Bateson's ideas about perception

What do we see?

Visualizing as an early step in improving perception
"There are some interesting side effects of our unawareness of the process of perception." p. 41.
	" The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary. But no necessity determines how it shall be done."
	Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 42.

Part 1:

Gregory Bateson, a biological anthropologist, was long interested in how the mind constructs reality or how individual people's psychological make-up reconstruct events. We do this as a normal function in our quest to rationally survive.

Rational here means to make sense of something, as opposed to a strict meaning of an orderly, analytically systematic and deliberate method for approaching how one experience or thing relates to another different episode, thing or event.

Bateson's test of perception:

We all must fit events, people, places and things into a context for these things to become meaningful. The world remains a disordered, frightening and threatening place unless we impose some rationality on the events we are involved in. When we become aware of a pattern of events, according to psychologist, Jean Piaget, we fabricate a schematic or schema. Schema's embed new experiences into a context that has meaning to us and those we seek to relate with.

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psychological |diagram | model | ecological

How accurate these schemas are with respect to the behavior of the outer world is another most important question because delusion arises from our misinterpreting sensory cues or from misrepresenting what others have said to us. We all miss most of what is said and most of what transpires because we have not practiced how to focus on important details to add to our growing schemas.

We use models and schemas to help us visualize the things we cannot see. Take for example this model of a hydrogen atom, the smallest building block of the atomic elements:

In the fusion of stars, these basic atomic elements are forged into all the material atomic elements that construct the world we see in the surrounding conditions of existence.

What is energy?

Bateson wanted to be sure that the schematic of our minds was attuned to the ecology of a place because we run the risk of self-destruction when we fail to comprehend the ecological conditions that are part of a sense of place.

While ecology is a vaguely empirical term "a sense of place" is a very fuzzy aesthetic term with many layers. Though both ideas are reflective of a layering of our perceptions of the world the notion of a sense of place moves from the focused to the wide ranging. In this respect the idea begins with the sensory experience and moves into the narrowly analytical framework of science. From empirical science and the rational grammar and syntax of language "a sense of place" is an intellectual process of growth. That is because the "sense" is a faculty that moves along into the more synthetic and higher realms of expression, appreciation and an eye for details.

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psychological |diagram | model | ecological

Models are abstractions from reality, in that they emphasize only a few parts for us to see far greater complexity in worldly relations more clearly.

Ecology gives rise to both ethnic identity and the modes of production or means of subsistence. Any such model or schematic that represents these ideas would be far more complicated than the gestalt psychology model.

interdependence - circulation among each and all of three concentric rings has to be depicted as a cycle in which continuous feedback links the core, to the social conditions and to the cultural adaptations to and adjustments of ecological and social realities.

Part 2:

From the empirical to the practical and on into the inspirational this journey of forgetting the familiar and remembering the contexts of the world is a difficult learning experience.

The qualities one looks for in themselves, or others, or in nature, are as important as the process of seeing and as crucial as the clear expression of these perceptions. The process is never finished but it does include a multiple repertoire of learning techniques. The process must be self-corrective and open to reflective insights, as well as, the criticism of others. Just as our senses are varied and contribute differently to our "sense" of ourselves, so too developing "a sense of place" is a varied experience that flowers over time from a seed of inquiry into the "fruit of knowledge."

To nourish our perception you need three things.

Buckminster Fuller, after Frank Lloyd Wright argued that "god dwells in the details." But details alone do not make a coherent pattern. Only the constant testing of your imagination and your veracity in pursuit of the facts will yield the necessary internal dialogue for this "sense." to develop.

For example, the ancient peoples of Persia, Egypt, Greece and China, Rene Dubose tells us all conceived of the uniqueness of places with respect to fertility, nourishment and harmony among elements. The Romans, he says, called this rare and precise quality the genii loci [genius of a place] of any area.

Added to or layered over the genius of a place is the archaic Mycenaean concept of the significance of crossroads as opposed to termini (end places) because of the daemons that inhabited such forks in the road. And beneath these conceptions lies the fire rituals of the Zoroastrians and the blood slaughtering rites of the Egyptian or Hindu priests to restore the balance between people and places.

Now all these "superstitious" beliefs can be thought of as the embodiment of irrational fears. Or they can be seen as layers in an account of how a sense of land, water, earth and sky conjoin to nourish our imaginative, sensitive and emotional character. Any "sense of place" requires the recognition of the rational and the "extra" rational layers of our own persona that relate in some profoundly significant way with layers in nature. German gestalt psychologists refer to this layering as the three worlds or "drei welt" that arise from our biological condition.

By biological condition I refer to the facts that may think we are separate beings who perceive reality (eigenwelt) and must communicate with others in our society (mitwelt) about the larger world (umwelt), but we are largely made up of bacteria. In many ways our beliefs are merely the linear comprehension of a far more complicated relationship. Ours is only real in a childish sense and that any normal adult will recognize the three worlds as interdependent perceptions of a hidden and often obscured underlying reality.

Among the reasons why we are deceived by our senses is because the child learns to speak of its perceptions (eigenwelt) in the language of the society (mitwelt) in which it is raised and that the physical world (umwelt) has no meaning for us unless it is voiced, heard and relayed to others (mitwelt). There are two ways to think of this layering of experience that is part of developing a proportionate "sense of place."

First Model: German Gestalt Psychology
		Three worlds in one:

umwelt	-	the ground of existence, or the physical conditions of the universe.
mitwelt	-	the middle ground between the observer and the world we apprehend.
eigenwelt	-	the individuals' personally constructed world