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8:1

(In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

We live in a relationalist universe. It is not relativist, and it is definitely not dualist, in either a Platonist or in any other sense. Which leads to complications when we humans, with our limited perspective – for understandable reasons, a strictly anthropocentric one – and our expedient but extremely selective and elucidating perception apparatus, are going to form a picture of the world and everything that transpires in our environment. What we see and apprehend is a world filled with clearly delimited things: chairs, tables, and pots and pans that are either standing on the stove or inside cupboards, if they are not lying around somewhere cluttering up where they really have no place being. But these clear delimitations constitute a mixture of wishful thinking and simplifications that are dictated by functionality. We must be able to orient ourselves and act in order to survive. In reality, the world consists of more or less impermanent and fuzzily delimited phenomena, where it is the system’s organisation that determines their function and properties to an infinitely greater extent than the phenomena in themselves. These systems are changing all the time and are in incessant and infinitely complex interaction with all other systems, which also keep changing all the time. This means that the constant conflict between form and matter is illusory. Form is matter, matter is form. There is no conflict between the one and the other. The world is a whole thing, but it never stays the same from one moment to the next.