I have a half-baked notion that maybe you good folks will be kind enough to help me bake. Here it is:
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Since all in the concrete is relational, all concrete potential is relational.
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I think most will agree that total isolation only exists in the abstract. In the concrete, everything is interacting in some way with everything in proximity to it.
What if potential in the concrete is also always relational? What I'm getting at is relevant to emergence. It amazes me that a jumble of neurons can come up with language. I mean, hell, they're just neurons, glorified amoebas. Where does the potential reside? In the glorified amoebas? How could that be? What if, instead, the potential resides in the relationship between the neurons and their environment? Not merely in the neurons, and not merely in the environment, but in what happens when the two interact?
This is relevant also to process metaphysics. Interaction, after all, is process. What if Whitehead was right, and the unit of reality is the event, not the object? Potential, then, would reside in the event, and events are relational, stimulus and response. To understand the emergence of language, we would have to look at the process, the sum total of events, with all their constituent factors.
Is this a useful way to think?
I think you might be onto something perhaps, but what exactly do you mean by 'concrete potential'? Potential that is there?
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on December 10, 2011, 06:28:11 PM
I think you might be onto something perhaps, but what exactly do you mean by 'concrete potential'? Potential that is there?
Yes. I'm not sure the adjective really helps. As I said, half-baked.
It seems to me that potential is as real (in its own way) as actuality.
So in a way you're saying that emergence would be inevitable? At least in certain situations?
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on December 10, 2011, 11:04:15 PM
So in a way you're saying that emergence would be inevitable? At least in certain situations?
I think it would have to be, since, for example, given healthy glorified amoebas in the skull and a helpfully socializing environment, language can be counted on to develop.