Contemporary Wiradjuri relatedness in Peak Hill, New South Wales.

Wiradjuri Aboriginal people in Peak Hill, a small economically-declining town in central rural New South Wales, have been subjected to a century of government policies included segregation, assimilation, and forced relocations. Despite this local, colonial history Peak Hill Wiradjuri continue to experience daily life in a distinctively Wiradjuri way. To ‘be Wiradjuri’ is to be embedded within a complex web of close relationships that are socially, morally and emotionally developed with both kin and friends, human and non-human subjects. Despite dramatic social and cultural transformations in Wiradjuri meanings and practices of relatedness, the Wiradjuri social world and their ways of self-experience remain informed by past practices. To understand contemporary socialities, and thus the significance of these transformations, this thesis is an examination of the ways in which the moral and emotional order of relatedness governs relatedness, where daily lived experience of shared emotional states can be understood in terms of a language for the self and moral framework. Specifically, this thesis is an exploration of how Wiradjuri people negotiate relatedness in a space in which shared and contrasting Wiradjuri and non-Wiradjuri inter-subjectivities are experienced. This study draws on historical research and ethnographical fieldwork to move beyond an analysis of kinship in terms of structures, roles or values to explore the deeper foundations of emotions and states of being in everyday life

Why red doesn't sound like a bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness

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An Attempt to an Applied Metaphysics

This chapter, describes more in depth the three interrelated motifs that were drawn from Bergson’s oeuvre to inform the further discussions in this study: immediate concreteness, vital impulse and duration. They all relate to a dynamic and fluid worldview, as opposed to a static and analytic one. The concepts are interwoven and reoccur throughout the writings of Bergson. The three motifs all treat the following question: how is ‘discrete individuality’ possible whilst direct experience is always in flux, indiscrete, and holistic? The main point of this reflective and reflexive exercise is to use them as notions for a concretisation of Bergson’s philosophy for contemporary science, first through science and subsequently through a discussion of technology, in relation to the self-creative, or autopoietic, nature of human evolution and its impact on global ecosystems

Time, Life and Memory: Bergson and Neuroscience

An important epistemological convention for scientific research is to make a strict separation between subject and object, between the scientist and that which this scientist observes and experiments upon. This convention becomes problematic, however, when the object of scientific study is the human subject. The conventions within which subject and object are defined come under pressure as soon as the focus of attention shifts towards the study of human consciousness itself. After all, what appears within the scope of our experience is something different that our possibility for experience itself – at least, in most commonly established ontological positions. A key aspect of Bergson’s philosophy is what he refers to as immediate data of consciousness. That which is given in an immediate sense is more basic than either the world of phenomena6 (that which appears to us) or the world of the noumena (that which exists in itself, outside of our experience), but it is even more basic than the subject of knowledge itself (the us to which everything appears). The human mind may capture the intricate mechanism of how a seed grows. Subsequently, the way in which this process is perceived may be studied by studying how the brain registers the shape, scent, colour, etc. of plants. The human soul may be enriched by this experience and the human heart may be touched by the beauty of life, etc., but all these processes presuppose something more primary: the immediacy of experience as such

Life and Time: Bergson and the Life Sciences

In Creative Evolution (1911 [1907]) Henri Bergson discusses the distinction between the living, biotic, and the non-living, abiotic world. The study touched directly upon several of the key developments of his age in biology. Notably evolution theory played a crucial role in his philosophy. In the historical context of the turn of the century, the debate between religious readings of the origin of life and evolution theory had far from quieted down. Evolution theory continued to be seen as controversial due to its negation of the story of the origin of species as it was laid down in Genesis. Biological vitalism appeared to safeguarded the notion of the sanctity of life. Bergson’s vitalism is however of a different nature, preluding views that emerged only decades later, in complex systems theory. This chapter discusses the relevance of Bergson's ideas for the life sciences

Conclusion and Notes on Various Themes

The previous chapters aimed to elucidate the relevance of Bergson’s philosophy for the sciences of his own era, but they also strived to revitalise his views, by extrapolating them to contemporary science. His works were neglected in international discourse for decades. Still, while remaining a respected philosopher in France, some attention for his work persisted elsewhere too: his oeuvre never completely went off the radar. In the past few years, a growing number of academics is reconsidering the philosophical importance of the ideas of Bergson and their relevance for more recent developments in technology and science