by Nora Bateson
Bias: The bias of the calibrating entity at every scale is the particular integration of the multiple variables of interrelating information influencing the entity–the person, the organ, the tree, the forest, or even the culture. The bias forms differences. The bias could be thought of in terms of the ‘epistemology’ or the ‘Umwelt’ of the symmathesy. (In the early days of Biosemiotics the term ‘Umwelt’ was introduced by Jakob von Uexküll as part of a theory which proposed that each organism in an environment has its own perspective. The perspective of a particular symmathesy gives it an outline, an interface, and an aesthetic through which to filter and frame, on an ongoing basis, the information it calibrates.)
To put it more simply, imagine there is a bowl of blueberries provided for a table of friends. It is our habit to assume that blueberries are blueberries, that the numeric nutritional values and knowable recipes for serving blueberries are obvious. However, the bias of each person at the table presents a collection of understandings and filters through which the blueberries are ‘known.’ For one person at the table blueberries may be a reminder of summer, a family activity of picking the small blue orbs from the forest bushes in Scandinavia for a pie, a social sweet spot. For another, the fruit may be a smoothie ingredient to eat after a workout, a symbol of health, a super-food, a virtue. For another person at the same table the blueberries may be a visceral trigger of memories of a smell of blueberry pie being baked during a traumatic experience of being raped by a relative. These three associations and physical, epistemological understandings of blueberries describe the informational bias in the perception of the beholder. The numerical nutritional values of the blueberries are altered by this bias. The digestive system, the nervous system, the seasons, the conversation at the table… all of these alter the way in which each person incorporates the blueberries into their luncheon. So what are blueberries?
Stochastic process: While learning is a process of evolution existing in patterns that appear stable, the random inputs and the implicit variables between the vitae of a symmathesy are unpredictable. There is pattern and there is also unpredictability (the term ‘stochastic’ here refers to that unpredictability). There is structure, and there is process. My children, for example, are not born puppies, they are human and share some physical characteristics with me; but they are also nothing like me. They live in another context. The paradox that this combination forms is inherent and unsolvable. The contingency for life and therefore learning is that the tangles of relation, communication, and information between all the vitae of a symmathesy are simultaneous. Both in pattern and in process.
Play: Practice, repetition, and experimentation in communication and behavior around the edges of a bias are the frontiers of learning, evolution, and change. The boundaries are ‘played with’ when the kitten play-fights with the other kittens, discovering the process, practicing the communication, and finding the edges of the game. Play is the combined discovery and opportunity to embody new ideas. As Jeff Bloom says, “‘acquisition of knowledge’ is really just a lower level learning, which has been raised to the top in our positivist/mechanist/boxist/quantitativist society. Acquisition of knowledge is a by-product of deeper learning.” In other words, play is a process of learning to learn. It may look like games, humor, art, experimenting, fighting, attempting, re-organizing, and more.
Boundaries: For the purposes of examining the possibilities of symmathesy, boundaries are the interfaces of learning. When discussing contextual learning, it is indeed a challenge to consider the dilemma of ‘where is the edge of the context?’ The boundaries can be seen as what separates me from you, or us from a forest, or the forest from a school—and these are seemingly real and true. The fact of their separateness is a fact of vitality even in the interaction required for life. A body needs a heart and lungs and a nervous system: the difference in these is as necessary as the unity of them. But, it should be noted that boundaries disappear when seen from a wider viewpoint. From the vista of society, the functioning of one individual’s heart is eclipsed by larger contextual patterns. To clarify this confusion, there is often an impulse to diagram the contexts within contexts as a set of concentric circles. But such a diagram, however tempting it might to be to illustrate it in this way, will be fraught with errors. Why? Because the boundaries are the differences, the areas of interaction, the communication interfaces that provide the contact, dependency, and bias of the process of ecology. They are not static. The boundaries represent a paradox. Such a diagram is a freeze-frame: time is missing from it. The inclusion of time will blur the lines; the contexts are interactive and learning.
Time: All living organisms, and the vitae of all living organisms, are revealed as existing within a context of mutual learning when time is taken into consideration. Time reveals that order is not static. A quest for the organization of life’s process has been at the heart of the natural sciences since their inception. Why are we here? Where are we going? How does evolution work? As the natural sciences have increased our ability to see the smallest details of our world, the mapping of life has become possible in new ways. The discovery of DNA, the genome, and colliding particles have each opened wide horizons of possible new research. However, with a shove in the direction of the quest for mutual learning in life, the organization of the pieces falls from the forefront of our studies, and instead the study finds information located most profoundly in how interrelationality moves through time. Learning together. Communication, for example, is often described as an interaction; a process of signal and response between parts of a system. Semiotic process, in this simplistic view which is not typical of advanced semiotic thinking, is mere transfer of information. But add time to that process and the interaction becomes mutual learning.
Order and Symmetry in a Learning World
Given these early criteria for learning and change in a living context, it is also important to acknowledge order and form. Surely, there is order and symmetry in the world. Anyone noticing a daisy or a language or in fact their own hand will perceive that there is structure in the world we live in. Our impression of order is embedded to the extent that it is often difficult with some forms of order to keep in mind the constant, if very slow, transformation.
The phrase that my father Gregory Bateson used—‘the pattern that connects’—is an enigmatic one. For some the pattern is ‘findable.’ It is a code that can be discovered and understood. But for others ‘the pattern that connects’ is taken as permission to contemplate a world in constant change which takes place in ways that can elude our culture’s customary styles of reasoning. The paradox of seeing ‘the pattern that connects’ as both process and form requires us, as observers, to expand our capacity to think about what order is. This is a paradox that we are not trained to accommodate in our thinking process, let alone in our research.
No matter how slow the movement, both form and process are in constant play in the living world. An accessible example of this is that, as we just considered, a child may resemble its parents, but will not be a duplicate of them. Some patterns transfer and appear to repeat, while others do not. The form in this case provides recognizable similarities, like hair color or even facial expressions. But the context in which the child is raised is not the same as the one in which the parents grew up. Siblings who grow up in the same house even occupy different contexts and patterns of communication. They are alike—and different—due to a combination of heredity and contextual responses.
An observer who takes the time to admire the structure of a daisy or a language or their hand might begin to see that these forms inform. What do they inform? If we are able to see an organism, or a living ecology at any scale, in its interrelationships, then our study of that particular symmathesy will begin to include its relations. Let us look again at the example of the hand, formerly a part of the body, now better understood as a vita.
The hand is an interface of human interaction and I would argue that we cannot know the whole spectrum of
this interfacing. My children’s use of the iPhone is testament to applications, purposes, and processes I would not have considered 20 years ago. But let’s start by saying the hand offers ways of interacting. Touch, signals, tools, skills, and countless other uses of the hand are relational processes that the form of the hand provides. Likewise, a daisy’s petals are messaging interfaces with the ecology that the plant inhabits. Language, too, is a form and a process of interaction. It is a structure within which to find symmetry and definition, but with variables and changeability. The outlines blur. The forms exist in time, and over time they change.
The shapes and characteristics that are recognizable and seem to repeat are languaging a sort of conversation—or contributing messages to a larger ecological conversation. This conversation is one we might call ‘order.’ Vitae like the hand are interfaces in multiple contexts. The observer’s ability to hold simultaneous contextual descriptions of the hand will offer deeper and more complex understanding. The definition of the hand is more valuable if the contexts or sets of relationships are brought into the description. Within the form lie the communicative and information processes that enjoin contextual ecologies and provide the fodder for symmathesy.
Part IV: The Word in the Belly
This transition in thinking is a personal, cultural, political, and academic dilemma
To provide a credible account of the thinking shift here, I have given this issue its voice in formal prose, but it does not live there. The dilemma of how we change our thinking about ‘systems’ is one which should be addressed at all its levels simultaneously. In the description below I have veered from the language of formal prose. To address the depth of these mechanistic habits of thinking is to go downstairs below our verbal conscious awareness, and that requires other language. We treat prose seriously and give it credibility, and consider this form of communication to be rational and precise. Words in prosaic syntax have gravitas in our culture. They appear to offer conceptual stability. But this stability is an impossibility that scientific and non-fictional discourse fail to account for. Science changes all the time; discoveries are perishable and get replaced by new discoveries as old knowledge is expanded upon and, at times, eclipsed by perpetual learning. Descriptions in this form are still stuffed with metaphors, still wound around invisible narratives. In fact, it is reasonable and responsible to ask whether life, love, or culture can really be described with words. To discuss the patterns and processes of the living world we will need to open the form, open the genres of our communication.
Can we describe life? Can we even describe ourselves? When we try, what are the cultural lenses that filter our perception?
We will not find the symmathesy if we do not name it. The word matters. Words are what we have. They are the best means we have to paint our thoughts onto pages, and to house the resonance of voice in the horizons of conversation. They are the script we speak within, or perhaps step out of. Either way, the playbook is always there as a pivot. What we say is a measure of what we have not said. Words have salt. They are wise. They nourish and poison. They are not located. They lie, and in lying show us the edges of our honesty. A child’s tantrum is a tone and stomp and twenty repeating words that roughly say, “don’t tell me what to do.” A lover’s exit is too many words that try too hard to buy smooth departure and fail. Words are there for so many logistics, so much weather, a lot of ‘nice to meet you’s’ and sometimes the unspeakable pops through.
Patterns of industry are hardwired into us at a deeply personal level Again, particular personal collections of experience matter. We cannot adopt a professional voice as researchers, artists, or philosophers without an underlying mechanistic understanding of the world leaking into our inquiry. Deep inside, below the level I can monitor, my life is mapped out charted like a factory might be. The metaphor is ubiquitous; it is in our education system, our medical system, our economic system, our political system, even our ideas of birth, life, and death. This is a personal, cultural, and academic dilemma. There is a great need to point to this underlying lens we are taught to see though, so I offer a further metaphor:
Jam-jargon
The world of mechanism has influenced my personal identity. Somewhere deep down, I see myself as a jam-jar.
On the flickering screen of my life-plan I am haunted by an unnamed story: I am an empty glass bottle, cruising on a motorized belt. I get a dollop of raspberry preserves, then a label, and then a twist-on top. As I move along the assembly line of life, I am worked, and I am in the works, I am working. The ‘system’ is working. I am packaged, trucked, and delivered to adulthood. And at each transition the more sophisticated jamjars ask, “What are your plans?” I feel I should have an answer to this question so I point to the next slot along the clunking belt.
The jam-jar phenomenon is a repeating story. We are all jam-jars one way or another. I’ve been discussing this invisible sub-story with groups around the world for a few years. Enough to know that, while the subjectivity of my own description is just that—my own—the overall experience is a shared one. The mechanical metaphors run so deep that, without realizing it, I place the contours of my own life on the factory belt. I wish I was not a jam-jar. I wish I were able to place a patterned lens on my perception of the world that did not revert to a grid. Everything is gridded, and only sometimes can I see the symmathesy—the learning context.
We find what we are looking for
The difficulty of catching ourselves when we begin to apply mechanistic logic to living systems is not to be underestimated. I get lost. I can only occasionally see the edges. So intrinsic is this habit of assembling the blocks of life, and deciphering the cogs of its architecture, that the way I set out to make sense of things, anything, is to begin to figure out how it works.
The danger is that if I look at life in the natural world—a forest or family, a person or an organization—and I am trying to find an arrangement of parts and wholes within it, I will find it. I can probably put names to the parts and wholes, and even diagram them in a model. We find what we are trained to see—we find what we have named.
• What I will not find with that lens is the interrelational communication, learning, and contextual timbre.
• What I will not find with that lens is what is holding the system together through time and into its evolution.
Here it is, on the front page of our way forward. The term ‘system’ sits like a shiny hood ornament (car bonnet mascot) catching the sparkle of the sun and the bug guts (squashed insects) of this moment in history. Arguably, the fate of humanity is a measure of our capacity to evolve beyond the destructive patterns we are now engaged in. I would suggest that this evolution relies on the possibility that we might see our world differently—as a living process, not as a mechanism.
I grew up in a household in which a system was a living thing, alive in its swirl of interrelationships and intercommunications. A system was something I was always inside of. I am one; I live in one that is inside a bigger one, inside a bigger one—inside a bigger one. But there are not really any draw-able boundaries between them: it is messier than that. There are too many variables. A system is hard to keep alive in this languaging. A forest is not diagrammable. Neither is a family. An ecosystem, a love affair, an organization: none of these are really ‘systems.’
But in my household, unusually, a system was a warm thing.
‘Warm Systems.’ I tried that wording, hoping to make clear that I was speaking of something more than a gearing of parts. In my own work I began to use the term to show that there is a difference that makes a difference, as my father once said, in the way we use the term. I wanted so much to reclaim the word ‘system,’ to give it back the dignity of its own complexity. A warm system is a thing of elegance and grace; it should be noble. But still I felt the lack of movement.
For me, the word ‘system’ and its accompanying entourage of boxy models cannot hold the gooey ecology of what the biosemiotics experts call the �
�semiosphere.’ Google ‘systems,’ look under images… and you need to scroll through pages of results before you find a photograph of a living thing. There is no art there. Not a single illustration of something in relationship. Instead you will see squares and triangles, and arrows and circles—all sharp with educated and earnest attempts to code-crack life. These graphics seem to be maps that lead us right back to the school of engineering where the culture we live in first found its footing. Gregory Bateson was suspicious of using metaphors from physics to describe the living world. The other way around is not so bad, he suggested. Without doing much harm one can pat a car’s dashboard and praise its performance. But to attribute the language of physics to a living system is more toxic, because it implies ‘control’; it implies parts and wholes.
As systems research develops, we find ourselves at a junction of what is called ‘linear’ and ‘non-linear’ thinking. This is a step in the right direction, but it is important to recognize that non-linear thinking, in a world that mechanizes our imagination, often leads to a tricky masking of linear thought patterns as non-linear. Also, some early non-linear work focused on models that were an improvement on the linear model, but have revealed their own limits. One such model is the circle as a visual analogy of ecology.