Towards an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cy...

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TOWARDS AN
AESTHETIC
EPISTEMOLOGY
Transforming Thinking Through
Cybernetic Epistemology And
Anthroposophy
Seth T. Miller
C...

Structure of the Problem: Epistemology
• Every action, every feeling, and every thought arises in the context of an
episte...

Goals of the exploration:
• To illuminate higher-order structures at work in epistemology in
order to give a theoretical c...

Context for the exploration
The large-scale topic is a theoretical exploration of potential meeting
points, congruencies, ...

More specifically, it is an exploration of:
• The difference between levels of order and the recursion between them, and h...

Personal Background
• As a philosophy major, I always had a personal interest in the big
picture, in patterns, and in tran...

The basic premise of the idea
• I had an undefined, nebulous, but persistent sense that these three
realms were exploring ...

Methods (in practice)
The work is essentially theoretical, which in my case meant:
• Cycles of reading/thinking/writing/di...

An important methodological caveat
• The content of the work is about recursion and mutual relations
between process and p...

Two Complementary Directions of Exploration
• Methodologies  Methods  Topics of Exploration
• A theoretical framework fo...

Methodology (theoretical underpinnings)
Basic hermeneutics with respect to major texts and ideas:
• Anthroposophical writi...

Methodology cont.
• Transdisciplinarity: Basarab Nicolescu
• Levels of Reality – mutually constitutive, integrated
• Logic...

Conclusions: Basic Compatibilities
• Anthroposophy, cybernetic epistemology, and Eugene Gendlin’s
philosophy of the implic...

Conclusions: The Fundamental Pattern
• A basic pattern: q (The “fundamental pattern” – Theta)
• This pattern is the distin...

Conclusions: More about q
• It is a way of describing the activity of thinking when it becomes
recursive, taking itself as...

Conclusions: Thinking and Distinction
• Thinking is the activity of distinction; distinction is the activity of thinking.
...

Conclusions: Sense-organ creation
• The way a system becomes recursively sensitive to the distinctions
it makes is the bas...

Conclusions: Sense-organs, cont.
• Distinction affords the possibility of sensation. Every distinction creates
the potenti...

Conclusions: Non-physical sense organs
• We often think of sense-organs as a mostly passive receptors for
differences in t...

Conclusions: Non-physical sense organs, cont.
• We can thus speak of non-physical sense organs, which are the result of
di...

Conclusions: Reality
• Not all distinctions yield equally relevant sensations. The distinguishing
system cannot determine ...

Conclusions: A peculiar sense organ
• Aesthetic epistemology is a way of knowing about our knowing. It relies
upon the bui...

Conclusions: Distinguishing Distinction
• The question of aesthetic epistemology is: How am I distinguishing?
• To ask thi...

Conclusions: Aesthetic Epistemology
• Why is this recursive process, which may seem very oriented
towards logic and abstra...

Importance of the Work
• Shows compatibilities between anthroposophy, second-order cybernetics,
and the philosophy of the ...

Potential Applications
• Aesthetic epistemology can be applied to any problem in
experience that seems intractable, too co...

Directions for Future Research
The ideas in the dissertation are essentially outlines only. There are many
areas that can ...

Directions for Future Research, cont.
• Practical directions:
• Exploring ways of making the principles and practices asso...

Finis

February, 2014

Towards an Aesthetic Epistemology, by Seth T. Miller

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