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Numbers Are The Product Of Counting. Quantities Are The Product Of Measurement. This Means That Numbers Can Conceivably Be Accurate Because There Is A Discontinuity Between Each Integer And The Next. Between Two And Three There Is A Jump. In The Case Of Quantity, There Is No Such Jump; And Because Jump Is Missing In The World Of Quantity, It Is Impossible For Any Quantity To Be Exact. You Can Have Exactly Three Tomatoes. You Can Never Have Exactly Three Gallons Of Water. Always Quantity Is Approximate.

-Gregory Bateson

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Numbers Are The Product

Gregory Bateson

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Numbers Are The Product Of Counting. Quantities Are The Product Of Measurement. This Means That Numbers Can Conceivably Be Accurate Because There Is A Discontinuity Between Each Integer And The Next. Between Two And Three There Is A Jump. In The Case Of Quantity, There Is No Such Jump; And Because Jump Is Missing In The World Of Quantity, It Is Impossible For Any Quantity To Be Exact. You Can Have Exactly Three Tomatoes. You Can Never Have Exactly Three Gallons Of Water. Always Quantity Is Approximate.

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Numbers Are The Product Of Counting. Quantities Are The Product Of Measurement. This Means That Numbers Can Conceivably Be Accurate Because There Is A Discontinuity Between Each Integer And The Next. Between Two And Three There Is A Jump. In The Case Of Quantity, There Is No Such Jump; And Because Jump Is Missing In The World Of Quantity, It Is Impossible For Any Quantity To Be Exact. You Can Have Exactly Three Tomatoes. You Can Never Have Exactly Three Gallons Of Water. Always Quantity Is Approximate.

Science Probes; It Does Not Prove.

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Science Sometimes Improves Hypotheses And Sometimes Disproves Them. But Proof Would Be Another Matter And Perhaps Never Occurs Except In The Realms Of Totally Abstract Tautology. We Can Sometimes Say That If Such And Such Abstract Suppositions Or Postulates Are Given, Then Such And Such Abstract Suppositions Or Postulates Are Given, Then Such And Such Must Follow Absolutely. But The Truth About What Can Be Perceived Or Arrived At By Induction From Perception Is Something Else Again.

If It Were Possible Adequately To Present The Whole Of A Culture, Stressing Every Aspect Exactly As Appears In The Culture Itself, No Single Detail Would Appear Bizarre Or Strange Or Arbitrary To The Reader, But Rather The Details Would All Appear Natural And Reasonable As They Do To The Natives Who Have Lived All Their Lives Within The Culture.

Life And 'mind' Are Systemic Processes.

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No Organism Can Afford To Be Conscious Of Matters With Which It Could Deal At Unconscious Levels.

What Is The Pattern That Connects The Crab To The Lobster And The Primrose To The Orchid, And All Of Them To Me, And Me To You?

A Man Walking Is Never In Balance, But Always Correcting For Imbalance.

Perhaps There Is No Such Thing As Unilateral Power. After All, The Man In Power Depends On Receiving Information All The Time From Outside. He Responds To That Information Just As Much As He Causes Things To Happen... It Is An Interaction, And Not A Lineal Situation.

In The Transmission Of Human Culture, People Always Attempt To Replicate, To Pass On To The Next Generation The Skills And Values Of The Parents, But The Attempt Always Fails Because Cultural Transmission Is Geared To Learning, Not Dna.

We Do Not Know Enough About How The Present Will Lead Into The Future. We Shall Never Be Able To Say, "ha! My Perception, My Accounting For That Series, Will Indeed Cover Its Next And Future Components," Or "next Time I Meet With These Phenomena, I Shall Be Able To Predict Their Total Course."

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People Are Going To Have To Make Themselves Predictable, Or The Machines Will Get Angry And Kill Them.

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It Is Impossible, In Principle, To Explain Any Pattern By Invoking A Single Quantity.

The Wise Legislator Will Only Rarely Initiate A New Rule Of Behaviour; More Usually He Will Confine Himself To Affirming In Law What Has Already Become The Custom Of The People.

We Are Most Of Us Governed By Epistemologies That We Know To Be Wrong

The Pathology Is To Want Control, Not That You Ever Get It, Because Of Course You Never Do.

Some Tools Of Thought Are So Blunt That They Are Almost Useless; Others Are So Sharp That They Are Dangerous. But The Wise Man Will Have The Use Of Both Kinds.

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Making A Difference

The Creature That Wins Against Its Environment Destroys Itself.

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Deep Understanding

Theory Of Evolution

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Wisdom Is The Intelligence Of The System As A Whole.

It Is To The Riddle Of The Sphinx That I Have Devoted Fifty Years Of Professional Life As An Anthropologist.

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There Are No Monotone "values" In Biology.

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In The Nature Of The Case, An Explorer Can Never Know What He Is Exploring Until It Has Been Explored.

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