But granting this interdependent nesting of systemic conditions, Bateson presses its implications for cultural evolution to some profound conclusions. If this identity between mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts in our thinking.” Such a statement uses ecology to make the conceptual shift by which “the large biological system-the ecosystem” may be taken to include as well those metabiotic matters-such as consciousness and communication-for which life per se is the precondition but not necessarily the operation.
Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure.
Biology or life per se enlarges to encompass immanent mind: “I now localize something which I am calling ‘Mind’ immanent in the large biological system-the ecosystem. Bateson notes that these descriptions hang on the level at which one draws the system boundaries. The later papers of Steps redescribe human culture and communication as part of a mental or informational ecology that is planetary in scope. The strategic generality of cybernetic formulations of information and communication allows the idea of ecology to pass beyond strictly geobiological and evolutionary reference and to provide the natural-scientific foundation and systemic occasion for Bateson’s immanentist metaphysics. Published in 1972, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind treats ecology alongside the discourse of cybernetic systems theory. Steps to a General Ecology in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University, Lubbock)
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