Annotation+4+-+Mind+and+Nature


 * EcoEd **
 * Reading Annotation Template **
 * Kelley Fischbach, March 25, 2014 **
 * Annotation 4 – “Mind and Nature” **

 1. Full citation?

Bateson, G. (1979). //Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unit.// New York: E. P. Dutton.

2. Where are the author/s located, what are their backgrounds and what kinds of expertise do they have?

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, whose work intersected with many other fields, giving him experience as a social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist. He was born in Grandchester, UK and graduated with a degree in biology from St. John’s College in Cambridge, before lecturing there and traveling from Sydney, to New Guinea, to Bali, and eventually to the US doing anthropology (Wikipedia, 2014). While in the US, Bateson began to develop a more “non-traditional” approach to anthropology, and began “embracing psychology, behavioral biology, evolution, systems theory, and cybernetics, and working toward a theoretical synthesis he referred to as //an ecology of mind//" (The Institute for Intercultural Studies, Inc., 2009).

3. List of at least three details or examples from the text that point to something important about culture, education and/or the challenge of environmental sustainability in the United States.


 * Bateson addresses a major concern almost immediately in his book: schools do not teach “the patterns which connect” us to each other and to our surroundings and environments (introduced on page 7).


 * Bateson notes that we think of patterns as being fixed, instead of thinking of them as “a dance of interacting parts” and as constantly changing (introduced on page 13).


 * Instructors teach students from a young and “tender” age definitions based on what that thing is to itself (a noun is a “person, place, or thing”) and not based on how it interacts with other things (its relationship to a predicate, for example). Bateson notes that this in inherently flawed (page 17).

 4. What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?


 * “Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality” (page 7).


 * “We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs… In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose” (page 13).


 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">“A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components… The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by differences, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than to energy (page 92).

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> 5. What is the main argument of the text?

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Bateson makes his argument excruciatingly clear even in the first few lines of his text. He poses the argument that it does no good to understand one thing alone, without understanding how it is connected to everything else. Basically, his argument rests in the fact that schools do not currently teach this way, and Bateson beliefs that this method would result in a much deeper understanding of the world and all of its facets. His “thesis” statement is that **“it is possible and worthwhile to //think// about many problems of order and disorder in the biological universe and that we have today a considerable supply of tools of thought which we do not use, partly because – professors and schoolboys alike – we are ignorant of many currently available insights and partly because we are unwilling to accept the necessities that follow from a clear view of the human dilemmas”** (page 21).

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">6. Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.


 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Bateson states, “This book is built on the opinion that we are parts of a living world” (page 17). By this, he stresses the importance of understanding all of the moving parts involved in our own existence. He continues on to say that we have “lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty” (page 17).


 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Bateson notes that “logic and quantity turn out to be inappropriate devices for describing organisms and their interactions and internal organization… there is no conventional way of explaining or even describing the phenomena of biological organization and human interaction” (page 20). Here, he expresses his unhappiness with the way that these interactions and connections are taught (i.e. not at all).


 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Throughout this book, Bateson comments that he will be “pulling out plums one after the other and exhibiting them side by side to create an array from which we can go on to list some fundamental criteria of mental process” (page 20). Bateson aims to use “disconnected pieces of wisdom” to better explain these fundamental connections and human interactions.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">7. What parts of the argument did you find most and least persuasive, and why?

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I found Bateson’s argument incredibly persuasive, but in particular, I related to his “Case of Synonymous Languages” (pages 73-77). The algebraic and geometric representations of the same data were a brilliant comparison to how students learn in different ways. Bateson really stressed the idea that “enlightenment” can be gained through understanding the “trick” behind finding the answer. I’m not even sure if I am relating to Bateson on the same level that he intended in this case, but what I took away from this segment is that, in teaching, we need to be aware that there is more than one “language” for teaching any subject, and that it is necessary to see these variations are complementary, rather than “right” or “wrong”.

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I was also very persuaded by Bateson’s “criteria of mind” and particularly loved how he describes how “thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning, and the like occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria” (page 92).

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I am perhaps least persuaded by Bateson’s discussion on “time out of joint,” likely because I don’t fully understand his argument. He notes that schools do well teaching students to become “engineers, doctors, lawyers,” but they don’t “get the idea [that the students] are just as obsolete as we” (page 219). I don’t have any idea what he’s getting at here…

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">8. What kinds of corrective action are suggested by the text (either overt or implied)?

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">For starters, Bateson implies that we (as educators and students) need to make better use of the resources that we have available for teaching and learning. For this to happen, Bateson thinks that we need to change how we think, to truly see these resources as valuable and even necessary for a complete education.

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Bateson ends his segment on time being “out of joint” by implying that teachers (himself included) are not promoting students to see “wider perspectives which will bring our system back into an appropriate synchrony or harmony between rigor and imagination” (page 223). Thus, he ends with a very open-ended means for change to come about in the education system.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">9. Explain how the argument and evidence in the text relates to our effort to conceptualize, design and deliver EcoEd?

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Throughout this reading, I was consistently reminded of our efforts in EcoEd, as many of the principles directly align with Bateson’s ideals. For instance, he focuses on our “unwillingness to accept the necessities that follow from a clear view of the human dilemmas,” which is something that we are constantly dealing with when developing our curricula. <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">This semester of our curriculum development is a great example of what Bateson proposes, as we have been focusing on systems and working very hard so that our students can see all of the intricate connections between themselves, their communities, and numerous systems.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">10.What additional information has this text compelled you to seek out? (Describe what you learned in a couple of sentences, providing at least two supporting references).

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">I was curious about what “cybernetics” is, and what that field studies, so I did a quick search and learned that it is concerned with “the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment” ( <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">[] <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">).

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> I was also interested in seeing how Bateson’s work has been reviewed by the public, so I did a bit of research into review on “Mind and Nature” and found that this work is widely admired. A few reviewer quotes that I found interested are below:


 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">“I liked Bateson’s premise that the world is aesthetic, and his definition of aesthetic is ‘responsive to the pattern which connects’… Bateson discusses the wider knowing which he described as ‘the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities.’ His point was that we humans notice the starfishes, but we don’t notice the glue that holds the starfishes and the rest of the world together.”
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">“Bateson was a great thinker who emphasized that logic and quantity are inappropriate devices for describing organisms and their interactions and internal organizations.”
 * <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">“This book rests at the strange nexus of the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Douglas Hofstadter, and is presented to us within a framework of biology with an ultimate concern for the institution of education.”

<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">( <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">[] <span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">)