Monday, March 02, 2020

Veronique Tomaszewski, VM Kärkkäinen, David Marjanović, and Peter Nyikos

Amoeba Words by Sam Mickey
“What is an amoeba word?” Amoeba words include many of the words thrown around when people are talking philosophically. The philosopher-priest Ivan Illich explains:
I take the term from the work of Professor Uwe Pörksen of Freiburg, a linguist and medievalist. [...] Ivan Illich in Conversation, with David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2007), 253-254

Representation of Women's Quest For 'Self'in the Selected Works of Kamala Das
RR GS - Our Heritage, 2020
… It has been categorized into pre- and post-independence poetry. The two prominent poets of pre-independence period are Aurobindo Ghose and Rabindranath Tagore … The two prominent poets of pre-independence period …

Indian English Non-Fictional Prose Writers in India
GR Solanki - Sustainable Humanosphere, 2020
… Sri Aurobindo is better known as a seer and poet, but he has to his credit many volumes of prose writings on philosophical, religious, social and cultural subjects … Sri Aurobindo was sent to England for his school education at the age of seven by his Anglophile father …

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore
S Chaudhuri - 2019
… [REVIEW] Swami Narasimhananda - 2016 - Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 121 (9):674. The Later Poems of Rabindranath Tagore.Rachel van M. Baumer, Aurobindo Bose & Rabindranath Tagore …

Death-A Beggar Orphan: OP Bhatnagar's Vision of Death
VB Agrawal
… life and death. Metaphysical poets like Tagore and Aurobindo have illumined this theme with the radiance of their thoughts … Tagore envisions the presence of God in every atom. Aurobindo visualizes a divine scheme in the birth of Savitri to redeem the world. Krishna …

THOREAU'S INDIA-AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW
VM Kumari
… Sri Aurobindo Ghose one of India's great mystics says; "To become ourselves is the one thing to be done; but the true ourselves is that which is within us, and to exceed our outer self of today, life and mind is the condition for this …

Emerging Trends in Psychology, Law, Communication Studies, Culture, Religion, and Literature in the Global Digital Revolution: Proceedings of the 1st International …
YB Setiawan, S Rahmawati - 2020

Doing the Work of Comparative Theology: A Primer for Christians
VM Kärkkäinen - 2020

My Creative Experience: Finding Voice, Finding Silence

A Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Approach of the (False) Dichotomy Subject-Object in Aesthetics....
Veronique Tomaszewski

Similar to your talk "Why Organisms are not only Machines?", today we have also received a very nice new submission for the event with the title "Biological Evidence Against the Mechanical and Chemical Simplification of Organisms" by Dr. Alak Kumar Patra. 
We would like to share with you and other on this list one interesting peer reviewed articles Organisms ≠ Machines published by Daniel J. Nicholson (Senior Research Fellow, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research) at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848613000824
This article Highlights
Organisms and machines differ in their internal organizational dynamics.
Organisms are intrinsically purposive whereas machines are extrinsically purposive.
Machine metaphors in biology are theoretically inadequate but heuristically useful.
The rhetorical use of machine metaphors provides support for intelligent design.
Thanking you. Sincerely,
Bhakti Niskama Shanta

"Life is a unity in multiplicity. It is a process as a united flow, but it consists of many instantaneous moments - like the frames of a movie. The tendency of abstract understanding is to either think of a unity OR a multiplicity. Pure multiplicity is indicative of the atomic thinking of material reductionism. Pure unity is the indeterminateness of abstract monism. Unity in multiplicity is the comprehensive thinking of dialectical reason. Life has to be comprehended as a process in which its participants are simultaneously both ends and means to one another."
— Śrīpād Bhakti Mādhava Purī Mahārāja, Ph.D.
(Serving Director of Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science, NJ, USA: http://bviscs.org )

Well, as far as I understand, this framework buckles when applied to most of the universe. A star has a material cause (a cloud of hydrogen), an efficient cause (gravity) and a formal cause (gravity plus electrostatic repulsion). Ockham's Razor denies that a star has a final cause. I have a material cause (food), an efficient cause (hard to summarize, but ultimately electrostatic attraction and repulsion) and a formal cause (DNA). I have a final cause only in so far as my parents wanted a child; they did not specifically want me, nor did they have a way of imagining specifically me, nor would that have changed anything.
Genetics entails the hypothesis that DNA is (most of) the formal cause for various of these traits, but also that mutations in the DNA are random. It does not entail any belief in a final cause.
The environment is the efficient cause of natural selection. But selection happens among alleles that have arisen by random mutation. Mutations have all kinds of efficient causes, including Brownian motion, chemical tautomery of nucleotides, and radioactive decay; the latter two are genuinely random parts of quantum physics to the best of current understanding.
Here, too, there is no need to assume any final cause.
Yes, with the understanding that there is no point in trying to figure out the (efficient, let alone final) cause of any particular mutation.
At the risk of reinventing the wheel, I like to make a distinction between "truth" and "reality".
Reality is that where the _argumentum ad lapidem_ is not a logical fallacy. Science deals with reality, not necessarily with truth.
Truth could be the same as reality. This option is called physicalism; of course it is the simplest assumption, so if your metametaphysics https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metametaphysics&oldid=593996199 includes Ockham's Razor, it will prefer physicalism. Only under this option is science necessarily able to tell us anything about truth.
Or, of course, the truth could be that I'm the solipsist, and that reality is nothing but a remarkably consistent figment of my imagination. In that case, _argumenta ad lapidem_ would be just as silly as philosophers generally think they are, and science would just be my own exploration of my own mind.
Or, of course, the truth could be that God is the solipsist, and that reality (including my mind this time) is nothing but a figment of His imagination. As far as I understand, some Christian philosophers have wondered aloud about this.
Or, of course, the truth could be that reality is _māyā_.
Or, of course, reality could be a metaphor for truth. This idea underlies a number of religions. (In the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus does pretty much everything "in order to fulfill Scripture" – to make history an image of truth, one could say.)
So, when I say "wrong", I mean wrong within the confines of reality. Whether the truth is different is a separate question, and a question that does not need to be answered for science to work.
Best regards,
David Marjanović

The main target of this brilliant essay comes later, in his refutation of the claim that servomechanisms, such as a target-seeking mechanism in a torpedo, are intrinsically purposeful. I recommend reading it to anyone interested in the claims of "strong AI."
Peter Nyikos 
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics 
University of South Carolina 
http://people.math.sc.edu
Dear Peter Nyikos, 

Namaste. It is necessary to clarify between inner and outer teleology in order to fully consider the purposeful existence of things.
Aristotle's position was that inanimate natural phenomena, such as rocks, only have external teleology. They may be utilized in some purposeful way by organisms. In reference to mechanical artifacts such as a roulette or clock, we must understand that our use for them, their external purpose (which includes the roulette's purposeful design to be unpredictable) is separate from the internal purpose of the device. Internally, a roulette's purpose is to be spun and slowly become still. The internal teleology of a clock is for the gears to move. External teleology is relative to a thing's external environment. Telling time is a purpose which is externally applied to a clock, and would not be evident to one who does not have prior familiarity with the connection between a clock and time.
Internal and external teleology take on a dialectical aspect when considered in terms of organisms, as explained by Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja:
"Participants cannot be isolated from the whole in which they are participants and remain what they are. A DNA molecule can no more be what it is as a producer of protein molecules, than the protein molecules can be what they are as produced from the action of DNA, and producing the DNA. Each participant is cause and effect of every other participant, as Kant defined organism. Therefore nothing in an organism is without purpose, nor is the organism as a whole without purpose in the environment. Thus everything in the organism is both purpose [end] and means."
Kind regards,
Krishna Keshava Das
Serving Assistant
Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science www.bviscs.org

Certainly what he was saying had been proposed in physics. He has a whole chapter in Essays saying so and citing Schrodinger. However, as he also points out, Schrodingers profound point was ignored and is to this day. There is a collective myopia about final and formal cause and it is not easy to correct it because people will attack the philosophy without following the logic...
My own synthesis of Rosen's work results in definition of a holon which is a circular causality moving between local and non-local domains - I'm now wondering if in some way that itself could correlate with this idea of torsion?? Any thoughts?
John

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