Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“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…
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…
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When…
[I]t seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day. … [U]nless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply. … This is how science (unlike religion)…