28.11.08
More on Bennett
From Darwiniana, more on Bennett
…But I think that once you challenge reductionism on one level you begin to think: what’s the next level after that?
The level of physics and biology, and, I think there is still another level: it’s hard to say where that level it will start.
(I should note in passing that J.G.Bennett, occasionally cited here, in his The Dramatic Universe partioned things into three such levels, the hyponomic, autonomic, hypernomic, or material, life, and trans-life, domains.
Bennett is a kind of brilliant trainwreck, interesting as reverse-reductionism, losing your grip as you ascend the scale from reductionsit modes, a sort of papermoney of non-reductionist thinking. But his thinking remains to be reckoned with.
Our problem with ‘reinventing the sacred’ is in those terms a question of man’s encounter, at the boundary of the autonomic zone, of the hypernomic zone. The problem is that we don’t properly observe it.
The stance of Bennett was very odd in many ways. Consciousness, in his scheme of things, is the lowest of the hypernomic modes, and a cosmic energy. It is an odd notion indeed, but explains a few things (like why we can’t make hide no hare of it), which doesn’t mean I agree with Bennett (my task in life seems to be to dismantle this book for confused New Agers).
I cite Bennett (watch out, you can rot your brains reading his books, but he was also very brilliant with General Relativity under his belt in the early thirties) because he is in many ways at the other extreme from the reductionist, and either a guiding thought or a temptation for those like Kauffman stepping beyond the hyponomic realm.