bordi e pori meta-Tao

Artists Without Borders

La successiva metastruttura discussa da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono i bordi e i pori, strutture complementari che da un lato separano e dividono, dall'altro permettono il contatto e lo scambio; nell'insieme controllano e regolano l'interscambio di materiali, energia o informazione:

Immagine SEM colorata di uno stoma aperto su una foglia

Background

Borders involve the concepts of protection, separation of inside from outside, containment, and barrier or obstacle. With pores, borders regulate the flow and exchange of materials, energy, or information. Small pores heighten regulation and reduce flow, while larger pores decrease regulation and increase flow. Borders can be visible entities, fuzzy, or invisible. Physical borders tend to be built of sheets of repeating parts (clonons).

Examples

• In science: cell membranes and osmosis, skin and pores, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, stomata, the Earth’s crust and volcanoes, clouds with fuzzy borders, atmosphere, ecotones, edge of a pond, etc.
• In architecture and design: walls with doors and windows, roof and skylight, etc.
• In art: depicted forms, frame with canvas as opening pore to another world, pottery bowl or vase with circular pore, etc.
• In social sciences: personal space, psychological and social obstacles, problem as border with paths to solutions as pores, physical space divisions and openings, social barriers, borders between social strata, racism and other biases as barriers, propaganda as a barrier to truth, borders between countries with border crossings and immigration pores, etc.
• In other senses: borders and openings in feng shui, borders between properties, airline security, etc.

Forte rosso, Agra

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

il lascito del Tao - V

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

The Intelligent Design Debate

We are still troubled by the invocation of deity to explain living systems. Most natural scientists devoutly try to avoid teleological language to this day. In the United States, however, we are seeing another of the waves of religious revival that have occurred in American history, which is shaping American policy in disturbing ways. Much of it looks absurd from Europe: absurd that the Americans were preoccupied with the sex life of a president and even more absurd that we are now debating yet again whether evolution should be taught in schools, or if mentioned whether it should be treated as scientific knowledge – that is to say, what metamessage children should be given about the nature of what they are being taught, including whether it should be presented as one of several alternatives.

President Bush, earlier this summer, said in a press conference that he believes Intelligent Design should be taught in all schools. I.D. is not quite Creationism, but is very similar, because of the suggestion that the complexity and apparent purposefulness of organs such as the eye can only be explained by postulating a designer shaping his creations toward particular ends.

Intelligent Design, of course, takes off from William Paley (1794), whom Darwin and, two generations later, Gregory read at Cambridge. Paley argued that just as, when you look at a watch, you can recognize that it is designed and made by someone for a purpose, so too you can look at the natural world and infer the existence of a creator. The advocates of Intelligent Design do not insist that it all happened in seven days and they don’t insist that species don’t change over time and so on, but still they see a need for an outside intelligence. They make an effort to present their ideas with the style and format we associate with science, thereby mislabeling their message, and at the same time try to label the accumulated evidence for evolution as speculative.

il lascito del Tao - IV

oloni meta-Tao

La successiva metastruttura discussa da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono gli oloni, un termine introdotto da Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine del 1967, e successivamente in Janus: A Summing Up del 1978. Nella definizione originaria di Koestler:

1. The holon

1.1 The organism in its structural aspect is not an aggregation of elementary parts, and in its functional aspects not a chain of elementary units of behaviour.

1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.

1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.

1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the "Janus phenomenon".

1.5 More generally, the term "holon" may be applied to any stable biological or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behaviour and/or structural Gestalt-constancy. Thus organelles and homologous organs are evolutionary holons; morphogenetic fields are ontogenetic holons; the ethologist's "fixed action-patterns" and the sub-routines of acquired skills are behavioural holons; phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases are linguistic holons; individuals, families, tribes, nations are social holons.

Gli oloni sono quindi - come i clononi - parti intrinseche, composte da altri sottosistemi - in generali altri oloni -,  di una olarchia di un sistema complesso, contemporaneamente parti (componenti) e tutto (livelli) del sistema. Si distinguono dai clononi in quanto funzionalmente e strutturalmente distinguibili tra loro. L'esempio tipico sono gli atomi dei diversi elementi, oloni distinti composti da tre tipi fondamentali (protoni, neutroni ed elettroni) di particelle clononi indistinguibili. Un altro esempio dal punto di vista delle strutture organizzate sono i livelli di oloni che progressivamente portano dal livello individuale a quello globale:

Background

Holon, as mentioned previously, refers to a whole, which is often comprised of clonon parts or sets of clonon parts. Holons themselves can become clonons of even greater wholes. The idea of holons (in contrast to indistinguishable clonons) is that holons are functionally and structurally distinct parts on the level of a holarchy. Holons are like organs, on different scales of wholes. Thus the body’s holons are heart, lungs, brain, and so forth, which themselves are composed of many clonons, the relatively indistinguishable heart cells, liver cells, and so forth.

Examples

• In science: a planet, a solar system (made of holons-planets that become clonons of the solar system), an atom is a holon of three fundamental types of clonon particles, atoms become clonons of larger holon molecules, etc.
• In architecture and design: buildings, a community, etc.
• In art: subjects, figures formed from points or strokes, a sculpture, etc
• In social sciences: a concept, a community or society, an action holon of component clonon actions, a family, a class of students, etc.
• In other senses: a wall or fence, an archway made of stone clonons, a gang or clique, etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

il lascito del Tao - IV

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken detto Hieronymus Bosch, il Maestro di Hertogenbosch
Nave dei folli
olio su tavola, 1494
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson and Religion

Gregory used to quote Kipling’s lines, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.”. That is, I think, a fairly interesting way of talking about religion: to say that there is something that human religions are trying to get at that matters. And they get at some of it in many different ways which include vast amounts of nonsense, much of it dangerous, but we perhaps do not yet have a better way of getting at it, whatever it is. For Gregory, that something could be approached by describing mind in cybernetic terms and recognized aesthetically in the similarities of living systems, the pattern that connects.

Gregory was profoundly ambivalent about what we generally call religion, but deeply concerned with the alienation created by the Cartesian mind–body partition that has been so liberating for science and yet leads to a whole series of isomorphic dualisms separating the sacred from the secular and our species from the rest of nature . He said that he “had always hated muddle-headedness and always thought it was a necessary condition for religion”. He grew up exposed to religious texts, reading the Bible in order – it was hoped – to avoid “empty-headed atheism”, and exposed to the art that surrounds religion, great master drawings and above all the works of William Blake collected by his father. There was an extraordinary Blake water color of “Satan Exulting over Eve” hanging in the dining room in his childhood (now in the Tate Gallery in London).

According to David Lipset, William Bateson, the pioneering geneticist who was Gregory’s father, was not a great student of the prophetic books of Blake – but Gregory went on to read them and other religious texts and poetry, puzzling over the content as well as the aesthetic value. Gregory grew up in a family that sturdily insisted that orthodox religion was nonsense, and at the same time he was stimulated by exposure to religious images, metaphors and poetry that demanded a different kind of understanding.

Gregory planned the book that became Angels Fear to discuss religion and aesthetics as ways of knowing that might prove to be indispensable to human survival and to that recognition of the larger interactive system of the biosphere he called wisdom. “The sacred (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the beautiful (whatever that means)”. For him, as a scientist, to begin to talk about religion and aesthetics was to step onto dangerous ground – Where Angels Fear to Tread – places he felt it was essential to venture, but where he was going to get into trouble with his colleagues, and he knew it. Yet the exclusion of certain ideas – the Cartesian partition of ways of knowing – seemed to him damaging.

- dettaglio -

il lascito del Tao - III

Tao destro e Tao sinistro

Il cervello dei mammiferi presenta una simmetria bilaterale consistente in due emisferi cerebrali collegati tra loro attraverso il corpo calloso,costituito da fasci di fibre nervose trasversali tra i due emisferi e che li interconnettono.

figure tratte da Gray's Anatomy degli emisferi cerebrali e corpo calloso

Per lungo tempo si è discussa la ragione per cui il cervello presenti una simile struttura di emisferi bilaterali interconnessi, e quale ruolo funzionale li distingua - una risposta molto difficile da scoprire in condizioni normali, dato che il corpo colloso che li collega li rende funzionalmente un tutto unico.

La soluzione provenne dagli studi sulla specializzazione emisferica (lateralizzazione) delle funzioni cognitive di Roger Sperry, a cui fu attribuito il Premio Nobel 1981 in Fisiologia e Medicina "for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres", Michael Gazzaniga e Joseph Bogen su animali o su soggetti con il corpo calloso sezionato (split-brain) per trauma o come intervento chirurgico (callosotomia) utilizzato in passato come cura palliativa dell'epilessia.

Alto: struttura mediana divisa da sezionamento chirurgico di un cervello di mammifero.
Basso: effetto del sezionamento delle fibre incrociate del chiasma ottico. La sovrapposizione della metà-campo dall'occhio controlaterale è eliminata; ciò riduce il flusso ottico all'emisfero omolaterale.
da: R.W. Sperry, "Cerebral Organization and Behavior", Science, June 2, 1961

La sintesi dei risultati sono consolidati e mostrano differenti specializzazioni delle funzioni cerebrali cognitive tra i due emisferi, quando considerati divisi separatamente:

Nel cervello "normale", completamente integrato funzionalmente, le possibili interazioni tra le funzionalità specifiche di ogni emisfero dà luogo ad una complessità praticamente infinita di strutture organizzative cerebrali.

Un classico esempio di comportamento umano con cervello con corpo calloso sezionato, rafforzato nel finale da una discordanza audio/video.

clononi meta-Tao

La successiva metastruttura discussa daTyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono i clononi, componenti fisici o mentali intrinsici in una olarchia. La caratteristica principale è la loro identicità, dovuta al processo di replicazione-clonazione. L'esempio tipico a livello fisico sono le cellule che, replicandosi, possono formare sovrasistemi a olarchie come tessuti e organi. L'analogia è quella dei mattoni utilizzati come elementi per formare muri e sovrastrutture sempre più complesse, ma formate sempre dagli stessi identici componenti.

Detail of decoration on the Taj Mahal, Agra, India (Photo: David Castor)

Background

The notion of clonons falls within the scope of holarchies, in that specific objects or ideas are repeated to create layers of embeddedness. As with the process of cloning, a specific object can be replicated. Clonons can build wholes and each whole can be a clonon of larger set.

Examples

• In science: identical cells in different layers of tissue, protons, neutrons, electrons, worker ants, each fish in a school, identical atoms in a molecule (e.g., two clonons of hydrogen joining a holon of oxygen to form a holon of a water molecule, which in turn become a clonon of water molecules in a cup of water), etc
• In architecture and design: bricks in a wall, tiles on a floor or ceiling, each light fixture in ceiling, each office or room on a floor, each floor in a building, windows in skyscraper, each house in a subdivision, etc.
• In art: each brush stroke in a painting, each decorative design unit in a pottery bowl, each point in a pointillism painting, etc.
• In social sciences: each individual in a community or society, each client in a business, each factory worker at a specific point in an assembly line, etc.
• In other senses: each tomato on a tomato plant, each tomato plant in a tomato garden, etc.

Corporate colones; Dale O'Dell

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

il lascito del Tao - III

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Kinds of Messages

I am going to start with a story that deals with the relationship between scientific and other kinds of discourse. As Gregory asserted, “… thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones”. In the early 80s, I was teaching a course in the anthropology department of an elite American college, Amherst College, with the title “Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East,” and I showed a documentary film of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

(Parenthetically, many readers will remember Gregory’s story about Sol Tax and the question of whether it was appropriate to film a ceremony of the Native American Church in order to defend the sacramental use of peyote, so it is important to note here that although it is forbidden for any non-Muslim to make the Meccan pilgrimage or to enter the Holy Cities, there are a number of documentary films made by Muslim film makers. I don’t believe that the issue in the Sol Tax story is the use of technology. I think the issue is the conscious use by believers of words and actions ostensibly directed toward spiritual beings to direct an argument toward political authorities, a behavior which is fairly routine in American politics. Many ethnographers have filmed rituals, including Gregory, who is still regarded as a pioneer of visual anthropology and of the use of film to record and analyze patterns of behavior. It is an oversimplification to focus on the technology per se as a desecration. The question is what is said and enacted, to whom, and in what context.)

In any case, I showed in my classroom a film of the Meccan pilgrimage, and after the class a young woman from an evangelical Christian background came up to me, with tears running down her face, and said to me, “It never occurred to me that they believed their religion.” This was, to me, a very shocking thing to hear, so I want you to pause and be shocked for a moment, before I try to unpack her statement. In fact, I think she misstated her reaction – but at the same time, she revealed a fundamental misconception in all the Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – which continues to give us trouble to this day and has indeed become more severe. What she intended to say was not that she had thought Muslims were lying when they affirmed their religion. I think that what she meant was, “It never occurred to me that their experience of their religion was comparable to my experience of mine.” The medium of film had allowed her to empathize with an experience and recognize it in an unfamiliar and exotic context.

Gregory would have pointed out that we are mammals and that we respond in terms of relationships. But of course, this young woman had been brought up with the idea that religion is about beliefs that are either true or untrue, not about experience or about relationship. Christianity and Islam have both, at different times in their history, been preoccupied with accuracy of interpretation, avoidance of heresy, and the insistence that believers should concur on specific beliefs. They have asserted that the “truths” of different religions are mutually exclusive and in competition, what I sometimes call zero sum truth. My student erred in her understanding of the kind of message communicated in religious discourse. The classification of kinds of messages occurs at a different logical level from the message itself, and often contextually. Thus, for those familiar with theater, words spoken in the context of a theatrical performance are responded to differently from the same words spoken elsewhere.

We are constantly dealing with communication at multiple levels, where some kind of metamessage classifies a particular communication as report or speculation, humor or poetry, or, in the case of Gregory’s film about river otters, combat or play. Without this level of understanding, interpretation is impossible. Gregory’s interest in the ways in which messages are modified by context and by other messages, which was elaborated in the application of the Russellian theory of logical types to schizophrenia, became fundamental to his thinking about all biological communication including that involved in epigenesis. But back to Abraham, who must have been a fairly literal-minded chap – a bit like the schizophrenic Gregory spoke about, who eats the menu card instead of the dinner. At some level – assuming that any of this happened, of course – Abraham took the admonition: “You must be willing to give all that is most precious to you to god” literally. And off he went with a sharp knife to sacrifice his son.

il lascito del Tao - II

olarchie meta-Tao

Le successive metastrutture esaminate da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono le olarchie, un termine coniato da Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in theMachine del 1967, formato dalla combinazione dei termini greci, "holos" che significa "l'intero", e il termine "gerarchia". Si tratta di una struttura gerarchica organizzata di unità o entità complesse denominate "Oloni" e "Clononi", elementi che sono sia delle parti del sistema sia un "tutto", utili per la descrizione di sistemi altamente complessi. Un sistema o organizzazione che presenta nella sua struttura (o meta-struttura) delle olarchie è detto anche olonomico o olonico.

Background

A holarchy is a nested system of layers in which the units (wholes) within one layer are parts for the wholes in the next larger, encompassing layer. Holarchic layers can be used to describe certain types of social, political, and institutional organizations, as well as structures in science and other disciplines. In holarchies the wholes at each level have particular kinds of relationships with the other wholes on that same level, and these relationships change as we move up the nested layers from physics to organisms to social systems. The relationships between layers in holarchies tend to be ambiguous and more difficult to describe.

Examples

• In science: rose flowers, the Earth and atmosphere, atoms, bodies of organisms, holarchic layers of complexity in organisms (from DNA/RNA components to the whole), solar system, galaxies, etc.
• In architecture and design: some building and community designs, etc.
• In art: forms as depicted, etc.
• In social sciences: communities (as described by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger), many tribal societies, democracy in its purest form, etc.
• In other senses: mandalas, apprenticeships, etc.

Un classico esempio di olarchia è la gerarchia di livelli di entità che al livello più alto formano un ecosistema:

© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram

La struttura gerarchica delle scienze naturali e dei domini di conoscenza è più precisamente una olarchia, in quanto una gerarchia ma in cui gli elementi dei livelli sono essi stessi parti per i livelli superiori ed interi per i livelli inferiori.
L’olarchia ha due caratteristiche fondamentali: è un’entità ben identificabile, separabile dal resto del sistema e con una precisa identità; è parte di un sistema complessivo - un sovrasistema - senza il quale non è in grado di operare e da cui trae, almeno in parte, obiettivi di azione e vincoli di comportamento, e può a sua volta essere formato da parti più elementari. A partire da tale significato, il termine si è diffuso, ad esempio tra i progettisti di sistemi di produzione manifatturiera, per indicare entità di tali sistemi con significative caratteristiche di autonomia. Insieme si è diffuso l’uso di alcuni suoi derivati, quali: olarchia (holarchy), sistema di oloni in grado di cooperare per il raggiungimento di un obiettivo; olonomia (holonomy), quando un’entità di un sistema organizzato mostra attributi olonici; sistema olonico, sistema basato sugli oloni, in grado di prendere decisioni e attuarle interagendo con gli altri elementi del sistema su base negoziale. I filoni collegati a questa terminologia nell'ingegneria gestionale sono spesso indicati anche come holonic manufacturing systems (HMS), intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), autonomous agent systems basati su agenti intelligenti, multi-agent systems, distributed production systems. Un ulteriore esempio nelle scienze cognitive è la Holonomic Brain Theory, sviluppata da Karl Pribram e inizialmente creata in collaborazione con David Bohm.

Esempio di evoluzione di una organizzazione olonica in strutture olarchiche sempre più complesse.

Esempio di organizzazione olonica di comunità rappresentata come mappa strategica:
Lawrence Boys and Girls Club
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram

Le olarchie possono essere anche "astratte", ad esempio una olarchia di regole per determinare specifici risultati o comportamenti. Un esempio rilevante sono i sistemi complessi adattativi, come i sistemi viventi (quando sopravvivono), dove l'evoluzione del sistema è determinato da una intrinseca olarchia di regole:

Modello di sistema complesso adattativo. L'evoluzione del sistema dai componenti iniziali a quelli finali, da sinistra a destra, è governato da un sistema di regole centrali strutturato come olarchia.
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram - NECSI

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

il lascito del Tao - II

Tree Mind, Storm Thorgerson

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson as a Scientist

Today I want to discuss these issues in relation to Angels Fear, the volume that I completed after Gregory’s death, which he saw as his most daring approach to the conventional limits of scientific attention. I inherited the task of dealing with Gregory’s intellectual legacy, as well as the intellectual legacy of my mother, Margaret Mead, and several other scholars for whose work she became responsible along the way, so I have had considerable opportunity to think about how to treat such material. It may be that having a multiple responsibility has shaped my approach – but I decided very early on that I was not going to accept the position of Anna Freud, a woman of undoubted brilliance and conscientiousness, who became protector and arbiter of orthodoxy for the work of her father, Sigmund Freud. The creation of an orthodoxy around Freud’s work was a misapprehension of the way he wove ideas and of the way he developed and expressed them, which has had a negative effect on psychoanalysis. Nowadays in the United States, Freud’s writings seem to be read primarily in literature departments, free from the pressure to maintain an orthodox interpretation, but with little concern for their ongoing scientific usefulness.

Our responsibility, I believe, in reading Gregory Bateson as a scientist, is to avoid the impulse to orthodoxy that is antithetical to science and to find a pathway through the unorthodoxy of his expression. Gregory’s writings offer a way of looking at phenomena that is grounded in science and suggests interesting and important questions. He hoped that he might address some of the ways in which scientific explanation inspires technological exploitation but fails to inspire behaviors that might, for instance, preserve species diversity and slow climate change. The “pattern which connects”  proposes not only similarity but identification – even empathy.

At the same time, unearthing the value in this work and integrating it with ongoing thinking in anthropology, biology, and psychiatry can be daunting. Often what we see in Gregory’s work is an uncompleted process, where he himself was still groping for the next step in his phrasing. The challenge is not so much to stand guard over the exact words but to continue to develop and test the thought. This is the challenge I had to deal with in putting together Angels Fear, selecting from a stack of manuscripts that only vaguely fit together and did not reach the goal he was searching for, so that it was important, as I wrote additional material, to preserve the tentativeness of it. For instance, I am convinced that Gregory’s “metalogues” gave him a literary device for exploring ideas without committing himself to the structured exposition that a more usual form of essay would have required. The metalogues, by their fluidity, proclaim the search that was still in flux. Although some parts of the metalogues did actually happen, and although I imitated them sometimes in actual conversation with Gregory and have written some since, they are a form of fiction.

il lascito del Tao - I

gerarchie meta-Tao

La quarta metastruttura introdotta da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono le gerarchie (dal greco ἱεραρχία, ierarchia, derivato di hierárkhēs, composito di hieros "sacro" e árkhō "presiedere" o "essere capo", quindi - complessivamente - "presiedere i sacri riti"), strutture concettuali che definiscono relazioni tra strati, fogli, gruppi di elementi o livelli di un sistema; il tipo più noto e comune di struttura gerarchica è la piramidale, in cui i livelli di descrizione e i flussi di informazione del sistema sono convenientemente rappresentabili in una struttura verticale, tipicamente utilizzata nelle organizzazioni.

Nel caso dei sistemi socio-culturali, nella misura in cui una gerarchia piramidale viene percepita dai soggetti coinvolti, si stabiliscono dei miti quali "controllo" e "potere":

e concetti relativi quali quello di leadership:

Le gerarchie di tipo piramidale normalmente considerate hanno la caratteristica che i livelli posti in relazione verticale hanno elementi omogenei, ad esempio contengono sempre persone, anche se con ruoli e funzioni diverse. La gerarchia Russelliana dei tipi logici illustra invece una discontinuità logica tra livelli e metalivelli, applicata ad esempio da Bateson alle categorie logiche dell'apprendimento e della comunicazione, e presenti anche in gerarchie di descrizione dove tra i livelli vi sia una disomogeneità logica, ad esempio nel caso di passaggio dai livelli fisico-chimici delle scienze naturali a quelli superiori della vita e dei fenomeni emergenti in sistemi complessi. Le gerarchie piramidali non sono le uniche possibili; per la descrizione di diversi sistemi concettuali categorizzazioni di tipo trasversale o laterale possono essere convenienti.

Background

Hierarchies tend to be depicted as pyramidal arrangements of sheets. Hierarchies are identified as the relationships between layers become evident. In most cases, hierarchies are exemplified by power or control moving downward. In other cases, the top layers may indicate greater importance or significance. Information, materials, or energy move upward. They tend to create stratified stability. However, this stability may depend upon the types of binary relationships and other patterns that are created within the overall structure.

Examples

• In science: trophic layers, phylogenetic trees, animal societies (bees, ants, chimpanzees, wolves), etc.
• In architecture and design: pyramids, building design and layout, etc.
• In art: as form, etc.
• In social sciences: governmental and organizational structures; classrooms, schools and schooling; some learning theories; etc.
• In other senses: information trees, branching decision trees, etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

il lascito del Tao - I

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Abstract Gregory Bateson intended his posthumous book Angels Fear as an approach to the scientific explanation of natural phenomena in the living world based on cybernetics that would not be so narrowly mechanistic that it triggers a fundamentalist reaction. This issue is newly urgent in the contemporary context of global religious conflict, resurgent fundamentalism, and the intelligent design debate. A redefinition of mind in terms of process and organization sufficient to analyze both evolution and learning, and an application of the Russellian theory of logical types to explanatory systems are central to his approach.

Keywords Gregory Bateson, evolution, intelligent design, mind, metamessages, systems theory, fundamentalism, cybernetics, double bind, schizophrenia, logical types

Introduction

The interdisciplinary conference brought together in Copenhagen in August 2005 by Professor Jesper Hoffmeyer was a fitting climax to the Gregory Bateson Centennial. First, because my father sought ways to make what he was saying accessible and useful to biologists, but second, because the broader interdisciplinary conversation was essential to preserve the weave of Gregory’s thinking. For biologists to discover what may be useful in his work it is necessary to consider writings that are primarily oriented to other disciplines, about, for instance, mental illness, where much of his thinking about communication can be found, or religion. Gregory regarded religions as efforts to understand the living world that might encode insights yet to be explored in other contexts, as exemplified in his comparison between Genesis, in which order is imposed on the natural world by god, and a New Guinea origin myth in which order is immanent in the material world and it is disorder that needs to be defeated. His primary approach, even in discussing matters that his colleagues declined to discuss, was as a scientist, but he regarded a sense of wonder at the natural world as a valuable corrective to the limitations of science.

Bateson’s Redefinition of Mind

The rule when Gregory began work as a scientist, as he expressed it, was perfectly clear: “in scientific explanation, there should be no use of mind or deity, and there should be no appeal to final causes. All causality should flow with the flow of time, with no effect of the future upon the present or the past. No deity, no teleology, and no mind should be postulated in the universe that was to be explained”.

The turning point for his thinking at the Macy conferences on cybernetics, was reflected in the title Warren McCulloch gave to the second conference in 1946: “Teleological Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems.” In that title there is already an expression of the particular epistemological exploration that engaged Gregory for the rest of his life: cybernetics could be looked at as a way of understanding what looks like final cause or purpose in systems where self-corrective feedback loops provide for an “effect of the future on the present.” If causation does not always flow with the flow of time, we need a way of talking about it without postulating an external agent or deity.

Because of this characteristic, particularly in living systems, Gregory defied taboo by redefining the word “mind” to refer to material systems so organized that they have the immanent capacity for self-correction. Gregory listed six “criteria of mental process” in Mind and Nature: “A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts… triggered by difference … requiring collateral energy …, [and] circular (or more complex) chains of determination … [resulting in] transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events … disclosing a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena”. I mention a seventh in Angels Fear that we discussed just before his death, the uneven distribution of information. He might have argued that this was entailed by one of the others but I put it forward because of his emphasis on the importance of parts of any system not having full information about other parts.

An examination of this list reveals that although Gregory is speaking of material systems dependent on physical energy, the process involves non-material abstractions and communication: triggering by difference, coding, and logical types.