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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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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
Enough
Meet
Components
Never
Present
Phenomena
Time
Shall
Cover
Courses
Total
Course
Perception
Future
Indeed
Next
Series
Accounting
Able
Lead
Predict

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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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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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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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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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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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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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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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