John:

This is *all* very exciting -- as in skin-tingly, even more than  
head-shaking (and, yes, mine was going up-down, not side-to-side) . .  
. <g>

I grew up in Madison, where both of my parents were on the UW faculty.  
  Madison West then undergraduate 1966-70, followed by a brief stint  
at UofChicago Divinity School (for a rare deferment, when only  
"ministers" escaped the draft lottery), then back to Madison for a  
year in a PhD program in Molecular Biology, which was aborted by the  
collapse of NSF-funding post-Vietnam.  Then I moved to NYC in 1972 and  
started an early mini-computer software company (while playing  
"revolutionary" and studying Renaissance history &c) -- which was the  
basis of my later career on Wall Street &c.

"Genetics" seemed to me to be barking-up-the-wrong-tree with its  
over-emphasis on DNA (and "information," trying to equate life to  
computation) -- which meant I was looking for epi-genetics before that  
was quite a thing yet.  Marshall McLuhan, as it turns out, is *all*  
about psycho-technological environments and our "adaptation" to them  
(although, for various reasons, he never elaborated a "psychology,"  
which is what we are now doing at the Center, with Aristotle's help.)

I suspect that what you mean by "consciousness" -- say at the  
cellular-level -- is what Aristotle meant by the "soul" (aka  
*entelechy*) and what Leibniz meant by "monad."  Have you had a chance  
to look at Leibniz in this way?

Throughout, this "being-at-work-staying-itself" (as Joe Sachs  
translates it), is in conflict with the urge to dissolve that  
"individuality" (i.e. Freud's "oceanic feeling" and the various  
"mysticisms") by trying to "be-something-else-destroying-yourself"  
which, in theological terms, is called *gnosticism* (aka  
"self-deification.")  Btw, this was Plato's "World Soul" and it was  
directly in conflict with Aristotle (yes, his most famous student),  
much as Spinoza's *pantheism* was in conflict with Leibniz.

This anti-balance, get-me-outta-here, clean-things-up urge (shown in  
Voltaire's satire of Leibniz's best-of-all-possible-worlds) -- giving  
rise to English "Puritanism," and thus the USA-as-proto-Eden (being  
celebrated today, as it was in Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" lyric, "We  
gotta get back to the Garden"), as well as "Communism" (via F. Engels  
and his German "puritanism"), speaking of ironies -- likely also has a  
"biological" explanation, which I'd be very curious to hear your  
thoughts about (perhaps linked to "mutation") . . . !!

Mark

P.S. Eventually, we'll also have to drag the Chinese into all this  
and, in particular, Daoism and the Yijing -- since, in the world  
today, theirs is a much more dynamic (and coherent) "sphere" than the  
West, in which the *balance* we are describing is institutionalized in  
the Communist Party of China (once again, noting the irony involved)  
-- all of which developed under *very* different psycho-technological  
conditions, with a writing system (i.e. the key to human self-aware  
"consciousness") radically unlike our alphabetic one.

P.P.S All of this is what some call "outlying thinking" (without a  
"home" since the 13th-century).  I remember one day when I was  
participating in a National Academy of Science meeting when the  
chairman described me to the group as a "very unusual scholar" (and,  
no, I wasn't invited back).  Aristotle was Greek but he wasn't  
Athenian -- which meant that he had to leave twice, his Lyceum school  
was outside the city-walls and in 307BC his followers were banished,  
taking up in Rhodes and then largely disappearing.  Likewise, Leibniz  
was almost completely expunged after his death, then mocked by  
Voltaire (on behalf of Newton &al) and slandered by Bertrand Russell.   
There is something psycho-technological about trying to "expel" the  
approach we are taking -- raising questions, as Spengler would put it  
about "Man and Technics" as well as the current drive to "merge"  
humanity with the robots (aka, Ray Kurzweil &al's hoped-for  
"Singularity.")

Quoting JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>:

> Hi Lonny, interesting comment about what I assume you mean is the ability
> of individuals to 'fit' with their environment, cultural and otherwise. I
> think that becomes particularly relevant in the context of the cell as the
> first Niche Construction (see attached), or how the organism integrates
> with its environment as a function of its internal 'resources' .......or
> not. I am thinking of identical twins, for example, whom we know don't
> share the same epigenomes. Deconvoluting all of that would surely help us
> better understand what makes us 'tick'. John
>
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 7:24 PM, Lonny Meinecke <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi John and Mark,
>> I am following your discussion with interest... thank you both for this
>> thread. I like the term endogenization. A curious thing about each
>> individual carrying the environment around inside, is that the common world
>> is unlikely to be the same as each private version. These often seem
>> substitutes for the external, when that unaffectable commons becomes
>> untenable (or inaccessible) to the creatures that must somehow dwell in it
>> anyway.
>> --Lonny
>>
>> ############################
>>
>> To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
>> write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
>> or click the following link:
>> http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
>>
>
> ############################
>
> To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
> write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
> or click the following link:
> http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1

############################

To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1