Love of knowledge. Flashcards
Aristotle’s notion of “actuality”, “potentiality”
“Information” - of how idos turns potential into actuality.
- first understand the notion of eidos:
a thing is not just a list of its features, but the way in which it works together. A bird is not a bunch of organs, feathers and a beak, but a specific structural and functional organization that fits together to make a bird a bird. The eidos of a bird is what makes a bird a bird. It’s the essence of the thing, it’s the “spirit” if it.
In English, its translated as “form” but a better word for it is the German ‘gestalt”
Humans can inherently understand the eidos of a thing, but it’s actually difficult to put into words in a way that will resist all exceptions to the definition. Nevertheless, this is how we understand the world and objects and ideas within it.
Aristotle agreed with the notion of idos, but also introduced “change” to this notion. What makes the wood a chair over here and a ship over there isn’t an inherent quality of the wood its made of, but how the wood is put together. The essence of each thing, the ship, chair and table isn’t the material aspect of it, but it’s the “eidos” underlying it. We imbue the wood with the eidos and turn it into a different thing. We put a form to it, we inform it and this is where the word “information” comes from.
Aristotle believed that the wood had the potential of being a ship, and when the eidos was put into it, it “actualized” its potential. These words actualize, and potential come from Aristotle.
Growth, development and self-organizing processes as explained by the Dynamical Systems Theory.
This agrues against the Newtonian models of causality, where A–>B–C and everything has some preceding cause and thats how change works and how growth occurs.
But Newtonianism can’t explain self-organizing systems, because these seem to self-determine their own shape, which is not linear Newtonian progression. DST points out that newtonian physics operates under constraints. The pen will move when I push it only if there is empty space ahead of it to move into. The pen won’t go into the ground because I don’t have enough force to push it through. These constraints allow events to occur in specific ways.
These constraints are where you’ll find form, and since Aristotle came from Plato, this Aristotlian model was well understood and employed (until Newton). Newtonian physics just didn’t explain biological, self-organizing systems well at all. (“There was a gap between our physics and our biology”).
Biological systems seem to employ DST. A tree grows a certain way to allow for more light to hit it (an event), more light hits it because the way it grows, and it grows more.
Evolution as a dynamical systems theory - enabling constraints and selective constraints
Sexual reproduction is the forward force (a virtual generator)
Scarcity of resources is the selective constraint (limiting the options for movement of the system in a certain direction)
The organisms have to change in order to increase their chances of survive. If that change enables survival, by the imposition of enabling constraints (i.e. it can now only grow in such a way that it has more muscle mass, for example, and that is helpful, and enabling) it feeds back into the system and lets more of those organisms survive.
There is almost an accordion-like “opening up” and “closing in” - the adaptations open up the possibilties (new constraints), and the scarcity of resources closes them up again. In and out, in and out.
governor and generator in dynamical systems theory. Enabling and Selective constraints. Virtual engine.
Development of wisdom as a DST
A governor is any device that limits what you can do on a system, like if you have a governor on a steam engine it sets the range, it limits the range at which you can cycle.
Selective constraints = governor. (things you cannot do)
Enabling constraints = generator (generating new options for you)
a governer plus a generator is an engine (in this case, a virtual engine). These together are the non-Newtonian forces that shape the system in a dynamical recursive manner fitted to its environment.
The development of character is akin to a DST.
“What you have to do is you have to train yourself to cultivate your character by engaging in practices that will slowly, over time, create a virtual engine because you ARE a self organizing process. You are the source of your actions that modify the environment that then feeds back into you. And changes you. And then you produce your actions and then the environment feeds back and changes you. Here’s the question I ask you: Are you just letting that run? Or are you trying to rationallyand reflectively cultivate your character, structure a virtual engine, so that that self-organizing process is growing and developing in an optimal fashion?”
“Part of what makes your life meaningful Is that you have cultivated character that allows you to actualize your potential.
“Autopoetic”,
We’re self making. And here’s an important idea: We’re self making. We’re not just self organizing! The term that Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson have generated to talk about this is we are “Autopoetic”, we are self-making things. So you’re different from a tornado. A tornado is self organizing. But a tornado will move… Its behavior… It can be rapidly self-destructive. It will move into conditions that destroy it. You’re self organized in such a way that you have a structural functional organization that allows you to seek out conditions. So the tornado does not seek out the conditions that will protect and promote its own self organization. It’s not self making. You are self making.
Aristotle urged us to cultivate character (as a dynamical system, to use a modern phrase) - to what end though? To what goal?
Well here is where Aristotle gives the Axial revolution answer: Your capacity for overcoming self-deception. Your capacity for cultivating your character. For realizing wisdom and for enhancing the structure of your psyche and your contact with reality. That’s what “rational” means. This sounds - if I hadn’t said all of this - what I’m gonna say now would sound trite. Your purpose is to become as fully human as Possible! How are you cultivating your character to do so? This is what Aristotle is going to ask you again and again. How much of your life is dedicated to creating a virtual engine that realizes your rational capacities. Those things that make you most human in contrast to all the other things around you.
akrasia
“Akrasia” which we poorly translate as ‘weakness of the will’ because we’re all post Protestants and we think the will is our central thing even though, increasingly, there’s scientific evidence that the notion of will or willpower is a defunct idea, we should give it up! So what’s Akrasia? Akrasia is when you know what the right thing to do is - you KNOW what the right thing to do is - and we talked about this, remember, with the chocolate cake. But you don’t do the right thing.
Here’s Aristotle’s answer: “you do the wrong thing because, although you have the right beliefs…” ( notice, again, the impotence of belief here.) “…you don’t have the right… you don’t have sufficient character”. You have not trained things. You’ve not trained skills. You’ve not trained sensitivities. You have not created a virtual engine that is regulating your development and growth such that you will live up to your potential;
core idea of rationality
Because we have tended - and we’ll see much later why - we’ve tended to reduce rationality to the idea of being logical. But that’s not the core idea of rationality. The core idea of rationality is your capacity for reflectively realizing your capacities for self-deception and illusion and for self correction. And for Aristotle that self correction is a process of also realizing your potential through the cultivation of character.
meaningcrisis.co. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis meaningcrisis.co (Kindle Locations 1935-1938). Kindle Edition.
conformity theory of knowing,
aka contact epistemology, “participatory” knowing
The chair maker really understands, deeply what a chair is, because he can make a chair. His knowledge of it is more deep that someone who can just explain what a chair looks like.
For Aristotle, this meant that the chair maker’s mind contained, within it, the eidos of the chair, and this allowed the chair maker to instantiate a chair into physical space.
“So for Aristotle, when ‘I know’ something - and this is the original meaning of this word - there is “conformity”; I share the same form with it. So when I know some object or know some thing, my mind takes on the same structural functional organization as the thing such that if I could take that idos from my mind and actualize it in some potential, I could make an instance of the thing: I could cause it ‘to be (points out be-cause on the board again)’.”
“So the conformity theory is a very different way of thinking about how we know things. So Charles Taylor, who I’ve mentioned before, Hubert Dreyfus and others, they talk about the Conformity Theory as a ‘contact’ epistemology. So to know something is to be in contact with it, is to actually participate in the same form as the thing. I’m going to come back to this sense of participatory knowing. Participatory knowing is when I shape myself in order to know the thing, and I know it by conforming to it. This is different from descriptive knowing where I stand apart and I generate propositions about the thing.”
