Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.
A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.
How Non-being Haunts Being makes much ado about nothing. A nimble scholar and graceful writer, Corey Anton explains why and how “human experience and reality as a whole can show itself for what it is only as we grasp how nothing or non-being relates to being.” Revelatory and provocative. Timely and important. — Sheldon Solomon, Skidmore College
Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.
A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.
How Non-being Haunts Being makes much ado about nothing. A nimble scholar and graceful writer, Corey Anton explains why and how “human experience and reality as a whole can show itself for what it is only as we grasp how nothing or non-being relates to being.” Revelatory and provocative. Timely and important. — Sheldon Solomon, Skidmore College
Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.
A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.
How Non-being Haunts Being makes much ado about nothing. A nimble scholar and graceful writer, Corey Anton explains why and how “human experience and reality as a whole can show itself for what it is only as we grasp how nothing or non-being relates to being.” Revelatory and provocative. Timely and important. — Sheldon Solomon, Skidmore College
"As we descend the dependent hierarchy from inorganic nature to society and culture, the relationship between matter-energy and information radically changes. The more complex a system is, the more distinctive is the relationship between the two...In the social and cultural order the relation between matter-energy and information becomes increasingly indirect and arbitrary, nowhere more so than in speech and language, where the matter-energy has no natural relation to what it symbolizes...It also becomes richer, more complex, more flexible, more ambiguous, and less dependent on close connection: continents or centuries may separate one sender-receiver from another." (Wilden, Rules, pp. 171-172).
"Once it is agreed that information and noise are not inherently distinct, then it follows that without context, there can be no information—i.e. no distinction between information and noise. For any biological or social system, the existence of coded and uncoded variety or diversity presupposes the existence of goalseeking subsystems dependent upon communication for survival. Communication is impossible without coding, and coding is impossible without context. We see, therefore, that information, communication, context, order, and goalseeking are all implicit in the original distinction between coded and uncoded variety." (Rules, p. 184).
"Three levels of knowledge can also be distinguished: sensing, where analog continuity dominates digital discontinuity; meaning, where analog and digital coding combine in iconic coding; and signification, where digital coding dominates analog coding. Taking up the definition of information as coded variety (or diversity), sensing can be defined as coded information, meaning as coded sensing, and signification as coded meaning." (Rules p. 185; 225)
"The process of increasing organization through the constant creation of novel information in life and society (Erwin Schrodinger called it 'negative entropy') does not violate the second axiom, however. Systems whose entropy remains constant, increases, or fluctuates are open systems dependent upon their environment. They take order from the environment (matter-energy and information), and re-order it to maintain or increase their own order, and return to the environment the increasing disorder." (Rules, p. 185) See the related playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... For more in-depth review of my take on information, go to: http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/3/3/351Quick Follow Up on Information (Veritasium & Vsauce)Corey Anton2014-08-05 | Response to: http://youtu.be/zUDqI9PJpc8?t=4m16s (at the "4min 16sec" mark) Also see: youtube.com/watch?v=YnLF5zsbGfs A related playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6584EDD9E5B4451B For more in-depth review of my take on information, go to: http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/3/3/351What does Veritasium mean by information?: Not A Random QuestionCorey Anton2014-07-16 | RE: youtube.com/watch?v=sMb00lz-IfE The Media Ecology Association: http://www.media-ecology.org
Wilden quotations worthy of careful study: "Thinking only of the beginning and end of the journey, we might regard our departure as the cause of our arrival, when in fact our arrival was the cause of our departure...in living and social systems the use of matter-energy is governed by information. Ordinary physical or Newtonian causality (also so called 'efficient causality') is a matter energy relationship determined by the past: the cause is 'behind' the effect...and the effect always follows the cause...In contrast, cybernetic causality, or goalseeking within constraints, is an informational relationship defined by the future: the goal exists before the effects that result from the absence of the goal, the result of something not yet happening. Cybernetic causality does not however contradict or nullify ordinary physical causality: it complements it on another level." (Rules, p. 78)
"As we descend the dependent hierarchy from inorganic nature to society and culture, the relationship between matter-energy and information radically changes. The more complex a system is, the more distinctive is the relationship between the two...In the social and cultural order the relation between matter-energy and information becomes increasingly indirect and arbitrary, nowhere more so than in speech and language, where the matter-energy has no natural relation to what it symbolizes...It also becomes richer, more complex, more flexible, more ambiguous, and less dependent on close connection: continents or centuries may separate one sender-receiver from another." (Wilden, Rules, pp. 171-172).
"Once it is agreed that information and noise are not inherently distinct, then it follows that without context, there can be no information—i.e. no distinction between information and noise. For any biological or social system, the existence of coded and uncoded variety or diversity presupposes the existence of goalseeking subsystems dependent upon communication for survival. Communication is impossible without coding, and coding is impossible without context. We see, therefore, that information, communication, context, order, and goalseeking are all implicit in the original distinction between coded and uncoded variety." (Rules, p. 184).
"Three levels of knowledge can also be distinguished: sensing, where analog continuity dominates digital discontinuity; meaning, where analog and digital coding combine in iconic coding; and signification, where digital coding dominates analog coding. Taking up the definition of information as coded variety (or diversity), sensing can be defined as coded information, meaning as coded sensing, and signification as coded meaning." (Rules p. 185; 225)
"The process of increasing organization through the constant creation of novel information in life and society (Erwin Schrodinger called it 'negative entropy') does not violate the second axiom, however. Systems whose entropy remains constant, increases, or fluctuates are open systems dependent upon their environment. They take order from the environment (matter-energy and information), and re-order it to maintain or increase their own order, and return to the environment the increasing disorder." (Rules, p. 185)