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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
Referring
Quite
Clear
Whether
Never
World

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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
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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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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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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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