rating : 2 : great stuff
review : 22 June 2024
Bateson shows us how our process of deductive logic has led civilization into a paradoxical maze that is contrary to the natural order. He redefines “mind” and presents new, simple truths by which mind and nature operate and fit together in a single biosphere—a basic unity that is essential to our continuing existence. Mind and Nature is a powerful, brilliant vision of universal harmony.
Trained in anthropology, Bateson pursued his interest in pattern and communication in New Guinea and Bali, then conducted research in psychiatry, schizophrenia and later on dolphins.
In this book, Bateson is outlining his ideas about life, nature, process, and the world.
He starts with a section called “Every Schoolboy Knows…”, which is a wide-ranging description of what Bateson claims are the “elementary” ideas of epistemology. That is not just how we humans know anything, but also how all of nature knows how to be itself. In 16 sub-sections, he ranges over science, subjective experience, wholes and parts, predictability, measurement, timeless logic versus temporal causality, and more. In particular, he distinguishes two realms of natural processes and organisation. One is epigenesis, also known as embryology, an act of “becoming” that occurs by being “built upon” or elaborating the previously existing state, a form of predictable repetition, iteration, unfolding. The other is evolution and learning, which requires randomness to provide a source of unpredicatable variation for creativity, exploration and change, and the generation of new information.
The rest of the book builds on these ideas. The ideas are dense and profound, illuminating, but not easily summarisable. This is a book that needs to be read, and reread, to appreciate the arguments being made.