Learning How to Be Wrong Correctly with Gregory Bateson's 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' -Reductio ad absurdum, Abduction, and Trial and Error-
Arakawa The person who tried to do that [to mottle the binary schema] was Gregory Bateson. Bateson actually did what you said in reality, but he didn't summarize it himself. I met him in his later years, and he was like a religious figure. He never said, 'I have done this much from here.' That is what is great about him. Because he understood that it was not something that would be completed in his era, he never asserted himself. In the end, he even used his own daughter to publish a book together, knowing that she didn't understand him. It's a book that says, 'Please misunderstand me.' Giving action to thought is a good example of using language in that way.
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In his educational essay 'The Society of Mind' (2020), artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky called people who provide intellectual enlightenment with a sense of attachment like a parent an 'Imprima.' Minsky further states that three types of people are necessary for a child to continue learning: a mentor as a guide, and a role model who serves as an example of thoughts and ways of living. (The three can be the same person.)
Mentor and role model have become quite familiar terms, but 'Imprima' is not so much. 'Imprimer' is said to mean to print, to engrave, or to orient.
For Minsky, his Imprima was Freud. The reason Minsky, the author of 'The Society of Mind,' feels a deep attachment to Freud is that he broke the previous idea that the mind is a single entity and proposed a new hypothesis.
After reading Minsky's book, I had a sense that Gregory Bateson was like my own Imprima, which welled up quite belatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In my university days, I encountered his book with a feeling like a bird seeing its parent for the first time after hatching from an egg, and I read it intently. I didn't have the enthusiasm of a fan, but the feeling of 'I don't understand it, but it's interesting' was fresh, and rereading it became a habit. For some reason, I felt energized when I read it. It felt like a sense of confinement was being released.
The two volumes I borrowed at the university were later combined into a single book over 700 pages thick, and a second edition with a preface by his daughter Mary Catherine was also released, making it even thicker.
In the midst of this, I met Shusaku Arakawa and was able to hear him speak personally.
When I first made an appointment and visited the Fairmont Hotel in Chidorigafuchi, I tried talking about Bateson. Arakawa-san replied by talking about meeting Bateson (he also talked about John Cage). Regarding his impression of meeting Bateson, Arakawa-san laughed and said, 'He was such a big person, and he was a quiet person like a monk.' That was when I learned that Bateson was a tall man of about 195cm.
(The roundtable discussion mentioned in the epigraph at the beginning seems to have taken place around the time I went to meet him. The quote also mentioned the impression of Bateson as being like a 'religious figure'.)
After that, the publisher Shin-Shisaku-sha went out of business, 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' went out of print, and the world became covered by COVID-19.
Taking advantage of the increased time at home, I decided to type the entire text of 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' into my PC. I thought that since I was at it, I would retrace every word of this book, which I believe formed my foundation.
When I finished typing it after more than a year, I found information on the internet that 'Mind and Nature' and 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' would be republished in the Iwanami Bunko series.
On the day 'Mind and Nature' was released as an Iwanami Bunko, I stopped by a bookstore in front of the station. I picked up a copy that was stacked flat with a blue band and headed to the register.
Then, the clerk asked in a puzzled voice, 'Are you okay?' I realized that my hands holding the book were shaking.
'I never thought this book would be republished while I was still alive,' I said, covering it up with a shy smile, and the clerk tied a ribbon on it and handed it to me.
While stuffing it into my backpack, I suddenly felt sorry for the clerk and bowed. I thought, 'When 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' is republished, I have to buy it on Amazon this time.' For some reason, I felt like I would burst into tears if I stood in line at the register again.
Thinking about it now, the reason such sentimental thoughts suddenly struck me might be because a childlike feeling welled up from inside my body, as if I had met a parent I couldn't meet.
Two months later, although I felt sorry for the bookstore clerk, I added the paperback version, retitled 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind Vol. 1,' to my cart on Amazon.
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I think Bateson's charm lies in his open-minded clarity, which uses traditional logic without being confined by it, and attempts to step outside the limits of logic itself.
For example, there is an inference that thinks if you collect a certain amount of information, you can get closer to the truth.
1 Even if I look around me, there are only white swans.
2 Therefore, the color of all swans in the world must be white.
This inference, thought of by Aristotle, is highly valued in modern statistics as a way to know the general trend of data around the world with a small amount of data.
1 There are many balls in a bag.
2 When I take them out one by one, they are all white balls.
3 Therefore, all the balls in the bag are likely white.
This logic called inductive inference, which extracts a tendency that 'it's mostly correct' even if there are exceptions, can also be seen to determine the direction of our modern lives if it is strengthened by big data. If we click on a smartphone app, we also become one of the data points calculated by this logic.
On the other hand, this tendency extracted by inductive inference always carries a fragility that is broken by exceptions. Even if one tries to make this inference robust with vast amounts of data and powerful computing machines, it is unavoidable.
It was the investor and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 'The Black Swan' who criticized the modern IT society that is drowning in statistics that strengthen inductive inference from the side of probability theory. Bateson's name appears unexpectedly in this book.
Taleb used the mysterious professional type of 'writer' who produces bestsellers as an example of events (Black Swans) that appear as anomalies that blow away statistical values.
It is an episode where the work of a fictional writer named Yevgenia somehow becomes a huge hit and is praised by the world. At the end of it, Taleb goes out of his way to include the name Bateson.
A renowned scholar explained that the influence of Gregory Bateson can be seen on every page. Bateson was a person who incorporated autobiographical scenes into academic research papers (Yevgenia had never even heard of Bateson).
Reading this passage, my mouth relaxed involuntarily.
'A person who incorporated autobiographical scenes into academic research papers' seemed to me to be Taleb himself, whom he entrusted to Bateson, and his book 'The Black Swan.'
That is not all. This book seemed to casually hint that Bateson thoroughly avoids inductive inference in his way of developing arguments.
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'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' is a magnificent trajectory of Bateson's trial and error spanning nearly 40 years from the 1930s to the early 1970s, consisting of six parts.
Bateson, who studied biology at Cambridge University, continued to test his thoughts by experimenting with patterns of thought while crossing anthropology, psychiatry, animal behavior, and ecology.
At the beginning of this book, there is a 'metalogue' consisting of a dialogue between a father and daughter.
The definition of the unfamiliar word 'metalogue' is as follows.
Definition
A metalogue is a conversation that proceeds in such a way that the structure of the discussion reflects its content, rather than just discussing the matter at hand. However, among the conversations included here, only a part of them have such a double structure.
Looking at the history of evolutionary theory, one notices that it has become a metalogue that continues to be exchanged between humans and nature. The generation of ideas about evolution and the interaction between ideas necessarily exemplify the evolutionary process.
The conversation, which proceeds in a form where the daughter (Mary Catherine) asks 'Why?' and the father (Bateson) receives it with 'Well,' proceeds in multiple layers. Therefore, it is a dialogue that spans a meta-level.
And Bateson says that this multiple structure is similar to evolution, which 'continues to be exchanged between humans and nature.'
Evolution does not proceed linearly through flat space-time.
It is said to proceed through a multi-layered world while zigzagging through trial and error.
For Bateson, who had the clarity of scientific thinking, thinking begins with trying to grasp things probabilistically while immersing one's own body in a multi-layered, complex world.
The probabilistic process only appears as an 'accidental' event in a linear, goal-oriented 'thought pattern.' In the theme of the metalogue 'Why Do Things Get Muddled?', the figure of a father struggling to make his child feel this process while teaching her the second law of entropy is depicted.
At that time, whether the daughter learns or not is also treated as one event within the probability (It is unclear whether the daughter 'properly' understood what her father said. Rather, in this 'metalogue,' the daughter's figure trying to 'interpret' the probability process in her own way is depicted).
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Our "patterns of thought" are things learned over a long period of time.
Writing letters, opening doors, sitting in chairs... these are not things we can do immediately upon seeing them. They are mastered over time, patterned, and made repeatable.
Once accustomed to this repetition, people begin to distinguish between themselves and objects (the target), and then consider the relationship between the self and the target.
It is said that a hand has "five fingers," but we do not think of it as having "four gaps." This, too, is a habit.
The habit of distinguishing between what is visible and what is not also has the property of creating and expanding a flat space-time. When we give a verbal label to a visible thing (the target), we try to imagine invisible things based on the word that was supposed to be just a label.
If you label a creature barking in front of you as a "dog," it does not take long to expand that into the general category of the mammal "dog." The power of imagery begins to work strongly there.
This inference, which spreads this flat space-time over consciousness and turns it into space-time, is inductive inference.
In this way, things become increasingly capitalized—self and object, self and others, self and society—moving further and further away from one's own scale.
Nevertheless, the reason we believe that this surrounds our daily lives is because the human species, as a mammal, creates the world with words and images.
Some are cultural units, some are social units, and some are individual units. The world becomes so complex that one does not know where to begin. What surrounds the self appears impossible for an individual to change.
But what if thinking this way is merely the calculation result produced by the thought pattern (inductive inference) of the human-organism, which creates the world with words embedded within itself?
"If you think so, that is the starting point. If you want to get out of such rules of calculation, why not start by trying to be wrong according to the rules?"
Bateson might say something like that.
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Throughout 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind,' Bateson uses a logic calledreductio ad absurdum(orproof by contradiction). This line of reasoning follows the flow below. (Recently, it is also used as a way to identify fake news.)
1 First, decide to believe a certain hypothesis for the time being.
2 Consider the conditions (necessary conditions) under which that hypothesis holds true.
3 Check whether those conditions sufficiently hold within the hypothesis (sufficient conditions).
4 If they do not hold, judge the hypothesis to be wrong.
Bateson changes and uses the final part 4 of this flow.
He changes the final part, "If they do not hold, judge the hypothesis to be wrong," and instead turns his attention to the exception—that using this hypothesis leads to something that does not fit the logic.
As you proceed while using and discarding logic as a hypothesis, it becomes networked, increases in complexity, and the world becomes the very movement of diversity and life.
And Bateson sets into this modified final part "abduction" (hypothetical inference = educated guess), the "logic of discovery" advocated by Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of semiotics.
This logic is also called "retroduction" because it treats the currently visible phenomenon as a result and traces it back to an invisible cause.
1 Found a stone buried in the dirt on the roadside, and it was a fossil. (Result)
↓ (Trace back)
2 Speculate that this area must have been the ocean in the distant past. (Cause)
Of course, this inference cannot be said to be certain.
Someone in the past might have just discarded or dropped a fossil they were carrying there.
Moreover, inferring a cause from a result is merely hindsight, and since it goes against the royal road of logic itself, which attempts to derive results from causes, it tends to be viewed with suspicion.
However, let us not forget that conventional logic operates by naming the self, the target, and visible things, extracting them from the fluid world, and fixing the relationship between words and things.
The original act of naming things also lies in the Latin root of digital, 'digitus,' meaning 'to point.' In other words, it is digitizing.
The digital society begins by 'pointing' at the dynamic world as something fixed. Even if we think of it as moving, we make the static state the default and then move it.
On the other hand, Bateson, who studied biology at university, thought that the world is moving—no, that it is alive (chaotic and random). To grasp the living world, logic that fixes oneself and the world is useless, but humans have no other way to use it.
If so, humans should change their attitude of trying to grasp the movement of the living world and try moving themselves along with the movement of the world.
In this way, Bateson shifts (tries and errs) from biology to anthropology, to psychiatry, and further to ecology.
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In 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind,' Bateson incorporates the new ideas of the time while always keeping an eye on their limitations.
A Regarding animal learning, he demonstrates the use of the Whitehead/Russell theory of logical types.
At the same time, he anticipates the limitations of the very idea of setting types in logic in Learning IV, and discovers the unknowability of type 0 (integers), called "learning to learn," outside the set theory idea of creating types based on natural numbers, thereby keeping his sights on the limitations of human knowledge in a dynamic world.
B Regarding the self-preservation of organisms, he avoids the word "instinct" (an empty word for explanation) and uses the cybernetic concepts of positive and negative feedback to explain it.
At the same time, he takes into account the existence of probabilistic intuition, such as comparing the correction of rifle accuracy to negative feedback, and pairing it with the metaphor of aiming at a range with a shotgun. (Concrete explanations are found later in 'Mind and Nature'.)
C Regarding mental illness arising from family relationships, he focuses on the point, "What happens when things don't go well?" while simulating cooperative games in game theory.
At the same time, he attempts to approach the structural problems of mental illness from the point of why, while game theory shows failure in games of 5 or 6 people, humans show failure when there are 3 people.
What I find interesting is this way of proceeding.
In this way, Bateson moves from pointing out the flaws in a theory from the perspective of"What happens when things don't go well?" toward questioning the nature of the theory itself, asking,"Why does it go well?" This is because Bateson has the conviction that if something can be successfully applied to a theory, one is only seeing the world within that theory.
The world is not simple enough to be grasped by theory, and humans are not intelligent enough to grasp the world.
In a diverse world, it is necessary to proceed in a zigzag.
From places where logical type theory, cybernetics, and game theory do not hold, Bateson turns his attention to the complexity of the relationship between people and the environment, which has been placed outside by the fixed thinking of humans.
And he attempts to transform humans fixed in consciousness and minds fixed in the brain into something holistic and dynamic as an "ecology" that lives with the body in connection with the environment.
Words are labels, and theories are merely hypotheses that are valid until the labels peel off.
Bateson proceeds by sticking, re-sticking, and peeling off labels. Tentative thinking is always moving.
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No matter how much a theory is mathematized and strengthened, its limitations point to the outside of human knowledge.
When I am about to voice the fragility of statistical inductive inference called "within/outside expectations," I try to activate Bateson's thinking and re-examine it using the procedures of reductio ad absurdum and abduction.
In the metalogue "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?" Bateson poses a question to his daughter about the mysteriousness of the opening scene of a Disney animation.
He tells his daughter that in this animation scene, the jumbled alphabet lining up into the letters "DONALD" is impossible in the "ordinary world."
This is a scene where he discusses with von Neumann and Wiener at the Macy conferences, criticizing the fact that the inductive reasoning underlying computer digitality is reinforced by technology, even before it adopts statistics.
Father All right, let's try another example. You've seen movies start where various letters appear all jumbled on the screen, right? Some are facing this way or that, some are upside down, but when the table starts to shake, the letters start to move, and eventually all the letters slide into the movie title.
Daughter I know that one. A Donald movie! It spells "DONALD."
Father It doesn't matter how it spells. The point is, when you shake or stir them, they don't get more jumbled, they line up in the proper order. The orientation is also properly aligned. And they spell words. They line up in a way that the person watching can read and understand the meaning—
Daughter Oh, that's actually—
Father —Wait. What Daddy is saying is that that absolutely cannot happen in the ordinary world. Unless it's a movie—
Daughter That, Daddy—
Father That's right, unless it's a movie, that can't happen. That stirring things up gradually creates order and meaning.
Daughter Daddy!
Father Wait. I'm not finished yet. Okay. While they are filming the movie, it's running in reverse. First, they line up "DONALD" properly on the table, and when they start the camera, they shake the table.
Daughter Oh! Daddy, you're saying everything I wanted to say. So they play it in reverse at the movie theater, right? Even though it's actually happening in reverse, it looks like it's happening just like that. But actually, the shaking was also in reverse, right? And they have to film it upside down too, right? ...But I wonder why that is. Hey, Daddy, why is that?
Seeing rules in a "muddled" nature or thinking that moving nature is "tidy" is merely the convenience of the one doing the tidying.
Bateson lives in a muddled world and thinks along with the muddle. Therefore, he does not disparage the muddle as a "not tidy" state from the side of "tidying" it.
When you think of "tidy" and "not tidy" as a set, you can see a dynamic and multi-layered world that is stable or orderly ("tidy").
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When I started reading 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' in two hardcover volumes during my undergraduate years, I think I was in the position of the "daughter" in the "metalogue." But now that I am reading the paperback version, I sometimes think I have moved to the side of the "father."
Such thoughts are likely the calculation results of a "mind" machine that has long likened time to a straight line and organized it into long-term episodic memory.
On the other hand, from the perspective of Bateson's "ordinary world," it is certain that while spending such days, both my body and the world are approaching the muddle.
While showing the prompt screen of my own thinking, I proceed along the path of trial and error rather than the path of correcting from failure to success. When I read such a collection of papers, I can feel that both I and the world are moving.
On a crowded platform waiting for the train, I close the pages of the paperback 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' and put it in my pocket, feeling the spring breeze on my cheeks.
Then, the scent of the air, the people, the sunlight, the feet... that which is breathing, moving, and landing in such a complex and dynamic world is a body that continues to move before I name it "I."
Even when it appears to be stationary, it is "intensely still" along with the environment that continues to move.
(Since I developed the habit of mindfulness, I have begun to feel this sensation growing little by little.)
In the bottom left, I had added 'steps to an ecology of mindfulness,' playing on the original title of 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind'
※ This essay is a scribble that has been edited, patched together, and listed to match the current situation, based on an article about Bateson that I uploaded when I was a member before.