new year 67
by uzwi
Metaphors of humanity as a turbulent system through which energy is lost into the context; of life considered as Levy flights from small town to small town; of the (false) idea you can start out new every day; of downward causation by which the emergent whole begins to select what will form it. New Year 67: for me a milestone of the weird mystery not so much of being old but of the approach to something deep. Last year at this time I posted a photograph of C’s–unfinished buildings, asymettrically framed and obscured by the blurred interior of the train from which they were briefly viewed. This year a paragraph will have to do. Rain & wind in the street outside.
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Downward causation? You should have been at the pub on Boxing Day. About 70 young professionals in virgin rain-wear sipped cautiously at the real ale and watched a Cotswold Morris. As the bells tinkled, a blithe mother clutched her small bored son and said, loudly enough to be heard over the concertina, “This is the countryside. We’re in the countryside now.” She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself as much as anyone else: as well she might.
Happy new year!
@Martin “Downward causation” is a term from analytical philosophy, connoting the influence (if any) of a mind on its body, after that mind has “emerged” from physical processes in that living body. Nobody has been able to analyse the notion since it was thought up nearly 100 years ago.