A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:

THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.

Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature.

What is it to know another person’s soul? To know their true nature? To look into the heart of their being? It is to be able to enter the infinite universe of their stories and to recognise the utter interconnectedness of their stories with yours.

As Bateson points out, our language does not describe the world as it is… it describes the world as it is useful to describe it. Our language is primarily a language of things. Or as Pratchett put it

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Again, as Bateson points out, the language of “reality” (whatever that may be) is the language of relationships, of connectedness; the language we use to describe the world simply does not describe the world. It only describes what is useful for us. Stories, though… stories are all about the relationships. All about the connectedness.

On a blog I read regularly, the author wrote about Lucretius’s “great didactic epic poem, which aims to teach us that the soul is mortal, death is not to be feared, religion is mere superstition, and the whole of creation is nothing but the random coming-together and shearing-apart of an infinity of atoms sleeting through the void.” He posed the question why would Lucretius do all this in the form of a massive complex poem? because the poem itself is a metaphor for order and structure, right down to the arrangement of letters in structured, grammatical and poetical order being a direct metaphor for reality and experience created from natural phenomena, atoms arranged and structured in patterns and relationship to each other…

These are stories, a story being an aggragate of formal relations scattered in time… It has a certain sort of minuet or formal dance to it. It gets more complicated, because this is where we live. And the funny thing about living there is that we care about it intensely. And when the metaphors get jangled by unfortunate events… we get very upset. You see, the idea that there is any mental process going on that isn’t metaphoric is a very late, school-marmish idea. What they were killing each other over in the 14th Century was metaphor. Is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics said yes. The Protestants said no; it stands for body and blood. And they felt that this was worth burning for. No one would ever think that now.

The set of mental processes – aesthetics, feeling, poetry perhaps – is precisely where dream is made… And the Protestant view of the sacrament was a policy decision to exclude from the church that part of the mind which is concerned with poetry, feeling, fantasy, metaphor, stories

Gregory Bateson, quoted on http://www.trismegistos.com/ as being from an audio tape