Gregory Bateson Quotes

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

You cannot do only one thing.

By what criterion... can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, - how can we distinguish which are the means and which are the ends?

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem.

The traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security, and ecology are disappearing. You cannot explain one without referring to them all.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

The larger the event, the less likelihood of having a single cause or origin.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Reductionism is merciless.

Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything.

We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.

Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.

This world cannot explain its own difficulties without the assistance of another.

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.

A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.