Emergence refers to the appearance of patterns of organization and is one of the key concepts of complexity and a-life.It is sometimes referred to as a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, because it cannot be analyzed by taking the parts apart and examining them separately. One reason for this is that in a complex phenomenon showing emergent properties, the parts become a determining context for each other, and these patterns of feedback contribute to the appearance of the emergent phenomenon. For Michael Polanyi, " Evolution can be understood only as a feat of emergence."
Read MoreEmbodiment is the line between psychology and biology. One important feature of embodiment is that the interaction between the body and cognition is circular. Thus posture, facial expressions, or breathing rhythm are in a feedback loop with motor movement, mood, and cognition. I am bouncing along the street because I am happy but I am also happy because I am walking with a spring in my step.
Read MoreThe law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the common
but leaves the greater villain loose
who steals the common from off the goose.
Anonymous
The English enclosure movement, which started in the fifteenth century and went on until the nineteenth, was a process of fencing off common land and turning it into private property. It is a story of consolidation of power by landowners with the help of the state, and was supported by political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. (Locke held that land became private property by the admixture of labor, which was the unquestionable property of the laborer -- in this case the capitalist.) Critics of that transformation have called it a state-supported "revolution of the rich against the poor" and "a plain enough case of class robbery." (eg. Michael Polanyi, The Great Transformation, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.) Following Marx, these historians see the process of enclosure as the forcible expropriation of the agricultural population, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. (see Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, chapt. 27).
Economic historians sympathetic to the rise of capitalism have seen the enclosure movement as enabling the transformation of agricultural practice, resulting in increased production for a growing population, the expansion of cities, (and increased rents for the landowners). According to this latter interpretation, the new techniques and investments made possible by privatization offset the ecological instability of the open field system, and put resources to efficient use rather than leading to the inexorable exhaustion of the soil from overuse and underinvestment.
Read MoreIn the late nineteenth century, the concept of Einfühlung , as "feeling into," was proposed by Rudolph Lotz and Wilhelm Wundt. E. G. Tichener, a student of Wundt, coined the English translation "empathy" in 1910, using the Greek root pathos for feeling and the prefix em for in. Empathy was developed as an aesthetic theory in the work of Theodore Lipps and others.
Read MoreJoule's principle of the conservation of energy is an example of the subsumption of qualitative transformations into a quantifiable entity. "Thus it is that order is maintained in the universe--nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost, but the entire machinery, complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously." (Joule, quoted in Prigogine, p.108-9)
Read MoreEntropy: Second law of thermodynamics:
Entropy is a measure of the energy distribution through a system. As energy becomes more dispersed or more evenly distributed in a system, the possibility of that energy's being used for mechanical work is decreased, and entropy increases.
Read MoreOne of the most important issues in the premodern biology of the 18th century was the struggle between preformationist and epigenetic theories of development. The preformationist view was that the adult organism was contained, already formed in miniature, in the sperm, and that development was the growth and solidification of this miniature being. Preformationists assumed that the germs of all living beings were preformed and had been since the Creation. Preformationism sought to maintain and secure--against the irritation posed by the complexity of organic phenomena--the claim for a thorough and rational determination of the material world.
Read MoreGeorges Bataille defines eroticism as the "assenting to life up to the point of death". (Erotism, introduction) For Bataille, eroticism distinguishes man from the animals because it is a consciously intellectualized feeling that is possible only in a context where sexuality is repressed, or at least where erotic pleasure is independent of reproduction as an end. Bataille relates eroticism to a knowledge of evil and the inevitability of death, rather than simply an expression of joyful passion. He quotes de Sade's observation that "There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image." While De Sade's "aberration" may be the logical extreme of this link, "In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation." (p. 16)
Read MoreThe idea of ethnicity is the idea of a naturalized group identity. It is usually linked, since Max Weber, to some sort of extension of the primordial idea of kinship. In this primordialist concept, group identity is a one-way process in which larger social units draw on the sentiments of family and kinship to gain emotional force.
Read MoreFor Kant, the concept "cause" is intimately tied to that of "event", in such a way that, unless the former concept were applicable, there would be no concept of an event as an objective happening. At the heart of scientific theories are models or representations that describe a mechanism by which a cause, be it event or state or potent thing or substance, brings about the effect, event, or state. (Rom Harré)
Read MoreIn many of his essays, Steven J. Gould has suggested complications or revisions to any simple version of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. (see, for example Wonderful Life, an graphic account of some contingencies of natural history -- as opposed to any predictable, progressive process) He has also proposed a number of alternative concepts to simple adaptation. In "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm," ( Proceedings of the Royal Society of London , 205, 281-288) Gould and Lewontin warned against "naive adaptationism" in the explanation of traits that had emerged for other reasons. Using the dome and spandrels of the basilica of San Marco as an illustration, Gould and Lewontin showed that some traits have no specific function, but are present for reasons of architecture, development, or history. The triangular spaces of the spandrels at San Marco are simple solutions to the problem of filling in the spaces left by placing a dome on four arches. In themselves, they should not be called adaptations, as they serve no function on their own. (but they may become part of a "Bauplan.")
Read More"The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be laterjudged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown." John Cage, Silence, p.13.
Would this characterization apply to scientific experiment?
Read MoreOne form of visual attention is eye movement (often assisted by head movement). Because we see more clearly close to the center of our gaze, we get more information about an object if we direct our eyes in that direction. We get coarser information (at least about shape) from objects we are not looking at directly.
Read MoreIn all feedback systems, some portion of the output system is used as input. Positive feedback adds the output to the input, leading to "vicious cycles." Negative feedback is self-regulating, inducing the system to approach equilibrium or steady-state. (In communications engineering, these two modes are also called regenerative and degenerative cycles.)
Read MoreThe three primary models of fetishism -- anthropological, Marxian, Freudian--all define the fetish as an object endowed with a special force or independent life. Marx called this transference, Freud called it overvaluation. In this sense the fetish is not a representation. It does not refer to something outside itself.
Deleuze and Guattari criticize psychology for not seeing the " becoming-animal, that is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing." They describe children as continually undergoing becomings of this kind, and find these "unnatural participations" in fetishism and particularly masochism. (1000 Plateaux, p. 259)
The power of the fetish can also be seen in the confusion of animate and inanimate of the Golem or cyborg.
Read MoreIn War and Cinema, Paul Virilio traces the "fatal coherence" between the eye and the arm (weapon) in the logistics of military perception. As has often been observed, what can be seen in warfare is what can be destroyed, and the technical developments of twentieth century warfare are characterized by the joint progress of visibility and invisibility. For Virilio the techniques of cinema and those of warfare became so bound up in the twentieth century that for him, film criticism has no meaning. It is reality that must be analysed in filmic terms. Starting with Etienne - Jules Marey's invention of the Chronophotograph the first of many matings between the machine gun and the movie camera, which unites the repetition of the automatic weapon with the repetition of cinema, Virilio focusses on common themes between warfare and cinema: the projecting lights of anti-aircraft batteries as spectacle, for instance, from Nuremberg to studio logos.
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![field]()
jackson pollock number IIa, 1948
In The Evolution of Physics, Einstein described the collapse of the mechanical world-view, leaving an intellectual vacuum before the radically new "field" theory could emerge. A field describes the behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space, through kinetics (interaction in time) and relational order (in space). It is a function of space and time coordinates that assigns a value of the field for each of the coordinates. Jackson Pollock, Number IIA, 1948
In current physics, several kinds of fundamental fields are recognized: the gravitational and electro-magnetic fields and the matter fields of quantum physics. Physicists talk about two kinds of fields: classical fields and quantum fields, although, for the most part, they believe that all fields in nature are quantum fields, and that a classical field is just a large-scale manifestation of a quantum field.
"A classical field is a kind of tension or stress that can exist in empty space in the absence of matter. It reveals itself by producing forces, which act on material objects that happen to lie in the space the field occupies." (Freeman Dyson, "Field Theory," in From Eros to Gaia, p. 93)
Read MoreGestalt psychologists employed the concept of figure and ground to study human pattern recognition, in which a figure (note the anthropomorphic aspects) or universal can be distinguished by its emergence from a (back)ground. One of the classic studies involves dual and contradicting readings such as the duck/rabbit or the two faces/vase. The same aspects of the images are interpreted differently as the guiding gestalt changes.
Read More"In the late work of the painter is the fold / of that which comes to presence and of presence itself / become simple, 'realized.' healed, / transfigured in an identity full of mystery. / Does a path open up here, that leads to the co- / belonging of poetry and thought?" From Martin Heidegger, "Cezanne." in Gedaches, quoted in Agamben, Stanzas, p 158, n.)
"A structure is a regularized infolding of an aleatory outside." (Brian Massumi, p. 58) (see inside / outside ) For Gilles Deleuze, the Baroque is an operative function endlessly producing folds. These operations occur on two levels: the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul. What is the connection between the two? Correspondence, communication, or a fold between two folds?
Read MoreIs the concept of force a technico/scientific one or a philosophical, even metaphysical one?
By defining force purely as the product of an acceleration (a purely kinematic magnitude--from Greek kineo, referring to constrained or controlled motion) and a mass (a coefficient to be determined empirically), modern science eliminated both the metaphysical terminology and psychological origins of the concept of force. (E. J. Dijksterhuis) (see machine ) see also qualititative / quantitative .
For classical physics, force is really only explainable in terms of bodies in contact. "Action at a distance", which is also a feature of gravity, seems "occult." Yet from the work of Kepler and Newton, particles had a dual nature: on the one hand, a highly localized object, and on the other an influence extending through the whole of space. But is the concept of force to be associated primarily with Newtonian mechanics -- as opposed to Newton's alchemical writings?
Newton refused to define the nature of his fundamental gravitational force. He emphasized its heuristic importance and the possibililty of mathematizing it. On the other hand, his alchemical speculations downright invited the amplification and translation of his concept of force into the realm of living things. Could magnetism and electricity, he asked, fulfill the same role for living beings that gravitation did for inanimate matter? (see mechanism / vitalism ) Whether as quasi-mechanical attraction of molecules (as suggested by Buffon and Maupertius) or eventually as formative force (as suggested by the epigeneticists) the Newtonian concept of force supplied the debate about generation with a new energy in the eighteenth century.
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