Beginning to read Yuk Hui's Recursion and Contingency in our anarchai research group. Hui seems to intend to update process philosophy with some of its basic tenets being kept: a commitment to transparency and immanence, the idea that processes have an upper hand on initial conditions and an attraction to the biological, the organic, the units of action and interaction. It is from this perspective that he will tackle the problem of technology: the problem of seizing the powers of nature. He thinks that seizure is never-ending as much as nature itself is full of instability and transformation. The notion of recursion will allow him to think that the structures of power are best suited to organic entities than to mechanical commands. The seizure of power will appear, I guess, as a cosmopolitical gesture that is part of an ongoing struggle for the formation and maintenance of surprising organisms. If he is right (and if I am right about his project), recursion will appear as a powerful addition to the process philosophy toolkit (and to the immanence-driven thinking in general). Those of us that hold rather that transcendence plays a role in the plot, will be then left with the task (exciting, I guess) of once more learn with the sophistication issued by the efforts to think immanence through.
Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
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