GREGORY BATESON
Mickey Nardo (1boringoldman) quotes a recent Scientific American article:
For most of the DSM‘s history, investigators have not had a detailed understanding of what causes mental illness. That excuse is no longer valid. Neuroscientists now understand some of the ways that brain circuits for memory, emotion and attention malfunction in various mental disorders…Then he goes on to say:This kind of rhetoric has an all too familiar ring. I call it future·think but the Disney metaphors like fantasy·land or tomorrow·land work just as well. The postulate, mental illnesses are presumed to be disorders of brain circuits, is not that far off away from the previous chemical imbalance theories, perhaps even more speculative. It’s similar in that what-we-are-currently-able-to-measure is the target du jour. It’s the available technology that generates the hypothesis, rather than technology being engaged to solve a problem… .I’m pretty sure Gregory Bateson would have sided with Mickey. In 1972, when I was a first-year resident in psychiatry, I had the luck of encountering Bateson’s collected papers, Steps to an Ecology of MInd. It was a difficult text, but it was fascinating. Somehow I stuck with it, struggling to understand his unusual-to-my-young-ears rhetoric. That struggle changed my cosmology. Instead of focusing on things, Bateson attended to relationships. Much of his later writing was about co-evolution—the process in which, for instance, prairie grass and the hooves of the animals that tread on it influence each other’s development over large sweeps of time. In an earlier post, I wrote about how he saw mind as a process that doesn’t stop or start inside a skull; the mind involved in cutting down a tree with an axe involves the tree, the axehead, the light waves coming from the growing notch in the tree, the slope of the land under the forester’s feet, and more. He believed that we make grave errors when we “chop up the ecology“ into small arcs of immediate cause and effect. Understanding that, I am amused and appalled when I encounter the kind of thinking that MIckey is criticizing in his recent post.When we locate individual minds inside individual skulls and make pretty pictures of the activity there, we are focusing on only one way station in a much larger set of processes. The “mind” involved in post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression or schizophrenia includes processes in the larger world outside of individual skulls. It involves nutrition, education, social supports, love or the lack thereof, economic opportunity, and more.
couple with Dubberly’s "Design In The Age Of Biology”…