The Reenchantment of the World (38 page)

 

 

Bateson uses the example of a man chopping down a tree to demonstrate
the circuitous nature of Mind. According to the Cartesian paradigm,
only the man's brain possesses consciousness: the tree is of course
alive, but it is not (in this view) a mental system of any sort, and
the axe itself is dead. The interaction is causal and linear: man takes
axe and operates on tree trunk. He may say to himself, as he does this,
"I am cutting down this tree," the thesis being that there is a single
entity, "I," the self, which is undertaking purposive action upon a
single object. The fallacy here is that mind is introduced in the word
"I," but is restricted to the man, whereas the tree is reified, seen
as an object. But the mind winds up being reified also; for since the
self acted upon the axe, which then acted upon the tree -- a perfect
application of Cartesian impact physics -- the self must also be a thing,
and therefore dead. Moreover, when we try to localize the self in such
a system, we find we cannot do so. In another Batesonian example, that
of a blind man making his way down the street with the help of a stick,
there is no way to say where his self begins or ends. Isn't the stick
really part of his self? He is not simply acting upon it, as an object,
which then acts upon the pavement. The stick is really a
pathway
to
the pavement, to his environment. But where does the pathway end? At the
handle? The tip? Halfway up the stick? "These questions," writes Bateson,
"are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences
are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line
across
this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which
determines the blind man's locomotion." The mental system of the blind man
-- or any of us -- does not end at the fingertips. To explain the man's
locomotion, says Bateson, you need the street, the stick, and the man;
and the stick becomes irrelevant only when he sits down and puts it aside.

 

 

The same argument applies to the man and the axe, Each stroke is
modified according to the shape of the cut left by the previous
stroke. There is no "self" "in here" cutting down a tree "out there";
rather, a relationship is occurring, a systemic circuit, a Mind. The
whole situation is alive, not just the man, and this life is immanent
in the circuit, not transcendent. The mind may indeed be the man's
frontal lobes, but the larger issue is the Mind, which in this case is
"tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree." More precisely, what is going
around the circuit is information: differences in tree/differences in
retina/differences in movement of axe/differences in tree, and so on. This
circuit of information is the Mind, the sell-corrective unit, now seen to
be a network of pathways which is not bounded by purposive consciousness,
or by the skin, but extended to include the pathways of all unconscious
thought, and all the external pathways along which information can travel.

 

 

Clearly then, large parts of the thinking network lie outside the
body, and the statement that Mind is immanent in the body, which I made
(more or less) in Chapter 6, can now be seen as a stepping stone to this
discussion. Tacit knowing is not merely a physiological phenomenon. The
study of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and deutero-learning has demonstrated
that such phenomena are not matters of individual psychology, but of
Minds, or systems, not bounded by the skin of the participants. "Self"
is a false reification of a small part of a larger informational network,
and we make the same mistake when we introduce such reification into
the relationship between a man and the tree he is cutting or into any
other interaction or understanding we might have with, or of, "inert"
objects. In terms of a cybernetic interpretation of what constitutes
an event, and a Mind, the world view of Galileo and Newton is literally
nonsensical, and the world view of the alchemists, which was posited on
the absence of a subject/object distinction, profoundly correct.

 

 

We are now ready to consider cybernetic epistemology as a formal system,
which can be done by making explicit those items that can be regarded
as criteria of Mind, or mental system. These are as follows:6

 

 

(1) There is an aggregate of interacting parts, and the interaction is
triggered by differences.

 

 

(2) These differences are not ones of substance, space, or time. They
are nonlocatable.

 

 

(3) The differences and transforms (coded versions) of differences are
transmitted along closed loops, or networks of pathways; the system
is circular or more complex.

 

 

(4) Many events within the system have their own sources of energy,
that is, they are energized by the respondent part, not by impact
from the part that triggers the response.

 

 

Before discussing each of these points in turn, let us note that
according to this set of criteria, a social or political structure,
a river, and a forest are all alive, and possess Mind. Each has its own
energy sources, forms an interlocking aggregate, acts self-correctively,
and has the potential for runaway. Each knows how to grow, how to take
care of itself, and should these processes fail, how to die. As Bateson
says, all the phenomena we call thought, learning, evolution, ecology,
and life occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria. Let us
elaborate on them briefly.

 

 

(1) There is an aggregate of interacting parts, and the interaction
is triggered by differences. We have already discussed this criterion
in the case of the steam engine, the man chopping down the tree, and
the blind man with the stick. In each case, information -- differences
that makes a difference -- circulates through the system. The blind
man suddenly slows down as the stick tells him he is at the edge of a
curb; a whole different process is set in motion as he feels his way
across the street. Differences in muscles make differences in movements
make differences in retina make differences in brain make differences
in exposed surface of the tree trunk, and such differences circulate
around the system of man-cutting-down-tree, influencing one another in
a continual, changing cycle.

 

 

Furthermore, parts of the aggregate -- the tree for example -- may also
satisfy these conditions, in which case they are sub-Minds. But there
is always a Sublevel that is
not
alive, the axe by itself for
instance. The explanation of mental phenomena is thus never supernatural
Mind always resides in the interaction of multiple parts that may,
of themselves, not satisfy the criteria of Mind.

 

 

(2) These differences are not ones of substance, space, or time; they
are nonlocatable. This statement represents another way of rejecting the
Cartesian impact physics model, or linear causality. The model certainly
works for interacting billiard balls, or Newtonian studies of force and
acceleration, but once a living observer is admitted to be part of such
cases, the cause of events is no longer a force or an impact. An observer,
or receiver, responds to a difference or a change in a relationship,
and this difference cannot be located in any conventional sense.

 

 

Consider, for example, the difference between the blackness of the ink in
this sentence and the whiteness of the paper on which it is printed. Few
people would deny that there is a real difference here. But where is
it? The difference is not in the ink; it is not in the white background;
it is not in the "edge," or outline, between them, which is after all
a collection of mathematical curves, possessing no dimension. Nor is
it in your mind, any more than the ink or the paper are actually in
your mind. A difference is not a thing or event. It has no dimension,
any more than do such abstractions as congruence or symmetry. Yet it
exists, and to complicate matters further, nothing -- that which is not
-- can be a cause. As Bateson points out, the letter you do not write
can get an angry reply; the tax form you fail to submit can get you
in trouble. There is no parallel here to the world of impact physics,
where impacts are causes, where real things must have dimension, and
where it takes a "thing" to have an effect.

 

 

(3) The differences and transforms (coded versions) of differences are
transmitted along closed loops or networks of pathways; the system is
circular or more complex. We have, essentially, discussed this criterion
in our analysis of the feedback process. Another way of stating it
might be to say that the system is self-corrective in the direction of
homeostasis and/or runaway, and that self-correctiveness implies trial
and error behavior. Nonliving things maintain a passive existence; living
entities, or Minds, escape change
through
change, or more
precisely, by incorporating continual change into themselves. Nature,
says Bateson,
accepts ephemeral change in favor of long-term stability. The bamboo
reed bends in the wind so as to return to its original position when
the wind dies down, and the tightrope walker shifts his or her weight
continually to avoid falling off the high wire. Even runaway systems
contain seeds of self-correction. Symmetrical tensions run so high among
the Iatmul that complementary naven behavior is almost constantly being
triggered. The alcoholic usually comes to AA when he or she has finally
hit bottom. Marx's argument that capitalism was, by its very nature,
digging its own grave, is also an example of cybernetic thinking;
and phenomena such as famine, epidemics, and wars might be regarded as
extreme cases of nature's attempt to preserve homeostasis. The current
collapse of industrial society may well be the planet's way of avoiding
a larger death.

 

 

(4) Many events within the system have their own sources of energy,
that is, they are energized by the respondent part, not by impact from
the part that triggers the response. This criterion is another way of
saying that living systems are self-actualizing, that they are subjects
rather than objects. The reaction of a dog that you kick comes from
the animal's own metabolism; the two feet it might have traveled from
the force of your kick is less significant than the dog's subsequent
response, which might include taking a chunk out of your leg.

 

 

Given these criteria of Mind, the next obvious question is: How do we
know the world; which is to say, other Minds? On the Cartesian model,
we know a phenomenon by breaking it into its simplest components and then
recombining them. Enough has been said already to indicate how fallacious
this atomistic approach really is. In fact, in terms of cybernetic theory,
Cartesian analysis is a way of not knowing most phenomena, because Mind
can only be characteristic of an (interacting) aggregate. Meaning is
virtually synonymous with context. Abstract a thing from its context
(a ray of light, for example) and the situation becomes meaningless,
although perhaps mathematically precise.

 

 

In cybernetic theory, then, we can know something only in context, in
its relation with other things.7 In addition to "context," Bateson uses
other words to denote "meaning," and these are "redundancy," "pattern,"
and "coding." The circulation of information involves the reduction of
randomness, a process that can also be called the creation of negative
entropy (entropy is the measure of randomness of a system). If something
is redundant, if it possesses a definite pattern, then it is not random
and constitutes a source of information. Communication is thus the
creation of redundancy, and redundancy is the central epistemologlcal
concept in cybernetic theory, which is the science of messages. It is
interesting to note, once again, that this concept is an advanced form
of an idea first advanced by William Bateson, namely the "undulatory
hypothesis" (see Chapter 7). Redundancy is an undulatory hypothesis;
both terms are derived from the Latin word 'unda,' wave. A redundant
situation is one in which wave after wave of similar or identical
information washes over us. The holistic outlook of both Batesons is
rooted in the notion that we know the world through redundancy.

 

 

Gregory Bateson takes the following definition as his paradigm for
knowing:

 

 

Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes,
a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain
"redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any
way by a "slash mark," such that an observer perceiving only what
is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random
success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say
that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has
meaning about what is on the other side.

 

 

Much of the information we absorb is digital in nature, usually spoken
or written. If I say "on the one hand," you know there is another hand
lurking somewhere in the wings, and you know what this means. Clichés
are redundant to the point of rigidity. The term itself originally
applied to blocks of typeface which were glued together by printers
because they occurred so often in published work. The English language
is also redundant at the level of individual letters. Given a letter T
in a piece of prose, we know that the next letter is almost certainly H,
R, W, or a vowel (including Y). Words like "tsetse" and "tmesis" tend
to catch our attention, for their spelling is less redundant than the
spelling of "than" or "the."

 

 

Most
of the information we take in, however, is analogue, or iconic. As I walk down a street alongside a large building, unable to see around the corner, I expect to find right angles in both street and building as I make the turn. This is in fact the equivalent of a cliché. If, however, I frequently fell down a mine shaft as I turned such a corner, the situation would be so lacking in meaning that I would never leave my house, Clichés, as we know, are safe.