Bateson difference which makes a difference

The classical Carnot heat engine consists of a cylinder of gas with a piston. This cylinder is alternately placed in contact with a container of hot gas and with a container of cold gas.

The gas in the cylinder alternately expands and contracts as it is heated or cooled by the hot and cold sources. The piston is thus driven up and down. But with each cycle of the engine, the difference between the temperature of the hot source and that of the cold source is reduced.

When this difference becomes zero, the engine will stop. The physicist, describing the pleroma, will write equations to translate the temperature difference into "available energy," which he will call "negative entropy," and will go on from there. The analyst of the creatura will note that the whole system is a sense organ which is triggered by temperature difference. He will call this difference which makes a difference "information" or "negative entropy. He is equally interested in all differences which can activate some sense organ.

For him, any such difference is "negative entropy. O r consider the phenomenon which the neurophysiolgists call "synaptic summation.

In pleromatic language, this combining of events to surmount a threshold is called "summation. But from the point of view of the student of creatura and the neruophysioligist must surely have one foot in the pleroma and the other in creatura , this is not summation at all.

What happens is that the system operates to create differences. There are two differentiated classes of firings by A: those firings which are accompanied by B and those which are unaccompanied.

Similarly there are two classes of firings by B. The so called "summation" when both fire, is not an additive process from this point of view. It is the formation of a logical product—a process of fractionation rather than summation. The creatura is thus the world seen as mind, whenever such a view is appropriate.

And whenever this view is appropriate, there arises a species of complexity which is absent from pleromatic description: creatural description is always hierarchic.

I have said that what gets from territory to map is transforms of difference and that these somehow selected differences are elementary ideas. But there are differences between differences.

Every effective difference denotes a demarcation, a line of classification, and all classification is hierarchic. In other words differences are themselves to be differentiated and classified. In this context I will only touch lightly on the matter of classes of difference, because to carry the matter further would land us in problems of Principia Mathematica. Let me invite you to a psychological experience, if only to demonstrate the frailty of the human computer.

First note that differences in texture are different a from differences in color. Now note that differences in size are different b from differences in shape. Similarly rations are different c from subtractive differences. Now let me invite you, as disciples of Korzybski, to define the differences between "different a ," "different b ," and "different c " in the above paragraph. The computer in the human head boggles at the task.

But not all classes of difference are as awkward to handle. One such class you are all familiar with. Namely, the class of differences which are created by the process of transformation whereby the differences immanent in the territory become differences immanent in the map.

In the corner of every serious map you will find these rules of transformation spelled out—usually in words. Within the human mind, it is absolutely essential to recognize the differences of this class, and, indeed, it is these that form the central subject matter of "Science and Sanity. An hallucination or a dream image is surely a transformation of something. But of what? And by what rules of transformation?

Lastly there is that hierarchy of differences which biologists call "levels. Th ese are the hierarchies of units or Gestalten , in which each sub unit is a part of the unit of next larger scope.

And, always in biology, this difference or relationship which I call "parT of" is such that certain differences in the part have informational effect upon the larger unit, and vice versa.

Having sated this relationship between biological part and whole, I can now go on from the notion of creatura as mind in general to the question of what Is a mind. What do I mean by "my" mind? 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.

Consider a tree and a man and an ax. We observe that the ax flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in this central nervous system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the ax flies, to the differences which the ax then makes on the face of the tree.

Our explanation for certain purposes will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits.

This is the elementary cybernetic thought. The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems but essentially this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

But what about "me"? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin?

Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. 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. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.

But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating that you want to understand.

And in addition to what I have said to define the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of memory and data "banks.

The behavior of the governor of a steam engine at Time 2 is partly determined by what it did at Time 1—where the interval between Time 1 and Time 2 is that time necessary for the information to complete the circuit. We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit.

And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an individual mind. But this picture is precisely the same as the picture which I arrived at in discussing the unit of evolution. I believe that this identity is the most important generalization which I have to offer you tonight. In considering units of evolution, I argued that you have at each step to include the completed pathways outside the protoplasmic aggregate, be it DNA-in-the-cell, or cell-in-the-body, or body-in-the-environment.

The hierarchic structure is not new. Formerly we talked about the breeding individual or the family line or the taxon, and so on. Now each step of the hierarchy is to be thought of as a system , instead of a chunk cut off and visualized as against the surrounding matrix. It was the idea that the way to make an intelligent agent was from the top down.

You have a set of propositions in some proprietary formulation. But it hit a brick wall. McCarthy and Hayes discovered the frame problem. There were other intractable issues, and then along came connectionism, and then, more recently, reinforcement learning and deep learning. People have moved away from this ideal of a canonical expression of specific propositions as in an axiom system. He was an early influential and knowledgeable critic of the field. He was already foreseeing its demise correctly in many regards, but the fact is that the fruits of good old-fashioned AI are all around us.

In fact, the Internet is largely based on good old-fashioned AI. Those are the semantic meanings that the philosophers were trying to capture with their notion of propositions.

You can get some because some areas of inquiry and datasets are wonderfully well articulated and organized and are just built for that kind of exploration. And the beautiful thing about it is they extract meaningful patterns without knowing what the meaning is, and that takes us back, interestingly enough, to Shannon and bits and differences that make a difference.

If you go to Google and search for something, they will search for exactly the sequence of letters you put in. A lot of people object to that because they want to do research that depends on actual string search, but the techniques that Google and others are developing for going beyond the string and trying to suss out the intended meaning of the search, this is new territory. Those methods are the ones that are intended to make the web more semantic in that you can look things up by meaning and not just by strict name, not by just the symbols in the string.

All of these issues are related. This grain of sand is here, not there. This grain of sand is a little different shape than that one. Some differences, however, have roles to play in larger circumstances, and it may be the butterfly that flaps its wings that causes the hurricane. My stock example is this: Some of the gold in my teeth once belonged to Julius Caesar. Or, none of the gold in my teeth ever belonged to Julius Caesar, not a single miligram.

One of those is true. I doubt if that information exists in the world today. It could. We can prove that some things belong to some people who have been dead for centuries. Skip to main content. He saw abduction as the study of patterns. In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind , Bateson developed his idea of a "difference that makes a difference" in his talk to Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics.

The talk was entitled "Form, Substance, and Difference. But in the formal world of patterns, the cybernetic world of communications, he says when you enter the world of communication, organization, etc. You enter a world in which "effects"— and I am not sure one should still use the same word—are brought about by differences.

That is, they are brought about by the sort of "thing" that gets onto the map from the territory. This is difference. Steps to an Ecology of Mind , p. What is communicated, he says, is a difference. A "difference which makes a difference" he identifies with information or negative entropy. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy.

I have said that what gets from territory to map is transforms of difference and that these somehow selected differences are elementary ideas. There are all sorts of things you can do with information that you would never do with what it refers to and vice versa.

You can eat food, but not information about food. Even if you choose to eat a piece of paper on which "food" is written that is usually irrelevant to your use of the word to refer to food. Information about X is normally used for quite different purposes from the purposes for which X is used.

For example, the information can be used for drawing inferences, specifying something to be prevented, or constructed, and many more.

Information about a possible disaster can be very useful and therefore desirable, unlike the disaster itself. So the notion of standing for, or standing in for is the wrong notion to use to explain information content. It is a very bad metaphor based on some person or object taking the place of another in some process or situation , even though its use is very common. We can make more progress by considering ways in which information can be used.

If I give you the information that wet weather is approaching, you cannot use the information to wet anything. But you can use it to decide to take an umbrella when you go out, or, if you are a farmer you may use it as a reason for accelerating harvesting.

The falling rain cannot so be used: by the time the rain is available it is too late to save the crops. The same information can be used in different ways in different contexts or at different times. The relationship between information content and information use is not a simple one. Problems with Bateson's alleged definition Despite all the interesting facts alluded to by Bateson, there are several problems with his proposed definition of "information" if it was intended as a definition, which seems unlikely, as explained below.

First of all, insofar as the physical universe is a connected whole, it is true of every temporal change that it has effects i. So if every difference is information, why do we need the concept of "information" in addition to the concept of "difference"?

A partial answer might be that we need two distinct concepts in order to avoid the circularity that would be manifest in attempting to define "difference" as "a difference that makes a difference", or "change" as "a change that causes changes". By having two words, one being defined and one used in the definition we avoid circularity. But what has been achieved? The proposed definition might make sense if we were trying to discuss what can be propagated through a network of causally connected mechanisms.

Obviously in some cases energy is propagated. In other cases, for instance in a chemical plant, or the circulatory system of an animal or plant, matter is propagated including both nutrients and waste. But our concept of information is distinct from our notions of matter and of energy, although information, matter and energy can interact, for instance when information received causes some large machine or other physical system to start moving.

Matter beginning to move requires energy to be dissipated. All of that can be triggered by information, as in the battle example, above. Moreover a serious flaw in the attempt to define "information" in terms of "change" or "difference" is that when we talk about information normally we are thinking of information as being about, or referring to, something other than the information.

A recipe in a cook book provides information about how to make a cake, but the making of the cake is not the same thing as the information about about making the cake, although a suitably knowledgeable cook watching the process of making could gain information from it. In the cases where changes are propagated through a connected system, something may use detected changes as bearers of information about something else, but that does not make the changes themselves the information.

In the vast majority of cases, information bearers and information contents are distinct. Exceptions might be the sight of obviously wet paint on a wall providing information that there is wet paint on the wall, or the visible motion of an object providing information that the object is moving.

However, in general the content of information is something other than the bearer of the information, even though all bearers of information about something other than themselves also provide information about themselves. For instance the english word "battle" when written can be used to provide information about the location of a battle, but it necessarily also provides information about its own spelling, though not its own pronunciation. Perhaps Bateson was really trying to define not "information" but "information-bearer".

For that, we need an explanation of what it is that can refer or denote, successfully or unsuccessfully, what it is that can be true or false, or inconsistent, what it is that can answer a question, or be the content of a decision or an instruction or command about what to do. And lurking in the background to all these questions is the problem that "a difference" suggests something discrete: a step-change, as does Bateson's use echoing Shannon of the phrases "bit of information" and "elementary unit of information", suggesting that information is built out of indivisible chunks that are combined to create larger items.

This does not square well with the common sense idea that information can be about things that vary continuously, such as pressure, or distance, or speed, or direction, or closeness to danger. In these cases there is no smallest information difference between two states, such as two possible velocities or locations for the same object.

Some quantum physicists might disagree: but our ordinary concepts of information, or meaning, don't presuppose that the physical universe is discrete, even if it actually is. Perhaps Bateson's answer would be that even if the content of some item of information can vary continuously, there isn't continuous variation between not having and having the information.

It may be that if the information is complex it could be acquired in steps, but there would be some minimal first step, and each time the content of the information is increased as opposed to merely being changed there is a minimal possible increase, which is indivisible.

If so, that minimal increment could not be acquired in parts or stages. All of that might be a way of defending Bateson's talk of bits or elementary units but I don't know whether he ever wrote something with precisely that interpretation.