about
“Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money. For example, $1,001 is to be preferred to $1,000. But this is not so for biological values. More calcium is not always better than less calcium. There is an optimum quantity of calcium that a given organism may need in its diet.”
Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, Gregory Bateson
Much of Western epistemology has allowed us to conceive ourselves outside of the world that we observe. The most significant articulation of this has been the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy. These systems have derived achievement through linear expansion. For example, the success of an economy is proved by growth, and a car factory is successful if it sells more cars. It is the detriment to a biological population or an ecological system if it grows too big or if it produces too much waste products.
“I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious than all the minor insanities that characterise those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity”
Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, Gregory Bateson
This aesthetic or holistic ability can be understood as the appreciation of the whole system, what we often call beauty or intuition, yet we have been taught to forget this experiential and imminent understanding of the world. We can’t go back to a time when we were pre-modern and pre-industrial, so we have little choice but to use technology to enhance our systemic and aesthetic understanding. In this way digital communication and visualisation of data can potentially help us observe and co-ordinate the aesthetic health of systems themselves, rather than what they output, whether that be biological or artificial.