Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localize response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience…
“Such a situation may be better understood if we consider that concepts with indefinite comprehension are concepts of Nature. As such, they are always in something else: they are not in Nature but in the mind which contemplates it or observes it, and represents it to itself. That is why it is said that Nature…
“…branding animals ‘invasive’ is not only unethical, but it is also based on a confused understanding of species migrations over time. The reason that the rhetoric of invasive species has become so popular is because it provides a simplistic account of what are in fact very complicated biological processes. As such, the invasive species discourse…
“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are…
“What often slips away in our quests to out-think the problems in our environments is that thinking itself is an ecological habit, a shared vocation between humans and non-humans. We have inherited the sticky myth that thinking happens in our heads, that creativity is a mental thing, and that if we pushed ourselves a bit…
“Whitehead’s theme, begun in the first chapter and maintained throughout the book and, in our judgment, for the rest of his philosophy, is that mathematics begins in experience and as abstracted becomes separated from experience to become utterly general. “We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and…
“For example, if we consider energy to be the most fundamental reality behind the apparent solidity of matter, it becomes very difficult to define what energy “really” is, without getting involved in circular definitions. Ultimately, this discussion becomes just a word game. We can define energy by using yet more words. But what we’re trying…
“During an evening walk with a close colleague of Bohr’s, Einstein once asked: “Do you really believe the Moon is not there if nobody looks?” From Barad’s perspective, it isn’t that the Moon isn’t there when we aren’t looking, it’s that when we do look, a new Moon, and a new me, emerge in the…
“Think of a brand new automobile on a rainy day. And it’s parked on the street and down at the street corner there’s a busy intersection and there’s a red light and it’s a green light. And now you look at your car sitting there and it’s red across it’s surface but it also has…
“If the mind is flat then our mental lives must exist purely at the ‘mental surface.’ Our brain is an improviser, and it bases it’s current improvisations on previous improvisations: It creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs and motives but on memory traces of…