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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
Mental
Billiard
Mapped
Phenomena
Characteristics
Pretend
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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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 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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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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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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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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 rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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