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.

Bali: The Value System of a Steady State

• We should expect our curves to be bounded by phenomena comparable to orgasm - that the achievement of a certain degree of bodily or neural involvement or intensity may be followed by a release of schismogenic tension.
• The Balinese steady state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change.

Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art

• Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem of humanity is the quest for grace.
• He argued - like Walt Whitman - that the communication and behavior of animals has a naiveté, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man's behavior is corrupted by deceit - even self-deceit - by purpose, and by self-consciousness. As Huxley saw it, man has lost the "grace" which animals still have.
• I argue that art is a part of man's quest for grace.
• Some cultures display an avoidance of complexity by crass preference either for total consciousness or total unconsciousness. Their art is unlikely to be "great".
• I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called "consciousness" and the other the "unconscious".
• In what form is information about psychic integration contained or coded in the work of art.
• I want precisely to avoid analyzing the "story".
• It is the very rules of transformation that are of interest to me - not the message, but the code.
• "Meaning" may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and "restraint".
• Any aggregate of events or objects shall be said to contain "redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a "slash mark and the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (ie reduce the probability of) wrong guessing:
  • [("It's raining"/ raindrops)/you-me relationship]
  • And the same is true of the rain. It, too, is patterned and structured. From the direction of one drop, I could predict the direction of others. And so on.
• The essence and raison d'être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by "restraint".
• "I know the way to Cambridge" might mean that:
  • I have studied the map and can give you directions.
  • I can recall details all along the route.
  • When driving that route I recognize many details even though I could recall only a few.
  • I can trust to "habit" to make me turn at the right points, without having to think where I am going.
• At least four levels of the mind:
  • 1. Habit - The better an organism knows something, the less conscious it becomes of its knowledge.
  • 2. Unconscious knowledge and defamiliarization - Van Gogh's chair affronts the conscious expectations and dimly reminds the consciousness of what had be unconsciously taken for granted.
  • 3. Freudian theory of dreams as metaphors coded according to primary process.
  • 4. The Freudian unconscious filled with painful memories via repression.
• I believe that much of early Freudian theory was upside down. Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious , eg primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing
• Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a procrustean bed of logic.
• Consciousness, for obvious mechanical reasons, must always be limited to a rather small fraction of mental process. If useful at all, it must therefore be husbanded.
  • The unconsciousness associated with habit is an economy both of thought and of consciousness; and the same is true of the inaccessibility of the processes of perception. The conscious organism does not require (for pragmatic purposes) to know how it perceives - only to know what it perceives.
  • To suggest that we might operate without a foundation in primary process would be to suggest that the human brain ought to be differently structured.
  • Of the four types, only the Freudian cupboard for skeletons is perhaps undesirable and could be obviated. But there may still be advantages in keeping the skeleton off the dining room table.
  • In truth, our life is such that its unconscious components are continuously present in all their multiple forms. It follows that in our relationships we continuously exchange messages about these unconscious materials, and it becomes important also to exchange metamessages by which we tell each other what order and species of unconsciousness (or consciousness) attaches to our messages.
• Art becomes an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind.
• Isadora Duncan or any artist is trying to communicate something like "This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication." Or perhaps: "This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious."
• The sensations and qualities of skill can never be put in words, and yet the fact of skill is conscious. The artist's dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting; and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it. He is ona sort of moving stairway about whose position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his efforts to communicate. Clearly, his task is impossible, but, as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily.
• The "algorithms of the heart/unconscious" are coded and organized in a manner totally different from the algorithms of language. And since a great deal of conscious thought is structured in terms of the logics of language, the algorithms of the unconsciousness are doubly inaccessible. It is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to this material, but also the fact that when such access is achieved, eg in dreams, art, poetry, religion, intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable problem of translation.
• Primary process is characterized as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood and metaphoric.
• It is also true that the subject matter of primary-process discourse is different from the subject matter of language and consciousness:
  • Consciousness talks about things or persons, and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned.
  • In primary process, the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them, ie, the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. But, in primary process, as in art, there are no markers to indicate to the conscious mind that the message material is metaphoric.
• The subject matter of dream and other primary process material is relationship in the narrow sense as between self and other persons or between self and the environment. Anglo-Saxons usually have to be told that these matters are the subject matter of what are called feelings - love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc.
  • It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names.
• The unconscious contains not only painful matters, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them. Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought. We can do things without consciously thinking about them. The skill of an artist, or rather his demonstration of a skill, becomes a message about these parts of his unconsciousness (but not, perhaps, from the unconscious).
• The economics of the system pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatics of particular instance.
• The premises may, economically, be sunk, but particular conclusions must be conscious. But the "sinking", though economical, is still done at a price - the price of inaccessibility. Since the level to which things are sunk is characterized by iconic algorithms and metaphor, it becomes difficult for the organism to examine the matrix out of which his conscious conclusions spring. Conversely, we may note that what is common to a particular statement and a corresponding metaphor is of a generality appropriate for sinking.
• No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. This is the economy achieved by habit formation.
• The TV which gives a distorted or otherwise imperfect picture is, in a sense, communicating about its unconscious pathologies - exhibiting its symptoms. And one may ask whether some artists are not doing something similar.
• What the unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams, and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of mind (ie the whole interconnected system of sub-components.
• A bag of tricks for curing or preventing a list of specified diseases provides no overall wisdom.
• Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life. Life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct.
• This is the sort of world we live in - a world of circuit structures - and love can survive only if wisdom (ie a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.
• Art has a positive function in maintaining what I called "wisdom", ie in correcting a too purposive view of life and making the view more systemic. But what sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art?
• With almost no exceptions, the behaviors called art or their products (also called art) have two characteristics:
  • They require or exhibit skill
  • They contain redundancy or pattern, and the skill is first in maintaining and then in modulating the redundancies.
• Rigid focusing on any single set of relata destroys for the artist the more profound significance of the work. If the picture were only about sex or only about social organization, it would be trivial. It is nontrivial or profound precisely because it is about sex and social organization and cremation, and other things. In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata.

Comment on Part II

• In both anatomy and grammar, the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary. The relations are of the sort generated by processes of information exchange.
• The progressive increase in size and armament of the dinosaurs was, as I saw it, simply an interactive armaments race - a schismogenic process. But I could not then see that the evolution of the horse from Eohippus was not a one-sided adjustment to life on grassy plains. Surely the grassy plains themselves were evolved pari passu with the evolution of the teeth and hooves of the horses and other ungulates. Turf was the evolving response of the vegetation to the evolution of the horse. It is the conteext which evolves.

Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship

Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning

• WWII is ideologically about the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented, and power-hungry individuals, to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Are we going to treat people as things?
• What circumstances promote that specific habitual phrasing of the universe which we call free will and those others which we call responsibility, constructiveness, energy, passivity, dominance, and the rest which promote democracy? For all these abstract qualities, the essential stock-in-trade of the educators, can be seen as various habits of punctuating the stream of experience so that it takes on one or another sort of coherence and sense.
• We are dealing with a sort of habit which is a by-product of the learning process.
• What we might see a mixed bunch of abstract terms - free will, predestination, responsibility, constructiveness, passivity, dominance, etc - are descriptive of apperceptive habits, habitual ways of looking at the stream of events of which our own behavior is a part, and these habits might all be, in some sense, by-products of the learning process.
• The subject is learning to orient himself to certain types of contexts, or is acquiring insight into the contexts of problem solving - the subject has acquired a habit of looking for contexts and sequences of one type rather than another, a habit of punctuating the stream of events to give repetitions of a certain type of meaningful sequence.
• The states of mind which we call free will, instrumental thinking, dominance, passivity, etc are acquired by a process which we may equate with "learning to learn".
• We are not concerned with a hypothetical isolated individual in contact with an impersonal events stream, but rather with real individuals who have complex emotional patters of relationship with other individuals. In such a real world, the individual will be led to acquire or reject apperceptive habits by the very complex phenomena of personal example, tone of voice, hostility, love, etc. Many such habits, too, will be conveyed to him, not through his own naked experience of the stream of events, for no human beings (not even scientists) are naked in this sense. The vents stream is mediated to them through language, art, technology, and other cultural media which are structured at evey point by tramlines of apperceptive habit.
• What sort of experimental leaning context would we devise in order to inculcate "free will" (or some other habit)? How would we rig the maze of problem-box