Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

the story in this book through a series of truth-seeking alternatives — empiricism, rationalism, mysterianism and pragmatism. As time goes on, and circumstances in the world and in human culture change, so too do the types of truth-seeking that we engage in. I have included phenomenology as a further truth-seeking concept. There have been inklings of ‘embodied truth’ as a further alternative towards knowledge. The more I’ve looked into this the more I feel that this embodied truth — embodied cognition, interbeing — is a developing subject separate from previous investigations. Hence, the ideas around emergence and the connections, not just at the levels of particles and substances, but also with life, consciousness, with wider ecologies and with the bio-sphere. Hence, also, the Aristotelian soul.

To have a fully consistent explanation of the universe — as science dreams — we need to come to terms with free will. Determinism, you’ll remember, is the belief that a totally random arrangement of energy at the start of the universe created trees, people, elephants and everything else. The alternative is agency — life and consciousness emerges as a result of living creatures. Biology struggles desperately to tell us that evolution does not involve choice — that it’s random through and through. What are we to believe? Agency is not supernatural and determinism is not really scientific (unless we can come up with a way to prove it’s true by experiment). Agency seems like common-sense, whilst determinism seems nonsensical. But we have been fooled by common-sense before.

282