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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
Universe
Process
Think
Thinking
Processes
Buried
Perception
Rules
Deep

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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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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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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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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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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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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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