A Sacred Unity: Further steps to an ecology of mind, 2023 edition (Alan Hudson’s notes)

Page x, Nora: One of the questions that I feel rumbling through this whole book is the question of how to describe a living system without killing it.

Page xv, Stephen Nachmanovitch: Wiping the Glosses and Getting to See a Little Bit More Clearly. Which always means seeing relationship and it always means seeing parts and wholes and parts and wholes encompassed within bigger wholes and that you are within a system that’s within systems that’s within systems and becoming comfortable with that nested recursive world we inhabit.

Page xvii, Nora: I sense that most of Gregory’s work is kind of an ongoing explanation of why you can’t have prescriptions.

Page xix, Nora: One minute you think you’re talking about interconnectedness and interdependency and ecology and living systems and the next minute all those words are in a McKinsey brochure. They don’t mean what they used to mean.

Page xxxii, Rodney Donaldson, Intro to the 1991 edition: If, as Bateson asserts, all we can know is difference then it becomes at least plausible that the bulk of our personal, interpersonal, international, and ecological problems arise ultimately from the simple turning of a distinction into a separation and the separation into an opposition

Page xxxiii: What is being proposed is a dance, a dance of, for lack of a better word, integrating. The dance of an evolving ecological tautology.

Page xxxiv: It would seem to me that if we were to see health, ethics, aesthetics, and the sacred all from the standpoint of a whole functioning organism-in-its-environment, that is, as being defined operationally as opposed to prescriptively, we could conceivably arrive ourselves at a vision of each of these seemingly separate categories as pointing toward a complex dynamic state of an evolving ecological tautology.

Page xxxv, Gregory Bateson: And last, there is death. It is understandable that in a civilization which separates mind from body we should either try to forget death or to make mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind. But 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. The ideas which seem to be me can also become immanent in you. May they survive, if true.

Page 7: Malinowski demonstrated that everything in a cultural system was, if not a cause, at any rate a necessary condition for everything else. He showed that, in describing a culture, it was possible to start with any institutional category of behaviour and from that to work outward in ever-widening circles of relevance until the whole cultural system appears as relevant background for the particular set of data from which we started.

Page 51: The book is a weaving of three levels of abstraction. At the most concrete level there are ethnographic data. More abstract is the tentative arranging of data to give various pictures of the culture and still more abstract is the self-conscious discussion of the procedures by which the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are put together. The final climax of the book is the discovery, described in the epilogue and achieved only a few days before the book went to press, of what looks like a truism today: That ethos, eidos, sociology, economics, cultural structure, social structure and all the rest of these words refer only to scientists’ ways of putting the jigsaw puzzle together.

Also page 51: If ethos, social structure, economics etc. are words in that language which describes how scientists arrange data, then these words cannot be used to explain phenomena nor can there be any ethological or economic categories of phenomena. People can be influenced of course by economic theories or by economic fallacies or by hunger, but they cannot possibly be influenced by economics. Economics is a class of explanations, not itself an explanation of anything

Page 62, footnote 5: Two contrasting schools of thought are in agreement on a fundamental analogy between the two genera of process. On the one hand, those that argue that evolutionary change is a sort of learning. On the other hand, those who argue that learning is a sort of evolutionary change [Connection to Anna Birney, learning is change]

Page 77: Clearly a first step in defining units or parts of the process of socialization will be the explication of these two levels of order, the actions and the contexts … Without identification of context, nothing can be understood.

Page 147: So all right, we’ve separated off one whole category of determinants, those due to physical force and impact. Now this leaves a second world of explanation with again many subdivisions in it. This is the world of explanation in which a “cause”, I use the word in quotes, is in general a difference

Page 148: [Difference as cause, difference as impact]: In such a world, difference makes a difference, difference being quite a different thing from force or impact. We are out of the world of the hard sciences into the world in which difference becomes determinative. Now difference is very interesting because it is a way of explaining the because – if I ask you to locate a difference, you will find that you cannot do so because obviously it is not in this, it is not in that, it is not in the space between, and it’s not in the time between

Page 151: The actual channels which you would have to map out to understand a man cutting down a tree with an axe would include differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in light waves reaching the eye, differences in the behaviour of the end organ and showers of impulse in the optic nerve, differences transmitted over very complex networks going out to differences transmitted to muscles, to differences in the movement of the axe, to differences in the next cut in the face of the tree

Page 152: Now not only do differences exist in circuits, they also exist in contexts, for, in the whole communicational world, nothing means anything in except in the presence of other things

Page 155: We are all continually subjected to contexts of learning because all contexts are contexts of learning, more or less

Page 155: Again what is unique from context to context is going to have to be dealt with; What is general from context to context can be handed over to what for a moment we will call habit.

Page 160: [Three aspects of matter which are all really the same thing]: One of them is evolutionary theory and that is a matter you know which is dealt with in one sort of book. Another is mind/body problems and that is dealt with in another sort of book, and the third is epistemology and that is dealt with again in another sort of book. These three apparently different matters are in fact all one subject of discourse and you can’t handle one without simultaneously handling the others

Page 166: The world in whose terms we have to think is a world of patterns and in that world there are tautologies and logics which we can use for explaining, for building accurate language and for creating some rigor. It’s not like the language of quantities and such things. It’s a language of patterns, and for most of us an unfamiliar business

Page 174: What gets from the territory onto the map? The answer to this question was obvious. News of difference is what gets across and nothing else

Page 176: Conventional epistemology, which we call “sanity”, boggles at the realization that “properties” are only differences and exist only in relation, only in context, only in relationship. We abstract from relationship and from the experiences of interaction to create “objects” and to endow them with characteristics. We likewise boggle at the proposition that our own character is only real in relationship. We abstract from the experiences of interaction and difference to create a “self”, which shall continue (shall be “real” or thingish) even without relationship. An epistemological crisis is provoked by enforcing the idea that even things have character only by their differences and interactions.

So mapping context as mapping the difference that matters – my piece for ODI 2005 on "mapping political context"

Page 182: The way to phrase scientific questions is with the word “how” and not with the word “why”. But typologies you know do not answer either “how” questions or “why” questions. Therefore a typology is only a way station. It may be a necessary way station, but always the next step is “how”

Page 183: From classification to process to classification to process. That is how the hierarchy of logical types got into the theory. First there was the classification of persons or cultures. Then I looked for the processes of interaction which generated and maintained interactions which generated and maintained the differences between persons. Then I classified those processes into symmetrical and complementary. Last came the questions about processes of interaction between symmetrical and complementary processes

Page 183: Led to recognition by me of context i.e. recognition that the terms of schismogenic theory are also terms for contextual structure and that “learning to learn” is indeed for the learner a learning of context

Page 186: I realized that what gets from the territory to the map – i.e. from the outside world to the brain – is news of difference. If there is no difference in the territory there will be nothing to say on the map which will remain blank. And further I saw that any given map has rules about what differences in the territory should be reported on the map

Page 188, 189: In my epistemology the concept of self along with all arbitrary boundaries which delimit systems or parts of systems is to be regarded as a trait of the local culture – not indeed to be disregarded since such little epistemological monsters are always liable to become foci of pathology. The arbitrary boundaries which were useful in the process of analyzing the data become all too useful easily battlefronts across which we try to kill an enemy or exploit an environment

Page 205: It is only news of difference that can get from the territory to the map and this fact is the basic epistemological statement about the relationship between all reality out there and all perception in here: That the bridge must always be in the form of difference … It can only encounter news of boundaries – news of the contexts of difference.

Page 241: If it be true that certain people are specially gifted in the art of acting upon complex systems with homeostatic or ecological characteristics and that these people do not operate by spelling out the interaction of all relevant variables then these people must use some inner ecology of ideas as an analogic model. (By ideas I mean thoughts, premises, effects, perceptions of self etc.)

Page 242: It is possible that the aesthetic approach with its special emphasis on patterns and the modulation of patterns may be a natural development out of mem-theory and o-graphs

Page 243: A system after all is any unit containing feedback structure and therefore competence to process information.

Page 244: The basic rule of systems theory is that if you want to understand some phenomenon or appearance you must consider that phenomenon within the context of all completed circuits which are relevant to it. The emphasis is on the concept of the completed communicational circuit and implicit in the theory is the expectation that all units containing completed circuits will show mental characteristics. The mind, in other words, is immanent in the circuitry

Page 245:Very little thought will show that this change in relevance from thinking of man versus tree to thinking of man as part of a circuit which includes the tree will change our ideas of the nature of the self, the nature of power, responsibility and so on. It might even lead the human race to a sort of wisdom that would preclude the wanton destruction of our biological environments and preclude some of the very peculiar attitudes we exhibit towards patients, foreigners, minorities, our spouses and our children and even each other.

Descartes created three of the major tools of our contemporary thinking. One: the split between mind and matter. Two: the cartesian coordinates, the graph – you put time on the bottom and you make a variable. And, three: the cogito – “I think therefore I am”. Those three things go together and have simply torn the concept of the universe in which we live into rags.

Page 288: Now that discovery, that the first and most fundamental step of mental life – the receipt of news from the outside – depends upon difference, and that the differences are in fact ratios, is basic for epistemology, the science of how it is that we can know anything

Page 288: Most of them do not make a difference. In the more modern language of information theory we may say that information is, difference which makes a difference, and that of the infinite number of differences immanent in this chalk very few become information. There is the fact that this chalk is here in London and differs therefore from some other piece of chalk in New York. But that is not an effective difference that makes a difference. It doesn’t enter into an information processing system. This is basic to our notion of what is life, our notion of what is death.

Page 290: I have offered you two central points in what I might call biological epistemology. First, that all mental life is related to the physical body as difference or contrast is related to the static and the uniform. And second, I have offered you the idea that the viewing of the world in terms of things is a distortion supported by language and the correct view of the world is in terms of the dynamic relations which are the governors of growth.

Page 290: Perhaps that will suffice to show all that what I am saying, if taken seriously – and I say it in all seriousness – would make an almost total change in the way we live, the way we think about our lives and about each other and ourselves

Page 292: Of course, natural history can be taught as a dead subject. I know that, but I believe also that perhaps the monstrous atomistic pathology at the individual level, at the family level, at the national level and at the international level – the pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live – can only in the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature which make up the beauty of nature.