Apologies for my previous comment—I missed the “read more” button on the guidelines.
In my own search for a good baseline for epistemic truth, I’ve come to a similar position to this, and thought it was worth mentioning that my path routed through cybernetics and systems theory, process philosophy, and social constructivism and anti-realist philosophy. I’m not sure if there’s a more specific term of art for these ideas besides “holism”, whose well has been somewhat poisoned, but naturalism strikes me as a good fit.
I’ve found it a helpful exercise when trying to break down the perception of concrete boundaries, to borrow from cybernetics and mentally model objects as not being distinct without being causally disconnected. A deer is not a deer without the vegetation it eats; it cannot exist separated from its environment. We have higher order “object” conceptions like ecosystems or world-systems where we are perfectly willing to accept an object as having ephemeral links make up parts of its whole but it seems we have a harder time breaking the whole object category when the parts are contiguous. I’m not sure if this perspective is culturally or evolutionarily grounded, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.
Apologies for my previous comment—I missed the “read more” button on the guidelines.
In my own search for a good baseline for epistemic truth, I’ve come to a similar position to this, and thought it was worth mentioning that my path routed through cybernetics and systems theory, process philosophy, and social constructivism and anti-realist philosophy. I’m not sure if there’s a more specific term of art for these ideas besides “holism”, whose well has been somewhat poisoned, but naturalism strikes me as a good fit.
I’ve found it a helpful exercise when trying to break down the perception of concrete boundaries, to borrow from cybernetics and mentally model objects as not being distinct without being causally disconnected. A deer is not a deer without the vegetation it eats; it cannot exist separated from its environment. We have higher order “object” conceptions like ecosystems or world-systems where we are perfectly willing to accept an object as having ephemeral links make up parts of its whole but it seems we have a harder time breaking the whole object category when the parts are contiguous. I’m not sure if this perspective is culturally or evolutionarily grounded, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.