agency

"agency in the universe"

Page 10 of about 10,100,000 results (0.30 seconds)

That's a Googlelusion.

There aren't really that many citations.

Good friend of Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, came up: "That matter is capable of eliciting feeling and thought follows necessarily from the principle that matter is the only substance, power, or agency in the universe..."

I don't think anyone would argue with that but does it really say anything.

I mean it's tautological.

This Santayana quote is more stylin'...

"Empiricism would be agony if any one was so silly as really to forget his material status and to become the sport of his passing ideas."

Soliloquies '22 at 157 ("Masks").


Santayana is good at saying what I was trying to say below.

I was trying to say that the scientific model and empiricism still have a spookiness to them because of their basic premise.

Santayana catches that rat right here.

And he's funny. He's considered to have written the first well-reasoned defense of pragmatism although he was not a pure pragmatist but rather a metaphysical naturalist. I should look at the correspondence with Stevens. I bet these two had fun with each other.

Was Stevens a Platonist? I can think of many Stevens poems that embody Platonist ideas. But then I can think of many Stevens poems that embody empiricist ideas. Stevens didn't really need to choose or be consistent, since he was a poet. I say that tongue-in-cheek, but of course it's true.


Empiricism

"In an empirical system causation is reduced to superstition, skipping from fact to observed fact without attempting to penetrate any of them substantially. It attributes to a juxtaposition of appearances a mysterious power to reproduce itself. Unfortunately in immediate experience there are, strictly speaking, no repetitions. The word and occurs often; but never, for actual feeling, in exactly the same context, or with exactly the same emphasis or colour. Empirical philosophy, if sincere, ought to become mystical and to deny that the flux of events has any articulation or method in it."

Realms '72 at 87 ("The Realm of Essence: Implication").

But Santayana is being flippant and being contrary here. Since he actually subscribes to metaphysical naturalism. So he's just chiding the wildest extremes of empiricist thought. It sounds as though he's mocking Hume here for his famous "dismantling" of causality.

Santayana was all about the sciences.

"Metaphysical naturalism regards nature as all that exists or can exist, and assumes that events in nature are explainable by empirically observable causes. However, various abstractions, such as numbers, are considered to be immaterial for practical purposes."

So no defense of mathematical Platonism or any other kind of abstractions independent of consciousness.

And seemingly no problem with the way consciousness meshes with nature.

I still have a problem with it. Because neither empiricism as a monism or as a dualism work for me. Sometimes empiricism describes itself as pluralistic (the universe is composed of all these different entities) but ultimately because of the empiricist treatment of consciousness, it's presumed human consciousness is the arbiter of everything. So empiricism still looks like an old-fashioned monism to me. Even with its quantum mechanics.

It's so funny that the sciences that empiricism trusts completely show it that consciousness is an animal continuum, and that "lower" animals cannot even grasp abstractions and so we feel they don't even exist in the "real universe."

And yet why would we assume that our present state of consciousness is somehow perfect--or even a million miles short of perfect?

It's not that I'm believing something without evidence. To me it's logic and science and empirical discoveries (not superstition) which make me believe that the human faculties are just one version consciousness can take, and that probably we are sealed off from divining the "true" nature of the universe.

Because truth is probably just epistemological relativism.

I believe an organism realizes the kind of reality of which its senses are capable and no more.

Different senses, different brain. Different universe.