This is one of the two books that I credit with shaping my education, my major in college, my metaphysics, my entire view of life. (The other one, in case you are curious, is "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter.)

If you read and understand this book, it is not just a collection of essays on topics as disparate as schiophrenia, thermostats, entropy, and consciousness. It actually outlines a coherent metaphysics: a view of the world and the relationship of our consciousness to it.

And on top of all that, the "Metalogues" are just plain fun to read, too. ( )

One of the most influential books in my life.

An antidote and a rebuttal to those intellectual chauvinists who believe that structuralism is Not In The American Grain (yes, yes, born in the U.K.). Contains the best explication of alcoholism I have ever seen.

"The pattern that connects"... Writings and speeches by Bateson spanning several decades, masterfully integrating topics as diverse as art, complex systems, mind, evolution, communication, schizophrenia, pattern, genetics, anthropology, cetacean intelligence, cybernetics and so on. Considerably ahead of its time, and influential, but not influential enough. Strongly recommended. ( )

Bateson ( 1985) stance in Steps to an Ecology of Mind pinpoints the current rash of environmental troubles in the combined action of (1) technological advance; (2) population increase; and (3) conventional (but wrong) ideas about the nature of people and their relation to the environment. He then gives us a seven-point list summarizing those ideas that have dominated Western culture since the Industrial Revolution, all of them stressing the dichotomy between humankind and nature and our attempts to control the nature around us. Some of these are: it's us against the environment; it's us against other people; we can have unilateral control over the environment; we live within an infinitely expanding frontier; and technology will do it for us.

"If you put God outside and set him vis-á-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. . . . The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell". Bateson. teps to an Ecology of Mind.

This book also looks at human communication and relationships. He noted the essentially incomplete and often telegraphic nature of much face-to-face interaction. He pointed out similarities between missing premises in enthymemes, pragmatic implications of utterances inferred from felicity conditions and conversational maxims, and other well-studied categories of unspoken messages as the parts that when presumed to form coherent patterns, constitute communicative frames. The development of these ideas has proved a powerful analytic tool in communication studies and related disciplines.

Gregory Bateson believed the greatest epistemological fallacy of the Western world was to see the self or “I” as separate from others, rather than as part of an interlocking, co-orienting processes. It is this same epistemological fallacy that creates an obstacle when we consider the possibility of a universal truth. A uni-versal truth from an epistemology of spiritual engagement is one in which uni means one, as in the “unbroken wholeness” of the scientific universe. It is the “one word” of spirit, the unbroken, unorganized, uncategorized Spirit.