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Sensory Ecologies, Rethinking Nature - Coggle Diagram
Sensory Ecologies, Rethinking Nature
A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans by Jakob von Uexkull
Unwelt after Uexkull
Life is about how matter interacts within interconnected systems
The nature of the alleged gulf between humans and (other) animals of course has ethical implications, because it helps determine how we treat them,
any imputation of complex awareness or humanlike consciousness in nonhuman entities might take away the license of researchers to tinker with suffering nonhuman bodies.
Science is reductionist
fear of teleology as nonscientific leads scientists to accept true purpose only at the level of evolved structures or human consciousness.
Even nonliving systems use up available energy, cycling matter and growing until their natural teleological task is finished.
Metahuman neural network = Forming scientific pictures of the universe with the aid of instruments and the cross-checking and peer reviews of scientists, despite political and corporate corruption of scientists,
Growth of org in single temp range = secret consensus (Doolittle)
organisms perceive worlds separately
worlds are necessarily incomplete
Language = a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.” (Blanchot)
Alan Turing defined a conscious computer as one that would be able to consistently persuade humans that it had a genuine inner self, a cyber-Umwelt.
Genetic determinism does not tell us how, if I tell you to close your eyes and think of a pink tree, you can do that, any more than it tells us how you can understand that you are alive in a world that exists.
Life has also hit upon many ways to moderate its use of available energy, which has allowed it to last far longer than nonliving complex systems that deplete energy.
Procrustean perception
= evolutionary expediency forces us (unless we are mad or drugged) to conceive of this world as whole despite being formed from data fragments
Our strength at connecting one thing to another, arbitrarily, by inventing signs, such as the color schemes displayed by countries on their flags, may well be our special strength, ou
Like humans, Mosquito: floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.
Cleverness = linguistic, thought-based power
Crutch for our phys weakness
The most confounding quality of our “intelligence” is its lack of wisdom: we use our know-how to plunder as quickly and greedily as possible, cheating each other, hoarding luxuries, organizing corporations on the basis of quarterly reports,
Uexkullian = notion of distinct perceptual univ for each animals
perceptions, communications, and purposeful behaviors as part of the purpose and sensations of a nature that is not limited to human beings.
natural selection is inadequate to explain the orientation of present features and behaviors toward future ends—purposefulness.
Natural selection = editor, not creator
Uexkull dismisses the notion that natural selection can account for the character of life he considers most important: the interlinked purposeful harmonies of perceiving organisms.
Turing Gaia
= What is purpose may not be creationist or Darwinian
postulation of a human-like consciousness orchestrating natural purposes from a vantage point outside of time and space =
master plan
semiotics
—the study of signs—being, according to John Deely, “perhaps the most international and important intellectual movement since the taking root of science in the modern sense in the seventeenth century.”
Living Cell = Semiotic Atom
Semiosis = meaning making
Uexkull Intro
Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?
Physiology: tick is a machine
Biologist: tick is machine operator
Brain cells for orderly cooperation
Half are perception cells
Half are effect/impulse cells
specific perception signs, join together to form the qualities of the external things which serve us as perception marks for our actions.
the connection between a living subject and its object. These take place at an entirely different level: between the subject’s perception signs and the object’s stimulus.
While we said before, “There can be no living subject without time,” now we shall have to say, “Without a living subject, there can be no time.” (or space)
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn
signs are alive
Signs do not just reside in sounds, events, or words, bodies or minds
alive insofar as it will come to be interpreted by a subsequent sign in a semiotic chain that extends into the possible future.
Signs have worldly eff ects even though they are not reducible to physical cause-and-eff ect.
remeinds me of Chaos Theory (butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil...)
interpretant
new sign that interprets the way in which a prior sign relates to its object.
Ongoing process of sign production and interpretation
increasingly captures something about the world and increasingly orients an interpreting self toward this aboutness.
The mind or self = product of semiosis
All semiosis (and by extension thought) takes place in minds-in-the-world.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Forestry School
Why do you want to major in botany? → “I was born a botanist…that plants colored my dreams, that plants had chosen me?”
I chose botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together.
Goethe: “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.
This phenomenon—the colored afterimage—occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.
When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge.
Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other?
When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.
Non-traditional scientific questions
Why do they stand beside each other when they could grow alone? Why this particular pair?
It was an
architecture of relationships
, of connections that I yearned to understand.
The advisor told me that science was not about beauty, not about the embrace between plants and humans.
Science sep observer de observed, by definition beauty could not be a valid scientific question.
No one asked plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was “How does it work?”
The guide nods and replies with downcast eyes. “
Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.
”
Jeffrey Burton Russell writes that “as the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness of reality cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone.”