Thursday, December 8, 2022

A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy at the Nano Level



click to enlarge


​A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy

by R.E. Slater

Years ago I watched YouTube's animation videos of our human body at the nano-scale. I was fascinated as I tried to imagine "the reality of the reality" I was seeing. It was absolutely surreal !

These vids came to mind this week when watching the movie "Strange World"... an illustration of the small and how it works together with itself and the world of the large. Without ruining the storyline let me just say I grew up in the generational worlds of my grandfather and my father who addressed life in their own ways even as I now have been adopting a newer view of life. A view which I hope I can pass down to Generations X, Gen Y (my kid's ages), and now Z (ages 14 and younger). A view which holistically focuses on the environment beyond our own.

Strange World
by Walt Disney Animation Studios


It is to the "Strange Worlds" beyond our own which I'd like to speak to here today... along with help from my online friend Jay McDaniel whose helpful process article you'll find at the end of this post. In it you'll find a far fuller discussion to what I will mention briefly here:

First, I've been replacing my Western Analytic Philosophy with A.N. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, as he named it in the early 1900s... now known as Process Philosophy (which is all the rage throughout science, theology, and eco-civilization discussions whether they know it or not). One of Whitehead's students was Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. (now, age 98, and very active in the process communities he has been spawning). Dr. Cobb took Whitehead's ideas and applied them to the bible and to his mainline Christian Methodist faith (built upon the Arminian (Reformed) tradition of human agency). What resulted was his philosophic application of process thinking into Methodism which we might describe as Christian Process Theology. Even so, I having been doing the same to my own evangelical faith structures by breaking down its Westernized Platonic teachingss in attempting a reasonable approximation of Whitehead's non-Platonic and very rich relational organic "Philosophy of Organism" into what I have been describing as Process Christianity over these many years.

A couple things to know:

1 - Process Philosophy is an Integral philosophy which means, all other philosophies, disciplines, and -isms, are but parts of the overall makeup of the universe we live in. A process universe once might describe as a process "reality" whatever that may mean. For Whitehead, it meant a book title, "Process and Reality" which is a must read. In the topical indexes to the right you'll find many resources to help you along (sic, "Index - Process...").

2Process Philosophy speaks to the cosmos as metaphysically alive; that it operates more as an organism than as a machine. This moves us from Plato, Medieval concerns, Newtonian Enlightenment, etc into the quantum age of all things. Things which operate processually like evolution, the human body, societies, economics... even God!

3 - Since we don't live in a binary, machine-like cosmology we may confidently state that we want to have an organic processual philosophy and theology (sic, religion of some kind; here, I prefer any process-based religion such as Process Christianity).

4 - Since everything is related to everything else we may thus describe the cosmology we live in as relational and may use terms such as panexperiential, panrelational, and panpsychic to describe this living organism we know as nature and the universe.

5 - Lastly, for those Christians asking this question, my own background comes out a deeply fundamental Baptist tradition which eventually heaved up into evangelicalism. This latter has recently split since the 1980s into conservative vs. progressive evangelical readings and understandings of the bible.

As process theology in naturally liberal and progressive I have simply uplifted my Christian faith (aka, Reformed) by removing bad theologies and replacing them with better, more expansive theology.

Love is the Center. A Loving God is its heart. Jesus is still the atoning, resurrected Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is still enlightening our beggarly hearts :) ... but rather than building on Platonic/Hellenaic/Western-American evangelicalism I've removed it as a foundation and am building upon Process Philosophy and Theology. When doing this it removes a lot of problems theologians have created for themselves over the millennia.

That's it, watch the vids. Enjoy the processual wonders of the human body. Learn to think organically, relationally, and interconnectively. Read Jay's article on the bottom to learn more. And follow through across the many articles you may find here. It's not meant to be hard but it may be helpful.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 8, 2022

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Human Cell, DNA, and Other Animations


DNA animation (2002-2014)
by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno
wehi.tv

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