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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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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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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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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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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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 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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson