Further Steps to an Ecology Mind: Introduction

...suddenly I knew that I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I'd ever met...

In the beginning there were various groups of them: ragged little bands...

As the bands grew larger, they would seize and clear a hill and, with the trees they'd cut, would set up shacks, and on the crown of the hill a large, shaggy house with a steeply pitched roof and a wide stone hearth, where they'd all go at night for protection from other bands of men...they'd all eat, the men first, then the women and children, the men still drinking, getting louder and louder and braver and braver, talking about what they were going to do to the bands on the other hills. I would huddle, listening to their noise in the darkness, my eyebrows lifted, my lips pursed, the hair on the back of my neck standing up like pig's bristles. All the bands did the same thing. In time I began to be more amused than revolted by what they threatened. It didn't matter to me what they did to each other. It was slightly ominous because of its strangeness--no wolf was so vicious to other wolves--but I half believed they weren't serious...

But the threats were serious.

The leaders on both sides held their javelins high in both hands and shook them, howling their lungs out. Terrible threats, from the few words I could catch. Things about their fathers and their fathers' fathers, things about justice and honor and lawful revenge their throats swollen, their eyes rolling like a newborn colt's, sweat running down their shoulders. Then they would fight. Spears flying, swords whonking, arrows raining from the windows and doors of the meadhall and the edge of the woods. Horses reared and fell over screaming, ravens flew, crazy as bats in a fire, men staggered, gesturing wildly, making speeches, dying or sometimes pretending to be dying, sneaking off. Sometimes the attackers would be driven back, sometimes they'd win and burn the meadhall down...

...once, around midnight, I came to a hall in ruins. The cows in their pens lay burbling blood through their nostrils, with javelin holes in their necks. None had been eaten. The watchdogs lay like dark wet stones, with their heads cut off, teeth bared. The fallen hall was a square of flames and acrid smoke, and the people inside (none of them had been eaten either) were burned black, small, like dwarfs turned dark and crisp.
--John Gardner, Grendel

Pre-Requisite
Meta Principles
in a Batesonian Epistemology

The Pattern which Connects

"What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the ameoba in one direction and the back-ward schizophrenic in another?"
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity

Homology

1. Bilateral Symmetry

"So they looked at the crab. And first of all, they came up with the observation that it is symmetrical; that is, the right side resembles the left.

Then they observed that one claw was bigger than the other. So it was not symmetrical. ...

Going back to symmetry,
somebody said that "yes, one claw is bigger than the other, but both claws are made of the same parts."

Ah! What a beautiful and noble
statement that is,
how the speaker politely flung into the trash can the idea that size could be of primary or profound importance and went after the pattern which connects. He discarded an asymmetry in size in favor of a deeper symmetry in formal relations."
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity

2. Serial Homology

"Later, it appeared that not only are the two claws built on the same "ground plan," (i.e., upon corresponding sets of relations between corresponding parts) but that these relations between corresponding parts extend down the series of the walking legs. We could recognized in every leg pieces that corresponded to the pieces in the claw.

And in your own body, of course, the same sort of thing is true. Humerus in the upper arm corresponds to femur in the thigh, and radius-ulna corresponds to tibia-fibula; the carpals in the wrist correspond to tarsals in the foot; fingers correspond to toes.

The anatomy of the crab is repetitive and rhythmical. It is, like music, repetitive with modulation. Indeed the direction from head toward tail corresponds to a sequence in time:
In embryology,
the head is older than the tail.
A flow of information is possible from front to rear."
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity

3. Phylogenetic Homology

"Professional biologists talk about phylogenetic homology for that class of facts of which one example is the formal resemblance between my limb bones and those of a horse. Another example is the formal resemblances between the appendages of a crab and those of a lobster."
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity

Let me start again. The parts of a crab are connected by various patterns of bilateral symmetry, of serial homology, and so on. Let us call these patterns within the individual growing crab first-order connections. But now we look at crab and lobster and we again find connection by pattern. Call it second-order connection, phylogenetic homology.

Now we look at man or horse and find that, here again, we can see symmetries and serial homologies. When we look at the two together, we find the same cross-species sharing of pattern with a difference (phylogenetic homology). And, of course, we also find the same discarding of magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. In other words, as this distribution of formal resemblances is spelled out, it turns out that gross anatomy exhibits three levels of logical types of descriptive propositions:

1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts of the same individual to give first-order connections.
(E.g., Symmetry, Serial Homology)

2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar relations between parts (i.e., to give second order connections).
(E.g., Phylogenetic Homology)

3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the comparison between man and horse to provide third order-connections.

We have constructed a ladder of how to think about--about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects.
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity

Stories

...if the world be connected,
if I am fundamentally right in what I am saying,
then thinking in terms of stories
must be shared by all mind or minds,
whether ours or
those of redwood forests and sea anemones.

...the sequence of the building up
of the sea anemone,
its embryology,
must somehow be made up
of the stuff of stories.

And behind that, again,
the evolutionary process
whereby the sea anemone
like you and like me,
came to be
--that process too,
must be the stuff of stories

What is a story
that it may connect the A's and B's,
its parts?

And is it true
that the general fact that parts are connected in this way
is at the very heart of being alive?

I offer you the notion
of context,
of pattern through time.
Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity, p. 12, 13

Stories:
Patterns through time

The meta-theme of this talk will be making explicit models of how living and knowing are the
Evolution of Patterns
through
Time

[Aside: Stories in relation to changing a life, why learn the wisdom of another culture? etc.]

A Story

[A man asked his computer]: "Do you compute that you that you will ever think like a human being?" [After some time] "the machine printed out its answer..."

THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY

Two logics
Logic of Logic		Logic of Dreams
Humans die		Humans die
Socrates is human		Grass dies
Socrates will die		Humans are grass

An identity of things,
that is, elements of set
Socrates is one element in a set of elements
versus
An identity of relations, of processes
The identity of Humans and Grass is based on sharing a basic biological process

A requisite for a full epistemology is
Fluency in both logics
AND
Understanding of when to use one versus the other

IF you use one logic to refute
another person who is using the other logic
...well, you get what you deserve

Two logics
Logic of Logic		Logic of Dreams
Humans die		Humans die
I am Human		Life dies
I will die		I am Life

The Chasm

Dragons don't exist in the Mythology of Bean Counters

In the Beowulf myth Grendel is the anti-hero whose requisite role (like all of Nature and the Earth itself) in the metaphor is to be defeated by the warrior-conqueror, is speaking to a dragon, a dragon of vast intelligence and great age, a dragon who has watched for many eons as many species have come and gone; the dragon says:

"Man," he said, then left a long pause, letting scorn build up in the cave like venom in his breath... "Counters, measurers, theory-makers... Games, games, games!" he snorted fire. "They only think that they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance,

no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs.

But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it,
and that, they think, settles that!"

(Scientific) Explanation

A Special Case of Double Description

Explanation:
the mapping of
Tautology
onto
Description

A tautology in its simplest form is
‘If P is true, then P is true’
(1979, p. 78)

Tautologies can be very elaborate
including, for example,
Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Models

Description and Tautology
constitute, for Bateson,
a particularly potent pair of
independent languages for
generating knowledge.

This is a form of humans are grass:
An identity of relations

In Science
We build spider-web bridges
across the chasm between
a Tautology and a Description

Universe as a web of relations

...I can know nothing about any individual thing by itself,
I can know something about relations between things.
As an observer, I am in a position
resembling that of a mathematician....
If I say the table is "hard,"...
what I know is that the... relationship between the table
and some sense organ or instrument
has a special character...
It is always the relationship
between things
that is the referent of all valid propositions.

It is suggestive that the mathematicians are content to accept the idea that relationships between propositions can be self evident, while they are unwilling to grant this status to the propositions themselves. It is as if they were claiming to know how to talk, but not to know what they are talking about. And that position is precisely parallel to my own (p. 157, 158).

Capra (1982, pp. 96 and 92) describes approaches to modern sub-atomic physics based on a view of the world as a dynamic web of relations...

"...so that at the subatomic level the interrelations and interactions between the parts are more fundamental than the parts themselves."

It is a man-made notion that “hardness” is immanent in one end of a binary relationship.

The Map is not the Territory

"epistemology is an indivisible, integrated meta-science whose subject matter is the world of evolution, embryology, and genetics—the science of the mind in the widest sense of the word… But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits [together] the entire biosphere" (Bateson, 1979, pp. 81, 82).

Nonlinear Dynamic Systems Theory

Pattern Changing over Time

Relations among Relations

Coupled Equations, e.g., Turing's Morphogenesis

We have proposed the broad framework that

Mind and Nature are a Unity

That Evolution
Morphogenesis
(Embryonic Development of Form)
Thinking
In the logic of Dreams
In the logic of Modeling
In the logic of Plausible Reasoning

All share the same fundamental process
and that process is in human terms:
THE STORY

And Story
is a description of
Pattern Changing over Time

And so...

The choice of a pattern language

The choice of a tautology to map

onto

Observations of Mind

NDS Theory

Example:

Equations describing Fractals
can form a basis for
Describing Pattern

There are profound issues
in the Development of Form
(Morphogenesis)
in any Pattern Language
(e.g.,Evelyn Keller, 2002)
but at least the issues are exposed

and not hiding behind quantity

Boolean Systems

My Tautology of Choice

Kauffman:
Mapping Boolean Systems onto Descriptions of Evolution

Kauffman (1993) proposed that
self-organization and natural selection
are co-principles
"weaving the tapestry of life."

Kauffman
developed Boolean network models as idealizations to explore questions about the creation of “genetic circuits of a variety of logics and complexities” (1995, pp. 98, 99)

Criteria of Mind

(1) Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
(2) The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.
(3) Mental process requires collateral energy.
(4) Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
(5) In mental process the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of the difference which preceded them.
(6) The description and classification of these processes of transformation discloses a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.

I shall argue that the phenomena which we call thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria.
(Bateson, 1979, pp. 85, 86)

The Map is Not the Territory

What gets onto maps
from the territory
are differences,
whether these be “a difference in altitude,
a difference in vegetation,
a difference in population structure,
difference in surface, or whatever...”
(Bateson, 1972, p. 457)

“the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is an elementary idea”
(1972, p. 460)

Operational Closure

Marvin Mynsky:
" Why are [mental]processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products.
[Input==>Processing==>Output]

But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars.

The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves - and this means we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce...

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we cannot yet trust our commonsense judgment about such matters."

Implications for the nature of knowledge.

Entrainment and Coupling and Coordination

Not some random operational closure but operational closure closure that works the way the rest of the universe works

Integrat.ed1

Tidal Locking of Moon and Earth.

Not an input--- processing ----output model

Imagine a scene. Moving down a steep mountainside carpeted by autumn tinted shrubbery, a herd of tawny deer is obscured by a thick cover of brown autumn leaves, appearing no more than a collection of flickering spots moving together at the same downward angle. How is that we can extract a coherent pattern that marks a herd of deer as distinct from all the other motion, distinct from the shimmering motion of the leaves in the wind, distinct from the swaying of tree branches, distinct from the motion of a flock of small brown birds flitting among trees along a trajectory that intersects that of the deer, distinct from the motion of the tree trunks which appear to move with respect to the observer who also is moving? There are many motives for extracting dynamic pattern in a dynamic context, curiosity being perhaps the most basic. Whether a being is simply a curious human or bird constructing knowledge of how the world works, whether a being is a predator or a prey, whatever the motive, knowing about patterns that are moving has fundamental significance. The curious bird who detects the motion of the deer herd may learn that the deer regularly eat leaves of bushes which also carry tasty seeds.

A being needs to be able extract many distinct dynamic patterns at once. Besides detecting the deer, bird may learn of the the tasty seeds in other ways--the sudden cessation of the movement of other birds as they land on the branch of a bush; dark seed pods swaying in the wind. The autumn scene is a patchwork of disconnected fragments of motion. How are coherent patterns formed from this dynamic puzzle?

Human Experience/Intuition/Judgments
Examples

I’am willing for the moment to limit myself to organizing knowledge only from that foundation

At the end of the day you only can stand here in your own body with your own experience and create knowledge whether that comes from quantitative experimental statistically analyzed data or from sitting by a stream.
I’am never not present, or that’s my goal at least

The pretense of disembodied objectivity just won’t do for me anymore.
I want to participate in an epistemology that acknowledges my existence and my intuitive judgments, however biased, in this (every) moment and which directs me about the construction of procedures through which I can provoke or arrange the world into giving the feedback that I need (whether I know it or not).

...there is something bigger in the world
than money
and pocketknives
and automobiles.
One of the things children have to learn
about prayer
is that you do not pray for pocketknives.
Some learn it and some don't.
Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson
Angels Fear: Toward an epistemology of the sacred


Of all imaginary organisms— dragons, protomollusca, missing links, gods, demons, sea monsters, and so on— economic man is the dullest. Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson Angels fear: Toward an epistemology of the sacred p. 175
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