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

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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
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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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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.
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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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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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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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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