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 which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
“Rather than experience depending on consciousness, consciousness presupposes experience” –Whitehead (PR 83) I have often wondered about the claim (largely found in Eastern spirituality) that Gurus, for instance, can attain a permanent “state” of enlightenment where they are perfectly in-tune with an Ultimate Reality. I confess that I am in large part an egalitarian;…
“To see why the quantum state might represent what someone knows, consider another case where we use probabilities. Before your friend rolls a die, you guess what side will face up. If your friend rolls a standard six-sided die, you’d usually say there is about a 17 percent (or one in six) chance that you’ll…
“Let’s take a look at this post-truth meme, this word of the year which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ Now, I would argue that the mode of communication and influence that they’re…
“Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.” ― Roger Cohen This presidential election has generated TONS of fun (philosophical) things to think and talk about. Among them is this notion of “rigging” that keeps coming up….
“So long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life…As soon, however, as I separate myself, and with me everything ideal from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object, and I cease to comprehend how a life outside me…
Here are two things I’ve been thinking about that would be really good ingredients for a tasty theological dish. Ingredient #1: This interview with Yale Philosopher Keith DeRose. In it he basically says two things that caught my interest: 1) Neither atheists nor believers know (at all) whether God exists. I agree. 2) there’s still…
Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is…