The website reflects a personal intellectual quest. At its simplest it reflects an impatience for science and theology to both grow and change. Looking forward, the impatience reaches for a more sound view of evolution that is robust enough to both meet the current challenges in the theory and to enable a reformed foundational philosophy.

The birth of Modern philosophy and science in the seventeenth century was a productive starting point. Now it is realized that this philosophical foundation is rotten (see citations from Nietzsche to Nagel). It is unfortunately less well understood that these foundations also compromise biology, the science born after Modernism. The assumption of an observer against physical reality was passed over to biology as the organism in relative independence from its physical environment. Nowadays the line between organism and environment are blurred in many ways – evo-devo, niche construction, widespread symbioses – not to mention the crucible at the origin of life (see references in Sources section).

These points hint at the intermingled issues in philosophy and biology. The opportunities are greater and less well appreciated. The promises of discovery and theory in biology and cognitive science (e.g., concepts in macroevolution, systems biology, extended mind) offer untapped vistas for how the individual-environment relationship will be recast. The twenty-first century is then a time of paradigm hunting, much like the seventeenth, where our basic concepts including agency and language are most probably going to be folded into the evolution frame. Even god at least qua auto-organization is likely to come to the foreground when the evolutionary narrative moves into its majesty from the restricted species parade. My own emphasis has been on the nature of the environment/reality as arising in the human evolutionary epoch.

So, this site celebrates the Paradigm Hunting of our time. The key sections to support and celebrate the paradigm hunting possibilities are in Circles and Sources. The former has a handful of my (unpublished) writings since 2004 while the latter is a large collection of citations culled from 20 years of note-taking. My use of this website shifted to using it somewhat like a study aid; I added all my collected citations into the Sources section of this website and organized them somewhat. If you are a researcher on similar themes, then this resource should hopefully be a resource to you as well. It can be useful to start at the complete list of references instead of at the categories list.

In the Circles section I would recommend my two manuscripts from 2013 – Systemism: The Reality of Life and the Life of Reality and Self-organizing Reality: An Hypothesis. Both concern the connections between the older concepts of environment or reality with newer concepts such as common ground and affordance theory from cognitive science (see citations from Tomasello or Chemero).

Now, at the beginning of 2015, this website is 14 years old. The site began as “Epistemology Express” (explaining the URL) as I began with an interest in naturalistic epistemologies as inspired by Gregory Bateson. But this was a misnomer from the beginning as “Anti-epistemology Express” would have been more accurate since I was actually against most of traditional epistemology, the study of truth in knowledge. The site still contains a section The Epistemology Express that chronicles the years 2000 to 2003 as the RV of that name and I traveled around N. American universities. It was a wonderful time of meeting people including those of the professorial type at universities and those assorted other types at RV parks interspersed with time-outs to write or take a job. It and the My Niche section also document somewhat the years 2003 to ‘06 at the Esalen Institute where I got lucky and met Pamela, the woman of my life. This My Niche section includes a bio and a loose assemblage of the years since 2006 including photos.

For an overview of the current state of this evolving site see the Site Map. Alternately, hit the contact button below, tell me about important new ideas, and start another circle.

Tangentially, there are photos only in the My Niche section and in the Epistemology Express web tree especially in the Road Trip and various trip journal sections under it. The latest journal (4) gives a glimpse of our life since the RV trip ended. And here is a link to the First Introduction as well as the Introduction from 2011.