As per a cool book, pithily, slightly modified: contingency, path-dependently, becomes subsequent “necessity,” for better and worse, because constraint is both enabling and limiting. Luckily can often proactively and preemptively unroll some path-dependencies hot-swap style.
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Two books actually:
Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon
and
Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings by William C. Wimsatt
(maybe fun to skim )
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getting the latter because I am just so charmed by the title
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Well, Terrence Deacon is generally great, so, yeah.
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Any good summaries of either/both? My book reading bandwidth is way down
The first is about how telos/goals/life arises out of “dead” causal mechanism. He’s not a math/physics guy but he nails it better than math/physics/philosophers. (He draws on physics.)
The second is about weak separability between a catalogue of levels of complexity and why.
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I would love to hear other people’s summaries in 1 to 2 tweets. Micro book club.
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At least on last reading (years ago, to be sure) it’s not “yet another mind/matter book.” It actually says something new. Several people accused him of copying their stuff, which I think is maybe a good sign in this case.
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