We've been talking about the virtual world and the real world in a couple recent threads (EVE and sex). I feel like a world is being left out, the more than human world. I thought it better etiquette to start a new thread rather than derail the intended topic of those threads.
Here's a model:
(The more than human world ( the world of human affairs ( the virtual world)))
The more than human world: physical reality, bugs, dirt, sunlight, water, black holes, humans, dogs, salmon, oceans, the moon, thermodynamics, eating, reproduction, etc. The more than human world is inclusive of human meatsacks, to be clear, we're "fully embedded within it". This term is used instead of Nature because we use the word nature as something Humans aren't inside of.
The world of human affairs: politics, religion, the nuclear family, kinship bonds, language, books, symbols, society, law, the economy...
The virtual world: facebook, EVE, crypto, all of our bank accounts, twitter, netflix...
The virtual world is inside the world of human affairs. The world of human affairs is contained within the more than human world.
Each level doesn't require the level(s) inside it, but does require the level outside it. The world of human affairs doesn't need the virtual world, but does need the more than human world. The more than human world doesn't need the world of human affairs.
The boundaries are permeable in certain ways of course. These world categories exist mostly as loci of attention. When you are in the virtual world you don't pay much attention to the world of human affairs, unless intruded upon. When focused on the world of human affairs, you tend not to pay much attention to the more than human world.
Something that poked at my brain is language that I thought lumped the more than human world in with the world of human affairs, by using the term the 'real world' vs 'the virtual world'. I think it's not good, not precise enough, to contrast the virtual world against 'the real world' which is sort of taken to lumpily mean both the world of human affairs and the more than human world.
For example, when Jacob said that the real world was boring/solved, was he referring to the world of human affairs, the more than human world, or both? And by using the term 'real world', whether he meant it to or not, he set up a condition in the context of that conversation that the options were binary: the virtual world and the non-virtual world. It's fine to categorize the world that way, it's useful to do so in many contexts, but I think it can sometimes centralize humans in a way that isn't useful, depending on what type of conversation is being had.
And just to be clear, I completely agree with this:
The meta-categories aren't meant to imply a value system of the worlds, it's meant to point at a certain relationship between the worlds, i.e. dependence. The virtual world can't exist without the world of human affairs, because it's the world of human affairs that arranges for things like datacenters and wifi to exist.jacob wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 11:50 amWhether the experience of any reality is impoverished likely depends on one's skill of engaging with it and how meaningful one finds it. In other words, it's about the strength of the connection. I would not presume that peak experiences can only be had with/from physical humans or natural landscapes. Indeed, that claim seems rather like a romantic counterreaction(?) to me; I'll bet it's mostly made by people who are temperamentally incompatible with the "built environment" or the Platonic world of ideas.
As we become better at building more worlds, humanity might differentiate. The nature-lovers can be out in nature. The spreadsheet jockeys can sit in a cubicle. I think the mistake is in declaring one connection more meaningful than others ... that easily leads people in the wrong direction. IOW, I don't think we should try to "adjust" people to enjoy the same thing.
All right, with those categories set, I want to talk about the Randers thing from his 2012 book 2052: A Global Forecast.
One of Randers' points, as I understand it, is that biodiversity loss is going to be mega by midcentury according to his forecast. People will mostly live in cities and live very connected to the internet, and 'nature' will mostly be parks and nature preserves.
One of his recommendations is to not teach your children to love the untouched wilderness.
From this site (I haven't gotten access to the book yet. I have read a bunch of the summaries on the book web page. I hope I'm not completely misunderstanding the context and strawmanning him. If he is being sly about this in some way, I and a whole bunch of other people missed the point I think, and so it's worthwhile to have the discussion anyway.)Randers wrote:“By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency. “Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.
1. On the one hand, I agree with Randers: I think no one, ever, should probably have been taught to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, because it's never existed. The untouched wilderness is a fabrication of the imagination of a civilized / western culture, a side effect of the idea that humans are separate from what we call 'Nature'. I think that the idea that humans are separate from nature is part of the problem in mindsest that has delivered our civilization into what people are calling The Metacrisis. Here's a paper about how the idea of pristine wilderness is a flawed construct. The book Tending the Wild is relevant as well, if anyone wants to dive deeper into a relevant topic. Check out Jonathon Rowson and Daniel Schmachtenberger as two onramps to thinking about the metacrisis.
2. On the other hand, his recommendation seems to be veering into the effect, intended or otherwise, of saying 'don't encourage nature connection or natural literacy'. This effect/goal that I perceive in his suggestion is what I dislike about the recommendation. I get that his point is that biodiversity is going to nosedive and so let's not fall in love with stuff that's going to be destroyed anyways. But 'Nature' isn't like some stuffed animal that we're not going to be able to take with us. Nature, aka the more than human world, is the world inside which the world of human affairs is nestled. The reason things are going to get shitty this century is partly because we've not understood our connection and relationship to the more than human world, we've not understood the consequences of our actions. We (as a society) need to be increasing our natural literacy, not decreasing it, even if that is going to make it harder to watch biodiversity loss. In other words, if you don't like watching species die, that's too bad, suck it up and watch anyways, because we need to learn from this shit.
The trick to both increasing natural literacy and minimizing psychological suffering/grief, I think, is to first jettison the idea that nature is or ought to be separate, pristine, lonely, untouched, or 'wild'. In a sense, what we're suffering over isn't any particular thing happening to the natural world, it's the increasing level of evidence that our idea that nature was wild and pristine is wrong, and has always been wrong. Maybe we're mourning not for the destruction of nature, but for the destruction of the idea that we humans are gods.
Zoning out and clamping headphones over our ears in the middle of our megacities seems like recommending that we all pull the e-brake at the 'denial' phase of Kubler-Ross. I'm struggling to see how this is supposed to work out well for anyone.
How about instead we push through and do the work necessary to get to Acceptance so we can move on with our lives and, maybe, Do Something About It All? Even if that Something is just figure out how to have a meaningful life in the midst of the sixth great extinction, through the slow descent, through whatever it is the following couple of centuries has in store for us?
Possibly, I don't know for sure but possibly, there are in fact actions we humans can take, even if that's just doing ground work for future generations who will be doing the actual work of rejuvenating the natural systems of this planet. Our generation's work might be to just survive as well as we can, figure out how to drop our footprint way way down, and how to shuffle good information, people, and practices from here through the bottleneck of the next couple centuries to the Ecotechnic Gardeners of Earth of 2322. AKA ere/2.0.
Either way, burying our heads in our megacities isn't any kind of functional response. It strikes me as doubling down on doing things the same wrong way we've been doing them for at least a few centuries now.
It's possible that this was all essentially Randers' point, and I've miscontextualized him. Like I said, I haven't had the chance to read his book yet. I'm happy to be corrected here. It just seemed to me that a lot of people were taking his point the way I interpreted it, whether he intended that or not. In that case, both my argument against his strawman and the explanation that it is in fact a strawman will be valuable.