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The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.
Evan Thompson Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
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The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.
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Evan Thompson

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

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The organism - there was no other thing she could think to call it - churned and moved as it propelled itself across the ground, the living bodies of animals briefly appearing before being submerged in a sea of bugs as others rose to the surface. And then there were the bones. At first she didn't quite understand what she was seeing. For a moment she believed that they were pieces of wood - limbs of trees picked up by the undulating mass - but when she saw the skull, its jaw hanging open in a silent scream, she understood the horror of what it was. the remains of victims were a part of its body, flowing within the multitude that made up its mass.

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The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than they other.

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Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).

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Evan Thompson

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind