In his Steps to an Ecology of Mind Bateson (2000) makes several points concerning our relationship to a greater whole that, taken in themselves, possess a high degree of plausibility—and importance. For example, he asserts that we can never be in a position to see the whole. Consciousness is always selective, working by a systematic sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on outside according to its purposes.
Basically, on Bateson’s account the picture is one of the greater whole as a vast cybernetic system—a self-corrective information feedback system. And the individual mind is portrayed as a variable localised part of this system. As Bateson puts it: ‘‘My’’ mind – delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to explain: Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant.’ (p. 464)
This statement provides a picture of mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. Within the mind, there will be a hierarchy of sub-systems, any one of which we can call an individual mind (p. 466)
For this ‘cybernetic epistemology’ the individual mind is immanent not only in the body, but also in pathways and messages outside the body—and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system whose identity varies with the phenomena to be explained. Bateson suggests that this larger Mind is now strictly immanent in ‘the total interconnected social system’ (p. 467).
The cybernetic/scientific model privileges an understanding of things as constituted through systematization—that is, through appropriation to a super-ordinate system that posits all as information. It sets up our understanding of the greater whole as a set of discursive interrelations. This characterisation of mind as a computer, simply a ‘sub-system’, a ‘total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit’ radically revises the whole landscape of human Understanding.
