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Gregory Bateson



Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, ecologist, and influential thinker of the twentieth century. He was an original advocate of systems thinking and cybernetics and inventor of the double-bind concept in psychiatry. He taught and wrote on subjects ranging from anthropology and epistemology to biology and evolution and was interested in how ideas can be approached in an interdisciplinary way.

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Why Gregory Bateson Matters

Bateson worked at the interfaces between technology, environment, and individual psychology, and he grasped the specific dangers faced by society when these three forces are in conflict with each other.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageWe have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense.

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38:25

Nora Bateson Talks About Her Father, the Anthropologist Gregory Bateson

Alan Macfarlane interviewed Nora Bateson about the film she had made about her polymath father, Gregory Bateson, in 2012

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A Re-Introduction to Ecology of Mind

Ecology of mind as Bateson envisioned it, refers to an interdisciplinary approach to probing the way in which consciousness changes and forms patterns, both on a social and individual level.

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Gregory Bateson’s Double Bind Theory

The double bind theory . . . talks about all the situations where you communicate with someone and receive conflicting messages.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageWhen we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageWe are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageFor a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception—his epistemological premises—he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageThe major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageWe create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.

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Fritjof Capra