Month: September 2022

LOVELY DREAM about deconstructing landscapes by looking at anthropomorphic, biogenic and geological causes. View in LinkedIn

Passageway near Girona cathederal. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend focuses on a truly fascinating and unusual essay by Professors John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, entitled ‘A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology’, or a viewpoint of process ontology, where life is a hierarchy of processes rather than of things. “There is no thing in biology (or, as Bohm would have it, in the world). Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes. We remain strangely fixated on explanation in terms of static unchanging entities. Things are ‘precipitates’ of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

STUFF VERSUS FLUX. “The opposition between things and processes as the ultimate constituents of reality is of course an ancient one. The Greek dictum panta rhei (‘everything flows’) encapsulates the Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

HOLISTIC CHAMPION. “Whitehead advocated a philosophy of nature that stressed the development, organization, and interdependence of all things.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

THE MESSAGE AND THE MESSENGER. “The figure that has come to be most closely associated with process thinking in recent times is unquestionably Alfred North Whitehead, who articulated a comprehensive metaphysical system that conceived of the world as a unified, dynamic, and interconnected whole. Whitehead’s most systematic metaphysical treatise, Process and Reality (Whitehead 1929), is generally agreed to be opaque and at times so obscure as to verge on the unintelligible.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SPACETIME IN BIOLOGY. “Organisms are temporally as well as spatially differentiated. (Woodger 1929).” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

WADDINGTON (1957): “The fundamental characteristics of the organism’, he wrote in The Strategy of the Genes, ‘are time-extended properties’. Biology does not study things; it studies pro- cesses occurring at various timescales.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

A SECTION THROUGH SPACETIME. “Bertalanffy (1952) regarded the organism as ‘the expression of an everlasting, orderly process’ consisting of ‘a continuous stream of component materials’ that flow through it and at the same time constitute it. ‘What is described in morphology as organic form’, Bertalanffy argued, ‘is in reality a momentary cross-section through a spatio-temporal pattern’.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

FAILURE OF REDUCTIONISM. “One of the key implications that Weiss drew from this is that a cell ‘can never be defined in terms of a static inventory of compounds, however detailed, but only in terms of their interactions’. What we perceive as an organism (e.g. a frog) at any given moment represents only a cross section, or time slice, in the unfolding of the persistent process it instantiates.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn