Turning Signs

Chapter 11 of Turning Signs introduced Robert Ulanowicz’s theory about the ascendency of ecosystems and the importance of overhead (inefficiencies) in the system’s response to stress. This is a clue to the nature of creativity. Continue reading Creative misconceptions

Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that a good poem can only emerge from a lifetime of experiences, which are not only remembered but, you might say, inhabited. (Or you might say that they inhabit you.) Continue reading Creativity and karma

Polyversity provides that a word can be taken in various ‘senses.’ In the context of the previous sentence, the word ‘sense’ means something different from what it means when we speak of ‘sense experience.’ Yet there is a connection linking the various senses of sense, as a study of the history of the word will show. Continue reading Imagine

Every convention was once an invention – though probably not by an inventor conscious of being one.

Expression relates to assertion as creation to description. Continue reading Expression and transformation

When the mystic ‘knows his Lord,’ he knows that he has a God in the same way that an organism has a world: he dwells within it, owns up to the condition of being owned by God. Nevertheless it is his God, his creation, since his Lord is his very singularity turned inside out. Continue reading I and I, Creator and Creation

We see what we focus on: what we see distinguishes itself from the visual field: the dynamic object determines the sign to determine its interpretant. Cognition begins by making distinctions; recognition continues with emergence of relations from the phaneron, now that things have emerged from the phaneron. Continue reading Seeing things