Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

This is a work of an exceptional and original genius. "Mind and Nature" is both Gregory Bateson's most accessible and most difficult book. It is a deeply personal exploration of what has come to be called cognitive science from a brilliant man and great scientist who pioneered a deep synthesis of anthropology, language and communications, and biology over the course of a remarkable life. Be advised that it is more of a progress report on a lifelong quest than a coherent whole. If you have an enduring interest in cognitive science and you haven't read Bateson, you don't know what you are missing. Bateson's starting point is, "How is it possible for the same evolutionary forces that shaped our survival as a species failed to shape our minds?" The answer, of course, is that it is not. It ought to be self-evident that the phenomenon that we call the "mind" is shaped by natural selection. Bateson does not claim to understand all the implications of this empiricist stance, his focus instead is on how to start asking the right questions about the mind and cognition. For instance: What is learning? What is play? (Is it true that only mammals play? Why is that?) If you think about it, these are phenomenon central to the human experience and there is no one that discussed them more insightfully than Bateson does here (and in "Steps...". I find myself returning to this book again and again over the years. Its effect on me has been profound. I am sure I will never understand more than a small part of what Bateson is trying to tell me here, but the feeble fraction that I do understand is remarkable. The wisdom that animates this book has shaped many of the foundational notions of my life. It is full of life lessons. And that reminds me of a story about the time I incorporated one of Bateson's teaching parables from this book into a speech I had to give not too long ago....

Sit in on a lecture by an engaging and knowledgable prof and you can expect to pick up a few tidbits. You certainly don't expect to come away knowing everything the prof knows. The subtitle of this book is about what Bateson knows, but you don't need to know any of that (or be particularly interested in it) to read this unusual book. My subtitle would be: You're Smarter Than You Think You Are." I read this book in a Bantam mass market edition after sampling a piece of it in some science magazine (maybe Discover). Gregory Bateson was a renaissance man (which is one of the delights in reading him), the former husband of anthropologist Margaret Mead, and best known for the double bind theory of schitzophrenia, included as an essay in The Ecology of Mind. That theory may not sound well-known at all, but it's the basis of family counseling and why we talk about dysfunctional families (instead of just individuals). And we've all been in situations that are double binds, or as these no-win situations are known in everyday jargon: "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Bateson wrote this book as metafiction, which is to say he talks about the book in the book, and he includes a handful or metalogues with his daughter, Catherine Bateson, herself now a writer for such magazines as Smithsonian, although he made them up. These metalogues reflect on ideas in the book and widen the feedback loop, as it were, to include the reader. They are relaxed and leisurely and not meant to be persuasive. My experience reading this book was that it changed the way I saw everything. That sounds like an over-reaching claim or a self-help book gone wild, but the reason is, as Bateson points out, that many of our educations are simply based on gathering information, like Number Five in the film Short Circuit, with no help at all on how to think about it. I certainly didn't understand everything in this book. But then, if you already understand and agree with everything in a book, why read it? What I did glean was a few tidbits from an engaging and knowledgeable prof who gave me not just more to think about but ways to think about it, and the happy realization that we're all smarter than we think we are.

Gregory Bateson is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. This is one of his last books and it deals with matters of epistemology. The thinking preserved within its pages is profound yet most of the time down to earth. There Bateson parts company with most formal epistemologists, the majority of whom are utterly confused, at least in their way of exposition. You do not need to be an expert logician to understand Bateson's thinking; he is the expert and tutors you through the straights of Scylla and Charybdis with the outmost comfort and safety. From this fantastic journey you will definitively be enriched. This book is one of his most important. It is a testament of his view of science and coming from a person who helped revolutionize more scientific fields than the average person has even heard of it should be taken seriously. In its pages Bateson tells us what science is and how it should be properly exercised. Given the confusion and nihilism that have followed on the pseudoscientific revolutions of postmodernism and decostructivism (read Focault, Derida or Judith Butler for instance) such readings are necessary if at times disturbing. Not all ways of doing science are equal and many of them are based on logical confusion. Bateson is clear on that point. On page 24 he tells us "Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless". Self-evident to most people this maxim needs to be restated and taken seriously, especially within the social sciences that have only succeeded in making minor steps since the time of Aristotle. In this book we learn the why of this unfortunate situation. The question is if anybody wants to listen... Still Bateson is not in any way preaching like some untouchable headmaster, unlike many other philosophers of his rank (read Jerry Fodor for instance). He is aware of the difficulties and obstacles involved and most of the time keeps his voice low. He also is not a techno-freak like many of the newest cognitive scientists, modern rationalists or evolutionary psychologists though he is one of their intellectual fathers. Instead he often talks of the need of a holistic approach, of looking out for the pattern which connects mind to nature and nature to the universe, and warns against the dangers of degrading the ecosystem and turning our backs to the fellow living creatures of this, still wonderful, planet. If you only read one book on the history of science or on epistemology make this one your choice. You wont regret it. It is a cybernetically quided misile which will hit you on the head, and change you forever. To the better that is.

Gregory Bateson is difficult to "get" but incredibly rewarding once you do understand him. The number of concepts he deals with in this masterwork is amazing; the number that are still relevant more than twenty years after publication is stunning. Mind and Nature will some day be seen as one of the most important books of the Twentieth Century.Bateson does not just tell us what he knows -- he shows us, using marvelous examples from nature that you will never forget. He gives beautifully clear -- on the sixth or seventh reading for some people -- descriptions of learning-by-the-individual and evolution-by-the-group as ***essentially similar fusions of analogic and digital (or energy and pattern) integrations.***Learning-by-the-individual is "somatic" and benefits the survival of the individual, but ***that*** survival in turn becomes the evolutionary driving force for the group because the genes of the individual are passed on in the germ (genetic) line of the species. Mind and Nature are an essential unity. But what's more, the processes by which both mind and nature work are the SAME: Whether individual learning or group evolution, some pattern-preferencing mechanism "selects," from a set of cast-up possibilities, some qualities of some kind. The selecting mechanisms can ONLY select from those cast-up possibilities. When those qualities have survival value, they get passed on.Far more than just a re-statement of Darwin, the essential unity of Mind and Nature described by Bateson has vast implications for our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. We are as one with Nature, as one with the way of the Universe. Each of us in our individual being, learning our individual lessons, goes through exactly the SAME process of stochastic learning as the greater group, the species. It's not just trial and error: We can ACTIVELY CO-EVOLVE with the messages of our world. What those messages are, Bateson teaches in stunning clarity: Modern systems thinking and complexity theory as maturing (yet still not mature) arts truly starts with Bateson's analysis. Bateson may not have added a great deal to this synthesis, but his analysis has made available to countless thinkers the wisdom of the systems thinking paradigm and the evolutionary imperative.The message Bateson sends is that to survive intelligently as humans we must better combine imagination with rigor. We must use our abilities as conscious beings to courageously imagine better futures, to go where angels fear to tread, fraught with danger though that may be. Only then can we make the world better. Until we imagine new ideas, until we bring our unique contributions into being as 'possibilities,' the forces of evolution cannot act on them. Our jobs are to be truly and deeply human: We must add our unique selves, our Minds, to the possibilities of the Universe, while balancing our beings within the constraints of Nature's flows of energy and pattern. Only the longest-term survival patter

This classic work by Gregory Bateson deserves to be read by anyone seriously interested in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, epistemology, philosophy (in particular, logic), or any related field. Bateson illustrates in brilliant fashion a number of key concepts which "every schoolboy should know", but which, unfortunately, have escaped the notice of a wide variety of philosophers and scientists---if not every schoolboy, certainly every professional scientist and philosopher should be familiar with this work, whether they agree with it or not. The basic ideas behind his work are subtle, yet Bateson does an excellent job of describing them clearly. In the process he manages to present and lucidly explain a wonderful solution to the mind-body problem which requires no supernatural forces, yet accounts very clearly for our intuitive perception that mind is in some sense non-physical. His information-theoretic approach is profound yet simple. His ideas touch upon many very deep issues, ranging from the definition of mental process itself to the logical distinctions between different levels of logical type, and also clearly illustrates and explains the origin of some of the major problems in formal logic, including why self-referential paradoxes arise in formal logical systems, and what this says about the limitations of these systems (and how one can get around these problems!). The work touches on many different aspects of many seemingly unrelated fields, and ties them together with a set of powerful and yet graspable abstractions which allow you to re-frame with clarity some of the greatest philosophical problems mankind has faced. It is a wonderful, poetic, and yet starkly rational approach which deserves to be read by every serious student of modern thought. Bateson's work here, interesting and thought-provoking as it is, is nevertheless unfinished---much more needs to be done to further extend his ideas---some obvious ways in which his work could be taken further include exploring its relationship to dynamical systems theory and chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and other more abstract philosophical areas. This book is an excellent introduction to Bateson's work and thought, and should be required reading for many college courses in different departments. Unfortunately, it is currently out of print, which is a terrible shame.