The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It
is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is
a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem...
I suggest that the delimitation of an individual mind must always depend
upon what phenomena we wish to understand or explain. Obviously there
are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages
which they carry must be included as part of the mental
system whenever they are relevant... The way to delineate the system
is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these
pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable... In principle,
if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are
always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits.
Bateson 1970a, pp.458-461 |