Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch, and welcome to another episode of Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today for the season premiere of our third season, we've got a discussion on the nature of nature in which we've gathered our smart and wise and really, I think, colorful people to discuss.

Really a paradox.

Often when we evoke the word nature, really, we're not only evoking the world around us, we're evoking the ultimate authority.

Like whenever you hear people talk about politics, often nature is brought in.

Well, that's against human nature, or that's in favor of human nature, or, you know, that's just part of nature.

It's, it's become this kind of great other that we don't really dissect or think of, but assume that we all have familiarity with.

And yet the other dynamic of meta views and what we talk about, of course, is climate change and climate volatility.

And in that regard, our relationship with nature is something I think we're all becoming a little more aware of, especially as our summers get hotter and our storms become stronger.

So today we're really gonna explore the nature of nature, whatever that might mean.

Kind of flush out the concept, think about the role it plays in our society.

And Jeanette, I always pick on one person to kind of start us off and share their thoughts.

So in this case I'm throwing to you, when I say nature, what does that evoke?

What does that bring to mind in terms of your own understanding of the concept and what you'd like us to talk about today?

I don't think there's any more heavily imagined concept than nature.

Nature, especially in the Western tradition, has just been the ultimate justification for almost anything you want to do.

I mean, that's particularly true in our society since the Enlightenment, when God became replaced by nature as the justification for what, you know, you determined was right.

And, and we see that, I mean, people so casually will refer to, oh, that's not natural, or you know, this is good because it's natural.

So I think that, that the quality, it's, it's an infinite whiteboard for our projections of pretty much every kind of cognitive system that we have.

And, and that's, that's sort of fascinating to me because it's through that scrim that we're going to encounter the natural world.

Right?

I mean, that's obviously the other thing that comes to mind is the, the, the non human world is, often falls into that grab bag of, of nature.

But, but any kind of perception we have of that is.

Is going to be so heavily filtered by our own personal and then, you know, larger cultural conceptions.

So that's.

That's what comes to mind when I think about the nature of nature personally.

There are a lot of people nodding heads there.

Any volunteers who want to follow up and jump in to help start the conversation off?

Go ahead, Ted.

You got your hand up.

The shy kid in the corner.

And I love that, Jeanette.

I love just how we shared that, being a physics background.

You know, I kind of look at nature as, you know, what's the universe?

And, you know, I think you could almost.

I think we need to differentiate nature, the stuff out there of the physical world and its phenomena as nature, and then there's the human experience of nature.

So I.

That's the only thing I want to offer, is that we be careful with our terms today.

And that's my understanding of what we talk about in nature is this universe in which we swim.

Although my point would be that they cannot be separated.

Sorry if I jumped on you there, Rob.

Hello.

Yeah, just coming back on what you're saying there.

Nature.

For me, I suppose what the thing is, is that we're part of nature and yet we're able to sort of objectify it.

And this is a paradox, isn't it, really?

And if we get more than one of those, Jesse, you know what we're going to end up with.

But the paradox is that, yeah, we're part of it, and then we're here talking about the nature of nature, and that's got to be our own nature because we're a part of it.

But we do tend to objectify it.

I mean, I'd be a little bit anecdotal here, because where I live, I live very near a wood, and in the wood there are all sorts of organisms, let's say, and I'm constantly wanting to name them.

So that's a squirrel and.

And that's an alder tree, and.

And that's.

You know, there's all these birds and I see a bird and I don't know what it is.

I don't know what sort of bird it is.

I've got to give a name to it.

I've got to look it up in the book.

You know, it's got yellow wings and it's got a funny little spot on its beak.

And.

Oh, yeah, there it is.

It's a siskin or whatever it is.

And we've got to objectify it and we've got to talk about it.

In this way.

And, and I feel that that as, as human beings, is the first step that we take to try and control it.

We classify it first because we want to control it, which we are a part of.

This is, this is the, this is the, the paradox which I'm drawing attention to a little bit here, I guess.

Well, Russell, you had your hand up.

And then Jim.

Just, I, I, I feel like I'm going to put my normal thought in there, which is we're talking about humans and what humans do.

I guess I look at systems and what people who identify with those systems do.

So when we're talking about the nature of nature or the word nature in the English language, I think about Andrew centrism and how those that subscribe to androcentrism are those who think of humans as separate than the rest of life, but not all peoples do.

And so I don't like, you know, part of my question about, you know, the nature of human nature is, is that most of the conversations I hear about human nature are not actually about humans, but specific worldviews and specific cultures and, and what I find fascinating as I go be, as I'm finally learning beyond the culture that I grew up in, British, North American, European, you know, let's, let's, you know, whenever we think about history, we think of the history of Europe, not the history of this continent.

But as I'm learning more, I find it interesting how different the nature of nature conversation would be depending on what culture you're looking at it from.

Jim, please.

Yeah, that leads right to what I was thinking too is, well, it first reminded me of the old movie African Queen when Humphrey Bogart gets drunk and Katherine Hepburn yells at him and says, what are you acting that way for?

And he says, it's just human nature.

Ms. And she says, nature, Mr. Allnot, is what man has been put on Earth to rise above.

And so that's that exact same idea that you brought up.

And I think that, I think my view comes a lot from looking at the indigenous experience on the planet and from Taoism.

And so in both of these things, I mean, nature is what nature is.

And, and if you take a cr, if you add a Christian view into it, then I like to look at it as what we're talking about is the difference between nature and what the Christians would call original sin, where we choose to control something and the Taoists say, no, sit back, observe, observe, watch what happens.

That's when things, that's when things are accomplished.

You know, do you always hear this idea that the universe tends toward chaos.

And I saw some people talking about consciousness on a.

On a podcast a month ago, and they said that, no, it doesn't tend toward chaos.

Human things that are constructed, human effort will all tend to chaos.

But the universe tends toward complexity, and we're a very good example of it is our consciousness is as complex as anything we can observe on this planet, I, I imagine.

But it doesn't, it doesn't lead us up any, Any higher on the pyramid than natural critters, our plants, the way water flows.

All those things are.

Oh, that's how I see nature.

And I don't know if we need a distinction between human nature and nature, because it's just a little beyond, but that's all I got to say.

Ted, did I see you raise your hand?

Were you just scratching your ear?

Sorry, my odd.

I couldn't hear anything Jim just said, so I was trying to indicate.

I ain't got audio.

I mean, others hear what Jim said.

I heard it all.

Jeanette, you want to respond to that?

I did.

I just.

I think it's sort of interesting.

I, I understand the contrast, Jim, you're trying to draw between, let's say, indigenous worldviews or Taoist approaches to nature and the Judeo Christian one.

But I think what's interesting is if you consider that sin really is ultimately conceived as separation, product of separation from that original source.

And that what's so fascinating about Genesis and particularly kind of thoughtful treatments of it, like Milton's Paradise Lost, is that estrangement from nature is the consequence of.

Of wanting to do exactly what Rob was talking about, being able to know things by separating them from the whole.

Right.

That this is like the early chapters of the Tao Te Ching.

Talk about the same thing.

That you lose something pretty profound when you want to capture something and know it, which is a form of not just separation, but control.

Just as Rob was saying with the, you know, when he was talking about naming of the birds, I kept thinking, oh, this is like how in Milton's Garden of Eden, Adam knows the names of the animals because there is no separation.

He does not have to consult another source.

He doesn't have to come up with the names.

He just knows.

So it seems to me there's actually this idea.

I mean, I don't want to get into this perennial philosophy discussion, but is there, at the baseline of that tradition as well, that.

That the.

The human condition is.

Is one of.

In the pursuit of knowledge, of good and evil, of binaries, of.

Of things that are separate, you lose ultimately that kind of connection to nature.

And, and, and then you start talking about things like human nature as something separate and as something that is conceptualized, not known in a more immediate way, let's say.

Sharita, do you want to jump in here a bit?

I think a lot of what we're talking about is kind of a Cartesian duality.

And I think that what we, you know, what other people saying, what we naturally do is we want to separate ourselves out because.

Because then we can take a really good look at whatever we call nature.

And my feeling about it is that we're all interconnected.

We are interconnected with nature.

Whatever is within nature is interconnected.

And perhaps it's the nature of human beings to want to separate ourselves out and make ourselves in quotation marks better than.

But then when I go back and I look at Cartesian, you know, duality, that's a very Eurocentric way of looking at it.

And if you look at all the other ways of looking at it, it's more of wanting to be interconnected, stopping not trying to control whether that's better or not better than, you know, the Eurocentric way of looking at it.

I have a personal opinion about that.

That for me, it's better to look at and interconnection than it is to look at the other.

I don't particularly enjoy othering.

Anyway.

That's where I'm basically coming from.

Go ahead, Rob.

Yeah, we're all.

See, it's a shame if Ted didn't hear what Jim was saying.

I.

We're all seemingly saying an awful lot the same thing in different ways.

There's quite a.

A consensus coming out of all of this here.

And just to sort of come back on the point I think that Jeanette is making, and the biblical Judeo, Christian sort of, you know, the Garden of Eden and the Adam and Eve thing and all the rest of it.

And that's the fall, isn't it?

And the fall is.

Therefore, are we saying, is it coming out of that tradition that the fall is when we do try to distance ourselves from nature and we try to objectify it in some sort of a way?

And this, you know, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that's.

That's another difference between us and the natural world, which is other than us.

Laura, who was here a while ago, she had a cat on her lap.

I don't know where she's gone to, and I don't know where the cat's gone to either.

But I used to Have a cat.

And my cat had no real idea of what good and evil was really.

It just added, acted like a cat, and it went around being a cat, and it probably did things that I didn't approve of some of the times and all the rest of it.

And I wonder if this is at the bottom of how we lost our.

There we are.

What?

You're gonna have to tell us the cat's name, Laura, in a moment, but I wonder if that's at the root of where this problem of our relationship with nature is.

I'm beginning to ramble, so I'll stop there, but I'm, I'm just trying to get back at that idea which Jeanette was sharing with us a few minutes ago.

Sally, you raised your hand.

By all means, jump in.

And Laura, I'll leave you up, too.

I don't know if you're able to hear you, Laura, but hopefully we can.

But please, Sally, go ahead.

I'm just thinking about how important it is that we show deference to nature, to our natural world.

And I sometimes think that maybe we're, the fact that we've kind of strayed away from, you know, the way our ancestors thought about nature is, is, is, is not doing us much good.

The, I, I was listening to your podcast this morning, Jesse, about how the herd is leader thing, and, and I, I'm thinking what's happened is that, that our natural world has, has tilted, and that's made us scared and uncertain.

And I think we need to figure out there's no way we're going to really be able to tilt back, so we have to adapt.

And I think that, you know, it's because it's tilted and because it's the fact that we have a natural world that is what has made it possible for us to have a social fabric at all.

Because if we were living, you know, near volcanoes erupting and constant earthquakes, there is no way that we would be able to advance the way we have.

And I think because nature has tilted, our social fabric is tilting also, and people that are in positions of power are taking advantage of that.

Although I hesitate to give them that kind of credibility.

I don't think they're that smart.

But I, I, I was thinking about what you were saying this morning about how important it is that, that we kind, kind of come up with new ideas to deal with this.

You know, it's like we're on a teeter totter right now.

I mean, you know, institutions that, you know, we thought we could trust, we, we no Longer can.

And.

And that's why we need to.

We.

We need to fight this.

So that's what I'll say about that.

Wise words, Sally.

Thank you very much.

Ted, I recognize your hand.

But, Laura, you were evoked because of your cat.

I'm sure you also have much to contribute to the conversation.

Please jump in.

Oh, try.

Yeah, my cat.

I have two cats here.

The one that you saw is pineapple.

They eat citrus fruits, which is quite uncommon for cats.

So.

Yeah, Darl.

Yeah, I'm.

I'm.

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of nature, and I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that biology is the ultimate metaphor and that most.

Most big thinkers take this very seriously.

For example, I've been reading Karl Marx, and he's like, hey, society is an organism.

And he doesn't mean it metaphorically.

Well, sort of, I guess.

But he says, like, society is an organism, just like an anthill is a super organism, right?

And then you have McLuhan, and McLuhan is like, media is ecology, name of Wittgenstein.

And Wittgenstein is like, hey, language.

You need to observe it as from the perspective of a biologist and stuff like that.

All of the big thinkers that I respect are taking a sort of biological and naturalist perspective on nature.

And what I think is interesting is that these people are all super influential in the west because I think they take a very natural look at things.

I thought that was interesting, and I'm personally of the opinion that connectedness, or how we interrelate to one another is quite literally the nature of nature.

And that's sort of what Lynn Margulis also believes with her perspective on Gaia theory and symbiosis.

And I think we're getting to a point where we can't ignore it anymore.

We've just been able to pretend that we're above nature for.

For a couple hundred years now because, you know, we haven't ever been.

Haven't had this huge impact on the world.

Now we do, except the world's changing because of us, and we can keep going on like this, but we'll destroy ourselves or we change things.

So the nature of nature is nature again.

Yay.

That was a very cute way to spin that back.

Ted, please.

We're getting into the weeds here in a very good way.

So I might be too rigorous on this, but again, when I heard the topic of the nature of nature, I'm not thinking about the human interpretation of nature at all.

In fact, I think the problems we're Experiencing is because humanity doesn't understand the nature of nature.

If you think about it, and it's an interesting term, the nature is lawful.

And what I mean by that, nature just is, it does its stuff.

And humans have done our best job to try to describe those laws as the, the patterns and consistencies that they, that this thing called nature operates by.

And there's all the scientific laws, right, of motion, of gravity, of electromagnetism in biology around inheritance, you know, even.

Anyway, all these patterns is our best description of it.

And it doesn't care what we think about it, we are part of it.

But I say we, there's a physiological we and then there's sort of this non physical idea based we which is distorted and all of our mental models are messed up.

So anyway, my point is it is all and even the word interconnected, our language is what screwed us up because that even connotes that these are objects that are connected.

Whereas we know from quantum everything is within a field and, and nature's just acting by these opportunistic laws without having to think about it.

So were we to be congruent with and see the earth as an entire system, and of course it's just a subsystem within this huge system, but even that would give us a collective idea about how all these parts and pieces weave together versus my idea about it and your idea about it.

So anyway, I'm just being rigorous about the nature of nature versus the nature of our interpretation of nature.

I recognize Sally raised her hand and then Rob, but I will indulge myself first and weigh in on the conversation by saying, I kind of feel that there is a power to perception.

And I'm a big fan of quantum entanglement and the concept of quantum entanglement.

But I spend a lot of time every day in a forest thinking about whether the tree falls and no one hears it, doesn't make a sound.

And I think about that a lot because, you know, to Sally's point about we're in this kind of seesaw and I feel I've been depressed the last couple of weeks because I feel that that seesaw has been obnoxiously repetitive, yet at the same time entirely dystopian, that I think perception really is important.

And I agree with part of what you're saying, Ted, that nature exists beyond us, outside of us, in spite of us.

But I think that our relationship with nature, our perception of nature is incredibly powerful.

And I think that that is changing.

I think that's another through line of Today's conversation that how the west used to see it doesn't stand up anymore.

How we are ourselves coming to terms with our relationship with nature.

And I think it's our perception of that that is incredibly powerful and incredibly important.

Kind of abstract, but it's, it's my way of saying, I think conversations like this, I think our thoughts around nature and are playing with the meta view of nature is really powerful and something that we can apply to other areas beyond nature.

Because while nature is one of those things that we rarely question, there are other aspects of our society that we rarely question that we should be questioning.

Sally, please.

You've got your hand up.

And then Rob, right after.

Well, I just wanted to pick up on Ted's point about natural law because like I'm interested in all different kinds of law and I, I'm just wondering if, if, if we look at natural law, where, where does that come from?

Like, and I'm just thinking, so as humans we have had to adapt to what's going on right now or we're desperately trying to adapt to the world around us right now.

And I can understand why you're depressed, Jesse, because I get that way too.

But I'm just wondering how have animals changed, how has their behavior changed?

How like I, I know that they don't have laws that govern how they behave in, in the sense that we as humans look at law, but I, I'm noticing changes in how the animals are behaving.

And if I, I.

There, there, there is a road in, in Toronto called Indian Trail.

And I know why it's called Indian Trail and it weaves around and it's because the Indians, that's the trail they went up.

But before they went up that trail, animals went up that trail.

And when you're a situation that might be dire, I mean, do you rely on what you think you should do or do you look at what the animals are doing?

And for me, I would look at what the animals were doing rather than, you know, maybe taking guidance from another human.

Rob, please.

Yeah, going back to what Ted was saying or one of the things that Ted was saying and he was saying, you know, that nature is there and as it were, nature, it not putting words into your mouth.

But nature doesn't sort of care what we think.

Nature is sort of a thing.

Nature is there and sort of a, things.

He was reminding me when you were talking, Ted, you were reminding me of the, the idea, I suppose, which is right at the beginning of the, the, the, the more cats there's cats everywhere.

Yeah, at the beginning of the Ta Ching, isn't it?

Where the towel that can be named is not the towel.

And perhaps it's that sort of a thing and we can't nail nature and we can't tie it down.

And again.

And now coming on to what Sally is saying, I suppose.

And again, it's in the Tao Te Ching, isn't it?

The way of the sage is the way of water.

It's the way of non resistance and a need to align ourselves with nature.

We are part of it.

We try to objectify it, but we are part of it.

And our salvation.

To perhaps use I don't know if that's the right word, but that'll do.

Our salvation is to try and align ourselves with nature in some way.

And as Sally is saying, to do that, perhaps we have to follow the way of other species on this planet rather than some of these people who we've promoted positions of power within our own species.

Maybe that's the sort of way out of this quagmire that we're in, which is frightening some people who are around the screen today.

Jeanette, please.

And then Jim, I just wanted to go back to.

I think what's really interesting is the natural law that Sally referenced.

And the slippage between that concept and the laws of nature that Ted was talking about is exactly where the Enlightenment screwed all of us in the West.

Because that's when the.

The kind of natural patterns that I would argue again, are human artifacts.

Because I don't think the wave goes around identifying itself as separate from the rest of the ocean.

We're making that distinction, even though it's predictable and regular and therefore a law of nature that waves happen when wind acts on water.

But to take that and transpose it onto, you know, this idea of natural law, like laws governing human nature or human interactions which are in some way natural, I think that's where we really start to get into trouble in the west in particular.

And it's to go back to what Russell said way at the beginning of the conversation.

This is where I think there is real value at looking at how diverse human cultures have approached this question perhaps differently and maybe have not been, you know, ended up with all of the baggage that comes out of that, that conflation of those two concepts.

Jim, please.

Sally asked how animals have changed.

It reminded me of a story I saw not too many months ago about the California ground squirrel who has a particular diet.

And some kind of human intervention created an explosion of voles and voles went into the squirrels habitat and started eating their food.

And so they had to change their behavior.

And what those ground squirrels did to change their behavior was something that nobody who'd studied them had ever seen.

They became hunters, they became carnivorous, and they worked as hunting animals when all their lives, all our observation of them is that they were just vegetarians.

And it speaks again to my point about perception that often, you know, whether we're vegetarian or not depends upon the circumstances.

But it's also.

Sorry, I just.

That's an exact.

That's an illustration of exactly what I'm talking about.

Right.

Because that was a law that we decided, oh, these animals are vegetarian.

Right.

Well, turns out that was based on limited observation.

Right.

I mean, when science is actually performed in the way ideally you would hope it would be done, there's a modification of our understanding of the natural world based on that new data.

But it does point to the fact that we're making up these ideas about what's natural all the time.

Russell, am I correct that you wanted to jump in?

You are.

You are correct.

I'll start with correcting myself from earlier.

I was talking about anthropocentrism, but I used the word androcentrism.

I guess I'm so used to using them together because our Western culture is both of those things and it's hard to separate them sometimes.

I noticed the reference to the Enlightenment and how that screwed the West.

While I understand why there'd be people wanting to look towards other species, I take for granted that I lack multi generational experience in doing that.

So given I grew up and my ancestors grew up within that, in light of the Western culture, I'm actually going to be looking towards other cultures such as the indigenous peoples of this continent, which is not Europe, because they have the experience observing.

And I don't think of myself as, you know, there's this, you know, the whole individualism, all that type stuff.

I, I look at myself as, as not someone who's going to be able to get those skills because I didn't grow up in them.

I don't believe as individuals we can just decide one day to become enlightened, that there's a lot more that goes into that.

So, so where am I going to get my cues from not attempting to look at other than human myself, but to look to those cultures that have that multi generational experience already so that, so again, like, you know, I'm going to be looking towards indigenous peoples because I don't think I have the skills to actually understand the nature of nature myself.

I agree generally with your premise, but I take issue partly with your wording, because I think if we were to assume the blended meaning that I as an individual, not really an individual, even when I use the language I and perceive myself as I.

But I can still make the decision that I want to change my relationship with nature.

And while I agree with you wholeheartedly that our relationship with first nations and indigenous communities is part of that, I would argue that our relationship with our cats and our dogs, and in my case our goats or our horses, is also part of that.

And I say that because I spend twice a day with my goats, in which they are largely leading the experience, they are driving the experience.

And I don't have a formal background in botany or in vegetation, but I could sure tell you I'm learning a lot from them, just observing them and watching them and sort of thinking about their behavior and observing their behavior.

So I agree with the intellectual side of what you're arguing, But I think that individuals do have a lot greater agency than we understand, and that while there is an inherent collective component to what we're describing that does involve connecting with other cultures and does involve creating a diverse and inclusive society, I think we can still empower the individual to think differently, to take new tracks, and to encounter that perception in a way that.

That doesn't fit the cliche we've been using the laws of nature that we might expect.

Jim, I think you indicated you wanted to jump in, and then, Ted, you did as well.

So please.

Jim.

Yeah, both of you guys hit something really good.

There's something that's been hitting me lately, and it's this idea of speaking from experience or speaking from knowledge.

And it's just like, you know, we.

All the things we don't know how to do, but there are.

There are cultures that knew how to do them, and.

And I don't know, I just keep notice.

I was.

I. I was.

I was eating a pear for breakfast a couple months ago, and I stuck a knife into my finger, so I had to get some stitches.

And the guy who gave me the stitches, I said, oh, I'm glad I'm gonna get home fast enough to get my chickens in before dark.

It's the same.

I don't have goats, but I learned so much from watching my chickens and letting them.

And letting them be chickens and not me trying to force them here and there.

And every time they have a problem, it's because I did force something, right?

So I'm telling this guy that I've learned amazing things about social life from my chickens.

And his response was like, what?

Dude, I just told you that you.

You need the luxury of time to observe.

You're just trying to vicariously learn something from me.

And it.

It's no good.

I keep seeing it around everywhere.

It's no good.

We have to have the experience and, you know, we just have to put in the reps is what we do.

We pick what we want, put in the reps, and gain expertise.

And I actually, as an aside, I think the ideologies that dominate our world, the kind of Western European ideologies, derive from people watching animals and thinking that those animals represented society.

And I say this as a hypothesis that I will pursue at some greater point.

But, Jim, I think we're onto something.

I think back in the day when these ranchers, when these plantation owners would watch their crops, would watch their operations, that's where they conceived of their ideologies of the world.

And that's why often they don't play.

Ted, we've got you in the queue.

Laura, was I correct in thinking that you raised your hand and Sally also raised her hand, so please, Ted, jump in here.

Thanks.

Jim, I cannot hear anything you said, but you are very colorful on screen.

I can't wait to hear the words attached to the body motions.

Just a couple comments in case we run out of time here.

So I will respectfully disagree, Jesse, about.

And I agree, perception is what we use.

I just think when our perception is distorted, then it's not useful, right?

What is it Mark Twain that said it's not.

It ain't what you know that gets you in trouble.

It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

And the point is, we don't see reality.

We see what our senses and brains allow.

Right?

And our mental.

We think our mental model of the world is the truth.

And I think that's the underlying failure or limit to our ability to grow.

We have perceptual filters.

We can't see the entire electromagnetic magnetic spectrum.

We see a very narrow part, and we think that's what's there.

These animals see all kinds of different things we do.

We mistake our thoughts for facts, our emotions for evidence.

Right.

Our words for reality.

And I think it was Jim or someone mentioned the cultural norms.

It wouldn't have been Jim.

But anyway, I think maybe the word awareness is a better replacement for perception.

Right?

Because perception is in it.

At least the awareness can see how I'm perceiving In light of it.

And that's the only mechanism that could probably help us keep an eye instead of getting sucked in.

So I just offer that.

Laura, please.

Yeah, I'm taking a little bit of a view from an knowledge and complexity kind of view.

And I remember like a few years ago I joined this writing thing, like write 30 days or something, and I was writing a lot about, like, how much we don't know about just things out there in nature and biology from a perspective of science.

And there's just so much weird stuff that we have no idea about.

Like, for example, take a spoon, put it in the soil, in a local forest somewhere.

99 of the DNA that we encounter in there, we can't like classify as a species, as a known species, even in bacteria or fungi or whatever it is.

So we have no clue.

I, I think it was two years ago or something that we found like a couple million new species of viruses inside of our own bellies.

Like that, that was a bit of a thing.

But you know, when we communicate, when we use words, words sort of put a boundary around perception and they capture it and it makes possible to transmit a part of an experience.

You can, you know, talk to, talk, communicate by the air, or you can put them in a book or in a podcast or whatever, and that makes the longevity of that word last longer or less long or whatever.

But it's nearly impossible to, to classify all the information in nature because there is, that's a loud sound.

There's just so, so much complexity.

The entire point of biology is that it's, it's this thing that where the exception is the rule.

And not only is the exception the rule, it's also ever changing.

So we can only observe and describe it, but our description is basically over, already outdated the moment you've observed it.

And yeah, like the, the, the lifetime of information, the half life.

There's this concept in information theory of half life, of information.

It's so short for, for, for natural knowledge.

And there's all kinds of examples, like that knowledge about the vegetarian stuff.

It just, it doesn't make any sense because observations are so limited and there's just so, so incredibly much information encoded in nature.

It's incredible to think about, like even us as humans, we have in total, inside of us there's a hundred trillion cells.

I, I believe there's like a few weeks ago we discovered new organelles in our own cells, in our own damn cells.

New organelles.

But this is why, again, to bring back the power of perception, it's easy to be overwhelmed, right?

It's easy for the amount of information out there to be at the level of incoherence.

And we come up with words and we come up with stories and we come up with frames to make sense of it all, right?

To create a signal that helps us at least focus on what's relevant.

And, you know, to my anecdote about watching the goats, you know, the last few days, they've cut our adventure short because if one of them gets bit by a deer fly, they all freak out because it's this big, oh, no, where'd that invisible pain come from?

And they all run home.

That.

I see that as a false positive.

Why are you guys ruining the party?

We're having a good time.

Time.

But they perceive that as something important that causes their behavior to change.

So I hear what people are saying about perception can be dangerous, but I think when handled in a certain light, it can also be very powerful and enabling.

But Laura's point about we are just scratching the tip of the surface of the information out there I think imbues a kind of humility.

And for me, it was the change from the word biome, in which we were looking at the bacteria in our guts, to biota, in which we acknowledge that the viruses, in addition to the bacteria in our gut, are part of the harmonious system that keeps us alive and keeps us humming.

Sally, you had your hand raised.

And Sharita, you've also got your hand up.

Please, Sally, go ahead.

Well, I just wanted to talk a little bit about what Jim and Ted were saying about how it's.

How if.

If you're going to be making comments or decisions or policy about something, you really need to experience it.

And of course, as you know, Jesse, I've been beating this drum for a while, especially when it comes to connectivity policy in Canada.

Decisions are being made and hexagon diagrams are being made based on statistics rather than, you know, giving these folks that are establishing policy a travel budget so that they can at least come to the communities and see what it is that has to be dealt with.

So that's one thing.

And the other thing about what Laura was saying, I remember seeing some sort of presentation at a conference a few years ago about some guy head honcho at Microsoft wearing a toque, standing in the middle of the forest, talking about how Microsoft was going to classify everything on Earth.

Everything.

And.

And then I heard about this, this other program.

These.

It's called what three words and where are these two gentlemen have gone through the entire globe and Every three square meters has three words, so that if there's an emergency, people know, the emergency crews know where to go.

And I'm wondering why are we doing this?

And, and getting back to what Laura was saying, how much of this information that, that we are generating is being generated, generated out of fear?

If we have all this information, is it doing us any good?

Or, or why do we feel we need to classify everything down to every square meter or every item that is on the planet?

Why do we need to do that?

I, I don't get that right On.

Sharita.

My background is very much of a scientific background, a background where you do classify, where you do interventions and then see what happens, etc.

However, what I have been experiencing recently is I've begun to meditate and I can't really describe what I feel when I meditate, but the only way I can describe it is some kind of connection is coming back to me and it's where I don't name things when I don't.

Other things, things when I, as Rob, you said something of the Tao.

The Tao that can be spoken of is not the constant Tao.

And in a way that's using words perhaps to explain a little bit of what I'm appreciating on a level that isn't language.

When I use language, I lose it.

Right.

I begin then to go back into my science background, etc.

Not that my science background is bad.

It, it's good in many ways because it's given me lots of things to think about and I think I've done some positive things in my.

But I really think that when we approach the whole issue of nature, we need to step back and feel something, perceive something that we cannot name.

And I'm not being religious or anything like that.

I'm trying to get back down into maybe being nature myself.

I don't know.

Lots I don't know.

Oh, I just, you know, actually just to follow up on Sharita and Sally and Laura.

But there was something, Jesse, you said when you were responding to Laura that I thought really got to the crux of the issue where you talked about the relevance of the data.

Right.

That yes, there is a narrowing of focus that comes with separating out the one thing you want to pay attention to above the immense, almost inconceivable complexity that is nature.

But there is utility in that.

As Sharita just said, her scientific training is very positive in some circumstances.

I think what seems Sally was talking about is that that has limited utility and the mistake we are making Particularly in the west, is we want to apply it to everything.

That scientific approach does great things in certain contexts.

It's a disaster.

If it is a universal approach, you are mistaking the map for the territory.

And what comes to mind is that Adam Curtis film.

I can't.

Jesse, you'll have to remind me which title this is where he talks about Biosphere 2 and the whole cybernetics approach to nature and oh, if we just collect enough data, we'll know all the variables and then we can create this, recreate a natural environment.

And of course didn't work because it's too complex.

They could not collect all the data.

They couldn't understand all the systems and how they work.

It was though they still think they can.

Oh, of course.

They still like this is, you know, Laura's point of.

Correct me if you think I'm paraphrasing that because we are starting to understand that there is more information.

There are some people who then believe that the cybernetics vision is possible versus I think what you and Sharita and many of us are articulating is maybe cyber, some stuff shouldn't be measured, right?

Maybe some stuff shouldn't have a return on investment, right?

Maybe some stuff should exist beyond those confines.

Laura, you've got your hand up, so I'm gonna press a few buttons here and bring you on.

Please jump in.

Yeah, we talked about this on your podcast before when I was guest alone.

But basically we can actually measure the complexity of nature and that's what's happening now with AI and that kind of stuff where we do this sort of learning on arbitrary data streams that are so incredibly huge and, and it's sort of working.

And of course it still has its limits and it's.

And it's all kinds of faults and that kind of stuff.

But I am certainly of the belief that we totally can actually scientifically or through an engineering way.

I don't think AI is science, it's engineering, but we totally can measure all this stuff and even cybernetically integrate it.

However, there's a little bit of an interesting thing that happens.

The thing that you create is so inherently complex that it is indistinguishable from.

From nature.

So, Russell, I've got you up presently for the reaction shot here on this two shot.

Do you want to rebut?

Do you want to express some skepticism?

Although I think Laura's last point was a very brilliant caveat that while on the one hand AI can entertain complexity, but that doesn't mean we can entertain the Complexity that's being entertained.

But Russell, I suspect you may offer an opposing view on the role of AI.

I don't know that I want it to be an opposing view, I guess.

Okay, so lenses.

I mentioned lens earlier.

So in a previous part of my life, I was involved in intellectual property policy.

And one of the things that I had to think about is how patent law is all about the manipulation of nature.

And then I started asking thoughts about what other cultures deliberately try to incentivize manipulation of nature versus cultures that are trying to observe, learn from, mimic and integrate themselves into nature.

And so when I look at the artificial intelligence, I don't actually look at the quote, quote science of it, but the application and how the application is done.

And to me, if you're trying to apply within the context of manipulations of nature as opposed to understanding nature, it's dangerous.

I don't think this society can actually observe everything because we're deliberately comprised, compressing, and we don't actually care to know everything.

Our economy, they are all of our, all of the economic theories that the west uses as if they're all like, you know, this is what an economy is, is compressed, discounts nearly everything with intrinsic value and then puts a magic number money on a tiny, tiny number of relatively insignificant things and says that's the management of our household.

Ted, did you want to jump in there?

Yeah, I just want to touch on the AI comment, which again, of course we call it things artificial intelligence.

And that word intelligence connotes, oh, something like us again, language and concepts.

There's the idea of specific AI, like specific relativity was they're very narrow.

These things are good at very narrow tasks.

This is this idea of general AI where we can think amongst, between ideas AI doesn't do.

So I would almost say it's artificial knowledge.

It's not yet intelligence, but we're parsing words.

I do think.

Park back to a couple comments you'd made, Jesse, when you said I it is an interesting thing I learned about internal family systems where there's different parts of us so we think we're one monolithic thing.

But I have desires and wants and I have shoulds and I have my ego.

And so even lumping ourselves into one thing.

And of course everything is contextual, it's environmental.

I'm going to respond based on my environment.

So is nature.

So this idea that things are static, that things are separate, it is a result of the Cartesian sort of reductionist thinking.

It does work in, you know, there's a saber tooth Tiger, I'm going to go this direction.

It works in a particle mentality, but what we all know is it's.

It's not particle or wave.

It's.

And.

And that is really true, metaphorically, for how right societies work.

There's the individuals and there's the collective, and it's often an emergent collectivism.

All this set of human nature effects actually do mimic nature.

We just don't understand that.

And so we make up stories about what these things mean.

And I'm so glad that you brought up family systems.

You put it in the chat, and I was going to bring it up to trigger you to do so because I love the concept and I've.

Over the last year and a half, I've really embraced the notion that I'm not Jesse, but there is a parliament of Jessies in my head, and that parliament of Jessies are constantly debating, competing for control when I'm really hungry.

The asshole faction tends to have a lot of influence.

And I say this partly because that understanding of myself and the internal diversity and the internal conflict currently has me adamant that AI will never be able to understand me, that AI will never be able to recognize the complexity and diversity within me because I struggle to do so.

And I feel that in doing so, I'm getting to a different level of understanding.

But this is why, again, Laura, I'll give you the caveat that it can handle complexity, but that doesn't mean we can handle the complexity.

Complexity that are being stored in these systems.

Now, Jim, I'm about to throw to you, and I do think I have solved the mystery as to why Ted can't hear Jim.

And it's because, Ted, you are the only person other than Jim who's not wearing headphones.

And I suspect that you've got some active noise cancellation going on to make sure that your audio doesn't conflict versus Jim's audio tends to be a little rough because he's outside and there's traffic going around.

So next salon, try headphones, and we'll see if it makes a difference.

But, Jim, please jump in.

All right.

Well.

I was thinking of the.

The whole idea of geoengineering, and you know what, what a folly that it's not.

It's.

It's.

It's not even a probability of folly.

It's just folly.

And, and the, the thing that is really illustrative.

And they started to measure the polar ice caps, and they said that they could tell how fast they were melting by how much lower they were getting by measuring them from satellites.

And then when they went and looked and discovered underneath the ice that it was like Swiss cheese and that that sums it all up.

There it is.

There's the biggest system we have, right?

The biggest system, and we can't even come close to understanding it.

And every.

Every little thing that we try to do.

And so I. I really think it boils down to humility, lack of humility that we.

We think we own and control all this stuff.

We think we have the power.

We think we're gods.

We're more like monsters, I'm afraid.

But.

You know, if.

If the simplicity of existence was what we taught and if it was the fabric of the environment that we've created to more easily consider societies that.

That were sustainable for hundreds or thousands of generations, certainly thousands of generations passing on the same.

Same land that was passed on to them.

I, I've been.

Rob.

Rob will be bored from here hearing this, but I've been in the group that we've had that we meet monthly.

I've started looking a lot at.

At Jung and, And his approach to.

To our relationship with our own selves.

And if we figure those things out, then we have a healthier attitude about humility and kindness and those things.

Go ahead, Rob.

Yeah.

There's so many points being made here and trying to.

Trying to sort of summarize.

It's trying to summarize my thoughts and coming back at things that are being said.

So I kind of going back to Sharido and something which she said, and then something which Jim just said a moment ago, and it's this business of language and, and some of you who know me, there's a couple of you who know me around the screen, you know that this is my.

My thing, I suppose.

I. I get up about language and stuff.

And when you talk about perception, Jesse, and you talk about your goats, and I've just said it there, you're goats.

And you are the owner of these goats.

And you're the owner of these goats because an extraordinarily complex system which we have built up by means of language, which makes them your property.

I have to be clear, I don't currently think of them as property.

And if they were, they'd be Jeanette's goats.

Okay, I work for Jeanette and take care of those goats.

Goats on her behalf.

But if we are going to assign any ownership on the record, since we know this is on the record, can we.

They're Jeanette's goats.

Okay.

Okay.

They belong.

Yeah, okay, that's fine.

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is this business of perception and our perception and I suppose the perception of the goats and how the goats see you and how the goats see Jeanette and so on and so forth.

Let's forget about the goats.

Let's just take a, a random bunch of sheep.

Sheep and the shepherd.

The, the, the sheep see the shepherd, we believe, as, as looking after them and tending to them and all the rest of it and the other.

But the truth is that it is the shepherd that will eat the sheep and, and, and the sheep don't sort of see it that way.

And the shepherd does see it that way.

He shepherdess is looking after the sheep that he.

She owns.

Because a very complicated language system that we have which makes the perception that the sheep is a sheep, but it's also a meal and it's a coat with the wool that's on its back and so on and so forth.

And so we, we apply our perceptions to the natural world and we, we, we, we therefore define it in our own way and we do this.

And as I say, I mean, this is almost.

I'm, I'm going to be extraordinarily cheeky here because we're presumably coming up towards the end of this and we've got to think about the next salon that we're going to do and we've got to do it about language.

So I've shoved that one down on the table.

That was very naughty of me because it's up to other people to decide what we need to talk about.

Well, just to encourage you, though, that was a very sly move.

If you, if you really want to go for the win, you got to give it a little, you know, rhyme to it, like the nature of nature sort of.

Language is the power of language sold to the, the, the bitter there.

Sorry not to cut you off.

Please continue.

That's okay.

I mean, that, that, that's really.

That, that, that, that's what I wanted to say about that and the power of language and the way in which.

Away from nature.

Look, I mean, let's.

Everybody will know this once.

It's a bit of a cliche, but it's the Levy Strauss thing.

It's about nature is the raw and, and culture is that the processed, if you like.

And what I'm suggesting, I suppose for the next salon is that we, we talk about that side of things, if you like.

And the way in which we use language to define a world and the world we live in and the way we use language to say that guy is the president.

I mean, wow.

It's just weird, isn't it, if you think about it in a weird sort of a way, the amount of stuff that we.

We live in in this world which is created simply because of the language which we use.

And I'm talking here about language as a human artifact, not communication systems, because I understand that there are probably fish off the African seas and the rest of it which have communication systems which I don't understand, and goats as well.

But we have language, and we have the ability.

And we can talk about this, and I'd love to do so.

We have the ability to create worlds that we live in simply by the language which we use.

So that's, I suppose, the thing which I'm trying to say here.

Right on, Janette.

And then Sally, you've got your hand.

And then Ted.

I actually wanted to go back to Sally's point about the role of fear, because I. I think that has become incredibly salient the way the conversation has gone.

I mean, it's interesting that Ted brought up ifs, which is really, you know, sure, it's a way of describing the psyche as being multiple, but also it's a way to address trauma and the impact of trauma, the psychic structures we develop in order to process and handle trauma.

And that's where Jim's point about the grandiosity of the west thinking, oh, you know, we got this, like, no problem.

We'll figure this out.

We, you know, that, that, that conceit that we can master nature, which I would say, you know, goes back centuries now, certainly on the Western side of things.

I think it all points to power and control.

Right?

That is the trauma response in the West.

Don't like what's happening, Feeling overwhelmed by what's around you.

Power and control.

Simplify so you have something you can grab onto and tell yourself, I got this.

And there are things in life we don't got.

I cannot control a tornado as much as I would love to.

I can't control goats as much as I might want to.

Sally, please jump in.

I just wanted to circle back to something that Laura mentioned and then something that Jim mentioned.

But I think we need to maybe take a step back and look what's missing here.

Because when I was taking library courses many years.

Well, about 20 years ago, I was asked to do a research project on, you know, look for papers on certain topics.

And I was absolutely amazed at the.

The complete absence of documents and research from certain parts of the world.

Africa, Asia, for example.

And then I Found out that a lot of it had to do with lack of access to Internet connectivity.

That was one thing.

And also to this day, approximately 3 billion people in our world do not have access to electricity.

So how are we hearing from them at all?

You know, we're, we're, we're like, is this it, like the, the, the knowledge that Western society has developed and that we're reading and discussing?

I mean, are we just going to, to go ahead with that or are we going to do what we can to kind of reach out to the 3 billion people that really haven't really had an opportunity to say anything because they're, they are not connected.

So that's one thing I, I want to mention.

And getting back to Jim's point, I, I, I think that and Jeanette's, I mean, I think we're quite conceited to think that, you know, we have all we, we are the ones that are, are working on the answers when there's a whole other world out there that might also be working on the answers that we're not even aware of because they don't have a say because they're not even connected to the grid.

And, and where your point about electricity I think is spot on.

The issue of connecting to non western perspectives.

Perspectives, paradoxically, this is where I'll recommend TikTok, because one of the things I love about TikTok is it's exposing me to farmers around the world and some of the technology that these farmers are using often in very ingenious and very limited resources.

So there are ways for us granted we are still connecting to the connected.

So your point is absolutely fair, Sally.

But it does enable those who are willing to find non western sources for a lot of these ideas and a lot of these different issues.

Laura, you had your hand up.

Please jump in.

Yeah, I want to respond to the idea of property and language because I was also wondering about this.

Like, oh, it's so weird that we use language and law and that kind of stuff to, you know, denote areas that are ours under our control.

But at the same time it's just not that weird.

Like I was reading about octopus behavior and they just claim part of the sea floor and if someone comes near they just slap the ever living out of you, you know, and that's just, I mean, no, they don't use language and they don't have property law and that kind of X in exactly the same way.

Like it's theirs and they know it's theirs and if someone else comes in there Even if it's not an octopus, if it's something like a crab, that crap gets yeeted out, you know, And.

And if it's another octopus, then they get in this weird fight because octopus.

Octopuses have very strange fights, apparently, because they don't have strong skeletons and stuff like that, so they can't really punch and they can only like, flopper each other.

But that's.

That's a fun thing to imagine.

But yeah, I mean, they, they have property.

That.

That's just property.

Just they.

But Laura, is that property or personal space like that?

That's not property.

That's not property.

Property is created by the law.

These octopuses, these octopi, they.

They don't have armies which they can control and, and dictate to and tell what they can do.

They don't create systems and institutions in the way in which we do, which allow things to happen.

Hands do that.

Donald Trump has power.

He has two hands like I do.

He can throttle the person in front of him, but he cannot on his own start a war.

He has to have an army.

He has to have a, A parliament or whatever.

He has to have a complete system behind him which is going to allow it to happen.

And don't forget, he has tiny hands.

It's important to emphasize that.

Very, very, very tiny hands.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good distinction.

Like, it extends to a social.

It's.

It extends further to like a social system, but at the same time, ants have that too.

Like, they start wars about property or whatever.

And if there's two colonies of ants and there's some food source here, there will be a proper fucking war with military and.

But perhaps again, we are thankfully now previewing the Power of Language Salon, which will be held in early August, because the difference between property and possessions, I think would be quite distinct and have a lot of power.

Ted, I did notice that you raised your hand and we are kind of in the closing thoughts, wrapping things up.

I need to pee part of the episode.

So, Ted, no pressure.

You don't have to wrap things up, but you wanted to join in the conversation, please.

So a couple things and I'll go rapidly.

One, you know, we speak of goats as though they're just objects and all goats are just goats.

And it's okay in one perspective.

Yes, that is a goat.

From the perspective of the goat, I am this kind of goat and you're that.

You know, it's the same thing.

So it's the dual sort of framework of that.

So, yes.

And each goat is unique.

Second thing, I read an article recently how we think octopi might be alien in the sense that the strategies and all that could not have come from an evolutionary basis and it must have come from areas where radiation and all these other elements must have been that much more complicated.

So I'm glad to share with you all but an interesting thing just about octopi.

And then I think we were stumbling on the ant thing.

Yes, every animal has a different strategy.

So octopus may be a soul type cat, whereas ants and others develop different strategies.

So again, calling animals animals again is also very crude.

Right, because the thing and the herd have emergence.

You know, complexities.

Anyway, it's a whole brick.

I do also appreciate, I think, Rob's point about language.

Totally agree.

I'll also add that I think what makes humans unique and part of what, you know, assisted our ascendants, so we think, I'm not sure what the apes would think is the ability to project in time.

And this idea of projection is part of that idea of property and all these other, that conceptualization.

No, look, I think, you know, language came from our human experience.

You hit me, you there, me there.

It mattered to us in the physical world.

We're now in a non physical world where things happen across the planet, affect us here.

And we don't have those new language constructs to speak into that and we use these old ones that continually drag us back into that.

But this idea of control, survival, our goal was predictability and we mistake cause and effect for control.

And again, it's all, it's all back to the mind.

So I think the more we can understand that nature has this particle wave duality, probabilistic universe, if we think in terms of ands and not ors, we could actually transform humanity pretty quickly.

Well, and I think that's what we're doing.

I mean, I will point out that we just had a close to 90 minute conversation that spanned multiple continents, crossed an ocean, and we did it in real time.

Like the latency here has been pretty incredible given the distance that has been crossed for this conversation.

And yet we are still in physical spaces.

Hence my back teeth singing Anchors Away and my bladder playing an issue.

So I think on the one hand you speak to the paradox that we are simultaneously living in different kinds of reality.

And to go to Sally's earlier provocation, that is stretching our conception of nature, our relationship with nature.

And so we do need a kind of language, we do need a culture.

And maybe that's why the power of language is such an appropriate and fitting fallen up salon.

Anyone have any final words before I wrap things up?

Thank you all.

This has been a very entertaining, a very enjoyable, hopefully provocative conversation.

It'll be released as episode 70, season 3, first episode of season 3 of Meta Views.

So thanks again everybody.

Let's see what kind of sound effects I got here.

Loaded up, all laughs, lots of laughs, some applause.

I think the automated audience is mocking us, but nonetheless is fully entertained.

Thank you all.

Rob, do you remember the date in August that we decided on?

The thing is, I've got in my head it's the 9th of August, Jesse.

Or is it that today?

No, that's today, isn't it?

But it's something like that.

I think it's similar.

So it's roughly a month from now, early August.

Yeah, I think it's the 6th.

It's the 6th of August.

I've just checked on my.

Okay, so the 6th of August, same bat time, same bat channel, probably even the same link that was sent to you today so you could bookmark it for the future.

And when you are interrogated by ICE officials, tell them that Jesse sent you.

Until then, we hope to see you soon.

There'll be lots more episodes coming.

Yes, Laura, do not travel to America.

Hopefully ICE will not interrogate you where you currently are.

But for those of you are in America again, let us know if you are imprisoned, we will rally to support you and make sure that you were exiled somewhere nice.

Thanks again everybody.

And I will press self record.