is, refuses to grade the students work on the basis that they know the quality of their own work already.

And yes, it was the age of LSD.

What do you mean by "put back the subjectivity"? — wonderer1

Simply that there is a prevalent view that physics is all there is, and that this is mistaken. When something is called "subjective" or "a social construct", it is usually dismissive to some extent, and sometimes completely. Organisms respond, rather than merely react to the environment. For example, yeast cells need water, sugar, oxygen and various salts to reproduce but in the absence of oxygen they adapt by turning the sugar into alcohol instead of CO2, and in the absence of water they go into a sort of hibernation.

There is a selective response to the environment even at the simplest level, that becomes more complex in plants that respond to seasons and climate. It is impossible to understand what is happening without recourse to the fact that the cell treats itself as a separate whole in its responses. It is already the subject of its actions. Note that nothing has been said yet about awareness or experience; theses are other levels of complexity that can only be built upon an organisms pre-existing and more fundamental subjectivity. We can say, fairly uncontroversially, that yeast needs sugar, where we cannot say that granite needs anything at all, and that which has needs of its own is a subject, and its needs are subjective. The philosopher's need to understand is built upon this, and so the notion of the objective world can only be a lifeless fragment.

Electro-mechanically, the square wave is produced by a circuit that when it is on, turns itself off, AND when it is off, turns itself on. So i imagine a buzzer, a circuit that turns on an electromagnet that pulls a lever against a spring until the circuit is broken, and then the spring pulls the lever back and closes the circuit again - on and off forever.

Whereas, (I'm guessing here) for the memory circuit, there would be no spring, but instead 2 electromagnets that operate a dual switch that turns one on and the other off and contrariwise, vice versa.

And then we come to imaginary values, and my best guess is that it relates to the p expression you mentioned above.

Suppose we now arrange for all the relevant properties of the point p in Figure 1to appear in two successive spaces of expres- sion, thus.
P'p
We could do this by arranging similarly undermined distinctions
in each space, supposing the speed of transmission to be
constant throughout. In this case the superimposition of the
•two square waves in the outer space, one of them inverted by
the cross, would add up to a continuous representation of the marked state there. — P.61

I'm too lazy to correct the expression - you know what it is...

Anyway, two undefined expressions one under a cross give 2 square waves exactly out of sync, give rise to what looks like a stable 'on' but isn't.

And that is where my understanding ends. How one gets from there to frequency doubling and halving is beyond me.

One thing though: wallowing is pleasurable or comfortable, and reading Crash is definitely not like that, and was very clearly not meant to be. — Jamal

Fair comment. Mind you, that's not to say that writing it wasn't pleasurable.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in — Bob Dylan

And “there is enough x in the real world as it is; I don’t need to see it in art” (a fair paraphrase, I hope) seems like an argument against all works of art, no? Well, except those that distract us from the real world with alternative visions, I guess. — Jamal

I don't think that is a fair representation. Primo Levi records real horror; George Orwell warns against dehumanising ideology. But they don't wallow in depravity. Perhaps that is an unfair characterisation on my side, but it is the impression I get from what you are saying.
Or consider P K Dick's work; an evocation of paranoia, but always with sympathy for the paranoid subject.

It seems to be the dehumanizing effects of technology combined with the pornification of relationships, and the psychopathic nature of the suburban landscape (“psychopathic” here meaning anti-social and dehumanizing). — Jamal

All I can say here is that if one has to struggle to understand what one is being cautioned against, the cautionary aspect is not very successful. But there lies the rub: to a misanthrope, dehumanising is a good thing! But that's enough pontificating from my unassailable position of total ignorance, hopefully others who have read it will have more interesting things to say.

Why did you read it?

I haven't read it, and do not intend to read it. Ballard was one of my least favourite sf writers, and one reason was a sense of misanthropy and moral nihilism that always seemed to come through his writing.

So as he says, it’s a cautionary tale. — Jamal

Is It? What are we being warned against that we are in danger of? Have you found something in society and or in your psyche that you were unaware of before? Or are we being shown the dangers of delight in cautionary tales?

what is in front of your face is horrifying, psychopathic perversity described as if it were normal. — Jamal

I find there is more than enough horror and psychopathic perversity around and within. One does well to acknowledge it, even to confess it perhaps, but one does ill to indulge it. I speak from ignorance, of course, but nothing you have said thus far has given me the least reason to think I ought to read it let alone want to. I haven't read Lolita either.

Quite simply, swapping places does not imply swapping perspectives, because the unique particularities of the being brings a lot to the perspective. If swapping perspectives was just a matter of swapping places, you could take a dog's perspective, or a cat's perspective, by taking that creature's place. But this is all wrong. And that is why "walking in someone else's shoes" is a matter of understanding the other person, not a matter of swapping physical positions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, you are quite right. Even the map-reading is not simple; the information is there in the contours, but working out what can be seen from where is complex. Similarly, one can know something of a persons's economic position, social and psychological condition and perhaps work out to some extent their psycho-social 'perspective'. And if one understands a dog's sensibilities, the same applies. That you bring up such particularities shows that you can do so to some extent, and shows, again, that they are features of the world.

I think this is what the thread is suggesting; that the objective world is an abstract theoretical construct, and to arrive at the real, one has 'to put' back the subjectivity that has been discounted.

How can it be extrapolated? That a person's psychological, social, economical situation is also a type of topography? — baker

Well, I would like to suggest that social and psychological situations along with social constructs are all real, but I don't have that map to hand, if there is one. Humans are territory rather than map, is more my point, whereas physics is map.

I have flagged your post so a moderator will notice it, and hopefully sort you out.

It belongs to some random guy who runs it for his own entertainment and sponges off his friends to pay for it. Probably not for you, if you need official seals of legitimacy.

Here is a good model of awareness as i find it: there is a blank space of unawareness at the centre, and the frame of the picture of which one is aware expands from the centre to encompass the observer and eventually the whole universe. Everything is the contents of awareness, even blank unawareness, and the observer is also part of what is observed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_%28M._C._Escher%29

One is awareness, the other is content. One is seer, one is scene/seen. It is important to make clear what we are bringing into question then when we question the self. Is it the subject itself, or the self-idea? — petrichor

Is there awareness without content, or is the container produced virtually, or imagined, as the limit of the contents? "The subject itself" has plenty of emphatic repetition but if it is not part of the content of awareness, who can say anything at all about it as to existence or anything else?

Some weird leaps occurring here. — NOS4A2

Amen to that.