Creatively Advancing into Novelty
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…
Critical to my approach is the need to maintain the ethic that keeps integral philosophy free from religious bias. Although integral philosophy has a strong spiritual component, its spirituality is broad enough to include a wide diversity of spiritual beliefs because it is careful to minimize its reliance on metaphysics. Like the three legs of…
In other words, for a system or structure to maintain its integrity as it becomes more complex, it must become more unified — each part of the system must work together with a large number of other parts, and together with the system as a whole. But it is, perhaps, predictable that scientists have tried…
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…
The genetic determinism of the “new synthesis” in biological studies in the 1930′s and 40′s proposed to have found the explanatory link between Darwinism’s processes of random variation and selective retention and transitions between generations with the discovery of the gene. It was the gene, via the structure of DNA, that served to pass the…
I enjoy responding to Tony Jones’ blog series “Questions That Haunt Christianity.” Recently he posted a question from a reader named Jesse. Below is Jesse’s question and my response. Jesse asks: Is the trajectory of our human culture/world/society positive or negative? In other words, are we fighting the long defeat until Christ returns to set…
“The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is…
Imagine zooming out to geosynchronous orbit and watching a map of light points rippling like the chromataphores of a cuttlefish as the location of everyone feeling love/thinking about the future/playing jazz pops up, illuminating the cloud-hidden coastlines. Art and Science, both children of Magic, made love and gave birth to Creative Data Visualization, which makes…
The classification of the European era between the decline of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance as the “Dark Ages” is now rejected by most modern historians.During the early Middle Ages, significant literary and educational advances (especially during the period known as the Carolingian Renaissance) were made, including the foundations of the modern university, as…
Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, “It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world we must filter it. To think,” Borgese writes, “is to forget.” I am currently enjoying Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein. It is a book about memory, specifically…