Quote Originally Posted by Whoobie77 View Post
yeah, sometimes I forget to remember that everyone's semiotics or language-game or meaning making or whatever you want to call it is different. the lack of empathy on my part was my bad. a fair point.
A point I didn't even mean to make! It's becoming ever more thematic that I don't explain myself enough and assume people know what I'm talking about. The responsibility rests squarely on my shoulders to cultivate my communication skills.

To me, it just seems as your writing has gotten more deliberately esoteric over the course of time. I consider myself at the very least a modestly intelligent person, but I haven't the slightest clue what a "Process God" or "reason on a cosmic scale" means. If we all live in "the cosmos" wouldn't that mean that anything that reasons at all would be reasoning "at the cosmic level", and if so, why not just say, "we are endowed with the ability to apply reason" or something? Isn't reason just impressive enough on its own?
"Process God" is the idea of some metaphysical suggestive will, like the God Whitehead identified, and in contrast to some static Christian God. Sorry, super lazy shorthand.

To address the meat of that section, if there is some Whiteheadian process will that is equally shaping/being shaped by the processes of the Universe, at least in this little corner, it's starting to wake up to itself. I think it's interesting that there are consistent patterns of things achieving predatory conscious awareness of a consensus experience, and self-awareness. It started at first with small-scale collections of organs, and is currently seemingly happening in large-scale collections of minds. The internet is starting to circulate memes of "Is the internet becoming self-aware?" which to me suggests it is, although it could go either way.

It reads like you've keyed into this, but at the same time, I think it's a fairly obscure idea, and probably outside someone's intuitive metaphysics if they've never been exposed to Whitehead or any of the people inspired by him (like Deleuze! Thanks for pointing him out).

Also, (I'm going to be a massive hypocrite for just telling MSM to read metaphorically 2 posts ago but whatever) when you use a sociobiology world like "meta-organism" for its technical application and then turn around and use a chemistry word like "entropy" in a poetic sense, it becomes difficult to tell if I'm supposed to be reading your writing at a literal or metaphoric level.
Perhaps a progression from chemical to abstract, while maintaining literality. We start with chemical entropy pumping to maintain relative levels of biological integrity, but I see it as a natural progression that we (and termites, and beavers) build structures in our environments. This is still a kind of literal information pumping, by offloading chaos elsewhere in the environment in order to create structure and predictability in an area of interest, but that might be a very naive and tenous leap on my part.

when we first met and were shooting the shit about Barthes and Amano and whatever, I had little trouble following you, but maybe it was because I at least somewhat understood your frame of reference...

in any case, I think you're a pretty solid dude, so don't I hope you don't construe this as a personal attack or anything
I think that's the case. Plus I probably wasn't writing in a frenzied haste.

Anyway, no personal attack construed. I respect your intelligence, and you've never failed to maintain a high standard of propriety. Plus, I like you, so no offence is likely to be taken by me.