WHERE IS THE OBSERVER STANDING? [01.10.98]

This awareness alone (of who makes the division between organism and environment ) can help us avoid two traps that have generated enormous confusion in the past.

First there is the tempting but logically erroneous idea that what we rightly call 'environment' relative to an organism when both the organism and its environment are being observed by us, must also be our environment and can, therefore, be held causally responsible for what we ourselves experience.

Second, there is the mistaken belief that that 'environment' which is part of our experiential field has to be identical with the experiential field of the observed organism.

Ernst von Glasersfeld