Weekly Thoughts 10/7/23

The other day, I decided to read a chapter or two of Dragon Ball ‘Gamma’ out loud, just to speak in my own home. It’s not something I think much about, and I think it’s probably pretty common, that when I’m alone, I don’t speak; I only speak when there’s another person around to hear it, who’s listening. I wanted to try doing daily affirmations, which to me seem impossible to do, so I figured the first step would be to get used to speaking out loud at home. And it took me fifteen minutes to get started. Several times, I opened my mouth and made the first noise and stopped. I don’t know why it’s so hard to talk at home, but it makes me nervous and anxious. I worked myself up by insisting I should pretend my triceratops Smoochy Pal is listening to me.

Anyway, this week, I want to revisit what I thought last week’s topic was, because I didn’t really get at the ideas I wanted to talk about. As I sit in my room at night, reading these books on evolution, what really strikes me is that as a society, we don’t consider enough how we’re all a part of nature. Western culture has this longstanding tradition of viewing humanity as separate from nature; we aren’t considered animals, the things we make are considered artificial, and the world we made for ourselves is “civilized,” separate from “savage” nature. The implication that non-white peoples were somehow closer to animals than Europeans has been used as an insult and pretext for exploitation for centuries. I’m mostly aware of how this is based in or justified by religious thought, that God created humanity as a special thing separate from the rest of creation, like children put in a sandbox and allowed to let it rip; everything on Earth is our plaything, made just for us, and because it’s so separate from us, we can just trust that it’ll all fix itself through mysterious natural processes and will always be there.

Obviously, as we have been learning much more rapidly in the West over the past couple centuries with the advent of modern Western science, this isn’t the case. The whole sweep of the history of life over the past roughly 600 million years has thrust us and the rest of nature as we know it into existence. We are a part of a grand lineage going back farther than we can imagine, taking on many forms. We are inextricably connected to nature in rather obvious ways that we choose to ignore or give other names. We’re naturally afraid of bugs because some can poison us and others can spread disease; our ancestors spent millions upon millions of years learning this association, and now it’s hardwired into our genes. A similar thing happened with snakes. The basic idea that we can identify the scary predator noises and shapes in the dark speaks to how every animal that led to us evolved around a myriad other animals, and we learned to distinguish the ones that may attack us from those that are simply afraid or neutral.

For a more concrete example, think about elephants. We are exposed to elephants from an early age, as they’re one of the cooler-shaped animals that we can show kids. There’s a ton of baby clothes, dolls, and blankets with elephants on them, and elephant décor is popular through adulthood. I have an elephant statue myself, as a visual pun I can use to tell people to be quiet if they point it out. In some parts of the world, they hold cultural and religious significance. They’re so common in our minds that we forget that they’re crazy. Have you seen their trunks? Their noses are twelve feet long and pick stuff up and twist around like an octopus tentacle. That’s crazy! But of course, humans accept elephants with ease. After all, until a few tens of thousands of years ago, we lived alongside elephants, mastodons, and mammoths all over the planet. They were a common sight, keystone species that turned over the soil and spread plant seeds as they made room for new growth. They appear all over paleo cave art in multiple parts of the globe. We respected them and hunted them. In fact, we would have been some of the only animals able to hunt them, with our tools and smarts, which means all the other predators and scavengers that ate what we couldn’t cut off and drag back home would never have gotten the chance to eat mammoth if it weren’t for us. Our species has a long and significant history with elephants and their relatives, and it’s possible that we wouldn’t have become the species we are today without that relationship. So yeah, no surprise we don’t view them as weird oddities of nature, and look forward to taking our kids to zoos to see them for the first time. Somewhere deep down, we know that our children need to be familiar with that kind of animal.

This connection to nature that we and all living things share is significant and should be something we value and address. Now that we can make such massive and sweeping changes to the environment, we should prioritize safeguarding the natural balance; we want various resources, not to displace and wipe out animals and plants, right? I’m no expert on the subject, but there have to be less impactful ways of getting resources, just as there are better resources to go after. It’s just so, for lack of a better word, blasphemous to purposefully attack nature as we pursue our own industry and then get indignant when someone suggests putting in a little more effort and money – a made-up thing we made up that has no impact on the world outside of us – to hurt nature less. It’s not like we have to poison the water with fertilizer and growth hormones to get food, just like we don’t have to continue using fossil fuels.

Our disregard for our nature as one of many animals is so complete that we assume technology is inherently superior to biology. I think about a quote from a comic, I forget which – it’s an Ultimate Marvel book, I think the quote is from Gregory Stark, but I forget exactly – where someone snidely says (paraphrasing), “the human eye works remarkably well for a camera made from water and jelly.” And I get the joke they’re trying to make there, but it’s fully backwards: Cameras work remarkably well for eyes made from glass and metal. Our eyes have been in development for roughly 600 million years, as you’ll recall, far longer than the paltry one-hundred plus years cameras have been around. They’re exquisite and marvelous tools for picking up high detail information from light, which our brains are able to form into a coherent picture. The fact that we ever figured out how to do anything like that with tools is astounding, for sure, but let’s not get so caught up in ego that we say they’re better than our eyes, that nothing in nature could compete with cameras. Pistol shrimps would laugh at our cameras, with their ultra-HD eyes that can see multiple kinds of polarization and colors outside the visible spectrum of light.

This line of thinking is everywhere in society, and I think the current state of AI tech is a good example of how wrong it is. AI art is derivative and can only exist because of examples of preexisting human art they plagiarize, yet we’re told it will one day replace us all, as an inevitability. Self-driving cars are notoriously terrible at driving, and the more you study the subject, the more it seems like we may never be able to make a computer that can drive like a human, let alone better than one. In general, with computers, we get so caught up in the idea that they’re so “smart” that we forget they’re not smart. They are – as I remember from yet another quote I can’t identify, sorry – “really efficient morons,” able to perform a lot of simple tasks to calculate complex aggregate results really quickly. That’s not intelligence, it’s just a really good tool. Computers can’t put together information into novel ideas or perform any creative task or exercise judgment based on past experiences, at least not outside the restrictive bounds of their algorithms that they, by nature, interpret literally. It may be the case that we can never make a computer that makes truly original creative art, or that can figure out not to freeze whenever a different color bird than the last they were taught about appears in front of them. If we do one day make a true, human-like AI, like the kinds that appear in sci-fi, then we wouldn’t be able to call it a computer or a machine. It would be human-made human, for all intents and purposes, a mind with as much personhood as we have. AI research commonly focuses on how to get computers to operate like human brains, to learn and interpret information like our brains. How about we focus on making the world better for people, instead of trying to make things that do what people do, without being people? Not only is it bad for people, but you’ll just make something that you have to also treat like a person, if you’re truly successful.

This focus on AI and the inevitable superiority of technology is another branch of capitalism devaluing people in their war with labor. Marx said something about how capitalism alienates people from their own labor and bodies, and that feels very true today. If you were born after the industrial revolution, then you were born into a world that asks you to sell your life away for someone else’s benefit, to trade pieces of yourself away. In a recent episode of Factually, Michael Harriot was talking about his new book Black AF History, and he made the argument that the entire engine of the American economy, from its founding, was free or cheap labor: Things were cheaper here because they were produced with slave labor, and after slavery was abolished, capitalism has been at war with workers to keep costs as low as possible; without this devaluing of labor (often along racial, ableist, and gendered lines), America simply wouldn’t have been able to explode onto the economic stage at the pace it did. It’s hard not to see the current moment, with a resurgent labor movement fighting against a new and even more gilded robber baron class that’s trying to replace as many workers as possible with AI, as an inevitable part of that history. Most of the history of the American economy is a combination of exploitive capitalists taking advantage of genuine demand for basic necessities and other such desires and capitalists engineering demand that never existed in order to sell otherwise useless products; all of this on the backs of exploited and underpaid labor.

All of this comes back to the issue of our connection to nature. Capitalists obsessively chase after a human cultural creation, money, to the detriment of the world around them. They let it blind them to their own natures and believe in the fantasy that they’re better than everyone else, that they can and should be able to do whatever they want like gods. They vainly assume that they’ll somehow survive whatever apocalypse they visit upon the Earth in exchange for their money and plan to set up the same system somewhere and somewhen else. They compel us to sell our bodies like simple products, to view ourselves as corrupted pieces that have to be made clean with their products, and to even monetize our identity and personality as a product of our own. They convince us that our bodies are cheap, easily replaced piles of meat that will soon be obsolete when they invent the next great machine, even as they strive to have as many babies as possible to replace us “defective commoners” with their “superior” genes. They commoditize our bodies to the extent that we view different parts of our bodies with different moral values, and cut ourselves into pieces in the most intimate and personal sexual realm. And all the while, they teach us their values and pour their ideology into our lives at every opportunity, convincing us to view ourselves in a similar, removed fashion. The scary part of all of this is that it can happen to anyone; studies show that the wealthier you become, the less empathy you have for others, the more isolated you become, and the more you assume that you’ll simply always have a way to get around any and all consequences and obstacles. What we’ve done with capitalism is, despite its roots in an artificial cultural construct, a great example of what invasive species do. We grow and exploit without a second thought until the world around us dies. It’s what Agent Smith meant when he called humanity a virus, right? He was made by the system that thinks humanity operating like a virus was a good and right thing, and his villainous turn was, like for most AI, reflecting this nature back on all of humanity. We should be trying to prove Smith wrong.

As capitalism creates isolation by taking over more and more of our lives, it’s a common lament that people have nothing to belong to. There are fewer social clubs, organized religion is in decline for the religious, and communities are atomizing around an obsessive focus on individualism. There are many ways to tackle this problem, and I think a productive angle that could help fight back against capitalist excess is to refocus on our place in the natural world. I’m no philosopher, so I don’t know how to articulate such a perspective. But wouldn’t it be nice to look outside your window and see not a world separate from yourself, that excludes you and has nothing to offer you, but a world that you are a part of and have always belonged to? We should be striving for such a perspective switch in as many areas of life as we can, and an easy one would be to have that thought when seeing (preferably native) trees and grass. We can come at it from all sorts of angles; I don’t think we need to have a singularly defined view of how we’re connected to nature, or what it means, just that we recognize the connection and act accordingly. This world wasn’t made for us in an idyllic equilibrium that will always be; it’s changed dramatically to result in the wild diversity we see today, which itself is actually lacking compared to iterations of life in the past. Not only have the organisms not always been here as they are now, but the conditions we need to live – the temperature, oxygen levels, and position of the continents – are all pretty unique and unusual in the long history of the Earth. We should study our history on this planet and the longer arc of nature and make decisions that work for us and are best for the world.

Our written history begins after our rise as the sole hominins, the last, lonely survivor of a mass extinction event that also wiped out the mammoths, rhinos, ground sloths, camels, giant armadillos, and many other grand creatures we used to share space with. Every part of the fossil record that we see where life is robust, there are giant animals that fulfill key roles in the ecosystem. Arguably, with our spread across the planet and massive industry and agriculture in the wake of a mass extinction, we are filling many ecological niches we don’t recognize, because we think our actions are unnatural. In this view, we should be striving to either perform the roles that large animals usually play in nature, to the benefit of the environment, or find ways to get out of the way of nature so that large animals can once again evolve to fill open niches we block. Of course, I’m using this somewhat sterile scientific language because it’s what I know how to use; we should also learn to talk about nature from a common perspective, as a part of our lives.

Another major aspect of this, for me, is rethinking my relationship with my own body. Thinking about my body from the perspective of the grand lineage of nature makes me feel better about it, in some ways. My body isn’t some weak, defective, gross pile of meat that’s holding back my mind; my mind is a part of my body, and my body is regularly performing a wide range of natural wonders. There are entire ecosystems, filled with unique species of microorganisms, that only exist because of me and my specific body. There are so many things our bodies and minds are capable of that we simply don’t teach or study properly. Not everyone can or should train like a Shaolin monk or an Olympic gymnast, but they are a great example of the extremes of physical ability that we are capable of; that’s why it’s fun to watch videos of the slightly more relatable parkour enthusiasts. Our brains are capable of many feats we normally go to computers for, if we train ourselves to think in the right way. Most people are capable of so much more than we teach, and it seems a shame that even when we do teach people to prepare themselves to perform these physical marvels, it’s specifically in the context of earning fame and money through sports leagues and the like. It would be really nice if we encouraged everyone to make use of their bodies in some way as a part of their expression of identity and community. We don’t live to work, and our bodies don’t exist for specific, limited use.

More concretely in my own life, I’ve come to a couple conclusions with this thinking. I want to practice martial arts again, somehow. I could go over technique on my own, but I don’t have space for it, really; no rooms in my house are big enough, and even if I got over feeling silly doing it in my parking lot, that’s uneven asphalt. It would also be better to find other people to practice with, which could easily cost money I don’t have. So I’m still working that out. I also have been looking at my art over the years, and I have this magnetism to pen and ink work, both visually and in memory of the creation process. I don’t dislike the digital work I’ve done, but the physical pen lines and marker-produced blacks are incredible. What I really want for my workflow is to draw and ink the pages in black and white, using pen and markers, and then scan it in for colors and lettering. That’s what my body is good at, or at least what I like using my body for, so I want to focus on how I can best use my body that way.

So yeah, nature stuff! We really need more writers and philosophers in the scientific realm to communicate the ideas and information we have about nature in a way that relates to us as people in our lived experiences. Western science itself has a history of being exclusive and isolating from the rest of society, and has studied the world from the Western perspective of (usually white) human exceptionalism. It would be better for society, our communities, and our relationship with our bodies to have a livelier perspective on what science actually has to teach us.