Being and becoming

What is and what should be: Domains

• Science: • What is it, that is the world?

• Morality: • How are we, in the world?• How should we be?

• What is the good?• What is health, and mental health?

• Science and Morality: Psychology• How is it that we may best obtain “what is the good”?

•Paired hypotheses•objective/phenomenological•objective/subjective•scientific/moral•materialistic/mythological

Materialistic: Being is a place of objects

• “By the aid of language different individuals can, to a certain extent, compare their experiences. • Then it turns out that certain sense perceptions of different individuals

correspond to each other, while for other sense perceptions no such correspondence can be established. • We are accustomed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common

to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. • The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics,

deals with such sense perceptions.”• Einstein, A. (1955). The Meaning of Relativity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 2.

Mythological: Being is a forum for action

• “All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts.”• Shakespeare, As You Like It

Morality and Mythology

•Mythology, moral philosophy, literature, religion•How are we, in the world?• Tragic self-consciousness

•How should we be?•Redemption

Capitalize on social groupsMaintain order

Order and chaos constitute the stage

An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests.

The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand.

The constituent elements of the world

The Scandinavian World Tree: Ygddrasil

Julian’s drawing (age 8)