Exit Music (notes)

* And epistemological, ontological, ethical too

Another Mastodon thread, this time on my panpsychist-leaning view on how to think of consciousness as a relational process of hierarchical bundling.

It might be a bit too compressed for easy unpacking, but if any of these ideas make sense to you, I'd love to hear from you!

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Current metaphysics/epistemology/ontology/ethics:

All is alive; consciousness is just the interior mentality of all stuff.

But “thingness”, that is, the idea of standalone objects, is an illusion; not only do objects not exist outside of relationship to other things, but thingness itself is no more than pure bundles of relationship, cohering conditionally for the time being.

Selfhood is the consciousness aspect of these coherences.

Consciousness is nested through the cohering of these relational bundles, such that “a consciousness” can appear conformed to the shape of a human being, but can also appear conformed to the shape of a fox, or a mycelial network, or a town, or a culture, or a bioregion, or a planet. (Again, these aren't things in themselves but temporarily cohering bundles of relations.)

The existence of a particular human-shaped consciousness does not preclude the existence of a gut-biome-shaped consciousness or a watershed-shaped consciousness that overlaps with that particular human-shaped consciousness. But nested consciousnesses are of different orders such that they do not seem to be aware of their continuity with that which they contain, and that which contains them.

(Our gut bacteria don't seem all that aware of the consciousness of the human that contains them; what does that imply about the world, or the bioregion, or the culture, or the society, that contains us?)

As such, selfhood is also non-exclusive, overlapping, entangled, multi-scale and multi-order.

I should point out here that our default stance of treating the world mechanistically and assuming that most things are not conscious, is an epistemic choice, in the same way that treating the world as a fantastically complex, living, feeling, thinking being, is also an epistemic choice.

However, the story of modern colonial societies is that we have repeatedly assumed the unaliveness, or the consciouslessness, or the unintelligence, or the inferiority, of other beings, and have repeatedly found ourselves totally wrong.

There is a moral question that therefore emerges out of our choice of frame – unalive world or alive, intelligent, overlapping, nondual world: are there any choices in our life that we would make differently if we knew the whole world was fully alive, all the way up and down and inside and out?

And given how many times we have been wrong about the aliveness and intelligence of other beings, wouldn't it seem more prudent to act on assumption of the aliveness of all things?

BTW this is not to say that, because all things are alive, either we should try not to kill anything, or we should feel ourselves justified in killing anything with equal abandon.

Rather, living systems depend on violence. They do; there's no way around it. But there is such a thing as violence that is regenerative, and violence that is degenerative. Regenerative violence between members of a living system ultimately results in the continued flourishing and complexification of the living system. Degenerative violence seeks, or results in, the elimination of members, and therefore relations, from the system.

This goes back to how I think of the process of life itself: living systems – and by “systems” I mean creatures fractally in regenerative relationship with each other – emerged through a process of counter-entropic complexification. This is what life does; this is what the universe does too, manifestly. “Is there life beyond Planet Earth”? How's the water today, boys?

So as such, I think of ethics more generally as wisdom frameworks baked into the fabric of life itself, about how to support and perpetuate the flourishing of living systems.

I have more on this – about how AI relates to all this, where I talk more about these “orders” and “kin”. But it's 2am, so that will be for another time.

* Yeah, this is kinda panexperiential dual-aspect monism, with a helping of nestedness and a heaping of complexity/emergence. I haven't seen all this stuff put together this way before, but sure, I'll go and try to read Whitehead or whomever.