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Steps to an Ecology of Mind

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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

Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia

  • I now define ego weakness as trouble in identifying an interpreting those signals which should tell the individual what sort of a message a message is. When a schizophrenic hears "What can I do for you?", he does not understand how to interpret it.
  • We are actually quite unconscious of receiving those messages which tell us what sorts of messages we receive
  • The schizophrenic word salad is his attempt to describe a traumatic situation which involves a metacommunicative tangle.
  • The trauma must have had formal structure in the sense that multiple logical types were played against each other to generate that particular pathology in this individual.
  • In conventional conversation, we weave logical types with incredible complexity and quite surprising facility. We make jokes which often weave multiple logical types together. When we meet these multiple identifications we laugh, and we make new psychological discoveries about what goes on inside ourselves, which is perhaps the reward of real humor.
  • But some people have the utmost difficulty with this problem of multiple levels, and there is an unequal distribution of this ability.
  • What is needed for a child to acquire, or to not acquire, a skill in the ways of interpreting these signals?
  • We all have some difficulty in deciding sometimes whether a dream was a dream or not, and it would not be very easy for most of us to say how we know that a piece of our own fantasy is fantasy and not experience. The ability to place an experience in time is one of the important cues, and referring it to a sense organ is another
  • To get confused about the logical types, you have to be intelligent enough to know that there is something wrong, and not so intelligent as to be able to see what it is that is wrong.
  • The mother of a schizophrenic continually contradicts her own message identifier. She laughs when she is saying that which is least funny to her, and so on.
  • Classifying the ability to identify messages:
    • Hebephrenic (chaotic) individuals for whom no message is of any particular definite type but who live in a sort of chronic shaggy-dog story.
    • Normal levels of identification
    • Those who try to overidentify, to make an overly rigid identification of what sort of a message every message is. This will give a much more paranoid type of picture. Withdrawal is another possibility.

Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia

  • Double-bind - a situation in which no matter what a person does, he can't win.
  • Russell's theory of logical types - there is a discontinuity between a class and its members. The class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class, since the term used for the class is of a different level of abstraction.
  • Humans handle communication involving multiple logical types:
    • Various communicational modes - play, fantasy, sacrament, metaphor, etc
    • Humor - the explosive moment in humor is when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and resynthesis. Commonly, the punchline compels a re-evaluation of earlier signals which ascribed to certain messages a particular mode.
    • The falsification of mode-identifying signals - the artificial laugh, the manipulative simulation of friendliness, the confidence trick, kidding, etc
    • Learning, and learning to learn.
  • The schizophrenic exhibits weakness in ssigning the correct communication mode to:
    • The messages he receives from others.
    • The messages that he himself utters or emits nonverbally.
    • His own thoughts, sensations, and percepts (objects of perception)
  • Schizophrenic utterance is rich in metaphor, which is an indispensable tool of thought and expression, but he uses unlabeled metaphors, and has special difficulty handling signals of that class whose members assign logical types to other signals.
  • The schizophrenic must live in a universe where the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will be in some sense appropriate.
  • The double-bind situation consists of:
    • Two or more persons
    • Repeated experience leading to habitual expectation
    • A primary negative injunction, where the context of learning is based on avoidance of punishment rather that of reward seeking
    • A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level and like the first enforced by punishment or signals which threaten survival (commonly communicated to the child by nonverbal means
    • A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field
  • The complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns. The pattern of conflicting injunctions may even be taken over by hallucinatory voices.
  • The schizophrenic is like a zen pupil, but he achieves something like disorientation rather than enlightenment
  • There will be a breakdown in any individual's ability to discriminate between logical types whenever a double bind situation occurs.
  • The schizophrenic feels so terribly on the spot at all time that he habitually responds with a defensive insistence on the literal level when it is quite inappropriate
  • Schizophrenics also confuse the literal and metaphoric in their own utterance.
  • The statements which show that a patient is disorientated can be interpreted as ways of defending himself against the situation he is in. The pathology enters when the victim himself either does not know that his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so.
  • There is an inability to judge accurately what a person really means and an excessive concern with what is really meant:
    • Paranoid - He might assume that behind every statement there is a concealed meaning which is detrimental to his welfare. He will continually be searching for meanings behind what people say and behind chance occurrences in the environment, and he will be characteristically suspicious and defiant.
    • Hebephrenic - He might tend to accept literally everything people say to him, discarding tone or gesture or context, give up trying to discriminate between levels of messages, and treat all messages as unimportant or to be laughed at.
    • Catatonic - He might try to ignore metacommunicative messages and then would find it necessary to see and hear less and less or what went on around him, and do his utmost to avoid provoking a response in his environment. He would try to detach his interest from the external world and concentrate on his own internal processes and, therefore, give the appearance of being a withdrawn, perhaps mute, individual.
    • He cannot discover what people mean nor, without considerable help, discuss the messages of others. Without being able to do that, the human being is like any self-correcting system which has lost its governor; it spirals into never-ending, but always systematic, distortions.
  • Family Situation:
    • The child's existence has a special meaning to the mother (or father) which arouses her anxiety and hostility.
    • Her problem is to control her anxiety by controlling the closeness and distance between herself and her child.
    • Her loving behavior is a common on (compensatory for) her hostile behavior and consequently it is of a different order of message than the hostile behavior - it is a message about the sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existence of those messages which it is about ie, the hostile withdrawal.
    • The mother uses the child's responses to affirm that her behavior is loving, and since the loving behavior is simulated, the child is placed in a position where he must not accurately interpret her communication if he is to maintain his relationship with her. He must not discriminate accurately between orders of message, in this case the difference between the expression of simulated feelings and real feelings (two separate logical types). As a result, the child must systematically distort his perception of metacommunicative signals.
    • He would be punished for learning to discriminate orders of meanings accurately.
    • He must deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support mother in her deception. To survive with her he must falsely discriminate his own internal messages as well as falsely discriminate the messages of others.
    • By preventing the child from talking about the situation, the mother forbids him using the metacommunicative level - the level we use to correct our perception of communicative behavior.
    • The ability to communicate about communication, to comment upon the meaningful actions of oneself and others, is essential for successful social intercourse. In any normal relationship there is a constant interchange of metacommunicative messages such as "What do you mean?" or "Why did you do that?" or "Are you kidding me?" and so on. To discriminate accurately what people are really expressing, we must be able to comment directly or indirectly on that expression.
    • The child grows up unskilled in his ability to communicate about communication and, as a result, unskilled in determining what people really mean and unskilled in expressing what he really means, which is essential for normal relationships.
    • He must question the times with her, and with others, when he thought he was experiencing affection and when they seemed to treat the situation as if he had. He experiences here loss-of-support phenomena and is put in doubt about the reliability of past experience.
    • Psychosis seems, in part, a way of dealing with double bind situations to overcome their inhibiting and controlling effect. The psychotic patient may make astute, pithy, often metaphorical remarks that reveal an insight into the forces binding him. Contrariwise, he may become rather expert in setting double bind situations himself.
  • Humor involves sudden shifts in logical types as well as discrimination of those shifts.

The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia

  • The realm of phenomena in which we are interested is always characterized by the fact that "ideas" may influence events. To the physicist, this is a grossly magical hypothesis. It is one which cannot be tested by asking questions about the conservation of energy.
  • All communication has this characteristic - it can be magically modified by accompanying communication.
  • What exists today are only messages about the past which we call memories, and these messages can always be framed and modulated from moment to moment.
  • No-one can learn at random, but only to be like or unlike those around him.
  • Typically, the schizophrenic will eliminate from his messages everything that refers explicitly or implicitly to the relationship between himself and the person he is addressing:
    • They commonly avoid the first and second person pronouns.
    • They avoid telling you what sort of a message they are transmitting - whether it be literal or metaphoric, ironic or direct
    • They are likely to have difficulty with all messages and meaningful acts which imply intimate contact between the self and some other.
    • They communicate as if they expect to be punished every time they indicate that they are right in their view of the context of their own messages. The double bind is an experience of being punished precisely for being right in one's own view of the context.
  • Perhaps what each of us means by the "self" is in fact an aggregate of habits of perception and adaptive action plus, from moment to moment, our "immanent states" of action

Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia

  • The psychiatrist is particularly interested in the changes whereby an individual comes to expect his world to be structured in one way rather than another.
  • Genetics covers the communicational phenomena of variation, differentiation, growth, and heredity.
    • Samuel Butler argued that heredity should be compared with - even identified with - memory.
    • He argued that there is a process whereby the newer inventions of adaptive behavior are sunk deeper into the biological system of the organism. From planned and conscious actions they become habits, and the habits become less and less conscious and less and less subject to voluntary control
    • The stochastic approach is perhaps the only organized theory of the nature of learning. The notion is that random changes occur, in the brain or elsewhere, and that the results of such random change are selected for survival by processes of reinforcement and extinction. Reinforcement is seen as giving direction to the accumulation of random changes of the neural system, just as natural selection is seen as giving direction to the accumulation of random changes of variation.
    • In learning, when the solution of the given problem has been passed on to havit, the stochastic or exploratory mechanisms are set free for the solution of other problems.
    • Perhaps in communicational behavior, such as humor, mathematical skill or musical composition, there are considerable genetic differences between individuals in those factors which make for an ability to acquire the appropriate skills. But the skills themselves and their particular expression also depend largely upon environmental circumstances and even upon specific training.
    • The individual who shows ability is likely to mold his environment in a direction which will favor his developing his ability and that he will, in turn, create an environment for others which will favor their development in the same direction.
  • Covert schizophrenia:
    • In overt schizophrenia, people behave in ways which are grossly deviant from the cultural environment:
      • Imagination is seemingly confused with perception.
      • The literal is confused with the metaphoric.
      • Internal messages are confused with external.
      • The trivial is confused with the vital.
      • The originator of the message is confused with the recipient and the perceiver with the thing perceived.
      • The patient behaves in such a way that he shall be responsible for not metacommunicative aspect of his messages.
    • In covert schizophrenia, so long as the he can succeed in putting the other in the wrong, his or her pathology is obscured and the blame falls elsewhere:
      • These people fear collapse into overt schizophrenia when faced by circumstances which would force them to recognize the pattern of their operations: "You are driving me crazy!"
  • Some sort of rigidity:
    • Perhaps the person prone to overt schizophrenia would be characterized by some extra strength of psychological commitment to the status quo as he at the moment sees it, which commitment would be hurt or frustrated by the parents' rapid shifts of frame and context.
    • Or perhaps he might be characterized by the high value of some parameter determining the relationship between problem solving and habit formation.
    • Perhaps it is the person who too readily hands over the solutions to habit who is hurt by those changes in context which invalidate his solutions just at the moment when he has incorporated them into his habit structure.
    • Rigidly committed to their patterns of inconsistency.
  • A new view of rationality:
    • Is our view of the world changed when we admit an infinite regress of contexts, linked to each other in a complex network of metarelations?
    • In breaking away from the premise that contexts are always conceptually isolable, I have let in the notion of a universe much more unified - and in that sense much more mystical.
    • The contrast between part and whole, whenever this contrast appears in the realm of communication, is simply a contrast in logical typing. The whole is always in a metarelationship with its parts.
    • In hierarchies of logical typing there is often some sort of change of sign at each level, when the levels are related to each other in such a way as to create a self-corrective system.
    • As I see it, the world is made up of a very complex network (rather than a chain) of entities which have this sort of relationship to each other, but with this difference, that many of the entities have their own supplies of energy and perhaps even their own ideas of where they would like to go.
    • In such a world, the problems of control become more akin to art than to science, not merely because we tend to think of the difficult and the unpredictable as contexts for art but also because the results of error are likely to be ugliness.
    • The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control
    • Our studies should be inspired by a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.
    • Every great scientific advance - not least the advances which Newton achieved - has been elegant.

Double Bind, 1969

  • There are in the mind no objects or events. The mind contains only transforms, percepts (consequences of the process of perception, images, etc.
  • The explanatory world of substance can invoke no differences and no ideas but only forces and impacts. And, per contra, the world of form and communication invokes no things, forces, or impacts but only differences and ideas.
  • Transcontextual - both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf, the greeting of a friend, or a "primrose by the river's brim" is not "just that and nothing more".
  • Genetic components might determine skill in learning to be transcontextual or (more abstractly) the potentialities for acquiring this skill. Or, conversely, the genome might determine skills in resisting transcontextual pathways.
  • All biological systems are capable of adaptive change, which depends upon feedback loops, be it those provided by natural selection or those of individual reinforcement. In all cases, then, there must be a process of trial and error and a mechanism of comparison.
  • By superimposing and interconnecting many feedback loops, we not only solve particular problems but also form habits which we apply to the solution of classes of problems. We learn to learn, or "deutero-learn".
  • The economy (or mental effort) consists precisely in not re-examining or rediscovering the premises of habit every time the habit is used. A habit of not examining them is developed.
  • Messages constitute the relationship between two entities.
  • Severe pain and maladjustment can be induced by putting a mammal in the wrong regarding its rules for making sense of an important relationship with another mammal. If this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may provoke creativity.

The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication

  • The word "learning" undoubtedly denotes change of some kind:
    • Zero learning - Specificity of response, which - right or wrong - is not subject to correction
    • Learning I - Change in specificity of response by correction of errors of choice within a set of alternatives
    • Learning II - Change in the process of Learning I, eg, a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.
    • Learning III - Change in the process of Learning II, eg a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made.
    • Learning IV - Change in Learning III. Probably does not occur in any adult living organism.
  • Zero learning:
    • The simple receipt of information from an external event.
    • All learning (other than zero learning) is in some degree stochastic (ie contains components of "trial and error"
    • The immediate base of all those acts (simple and complex) which are not subject to correction by trial and error:
      • Learning I - The revision of choice within an unchanged set of alternatives.
      • Learning II - The revision of the set from which the choice is to be made, and so on
  • Learning I:
    • Cases in which an entity gives at time 2 a different response from what it gave at time 1:
      • Habituation - the change from responding to each occurrence of a repeated event to not overtly responding. Perhaps the only form of Learning 1 which living things can achieve without a neural circuit.
      • Pavlovian Conditioning
      • Instrumental Reward and Instrumental Avoidance
      • Rote Learning
      • Disruption, Extinction, or Inhibition of "completed learning" which may follow change or absence of reinforcement
    • Context - A collective term for all those events which tell the organism among what set of alternatives he must make his next choice
    • Context Markers - Signals whose major function is to classify contexts. A dog may see a leash in his master's hand and act as if he knows that this indicates a walk; or he may get information from the sound of the word "walk" that this type of context or sequence is coming.
    • Analogic communication is in some sense more primitive than digital and there is a broad evolutionary trend toward the substitution of digital for analogic mechanisms.
    • The sequence of life experience, action, etc, is somehow segmented or punctuated into subsequences or "contexts" which may be equated or differentiated by the organism
    • Perception, notoriously, can be changed by experience. Every item of action or output may create an item of input.
    • In Learning I, every item of perception or behavior may be stimulus or response or reinforcement according to how the total sequence of interaction is punctuated.
  • Learning II:
    • Changes in the manner in which the stream of action and experience is segmented or punctuate into contexts together with changes in the use of context markers.
    • Learning II has occurred if it can be shown that experience of one or more contexts of Pavlovian type results in the animal's acting in some later context as though this, too, had the Pavlovian contingency pattern
    • For any given subject, there is an improvement in rote learning with successive sessions, asymptotically approaching a degree of skill which varied from subject to subject.
    • This improvement can only be accounted for by some sort of adaptation to the context which Hull provided for rote leaning
    • Set learning - Learning to solve sets of problems with similar types of logical complexity.
    • Reversal learning - If simple learning is based upon a set of trials, then reversal learning is based upon a set of such sets.
    • Experimental neurosis - Make discrimination more and more difficult until a stage is reached at which it is impossible. Now the animal is in a situation which demands guesswork or gambling, not discrimination. The whole sequence is a procedure for putting the animal in the wrong at the level of Learning II
    • All who think about the processes which determine the character of the individual or the processes of change in human (or animal) relationship must use in their thinking a variety of assumptions about Learning II.
    • Adjectives of character - dependent, hostile, fey, finicky, anxious, exhibitionistic, narcissistic, passive, competitive, energetic, bold, cowardly, fatalistic, humorous, playful, canny, optimistic, perfectionist, careless, careful, casual, etc - are all descriptive of possible results of Learning II. They describe transactions between the individual and his material and human environment.
    • The stream of events is commonly punctuated into contexts of learning by a tacit agreement between the persons regarding the nature of their relationship - or by context markers and tacit agreement that these context markers shall "mean" the same for both parties.
    • The general ambiguity of the notions "stimulus", "response", "afferent" (towards), "efferent" (away from) means in fact that the ongoing sequence of interchange between two persons is structured only by the person's own perception of the sequence as a series of contexts, each context leading into the next. The particular manner in which the sequence is structured by any particular person will be determined by that person's previous Learning II (or possibly his genetics).
    • It is up to A and B to distinguish (consciously or unconsciously or not at all) between "dominance" and "dependence". A "command" can closely resemble a cry for help.
    • In psychotherapeutic transference, the patient will try to shape his interchange with the therapist according to the premises of his former Learning II
    • Much of Learning II dates from early infancy and is unconscious.
    • What is learned in Learning II is a way of punctuating events, but his is not and cannot be true or false.
    • In fact, the propositions which govern punctuation have the general characteristic of being self-validating, meaning the Learning II is almost ineradicable.
  • Learning III:
    • Is likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings.
    • Something like it can happen in psychotherapy, religious conversion, and in other sequences in which there is profound reorganization or character.
    • Psychotherapists can help their patients to change their premises by:
      • Achieving a confrontation between the premises of the patient and those of the therapist.
      • Getting the patient to act in ways which will confront his own premises.
      • Inducing some exaggeration or caricature of experience based on the old premises.
    • The premises of what is commonly called "character" - the definitions of the "self" - save the individual from having to examine the abstract, philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of many sequences of life. But Learning III will throw these unexamined premises open to question and change:
      • More readily form habits of type Learning II
      • Close loopholes which would prevent Leaning III
      • Learn to change the habits of type Learning II
      • Learn that he is a creature which can and does unconsciously achieve Learning II
      • Learn to limit or direct Learning II
    • Learning III must lead to a greater flexibility in the premises acquired by the process of Learning II - a freedom from their bondage
    • Zen master: "To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing."
    • But any freedom from the bondage of habit must also denote a profound redefinition of the self:
      • If I stop at the level of Learning II, "I" am the aggregate of those characteristics which I call my "character".
      • "I" am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving the contexts in which I act.
      • Selfhood is a product or aggregate of Learning II
      • To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his "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.
    • Persistence - is generated by experience in multiple sequences among which reinforcement is sporadic. There are thousands of situations where living things must persist in certain sorts of behavior precisely because reinforcement is sporadic or improbable. Learning II will simplify the universe by handling these instances as a single category. But if Learning III be concerned with the contexts of these instances, then the categories of Learning II will be burst open.
    • The creature is driven to Level III by contraries generated at Level II, and the resolving of these contraries can constitute positive reinforcement at level III
    • Even the attempt at level III can be dangerous:
      • Psychotics
      • Innocents
      • Artists
  • Not "Is it learned or is it innate?", but rather "Up to what logical level is learning effective and down to what level does genetics play a determinative or partly effective role?"
  • The broad history of the evolution of learning seems to have been a slow pushing back of genetic determinism to levels of higher logical type.

The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism

  • In the natural history of the living human being, ontology and epistemology cannot be separated. His (commonly unconscious) beliefs about what sort of world it is will determine how he sees it and acts within it, and his ways of perceiving and acting will determine his beliefs about its nature.
  • Any ongoing ensemble of events and objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics. It will compare, that is, be responsive to difference. It will process information and will inevitably be self-corrective either toward homeostatic optima or toward the maximization of certain variables.
  • Alcoholics are guided by highly abstract principles of which they are either quite unconscious, or unaware. A common misnomer for such principles is "feelings". This misnomer arises naturally from the Anglo-Saxon epistemological tendency to reify or attribute to the body all mental phenomena which are peripheral to consciousness.
  • Symmetrical struggles and armament races may escalate, while complementary patterns of succoring-dependency between parent and child may become monstrous.
  • The alcoholic's symmetrical "pride" can tolerate no complementary role. The relationship between the alcoholic and his real or fictitious other is clearly symmetrical and clearly schismogenic.
  • A tendency to verify the unpleasant by seeking repeated experience of it is a common human trait. It is perhaps what Freud called the "death instinct".
  • The "self" is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of a much larger field of interlocking processes.
  • Anonymity is also a profound statement of the systemic relation, part-to-whole.
  • Is complementarity always somehow better than symmetry? If we deeply and even unconsciously believe that our relation to the largest system which concerns us - the "power greater than self" - is symmetrical and emulative, then we are in error.

Comment on Part III

  • Schizophrenia, deutero-learning, and the double bind cease to be matters of individual psychology and become part of the ecology of ideas in systems or "minds" whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals.

Part IV: Biology and Evolution

On Empty-Headedness among Biologists and State Boards of Education

  • Where does order come from?
  • If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a "random" event?

The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution

  • All theories of biological evolution depend upon at least three sorts of change:
    • Change of genotype, either by mutation or by redistribution of genes.
    • Somatic change under pressure of environment.
    • Changes in environmental conditions.
  • Both in acclimation and in habit formation the economy of flexibility is achieved by substituting a deeper and more enduring change for a more superficial and more reversible one.
  • The difference between regulators and adjusters is a matter of where, in the complex network of physiologic causes and effects, homeostatic process operates:
    • Regulators - Close to the input and output points of that network which is the individual organism
    • Adjusters - The environmental variables are permitted to enter the body and the organism must then cope with their effects, using mechanisms which will involve deeper loops of the total network.
    • Extraregulators - Achieve homeostatic controls outside the body, by changing and controlling the environment - man being the most conspicuous example of this class.
  • Centripetal and centrifugal changes in the location of control:
    • Centripetal - Habit is more economical than trial and error and genotypic control may be more economical than acclimation.
    • Centrifugal - Natural selection, in the long run, favors regulators more than adjusters, and extraregulators more than regulators

Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication

  • Preverbal mammals have a discourse that is primarily about the rules and the contingencies of relationship.
  • The great new thing in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship.
  • Large-brained creatures were, at some evolutionary stage, unwise enough to get into the game of relationship and, once the species was caught in the game of interpreting its members' behavior twoard one another as relevant to the complex and vital subject, there was survival value for those individuals who could play the game with greater ingenuity or greater wisdom.
  • In all mammals, the organs of sense become also organs for the transmission of messages about relationship
  • In dolphins, has vocalization taken over the communicative functions that most animals perform by facial expression, wagging tails, clenched fists, supinated hands, flaring nostrils, and the like.
  • If you say to a girl, "I love you," she is likely to pay more attention to the accompanying kinesics and paralinguistics than to the words themselves.
  • We humans become very uncomfortable when somebody starts to interpret our postures and gestures by translating them into words about relationship. We much prefer that our messages on this subject remain analogic, unconscious, and involuntary. We tend to distrust the man who can simulate messages about relationship.
  • Captive cetaceans are like monkeys in a cage. They are highly intelligent and highly developed, and they are bored (and hence uncommunicative do to a lack of stimulation).

A Re-examination of "Bateson's Rule"

  • In biological systems, the step from radial symmetry to bilateral symmetry commonly requires a piece of information from the outside.
  • Every reduction in symmetry (from radial to bilateral or from bilateral to asymmetrical) requires additional information.

Comments on Part IV

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Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic Explanation

  • Causal explanation is usually positive, while cybernetic explanation is always negative. We consider what alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of those few which could, in fact, occur.
  • In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to restraints.
  • If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints, either inside the monkey or inside the typewriter. Perhaps he could not strike inappropriate letter; perhaps the type bars could not move if improperly struck; perhaps incorrect letters could not survive on the paper. Somewhere there must have been a circuit which could identify error and eliminate it.
  • In cybernetics, mapping appears as a technique of explanation whenever a conceptual "model" is invoked or, more concreely, when a computer is used to simulate a complex communicational process.
  • An endless hierarchy of contexts within contexts
  • Without context, there is no communication
  • The quantity of information is conventionally expressed as the log to base 2 of the improbability of the actual event or object.
  • The central explanatory quantity, information, is of zero dimensions. Quantities of realy dimensions (mass, length, time) and their derivatives (force, energy, etc) have no place in cybernetic explanation.
  • Choices are not all at the same level.
  • The patterning or predictability of particular events within a larger aggregate of events is called "redundancy".
  • We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'être of communication.
  • In a wider context than the transmission between A and B, where there is an observer, C, the transmission appears rather as a spreading of redundancy.
  • A pattern is definable as an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection.
  • If we say a message has meaning or is about some referent, what we mean is that there is a larger universe of relevance consisting of message-plus-referent, and that redundancy or pattern or predictability is introduced into this universe by the message.
  • The matter of the localization has bedeviled communication theory and neurophysiology for years, and it is interesting to consider how it looks if we start from redundancy, pattern, or form as the basic concept.
  • In fact, information and form are not items which can be localized.
  • In perception, we shall not say "I see a tree", because the tree is not within our explanatory system. At best, it is only possible to see an image which is a complex but systematic transform of the tree. This image, of course, is energized by my metabolism and the nature of the trasnform is, in part, determined by factors within my neural circuits: "I" make the image, under various restraints, some of which are imposed by my neural circuits, while others are imposed by the external tree. An hallucination or dream would be more truly "mine" insofar as it is produced without immediate external restraints.
  • All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints - is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.

Redundancy and Coding

  • I suggest that the separate burgeoning evolution of kinesics and paralanguage alongside the evolution of verbal language indicates that our iconic communication serves functions totally different from those of language and, indeed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform.
  • When considering two animals in an environment:
    • The physical environment contains internal patterning or redundancy.
    • Sounds or other signals from one animal may contribute redundancy to the system.
    • The sequence of signals will certainly contain redundancy.
    • The signals may contribute redundancy to the universe.
    • Some animals are capable of learning.
    • For every organism there are limitation and regularities which define what will be learned and under what circumstances this learning will occur.
    • From the morphology and behavior of the organism a human observer can guess with better than random success at the nature of the environment
  • "the mysterious evolutionary step from the iconic to the verbal."
  • "that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics"

Conscious Purpose versus Nature

  • I, the conscious I, see an unconsciously edited version of a small percentage of what affects my retina. I am guided in my perception by purposes.
  • Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system - that system which, if disturbed, is likely to generate exponential curves of change. Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live.
  • If you follow the "common-sense" dictates of consciousness you become, effectively, greedy and unwise.
  • Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. Call the systemic forces "God" if you will.
  • (in the garden of Eden), On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.
  • (man) does not see himself as part of the system in which the mess exists, and he either blames the rest of the system or he blames himself. In my parable Adam combines two sorts of nonsense: the notion "I have sinned" and the notion "God is vengeful".
  • In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance.
  • Evolution was the history of how organisms learned more tricks for controlling the environment; and man had better tricks than any other creature.
  • We might say that in creative art man must experience himself - his total self - as a cybernetic model.

Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation

  • Three cybernetic or homeostatic systems:
    • The individual human organism
    • The human society
    • The larger ecosystem
  • This phenomenon of spreading change is in the widest sense a sort of learning. Acclimation and addiction are special cases of this process.
  • All biological change is conservative and all learning is aversive (to try to keep things as they are).
  • Consciousness has feedback into the remainder of mind and so an effect upon action
  • The system of selection of information for the screen of consciousness is importantly related to "purpose", "attention", and similar phenomena
  • The cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the "screen" of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose.
  • The attempt to achieve a change in a given variable, located either in self or environment, is likely to be undertaken without comprehension of the homeostatic network surrounding that variable.
  • Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment - with the very best of conscious intentions.
  • The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of "persons" - trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like.

Form, Substance and Difference

  • The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.
  • In the map and the territory combination, what gets onto the map is "difference"
  • Difference which occurs across time is what we call "change".
  • The word "idea", in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with "difference".
  • The elementary unit of information is a difference which makes a difference.
  • What travels in an axon is "news of a difference".
  • The mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All "phenomena" are literally "appearances".
  • Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body - the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self.
  • Under LSD, I have experienced, as have many others, the disappearance of the division between self and the music to which I was listening. The perceiver and the thing perceived become strangely united into a single entity. This state is surely more correct than the state in which it seems that "I hear the music".

Comment on Part V

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Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

From Versailles to Cybernetics

  • This is what mammals are about. They are concerned with patterns of relationship, with where they stand in love, hate, respect, dependency, trust, and similar abstractions, vis-a-vis somebody else. This is where it hurts us to be put in the wrong. If we trust and find that that which we have trusted was untrustworthy; or if we distrust, and find that that which we distrusted was in fact trustworthy, we feel bad.
  • The Treaty of Versailles was one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization.
  • One of the roots of cybernetics goes back to Whitehead and Russell and what is called the Theory of Logical Types. In principle, the name is not the thing named, and the name of the name is not the name, and so on. In terms of this powerful theory, a message about war is not part of the way. The message "Let's play chess" is not a move in the game of chess. It is a message in a more abstract language than the language of the game on the board.
  • What is wrong with the international field is that the rules need changing.

Pathologies of Epistemology

  • You don't "really" see me. What you "see" is a bunch of pieces of information about me, which you synthesize into a picture image of me. You make that image. It's that simple.
  • The erroneous premises, in fact, work. On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. But then it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error - it's sticky.
  • The unit of information is difference. In fact, the unit of psychological input is difference.
  • Minimal characteristics of a system such as mind. The system shall:
    • Operate with and upon differences.
    • Consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted.
    • Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.
    • Show self-correctiveness.
  • Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs.
  • A redwood forest or a coral reef, which its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure.
  • Every human organization shows both the self-corrective characteristic and has the potentiality for runaway.
  • What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between each of the three are entirely fictitious.
  • Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (ie differences, complexes of differences, etc) in circuits.
  • Evolution of man's attitude to his environment:
    • Totemism - he identified with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organization and his own theories of his own psychology.
    • Animism - he reversed the process and took clues from himself and applied them to the natural world around him, giving the notion of personality or mind to mountains, rivers, forests, and such things.
    • Separating the notion of mind from the natural word and getting the notion of gods.
  • If you do not get what you want, you will blame somebody and establish either a jail or a mental hospital, according to taste, and you will pop them in it if you can identify them. If not, you will say, "It's the system". This is roughly where our kids are nowadays.
  • They say that power corrupts, but it is rather the idea of power that corrupts.

The Roots of Ecological Crisis

  • The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization

  • Flexibility is to specialization as entropy is to negentropy. Flexibility may be defined as uncommitted potentiality to change.
  • The variable which does not change its value becomes ipso facto hard programmed (because other variables encroach on its freedom, narrowing its tolerance limits. This is another way of describing habit formation.
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