One or Many?
Singular/Plural
One can dominate the scene.
Two get attention by reduplication.
But ‘many’ does something different…
It creates a sense of frenzy and
business.
And then there are lots of little W's buzzing around them. How are they related? They seem to be irritating them, perhaps
like insects... And then there are even smaller W's...
Objects and Groups
What did we do, without even thinking about it? We saw an outline. And although it was almost certainly different
from any other 'W' we had seen before, we called it a 'W', ignoring all those differences as meaningless and not worthy of consideration.
The Realm of the W has taken over its newest conquest.
And of course, every previous W was also different from every other. So why refer to them all as being the same thing - a 'W'?
Well, because we know what a 'W' is. that is to say, we know what to do with it, what other letters it goes with, that we can turn it upside down
and use it as an 'M' if we need to, etc. We have existing standard behaviours (Grinder calls them TOTES) available to summon when
meeting a W. Unless they have some notable peculiarity, we treat them all the same, and it is
unconscious - all stored in unconscious, conceptual memory. We do not need to think about it. It is a stereotype.
We treat it as one of a group, not as an individual, and the reaction is automatic.
And we have to do this ALL the time. Almost everything we encounter gets this treatment. Why? Because
we only have VERY limited space for original thought, for consciously manipulating thoughts and ideas.
Try remembering a string of numbers. For most people it's not too hard to do with four, five or six in a row.
Seven is possible, but more tricky. Eight is almost impossible. Unless you 'chunk' the numbers - if they are
24957431... you can chunk them as 2 no49 buses followed by 574 '31's. If you are familiar with those bus routes, its not too hard.
But we only moved the problem back a step. We will soon find that we can only handle seven 'chunks' no matter
what is in the chunks. We have seven channels to use, and that's it. Add one more, and a previous one gets wiped.
This highly limited consciousness has to be used for novel situations and objects. It can't be squandered on
noticing the fine details and idiosyncratic differences of the latest 'w' to appear in a string of letters. Unless
that happens to be of vital and apparent importance.
If it is important, then we no longer treat the W as one of a group, but instead it and other Ws become metaphors of each other
and we examine the differences anew. Bateson refers to the difference as in the ceremony of receiving the body and blood of Christ
as bread and wine. If one sees it as a metaphor, the focus includes the differences as well as the similarities.
If one treats it as a sacrament, then the bread and wine actually BECOME the body and blood of Christ.
To the participant they are one and the same. The metaphor is forgotten, lost, ossified, and two very
different things have become one and the same to us.
Gravity
Gregory Bateson 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' Ballantine Books, 1972
F: "...an hypothesis tries to explain some particular something but an explanatory principle - like "gravity" or "instinct" - really explains nothing.
It's a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.
D: Then is that what Newton meant ? If "gravity" explains nothing but is only a sort of full stop at the end of a line of explanation,
then inventing gravity was not the same as inventing an hypothesis...
F: That's right. There's no explanation of an explanatory principle. It's like a black box.
All 'known' things are rather like this. They are landmarks of familiarity in a landscape - terrestrial or in the Realm of ideas. Everything
new that we are commenting on uses these landmarks to locate and orient themselves. They take their meaning from them. And these 'known'
things have a range of fixed patterns of behaviour or expectations which have become associated with them, and which come into operation
automatically and without thought, depending on the situation (stage of the Quest) in which they occur. They are the triggers of
the automatic response system, already built into our conceptual and terrestrial maps.
Similarly in language... we introduce the unknown in terms of the known. Not surprising, considering that the part of the brain
responsible for exploring the environment was sequestered for language...
Petroushka (a human/puppet) and Swan Lake (lady/swan) - ambiguity in art, and how hovering on the edge of a category prevents
the automatic, unconscious response, stops the rote response and allows us to examine
the familiar as if it were something new.
Deception, Error and Surprise
Above we saw two items. one partly hiding another
(big assumption), and regarded them as two examples of the same sort of thing... big W's.
Of course, we could have been wrong... let's move the front one a bit:
We see three groups of big W's. A lot has already happened by this stage.
Rhyme, Repetition,
Character, and how do we identify Coherence, a Group?
In a sense this section foreshadows
the first in the section on the Quest Hypothesis,
who is bonded and who isn’t. Who is
part of the tribe, society,
and who is an outsider, independent?
What is part of the herd, and what is
separate, preying on it?
In landscape repetition or rhyme
helps define the Realm,
contrasting the repetitions and
rhymes of meadowland with those of a higher realm of pine forest,
or a still higher realm of snow and
ice.
In a novel or a joke, or a play for
goal…
what is part of the pathway, and what
is a diversion?
Do all the species belong to the same
genus?
Are these all parts of the
same metaphor?
