Its been more than two years since I've done any writing, except for a couple of minor pieces that probably should have had more thought put into them. My skills are rusty. If I'd taken two years off running and come back to it, there's an entire shelf of books I could use for advice on appropriate workouts and pacing to get me back to where I was. This being writing, though, something I've been doing for longer than running (sadly enough) I'll just jump right back in, do back-to-backs, and hopefully not sprain myself.
Its all just journal entries anyway. No one reads this, despite it being public, and that's one of the benefits of being incommunicado for two years. You may as well be dead. At least the old skin is gone, and a few parts that, like a lizard under attack drops its tail, really weren't necessary to begin with.
I want to return to the point I made yesterday about Animism, about the universe being conscious. Yesterday I mentioned that there was a sense among a certain number of men from a very specific group of families in northern Europe that they and they alone were the only conscious beings in the universe. Everyone else, their wives and children, employees, slaves and servants, their hunting dogs and livestock, the indigenous inhabitants - homo sapiens and otherwise - of every other continent on the planet, were more or less conscious but decidedly less so and most simply not at all. And the more unlike in form something was from that male Hohenzollern scion, the less conscious they were assumed to be; African men might have more consciousness than African women, but less than Hohenzollern women, and so on down the line. This sliding scale infected everything in existence. All agency was assumed to reside in the conscious, and as no one but the Select were conscious they were not capable of agency and so had to have their decisions made for them.
This particular train of thought has always puzzled me. Its difficult to get to that specific frame of mind from the philosophical writings of Descartes or Plato - although reading the personal opinions of e.g. Descartes and Kant is enlightening - and while there's passages in the Christian book of Genesis that justify political hierarchy there's no theory of mind anywhere in the Bible that appears to grant consciousness to some beings and not to others. But I think this account of the motivation of the European aristocracy who laid waste to the world starting in the late 15th century, overwriting virtually all local history until very recently, is probably correct. Its very simple: They didn't think anyone else had a mind but them. They thought they were special. The universe is a very lonely place when you're the only one who's aware.
This concept of specialness is a really important one. It drives much of the investigation practice of the non-physical sciences. Consider the function of warnings against "anthropomorphism" in biology: Biologists are trained from birth to avoid ascribing specifically human motivations to the behavior of other animals. This can work two ways.
First, its just good logical sense not to ascribe your own personal motivations to someone else. This is true of both behaviors in animals we've got communication mechanisms with - in my case, for example, other homo sapiens - but also in animals we don't. For one thing its a pretty standard social convention not to assume someone else is doing something for specific reasons simply because you have the same reasons for doing it; the convention holds because more often than not the assumption is wrong and being wrong can lead to unnecessary misunderstanding and conflict. That we can be wrong about motivations is true whether we're talking about our kids, who have all sorts of reasons for doing things that differ from their parents, the nesting birds outside our window, or the tortoises in the pond at the park. It can take a lifetime to build the trust necessary to properly assume motivations for the behaviors of our spouses. It takes less time to figure out why your dog is doing something, perhaps, and maybe a little longer comparatively for your cat. But its still best to assume that someone has their own reasons for doing something, unless otherwise stated.
But while this convention - properly abstracted into humility about the projects of other beings - may be good science, it isn't the primary reason biologists have traditionally avoided anthropomorphism. The traditional avoidance is instead based on the sense that humans have motivations, and animals have instincts. Notice the distinction between "humans" and "animals": You might have thought that humans were animals, but apparently not. While evolution applies to both, there's a strong desire to find what makes humans unique. (Imagine an analog question asked by a cowbird biologist: What makes cowbirds unique? Would their answer be "cognition" or "language"? To us it would be some very mundane behaviors; to the cowbird biologist it would undoubtedly be something ineffable.) This reflexive or even instinctive push to separate humans from the other animals, to make our species special and distinct in some way from the rest of creation, is what motivates the tabu on anthropomorphism. One can't ascribe motivations to animals other than humans because animals other than humans are assumed not to have motivations, only instincts.
But why is that? When you interrogate the assumption what you find is the very same kinds of claims that used to be made about groups of humans that weren't in that special male group: Inscrutability. Who knows what women are thinking, or why undergraduates major in the things they do? Asians of course are inscrutable, as are Africans in their mute solitude. Only bewhiskered white guys with a glass of port in one hand, a cafe cigar in the other, and a hearty grasp of the King's English can properly express and inspect real motivations and thus achieve agency.
This is obviously just ridiculous. The reason people can tell why their dogs need to go outside to relieve themselves is because they've paid attention to behaviors and drawn justifiable inferences. When we see animals other than humans behave in complex ways, why would we not at least assume they've got a mind? Because we're special, is the response. We're not like the other animals. For one thing, we've got furniture.
Are we really outside of evolution, though? Have we removed ourselves from the mechanisms of natural and sexual selection, from the competition and cooperation for resources that define both individual species, the niches they fit into, and the ecosystems they're part of? Of course not. Evolution as a process is not a game you win, or a level you achieve. If an individual doesn't have any kids their genetic heritage doesn't survive; enough individuals of a specific type don't have kids and that type is gone; enough types in a species, and the species is gone. The fact that we have couches and video games doesn't put us outside of that process. There are lots of species historically that became enormously successful only to see their populations crash dramatically because they altered their environment to the point where the environment became inhospitable, and we are and always will be under the same threat. "Oh but we can move to other planets or make moral decisions to stop burning carbon," you might say; to which I can only ponder, "yes when will we finally get it together to do that?"
Because every species modifies its environment to survive. Our ability to do that doesn't make us special. Fish are covered in a slime of their own manufacture that functions like a wetsuit; while you can claim the difference is the fish doesn't know that its manufacturing or wearing the wetsuit while the human does, I would say its a very short set of degrees between a human who puts on a wetsuit and has no idea how it was manufactured and a fish that knows if it eats certain types of foods it swims faster. Modification of the environment is the very nature of life. As the environment stabilizes the species may find itself with more leisure and evolve behaviors that appear to us to be complex, like the art of the Bowerbird, the play of dolphins, the more playful songs of birds or the vocalizations of parrotlets. But each of those behaviors in and of itself is also a modification, as much a modification as predation. And everything eats, as well: Whether its bison or aurochs munching grass, deer eating baby birds, lions eating gazelles or chimpanzees eating ants, about the only purely symbiotic non-predatory relationship I can think of is the exchange of minerals for sugar performed between mycelium like mycorrhizae and plants. But even within that kingdom, plants lock out other plants: Trees grow to shade out the saplings of other species, weeds shade out other seedlings, vines use other plants to get their share of the sun.
So everything modifies its environment in the course of life. We might even say that is a necessary condition for life: The modification of environment to protect oneself and ensure the individual can thrive. In one case, for protection, we living things manipulate our environment to make us comfortable; in the other, for predation, we manipulate the environment for nutrition.
Tomorrow I want to think through the assumption of specialness and what happens when we flip it around.
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