Gregory Bateson died in 1980

Biologist & anthropologist investigating systems. Tweets here are quotes & re-phrasings of ideas from his writings. GB is only ideas now.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

“It is flatly obvious that no variable of zero dimensions can be truly located.” From “Cybernetic Explanation,” in Steps…, page 408.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

Perhaps this is overstated: The "self" might be better said to recede as an experiential argument, becoming, let's say, a sub-argument or side-argument, a "para-self" or self beside the stream of a widened experience.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

When someone "learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts," that "'self' will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of 'self' will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience" (Steps 304).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

When someone "learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts," that "'self' will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of 'self' will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience" (Steps 304).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"Self-corrective sequences" must be "viewed as contexts of learning" for "the systemic difference between them" to be "immediately evident" (M&N, "Appendix," 221).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

If you want to understand mental process, look at biological evolution and conversely if you want to understand biological evolution, go look at mental process. -- "Appendix: Time is Out of Joint," (1978), Mind and Nature, p. 245.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

There is an "epistemological truth, which will insist that the poles of contrast dividing the persons [politically] are indeed dialectical necessities of the living world" (Mind and Nature, "Appendix," 246).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"My machinery and processes of knowing simply constitute one enormous blind spot. A spot through which I cannot even see that it is blind. Not even any darkness" (A Sacred Unity 226).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

Letter dated June 26, 1977. Rpt in G. Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, as "Our Own Metaphor: Nine Years After." Ed. Rodney E. Donaldson. Harper Collins, 1991. 225-242.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"If epistemology must always come between me and my organic perception of the world, and similarly must always come between me and any understanding of myself; if my epistemology is the organizing principle of all my understanding; then I can never know anything" (ASU 226).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

“As you know, the difficulty was always to get people to approach the formal analysis of mind with a similar or even an open epistemology. Many people claim to have no epistemology and must just overcome this optimism.” “Afterword,” About Bateson. 1977. 235.

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"I have driven myself, over the years, into a 'place' where the conventional dualistic statements of mind-body relations...are absolutely unintelligible to me. It is becoming as difficult for me to understand dualists as it is for them to understand me" (236).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"Many people claim to have no epistemology and must just overcome this optimism" ("Afterword," About Bateson, 235).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

“The shower of impulses coming in over the optic nerve surely contains no picture” (“Afterword,” About Bateson, 245).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"[T]he multiple insults, the double binds & invasions that we all experience in life,...corrupts our epistemology, challenging the core of our existence,... [and] seduc[es] us into a false cult of the ego,...a false epistemology."
https://t.co/xPUdK1VB0p

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"It is characteristic of mind and mental process that, in many of the steps which make up the circuitry of the mind, events are triggered not by force or impact, but by *difference*" ("The Birth of a Matrix or Double Bind and Epistemology," in Beyond the Double Bind, 50).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'" (Steps 304).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

"All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints--is noise, the only possible source of *new* information" ("Cybernetic Explanation," Steps, 410).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

Art is part of humanity's "quest for grace," with an attendant "rage and agony in failure," and "ecstasy in partial success" (129).

[Gregory Bateson died in 1980 @GregoryBateson]

According to Aldous Huxley, the essential problem for human beings is "the quest for grace" (Steps, 128). #Bateson