Gregory Bateson on Faulty Epistemology and Addiction

I have been reading recently a number of articles about the 12 step program initially established by A.A. but now the template for many forms of addiction treatment. Obviously it works in a great many cases. That doesn’t stop philosophers breaking out in quibbles chiefly around the issue of power, powerlessness and surrender to a higher power.
are addicts truly powerless
Massimo on weakness of will
vox on drug treatments

In my view they are all quite mistaken about the nature of addiction and will power. Gregory Bateson writing on The Cybernetics of “self”: A Theory of Alcoholism makes a powerful case for the root of addiction lying in a faulty epistemology.

cybernetics

The surrender to a higher power of an atheist addict is not nonsense if that power is the total system. I’m not going to try to summarise it. Nobody follows links but until you’ve read Bateson’s essay just shut up and quit your Cartesian wittering.

While you’re at it read the collection of essays (Steps to an Ecology of Mind pub. 1972) which includes the remarks on the 12 step program aforementioned:
Steps to an Ecology of Mind

A.E. Taylor leading the meditation

The self implies, and has no existence apart from, a not-self, and it is only in the contrast with the not-self that it is aware of itself as a self. This seems to me clear, as a matter of principle, though the consequences of the principle are in much current speculation partly misconceived, partly neglected. The most important among them, for our purposes, are the following. The feeling of self is certainly not an inseparable concomitant of all our experience. For it only arises—and here nothing but direct experimentation can be appealed to as evidence—as a contrast-effect in connection with our awareness of a not-self, whether as imposing restraints upon the expression of the self, or as undergoing modification by the self. Hence experiences from which this contrast is absent seem to exhibit no trace of genuine " self-consciousness." Feeling, where you can get it in its simple form, seems to be universally allowed to be an instance in point. Much of our perception appears to me, though I know the view is not widely current among psychologists, to be in the same position. E.g., normally when I am looking at an object, say for instance, a white-washed wall, I do not find that I am in any real sense "conscious of self." The content of my awareness seems, to me at least, to be just the wall in a setting of a mass of unanalysed feeling, organic and other, which you may, if you please, from your standpoint as an external observer, call my perceiving self, but of which I am only aware as the setting of the perceived wall.
It is only when attention to the content of the perception becomes difficult (as, e.g., through fatigue of the organs of sense, or conflict with some incompatible purpose) that I am normally aware of the perceived object as a not-self opposed to and restricting my self. The same is, I think, true of much of our life of conscious purposive action.

(from Elements of Metaphysics by A.E. Taylor)

This is the basic metaphysical stance that can be taken in meditation practice. The ‘white-washed wall’ is now the particular chakra that we have fallen through, so to speak, and we immerse ourselves in the mood that is evoked in as formless a manner as we can manage. When not formally meditating this feeling can frame events. Gregory Bateson has called this learning III. I see from a search that I haven’t mentioned him before. To do.