Author Archives: tmurphy

Were You Happy?

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Close enough. By Tdorante10 (Wikipedia Commons)

As I learn more about the way humans used to live before agriculture (and a few still do today), I am often reminded of an experience I had in my youth that contains parallels to the situation Indigenous groups find themselves in today. Things were going pretty well for them before their lifeways were destroyed: they had life figured out.

Aside from a brief coda, I’ll let parallels speak for themselves. My small tribe will play the part of displaced people, and the Western “authority” figure will be obvious. In making this parallel, in no way do I mean to imply that my momentary discomfort has even the slightest equivalency. That said, the experience still offers a window, even if a very grubby one.

Oh—and if the story comes off as boring, I do apologize, but that’s only because it hasn’t been embellished.

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Views: 889

A Theory Gone Flat

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Flat Earth and spotlight sun, by Towarzysz Przewodniczący (Wikimedia Commons)

Am I really going to do this? Am I going to spend time on a topic so far from legitimacy as Flat Earth? Doing so risks affording a tiny bit of credibility to an idea that hasn’t earned it, as if I doth protest too much.

Reasons to bother: 1) illustrate direct observation in action; 2) emphasize the power of listening to what the universe tells us rather than insisting on insufficient mental models as “truth”; 3) provide examples of how mental models go wrong; and 4) I made some graphics worth sharing. While a bit of a tangent from my usual “serious” topics, I figure I can have a little fun once in a while.

The focus will be on conspicuous observations anyone can confirm, personally, without too much effort—even from memory, in fact. I’ll skip the literally dozens of ways I have personally measured and confirmed the spherical Earth, which would make for boring reading. Lots of things break in Flat-Earth scenarios, including GPS navigation (no satellites; broken math), gravity (would crumple a disk-Earth into a sphere in no time; plumb bobs would point more north the farther south one went), and what we’ll focus on here: sunsets. No more sunsets, folks—and any sunsets (or sunrises) you might believe yourself to have seen aren’t what you made them out to be, according to Flat-Earthers.

Rather than denigrating the people who subscribe to Flat-Earth beliefs, I’ll focus on observation. I’m not aiming to convince Flat-Earthers; nothing I say (as an obvious shill for the mega-conspiracy) can replace the sense of community and unconditional support they receive from their FE-family. Any of us might go to extremes of twisted and easily-refuted logic to preserve what’s most important to us. Modernity fails humans in countless ways—loss of intimate tribe being among them. We can forgive those seeking to recapture what’s been lost.

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Views: 1548

8 Billion Will Die!

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By Michael Dornbierer from Wikimedia Commons

Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first.

One of the most common reactions is that abandoning agriculture is tantamount to committing many billions of people to death, since the planet can’t support billions of hunter-gatherers—especially given the dire toll on ecological health already accumulated.

Such a reaction definitely contains elements of truth, but also a few unexamined assumptions. The outcome need not be reprehensible for several reasons.

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Views: 4180

Is the 6ME Hyperbole?

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Unrealistic image from Easy-Peasy.

Many of the stark conclusions I offer on Do the Math and in conversations with others rest on the equally stark premise that we have initiated a sixth mass extinction (6ME). Other self-defeating factors also loom large in establishing modernity as a temporary stunt, including resource depletion, aquifer exhaustion, desertification and salination of agricultural fields, climate change, microplastics, waste streams, “forever” toxins, and plenty more. People do call it a poly-crisis, after all (I prefer meta-crisis as most symptoms trace to the same root mindset of separateness and conquest).

Yet, towering over these concerns is a sixth mass extinction. Mass extinctions are defined as brief periods during which over 75% of species go extinct. I take it as given that large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals like humans won’t be among the lucky survivors—who are more likely to hail from families like microbes, mollusks, arthropods, or otherwise small, scrappy critters. In any case, it’s bad…very bad.

Invocation of the 6ME serves as a final nail in the coffin…end of story…to be avoided at all costs. All the aspects we like about modernity lose appeal when held up against the 6ME as a direct consequence. Even though the other challenges listed above can carry the argument as well, they generally must do so as a set, and we’re not so talented at apprehending parallel concerns—imagining each to be surmountable in isolation (pointlessly; it’s whack-a-mole). The 6ME delivers a single, inarguable, fatal blow to modernity, which is why I have taken to invoking it as a heavy-handed “nuclear option” straight away. No point playing around. While it may seem extreme, extreme circumstances justify extreme responses.

But is the threat real, or rhetorical? Basing arguments against modernity largely—though not entirely—on the 6ME could amount to overblown doomerism. In this post, I challenge myself on the veracity of 6ME claims. Have I fallen into a false sense of the urgency of this moment? Do I really believe a 6ME is going to play out?

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Views: 4141

Animistic Physics

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Murmuration by Mostafameraji (Wikinedia Commons).

It might seem that animistic beliefs—which prevailed prior to agriculture—would be about as far away from modern physics as possible. Yet, I find them to be rather compatible in a number of foundational ways. Allow me to elaborate. And don’t worry: it’s not about quantum mumbo-jumbo.

What is animism? While not a formal belief system, animists tend to view nearly everything in the world as being animated by spirits or forces beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. We can call these animating agents spirits or “the gods.” Animists live in the hands of the gods along with all other Life: not particularly special. These spirits not only move animals and plants, but also weather, landscapes, oceans, rivers, mountains, rocks, and soil.

Modern languages (reflecting a non-animistic worldview) objectify the world by being noun-dominated—which deeply affects how we think about the world. Animist languages, by contrast, are often verb-dominated (verbal people!), so that verbs are used to connote mountains, rivers, bays, trees, etc.—reflecting the sense that such beings are always in a state of motion and change. What we call a sand bar is “verbalized” as “to be a sand bar”—it is acting as a living, changing, life-interacting entity, or being. Note that the noun “being” itself carries an echo of animism, embodying this state of verbiness, as a variant of “be.” It’s a nounified verb.

An important tip-off as to how animism relates to physics is provided by Daniel Quinn in The Story of B, on page 136.

Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.

Below, I outline five (connected) ways that animism meshes well with physics, mirroring a conversation I had with Derrick Jensen that you can listen to here. While very few scientists would volunteer that they have animistic leanings, these connections might make it easier to identify as such.

As an aside, I “privilege” physics here not only because that’s my own background, but because all other sciences appear to rest on (abide by) a physics foundation, often characterized by complexity that eludes first-principles formulations in the style of physics. One might say that chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, etc. The word “science” may easily be substituted for “physics” in what follows.

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Views: 2864

Anthropological Summer

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Image by G.C. from Pixabay

A while back, I shared an arc of discovery involving key books that had significant influence on my perspectives. This post serves as an update, mainly covering six books I read (and/or listened to) over the summer. Loosely speaking, the theme revolved around gaining a better anthropological sense of who we really are as a species.

I’ll first offer a few preliminaries. As is obvious from previous posts, I benefitted greatly from Daniel Quinn’s writings, reflected in my recent summaries of Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael. I also found value in Quinn’s Providence (the story behind Ishmael), Tales of Adam, and Beyond Civilization. I should clarify that being appreciative of key insights is not the same as being an unwavering adherent or disciple.

Next, I’ll repeat admiration for The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, which still exerts a substantial influence on how I perceive cognition in its various forms (and especially its limitations). I may dedicate a post to this book at some future time.

Finally, I should acknowledge The Dawn of Everything for its formative role in much the same way that my parents were formative influences: their example taught me how not to be, in many respects. My net-negative review of DoE tells this story well enough.

Now onto the Summer Six…

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Views: 3843

The Genius of Survival

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Photo by Meldy Tameng (Wikimedia Commons).

By accident, my wife and I stumbled onto the convention of calling essentially every living being a genius. It started as a joke about our cat, because obviously—in our human-supremacist culture—superlative traits like genius can only be applied to humans! Soon enough, this practice migrated to squirrels, newts, baby birds, ants—and even plants, fungi, and microbes. I no longer think of it as a joke.

I’ve utilized this framing in other posts by noting that every one of these beings knows how to do things we haven’t the foggiest clue how to do ourselves—or how, in detail, they manage it. I’ll get to the nuanced nature of the word “know” in a bit. But for now we can at least admit that the world is overflowing with phenomena we haven’t even registered, let alone understood. Typically, we just scratch the surface at best.

What I’ll do here is explore the relative genius of Life as compared to the normal use of the term, in the way of cognitive prowess. Let the games begin!

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Views: 2754

The Worst Inventions

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A joke for Alex Leff; these don’t explicitly make the list (image from Wikimedia Commons).

Listening to a podcast conversation between Derrick Jensen and James Van Lanen (anthropologist), I was intrigued by their discussion of the “five worst” inventions. This would get anyone’s gears turning. But I was particularly energized because in the day or two before, I had considered for the first time the terrible power of one invention that I had previously never questioned as being anything but fantastic. I employ it constantly…right now, in fact.

I was excited enough to contact Derrick about this “dark horse” candidate to get his reaction, and he, too, was energized enough to suggest our own conversation on the matter, which has since been recorded and is available on Resistance Radio.

In this post paralleling the podcast conversation, I define what makes an invention bad in my view, preface with a trigger warning about inevitable attachments and fondness, and offer a few provisional “worst” inventions before getting to five that are less ambiguous in my book.

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Views: 4809

My Ishmael

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Photo of book cover by Tom Murphy.

Having first covered Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in extensive fashion, then The Story of B in a mega-post, it was basically inevitable that I would finish the loose trilogy and offer a treatment of My Ishmael.

This third book in the series connects much more closely with the first book than did “B”—both in time and space. It follows the relationship between Ishmael, the wise gorilla teacher, and a precocious teenager named Julie who studies under Ishmael in overlap with an oblivious Alan Lomax (narrator/pupil from the first book).

As Ishmael customizes lessons to individual students, we see that Julie’s education is complementary to Alan’s—conveniently justifying a whole different book providing a new set of provocative insights.

Format

The book is arranged into 36 short, chronological chapters. Headings below reflect chapter titles and starting page numbers in parentheses (1998 printing). As I did for the other books, I mainly stay away from narrative elements—focusing instead on lessons. The exception in this case is in the setup. Part of my rationale is to encourage folks to read the original, treating this post as highlights of the “boring” portions—ideal for a refresher after having read the book.

All the chapter titles and page numbers are represented until the end of lessons, when the book shifts to more of a traditional novel. Note that the 20th Century Daniel Quinn often uses “man” to mean “humans” more broadly. As in the other treatments, I attempt to confine my own slant to [square brackets].

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Views: 1951

Death as a Nothing-Burger

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Image by LEONSTORETR from Pixabay.

I’ve had two posts in a row about the phenomenon of Life, so it is perhaps fitting to round things out with a post on death. Despite the fact that one cannot enjoy life without the accompaniment of death in its many forms, death is not a suitable subject for polite company in our culture.

Before discontinuing after a few episodes (due to excessive violence), my wife and I started watching the American Primeval show on Netflix. One scene contrasted most members of modernity who—when threatened by Native Americans—blubber and shriek at the prospect of death against one rare individual who showed no fear. While not explicit on this point, I could believe the Native Americans would perceive most members of modernity as being infantilized, pampered, useless, “full-grown children” who had not learned to accept the reality of life—including its requisite, ubiquitous mortality. Or, is that just me, projecting?

Fear of death pervades our culture: many among us cringe at its mention, and indeed structure whole lives around elaborate stories of denial: we can’t really ever be dead, surely!

It’s understandable: having never experienced death ourselves, our brains have no point of contact and cannot conceive what it is like. The vacuum begs to be filled by any fanciful notion that displaces fear of the great unknown.

But, I’ll make a point that many of us actually have experienced something close enough to death to be surprisingly informative. In another sense, all of us have “experienced” our own death state. I’ll explore these “experiences” and why I believe they tell us almost everything we need to know about the state of death. Indeed: if we’re open to observation, we actually already possess a highly probable sense of what happens after we die! As far as I can tell, it turns out to be a nothing-burger—which can be either disappointing or relieving (or just “whatever”) depending on perspective.

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Views: 3103