Can an amoeba be a genius?

By Maria Odete Madeira

What does the notion of genius synthesize? What values? What cultural, social and, above all, political values, are involved here?

Any organism is dispositionally gifted to perform tasks that concern its survival, some organisms exhibit greater ease in the performance of some tasks while others exhibit greater ease in the performance of other tasks. Genius is just a name for those that can maximize these abilities in order to transcend patterns considered normal, but this depends on training, willpower, and also of available means. All of us can be geniuses in different ways. For instance, a "simple" domestic worker, especially gifted to that kind of work, can be a genius, even if society would not classify such a worker as a genius, because it is a type of work without sufficiently relevant social value (no Nobel prize for domestic workers).

In certain societies the genius would be the one who found good solutions to the community's problems, and, not necessarily, for instance, the individual capable of feats of abstract reasoning but otherwise socially awkward and capable of having contra-adaptive responses when put before basic survival problems. Thus, for instance, the pattern of genius, in the first case, might depend upon an ability for common sense thinking and/or for finding good responses to adaptive problems. In such a sense, even an amoeba or any organism that reveals robust adaptive effectiveness can be considered a genius.

All the neurobiological cognitive work is supported by an image space and a dispositional space, supported, in turn, by distinct neural bases activated in the limbic cortices and in subcortical nuclei, whose work depends upon and is inseparable of an integrated organismic work, in permanent interface with the environment. And when we speak of organism we speak of bones, flesh, blood, homeostatic mechanisms, emotions, feelings, etc…

Anaximander - "apeiron"

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Maybe the most important notion of Anaximander' s thinking is the notion of apeiron. The apeiron was described and interpreted by the community of the Greek thinkers, and among them Aristotle (Metaph), as a kind of undifferentiated mixture, without defined limits and rigorously uncharacterizable.

But, in the physical system of Anaximander, every process is conceived as a motion of separation. The apeiron corresponds to an initial chaos, which birthed a vortex that initiated a separation process. In the apeiron exists a principle of latent separation.

The mixture must be interpreted as a state of mutual neutralization of potentially separable opposites, a latent state of indifference.

What is a thing?

By: Maria Odete Madeira

What is a thing (Latin causa)? What do we think, or can think about, when we state and refer ourselves to the word thing? An event is a thing? A feeling is a thing? A thought is a thing? A process is a thing? A system is a thing? Plans, strategies and convictions are things? The beautiful, the good, the bad and the ugly are things? We, the humans, are things? Is God a thing?What makes a thing a thing?

The Latin word causa also means res. From res formed the terms reality and realism. In general terms, the notion of causa applies to all reality and means everything that exists, or can exist.

In scholastic philosophy, res was an attribute of the being, in Thomas Aquinas it was a synonym of quiddity. In modern and contemporaneous philosophy the being of a thing is being an existent, any existent, that, as such, can be thought on and known.

Afairesis, Abstractio or Abstraction

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Abstractio was the term chosen by Boetius for the translation of the Greek term afairesis. Abstractio signalizes a systemic operative cognitive dynamics through which a part, a characteristic or an element of an integrated systemic whole is separated from that same whole upon which it constitutively depends, as concrete existent, particular and contingent, to be constituted (that part) as an object of thought, conceptually existent and available to be approached and cognitively synthesized with a generalizable objective value.