Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson smuggles a philosophy of mind into a lab-grade definition. On the surface, "synaptic summation" is just circuitry: neuron C stays quiet unless inputs from A and B arrive together, their small pushes adding up to a threshold-crossing event. But the sentence is doing more than naming a mechanism. It’s a quiet polemic against single-cause stories.

The intent is to make combination, not essence, feel like the basic unit of explanation. C is not "caused" by A or B; it’s elicited by a relation. That shift matters because Bateson spent his career arguing that information and meaning live in patterns of difference - in how signals co-vary - rather than in isolated signals. This one technical example models his broader claim: the world doesn’t behave like a straight line of dominoes; it behaves like networks where effects are conditional, context-bound, and often only legible at the level of interaction.

Subtext: stop looking for the lone villain, the single gene, the one traumatic memory, the magic policy lever. In brains, in families, in ecosystems, causality is typically conjunctive: A plus B under the right timing and conditions yields C; change the context and the "same" input does nothing. Even the clinical-sounding letters (A, B, C) dramatize how easily we mistake our abstractions for reality, then blame A when the system demanded A-with-B.

Contextually, this line sits inside mid-century cybernetics and systems thinking, where feedback, thresholds, and emergence replaced mechanistic certainty. Bateson uses neurophysiology as a rhetorical foothold: if even a neuron refuses simple causation, our social and psychological explanations should be embarrassed to keep pretending otherwise.