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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

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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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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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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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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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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