The alien hypothesis?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

"[...] what may need to be ‘replaced’ in nature, in order to establish 
a social explanation of natural phenomena, is the objectivist concept 
of insentient ‘physico-chemical force’—by an empirically equivalent 
sentient ‘physico-social force.’ The resulting theory of SAC-mediated 
phenomena is subjectivist rather than objectivist, but it nevertheless 
is Newtonian in form (mathematically) because it still is determined by 
his laws of motion reinterpreted in social rather than physical terms. 
Physico-social force is simply that influence or power arising within 
anyone or anything that responds to information received from the world 
beyond itself, whose response in turn tends to reciprocally influence 
the world beyond via information that it itself disseminates in some 
manner.

The abstract ‘carrier’ of the physico-social force thus conceived, to 
borrow a concept from particle physics, and in contradistinction to the 
insentient objects of the objectivist world of OEC, is essentially the 
Leibnizian ‘monad’ (Rutherford, 1995:124-175)—a term here signifying 
any material body (or the elements or parts thereof) that exhibits 
sentient behavior, whether in actuality or only apparently, whether 
‘human’ or ‘non-human’ (in Latour’s usage), whether living or 
non-living. However, Latour’s ‘actant’ is essentially the same thing in 
SAC and will be used in place of Leibniz’s monad. As interpreted here, 
the actant: (1) is an innate sentience and intelligence that underlies 
all existence, (2) is simultaneously both subject and object, (3) is 
manifested through agent causation rather than event causation, and (4) 
encompasses both humans and non-humans to include all systems and 
subsystems thereof down to the elementary particle level. [...]" (Zaman 
2001)

Cf. also Felipe and those "Sentient Rocksters" in GR (pp. 612-3).

best

> See also, e.g.,
>
> http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol002.001/05zaman.html
>
> http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol003.002/zaman.html
>
> Cf. "[...] there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been 
> taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it 
> must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. 
> The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk 
> cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle." (GR 
> 89)
>
> best
>
> On 19/10/2005 Otto wrote:
>
>> This reminds me of Jonathan Culler's "On Deconstruction. Theory and 
>> Criticism after Structuralism" (Cornell Univ., Ithaca, New York, 
>> 1982). Maybe you should check the second chapter "Deconstruction" for 
>> Nietzsche's reversal of cause and effect where it is shown how the 
>> cause is imagined after the effect has been suffered. Got it only in 
>> German.
>