Participant: Eric Vatikiotis Bateson
Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Format: Plenary Speech
Themes:

In this talk I use several empirical and conceptual topics currently central to my teaching and research to spell out an uneasy connection between biological coordination and human cognition and to discuss the implications this has for communicable characterizations of reality. In list form, these topics include:
computationally assessing spatial and temporal coordination within and between individuals during linguistic and musical performance, with particular emphasis on the role of fluctuations in the coordination, which facilitate short-term entrainment (as occurs when two people walking side by side fall into step) and block sustained synchrony, which turns out to be pathological in biological systems; the predominance and probably systemic necessity of what I call contentless communication, which dominates so much of human interaction and has now been canonized by the technology mediating communication; the breakdown of recursion as a means of negotiating our link between the real world, where patterns that connect (á la G. Bateson) are possible, and the navigational hazards of the cognitive world of categories and distal objects where such patterns are annihilated by their very formulation.

We all think we know that learning about the world cannot simply be a matter of acquiring and manipulating inherently static and context-free name/thing-named dyads; yet this oversimplification too often serves as an adequate description of how we approach the world. Rather, a more complex and unstable approach is required that incorporates the dynamism and connection to context necessary for learning and survival. As C.S Peirce recognized so well, our engagement with reality is built on possibility, not certainty, and therefore minimally requires probabilistic mechanisms for relating to the world. Peirce’s triadic (actually tetradic) system for iteratively constructing reality needs to be reconsidered in terms of biological coordination where both similarity and difference inform the system.