a legacy for Tao - VI

Change of Season

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Learning and Evolution as Mental Processes

The question of teleology (design) brings me back to the final chapter of Mind and Nature (1979), in which Gregory talks about the “two great stochastic processes” that combine randomness with selectivity. Having in many different ways, in the course of that book, discussed the mind-like properties of natural systems, he compares evolution with learning. And it strikes me today that he is saying that of course there is something that looks like intelligent design in evolution, because the mind-like properties of systems are unfolding. In this sense one can see mind at work in the structure of the eye, or in the structure of the cell and what have you. But in this understanding the mind is not external. Mind is a characteristic of the unfolding organization and process, immanent and emergent.

When Gregory spoke about the two great stochastic processes – learning, involving trial and error and involving something like reinforcement to determine what is retained, and evolution, where natural selection has the same effect, he was proposing yet another aspect of the pattern which connects all living things, recognizing in our own mental processes of thought and learning a pattern which connects us to the biosphere rather than an argument for separation. This recognition is inhibited by the dualistic assumption that what happens in the natural world is mechanical. It is inhibited in a deep way by the Cartesian body – mind distinction, as if the natural world were purely material instead of being shaped by process and organization. Having over simplified our description of the natural world, we open the door to a compensatory leap from the recognition of the complexity around us to the insistence on a mind external to it – a deity – shaping it. “Miracles,” said Gregory, “are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism.”

a legacy for Tao - V