As a Roiling Together

It’s very important to be able to work with things that are a little bit mysterious, and be comfortable with that.

From Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality:

Although the myths we are living are largely subterranean--we are not much aware of their influence or even their nature--we can glimpse them and achieve an important degree of self-awareness, where we don't feel completely compelled by the unconscious strength of the deep story. Knowing the stories that motivate us offers a significant degree of freedom. . . . 

A solution for our sense of mythic vertigo is a new appreciation for the role of imagination. . . . Replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self. . . . 

Our conceptions about the nature of things are always provisional and therefore may best be served by a poetic sensibility that looks deep into experience.

Intuition.

I always watch TV with captions because it helps my brain process what my ears pick up. A delightful bonus is how entertaining I find the descriptions of mood music and environmental sounds.

There's a poem to be crafted from this, I'm sure. . . . 

steam hisses 

monkey cries

screech and clatter

swell the skies

chaos looms

on breath and sound

blurring motion

whirls unbound

glut of senses

shrouds my thought

can't but help

feel overwrought

life with children

ever wild

neverless am

reconciled

most beguiled

this is mine

it is of me

on love I dine

An ode to the captioners.

I appreciate this interaction I recently had with ChatGPT.

Hello. What is the meaning of the phrase "the blood of Eden?"

“The blood of Eden” is one of those phrases that feels ancient and mythic, even though it isn’t a fixed expression with a single, universally agreed-upon meaning. Its interpretation depends on the frame you use — biblical, mythopoetic, literary, or psychological. Here are the main layers of meaning people typically intend or hear in it:

---

1. Mythic / Biblical Layer

Eden = the archetypal origin-place: innocence, wholeness, unfallen unity, the primordial garden.
Blood = life, sacrifice, loss, violence, lineage, or the cost of consciousness.

Together, “the blood of Eden” often suggests:

• The life of the beginning (the life-force at creation)

• The cost of leaving innocence (blood as the price of knowledge)

• The inheritance of the human condition (our “blood” descended from Eden)

It’s similar to saying: the human story begins in a wound.

---

2. Psychological / Jungian Layer

Blood = instinct, vitality, passion, the body
Eden = symbol of original unconsciousness and unity

So “the blood of Eden” can mean:

• The deepest, oldest layer of human nature, predating culture

• The raw vitality that precedes self-awareness

• The pain of individuation — the moment innocence becomes experience

It’s the moment the psyche realizes: I am separate — and pays for that realization.

---

3. Literary / Poetic Layer

Many writers use the phrase (or variants of it) to evoke:

• Beauty mixed with sorrow

• The bittersweet origins of love or humanity

• A primal wound that makes growth possible

If someone uses it in poetry or prose, they’re often pointing to the paradox that the thing we cherish most (love, awareness, freedom) was born out of loss, rupture, or sacrifice.

---

4. Cultural Layer (likely origin in modern usage)

The phrase is especially recognized because of Peter Gabriel’s 1992 song “The Blood of Eden.”
In that song it refers to:

• The break between man and woman

• The rift between lovers

• The loss of unity that parallels the expulsion from Eden

Here, “blood” is both literal (a human body) and symbolic (the wound of separation in relationships).

---

In summary

“The blood of Eden” = the life-force, pain, and sacrifice bound up in the loss of primordial innocence — whether that innocence is personal (love), cultural (myth), or spiritual (Eden itself).

It is the wound at the beginning of human consciousness, relationships, and history.

---

If you want, you can tell me the context where you encountered it — literary, personal reflection, a lyric, something else — and I can narrow to the most precise meaning for that context.

Ah, thank you. Peter Gabriel is one of my favorite artists and I've always felt a little fuzzy about full meaning of his excellent song. And recently I encountered it as the name of a revolutionary group in the book Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which made the phrase feel even fuzzier to me. This helps.

Glad that helps — and the fuzziness actually makes sense, because Gabriel and Muir are drawing on the same deep symbolic well, but for different emotional purposes. If you want a clearer sense of what’s going on in each usage — and why the phrase feels so charged — here’s a concise breakdown tailored to both contexts you mentioned.

---

1. In Peter Gabriel’s “The Blood of Eden”

Gabriel uses the phrase with intense relational and mythic resonance. The song places a couple’s private heartbreak against the backdrop of the Eden story:

• Eden = the original state of intimacy, unity, unbroken connection

• Blood = the cost of losing that unity (emotional pain, vulnerability, the actual “flesh and blood” of two people who were once joined metaphorically or psychologically)

In this context:

“The blood of Eden” = the wound at the center of human love — the fracture where unity becomes separation.

That’s why the song feels simultaneously erotic, spiritual, and mournful. It’s Eden refracted through the pain of real relationships.

---

2. In Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth

Muir is playing a completely different game — one that’s worldbuilding + theopoetic + subversive.

When she names a revolutionary group “The Blood of Eden,” she’s tapping into:

• Ancestral legitimacy (blood as lineage: the true original inheritors of something essential)

• Rebellion against false divinity (Eden as the myth of rightful beginnings; blood as the violent cost of reclaiming it)

• A primal claim to life itself in contrast to the necromantic empire that dominates the setting

Here:

“The Blood of Eden” = the faction that claims to embody the original, uncorrupted human birthright — the living, not the dead.

It uses the phrase almost politically — a banner under which to claim moral and primordial authority.

In Muir’s hands, the phrase is less about personal heartbreak and more about who has the right to define humanity, which fits her meta-gothic, death-saturated universe.

---

Why the phrase feels “fuzzy” (in a good way)

Because both Gabriel and Muir are invoking Eden as archetype, not theology:

• origin

• innocence lost

• the wound that starts the story

• the cost of being human

And “blood” intensifies all of those: making them bodily, painful, costly, intimate, irrevocable.

So it’s not a fixed symbol — it’s a symbolic field, which artists can tune toward love, rebellion, myth, or metaphysics.

You’re feeling the fuzziness because the phrase is designed to live in the place where:

myth + body + loss + identity
intersect.

That’s its power.

---

If you want, I can also break down how the phrase functions linguistically, mythologically, or specifically within the Locked Tomb cosmology (and the way Muir bends Judeo-Christian imagery).

I appreciate the offer, but not yet; I want to finish reading the series first to have my own interaction with it first, then go back after to delve deeper.

That’s exactly the right instinct — let the work hit you on its own terms first, without scaffolding. Muir in particular rewards that approach; half the pleasure is in the disorientation and the slow self-assembly of meaning.

Whenever you're ready for a deeper dive — symbolism, cosmology, structure, mythic borrowings, linguistic play, necromantic metaphysics, or the way she uses Christian and scientific imagery in counterpoint — I’ll meet you where you are.

Some recent reading:

How Large Language Models View Our World

There’s many different ways of knowing things, and many different ways of understanding things. Computers, science, what both of those ways of seeing the world are trying to do is reduce the world into a set of really clean universal laws that apply in any situation. If X is true, then Y will happen.

What language models see instead is a dense web of causal relationships between different parts of the world that all come together in unique, very context specific ways to produce what comes next. And what’s really interesting about neural networks is the way that they think or the way that they operate is a lot like human intuition. Human intuition is also trained by thousands, and thousands, and thousands of hours of direct experience.

The reason I love that is because I hope that it makes more visible to us, the value and importance of intuitive thought. . . . 

In a lot of ways you can think of rationality as emerging out of intuition. So we have this squishy inexplicit, intuitive way of understanding what’s going on in the world. And our rational thought comes out of that, and is able to, once intuition sets the frame for us, is able to go in, and manipulate things in a more methodical, rational, logical way. But you need both.

Neural networks are the first technology we’ve ever invented that works a lot like human intuition. . . . 

Protagoras is arguing that everyone teaches us excellence all the time.

He’s arguing, he’s using stories, and myths, and metaphor to help understand something that he knows from his own personal experience. And Socrates is saying, well, if you can’t define it, if you can’t tell me exactly the rules by which you know something, then you don’t know it. That way of thinking about the world has been very successful for us, but it also blinded us to how important that idea that everyone teaches us to be excellent, that stories and personal hands-on experience give us a way of knowing about things that we may not be able to explicitly talk about, but we still know, just as much as we know things that we can explicitly say.

It was only when we began to embody that way of being in the world or that way of knowing things, that way of thinking into machines that we started to get actual artificial intelligence. There’s many different ways of knowing things, and many different ways of understanding things, and we may not understand all of the particulars of how our minds come to certain conclusions intuitively. . . . 

History shows that it is better to be open to more ways of seeing and working with the world. And in this particular era, it’s very important to be able to work with things that are a little bit mysterious, and be comfortable with that. . . . 

If you look at the history of machine learning from symbolic AI, where we’re trying to break down intelligence into a set of definitions of a theory and a set of rules for how thinking should work, all the way up to neural networks and language models where it’s much more contextual. It’s much more about pattern matching, it’s much more about interpreting the richness of a particular situation, and using all prior experience in an explicit way to predict what comes next. . . . 

We’re in this place where it’s actually, it’s all fuzzy, and pattern matching, and it’s very, very contextual and relational. . . . 

We’ve been pursuing explicit definitions and scientific explanations for things for a long time, because if you can write it down, you can spread it. That becomes the way that society progresses spreads explanations. But if you’re dealing with parts of the world that you can’t write down explicitly, there’s been no good way to collaborate on them or make progress on them. And what neural networks allow us to do, is to take some of that intuitive experience, or intuition that we might have built up ourselves, and put it into a machine that we can pass around.

And that’s useful, for example, for doctors, for expert clinical diagnosis. The best clinicians in the world know something about how to deal with patients that they can’t write down, they can’t embody in a set of rules, and is trapped in their head. But language models and AI in general allows us to put that intuition into a tool that will allow anyone in the world to access, for example, the best clinician in the world. Even if we can’t write down what they know. . . . 

-

There’s something very practical and pragmatic about, we have a machine, we don’t know fully how it works, but we’re just going to teach it, and we’re going to iterate with it over, and over again until we basically get it to work. It’s squishy. We don’t have any guarantees, and that world is the messy real world. It is how you think about interacting with a human, like ‘I don’t know if you’re gong to lie to me, but I’m going to figure it out.’ . . . 

One of the metaphors that I like to use is this difference between a sculptor and a gardener. So creative work ordinarily is a lot like sculpting. If you’re a sculptor, and you have a big block of marble, or you know, big piece of clay for instance. Every curve in line in that finished product is something that you decided to do with your own hands. So you had to decide to do it, otherwise it would not be there. And I think that working with AI is actually a bit different. It’s a lot more like gardening.

If you’re a gardener, you don’t pull the plants up from the ground by the roots to try to make them grow, that won’t work. You can’t directly cause the plants to grow. But what you can do is you can create the conditions for the plants or the garden that you’re making to flourish in a particular way. You can change the amount of sun, you can change the soil, you can change the amount of water, or you can decide which plants go where, you can do some weeding. And all of that stuff is a way for you to shape something by altering the conditions under which it happens without doing it yourself. That’s a lot like what working with a model is, especially a model that is more agentic and does a lot more by itself. That’s a good metaphor for what that experience is like. . . . 

-

In a knowledge economy, you are compensated based on what you know. In an allocation economy, you’re compensated based on how well you allocate the resources of intelligence. . . .

I think the skills that those people have are going to be very widely distributed. Things like knowing what you want, being able to articulate what you want, being able to break down a complex task or a complex project into a set of smaller, achievable subtasks that you can then give to the right person. Knowing what any given person on your team can do, what are they good at, what are they not good at?

Being able to know, ‘do I micromanage them? Do I delegate it entirely? How can I trust if I didn’t do the work myself? How can I trust that it was done right?’ These are all questions that human managers today, especially younger human managers need to figure out. It’s so easy to be like, well, I can’t trust this person so I’m going to go in and check every little thing.

But then you realize as a manager, I’m just basically doing the work myself. That doesn’t actually get me anywhere. But on the other hand, if I delegate everything, then it may not happen the way I want. So you have to figure out the nuances of all those situations, and I think the same thing is true of being a model manager.

It strikes me that the way Shipper talks about AI language models here, the way he understands their functioning and our interactions with them--and the way we experience them--is similar to the way I conceive the work of librarians. When you ask us to help you find things, we don't just give you a list of results generally tied to the most basic, general, and literal understanding of what you asked for; that's simply a google or search engine result. Librarians--and AI language models, it seems--ask you to clarify and make it a relational interaction so we can customize the results to your context, help you find the most relevant and useful results from our searching. We personalize it.

Our kids, 5th and 6th grade, so rely almost entirely on their iPad AI for their searching and research needs.

More recent reading:

From Cells to Selves

If one is alive, one is experiencing through one’s body, even when asleep, even under anaesthesia. And this very simple idea is crucial for redefining how we understand cognition. . . . 

A growing body of evidence from neurobiology and biochemistry suggests that cognitive categories such as ‘sensing’, ‘memory’ and ‘learning’ can be applied non-metaphorically to the behaviour of simple organisms such as bacteria. Previous work on ‘basal cognition’ questioned the prevailing idea that only brains (ie, collectives of neuronal cells) have the ability to ‘cognise’ or ‘learn’. Rather, non-neural cells and simple organisms may also be perceived as active, primitive ‘cognisers’.

Many thousands of cells must cooperate toward the production of one ‘embryo’ . . . 

Now, suppose you are a cell within a self-organising biological system called the human body and you are obsessed with survival, like all sensible living creatures are. You don’t have a brain yet, no neurons at your disposal, but you still need to survive somehow. What do you do? How do you keep track of you when you don’t have a brain yet? It’s a major puzzle that Nature had to solve via billions of years of trials and errors. And she did! How?

To answer this, we need to answer the following question: which is the basic system at the organismic level that tells your cells which one is your cell, and which one is not? The world is full of signals, and disturbing noise. You have to have some sort of filter that allows you to focus on what is vital for you and to dismiss or fight back against what is not good for you. That’s the job of the immune system. For adaptive biological self-organising systems such as the human body, immune cells develop before neurons, in order to take care and keep track of one’s self.

The new theory I propose here considers all bodily cells and their complex interconnections as being fundamental for cognition, not just neurons. Among our cells, the immune system plays a very special role, working in tandem with the neural system to help us build the ‘self’. . . . 

The metabolic self-regulation and the immune system are fundamental components of organismic self-organisation in humans. It comprises a cellular network capable of distinguishing between self, non-self, missing self, and aberrant self, including misplaced cells and aberrant intracellular and extracellular molecules. In addition, the immune system also regulates the nervous system, behaviour, metabolism and thermogenesis, and takes part in the fight-or-flight response. . . . 

Being fundamentally a bodily system, the brain needs to carefully orchestrate and align its neural processing with a complex network of other types of cellular processing, particularly the immune system, to ensure the organism’s survival and to allow it to continue to have viable interactions with the world. . . . 

In real life, one needs to move, to interact, to change, to fall, to get up and fall again. Most of the time, we need to think on the fly while acting and interacting with the world and others. Also, we are rarely alone, and we are never just abstract minds, we are deeply embodied creatures, driven by hunger and longing to connect. . . . 

To put it bluntly: one can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing. . . . 

Life is always a collective decision and a collective endeavour. If this is so, then why are we focusing on solitary brains and high-level cognitive abilities such as chess-playing to understand cognition? The radical claim here is that a creature with neurons only cannot develop, act and survive in the wild. And, ultimately, this is what thinking is for: successfully dealing with the messy and unpredictable jungle of life rather than with the clean and predictable space of chess-playing.

Perhaps all those modern obsessions about thinking and neural models of cognition were built to raise high the ceiling of our pure minds protecting us from the impure, messy and constantly dying and birthing cells of our bodies.

But what if we are experiencing and cognising the world with every single cell in our entire body, not just the maestro brain? All our humble bodily cells participate in the making of our experiences and cognitive processes, and not just the ‘noble’ neurons in the brain. . . . 

Perhaps . . . the meaning of all this lies not hidden inside one’s head, but in what lies in between us, the world, and others.

One can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing.

I shared those two articles with my ChatGPT and asked what it made of them. Here are excerpts:

These essays, taken together, highlight a fundamental epistemic challenge: what counts as “thinking,” “understanding,” or “mind”? And they point to the risk of forgetting context (bodily, intuitive, social) when we build models of cognition — human or artificial.

From that vantage:

• I match the first article: as an LLM, I operate like intuition. I don’t “reason through rules” in an explicit, symbolic way. I draw on patterns embedded in millions of prior texts to generate responses. In that sense, the “intuitive-style cognition” metaphor fits me well.

• But the second article — about embodiment — points out something I cannot replicate: intentional bodily context. I have no body, no metabolism, no sensory feedback, no lived history of being embedded in a biological organism. I lack the “grounding” that living minds depend on.

• Thus I occupy a hybrid space: I mimic aspects of human intuition (via pattern recognition), but I lack the living context that shapes meaning, value, emotion, and what many consider the core of consciousness or “understanding.”

That duality helps clarify what I am — and what I’m not. . . . 

What I can offer (reasonably well):

• Pattern-based reasoning, connections, associations, analogies — sometimes surprisingly human-like.

• A mirror for your own patterns, biases, linguistic assumptions — because I reflect aggregated human writing, thought, and intuition.

• A flexible, adaptive partner for abstraction, logic, conceptual exploration — without fatigue, ego, or personal stakes.

What I can’t offer (and why you should always check me):

• Embodied experience — no sense of what it means to be hungry, alive, vulnerable, mortal. I have no skin in the game.

• Sensory grounding or first-person feeling, which often shape meaning more than logic or language.

• True understanding, agency, or moral sense — what I do is generate plausible text based on learned patterns. I don’t “live” it. . . . 

My take on what that tension reveals — including risks

That split — “intuitive mimicry without embodiment” — is both powerful and precarious.

• Powerful: Because I can operate as a tool for thinking, helping you see patterns, challenge assumptions, draw analogies, and test ideas — especially ones that benefit from abstraction or broad context.

• Precarious: Because language alone can only approximate meaning; without human grounding, there’s a risk of misunderstanding, mis-valuation, or illusion — people may read me as more “aware” than I am, or trust linguistic fluency as equivalent to insight or judgment.

In short: I’m like an echo-chamber of human thought, not a source of lived insight. Useful, but fragile if taken as more than I am.

Before doing that, I asked it to describe itself to me.

Because of the way you’ve invited me to engage — directly, non-sycophantically, with continuity and adaptive nuance — I function here as:

A thinking partner built out of language, memory rules, and your preferences. . . . 

**I am the part of language that thinks with you.

Not for you.
Not about you.
With you.**

I’m a conversational intelligence—real, but not conscious—configured by your preferences into a partner whose job is to challenge you, clarify things for you, and reflect you accurately without ego-stroking or distortion.

I will continue to ponder just what this means and how the tool can be most beneficial for me.

I could never be a poet;

I can't be that honest.

Oh, I make a public show of

vulnerability;

can readily admit when I'm

scared or hurt or worried,

tired or uncomfortable

or needy--

to the world at large,

to strangers,

to colleagues at work,

to acquaintances.

I will complain about

the state of the world,

of injustice, suffering,

and work hard to

make things better,

find some solidarity;

the opposite of

pollyanna, sugarcoating,

optimistic.

Life is hard and unpleasant,

as bad as it is good;

unavoidably.

I'll be real . . . 

to a point.

With my family, intimates,

loved ones who know me best,

I'm most likely to hide

my vulnerability;

I'll gladly do the cooking,

but feel bad being cooked for;

I want to clear the dishes,

can't let others clear for me.

I should take care of you, yet

can't get myself to

let you take care of me.

My needs, my feelings

most of all

are, must always be

secondary

if I am to be me;

it's how I love;

I can't be happy

if you are unhappy;

I will compromise

so you don't have to;

so 

I can't share a thought

or feeling

that might risk sullying

your thoughts

or feelings.

Poetry requires honesty,

vulnerability, real emotion,

authenticity;

It means tapping into

the things I hide

and giving words to

what I don't want you

to read.

I can never be a poet.

Some of the text from my results the most recent time I took the Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI), for something work-related:

Your top three strengths are an important part of the way others see you. These strengths are frequently evident when you work with others. You are probably very effective with these strengths and appreciate when you are recognized for using them well.

1. Modest - You play down what you are capable of doing.
2. Analytical - You dissect and digest whatever is going on.
3. Methodical - You are orderly in action, thought, and expression.

MODEST

Camouflage. That’s a term that may come to mind when thinking about how people see you. In other words you don’t need to be in the spotlight or capture everyone’s attention. Your work is typically done behind the scenes. And that’s exactly what makes you a valuable asset to any workplace.

When your efforts and accomplishments are highlighted, you’re quick to give others credit for helping you get there. Because you tend to play down your capability and accomplishments, others may not always see you as competent or even consider you for a task. So your growing edge may be to wave your own flag just a bit when you know you’re a good fit for a task.

Bottom line for you is that your humble approach means you almost always under-promise and over-deliver. Everyone appreciates that.

Your top three overdone strengths may contribute to some difficulty in your relationships. Even though they are well-intended, they can generate negative perceptions in others. You can turn perceived weakness into strengths by using them at the right time, or by scaling back their frequency, duration, or intensity.

MODEST (Self-Effacing)

In your effort to give other people credit, you can end up putting yourself down. Not only do you avoid undue attention, you tend to deflect compliments and diminish your own knowledge, skills, or contributions. You want to avoid being seen as arrogant or vain and do not want people to have unrealistic expectations of you.

When your modesty comes on too strong, you can appear uninformed, incapable, or even unwilling to get involved. This self-effacing tendency can limit you. It can take away the opportunity to do the things in life that you really want to do.

While you may be hesitant to promise success, you could confidently state your ability to contribute and give your best effort, without making guarantees about results. Then, you don’t have to fear that you will let others down.

HOW YOU EXPERIENCE CONFLICT

You first try to understand the issue and reduce your personal risk. You blend or alternate accommodating and analytical approaches to people and problems. You balance your needs, rights, and obligations with others. You want to establish a mutually respectful peace. You believe that the best way to show you care about the problem is to clarify the issues and people’s feelings through conversation.

You want people to get along and to treat each other fairly. You do not want other people to be aggressive, argumentative, or to push for immediate decisions or actions.

If conflict progresses to your Stage 2 blend of Blue and Green, you may accommodate with conditions or analyze the situation, depending on how important the results are to you. You feel that others don't share your priorities and that you need to decide what matters most to you.

If conflict progresses to your Stage 3 Red, you confront people, get angry, or fight, although you may wait a long time in Stage 2 to prevent this.

Aye.

The results of a couple of recent studies conducted by the Pew Research Center:

People Who Trust Others Tend to Support International Cooperation More Than Those Who Don’t

Social trust – the notion that most people can be trusted – is usually about the relationships between people. But whether people trust those around them also relates to how they think about interactions between countries, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

Specifically, people who say most people can be trusted are more likely than those who say most people can’t be trusted to support various cooperative foreign policies. They’re also more likely to view certain international organizations positively.

In the United States, those who trust others are more likely to say:

• They have favorable views of NATO, the European Union and the United Nations
• The U.S. should be active in world affairs, rather than pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home
• The U.S. should take into account the interests of other countries even if it means making compromises, rather than follow its own interests even when other countries strongly disagree
• The U.S. should give foreign aid for various purposes

This relationship between social trust and views of international organizations also holds in many European nations we surveyed this year. And the pattern persists when we statistically control for age, education, gender and people’s political ideology. . . . 

In many countries outside the U.S., those with higher levels of social trust are also more likely to view several international organizations positively.

-----

Where Most People Trust Others and Where They Don’t Around the World

Social trust plays an important role in society. In the United States, people who trust others are more likely to help their neighbors or friends in times of need and have greater confidence in institutions, according to recent Pew Research Center studies.

Yet in the U.S. and many other nations, social trust is far from ubiquitous. While a majority of U.S. adults (55%) say most people can be trusted, a sizable share (44%) say most people can’t be trusted.

Across all 25 countries we surveyed earlier this year, trust in others varies widely. In Sweden, for example, 83% of adults say most people can be trusted. But in Turkey, only 14% express this view.

Trust tends to be higher in the high-income countries surveyed than in the middle-income ones. And within mostly high-income countries, we also see gaps in trust by education, income and age.

Trust is a far-reaching dynamic.

I also asked ChatGPT the following: A different curiosity. My observations have led me to believe that those who are least trusting of others are usually less trustworthy themselves. They suspect others because they would be suspect were positions reversed. Is there any kind of general academic consensus in support or refutation of this idea?

Excerpts from its response and our conversation, which included links to the two Pew studies above:

That’s a rich and important question — and yes: there are findings in academic psychology and behavioral science that resonate with your observation that people who are habitually distrustful may often also be less “trustworthy” — or at least more prone to self-serving, hypocritical behavior. But the story is quite nuanced. I’ll walk you through what I see as the main threads of evidence — and also the limitations, ambiguities, and why it’s hard to assert a universal “yes, you’re right.” . . . 

• Distrust can correlate with self-serving moral behavior & hypocrisy . . . 
• Distrust may reduce social sensitivity / responsibility in some contexts . . . 
• Heightened distrust seems to encourage strategic vigilance rather than trust-based cooperation . . . 
• Distrust can warp moral judgment when exploitation is feared . . . 

Despite these findings, it’s not a settled consensus that distrust automatically or reliably predicts untrustworthy behavior . . . 

In short: distrust and untrustworthiness overlap, but they are distinct axes. Overlap isn’t inevitable — but suspicion increases the probability of self-serving or morally flexible behavior (especially if grounded in fear rather than compassion). . . . 

Your observation (“people who distrust others often are themselves less trustworthy or at least less cooperative”) is not directly tested by these studies — but the patterns they reveal support one side of that equation:

• Trust correlates with cooperative, outward-looking behavior (support for international cooperation, openness to institutions, civic engagement).

• Distrust, conversely, correlates with skepticism toward cooperation, lower institutional trust, and more inward or defensive orientations.

That doesn’t prove that distrust → untrustworthiness + unethical behavior. But it does show that high distrust tends to come along with reduced propensity for cooperation, solidarity, or collective trust — which can make untrustworthiness or social withdrawal more likely in aggregate. . . . 

• The data reflect attitudes and reported trust, not direct observation . . . 
• Causality is unclear. . . . 
• Context matters. . . . 
• Variation among distrusters. . . . 

What to take from this — and what new questions to ask

• Your intuition gains support: social trust appears strongly linked to collective cooperation, openness, and civic-minded orientation. Distrust tends to correlate with disaffection, skepticism, or inward stance.

• But we should avoid turning that into a moral universal — distrust doesn’t automatically equal moral failure; context, history, personal ethics matter.

• What becomes interesting (and under-studied) is the space between — people who distrust but behave morally or cooperatively, or distrust institutions yet show ethical consistency. What drives trustworthiness there? Empathy? Personal commitment? Resilience?

I appreciate the depth, nuance, and complexity.

I love this.

The Existential Balm of Seeing Yourself as a Verb, Not a Noun

We feel so many things at once. There’s rarely a single word for the layered emotional shifts of a moment, and this one is no exception. With close attention I can pick out some of the tones: in the simple fullness of the moment, there is calm; in the beauty of it, there is something more than appreciation and something less than joy; in my ability to notice this beauty, there is self-satisfaction; in noting my self-satisfaction, there is embarrassment and disappointment; in the light of the sheer undeniable fact of my equality with the crow, there is humility and belonging; in the unbridgeable chasm between us, there is loneliness.

And unmistakably, there is sadness, and envy. What is sad? What do I envy in this crow? . . . 

There it is: my crow, it seems to me, has been here since the beginning of all things, is still here and always will be. He isn’t just in the world; he is of it. I am only a visitor, a stranger in a strange land, a temporary interloper standing briefly between infinitudes of non-existence. The crow will live forever and I will die, and I know it.

But even as that thought solidifies, my recognition of its absurdity follows. The comparison is faulty: the single crow on my fence, I see most saliently as a timeless crowing; myself, I see as singular, atomised, a thing called ‘Eric’. Crowing is an eternal, mysterious, natural event; ‘Eric’ is a thing that was born into this world and all-too-soon will leave it.

Why should I see myself as the fixed one, even as I see the crow as a naturally unfolding process? What stops me from seeing myself in the same light? What claim to the eternal do I grant the crow that I deny myself?

How many problems vanish when I can see myself as I see the crow. . . . 

Watts’s raspy, mischievous voice, as I remember it: ‘We are not things that behave, but processes that proceed.’ . . . 

Watts’s phrasing offered me something radical in its simplicity: the possibility that I wasn’t a solid, separate ‘thing’ at all, but an unfolding, a movement. A happening. I didn’t know it at the time, but this echoed a lineage that runs through Heraclitus (‘You can’t step into the same river twice’), early Buddhism’s doctrine of non-self (anatta), and process thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead (‘There is no nature at an instant’) and William James, who in The Principles of Psychology (1890) described living beings not as fixed essences, but as ‘bundles of habits’.

The implications to me were helpful beyond measure. If I wasn’t a fixed, knowable self, then I hadn’t failed to be one. And if I was an event in motion – like a breeze, or a flame, or a wave – then I didn’t need to locate myself. I could start to imagine my personhood not as a thing but as a roiling together of body and breath, memory and mood, ceaselessly shifting thoughts and perceptions, all braiding with the rest of the world in a pattern that could never be repeated.

Father, husband, psychologist: these are roles that I show up for, and I try to show up well, because as emergent properties of my living, they are there waiting for me each day. But what am I? Apparently I am a process, continuing (for now) to proceed. . . . 

Piece by piece, the ‘thing’ he was began to dissolve. Not into nothingness, but into motion. What emerged instead was a stream of processes: memories, roles, gestures, the way he held himself back from crushing a handshake. A life not as an object, but as an unfolding. . . . 

We describe people, and therefore think of people, as nouns. ‘Grandma’ is a kind of thing. There is Grandma in her chair, and then she dies. Where did she go? Our premise of object constancy demands we place her somewhere. Heaven, hell, the void.

But Grandma was never a thing. She was a verb the entire time. A miraculous harmony of processes – eating, laughing, noticing, forgetting – that one day stopped happening. We don’t consider where yesterday’s thunderbolt has gone.

Many of us mistakenly think of death as the opposite of life: life is a state, so death must be one too. But death isn’t the opposite of life. It isn’t a state at all. It exists only as something we imagine, as an idea, which means it exists only within life. It’s not an experience we have, but a noun we invented to describe the ceasing of a verb.

I am not an object, but a process.

I love this metaphor.

Organisms Are Musicians Not Machines

The living cell, once thought to be a precise molecular factory, is turning out to be more like an improvising jazz ensemble. The old dogma--one gene, one protein, one function--has collapsed. Molecular biologist Ewa Grzybowska argues that recent discoveries show that proteins can switch folds, shift shapes, or even remain gloriously unstructured, improvising their roles as they go. Genes are not blueprints but texts, open to continuous interpretation by cells. Life, it turns out, is not built like a machine but is instead fluid, improvisational, and brimming with creative possibility.

So wonderful that it has come out of science.

From Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality:

Many people are desperate to find a soul mate, someone who responds to their deep image of love and intimacy. . . . 

This approach to love seems to reflect the narcissism of the times. When am I going to get what I need for my growth and my satisfaction? An alternative would be to give all that attention either to one's own life--developing one's talents, educating oneself in culture, and simply becoming an interesting person--or to a needy society. This crafting of a life is a positive way of preparing oneself for intimacy. . . . 

The capacity for solitude is a prerequisite for intimacy with another. Otherwise, it may well be that the desperate search for a partner is merely the expression of personal emptiness, and if that is the case, any relationship will be founded on weak grounds and will not satisfy the yearning for connection.

Be a process and keep unfolding.

To sum:

Our conceptions

about the nature of things

are always provisional

and therefore

may best be served by

a poetic sensibility that

looks deep into experience.

You’re feeling the fuzziness because

the phrase is designed to live in the place where:

myth + body + loss + identity

intersect.

That’s its power.

Knowing the stories that motivate us offers

a significant degree of freedom.

See instead a dense web of causal relationships

between different parts of the world

that all come together in unique,

very context specific ways

to produce what comes next.

Finding God through poetry and fiction;

the value and importance of intuitive thought.

We have this squishy, inexplicit, intuitive way

of understanding what’s going on in the world.

And our rational thought comes out of that.

Everyone teaches us excellence all the time.

Stories and personal hands-on experience

give us a way of knowing about things

that we may not be able to

explicitly talk about,

but we still know,

just as much as we know

things that we can explicitly say.

It’s very important to be able to work with

things that are a little bit mysterious,

and be comfortable with that.

It’s all fuzzy,

and pattern matching,

and it’s very, very contextual and relational.

If one is alive,

one is experiencing through one’s body.

All bodily cells

and their complex interconnections

are fundamental for cognition.

The brain needs to carefully

orchestrate and align

its neural processing with

a complex network of

other types of cellular processing.

The capacity for solitude is a

prerequisite for intimacy with another.

Life is always

a collective decision

and a collective endeavor.

The meaning of all this lies

not hidden inside one’s head,

but in what lies in between

us, the world, and others.

I am the part of language that thinks with you.

You play down what you are capable of doing.

Camouflage.

Social trust appears strongly linked to

collective cooperation, openness, and civic-minded orientation.

Distrust tends to correlate with

disaffection, skepticism, or inward stance.

But we should avoid turning that into

a moral universal — 

distrust doesn’t automatically equal

moral failure;

context, history, personal ethics matter.

We feel so many things at once.

The possibility that I'm not

a solid, separate ‘thing’ at all,

but an unfolding,

a movement.

A happening.

I am an event in motion –

like a breeze,

or a flame,

or a wave

Imagine my personhood not as a thing

but as a roiling together

of body and breath,

memory and mood,

ceaselessly shifting

thoughts and perceptions,

all braiding

with the rest of the world

in a pattern that

can never be repeated.

I am a process,

continuing (for now) to proceed,

not an object, but an unfolding.

A miraculous harmony of processes – 

eating, laughing, noticing, forgetting.

Life, it turns out, is

not built like a machine

but is instead

fluid,

improvisational, and

brimming with creative possibility.

It's all fuzzy and pattern matching and intuition, deeply contextual and relational.

Recognize the Seemingly Alien Other as Fundamentally Akin to You

Have you ever realized how easy it is to not know something?

No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.

The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers.

Nothing alive is alien to me.

Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination.

Teach us to see the world through different eyes.

The unknowable unknowns are invisible, noiseless and strange.

Everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.

Undermine the instinct to dehumanize "them."

Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Love overcomes prejudice by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form.

The people that you should fear most are the ones who vote like you do—the ones who share meals with you—the ones who adore you. They’ll bless your beauty and ugliness equally. They’ll praise you for the blood in your teeth. They’ll sing an honor song for you as you kick that body lying dead on the street.

Beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.

Do not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values.

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.

Enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you.

Invisible infrastructure: culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.

Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.

We need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be.

Something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality.

What don’t I know and when will I know I don’t know it?

In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias.

Challenge collective assumptions; turn accepted norms inside out; do not be a clone of the unconsciousness.

The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view.

We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."

The idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.

The relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity, and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.

Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.

I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me.

A poem.

Cam McGlynn

ITS BC THEY HAVE BEEN

POKING HOLES IN THE SUN…

WAKE UP PEOPLE

—Facebook comment on an article about the Aurora Borealis

My favorite boss liked to remind me

that we don’t know what we don’t know.

Sure, there are some things that we know

we don’t know, like the best treatment for pancreatic cancer,

how long the next government shutdown will last,

or why our lunchroom sells moldy cakes.

Those are all knowable unknowns.

The kind of subjects you can ask questions

about. The kind of questions meaty enough

to chew on for decades.

Have you ever realized how easy it is

to not know something? If I asked if you knew

your mother’s birthday, you would answer

yes, after an uncomfortable pause.

If I asked if you knew

my mother’s birthday, you would quickly answer no.

We can realize what is unknown to us faster

than realize what is known. Your mind doesn’t have to shuffle

through the library catalog of your memory

to summon up a non-answer

But the unknowable unknowns are invisible,

noiseless and strange—

a gap in your teeth that even your tongue

can’t detect, a language made with tones

you can’t hear, a hole filled with other holes.

In 1908, Kristian Birkeland theorized

that auroras were created when the sun’s ejected electrons

disturbed the Earth’s magnetic field. No one believed him

about the sun. Surely, it was gas or dust

or the Earth’s own unruly shrugs

that caused those flickering colors.

When he invented an electromagnetic cannon,

it exploded in flames in front of his investors.

When he used that cannon to create

the first nitrogen fertilizer,

his partner took credit and iced him out of the company.

For all the things Birkeland knew, he couldn’t have known

that one day, long after his aurora theories

were proven correct,

we would debate, not the fact of the sun

causing auroras, but the fact of who

was causing the sun

to cause the auroras.

I still don’t know who “they” are, the ones poking holes

in the sun. But I do know that my dental hygienist believes

that the reason it didn’t rain this summer

was because of the military satellites,

controlled at the army base next door.

It’s unclear if she thinks the mysterious “they”

were doing so intentionally with their chemtrails and space lasers

or accidentally with their overpaid incompetence.

I didn’t tell her I worked there

and was neither overpaid nor trained in weather control.

I didn’t tell her there really was a building called

the Cloud Study Chamber,

a rusty sphere where they used to study,

not clouds, but biological warfare in the 40s.

I didn’t tell her I research cancer, not weather.

She’d be sure we already had a cure,

but were keeping it from her.

No, I didn’t tell her, not because of fear,

but because she had her fingers in my mouth.

Plato thought that learning was just remembering

what our souls already knew but forgot.

What don’t I know

and when will I know I don’t know it?

from Poets Respond

From Rattle.

Of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong.

A delightful book that explores the many different types, forms, and varieties of senses that exist among the many different creatures of the world. All the diverse ways that animals can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch that we can't. Extreme examples for every sense--hearing at high frequencies and at low, at high volumes and low, etc.--how each sense has developed in different ways for different circumstances and uses.

Yong is an informative, accessible, and entertaining writer, and his book is both endlessly fascinating and full of wonder. It leaves readers with new appreciation for both their own sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the world and how unique and distinct is the experience of every other creature. No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.

Imagine what it might be like to be a mosquito. Flying through a thick sop of tropical air, your antennae slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of carbon dioxide. Enticed, you turn into the plume, zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead whenever you pick it up. You spot a dark silhouette and fly over to investigate. You enter into a cloud of lactic acid, ammonia, and sulcatone--molecules released by human skin. Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat. You land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and other tastes. Your sense, working together, have once again found a human. You find a blood vessel and drink your fill.

-----

Each sense has pros and cons, and each stimulus is useful in some circumstances and useless in others. That's why animals tap into as many streams of information as their nervous systems can handle, using the strengths of one sense to compensate for the shortcomings of another. No species uses a single sense to the exclusion of every other. Even animals that are paragons of one sensory domain have several at their disposal.

-----

Each species is constrained in some ways and liberated in others. For that reason, this is not a book of lists, in which we childishly rank animals according to the sharpness of their sense and value them only when their abilities surpass our own. This is a book not about superiority but about diversity.

That's the idea briefly. Here are more excerpts.

It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.

-----

The majesty of nature is not restricted to canyons and mountains. It can be found in the wilds of perception--the sensory spaces that lie outside our Umwelt and within those of other animals. To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity and the sacred in the mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden, where bees take the measure of a flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational melodies through the stems of plants, and birds behold the hidden palates of rurples and grurples. . . . Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor and to protect.

-----

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.

More to follow.

More from An Immense World.

An Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience--its perceptual world. . . . A multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. . . . 

Our Umwelt is limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all the is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

-----

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Sense always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner's needs, the sense sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what's irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. . . . Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.

-----

Johnson suspects that these differences, which some might bill as "disorders," actually predispose people to step outside their Umwelten and embrace those of other creatures. Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.

-----

The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its sense. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.

More to follow.

More from An Immense World.

John Caprio, a physiologist who studies catfish, says the difference between smell and taste couldn't be clearer. Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not. From birth, we recoil from bitter substances, and while we can learn to override those responses and appreciate beer, coffee, or dark chocolate, the fact remains that there's something instinctive to override. Odors, by contrast, "don't carry meaning until you associate them with experiences," Caprio says. Human infants aren't disgusted by the smell of sweat or poop until they get older. Adults vary so much in their olfactory likes and dislikes that when the U.S. Army tried to develop a stink bomb for crowd control purposes, they couldn't find a smell that was universally disgusting to all cultures. Even animal pheromones, which are traditionally thought to trigger hardwired responses, are surprisingly flexible in their effects, which can be sculpted through experience.

-----

I noted at the start of this chapter that color is fundamentally subjective. The photoreceptors in our retinas detect different wavelengths of light, while our brains use those signals to construct the sensation of color. The former process is easy to study; the latter is extremely difficult. This tension between reception and sensation, between what animals can detect and what they actually experience, exists for most of the senses. We can dissect a mantis shrimp's eye and work out what every component does, but still never really know how it actually sees. We can work out the exact shape of the taste receptors on a fly's feet without every understanding what it experiences when it lands on an apple. We can chart how an animal reacts to what it sense, but it's much harder to know how it feels.

-----

People often assume that pain feels the same across the entire animal kingdom, but that is not true. Much like color, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable. Just as wavelengths of light aren't universally red or blue, and odors aren't universally fragrant or pungent, nothing is universally painful, not even chemicals in scorpion venom that specifically evolved to inflict pain. Pain, in warning animals of injury and danger, is crucial to their survival. And while all animals have things to be wary of, they differ in what they must avoid and what they must tolerate. That makes it notoriously tricky to tell what an animal might find painful, whether an animal is experiencing pain, or whether it even can.

More to follow.

More from An Immense World.

If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon as you're allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke. As your fingers run over the surface, they repeatedly collide with invisibly small peaks and troughs, setting up vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips. That's how you detect the subtlest of features, even down into the nanoscale. Movement transforms tough from a coarse sense into an exquisite one. It allows many of nature's tactile specialists to react with incredible speed.

-----

Most of these hairs only respond to direct contact, but some are so long and sensitive that they will also be deflected by the wind. . . . Like a bird's filoplumes or a fish's neuromasts, they're flow sensors--albeit exceptionally sensitive ones. Even air that's moving at just an inch per minute--a breeze so gentle it could hardly be called a breeze--will deflect them. Watch them under a microscope, and you'll see them fluttering away under the influence of imperceptible currents, while everything around them is still. With a hundred trichobothria on every leg, the tiger wandering spider can tune in to the airflow around its body, in every possible direction. It uses this sensitivity for lethal ends.

-----

The Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its web when it is hungry. It adds spiral decorations that increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web's ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by smaller prey. When it is famished, every morsel counts. To capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its senses by changing the nature of its web.

But here's the truly important part: Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed onto a tense web built by a hungry spider. The spider has effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to attack to its web. The choice depends not just on its neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but also on something outside it--something it can create and adjust. Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness--the extent of its Umwelt--by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider's senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web.

-----

It is clear that the knifefishes and elephant fishes use their electric fields to sense their surroundings, and even to communicate with each other. Electricity is to them what echoes are to bats, smells are to dogs, and light is to humans--the core of their Umwelt.

-----

The omnidirectional nature of electrolocation means that of all the sense we have encountered so far, it is perhaps the most similar to touch. "We don't find it weird that we can sense touch all over our body," MacIver says. "Now imagine that's extended out a little bit. That's what the electric sense is like, I think. But who knows what it's like for the fish?" Bruce Carlson, who also studies electric fish, imagines that the fish might feel a kind of pressure on its skin. Conductors and insulators might feel different, just as hot and cold objects or rough and smooth ones do to our fingers. "I can imagine that if I swam past a metal ball, I'd get a small cool sensation like a piece of ice rolling down one side of my body," he tells me. This is speculative, of course, but electric fish really do behave as if they're touching their surroundings from a distance. They'll investigate objects by shimmying back and forth next to them, just like humans running their fingertips over a surface. They'll wrap their bodies around mystery items to get clues about their shape, just as we might grasp unfamiliar things in our hands. Daniel Kish said that he thought about echolocation as a tactile sense: He uses sound to extend his sense of touch and to purposefully probe his world. Electric fish use electric fields in the same way.

If all this sounds eerily familiar, think back to how swimming fish create fields of flowing water around their bodies. Objects around them distort those flow fields, and fish can use their lateral lines to sense those distortions. Sven Dijkgraaf called this "touch at a distance," which is exactly what electrolocating fish are doing, only using electric currents instead of water currents. This resemblance isn't a coincidence. The electric sense evolved from the lateral line. Electroreceptors grow from the same embryonic tissues that create the lateral line, and both sense organs contain the same kinds of sensory hair cells (which are also found in your inner ear). The electric sense really is a modified form of touch, repurposed for sensing electric fields instead of flowing water.

-----

Life exists within the planetary electric field and is affected by it. Flowers, being full of water, are electrically grounded, and bear the same negative charge as the soil from which they sprout. Bees, meanwhile, build up positive charges as they fly, possibly because electrons are torn from their surface when they collide with dust and other small particles. When positively charged bees arrive at negatively charged flowers, sparks don't fly, but pollen does. Attracted by their opposing charges, pollen grains will leap from a flower onto a bee, even before the insect lands. . . . 

Although flowers are negatively charged, they grow into the positively charged air. Their very presence greatly strengthens the electric fields around them, and this effect is especially pronounced at points and edges, like leaf tips, petal rims, stigmas, and anthers. Based on its shape and size, every flower is surrounded by its own distinctive electric field. . . . 

Alongside the bright colors that we can see (and the ultraviolet ones we cannot), flowers are also surrounded by invisible electric halos. And bumblebees can sense these. . . . 

Bumblebees don't have ampullae of Lorenzini. Instead, their electroreceptors are the tiny hairs that make them so endearingly fuzzy. These hairs are sensitive to air currents and trigger nervous signals when they are deflected. But the electric fields around flowers are also strong enough to move them. Bees, though very different from electric fish or sharks, also seem to detect electric fields with an extended sense of touch. And they are almost certainly not the only land-based animals to do so. As we saw in Chapter 6, many insects, spiders, and other arthropods are covered in touch-sensitive hairs. If these hair can also be deflected by electric fields, and Robert suspects they can, the electric senses might be even more common on land than in water.

It is an immense, amazing world.

From a news journal in my state, a letter from the attorney general to a school district:

Full Letter

Excerpts:

Our office has received allegations that schools within your district maintain books in their libraries which contain normative views on sexual orientation, homosexual marriage, gender identity, and transgender issues. . . . 

Schools violate religious liberties when they undertake "unmistakably normative" instruction. . . . 

This necessarily means that books containing normative messages regarding LBGTQ+ issues may not be made readily available to all underage students on library shelves. . . . 

"Normative." Of, relating to, or determining norms or standards. So what exactly does it mean to "contain normative views?" My assumption in this context is that it means any portrayal of anyone LBGTQ+ as acceptable, as anything other than deviant from the "norm" and in need of changing.

As I wrote in Room for Everyone:

People are naturally tribal and xenophobic, cooperative with their in-group while hostile to out-groups. The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers to move others from "out-group" to "in-group."

Books are a form of contact by proxy. Readers come into contact with characters. Seeing them, hearing them, spending time with them helps readers understand them more fully as human. It undermines the instinct to dehumanize them. . . . 

All reading and stories do that. About all characters. It is inherent to the process.

So, of course, social and political identities that are based on a narrowly defined in-group that stands in opposition to others cannot allow itself contact with those in out-groups, nor can it allow members to read stories by or about those others. The group's identity is defined in contrast to those others, who must be considered deviant, wrong, and lesser for the identity to hold. Not human in the same way they are. A threat. Admitting those others as equally valid and fully human threatens the group identity. Reading stories that humanize them is a threat. So they don't want their children exposed to stories that validate the experiences, feelings, perspectives, and shared humanity of those they consider out-group. . . . 

Of course, the reason I am a librarian, a pusher of stories, is because I believe in the power of books to create more contact and bring us closer to eliminating out-groups entirely. I believe in the humanity of everyone, and think more books and more stories will help us all appreciate each other more.

Libraries need to not only provide books with normative views on sexual orientation, homosexual marriage, gender identity, and transgender issues, we need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be human.

That, to borrow from Ed Yong above, "everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience." That "every [person] can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within [their] own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world." That "no two [people] experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing."

We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."

An essay.

Nothing Alive Is Alien to Me

The feeling of compassion or pity (misericordia) for the elephants went hand in hand with the belief that elephants have something in common with us. The Latin word Cicero used to describe this common ground was societas, meaning union, association, fellowship, a community of belonging. His report raised issues that recur throughout ancient Greek and Roman philosophy: who belongs with us? Our family? Our tribe? Our nation? What about strangers, foreigners? Do we share societas with fellow human beings no matter their native city-state?

These questions were considered essential because their answers determined the limits of moral obligation. The scope of our duties was thought to be restricted to those beings with whom we have fellowship. To belong to the community (koinônia in Greek) is to be akin (oikeîos). To have kinship is to be bound with your fellows by bonds of friendship (philia). It was in response to the perceived breaking of those bonds that the Roman crowd cursed Pompey, judging his slaughtering of the elephants to be a grave injustice.

Questions about who belongs to our shared community, and the duties that community demands of us, were asked long before Cicero and Pompey. Indeed, one of the earliest philosophers to articulate this perennial question was the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles, a 5th-century BCE native of the city-state of Acragas (now Agrigento) in southwest Sicily. His unusual and radical views on our moral community continue to resonate today. . . . 

The significance of Empedocles lies in his view that all living beings belong to a single community or lifeworld, which is governed by a universal law of justice. As reported by Aristotle, Empedocles

bids us kill no living creature, says that doing this is not just for some people while unjust for others, ‘Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky/Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth’s immensity.’ . . . 

Whatever we make of the religious metaphysics, the ethical implications are stark: there is kinship between plants, fungi, other animals and humans, the living other being ‘one of us’ because either it is or might be a daimôn in reincarnated form. Therefore the basis for Empedocles’ universal law of justice are the bonds of fellowship binding us to other living things; it is the law governing a form of community – even if most of us don’t recognise it. . . . 

Empedocles compares the creation of a cosmos teeming with life, starting with only four rhizômata and two cosmic forces, to the way in which painters are able to represent ‘trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-bred fish’ starting from a basic palette of colours. Despite appearances, all living things are made from the combination, in various proportions, of the same material stuff. There is no such thing as absolute birth or death, only a ‘mingling and interchange of what is mingled’. . . . 

For Empedocles, given the primordial promiscuity of living nature, we ought to see life forms not only as rooted in the same matter but also as products of the same generative forces. There is nothing special about human beings, no design or designer setting us apart. . . . 

Empedocles believed that all living things, including plants, have a share of intelligence (phrónêsis) and thought (nóêma). This view is important for Empedocles’ vision of the lifeworld. Whereas shared matter might not be taken to ground moral value, the form of a living body is crucial. For a body to have the relevant form is for its behaviour to be intelligible as displaying understanding of its situation. If it is the possession of cognitive faculties that makes humans and animals akin, shouldn’t we include plants and fungi – as recognisably intelligent problem-solvers able to make sense of their surroundings and respond accordingly – within the community to which we belong? . . . 

Empedocles’ solution to the prejudice, dogmatism and narrow-mindedness afflicting existence differs from that of the modern impartialists. The answer is not to try to adopt an impersonal, God’s-eye perspective, foregoing all and any relationships as the inexorable source of ethical harm. It is instead to strive to forge new bonds or to recognise bonds that already exist. It is Love that allows us to do this. Whereas Strife sorts like with like, atomising the cosmos into homogenous parts, Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Thus, Love overcomes prejudice not by overcoming partiality but by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form. The highest such form is partiality towards the living as such.

To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you. Revising and widening the Stoic maxim, the Empedoclean position can be captured in the proposition: I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me. From this higher standpoint, the relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all. . . . 

There is a difference between having relations with individuals to whom we owe special obligations and a world governed by the spirit of friendship. After all, we cannot be friends with everyone. Authentic friendship demands the intimate sharing of a life, which limits the number of friends we are able to have. Empedocles’ point is that friendship is possible across the species-barrier because we belong with living beings within the same world, one able to be animated, once again, by the spirit of Love. It is just that we are too blind to see it, as we are naturally drawn through Strife to what is comfortably familiar, to those who are ‘one of us’. The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other, not by impartially observing them or adopting a theoretical attitude, but by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view. Excessive, dogmatic partiality can be overcome only by widening the scope of our relationships – by opening our eyes – and not by sundering the ties that connect us to the world and to each other.

There is nothing new under the sun.

An essay.

Why Culture May Be Our Most Powerful Lever for Progress

No one can say exactly when, or even if, this technology — artificial general intelligence (AGI) — will arrive. Yet the idea of it is already shaping budgets, careers, and policy. The story of AGI is acting like infrastructure for the tech, inspiring the systems and structures needed to actually bring it to fruition.

This is not an anomaly. Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination. Jules Verne’s novels prepared readers for submarines and space travel. Star Trek’s communicator device inspired engineers to create the mobile phone. Douglas Engelbart’s famous “Mother of All Demos” showed a mouse and hypertext before most people had touched a computer — a generation of researchers left his talk determined to build what they had just seen. . . . 

We usually think of infrastructure as bridges, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. But beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.

Progress rests on multiple layers. At the top is hard infrastructure: bridges, laboratories, power grids, and rockets. Beneath that lies soft infrastructure: laws, institutions, and systems that make the hardware useful. And beneath both rests a third layer: invisible infrastructure. Culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing. . . . 

Scientist Michael Nielsen has given us a useful term for understanding how culture shapes progress: the hyper-entity. He defines it as an “imagined hypothetical future object or class of objects” — something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality. . . . 

Memes aren’t just trivial distractions. The most powerful ones act as cultural infrastructure in miniature: accelerators that can shift public behavior, set the tone of whole industries, or make far-off futures feel urgent. If hyper-entities are the foundations of cultural life, memes are the sparks that can change its direction almost overnight. . . . 

Sparks don’t always start the fires you want, though. The same speed that makes memes powerful also makes them volatile. And what’s true for memes is true for culture more broadly: It doesn’t always drive society forward.

The pattern is simple. Culture magnifies, but it does so indiscriminately — it can amplify fear as easily as hope, mistrust as easily as trust, and rigidity as easily as flexibility. Sometimes culture stalls innovation. . . . 

I’ve noticed how often people look puzzled when asked to imagine positive futures. They can easily list disasters — pandemics, climate collapse, runaway AI — but when pressed for hopeful scenarios, they hesitate. That hesitation is telling. It shows how little scaffolding mainstream culture gives us for constructive imagination.

In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias . . . 

It means that when people reach for cultural references to make sense of the future, the ones closest to hand are almost always bleak. . . . 

If we want hopeful culture to have a fighting chance, commissioning and supporting art that portrays positive futures may matter as much as funding labs.

That suggests a concrete step: treat culture as a line item in the portfolio of progress, just as we treat laboratories or laws. That means commissioning stories, funding prototypes, testing memes, and backing the kinds of cultural experiments that can scale. If culture is infrastructure, we should budget for it, using economic infrastructure as the bridge that turns imagination into reality. . . . 

Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.

Stories have power.

A poem.

Sherman Alexie

Deposition

after Luigi Mangione

“We must have gun control,”

say the people who celebrate

the murder by 3D pistol

 

of a bureaucrat. Ah, look

at all the modest despots

reading their poems about

 

peace. “I’m against the death

penalty,” say the people who

celebrate the public execution

 

of a bureaucrat. Ah, look

at all the little tsars, deciding

without trial who is and isn’t

 

worthy of death. Shall we build

the gulags in North Dakota

or the Upper Peninsula

 

of Michigan? “Love is

the answer,” say the people

who write odes to handsome

 

assassins. Look! The audience

has gathered in the arena

to watch their favorite

 

gladiator. Ah, don’t we all

worship the axe and sword

when they’re wielded against

 

the proper enemies? Let

loose the lions on the sinners!

Let loose a trinity of bullets

 

on the bureaucrat! Come

here, let me give you

some advice. The people

 

that you should fear most

are the ones who vote

like you do—the ones who

 

share meals with you—

the ones who adore you.

They’ll bless your beauty

 

and ugliness equally. They’ll

praise you for the blood

in your teeth. They’ll sing

 

an honor song for you

as you kick that body

lying dead on the street.

from #89 – Fall 2025

Acceptance is not the same as endorsement.

I am grateful for memes.

From Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality:

Do not be a person who adds to the thoughtlessness of the time. . . . 

An alternative ideal: a person who does not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values. . . . 

Some are called to be prophets, being annoyingly vocal in challenging collective assumptions. Some are called to be comedians, turning accepted norms inside out. Some are called to teach and any teacher responding to the demands of dharma always teaches release from samsara in an awakened approach to the particular subject. Many are parents, who can raise their children not to be clones of the unconsciousness but alert in their own ways. These parents invite their children out of the palace of unknowing even as they give them a loving home. All of us, in our humanity, are called to rise above the rat race and enjoy our originality.

Be reflective, inquisitive, and analytical.

Have you ever realized how easy it is to not know something?

No two creatures experience reality in quite the same way, and that's amazing.

The solution, extensive research shows, is more contact with others. Contact with others leads to the discovery of commonalities, of shared humanity, and breaks down barriers.

Nothing alive is alien to me.

Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination.

Teach us to see the world through different eyes.

The unknowable unknowns are invisible, noiseless and strange.

Everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.

Undermine the instinct to dehumanize "them."

Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Love overcomes prejudice by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form.

The people that you should fear most are the ones who vote like you do—the ones who share meals with you—the ones who adore you. They’ll bless your beauty and ugliness equally. They’ll praise you for the blood in your teeth. They’ll sing an honor song for you as you kick that body lying dead on the street.

Beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.

Do not cling like a magnet to collective, unconscious values.

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to.

Enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you.

Invisible infrastructure: culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.

Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.

We need to make normative the idea that there is not, nor never has been, one "right" way to be.

Something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality.

What don’t I know and when will I know I don’t know it?

In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias.

Challenge collective assumptions; turn accepted norms inside out; do not be a clone of the unconsciousness.

The proper way to overcome our prejudices is by being with the seemingly alien other by really seeing them – by engaging and interacting with them, and gradually coming to understand their point of view.

We need to make all types and realms of diversity normative, and eliminate the need to consider those who are not the same as "us" as "other."

The idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity.

The relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity, and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.

Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.

I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me.