Modern philosopher?
Art
the lines of pantheism/panentheism/panpsychism? By recent,
I mean within the last century, or preferably half century. I'm
particulary interested in something along the lines of a expansion
of Leibnitz's thought, with his monads, etc., but with quantum
theory incorporated and linked to or combined with notions of
a aware and psychic mind "in" matter or entwined with matter.
Art
Sir Frederick
Such cannot exist, as a classical religion, as any and all
"prophets" , today, are drugged (and therapied) out of any leadership role.
The closest are the many science writings, but they stay away
from any "personifications" of the situation.
Perhaps explore www.edge.com for some ideas.
Your desire is simply not in style. Science fiction may be all
you have.
The world cultures are all quite medieval so you may have to
roll your own!
Art
<mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:49:36 GMT, Art <nu...@zilch.com> wrote:
>
>>Does anyone know of a recent philosopher/philosophy along
>>the lines of pantheism/panentheism/panpsychism? By recent,
>>I mean within the last century, or preferably half century. I'm
>>particulary interested in something along the lines of a expansion
>>of Leibnitz's thought, with his monads, etc., but with quantum
>>theory incorporated and linked to or combined with notions of
>>a aware and psychic mind "in" matter or entwined with matter.
>>
>>Art
>>
>Such cannot exist, as a classical religion, as any and all
>"prophets" , today, are drugged (and therapied) out of any leadership role.
>The closest are the many science writings, but they stay away
>from any "personifications" of the situation.
>Perhaps explore www.edge.com for some ideas.
That's a computer software vendor :)
>Your desire is simply not in style. Science fiction may be all
>you have.
>The world cultures are all quite medieval so you may have to
>roll your own!
Yep. Roll your own, indeed.
Art
enlight...@gmail.com
Sir Frederick
>On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:33:15 -0700, Sir Frederick
><mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:49:36 GMT, Art <nu...@zilch.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Does anyone know of a recent philosopher/philosophy along
>>>the lines of pantheism/panentheism/panpsychism? By recent,
>>>I mean within the last century, or preferably half century. I'm
>>>particulary interested in something along the lines of a expansion
>>>of Leibnitz's thought, with his monads, etc., but with quantum
>>>theory incorporated and linked to or combined with notions of
>>>a aware and psychic mind "in" matter or entwined with matter.
>>>
>>>Art
>>>
>>Such cannot exist, as a classical religion, as any and all
>>"prophets" , today, are drugged (and therapied) out of any leadership role.
>>The closest are the many science writings, but they stay away
>>from any "personifications" of the situation.
>>Perhaps explore www.edge.com for some ideas.
>
>That's a computer software vendor :)
Sorry. Here is what I meant : http://www.edge.org/
About :
Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership
includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.
The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary
issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society. Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private
operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Contributors to Edge own the copyright to their original writing posted on this site and their posting is in effect a license
permitting Edge Foundation, Inc. the electronic use of this work. In the event Edge Foundation, Inc. wishes to use the work in a
print medium it will not do so before asking and securing the written permission of the author. Edge Foundation, Inc. owns the
cumulative copyright to the site.
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository
writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who
and what we are.
In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become
increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person
in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and
perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses
science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on
comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other,
the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to
referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded
scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the
physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.
How did the literary intellectuals get away with it? First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the
implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists, notably Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, also wrote books for a
general audience, their works were ignored by the self- proclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas
presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.
In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he
optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary
intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the
scientists. Although I borrow Snow's phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not
communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played
a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third- culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and
endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.
The recent publishing successes of serious science books have surprised only the old- style intellectuals. Their view is that these
books are anomalies- - that they are bought but not read. I disagree. The emergence of this third- culture activity is evidence that
many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves.
The wide appeal of the third- culture thinkers is not due solely to their writing ability; what traditionally has been called
"science" has today become "public culture." Stewart Brand writes that "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper
or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he- said- she- said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic
dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature
doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly." We now live in a world in which the
rate of change is the biggest change. Science has thus become a big story.
Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology,
artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals,
complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium,
cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among
others. There is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can
tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the
third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.
The role of the intellectual includes communicating. Intellectuals are not just people who know things but people who shape the
thoughts of their generation. An intellectual is a synthesizer, a publicist, a communicator. In his 1987 book The Last
Intellectuals, the cultural historian Russell Jacoby bemoaned the passing of a generation of public thinkers and their replacement
by bloodless academicians. He was right, but also wrong. The third- culture thinkers are the new public intellectuals.
America now is the intellectual seedbed for Europe and Asia. This trend started with the prewar emigration of Albert Einstein and
other European scientists and was further fueled by the post- Sputnik boom in scientific education in our universities. The
emergence of the third culture introduces new modes of intellectual discourse and reaffirms the preeminence of America in the realm
of important ideas. Throughout history, intellectual life has been marked by the fact that only a small number of people have done
the serious thinking for everybody else. What we are witnessing is a passing of the torch from one group of thinkers, the
traditional literary intellectuals, to a new group, the intellectuals of the emerging third culture.
John Brockman
1991
Art
Thanks. Whitehead's views are somewhat similar to my own.
I've never read his Process and Reality. Sounds very interesting.
Art
jusholm
"Art" <nu...@zilch.com> wrote in message
news:8blc23t4p32ok6cao...@4ax.com...
It seems to me that String Theory has a lot in common with Leibniz's
Monadism.
Art
Please elaborate. From the little I know of string theories, none of
them postulate any kind of elemental mind or intelligence or
consiousness. I thought string theory is strictly materialist-
reductionist as is all physics.
Art
Errol
> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:26:22 +0100, "jusholm"
>
>
>
>
>
> <jus1@talktalk_REMOVETHIS_.net> wrote:
>
> >news:8blc23t4p32ok6cao...@4ax.com...
> >> Does anyone know of a recent philosopher/philosophy along
> >> the lines of pantheism/panentheism/panpsychism? By recent,
> >> I mean within the last century, or preferably half century. I'm
> >> particulary interested in something along the lines of a expansion
> >> of Leibnitz's thought, with his monads, etc., but with quantum
> >> theory incorporated and linked to or combined with notions of
> >> a aware and psychic mind "in" matter or entwined with matter.
>
> >> Art
>
> >It seems to me that String Theory has a lot in common with Leibniz's
> >Monadism.
>
> Please elaborate. From the little I know of string theories, none of
> them postulate any kind of elemental mind or intelligence or
> consiousness. I thought string theory is strictly materialist-
> reductionist as is all physics.
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
I agree, however the imaginative reader will wonder about the
seemingly endless layers of construction that make up reality, and
possible universes in which more dimensions have "unfurled".
Check out John Wheeler - I quote from a book review
According to the participatory anthopic principle the evolving
multiverse was thus always destined to resolve itself into a
sufficiently ordered state to allow itself to be observed.
The early multiverse can perhaps be thought of as a massively parallel
quantum computer which explored all of possibility-space until it was
able to generate a living body, which became the habitation of an
observing, sentient being. At that moment the multiverse collapsed
into the actuality of that one alternative environment, complete with
its history. This theory is known as the Participatory Anthropic
Principle and was first put forward by the physicist John A.Wheeler in
1983.
Also check out his "Holographic Universe"
jusholm
That's true but I think it doesn't contradict such an idea necessarily.
I thought string theory is strictly materialist-
> reductionist as is all physics.
Sort of, I don't know a great deal about it but it says the basis of
particles are strings of energy. These are incredibly small and very
complicated a bit like monads. I'm pretty sure Leibniz would have declared
that the nature of monads was what string theory was about.
>
> Art
jusholm
"Errol" <vs.e...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1176994541.1...@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
Also some similiarity with Leibniz's best of all possible worlds idea.