Creatively Advancing into Novelty
…We exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it. Moreover, nothing determines us from the outside or inside, precisely because we are from the…
Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is…
Measurements of human brain signals on the level of neurons and synapses have long shown that acts of will are preceded by a buildup of neural activity in the brain. These signals can begin up to seconds before a person is consciously aware of the exercise of volition, according to the weight of data, Tse…
The notion of process, activity, or change has an inextricable relation to the nature and meaning of dialectic. In ancient philosophy, dialectic (dialektik‘), derived from the Greek dialegein, meaning to ‘converse,’ ‘argue,’ or ‘discourse,’ involved a conversational method of argumentative exchange. By Plato’s time, the term acquired a technical sense in the form of question…
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…
There is therefore no stable and essential distinction, for Whitehead, between mind and matter, or between subject and object. There is also no stable and essential distinction between human and non-human, or even between living and non-living. It’s not that such distinctions are unimportant; often they are of the greatest pragmatic importance. I should not…
“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than…
A concert is being performed tonight. It is the event. Vibrations of sound disperse, periodic movements go through space with their harmonies or submultiples. The sounds have inner qualities of height, intensity, and timbre. The sources of the sounds, instrumental or vocal, are not content only to send the sounds out: each one perceives its…
“The majority of biologists picture mind as emerging at some stage in the evolution of animals. Before that time there was no mind. From no mind comes mind. Agar proposed the alternative that there has been no moment in evolution when mind made its first appearance. Minds and bodies evolved together even though that body…
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…