Author Archives: tmurphy

Ditching Dualism #3: The Divorce

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Dualists have a foot in each camp, precariously.

Having prefaced this series on dualism with a clarifying exaltation and a grounding in animism, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and trace the origins of dualism.

Animist tendencies have to be stamped out of children in our culture, who display a natural proclivity to treat the entire world around them as alive and full of potential friends. They soon learn from acculturated adults the sin of anthropomorphism. “Stop talking to that stool and inviting it for tea! Don’t dare project human greatness onto mere ‘things’—or even animals. No, not even Boots, the family pet. Yes, technically humans are animals, but that’s just a quirky fact, not how we should act.” Indeed, we do a number on our kids, molding them into fine little human supremacists.

Viewing rocks and weather and rivers as part of a single, unified co-dependent Web of Life, animists are somewhat allergic to both supremacy and hierarchy. Humility is the watchword. We don’t and can’t understand enough to call ourselves superior, voiding any case for ranking. Many cultures recognized humans’ newbie status and explicitly looked for wisdom in our elder relatives: the plants and animals, who knew how to live in “right relationship” with each other and with the planet—tested over eons.

This aversion to hierarchy went hand-in-hand with “fiercely egalitarian” social practices—wherein everyone had essentially equal access to food and its means of procurement. Various “leveling mechanisms” were employed deliberately and explicitly to prevent the emergence of instability resulting from power concentration. Demand-sharing and jocular meat-shaming were common practices in this vein, all the way to banishment or death for dangerous aggrandizers (see also earlier, related work from Hayden). As Christopher Ryan phrases it in Civilized to Death, “There’s plenty of ferocity in the ‘fierce egalitarianism’ of foragers.”

So, what happened to upset this long-standing social order?

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Ditching Dualism #2: Animism

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Tell this rock it’s not alive! From Wikimedia Commons.

In this second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Why this additional detour before getting to dualism itself? Two answers come to mind. First, it’s valuable to know what pervaded long before dualism swept in. Second, some aspects of animism might provide an appealing alternative—and in so doing might stave off the sense of nihilism and lack of meaning that can accompany the contemplated abandonment of an entrenched worldview. In other words, it’s nice to have another lifeboat at the ready—especially one as time-tested as animism—before asking someone to step off their current, familiar platform.

Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more “normal,” but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.

Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, as fabricated by Greek philosophers during modernity’s early adolescence. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods and that of “lower” animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing, separating the heavenly from the earthly—humans of course having access to both at once: a foot in both camps.

A persuasive argument has it that this perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control “lower” life, as its domesticating masters. Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions explicitly grant dominion of Earth and its lesser inhabitants to a culture of ordained human supremacists.

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Ditching Dualism #1: Exaltation

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Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

By elevating human experience above the remainder of the universe, dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity—which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. Therefore, it seems important enough to devote some time to the matter. The first question one might ask is: “Am I a dualist?” A crude test involves answering the following questions:

  1. Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
  2. Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?

Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. “Maybe” answers are okay, too, but perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.

The topic of dualism is too important and too stealthily integrated into modern worldviews to be handled in a post of ordinary length. Maybe a book would be better, but I’m going to be lazy and parcel it out as a series of posts. I recognize that what I am attempting is very tricky, and probably insufficient to persuade anybody—we do get set in our beliefs (although I was once a default dualist, and still squirm at some of the implications of abandoning this comfortable, safe, and culturally reinforced position). All the same, I will try to anticipate failure modes and navigate around them before they seize the reader.

The larger effort here benefits from first establishing a starting position before even getting to the main topic of dualism. I hope it helps build a coherent framework, perhaps establishing deep resonance, connection, and trust before trying to extract the toxins. Of course, I may lose some people even in trying to establish a foundation, but I find I’m most interested in building something among those who start off with admiration for the universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. The others may be beyond reach.

The motivation for starting with an exaltation to the living world is mainly that I will ultimately be making the case that we find ourselves in a material universe, and that the only non-dualistic way to take this seriously is to have microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans, of course) be entirely material beings. For many, this elicits distaste over the notion that humans and animals are “just machines,” and thus don’t deserve any more regard than a calculator. This hasty conclusion misses something enormous, and I thought it important to begin by expressing complete admiration for Life (which I even tend to capitalize, mimicking the convention for God). If being “only” material would seem to make a living being worthless, I hope by the end of the series the reader will understand this to be a failure of scope and not at all a necessary conclusion.

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Space Case

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Beyond infinity? (from Publicdomainpictures)

As a consequence of my dismissing human space futures as fantasy, I was contacted by an academic astrophysicist counterpart pushing back on my position—which is perfectly reasonable. But the nature of the conversation offered too many revealing insights for me to set it aside. I share the dialog here as a case study representing two extrema on the space question, quickly exposing foundational disconnects of staggering proportions in terms of how the universe works and what we might expect of the future.

The identity of my interlocutor is not revealed, here. Suffice it to say that they are an astrophysicist in a research/professorial position having an impressive list of publications to their name as well as a few books—often touching on the topic of space futures. In other words, the opinions you are about to see are from a serious professional engaged in the subject at hand—more so than I am, in fact.

Not every sentence from the thread is reproduced below (cut about 10% of material less germane to the issue), but whole sections are left intact with no editing or modified emphasis. For each of the four rounds in the exchange, I include the original verbiage, then elaborate a few points before moving to the next round. Each starts with Not Me (NM) followed by the response from me (TM).

A recurrent emerging phenomenon is one of apparent symmetry, in a number of facets. For example, a top-level assessment is that each appears to think the other’s position is bonkers, and I’m ineligible to judge.

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Space as a Window

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A reflected window on space camp (Wikimedia Commons).

I grew up as a space enthusiast before I grew up. Part of the maturation process involved work on a Space Shuttle project, two decades of uninterrupted funding from NASA, reviewing many dozens of NASA proposals for space/rocket investigations, and serving as Principal Investigator for a mission concept study centered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to put a laser transponder on Phobos. Oh, and the most significant chunk of my astrophysics career relied upon the reflectors placed on the lunar regolith by astronaut hands.

No single moment stands out as a crossing of the Rubicon in terms of my migration away from fantasy. But by October 2011 my faith had eroded sufficiently to put out a blog post titled Why Not Space—motivated by responses to the “growth can’t last on a finite planet” drive that initiated this blog. “We’ll just expand into space,” some countered. Note: always beware the word “just,” especially when attached to feats of unprecedented difficulty.

I reprised the theme in Chapter 4 of my textbook (out in 2021), and again a few weeks back. In the last five years, my journey has produced significantly new perspectives (for me) which only serve to make the space delusion more strikingly fascinating and revealing. At this point, it’s hard to identify a phenomenon that so completely captures the religion of the day and its unhinged basis.

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When Space Becomes Silly

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Transport transfer in 1925: we’ve all done this by now, right? (Wikimedia Commons)

Recent posts have compared belief in a space future to belief in Flat Earth, and also compared living in space to hijinks like keeping a crewed airplane flying for over two months straight. Indeed, a number of insights might be gained by comparing the quest for flight to the space ambitions that followed.

Long before fuel-powered flight was demonstrated in 1903, human-powered flight had been a perennial dream of early inventors. It wasn’t until decades later that the much harder task of human-powered flight became possible—aided by modern lightweight materials. Yes, it can be done, but only if you’re a world-class athlete and content to travel at running speed a meter or two off the surface (remaining in ground-effect). Likewise, supersonic commercial flight is possible but not practical enough to remain an option. And it is possible to keep two people up in an airplane for 65 days.

Just because something can be demonstrated as a stunt does not mean it is destined to become normal practice. In particular—as I pointed out in an earlier post—occupation of a space station shares a lot in common with sustaining people in continuous airplane flight, which was once quite the enterprise. But after 1959, people stopped even trying. The exercise had crossed the line from meaningful to a silly waste of effort.

In the first half of the 20th Century, few (in techno-industrial cultures) would question the merits of attempting to keep people airborne as long as possible. It was exciting—proof of man’s greatness and progress into the novel. Given some degree of technological development since that time, we could presumably beat the 65 day record by a large margin, perhaps even demonstrating indefinite airborne capability—if sufficiently driven and provided adequate funds. But the proposal would likely—and fittingly— elicit shrugs and questions as to what the point would be. From my perspective, similar responses should accompany proposals for living in space. The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?

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Biosphere Theatrics

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Photograph by John de Dios (Wikimedia Commons)

I recently watched a documentary from 2020 called Spaceship Earth about the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. I had picked up bits and pieces about Biosphere 2 over the years, but found the film to be effective in expanding my sense of the endeavor.

Biosphere 2 was an effort motivated by obvious ecological peril together with the crazed space-age notion that we’d be living on other solar system bodies in a few generations. So, we’d better get our butts in gear and learn how to create our own sealed ecosystems. To clear up a point of confusion, Biosphere 2 was not the second attempt at an artificial environment, but was so-named to honor Earth as the original biosphere.

Here, I offer a few reflections spurred by the documentary.

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Tangents with Chris Ryan

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I hit the jackpot this summer in terms of good books to read, Chris Ryan’s Civilized to Death among them. Chris offered to become better acquainted via a recorded conversation for his podcast, Tangentially Speaking.

Schedules aligned for us to record a conversation on September 25, and shortly after our “hour” together, we decided to do a second round two days later. The day between was so packed for me that it felt like a week transpired in between. On that day, I biked about 20 miles, got on a ferry, sailed to Canada to meet icon Rex Weyler (fantastic guy and conversation), then reversed my route, biking back home late that evening in pitch blackness on a narrow forest trail. Memorably, my face collided with a flying bat! I’m sure it was as shocked as I was, but I suspect it was unhurt, like me. I just laughed, holding on to the sensation of warmth, fur, and leathery wing on my cheek. Anyway, in the second conversation with Chris my confusion on how long it had been is apparent. Also, having covered some similar ground with Rex it was harder than it ought to have been to keep track of what Chris and I had discussed in the first conversation (apologies for a few repeated sentiments).

Anyway, the two episodes can be accessed via any of these formats:

The audio versions include introductions by Chris as well as some musical selection. The videos are just the conversation, auto-edited to remove pauses and “ums.” I look forward to future dialog with Chris. It’s great to have conversations with wise and well-aligned individuals.

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2025: A Space Absurdity

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Space is sillier. Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum (from this site).

I recently connected faith in space colonization to Flat Earth belief, even though these might seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum—as Flat-Earthers contend that NASA is a hoax and that artificial satellites are not real (wait: because they’re artificial?). What connects these groups is a belief in something that’s not actually real: based more on imagination than fact, and working backwards from what they wish to be true. I’m not saying the groups are equivalent by any stretch, but that they do share something in common, at core.

Anyway, this observation sparked a few conversations that prompted me to resurrect old arguments (see Why Not Space and chapter 4 of my textbook), but also add some new ones. Here, I share some of these new perspectives and related calculations.

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Systems Mindset

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World3 model (from Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, 1972)

Our culture suffers an epidemic of disconnected narrow analyses. Almost every single news article, opinion piece, insight from pundits, bestseller book, or internet screed fails to absorb a broad-enough view to fully contextualize this moment in time. What remains can be effectively useless or invalidated by a more complete and enveloping context.

A small but growing cadre of folks promote “systems thinking,” broadening the boundaries to acknowledge complex relationships “external” to the considerations of typical works. Whether those broader elements involve biophysical, planetary, anthropological, ecological, or more-than-human considerations, the effect can dramatically change conclusions and prescriptions.

So, systems thinking can make positive contributions. But it has a dark side as well. Novice engagement in this heady practice can serve to amplify a nasty human habit of deluding ourselves into believing that we can master it all—that our crude maps are essentially-complete captures of all relevant aspects of the territory. Encouraged by climbing atop a “big-boy” horse without falling off, one might be tempted to think they can gallop their way into a more perfect system for humanity on Earth. I’ll make the argument that the horse of hubris is inherently unrideable, and that the best lesson from systems thinking is that systems tend to be far too complex for our meat-brains to master. We’re not going to think our way to paradise. Any place deserving the name “paradise” has never been constructed by humans, but by a Community of Life over deep time.

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