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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
Balls
Mental
Billiard
Mapped
Phenomena
Characteristics
Pretend

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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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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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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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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