Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics. They seem an odd couple
like raisins and numbers though they elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and
religions for example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the
other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners gluons to
physicists prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities or many perspectives on
one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza:
natura naturans natura naturata. Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material
processes in spacetime. Each structure or event-storm clouds forming nature natured-is
self-differentiating self-stabilizing and sometimes self-disassembling each alters or
transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses
to which neither thinker had access though physics and biologyconfirm their hypothesis beyond
reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is reality divided:nature vrs. lived
experience? Or is experience with all its meanings and values the complex expression of
natural processes?
