> If animal, human, and plant are essentially bundles of energy, then isn't
> eating one another a form of natural fusion? Cells consume each other.
> What makes us independent from that?
>
> Dennis
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Under the problematic conventions of some contemporary scientific disciplines -with the attendant fantasy of the privileged, one true description of the world- everything is to be redescribed as bundles of energy; even as the concept of energy then becomes the unexplained explainer:
"This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity -- a substantial activity -- expressing itself in achievements of organism." [Whitehead, Science and the Modern World]
[Hi Ted]
Despite it's flaws, the article clearly alludes to the problems of the malleability of our self-descriptive strategies, what Alan called the boundary practices and the norms that drive boundary maintenance and dissolution, not just in the ontologies of the life/social sciences but in a society where high colonics get the attention of leftists on listserves and utter angst about whether we really are souls created by god born to love apple pie, breakfast burritos, unleaded gasoline and the republican party pervades a collapsing empire. Understanding ourselves as talking ecosystems is better than science fiction, it makes for great biopolitics. A biopolitics that takes the work of not only Donna Haraway seriously as Alan suggested, but Lynn Margulis, Marjorie Profet, Gerald Edelman and Francisco Varela as well A biopolitics we need to make it to 2100. Imagine Nietzsche with Prilosec.
Ian