Category:Cosmobiological

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Contextual Quote

"Organicism in the maximally broad sense, entails a commitment to the thesis that there is a metaphysical continuity between the natural world, life, and (human) mindedness. We are metaphysically continuous with the rest of the cosmos."

- Otto Paans [1]


Quotes

“I’ve become increasingly convinced that it is the growing immaterialism of modern society that is generating many of our most destructive political impulses and divisions. As we increasingly move into a digital virtual world, we create an immaterial environment where the abstract starts to seem more real than reality. In the past, our frequent engagement with the materiality of work and play had served to bring us back ‘down to earth’ where our shared human commonalities might bridge political divides. But now our identities are increasingly whatever we wish to pretend they are, and politics has become just another spectator sport that we play on the Internet. This, I would suggest, is the logical outcome of the post-modern cultural turn: an environment where immaterial ideas are everything and material reality is largely irrelevant. Any politics that does not recognise and counter this growing immateriality is, I be-lieve, unlikely to succeed in changing much of anything in the real World.”

- Timothy J. LeCain. [2]


"At at some point, through the emergence of modern science leading to the industrial and information revolutions, a gap developed — an ever-widening chasm between interior (cognition, awareness, emotion, value) and exterior (technological) capacities. The longstanding co-evolution of interiors and exteriors has dramatically broken down, and we no longer have a story of value equal to our power. This gap between the wisdom of a civilization and its power has greatly contributed to the existential challenges threatening the future of our social systems. The challenges that resulted in the failure of classical civilization are now compounded through exponential technologies, which created a vital global civilization as well as existential risk. As scholars have pointed out, all civilizations generally fail due to the same set of causes, most of them rooted in some version of rivalrous, win/lose dynamics and unsustainable resource extraction. We have not yet solved for any of those causes. But if our civilization unravels it will be a failure of an entirely different order, a global failure."

- David J. Temple (CosmoErotic Humanism, draft review, Spring 2023)


" if the Cosmos is the unfolding of organizations and their cycles, then global endosymbiosis suggests that this unfolding and relationality is fundamentally co-constitutive with and through other organizations and cycles; that the Cosmos is not merely full of separate organizations which collide and interact, but organizations which are, to varying degrees, entangled and co-constitutive and sensitive to other organizations. Put more poetically, we might say that it is through the World that we are what we are, or that anything is the way it is; that we are not a thing which merely interacts, but a process that is fundamentally alive and in tune to everything else. It is through relation that we become enlivened, through relation that embodiment is allowed and explored.

-Matthew McCarthy [3]


About the ancestor Goethe

"In her seminal study Goethe: Poet and Thinker, Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson depicts Goethe as having had an instinctive, pre-philosophic grasp of the inadequacy of the bifurcation of Nature that was later so thoroughly criticized by Whitehead. She notes Goethe’s concern to avoid overemphasizing either the subjective or objective side of the bifurcation in an imbalanced attempt to overcome it, as idealists and materialists are apt to do."

- Matthew David Segall [4]


Technology as Artificial Representation

"The very idea of “natural representation,” when combined with the 17th-century Cartesian idea of an objective space in which we can represent by means of coordinates, contributed significantly to the emergence of the mechanistic worldview: not only is the natural world nothing but a large-scale complex machine, but also the human perceptual mind is nothing but a small-scale simple machine like a pinhole camera, i.e., a camera obscura. This thought-shaping mental model—the human perceptual mind as a camera obscura—which more or less covertly lies behind the shaped thought that the technology associated with the leading formal and natural sciences are the final answer to the problem of mental representation—whether it is a pinhole camera, a brownie camera, a movie camera, or a digital camera application in a smart phone—has proven to be a remarkably influential and persistent myth. The increasing mathematization of the sciences, the models for problem-solving derived from engineering, the reduction of biology to statistical mathematics, evolutionary genetics, chemistry, and physics, and the reduction of animal behavior to Turing-computable algorithms, as well as the reduction of consciousness to physico-neural processes, all point in the same conceptual direction: the variety of life itself must be brought under one idealizing system of representation. And, not surprisingly, that very idiom is conceptual and limited to the operations of mathematizability and/or formal logic. The fact that science itself speaks in abstractions and idealizations does not in the slightest stop the advance of mechanistic thinking, because it justifies its existence by appeals to its objectivity and practical efficacy. Thereby, it reduces life (and in its wake, Being) to phenomena that are understood once they can be replicated or described in mathematical (and increasingly digital) terms, potentially making them available for artificial reproduction."

- Otto Paans [5]


Living Beings Are Not Machines

1.

"When someone persistently hallucinates, seeing things that aren’t there, we usually assume a cognitive aberration of some sort, if not a severe mental illness. What, then, to make of those countless biologists who look at organisms and think they are seeing machines? Or who look at organs, cells, organelles, and even molecules, and see machines within machines? I will leave it for you to judge. However, one thing is certain: an inexcusable mistake has gripped the scientific community for decades, severely perverting biological understanding." I have previously tried to explain in various places why the analogy between organisms and machines fails utterly. But in reading the biological literature lately, I have found the insistent appeals to machinery so egregious, so viciously destructive of scientific insight, and so contrary to the obvious evidence, that I have myself been driven rather too close to a pathological reaction, or at least to an unhelpful exasperation. And so I have decided to gather my thoughts together in what I hope will be a more concise and effective statement."

- Stephen Talbott [6]


2. The world is not a mechanism:

"The machine view of the world is a double-edged sword if there ever was one. On the one hand, the mechanistic science it enables lays the foundation for our comfort, health, and safety by providing us with the best knowledge a limited human being could hope for. On the other hand, it is a view that is turning toxic as we now face the end of our brief historical interlude of carefree abundance.

The underlying problem is simple: the world is not a machine. It is not even like a machine.

In reality, we interfere with intricate and interwoven processes whose complex nature we do not even begin to understand. Whatever we do, we inevitably run into unanticipated and unwanted consequences of our actions. Take the uncontrolled release of genetically modified organisms into the environment, or the unbridled imposition of artificial “intelligence” on our society.

And yet, we continue to interfere like there is no tomorrow. In fact, our pace is accelerating exponentially, spiraling out of control, and many modernist thinkers applaud this as a good thing. Beating the competition is everything, even as we are engaged in a global race to the bottom.

By now, the side effects of modernity are threatening to overwhelm and overturn the progress we have worked so hard to achieve. Our illusion of safety and comfort is crumbling, our health and life expectancies declining, our future in jeopardy. Those who want to see can clearly see it."

- Johannes Jager [7]


3. How to replace atomistic thinking

"Relatively new sciences like ecology and environmental toxicology are already departing from from an exclusive reliance on mathematical modelling, although this still plays a central role. Be that as it may, the underlying issue is now how to replace atomistic thinking and inventing a new form of cognitive representation that adequately addresses the problems that we face at the beginning of the 21st century. In recent years, there have been interesting developments in thinking about objects from a mereological rather than decompositional standpoint.

Examples in this philosophical orientation are Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Speculative Realism, Onticology, and new ecological thought. All these new developments have one thing in common: they reject the easy, hard-and-fast distinction between part and whole in favor of relationality. Once one lets go of the idea that every compound entity is constituted by easily definable parts that can be removed and re-assembled at will, one has made the first step in leaving the mechanistic worldview behind. This does not mean that its utility as such is questioned, but simply that its area of application is constrained to the domain where it is actually useful, appropriate and informative. All areas in which the scientistic, mechanistic, and materialist/physicalist commitment to atomism led to oversimplification can be revisited with a new, and more appropriate set of concepts in mind. An outstanding example is the field of design science, that, as we saw, had been forcibly shoehorned into the natural mechanist worldview, only to discover its own nature rather recently."

- Otto Paans [8]

Consciousness and self-understanding are not epiphenomenal

"Consciousness and self-understanding are not epiphenomenal — they are not merely supervening or reacting to a more basic bio-technological base—human consciousness and self-understanding are driving the global crisis at all levels. So it is conscious evolution from here on out: we are able to know and do too much to pretend otherwise; we must consciously orchestrate the future of the planet and the biosphere. Our generation is in an unprecedented position to take responsibility for participating in profoundly generative and destructive evolutionary crises. The question is: can we understand our crises in cosmic context, as opportunities for the emergence of the unprecedented, and as invitations into a higher form of life? To do so we must come to see that the evolution of the universe and biological life is not a fact, it is a story. Evolution is a story about us, who we are, and what we are going through now. The universe itself is a best understood as a story, not as a mere fact. The universe is a love story. Like all true love stories (and unlike harlequin romances or romantic comedies) it has been as story of profound crisis, cataclysm, tragedy, hope, emergence, and creativity."

- Zachary Stein and Marc Gafni [9]


From Reduction to Emergence

“The emerging new scientific conception of life…can be seen as part of a broader paradigm shift from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological worldview. At its very core we find a shift of metaphors that is now becoming ever more apparent…a change from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network. During the twentieth century, the change from the mechanistic to the ecological paradigm proceeded in different forms and at different speeds in various scientific fields. … The basic tension is one between the parts and the whole. The emphasis on the parts has been called mechanistic, reductionist, or atomistic; the emphasis on the whole holistic, organismic, or ecological. In twentieth-century science, the holistic perspective has become known as ‘systemic’ and the way of thinking it implies as ‘systems thinking’…” (p. 4).

- The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, by Fritjof Capra and biochemist Pier Luigi Luisi [10]


Why the Reductionism in the Sphere of Life is so much more problematic than the reductionism in the Sphere of Matter

"Data is a game of statistics adopted by the Digital Sphere and depends exclusively on what can be “modeled” based on what can be measured. Many things cannot be measured: the knowledge limit of “reductionism.” Material science and engineering made its devil’s bargain with reductionism centuries ago. No experiment or construction project can include every variable, but material science (physics and chemistry) and engineering (building and construction) have the advantage of working with non-living “materials.” Once science and engineering drift over into organic “material,” the territory of the “life sciences,” and get a hold of the definition of a term like “health,” the reductionist limit grows into a significant problem. The problem balloons to red-giant size in the area of “mental health.”

In spite of these limits, medicalized physical and mental “health” is where the Digital Sphere is steering the data game. The Digital East is likely doing the same, though under much more central control of the CPC. Witness China’s radically different social media policies (strict limits on gaming for children and no “effeminate” men on television). In contrast, the West Sphere has thrown its children to the digital wolves, producing a stream of observable “anomalies” (increased depression, suicide, and gender and species identity confusion)."

- Mark Stahlman [11]


Nature has a tendency to be “in tune.”

"We may not want to affirm harmony in the same naïve sense as, say, Aristotle did (who emphasized a static cosmos with every element in its right place), but even contemporary evolutionary biology and complex systems science provide some justification for the notion of tendencies toward harmonization. In Plato’s Timaeus, there is already an acknowledgment that the rational dimension of the cosmos must contend with anankē—necessity or contingency—so there is always some measure of chaos alongside cosmos. That, I think, is precisely what evolution is: the outcome of the meeting and transformation of order at the edge of chaos.

All of this leads me to want to problematize the strict nature–culture bifurcation. From my perspective, animals and in fact all organisms have always been engaged in some degree of “cultural” or learned behavior, which can be inherited through epigenetic processes. Even Darwin affirmed a kind of Lamarckism, and although genetics seemed to refute the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetics has, in a way, reopened that possibility. Not only complex animals but simple bacteria can laterally transfer learned or adaptive behaviors (eg, genes for enzymes to digest novel food sources), so in a generalized sense, culture has been unfolding since the origin of life.

That said, human symbolic consciousness clearly marked a massive shift in how rapidly culture could evolve, because we began to externalize memory in artifactual form. Another bifurcation I would challenge is the human–technology divide. We have always been in tight coevolution with our tools. Harnessing fire to cook our food literally shrank our jaws and grew our brains; thus from the beginning of our species, there is no strict line between our physiology and so-called external tools."

- Matthew Segall [12]

Introduction

New section, created March 9, 2023, on the Organicist philosophical and metaphysical approach.

  • Before the victory of the modernist mindset of separation and atomization, the Renaissance had attempted the construction of a participatory worldview, which Loren Goldner calls the Cosmobiological Tradition.


  • Robert Hanna and Otto Paans, relate a similar trajectory of philosophy under the name of Organicism, and more specifically, Expressive Organicism. Prominent formulations of this philosophy come from philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, but especially the process philosophy of Whitehead.

See: Robert Hanna on Defining and Defending Human Dignity


  • We also include attention to non-European trends such as the Organic Marxism in China, which seeks a blend of both traditional and modern Chinese philosophy (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism but also Open Marxism) while including the kind of Marxism still functioning in China; Thinkers like Zhihe Wang, Huili He and Meijun Fan consider Whitehead's Process Philosophy to originate the fork of Constructive Postmodernism; alternatively, the Mesology of Augustin Berque, which is entirely a philosophy of relations, is inspired by trends in Japanese philosophy.

See: Second Enlightenment as an Aesthetic Enlightenment


  • Given the orientation of this wiki towards peer to peer and commons-oriented relational logics, this section will also cover Relational philosophies.

As usual, listing in this wiki is done under a philosophy of pluralistic curation and does not mean an endorsement. However, we do feel, at this stage of our inquiry and mapping, that the Organicist tradition is the most compatible approach to a relational philosophy in harmony with our commons approach.

Essentially, what binds the elements of the organicist philosophy together is the critique of the Cartesian and mechanistic worldview, and the Eight_Core_Commitments_of_Mainstream_Contemporary_Western_Metaphysics.


Some additional approaches:



Related Sections:

  • In our section on Civilizational Analysis, we pay attention to approaches that link societal evolution, to the evolution of human consciousness, including those that take seriously the data from the mystical tradition and connection to the 'ground of being', for example, the Sophiological tradition: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Civilizational_Analysis


Themes

D: From Human Dignity to Cosmic Dignitarianism

Please read: Robert Hanna on the Distinction Between Identitarianism and Dignitarianism; and: Solidarity vs Identitarian-Based Relationships

  • The basic concepts of organicist Dignitarianism:
  1. Cosmic Dignitarianism
  2. Human Dignity


H: History

Q: Quality / Purpose / Telos / Value


T: Thought-Shapers

  • An introduction to the Theory of Thought-Shapers: "Thought-shapers are essentially non-conceptual contents that operate in the construction of mental imagery and thought by arbitrarily picking out some topological and/or processual properties, and subsequently exaggerating or diminishing their presence."

According to Robert Hanna and Otto Paans et al. "In our view, only organicism is a philosophically, scientifically, artistically, morally, and socio-politically fully adequate worldview, and therefore only its root metaphor—the organism — is a fully generative thought-shaper. As a consequence, the root metaphors associated with animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, and contextualism are all, to some degree, constrictive thought-shapers; and the natural automaton or natural machine, the root metaphor associated with the mechanistic worldview, is the most constrictive."

See: Constrictive vs. Generative Thought-Shapers


See also for related material:

  1. Religious Ground Motives Behind Human Thought, by Herman Dooyeweerd (i.e. Transcendental Pragmatism)
  2. The Root Metaphor Theory in the Fourfold World Hypotheses Model of Stephen Pepper which distinguishes Formism (similarity), Mechanism (machine), Contextualism (historical act) and Organicism (living system)


T: Transculturalism

Arran Gare:

As opposed to the transculturalism ... assert their own cultural values against others. Transculturalism advances dialogue; multiculturalism precludes it." [14]


Key Resources

Key Articles

  • "We have to ground our understanding of machines and intelligence in evolutionary thought": Article by Daniel Paski [15]
  • ON THE ABSENCE OF REDUCTIONISM IN CHINESE THOUGHT. BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, December 1973. [17]

Key Books

[19]: "RECONSIDERS THE NOTION OF ORGANISM AS CENTRAL TO CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Bibliography

The Sophianic / Sophiological and Cosmobiological Traditions

A tradition that 'sacralizes' the material world.




  • Sergei Bulgakov


From the materialist tradition, a quite similar argument and approach:

Pages in category "Cosmobiological"

The following 121 pages are in this category, out of 121 total.

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