Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“At issue is a new effort by the US Copyright Office to consider how to apply US copyright law to the nascent AI industry. The matter has triggered impassioned pushback from powerful tech interests who say they must have access to people’s hard work for free, or the future of their industry will be jeopardized….
“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives…
“We once had roots. We knew our ancestors and the cyclical line that was the future. But colonialism came and we were uprooted. We lost our past and had to invent a future that never existed. If we want to make an inventory of our time and understand ourselves in this timeless present, we must…
“…branding animals ‘invasive’ is not only unethical, but it is also based on a confused understanding of species migrations over time. The reason that the rhetoric of invasive species has become so popular is because it provides a simplistic account of what are in fact very complicated biological processes. As such, the invasive species discourse…
“The actions of billiard players, people in general, nonhuman animals, and even plants when seen in the right time frame, are patently intentional, both in the more precise sense used by philosophers in the line of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and in the more everyday sense referring to an act carried out for some purpose, something…
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I…
“Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old…
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…
“What often slips away in our quests to out-think the problems in our environments is that thinking itself is an ecological habit, a shared vocation between humans and non-humans. We have inherited the sticky myth that thinking happens in our heads, that creativity is a mental thing, and that if we pushed ourselves a bit…