Gregory Bateson

Disclaimer:
This literature extract was gathered purely and subjective according the interests of the author (Manfred Bundschuh). Usually there were complete sentences from the original transferred. Especially the Table of Contents is my invention, elaborated 30 years after the excerption of the text, in order to facilitate the readers orientation. There's no guarantee for correctness.

Literaturauszug aus Humberto R. Maturana/ Francisco J. Varela: Der Baum der Erkenntnis - Wie wir die Welt durch unsere Wahrnehmung erschaffen - die biologischen Wurzeln des menschlichen Erkennens, Bern u.a. 1987

1. Vorwort der Autoren             1
2. Vorwort des Übersetzers     2
3. Die große Versuchung   2 
3.1 Das Erstaunliche des Auges   3
3.2 Der große Skandal           3
4. Erklärung           3
4.1 Die Organisation des Lebendigen   4
4.2 Das Erscheinen der Lebewesen   4
4.3 Autonomie und Autopoiese   5
4.4 Geschichte: Fortpflanzung und Vererbung   5
4.5 Vorgänge bei der Reproduktion   5
5. Entstehungsweisen von Einheiten   5
5.1 Replikation                   5
5.2 Kopie                   6
5.3 Reproduktion           6
5.4 Die zelluläre Reproduktion           6
5.5 Reproduktive Vererbung           6
6. Das Leben der Metazeller   7
6.1 Strukturelle Koppelung   7
6.2 Lebenszyklen           8
6.3 Die Organisation der Metazeller   8
6.4 Das natürliche Driften der Lebewesen   9
6.5 Determination und strukturelle Koppelung   9
7. Ontogenese und Auslese 10
7.1 Evolution als natürliches Driften 10
7.2 Voraussagbarkeit und Nervensystem 11
7.3 Die Gratwanderung         11
8. Verhalten und Nervensystem 12
8.1 Nervensystem und Erkenntnis 12
8.2 Neuronale Struktur         12
8.3 Das interneuronale Netzwerk 13
8.4 Operationale Geschlossenheit des Nervensystems 13
8.5 Plastizität         14
8.6 Angeborenes und erlerntes Verhalten 14
9. Erkenntnis und Nervensystem 14
9.1 Die sozialen Phänomene         15
9.2 Soziale Phänomene und Kommunikation 15
10. Semantische Beschreibungen 16

Vorwort der Autoren: Wir werden nämlich eine Sicht vortragen, die das Erkennen nicht als eine Repräsentation der "Welt da draußen" versteht, sondern als ein andauerndes Hervorbringen einer Welt durch den Prozeß des Lebens selbst. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, werden wir einer an streng logischem Vorgehen orientierten Route der Entwicklung von Konzepten und Ideen folgen, auf der jedes Konzept auf vorange-gegangenen Konzepten aufbaut, bis das Ganze zu einem unzerteilbaren Netzwerk geworden ist .... Als Ausgleich für die vom Leser erwartete Anstrengung haben wir das Buch durch zahlreiche Illustrationen aufgelockert-auch, weil wir immer wieder die alte Erfahrung bestätigt gefunden haben, daß ein Bild oft mehr sagt als tausend Worte. Außerdem haben wir die zentralen Begriffe in ein "vernetztes" Diagramm eingeschrieben, das die Route unserer Entdeckungsreise darstellt.

My bold suggestions in this paper, as an artisan-anthropologist-therapist, are as follows: (a) human manufacturing of objects brings about individual/collective (deep well-being) experiences of beauty and grace and (b)‘making artifacts’ represents an important ancient continuity in (social-cultural-biological) humanization. Combining these two assertions suggests a universal existence of ‘crafting in the world’. The argument was ignited by the termination of both my mother’s and father’s family blacksmithing workshops in the twentieth century. Being a technical engineer/craftsman in my first career, and being one of six sons, I was deeply puzzled about why and how our transgenerational arts and crafting family tradition would die out when my father closed down his metal construction workshop in 1986. My great-uncles from mother’s side had already closed down their smithy decades earlier.

Este es el trabajo final que escribí en 2019 para la Cátedra, Humanidad, evolución y ecología a cargo de Rolando Silla y Debora Swistun.
La consigna era escribir una especie de Ensayo relacionando algo que hayamos visto con los autores que vimos durante el cuatrimestre.
Así escribí este análisis de la Serie One strange rock ( USA) y Villefranche ( Francia) bajo la lupa de algunos autores de la Antropólogos de la mente.

has been widely excerpted and reviewed on the Internet. He is currently writing a manuscript on Husserl and Marx. Abstract: Recalling the phenomenological and Hegelian bases of the critique of misplaced concreteness, and supplementing these by the contribution of Gregory Bateson, it is possible to say that a contemporary critique of digital media cannot appeal to an irrevocable concreteness nor finally defeat abstraction. Since the digital media complex is characterized by temporal decay, transversality, and singularity, a new departure for a critical theory of digital media must centre on the cultural unconscious (non--dominant translations) and the limit, or edge, of the cultural complex.

Abstract The analysis takes up the conjunction of semiotics and cybernetics as a problem in theory construction in the human sciences. From a philosophical per- spective, this is also the ontological problem of communicology: the disciplinary study of human communication. My analysis suggests current conceptions of “semiotics” and “cybernetics” are misunderstood because “information” is assumed as synonymous with “communication” and that the axioms of “mathematics” are identical to those of “logics”. The evidence contained in the misunderstandings is a conflation of reductionist ecology ideas about the “environment” differentiation of (1) human beings [apperceptive organic life], (2) animals [perceptive organic life], and machines [inorganic and constructed mechanisms]. The communicological view argues that a correct understanding of these issues requires a competence in logics and linguistics to determine the metatheory criteria for choosing evidence among humans, animals, and machines. The domain thematic is the phenomenological synergism of human embodiment as expression and perception. In this context, my criterion for evidence is the structure or form of a pure concept of reason (choice making judgment) that is given a priori in consciousness, the notion demonstrated by Immanuel Kant: A notion is a rule that you know before you experience it as a result.

This chapter explores Bateson's concept of the Mind as Ecology, in the context of philosophical ideas on phenomenology and embodied knowing, and neuroscientific ideas on embodied cognition. It equally links it with ancient oriental ideas regarding the relationship between body, mind and soul, and practices as meditation and yoga to nourish the body as an organ of perception. It then explores its consequences for our ways of knowing, and concludes that the Mind as Ecology needs to be nourished by an Ecology of Knowing including direct and phenomenological knowing, autobio-graphic and experience-based knowing, and formal and science-based knowing. The chapter argues that such Ecologies of Knowing can be realized through the practice of Embodied Transdisciplinary Hermeneutics. It finally presents seven steps to teach Embodied Transdisciplinary Hermeneutics. Two of these steps focus on the learning process as a whole, and five explore particular ways of knowing, and how to teach them.

ABSTRACT
The foundation of disciplines is often associated with initial books and their authors. The discipline of speech–communication– communicology is no exception. Books by Albert Craig Baird, Lester Thonssen, and Franklin Hayward Knower serve as the definition of our early discipline. This article is about foresight— the anticipation of future developments for what was initially called “general speech,” whose practitioners have ever since been known as generalists. Departments and schools of communicology are now emerging worldwide as a synthesis of problematics and thematics that used to be called general speech. Knower suggested in 1962 that the beginning of theoretical and applied coherence must begin with a descriptive single-term name. Long overlooked, if known at all, and certainly never reprinted, is Knower’s candidate for a name and definition of a discipline he called communicology. This article is an edited

Cet ouvrage propose de comprendre ce qui se joue au moment des interactions communicationnelles en général et en situation de recrutement en particulier. L'ouvrage explore la part du verbal et du nonverbal dans la communication, interroge l'histoire de l'espèce et le rôle de la culture. L'auteur propose ici la présentation de concepts fondamentaux ainsi que leurs applications dans le cadre de l'insertion professionnelle et du développement des organisations.

This paper weaves together two recurring themes in philosophical and political debates of recent years: the idea, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin, that describes melancholia as a dominant structure of feeling and desire among the left; and the suggestion that we are currently witnessing a revival of debates on the question of organisation. My argument identifies not one but two left-wing melancholias, the specular relation between which precludes the work of mourning and deprives us of the conditions for thinking organisation concretely. I follows that a real return to the question of organisation can only take place if we escape this melancholic mechanism; I propose that the very idea of organisation might offer us theoretical resources with which to do so. We come to love our left passions and reasons, our analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. … What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Wendy Brown The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

We justify the concept of metapatterns as functional patterns or functional principles that are common to a large set of systems that encompass both biology and culture, by starting with the fact that evolved systems, whether biological or cultural, are produced from any iterative sequence of replication, variation, and selection. Therefore the systems that result, with specific functional parts, are formed as wholes that fit particular contexts. The principle of convergence in biological evolution, in which similar structures are independently evolved, is the model that can be extended even beyond biology. If the contexts of evolved systems across widely separated scales are similar, the resulting evolved systems can exhibit convergences that themselves occur at diverse scales. These grand convergences are the metapat- terns. For example, the functional advantage of dynamically separating systems from their environments sets the context for the evolution of the metapattern of borders across various scales. We outline fifteen additional examples of metapat- terns. We also examine the correspondences and differences between metapatterns as a multi-scale approach to systems and the approach from complexity science. We suggest that metapatterns could serve as tools for thinking about a diverse range of topics, and could thereby motivate the transference of generalizations. Finally, we propose that because metapatterns are employed in human thought, they will be useful in formulating new questions for education research, which is the subject of the companion paper.

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was eclectic in his inquiry and study. This essay explores the continuing significance of Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, an ecology of multifaceted relational dimensions of pragmatic dialogic engagement. Bateson’s insights embrace Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: that which is under our gaze is phenomenologically transformed (Bateson, 1972; Heisenberg, 1927/2014). This assumption moves dialogic study into a participant/observer genre of observation and influence. Bateson’s approach exemplifies a dialogic sensitivity in his best-known volume, which displays dialogic relational multiplicity as the bedrock of human understanding.

Purpose–This paper aims to outline recent developments in the field of choreography, especially focusing on the influence of Gregory Bateson's ideas. Choreography is progressing towards a form of art that not only deals with the creation and manipulation of ...

La riflessione intorno alle forme ed alle metaforme della saggistica pedagogica si innesta all’interno delle riflessioni inerenti l’epistemologia della scienza contemporanea.

La questione è insieme attuale e antica: interrogarsi intorno ai metodi ed ai linguaggi della scienza è interrogativo che nasce con la scienza stessa e con la necessità di demarcare episteme e doxa e che, pertanto, riporta ai temi della relazione tra quantità e qualità, oggettività e soggettività, universale e particolare.



Il saggio ha inteso ritagliare una prospettiva circoscritta tra le molteplici indicate dalla call, soffermandosi sui modi dei linguaggi nella saggistica pedagogica e interrogandosi a proposito delle possibili congiunzioni tra scientifico e poetico nella letteratura accademica, provando a sperimentare una possibile coniugazione tra forme esatte e forme erranti della comunicazione scientifica.
Lo sfondo della riflessione è nella visione sistemica che connette Bateson a Morin, Calvino alle teorie della complessità, la poesia all’irriducibile incertezza ed ai limiti della conoscenza, così come emergenti dalle indicazioni della fisica contemporanea, riportando la scelta del linguaggio estetico nella produzione saggistica alla scelta della postura epistemologica che ogni ricercatore, in pedagogia così come in ogni disciplina accademica, sceglie come forma e metaforma della sua ricerca: interrogarsi non solo sui contenuti ma anche sulle proprie cornici.

Die Arbeit diskutiert die Frage, was das ökonomische Feld, und speziell die "Managementlehre", aus Überlegungen der Postmoderne und vor allem der Soziologie Niklas Luhmanns ziehen kann.
"Summa cum laude"-bewertete Dissertation der Hochschule St. Gallen für Wirtschafts-, Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaften vom Juni 1994.
Referent: Prof. Dr. Armin Wildermuth, Ordinarius für Philosophie der Hochschule St. Gallen. Co-Referent: Prof. Dr. Emil Walter-Busch, Professor für Sozialpsychologie und angewandte Sozialforschung, Hochschule St. Gallen.

The hypothesis of the following essay is that any relationship, even a friendship, is asymmet-ric. At the beginning of the essay, I will analyse asymmetry as the basis of any exchange. Where surplus and subtraction are viewed as interactions' continuous plateaux. I will focus on surplus and subtraction as a way of local strategizing with no general Strategy. Homer's Ulysses is the paradigm of subtraction (Metis) while Shakespeare's Portia the one of surplus (Mercy). As Marcel Mauss (1990), Georges Bataille (1976) and other authors claim: the gift is never free. Subtractions and surplus are always constitutive parts of the exchange, even though the surplus is not always exploitation (as seen with Portia) and the subtraction is not always submission (as in Ulysses). This implies that the rational exchange, in which I sell you something and you buy something from me—providing an adequate quantity of goods, money, or else—is utopic and ideological. The aim of the essay is to support a trans-disciplinary investigation concerning the exchange and to approach asymmetry from different scientific and literary perspectives, an essay on what Gilles Deleuze (1997) called " critical and clinical ". So literary critics and clinical approach are mingled, both of them belong to " life as we know it " (Bérubé 1998).

The paper focusses on the central topic of friendship in the ‘Trinummus’ and observes the emerging paradoxes in the text’s staging of relationships between individuals. As it is well known, a specific aspect of this comedy is the representation of ‘amicitia’ as an interactive system involving both affective bounds and social hierarchies, kinship and economic exchanges. The analysis of some passages of the text highlights how the characters may become ‘enmeshed’, i.e. clumsily trapped in the ambiguities and contradictions of these complex relational networks. This analysis allows to investigate, on an anthropological level, the reasons for the unease of the individuals who struggle amid the paradoxes of amicitia, but also to explore, on a dramaturgical level, the ways in which Plautus plays with this complexity and this unease and presents them as comic devices.

La dicotomia identità/contraddizione vede un prevalere del primo termine nella logica classica, che esclude la contraddizione. Tra il Settecento e la prima metà dell’Ottocento la situazione si rovescia. Se Kant dimostra l’inevitabilità della contraddizione per il pensiero, Hegel fa della contraddizione addirittura uno dei cardini del proprio pensiero: non soltanto “tutte le cose sono in se stesse contraddittorie”, ma precisamente la capacità di sostenere/concepire la contraddizione diviene il grande discrimine tra le diverse strutture del reale e tra le diverse categorie del pensiero.

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), tytułowy bohater tego artykułu, angielski antropolog, biolog i cybernetyk, aktywny zawodowo głównie w USA, zasłynął jako badacz natury poznania istot żywych. Był postacią niezwykłą, człowiekiem o przenikliwym umyśle i rozległym horyzoncie intelektualnym, który wywarł znaczny wpływ na rozwój teorii komunikacji, antropologię kulturową, filozofię New Age, ekologię czy psychoterapię, w tym szczególnie na systemową terapię rodzin. Tuż pod koniec życia przedstawił niedokończoną syntezę biologii poznania, nazywaną przez niego samego ekologią umysłu. Jej zapowiedź zawarł w swojej głównej książce, ostatniej wydanej za życia pracy pt. Umysł i przyroda (Bateson, 1996 [1979]) 1. Myśl Batesona podlegała długiej i ciekawej ewolucji Gregory był najmłodszym synem Williama Batesona (1861-1926), znanego angielskiego biologa i genetyka, twórcy samej nazwy "genetyka", przeciwnika teorii Darwina. Ojciec Gregory'ego * W tekście tym wykorzystałem fragmenty drugiego rozdziału mojej pracy habilitacyjnej, Homo Significus (Warszawa 2003, Wyd. IMEX-GRAF.), w zmodyfikowanej, skróconej i poprawionej wersji. 1 Polskie tłumaczenie tej książki, wydane w 1996 roku przez PIW, pełne jest błędów i przeinaczeń, dlatego z publikacją należy zapoznawać się w oryginale.

abstract della mia tesi di laurea in filosofia del linguaggio scritta nel 2002 e pubblicata nel 2006 and inAa.Vv.Legàmi. Con Gregory Bateson, Editrice universitaria, Università di Verona, Verona 2006
solo version italian.
Insieme ad altri studentesse e studenti che hanno ricercato per la loro tesi di laurea il pensiero di Gregory Bateson con Chiara ZAmboni docente di filosofia del linguaggio presso l'università di Verona, abbiamo pubblicato gli abstract delle nostre tesi riunite in questo libro.
Il mio testo riguarda le relazioni che ho rintracciato studiando il pensiero di G. Bateson, tra la comunicazione animale e la creazione dell'opera d'arte. La comunicazione e il movimento degli animali avverrebbe in uno stato di grazia che l'artista ricercherebbe nella produzione della sua opera.

1. Einführung ................................................................  1
2. „Sozialplanung“ und die Anfänge der 
    Lerntheorie...................................................................2
3. Die Theorie der logischen Typen ..............................2
4. Kontextualisierung .....................................................2
5. Lernen als Veränderung – Lernen NULL ...............3
6. Lernen I ....................................................................3
7. Lernen II – Gewohnheits- und Charakterbildung.......3
8. Lernen III ....................................................................4
9. Lernen IV – Ontogenese plus Phylogenese ........5
    Anwendungsversuch I: Lernen II im Kulturvergleich 5
    Anwendungsversuch II: Die pädagogische Praxis 5
10. Kritik I: Übertragung der logischen Typen ........5
    Kritik II: Fehlende Empirie ......................................6
    Kritik III: Epimenides’ Paradoxon ...............................6
Quellen und Literatur: .....................................................6

This article explores an origin of architectural sustainability in the 1970s Californian governmental programs of Governor Jerry Brown and the circle around his Consultant, the countercultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand. Focusing on the Bateson Building, designed by State Architect Sim Van der Ryn and his team to be the world’s first large energy-saving, climate-modulating building, the article traces the ambition of the first Brown Administration to reinvent the state as a unified ecology founded on New Age principles, notably those drawn from the second order cybernetics of the Governor’s Advisor, anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Through archival and published sources drawn from government, environmental policy, cybernetics and architecture, the article recounts an ambitious ecological agenda that included a new Office of Appropriate Technology, a projected Space program, and a Water Atlas. The article argues for a reconsideration of the history of sustainable and postmodern architecture alike.

In this article, I draw on the theories of three scholars whose works have not typically been part of the negotiation and conflict resolution canon (Arthur Koestler, Edward T. Hall, and Gregory Bateson) to develop the beginnings of a new model for creative and constructive conflict transformation that features playfulness and humor as its key components. I explore the connections between Koestler’s theory of bisociation in the act of creation, Hall’s ideas about the cultural construction of emotional responses, and Bateson’s theories about the role of play and humor in human communication. All three authors focused particularly on body language and on the cognitive impact of emotions. Drawing on their theories and the connections between them, I suggest the theoretical underpinnings of a model for approaching conflict in which displacements and surprises, playfulness, humor, and “punch lines” can serve to reframe issues and open up new avenues for consensus building and resolution.

In these two papers, written in 2019, and 2020, I review the development of Green New Deal thinking over the last decade, referring in particular to the growth of a more radical Global Green New Deal, the work of DiEM in Europe, and the engagement of indigenous activists such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and The Red Nation. I review questions about the very possibility of planning that thinkers such as Gregory Bateson can help us to see.

A critical review of some of the historical debates among systemic therapists suggests that the enactment of systemic practice has largely been eclipsed by an over-emphasis on interpretation, narrative, and theoretical understanding. We argue that being principally organized by any therapeutic model-whether it advocates a postmodern, narrative, systemic, or other view-maintains the hegemony not of only a singular form of interpretation, but of interpretation itself. We suggest the practical shift intended by systemic and cybernetic contributions to the field involved its implicit encouragement of an always readyto-change therapy, creatively guided by interactivity rather than allegiance to any habituated form.

Las mal llamadas teorías del caos y de la complejidad, elaboradas en las dos últimas décadas del siglo XX y en lo que va del tercer milenio, han aportado numerosos elementos de juicio, elaboraciones algorítmicas y herramientas de trabajo, susceptibles de utilizarse productivamente en las ciencias sociales. Algunos principios de la dinámica no lineal, tales como la auto-organización, la sensitividad a las condiciones iniciales en escenarios caóticos, las complejidades emergentes de la aplicación recursiva de reglas simples, la independencia de escala y las clases de universalidad, deberían ser bien conocidos por los investigadores, cualesquiera sean sus orientaciones teóricas. Lo mismo se aplica a los algoritmos complejos, principalmente a los sistemas adaptativos, las metaheurísticas evolutivas, las distribuciones de ley de potencia, las redes SOM, la criticalidad auto-organizada y por supuesto la geometría fractal.
En este libro se introducen los principales algoritmos que constituyen ese espacio científico, examinándolos desde el punto de vista de las ciencias sociales pero con un espíritu fundamentalmente transdisciplinario. También se practica una clara demarcación entre las prácticas científicas genuinas y las apropiaciones discursivas y programáticas del campo de la complejidad, tales como la autopoiesis, el paradigma de la complejidad de Edgar Morin, las elucubraciones new age de Fritjof Capra y la investigación social de segundo orden.
Temario:
1. Introducción
2. Las grandes teorías de sistemas complejos
2.1 – Tipificación epistemológica: Los cuatro modelos
2.2 – El fundamento común de las teorías de sistemas: Teoría de la Información
2.3 – Cibernética
2.3.1 – Mecanismos de control y retroalimentación
2.3.2 – Aplicaciones antropológicas
2.3.2.1 – Gregory Bateson y la esquismogénesis
2.3.2.2 – Sistemas sociales autorregulados: Siegfried Nadel
2.3.2.3 – La Ecosistémica de Roy Rappaport
2.3.2.4 – Críticas y alternativas procesuales a la ecosistémica
2.4 – La teoría general de sistemas
2.4.1 – Sistemas generales
2.4.2 – Teorías de los sistemas sociales y vivientes
2.4.3 – Aplicaciones de la TGS en ciencias sociales
2.5 – Estructuras disipativas y cibernética tardía
2.5.1 – Sistemas alejados del equilibrio
2.5.2 – La flecha del tiempo: Críticas al modelo de Prigogine
2.5.3 – Autopoiesis y Enacción: Maturana y Varela
2.5.4 – La realidad negada: Constructivismo radical
2.5.5 – Estructuras disipativas en la cultura: Adams
2.5.6 – Paisajes mentales : El Modelo de Maruyama
2.5.7 – El desorden: Balandier y la morfogénesis de la Antropología Dinámica
2.5.8 – La investigación social de segundo orden
2.5.9 – La sociología autopoiética de Niklas Luhmann
2.6 – Teoría de catástrofes
2.6.1 – Singularidades: estabilidad estructural y morfogénesis
2.6.2 – Teoría de catástrofes en ciencias sociales
2.7 – Los paradigmas discursivos de la complejidad
3. Los algoritmos de la complejidad
3. 1 – Emergentes: Sistemas complejos adaptativos
3.1.1 – Autómatas celulares y vida artificial
3.1.2 – Autómatas celulares en ciencias sociales
3.1.3 – Auto-organización en Redes Booleanas Aleatorias
3.1.4 – RBA, agentes y sociedades artificiales en Antropología
3.2 – Conexionismo: Redes neuronales
3.2.1 – El paradigma conexionista de la inteligencia artificial
3.2.2 – Redes neuronales en Antropología
3.3 – El Algoritmo Genético y otras técnicas evolutivas
3.3.1 – La teoría de la evolución como heurística algorítmica
3.3.2 – Aplicaciones de algoritmos genéticos en Antropología
4. Caos y complejidad
4.1 – Caos: Teoría y práctica
4.2 – Caos y criticalidad auto-organizada en las ciencias sociales
4.3 – Medidas y definiciones de la complejidad
4.4 – La contienda entre el caos y la complejidad
4.5 – Teorías del caos y posmodernismo
5. Fractales: La geometría del caos
5.1 – El significado conceptual de los fractales
5.2 – Las geometrías de la naturaleza (y la cultura)
5.2.1 – Curvas monstruosas y dimensiones fraccionales
5.2.2 – Agregación limitada por difusión y movimiento browniano
5.2.3 – Recursividad: El eterno y grácil bucle
5.2.4 – El juego del caos: Sistemas de funciones iteradas (IFS)
5.2.5 – Systemas-L: las gramáticas recursivas del crecimiento
5.2.6 – Mosaicos periódicos y autómatas teselares
5.2.7 – Fractales clásicos, imaginarios y complejos
5.2.8 – Atractores extraños y biomorfos
5.2.9 – Patrones fractales en Arqueología y Antropología Sociocultural
6. Conclusiones

It is urgent that we assume the duty of fighting for the fundamental ethical principles, like respect for the life of human beings, the life of other animals, the life of birds, the life of rivers and forests. I do not believe in love between men and women, between human beings, if we are not able to love the world. Ecology takes on fundamental importance at the end of the century. It has to be present in any radical, critical or liberationist educational practice. For this reason, it seems to me a lamentable contradiction to engage in progressive, revolutionary discourse and have a practice which negates life. A practice which pollutes the sea, the water, the fields, devastates the forests, destroys the trees, threatens the birds and animals, does violence to the mountains, the cities, to our cultural and historical memories. -Paulo Freire 1

In questo mio breve elaborato scritto, ho cercato di presentare alcuni passaggi interessanti dell’opera di Gregory Bateson (Grantchester, 9 maggio 1904 – San Francisco, 4 luglio 1980),intitolata "Verso un’ecologia della mente", pubblicata nel 1972.In particolare, ho rivolto l’attenzione ai due saggi contenuti nella quarta parte dell’opera, che tratta i temi della biologia e dell’evoluzione: "Il ruolo del cambiamento somatico nell’evoluzione"
e "Problemi relativi alla comunicazione dei cetacei e di altri mammiferi".

This article tries to apply Gregory Bateson’s six criteria of mental process to the understanding of a group of musicians improvising from a score. Drawing from a wider concept of score, it tries to demonstrate that this whole system can be considered as a mind in itself. By explaining his presuppositions when considering that such a structuring is possible, a detailed exposition of the criteria is brought forth. The criteria are then applied to an imagined situation of guided improvisation, considering: its parts, the interaction between them, the point where collateral energy flows into the system, its circular chain of determination and the transformations that occur therein, so as to reveal, at the end, a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the system. Particular attention is given after that to the contributions that such an approach brings to the understanding of performance ecosystems. The persistence of a dynamic memory in the system, such as understood by Bateson, is shown to be determinant for the identity and unity of compositions that use guided improvisation.

Unpublished galleys of Chapter One of The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY, 2023).

"This is a major contribution to the ontology of film. It extends our understanding of what the human figure on film is, what it does, and some very important ways in which it has attracted scholarly attention. It is still with me, haunting my thinking and teaching about film in the present, and one can hardly ask more of a book." — Jason Jacobs

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Human-Figure-on-Film

The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.

Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

Design thinking is not thinking about design, but rather a re-focus on the way we think, about the world in general, and in this cybernetic process the real self can be brought into being. Gramma/topology is the social structuration of a theory-as-ontology framework with the ability to function as a design educational model that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications. To paraphrase and deconstruct Derrida, I shall call this model gramma/topology; since such a peculiar field-of-knowing does not exist, in any particular form, before the model is used, no one can say with certainty what the outcome would be, but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance for both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein.

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was a multifaceted scholar who embraced fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, systems theory, and cybernetics. He was an original thinker whose work influenced the growing environmental movement of his day, contributed to the emergence of new fields of investigation, and continues to exert an influence in a variety of disciplines, including ecological and environmental anthropology.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

En el presente ensayo, se sostiene que nuestras posibilidades de “proseguir la hominización” (Morin y Kern 2006) y de revertir la degradación biosférica y la amenaza biótica dependerán de nuestra capacidad para imaginar, de modo práctico y continuamente, a la Tierra como a un entramado de sistemas con los cuales estamos enmarañados de modo inevitable. El reconocimiento de la integración y la interdependencia con el mundo más-que-humano se perfilan como indispensables para vislumbrar una alternativa viable a la degradación ambiental y social en todo el mundo. Se coincide plenamente con Gregory Bateson, en este sentido, en que son nuestras formas de conocer las que deben ser enmendadas. Y se sugiere que poseemos, hoy, las herramientas para rectificar esas patologías de la epistemología; al menos para emprender su gradual modificación. Más específicamente, se parte de la hipótesis propuesta por Doyle (2011) de que las sustancias “psicodélicas” (que manifiestan la mente) pueden actuar como psicotecnologías “ecodélicas” (que hacen manifiesta nuestra imbricación con el ecosistema). Es decir, que son moléculas que pueden ser instrumentalizadas para hacer patente el hecho de que el ser humano es elementalmente indivisible de la biosfera. Debido precisamente a esta capacidad, se argumenta que dichas sustancias podrían ser fundamentales para recobrar la gracia de reconocer nuestra membrecía interrelacionada dentro de la comunidad de organismos vivientes en el planeta. La “experiencia ecodélica” nos impele a entretejer una nueva narración épica y mítica de re-simbolización y transformación, que nos llama a retomar nuestro lugar adecuado en el cosmos de la evolución. Y con todo ello, se argumenta, se vuelve más factible el promover la solidaridad y la responsabilidad, así como las reformas del pensamiento y la política que tan desesperadamente requerimos en la actualidad.

The film Don't look up is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of the world, a mirror showing us through what perverse mechanisms it is possible for the collective power accumulated over 300 years of economic development to be transformed into collective impotence in safeguarding social reproduction in the face of a major threat. And this is not because of a lack of knowledge or technology, but simply because of the way our world is organised.  . . .

Este libro examina una por una las corrientes teóricas que a uno y otro lado de las divisorias disciplinares combinan (o confrontan) psicología y antropología. Pese a lo delicado de muchas cuestiones, sigo estando de acuerdo con mucho  lo que escribí hace ya treinta años. Ninguna tendencia importante, por lo pronto, ha quedado sin revisar. Algunas (la antropología cognitiva entre otras) no evolucionaron mucho más desde entonces pese a los conatos de Sperber y Attran, de modo que lo que sostuve entonces todavía se sostiene.

Cuando este libro se escribió la antropología y la psicología se encontraban más cerca de lo que hoy lo están. Algunos psicólogos creían, ingenuamente, que la antropología poseía las claves de una visión de conjunto transcultural y proporcionaba herramientas de comparación. Ahora es público y notorio que la antropología carece de todo método comparativo, a excepción de las ignotas estadísticas de los HRAF; si hay una disciplina en la que la comparación ha sido bastardeada, no cabe duda que ella ha de ser la nuestra.

Nunca publicaré una segunda edición de este libro denso y raro, condenado a ser sustituido de aquí a un tiempo por una revisión de la Ciencia Cognitiva y la Antropología del Conocimiento de lo que llegado el momento califique como (digamos) los últimos quince años de producción científica en ese campo. No sé cuándo podré terminar semejante tratado, pero todavía sostengo la intención de publicar algo así cuando sea grande.

Mientras tanto, en este libelo pergeñado cuando todavía no se hablaba de Internet hay mucho material de la clase que se ha comenzado a discutir recién ahora y del que la antropología de habla hispana debería ocuparse alguna vez.