Abstract
The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference travelling in a circuit is the elementary idea. …The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. G. Bateson (1972: 465)
Gregory Bateson (1904–1980)
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Notes
- 1.
Writing in 1971, at age sixty-five, Gregory Bateson would dedicate what would become his most famous work, the collection of essays entitled Steps to an Ecology of Mind, in part to: “William Bateson, my father, who was certainly ready in 1894 to receive the cybernetic idea” (1972: xxii).
- 2.
The cybernetic concept of “feedback” had not yet been formally developed at the time that Bateson was writing Naven in 1936 (cf., though, Uexküll 1928), and Bateson credits his later reception of the idea through the work of Warren McCulloch in 1942 as a turning-point in the development of his understanding.
- 3.
The onset of World War II had made it difficult for scholars such as Mead to publish their research findings in a timely fashion in academic journals, and Balinese Character is in many ways more Mead’s own summative analysis of her findings than it is a true intellectual collaboration with Bateson, whose central role in the project was to devise effective, unintrusive, and scientifically responsible methods of filming naturally occurring social interaction, notes Peter Harries-Jones (2009: p.c.).
- 4.
[As noted in the original,1 this chapter is a transcript of the 19th Annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture that Gregory Bateson delivered at the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii on January 9, 1970.]
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Favareau, D. (2009). Form, Substance and Difference. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_16
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