Steps to an ecology of mind (Alan Hudson’s highlights)

“Even with current progress in chaos and complexity theory, we remain less skilled at thinking about interactions than we are at thinking about entities, things.” (p.vii, Mary Catherine Bateson).

“emerging concern for integrative changes that would offer the possibility of ongoing systemic health” (p.ix, Mary Catherine Bateson).

“in the world of mental processes, difference is the analog of cause (‘difference that makes a difference’)” (p.xi, Mary Catherine Bateson).

“the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science” (p.75).

“On both fields [biology and linguistics], the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary. Beyond this, it is claimed that the relations are of the sort generated by processes of information exchange. In other words, the mysterious and polymorphic relation between context and content obtains in both anatomy and linguistics …” (p.154)

working towards ends involves manipulation of people. “Only by working in terms of values which are limited to defining a direction is it possible for us to use scientific methods in the control of the process without the negation of the moral autonomy of the human spirit” (Margaret Mead, quoted on p.159).

“if we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely as instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life.” (Margaret Mead, quoted on p.160)

“No man is ‘resourceful’ or ‘dependent’ or ‘fatalistic’ in a vacuum. His characteristic, what it be, is not his but is rather a characteristic of what goes on between him and something (or somebody) else.” (p.298)

“As William Blake noted, long ago, ‘Without Contraries is not progression’.” (p.303) and Zen koans as paradoxes

“It is important to see the particular utterance or action as part of the ecological subsystem called context and not as the product or effect of what remains of the context after the piece which we want to explain has been cut out from it” (p.338).

“Of special interest in this connection is the relationship between context and its content. A phoneme exists as such only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word only exists as such – only has ‘meaning’ – in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship.” (p.408).

“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 pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology”. (p.465)

“if mind is immanent not only in those pathways of information which are located inside the body but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect. The individual nexus of pathways which I call ‘me’ is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.” (p.471).