/lit/ - Literature

Ecology of Mind by Bateson. He’s Margaret Mead’s husband, and is an infinitely more rigorous thinker and anthropologist.
He said that the 2 most important events of the 20th century were the treaty of Versailles and artificial Neural networks.

He opens the book with metalogues between him and his daughter, focusing on language games and ontology.
Have you ever seen the anime Baccano? The opening between the newspaper owner and the little girl is practically lifted from this book.
It’s really interesting and easy to read.
Reading the dialogue between father and daughter on the topic of “messiness vs tidiness” is actually very interesting. As he makes the point that while everyone knows if a thing is messy, a tidy thing can take many forms. For instance, if your books and toys are strewn about the room it’s messy. However if they are all on their shelves they’re tidy, no matter the order they’re put in. You can become more anal about of course, but that’s not the point of the metalogue.
It’s good. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in anthropology and futurism