Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

universal scale, the way that the term ‘Aristotelian soul’ has been adopted for individual beings. What the Aristotelian soul is telling us about meaning and purpose is that she is not some secret, private thing hidden within us. I believe that this way of looking at things — which chimes so well with the embodied cognition and interbeing of phenomenology — gives us a way of seeing the world that should appeal to those who find religion too awful to contemplate! The Aristotelian soul is all about connection — with our bodies, with nature and with the cosmos. It’s also about context.

Context may mean something different for different levels of emergence. Maybe it’s okay to treat simple things the way science treats them. It is adequate — just as Newtonian physics is adequate for most tasks in the world. But we need a wider context of quality, choice, consciousness and agency to get to a more comprehensive view of things. And — like Einstein in comparison to Newton — we need a totally different way of understanding the world.

In fact, emergence itself already suggests an inherent unpredictability to the universe (with consciousness and agency just higher-level emergence). It is difficult to figure out what kind of explanation could ever correspond to the territory of the real world — that is, the world that includes for choice, quality and agency. Or indeed any kind of coherent theory, given the way we currently understand coherence. Unpredictable, but not necessary random.

I have tried not to advocate any particular type

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