260718: Mind & World, Co-constructing
There cannot be a sense of the world without a sensing organ. There cannot be a computation of the Universe, that is outside the Universe and somehow identical to the Universe. There are only organs' sensations, and computations from within, on such meagre instruments probing and pulsing in the flux.
It has taken us a long time to gain this most basic of cosmologies. Many of its key elements came only in the past century: cybernetics, reflexivity, reification, social construction, and the habitus.
Before, we believed that the Idea was primary and perfect, and that all the world was a mere approximation of ideal forms. The Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, required the rejection of Platonism; Europe began to realize that the World was primary, and that it was ideas which approximated reality, imperfectly.
The world, moreover, was no one-and-done set order, but something changeable, something which might be improved through reason and deed. This was the meliorist mindset; this, the whiggishness of the deist.
Only in post-romantic, recent centuries—through the theoretical advances of ecology and ethology, anthropology and social phenomenology—have we come to understand that Minds and Worlds are co-constructing. We recognize Man as a niche constructor par excellence; that the ideas in his head affect his alteration of his environs.
So too came we to realize that our types and kinds were neither immanent, nor eternal, but temporary and pragmatic tools, projected onto a varying flux. Our tactics of dissection and classification have come full circle—Darwin was such a step; ecology was such a step—until Watson & Crick smashed the concept of biological species, and suddenly, all difference was a matter of degree, and all creation inextricably One.