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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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 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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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