Opening of the Way

Ontology is the philosophical study of being

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

Having reached a point decades ago where it seemed like my career had been boxed in, turned into something just to get money, and that becoming more and more difficult.

What had been lost was the feeling that it was about the work itself and the skills being used.  What was being lost was the conviction that it was all and ends activity, something which had value in and of itself.

So I started trying to broaden my education.  I needed to learn new things, needed to go further than I had.

So I came across the works of Maturana and Varela, in Chile, and particularly their book Tree of Knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0877736421/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Autopoiesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

The book has lots of pictures.  But it is also a rare book that I could not assimilate it just by skimming in the book store.

More than anything, I think it does a tremendous job of showing us how deeply embedded into popular psychology we find Social Darwinism.  And it completely debunks this.  It challenges us to grow and to change how we think about ourselves and about society.

We are told of how things are effected by events, and we are told to look at ourselves as quite autonomous.  And we are told about biological adaptation.

But this book in great detail shows us how there is always a couple to the environment, and that what things which happen are simply being triggered by outside events, but that potentiality had to have been there already.  And we are told about Phylogenic Drift, as opposed to biological adaptation.

This book changed me greatly and sent me in directions that I finally decades later feel are finally starting to pan out.

Ontology is that other way of looking at things instead of Epistemology.



Miles Davis - Call It Anything (Miles Electric)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMYVvjoXf4o