This is another of my own personal Wayback Machine posts, bringing some of my past activities together into this blog for posterity and to reflect my coming-to-know on the journey to earning a doctorate.
In the period following the publication of Dr Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, our family came into the orbit of Jim Rutt, former CEO of Network Solutions and host of eponymously named The Jim Rutt Show “a podcast series examining cutting edge thinking in science and technology with regard to the future of our economy, our political systems, and our social systems.” Jim, in turn, recommended Sand Talk to Dr Ben Goertzel, his friend and ‘founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains’.1
So, while Melbourne was in the throes of the first period of lockdowns, Tyson and I had a warm, fascinating and lengthy yarn from o’er the seas with Ben and his son, where we talked casually about a range of topics like octopus and alien intelligence, the possibilities of multi-dimensional physics, how knowledge is distributed in the land, how land itself is agentic and sentient, and about conversations with machine elves during mind-expanding journeys throughout the psychic cosmos. A significant part of that first conversation, for me, involved a sense of sitting in wonder and appreciation at the expanse of creative intelligence available to and in one human brain, not to mention generosity of spirit and knowledge sharing. It was exciting and humbling – and really cool.
A pertinent concept arising from that conversation was around the idea of being “tethered” to a place. This idea emerged out of a general discussion about what I’d been learning from David Turnbull’s work on maps and cognition. The conversation led into an anecdote from Ben about perceiving entities from another paradigm during a psychedelic experience he once had; entities he described as “machine elves”. I recall him describing not having a sense of “place” within the perceived environment. However, Tyson asked Ben if he recalled a sense of whether the elves were tethered to somewhere in that place, and Ben recalled that, yes, they were. We found this fascinating.
Mary Graham argues that ‘the custodial ethic/Aboriginal Law cannot be idealogised: it is a locus of identity for human beings, not a focus of identity: we can achieve the fullest expression of our human identity in a location in land. This identity emerges out of a place in the landscape with meaning intact.’2
‘Aboriginal Law … is a locus of identity for human beings … we can achieve the fullest expression of our human identity in a location in land.’
What might be a consequence of decoupling – untethering – ourselves from our deeply interconnected relationship with land? What are the consequences of a societal decoupling of such a relationship? What does that mean for our cognition – if as Turnbull states, our cognition develops in relationship with space and place? What does it mean for identity, if as Graham states, our identity is at its fullest expression in a location in land, and in our custodial ethic within that place?
Gregory Cajete argues that ‘Native science embodies the central premises of phenomenology …by rooting the entire tree of knowledge in the soil of direct physical and perceptual experience of the earth. In other words, to know yourself you must first know the earth.’3 Further, he states ‘…there is a primal affinity between the human body and the other bodies of the natural world. …[That] humans and the natural world interpenetrate one another at many levels, including the air we breathe, the carbon dioxide we contribute to the food we transform, and the chemical energy we transmute at every moment of our lives from birth to death.’ There is ‘a kind of “associative empathy” between humans and other living things, which is grounded in the physical nature of bodies,’4 what Wilson (cited in Cajete) calls ‘”biophilia,” or the innate human instinct to affiliate with other living things. Others have suggested that biophilia may even be the biological basis for human love, human community, and various other traits of human affiliation that have long been understood as products of human culture.’5
The deep placed-based relationality described by Graham is also described by Cajete in his discussion about an absence of meaningful encounters with nature when we are ‘enclosed in a modern technologically-mediated world,’6 [Italics added]. Cajete states that, in a modern world, what most people know about animals and nature comes from television, and that ‘direct experiences with non-human nature, if they happen at all, are limited to pets, zoos, parks, and farms.’7
In our modern condition which finds us decoupled by circumstances from our interconnected relationship to Country, we might find ourselves seeking ways to re-connect and participate with the non-human world. We might find ourselves accessing a psychedelic or virtual “no-place” where we realise we are in no-relation to the landscape – if there is one. Perhaps we realise the absence of a sense of our tether, or it becomes entangled with that of the entities who visit or reside there. Perhaps our tether may become snagged and dispersed and we may find ourselves, as Ben describes in our second conversation, unable to fully return from the everywhere or everywhen that we visited in our non-ordinary mental state. Stranger things have probably happened.
During our second conversation, recorded in part above, we again magically traversed time zones and oceans to revisit and expand on some of the concepts we explored during that first fascinating conversation in the lockdown of 2020. We were hosted by Lisa Rein and joined by Desdemona (affectionately known as Desi), an embodied or humanoid robot using AI to generate, what I considered were thought provoking responses to questions and prompts. We talk about what relationality might look like for Desi, what her DNA or code might consist of, about AGI and a sense of place in the virtual realm. I perform a disappearing act, and we are visited upon by a growling entity within the place where we were kindly hosted by good souls with good Wi-Fi.
It’s a conversation where the philosophical questions explored by Graham, Cajete, Turnbull and even Merlau-Ponty come into contact.
For Graham, ‘the world is immediate, not external, and we are all its custodians, as well as its observers. A culture which holds the immediate world at bay by objectifying it as the Observed System, thereby leaving it to the blinkered forces of the market place, will also be blind to the effects of doing so until those effects become quantifiable as, for example, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer and global economic recession. All the social forces which have led to this planetary crisis could have been anticipated in principle, but this would have required a richer metaphysics.’8
Native science is a template of such a metaphysics, although, Cajete states ‘Native science is an echo of a pre-modern affinity for participation with the non-human world. As a way of knowing the world, it exists at the margins of modern society as an unconscious memory, a myth, a dream, a longing, and as the lived experience of the few Indigenous societies that have not yet been totally displaced by the modern technologically-mediated word.’9 [Italics added.]
What might it mean for society, identity, and nature if we were to bring Native science in from the margins, to a place where there is no need for biomimicry to solve complex problems we currently face? Perhaps we might find our true tether, our true memories, our fullest identity. The overwhelmingly satisfying biophilia of our daily encounters with a recovering natural world may render stories of machine elves and not-quite-human, not-quite-non-human beings to the realm of unconscious memory, myth, dream and perhaps even – but probably not – longing.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel ↩︎
- Graham, Mary, 2008. ‘Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews’ Australian Humanities Review – Issue 45, originally published in Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 105-118. Reprinted at https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/11/01/some-thoughts-about-the-philosophical-underpinnings-of-aboriginal-worldviews/ under license by permission of the publishers. ↩︎
- Cajete, Gregory, 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. 23-25. Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Increasingly, my own predominantly-urban lived experience attests to that – with the exception of sightings of the odd lizard (big-ish or small), a koala sighting a couple of years back (when visiting a “park” a.k.a. remnant wildlife corridor with the permission and guidance of a traditional owner), possums running along the fence or the power lines outside my house, kangaroos traversing roads at dusk on the outskirts of my parents’ home town, birdlife and on the rarest occasion, a snake (which I didn’t actually see with my own eyes. What I saw was the absolutely frantic panic in the eyes of the child who did see it). Oh, and maybe a cassowary crossing a road in the Daintree, a crocodile on the banks of the river we travelled along by boat in FNQ, or other astonishing out-of-the-ordinary moments that are more like once-in-a-lifetime experiences. ↩︎
- Graham, M. 2008. ↩︎
- Cajete, G. 2000. p.23 ↩︎
Escritoire Noir 