▻http://worrydream.com/quotes/#gregory-bateson-conversation-with-stewart-brand-in
Une citation d’un dialogue entre Gregory Bateson et Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) — via @worrydream.
ça parle des dégats faits par les protocoles d’expérimentation aux théories psychiatriques (et donc par extension aux théories de l’esprit).
"Oh the damage that’s been done to psychiatric thinking by the clinical bias.
More of the Bateson chortle. “You’ve got to have a lab.”
“Why?”
"Because the smell of the lab, the feel of the harness in which the animal stands, and all that, are context markers which say what sort of thing is going on in this situation; that you’re supposed to be right or wrong, for example.
"What you do to induce these neuroses is, you train the animal to believe that the smell of the lab and similar things is a message which tells him he’s got to discrimiate between an ellipse and a circle, say. Right. He learns to discriminate. Then you make the discrimination a little more difficult, and he learns again, and you have underlined the message. Then you make the discrimination impossible.
“At this point discrimination is not the appropriate form of behavior. Guesswork is. But the animal cannot stop feeling that he ought to discriminate, and then you get the symptomalogy coming on. The one whose discrimination broke down was the experimenter , who failed to discriminate between a context for discrimination and a context for gambling.”
“So,” says I, “it’s the experimenter’s neurosis that —”
“— Has now become the experimental neurosis of the animal. This whole context business has a Heisenberg hook in it much worse than the atoms ever thought of.” ...
Suppose you’ve got an animal whose job in life is to turn over stones and eat the beetles under them. All right, one stone in ten is going to have a beetle under it. He cannot go into a nervous breakdown because the other nine stones don’t have beetles under them. But the lab can make him do that you see."