The Human Question

This is a tentative proposal. Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience.  This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived  as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience.  That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements.  That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency).   We'll call that s...