Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and look out at the vast ocean of mystery!

What we intend in our search for truth and knowledge is part of the story or stories we want to tell ourselves. What we exclude is also part of the story. All claims to truth, beauty and goodness are at the same time excluding something, so a close eye needs to be kept on what people choose to exclude. Only certain questions get asked, and at the moment these questions tend to be along the lines of a fundamentally materialist universe, with consciousness as ‘substrate independent’ (or ‘substrate neutral’) such that it could be ‘hosted’ by other arrangements of matter, such as, of course, computers. There’s a great deal that’s excluded by focusing on this way of seeking truth. Most especially, we miss out on wider notions of connection and interbeing and of mind and body being fully reliant on their surrounding ecology and their manner of being in the world.

The strange situation we face today is that it is often claimed that grand narratives belong to the past, whilst modern folk have somehow got beyond such things and deal in truth — pure and simple. At the same time, Western culture also seems to embrace truth as an ultimate value and quite readily speculates on truth as being transcendent. Mathematical ‘forms’ are regarded as somehow pre-existent or transcendent and yet such a notion would be rejected wholesale if it were suggested for beauty or goodness.

Going forward, we take a slightly divergent route. We take up our story with the idea of

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