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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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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
Characteristics
Pretend
Balls
Mental
Billiard
Mapped
Phenomena

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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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