Alan Watts and Mitchell Resnick

The excerpts from Mitchell Resnick are taken from his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.

Resnick
"In the common perception of the Newtonian universe, the idea of 'mutual interaction' is de-emphasized. When people think of interactions in the Newtonian universe, they think of one object acting on another. One object acts as the cause, the other object receives or suffers the effect. One object is in control, the other is acted upon. Most of the attention goes to Newton’s first two laws of motion, which focus on how a force influences the motion of an object. Much less attention goes to Newton’s third law, which focuses on the reaction that accompanies every action." (page 12)

"'[C]reature-oriented' programming languages tend to treat the environment as a passive entity, manipulated by the creatures that move within it. This view, not surprisingly, matches the way many people view the Earth itself." (page 34)

"People often seem to think of the environment as something to be acted upon, not something to be interacted with. People tend to focus on the behavior of individual objects, ignoring the environment that surrounds (and interacts with) the objects." (page 142)


Watts
"Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." (Psychedelics and Religious Experience)

"What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior, as much as its behavior is your behavior. It is mutual. We could say it is transactional. You are not a puppet that your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet that you push around. They go together…" (Myth and Religion)

The aim of this blog

My (humble) aim in this blog is to illustrate ways in which the ideas and reasoning given in Alan Watts's writings and lectures echo those in a wide variety of other disciplines.