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
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