Musicking. Christopher Small G.

an incorporeal mind that in some mysterious way is lodged within it, yet is not part of it, and appears not to be subject to any discoverable scientific laws. Even some of the great neurophysiologists of the twentieth century have been so defeated by this problem that they have found themselves postulating a “suprabiological” mind, a “ghost in the machine,” that in some mysterious way that is inaccessible to the methods of science watches over the chemical and physiological workings of the body, including the nervous system. The nervous system, with the brain at the center, appears to be the site of the mind, but what might be the nature of that mind they could only speculate. Others, the so-called behaviorists, tried to solve the problem by denying that mind exists at all; they said it was only an epiphenomenon, the illusion of a phenomenon, whose apparent existence is the outcome of a hugely complex system of automatic actions of the body, like a shadow cast on a wall.

      Part of the Cartesian legacy to Western thinking is the assumption that the body plays no part in such operations of the mind, apart perhaps from presenting through the senses the material on which the mind operates (and in some of the weirder manifestations of the mind-body split even that has been called into question). Knowledge exists “out there,” independently of who knows it, preexisting any possible knower of it, and continuing after any knower has ceased to exist. Similarly with reasoning; premises lead inexorably to conclusions, regardless of who, if anyone, is doing the reasoning. This idea, that the operations of the mind work independently of the body, is all the more pervasive for being unrecognized for what it is: an assumption, by no means to be accepted without scrutiny.

      Bateson has not, of course been the only twentieth-century thinker to call into question these and other assumptions of Cartesian dualism, and over the past two or three decades this questioning has found ample experimental support in the works of neurologists and neurobiologists such as Oliver Sacks, Gerald Edelman, and Francis Crick. It is becoming clearer and clearer that mind is not substance at all but process, one of the processes of life, which is explicable by the organization and working of the brain and the rest of the nervous system, with their billions of intricately interconnected and reinterconnected nerve cells (Edelman [1992] calls the human brain “the most complex object in the entire universe”), and is thus inseparable from the living matter of whose operation it is the outcome. That may sound like the behaviorists’ position, but in fact it differs from it fundamentally, since the behaviorist, even as he or she denies the existence of the substance mind, remains caught in the absurdity of the Cartesian split, whereas to understand that mind is part of the functioning of living matter, as much as, say, digestion and reproduction, makes it unnecessary either to affirm or deny its existence as substance. Once that is understood, the Cartesian split between body and mind ceases to exist.

      Bateson goes further, and holds that mind in some form is part of the functioning of all living creatures. He defines mind very simply, as the ability to give and to respond to information, and maintains that it is a characteristic of matter wherever and whenever it is organized into those patterns we call living. The world of living beings, he says, is suffused with the processes of mind; wherever there is life there is mind.

      The neurobiologist may find this definition somewhat too wide and all- encompassing, but it does have a use in our context; anyone who cultivates a garden must constantly be astounded by the way in which plants not only respond to information, such as changes in the intensity and duration of light, changes in temperature, and even the presence of other plants nearby, in ways that are appropriate to them and to their mode of being, but also give information, through their color, their mode of growth and their flowering, and modify their environment in order to make it more favorable to their growth and reproduction. Further, the seemingly infinitely complex interaction between plants, microorganisms, insects, other animals and human beings suggests that the biosphere, the world of living creatures, is indeed a vast and intricate network of what by Bateson’s definition we can call mind, all giving and responding to information. The mind relates to the environment outside the creature not by mere passive reception of what is “out there” but by an active process of engagement with it. We could say that creatures shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it.

      Not all the information, of course, comes from other creatures, since much also comes from the nonliving environment—changes in temperature, atmospheric constitution, saltiness of water, the lengthening and shortening of days, and so on. Living creatures in turn have their effect on the nonliving environment; the very constitution of the earth’s atmosphere, and its maintenance, against all the strictly physical probabilities, at a roughly uniform level over eons is due to the activities of life, so that the entire earth sometimes appears as if it were a single great organism—the point of origin of James Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia hypothesis.

      Each individual mind, each set of processes of giving and receiving information as it goes on within each individual living creature, may in itself be simple or complex, but it is at the same time a component of the larger and more complex network. Bateson calls this vast network “the pattern which connects” because it unites every living creature with every other, some intimately, some remotely, but not one excluded from the pattern. What holds the pattern together, what puts the world that exists within the boundaries of the organism in continuous interaction with the world that is outside it, is the passing of information. The mind has its external no less than its internal pathways.