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@ liminal
2025-02-25 15:35:47
> The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment... Let us go back to the map and the territory and ask: "What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?" ... if the territory were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its boundaries ... What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. differences are the things that get onto a map.
- Gregory Bateson "Form, Substance and Difference", in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
https://faculty.washington.edu/jernel/521/Form.htm