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An onotlogical pivot I experienced in my late teens was recognizing that the taxonomy of life is not some immutable fact that we're uncovering. It's this Sisyph
by Waterluvian 8d ago
An onotlogical pivot I experienced in my late teens was recognizing that the taxonomy of life is not some immutable fact that we're uncovering. It's this Sisyphean task of providing structure to something that is everchanging. It's never complete, never correct, but it's often useful. In that way it's a lot like unicode!
When thinking about the evolution of the taxonomy of life, I think about how there's really no good reason to imagine a lifeform as being a singular, physically connected organism. We structure it that way because it's useful. We see trees and we imagine each one is a lifeform, but there are entire forests of just one tree. I don't think it's too bizarre to structure a model that demonstrates communities of lifeforms (whether ants, slime mold, or humans) as being effectively one conscious being.
- card_zero 8d agoThat's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly. What, a downvote, did I get that wrong? I wish downvoters would speak up and explain themselves. OK, I searched GEB, it is in fact Aunt Hillary.
- bena 8d agoI like to say "taxonomy is bullshit". Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start looking at it too hard. Take everyone's favorite example: the tomato. We get into all sorts of discussions about what is a fruit, a vegetable, botanically or culinarily, etc, etc. Ultimately realizing that all plant matter is categorized as "vegetable" on the most abstract level. Thinking that one more layer of taxonomy will neatly box everything. But it won't. We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is. Classification is one of the hardest things because it's entirely a fuzzy problem.
- Waterluvian 8d agoYeah, exactly my thoughts. I wish these kinds of structures in science had been taught to me with a lesson on, "models are useful metaphors, not cosmic truths." Because they often got taught alongside the things that are much closer to cosmic truths (I see you philosophers lining up around the corner to argue that these never exist. Go on now. Git!).
- card_zero 8d agoIt's a fucking berry. No, I quite agree, I don't know what the point of saying that is either. Oh, let's link to "lumpers and splitters"! This comes up over and over again in a million contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
- jl6 8d ago> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is. Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.
- Waterluvian 8d ago> it is definitely not a cricket bat. My son has empirically disproven this when he was four. He's also disproven that it's not a cookie.
- mcphage 8d agoThe problem is that we think of categories as this binary thing, when they're not. We recognize it with adjectives like "Tall"—most people wouldn't say "something is either Tall or it's Not Tall". But the truth is, every word is like that. The solution isn't more and more rigid delineations—the solution is accepting that the borders are wide, and plenty of object straddle them. To bring up an even more argued about example—is a hot dog a sandwich? Some people say yes, some people say no, but the answer can be (and most likely is) "kinda".
- bglazer 8d agoYou might like process philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
- Waterluvian 8d agoI might! Thanks for a thread to pull. I’ve never heard of the concept.
- horsawlarway 8d agoYeah - my joke (that's only somewhat joking) is that you can think of nations as "planetary coral".
- wilbur_whateley 8d agoThen why do I feel like me and not this larger structure?
- Waterluvian 8d agoMaybe you just feel like your brain and its dominance over the other organs. What does your heart say? Or your spleen?
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- jchook 8d agoA materialist might imagine consciousness is made up of constituent parts, like the organs of perception and the cells that make up those organs. So perhaps you are a constituent part of the larger consciousness, and you feel your part of it (e.g. your roles and relationships in society)
- Henchman21 8d agoBecause your brain is an “antenna” for the consciousness of your soul. It can only feel a certain way because of the limits of flesh coded into each of us. :)