![]() So is this a problem? Bateson suggested that it is a problem. ![]() This enables us to make decisions quickly to achieve our desired goals. We notice the things that are directly related to our purposes, and ignore the rest. ![]() Humans determine a purpose, and then consciousness is directed towards that purpose. He asked: if what comes to consciousness is a selective sample, how is that sample chosen? He suggested that part of the answer to this lay our tendency to be guided by ‘purpose’. This is because “the whole of the mind could not be reported in a part of the mind” (1972: 438). Bateson made a distinction between what he called ‘total’ mind, and what comes to consciousness which, he said, is selected. ![]() Human consciousness is, he suggested, necessarily selective. Writing in 1968 (the year I was born, nearly 50 years ago), Bateson noted that although the human organism is a system, interdependent with wider social and ecological systems, human consciousness seems incapable of comprehending this. Bateson’s essays towards the end of this book are concerned with how we think and how we know the world. I remember that it had a significant impact on me at the time, and re-reading it has brought me to realise how much it has shaped my thinking. ![]() I’ve recently been re-reading the anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an ecology of mind (1972) which I first read in 2002. Sometimes it’s good to pause, and consider what makes us think the way we do. ![]()
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