:up: Yes, as I said, changes, even absent anyone to observe them, are news "at least potentially".

Whereas in time ignorant can become knowing, — unenlightened

Indeed.

It gets very interesting when one who has been ignorant of their own false belief becomes aware of exactly what they once believed.

Farmers mistaking sheets for sheeps. People believing that broken clocks are working ones. Etc.

Either some belief is not equivalent to propositional attitude or no one ever looks at a broken clock and presupposes that it's not broken. That's exactly what happens when one of us believes that a broken clock is working. S will not agree to "that broken clock is working" at the time they trust it. The farmer certainly would not assent to the claim that that sheet is a sheep, but they most certainly take that sheet to be a sheep. They believe that a sheet is a sheep. They will not state it at the time. That's due to our inability to knowingly believe a falsehood.

Nice thread!

unenlightened :up: Yes, as I said, changes, even absent anyone to observe them, are news "at least potentially". — Janus

You did, but I think you are not quite right in a small but important way. The potentiality is in the observer, not the changes.

I noticed this, that seemed related to the topic.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

You did, but I think you are not quite right in a small but important way. The potentiality is in the observer, not the changes. — unenlightened

I see the potentiality as being in both, and the actuality as being in the interaction. I think the changes are real and independent of the observer, although the ways in which they are perceived and understood are obviously not. I was trying to get away from the notion that reality is entirely constructed by the mind, and I don't think that Bateson thought it was either. I don't have the impression that he was an idealist.

I noticed this, that seemed related to the topic. — unenlightened

Cheers, will have a look.

I see the potentiality as being in both, and the actuality as being in the interaction. — Janus

Yes, that's about right.

What is important is that, right or wrong, the epistemology shall be explicit. Equally explicit criticlsrn will then be possible.

This seems to be pointing to the religions mentioned in the previous sentence, the critique being that such religions od not possess explicit epistemologies. Making claims without being able to explain how you know, or at least believe, the claim is warranted. Claiming authority of scripture or church is not explicit epistemology because if the question "why believe authority or scripture" is asked, the only possible answers seem to be either "because it feels right to me" or "because the authority or scripture tells me to believe it". The first seems reasonable enough for the individual believer but cannot constitute a cogent argument for why others should believe likewise.

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.

I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness, and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other. — Introduction

Patterns do connect and they form the basis of taxonomy in science. Seeing the ways patterns relate to one another also enables the unfolding of the story of evolution. Similarities of morphology are things we can all recognize and generally do not need to be argued for because making oneself familiar enough with the morphologies should be sufficient to bring about seeing the connections. Among other things this seems prescient of chaos theory; commonalities of pattern at all levels of being and organization.

I'm thinking Bateson means that such examples are "no-things"_ in the sense that similarities and differences are not objects of the senses in the way things are. And yet we do perceive these "no-things" and without such perception no-thing coherent at all would be perceived.

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.

I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness, and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other. — Introduction — Janus

The "claw" in that quote may refer to a cooked crab's claw, which Bergson used as an object lesson for the difference between living matter and dead matter. He didn't use the term in this case, but I think the "pattern that connects" is what we now call Holism. :smile:


Excerpt from Mind and Nature :
"I was prepared for that. I had two paper bags, and the first of these I opened, producing a freshly cooked crab, which I placed on the table. I then challenged the class somewhat as follows: "I want you to produce arguments which will convince me that this object is the remains of a living thing. . . . ."

Holism :
the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology. ___Oxford Dictionary

. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other. — Introduction

The wiki page has sections on mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, as well as arthropods, and a nice picture of a beetle claw. They leave out the claw hammer, the clawed foot bath and other furniture, and that thing on the end of cranes with 3 great hooks for picking up logs and boulders etc, or in the case of those arcade machines usually, to not quite pick up the prize.

Bateson is not referring to a thing, but to this pattern, this family resemblance that connects. In the end, he is saying, what one can think about and talk about is always the abstraction, and never the particular, and that mind is 'made of' these patterns that we name.

To make sense of the world is to find the patterns, which is to say the regularities; this, that and the other can all be claws, but 'the claw' is none of them in particular. And this pattern of making sense of the patterns of the world is the meta-pattern, that Bateson is drawing attention to. This is philosophy, because philosophy above all is its own meta.

It all seems rather Kantian, but with 'substance' dropping out of the conversation altogether like a Wittgenstein beetle, leaving a monism of form and process. There's a point later on where he describes an electrical switch in its functional existence as either a gap in a circuit when off, or nothing at all, not even a gap when on.

information about depth is created. In more formal language, the difference between the information provided by the one retina and that provided by the other is itself information of a diferf ent logical type. From this new sort of information, the seer adds an extra dimension to seeing.
In Figure 4, let A represent the class or set of components of the aggregate of information obtained from some first source (e.g. , the right eye) , and let B represent the class of components of the information ob­ tained from some second source (e.g. , the left eye). Then AB will repre­sent the class of components referred to by information from both eyes.
AB must either contain members or be empty.
If there exist real members of AB, then the information from the second source has imposed a sub-classification upon A that was previously impossible (ie , has provided , in combination with A , a logical type of information of which the first source alone was incapable). — P70.

The explanation of the functioning of human vision is worth reading in its entirety, but here is just the punchline, that illustrates the principle that a double description allows, through comparison, a second order description of information that is not present in either description alone, the difference makes all the difference. Stereoscopic vision enables depth perception.

[This description of the value of double description will be given a second description in my next post.]

Finally , all that comparing of comparisons was built up to pre­ pare author and reader for thought about problems of Natural Mind. There, too, we shall encounter creative comparison. It is the Platonic thesis of the book that epistemology is an indivisible, integrated meta­ science whose subject matter is the world of evolution, thought , adapta­ tion , embryology , and genetics-the science of mind in the widest sense ofthe word.*
The comparing of these phenomena (comparing thought with evolution and epigenesis with both) is the manner ofsearch of the science called "epistemology."
Or, in the phrasing of this chapter, we may say that epis­temology is the bonus from combining insights from all these separate genetic sciences.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. — P.87

[The text, as indicated here, gives many examples, in this chapter, but rather than go through line by line writing that is already more eloquent than I can manage, I skip gaily forward.]

The Pavlovian case is very famous, but my interpretation of it is different from the standard interpretation, and this difference consists precisely in my insistence on the relevance of context to meaning, which relevance is an example of one set of messages meta-communicative to another. The paradigm for experimental neurosis is as follows: A dog (commonly a male) is trained to respond differentially to two alternative "conditioned stimuli," for instance, a circle or an ellipse. In response to X, he is to do A; in response to Y, he is to do B. Ifin his responses, the dog exhibits this differentiation, he is said to discriminate between the two stimuli and he is positively reinforced or, in Pavlovian language, given an "unconditioned stimulus" offood. When the dog is able to dis­criminate, the task is made somewhat more difficult by the experi­menter, who will either make the ellipse somewhat fatter or make the circle somewhat flatter so that the contrast between the two stimulus ob­ jects becomes less. At this point, the dog will have to put out extra ef­fort to discriminate between them. But when the dog succeeds in doing this, the experimenter will again make things more difficult by a similar change. By such a series of steps, the dog is led to a situation in which finally he cannot discriminate between the objects. At this point, if the experiment has been performed with sufficient rigor, the dog will ex­hibit various symptoms. He may bite his keeper, he may refuse food, he may become disobedient, he may become comatose, and so on. Which set of symptoms the dog exhibits depends, it is claimed, upon the "tem­perament" of the dog, excitable dogs choosing one set of symptoms and lethargic dogs choosing another.
Now, from the point of view of the present chapter, we have to examine the difference between two verbal forms contained in the ortho­ dox explanation of this sequence. One verbal form is "the dog discrimi­ nates between the two stimuli"; the other is "the dog's discrimination breaks down." In this jump, the scientist has moved from a statement about a particular incident or incidents which can be seen to a general­ization that is hooked up to an abstraction-"discrimination"-located beyond vision perhaps inside the dog. It is this jump in logical type that is the theorist's error. I can, in a sense, see the dog discriminate. but I can­ not possibly see his "discrimination. " There is a jump here from particu­lar to general, from member to class. It seems to me that a better way of saying it would depend upon asking: "What has the dog learned in his training that makes him unable toaccept failure at the end?" And the an­swer to this question would seem to be: The dog has learned that this is a context/or discrimination . That is , that he " should" look for two stimuli and "should" look for the possibility of acting on a difference between them.
For the dog, this is the "task" which has been set-the context in which success will be rewarded.'*'
Obviously, a context in which there is no perceptible difference between the two stimuli is not one for discrimination. I am sure the ex­ perimenter could induce neurosis by using a single object repeatedly and tossing a coin each time to decide whether this single object should be interpreted as an X or as a Y. In other words, an appropriate response for the dog would be to take out a coin, toss it, and use the fall of the coin to decide his action. Unfortunately, the dog has no pocket in which to carry coins and has been very carefully trained in what has now become a lie; that is, the dog has been trained to expect a context for discrimination. He now imposes this interpretation on a context that is not a context for discrimination. He has been taught not to discriminate between two classes of contexts. He is in that state from which the ex­perimenter started: unable to distinguish contexts.
From the dog's point of view (consciously or unconsciously), to learn context is different from learning what to do when X is presented and what to do when Y is presented. There is a discontinuous jump from the one sort of learning to the other.
In passing, the reader may be interested to know some of the supporting data that would favor the interpretation I am offering.
First, the dog did not show psychotic or neurotic behavior at the beginning of the experiment when he did not know how to discrimi­ nate, did not discriminate, and made frequent errors. This did not "break down his discrimination" because he had none, JUSt as at the end the discrimination could not be "broken down" because discrimination was not in fact being asked for.
Second, a naive dog, offered repeated situations in which some X sometimes means that he is to exhibit behavior A and at other times means that he should exhibit behavior B , will settle down to guessing. The naive dog has not been taught not to guess; that is, he has not been taught that the contexts of life are such that guessing is inappropriate. Such a dog will settle down to reflecting the approximate frequencies of appropriate response. That is, if the stimulus object in 30 percent of cases means A and in 70 percent means B, then the dog will settle down o exhibiting A in 30 percent of the cases and B in 70 percent. (He will not do what a good gambler would do, namely, exhibit B in all cases.) Third, if the animals are taken away outside the lab, and if the reinforcements and stimuli are administered from a distance-in the form, for example, of electric shocks carried by long wires lowered from booms (borrowed from Hollywood)--they do not develop symptoms. The shocks, after all, are only of the magnitude of pain that any animal might experience on pushing through a small briar patch; they do not become coercive except in the context of the lab, in which other details of the lab (its smell, the experimental stand on which the animal is sup­ported, and so on) become ancillary stimuli that mean to the animal that this is a context in which it must continue to be "right." That the animal learns about the nature of laboratory experiment is certainly true, and the same may be said of the graduate student. The experimental subject, whether human or animal, is in the presence of a barrage of context markers o exhibiting A in 30 percent of the cases and B in 70 percent. (He will not do what a good gambler would do, namely, exhibit B in all cases.) Third, if the animals are taken away outside the lab, and if the reinforcements and stimuli are administered from a distance-in the form, for example, of electric shocks carried by long wires lowered from booms (borrowed from Hollywood)--they do not develop symptoms. The shocks , after all , are only of the magnitude of pain that any animal might experience on pushing through a small briar patch; they do not become coercive except in the context of the lab, in which other details of the lab (its smell, the experimental stand on which the animal is sup­ ported, and so on) become ancillary stimuli that mean to the animal that this is a context in which it must continue to be "right." That the animal learns about the nature of laboratory experiment is certainly true, and the same may be said of the graduate student. The experimental subject, whether human or animal, is in the presence of a barrage of context markers . — P.118

Sorry for the very long quote. Bateson does here what the behaviourist refuses to do, which is to consider the dog's view of things. By comparing the empathically analysed and imagined dog's description of the experiment, to the experimenter's description, the double description gives us a new understanding. The induction of neurosis in the dog is shown to be a complex relationship of mutual learning and meta-learning that places the dog in a bind that he cannot resolve, and this understanding feeds into Trauma theory which I have discussed elsewhere. Punishment is worse than pain because it it is understood to be intentional, just as reward is understood to be. These are communications between beings, not mere events.
Dogs and humans are social beings, with a high sensitivity to the emotional condition of their significant others; a child needs to be able to make their parent happy and vice versa, and the inability to do so is traumatising and tends to neurosis.

How do we learn those learnings or wisdoms (or follies) by which "we ourselves"-our ideas about self-seem to be changed?
I began to think about such matters a long time ago, and here are two notions that I developed before World War II, when I was working out what I called the "dynamics" or "mechanics" of Iatmul cul­ ture on the Sepik River in New Guinea.
One notion was that the unit of interaction and the unit of charac­terological learning (not just acquiring the so-called "response" when the buzzer sounds, but the becoming ready for such automatisms) are the same. Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed, not internally, but as a matter of the external relationship between two crea­tures. And relationship is always a product of double description .
It is correct (and a great improvement) to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view is the relationship.
Relationship is not internal to the single person. It is nonsense to talk about "dependency" or "aggressiveness" or "pride," and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person.
No doubt there is a learning in the more particular sense. There are changes in A and changes in B which correspond to the dependency­ succorance of the relationship. But the relationship comes first; it pre­ cedes .
Only if you hold on tight to the primacy and priority of rela­tionship can you avoid dormitive explanations. The opium does not con­tain a dormitive principle, and the man does not contain an aggressive instinct.
The New Guinea material and much that has come later, taught me that I will get nowhere by explaining prideful behavior, for example, by referring to an individual's "pride." Nor can you explain aggression by referring to instinctive (or even learned) "aggressiveness."* Such an explanation, which shifts attention from the interpersonal field to a facti­ tious inner tendency, principle, instinct, or whatnot, is, I suggest, very great nonsense which only hides the real questions.
If you want to talk about, say, "pride," you must talk about two persons or two groups and what happens between them. A is admired by B; B's admiration is conditional and may turn to contempt. And so on. You can then define a particular species of pride by reference to a partic­ular pattern of interaction. — P.133

You only exist in relationship. — J. Krishnamurti

Is this a learning by which you might be changed? Are the relationships you have on this site ever such as your ideas about yourself are changed? I affirm from my own experience that it happens – not every day, one is not a gadfly – but now and then, And I know others here that have affirmed a change of mind.

The book has always been preparing for, and from the very beginning engaging in, a transformative relationship intended to be liberating. We already knew, mind, that teaching is a matter of inspiration, and a mutual affair, but here it is laid out how exactly we are responsible for each other and for the world. One becomes respectable by being respected, just as one becomes violent by being violated. we make or break each other by our identifications. In calling you a terrorist I'm claiming to be terrorised on my own behalf or on behalf of another.

that there is a learning of context, a learning that is different from what the experimenters see. And that this l earning of con­text springs out of a species of double description which goes with rela­ tionship and interaction. Moreover, like all themes of contextual learn­ing , these themes of relationship are self-validating . Pride feeds on admiration. But because the admiration is conditional-and the proud man fears the contempt of the other-it follows that there is nothing which the other can do to diminish the pride. If he shows contempt, he equally reinforces the pride.

Alice Miller's The Drama of the gifted child in a single paragraph, and a simple model of the making of antisocial behaviour. The important learning is the contextual learning, which is learning how to be and who one is socially. If one learns early on that others are the enemy, one will be alone forever. And if such a one has children, they will be toys, trophies and eventually rivals. Hell is the inability to change.

One sees more and more in the media persons who ignore interrupt and override the interviewer, in order to recite their own version of reality. There is no dialogue, but a monologue, and therefore there can be no contextual learning, and the speaker makes themself into a non-person, a mere mechanical recording that fails to communicate at all. Such is teaching without learning; sound and fury, signifying nothing.