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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.

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
Never
World
Referring
Quite
Clear
Whether

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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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 are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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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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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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