Year: 2009
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On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics
On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Biology of Economics Table of Contents Preface Introduction: What is Life? I. The Irruption of Time II. Ancient Biology III. Modern Biology IV. Teleology as a Regulative Principle of Living Organization V. Autopoiesis: Teleology as Constitutive of Living Organization VI. Concrescence and Bodily Perception VII. Concrescence and Autopoiesis…
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Logos of a Living Earth: Towards a Gaian Praxecology
Logos of the Living Earth: Towards a Gaian Praxecology By Matthew Segall Introduction The word “praxeology” has been employed with various meanings in 20th century French and Austrian discourse.[1] Praxecology is a distinct, though not entirely unrelated neologism invented for the purposes of this essay. A new word is not without a history, nor…
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Correspondence on Earth and Economy
The following is a series of emails exchanged between Mat Wilson and I over the course of the last several months (my messages will be in bold, Mr. Wilson’s not): ——————————— Mat, First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that just yesterday I watched a video where an objectivist read something Rand…
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“Out of Our Heads” by Alva Noë
It’s probably not news to most people that philosophers have a tendency to get stuck in their heads. This is especially true in the field of cognitive science, where for several decades the dominant paradigm has lead philosophers (and scientists) to look in the brain for evidence of thought and consciousness. The core metaphor guiding…
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Holons Network
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God is a Word
God is a word laughed at by many, worshiped in fear by others, and understood by just a few. You may find this a presumptive thing to say, but save your suspicions for what I next submit to you: it is not the human animal that is in need of God, but God who is…
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Gnostic Consciousness: Knowing with Spiritual Beings
Introduction Despite my resolute sense of the sacred nature of earthly existence, religious belief has yet to strike me as a particularly appropriate form of response to the presence of the holy. Belief is to be distinguished from Faith, in that believing implies conceiving of the existence of spiritual beings without the perceptual experience to…
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Response to PZ Myers on the Philosophy of Science
The following was posted on PZ’s blog, Pharyngula, in response to this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/10/nicholas_wade_flails_at_the_ph.php Evolution. Theory, fact, or both? I don’t think answering these questions is as simple as PZ or Wade make it seem. It involves more than science and philosophy, and forces us to deconstruct notions of a pure science uncontaminated by politics, culture,…
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Avoiding the Religion of Scientism
Several weeks ago, I posted a blog about my entry to Discover Magazine’s “Evolution in Two Minutes” contest. Developmental biologist and outspoken atheist PZ Myers is judging the entries (still no word on the winner), and out of curiousity, I decided to visit his blog Pharyngula. Though it is supposedly a science blog, Myers posts…
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The Science of Life
Daniel Dennett says biology is engineering. He argues that living organisms are machines, flattening the classical Aristotelian difference between natural and artificial. For Aristotle, natural things had their form and purpose internal to themselves, while artificial things were designed from without for a purpose other than themselves. Of course, the beauty of human art (film,…
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Timaeus, or the Universe as a Living Thing
Cosmology is an art that involves speaking about the whole: to do cosmology, I must share stories with others concerning what we all belong to. This can be done in many languages –some musical, others mathematical– and if I succeed, perhaps in English text. The universe is a body, according to Plato– a Living Thing.…
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Ongoing discussion on PZ Myers’ blog
Anyone interested in following the thread I’ve been participating in over on Myers’ blog, here’s the link: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/i_was_wondering_about_that.php A little taste of what’s been going on there (one of my posts): @ 201 John Morales writes: “those assumptions (of science) are that there is an external reality, and that it is consistent, and that only…
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Noospheric Evolution: Science and Religion
A few weeks ago, a contest put on by Discover Magazine was brought to my attention. The publication asked for short video submissions explaining evolution (by which they meant specifically Darwin’s theory) in a lucid enough way that even the most dim-witted of creationists would be able to grasp it. From Discovery’s submission page: “Think…
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People, People Everywhere
People, people everywhere, Wake up and look around. Where are we, as people, Upon this planet, Our forgotten ground? Hear the quiet whisper of Earth Falling forever with the Moon Into the depths of the Sky Toward the Sun, never reaching The light that showers down upon us; Greet each day without shame With the…
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A New Day on Earth
A new age is being born from the ashes of a corpse consumed in the fire fueled by demonic dreams of animals gone made. These crazed beasts foresaw the future, and in fear of death, harnessed the rhythms of the stars to grow the seeds that fed empires and sailed ships across continental seas in…
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Unearthing the Earth: A Phenomenological Excavation of our Being-on-the-Earth
“Eco-phenomenology offers a methodological bridge between the natural world and our own, or rather the rediscovery of the bridge that we are and have always been but—thanks to our collective amnesia—have forgotten, almost irretrievably. It is not enough to disguise our forgetting; there is also a matter of remembering—remembering the earth.” -Charles S. Brown and…
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Perspectives on Emerging Planetization (w/ help from William Irwin Thompson)
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Heaven Before Birth
Heaven is not a place or a space, but a time: A time transparent, its light spread in colors by our lithurgy of lies. Each of us perceives a limited shadow— Until the eye awakens and the scene is seen as thee. Heaven is a destiny, a purpose, not a surprise. We begin there, We…
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Physical and Spiritual Energy
Energy. The science of thermodynamics defines it as the ability of a physical system to do work. But in the case of a human being, how does this work relate to the conscious experience of the person performing it? That is, what is the relationship between physical and spiritual energy? We might start trying to…
Footnotes2Plato 