Ecology of mind

'Nature is like a text into which generations of all beings write their vision', writes Varga, in a sentence that helps to frame the entire work. Varga's process is deeply personal, reflecting his own struggle with the fragility of nature and an ecological vision of the web of connectivity, 'morphic resonsonances' through complex 'morphogenetic fields'. The attempt to record the passage of experiences, an intuitive connection to the floating pulses of nature, and the mental restrictions imposed by education and upbringing are all here. The art here also touches a chord with a much wider world, the collectives' fears, desires, hopes and anxieties for the future for the humanity, and to wider connections into the other than human web of life intimating at a new ecological vision. Art is needed here as a place to feel the feeling we don't want to feel, or don't know that we feel. Our fear, guilt, rage, loss, mourning, mourning for the loss of a world. This paper is an ecopsychoanalytic reflection on Jaro Vargas 'We don't know that we know' art exhibition.

In questo mio breve elaborato scritto, ho cercato di presentare alcuni passaggi interessanti dell’opera di Gregory Bateson (Grantchester, 9 maggio 1904 – San Francisco, 4 luglio 1980),intitolata "Verso un’ecologia della mente", pubblicata nel 1972.In particolare, ho rivolto l’attenzione ai due saggi contenuti nella quarta parte dell’opera, che tratta i temi della biologia e dell’evoluzione: "Il ruolo del cambiamento somatico nell’evoluzione"
e "Problemi relativi alla comunicazione dei cetacei e di altri mammiferi".

Code biology uses protein synthesis to pursue how living systems fabricate themselves. Weight falls on intermediary systems or adaptors that enable translated DNA to function within a cellular apparatus. Specifically, code intermediaries bridge between independent worlds (e.g. those of RNAs and proteins) to grant functional lee-way to the resulting products. Using this Organic Code (OC) model, the paper draws parallels with how people use artificial codes. As illustrated by Tetris and Morse, human players/signallers manage code functionality by using bodies as (or like) adaptors. They act as coding intermediaries who use lee-way alongside “a small set of arbitrary rules selected from a potentially unlimited number in order to ensure a specific correspondence between two independent worlds” (Barbieri, 2015). As with deep learning, networked bodily systems mesh inputs from a coded past with current inputs.

Received models reduce ‘use’ of codes to a run-time or program like process. They overlook how molecular memory is extended by living apparatuses that link codes with functioning adaptors. In applying the OC model to humans, the paper connects Turing’s (1937) view of thinking to Wilson’s (2004) appeal to wide cognition. The approach opens up a new view of Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) seminal studies on Tetris. As players use an interface that actualizes a code or program, their goal-directed (i.e. ‘pragmatic’) actions co-occur with adaptor-like ‘filling in’ (i.e. ‘epistemic’ moves). In terms of the OC model, flexible functions derive from, not actions, but epistemic dynamics that arise in the human-interface-computer system. Second, I pursue how a Morse radio operator uses dibs and dabs that enable the workings of an artificial code. While using knowledge (‘the rules’) to resemiotize by tapping on a transmission key, bodily dynamics are controlled by adaptor-like resources. Finally, turning to language, I sketch how the model applies to writing and reading. Like Morse operators, writers resemiotize a code-like domain of alphabets, spelling-systems etc. by acting as (or like) bodily adaptors. Further, in attending to a text-interface (symbolizations), a reader relies on filling-in that is (or feels) epistemic.  Given that humans enact or mimic adaptor functions, it is likely that the OC model also applies to multi-modal language.

Cultural Midwifery is a theoretical inquiry that explores an ontology of
being, being with, and being within the becoming that may ease the transition of individuals, communities, organizations, and social institutions through the uncertainties of “postnormal times”—the undefined spaces between paradigms that are failing and those that have yet to emerge. With a mind toward a declining Industrial Age in the West, and a possible Ecological Era on the horizon, Cultural Midwifery attempts to cull the knowledge and skill sets of midwives, who have been attending to liminal spaces for millennia, so as to inform and to narrativize the emergent and complex adaptive dynamics of epistemology, leadership, relational care, and culture. Midwifery is presented as an originary, poetic, pragmatic, and embodied ēthos of relating, meaning-making, and leading into being. To engage this inquiry with a depth of understanding and a breadth of awareness that honors myriad ways of knowing, that calls upon a wholeness of being, and that allows for nonlinear emergentism, a new, processual inquiry perspective, entitled the “complex gaze,” is also introduced.

This work is an exploration of the relationship between Bateson and LSD, seen in historical, scientific and philosophical terms. In the introduction I will explain the focus on the theoretical problem of conscience and consciousness (also in relation to LSD) interpreted with the conceptual tools of the ecology of mind. We will then examine Bateson's two direct experiences with LSD, the technical and theoretical approaches of the two therapist-colleagues who administered the drug, and the relationship between their perspectives and that of Bateson. Then we will retrace the path that led Bateson to enter these contexts (cybernetics, psychiatry, counterculture), while opposing his practical (moral) and theoretical choices in relation to developments in his research. In the intermezzo we will attempt connect the conceptual instruments of Bateson to their application in my research project. Finally, we will see how Bateson establishes the philosophical basis of his theory by approaching the problem of conscience and consciousness in terms of "aesthetic determinism", and how his experience with LSD represents certain salient points of this work, bringing out the implicit assumptions, fixed points and impasses he was to develop and confront in his later research.

Reason and rationality, upon which modern, westernized, societies have been founded, have powerfully characterized the nature of human relations with other species and with the natural world. However, countless indigenous and traditional worldviews tell of a very different reality in which humans, conceived of as instinctual and intuitive, are a part of a complex web of ecological relationships. Other species, elements of the natural world, and people are active participants in relations overflowing with communications, interactions sometimes recorded in ethnographies, or as ‘myths’ and ‘stories’. The present article draws upon a range of traditions to explore the biases which shape how indigenous and traditional life-ways are represented in westernized contexts; the phenomenon of receiving direct insight or intuitive knowing from more-than-human worlds; and the numerous valuable understandings regarding the nature of the human being, other species, and how to live well, that are offered by a deeper comprehension of different worldviews. I also argue that the various capacities for instinctual and intuitive knowledge which accompanies these life-ways are endemic to the human species yet overlooked, the correction of which might work to usefully recalibrate our ethical relations with each other, and with other life on earth.

This essay applies the theoretical categories of Bateson's ecology of mind and Joseph Meeker's literary ecology to Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics," here interpreted as a big "narrative play" and a perfect example of ironic interaction among living forms. With its "non-anthropocentric anthropomorphism," Calvino's work is a great "comedy of the universe," a cosmological Darwinism, and an evolutionary tale about the world's life.

This article has the aim to discuss the ways through which takes place the auto-organizations of social forms, and how this can represents a redefinition of the role of social sciences. The idea is to be able to trace a sociology as “science of emergent proprieties”. In fact the social phenomena aren’t the results of individual proprieties, and neither the outcomes of impersonal structures, but are the results of structural coupling between these two elements. The article is giving a new likely definition of “social relation”, meant as a “a co-regulated, co-adaptive and co-evolutionary coupling where every agent influences another, giving life to a relational and self-organized domain”. This definition is partly influenced by autopoiesis theory and its possible connections with the thoughts of Georg Simmel, Gregory Bateson and Pierpaolo Donati. Also, it can be useful in order to trace a new sociological path that looks at the observed phenomena as “ongoing social phenomena”, discussing interventions of welfare. In the frame of discussions of relational phenomenon, the concept of “economic flexibility” of Bateson’s Thought will be introduced for explain the homeostatic capacity of relationship as circularity interaction.

Conclusion

These paintings were produced in a particular historical time and many poems retain the connection. But most reject this approach and see the ladies they try to describe through the eyes of nature with a great number of natural, vegetal or animal metaphors, including one little fable of a bee caught by a lily flower.
Yet the most original, hence interesting, approach is the Buddhist one that tries to confront itself with the passion some men are feeling in front of these paintings and that tries to find a way out. The easier way is to imagine the real women reborn in these pictures that then lose their real power since they are only pictures. The more difficult way is to understand that their beauty as images is the mark of the power of the painter who is trying to affect us with emotions, but these are purely artistic, aesthetic and not physical or mental, hence no tanhā at all.
Nature in other words is used to describe the women or their lot there stuck forever on the rock face, at least till the wear and tear of the yearly monsoon washes them away, but the mind is used in order to bring the viewers back to reason, though not in the western way, by teaching them some good attitude, why not some truth, but in the Buddhist way by building the right attitude in oneself and letting others know for them to use their minds and meditation to achieve a similar detachment, eventually.

second draft. forthcoming chapter in 'Click & Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media', eds May Friedman & Silvia Schultermandl.

This chapter discusses recent shifts toward 'avatar' online identities from the lens of post-humanist media theory, speculative materialism, cybernetics, and perspectivist multi-naturalism. At its least ambitious, it interrogates qualitative losses in possibilities of personhood, movement and knowledge brought about by quantitative increases in travel, communication, and information technology, and discusses problems associated with the projection of disembodied persons in a simple representational system I term the avatarsphere. Situating this problem within the broader 'ecological error' (Bateson) of node-driven, navigational cartography, I present oppositional stories of non-representational wayfaring (Ingold) in the complex river systems of the Amazon. But my investigation of human-object relations asks broader ontological questions. In theorizing technologically mediated human relationships, I avoid the mistake of presenting a unidimensional world with one kind of human, one kind of technology, and one class of pre-existing non-human objects – a thing sometimes called 'nature' that is either revealed or veiled to human perception. Airplanes, the Internet and credit cards are simply objects created by humans; dominant as they have become in the way humans relate to the world and each other, they reflect as much as they shape a set of specific worldviews articulated by specific humans. Here, I am interested in the possibilities that are offered but also those that are not offered by specific human worldviews. As such, I am preoccupied with the open-ended possibilities about what is real and how to live in the world that are no longer permitted once most of humanity is recruited into a particular ontological regime; in this case that of the avatarshpere. The question posed here is not what kind of 'nature' is the avatarshpere, but what are all the other kinds of natures we do not live in as a result?"

Cognitive Anthropology has developed some powerful tools in the refinement of schema theory and cultural models. Unfortunately, the discipline has not utilized these tools to investigate religion. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) has employed cognitive and evolutionary psychology towards better understanding how
the mind selects and internalizes religious representations but has not taken up schema theory as one of its techniques. This paper analyzes schema theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion with an eye towards reconciling these two methodologies in order to more comprehensively study religion. Bateson’s notions of the “ecology of mind,” Sperber’s ideas about the epidemiology of representations, and Sørensen’s concept of an immunology of cultural systems are highlighted as ways to envelop CSR methodologies into a systems-level approach. Part I reviews the development of schema theory and considers the influence of psychodynamic processes on the internalization of schemas. Part II looks at the major contributions of the Cognitive Science of Religion and points out potential criticisms of the field. Part III takes up systems-level analyses as a way to reconcile schema theory and CSR.

This article has the vocation of being a small place in which we can dialogue about the relationship between the enactive approch to cognition
and the ecological humanism. The enactive approach underlines how the
organisms create their own perceived world and interpret it. World and
organism in this sense specify each other forming a new unit. The environment (even his organic components) is as important as the subject
in determining experiences and ideas, because there would not be the
phenomenon of perception without something to be perceived. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the natural world is influent in the
formulation of experiences, memories that are transformed into artistic
ideas that in turn are bound in their realization from the dependence to
that natural world that has helped to generate them.

Cosmos/Earth Run on Spiritual Commons and Aesthetics

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Lao Tzu
(China about 4000 years ago)

AN ODD TRAIL INTO SPIRITUAL COMMONS

Van Morrison sang in1968 …I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world…could you find me? would you kiss my eyes? and lay me down …in silence easy…to be born again…in another time…in another place…. on: Astral Weeks

Wrestling with this text I became to realize-looking back as a grandfather at 74-it has been an odd quest ending up in spiritual commons. I have always, even as a child in my own families, felt 'out of place' and made it a lifelong quest to get 'in place'. ...

By changing everything we know about artificial intelligence (AI), the ways in which AI changes everything will be more plausible to explore. Arguments concerning AI as a potential threat are based on two taken-for-granted assumptions, namely, that AI exists as a separate category of intelligence, different to “natural” intelligence, and that intelligence is an inherent property of separable entities, such as humans or robots. Such arguments have given rise to ethical debates and media commentary concerned with AI, often quite extrapolating, followed by catastrophic scenarios. However, several discussions in the philosophy of social science (as well as in theoretical approaches to synthetic biology and cybernetics) have suggested (a) that the distinctions between “natural”/“human” and “artificial”/“nonhuman” are fallible, and (b) that intelligence should most likely be conceived as an environmental/systemic property or phenomenon – a shared cognition. In an attempt to import these discussions within the context of the socio-ethical implications of AI, this paper deconstructs the components of the term AI by focusing firstly on the invalidation of the term “artificial” and secondly on “intelligence.” By paraphrasing Lacan’s dictum that “the woman does not exist” as in relation to the man, this paper proposes that AI does not exist as in relation to a natural intelligence or in relation to non-intelligent entities. By this double, apparently simple, lesson learned from a re-examination of AI’s characteristics, a number of questions are raised, concerning the co-production of morality in meshed human/robotic societies, as well as a tentative agenda for future empirical investigations.

A primeira versão deste artigo, publicada em 1966 pela editora da Universidade da Califórnia no capítulo 25 do livro Whales, dolphins and porpoises (editado por Kenneth S. Norris), foi republicada no célebre livro de Gregory Bateson Steps to an ecology of mind, que teve sua última publicação pela Universidade de Chicago, no ano 2000. Embora haja divergência mínima entre o original e a publicação mais recente, os tradutores se baseiam na última versão para esta tradução.

About
Published on January 10,3013

Background

This blog is part of a long-lasting work of research and study about the current, unprecedented development of Information and Communication Technologies as a possible context for facilitating the growth of psychopathology in today’s society, especially among the younger generations.

The authors, Prof. Fabrizio Ciappi & Dr. Riccardo Mario Corato, started working together on this matter in 1994, when they created a first audiovisual publication, “Education, Identity and Knowledge”, as part of a campaign against drug addiction among young people commissioned by an Italian Public Authority.

The trans-disciplinary approach of their research has been made possible by the “merging” of the two specific areas of competence and experience of the authors, neuroscience and psychiatry (Ciappi) and multimedia communication (Corato).

Their work is based on the concrete clinical experience of the Department of Mental Health of the Region of Umbria in Italy, and on the monitoring, classifying and decoding of media contents in terms of language impoverishment, simplification of reality and deterioration of sense.

Methodological aspects

The progress from the sociological study (sociology of communication and media) to the medical and anthropological analysis of the individual and social behaviour was essential to better understand an epidemiological context that now concerns the entire population, not only the so called “groups at risk” (children, adolescents, deviants, marginalized, elderly, etc.).

It was a major breakthrough in terms of increasing knowledge and critical skills capable of facilitating the development of possible strategies to reduce the human and social cost of such epidemiological patterns.

It must be outlined that, from a methodological, logical and epistemological point of view, in the analysis of the possible motivating factors of psychopathology, this research does not utilize deterministic criteria but, instead, those of “circular causality”, “stochastic process”, “homeostatic balance and perturbation” and other concepts typical of complex systems like the Human Living System.

From “cause-effect” to “context-risk” or to “context-opportunity”.

From Aristotle to the Cybernetics of II level.

Abstract e primo paragrafo dell'articolo, preceduto dall'indice del fascicolo della rivista su cui è comparso: Rivista del clero italiano, giugno 2022, pp. 450-459). Contributo al Dossier "I media e la Chiesa", a cura di Chiara Giaccardi. Per acquisto della rivista o download del full text: www.vitaepensiero.it, oppure http://rivistadelclero.vitaepensiero.it/

L’intention du colloque ‘Care, éducation, écologie’ (24-26 novembre 2021) est d’ouvrir un espace réflexif et expérientiel sur le potentiel des éthiques et philosophies du care pour enrichir la réflexion collective sur les humanités écologiques ainsi que sur les pratiques et les théories de l’éducation dans un contexte de transition écologique. Il s’agit ainsi de faire dialoguer les chercheurs venant de plusieurs disciplines (médecine, psychologie, sciences de l’éducation, études littéraires et artistiques, entre autres) et des praticiens (notamment les enseignants, les formateurs, les soignants mais aussi tous les professionnels intéressés par la thématique du colloque) sur ces interactions potentiellement fécondes entre care, éducation et écologie.
Le colloque s’inscrit ainsi dans une démarche de recherche action visant à renforcer les liens entre sciences et sociétés en rapprochant les chercheurs (impliqués dans l’action) et les praticiens (engagés dans une théorisation de leurs pratiques). L’objectif du colloque est également de mener une analyse réflexive sur des expériences de recherche, d’éducation et de formation conduites au niveau local et national (pôles de Montpellier et de Paris notamment) en les faisant dialoguer avec d’autres initiatives au niveau international (Italie, Espagne, Suisse, Grande-Bretagne, Tunisie, Canada). Les formats ‘atelier’ et ‘table ronde’ seront privilégiés afin d’assurer au mieux cette mise en relation entre théories et pratiques.

Este artículo discute las relaciones entre el tiempo y la ecología de la mente, a la vez que estudia los diferentes tiempos de los organismos de la mente. La tesis del artículo es que los organismos de la mente pueden y deben ser considerados como sistemas vivos.

Given the contemporary ambivalent standpoints toward the future of artificial intelligence, recently denoted as the phenomenon of Singularitarianism, Gregory Bateson’s core theories of ecology of mind, schismogenesis, and double bind, are hereby revisited, taken out of their respective sociological, anthropological, and psychotherapeutic contexts and recontextualized in the field of Roboethics as to a twofold aim: (a) the proposal of a rigid ethical standpoint toward both artificial and non-artificial agents, and (b) an explanatory analysis of the reasons bringing about such a polarized outcome of contradictory views in regard to the future of robots. Firstly, the paper applies the Batesonian ecology of mind for constructing a unified roboethical framework which endorses a flat ontology embracing multiple forms of agency, borrowing elements from Floridi’s information ethics, classic virtue ethics, Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, Braidotti’s posthumanism, and the Japanese animist doctrine of Rinri. The proposed framework wishes to act as a pragmatic solution to the endless dispute regarding the nature of consciousness or the natural/artificial dichotomy and as a further argumentation against the recognition of future artificial agency as a potential existential threat. Secondly, schismogenic analysis is employed to describe the emergence of the hostile human–robot cultural contact, tracing its origins in the early scientific discourse of man–machine symbiosis up to the contemporary countermeasures against superintelligent agents. Thirdly, Bateson’s double bind theory is utilized as an analytic methodological tool of humanity’s collective agency, leading to the hypothesis of collective schizophrenic symptomatology, due to the constancy and intensity of confronting messages emitted by either proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence. The double bind’s treatment is the mirroring “therapeutic double bind,” and the article concludes in proposing the conceptual pragmatic imperative necessary for such a condition to follow: humanity’s conscience of habitualizing danger and familiarization with its possible future extinction, as the result of a progressive blurrification between natural and artificial agency, succeeded by a totally non-organic intelligent form of agency.

Статья посвящена проблеме соотношения антропологии и психиатрии Грегори Бейтсона. Принципиально междисциплинарный характер исследований этого учёного, включающих антропологию, кибернетику, теорию коммуникации, психиатрию, этологию и эволюционную теорию, остро ставит вопрос о преемственности и взаимосвязи между различными направлениями его исследовательского проекта. Автор настоящей статьи концентрирует внимание на анализе связи ранних визуально-антропологических исследований Бейтсона на о. Бали с более поздними клиническими исследованиями шизофрении в Пало-Альто, приведших к формулировке теории двойного послания (double bind). Методология исследования предполагает анализ визуально-антропологического документа на предмет повторяющихся паттернов, сопоставимых с паттернами клинических иллюстраций. Обнаружение сюжетных подобий между ритуальной драмой и клиническими примерами инициирует рассмотрение корреляций между центральными фигурами ритуальной и клинической ситуации. В результате проведённого исследования было обнаружено, что один из ключевых клинических примеров Бейтсона, иллюстрирующий действие двойного послания (double bind), является инверсией фрагмента, заснятой им и М. Мид ранее, балийской мистерии, что подталкивает к пересмотру концепции double bind и коммуникативной теории шизофрении Бейтсона в целом.

Ключевые слова: транс, танец, ритуал, Бейтсон, двойное послание, шизофрения, ведьма, экология разума, паттерн, системная семейная психотерапия.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the video of Balinese ritual on the material that explores the relationship
between Bateson’s anthropology and psychiatry. The crossdisciplinary nature of Bateson’s researches that included anthropology,
cybernetics, communication theoy, psychiatry, ethology and evolution theory raises a question about succession and relationships
between different directions of his research projects. The author of the present article focuses on the analysis of the
relationship between early visual and anthropological researches conducted by Gregory Bateson with regard to Bali (island)
and later clinical researches on schizophrenia carried out in Palo Alto that led to the development of the theory of double bind.
The methodology of the research involves the analysis of the visual anthropological document (video) for regular patterns that
associate with the patterns of clinical illustrations. The interpretation of the central characters of ritual drama exposes the
mechanisms of their transposition from Bateson’s early ethnographic research into clinical illustrations of his later works on
psychiatry. It has been found that one of the Bateson’s key clinical examples, illustrating how double bind works can be considered
as the inverse of Balinese ritual drama structure. This idea encourages to review the foundations of communicative theory
of schizophrenia by G. Bateson in general and the concept of double bind in particular.

Keywords: witch, pattern, schizophrenia, double bind, Bateson, ritual, dance, trance, systemic family therapy, ecology of mind.

I read: ‘philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got.’ What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever? (Wittgenstein)