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The image above began with the ideogram below and the text prompt, "An organism in its environmental niche." I like the direction the AI picked. The result looks almost like a cell crossed with a tree. Its overall feeling is fresh.
The ideogram itself comes from the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. It depicts an organism as a closed system interfacing with an environmental niche through sensors and effectors. Their work, and the concept of autopoiesis that they introduced, always struck me as sensible. And it has far out implications.
Here's a quote from a good blog post about it:
Cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather the act of bringing forth a world through the processes of living as relating. From this perspective, cognition is the basic process of life.
In The Tree of Knowledge, Maturana and Varela suggest that as we are beginning to understand how we know, we have to realize that "the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others." The world-as-we-know-it emerges out of the way we relate to each other and the wider natural process.
How We Relate
This view, that we create the world through our interactions with the world, seems intuitively correct to me. It doesn't preclude the existence of an objective reality, but it does assert that reality as we experience it is produced by our experiences of this reality. Although grounded in Maturana's biology research, this perspective has been criticized as solipsism. But solipsism in people quickly breaks down upon contact with the environment, whereas Maturana's radical constructivism suggests that this environmental contact is a crucial component of the cybernetic system that determines an individual's experience.
To be honest, Maturana and Varela make my brain hurt a little. And most commentary on their work is worse, ranging from dense to unreadable. This is unfortunate, because their work literally describes the structural mechanics of reality creation, which seems pretty important. Especially now, when the known world appears in many ways to be coming apart at the seams.
In my own thinking, I consider the world to be made of stories. Sure, it's made of physical material, too, but I can't make sense of any of that except through stories. And shared stories are the basis for all of society. They coordinate activities and establish the reality of things that would otherwise be mere fantasies, like the powers of laws and contracts.
This is part of why I like working in news media. It gives me a look behind the curtain into how realities are manufactured. And make no mistake, our realities are manufactured. The big question, in my mind, is how to manufacture better realities. If step one was the internet, what is step two?
I think step two begins with learning to harness the potential of networks. Web 2.0 is dominated by corporate powers forcing individuals into online niches to maximize revenue from ads and data sales. The emergence of Web 3.0 promises something better. Public blockchains. Individual control over individual accounts. Censorship resistance. These things aren't trivial. They're stepping stones to better systems.
Grandiosity aside, in the realm of everyday experience, the radical constructivist perspective is a good reminder of the power we all have, with each other, to continually produce new worlds from existing worlds. This power is mostly hidden behind the noise of millions of other things, but it's accessible to everyone.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.