Minds and Mental Process in the thought of Gregory Bateson.

Bateson’s understanding of ‘minds’ is not easily understood or accepted. It is difficult to explain briefly, because we are all conditioned to think of minds as existing only in relation to the brains of human beings – or, possibly, of some ‘higher animals’. Bateson’s understanding of ‘minds’ grew from his understanding of ‘cybernetics’ - systems thinking and information theory. He was a major figure in the development of cybernetics which (at the end of World War II) developed out of study of the self-correcting control systems of ‘flying bombs’.

Bateson came to see ‘minds’ or ‘mental systems’ as existing everywhere in the living world where the relating within any system was able to register ‘news of difference’ (any sort of change in the world outside itself) and then make an appropriate response to that change. The first thing to understand is that these mental systems or minds are not necessarily conscious – or self-conscious. They may be conscious – but that is not a requirement. So – a plant growing towards the light, a tree shedding its leaves as the cold weather of late autumn comes, a forest fostering some species of trees and suppressing others as the climate changes, a flock of birds wheeling and swinging as one in the wind, a human (or other animal) beginning to sweat on a hot day, a population of humans ‘turning against’ a government, a flock of swallows navigating their way home to Africa as the English winter approaches – all these are responding to news of difference – and they are, for Bateson, examples of minds or ‘mental systems’.

A second point to make clear is that all these systems contain smaller systems and are themselves parts of larger systems. The microscopic organisms in the earth are themselves mental systems – responding to changes of temperature, nutrients, moisture and so on, and taking appropriate action – dividing, moving, growing, dying. These tiny beings form part of the process of the soil, contribute to (and so are part of) the growth of plants or trees. The trees and plants provide food and habitat for many animals and birds so this whole ecology can be seen as a mental system or mind, though each component of it is also a mind. The whole forest is, itself, part of larger systems – it contributes to the humidity and composition of the atmosphere, takes in and holds carbon dioxide and influences the weather of the planet. Planet Earth herself is dependent on larger cosmic processes: heat and light from the Sun (neither too much nor too little for life), carbon atoms (formed in the residue of an exploded ‘second generation’ star) and necessary for nearly all our life-forms. Each scale of process from the microscopic to the cosmic shows, by Bateson’s definitions, the characteristics of mind.

His definition of ‘minds’ (paraphrased) goes:

This is the core material of Understanding Gregory Bateson, in which I examine all this in much greater detail.