Mind and Nature
This classic book summarizes Gregory Bateson's thinking on the subject of the patterns that connect living beings to each other and to their environment. Bateson's classic transdisciplinary work presents us with tools of thought, and explores the presuppositions of science and everyday life. This book has influenced scholars in disciplines as diverse as biology, management theory. creativity research, family therapy, communication, systems theory, and epistemology.-- Publisher description.
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6recommend
19mentions
7people
2011–2024years
79% recommend21% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Nabokov ends one of the most captivating fragments of Pale Fire with a sentence "I trust the reader has enjoyed this note."
He totally got me.
It is not the book I would recommend most often, it just came to my mind.
What I would recommend the most are psychological books. 'Mind and Nature' by Gregory Bateson is one of my favorites.
Posts like this one are awesome, always happy to sieve through.
- Trading insults back and forth isn't going to be very conducive to a productive discussion. Why don't you tell me a little about your theory of moral values in cultural expression and consumption and I'll tell you a little about mine?
My instinctual position is that one's character (moral, aesthetic, civil, political, emotional, etec) is strongly influenced by the cultural media one encounters. I think encountering the wide range of human emotions and contexts available in fictional literature makes one more resilient when faced with adversity, and better able to make an informed decision that will lead constructively towards one's desired outcome. I also don't think literature is the only way to be exposed to that range of emotions and contexts.
I think the shift from interacting with a predominantly printed media to an interactive/hypertextual media has been a net negative for society, although I'd struggle to define the exact metric on which it's a net negative. I think the impact on attention span would be one of those negative impacts, but I'm aware of no hard evidence of such an impact, and would ask citations if someone made such a claim in debate. I've witnessed friends and loved ones, through their habits of interaction with online media, end up in a worse place than they would were it not for online media.
I have a handful of friends with whom I exchange books and book recommendations, and I've noticed and been saddened by noticing that most of what I get recommended is somewhat pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, and while I recommend my share of that I also recommend a lot of books with, for lack of a better phrase, more "aesthetic value". Some of the books I've been pushing on people in the past few years, with varying success, include: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, The Great Gatsby, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, (v.) by Anastacia-Renee, and Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon. They're all excellent books!
But you're right, I am somewhat of a moral relativist. I think it's very hard to objectively compare different cultural values or cultural habits of media interaction. I think it's easy to fool oneself that one's personal preferences are morally superior to one's personal dislikes, and I'm fairly hesitant to listen to someone propound on that topic without seeing evidence of some fairly rigorous introspection and attempts to overcome those inherent, inevitable biases.
- Alien Information Theory by Andrew Gallimore
Excerpt reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxC2cyg-cTg
Less about psychedelics, but a great accessory read is Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson
- Three Pillars of Zen, read when I was 16, it felt like "This is it. This is how I see it."
Few books by Ken Wilber, gave me a framework, a meta-frame of sorts when I was young.
Introduction to NLP (esp. chapter V on Meta Model, took me two years to process it)
Structure of Magic, vol. II - communication, incongruity
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson
And I could go on and on... but the winner is...
"Embracing Our Selves" by Sidra & Hal Stone.
This book and perspective changed my life completely. It was like a grenade bursting inside my mind and I've seen many people reacting to it this way (incl. people closest to my heart). It's a perspective shift, an insight. You've been warned. :)
- I feel compelled to recommend a couple of books: Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson and Alien Information Theory by Andrew Gallimore
- I'm really sorry about that. No offense taken.
In re: Cybernetics in general I always recommend "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby. It's a whole book but I find it to be the most direct and concrete exposition of Cybernetics.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
In re: paradigm shift, I don't really know of a single good source for that, but the works of Gregory Bateson, specifically "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity", were useful to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson
