Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localize response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience…
“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….
“…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 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…
“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…
“Think of a brand new automobile on a rainy day. And it’s parked on the street and down at the street corner there’s a busy intersection and there’s a red light and it’s a green light. And now you look at your car sitting there and it’s red across it’s surface but it also has…
“Cruelty plays a fundamental role in the vegetarian’s argument inasmuch as the principal reason the vegetarian does not want to eat meat is that she does not want to kill animals or cause them to suffer. The vegetarian sees cruelty in purely negative terms; she believes that its complete eradication is a realistic goal that…
“In discussions about plastic use it is common to blame mass consumerism and a throwaway culture for the environmental problem of plastic. However, rather than being demand led, the throwaway culture was created and driven by the corporations who profit from it. The amazing materials created from the waste products of the oil and gas…
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…