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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

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
Thinking
Processes
Buried
Perception
Rules
Deep
Universe
Process
Think

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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.
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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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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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