Practical Application of Speculative Philosophy

In the early 1990s I got interested in the idea that consciousness is a general property of our universe. I was swimming in Lake Erie on a really super hot summer day and was just floating on my back in the water. As a lark, I wondered what the Lake "felt" on that day.

It's not really a huge stretch to imagine that there's many forms of consciousness, and it's not confined to living creatures with brains and central nervous systems. If you generalize it a little bit to storage of information, and operations on information, then it's a very small leap to see it everywhere. For example, aggregate groups of animals have a sort of shared consciousness, like a flock of birds. And then it's not really much of a leap from there to concluding everything has some form of consciousness.

So in a certain sense, something like a forest has a consciousness. That consciousness is probably completely unintelligible to humans. Just as our consciousness is basically in another "dimension" from our meat computer brain, the consciousness of something like a forest is nowhere to be found "in" the forest.

Why isn't consciousness "in" our brain? It "arises" from the relationship of the matter and chemical and electrical signals in our brain. It's akin to something like the concept of distance between two physical objects. That is, the "property" of distance really isn't present in the world like the two physical objects are--it's really in some other dimension.

I think these concepts can actually be applied in real world scenarios, especially with respect to something like gardening. A basic gardener will usually think about their activity in aesthetic terms. They'll think "this garden bed should be brown dirt with uniform appearance". The appearance of the garden will inform all their activities throughout the season.

If they endeavor to understand their activity from the garden's point of view, their activity will be almost the opposite of the aesthetic-driven gardener. There's a school of gardening from Korea that is really very in-line with that notion. For example, they'll cultivate the bacteria and fungi in the garden by culturing it and feeding it. Basically, they go out in the woods and leave a sterile container of some freshly cooked (i.e. sterile) rice to collect a population of micro-organisms, then they basically multiply those micro-organisms in a vat and use it as fertilizer.