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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
Deal
Deals
Generalities
Levels
Organism
Matter
Organisms
Afford
Unconscious
Matters
Conscious

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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.
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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and 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'
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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