0000000000513334
AUTHOR
Gregory M. Nixon
showing 4 related works from this author
A 'Hermeneutic Objection': Language and the Inner View
1999
In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed that understands conscious experience as experience that is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991) and Terrence Deacon (1997), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the mutually constructive hermeneutic circle. The consciousness we humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic…
HOLLOWS of EXPERIENCE
2010
This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I chapter is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conc…
Whitehead & the Elusive Present Process Philosophy’s Creative Core
2010
Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in t…
Myth and Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred
2010
By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realisation of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced a…