Raleigh Rambles

John Dancy-Jones at large!

G Bateson

This is the guy that introduced me to metacognition, which led me to epistemology and so much more.  I read his work in Professor Fritz Hafer’s anthropology class at UNC.  More than any sixties rhetoric or philosophy, this man’s ideas about human culture made me believe the world really was getting ready for a huge sea change.

Bateson and his partner, Margaret Mead

Google’s Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

     This is the book that rocked my little world. Learning to know how we know what we know – it sounds like the epitome of sophomoric self-reflective philosophy – but the process also illuminates in a unique light the ways in which we share and receive knowledge through social customs and interactions.  Now information has indeed become the McLuhan universal currency, and Bateson’s ecological properties describe and proscribe for some of our most glaring social inadequacies.

Bateson links

Wonderful summary essay by Ted Gioia

1 Comment »

  1. Hello !

    This is my first time on this blog.

    Nice presentation of G. Bateson and your personal contact with his ideas.

    For some years I was very much influenced by him and them.

    Generally I still like Bateson’s ideas very much, but it seems to me that now the limitations of his thinking are becoming more apparent or clearer to me.

    An indian philosopher (let’s say so) called Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar introduced me to new ways of thinking, that helped me understand Bateson’s ideas from another point of view – more broader, in my opinion.

    If cybernetics was a scientific revolution, this little man’s ideas are a revolution in the way we understand what science is and about its place in the larger frame of human society – to say the least.

    Continuing these comments, I have written a big text, but I will not post it here: because it is too big for a comment, and also because I thought that may be it would be better to wait and see if you are interested in “hearing” more from me. (You have my email.)

    Thank you for your attention. I really appreciated your text on Bateson, with its personal colors.

    Mahesh

    Comment by Mahesh | January 29, 2011


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