[lbo-talk] Democracy Now 5/26

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Wed Jun 2 11:55:07 PDT 2004


From: Ted Winslow

How do you and Miles explain the emergence of a "soul," i.e. not merely self-determination and final causation but forms of these consistent with the development of a "will proper" and a "universal will," from the aggregation of material interpreted in terms of conventional "materialism" as "vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying through space" i.e. in terms of an ontology that by assumption explicitly excludes any role for self-determination and final causation? In any event, "materialism" of this kind and "structuralism" explicitly deny we are "subjects" - "agents" - in this sense, don't they?

^^^^^

CB: You know the rap. Emergence at different levels is expression of the transformation of quantitative change into qualitative change.

Individual members of many animal species have wills don't they ? They seem a bit more than vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying (unconsciously) through space. Animals even have play and feelings. Not really difficult to conceive of another emergent level from other animals to human animals, but with a qualitative change in human sociality causing an emergence in human individuals.



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