[ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life?

[Mike Dougherty]

2011/12/30  <natasha at natasha.cc>:
> Quoting Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com:
>> If anyone claims to be an expert on Life they are trying to sell you
>> something.  :)
>
> Come on.   Asking for an expert is a gracious way of asking for a skill or
> scholarship in an area while complimenting in the same tone. Bty, BillK and
> Stefano most likely have a prolonged experience with life, a quantifier for
> being experts at life. :-)

So is "a prolonged experience with life" also a gracious way of
calling someone "old" ?   It's a nice euphemism.

I am intrigued by the original question.  I feel like I have some
sense of its direction but not its destination.  Can you elaborate?

2011/12/29  <natasha at natasha.cc>:
>Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and determined by a God?  Why is not the telos of human >consciousness or aim to evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism?

If the context is Aristotle, how do you define "religious" and "God"?

"It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because
we do not see an agent deliberating."
—Aristotle, Physics 2.8, 199b27-9; (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Aristotelian)

'seems like Aristotle has already dispensed with "a god" that drives
the universe.

I imagine this kind of thinking to be analogous to pointing a video
camera at the monitor displaying the camera's output.  The recursion
of image-in-image is very sensitive to the orientation of the camera.
Thinking about thinking (or awareness of awareness) tends to have the
same sensitivity to being toppled by the next "ah-ha" moment.