Q Crain > Recent Status Updates

Finished Chpt 1: This chapter was an express overview of CR and an outline of the book.

epistemic fallacy: ontology reduces to epistemology & ontic fallacy: the world determines our knowledge
holy trinity: ontological realism, epistemological relativism, judgemental rationalism
Humean causal law: constant conjunctions; critique: the real, the actual, the empirical

Still quite good. Really love that each chapter is basically 2pages on a thought.

chpt 1 is fantastic overview of the concept of "civilization"; 25p chapt, broken into 2-4p sections.

Very good intro; helps remind that GST is about the "whole being greater than the parts" and process (not things).

Our central source of difficulty is that, long before we are capable of critical rationality, we must learn how to behave, to evaluate ourselves, to interpret success, and to make our various psychic potentials conform to the patterns we are learning. Because this learning is done at an emotional or affective level, an intimate connection evolves between our emotional development and our capacity for self-evaluation.

"We arrive at adulthood with a patched-up psyche that manages on top of compartmentalizations, conflict, and all sorts of unfinished business as long as our environment is sufficiently supportive to keep us afloat."

Great chapter on the psyche system!

"As long as the individual is reasonably successful and enjoys sufficient social validation, processes of partial reinforcement supported by rationalism and other defence mechanisms keep many unrealistic solutions intact."

Ooh! Just described the "simple stable system" of the atom -- protons, neutrons, electrons -- as subsystems in synthesis creating the "novel" characteristics of the atom so that it may participate as a subsystem in another novel system: molecules. Awesome!