April
12
An Interview with Nora Bateson
In this interview Jeff Carreira talks with Nora Bateson about her profound work aimed at supporting people into a new conception of reality and a new consciousness. Expanding on the work of her father the brilliant 20th Century philosopher Gregory Bateson, Nora is seeking to discover how human beings can embrace and perceive the depth of relatedness of our world. In this discussion Jeff and Nora discuss the need to embrace the significance of context in all of our perceptions and elucidate why they believe that aesthetic considerations are critical for the emergence of a new worldview.
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thank you for introducing me to Nora – I realized that I was looking for it what she is talking about for a long time
Brilliant way to approach our relationship with the world in a new way, through the interaction of components in systems. Everything is relationship. Nora Bateson is onto it.
Good interview. Nicely done.
I especially liked when Jeff pointed out, and Nora listened and agreed, that a mechanistic model, no matter how much you puff it up or how complex the systems get, cannot account for centers of experience with authentic agency.
Also, the critical issues was presented. Relationships are central to the function of living organisms and so must appear explicitly and centrally in any model that actually accounts for them.
So far so good, but the problem of memory – in the broadest sense of the word as both inherited characteristic and individually acquired memory or habit – must be addressed. Mechanistic, code-based models (DNA and memory traces in the brain) cannot account for the for the participation (with agency) of the organism or for internal cohesion.
We need to look at this issue of memory and also attempt to account for internal cohesion within organisms. Otherwise, all of this can be too easily dismissed as ‘new age puffery’ because it remains ungrounded and incomplete.
When thinking about memory, in the broadest sense of the word, it might be useful to consider the phenomenon of habit.
It touches me how both of you keep a very clear ongoing focus on this ungraspable issue. Trying to experience the huge web of relations you talk about, expands my awareness to a degree where there are no things anymore and where it is very meaningful use the word aesthetic to describe the experience, since there are no things and no story but still sensory input, and it could be described as wholeness, art or beauty. In my life I have had several experiences, where paintings in a similar has opened up my consciousness to sense a world of many layers of relations and contexts, so for me art is is not only a painting or an art object, it is more what you describe as a web of relations. Thank you so much for relating the terms aesthetic and art to the meditative context.