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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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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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'
Gregory Bateson
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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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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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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.
Gregory Bateson
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson