Creatively Advancing into Novelty
For Whitehead there’s something important at stake in the framing of human experience in terms of the bifurcation of nature that Stengers wants us to pay attention to; namely, the bifurcation of nature requires a certain kind of sacrifice on behalf of human experience that we may not wish to accept. Stengers describes this sacrifice,…
Existentialism in all its forms (existential, scientific, religious or atheistic) affirms the individuality of an individual as the end and beginning of everything. Absurdism, as a movement, rejected traditional and secularist progressivist accounts of the fate of man. It expressed the condition of individual as it is, not as it should be. Man, according to…
One of the deepest problems in biology is to explain development, the process by which organisms reliably grow into organisms of the right kind. Dogs give birth to puppies not snakes or cabbages. Preformationism, a solution to this problem often illustrated by quaint seventeenth century pictures of tiny babies squatting in the head of a…
Passing judgment on the veracity of Whitehead’s new concept of nature requires first deploying it, experimenting with its effects in the world, establishing its relevance to the values of actual life. Materialist enemies of his philosophy tend to lack the negative capability required to pursue the consequences of Whitehead’s unbifurcated image of the universe; they…
To make that more tangible: when I look outside my window at home, I can see a lake (Champlain), mountains (the Adirondacks), darkening blue sky with an airplane crossing it, a few boats on the water, some trees, a family of bicyclists riding along the bike path down below, and so on. Or, alternatively, I…
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…
“This permanence is the result of a process that researchers call ‘chunking’: a person using drugs or alcohol experiences a burst of the activating neurotransmitter, dopamine, encoding memories and stimuli associated with that high in the brain. As substance use turns chronic, those same networks in the brain are increasingly engaged, and eventually the habit…
“We use machines to make our labor more productive. Productivity is a measure of the amount of use-value created in a span of time. Since, for Marx, value is determined by labor time an increase in productivity (in use-values) does not create a corresponding increase in value. The same amount of value is created, just…
Every problem in the world can be understood, at least partially, as a problem of consciousness. So it follows that the solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as environmental degradation and climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, hunger and overpopulation, unregulated globalization and gross inequality, can all be effectively ameliorated by raising or changing the…
It is a basic tenet of systems theory that for a system to be optimized, its subsystems must be sub-optimized (their agency must be brought within the communal embrace of the higher holonic level of the system as a whole). When we look at the evolutionary system that is the spiral of development in consciousness…