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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

Gregory Bateson

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Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Matter
Organisms
Afford
Unconscious
Matters
Conscious
Deal
Deals
Generalities
Levels
Organism

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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.
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The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
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The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
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It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components, or Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
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To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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