You are listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies.

Alright... check check check.

Looks good.

Good. Would you... would you mind dimming

the lights?

Oh, you want it even darker in here?

Yeah.

Let me see what I can do.

How's that?

Perfect. What's in this tea by the way?

It's a blend of different plants. But it's

mostly sweet gale, which is a plant that grows in bogs.

It's really relaxing.

Yeah, it's one of my favorites. And people do say

that it is helpful in inducing lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming... to know you're

dreaming while it's happening. It's been a while since I had

one of those.

Yeah, I can't even remember the last time I lucid

dreamed. Maybe tonight is the night.

Maybe!

Okay, so now that we've kind of set the mood here.

I wanted to tell you that way back, before we started this

podcast, and before I even knew what a podcast was, I had a

college radio show for a couple of years.

Did you now?

I did! With a couple of friends of mine. We

were young. And we had an 11pm time slot that nobody cared

about. And we had the keys to the station CD library, which

had an excellent vinyl collection.

Knowing you, that sounds dangerous.

Yeah.

So I'm guessing you had like two turntables and

a microphone.

That was actually the exact setup. And the reason

that I bring it up right now is that our college radio show was

all about dreams.

Welcome back, you're listening to see

JSF 90.1 FM 93.9 cable FM in Burnaby. And this is Electric

Sheep radio.

We'd like you to send us your dreams.

Yeah, indeed to electricsheepradio@gmail.com

If you feel like having your dreams aired on the radio,

because we just love to hear dreams as you might have

noticed.

We also prefer if you record them yourself.

And so I guess until we see you next time.

Goodnight.

Sweet dreams.

Oh my god, your little baby radio voice. Little

late night DJ Adam. But other than that, nothing's really

changed, huh?

Apparently not. No, I still really love to hear

dreams. And that's what we're going to do now. Except that

tonight, our program is called Future Ecologies.

Well, to be precise. Tonight, it's the Shape

of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish. A recurrent festival

that's explored the idea of consciousness, language and the

mind across non human species and beings. Initiated by the

Serpentine galleries in London since 2018, recorded on stage in

November 2022 at the Galleria do Biodiversidade in Porto,

Portugal, and then reduced and remixed by Future Ecologies.

Tonight, with the help of artists, scientists,

philosophers and historians, were sprinkling a little bit of

stardust on our understanding of dreams, reality, and non human

beings — from fish, to demons, and Gods

Kicking things off, festival curators, Lucia

Pietroiusti, and Filipa Ramos.

And I have the sort of impossible task of

telling you about dreams. We experience dreams as a

transition state between realms of the physical and the

spiritual. And so dreams become a kind of translation space.

But we refer to dreams when we speak about hope,

when we speak about repair. When we give symbolic interpretations

of dreams, we hold the world in place, in a sense. We shape a

world, its symbols, and its myths. We shape our sense of

belonging to that world.

And through the notion of the dream in this

event, we hope to -

somehow continue in our project to move away from

a human-centric conception of this world. So what might it

look like if we tried to de-anthropocenter the notion of

a dream? Well, in the first instance, it might be that in a

multi-species complex planet, non-human dreams might not be at

all like what we expect of human ones, because they'd be

processes belonging to completely different ways of

being in the world.

So we've asked ourselves, and we'll ask

ourselves all sorts of questions — how much of a more-than-human

or-non human being sense of self are we able to intuit and

appreciate? To hopefully come out on the other side with just

a tiny bit of a slightly larger intuition, not only of how we

exist on this planet, and how we share it with more than human

beings, what our responsibility in relation to that sharing, and

also what art,

poetry,

science

when it dreams,

and so many other forms of expression,

might, in fact, be here on this earth to do?

My name is Alex Jordan, and I'm a scientist. I'm

a scientist very interested in the questions that we have as

humans about how animals experience the world, their

sense of self, their sense of awareness, their perception,

perhaps their consciousness, and how we might as humans,

understand and interpret and ask questions of these animals that

we might better understand their worlds.

Generally speaking, at a scientific level, I'm interested

in the broad question of how behavior evolves. How, in the

transition from simple life to more complex forms of life,

including our own form of life, behaviors have evolved,

cognitive capacities have evolved, and traits that help

animals interact with the world and experience the world have

evolved.

Some research we've just published this year was about

sleep, and potentially dreaming in spiders. And so we've done

this work here demonstrating that jumping spiders, these

beautiful, intelligent creatures have periods of REM sleep, rapid

eye movement, sleep. This is a trait that was once thought

exists, as many traits are thought to exist only in humans.

But now we're starting to expand our perception and understanding

that the idea of dreaming for a spider for a fish for a plant

may not be that far off.

It's delightful to dream together in

the belly of a whale. aWhat does it feel like to be a fish or a

bird or a plant?

The rivers and the glaciers, the big mammals and

the imperceptible microbes, the small algae, and the complex

trees.

When I showed you this tree, this evolutionary

tree, it's really important for me that that tree is not in a

line. There's not a ladder that humans sit on the top of, and

chimps are nearer to us, and then dolphins are nearer then —

that evolution is pushing all animals towards. This is an

absurd concept. Evolution produces solutions and animals

and organisms that fulfill whatever purpose is required and

whatever purpose they have. In my opinion, both my personal but

also scientific opinion, many fish and many of the animals and

organisms I deal with are just as intelligent and just as

sophisticated and just as subtle, in many ways, as some of

these species.

And so a lot of my work is done in the places where these

animals live. I try to take all of our approaches and questions

out into the wild. Ours is a is a practice of going to the

places where these animals are, trying to disturb them as little

as we can, filming them, then using some of these machine

learning and artificial intelligence approaches to help

us understand and decompose and maybe intuit what these animals

are feeling and experiencing — of one another and of the world

around them. Contextualizing this behavior, of having our

questions asked in the places where these animals live. And

that means we have to understand and try and appreciate where

they live. So we're not divorcing them from their

experience — from their evolutionary history. We're

trying to situate our studies in those places and recreate in

silico or in some kind of analytical framework, the

interactions they have not just with one another, but with the

world around them.

Even the word environment, right, like the

more-than-human world has been reduced to an environment — like

just like a backdrop where the human drama unfolds.

Some of my research has has asked the question, this

classic test we have which is called the mirror test, in which

an animal is presented, like here, with a mirror and asked...

does it recognize its reflection as self or is it unable to do

that... that thing that we do? Is it unable to deal with the

concept of self? And this mirror test is a test in which you are

supposed to see yourself in a reflection, and there's a mark

on your body somewhere that you can't see, except with the

mirror. And if you touch yourself, rather than touch the

mirror, then you've understood that you exist in that

reflection — that reflection is you. It's not some other entity.

And this is wonderful. This is a perfectly valid test, provided

you care. Provided you care that there's a mark on your body.

Provided you have the vanity, let's say to... to worry that

something about your appearance has changed.

Oh, I look different. Wait, but it's me.

Is it a problem of motivation? Or is it a problem

of intelligence? Can they not understand the context, or do

they simply not care in the same way we do?

You know, what does wealth mean for a sparrow? Is

it, sort of, this ability to flock?

and I settled on a species called the cleaner

wrasse. The cleaner wrasse we thought was perfect, because it

does care about these marks. Its whole biology, its whole

cognitive capacity and its ecology is centered around this

idea of seeing marks on the skin and trying to remove them.

That's what it does. Because its whole existence is about finding

and removing parasites from client fish.

You can only interpret the test as revealing

something if the behavior can be considered strange or unusual in

some way. And similarly, the notion of recognizing a mark

somewhere, is also an experience of recognizing oneself with a

kind of strangeness.

But this is a really important question. What

on earth is unusual for an animal? How do you as a human

observer, me as a scientist decide what an animal should or

should not be doing? And therefore what is unusual for an

animal? This is not not a simple question. I'm not being

facetious here. This is a genuine question about our

expectations and intuition of non human animals.

You know, you almost don't recognize what's being

said.

Hang on, this is not another individual. It's

copying everything I do. Maybe it's me. And in this phase,

humans perform unusual behaviors.

I think what's remarkable about dreams

is that while you are in a dream is really not very strange at

all. Everything is remarkably normal. It becomes strange, the

moment you exit the dream, and then you look back, and then you

realize that the two don't match up.

But for these fish, this was a very clear behavior,

that they were doing something completely outside of their

repertoire. Some of them are very easy to interpret. Upside

Down swimming — fish do not swim upside down, unless it's time to

buy yourself a new goldfish. Now, if you think about it, one

of the main barriers that we might have in using these kinds

of tests across animals is that if they're designed for humans,

how do we expect an animal without hands or fingers to be

able to pass them in the same way that a human would?

You know, you wonder, like how all these

different things put together? That don't fit?

One way, we've started to interrogate that

question and try to get a deeper handle on what a fish is

experiencing and what kind of behaviors it's performing, and

what those behaviors might mean, is to start to attempt to

understand the behavioral language of fishes and other

animals. And as I've mentioned, we're doing that with the aid of

artificial intelligence. Because for us to look at something like

a fish and understand what the postures, movements and

interactions mean, is an incredible challenge and

potentially impossible. And so we're using an approach called

behavioral decomposition. Behavioral decomposition is a

method in which you look at every single movement, an animal

makes — every single change in its legs, its postures, whatever

it is. And you can break those behaviors down into these sort

of dimensions of kinematics, and build them into this map of

behavior.

The fish will go to the mirror, observe its reflection, observe

that it has a mark on its body, will go away from the mirror,

will scrape that mark against the gravel or a rock, and then

go back to the mirror to check. If the fish go through all three

of the phases that I told you, and then attempt to remove this

mark, they have passed the test. By the original definition of

the test, by all other standards that are applied to all other

organisms, they have passed the test. Now is this evidence that

they are self conscious — that they are self aware? Is the

performance of this behavior enough to convince you that a

fish is self aware?

When you're obsessed with something

and once you start looking for something

you see that something everywhere.

The sky told stories, remembered legends and provided

clues.

Sometimes you can be suspended in a dream and

not necessarily be connected to time, but still connected to

this idea of rhythm. Constantly in this rhythmic cycle of

nutrients... it's like you're... you're eating reality, in a way.

Food is the connection from distant and exotic

landscapes, to domestic backyards — going near and far,

stretching across the Earth's surface. It connects the sun

above and the soil below, like a vertical axis of life.

And at the same time, you're reflecting on that

digestion.

Food connects our bodies with the surrounding

world. Nothing is more intimate than eating. What somebody sees

can be seen by others. What somebody hears can be heard by

others. But what somebody eats, nobdy else can eat. There's

nothing more private, more introverted, more turned inwards

on itself.

A transformation takes place

Thus the world was created. And out of Chaos, the

orderly and complex Cosmos arose.

This most intimate of absorptions is what

brings you to the Cosmos.

Cosmos, the physical universe of things seen and

touched, and the spiritual entities they existed beyond.

We'll get there by steps — we will go

through three great transformations. And we will

start by setting the scene — setting the parameters of this

journey towards human and more than human dreams. The

parameters are very simple. There are two parameters for our

inquiry. There are two simple words — nothing, something.

Nothing, something.

Now, the important thing are not the words. The little pause

between them is the greatest mystery of all, for science,

theology, philosophy since forever. How is it possible that

nothing might become something? This might sound like a very

academic and useless question. But in reality, it has to do

with everything we hold dear. It has to do with the very stuff of

the world. Asking ourselves the question "how is it possible

that nothing might become something" means asking

ourselves "How did it happen? That all that surrounds us —

every single thing, reality as a whole, at some point, came into

existence." And it's been at the center of our imagination and

concerns, as I was saying, since time immemorial. We could say

literally, since the beginning, the beginning of history.

History begins with the first written records we have

discovered. Before that there is prehistory. About prehistory, we

cannot say anything, because we don't know.

And the earliest written records have to do with the problem of

how the world came into existence. These are what are

called Cosmogonies — so stories that tell about the birth of the

cosmos. And these cosmogonies are very interesting because

they address the question "how we pass from nothing to

something". The question is "Can something come out of nothing?"

And the answer of the mythological cosmogonies is no.

The idea of reincarnation, that souls

took on successively the bodies of multiple different species,

from humans to animals to plants, and back again. This

idea was embedded in a range of classical Greek and Roman

philosophy, poetry and magic. And as we'll see, reincarnation

raises fundamental question about where the identity of an

organic entity rests, and how it is constituted. Is it in the

movements, feelings and capabilities of the body? In the

ability to vocalize or speak? Or in the capacity to remember or

dream?

To the question, "did from nothing,

something come out," the answer is no. Nothing is an impossible

philosophical concept. It is not just unthinkable, but it is

impossible. Since things exist, at least we exist as points of

awareness in the world as the object to our awareness, since

there is existence, non existence cannot take place.

Since there is being, non-being is totally impossible. So, to

the question of the beginning, how you pass from nothing to

something, they say, "In the beginning, there was not

nothing. In the beginning that was something, but something

special." This something was ineffable — is something beyond

words... impossible to describe. You have philosophers and

theologians talking about this. Then, this something fragmented

itself into many. Simone Weil says "decreated itself".

Why am I talking about this? How is this relevant in any way to

our lives today? Well, the question of the beginning

becomes relevant to our life today if we look at it in a

mirror — be like those fish that we saw earlier. If we look at it

in a mirror, the question of the origin is the question of the

end. The question of what happens before birth is the same

as the question of what happens after death. And now we start

seeing how the question of what happens after death concerns us.

There is a certain urgency to the question "After something,

can there be nothing? After this life, can we be utterly

annihilated?" And here we see that the intuition of the

eternity of being becomes a powerful protection. Because it

says that since things did not have a beginning in nothing,

they cannot have an end in nothing. Nothing is an invalid

concept — philosophically is an impossible concept.

What we have is that the beginning had to do with the

fragmentation of boundaries, an establishment of boundaries. And

the end, similarly has to do with the reshuffling of

boundaries. It's just a matter of movements of boundaries.

There is a way in which we can understand it metaphorically.

The world being the dream, and the characters of the dream

being the inhabitants of the world, including ourselves. Like

us, the inhabitants of a dream have no recollection of their

origin, and no horizon of their end. And like us, the

inhabitants of a dream are made of the same substance, as the

mind of the sleeper. If you for a moment, consider what is the

substance of which a dream is made, you realize that is the

substance of the mind — there is a continuity. The fragments are

made of the same substance of the monolith.

And in fact, this idea that it's possible to understand the world

as a dream, and the relationship between the world and the other

worldly (so, before the beginning, after the end), is

not just a metaphor that I've made up, but is a typical way of

understanding the world. In many philosophies, theologies and

mythologies from from all over the world.

The idea is that the world that we see around ourselves is a

dream of the eternal being. It is a dream in the mind of the

eternal being. And that everything we see around

ourselves, including ourselves as individuals, and the things

and the people around us are fundamentally characters of this

dream of this eternally-sleeping mind. And to this mind, that is

dreaming up the whole of reality, it is not unfitting to

give the name of God.

Now, this realization can have consequences. Of course, in

philosophy, often you observe a hypothesis about reality, you

embrace them, and you see what happens, okay? You try them out.

There is an engineering aspect to philosophy, very much. So if

you try out this perspective, it could have, you know, a

paralyzing effect or an ecstatic effect. Ecstatic effect, typical

mystical reaction. A paralyzing effect, in the sense that you

start asking yourself, "Doesn't this mean, then, that we are

passive elements inside the dream?" If we are the characters

being dreamt up by a great divine mind, to use the

theological metaphor, doesn't this mean that we cannot do

anything inside this dream to modify it? It's dreamt up by a

mind greater than our own. If you remain equal with the

metaphor of the dream, you realize that you can ask this

question to your own dreams. Inside your own dream, what is

the distribution of agency? Is it you? That is dreaming up the

dream and directing it and unfolding it? Or should you

rather say that in the dream, the, the one with the least

agency is you, while in fact, it's the characters of the dream

that unfold the story of which they are the protagonist. The

dream dreams itself through its characters, typically. And by

the same token, inside this world dream this dream world, it

is us as the characters that have the possibility of

unfolding the dream narration and the responsibility of doing

it the best we can, as well as we can.

So I thought I'd try it out.

Dreams and imagination and abstraction can

function to place you in scenarios that you didn't

experience. And that could be considered in the scientific

terminology, adaptive. It allows your body and your mind to

explore scenarios, and maybe prepare you for them, even if

you didn't experience them.

So dreamers that are aware of their act of

creation of the world, being part of a fiction, they

understand that they can redeem the world only through narrative

means.

You know, because without the heart, there is no

mind. There's no blood that pumps into the brain.

Yeah, every time I feel somehow lost, I try to

connect to the memory of the nature there — the wild energy

of the land.

We started with the first great

transformation, birth — the beginning. The second great

transformation, death — the end. And here we have the third

transformation. And the third transformation is a

transformation beyond the frontiers of the human.

The language of demon is a bit

tricky for us because it's used by Christians to refer

specifically to evil demons that have a particular place in the

cosmos and in the story of creation. Whereas, in the kind

of broader Greek and Roman usage, it's a slightly

stretchier term, and it tends to mean a kind of an intermediate

spirits, something between Gods and humans.

If she's to go into the forest realm of spirits and

ghosts, she needs to have night vision.

Other fragments of his work reveal

that he identified himself as a restless demon. The Greek word

is daimon, a kind of inbetweener spirit, and one who's been

exiled from the gods — perhaps a punishment for some unspecified

crime. In this snippet of text, Empedocles recalls multiple

previous births, moving between genders and species apparently

without effort. He becomes most eloquent when remembering the

past bodily experience of being a little wordless fish leaping

out of the sea.

When I retreat as far into myself as possible, I

become aware only of the shadow cast by my faint currents. The

water knows no natural boundary, and occupies all niches.

Did souls have a basic identity as human

or animal? Were there limits to where souls could go? Plato

thought that human souls could get inside animals. But

Porphyry, a philosopher in the Platonist tradition, thought

human souls could only enter human bodies. Otherwise,

Porphyry worries, a mother who'd returned into the body of a mule

might perhaps end up carrying her own son on her back. Was the

destination body for reincarnation a deliberate

choice of the soul, as related by Plato's Er. Or was it random?

In which bodies breathe in souls as they're blown about in the

air — And that's something apparently taught by followers

of Pythagoras and Orpheus.

And so the question that I have for you

over and over and over again, and it's not the first time that

I've asked you it, is what could be a possible metaphysics of the

more than human?

Metaphysics is a Greek term that has to do

with what is beyond the physics. It was originally assigned to

the, the organization of Aristotle's works. He wrote a

work on the Physics and the work after that was called the

Metaphysics, so the one after the work on the physics. So it

was just a cataloging entry.

But it has to do with more than cataloguing. It has to do with

the difference between what we see around ourselves, the

physics, what we can experience in a particular way. And our

questioning about what there is beyond. Beyond can mean many

different things. Beyond can mean in the realm of the

invisible, or in the realm of the infinitely small, or in the

realm of the immaterial, or in the realm of the possibilities

that are not actualized, and so on and so forth. Or of the

impalpable, ineffable structures that hold up reality. Now, to a

large extent, the things that... the structures that hold up

reality are not so much inscribed within things, but

they are inscribed within our mind. So within the way in which

we perceive things. And in that case, we realize that the way in

which we... set our interpretation of the

perceptions that we have from the world goes to construct

different worlds. So, it is world building in that sense. We

could use another words — a Greek word "Cosmopoetics".

Cosmopoetics is literally the same as worldbuilding. But maybe

it's a little bit clearer, because Cosmopoetics means...

Cosmos, literally order. So the setting of a particular order.

And this setting is Poetics from the Greek popoieîn, "to make" —

but also the same word that means "poetry".

Artists, cultural producers, because they intervene

particularly on the way in which we see things, they are

opticians. You know, they are eye surgeons to a large extent.

Through their poetic work, they construct worlds, and they help

us to construct different worlds because they intervene at that

level. They are not physical engineers in that sense, but

they are metaphysical engineers. To the extent to which our

shifting of perspective constructs different worlds.

Christians thought that human souls were

restless but also fundamentally individual, singular, and

monogamous in their relationship with bodies. That said, human

bodies could themselves be magicked into horses or

possessed by demons, so they were also porous and unstable.

The most threatening creatures in the atmosphere were demons,

who could operate inside human souls and bodies and minds,

animating their dreams with obscene thoughts and producing

powerful waking fantasies. Demons own thin bodies can take

on apparently more solid disguises as wild animals or

beautiful women, but they were fundamentally vulnerable too —

evanescing at exorcism into a puff of smoke. We've also seen

how some Greeks and Romans had variously imagined demons as

close to or even identical with human souls, and also as souls

as much less bound to singular bodies. Some fortunate or

privileged humans might even be able to recall a faint memory of

an earlier incarnation, whether as a human, an animal, or even a

plant. Whether such memories and dreams of a past self were

punitive or ecstatic, depends rather on what you think it

might be like to live as a bird or a shrub.

There, I was exiled from myself. But nothing

lasts forever.

I've been trying to recreate that story, over and

over.

There's this idea that dreaming is feeding

nonsense into the system, such that nonsense can be

discriminated from sense. And this is, in fact, at a practical

level, one of the methods we have to use in many of these

technological approaches. We have to feed noise into the

system to differentiate it from signal.

And now of course, a machine is complex as

the world itself is the world.

Of course, it's hard to tell from

these little tiny fragments of archaic poetry by people like

Empedocles and Aeneas, how they related to these past selves,

and indeed whether that animal incarnations dreamed in the same

way of their human incarnations. Looking more broadly, we can see

that there is a great amount of disagreement among poets and

natural philosophers in antiquity, about which animals

dreamed, what they dreamed about, all done on the basis of

empirical observation and inference.

And it is our hope that ultimately, by looking at

these animals in their natural environment, by understanding

their experiences, by understanding their context, by

understanding their behavioral outputs, we can then bring them

into the conversation — to tell us what they want, what their

aesthetic preferences are, what their desires are. But also what

their language means, and perhaps if we're lucky, what

their subjective experience of the world may really be.

If you look more broadly at the kind of

spread of literary and visual production, you can see that

there is some understanding that the world is interconnected and

that human lives might contain echoes of a kind of previous

vegetal animalistic existence. So it seems to me that there are

lots of different explanations for where dreams come from in

antiquity. And some of them are very naturalistic and sort of

pragmatic and to do with bodily movements. And others are much

more related to the sublime, be it the Divine or the Demonic —

and it's particularly there that you find notions that the dream

might be an uncovering of something by some third agency.

There might be some interest in revealing to humans... what else

they've been.

This episode of Future Ecologies features the

words and voices of Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, Alex

Jordan, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Rain Wu, Nahum Mantra, Onome

Ekeh, Federico Campagna, Yussef Agbo-Ola, and Hatis Noit

All recorded in November of 2022 as part of The

Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish,

The remix of which you heard here was

produced by me, Mendel Skulski, and my co host, Adam Huggins,

with music by Yussef Agbo-Ola, Hatis Noit,

Any-Angled Light, and Thumbug.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, is

a recurrent festival, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa

Ramos, initiated by the Serpentine Galleries in London

since 2018.

And held last year in partnership with the Galeria

Municipal do Porto.

Special thanks to Kostas Stasinopoulos, as well

as Adam's Electric Sheep Radio co-hosts, Ryder Thomas White and

Samantha Ruth who you heard briefly at the top.

You can hear more from us

and reach out across the dream and say hello

at futureecologies.net

Or wherever you find your podcasts.

Until next time.