Gregory Bateson: Difference

Gregory Bateson was English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist. Explore interesting quotes on difference.
Gregory Bateson: 98 quotes3 likes

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”

Gregory Bateson

“Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i. e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible, only by scanning. Similarly, very slow changes become perceptible only by a combination of scanning and bringing together observations from separated moments in the continuum of time.”

Gregory Bateson

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 74-75

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.”

Gregory Bateson

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 25

“Number is different from quantity.”

Gregory Bateson

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 118

“What we mean by information — the elementary unit of information — is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Source: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), p. 459, Chapter " Form, Substance and Difference http://www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html#Anchor-39583"

“Finally, in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the “metaphor that is meant,” the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than “an outward and visible sign, given unto us.” Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

From Part 4, section 2: A Theory of Play and Fantasy
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

“Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change — and difference is a relationship.”

Gregory Bateson

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 173