High Weirdness, Complexity and Henri Bergson
Here is an enticement for the upcoming seminar on Erik Davis and Diane Pasulka beginning Tuesday next week (you can register here). I think there is a wonderful web of relations and analogies among 1. the strange realities we’ve been exploring lately, 2. complexity theory of the kind explored by Neil Theise, and 3. the philosophy of Henri Bergson. I’m way out ahead of my skis here, but my current plan is to spend eight weeks on High Wierdness and alien encounters in Pasulka’s broad sense, and then launch into an extended exploration of Bergson. I’ve already talked a little bit in class about complexity theories, which I was introduced to at the Santa Fe Institute in 1990-93, and of my enthusiasm for Theise’s book. All this material hangs together for me in ways that I’m a bit foggy about at the moment, but which I hope we can articulate more clearly in the coming weeks.
Here is a really nice interview with Theise that hits on many of my memories of those days in Santa Fe, and reminds me how close I was to following in the footsteps od Varela and Thompson and Kauffman—all mentioned here. I think you’ll all find it interesting. And do read his book. It’s beautifully done, and is extremely relevant to our search for new ways of understanding, or at least being able to accept the bizarre realities that Radical Empiricism forces us to confront.
And as a teaser for something I may not be able to acheive in this life but am still aiming towards: my intuition is that one way to actualize the expereince of “non-duality” in the sense implicit in Bergson’s durée is through a deep engagement with the writing of Leslie Scalapino. It’s entirely possible that my intuition is off-base. I don’t think I’m wrong, but it could be that there is a mismatch I’m unaware of. But something is probably going on underneath my awareness since I’ve been obsessed with Scalapino for at least 15 years, and I remain frustrated at the inaccessibility of her work for me. I reminds me of wandering the stacks at the UConn library back in the early ‘80s looking at mathematics books and feeling the frustration of not having any way of understanding the meaning of all those strange symbols… and wanting to know what my world would be like if I could read them.