What, Why & How do we Know ?
A thread starter: One recurring theme of mine is stuff that looks like conspiracy to conspiracy theorists – the coast guy, anyone – is a symptom of having no model or accepted language to account for a felt problem. With the received wisdom of western, objective (scientific) rationality in the dominant culture – feelings don’t … Continue reading “Received Wisdom”
Thinking about an upcoming dialogue, I thought I’d compose a brief outline of what I’m about in 2023. A conversation starter. I’m doing “Systems Thinking”. For 20+ years, I would have called it “Cybernetics” by which I mean the original sense of the term – how humans as living things decide and govern ourselves for … Continue reading “What Am I Thinking?”
Trying to get back into writing, clearing away some reading after a week on vacation and shaking-off another damn cold, I found myself reading some old posts, prompted by some link hits in the stats. I’ve written some good stuff, if I say so myself. A lot of it concluding I really should stop noodling … Continue reading “Some Good Writing?”
Mentioned Matt Segall (Footnotes2Plato / @ThouArtThat) in an aside note to this recent post on Rudolf Steiner. and I have acknowledged him before here. (He’s a Whitehead scholar with whom I’ve engaged once or twice on questions of process philosophy and McGilchrist space (?) – in comments and tweet threads, but I realise I probably … Continue reading “Defining Concepts – Not”
Rudolf Steiner divides opinion but his thinking is undoubtedly valuable. Think Anthroposophy/Theosophy and Steiner/Waldorf Schools, whether as intended by Steiner or interpreted ideologically by his disciples ever since, but the value in what he actually said and wrote remains. [Feels a bit like Jordan Peterson for a 21st C example – undoubtedly guilty of association … Continue reading “The Boundaries of (Natural) Science”
Chris Fields and Mark Solms clearly seem to be aware of each other’s work even if this is the first time they’ve communicated. As the tweet says it’s a very informal chat facilitated by Mike Levin (interesting Tufts connection with Dan Dennett in my context.) Here is an informal conversation I had this week with … Continue reading “Chris Fields talks with Mark Solms”
Capturing this neat summary, NOT for the decade long Sex vs Gender blip of 21st C insanity, but for the millennia old fact that men and women do have archetypically different brains & minds as well as biological bodies. “Vive la Difference” as I keep referring to it. Facts are not normative, everything and anything … Continue reading “Sexual Dimorphism”
ECO is Emergence, Complexity & Organization – An International Transdisciplinary Journal of Complex Social Systems It’s the rabbit hole I’ve been down today, so this is just a riff on the content connections I’ve been making. Kevin Mitchell is rapidly becoming my favourite follow on Twitter. As well as reviewing his book “Innate“, I’ve also … Continue reading “Emergence, Complexity and Organisation”
Made no secret of the fact that I was never very impressed with Yuval Harari’s take on consciousness – what it is and how it functions – so was a little sceptical linking to this discussion facilitated by Indonesian blogger / you-tuber Gita Wirjawan. In terms of biological brains and minds, my trajectory has been … Continue reading “Solms and Harari on the Future of Humanity”
In a break from writing, one or two pieces in need of reading and listening caught my attention. It’s all related. In an ISSS context there has been some debate between two schools, between many different aspects of systems definition, complex detail for systems of different types in different real-world applications versus abstraction of systems … Continue reading “Systems Connections”