Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“This creates the series of questions Pluribus forces us to confront in every episode: Is our freedom—our autonomy—really too high a price to pay in exchange for global happiness and organized, respectful survival on our planet? If we accept the implied thesis that a free human will inevitably destroy the planet and themselves, is the alternative…
“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…
“Then, having overcome this awkwardness, they [Jesus and friends] are confronted with another: a man ‘possessed’ by a demon, chained and living among the tombs, to represent both his affinity with death and his uncleaness. But nothing had the power to restrain him. And he speaks, or rather the spirit within him speaks: ‘My…
“Our word “reason” goes back to the Greek verb lego, the verbal noun of which is the famous word logos, which was translated as the Latin ratio. Lego has two principal meanings: “to say” (hence the Word of John’s logos) and “to put together” (related to lechos as the marital couch). (As Whitehead states: “Logic…
“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…
“I’ve succumbed [to panentheism]…but here’s the thing about panentheism: there is a reasonable probability, and it’s a reasonably well received theory that the Universe is running down, the law of entropy is inevitable, and the arrow of time is irreversible and the best estimate we have right now is that the expansion will expand to…
“As we have seen, Girard regards religion and culture not as the inventions of rational human beings but as essential processes in the evolution of humanity. For him, the scapegoating process functions as a catalyst in the development of symbolic thought. This increased mental capacity leads to ritual and myth, which in their turn develop…
“Ultimately, Henry Nelson Wieman identified the “creative event” with “God,” emphasizing that “God, according to this interpretation is immediately accessible to human living and human feeling in all the fullness of God’s concrete reality.” The divine creative process, he stresses, “makes qualities more appreciable by creative sensitive organisms; by making them progressively more sensitive; by…
“…human retinas are hardwired to spot edges and differences. When we look around a room, our retinal ganglion cells fire more strongly when they see borders and contours than when they see the blank middle areas of uniform color. As the information gets bumped up through higher levels of brain cells, those edges yield more…
“Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. When a group of free players gets together and unfolds a coherent and interesting piece without a prior plan or template, it is like watching separate beings become integrated into a single nervous system. It is a partnership, with each…