The Difference that Makes a Difference

Taken from:

Bateson, G. & Bateson, M.C. (2005). Angels Fear - Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Elaborating on the contrast between Creatura and Pleroma in C.G. Jung's Septem Sermones ad Mortuos:

'In fact, wherever information - or comparison- is of the essence in our explanation, there, for me, is mental process. Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference. A sensory end organ is a comparator, a device which responds to the difference. Of course, the sensory end organ is material, but it is this responsiveness to difference that we shall use to distinguish it's functioning as 'mental'.....information is all ours; it is part of our life processes. The world of nonliving matter, the Pleroma, which is described by the laws of physics and chemistry, itself contains no description. A stone does not respond to information and does not use injunctions or information or trial and error in it's internal organisation. To respond in a behavioural sense, the stone would have to use energy contained within itself, as organisms do. It would cease to be a stone.....
I can give the stone a name, I can distinguish it from other stones. But it is not it's name, and it cannot distinguish.....while Pleroma is without thought or information, it still contains - is the matrix of - many other sorts of regularities. Inertia, cause and effect, connection and disconnection, and so on, these regularities are immanent in Pleroma. Although they can be translated into the language of Creatura, the material world still remains inaccessible, the Kantian Ding an sich which you cannot get close to....
In summary then, we will use Jung's term Pleroma as a name for that unliving world described by physics which in itself contains and makes no distinctions, although we must, of course, make distinctions in our description of it.
In contrast, we will use Creatura for that world of explanation in which the very phenomena described are among themselves governed and determined by difference, distinction, and information.'

At the interface of the Pleroma and Creatura, we have the line of information-in and information-out that we call 'mind'. Herein, according to Bateson, is birthed epistemology. Jung's epistemology is perhaps a step sideways from Descartes's - it starts from a comparison of difference, not from matter. We presume knowing is possible, and begin to tease out how it is done.

I must dig out some Korzybski to read......