Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“I worry a bit about the glorification of consciousness as the pinnacle of all Creation…there is…a seductive, but deceptive, seeming move away from anthropocentrism in the ascription of consciousness to all things, but what this really does, I think, is to say “oh right, all things are like us, or all things have this awesome…
“…we can no more bring to consciousness the operation of our brain than we can bring to consciousness other aspects of our own biology. We can invent stories about what the liver is trying to achieve, speak as if the immune system is confused by tissues from our own bodies, or talk of genes being…
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…
“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from…
“For Wittgenstein, the problem with Cartesian dualism isn’t the distinction between mental and physical states. The problem is the metaphysical understanding of that distinction in terms of an inner-outer dualism. We use the word “inner” in everyday word use to talk about mental states, sensations, thoughts, images, moods, intentions, etc. That’s fine. The metaphysical problem…
“Evil is not eliminated by a destructive retributive judgment, but by an aesthetic synthesis of intensity, order, and harmony. Whitehead’s God is not a cosmic judge; rather, God is a cosmic artist. The many poor paintings of individual lives and events are transformed in a continuous aesthetic process of harmonizing the parts with an ideal…
“In light of this, we think that the picture emerging from evolutionary and developmental biology is – contrary to the widespread opinion among contemporary philosophers – one that very much supports the notion of human nature, just not an essentialist one. Human nature is best conceived of as a cluster of homeostatic properties, ie of…
“I would say that selfhood as we humans normally conceive of it emerges as we master language. As Whitehead says in “Adventures of Ideas” (I summarize), the account of the 6th day should be written, “He gave them language, and they became souls.” I think we can make distinctions between degrees of nonconscious experience (particles,…
“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;…