All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
(By David Bentley Hart) Read EbookSize | 20 MB (20,079 KB) |
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Author | David Bentley Hart |
So begins David Bentley Hart’s unprecedented exploration of the mystery of consciousness. Writing in the form of a Platonic dialogue, he systematically subjects the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for four centuries to dialectical interrogation. Powerfully rehabilitating a classical view in which mental acts are irreducible to material causes, he argues, through the gods’ exchanges, that the foundation of all reality is spiritual or mental rather than material. The structures of mind, organic life, and even language attest together to an infinite act of intelligence in all things that we may as well call God.
Engaging contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind, free will, revolutions in physics and biology, the history of science, computational models of mind, artificial intelligence, information theory, linguistics, cultural disenchantment, and the metaphysics of nature, Hart calls readers back to an enchanted world in which nature is the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences. He suggests that there is a very special wisdom to be gained when we, in Psyche’s words, “devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines.””