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…
“Too often the debate of economics and religion is reduced to issues of morality—for instance, when greed is identified as the culprit in economics. As a result, individual CEOs and business leaders are condemned as greedy. This approach is doubly problematic, as it neglects the real structures of the economy, and it sets up a…
To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.” –Henri Bergson A few weeks ago I participated in a really thoughtful and stimulating written philosophical discussion regarding the subject of laughter and comedy. It was sparked by…
“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die;”” John 11:25 Good Friday is the day Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus. There are a few theories out there regarding why Good Friday is called “Good Friday.” The one…
“One reason that a profound moral improvement of humankind is hard to envision is that it seems difficult to pull ourselves up morally by our own bootstraps; our attempts at improvement are going to be made by the unimproved. The people who implement the singularity, mess about with the genome, prescribe the medication, preach the…
“Well first of all, there is present in the structural pattern in the development of human consciousness and culture what we might describe as the dialectic of “progress and pathology”…for every new set of advances, for every new worldview stage that emerges beyond what came before, we find that there is pathology, or problems, or …
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. – 1 John 1:8 Sin. I have to be honest, I don’t think about it much anymore. I know a lot of Christians do, though. I used to be one of them. I used to think sin was…
It is a basic tenet of systems theory that for a system to be optimized, its subsystems must be sub-optimized (their agency must be brought within the communal embrace of the higher holonic level of the system as a whole). When we look at the evolutionary system that is the spiral of development in consciousness…
“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…
This post originally appeared as part of Toy Adams’ Imaging Jesus Advent Series. Go check out the rest of the great submissions. … I’m not a huge fan of the gnostic Christian sects that existed in the early centuries–you know, the kind that were “silenced” by the rest of orthodox christianity. I say I’m not…