that it is a characteristic of matter wherever and whenever it is organized into those patterns we call living. The world of living beings, he says, is suffused with the processes of mind; wherever there is life there is mind.
The neurobiologist may find this definition somewhat too wide and all- encompassing, but it does have a use in our context; anyone who cultivates a garden must constantly be astounded by the way in which plants not only respond to information, such as changes in the intensity and duration of light, changes in temperature, and even the presence of other plants nearby, in ways that are appropriate to them and to their mode of being, but also give information, through their color, their mode of growth and their flowering, and modify their environment in order to make it more favorable to their growth and reproduction. Further, the seemingly infinitely complex interaction between plants, microorganisms, insects, other animals and human beings suggests that the biosphere, the world of living creatures, is indeed a vast and intricate network of what by Bateson’s definition we can call mind, all giving and responding to information. The mind relates to the environment outside the creature not by mere passive reception of what is “out there” but by an active process of engagement with it. We could say that creatures shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it.
Not all the information, of course, comes from other creatures, since much also comes from the nonliving environment—changes in temperature, atmospheric constitution, saltiness of water, the lengthening and shortening of days, and so on. Living creatures in turn have their effect on the nonliving environment; the very constitution of the earth’s atmosphere, and its maintenance, against all the strictly physical probabilities, at a roughly uniform level over eons is due to the activities of life, so that the entire earth sometimes appears as if it were a single great organism—the point of origin of James Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia hypothesis.
Each individual mind, each set of processes of giving and receiving information as it goes on within each individual living creature, may in itself be simple or complex, but it is at the same time a component of the larger and more complex network. Bateson calls this vast network “the pattern which connects” because it unites every living creature with every other, some intimately, some remotely, but not one excluded from the pattern. What holds the pattern together, what puts the world that exists within the boundaries of the organism in continuous interaction with the world that is outside it, is the passing of information. The mind has its external no less than its internal pathways.
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