Meeting 2:00 Friday October 8, 2021

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 16:09:40 -0400

Hey Everybody

First I want to thank everybody for attending the last meeting. The group has been super open-minded, thoughtful and focused when discussing the topics of the meetings. I want to invite everybody to consider philosophical topics they would like to present on or share with the group. As much as me and Curtis love sharing things we like we both think it would be unfair, boring and authoritarian if we were the only people dictating the topics of discussion. Obviously nobody has to share or present if they do not want to but just know the door is open and we are excited to hear your bids!

This week, I think it would be ultra-cool to take a look at the concept of emergence. This is an enormous concept that I would argue that you are OBLIGATED as a thinking person to have opinions on.

When speaking of complex entities such as the capitalist world system, or the human mind or language the question is always going to come up: what is the relationship of the whole to its parts and what is the relationship of the parts to the whole.

Is the complexity of the human mind fundamentally understandable by reducing its phenomenon to neurological events in the brain? Or does the human mind have qualities or properties that you cannot immediately trace back to physical events in the brain?

Was Margaret Thatcher in her efforts to gut the British Welfare State and break the power of trade unions correct in saying that "there's no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families?" Is society just a mass aggregation of individuals? is society just its individuals? Or was Karl Marx correct to see capitalists and workers as mere personifications of MACRO economic categories, their behavior being shaped capitalism's "laws of motion"?

Is gender reducible to the body or is it in fact the social construct more and more people say that it is? Is "race" reducible to bodily difference of people, or is it determined by historically situated hierarchies that are open to abolition?

I am by no means a specialist in any natural science but emergence is also an important concept for understanding the relation of biological entities to non-biological components. What is the relationship of any micro entity to any macro entity. What are the relationships of the "special sciences" to physics?

What is the relationship of your major to other majors?

What ever your academic goals the relationship of parts to wholes is a problem you cannot escape. Lets face it head on! Avanti!

Thomas