Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

A scientist declaring “All experience is subjective” is less a surrender to relativism than a precision strike on scientific arrogance. Bateson spent his career studying systems - minds, families, ecosystems - and he knew that what we call “data” always arrives through an organism’s built-in filters: attention, language, culture, prior learning, even physiology. The line reads like a warning label for objectivity, not a rejection of it.

Its intent is methodological. If experience is inherently framed by the observer, then the first variable in any inquiry is the inquirer. That’s classic Bateson: the mind isn’t a thing sealed inside a skull, it’s a pattern of relationships, a circuit. So “subjective” here doesn’t mean whimsical; it means situated. Your nervous system selects differences that make a difference, and that selection shapes the world you can perceive. The subtext is blunt: when we treat our perspective as neutral, we smuggle in our values and blind spots while pretending we didn’t.

Context matters because Bateson worked at the crossroads of anthropology, cybernetics, and psychiatry, where bad assumptions about “objective reality” can do real damage. In family therapy, for example, people don’t just disagree on facts; they live in different interpretive loops, each one self-confirming. In ecology, the fantasy of an outside, god’s-eye view licenses extraction: if the observer isn’t part of the system, consequences feel optional.

The quote works because it collapses a comforting hierarchy. It yanks the scientist off the pedestal and puts them back in the experiment - accountable, entangled, and therefore capable of better questions.