Talk:Bateson’s Negentropic Discourse Matrix

AB-BA-ABABA...CODIFICATION-EVALUATION

Bateson maintains that the division between perception and action is false; the division can rather be grouped under a single category: “codification-evaluation”; both must be treated as a single entity which can be studied through the complex relationship between input (stimulus) and output (reaction).

In occidental cultures, Bateson notes, the two are regarded as separable. This fallacy is routinely performed as a reality, which is reflected through the interactions between people in which inferences about the motivations and values of others are phrased in terms of value and perception. Challenging the presumption of this division becomes the basis for correcting “epistemological errors” as we go forward.

In order to clarify the equivalence of codification-evaluation, Here Bateson develops his reading of McCulloch (via Russell): each message is simultaneously a statement or report about events at a previous moment and a command – a cause for stimulus at a later moment. Bateson takes a string of neurons as an example (AB & C). Firing A leads to firing B, which leads to firing C. In this circumstance, B has a dual function of commanding C to fire and of reporting a past event (the firing of B) to C. This duality is at the basis of human value in relation to communication. In all communication, the transference of knowledge by A will influence the subsequent actions of B, although in the case of human communication this relation may be obscured or complicated by syntax: a person may heed the command without fully understanding the information this command conveys, or they may take the command as a report.

As Bateson’s career progressed his articulation became more succinct, in Social Scientist Views the Emotions (1960), again following the assertion that a message (from a to b) is simultaneously a command and a report, Bateson adapts McCulloch’s triad of learning, which I have mapped thus:

if

aba = stimulus

and

bab = response

then

ababababa... = reinforcement

so that:

“aba” in a loop = “abababa...&c.”,

reinforces stimulus and response

= learning.

In this case a thought only ever evolves in time. Consciousness of thought comes into being in long and short feedback loops (in the manner of the ultrastable state or homeostasis). A great deal of thought processing is unconscious and involves the nervous system, the thresholds afforded by end organs and the environment, and even on the (higher) level of grammar the subject is unconscious of the processes which make consciousness. In the 1966 lecture, Message of Reinforcement, Bateson again relates reinforcement to levels of abstraction, which are by this time analogous to “hard” and “soft” programming. “Hard programming” elements in the system are not as open to structural change as “soft-programming” elements. On the psychological level, to change hard programming could be traumatic and threaten the integrity (identity) of the system. Again, soft and hard programming correspond to the double feedback loops of the homeostat; the self-corrective workings of negentropy; and the triad of learning described by McCulloch.