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Docta Ignorantia LXXXVI Gregory Bateson I'm not familiar with optimization theory directly -- and don't have the tech math background to follow it in detail -- but I'm grasping enough from your indications to be able to make a start at a useful response in re what I understand of Bateson's work. Gregory was a chain smoker -- I chided him for being an environmentalist chain smoker (oxymoron) -- who was as he said Maggie Mead's "third squeeze" (she was very short and he very tall, like Bob Theobald and his wife Jean, with whom I worked at the time) and devoted father of an especially devoted daughter, whom I was once close to, Cat (Mary Catherine) Bateson. Cat used to be and maybe still is married to an Armenian once-MIT prof named Barkev Kassargian. I was at the time rather close in the family circle. A long story. Gregory was loveable as a person and probably all how knew him would vouch for that. He was also what appeared to be supremely intelligent and was of very large, extremely handsome physique to match. He was a "wonder of the world" so to speak, demonstrative, highly out-going, a man both of this world and of some others. Bucky Fuller, whom I met but did not know personally, by comparison was very small and retiring, equally brilliant with Gregory but much the hermit in mannerism. Bucky was a very sweet man, very sweet. You know how brilliant he was. During the late 60s and first years of the 70s I was traveling on what would have been a meteoric career -- and that's what I didn't like about it. Meteors burn themselves out. I wanted to be a sun, self-luminous, self-effulgent, and so left the career -- and all of its perks -- I had EVERYTHING Americans are supposed to want and need -- and became a hermit. I could tell a lot of stories. Many would sound unbelievable. My field at the time was futurism and I came at it from theology (Union Theological Seminary, New York City, 1969). I was always a universalist and fit then -- but also exceeded -- these words of Cat's describing her father: "A great many people, recognizing that Gregory was critical of certain kinds of materialism, wished him to be a spokesman for an opposite faction, a faction advocating the kind of attention they found comfortable to things excluded by atomistic materialism: God, spirits, ESP, "the ghosts of old forgotten creeds." Gregory was always in the difficult position of saying to his scientific colleagues that they were failing to attend to critically important matters, because of methodological and epistemological premises central to Western science for centuries, and then turning around and saying to his most devoted followers, when they believed they were speaking about these same critically important matters, that the way they were talking was nonsense. . . Gregory wanted to continue to speak to both sides of our endemic dualism . . ." I was this and more than this. I felt it was possible, using Cat's language, above, not only to speak on both sides of our endemic dualism -- which is structural to communication per se, necessarily so -- but also to see from beyond it and speak towards that beyond to help the rest get there, internally. That is the unique calling of a theologian. Gregory understood this development near the end, which technically was lung cancer and actually was the need to get a new body (rebirth) so he could become a hermit and continue work. :-) He understood that and his daughter may have by now. BTW, last I knew -- 20 years ago -- Cat was still pissed at me for leaving the career. I did her and Maggie a worldly discourtesy of not showing up in Vienna for a Wenner-Gren Conference at Burg Wartenstein. I did return the money. Seems Cat's in your area, at George Mason U in Fairfax. Last I knew she was at Dartmouth as Student Dean, which was a holding position after she and Barkev left Iran in front of the Ayatollah's F-4s. Gregory was a phenomenalist. He was not a statist. In Medieval terms, he was a Realist, not a Nominalist, or more precisely, he knew that Nominalism (statism) is accurate and therefore useful to an extent but that Realism (phenomenalism) is the full story, comprehending Nominalism, which is a necessary part of the story. The line of phenomenalists in Christian culture is the line os St. Augustine, whom Gregory naturally warms to. It is the line of Paul Tillich and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and of Sts. Francis and Teresa of Avila and Jean Guyon and the Jansenists. In math/science it is the line of Godel and Heisenberg and is sometimes indicated by some quantum and chaos theorists, who as a group tend to over-represent their accomplishments and over-estimate their abilities. In culture and engineering it is the line of Duty-Honor-Country, the United States Military Academy. BTW, "math" and "philosophy" are synonyms. "Theology" is the way we talk when we personalize principle, which is only and ever active -- what Bergson calls elan vital and what a Tibetan such as Anagarika Govinda (who, BTW first turned me around) would call Dharma or specifically Sanathana Dharma -- the ever-present power that holds the consciousness bound to truth. "Sanathana Dharma" is the Sanskritic version of the word. The Tibetan version deletes the "h"s. Phenomenalists are inside process and know they are never outside it. Einstein hated Heisenberg because he wanted to be able to observe, period, whereas phenomenalists such as Heisenberg are aware that observation is an activity within the process being observed and so is most accurately (Realistically) treated as a factor of that process, which itself is both poly-morphic and poly-temporal simultaneously. In other words, all assumptions that discontinuity exists between subject and object (any of each) are epistemological, heuristic and/or practical conveniences -- for getting some kinds of useful work done -- that do not reflect the actuality of operations, which is and proceeds from the identity of subject and object (all of each). Gregory's terminology for the intrinsic non-dualism of phenomenology (operations) is "tautology," which appeals to him because of his background in ethnography and logic with his profound sensitivity to linguistics. Maggie got the press -- and she absolutely cheated on her "research," worse even than M.L. King did, as the world learned posthumously -- and Gregory was the intellect. Maggie was a low-level scholar famed from her professors' putting her forward to champion their opinions -- and she appealed to them for this task because of her scrappiness. In her later years she gave lectures in a full Wicked Witch of the West costume, including pointed hat. I was at one at Berkeley in 1973 where she shared the stage with Barry Commoner. The feeble talk about "knowing" this and that: "we now know..." The strong talk about "being aware" of this and that. The difference is subtle and great. Knowing colloquially implies distinction between subject and object (Einstein). Awareness colloquially implies identity of subject and object (Heisenberg). Gregory at times teetered on the brink of schizophrenia -- as all do who get anywhere satisfying -- by trying to walk the razor of holding both sides of a duality in the mind at once. It can't be done, not in theory or in practice, as he knew, but he tried sometimes for no other reason than to show off the immense capacity of his intellect. It was a dangerous stunt, as he knew. Some of his Naval papers show it in action. BTW, I don't know where to get these. They were classified when I read them in the 60s -- I wasn't supposed to have them -- and I suspect they're not published for the public even still. Perhaps if you have friends at the Naval War College ... or elsewhere in DOD or Energy. The elegance of Gregory's sensitivity to universe's essential logistical (word-made) "tautology" (the better word is non-dualism, but he didn't get far enough inside to use it) is given in one of his famous dicta: "Information is a difference that makes a difference." Note the sensitivity to linguistics. He is aware that everything at all is ultimately symbols and specifically words. This I have always felt is his most effective contribution to our intellectual (engineering) repertoire. The dynamic of delusion, built-into the epistemological process, easily and rapidly shrouds the presence of symbols (words) as our fundamenta, but that presence is always there, literally regardless. It is streaming continuously in our minds. Bateson was aware that information is an agent. All objects are actually subjects that for the convenience of getting work done temporarily take aspects of themselves as objects. The truth is, I am I, or, All is I, or best, Reality (Truth, God, Universe, etc.) has no second. Once one grasps the fact of the phenomenology of fact -- that it is logistics -- that every activity is as well as is by an agent that is fundamentally symbolical and specifically verbal (OM in Sanskrit) -- one has indescribable freedom and inexhaustible wealth. More than I had being on the New York Social Register. Far more. :-) For, one also has calm and that, as every soldier is aware, is the source of true fortitude. Bateson did what every Theologian, Christian or otherwise, aims to do, namely to explicate from within itself and encourage forward all who are within it the phenomenology of the poly-temporal process that is life. He used systems language to articulate Augustine's famous, "Love God and do what you want." Everything is seen and done from within process, from within the rich phenomenology of life, which may be described simply as Expansion. Life is the phenomenology of the Law of Expansion (the only law that's incorruptible, BTW). The specific "scientific" point at this Gregory applied this insight was determined by the exigencies of his time. He applied it at the point of nervous system theory, which he, with others of the day, took for cybernetics . For it was taken in these circles as axiomatic that since biology is the paradigmatic system bionics (a.k.a. cybernetics) is the paradigmatic systems theory as well as the engineering ideal for all fields. I'm sure not a few today share this insight. The specific of nervous system theory that intrigued Gregory -- and par excellence what he considered the nub of the whole subject -- was cross-communication in the CNS between parallel-transporting neural sheaves. Parallel computing concepts emerged from similar such considerations, but Gregory was seeing something more than massively parallel processes. He was seeing lateral communcation in parallel processes and trying to discover/explicate how/why this phenomenon not only enabled stability but made it possible at all. In other words, he saw that the CNS operated steady state while on the fly and there was no machine then-made that could replicate that and perhaps none yet. Then steady state had to be built-in at the base of machines, even massively parallel ones. I don't know if this is still the case. But Gregory saw that the CNS generated steady state from its own operational nature and on the fly. In other words, the operation IS the structure and it relies on lateral (which would be "chaotic" activity in a machine) communication as well as linear, even and especially (brain) when linear communication is so massive as to be effectively circular (tautological). Bauhaus was famous for saying "Form follows function." Gregory advanced this far by saying, in effect, "Function is form." He was a Franciscan: a bird to him was not a winged creature, it was an hilarious bolt of colored sonority lightening forward on a mission for the world to relish and marvel with. For this line of thinkers/sages, phenomenology is focus. To be aware of goings on is what's going on. They don't generally say what a thing is, they say what it is doing. What a thing is doing is what it is. And if they are relatively or more aware, they say what they are doing because that's what the thing ("over there" or "out there") is doing. Their epistemology is tautological -- "non-dualistic" is a better way to put it because "tautological" customarily means "disallowed" in the canons of logic many fancy they know -- and their methodology is immanental (identity of subject and object), which is the true empiricism. My own rearticulation of Gregory, from the time (1973), was this: All time-fields are concurrent. That and his own "Information is a difference that makes a difference." have stood the ravages of time. There is another favorite of his, paraphrasing: All of our problems result from an epistemolgical error which may be described as eating the menu instead of the meal. (Accepting as real the symbol instead of the thing it symbolizes.) There is a Sanskritic way of saying this: "The world is not illusion, but taking it as the world is." Godel's "Proof" is by way of making the same point, along the way of making another. The Pythagorean mantra is "All is Number." This is the same as saying, "All is Logos." For, words, are embellished numbers, the OS of the CNS, to make the dance fun by making it interesting.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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