[Xmca-l] Re: Bateson on thinking relatively

[Martin Packer]

I’m struck by the similarity between Bateson’s description and the notion floating around in neuroscience of a “perception-action cycle,” in which brain, body, and environment are each components in a circular process.

The perception-action cycle is a circular cybernetic flow of information processing between the organism and its environment in a sequence of goal-directed actions. An action of the organism causes an environmental change that will be processed by sensory systems, which will produce signals to inform the next action, and so on. The perception-action cycle is of prime importance for the adaptive success of a temporally extended gestalt of behavior, where each action is contingent on the effects of the previous one. The perception-action cycle operates at all levels of the central nervous system. Simple, automatic, and well rehearsed behaviors engage only the lower levels of the perception-action cycle, whereas, for sensorimotor integration, the cycle runs through the spinal cord and subcortical structures.

To the extent that deliberate, reflexive planning becomes part of the cycle on its highest levels, the sense of being the initiator of action can be hard to resist. But it’s just the walnut on the cupcake.

Here’s a diagram, though it’ll be probably be removed, so here’s the link too…

<http://willcov.com/bio-consciousness/sidebars/Perception--Action%20Cycle_files/image295.jpg>



Martin




> On Jan 31, 2018, at 9:38 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> Darned if I did not find that Bateson passage online! Amazing.
> Here it is from *Steps to an Ecology of Mind.*
> 
> mike
> --------------\
> 
> Consider a tree and a man and an axe. We observe that the axe flies through
> the air and makes certain gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the
> tree. If we now want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be
> concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the
> retina of the man, differences in the central nervous system, differences
> in his different neural messages, differences in the behaviour of his
> muscles, difference in how the axe flies, to the differences which the axe
> then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation will go round and round
> that circuit. If you want to explain or understand anything in human
> behaviour, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits.
> (Bateson, 1972, p. 433)
> 
> 
> 
> Later in the same paper he writes about how difficult it is to adopt this
> epistemology:
> 
> 
> 
> I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter;
> but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think ‘Gregory Bateson’ is cutting
> down a tree. I am cutting down the tree. ‘Myself’ is to me still an
> excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been
> calling ‘mind’.
> 
> 
> 
> The step to realizing – to making habitual – the other way of thinking – so
> that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of
> water or cuts down a tree – that step is not an easy one.
> 
> 
> .... Once we have made this shift, our perspective fundamentally changes.
> We firstly start focusing on relationships, flows and patterns; and
> secondly realize that we are part of any field we are studying.