Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Here is where Bellah’s approach becomes really interesting. He posits that early hominids developed the first ritual activities out of complexified forms of play, and that once our symbolic capacities developed sufficiently, these ritualized activities took on religious significance. Religion, then, grows out of the implications of ritual. Religion is not therefore primarily something you…
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…
An individual entity is that which acts and feels as one. To feel in this context means to take account of the environment such that the individual is, at least in part, constituted by such taking account. An electron is an example of an individual entity. An electron at one end of the universe is…
This is a comment I left on Tony Jones’ blog a while back when he posed the questions: what is a “person?” Warning: I quote John Cobb (no surprise there). What is a “person?” Well, let’s start small. Multicellular organisms can loosely be divided into two categories: One type establishes order among cells through their…
Ever wonder what Socrates meant when he said “the unexamined life is not worth living?” I’ll take a crack at explaining. Basically, when we talk about “purpose” we can talk about two types: first-order purpose (or quasi-purpose) and second-order purpose (self-reflective purpose). First order purpose is basically what distinguishes living things from matter. It is…