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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Tag Archives: Philosophy of Mind

Making Sense 2: Storytime

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy

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being human, Narrative, Philosophy of Mind, Relational thinking

Making sense of things is a process of variously discovering and applying logical coherence, empirical adequacy and – the hard one – narrative intelligibility. Narrative is the subject of this post.

Narrative is a fancy word for “story telling.” And there is quite a story to tell.

Let us go back a bit, and by “a bit,” I mean before human beings even existed. Why would early hominids ever develop language in the first place? Did it somehow facilitate hunting? Well, other pack hunters like lions, dolphins, and troops of chimpanzees do not seem to suffer from its absence. (The latter group will evidently go out on murder raids against their own kind, again without any assistance from language.) Exactly what information could one convey with language, while hunting, that observation, practice and hand signals could not do better? Just imagine one hunter using language to assist in the hunt: “HEY FRED! CIRCLE AROUND TO THE LEFT! THERE’S A HERD OF ANTELOPE RIGHT OVER TH… oh … Never mind.” As anyone who has ever hunted in any capacity – or merely thought about the subject for an instant – will instantly recognize, stealth is of far greater importance than extended communication.

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(E)merging Traffic

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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Emergence, Philosophy of Mind, Semantics

      What does it mean to say that some thing, quality, relation, or constellation of combinations of any of the above (as well as whatever I might not have mentioned) is “emergent”? What does it mean for something to be genuinely new, for the universe to be genuinely creative?

      One obvious response falls out along the lines that, “Well, something is there now that wasn’t there before.” Despite its initial plausibility, I would suggest that such an account is badly off-base. For one thing, the reliance on a difference over time is quite naïve. The evolution of eukaryotic cells on the primordial Earth took place over time, and in a sense such nucleated cells “emerged” from an earlier situation where they did not exist. But this is a kind of “weak tea” emergence that is easily accounted for within ordinary evolutionary theory. No, when philosophers speak of emergence, they mean something radically new, seemingly unaccountable within the existing scheme of things. In a very real sense, they mean something genuinely creative.

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“But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

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Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

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Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)