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Before I go too far into the misty abyss of abstraction and dancing shadows of my own mind, it’s important that I restate the basic purpose of these essays, in effect to tether myself to something simple and concrete, grounded in the reality of everyday experience, as Eric Cartman famously did before entering the smug-filled city of San Francisco where people are lost in the vapor of their own farts. I like learning things. The problem is often that I’m not sure how much I actually understood. I can read a book and feel I’ve made total sense of it, but ask me to explain what I got in a few crisp sentences, and I fall apart. That’s not necessarily to say that I didn’t get anything from it, but that whatever it was is still in gaseous form, not yet distilled into something you can put in a mason jar and share. Of course, when it’s in that gassy form, there can also seem to be much more of it than I’ll get from the drip. In other words, half the time I know what I mean but I can’t say it, and the other half I have no clue what’s going on.
The purpose of this blog is to force me to articulate my thoughts. In doing so, I get a chance to see if they make sense. In the process of writing something down, I realize that some of it is nonsense, some of it is interesting but requires a lot more consideration and a few things are ready to taste. Furthermore, doing it in public gives whoever has fewer meaningful ways of occupying their time than even I do, a chance to point out the faulty reasoning that will inevitably slip through.
My basic assumptions that I need to set down before I can get down to business are borrowed from that Korzybski line about the map not being the territory. Whatever we experience is a representation of an objective thing (to borrow Schopenhauer’s terms) filtered through a subject. It’s a map. A metaphor that has to choose which things to exclude, which to include. What I’m asking myself are things like: Do the maps I use facilitate navigation? Are there better maps I could try in certain situations? Other angles from which to view problems that illuminate them in different ways? And by problems and navigation I mean the general stumble and fumble of everyday decision-making and interaction with the rest of the world. That sounds pretty abstract, but really it’s pretty empirical. If I come up with a system for counting cards in blackjack based on assigning characters from The Iliad to each card, I can throw down some money and see if I walk away rich. If I’m frustrated with the way that city administrators administer, I can check a few maps to see if it makes sense of their actions and yields predictable results, even if those results are just to give me a sense of how a decision someone else makes might affect my daily get-around. Which is to say, I can learn things and use that knowledge to improve my decisions. There’s my anchor and my rope. If I can’t find my way back to that, gimme a yank and save me from the smell of my own flatulence.
There’s a little work to do at base camp, though. If I want to figure out the process by which I make up my mind, I first have to ask myself, what mind? Is that even a thing? I know the brain is the basic organ of the nervous system, or at least I’m willing to believe it more than I’m willing to drill holes in my head to test the thesis, but what is the basic organ of experience? The brain is physical. Mental phenomenon are not. Is there a way to think about the thoughts and movies that play through my head and the stimuli that produce them without having to resort to the thought-stopper “chemical reactions”? None of that to discredit the study of the human brain, a fascinating topic. I just don’t happen to resort to O-chem and endocrinology when I’m deciding what to do with my evening. It’s a good map, for someone else, in certain situations.
I’ll differentiate between the physical phenomena of the brain and the conscious and unconscious mental processes that tell me “order pizza” by calling the second one “mind.” I’m not a big fan of the Cartesian split and happen to think they’re inseparable, but it’s easier to talk about in the way that I want to if we leave brains and the bodies that contain them behind at base camp. Another clarification that’s necessary at this point is that “mind” is not the same thing as “consciousness.” The latter has been debated for centuries and is nearly impossible to define, not to mention it causes a lot of ranting and raving that effectively kills productive dialogue any time it’s even speculated that something other than Man might have the thing. So no consciousness. Mind. It’s different. How? I’m going to let Gregory Bateson field that one, as he did in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, which is a book about systems theory or philosophy or cybernetics or ethology or insanity or whatever you want to call it. In that book, he lists six criteria, and states that “if any aggregate of phenomena, any system, satisfies all the criteria listed, I shall unhesitatingly say that the aggregate is a mind and shall expect that, if I am to understand that aggregate, I shall need sorts of explanation different from those which would suffice to explain the characteristics of its smaller parts.” Note the seed of an important reference to the hierarchy of logical types has been sown. He adds that, ““thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning, and the like occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria.” Let’s see if I can make heads or tails of each rule.
1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
OK, easy enough. Sounds like what we might call a system. But not just a pile. Organization and interaction are critical to this aggregate. Still, that’s broad enough to include a lot of things that don’t make sense as minds, and in fact we’ll exclude with one or more of the other criteria. Take a car engine, for example. Lots of interacting parts that constitute a whole, the engine. They’re in a certain order. They move and stuff. That satisfies the first criterion, but spoiler alert: it won’t go much farther. On the other hand, you are also such an aggregate, made of cells, which make up organ systems, the interaction of which make a living person.
The second thing we need to note about this aggregate is that any of the parts may also meet all six criteria to qualify as a mind, or sub-mind if you prefer (I don’t). Or they might not. Or some of them do, and others don’t. Eventually, as you go down into the parts of the parts of the parts, you should reach a level where none of the parts are a mind. Bateson’s example is subatomic particles. Many minds are made of them, but they fail a number of the qualifications. That’s important, because mind needs to stop somewhere, otherwise we fall into “all is mind” and any further discussion that attempts to learn anything from mind suffers from a lack of anything to compare it to.
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial* phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy(2) and entropy(1) rather than to energy.
*meaning not a material substance, as opposed to “insignificant”
1. Entropy – The degree to which relation between the components of any aggregate are mixed up, unsorted, undifferentiated, unpredictable, and random.
2. Negentropy – the degree of ordering or sorting or predictability in an aggregate.
That’s more of a mouthful. I’ll take it apart by clarifying what “difference” means, then it might be easier to see how that thing results in interaction within a mind. First, difference is not located in time or space. Yeah, you spot when something is different using time and space, but “difference” is not a physical or temporal thing. As with the member of a class that cannot also be the class itself, a particular example of difference can’t be the entire class of things called “difference.” In Mind and Nature, “information” is defined as a difference that makes a difference. This difference would cause some part in the system to register that event and change, which of course affects the whole system.
Bateson points out a key difference between matter and mind. In matter, let’s say a cluster of pool balls on a table, change is produced by a cause like a cue ball slamming into the cluster, transferring energy. In mind, it isn’t cause that triggers change, but relationships. This relationship can be between two different parts, or the same part at two different times, but it takes two. The difference, if it crosses a threshold above which it can register, produces a change in the part or parts, which changes the system. I’m reminded of certain game shows where two contestants are shown a very blurry picture that slowly crystallizes, and the first to recognize the object wins a new car or a set of silverware. In the blurriest stage, it’s very hard to detect lines and differences. As the differences become more numerous, the image becomes sharper and eventually the mind can relate it to some formal object it recognizes. Before anyone pushes their glasses back up on their nose as says, “Well, actually, there are far more ‘lines’ in a blurry image of a square than the clear square,” I’ll point out that these differences need to register, and in a blurry image they are probably too small, which is where the optical effect of blurring comes from.
This part of criterion 2—the requirement for relationships and difference to cause change instead of something like energy—pretty effectively eliminates most inorganic systems. There are a few that would qualify under certain circumstances, but they fail other criteria pretty quickly. Interesting that even a complex inorganic system seems incapable of noticing and responding to changes of relationship. My mind catches and adjusts to the changing image, but the pool balls don’t care about things like distance from or velocity of another pool ball. They respond to the energy transferred in collision and the friction of the table. A sensory system can’t operate with something unchanging, or changing at an imperceptible rate. It needs to “see” movement, or move itself relative to the second thing.
There are even countless organic examples of change produced due to the absence of something needed or expected. The dark triggers changes in most living things, but dark isn’t an energy or a thing. It’s the relative absence of photons. If I expect the person I’m meeting to show up at the restaurant at 1:00 pm and they are still absent at 1:20, it might trigger a caustic text message. No energy was required to produce absence. It was a difference over time—not yet above the threshold at 1:03 but well there at 1:20.
William Blake, noted poet who made a living creating etchings and engraving for printers, said, “Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them.” (He also at one point said the same thing but substituted “mad men” for “wise men,” which seems consistent). That outline that we see is the line of difference between, say, a shoulder and the sky behind it. Draw yourself a circle on a sheet of very white paper. What you’ll see is the line, and that alone. We can’t actually “see” the undifferentiated whiteness in either the center or the outside. Maybe if you look closely you’ll pick up small discoloration or pitting in the paper, but that again is a difference. The homogenous parts are more or less filled in by the imagination.
It’s important to note that there’s a threshold below which change is imperceptible—true of any receiving mind, and certainly our five senses. At a point, we can’t tell the difference between slow change and steady state. Not until it crosses a threshold, and if that change is strongly undesirable, the window of opportunity for stalling or reversing it may have already closed. On the flip side, what might look like rapid, obvious changes could be one part acting in a system that is cyclical in nature. So while each part looks like it is changing and strongly affecting each other part, the whole system runs in a cycle that reliably repeats itself. In other words, the system itself is in a steady state if left alone, and requires no naive intervention.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
Collateral energy is easy enough to distinguish from the pool ball energy, which we can think of in terms of the basic laws of motion. A ball strikes another ball, and the second one rolls away commensurate in speed and direction with the impact. That’s just Newton. If the ball then dusted itself off, marched back over, and punched the cue ball in the face, that would be collateral energy. It responded to the difference using energy already present in the system, possibly caloric energy gained from eating quarters.
An example Bateson offers of a mechanical system responding with collateral energy is turning on the bathroom sink. I used my energy to open the faucet, but the energy that makes the water run, whether from gravity or a pump, was already present in the system. I didn’t create it, I just gave it a difference it could respond to. Whether or not that water system meets the other criteria of mind is another debate, but it passes for number 3.
To return to a previous essay on the way metaphors can induce a change in the system, Bateson offers the personification of a mountain. If I describe a mountain as a fair lady, it’s unlikely to notice or care or change with collateral energy. Not to knock the fair lady, maybe she would if I could offer a greater stimulus, but as it stands we don’t pass the litmus test. On the other hand, if I mountainify a human, comparing his qualities to that of a mountain within earshot, he may very swell stand up taller and puff out his chest with pride, maybe even gouge out his enemy’s eyes, using his own energy for the demonstration.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
First, Bateson points out that the mental process itself is a logical type higher than these chains of determination that create it. The hive exists on a higher order than any of the bees—it’s the sum relationships of all of the bees.
There are a few different ways to achieve stability. Our mountain in the previous metaphor avoids me changing her into a fair lady, or carving one into her sides, by sheer force of resistance to change. It would appear that the mountain can either be successful, and avoid change, or unsuccessful, and have change thrust upon it. Organic systems like the bee hive tend to deal with change by adapting to it or redirecting it. How they do it depends on the change, but the parts (bees) will respond with collateral energy to differences in relationship between each other and their environment, which is a chain of determination that hopefully leaves the hive in a steady state. The buzzing bee may never appear to be in a steady state, but all of this change within the system hopefully puts the whole into a steady state. In the case of adaptation, change is too strong to resist or redirect, so the first steady state is abandoned and reworked into a new kind of steady state that can maintain itself under the new conditions. “Steady state” refers to the system, not the parts. For a bee, a steady state would be its body systems working frantically to maintain homeostasis.
In any kind of steady state mind system, we should be able to find the components of that system working very hard to maintain zero change at the higher order. The higher order will always prefer that the lower order work for it, not the other way around. Individual bees live out their lifespan and die, but the hive is maintained. Lower order things are sacrificed for the preservation of stability in the higher order. Bateson points out that whole species might go extinct, having overshot the resource base of a particular ecosystem, and the extinction allows the ecosystem (which includes all other species still alive in it) to regain an equilibrium.
This process of a species multiplying itself unchecked until it is destroyed can be called a positive feedback loop, or runaway (ecologists call it overshoot). Bateson notes that some runaway systems may in fact contain negative feedbacks designed to restore balance that don’t necessarily strike us as such. An epidemic that kills a large number of individuals can bring an overgrown population back under control, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Unsavory, but left unchecked, this positive feedback may have ended in a more catastrophic negative feedback, or an extinction. I would add that you could argue a negative feedback always happens, though sometimes the runaway at one level is complete and the backhand occurs at a higher order.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events which proceeded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content) but are themselves subject to transformation.
Instead of “cause and effect,” in mental processes, we have “difference and transform”. Or maybe transform is better thought of as the difference between “difference and the new state it brings about”. The transformations are not random, just as the way the pool balls break is nonrandom, but while the laws of motion aren’t likely to change any time soon, the rules of transformation can change as long as they are generally more stable than the things that produce transformation. I know, what the hell does that mean? This is, to my mind, the hardest of the criteria to grasp and I’m not sure if I have it, so let me go a little deeper and see what clicks.
Bateson notes that anything can produce information (difference that makes a difference) if it can be incorporated into a circuit in which it can produce change. So, anything can become a part of a “mind” as long as it introduces a change that is perceived by another part and has consequences. Let’s say the “d” key on my laptop is sticky and I keep typing “an” instead of “and,” and it annoys me every time I catch it. I’m not saying my laptop qualifies as a mind—my keyboard certainly doesn’t—but it can become incorporated into my mental circuit, producing changes in my mood and behavior each time it registers the difference between “an” an “and”. At this point, it might be useful to change the name of this mind from Me, to Me-laptop, to denote that consequential differences in the second thing have become a part of my mind’s feedback system. It will stay that way until I stop paying attention to it. Until then, those differences produce transforms of the event preceding, the sticking of the “d” key.
In systems involving collateral energy, i.e. minds, the transforms are not necessarily linear. Eventually, I may get angry at the sticky key an smash the laptop on the corner of my desk until its guts spill across the room. So the rules of transformation changed a little, from annoyance to rage. It wasn’t a purely energetic cause and effect. The difference causes the system to go farther and farther out of equilibrium until a threshold was crossed and something out of proportion with any one of the changes occurred. Once I sweep it up, the laptop will no longer be a component of Me, at least until I notice the absence of a computer in my life.
Changes can be analog or digital. Analog is related to quantity and gradation, while digital is related to number and on-off switches. In an analog change, the transform will move more gradually, probably proportionate to the difference, and the gradation can be of any size. If I slowly get angrier and angrier, that might be an analog change. How many numbers are between 0 and 1? If we allow decimals, we can think of quite a few: 0.0001, 0.0002, 0.00021, etc. to an infinite numbers of decimal places. That is quantity, gradation, analog.
Digital is the binary number system. It is a 1 or a 0. There are no other options. Turn the light on, or turn it off. None of that creepy mood lighting. For the laptop example to have been digital, I would have had to smash the computer the moment I perceived a difference in the stickiness of the “d” key. In number, we have 1, 2, 3, 4…only wholes. If you brought 11 ½ donuts to the break room at work, you brought 11 donuts. My instinct is that whether or not a change is analog or digital depends on what order you look at. My gradual annoyance may have been analog on the level of the whole, but I’m sure there was a system at work in me that didn’t fire at all until it did, and that difference caused the reaction up the chain.
Mental process being composed of difference and coded versions of that difference means that we communicate in parts, and have to guess at the whole. You might see my upper lip raise, and my brow furrow. What is not given to you is an uncoded, entirely plaintext sensation of how I am feeling, what state of mind I am in. If you’re accustomed to reading people’s body language, you might guess from those parts that I am frustrated about something, and may even have an idea of the something, but what you have is a map, not the territory. You have a transformed version of a whole that cannot be communicated. As my body language cues mount, you may even guess that I am irate and that I’m liable to smash the computer. What you are actually seeing is another set of behaviors, or parts, that when taken together, remind you of this concept that we call “anger”. It isn’t the anger itself—just as you can’t experience the non-physical concept “difference,” but perceive it in changes over time. Even if I could convince you to be just as angry as I am, the communication is not absolute, in wholes. You can never have total knowledge of the territory, only a very good map. Effective communication depends on our ability to produce and perceive differences that are easily coded into wholes that make sense in context. I am drawing a map, or unblurring an image, but you still need to guess the bigger picture.
Further, our idea of who one another are is a guessed-at whole constructed from difference. I might take a survey of your words, your body language, your actions, things you tell me about your history, things other say, and continually attempt to unblur an image that can never be precisely clear. I can’t possibly know another mind directly, only as an educated guess from incomplete strands of code. Whether or not I’m able to guess well enough to have productive interactions with you is the same concern I have when using a map to navigate. I know this map isn’t the place, but hopefully the coded information corresponds well enough that I don’t end up with any nasty surprises, and that depends on the relationship between the map and the navigator.
6. The description and classifications of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types inherent in the phenomena.
As information is transformed by the receiver—let’s say, a certain facial expression is transformed into “that guy is angry”—we start to notice that messages and learning occur across different logical types, or orders. He is angry, but why? What is the context of his anger, and how does that affect your reaction? If in addition to the telltale sings of anger you also notice a large red curtain drawn to either side of a stage, bright lights, and an audience, you might realize that the context of his anger is that his character in the play just got slapped by another character, and your reaction could be laughter. If the same expression appeared on the face of man in the street who was staring right at you, and you either could not pick up on the context, or maybe it was that you just backed over his dog while trying to parallel park, your reaction might be very different. Actually, obvious anger is a combination of a number of facial movements, each of which are messages, and taken as a whole, they form the metamessage of anger—a message about how to code messages. We also have context and metacontexts, learning and metalearning, etc., with several levels existing at each of these. A red X on a map is code for buried treasure, any good pirate knows that. But that’s because they understand how to code that message and place it in context of the way that pirates represent treasure caches on maps.
A few more examples to illustrate the difference between logical types, this time with regards to learning. Rats like to explore. If you put a rat in a maze littered with small boxes, which contain either nothing, cheese, or a small electric shock, the rat will poke his nose into boxes. If the first few deliver a shock, he will not stop poking his nose into future boxes. Only the ones that shocked him. Why? It might seem to an observer that rats don’t learn about the general, only the particular. But that’s a mistake of context. For the rat, the context is exploration, not “finding cheese in this box,” or “pain avoidance.” In exploring, learning where not to go, what not to do, is just as valuable as finding a reward. Exploration only fails if you sit still. So a little shock is a small price to pay for a valuable bit of information. Learning occurs both at the lower order (don’t go here) and a higher one (exploring to map the area). Bateson says that for the same reason, punishing a specific action in a class of behavior called “crime” does nothing to cure criminals, because it is an error of logical type—the context was not considered.
Or we can consider one of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs. A dog is shown a picture of a circle and a picture of an ellipse, and taught that he will be rewarded if he points out the circle. After he gets good at this, maybe a little cocky, a new set of pictures are shown in which the circle is made marginally more elliptical, and the ellipse marginally more circular. For a while he does fine, but as they converge on a single shape, once the difference is no longer readily apparent, the dog will start to lose his mind, whether by getting angry, having a whimpering breakdown, or whatever might be the case according to his character. What messages about messages are occurring here, besides the reader learning that Pavlov really shouldn’t be allowed to keep pets?
When a dog first has difficulty telling the shapes apart, and is essentially guessing at them, failure doesn’t bother him. If you show him two identical circles from the get-go, reward for only one of them, and continue to show identical circles, he will just guess but he won’t lose his marbles. What did he learn, other than the difference between an ellipse and a circle? He learned that this was a context for discrimination. He expected a situation in which he should and could tell two things apart and be rewarded for it. The context shifted to a context for guessing, but the dog was unable to make that shift. The shapes were messages, but so was the room, the trainer, the reward, the way he was lead from his cage at a certain time in a certain way, etc. He learned on a few levels how to respond appropriately, and then the context changed while the messages remained almost entirely the same. Imagine if someone led you into your standard high school classroom, handed you what you thought was a particularly easy multiple choice test, then returned an F because you were supposed to cut out the letters and make as many English words as possible using A, B, C, and D by pasting them to the test paper.
This kind of error of logical type—punishing a mistake in action when the mistake was actually in context—creates a double bind, the term Bateson gives to a contradiction of logical types that he believes leads to schizophrenia at certain magnitudes or levels of repetition.
Summary
A mind is influenced by the map, not the territory. It receives messages, not wholes, and must transform these (at many levels) into something that informs action. It’s generalization never “proves” anything about that territory, as the name is not the thing named.
Two characteristics of mind Bateson offers are autonomy and death. Autonomy is control of the self, and its metamessages give information about the whole system function by communicating about the next-lowest level. If you feel energetic and strong, you might consider that a message about the health of the organ systems that maintain you. Though I assume that, since we get messages and not wholes, the information about a whole system is received in relation to that system as a part of a larger context (i.e. a higher order system). Death, on the other hand, is the disordering of either the parts (criterion 1) or the circuit (criterion 4).
A few additional takeaways: a mind is capable of storing energy (criterion 3). It can appear in a steady state, a runaway, or some combination (criterion 4). It is capable of purpose and choice by the possibility of self-correction. It’s capable of uniting with other systems to make a larger whole, as when information is coded between two minds, or a mind and a non-mind. And it learns, remembers, and builds (negentropy) through stochastic games such as empiricism.
Now remember that we are talking about mind, a class of mental phenonema, not consciousness. Mind is also not a literal, physical brain, though if it has a brain you can bet it has mind. Whether or not a single-celled organism or a very intelligent computer qualifies would be an interesting debate, and would hinge on that particular thing meeting all six criteria. Most if not all life qualifies, but where it gets interesting is that so do other aggregates we tend to think of as mindless. The bee is a mind, but so is the hive—one of a higher order. So is the species Apis mellifera, the western honey bee as a whole. The ecosystem of a lake does not have a brain, and I don’t care to guess at consciousness, but it meets all the criteria of a mind that you and I do.
Of course, no one is required to agree with Bateson’s six criteria. We could easily add, subtract, or deny the existence of anything like mind altogether. As far as I’m concerned, his system is a map. An approximation of an unknown territory, no more right or wrong that any other, but it allows for a certain kind of navigation, and if that navigation yields fruitful results, then I won’t sweat it if the paper map I’m standing on is not the city of New Orleans itself but a limited representation that allows me to more or less find my way around. Now that the map is laid out, the next step is to test it to see if it reveals any interesting perspectives that I couldn’t get from some other map. If so, I keep it. Use it when needed. If not, it goes. That, as I said, is my lifeline to the territory.
The purpose of this blog is to force me to articulate my thoughts. In doing so, I get a chance to see if they make sense. In the process of writing something down, I realize that some of it is nonsense, some of it is interesting but requires a lot more consideration and a few things are ready to taste. Furthermore, doing it in public gives whoever has fewer meaningful ways of occupying their time than even I do, a chance to point out the faulty reasoning that will inevitably slip through.
My basic assumptions that I need to set down before I can get down to business are borrowed from that Korzybski line about the map not being the territory. Whatever we experience is a representation of an objective thing (to borrow Schopenhauer’s terms) filtered through a subject. It’s a map. A metaphor that has to choose which things to exclude, which to include. What I’m asking myself are things like: Do the maps I use facilitate navigation? Are there better maps I could try in certain situations? Other angles from which to view problems that illuminate them in different ways? And by problems and navigation I mean the general stumble and fumble of everyday decision-making and interaction with the rest of the world. That sounds pretty abstract, but really it’s pretty empirical. If I come up with a system for counting cards in blackjack based on assigning characters from The Iliad to each card, I can throw down some money and see if I walk away rich. If I’m frustrated with the way that city administrators administer, I can check a few maps to see if it makes sense of their actions and yields predictable results, even if those results are just to give me a sense of how a decision someone else makes might affect my daily get-around. Which is to say, I can learn things and use that knowledge to improve my decisions. There’s my anchor and my rope. If I can’t find my way back to that, gimme a yank and save me from the smell of my own flatulence.
There’s a little work to do at base camp, though. If I want to figure out the process by which I make up my mind, I first have to ask myself, what mind? Is that even a thing? I know the brain is the basic organ of the nervous system, or at least I’m willing to believe it more than I’m willing to drill holes in my head to test the thesis, but what is the basic organ of experience? The brain is physical. Mental phenomenon are not. Is there a way to think about the thoughts and movies that play through my head and the stimuli that produce them without having to resort to the thought-stopper “chemical reactions”? None of that to discredit the study of the human brain, a fascinating topic. I just don’t happen to resort to O-chem and endocrinology when I’m deciding what to do with my evening. It’s a good map, for someone else, in certain situations.
I’ll differentiate between the physical phenomena of the brain and the conscious and unconscious mental processes that tell me “order pizza” by calling the second one “mind.” I’m not a big fan of the Cartesian split and happen to think they’re inseparable, but it’s easier to talk about in the way that I want to if we leave brains and the bodies that contain them behind at base camp. Another clarification that’s necessary at this point is that “mind” is not the same thing as “consciousness.” The latter has been debated for centuries and is nearly impossible to define, not to mention it causes a lot of ranting and raving that effectively kills productive dialogue any time it’s even speculated that something other than Man might have the thing. So no consciousness. Mind. It’s different. How? I’m going to let Gregory Bateson field that one, as he did in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, which is a book about systems theory or philosophy or cybernetics or ethology or insanity or whatever you want to call it. In that book, he lists six criteria, and states that “if any aggregate of phenomena, any system, satisfies all the criteria listed, I shall unhesitatingly say that the aggregate is a mind and shall expect that, if I am to understand that aggregate, I shall need sorts of explanation different from those which would suffice to explain the characteristics of its smaller parts.” Note the seed of an important reference to the hierarchy of logical types has been sown. He adds that, ““thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning, and the like occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria.” Let’s see if I can make heads or tails of each rule.
1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
OK, easy enough. Sounds like what we might call a system. But not just a pile. Organization and interaction are critical to this aggregate. Still, that’s broad enough to include a lot of things that don’t make sense as minds, and in fact we’ll exclude with one or more of the other criteria. Take a car engine, for example. Lots of interacting parts that constitute a whole, the engine. They’re in a certain order. They move and stuff. That satisfies the first criterion, but spoiler alert: it won’t go much farther. On the other hand, you are also such an aggregate, made of cells, which make up organ systems, the interaction of which make a living person.
The second thing we need to note about this aggregate is that any of the parts may also meet all six criteria to qualify as a mind, or sub-mind if you prefer (I don’t). Or they might not. Or some of them do, and others don’t. Eventually, as you go down into the parts of the parts of the parts, you should reach a level where none of the parts are a mind. Bateson’s example is subatomic particles. Many minds are made of them, but they fail a number of the qualifications. That’s important, because mind needs to stop somewhere, otherwise we fall into “all is mind” and any further discussion that attempts to learn anything from mind suffers from a lack of anything to compare it to.
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial* phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy(2) and entropy(1) rather than to energy.
*meaning not a material substance, as opposed to “insignificant”
1. Entropy – The degree to which relation between the components of any aggregate are mixed up, unsorted, undifferentiated, unpredictable, and random.
2. Negentropy – the degree of ordering or sorting or predictability in an aggregate.
That’s more of a mouthful. I’ll take it apart by clarifying what “difference” means, then it might be easier to see how that thing results in interaction within a mind. First, difference is not located in time or space. Yeah, you spot when something is different using time and space, but “difference” is not a physical or temporal thing. As with the member of a class that cannot also be the class itself, a particular example of difference can’t be the entire class of things called “difference.” In Mind and Nature, “information” is defined as a difference that makes a difference. This difference would cause some part in the system to register that event and change, which of course affects the whole system.
Bateson points out a key difference between matter and mind. In matter, let’s say a cluster of pool balls on a table, change is produced by a cause like a cue ball slamming into the cluster, transferring energy. In mind, it isn’t cause that triggers change, but relationships. This relationship can be between two different parts, or the same part at two different times, but it takes two. The difference, if it crosses a threshold above which it can register, produces a change in the part or parts, which changes the system. I’m reminded of certain game shows where two contestants are shown a very blurry picture that slowly crystallizes, and the first to recognize the object wins a new car or a set of silverware. In the blurriest stage, it’s very hard to detect lines and differences. As the differences become more numerous, the image becomes sharper and eventually the mind can relate it to some formal object it recognizes. Before anyone pushes their glasses back up on their nose as says, “Well, actually, there are far more ‘lines’ in a blurry image of a square than the clear square,” I’ll point out that these differences need to register, and in a blurry image they are probably too small, which is where the optical effect of blurring comes from.
This part of criterion 2—the requirement for relationships and difference to cause change instead of something like energy—pretty effectively eliminates most inorganic systems. There are a few that would qualify under certain circumstances, but they fail other criteria pretty quickly. Interesting that even a complex inorganic system seems incapable of noticing and responding to changes of relationship. My mind catches and adjusts to the changing image, but the pool balls don’t care about things like distance from or velocity of another pool ball. They respond to the energy transferred in collision and the friction of the table. A sensory system can’t operate with something unchanging, or changing at an imperceptible rate. It needs to “see” movement, or move itself relative to the second thing.
There are even countless organic examples of change produced due to the absence of something needed or expected. The dark triggers changes in most living things, but dark isn’t an energy or a thing. It’s the relative absence of photons. If I expect the person I’m meeting to show up at the restaurant at 1:00 pm and they are still absent at 1:20, it might trigger a caustic text message. No energy was required to produce absence. It was a difference over time—not yet above the threshold at 1:03 but well there at 1:20.
William Blake, noted poet who made a living creating etchings and engraving for printers, said, “Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them.” (He also at one point said the same thing but substituted “mad men” for “wise men,” which seems consistent). That outline that we see is the line of difference between, say, a shoulder and the sky behind it. Draw yourself a circle on a sheet of very white paper. What you’ll see is the line, and that alone. We can’t actually “see” the undifferentiated whiteness in either the center or the outside. Maybe if you look closely you’ll pick up small discoloration or pitting in the paper, but that again is a difference. The homogenous parts are more or less filled in by the imagination.
It’s important to note that there’s a threshold below which change is imperceptible—true of any receiving mind, and certainly our five senses. At a point, we can’t tell the difference between slow change and steady state. Not until it crosses a threshold, and if that change is strongly undesirable, the window of opportunity for stalling or reversing it may have already closed. On the flip side, what might look like rapid, obvious changes could be one part acting in a system that is cyclical in nature. So while each part looks like it is changing and strongly affecting each other part, the whole system runs in a cycle that reliably repeats itself. In other words, the system itself is in a steady state if left alone, and requires no naive intervention.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
Collateral energy is easy enough to distinguish from the pool ball energy, which we can think of in terms of the basic laws of motion. A ball strikes another ball, and the second one rolls away commensurate in speed and direction with the impact. That’s just Newton. If the ball then dusted itself off, marched back over, and punched the cue ball in the face, that would be collateral energy. It responded to the difference using energy already present in the system, possibly caloric energy gained from eating quarters.
An example Bateson offers of a mechanical system responding with collateral energy is turning on the bathroom sink. I used my energy to open the faucet, but the energy that makes the water run, whether from gravity or a pump, was already present in the system. I didn’t create it, I just gave it a difference it could respond to. Whether or not that water system meets the other criteria of mind is another debate, but it passes for number 3.
To return to a previous essay on the way metaphors can induce a change in the system, Bateson offers the personification of a mountain. If I describe a mountain as a fair lady, it’s unlikely to notice or care or change with collateral energy. Not to knock the fair lady, maybe she would if I could offer a greater stimulus, but as it stands we don’t pass the litmus test. On the other hand, if I mountainify a human, comparing his qualities to that of a mountain within earshot, he may very swell stand up taller and puff out his chest with pride, maybe even gouge out his enemy’s eyes, using his own energy for the demonstration.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
First, Bateson points out that the mental process itself is a logical type higher than these chains of determination that create it. The hive exists on a higher order than any of the bees—it’s the sum relationships of all of the bees.
There are a few different ways to achieve stability. Our mountain in the previous metaphor avoids me changing her into a fair lady, or carving one into her sides, by sheer force of resistance to change. It would appear that the mountain can either be successful, and avoid change, or unsuccessful, and have change thrust upon it. Organic systems like the bee hive tend to deal with change by adapting to it or redirecting it. How they do it depends on the change, but the parts (bees) will respond with collateral energy to differences in relationship between each other and their environment, which is a chain of determination that hopefully leaves the hive in a steady state. The buzzing bee may never appear to be in a steady state, but all of this change within the system hopefully puts the whole into a steady state. In the case of adaptation, change is too strong to resist or redirect, so the first steady state is abandoned and reworked into a new kind of steady state that can maintain itself under the new conditions. “Steady state” refers to the system, not the parts. For a bee, a steady state would be its body systems working frantically to maintain homeostasis.
In any kind of steady state mind system, we should be able to find the components of that system working very hard to maintain zero change at the higher order. The higher order will always prefer that the lower order work for it, not the other way around. Individual bees live out their lifespan and die, but the hive is maintained. Lower order things are sacrificed for the preservation of stability in the higher order. Bateson points out that whole species might go extinct, having overshot the resource base of a particular ecosystem, and the extinction allows the ecosystem (which includes all other species still alive in it) to regain an equilibrium.
This process of a species multiplying itself unchecked until it is destroyed can be called a positive feedback loop, or runaway (ecologists call it overshoot). Bateson notes that some runaway systems may in fact contain negative feedbacks designed to restore balance that don’t necessarily strike us as such. An epidemic that kills a large number of individuals can bring an overgrown population back under control, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Unsavory, but left unchecked, this positive feedback may have ended in a more catastrophic negative feedback, or an extinction. I would add that you could argue a negative feedback always happens, though sometimes the runaway at one level is complete and the backhand occurs at a higher order.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events which proceeded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content) but are themselves subject to transformation.
Instead of “cause and effect,” in mental processes, we have “difference and transform”. Or maybe transform is better thought of as the difference between “difference and the new state it brings about”. The transformations are not random, just as the way the pool balls break is nonrandom, but while the laws of motion aren’t likely to change any time soon, the rules of transformation can change as long as they are generally more stable than the things that produce transformation. I know, what the hell does that mean? This is, to my mind, the hardest of the criteria to grasp and I’m not sure if I have it, so let me go a little deeper and see what clicks.
Bateson notes that anything can produce information (difference that makes a difference) if it can be incorporated into a circuit in which it can produce change. So, anything can become a part of a “mind” as long as it introduces a change that is perceived by another part and has consequences. Let’s say the “d” key on my laptop is sticky and I keep typing “an” instead of “and,” and it annoys me every time I catch it. I’m not saying my laptop qualifies as a mind—my keyboard certainly doesn’t—but it can become incorporated into my mental circuit, producing changes in my mood and behavior each time it registers the difference between “an” an “and”. At this point, it might be useful to change the name of this mind from Me, to Me-laptop, to denote that consequential differences in the second thing have become a part of my mind’s feedback system. It will stay that way until I stop paying attention to it. Until then, those differences produce transforms of the event preceding, the sticking of the “d” key.
In systems involving collateral energy, i.e. minds, the transforms are not necessarily linear. Eventually, I may get angry at the sticky key an smash the laptop on the corner of my desk until its guts spill across the room. So the rules of transformation changed a little, from annoyance to rage. It wasn’t a purely energetic cause and effect. The difference causes the system to go farther and farther out of equilibrium until a threshold was crossed and something out of proportion with any one of the changes occurred. Once I sweep it up, the laptop will no longer be a component of Me, at least until I notice the absence of a computer in my life.
Changes can be analog or digital. Analog is related to quantity and gradation, while digital is related to number and on-off switches. In an analog change, the transform will move more gradually, probably proportionate to the difference, and the gradation can be of any size. If I slowly get angrier and angrier, that might be an analog change. How many numbers are between 0 and 1? If we allow decimals, we can think of quite a few: 0.0001, 0.0002, 0.00021, etc. to an infinite numbers of decimal places. That is quantity, gradation, analog.
Digital is the binary number system. It is a 1 or a 0. There are no other options. Turn the light on, or turn it off. None of that creepy mood lighting. For the laptop example to have been digital, I would have had to smash the computer the moment I perceived a difference in the stickiness of the “d” key. In number, we have 1, 2, 3, 4…only wholes. If you brought 11 ½ donuts to the break room at work, you brought 11 donuts. My instinct is that whether or not a change is analog or digital depends on what order you look at. My gradual annoyance may have been analog on the level of the whole, but I’m sure there was a system at work in me that didn’t fire at all until it did, and that difference caused the reaction up the chain.
Mental process being composed of difference and coded versions of that difference means that we communicate in parts, and have to guess at the whole. You might see my upper lip raise, and my brow furrow. What is not given to you is an uncoded, entirely plaintext sensation of how I am feeling, what state of mind I am in. If you’re accustomed to reading people’s body language, you might guess from those parts that I am frustrated about something, and may even have an idea of the something, but what you have is a map, not the territory. You have a transformed version of a whole that cannot be communicated. As my body language cues mount, you may even guess that I am irate and that I’m liable to smash the computer. What you are actually seeing is another set of behaviors, or parts, that when taken together, remind you of this concept that we call “anger”. It isn’t the anger itself—just as you can’t experience the non-physical concept “difference,” but perceive it in changes over time. Even if I could convince you to be just as angry as I am, the communication is not absolute, in wholes. You can never have total knowledge of the territory, only a very good map. Effective communication depends on our ability to produce and perceive differences that are easily coded into wholes that make sense in context. I am drawing a map, or unblurring an image, but you still need to guess the bigger picture.
Further, our idea of who one another are is a guessed-at whole constructed from difference. I might take a survey of your words, your body language, your actions, things you tell me about your history, things other say, and continually attempt to unblur an image that can never be precisely clear. I can’t possibly know another mind directly, only as an educated guess from incomplete strands of code. Whether or not I’m able to guess well enough to have productive interactions with you is the same concern I have when using a map to navigate. I know this map isn’t the place, but hopefully the coded information corresponds well enough that I don’t end up with any nasty surprises, and that depends on the relationship between the map and the navigator.
6. The description and classifications of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types inherent in the phenomena.
As information is transformed by the receiver—let’s say, a certain facial expression is transformed into “that guy is angry”—we start to notice that messages and learning occur across different logical types, or orders. He is angry, but why? What is the context of his anger, and how does that affect your reaction? If in addition to the telltale sings of anger you also notice a large red curtain drawn to either side of a stage, bright lights, and an audience, you might realize that the context of his anger is that his character in the play just got slapped by another character, and your reaction could be laughter. If the same expression appeared on the face of man in the street who was staring right at you, and you either could not pick up on the context, or maybe it was that you just backed over his dog while trying to parallel park, your reaction might be very different. Actually, obvious anger is a combination of a number of facial movements, each of which are messages, and taken as a whole, they form the metamessage of anger—a message about how to code messages. We also have context and metacontexts, learning and metalearning, etc., with several levels existing at each of these. A red X on a map is code for buried treasure, any good pirate knows that. But that’s because they understand how to code that message and place it in context of the way that pirates represent treasure caches on maps.
A few more examples to illustrate the difference between logical types, this time with regards to learning. Rats like to explore. If you put a rat in a maze littered with small boxes, which contain either nothing, cheese, or a small electric shock, the rat will poke his nose into boxes. If the first few deliver a shock, he will not stop poking his nose into future boxes. Only the ones that shocked him. Why? It might seem to an observer that rats don’t learn about the general, only the particular. But that’s a mistake of context. For the rat, the context is exploration, not “finding cheese in this box,” or “pain avoidance.” In exploring, learning where not to go, what not to do, is just as valuable as finding a reward. Exploration only fails if you sit still. So a little shock is a small price to pay for a valuable bit of information. Learning occurs both at the lower order (don’t go here) and a higher one (exploring to map the area). Bateson says that for the same reason, punishing a specific action in a class of behavior called “crime” does nothing to cure criminals, because it is an error of logical type—the context was not considered.
Or we can consider one of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs. A dog is shown a picture of a circle and a picture of an ellipse, and taught that he will be rewarded if he points out the circle. After he gets good at this, maybe a little cocky, a new set of pictures are shown in which the circle is made marginally more elliptical, and the ellipse marginally more circular. For a while he does fine, but as they converge on a single shape, once the difference is no longer readily apparent, the dog will start to lose his mind, whether by getting angry, having a whimpering breakdown, or whatever might be the case according to his character. What messages about messages are occurring here, besides the reader learning that Pavlov really shouldn’t be allowed to keep pets?
When a dog first has difficulty telling the shapes apart, and is essentially guessing at them, failure doesn’t bother him. If you show him two identical circles from the get-go, reward for only one of them, and continue to show identical circles, he will just guess but he won’t lose his marbles. What did he learn, other than the difference between an ellipse and a circle? He learned that this was a context for discrimination. He expected a situation in which he should and could tell two things apart and be rewarded for it. The context shifted to a context for guessing, but the dog was unable to make that shift. The shapes were messages, but so was the room, the trainer, the reward, the way he was lead from his cage at a certain time in a certain way, etc. He learned on a few levels how to respond appropriately, and then the context changed while the messages remained almost entirely the same. Imagine if someone led you into your standard high school classroom, handed you what you thought was a particularly easy multiple choice test, then returned an F because you were supposed to cut out the letters and make as many English words as possible using A, B, C, and D by pasting them to the test paper.
This kind of error of logical type—punishing a mistake in action when the mistake was actually in context—creates a double bind, the term Bateson gives to a contradiction of logical types that he believes leads to schizophrenia at certain magnitudes or levels of repetition.
Summary
A mind is influenced by the map, not the territory. It receives messages, not wholes, and must transform these (at many levels) into something that informs action. It’s generalization never “proves” anything about that territory, as the name is not the thing named.
Two characteristics of mind Bateson offers are autonomy and death. Autonomy is control of the self, and its metamessages give information about the whole system function by communicating about the next-lowest level. If you feel energetic and strong, you might consider that a message about the health of the organ systems that maintain you. Though I assume that, since we get messages and not wholes, the information about a whole system is received in relation to that system as a part of a larger context (i.e. a higher order system). Death, on the other hand, is the disordering of either the parts (criterion 1) or the circuit (criterion 4).
A few additional takeaways: a mind is capable of storing energy (criterion 3). It can appear in a steady state, a runaway, or some combination (criterion 4). It is capable of purpose and choice by the possibility of self-correction. It’s capable of uniting with other systems to make a larger whole, as when information is coded between two minds, or a mind and a non-mind. And it learns, remembers, and builds (negentropy) through stochastic games such as empiricism.
Now remember that we are talking about mind, a class of mental phenonema, not consciousness. Mind is also not a literal, physical brain, though if it has a brain you can bet it has mind. Whether or not a single-celled organism or a very intelligent computer qualifies would be an interesting debate, and would hinge on that particular thing meeting all six criteria. Most if not all life qualifies, but where it gets interesting is that so do other aggregates we tend to think of as mindless. The bee is a mind, but so is the hive—one of a higher order. So is the species Apis mellifera, the western honey bee as a whole. The ecosystem of a lake does not have a brain, and I don’t care to guess at consciousness, but it meets all the criteria of a mind that you and I do.
Of course, no one is required to agree with Bateson’s six criteria. We could easily add, subtract, or deny the existence of anything like mind altogether. As far as I’m concerned, his system is a map. An approximation of an unknown territory, no more right or wrong that any other, but it allows for a certain kind of navigation, and if that navigation yields fruitful results, then I won’t sweat it if the paper map I’m standing on is not the city of New Orleans itself but a limited representation that allows me to more or less find my way around. Now that the map is laid out, the next step is to test it to see if it reveals any interesting perspectives that I couldn’t get from some other map. If so, I keep it. Use it when needed. If not, it goes. That, as I said, is my lifeline to the territory.
