Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Part I: Metalogues

Why do Things Get in a Muddle

• But Daddy, isn't that a funny thing - that everybody means the same when they say "muddled" but everybody means something different by "tidy". But "tidy" is the opposite of "muddled", isn't it?

Why do Frenchmen?

• Anyhow, most conversations are only about whether people are angry of something. They are busy telling each other that they are friendly - which is sometimes a lie. After all, what happens when they cannot think of anything to say? They all feel uncomfortable.

About Games and Being Serious

• In order to think new thoughts or to say new things, we have to break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle the pieces.
• I know that I am serious - whatever that means - about the things that we talk about. We talk about ideas. And I know that I play with the ideas in order to understand them and fit them together. It's "play" in the same sense that a small child "plays" with blocks... And a child with building blocks is mostly very serious about his "play".
• The purpose of these conversations is to discover the "rules". It's like life - a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.

How Much Do You Know?

• Arithmetic is a set of tricks for thinking clearly.
• The first thing about being clear is not to mix up ideas which are really different from each other. The idea of two oranges is really different from the idea of two miles. Because if you add them together you only get fog in your head.
• You can't mix thoughts, you can only combine them. And in the end, that means that you can't count them. Because counting is really only adding things together. And you mostly can't do that.
• Then really do we only have one big thought which has lots of branches - lots and lots and lots of branches?
• Yes. I think so. I don't know. Anyhow I think that is a clearer way of saying it. I mean it's clearer than talking about bits of knowledge and trying to count them.
• My schoolteachers filled up about a quarter of my brain with fog. And then I read newspapers and listed to what other people said, and that filled up another quarter with fog. And the other quarter Daddy? Oh - that's fog that I made for myself when I was trying to think.

Why Do Things Have Outlines?

• Once you bring live things into (the game of croquet in Alice in Wonderland) in becomes impossible
• It's just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really unpredictable things in the world.
• You say it is important to be clear about things. And you get angry about people who blur the outlines. And yet we think it's better to be unpredictable and not to be like a machine. And you say that we cannot see the outlines of our conversation till it's over. Then it doesn't matter whether we're clear or not. Because we cannot do anything about it then.

Why a Swan?

• I evidently do not know what the word "sort of" means, but fantasy, poetry, ballet, and art in general owes its meaning and importance to the relationship which I refer to when I say that the swan figure is a "sort of" swan - or a "pretend" swan.

What is an Instinct?

• There's no explanation of an explanatory principal (like gravity). It's like a black box.
• The intellect is always classifying and dividing things up.
• Dreams are sort of suspended in time. They don't have any tenses.
• The dream elaborates on the relationship but does not identify the things that are related.
• Both dreams and animal behavior deal in opposites, have no tenses, have no "not", work by metaphor, and neither of them pegs the metaphor down.

Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Culture Contact and Schismogenesis

• Almost the whole of a culture may be seen variously as a mechanism for modifying and satisfying the sexual needs of the individuals, or for the enforcement of the norms of behavior, or for supplying the individuals with food.
• Every bit of behavior is - at least in a well-integrated individual - probably simultaneously relevant to all abstractions (such as self-protective, assertive, sexual, acquisitive, etc)
• Contacts between profoundly different communities must theoretically result in either:
  • The complete fusion of the originally different groups
  • The elimination of one or both groups
  • The persistence of both groups in dynamic equilibrium within one major community.

Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Behavior

• Bateson's father had always a hankering after the problems of pattern and symmetry
• The types of mental operation which are useful in analyzing one field may be equally useful in another.
• The advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.
• A habit of constructing abstractions which refer to terms of comparison between entities.
• I felt that I had discovered how to think.
• Psychoanalysis has erred sadly in using words that are too short and therefore appear more concrete than they are.

Morale and National Character

• A person's character is oriented to the motifs and patterns of relationship in the society in which they live.
• To limit the scope of a concept is almost synonymous with defining it.