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Mind – The need for a new model (part 3)
Project: Polytopia
Project: Polytopia
Yet another augmented prologue
It took me a while to figure how to continue from here. There are many potential threads waiting to be unfolded and many ideas to weave. I thought however to dedicate another short post to reiterate what is it all about. The goal of writing about the mind, in itself being the subject of an intensive, quasi chaotic, process of iterative clarification, is not a philosophical investigation per se. It is not even a goal but rather a response to an inner call of sorts; an emerging yet not entirely formed imperative, private in nature and of intimate, unmediated, clarity.
Mind is a great puzzle but it also may become a key. We, the conscious reflecting animals that we are - we are born, we live and we die in our minds. The mind is certainly the nexus of our humanity, and still in an almost mystical way it encompasses much more than our humanity; as if it enwombs the vastness of our potential humanity and not only the humanity that is.
In this very sense, being quite removed (but not alien) from the noble endeavor to merely understand, mind is perhaps to be appreciated as a very potent metaphorical vehicle - a metaphor for an open-ended humanism. To know the mind becomes synonymous to knowledge that evolves, to image that transforms, to concept as a process of ever extracting its own context while bringing forth its transitory (persistent momentary) instances. You might sense the vacuum’s throbbing pulse underneath the words – a remote echo not entirely unfamiliar.
Birth of a Thought 2- Susan Aldworth (2007)
In modern philosophical discourse, post-humanism comes to explore what possibly might come after the human. But the human is but an image in its own mind and this mind is but an image within an image… There is no way to dodge this inevitable circularity so we have to look into it and surf it without falling into the vortex of infinite recurs. That is why I prefer open-ended humanism upon post humanism.
Open-ended humanism carries no implicit trace of temporality (it is not ‘post’ to something else). More importantly, open-ended humanism involves no covert act of (so called) semantic aggression in delimiting the concept ‘human’ in hope of conquering a new conceptual territory. Open-ended humanism can be considered as a conceptual sibling to Wildcat’s Polytopia. Both are conceived with the same understanding of non-aggressive open-endedness. Yet, I do not want to see any of them reach the status of fully developed mature concepts (an elaborate invention anyway). Why? Because both explore a novel kind of distinctiveness which is inherently a-territorial and incomplete.
Therefore I will not make open-ended humanism the subject of a discourse or investigation here; at least not explicitly. I would rather explore the unknown shores of a worthy metaphor, an archipelago of emergent meaning. In doing so, the ‘humanity’ in ‘open ended humanity’ will never take too deep roots in this or that image, this or that idea, this or that sentiment or emotional disposition; not even in what we might realize emotions, ideas and images to be at any given stage of our evolution. After all, realization in itself is an open ended process. Eventually, this h word (or h+ or h++) will fade out, leaving us, whatever we might become, open-ended _, incomplete, yet with absolutely no sense of loss.
We will become free from our humanity, which paradoxically is the deepest sense of fulfilling it.
To be continued...
It took me a while to figure how to continue from here. There are many potential threads waiting to be unfolded and many ideas to weave. I thought however to dedicate another short post to reiterate what is it all about. The goal of writing about the mind, in itself being the subject of an intensive, quasi chaotic, process of iterative clarification, is not a philosophical investigation per se. It is not even a goal but rather a response to an inner call of sorts; an emerging yet not entirely formed imperative, private in nature and of intimate, unmediated, clarity.
Mind is a great puzzle but it also may become a key. We, the conscious reflecting animals that we are - we are born, we live and we die in our minds. The mind is certainly the nexus of our humanity, and still in an almost mystical way it encompasses much more than our humanity; as if it enwombs the vastness of our potential humanity and not only the humanity that is.
In this very sense, being quite removed (but not alien) from the noble endeavor to merely understand, mind is perhaps to be appreciated as a very potent metaphorical vehicle - a metaphor for an open-ended humanism. To know the mind becomes synonymous to knowledge that evolves, to image that transforms, to concept as a process of ever extracting its own context while bringing forth its transitory (persistent momentary) instances. You might sense the vacuum’s throbbing pulse underneath the words – a remote echo not entirely unfamiliar.
In modern philosophical discourse, post-humanism comes to explore what possibly might come after the human. But the human is but an image in its own mind and this mind is but an image within an image… There is no way to dodge this inevitable circularity so we have to look into it and surf it without falling into the vortex of infinite recurs. That is why I prefer open-ended humanism upon post humanism.
Open-ended humanism carries no implicit trace of temporality (it is not ‘post’ to something else). More importantly, open-ended humanism involves no covert act of (so called) semantic aggression in delimiting the concept ‘human’ in hope of conquering a new conceptual territory. Open-ended humanism can be considered as a conceptual sibling to Wildcat’s Polytopia. Both are conceived with the same understanding of non-aggressive open-endedness. Yet, I do not want to see any of them reach the status of fully developed mature concepts (an elaborate invention anyway). Why? Because both explore a novel kind of distinctiveness which is inherently a-territorial and incomplete.
Therefore I will not make open-ended humanism the subject of a discourse or investigation here; at least not explicitly. I would rather explore the unknown shores of a worthy metaphor, an archipelago of emergent meaning. In doing so, the ‘humanity’ in ‘open ended humanity’ will never take too deep roots in this or that image, this or that idea, this or that sentiment or emotional disposition; not even in what we might realize emotions, ideas and images to be at any given stage of our evolution. After all, realization in itself is an open ended process. Eventually, this h word (or h+ or h++) will fade out, leaving us, whatever we might become, open-ended _, incomplete, yet with absolutely no sense of loss.
We will become free from our humanity, which paradoxically is the deepest sense of fulfilling it.
To be continued...
Sat, Jul 18, 2009 Permanent link
Categories: Open-ended humanism
Sent to project: Polytopia
Categories: Open-ended humanism
Sent to project: Polytopia
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