is to start from our common personal experiences. I invite the reader to consider the experience of one’s “own” mind.
We as persons understand ourselves to “have” a mind. We are not too sure what this mind is, or where it is, but we know “it” is “there” by our direct experiencing of its activity. We know from our own experience that what is most essentially “ourselves,” that is, our personality and our basic understanding of who we are, is (to borrow philosopher Dorothy Emmet’s homely and useful phrase from The Passage of Nature [1992]) our mental “going on.” What we identify as “self” is our thinking, believing, feeling, loving, deciding, choosing, and so on. The entity that we understand to have this mind, we see as our self, as a body-sized being.
Bateson denies that the mind is limited in this way. His concept of much wider mind, or mental process, requires that we question this for ourselves. Are we really a single entity, controlled and managed by a conscious internal mind? Are there not entities within our bodies that have their own independence? Are our “selves” not significantly shaped and altered by larger physical and social processes that can also be seen as minds? And do we not participate in these larger processes in ways that suggest that our self is much wider in scope and influence than we think?
It is a fact that there are smaller entities within us that may also be seen as having (or being) minds. Pregnant women carry an entity that is both self and other. Men carry sperm: millions of potential others, some of which may prove to have quite independent direction and purposes.
Further, within our body-sized selves are organs that, in the complex interactions between themselves and other bodily entities, grow, mature, change function, and opt for one of possible alternative courses of action.
Examples of such choices include growth, healing, maintaining the pre-sent state, or beginning to decay. Our organs age and may eventually cease to function. All of this goes on without the conscious intervention of the human person’s mind.
There is still further complexity to consider. Our bodies are made up of microscopic, indeed, microcosmic, beings: many billions of cells, enormous numbers of bacteria. Our cells divide and multiply, grow, die, and are replaced largely according to their own internal genetic knowl-edge, dynamics and process interactions. Few of them remain as part of us for more than six or seven years. The biologist Lynn Margulis stated (in a lecture at Schumacher College, Devon, UK) that 10 percent of our body weight is bacteria. We carry around two kilograms of them, of two hundred different species, in our digestive tract alone. We need a balanced ecology of another six hundred species of bacteria in our mouths to stay healthy. All these are self-organizing entities, essentially independent beings that can (and do) enter and leave our bodies. We are walking communities of billions of tiny beings, which cannot flourish without being in us and without which we cannot live. Bateson requires that we see each of these beings as a mind or mental process and that, where aggregates of such beings form a recognizable organ or subprocess, we should see these also as minds.
To this must be added a further molecular complexity. Our bodies are entirely composed of atoms that we have taken in from the outside world, many of them (all the carbon for instance) originating from the second-generation star that destroyed itself four or five thousand million years ago to form the materials of our solar system, thus conferring the possibility of life and mind on Earth. These atoms and molecules also pass in and out of our “selves” continuously in accordance with larger processes that are, in Bateson’s terms, strictly comparable to thinking, posing the ultimate question of our “personal” identity with the universe.
Thus, it is a matter of material fact that there are smaller beings within every living organism that effectively make their own “decisions”
about how to act and react to new information. Each of these living beings, says Bateson, is a thinking mind. The recent work of biologists Candace Pert and Michael Ruff on peptides and the immune and endocrine systems in humans provides physiological support for Bateson’s intuition. Their findings indicate that peptides behave as “bits of brain/mind floating around in the bloodstream” performing essen-tial tasks that enable emotional responses and memory, and that the immune and endocrine systems also act in complex relationships with
mental and neural processes. Pert (1999) suggests that the body really is the subconscious mind.
Comparable mental processes may be recognized in the larger systems of which we humans have direct experience: couple relation-ships, friendrelation-ships, families, neighborhood and work communities, committees, regional and national communities or political systems. In these and other interactive relationships the larger system itself shows mental characteristics. Marriages take on their own flavor and dynamics, families develop styles and norms of thinking and attitude, committees collec-tively “turn against” or “are minded to support” a project, the “mind of the country” swings against a government or an ideology, hate or fear can infect a whole population with insanity. The larger minds in which we are enfolded are not limited to collections of individual human mental processes. What we call our “environment” is also made up of mental systems. The complex processes that permit the production of our food (the weather and solar energy, soil processes, nutrients, and chemical exchanges), the natural systems that provide breathable air, drinkable water, warmth, clothing, and the experiencing of beauty are also to be seen as minds. The existence of such processes is a necessary condition of our ability to continue living and so, as systems depending on infor-mation transfer and the utilization of knowledge (in Bateson’s wide senses), they can be seen as processes comparable to the minds we conventionally regard as being resident in our bodily person. Similarly, all nonhuman organisms are to be recognized as mental processes, beings with minds.
For Bateson, all of evolution and embryology is mental too. In a 1967 lecture (2000, 432–45) he explained that the logical outcome of the eighteenth-century evolutionary thinker Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s inver-sion of the traditional God-down hierarchy of being, is that “the study of evolution might provide an explanation of mind.” Bateson went on to ask what was for him a rhetorical question, “Is the biological world the explanation of mind?”, thus reversing the traditional understanding that transcendent divine mind is the explanation of the natural world.
Bateson claims that the adaptive evolution of species and the develop-ment of individual babies and kittens and little fishes is a matter depending on information and knowing: how to select and perpetuate those characteristics of a species that render it able to persist, how to grow and still stay the same shape, how to develop an eye on either side of a nose. From all this, mind is mental process—comparable to thought—
whatever living being or system it is evidenced in.