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STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, EVOLUTION AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic Explanation [1]

It may be useful to describe some of the peculiarities of cybernetic explanation.

Causal explanation is usually positive. We say that billiard ball B moved in such and such a direction because billiard ball A hit it at such and such an angle. In contrast to this, cybernetic explanation is always negative. We consider what alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of those few which could, in fact, occur. The classical example of this type of explanation is the theory of evolution under natural selection. Ac-cording to this theory, those organisms which were not both physiologically and environmentally viable could not possibly have lived to reproduce. Therefore, evolution always followed the pathways of viability. As Lewis Carroll has pointed out, the theory explains quite satisfactorily why there are no bread-and-butter-flies today.

In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to restraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such restraints, the pathways of change would be governed only by equality of probability. In fact, the “restraints” upon which cybernetic explanation depends can in all cases be regarded as factors which determine inequality of probability. If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints, either inside the monkey or inside the typewriter. Perhaps the monkey could not strike inappropriate letters; perhaps the type bars could not move if improperly struck; perhaps incorrect letters could not survive on the paper. Somewhere there must have been a circuit which could identify error and eliminate it.

Ideally—and commonly—the actual event in any sequence or aggregate is uniquely determined within the terms of the cybernetic explanation. Restraints of many different kinds may combine to generate this unique determination. For example, the selection of a piece for a given position in a jigsaw puzzle is “restrained” by many factors. Its shape must conform to that of its several neighbors and possibly that of the boundary of the puzzle; its color must conform to the color pattern of its region; the orientation of its edges must obey the topological regularities set by the cutting machine in which the puzzle was made; and so on. From the point of view of the man who is trying to solve the puzzle, these are all clues, i.e., sources of information which will guide him in his selection. From the point of view of the cybernetic observer, they are restraints.

Similarly, from the cybernetic point of view, a word in a sentence, or a letter within the word, or the anatomy of some part within an organism, or the role of a species in an ecosystem, or the behavior of a member within a family—these are all to be (negatively) explained by an analysis of restraints.

The negative form of these explanations is precisely comparable to the form of logical proof by reductio ad absurdum. In this species of proof, a sufficient set of mutually exclusive alternative propositions is enumerated, e.g., “P” and “not P,” and the process of proof procedes by demonstrating that all but one of this set are untenable or “absurd.” It follows that the surviving member of the set must be tenable within the terms of the logical system. This is a form of proof which the nonmathematical sometimes find unconvincing and, no doubt, the theory of natural selection sometimes seems unconvincing to nonmathematical persons for similar reasons—whatever those reasons may be.

Another tactic of mathematical proof which has its counterpart in the construction of cybernetic explanations is the use of “mapping” or rigorous metaphor. An algebraic proposition may, for example, be mapped onto a system of geometric coordinates and there proven by geometric methods. In cybernetics, mapping appears as a technique of explanation whenever a conceptual “model” is invoked or, more concretely, when a computer is used to simulate a complex communicational process. But this is not the only appearance of mapping in this science. Formal processes of mapping, translation, or transformation are, in principle, imputed to every step of any sequence of phenomena which the cyberneticist is attempting to explain. These mappings or trans-formations may be very complex, e.g., where the output of some machine is regarded as a transform of the input; or they may be very simple, e.g., where the rotation of a shaft at a given point along its length is regarded as a transform (albeit identical) of its rotation at some previous point.

The relations which remain constant under such transformation may be of any conceivable kind.

This parallel, between cybernetic explanation and the tactics of logical or mathematical proof, is of more than trivial interest. Outside of cybernetics, we look for explanation, but not for anything which would simulate logical proof. This simulation of proof is something new. We can say, however, with hindsight wisdom, that explanation by simulation of logical or mathematical proof was expectable. After all, the subject matter of cybernetics is not events and objects but the information “carried” by events and objects. We consider the objects or events only as proposing facts, propositions, messages, percepts, and the like. The subject matter being propositional, it is expectable that explanation would simulate the logical.

Cyberneticians have specialized in those explanations which simulate reductio ad absurdum and “mapping.” There are perhaps whole realms of explanation awaiting discovery by some mathematician who will recognize, in the informational aspects of nature, sequences which simulate other types of proof.

Because the subject matter of cybernetics is the propositional or informational aspect of the events and objects in the natural world, this science is forced to procedures rather different from those of the other sciences. The differentiation, for example, between map and territory, which the semanticists insist that scientists shall respect in their writings must, in cybernetics, be watched for in the very phenomena about which the scientist writes. Expectably, communicating organisms and badly programmed computers will mistake map for territory; and the language of the scientist must be able to cope with such anomalies. In human behavioral systems, especially in religion and ritual and wherever primary process dominates the scene, the name often is the thing named. The bread is the Body, and the wine is the Blood.

Similarly, the whole matter of induction and deduction —and our doctrinaire preferences for one or the other—will take on a new significance when we recognize inductive and deductive steps not only in our own argument but in the relationships among data.

Of especial interest in this connection is the relationship between context and its content. A phoneme exists as such only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word only exists as such—only has “meaning”—in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship.

This hierarchy of contexts within contexts is universal for the communicational (or “emic”) aspect of phenomena and drives the scientist always to seek for explanation in the ever larger units. It may (perhaps) be true in physics that the explanation of the macroscopic is to be sought in the microscopic. The opposite is usually true in cybernetics: without context, there is no communication.

In accord with the negative character of cybernetic ex-planation, “information” is quantified in negative terms. An event or-object such as the letter K in a given position in the text of a message might have been any other of the limited set of twenty-six letters in the English language. The actual letter excludes (i.e., eliminates by restraint) twenty-five alternatives. In comparison with an English letter, a Chinese ideograph would have excluded several thousand alternatives. We say, therefore, that the Chinese ideograph carries more information than the letter. The quantity of information is conventionally expressed as the log to base 2 of the improbability of the actual event or object.

Probability, being a ratio between quantities which have similar dimensions, is itself of zero dimensions. That is, the central explanatory quantity, information, is of zero dimensions. Quantities of real dimensions (mass, length, time) and their derivatives (force, energy, etc.) have no place in cybernetic explanation.

The status of energy is of special interest. In general in communicational systems, we deal with sequences which resemble stimulus-and-response rather than cause-and- effect. When one billiard ball strikes another, there is an energy transfer such that the motion of the second ball is energized by the impact of the first. In communicational systems, on the other hand, the energy of the response is usually provided by the respondent. If I kick a dog, his immediately sequential behavior is energized by his metabolism, not by my kick. Similarly, when one neuron fires another, or an impulse from a microphone activates a circuit, the sequent event has its own energy sources.

Of course, everything that happens is still within the limits defined by the law of energy conservation. The dog’s metabolism might in the end limit his response, but, in general, in the systems with which we deal, the energy supplies are large compared with the demands upon them; and, long before the supplies are exhausted, “economic” limitations are imposed by the finite number of available alternatives, i.e., there is an economics of probability. This economics differs from an economics of energy or money in that probability—being a ratio—is not subject to addition or subtraction but only to multiplicative processes, such as fractionation. A telephone exchange at a time of emergency may be “jammed” when a large fraction of its alternative pathways are busy. There is, then, a low probability of any given message getting through.

In addition to the restraints due to the limited economics of alternatives, two other categories of restraint must be discussed: restraints related to “feedback” and restraints related to “redundancy.”

We consider first the concept of feedback:

When the phenomena of the universe are seen as linked together by cause-and-effect and energy transfer, the resulting picture is of complexly branching and interconnecting chains of causation. In certain regions of this universe (notably organisms in environments, ecosystems, thermostats, steam engines with governors, societies, computers, and the like), these chains of causation form circuits which are closed in the sense that causal interconnection can be traced around the circuit and back through whatever position was (arbitarily) chosen as the starting point of the description. In such a circuit, evidently, events at any position in the circuit may be expected to have effect at all positions on the circuit at later times.

Such systems are, however, always open: (a) in the sense that the circuit is energized from some external source and loses energy usually in the form of heat to the outside; and (b) in the sense that events within the circuit may be influenced from the outside or may influence outside events.

A very large and important part of cybernetic theory is concerned with the formal characteristics of such causal circuits, and the conditions of their stability. Here I shall consider such systems only as sources of restraint.

Consider a variable in the circuit at any position and sup-pose this variable subject to random change in value (the change perhaps being imposed by impact of some event external to the circuit). We now ask how this change will affect the value of this variable at that later time when the sequence of effects has come around the circuit. Clearly the answer to this last question will depend upon the characteristics of the circuit and will, therefore, be not random.

In principle, then, a causal circuit will generate a non-random response to a random event at that position in the circuit at which the random event occurred.

This is the general requisite for the creation of cybernetic restraint in any variable at any given position. The particular restraint created in any given instance will, of course, depend upon the characteristics of the particular circuit—whether its overall gain be positive or negative, its time characteristics, its thresholds of activity, etc. These will together determine the restraints which it will exert at any given position.

For purposes of cybernetic explanation, when a machine is observed to be (improbably) moving at a constant rate, even under varying load, we shall look for restraints—e.g., for a circuit which will be activated by changes in rate and which, when activated, will operate upon some variable (e.g., the fuel supply) in such a way as to diminish the change in rate.

When the monkey is observed to be (improbably) typing prose, we shall look for some circuit which is activated whenever he makes a “mistake” and which, when activated, will delete the evidence of that mistake at the position where it occurred.

The cybernetic method of negative explanation raises the question: Is there a difference between “being right” and “not being wrong”? Should we say of the rat in a maze that he has “learned the right path” or should we say only that he has learned “to avoid the wrong paths”?

Subjectively, I feel that I know how to spell a number of English words, and I am certainly not aware of discarding as unrewarding the letter K when I have to spell the word “many.” Yet, in the first level cybernetic explanation, I should be viewed as actively discarding the alternative K when I spell “many.”

The question is not trivial and the answer is both subtle and fundamental: choices are not all at the same level. I may have to avoid error in my choice of the word “many” in a given context, discarding the alternatives, “few,” “several,” “frequent,” etc. But if I can achieve this higher level choice on a negative base, it follows that the word “many” and its alternatives somehow must be conceivable to me—must exist as distinguishable and possibly labeled or coded patterns in my neural processes. If they do, in some sense, exist, then it follows that, after making the higher level choice of what word to use, I shall not necessarily be faced with alternatives at the lower level. It may become unnecessary for me to exclude the letter K from the word “many.” It will be correct to say that I know positively how to spell “many”; not merely that I know how to avoid making mistakes in spelling that word.

It follows that Lewis Carroll’s joke about the theory of natural selection is not entirely cogent. If, in the communicational and organizational processes of biological evolution, there be something like levels—items, patterns, and possibly patterns of patterns—then it is logically possible for the evolutionary system to make something like positive choices. Such levels and patterning might conceivably be in or among genes or elsewhere.

The circuitry of the above mentioned monkey would be required to recognize deviations from “prose,” and prose is characterized by pattern or—as the engineers call it—by redundancy.

The occurrence of the letter K in a given location in an English prose message is not a purely random event in the sense that there was ever an equal probability that any other of the twenty-five letters might have occurred in that location. Some letters are more common in English than others, and certain combinations of letters are more common than others. There is, thus, a species of patterning which partly determines which letters shall occur in which slots. As a result: if the receiver of the message had received the entire rest of the message but had not received the particular letter K which we are discussing, he might have been able, with better than random success, to guess that the missing letter was, in fact, K. To the extent that this was so, the let-ter K did not, for that receiver, exclude the other twenty-five letters because these were already partly excluded by information which the recipient received from the rest of the message. This patterning or predictability of particular events within a larger aggregate of events is technically called “redundancy.”

The concept of redundancy is usually derived, as I have derived it, by considering first the maximum of information which might be carried by the given item and then considering how this total might be reduced by knowledge of the surrounding patterns of which the given item is a component part. There is, however, a case for looking at the whole matter the other way round. We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d’etre of communication, and see the single letter unaccompanied by collateral clues as a peculiar and special case.

The idea that communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning can be applied to the simplest engineering examples. Let us consider an observer who is watching A send a message to B. The purpose of the transaction (from the point of view of A and B) is to create in B’s message pad a sequence of letters identical with the sequence which formerly occurred in A’s pad. But from the point of view of the observer this is the creation of redundancy. If he has seen what A had on his pad, he will not get any new information about the message itself from inspecting B’s pad.

Evidently, the nature of “meaning,” pattern, redundancy, information and the like. depends upon where we sit. In the usual engineers’ discussion of a message sent from A to B, it is customary to omit the observer and to say that B received information from A which was measurable in terms of the number of letters transmitted, reduced by such redundancy in the text as might have permitted B to do some guessing. But in a wider universe, i.e., that defined by the point of view of the observer, this no longer appears as a “transmission” of information but rather as a spreading of redundancy. The activities of A and B have combined to make the universe of the observer more predictable, more ordered, and more redundant. We may say that the rules of the “game” played by A and B explain (as “restraints”) what would otherwise be a puzzling and improbable coincidence in the observer’s universe, namely the conformity between what is written on the two message pads.

To guess, in essence, is to face a cut or slash in the sequence of items and to predict across that slash what items might be on the other side. The slash may be spatial or temporal (or both) and the guessing may be either predictive or retrospective. A pattern, in fact, is definable as an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree such guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection.

But this sort of patterning is also a very, general phenomenon, outside the realm of communication between organisms. The reception of message material by one organism is not fundamentally different from any other case of perception. If I see the top part of a tree standing up, I can predict —with better than random success—that the tree has roots in the ground. The percept of the tree top is redundant with (i.e., contains “information” about) parts of the system which I cannot perceive owing to the slash provided by the opacity of the ground.

If then we say that a message has “meaning” or is “about” some referent, what we mean is that there is a larger universe of relevance consisting of message-plus-referent, and that redundancy or pattern or predictability is introduced into this universe by the message.

If I say to you “It is raining,” this message introduces redundancy into the universe, message-plus-raindrops, so that from the message alone you could have guessed—with better than random success—something of what you would see if you looked out of the window. The universe, message-plus-referent, is given pattern or form—in the Shakespearean sense, the universe is informed by the message; and the “form” of which we are speaking is not in the message nor is it in the referent. It is a correspondence between message and referent.

In loose talk, it seems simple to locate information. The letter K in a given slot proposes that the letter in that particular slot is a K. And, so long as all information is of this very direct kind, the information can be “located”: the information about the letter K is seemingly in that slot.

The matter is not quite so simple if the text of the message is redundant but, if we are lucky and the redundancy is of low order, we may still be able to point to parts of the text which indicate (carry some of the information) that the letter K is expectable in that particular slot.

But if we are asked: Where are such items of information as that: (a) “This message is in English”; and (b) “In English, a letter K often follows a letter C, except when the C begins a word”; we can only say that such information is not localized in any part of the text but is rather a statistical induction from the text as a whole (or perhaps from an aggregate of “similar” texts). This, after all, is metainformation and is of a basically different order—of different logical type—from the information that “the letter in this slot is K.”

This matter of the localization of information has be-deviled communication theory and especially neurophysiology for many years and it is, therefore, interesting to consider how the matter looks if we start from redundancy, pattern or form as the basic concept.

It is flatly obvious that no variable of zero dimensions can be truly located. “Information” and “form” resemble contrast, frequency, symmetry, correspondence, congruence, conformity, and the like in being of zero dimensions and, therefore, are not to be located. The contrast between this white paper and that black coffee is not somewhere between the paper and the coffee and, even if we bring the paper and coffee into close juxtaposition, the contrast between them is not thereby located or pinched between them. Nor is that contrast located between the two objects and my eye. It is not even in my head; or, if it be, then it must also be in your head. But you, the reader, have not seen the paper and the coffee to which I was referring. I have in my head an image or transform or name of the contrast between them; and you have in your head a transform of what I have in mine. But the conformity between us is not localizable. In fact, information and form are not items which can be localized.

It is, however, possible to begin (but perhaps not complete) a sort of mapping of formal relations within a system containing redundancy. Consider a finite aggregate of objects or events (say a sequence of letters, or a tree) and an observer who is already informed about all the redundancy rules which are recognizable (i.e., which have statistical significance) within the aggregate. It is then possible to delimit regions of the aggregate within which the observer can achieve better than random guessing. A further step toward localization is accomplished by cutting across these regions with slash marks, such that it is across these that the educated observer can guess, from what is on one side of the slash, something of what is on the other side.

Such a mapping of the distribution of patterns is, how-ever, in principle, incomplete because we have not considered the sources of the observer’s prior knowledge of the redundancy rules. If, now, we consider an observer with no prior knowledge, it is clear that he might discover some of the relevant rules from his perception of less than the whole aggregate. He could then use his discovery in predicting rules for the remainder—rules which would be correct even though not exemplified. He might discover that “H often follows T” even though the remainder of the aggregate contained no example of this combination. For this order of phenomenon a different order of slash mark—metaslashes —will be necessary.

It is interesting to note that metaslashes which demarcate what is necessary for the naive observer to discover a rule are, in principle, displaced relative to the slashes which would have appeared on the map prepared by an observer totally informed as to the rules of redundancy for that aggregate. (This principle is of some importance in aesthetics.

To the aesthetic eye, the form of a crab with one claw bigger than the other is not simply asymmetrical. It first pro-poses a rule of symmetry and then subtly denies the rule by proposing a more complex combination of rules.)

When we exclude all things and all real dimensions from our explanatory system, we are left regarding each step in a communicational sequence as a transform of the previous step. If we consider the passage of an impulse along an axon, we shall regard the events at each point along the pathway as a transform (albeit identical or similar) of events at any previous point. Or if we consider a series of neurons, each firing the next, then the firing of each neuron is a transform of the firing of its predecessor. We deal with event sequences which do not necessarily imply a passing on of the same energy.

Similarly, we can consider any network of neurons, and arbitrarily transect the whole network at a series of different positions, then we shall regard the events at each transection as a transform of events at some previous transection.

In considering perception, we shall not say, for example, “I see a tree,” because the tree is not within our explanatory system. At best, it is only possible to see an image which is a complex but systematic transform of the tree. This image, of course, is energized by my metabolism and the nature of the transform is, in part, determined by factors within my neural circuits: “I” make the image, under various restraints, some of which are imposed by my neural circuits, while others are imposed by the external tree. An hallucination or dream would be more truly “mine” insofar as it is produced without immediate external restraints.

All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.

Redundancy and Coding [2]

Discussion of the evolutionary and other relationships between the communication systems of men and those of other animals has made it very clear that the coding devices characteristic of verbal communication differ profoundly from those of kinesics and paralanguage. But the point has been made that there is a great deal of resemblance between the codes of kinesics and paralanguage and the codes of nonhuman mammals.

We may, I think, state categorically that man’s verbal system is not derived in any simple way from these preponderantly iconic codes. There is a general popular belief that in the evolution of man, language replaced the cruder systems of the other animals. I believe this to be totally wrong and would argue as follows:

In any complex functional system capable of adaptive evolutionary change, when the performance of a given function is taken over by some new and more efficient method, the old method falls into disuse and decay. The technique of making weapons by the knapping of flint deteriorated when metals came into use.

This decay of organs and skills under evolutionary replacement is a necessary and inevitable systemic phenomenon. If, therefore, verbal language were in any sense an evolutionary replacement of communication by means of kinesics and paralanguage, we would expect the old, preponderantly iconic systems to have undergone conspicuous decay. Clearly they have not. Rather, the kinesics of men have become richer and more complex, and paralanguage has blossomed side by side with the evolution of verbal language. Both kinesics and paralanguage have been elaborated into complex forms of art, music, ballet, poetry, and the like, and, even in everyday life, the intricacies of human kinesic communication, facial expression, and vocal intonation far exceed anything that any other animal is known to produce. The logician’s dream that men should communicate only by unambiguous digital signals has not come true and is not likely to.

I suggest that this separate burgeoning evolution of kinesics and paralanguage alongside the evolution of verbal language indicates that our iconic communication serves functions totally different from those of language and, in-deed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform.

When boy says to girl, “I love you,” he is using words to convey that which is more convincingly conveyed by his tone of voice and his movements; and the girl, if she has any sense, will pay more attention to those accompanying signs than to the words. There are people—professional actors, confidence tricksters, and others—who are able to use kinesics and paralinguistic communication with a degree of voluntary control comparable to that voluntary control which we all think we have over the use of words. For these people who can lie with kinesics, the special usefulness of nonverbal communication is reduced. It is a little more difficult for them to be sincere and still more difficult for them to be believed to be sincere. They are caught in a process of diminishing returns such that, when distrusted, they try to improve their skill in simulating paralinguistic and kinesic sincerity. But this is the very skill which led others to distrust them.

It seems that the discourse of nonverbal communication is precisely concerned with matters of relationship—love, hate, respect, fear, dependency, etc.—between self and vis-à-vis or between self and environment and that the nature of human society is such that falsification of this discourse rapidly becomes pathogenic. From an adaptive point of view, it is therefore important that this discourse be carried on by techniques which are relatively unconscious and only imperfectly subject to voluntary control. In the language of neurophysiology, the controls of this discourse must be placed in the brain caudad of the controls of true language.

If this general view of the matter be correct, it must follow that to translate kinesics or paralinguistic messages into words is likely to introduce gross falsification due not merely to the human propensity for trying to falsify statements about “feelings” and relationship and to the distortions which arise whenever the products of one system of coding are dissected onto the premises of another, but especially to the fact that all such translation must give to the more or less unconscious and involuntary iconic message the appearance of conscious intent.

As scientists, we are concerned to build a simulacrum of the phenomenal universe in words. That is, our product is to be a verbal transform of the phenomena. It is necessary, therefore, to examine rather carefully the rules of this trans-formation and the differences in coding between natural phenomena, message phenomena, and words. I know that it is unusual to presume a “coding” of nonliving phenomena and, to justify this phrase, I must expand somewhat on the concept of “redundancy” as this word is used by the communications engineers.

The engineers and mathematicians have concentrated their attention rigorously upon the internal structure of message material. Typically, this material consists of a sequence or collection of events or objects (commonly members of finite sets— phonemes and the like). This sequence is differentiated from irrelevant events or objects occurring in the same region of time-space by the signal/noise ratio and by other characteristics. The message material is said to contain “redundancy” if, when the sequence is received with some items missing, the receiver is able to guess at the missing items with better than random success. It has been pointed out that, in fact, the term “redundancy” so used becomes a synonym for “patterning.” [3] It is important to note that this patterning of message material always helps the receiver to differentiate between signal and noise. In fact, the regularity called signal/noise ratio is really only a special case of redundancy. Camouflage (the opposite of communication) is achieved (1) by reducing the signal/noise ratio, (2) by breaking up the patterns and regularities in the signal, or (3) by introducing similar patterns into the noise.

By confining their attention to the internal structure of the message material, the engineers believe that they can avoid the complexities and difficulties introduced into communication theory by the concept of “meaning.” I would argue, however, that the concept “redundancy” is at least a partial synonym of “meaning.” As I see it, if the receiver can guess at missing parts of the message, then those parts which are received must, in fact, carry a meaning which refers to the missing parts and is information about those parts.

If now we turn away from the narrow universe of message structure and consider the outer world of natural phenomena, we observe at once that this outer world is similarly characterized by redundancy, i.e., that when an observer perceives only certain parts of a sequence or configuration of phenomena, he is in many cases able to guess, with better than random success, at the parts which he cannot immediately perceive. It is, indeed, a principal goal of the scientist to elucidate these redundancies or patternings of the phenomenal world.

If we now consider that larger universe of which these two subuniverses are parts, i.e., the system: message plus external phenomena, we find that this larger system contains redundancy of a very special sort. The observer’s ability to predict external phenomena is very much increased by his receipt of message material. If I tell you that “it is raining” and you look out the window, you will get less information from the perception of raindrops than you would have got had you never received my message. From my message you could have guessed that you would see rain.

In sum, “redundancy” and “meaning” become synonymous whenever both words are applied to the same universe of discourse. “Redundancy” within the restricted universe of the message sequence is not, of course, synonymous with “meaning” in the wider universe that includes both message and external referent.

It will be noted that this way of thinking about communication groups all methods of coding under the single rubric of part-for-whole. The verbal message “It is raining” is to be seen as a part of a larger universe within which that message creates redundancy or predictability. The “digital,” the “analogic,” the “iconic,” the “metaphoric,” and all other methods of coding are subsumed under this single heading. (What the grammarians call “synecdoche” is the metaphoric use of the name of a part in place of the name of the whole, as in the phrase “five head of cattle.”)

This approach to the matter has certain advantages: the analyst is forced at all times to define the universe of discourse within which “redundancy” or “meaning” is supposed to occur. He is forced to examine the “logical typing” of all message material. We shall see that this broad view of the matter makes it easy to identify major steps in the evolution of communication. Let us consider the scientist who is observing two animals in a physical environment. The following components then must be considered:

(1) The physical environment contains internal patterning or redundancy, i.e., the perception of certain events or objects makes other events or objects predictable for the animals and/or for the observer.

(2) Sounds or other signals from one animal may con-tribute redundancy to the system, environment plus signal; i.e., the signals may be “about” the environment.

(3) The sequence of signals will certainly contain redundancy—one signal from an animal making another signal from the same animal more predictable.

(4) The signals may contribute redundancy to the universe; A’s signals plus B’s signals, i.e., the signals may be about the interaction of which they are component parts.

(5) If all rules or codes of animal communication and understanding were genotypically fixed, the list would end at this point. But some animals are capable of learning, e.g., the repetition of sequences may lead to their becoming effective as patterns. In logic, “every proposition proposes its own truth,” but in natural history we deal always with a converse of this generalization. The perceivable events which accompany a given percept propose that that percept shall “mean” these events. By some such steps an organism may learn to use the information contained in patterned sequences of external events. I can therefore predict with bet-ter than random success that in the universe, organism plus environment, events will occur to complete patterns or configurations of learned adaptation between organism and environment.

(6) The behavioral “learning” which is usually studied in psychological laboratories is of a different order. The redundancy of that universe, which consists of the animal’s actions plus external events, is increased, from the animal’s point of view, when the animal regularly responds to certain events with certain actions. Similarly, this universe gains redundancy when the animal succeeds in producing those actions which function as regular precursors (or causes) of specific external events.

(7) For every organism there are limitations and regularities which define what will be learned and under what circumstances this learning will occur. These regularities and patterns become basic premises for the individual adaptation and social organization of any species.

(8) Last but not least, there is the matter of phylogenetic learning and phylogeny in general. There is redundancy in the system, organism-plus-environment, such that from the morphology and behavior of the organism a human observer can guess with better than random success at the nature of the environment. This “information” about the environment has become lodged in the organism through a long phylogenetic process, and its coding is of a very special kind. The observer who would learn about the aquatic environment from the shape of a shark must deduce the hydrodynamics from the adaptation which copes with the water. The information contained in the phenotypic shark is implicit in forms which are complementary to characteristics of other parts of the universe, phenotype plus environment whose redundancy is increased by the phenotype.

This very brief and incomplete survey of some of the sorts of redundancy in biological systems and the universes of their relevance indicates that under the general rubric “part-for-whole” a number of different sorts of relationship between part and whole are included. A listing of some of the characteristics of these formal relations is in order. We consider some of the iconic cases:

(1) The events or objects which we here call the “part” or “signal” may be real components of an existing sequence or whole. A standing trunk of a tree indicates the probable presence of invisible roots. A cloud may indicate the coming storm of which it is a part. The bared fang of a dog may be part of a real attack.

(2) The “part” may have only a conditional relationship to its whole: the cloud may indicate that we shall get wet if we don’t go indoors; the bared fang may be the beginning of an attack which will be completed unless certain conditions are met.

(3) The “part” may be completely split from the whole which is its referent. The bared fang at the given instant may mention an attack which, if and when it occurs, will include a new baring of the fangs. The “part” has now became a true iconic signal.

(4) Once a true iconic signal has evolved—not necessarily through steps 1, 2, or 3, above—a variety of other pathways of evolution become possible:

(a) The “part” may become more or less digitalized, so that magnitudes within it no longer refer to magnitudes within the whole which is its referent but, for example, contribute to an improvement of the signal/noise ratio.

(b) The “part” may take on special ritual or metaphoric meanings in contexts where the original whole to which it once referred is no longer relevant. The game of mutual mouthing between mother dog and puppy which once followed her weaning of the pup may become a ritual aggregation. The actions of feeding a baby bird may become a ritual of courtship, etc.

Throughout this series, whose branches and varieties are here only briefly indicated, it is notable that animal communication is confined to signals which are derived from actions of the animals themselves, i.e., those which are parts of such actions. The external universe is, as already noted, redundant in the sense that it is replete with part-for-whole messages, and—perhaps for that reason—this basic style of coding is characteristic of primitive animal communication. But in so far as animals can signal at all about the external universe, they do so by means of actions which are parts of their response to that universe. The jackdaws indicate to each other that Lorenz is a “jackdaw-eater” not by simulating some part of the act of eating jackdaws but by simulating part of their aggression vis-a-vis such a creature. Occasionally actual pieces of the external environment—scraps of potential nest-building material, “trophies,” and the like—are used for communication, and in these cases again the messages usually contribute redundancy to the universe message plus the relationship between the organisms rather than to the universe message plus external environment.

In terms of evolutionary theory, it is not simple to ex-plain why over and over again genotypic controls have been evolved to determine such iconic signaling. From the point of view of the human observer such iconic signals are rather easy to interpret, and we might expect iconic coding to be comparatively easy for animals to decode—in so far as the animals must learn to do so. But the genome is presumed not capable of learning in this sense, and we might therefore expect genotypically determined signals to be aniconic or arbitrary rather than iconic.

Three possible explanations of the iconic nature of genotypic signals can be offered:

(1) Even genotypically determined signals do not occur as separate and isolated elements in the life of the phenotype but are necessarily components in a complex matrix of behavior some, at least, of which is learned. It is possible that the iconic coding of genotypically determined signals renders these easy to assimilate into this matrix. There may be an experiential “schoolmarm” which acts selectively to favor those genotypic changes which will give rise to iconic rather than arbitrary signaling.

(2) A signal of aggression which places the signaler in a position of readiness to attack probably has more survival value than would a more arbitrary signal.

(3) When the genotypically determined signal affects the behavior of another species—e.g., eye marks or postures which have a warning effect, movements which facilitate camouflage or aposematic mimicry—clearly the signal must be iconic to the perceptive system of that other species. However, an interesting phenomenon arises in many instances where what is achieved is a secondary statistical iconicism. Labroides dimidiatus, a small Indo-Pacific wrasse, which lives on the ectoparasites of other fishes, is strikingly colored and moves or “dances” in a way which is easily recognized. No doubt these characteristics attract other fish and are part of a signaling system which leads the other fish to permit the approaches of the cleaner. But there is a mimic of this species of Labroides, a saber-toothed blenny (Aspidontus taeniatus), whose similar coloring and movement permit the mimic to approach—and bite off pieces of the fins of other fishes. [4]

Clearly the coloring and movements of the mimic are iconic and “represent” the cleaner. But what of the coloring and movements of the latter? All that is primarily required is that the cleaner be conspicuous or distinctive. It is not required that it represent something else. But when we consider the statistical aspects of the system, it becomes clear that if the blennies become too numerous, the distinctive features of the wrasses will become iconic warnings and their hosts will avoid them. What is necessary is that the signals of the wrasse shall clearly and indubitably represent wrasse, i.e., the signals, though perhaps aniconic in the first instance, must achieve and maintain by multiple impact a sort of autoiconicism. “When I say it three times, it is true.” But this necessity for autoiconicism may also arise within the species. Genotypic control of signaling ensures the necessary repetitiveness (which might be only fortuitous if the signals had to be learned).

(4) There is a case for asserting that the genotypic determination of adaptive characteristics is, in a special sense, more economical than the achievement of similar characteristic by somatic change or phenotypic learning. This matter has been argued elsewhere. [5] Briefly it is asserted that the somatic adaptive flexibility and/or learning capacity of any organism is limited and that the demands placed upon these capacities will be reduced by genotypic change in any appropriate direction. Such changes would therefore have survival value because they set free precious adaptive or learning capacity for other uses. This amounts to an argument for Baldwin effects. An extention of this argument would suggest that the iconic character of genotypically controlled signaling characteristics may, in some cases, be explained by supposing that these characteristics were once learned. (This hypothesis does not, of course, imply any sort of Lamarckian inheritance. It is obvious (1) that to fix the value of any variable in a homeostatic circuit by such inheritance would soon gum up the homeostatic system of the body, and (2) that no amount of modification of the dependent variables in a homeostatic circuit will change the bias of the circuit.)

(5) Last, it is unclear at what level genotypic determination of behavior might act. It was suggested above that iconic codes are easier for an organism to learn than more arbitrary codes. It is possible that the genotypic contribution to such an organism might take the form, not of fixing the given behavior, but rather of making this behavior easier to learn—a change in specific learning capacity rather than a change in genotypically determined behavior. Such a contribution from the genotype would have obvious advantages in that it would work along with ontogenetic change instead of working possibly at cross-purposes with it.

To sum up the argument so far:

(1) But the evolution of aniconic verbal coding remains unexplained. It is understandable that an early (in an evolutionary sense) method of creating redundancy would be the use of iconic part-for-whole coding. The external nonbiological universe contains redundancy of this kind, and in evolving a code of communication it is expectable that organisms would fall into the same trick. We have noted that the “part” can be split from the whole, so that a showing of the fangs can denote a possible but as yet nonexistent fight. All this provides an explanatory background for communication by means of “intention movements” and the like.

(2) It it partly understandable that such tricks of coding by iconic parts might become genotypically fixed.

(3) It has been suggested that the survival of such primitive (and therefore involuntary) signalling in human communication about personal relationship is explained by a need for honesty in such matters.

We know from studies of aphasia, from Hockett’s enumeration at this meeting of the characteristics of language and from elementary common sense that the component processes of creating and understanding verbal communication are many and that language fails when any one of those component processes is interrupted. It is possible that each of these processes should be the focus of a separate study. Here, however, I shall consider only one aspect of the matter: the evolution of simple indicative assertion.

An interesting intermediate between the iconic coding of animals and the verbal coding of human speech can be recognized in human dreaming and human myth. In psychoanalytic theory, the productions of dream process are said to be characterized by “primary-process” thinking. [6] Dreams, whether verbal or not, are to be considered as metaphoric statements, i.e., the referents of dream are relationships which the dreamer, consciously or unconsciously, perceives in his waking world. As in all metaphor, the relata remain unmentioned and in their places appear other items such that the relationships between these substitute items shall be the same as those between the relata in the waking world.

To identify the relata in the waking world to which the dream refers would convert the metaphor into a simile, and, in general, dreams contain no message material which overtly performs this function. There is no signal in the dream which tells the dreamer that this is metaphor or what the referent of the metaphor may be. Similarly, dream contains no tenses. Time is telescoped, and representations of past events in real or distorted forms may have the present as their referent—or vice versa. The patterns of dream are timeless.

In a theater, the audience is informed by the curtain and the framing of the stage that the action on the stage is “only” a play. From within that frame the producers and actors may attempt to involve the audience in an illusion of reality as seemingly direct as the experience of dream. And, as in dream, the play has metaphoric reference to the out-side world. But in dream, unless the sleeper be partly conscious of the fact of sleep, there is no curtain and no framing of the action. The partial negative—”This is only metaphor”—is absent.

I suggest that this absence of metacommunicative frames and the persistence in dream of pattern recognition are archaic characteristics in an evolutionary sense. If this be correct, then an understanding of dream should throw light both on how iconic communication operates among animals and on the mysterious evolutionary step from the iconic to the verbal.

Under the limitation imposed by the lack of a metacommunicative frame, it is clearly impossible for dream to make an indicative statement, either positive or negative. As there can be no frame which labels the content as “metaphoric,” so there can be no frame to label the content as “literal.” Dream can imagine rain or drought, but it can never assert “It is raining” or “It is not raining.” Therefore, as we have seen, the usefulness in imagining “rain” or “drought” is limited to their metaphoric aspects.

Dream can propose the applicability of pattern. It can never assert or deny this applicability. Still less can it make an indicative statement about any identified referent, since no referent is identified.

The pattern is the thing.

These characteristics of dream may be archaic, but it is important to remember that they are not obsolete: that, as kinesic and paralinguistic communication has been elaborated into dance, music, and poetry, so also the logic of dream has been elaborated into theater and art. Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics, a world forever isolated by its axioms and definitions from the possibility of making an indicative statement about the “real” world. Only if a straight line is the shortest distance between two points is the theorem of Pythagoras asserted.

The banker manipulates numerals according to rules sup-plied by the mathematician. These numerals are the names of numbers, and the numbers are somehow embodied in (real or fictitious) dollars. To remember what he is doing, the banker marks his numerals with labels, such as the dollar sign, but these are nonmathematical and no computer needs them. In the strictly mathematical procedure, as in the process of dream, the pattern of relationships controls all operations, but the relata are unidentified.

We return now to the contrast between the iconic method of creating redundancy in the universe, organism plus other organism, by the emission of parts of interactive pat-terns and the linguistic device of naming the relata. We noted above that the human communication which creates redundancy in the relationships between persons is still preponderantly iconic and is achieved by means of kinesics, paralinguistics, intention movements, actions, and the like. It is in dealing with the universe, message plus environment, that the evolution of verbal language has made the greatest strides.

In animal discourse, redundancy is introduced into this universe by signals which are iconic parts of the signaler’s probable response. The environmental items may serve an ostensive function but cannot, in general, be mentioned. Similarly, in iconic communication about relationship, the relata—the organisms themselves—do not have to be identified because the subject of any predicate in this iconic discourse is the emitter of the signal, who is always ostensively present.

It appears then that at least two steps were necessary to get from the iconic use of parts of patterns of own behavior to the naming of entities in the external environment: there was both a change in coding and a change in the centering of the subject-predicate frame.

To attempt to reconstruct these steps can only be speculative, but some remarks may be offered:

(1) Imitation of environmental phenomena makes it possible. to shift the subject-predicate frame from the self to some environmental entity while still retaining the iconic code.

(2) A similar shifting of the subject-predicate frame from self to other is latent in those interactions between animals in which A proposes a pattern of interaction and B negates this with an iconic or ostensive “don’t.” The subject of B’s message here verbalized as “don’t” is A.

(3) It is possible that the paradigms of interaction which are basic to iconic signaling about relationship could serve as evolutionary models for the paradigms of verbal grammar. We should not, I suggest, think of the earliest rudiments of verbal communication as resembling what a man does with only a few words of a foreign language and no knowledge of its grammar and syntax. Surely, at all stages of the evolution of language, the communication of our ancestors was structured and formed--complete in itself, not made of broken pieces. The antecedents of grammar must surely be as old or older than the antecedents of words.

(4) For actions of the self, iconic abbreviations are readily available, and these control the vis-à-vis by implicit reference to interactional paradigms. But all such communication is necessarily positive. To show the fangs is to mention combat, and to mention combat is to propose it. There can be no simple iconic representation of a negative: no simple way for an animal to say “I will not bite you.” It is easy, however, to imagine ways of communicating negative commands if (and only if) the other organism will first propose the pat-tern of action which is to be forbidden. By threat, by inappropriate response and so on, “don’t” can be communicated. A pattern of interaction, offered by one organism, is negated by the other, who disrupts the proposed paradigm.

But “don’t” is very different from “not.” Commonly, the important message “I will not bite you” is generated as an agreement between two organisms following real or ritual combat. That is, the opposite of the final message is worked through to reach a reductio ad absurdum which can then be the basis of mutual peace, hierarchic precedence, or sexual relations. Many of the curious interactions of animals, called “play,” which resemble (but are not) combat are probably the testing and reaffirmation of such negative agreement.

But these are cumbersome and awkward methods of achieving the negative.

(5) It was suggested above that the paradigms of verbal grammar might somehow be derived from the paradigms of interaction. We, therefore, look for the evolutionary roots of the simple negative among the paradigms of interaction. The matter, however, is not simple. What is known to occur at the animal level is the simultaneous presentation of contradictory signals—postures which mention both aggression and flight, and the like. These ambiguities are, however, quite different from the phenomenon familiar among humans where the friendliness of a man’s words may be contradicted by the tension or aggressiveness of his voice or posture. The man is engaging in a sort of deceit, an altogether more complex achievement, while the ambivalent animal is offering positive alternatives. From neither of these patterns is it easy to derive a simple “not.”

(6) From these considerations it appears likely that the evolution of the simple negative arose by introjection or imitation of the vis-à-vis, so that “not” was somehow derived from “don’t.”

(7) This still leaves unexplained the shift from communication about interaction patterns to communication about things and other components of the external world. This is the shift which determines that language would never make obsolete the iconic communication about the contingency patterns of personal relationship.

Further than that we cannot at present go. It is even possible that the evolution of verbal naming preceded the evolution of the simple negative. It is, however, important to note that evolution of a simple negative would be a decisive step toward language as we know it. This step would immediately endow the signals— be they verbal or iconic--with a degree of separateness from their referents, which would justify us in referring to the signals as “names.” The same step would make possible the use of negative aspects of classification: those items which are not members of an identified class would become identifiable as nonmembers. And, lastly, simple affirmative indicative statements would become possible.

Conscious Purpose versus Nature. [7]

Our civilization, which is on the block here for investigation and evaluation, has its roots in three main ancient civilizations: the Roman, the Hebrew and the Greek; and it would seem that many of our problems are related to the fact that we have an imperialist civilization leavened or yeasted by a downtrodden, exploited colony in Palestine. In this conference, we are again going to be fighting out the conflict between the Romans and the Palestinians.

You will remember that St. Paul boasted, “I was born free.” What he meant was that he was born Roman, and that this had certain legal advantages.

We can engage in that old battle either by backing the downtrodden or by backing the imperialists. If you are going to fight that battle, you have to take sides in it. It’s that simple.

On the other hand, of course, St. Paul’s ambition, and the ambition of the downtrodden, is always to get on the side of the imperialists—to become middleclass imperialists themselves—and it is doubtful whether creating more members of the civilization which we are here criticizing is a solution to the problem.

There is, therefore, another more abstract problem. We need to understand the pathologies and peculiarities of the whole Romano-Palestinian system. It is this that I am interested in talking about. I do not care, here, about defending the Romans or defending the Palestinians—the upper dogs or the underdogs. I want to consider the dynamics of the whole traditional pathology in which we are caught, and in which we shall remain as long as we continue to struggle within that old conflict. We just go round and round in terms of the old premises.

Fortunately our civilization has a third root—in Greece. Of course Greece got caught up in a rather similar mess, but still there was a lot of clean, cool thinking of a quite surprising kind which was different.

Let me approach the bigger problem historically. From St. Thomas Aquinas to the eighteenth century in Catholic countries, and to the Reformation among Protestants (be-cause we threw out a lot of Greek sophistication with the Reformation), the structure of our religion was Greek. In mid-eighteenth century the biological world looked like this: there was a supreme mind at the top of the ladder, which was the basic explanation of everything downwards from that—the supreme mind being, in Christianity, God; and having various attributes at various philosophic stages. The ladder of explanation went downwards deductively from the Supreme to man to the apes, and so on, down to the infusoria.

This hierarchy was a set of deductive steps from the most perfect to the most crude or simple. And it was rigid. It was assumed that every species was unchanging.

Lamarck, probably the greatest biologist in history, turned that ladder of explanation upside down. He was the man who said it starts with the infusoria and that there were changes leading up to man. His turning the taxonomy upside down is one of the most astonishing feats that has ever occurred. It was the equivalent in biology of the Copernican revolution in astronomy.

The logical outcome of turning the taxonomy upside down was that the study of evolution might provide an explanation of mind.

Up to Lamarck, mind was the explanation of the biological world. But, hey presto, the question now arose: Is the biological world the explanation of mind? That which was the explanation now became that which was to be explained. About three quarters of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (1809) is an attempt, very crude, to build a comparative psychology. He achieved and formulated a number of very modern ideas: that you cannot attribute to any creature psychological capacities for which it has no organs; that mental process must always have physical representation; and that the complexity of the nervous system is related to the complexity of mind.

There the matter rested for 150 years, mainly because evolutionary theory was taken over, not by a Catholic heresy but by a Protestant heresy, in the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin’s opponents, you may remember, were not Aristotle and Aquinas, who had some sophistication, but fundamentalist Christians whose sophistication stopped with the first chapter of Genesis. The question of the nature of mind was something which the nineteenth-century evolutionists tried to exclude from their theories, and the matter did not come up again for serious consideration until after World War II. (I am doing some injustice to some heretics along the road, notably to Samuel Butler—and others.)

In World War II it was discovered what sort of complexity entails mind. And, since that discovery, we know that: wherever in the Universe we encounter that sort of complexity, we are dealing with mental phenomena. It’s as materialistic as that.

Let me try to describe for you that order of complexity, which is in some degree a technical matter. Russel Wallace sent a famous essay to Darwin from Indonesia. In it he announced his discovery of natural selection, which coincided with Darwin’s. Part of his description of the struggle for existence is interesting:

The action of this principle [the struggle for existence] is exactly like that of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure to follow.

The steam engine with a governor is simply a circular train of causal events, with somewhere a link in that chain such that the more of something, the less of the next thing in the circuit. The wider the balls of the governor diverge, the less the fuel supply. If causal chains with that general characteristic are provided with energy, the result will be (if you are lucky and things balance out) a self-corrective system. Wallace, in fact, proposed the first cybernetic model.

Nowadays cybernetics deals with much more complex systems of this general kind; and we know that when we talk about the processes of civilization, or evaluate human behavior, human organization, or any biological system, we are concerned with self-corrective systems. Basically these systems are always conservative of something. As in the engine with a governor, the fuel supply is changed to conserve—to keep constant—the speed of the flywheel, so always in such systems changes occur to conserve the truth of some descriptive statement, some component of the status quo. Wallace saw the matter correctly, and natural selection acts primarily to keep the species unvarying; but it may act at higher levels to keep constant that complex variable which we call “survival.”

Dr. Laing noted that the obvious can be very difficult for people to see. That is because people are self-corrective systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the process of perception. Disturbing information can be framed like a pearl so that it doesn’t make a nuisance of itself; and this will be done, according to the understanding of the system itself of what would be a nuisance. This too—the premise regarding what would cause disturbance—is something which is learned and then becomes perpetuated or con-served.

At this conference, fundamentally, we deal with three of these enormously complex systems or arrangements of conservative loops. One is the human individual. Its physiology and neurology conserve body temperature, blood chemistry, the length and size and shape of organs during growth and embryology, and all the rest of the body’s characteristics. This is a system which conserves descriptive statements about the human being, body or soul. For the same is true of the psychology of the individual, where learning occurs to conserve the opinions and components of the status quo.

Second, we deal with the society in which that individual lives—and that society is again a system of the same general kind.

And third, we deal with the ecosystem, the natural biological surroundings of these human animals.

Let me start from the natural ecosystems around man. An English oak wood, or a tropical forest, or a piece of desert, is a community of creatures. In the oak wood perhaps 1000 species, perhaps more; in the tropical forest perhaps ten times that number of species live together.

I may say that very few of you here have ever seen such an undisturbed system; there are not many of them left; they’ve mostly been messed up by Homo sapiens who either exterminated some species or introduced others which be-came weeds and pests, or altered the water supply, etc., etc. We are rapidly, of course, destroying all the natural systems in the world, the balanced natural systems. We simply make them unbalanced—but still natural.

Be that as it may, those creatures and plants live together in’ a combination of competition and mutual dependency, and it is that combination that is the important thing to consider. Every species has a primary Malthusian capacity. Any species that does not, potentially, produce more young than the number of the population of the parental generation is out. They’re doomed. It is absolutely necessary for every species and for every such system that its components have a potential positive gain in the population curve. But, if every species has potential gain, it is then quite a trick to achieve equilibrium. All sorts of interactive balances and dependencies come into play, and it is these processes that have the sort of circuit structure that I have mentioned.

The Malthusian curve is exponential. It is the curve of population growth and it is not inappropriate to call this the population explosion.

You may regret that organisms have this explosive characteristic, but you may as well settle for it. The creatures that don’t are out. On the other hand, in a balanced ecological system whose underpinnings are of this nature, it is very clear that any monkeying with the system is likely to disrupt the equilibrium. Then the exponential curves will start to appear. Some plant will become a weed, some creatures will be exterminated, and the system as a balanced system is likely to fall to pieces.

What is true of the species that live together in a wood is also true of the groupings and sorts of people in a society, who are similarly in an uneasy balance of dependency and competition. And the same truth holds right inside you, where there is an uneasy physiological competition and mutual dependency among the organs, tissues, cells, and so on. Without this competition and dependency you would not be, because you cannot do without any of the competing organs and parts. If any of the parts did not have the expansive characteristics they would go out, and you would go out, too. So that even in the body you have a liability. With improper disturbance of the system, the exponential curves appear.

In a society, the same is true.

I think you have to assume that all important physiological or social change is in some degree a slipping of the system at some point along an exponential curve. The slippage may not go far, or it may go to disaster. But in principle if, say, you kill off the thrushes in a wood, certain components of the balance will run along exponential curves to a new stopping place.

In such slippage there is always danger—the possibility that some variable, e.g., population density, may reach such a value that further slippage is controlled by factors which are inherently harmful. If, for example, population is finally controlled by available food supply, the surviving individuals will be half starved and the food supply overgrazed, usually to a point of no return.

Now let me begin to talk about the individual organism. This entity is similar to the oak wood and its controls are represented in the total mind, which is perhaps only a reflection of the total body. But the system is segmented in various ways, so that the effects of something in your food life, shall we say, do not totally alter your sex life, and things in your sex life do not totally change your kinesic life, and so on. There is a certain amount of compartmentalization, which is no doubt a necessary economy. There is one compartmentalization which is in many ways mysterious but certainly of crucial importance in man’s life. I refer to the “semipermeable” linkage between consciousness and the remainder of the total mind. A certain limited amount of information about what’s happening in this larger part of the mind seems to be relayed to what we may call the screen of consciousness. But what gets to consciousness is selected; it is a systematic (not random) sampling of the rest.

Of course, the whole of the mind could not be reported in a part of the mind. This follows logically from the relationship between part and whole. The television screen does not give you total coverage or report of the events which occur in the whole television process; and this not merely because the viewers would not be interested in such a re-port, but because to report on any extra part of the total process would require extra circuitry.. But to report on the events in this extra circuitry would require a still further addition of more circuitry, and so on. Each additional step toward increased consciousness will take the system farther from total consciousness. To add a report on events in a given part of the machine will actually decrease the percentage of total events reported.

We therefore have to settle for very limited consciousness, and the question arises: How is the selecting done? On what principles does your mind select that which “you” will be aware of? And, while not much is known of these principles, something is known, though the principles at work are often not themselves accessible to consciousness. First of all, much of the input is consciously scanned, but only after it has been processed by the totally unconscious process of perception. The sensory events are packaged into images and these images are then “conscious.”

I, the conscious I, see an unconsciously edited version of a small percentage of what affects my retina. I am guided in my perception by purposes. I see who is attending, who is not, who is understanding, who is not, or at least I get a myth about this subject, which may be quite correct. I am interested in getting that myth as I talk. It is relevant to my purposes that you hear me.

What happens to the picture of a cybernetic system—an oak wood or an organism—when that picture is selectively drawn to answer only questions of purpose?

Consider the state of medicine today. It’s called medical science. What happens is that doctors think it would be nice to get rid of polio, or typhoid, or cancer. So they devote re-search money and effort to focusing on these “problems,” or purposes. At a certain point Dr. Salk and others “solve” the problem of polio. They discover a solution of bugs which you can give to children so that they don’t get polio. This is the solution to the problem of polio. At this point, they stop putting large quantities of effort and money into the problem of polio and go on to the problem of cancer, or whatever it may be.

Medicine ends up, therefore, as a total science, whose structure is essentially that of a bag of tricks. Within this science there is extraordinarily little knowledge of the sort of things I’m talking about; that is, of the body as a systemically cybernetically organized self-corrective system. Its internal interdependencies are minimally understood. What has happened is that purpose has determined what will come under the inspection or consciousness of medical science.

If you allow purpose to organize that which comes under your conscious inspection, what you will get is a bag of tricks—some of them very valuable tricks. It is an extraordinary achievement that these tricks have been discovered; all that I don’t argue. But still we do not know two-penn’orth, really, about the total network system. Cannon wrote a book on The Wisdom of the Body, but nobody has written a book on the wisdom of medical science, because wisdom is precisely the thing which it lacks. Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system—that system which, if disturbed, is likely to generate exponential curves of change.

Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all, it may be money or power.

But you may say: “Yes, but we have lived that way for a million years.” Consciousness and purpose have been characteristic of man for at least a million years, and may have been with us a great deal longer than that. I am not prepared to say that dogs and cats are not conscious, still less that porpoises are not conscious. So you may say: “Why worry about that?”

But what worries me is the addition of modern technology to the old system. Today the purposes of consciousness are implemented by more and more effective machinery, transportation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides, and so forth. Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us. A pathology—a loss of balance—is threatened.

I think that much of what brings us here today is basically related to the thoughts that I have been putting before you. On the one hand, we have the systemic nature of the individual human being, the systemic nature of the culture in which he lives, and the systemic nature of the biological, ecological system around him; and, on the other hand, the curious twist in the systemic nature of the individual man whereby consciousness is, almost of necessity, blinded to the systemic nature of the man himself. Purposive consciousness pulls out, from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole systemic structure. If you follow the “common-sense” dictates of consciousness you become, effectively, greedy and unwise—again I use “wisdom” as a word for recognition of and guidance by a knowledge of the total systemic creature.

Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. We may say that the biological systems-the individual, the culture, and the ecology—are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces “God” if you will.

Let me offer you a myth.

There was once a Garden. It contained many hundreds of species—probably in the subtropics—living in great fertility and balance, with plenty of humus, and so on. In that garden, there were two anthropoids who were more intelligent than the other animals.

On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.

By and by, the he ape, whose name was Adam, went and got an empty box and put it under the tree and stepped on it, but he found he still couldn’t reach the fruit. So he got another box and put it on top of the first. Then he climbed up on the two boxes and finally he got that apple.

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D.

They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic nature.

After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared. After that, several species of plants became “weeds” and some of the animals became “pests”; and Adam found that gardening was much harder work. He had to get his bread by the sweat of his brow and he said, “It’s a vengeful God. I should never have eaten that apple.”

Moreover, there occurred a qualitative change in the relationship between Adam and Eve, after they had discarded God from the Garden. Eve began to resent the business of sex and reproduction. Whenever these rather basic phenomena intruded upon her now purposive way of living, she was reminded of the larger life which had been kicked out of the Garden. So Eve began to resent sex and reproduction, and when it came to parturition she found this process very painful. She said this, too, was due to the vengeful nature of God. She even heard a Voice say “In pain shalt thou bring forth” and “Thy desire shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

The biblical version of this story, from which I have borrowed extensively, does not explain the extraordinary perversion of values, whereby the woman’s capacity for love comes to seem a curse inflicted by the deity.

Be that as it may. Adam went on pursuing his purposes and finally invented the free-enterprise system. Eve was not, for a long time, allowed to participate in this because she was a woman. But she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate.

In the next generation, they again had trouble with love. Cain, the inventor and innovator, was told by God that “His [Abel’s] desire shall be unto thee and thou shalt rule over him.” So he killed Abel.

A parable, of course, is not data about human behavior. It is only an explanatory device. But I have built into it a phenomenon which seems to be almost universal when man commits the error of purposive thinking and disregards the systemic nature of the world with which he must deal. This phenomenon is called by the psychologists “projection.” The man, after all, has acted according to what he thought was common sense and now he finds himself in a mess. He does not quite know what caused the mess and he feels that what has happened is somehow unfair. He still does not see him-self as part of the system in which the mess exists, and he either blames the rest of the system or he blames himself. In my parable Adam combines two sorts of nonsense: the notion “I have sinned” and the notion “God is vengeful.”

If you look at the real situations in our world where the systemic nature of the world has been ignored in favor of purpose or common sense, you will find a rather similar reaction. President Johnson is, no doubt, fully aware that he has a mess on his hands, not only in Vietnam but in other parts of the national and international ecosystems; and I am sure that from where he sits it appears that he followed his purposes with common sense and that the mess must be due either- to the wickedness of others or to his own sin or to some combination of these, according to his temperament.

And the terrible thing about such situations is that inevitably they shorten the time span of all planning. Emergency is present or only just around the corner; and long-term wisdom must therefore be sacrificed to expediency, even though there is a dim awareness that expediency will never give a long-term solution.

Morever, since we are engaged in diagnosing the machinery of our own society, let me add one point: our politicians—both those in a state of power and those in a state of protest or hunger for power—are alike utterly ignorant of the matters which I have been discussing. You can search the Congressional Record for speeches which show awareness that the problems of government are biological problems, and you will find very, very few that apply biological insight. Extraordinary!

In general, governmental decisions are made by persons who are as ignorant of these matters as pigeons. Like the famous Dr. Skinner, in The Way of All Flesh, they “combine the wisdom of the dove with the harmlessness of the serpent.”

But we are met here not only for diagnosis of some of the world’s ills but also to think about remedies. I have al-ready suggested that no simple remedy to what I called the Romano-Palestinian problem can be achieved by backing the Romans against the Palestinians or vice versa. The problem is systemic and the solution must surely depend upon realizing this fact.

First, there is humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy. In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance. We had discovered how to make trains and other machines. We knew how to put one box on top of the other to get that apple, and Occidental man saw himself as an autocrat with complete power over a universe which was made of physics and chemistry. And the biological phenomena were in the end to be controlled like processes in a test tube. Evolution was the history of how organisms learned more tricks for controlling the environment; and man had better tricks than any other creature.

But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.

Goebbels thought that he could control public opinion in Germany with a vast communication system, and our own public relations men are perhaps liable to similar delusions. But in fact the would-be controller must always have his spies out to tell him what the people are saying about his propaganda. He is therefore in the position of being responsive to what they are saying. Therefore he cannot have a simple lineal control. We do not live in the sort of universe in which simple lineal control is possible. Life is not like that.

Similarly, in the field of psychiatry, the family is a cybernetic system of the sort which I am discussing and usually when systemic pathology occurs, the members blame each other, or sometimes themselves. But the truth of the matter is that both these alternatives are fundamentally arrogant. Either alternative assumes that the individual human being has total power over the system of which he or she is a part.

Even within the individual human being, control is limited. We can in some degree set ourselves to learn even such abstract characteristics as arrogance or humility, but we are not by any means the captains of our souls.

It is, however, possible that the remedy for ills of conscious purpose lies with the individual. There is what Freud called the royal road to the unconscious. He was referring to dreams, but I think we should lump together dreams and the creativity of art, or the perception of art, and poetry and such things. And I would include with these the best of religion. These are all activities in which the whole individual is involved. The artist may have a conscious purpose to sell his picture, even perhaps a conscious purpose to make it. But in the making he must necessarily relax that arrogance in favor of a creative experience in which his conscious mind plays only a small part.

We might say that in creative art man must experience himself—his total self—as a cybernetic model.

It is characteristic of the 1960s that a large number of people are looking to the psychedelic drugs for some sort of wisdom or some sort of enlargement of consciousness, and I think this symptom of our epoch probably arises as an attempt to compensate for our excessive purposiveness. But I am not sure that wisdom can be got that way. What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.

My own slight experience of LSD led me to believe that Prospero was wrong when he said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” It seemed to me that pure dream was, like pure purpose, rather trivial. It was not the stuff of which we are made, but only bits and pieces of that stuff. Our conscious purposes, similarly, are only bits and pieces.

The systemic view is something else again.

Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation [8]

“Progress,” “learning,” “evolution,” the similarities and differences between phylogenetic and cultural evolution, and so on, have been subjects for discussion for many years. These matters become newly investigable in the light of cybernetics and systems theory.

In this Wenner-Gren conference, a particular aspect of this wide subject matter will be examined, namely the role of consciousness in the ongoing process of human adaptation.

Three cybernetic or homeostatic systems will be considered: the individual human organism, the human society, and the larger ecosystem. Consciousness will be considered as an important component in the coupling of these systems.

A question of great scientific interest and perhaps grave importance is whether the information processed through consciousness is adequate and appropriate for the task of human adaptation. It may well be that consciousness contains systematic distortions of view which, when implemented by modern technology, become destructive of the balances between man, his society and his ecosystem.

To introduce this question the following considerations are offered:

All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential “runaway” if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.) The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve “steady state.” Such systems are “conservative” in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change. Such systems are homeostatic, i.e., the effects of small changes of input will be negated and the steady state maintained by reversible adjustment.

But “plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change.” This converse of the French aphorism seems to be the more exact description of biological and ecological systems. A constancy of some variable is maintained by changing other variables. This is characteristic of the engine with a governor: the constancy of rate of rotation is maintained by altering the fuel supply. Mutatis mutandis, the same logic underlies evolutionary progress: those mutational changes will be perpetuated which contribute to the constancy of that complex variable which we call “survival.” The same logic also applies to learning, social change, etc. The ongoing truth of certain descriptive propositions is maintained by altering other propositions.

In systems containing many interconnected homeostatic loops, the changes brought about by an external impact may slowly spread through the system. To maintain a given variable (V1) at a given value, the values of V2, V3, etc., undergo change. But V2 and V3 may themselves be subject to homeostatic control or may be linked to variables (V4, V5, etc.) which are subject to control. This second-order homeostasis may lead to change in V6, V7, etc. And so on.

(1) This phenomenon of spreading change is in the widest sense a sort of learning. Acclimation and addiction are special cases of this process. Over time, the system becomes de-pendent upon the continued presence of that original external impact whose immediate effects were neutralized by the first order homeostasis.

Example: under the impact of Prohibition, the American social system reacted homeostatically to maintain the constancy of the supply of alcohol. A new profession, the bootlegger, was generated. To control this profession, changes occurred in the police system. When the question of repeal was raised, it was expectable that certainly the bootleggers and possibly the police would be in favor of maintaining Prohibition.

In this ultimate sense, all biological change is conservative and all learning is aversive. The rat, who is “re-warded” with food, accepts that reward to neutralize the changes which hunger is beginning to induce; and the conventionally drawn distinction between “reward” and “punishment” depends upon a more or less arbitrary line which we draw to delimit that subsystem which we call the “individual.” We call an external event “reward” if its occurrence corrects an “internal” change which would be punishing. And so on.

Consciousness and the “self” are closely related ideas, but the ideas (possibly related to genotypically determined premises of territory) are crystallized by that more or less arbitrary line which delimits the individual and defines a logical difference between “reward” and “punishment.” When we view the individual as a servosystem coupled with its environment, or as a part of the larger system which is individual + environment, the whole appearance of adaptation and purpose changes.

In extreme cases, change will precipitate or permit some runaway or slippage along the potentially exponential curves of the underlying regenerative circuits. This may occur without total destruction of the system. The slippage along exponential curves will, of course, always be limited, in extreme cases, by breakdown of the system. Short of this disaster, other factors may limit the slippage. It is important, however, to note that there is a danger of reaching levels at which the limit is imposed by factors which are in themselves deleterious. Wynne-Edwards has pointed out—what every farmer knows—that a population of healthy individuals cannot be directly limited by the available food supply. If starvation is the method of getting rid of the excess population, then the survivors will suffer if not death at least severe dietary deficiency, while the food supply itself will be reduced, perhaps irreversibly, by overgrazing. In principle, the homeostatic controls of biological systems must be activated by variables which are not in themselves harmful. The reflexes of respiration are activated not by oxygen deficiency but by relatively harmless CO2 excess. The diver who learns to ignore the signals of CO2 excess and continues his dive to approach oxygen deficiency runs serious risks.

(8) The problem of coupling self-corrective systems together is central in the adaptation of man to the societies and ecosystems in which he lives. Lewis Carroll long ago joked about the nature and order of randomness created by the inappropriate coupling of biological systems. The problem, we may say, was to create a “game” which should be random, not only in the restricted sense in which “matching pennies” is random, but meta-random. The randomness of the moves of the two players of “matching pennies” is restricted to a finite set of known alternatives, namely “heads” or “tails” in any given play of the game. There is no possibility of going out-side this set, no meta-random choice among a finite or infinite set of sets.

By imperfect coupling of biological systems in the famous game of croquet, however, Carroll creates a meta-random game. Alice is coupled with a flamingo, and the “ball” is a hedgehog.

The “purposes” (if we may use the term) of these contrasting biological systems are so discrepant that the randomness of play can no longer be delimited with finite sets of alternatives, known to the players.

Alice’s difficulty arises from the fact that she does not “understand” the flamingo, i.e., she does not have systemic information about the “system” which confronts her. Similarly, the flamingo does not understand Alice. They are at “cross-purposes.” The problem of coupling man through consciousness with his biological environment is comparable. If consciousness lacks information about the nature of man and the environment, or if the information is distorted and inappropriately selected, then the coupling is likely to generate meta-random sequence of events.

We presume that consciousness is not entirely with-out effect—that it is not a mere collateral resonance without feedback into the system, an observer behind a one-way mirror, a TV monitor which does not itself affect the pro-gram. We believe that consciousness has feedback into the remainder of mind and so an effect upon action. But the effects of this feedback are almost unknown and urgently need investigation and validation.

It is surely true that the content of consciousness is no random sample of reports on events occurring in the remainder of mind. Rather, the content of the screen of consciousness is systematically selected from the enormously great plethora of mental events. But of the rules and preferences of this selection, very little is known. The matter requires investigation. Similarly the limitations of verbal language require consideration.

It appears, however, that the system of selection of information for the screen of consciousness is importantly related to “purpose,” “attention,” and similar phenomena which are also in need of definition, elucidation, etc.

If consciousness has feedback upon the remainder of mind (9, above), and if consciousness deals only with a skewed sample of the events of the total mind, then there must exist a systematic (i.e., nonrandom) difference between the conscious views of self and the world, and the true nature of self and the world. Such a difference must distort the processes of adaptation.

In this connection, there is a profound difference between the processes of cultural change and those of phylogenetic evolution. In the latter, the Weismannian barrier between soma and germ plasm is presumed to be totally opaque. There is no coupling from environment to genome. In cultural evolution and individual learning, the coupling through consciousness is present, incomplete and probably distortive.

It is suggested that the specific nature of this distortion is such that the cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the “screen” of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose. The argument of purpose tends to take the form “D is desirable; B leads to C; C leads to D; so D can be achieved by way of B and C.” But, if the total mind and the outer world do not, in general, have this lineal structure, then by forcing this structure upon them, we become blind to the cybernetic circularities of the self and the external world. Our conscious sampling of data will not disclose whole circuits but only arcs of circuits, cut off from their matrix by our selective attention. Specifically, the at-tempt to achieve a change in a given variable, located either in self or environment, is likely to be undertaken without comprehension of the homeostatic network surrounding that variable. The considerations outlined in paragraphs 1 to 7 of this essay will then be ignored. It may be essential for wisdom that the narrow purposive view be somehow corrected.

The function of consciousness in the coupling between man and the homeostatic systems around him is, of course, no new phenomenon. Three circumstances, however, make the investigation of this phenomenon an urgent matter.

First, there is man’s habit of changing his environment rather than changing himself. Faced with a changing variable (e.g., temperature) within itself which it should control, the organism may make changes either within itself or in the external environment. It may adapt to the environment or adapt the environment to itself. In evolutionary history, the great majority of steps have been changes within the organism itself; some steps have been of an intermediate kind in which the organisms achieved change of environment by change of locale. In. a few cases organisms other than man have achieved the creation of modified microenvironments around themselves, e.g., the nests of hymenoptera and birds, concentrated forests of conifers, fungal colonies, etc.

In all such cases, the logic of evolutionary progress is to-ward ecosystems which sustain only the dominant, environment-controlling species, and its symbionts and parasites.

Man, the outstanding modifier of environment, similarly achieves single-species ecosystems in his cities, but he goes one step further, establishing special environments for his symbionts. These, likewise, become single-species ecosystems: fields of corn, cultures of bacteria, batteries of fowls, colonies of laboratory rats, and the like.

Secondly, the power ratio between purposive consciousness and the environment has changed rapidly in the last one hundred years, and the rate of change in this ratio is certainly rapidly increasing with technological advance. Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment—with the very best of conscious intentions.

Third, a peculiar sociological phenomenon has arisen in the last one hundred years which perhaps threatens to isolate conscious purpose from many corrective processes which might come out of less conscious parts of the mind. The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of “persons”—trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like. In biological fact, these entities are precisely not persons and are not even aggregates of whole persons. They are aggregates of parts of persons. When Mr. Smith enters the board room of his company, he is expected to limit his thinking narrowly to the specific purposes of the company or to those of that part of the company which he “represents.” Mercifully it is not entirely possible for him to do this and some company decisions are influenced by considerations which spring from wider and wiser parts of the mind. But ideally, Mr. Smith is expected to act as a pure, uncorrected consciousness—a dehumanized creature.

Finally, it is appropriate to mention some of the factors which may act as correctives—areas of human action which are not limited by the narrow distortions of coupling through conscious purpose and where wisdom can obtain.

(a) Of these, undoubtedly the most important is love. Martin Buber has classified interpersonal relationships in a relevant manner. He differentiates “IThou” relations from “I-It” relations, defining the latter as the normal pattern of interaction between man and inanimate objects. The “I-It” relationship he also regards as characteristic of human relations wherever purpose is more important than love. But if the complex cybernetic structure of societies and ecosystems is in some degree analogous to animation, then it would follow that an “I-Thou” relationship is conceivable between man and his society or ecosystem. In this connection, the formation of “sensitivity groups” in many depersonalized organizations is of special interest.

The arts, poetry, music, and the humanities similarly are areas in which more of the mind is active than mere consciousness would admit. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”

Contact between man and animals and between man and the natural world breeds, perhaps—sometimes—wisdom.

(b) There is religion.

(20) To conclude, let us remember that job’s narrow piety, his purposiveness, his common sense, and his worldly success are finally stigmatized, in a marvelous totemic poem, by the Voice out of the Whirlwind:

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding… Dost thou know when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Or canst thou tell when the hinds do calve?

Form, Substance, and Difference [9]

Let me say that it is an extraordinary honor to be here tonight, and a pleasure. I am a little frightened of you all, because I am sure there are people here who know every field of knowledge that I have touched much better than I know it. It is true that I have touched a number of fields, and I probably can face any one of you and say I have touched a field that you have not touched. But I am sure that for every field I have touched, there are people here who are much more expert than I. I am not a well-read philosopher, and philosophy is not my business. I am not a very well-read anthropologist, and anthropology is not exactly my business.

But I have tried to do something which Korzybski was very much concerned with doing, and with which the whole semantic movement has been concerned, namely, I have studied the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophic thought on the one hand and the natural history of man and other creatures on the other. This overlap between formal premises and actual behavior is, I assert, of quite dreadful importance today. We face a world which is threatened not only with disorganization of many kinds, but also with the destruction of its environment, and we, today, are still unable to think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. What sort of a thing is this, which we call “organism plus environment”?

Let us go back to the original statement for which Korzybski is most famous—the statement that the map is not the territory. This statement came out of a very wide range of philosophic thinking, going back to Greece, and wriggling through the history of European thought over the last 2000 years. In this history, there has been a sort of rough dichotomy and often deep controversy. There has been a violent enmity and bloodshed. It all starts, I suppose, with the Pythagoreans versus their predecessors, and the argument took the shape of “Do you ask what it’s made of— earth, fire, water, etc?” Or do you ask, “What is its pattern?” Pythagoras stood for inquiry into pattern rather than inquiry into substance.1 That controversy has gone through the ages, and the Pythagorean half of it has, until recently, been on the whole the submerged half. The Gnostics follow the Pythagoreans, and the alchemists follow the Gnostics, and so on. The argument reached a sort of climax at the end of the eighteenth century when a Pythagorean evolutionary theory was built and then discarded—a theory which involved Mind. [10]

The evolutionary theory of the late eighteenth century, the Lamarckian theory, which was the first organized transformist theory of evolution, was built out of a curious historical background which has been described by Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being. Before Lamarck, the organic world, the living world, was believed to be hierarchic in structure, with Mind at the top. The chain, or ladder, went down through the angels, through men, through the apes, down to the infusoria or protozoa, and below that to the plants and stones.

What Lamarck did was to turn that chain upside down. He observed that animals changed under environmental pressure. He was incorrect, of course, in believing that those changes were inherited, but in any case, these changes were for him the evidence of evolution. When he turned the ladder upside down, what had been the explanation, namely, the Mind at the top, now became that which had to be explained. His problem was to explain Mind. He was convinced about evolution, and there his interest in it stopped. So that if you read the Philosophic Zoologique (1809), you will find that the first third of it is devoted to solving the problem of evolution and the turning upside down of the taxonomy, and the rest of the book is really devoted to comparative psychology, a science which he founded. Mind was what he was really interested in. He had used habit as one of the axiomatic phenomena in his theory of evolution, and this of course also took him into the problem of comparative psychology.

Now mind and pattern as the explanatory principles which, above all, required investigation were pushed out of biological thinking in the later evolutionary theories which were developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Darwin, Huxley, etc. There were still some naughty boys, like Samuel Butler, who said that mind could not be ignored in this way—but they were weak voices, and incidentally, they never looked at organisms. I don’t think Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat, but he still knew more about evolution than some of the more conventional thinkers.

Now, at last, with the discovery of cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, and so on, we begin to have a formal base enabling us to think about mind and enabling us to think about all these problems in a way which was totally heterodox from about 1850 through to World War II. What I have to talk about is how the great dichotomy of epistemology has shifted under the impact of cybernetics and information theory.

We can now say—or at any rate, can begin to say—what we think a mind is. In the next twenty years there will be other ways of saying it and, because the discoveries are new, I can only give you my personal version. The old versions are surely wrong, but which of the revised pictures will survive, we do not know.

Let us start from the evolutionary side. It is now empirically clear that Darwinian evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding individual or the family line or the sub-species or some similar homogeneous set of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its “progress” ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. And we may very easily see this process carried to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum in the next twenty years. The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society.

The old unit has already been partly corrected by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.

The artificially homogenized populations of man’s domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival.

And today a further correction of the unit is necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.

Now, let me leave evolution for a moment to consider what is the unit of mind. Let us go back to the map and the territory and ask: “What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?” We know the territory does not get onto the map. That is the central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some larger matrix. What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are the things that get onto a map.

But what is a difference? A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—of color, texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is obviously not in the space between them, and it is obviously not in the time between them. (Difference which occurs across time is what we call “change.”)

A difference, then, is an abstract matter.

In the hard sciences, effects are, in general, caused by rather concrete conditions or events—impacts, forces, and so forth. But when you enter the world of communication, organization, etc., you leave behind that whole world in which effects are brought about by forces and impacts and energy exchange. You enter a world in which “effects”—and I am not sure one should still use the same word—are brought about by differences. That is, they are brought about by the sort of “thing” that gets onto the map from the territory. This is difference.

Difference travels from the wood and paper into my retina. It then gets picked up and worked on by this fancy piece of computing machinery in my head.

The whole energy relation is different. In the world of mind, nothing—that which is not—can be a cause. In the hard sciences, we ask for causes and we expect them to exist and be “real.” But remember that zero is different from one, and because zero is different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the world of communication. The letter which you do not write can get an angry reply; and the income tax form which you do not fill in can trigger the Internal Revenue boys into energetic action, be-cause they, too, have their breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner and can react with energy which they derive from their metabolism. The letter which never existed is no source of energy.

It follows, of course, that we must change our whole way of thinking about mental and communicational process. The ordinary analogies of energy theory which people borrow from the hard sciences to provide a conceptual frame upon which they try to build theories about psychology and behavior—that entire Procrustean structure—is non-sense. It is in error.

I suggest to you, now, that the word “idea,” in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with “difference.” Kant, in the Critique of Judgment—if I understand him correctly—asserts that the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact. He argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts. The Ding an sich, the piece of chalk, can never enter into communication or mental process because of this infinitude. The sensory receptors cannot accept it; they filter it out. What they do is to select certain facts out of the piece of chalk, which then become, in mod-ern terminology, information.

I suggest that Kant’s statement can be modified to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk. There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which be-come information. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The path-ways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.

There is, however, an important contrast between most of the pathways of information inside the body and most of the pathways outside it. The differences between the paper and the wood are first transformed into differences in the propagation of light or sound, and travel in this form to my sensory end organs. The first part of their journey is energized in the ordinary hard-science way, from “behind.” But when the differences enter my body by triggering an end. organ, this type of travel is replaced by travel which is energized at every step by the metabolic energy latent in the protoplasm which receives the difference, recreates or transforms it, and passes it on.

When I strike the head of a nail with a hammer, an impulse is transmitted to its point. But it is a semantic error, a misleading metaphor, to say that what travels in an axon is an “impulse.” It could correctly be called “news of a difference.”

Be that as it may, this contrast between internal and external pathways is not absolute. Exceptions occur on both sides of the line. Some external chains of events are energized by relays, and some chains of events internal to the body are energized from “behind.” Notably, the mechanical interaction of muscles can be used as a computational model. [11]

In spite of these exceptions, it is still broadly true that the coding and transmission of differences outside the body is very different from the coding and transmission inside, and this difference must be mentioned because it can lead us into error. We commonly think of the external “physical world” as somehow separate from an internal “mental world.” I believe that this division is based on the contrast in coding and transmission inside and outside the body.

The mental world—the mind—the world of information processing—is not limited by the skin.

Let us now go back to the notion that the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is an elementary idea. If this be correct, let us ask what a mind is. We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put upon paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. The territory is Ding an sich and you can’t do anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. [12] All “phenomena” are literally appearances.

Or we can follow the chain forward. I receive various sorts of mappings which I call data or information. Upon receipt of these I act. But my actions, my muscular contractions, are transforms of differences in the input material. And I receive again data which are transforms of my actions. We get thus a picture of the mental world which has somehow jumped loose from our conventional picture of the physical world.

This is not new, and for historic background we go again to the alchemists and Gnostics. Carl Jung once wrote a very curious little book, which I recommend to all of you. It is called Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, Seven Sermons to the Dead. [13] In his Memoirs, Dreams and Reflections, Jung tells us that his house was full of ghosts, and they were noisy. They bothered him, they bothered his wife, and they bothered the children. In the vulgar jargon of psychiatry, we might say that everybody in the house was as psychotic as hooty owls, and for quite good reason. If you get your epistemology confused, you go psychotic, and Jung was going through an epistemological crisis. So he sat down at his desk and picked up a pen and started to write. When he started to write the ghosts all disappeared, and he wrote this little book. From this he dates all his later insight. He signed it “Basilides,” who was a famous Gnostic in Alexandria in the second century.

He points out that there are two worlds. We might call them two worlds of explanation. He names them the pleroma and the creatura, these being Gnostic terms. The pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no “distinctions.” Or, as I would say, no “differences.” In the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference. In fact, this is the same old dichotomy between mind and substance.

We can study and describe the pleroma, but always the distinctions which we draw are attributed by us to the pleroma. The pleroma knows nothing of difference and distinction; it contains no “ideas” in the sense in which I am using the word. When we study and describe the creatura, we must correctly identify those differences which are effective within it.

I suggest that “pleroma” and “creatura” are words which we could usefully adopt, and it is therefore worthwhile to look at the bridges which exist between these two “worlds.” It is an oversimplification to say that the “hard sciences” deal only with the pleroma and that the sciences of the mind deal only with the creatura. There is more to it than that.

First, consider the relation between energy and negative entropy. The classical Carnot heat engine consists of a cylinder of gas with a piston. This cylinder is alternately placed in contact with a container of hot gas and with a container of cold gas. The gas in the cylinder alternately expands and contracts as it is heated or cooled by the hot and cold sources. The piston is thus driven up and down.

But with each cycle of the engine, the difference between the temperature of the hot source and that of the cold source is reduced. When this difference becomes zero, the engine will stop.

The physicist, describing the pleroma, will write equations to translate the temperature difference into “available energy,” which he will call “negative entropy,” and will go on from there.

The analyst of the creatura will note that the whole system is a sense organ which is triggered by temperature difference. He will call this difference which makes a difference “information” or “negative entropy.” For him, this is only a special case in which the effective difference happens to be a matter of energetics. He is equally interested in all differences which can activate some sense organ. For him, any such difference is “negative entropy.”

Or consider the phenomenon which the neurophysiologists call “synaptic summation.” What is observed is that in certain cases, when two neurons, A and B, have synaptic connection to a third neuron, C, the firing of neither neuron by it-self is sufficient to fire C; but that when both A and B fire simultaneously (or nearly so), their combined “impulses” will cause C to fire.

In pleromatic language, this combining of events to surmount a threshold is called “summation.”

But from the point of view of the student of creatura (and the neurophysiologist must surely have one foot in the pleroma and the other in creatura), this is not summation at all. What happens is that the system operates to create differences. There are two differentiated classes of firings by A: those firings which are accompanied by B and those which are unaccompanied. Similarly there are two classes of firings by B.

The so-called “summation,” when both fire, is not an additive process from this point of view. It is the formation of a logical product—a process of fractionation rather than summation.

The creatura is thus the world seen as mind, wherever such a view is appropriate. And wherever this view is appropriate, there arises a species of complexity which is absent from pleromatic description: creatural description is always hierarchic.

I have said that what gets from territory to map is trans-forms of difference and that these (somehow selected) differences are elementary ideas.

But there are differences between differences. Every effective difference denotes a demarcation, a line of classification, and all classification is hierarchic. In other words, differences are themselves to be differentiated and classified. In this context I will only touch lightly on the matter of classes of difference, because to carry the matter further would land us in problems of Principia Mathematica.

Let me invite you to a psychological experience, if only to demonstrate the frailty of the human computer. First note that differences in texture are different (a) from differences in color. Now note that differences in size are different (b) from differences in shape. Similarly ratios are different (c) from subtractive differences.

Now let me invite you, as disciples of Korzybski, to define the differences between “different (a) ,” “different (b),” and “different (c) “ in the above paragraph. The computer in the human head boggles at the task. But not all classes of difference are as awkward to handle.

One such class you are all familiar with. Namely, the class of differences which are created by the process of trans-formation whereby the differences immanent in the territory become differences immanent in the map. In the corner of every serious map you will find these rules of transformation spelled out—usually in words. Within the human mind, it is absolutely essential to recognize the differences of this class, and, indeed, it is these that form the central subject matter of “Science and Sanity.”

An hallucination or a dream image is surely a transformation of something. But of what? And by what rules of trans-formation?

Lastly there is that hierarchy of differences which biologists call “levels.” I mean such differences as that between a cell and a tissue, between tissue and organ, organ and organism, and organism and society.

These are the hierarchies of units or Gestalten, in which each subunit is a part of the unit of next larger scope. And, always in biology, this difference or relationship which I call “part of” is such that certain differences in the part have informational effect upon the larger unit, and vice versa.

Having stated this relationship between biological part and whole, I can now go on from the notion of creatura as Mind in general to the question of what is a mind.

What do I mean by “my” mind?

I suggest that the delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to under-stand or explain. Obviously there are lots of message path-ways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant.

Consider a tree and a man and an axe. We observe that the axe flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in his central nervous system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the axe flies, to the differences which the axe then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation (for certain purposes) will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought.

The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the trans-form of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems, but essentially this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

But what about “me”? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.

But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating that you want to understand.

And in addition to what I have said to define the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of memory and data “banks.” After all, the simplest cybernetic circuit can be said to have memory of a dynamic kind—not based upon static storage but upon the travel of information around the circuit. The behavior of the governor of a steam engine at Time 2 is partly determined by what it did at Time 1—where the interval between Time 1 and Time 2 is that time necessary for the information to complete the circuit.

We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of sub-systems, any one of which we can call an individual mind.

But this picture is precisely the same as the picture which I arrived at in discussing the unit of evolution. I believe that this identity is the most important generalization which I have to offer you tonight.

In considering units of evolution, I argued that you have at each step to include the completed pathways outside the protoplasmic aggregate, be it DNA-in-the-cell, or cell-in-the-body, or body-in-the-environment. The hierarchic structure is not new. Formerly we talked about the breeding individual or the family line or the taxon, and so on. Now each step of the hierarchy is to be thought of as a system, instead of a chunk cut off and visualized as against the surrounding matrix.

This identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical.

It means, you see, that I now localize something which I am calling “Mind” immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure. If this identity between mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts in our thinking.

First, let us consider ecology. Ecology has currently two faces to it: the face which is called bioenergetics—the economics of energy and materials within a coral reef, a red-wood forest, or a city—and, second, an economics of information, of entropy, negentropy, etc. These two do not fit together very well precisely because the units are differently bounded in the two sorts of ecology. In bioenergetics it is natural and appropriate to think of units bounded at the cell membrane, or at the skin; or of units composed of sets of conspecific individuals. These boundaries are then the frontiers at which measurements can be made to determine the additive-subtractive budget of energy for the given unit. In contrast, informational or entropic ecology deals with the budgeting of pathways and of probability. The resulting bud-gets are fractionating (not subtractive). The boundaries must enclose, not cut, the relevant pathways.

Moreover, the very meaning of “survival” becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit. The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Socrates as a bioenergetic individual is dead. But much of him still lives as a component in the contemporary ecology of ideas. [14]

It is also clear that theology becomes changed and perhaps renewed. The Mediterranean religions for 5000 years have swung to and fro between immanence and transcendence. In Babylon the gods were transcendent on the tops of hills; in Egypt, there was god immanent in Pharoah; and Christianity is a complex combination of these two beliefs.

The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind in-wards to include the whole communication system within the body—the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind out-wards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Indus-trial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don’t know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. “Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”

The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking—so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.

And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.

There are experiences and disciplines which may help me to imagine what it would be like to have this habit of correct thought. Under LSD, I have experienced, as have many others, the disappearance of the division between self and the music to which I was listening. The perceiver and the thing perceived become strangely united into a single entity. This state is surely more correct than the state in which it seems that “I hear the music.” The sound, after all, is Ding an Bich, but my perception of it is a part of mind.

It is told of Johann Sebastian Bach that when somebody asked him how he played so divinely, he answered, “I play the notes, in order, as they are written. It is God who makes the music.” But not many of us can claim Bach’s correctness of epistemology—or that of William Blake, who knew that the Poetic Imagination was the only reality. The poets have known these things all through the ages, but the rest of us have gone astray into all sorts of false reifications of the “self” and separations between the “self” and “experience.”

For me another clue another moment when the nature of mind was for a moment clear—was provided by the famous experiments of Adelbert Ames, Jr. These are optical illusions in depth perception. As Ames’ guinea pig, you discover that those mental processes by which you create the world in three-dimensional perspective are within your mind but totally unconscious and utterly beyond voluntary control. Of course, we all know that this is so—that mind creates the images which “we” then see. But still it is a pro-found epistemological shock to have direct experience of this which we always knew.

Please do not misunderstand me. When I say that the poets have always known these things or that most of mental process is unconscious, I am not advocating a greater use of emotion or a lesser use of intellect. Of course, if what I am saying tonight is approximately true, then our ideas about the relation between thought and emotion need to be revised. If the boundaries of the “ego” are wrongly drawn or even totally fictitious, then it may be nonsense to regard emotions or dreams or our unconscious computations of perspective as “ego-alien.”

We live in a strange epoch when many psychologists try to “humanize” their science by preaching an anti-intellectual gospel. They might, as sensibly, try to physicalize physics by discarding the tools of mathematics.

It is the attempt to separate intellect from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous—and dangerous—to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to separate mind from body.

Blake noted that “A tear is an intellectual thing,” and Pascal asserted that “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” We need not be put off by the fact that the reasonings of the heart (or of the hypothalamus) are accompanied by sensations of joy or grief. These computations are concerned with matters which are vital to mammals, namely, matters of relationship, by which I mean love, hate, respect, dependency, spectatorship, performance, dominance, and so on. These are central to the life of any mammal and I see no objection to calling these computations “thought,” though certainly the units of relational computation are different from the units which we use to compute about isolable things.

But there are bridges between the one sort of thought and the other, and it seems to me that the artists and poets are specifically concerned with these bridges. It is not that art is the expression of the unconscious, but rather that it is concerned with the relation between the levels of mental process. From a work of art it may be possible to analyze out some unconscious thoughts of the artist, but I believe that, for example, Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s Virgin on the Knees of St. Anne precisely misses the point of the whole exercise. Artistic skill is the combining of many levels of mind — unconscious, conscious, and external—to make a statement of their combination. It is not a matter of expressing a single level.

Similarly, Isadora Duncan, when she said, “If I could say it, I would not have to dance it,” was talking nonsense, be-cause her dance was about combinations of saying and moving.

Indeed, if what I have been saying is at all correct, the whole base of aesthetics will need to be re-examined. It seems that we link feelings not only to the computations of the heart but also to computations in the external pathways of the mind. It is when we recognize the operations of creatura in the external world that we are aware of “beauty” or “ugliness.” The “primrose by the river’s brim” is beautiful because we are aware that the combination of differences which constitutes its appearance could only be achieved by information processing, i.e., by thought. We recognize an-other mind within our own external mind.

And last, there is death. It is understandable that, in a civilization which separates mind from body, we should either try to forget death or to make mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind. But if mind is immanent not only in those pathways of information which are located in-side the body but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect. The individual nexus of pathways which I call “me” is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.

The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you. May they survive if true.

Comment on Part V

In the final essay of this part, “Form, Substance and Difference,” much of what has been said in earlier parts of the book falls into place. In sum, what has been said amounts to this: that in addition to ( and always in conformity with) the familiar physical determinism which characterises our universe, there is a mental determinism. This mental determinism is in no sense supernatural. Rather it is of the very nature of the macroscopic [15] world that it exhibit mental characteristics. The mental determinism is not transcendent but immanent and is especially complex and evident in those sections of the universe which are alive or which include living things.

But so much of occidental thinking is shaped on the premise of transcendent deity that it is difficult for many people to rethink their theories in terms of immanence. Even Darwin from time to time wrote about Natural Selection in phrases which almost ascribed to this process the characteristics of transcendence and purpose.

It may be worthwhile, therefore, to give an extreme sketch of the difference between the belief in transcendence and that in immanence.

Transcendent mind or deity is imagined to be personal and omniscient, and as receiving information by channels separate from the earthly. He sees a species acting in ways which must disrupt its ecology and, either in sorrow or in anger, He sends the wars, the plagues, the pollution, and the fallout.

Immanent mind would achieve the same final result but without either sorrow or anger. Immanent mind has no separate and unearthly channels by which to know or act and, therefore, can have no separate emotion or evaluative comment. The immanent will differ from the transcendent in greater determinism.

St. Paul (Galatians VI) said that “God is not mocked,” and immanent mind similarly is neither vengeful nor forgiving. It is of no use to make excuses; the immanent mind is not “mocked.”

But since our minds—and this includes our tools and actions—are only parts of the larger mind, its computations can be con-fused by our contradictions and confusions. Since it contains our insanity, the immanent mind is inevitably subject to possible in-sanity. It is in our power, with our technology, to create insanity in the larger system of which we are parts.

In the final section of the book, I shall consider some of these mentally pathogenic processes.

_______________

Notes:

1. This article is reprinted from the American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 8, April 1967, pp. 29- 32, by per-mission of the publisher, Sage Publications, Inc.

2. This essay appeared as Chapter 22 in Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Copyright 1968 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

3. F. Attneave, Applications of Information Theory to Psychology, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1959.

4. J . E. Randall and H. S. Randall, “Examples of Mimicry and Protective Resemblance in Tropical Marine Fishes,” Bulletin of Marine Science of the Gulf and Caribbean, 1960, 10: 444-80.

5. G. Bateson, “The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution,” Evolution, 1963, 17: 529- 39.

6. O. Fenichel, Psychoanalytic Theory of Neu York, Norton, 1945.

7. This lecture was given in August, 1968, to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, and is here reprinted from Dialectics of Liberation by permission of the publisher, Penguin Books Inc.

8. This essay was prepared as the author's position paper for Wenner-Gren Foundation Conference on “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” The author was chairman of this conference, which was held in Burg Wartenstein, Austria, July 17-24, 1968. The proceedings of the conference as a whole are to be published by Knopf & Co. under the title Our Own Metaphor, edited by Mary Catherine Bateson.

9. This was the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture, delivered January 9, 1970, under the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics. It is here re-printed from the General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37, 1970, by permission of the Institute of General Semantics.

10. R. G. Collingwood has given a clear account of the Pythagorean position in The Idea of Nature, Oxford, 1945.

11. It is interesting to note that digital computers depend upon transmission of energy “from behind” to send “news” along wire from one relay to the next. But each relay has its own energy source. Analogic computers, e.g., tide machines and the like, are commonly entirely driven by energy “from behind.” Either type of energization can be used for computational purposes.

12. Or we may spell the matter out and say that at every step, as a difference is transformed and propagated along its pathway, the embodiment of the difference be-fore the step is a “territory” of which the embodiment after the step is a “map.” The map-territory relation obtains at every step.

13. Written in 1916, translated by H. G. Baynes and privately circulated in 1925. Republished by Stuart & Watkins, London, and by Random House, 1961. In later work, Jung seems to have lost the clarity of the Seven Sermons. In his “Answer to Job,” the archetypes are said to be “pleromatic.” It is surely true, however, that constellations of ideas may seem subjectively to resemble “forces” when their ideational character is unrecognized.

14. For the phrase “ecology of ideas,” I am indebted to Sir Geoffrey Vickers' essay “The Ecology of Ideas” in Value Systems and Social Process, Basic Books, 1968.

For a more formal discussion of the survival of ideas, see Gordon Pasks' remarks in Wenner- Gren Conference on “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” 1968.

15. I do not agree with Samuel Butler, Whitehead, or Teilhard de Chardin that it follows from this mental character of the macroscopic world that the single atomies must have mental character or potentiality. I see the mental as a function only of complex relationship.

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