Creatively Advancing into Novelty
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…
The notion of process, activity, or change has an inextricable relation to the nature and meaning of dialectic. In ancient philosophy, dialectic (dialektik‘), derived from the Greek dialegein, meaning to ‘converse,’ ‘argue,’ or ‘discourse,’ involved a conversational method of argumentative exchange. By Plato’s time, the term acquired a technical sense in the form of question…
There is therefore no stable and essential distinction, for Whitehead, between mind and matter, or between subject and object. There is also no stable and essential distinction between human and non-human, or even between living and non-living. It’s not that such distinctions are unimportant; often they are of the greatest pragmatic importance. I should not…
“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than…
“Darwin saw every reason to predict that this evolution of human cooperation would, after the nineteenth century, continue to even higher levels. “Looking to future generations,” he predicted in the Descent of Man, “there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow…
A concert is being performed tonight. It is the event. Vibrations of sound disperse, periodic movements go through space with their harmonies or submultiples. The sounds have inner qualities of height, intensity, and timbre. The sources of the sounds, instrumental or vocal, are not content only to send the sounds out: each one perceives its…
“The majority of biologists picture mind as emerging at some stage in the evolution of animals. Before that time there was no mind. From no mind comes mind. Agar proposed the alternative that there has been no moment in evolution when mind made its first appearance. Minds and bodies evolved together even though that body…
Introduction First, a confession: I view nature as being full of indestructible polarities. They’re everywhere. Things like positive/negative, male/female, competition/corporation, chaos/order, are all examples of these type of naturally occurring complementary pairs. Further, I really like when Integral Philosophers like Steve McIntosh talk about the dialectic advance of Evolution in which the two polarities are…
Jesus was one of a long line of people who submitted to God. So did Adam, so did Abraham, so did Moses, so did David. They each demonstrated submission to God in their own context. What follows is an excerpt from an online correspondence I had with a friend–who is a member of the Eastern…