Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

of truth-seeking or knowledge in this work. So I don’t want to say that the current scientific method is not up to the task of figuring this out. And as I’ve hinted in the book, perhaps one day we will see things such that there seems no contradiction at all between a scientific view and a spiritual view. But that day still seems a long way off.

Shallow emergence is not considered magical, even although it really has no proper explanation. This is because it is entirely consistent in the way it occurs and therefore just accepted as a ‘brute fact’. Deep emergence may likewise be consistent in its operations, but as yet we don’t know enough to say if it is or not. So it can seem like we are suggesting magic when deep emergence is proposed. But it is no more (or less) magical than its ‘shallower’ cousins! But I’m not saying that there’s not also the upwards pull from higher orders of being. To be consistent and fair, the possibility of a genuinely supernatural, mysterian explanation for things needs to be kept open.

There’s an objective world out there, even if it cannot be explained. So our stories are not based on nothing. At the same time though, stories shape our culture — stories are power! The tendency to believe conspiracy theories seems to be contagious! This is the power of story. But whatever dominant narrative against which we judge the truth, or otherwise, of conspiracies is itself a powerful story. We don’t refer to it as a conspiracy, simply because it is accepted as the normative version of ‘the truth’.

So, could it be said that stories have ‘created’

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