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 so that the anthropomorphic rat shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free will.
• Four types of positive (as opposed to negative learning or inhibition):
  • Classical Pavlovian Contexts - With a fixed rigid sequence of events. Only a very limited fatalism would be possible. He would see all events as preordained, and he would see himself as not able to influence the course of events.
  • Instrumental Reward or Escape - Where you learn to do something to get something.
  • Instrumental Avoidance - Learn to do something to avoid something.
  • Serial and Rote Learning - Flywheel learning - self-constructed habits.

A Theory of Play and Fantasy

• Human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction, including:
  • The simply denotative level - "The cat is on the mat"
  • Multiple metalinguistic levels where the subject of discourse is the language
  • Multiple metacommunicative levels where the subject of the discourse is the relationship between the speakers.
  • (in a psychiatric context) A further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
• The vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit.
• The birth of signals:
  • The organism gradually ceases to respond quite "automatically" to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal, and that his own and the other's signals are only "signals", which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, etc. Ie, they have to be evaluated!
  • This recognition is by no means complete even among humans. We all to often respond automatically to newspaper headlines as though they were direct object-indications of events in our environment instead of signals concocted and transmitted by creatures as complexly motivated as ourselves.
  • Non-human mammals are automatically excited by the sexual odor of another, as this is an involuntary mood sign, while we have deodorants and perfumes to suppress involuntary signs and project voluntary signals
  • Only when signals are recognized as signals can human language begin, along with all the complexities of empathy, identification, projection, and so on, along with the possibility of communicating at the multiplicity of levels of abstraction in metalinguistic and metacommunicative ways.
• Play can only occur if the participants are capable of some degree of meta-communication to say that "this is play", which is a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement: "These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote."
• The evolution of communication allows the map-territory relation to come into being
• The evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication
• Threat, histrionic behavior and deceit, dramatization, teasing, spectatorship, etc form a single total complex of phenomena, and such phenomena as gambling and risk-taking have their roots in a combination of threat and play.
• Ritual, such as peace-making ceremonies, illustrate the labile nature of the frame "this is play", or "this is ritual", and how these discriminations can break down
• "this is play" can also be formulated/experience as "is this play?"
• Paradox - playing animals do not quite mean what they are saying but also, they are usual communicating about something which does not exist.
• Human beings have evolved the "metaphor that is meant", the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than "an outward and visible sign, given unto us."
• Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs.
• In movies and nightmares, images do not denote that which they seem to denote, but these sme images really do evoke the terror which would have been evoked by a real spear or a real precipice.
• It is our hypothesis that the message "This is play" establishes a paradoxical frame comparable to Epimenides' paradox:
  • While the unconscious or primary process thinking cannot discriminate between "some" and "all" or between "not all" and "none", these discriminations are performed by higher or more conscious mental processes which serve in the nonpsychotic individual to correct the black-and-white thinking of the lower levels.
  • The primary process is continually operating and the psychological validity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind (to experience the (fake) sensations).
  • The discrimination between play and non-play like that between fantasy and non-fantasy, is certainly a function of secondary process or ego.
  • Within dream or fantasy, the dreamer does not operate with the concept "untrue". He operates with all sorts of statements but with a curious inability to achieve metastatements. He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (ie framing) his dream.
    • In primary process, map and territory are equated
    • In secondary process, they can be discriminated
    • In play, they are both equated and discriminated.
• Frames or contexts:
  • A psychological frame is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions).
  • It has some degree of real existence and can be recognized as such through words like "play", "movie", "interview", "job", "language", etc.
  • But in other cases, there may be no explicit verbal reference to the frame, and the subject may have no consciousness of it
  • While the analogy of the mathematical set is perhaps over abstract, that of the picture frame is excessively concrete. The psychological frame is neither physical nor logical.
  • It is exclusive (excluding messages outside the frame) and inclusive (where perception of the "ground" (outside the frame) is positively inhibited and perception of the "figure" (inside the frame) is positively enhanced).
  • It is related to the concept of "premises", telling the viewer to use a different kind of thinking than that outside the frame
  • It is metacommunicative - any message that explicitly or implicitly defines a frame gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame.
  • Conversely, every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological frame.
  • There can be frames within frames and mental processes resemble logic in needing an outer frame to delimit the ground against which the figures are to be perceived. This need is often unsatisfied, as when we see a piece of sculpture in a junk shop window, but his is uncomfortable.
  • Russell's rule cannot be stated without breaking the rule. He insists that all items of inappropirate logical type be excluded (ie be an imaginary line) from the background of any class, ie he insists upon the drawing of an imaginary line of precisely the sort which he prohibits.
  • Three types of messages in animal behavior:
    • Mood signs
    • Messages which simulate mood signs (in play, threat, histrionics, etc)
    • Messages which enable the receiver to discriminate between mood-signs and those other signs that resemble them.
• The word salad of schizophrenia can be seen as the patient's failure to recognize the metaphoric nature of his fantasies. The frame-setting message (eg the phrase "as if") is omitted, and the metaphor or fantasy is narrated and acted upon in a manner which would be appropriate if the fantasy were a message of the more direct kind. The absence of metacommunicative framing in dreams is characteristic of the waking communications of the schizophrenic.
• Therapy is an attempt to change the patient's metacommunicative habits. In the process of therapy, there must have been communication at a level meta to these rules, communication about a change in rules.
• Both therapy and play:
  • Occur within a delimited psychological frame
  • Use messages that have a special and peculiar relationship to a more concrete or basic reality.
• The "transfer" of therapy is discriminated from real love and hate by signals invoking the psychological frame, and so can be discussed between patient and therapist:
  • It's like when canasta players cease to play and start a discussion of the rules. Their discourse is now of a different logical type from that of their play, and at the end of the discussion, we can imagine that they return to playing but with modified rules.
  • We avoid paradox by separating our discussion of the rules from the play, but this separation is impossible in psychotherapy, which is a framed interaction between two persons, in which the rules are implicit but subject to change.
  • This combination of logical types within the single meaningful act give to therapy the character not of a rigid games like canasta but, instead, that of an evolving system of interaction. The play of kittens or otters has this character.
  • By the process of interpretation, the neurotic is driven to assert an "as if" clause into the productions of his primary process thinking, which productions he had previously deprecated or repressed. He must learn that fantasy contains truth.
  • For the schizophrenic, his error is in treating the metaphors of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. Through the discovery of what these metaphors stand for, he must discover that they are only metaphors.
• Our central thesis is about the necessity of the paradoxes of abstraction:
  • It is not merely bad history to suggest that people might or should obey the Theory of Logical Types in their communications; their failure to do this is not due to mere carelessness or ignorance.
  • Rather, we believe that the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and that without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be an endless exchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor