This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective.
What has happened? What needs to be done?
I started reading Beyond Being by Brice R. Wachterhauser this week. It’s a book about Gadamer’s philosophy. Conversation or dialogue (Gesprächt) was a key term for Gadamer. He viewed the whole of Western philosophy as a living conversation. It will be interesting to see where this book leads.
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler arrived this week. I have started reading this book too. It’s well-written, but the authors use ideas in information and computer theory to define life.1 This is a mistake! Living systems stand in sharp contrast to computer systems whose coupling with the environment are specified through input/output relations. Living systems are autonomous and determine the meaning of their interactions themselves.2 They are not information-processing devices.
I’m re-reading David Bohm and F. David Peat’s book Science, Order, and Creativity again. This is the book which inspired me to start this series of posts. Here is my review from last year. I’ve noticed new things in the book. There’s, for example, an essential need for the loosening of rigidly held intellectual content in the tacit infrastructure of consciousness, while also melting the hardness of the heart on the side of feeling.3 For me, the loosening of thought has to do with a willingness to question my own assumptions and the limits within which they are valid, while the melting of the emotional side has to do with getting in touch with my felt sense and raw aliveness.
What was good? What can be improved?
Skye Hirst (@autognomics) and I have an ongoing conversation about living dynamics and life-itself. We had our 79th conversation this week. Thank you Skye! I’m looking forward to our continued conversations and working together next year.
Notes:
1 John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 14, 511–23.
2 Fransico J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1993), pp. 157.
3 David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity (Routledge, 2010, first published 1987), p. 274.
Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts
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