Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Let’s take a look at this post-truth meme, this word of the year which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ Now, I would argue that the mode of communication and influence that they’re…
“…the elements or constituents of organisms are related to each other in two basic ways—through external (physical) relations and internal (nonphysical) relations. The external relations are studied in physics, and involve the four forces of electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, and gravity. These forces bind physical components together. But the parts of our bodies (cells,…
“[Daniel Dennett] regards the zombie problem as a typically philosophical waste of time. The problem presupposes that consciousness is like a light switch: either an animal has a self or it doesn’t. But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have…
“In order for anything to exist it has to exist in relationship to something else. This is an important part of the core character of American Pragmatism. We live in a world of relationships. As I said before, things do not exist except in relationship with other things. In fact, things do not exist at…
“I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emotional.” —A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas Lately I have thinking about the phrases “I feel” and “I think.”…
“The God of “coercive agency” is anthropomorphic and is considerably easier to believe in for the masses because there is little room for ambiguity: God is king (perhaps angry, perhaps strong-willed); human beings are His weak and pitiful subjects; this God is to be obeyed, feared; this God is somehow the “answer” to (surely not…
“Libertarianism is perhaps the most toxic mixture of liberalism (ala Hobbes and Locke) and capitalism.” It should not be a huge surprise for anyone who reads this blog to learn that I am not a huge fan of the political philosophy known as libertarianism. One of the things I hate most about libertarianism is it’s…
“It is a grim irony the more we lose our connection to the primal, natural state–often described as “animalistic”–we actually lose more and more of our own humanity. To be grounded in the earth gives us the means to grow towards the sky. Yet part of our fall into civilization has meant losing those psychic…
“There is no fundamental, coherent, pre-given, exclusive formula or ontology to reality. Time isn’t fixed; identity is relational; matter is not a thing, it is an ongoing generativity. This disrupts the idea that all that is alive about the world is necessarily human to begin with. It suggests matter is mind, and mind is matter;…
“Difference is endless, and so we are endlessly—infinitely—tangled in it.” –Catherine Keller It struck me recently that All Lives Matter, the defiant, pious, racist push-back to the very important Black Lives Matter movement, should also be filed under the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is one of my favorite Whiteheadian theories;…