Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Bill Eckert: Do any of you hold a non-personal view of God? If so, is your worldview distinct from naturalism? Jay McDaniel: Bill, my own view is that God can meaningfully be conceived in both personal and transpersonal terms, and that there is a continuum between the two poles. I myself sometimes speak of…
“That is the great danger of meritocracy: the people who reach the top of the system are precisely the people who have most completely identified with the system and its demands, creating a vicious circle preventing any actual change. It is no accident that conservatives tend to employ the rhetoric of social mobility so readily,…
“The Old Testament was the first alphabetic written work to influence future ages. Attesting to its gravitas, multitudes still read it three thousand years later. The words on its pages anchor three powerful religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each is an exemplar of patriarchy. Each monotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shines…
Einar Gerhardsen, Prime Minister of Norway for most of the period between 1945 and 1965, once claimed there were two principal lessons he had learned from his time in government. …there will always be conflicts in a democratic society: between workers and employers, between the majority and groups who view themselves as marginalized, or between…
…We exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it. Moreover, nothing determines us from the outside or inside, precisely because we are from the…
Without interiority, objects lack the capacity–however meager it may be–to constitute a perspective of their own in which to register or to take account of other things. By restoring an appropriate position for interiority in the cosmos, we can solve two related problems. The first is the widespread modern sense that self-aware humankind is an…
In other words, for a system or structure to maintain its integrity as it becomes more complex, it must become more unified — each part of the system must work together with a large number of other parts, and together with the system as a whole. But it is, perhaps, predictable that scientists have tried…
Volume 2, Chapter 2, Footnote 2: Richard Chasten 1620-95: Chasten wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men, reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies, it is the other way around; magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards…
Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is…
Measurements of human brain signals on the level of neurons and synapses have long shown that acts of will are preceded by a buildup of neural activity in the brain. These signals can begin up to seconds before a person is consciously aware of the exercise of volition, according to the weight of data, Tse…