Recognize the Seemingly Alien Other as Fundamentally Akin to You
Have you ever realized how easy it is to not know something?
No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.
The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers.
Nothing alive is alien to me.
Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination.
Teach us to see the world through different eyes.
The unknowable unknowns are invisible, noiseless and strange.
Everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.
Undermine the instinct to dehumanize "them."
Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Love overcomes prejudice by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form.
The people that you should fear most are the ones who vote like you do—the ones who share meals with you—the ones who adore you. They’ll bless your beauty and ugliness equally. They’ll praise you for the blood in your teeth. They’ll sing an honor song for you as you kick that body lying dead on the street.
Beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.
Do not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values.
Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.
Enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you.
Invisible infrastructure: culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.
Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.
We need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be.
Something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality.
What don’t I know and when will I know I don’t know it?
In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias.
Challenge collective assumptions; turn accepted norms inside out; do not be a clone of the unconsciousness.
The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view.
We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."
The idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.
The relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity, and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.
Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.
I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me.
A poem.
—Facebook comment on an article about the Aurora BorealisMy favorite boss liked to remind methat we don’t know what we don’t know.Sure, there are some things that we knowwe don’t know, like the best treatment for pancreatic cancer,how long the next government shutdown will last,or why our lunchroom sells moldy cakes.Those are all knowable unknowns.The kind of subjects you can ask questionsabout. The kind of questions meaty enoughto chew on for decades.Have you ever realized how easy it isto not know something? If I asked if you knewyour mother’s birthday, you would answeryes, after an uncomfortable pause.If I asked if you knewmy mother’s birthday, you would quickly answer no.We can realize what is unknown to us fasterthan realize what is known. Your mind doesn’t have to shufflethrough the library catalog of your memoryto summon up a non-answerBut the unknowable unknowns are invisible,noiseless and strange—a gap in your teeth that even your tonguecan’t detect, a language made with tonesyou can’t hear, a hole filled with other holes.In 1908, Kristian Birkeland theorizedthat auroras were created when the sun’s ejected electronsdisturbed the Earth’s magnetic field. No one believed himabout the sun. Surely, it was gas or dustor the Earth’s own unruly shrugsthat caused those flickering colors.When he invented an electromagnetic cannon,it exploded in flames in front of his investors.When he used that cannon to createthe first nitrogen fertilizer,his partner took credit and iced him out of the company.For all the things Birkeland knew, he couldn’t have knownthat one day, long after his aurora theorieswere proven correct,we would debate, not the fact of the suncausing auroras, but the fact of whowas causing the sunto cause the auroras.I still don’t know who “they” are, the ones poking holesin the sun. But I do know that my dental hygienist believesthat the reason it didn’t rain this summerwas because of the military satellites,controlled at the army base next door.It’s unclear if she thinks the mysterious “they”were doing so intentionally with their chemtrails and space lasersor accidentally with their overpaid incompetence.I didn’t tell her I worked thereand was neither overpaid nor trained in weather control.I didn’t tell her there really was a building calledthe Cloud Study Chamber,a rusty sphere where they used to study,not clouds, but biological warfare in the 40s.I didn’t tell her I research cancer, not weather.She’d be sure we already had a cure,but were keeping it from her.No, I didn’t tell her, not because of fear,but because she had her fingers in my mouth.Plato thought that learning was just rememberingwhat our souls already knew but forgot.What don’t I knowand when will I know I don’t know it?from Poets Respond
From Rattle.
A delightful book that explores the many different types, forms, and
varieties of senses that exist among the many different creatures of the
world. All the diverse ways that animals can see, hear, taste, smell,
and touch that we can't. Extreme examples for every sense--hearing at
high frequencies and at low, at high volumes and low, etc.--how each
sense has developed in different ways for different circumstances and
uses.
Yong is an informative, accessible, and entertaining writer, and his book is both endlessly fascinating and full of wonder. It leaves readers with new appreciation for both their own sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the world and how unique and distinct is the experience of every other creature. No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.
Yong is an informative, accessible, and entertaining writer, and his book is both endlessly fascinating and full of wonder. It leaves readers with new appreciation for both their own sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the world and how unique and distinct is the experience of every other creature. No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.
Imagine what it might be like to be a mosquito. Flying through a thick sop of tropical air, your antennae slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of carbon dioxide. Enticed, you turn into the plume, zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead whenever you pick it up. You spot a dark silhouette and fly over to investigate. You enter into a cloud of lactic acid, ammonia, and sulcatone--molecules released by human skin. Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat. You land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and other tastes. Your sense, working together, have once again found a human. You find a blood vessel and drink your fill.
-----
Each sense has pros and cons, and each stimulus is useful in some circumstances and useless in others. That's why animals tap into as many streams of information as their nervous systems can handle, using the strengths of one sense to compensate for the shortcomings of another. No species uses a single sense to the exclusion of every other. Even animals that are paragons of one sensory domain have several at their disposal.
-----
Each species is constrained in some ways and liberated in others. For that reason, this is not a book of lists, in which we childishly rank animals according to the sharpness of their sense and value them only when their abilities surpass our own. This is a book not about superiority but about diversity.
That's the idea briefly. Here are more excerpts.
It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.-----The majesty of nature is not restricted to canyons and mountains. It can be found in the wilds of perception--the sensory spaces that lie outside our Umwelt and within those of other animals. To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity and the sacred in the mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden, where bees take the measure of a flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational melodies through the stems of plants, and birds behold the hidden palates of rurples and grurples. . . . Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor and to protect.-----Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.
More to follow.
An Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience--its perceptual world. . . . A multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. . . .Our Umwelt is limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all the is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.-----An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Sense always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner's needs, the sense sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what's irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. . . . Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.-----Johnson suspects that these differences, which some might bill as "disorders," actually predispose people to step outside their Umwelten and embrace those of other creatures. Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.-----The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its sense. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.
More to follow.
John Caprio, a physiologist who studies catfish, says the difference between smell and taste couldn't be clearer. Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not. From birth, we recoil from bitter substances, and while we can learn to override those responses and appreciate beer, coffee, or dark chocolate, the fact remains that there's something instinctive to override. Odors, by contrast, "don't carry meaning until you associate them with experiences," Caprio says. Human infants aren't disgusted by the smell of sweat or poop until they get older. Adults vary so much in their olfactory likes and dislikes that when the U.S. Army tried to develop a stink bomb for crowd control purposes, they couldn't find a smell that was universally disgusting to all cultures. Even animal pheromones, which are traditionally thought to trigger hardwired responses, are surprisingly flexible in their effects, which can be sculpted through experience.-----I noted at the start of this chapter that color is fundamentally subjective. The photoreceptors in our retinas detect different wavelengths of light, while our brains use those signals to construct the sensation of color. The former process is easy to study; the latter is extremely difficult. This tension between reception and sensation, between what animals can detect and what they actually experience, exists for most of the senses. We can dissect a mantis shrimp's eye and work out what every component does, but still never really know how it actually sees. We can work out the exact shape of the taste receptors on a fly's feet without every understanding what it experiences when it lands on an apple. We can chart how an animal reacts to what it sense, but it's much harder to know how it feels.-----People often assume that pain feels the same across the entire animal kingdom, but that is not true. Much like color, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable. Just as wavelengths of light aren't universally red or blue, and odors aren't universally fragrant or pungent, nothing is universally painful, not even chemicals in scorpion venom that specifically evolved to inflict pain. Pain, in warning animals of injury and danger, is crucial to their survival. And while all animals have things to be wary of, they differ in what they must avoid and what they must tolerate. That makes it notoriously tricky to tell what an animal might find painful, whether an animal is experiencing pain, or whether it even can.
More to follow.
If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon as you're allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke. As your fingers run over the surface, they repeatedly collide with invisibly small peaks and troughs, setting up vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips. That's how you detect the subtlest of features, even down into the nanoscale. Movement transforms tough from a coarse sense into an exquisite one. It allows many of nature's tactile specialists to react with incredible speed.-----Most of these hairs only respond to direct contact, but some are so long and sensitive that they will also be deflected by the wind. . . . Like a bird's filoplumes or a fish's neuromasts, they're flow sensors--albeit exceptionally sensitive ones. Even air that's moving at just an inch per minute--a breeze so gentle it could hardly be called a breeze--will deflect them. Watch them under a microscope, and you'll see them fluttering away under the influence of imperceptible currents, while everything around them is still. With a hundred trichobothria on every leg, the tiger wandering spider can tune in to the airflow around its body, in every possible direction. It uses this sensitivity for lethal ends.-----The Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its web when it is hungry. It adds spiral decorations that increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web's ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by smaller prey. When it is famished, every morsel counts. To capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its senses by changing the nature of its web.But here's the truly important part: Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed onto a tense web built by a hungry spider. The spider has effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to attack to its web. The choice depends not just on its neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but also on something outside it--something it can create and adjust. Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness--the extent of its Umwelt--by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider's senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web.-----It is clear that the knifefishes and elephant fishes use their electric fields to sense their surroundings, and even to communicate with each other. Electricity is to them what echoes are to bats, smells are to dogs, and light is to humans--the core of their Umwelt.-----The omnidirectional nature of electrolocation means that of all the sense we have encountered so far, it is perhaps the most similar to touch. "We don't find it weird that we can sense touch all over our body," MacIver says. "Now imagine that's extended out a little bit. That's what the electric sense is like, I think. But who knows what it's like for the fish?" Bruce Carlson, who also studies electric fish, imagines that the fish might feel a kind of pressure on its skin. Conductors and insulators might feel different, just as hot and cold objects or rough and smooth ones do to our fingers. "I can imagine that if I swam past a metal ball, I'd get a small cool sensation like a piece of ice rolling down one side of my body," he tells me. This is speculative, of course, but electric fish really do behave as if they're touching their surroundings from a distance. They'll investigate objects by shimmying back and forth next to them, just like humans running their fingertips over a surface. They'll wrap their bodies around mystery items to get clues about their shape, just as we might grasp unfamiliar things in our hands. Daniel Kish said that he thought about echolocation as a tactile sense: He uses sound to extend his sense of touch and to purposefully probe his world. Electric fish use electric fields in the same way.If all this sounds eerily familiar, think back to how swimming fish create fields of flowing water around their bodies. Objects around them distort those flow fields, and fish can use their lateral lines to sense those distortions. Sven Dijkgraaf called this "touch at a distance," which is exactly what electrolocating fish are doing, only using electric currents instead of water currents. This resemblance isn't a coincidence. The electric sense evolved from the lateral line. Electroreceptors grow from the same embryonic tissues that create the lateral line, and both sense organs contain the same kinds of sensory hair cells (which are also found in your inner ear). The electric sense really is a modified form of touch, repurposed for sensing electric fields instead of flowing water.-----Life exists within the planetary electric field and is affected by it. Flowers, being full of water, are electrically grounded, and bear the same negative charge as the soil from which they sprout. Bees, meanwhile, build up positive charges as they fly, possibly because electrons are torn from their surface when they collide with dust and other small particles. When positively charged bees arrive at negatively charged flowers, sparks don't fly, but pollen does. Attracted by their opposing charges, pollen grains will leap from a flower onto a bee, even before the insect lands. . . .Although flowers are negatively charged, they grow into the positively charged air. Their very presence greatly strengthens the electric fields around them, and this effect is especially pronounced at points and edges, like leaf tips, petal rims, stigmas, and anthers. Based on its shape and size, every flower is surrounded by its own distinctive electric field. . . .Alongside the bright colors that we can see (and the ultraviolet ones we cannot), flowers are also surrounded by invisible electric halos. And bumblebees can sense these. . . .Bumblebees don't have ampullae of Lorenzini. Instead, their electroreceptors are the tiny hairs that make them so endearingly fuzzy. These hairs are sensitive to air currents and trigger nervous signals when they are deflected. But the electric fields around flowers are also strong enough to move them. Bees, though very different from electric fish or sharks, also seem to detect electric fields with an extended sense of touch. And they are almost certainly not the only land-based animals to do so. As we saw in Chapter 6, many insects, spiders, and other arthropods are covered in touch-sensitive hairs. If these hair can also be deflected by electric fields, and Robert suspects they can, the electric senses might be even more common on land than in water.
It is an immense, amazing world.
From a news journal in my state, a letter from the attorney general to a school district:
Excerpts:
Our office has received allegations that schools within your district maintain books in their libraries which contain normative views on sexual orientation, homosexual marriage, gender identity, and transgender issues. . . .Schools violate religious liberties when they undertake "unmistakably normative" instruction. . . .This necessarily means that books containing normative messages regarding LBGTQ+ issues may not be made readily available to all underage students on library shelves. . . .
"Normative." Of, relating to, or determining norms or standards. So what exactly does it mean to "contain normative views?" My assumption in this context is that it means any portrayal of anyone LBGTQ+ as acceptable, as anything other than deviant from the "norm" and in need of changing.
As I wrote in Room for Everyone:
People are naturally tribal and xenophobic, cooperative with their in-group while hostile to out-groups. The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers to move others from "out-group" to "in-group."Books are a form of contact by proxy. Readers come into contact with characters. Seeing them, hearing them, spending time with them helps readers understand them more fully as human. It undermines the instinct to dehumanize them. . . .All reading and stories do that. About all characters. It is inherent to the process.So, of course, social and political identities that are based on a narrowly defined in-group that stands in opposition to others cannot allow itself contact with those in out-groups, nor can it allow members to read stories by or about those others. The group's identity is defined in contrast to those others, who must be considered deviant, wrong, and lesser for the identity to hold. Not human in the same way they are. A threat. Admitting those others as equally valid and fully human threatens the group identity. Reading stories that humanize them is a threat. So they don't want their children exposed to stories that validate the experiences, feelings, perspectives, and shared humanity of those they consider out-group. . . .Of course, the reason I am a librarian, a pusher of stories, is because I believe in the power of books to create more contact and bring us closer to eliminating out-groups entirely. I believe in the humanity of everyone, and think more books and more stories will help us all appreciate each other more.
Libraries need to not only provide books with normative views on sexual orientation, homosexual marriage, gender identity, and transgender issues, we need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be human.
That, to borrow from Ed Yong above, "everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience." That "every [person] can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within [their] own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world." That "no two [people] experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing."
We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."
An essay.
The feeling of compassion or pity (misericordia) for the elephants went hand in hand with the belief that elephants have something in common with us. The Latin word Cicero used to describe this common ground was societas, meaning union, association, fellowship, a community of belonging. His report raised issues that recur throughout ancient Greek and Roman philosophy: who belongs with us? Our family? Our tribe? Our nation? What about strangers, foreigners? Do we share societas with fellow human beings no matter their native city-state?These questions were considered essential because their answers determined the limits of moral obligation. The scope of our duties was thought to be restricted to those beings with whom we have fellowship. To belong to the community (koinônia in Greek) is to be akin (oikeîos). To have kinship is to be bound with your fellows by bonds of friendship (philia). It was in response to the perceived breaking of those bonds that the Roman crowd cursed Pompey, judging his slaughtering of the elephants to be a grave injustice.Questions about who belongs to our shared community, and the duties that community demands of us, were asked long before Cicero and Pompey. Indeed, one of the earliest philosophers to articulate this perennial question was the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles, a 5th-century BCE native of the city-state of Acragas (now Agrigento) in southwest Sicily. His unusual and radical views on our moral community continue to resonate today. . . .The significance of Empedocles lies in his view that all living beings belong to a single community or lifeworld, which is governed by a universal law of justice. As reported by Aristotle, Empedoclesbids us kill no living creature, says that doing this is not just for some people while unjust for others, ‘Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky/Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth’s immensity.’ . . .Whatever we make of the religious metaphysics, the ethical implications are stark: there is kinship between plants, fungi, other animals and humans, the living other being ‘one of us’ because either it is or might be a daimôn in reincarnated form. Therefore the basis for Empedocles’ universal law of justice are the bonds of fellowship binding us to other living things; it is the law governing a form of community – even if most of us don’t recognise it. . . .Empedocles compares the creation of a cosmos teeming with life, starting with only four rhizômata and two cosmic forces, to the way in which painters are able to represent ‘trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-bred fish’ starting from a basic palette of colours. Despite appearances, all living things are made from the combination, in various proportions, of the same material stuff. There is no such thing as absolute birth or death, only a ‘mingling and interchange of what is mingled’. . . .For Empedocles, given the primordial promiscuity of living nature, we ought to see life forms not only as rooted in the same matter but also as products of the same generative forces. There is nothing special about human beings, no design or designer setting us apart. . . .Empedocles believed that all living things, including plants, have a share of intelligence (phrónêsis) and thought (nóêma). This view is important for Empedocles’ vision of the lifeworld. Whereas shared matter might not be taken to ground moral value, the form of a living body is crucial. For a body to have the relevant form is for its behaviour to be intelligible as displaying understanding of its situation. If it is the possession of cognitive faculties that makes humans and animals akin, shouldn’t we include plants and fungi – as recognisably intelligent problem-solvers able to make sense of their surroundings and respond accordingly – within the community to which we belong? . . .Empedocles’ solution to the prejudice, dogmatism and narrow-mindedness afflicting existence differs from that of the modern impartialists. The answer is not to try to adopt an impersonal, God’s-eye perspective, foregoing all and any relationships as the inexorable source of ethical harm. It is instead to strive to forge new bonds or to recognise bonds that already exist. It is Love that allows us to do this. Whereas Strife sorts like with like, atomising the cosmos into homogenous parts, Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Thus, Love overcomes prejudice not by overcoming partiality but by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form. The highest such form is partiality towards the living as such.To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you. Revising and widening the Stoic maxim, the Empedoclean position can be captured in the proposition: I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me. From this higher standpoint, the relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all. . . .There is a difference between having relations with individuals to whom we owe special obligations and a world governed by the spirit of friendship. After all, we cannot be friends with everyone. Authentic friendship demands the intimate sharing of a life, which limits the number of friends we are able to have. Empedocles’ point is that friendship is possible across the species-barrier because we belong with living beings within the same world, one able to be animated, once again, by the spirit of Love. It is just that we are too blind to see it, as we are naturally drawn through Strife to what is comfortably familiar, to those who are ‘one of us’. The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other, not by impartially observing them or adopting a theoretical attitude, but by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view. Excessive, dogmatic partiality can be overcome only by widening the scope of our relationships – by opening our eyes – and not by sundering the ties that connect us to the world and to each other.
There is nothing new under the sun.
An essay.
No one can say exactly when, or even if, this technology — artificial general intelligence (AGI) — will arrive. Yet the idea of it is already shaping budgets, careers, and policy. The story of AGI is acting like infrastructure for the tech, inspiring the systems and structures needed to actually bring it to fruition.This is not an anomaly. Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination. Jules Verne’s novels prepared readers for submarines and space travel. Star Trek’s communicator device inspired engineers to create the mobile phone. Douglas Engelbart’s famous “Mother of All Demos” showed a mouse and hypertext before most people had touched a computer — a generation of researchers left his talk determined to build what they had just seen. . . .We usually think of infrastructure as bridges, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. But beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.Progress rests on multiple layers. At the top is hard infrastructure: bridges, laboratories, power grids, and rockets. Beneath that lies soft infrastructure: laws, institutions, and systems that make the hardware useful. And beneath both rests a third layer: invisible infrastructure. Culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing. . . .Scientist Michael Nielsen has given us a useful term for understanding how culture shapes progress: the hyper-entity. He defines it as an “imagined hypothetical future object or class of objects” — something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality. . . .Memes aren’t just trivial distractions. The most powerful ones act as cultural infrastructure in miniature: accelerators that can shift public behavior, set the tone of whole industries, or make far-off futures feel urgent. If hyper-entities are the foundations of cultural life, memes are the sparks that can change its direction almost overnight. . . .Sparks don’t always start the fires you want, though. The same speed that makes memes powerful also makes them volatile. And what’s true for memes is true for culture more broadly: It doesn’t always drive society forward.The pattern is simple. Culture magnifies, but it does so indiscriminately — it can amplify fear as easily as hope, mistrust as easily as trust, and rigidity as easily as flexibility. Sometimes culture stalls innovation. . . .I’ve noticed how often people look puzzled when asked to imagine positive futures. They can easily list disasters — pandemics, climate collapse, runaway AI — but when pressed for hopeful scenarios, they hesitate. That hesitation is telling. It shows how little scaffolding mainstream culture gives us for constructive imagination.In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias . . .It means that when people reach for cultural references to make sense of the future, the ones closest to hand are almost always bleak. . . .If we want hopeful culture to have a fighting chance, commissioning and supporting art that portrays positive futures may matter as much as funding labs.That suggests a concrete step: treat culture as a line item in the portfolio of progress, just as we treat laboratories or laws. That means commissioning stories, funding prototypes, testing memes, and backing the kinds of cultural experiments that can scale. If culture is infrastructure, we should budget for it, using economic infrastructure as the bridge that turns imagination into reality. . . .Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.
Stories have power.
A poem.
after Luigi Mangione“We must have gun control,”say the people who celebratethe murder by 3D pistolof a bureaucrat. Ah, lookat all the modest despotsreading their poems aboutpeace. “I’m against the deathpenalty,” say the people whocelebrate the public executionof a bureaucrat. Ah, lookat all the little tsars, decidingwithout trial who is and isn’tworthy of death. Shall we buildthe gulags in North Dakotaor the Upper Peninsulaof Michigan? “Love isthe answer,” say the peoplewho write odes to handsomeassassins. Look! The audiencehas gathered in the arenato watch their favoritegladiator. Ah, don’t we allworship the axe and swordwhen they’re wielded againstthe proper enemies? Letloose the lions on the sinners!Let loose a trinity of bulletson the bureaucrat! Comehere, let me give yousome advice. The peoplethat you should fear mostare the ones who votelike you do—the ones whoshare meals with you—the ones who adore you.They’ll bless your beautyand ugliness equally. They’llpraise you for the bloodin your teeth. They’ll singan honor song for youas you kick that bodylying dead on the street.from #89 – Fall 2025
I am grateful for memes.
Do not be a person who adds to the thoughtlessness of the time. . . .An alternative ideal: a person who does not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values. . . .Some are called to be prophets, being annoyingly vocal in challenging collective assumptions. Some are called to be comedians, turning accepted norms inside out. Some are called to teach and any teacher responding to the demands of dharma always teaches release from samsara in an awakened approach to the particular subject. Many are parents, who can raise their children not to be clones of the unconsciousness but alert in their own ways. These parents invite their children out of the palace of unknowing even as they give them a loving home. All of us, in our humanity, are called to rise above the rat race and enjoy our originality.
Be reflective, inquisitive, and analytical.
Have you ever realized how easy it is to not know something?
No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.
The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers.
Nothing alive is alien to me.
Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination.
Teach us to see the world through different eyes.
The unknowable unknowns are invisible, noiseless and strange.
Everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.
Undermine the instinct to dehumanize "them."
Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Love overcomes prejudice by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form.
The people that you should fear most are the ones who vote like you do—the ones who share meals with you—the ones who adore you. They’ll bless your beauty and ugliness equally. They’ll praise you for the blood in your teeth. They’ll sing an honor song for you as you kick that body lying dead on the street.
Beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.
Do not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values.
Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.
Enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you.
Invisible infrastructure: culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.
Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.
We need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be.
Something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality.
What don’t I know and when will I know I don’t know it?
In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias.
Challenge collective assumptions; turn accepted norms inside out; do not be a clone of the unconsciousness.
The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view.
We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."
The idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.
The relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity, and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.
Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.
I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me.
posted by Degolar @ 7:21 PM
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