An Outline of Bateson’s Ideas | Systemics. (in collaboration with Giovanni Madonna) Following are the ideas we consider most important of Bateson’s thinking - There is a dividing line between the worlds of living and non-living beings, which Bateson referred to respectively as creatura and pleroma, gnostic terms borrowed from Jung. Pleroma is the material universe, characterised by the regularities described by the physical sciences, in which the “cause” of an event can be a collision or a force exerted on one part to the system by another. Creatura is the universe of ideas, the biological and social sphere (necessarily embodied in material forms subject to the physical laws of causality), in which the “cause” of an event can be a difference detected in the relationship between two parts or a difference detected in the relationship between one part at instant 1 and the same part at instant 2, i.e. a change.
Human knowledge of pleroma is wholly mediated by the creatural processes of response to difference or change. Evan Thompson. As a child, Thompson was home-schooled at the Lindisfarne Association, a thinktank and retreat founded by his father, William Irwin Thompson. In 1977, Thompson met Chilean phenomenologist Francisco Varela when Varela attended a Lindisfarne conference which was organized by Thompson and Gregory Bateson. Thompson received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990 and an A.B. in Asian Studies from Amherst College in 1983. Notes[edit] Works[edit] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. See also[edit] Jordan PetersonJohn Vervaeke External links[edit] Thompson's website. Francisco Varela. Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
Life and career[edit] Varela was born in 1946 in Santiago in Chile, the son of Corina María Elena García Tapia and Raúl Andrés Varela Rodríguez.[1] After completing secondary school at the Liceo Aleman del Verbo Divino in Santiago (1951–1963), like his mentor Humberto Maturana, Varela temporarily studied medicine at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Chile. He later obtained a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University. His thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by Torsten Wiesel, was titled Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye. In 1987, Varela, along with R. Gregory Bateson. Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields.
In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory/cybernetics to the social/behavioral sciences, and spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in various fields of science.[2] Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Angels Fear (published posthumously in 1987) was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. Biography[edit] Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England on 9 May 1904 – the third and youngest son of [Caroline] Beatrice Durham and of the distinguished geneticist William Bateson.
Personal life[edit] On Bateson's religious views, he was a lifelong atheist.[13] Work[edit] COLUMN: LINDISFARNE CAFE - MEMOIR - With Gregory Bateson's Mind in Nature | Wild River Review. Gregory Bateson We were six sitting on the porch of Gregory Bateson's cabin at Lindisfarne. The late summer evening's light was shining through the scrub oak trees onto the waters of Fishcove in Noyack Bay, and all of us were feeling the relaxed atmosphere, not just of the end of the day, but the end of summer and the end of four years of Lindisfarne in Southampton. Always before we were piously at work, winterizing the 29 cabins, repairing the central Lodge, and transforming a playing field into an organic garden; and, of course, to sustain all the work, fund-raising.
We relaxed in the peace of letting go, and I relaxed the community rules and decided to permit the conviviality of wine to touch the hitherto strict severity of our "spiritual" life. Like many of my generation who had made the Journey to the East in the seventies, I was trying very hard to be "spiritual" and not merely intellectual. William and Beatrice were the names of Gregory's parents. And indeed he did. "Harrummphh! "