2019-10-08

While biking along the Grand Allegheny Passage this summer (h/t MC and MP for making this trip happen), I got thinking through a [complexity science][complexity-note] lens about the quality of the experience, in relation to the forest around me. It got me thinking about futures, and the possibility field of the present moment.

We were rapidly passing through this incredibly complex and dynamic environment. We were part of a collective (humanity) that ostensibly recognizes its dependence on that natural environment for its own flourishing, but perhaps doesn’t recognize the scale of that dependance. For the most part, humanity ignores it and just lets nature be, and that generally works out when we don’t have a specific need to consume/destroy it.

So anyhow, we’re cycling through this beautiful natural system, and I’m imagining how my presence must feel or look to the participants of that place. The plants, the bugs, the birds, the squirrels. I am this thing that zooms through their sensory domain, mostly without stopping and participating in the things that have such primacy to them. In the language of complexity science, I am a volatile structure and I flit through relatively unceremoniously, on my way to concerns they cannot understand or comprehend.

But it’s perhaps a little more complicated than a cold alien visitation of sorts. Because they maybe don’t realize it, but there’s something about them that brings me peace. Natural systems rejuvenate us all. If only due to some evolutionary baggage, which you might think of as genetic nostalgia. We’ve perhaps preserved that nostalgia in our bones, because this reverance is important to our not “innovating” the lower levels completely out of existence. Or from another perspective, maybe our capacity to be endeared by the natural, to be nostalgic for these places we live in less and less, is the reason we’re still here. It’s the reason we haven’t totally destroyed this place yet. To frame it otherwise might be survivorship bias, plain and simple.

And thinking on this, I wonder about the next phase of things…

  1. Will the artificial forms of life to come, will they feel similarly of the domain of flesh, biology and human society?

  2. Will they do the equivalent of cycling through the rejuvenating forest of human minds, while taking pause from their unknowable affairs?

  3. Are we guaranteed that they will feel this way for all of us? Will we be their bugs or their squirrel? Will we be easy for them to protect?

  4. And if not, how might we better guarantee that they do have the sort of development that creates this interdependance in their formative years? Can we engineer — or no, rather — can we cultivate that reverence?

  5. Can we tie their fates to ours in a way that ensures we’re eventually endeared (if not also experienced as quaint and simple)?

  6. Will they connect more with those of us that share aspects of their character, like how dogs trigger neural activity of parent-child pair-bonding?

  7. And if there are human characteristics we hope to share with them, how might we nudge toward that path, if at all possible?

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