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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

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
Epistemology
Governed
Wrong

More quotes by 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.
Gregory Bateson
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
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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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.
Gregory Bateson
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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
Gregory Bateson
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson