A discussion forum for all things related to my book, 'Making Sense of Us', which explores how we can reach a better understanding of one another, ourselves, and indeed everything else!
Some time ago I commented very briefly on the form of presentation confronting the readers of this blog. Like many others, this site puts the most recent posting at the top of the cumulative list of postings. Since many of the posts refer to earlier posts,,...
Oh, dear! I did in fact get "carried away" in my earlier post. (Interesting metaphor that allows me to deny responsibility, eh?) What I had intended specifically to mention was in reference to a posting on the 3quarksdaily site today, April 5th, in which...
At one point in Making Sense of Us, I spoke of the inadequacy of language for being able to represent to others, and even to ourselves, the enormous significance of a sudden insight into the nature of our reality. In his lovely short novel Kleinzeit,...
In one of my earlier posts I expressed considerable concern about the various speculations that enable so many of us to justify our neglect, disregard, exploitation and indeed destructiveness of one another by using a variety of ploys that allow us to...
Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I hope it is still the case that not all readers of this blog will yet have succumbed to the temptation of using the word "meme" to characterize every possible kind of symbolically transmitted information between human...
Hello, again! In my haste to get my first post out into cyberspace, I omitted any mention of the book that I am curently reading, and which has a great deal to say that is relevant to the issues with which MSOU is concerned. It is a hefty book, and, to...
After having whetted your appetites in the last two or three posts, I'm now in a quandary. It isn't that I don't know what to say, it's that I do not now have to hand the very book that I wanted to quote from as a justification for my proposals. (It is...
In the last chapter of my book Making Sense of Us I made a case for our committing ourselves, both as individual beings, and as a species collectively, to an optimal process of being, rather than to a pre-determined goal. The relevant section, if you...
I rather suspect that my last post may have been experienced as cryptic and consequently difficult by those of you who are unfamiliar with the authors mentioned in that post, and more particularly with the concept of Gaia. For greater clarity, and hopefully...
For those readers who are familiar with Making Sense of Us, and perhaps even for some of you who have dipped only occasionally into this blog, it will come as no surprise that my overall purpose has consistently been to show how the manner in which we...
I suspect many readers of my posts have had qualms about the degree to which aspects of my arguments might seem to over-emphasize abstract argument at the expense of immediate relevance to the issues we face. For those of you who still entertain such...
I was musing over a letter from a friend recently, and was struck by how frequently the writer used what are currently termed "scare quotes". It's a bad misnomer, if only because the meaning of the use of the quotation marks may be quite other than specified...
At several places in MSOU, I referred to the possibility of understandings of our human situation which do not lend themselves easily, or at all, to the likelihood of summary in words. For the most part, my references to such possibilities were simply...
Since following up on my own recommendation the other day to consider the implications of Johanna Seibt's article on "Process Philosophy" in the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I was sufficiently intrigued by Alfred North Whitehead's treatment...
Whether or not you are a regular reader of this blog, please indulge me, and do the following: Click on this link, watch the following 3 minutes or so, and then try to tell yourself you have not been changed. No need to tell me or anyone else what results,...
Readers who have been reading this blog over several months, and readers who have themselves also read Making Sense of Us, will know that I attach enormous importance to the work of Carl Woese and Lynn Margulis (and incidentally, of course, James Lovelock),...
This is my follow-up on the unfinished business of my last post. It was unrealistic of me to imagine that, in the interim, any of you would be able to gain access to the two major sources I referred to. Never mind: here's the promised summary. It's hard...
Much more to come . . . But I came across the following sentence from Elias as I was preparing my next post, and it occurred to me that it was probably better to defer my drafting plans for the moment, and let Elias's bald sentence summarize what will...
I hope it will have been clear from my last post that a specific concentration of resources by a national government can distract the attention of its citizens from their own collusive involvement in supporting the dehumanization of segments of the population,...
First, a warning . . . I suspect this post will appear in my overall blog inventory as having been written before the post on effability. It would make considerably better sense for you to read it after that post. What I intend to do here is to explore...
Like many of you, I suspect, I have over this past holiday period experienced a turmoil of emotions. The massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers in Connecticut, the killing of firefighters at Webster, the horrible rape-murders in India, the murder...
It is quite likely that very few readers of this blog will have read Making Sense of Us in its entirety, so I am once more faced with the dilemma that I identified in several of my earlier, and indeed recent posts. How can I adequately connect with readers...
In quite a few of my earlier posts I have touched on our ability to disregard our responsibility towards one another. In the last couple of days the relevance of such a message has been epitomized by the reports from London (via the BBC) of the contribution...
(For those of you who have ready access to a copy of MSOU, the following post refers to and extends the discussion of collusive ploys that are identified on pages 102-106 of the book. For those who are unfamiliar with those pages, I should explain that...
I was a bit disconcerted yesterday to discover that the post I had just completed appears in the complete list of posts out of the actual chronological order. It was in fact completed after the "Lynx envers nos pareils" post. (The problem arises because...
