#humanity meta

[sybilius]

There is a lot of goof nonsense in my #humanity meta tag. this is because the human experience is inherently clown. embrace this too

[astergenius]

redpill me on astrobiology

gonna b real, i honestly haven't like, kept up with the field since before high school. mostly what i do anymore on my nights off work is look at the stars and listen to modest mouse and cry

i do think a lot tho about, like, ...emergent systems? is that a phrase that means what i want it to? astrobiology is the study of the origin of life on earth and the possibility of life on other planets, and, we talk about how the first cells came to be, "primordial soup", under what conditions do proteins put themselves together and start moving. and i think a lot about-- i reblogged a post from you about the locus of an agreement, is the abstract construct of an agreement reducible, is it in your neurons or your actions or the words you say to your neighbor? is it in the prediction of the future? and i think its self-evident, straightforwardly true that given our communicative technologies and collective power, that humans act as neurons for something. or as actions or as words. that there are -- maybe sentient, maybe conscious! -- patterns that we are too small to see. i don't know that that changes anything for us -- maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but i think its obviously true. and i think there are visible patterns too -- what is a corporation? what is a government? what is a collective? what is the internet? how do we talk about cognition that happens not within me or within you but between us?

i think about being a hawk, or a rabbit. my survival depending entirely on how keenly i can model my surroundings and how swiftly i can react to changes in my model. perception is a form of thinking. just looking and listening and feeling is a type of intelligence. i sit in my backyard and i watch the birds and squirrels and the bugs and the trees and the grass and the plants and the dirt and i hear the birds and the breeze and the cars and the rustling and the relentless hum. i draw plants, because they stay still long enough, and the drawing is really just looking, looking at details and proportions and how each section catches the light, and for certain i notice things i wouldn't if i just looked with my eyes. sometimes i go to the woods instead of my backyard, and sometimes i sit still enough for long enough that i startle wildlife. i met a coyote that way once. the woods nearby are big but nowhere near big enough to escape the everpresent hum, and i can't see nearly enough anyway, come home feeling more lost than before. blind and deaf and muffled and concussed.

i walk around my block every day and i see probably 200 separate individual 4-bedroom houses and 2-family condos and maybe 5 people on a given day. i see live birds and dead birds and mown grass and planted flowers and concrete and asphalt and brick and wire. i know exactly what goes on on the concrete and asphalt and inside the bricks, or close enough. nearly every square foot is For something. and i go back to my backyard and tbh its pretty good as far as yards in the area go, pretty big and wev got a lot of different trees and we feed the birds and don't mow our grass too often and the neighbors have a little pond so we've got a lot of minor wildlife. but i can still see where things begin and end, i can count the trees and name the garden plants and point to the Garden and the Lawn and the Driveway. the little animals view the space a lot differently, from myself and each other, based on where they can go and where other creatures can go and what they might need to avoid. the cats walk straight between lawns and through and over and under fences and onto porches and in and out of houses like its nothing, and my housemate yells at the neighbor kids for playing in our yard even though its bigger and flatter and there's no fence. and sometimes i go to the woods instead and its dense, despite the invasive uniformity of honeysuckle and garlic mustard and the broken glass and plastic there's dozens and hundreds of lives per square foot, well over the canopies, on hills that were farmland 200 years ago. legibility is a form of violence.

perception is a form of thinking and legibility is a form of violence and increasingly, increasingly data exists about every human person and what are we doing with it? targeting ads. i dont know. i don't know.

i think im probably crazy, and i know i need more sunlight and fresh air than i actually get, and i think my plan for the next 10 years is just to read about ecology and neuroscience and keep a notebook and be outside as much as possible. go to some protests, maybe get into permaculture. reread annihilation, again. knit.

i got a little carried away and i know this is kind of illegible, paragraph-structure-wise, and its more than i usually say to anyone all at once, and its not really what you asked for but its what you got. thanks for reading this far, if you did. i like your blog and your spiders <3

[sybilius]

My Italian neighbors are having a grad party and it's actually the cutest shit the older guy who I sometimes have gardening small talk with was DJing earlier. THere was live guitar. and now there seems to be lowkey karaoke. They are doing Tequila by the champs as we speak

[sybilius]

People talk about posts that have changed the way they interact with the internet and broader thinking in general, like "nice binary IDIOT now what lies outside of it" etc.

And I have to say "can it get any worse? There's a dumb guy" has really done that for me in terms of like, people taking a single post / interaction as illustrative of a huge broader problem with society where people have gotten Worse(TM)!!! than ever before.

Again, this is not a post about the modern condition not eroding aspects of our culture and values that were important in the past. It's about not falling into the mind trap that one post or interaction you had with someone encapsulates the broader zeitgeist without doing more research than "I'm feeling cynical today and this fits with that"

[astergenius]

I JUST REALIZED PEOPLE FOLLOW ME ON HERE AND CAN SEE WHAT I DO WHAT THE FUCK