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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
Quite
Clear
Whether
Never
World
Referring

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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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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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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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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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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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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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A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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