Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour

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Listening to this right now, ie. Matthew Seagall discussing Bruno Latour's Facing Gaia in two parts. It's interesting because it seems to be a further expansion and contextualization of James Lovelock's ideas on Gaia, not as goddess but as a disequilibrium system and how we may most accurately contextualize ourselves as agents within it.

Discovering Latour has been probably my most enlightening discovery besides Peter Sloterdijk.
But unlike Sloterdijk, Latour's ideas and his prose are occasionally quite difficult to read and follow.

Oh, and: Lovelock regretted calling his 'global biosphere with buffer-mechanisms' -or however one would want to describe it briefly- Gaia, because that created an association with esotericism and hippies and 'mother nature'.
But Lovelock's Gaia is cold hard science, or in the words of Zizek: 'if nature is a 'mother', it's a dirty b***h of a mother'

On that note: Timothy Morton's got a book by the title 'ecology without nature', which Zizek recommends. But I find Morton quite exhausting to read. I love listening to him though, and fought myself through some of his books, but not all, yet.

TY, I'll have to follow up more on some of the other names here like Morton and Sloterdijk.

Right now I'm actually going through a lot of what Donald Hoffman has been saying with a fine-toothed comb to see if what he's onto maps onto what Nima Akhani-Hamed is saying. They both seem to agree that spacetime is doomed at least as a fundamental rather than emergent feature but they seem to chip at it from very different angles.

Oh wow. I had to Google those. But I think they might be playing a very different game than any of the philosophers mentioned above-
As in: I haven't read anywhere whether Latour or Morton care much about the trajectory of spacetime, they're much more poetic and about how to engage with the world, aesthetically (in Morton's case) or conceptually (Latour).
Sloterdijk is sort of a historical revisionist who gives 5 factually true yet qualitatively different accounts of some historical event, making it relevant for totally different problems - he's extremely deep into analogies and metaphors to see where that goes...

Oh for sure they're playing different games. I'm interested in what the findings of both groups might be able to figure out in terms of navigating some of the sticking points we're dealing with right now. I think both significant changes in technology and sociology are needed and humanity needs to find a way to keep the peace and progressive mindsets about ourselves even if or when our numbers might be retracting or when economies change so much that what's technically measurable as failure on a pure consumption growth pattern actually maps as progress and even reaches toward something more beneficially stable. It may well be also that if we reverse Descartes and go back to a more animistic take on life, not just metaphorically but particularly if we find such as in Donald Hoffman's conscious agent theory, we might still be able to mix something of a Sagan-like wonder with the universe as much as a William Blake type of wonder - ie. keep it rational but at the same time realizing that we come from a place where not only is our planet teaming with important forms of life that we should work with to regulate the mix of things but that the universe is perhaps doing something important with consciousness and that it's an important part of what's getting played out rather than being a spandrel.

Here's a good example of Latour doing his conceptual/metaphorical thing - I found reading it somewhat harder than listening to it, but of course, the books are a lot more dense.





Also: extra points for using "spandrel" in a sentence. I've only come across it being used by geneticists.
Also: I take the opposite position and think consciousness is exactly that, but I don't think I'm telling you anything new here.

Ty, I think I have this one on my list - will probably jump on it this evening.


This interviewer's a bit of a character (the name Z-Dogg MD sort of gives that away) but I think he and Don actually had a good conversation in the way of unpacking what he's on about. He seems to be making a pretty firm case for the notion that in the way of preparing useful sensory information for us to survive with that our minds are doing a bit more than just sequencing spatial or kinetic perception or filtering out light and sound ranges we don't need, something more like the idea that we're unpacking what would almost seem like a virtual world (a drastically reduced set of structures commensurate to the conditions of our survival) from a more fundamental stage that's neither space nor time but rather the place both emerge from and thus spacetime as we experience it, and our examination of it, is really our examination of something a bit like an anthropocentric UI:

Okay
... I'm happy to follow the argument that humans haven't evolved to perceive reality, in the same way that we haven't evolved fir a desire to procreate, but by a desire for sexual satisfaction. Then we disrupted biological evolution through contraception, masturbation and heroin - pleasures without the side effect of procreation. Too bad.
(Or, in the words of Hofmann: interaction with another consciousness WITHOUT creation of a new one. Or no interaction with another consciousness at all. The human consciousness in general seems to prefer that over making new ones. ... Weird. Oh god, is masturbation a sin again, now?)


Okay, I figured that out by myself.
Also that atoms aren't really little ping pong balls, but rather something like probability distributions of energy - whatever that is.

But Hofmann is totally speculating beyond this point. Like... Instead of saying: the brain is a computer - he says: no, consciousness is real, everything else is a computer, creating this ad hoc for the individual observer - but it could also be another consciousness.
Sure. But also not.
How would we test this? And how would we refute this?

I mean... How is he not just saying that God (or was it the devil?) put the dinosaur turds there to make the illusion perfect?
Or am I gravely misunderstanding something here?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fossils-3

When I hear about Gaia, I think of Final Fantasy, which often mentioned it. And some of them I guess you could say were pretty radical. It's interesting how in Final Fantasy VII you are essentially in a group of eco-terrorists. Basically, in the game, Gaia, as the planet is called, has a life essence known as the lifestream; however, it is being turned into mako and used as an energy source by the evil Shinra Corporation. Unfortunately, the lifestream is finite, and if it's all used up then Gaia (and thus everybody) dies. People have attempted to warn Shinra of this, but they refuse to listen because all they care about are their profits. I guess it shows how myopic self-interest can often take precedence over dealing with a longer-term threat.

(This game originally came out in 1997, but now they're making a remake.)

I'm also curious about what kinds of information or tells would span the gap between us simply filtering out certain ranges of sight and sound from an autonomous physical world vs. really scraping a tiny fraction of relevant data from some huge data lake in which very few dots are the ones we need and that our observations of space time well up from that subconscious endeavor.


He did at least propose a falsifiability measure which I'm not sure if he did in this particular interview but he's brought it up in other places. If his theory is right it should give back QM, GR, gravity, and everything else we take for granted with our current models plus simpler math for things that we currently have more complex math to describe - if it can't do that then it's wrong. From what he's saying he has collegues he's working with and they're hoping to try this out, his own take is that it's most likely wrong but that it's still the first falsifiable theory to run as deep as it does and chases qualia this aggressively.

The other thing I'd add - back to science rather than science-related philosophy (which seems to be where Hoffman is at least at present), one of the complaints Nima Akhani Hamed has had about spacetime is that we can't measure at the plank scale without putting enough energy in to cause a black hole to form. That seems to suggest that there's a very high cost to measuring at these scales and I'm starting to wonder if that may have something to do with the divide between the world of classical mechanics, as we experience it, the world of the quantum, and the inexplicable intermediary between the two.


Oh, he's being *extremely* irreverent to our current views of the material universe and suggesting that we're getting trapped because we're still only measuring a sort of UI rather than the actual stuff behind it. What I think will happen though - more scientists will be jumping on the train Nima Arkani Hamed has taken, completely irrespective of what Donald Hoffman is doing, and whatever they start figuring out about amplituhedrons and related crystalline structures or symmetries outside of space and time will either veer toward this possibility or away from it.

My own reason for being quite interested in this theory, as you're probably aware, I've been wanting to see a theory come up that encapsulates the world as we experience it - with the 99.999% congruence with reductive materialism in the way it behaves, and not throw the other 0.001% in a hodgepodge basket called the paranormal or supernatural, ie. those are made-up categories and nothing that's actually real belongs there. I've had enough of the .001% experiences not to be a reductive materialist but I've also seen enough limitation on these to consider that there are such rigid rule sets that these things exist within that it almost seems like they're strapped to a constraining physics that no amount of Ronda Byrnes or anything else like that makes Law of Attraction real. At best someone might shake a structure thoroughly enough that they get a shower of synchronicities that will halo out a few days after them taking a very decisive action like an intense ritual with several weeks planning or some intense psychedelic working where by all intents and purposes it seems like they had intense contact with an entity foreign to themselves. Those sorts of things cause skips and bounces in reality as an after-effect which would suggest consciousness, even if it's not our consciousness and if that were only confined to our brains for the most part, is woven deeper into the fabric. Where you run into the sense that matter is deaf, dumb, etc. - I'd argue spackled or woven through with consciousness in a format that's incoherent to us and would lack the basic coherence to be able to respond cognitively to human inquiry.

That's where I'd say I've pretty well settled that functionalism is probably the better explanation than panpsychism (ie. you said it above quite well - matter isn't really 'stuff' so to say particles are consciousness is a bit cultural hand-holding at best). What I like about what Hoffman's offering here is that he's giving a much more clear explanation of what something like functionalism with multiple realizability would condense down to if it were brought to the level of a theory, and in his theory it's his network of conscious agents which are united by what he's loosely called contracts (exchange of data or mutual awareness) which then yields stacking organizing binders, probably helps as well when we're thinking about how bizarre the mechanics of a cell are and how a lot of the moving nanostructures seem to be moving almost by remote control rather than any wind-up programming, ie. cyclical bottom-up and top-down feedback loops.

So it's the first time I've heard someone join these things together with what could be a scientific theory if tested right or, if failing, could give a framework for further hypothesis testing and potentially theories that pan out which may have some of the same elements, not other, or perhaps even stranger outcomes when walked out experimentally. This is part of why I'm curious to see whether Nima et al's maps will converge with his or drift off in a much different direction.

They clearly weren't culturally obtuse in making that. I'd also figure, Lovelock having signed his name to the Gaia hypothesis back in the mid 2000's I believe, the game was probably harkening back to 1970's environmentalist analogies, and the term Gaia or the concept of 'mother earth' is far, far older.

What I think Lovelock and Latour are talking about is the real sum-total set of complex relationships between various organisms and agents relevant to the functioning of the ecosystem that we rely on and they seem to be using this term in a way that's agnostic to it having or not having any collective self-awareness. I do think they've sized the job right with respect to just how much we'll have to learn about the environment and truly complex systems if we want to do better with our relationship to the rest of the world, OTOH I do agree with shliafu - and something that's often been admitted by many of Lovelock's supporters - that they sort of wish he would have made Gaia into an acronym for some more proper term or done something so as not to trip the hippy-alarm bells.

I'm actually going to say that I'd use a different descriptor for it than poetry.

It goes back to some things that John Vervaeke has said about the space of ideas and potentiality, ie. that it's so big, combinatorially explosive even, that simple narratives can't encapsulate it and that we can very easily lose salient relationships (or in the more anthropocentric scope - effective problem-solving lenses) between concepts, objects, etc.. It seems like in this lecture he's suggesting a different parsing or a different way to look at the same issues. When he talks about the idea that the unforeseen hangups of globalism, or the recent summit of various countries sharing long-term plans, he seems to be talking about projections and rounding errors, let alone geopolitical needs, compound to a degree where hardly anyone's holding the same map and thus pointing out the difficulty of extrapolating how one would encapsulate or plan a truly complex system's future state in one way or another.

techstepgenr8tion, you seem to be discussing animism. It'd be interesting if you can create an animistic theory that is also falsifiable. But how on God's green earth you would do that, I have no idea.

Neither Lovelock nor Latour express any panpsychic tendencies.
Latour is exploring different metaphors of how to describe objects - an endeavour that goes back to Aristotle, and is unfinished.
Aristotle described objects through their 'four causes': what it is made of, what is made for, the idea after which it was designed, and the way it came to be.
The usual example is a table: it's made of wood, made to put food on, made from the common idea of what a table looks like, and made by a woodworker.
Latour created 'actor network theory', in which an object is what it does.
So, the table is a thing to put stuff on, to hide under, food/home for worms, etc.

Actor network theory thereby tries to describe networks of interactions as a way to view situations. This way, he created a circumvention of the problem of fictions and non-human entities in the social sciences.
These objects may not exist, or consciously commit actions, but they nonetheless do interact with things and act on the real world.

One of his techniques to think about the world is called the parliament of things: it works like a normal parliament, in which representatives negotiate - only that non-human actors also get representation.
(This is of course something done in universities etc.) Say, you negotiate fishing quotas, and the ocean, the species of halibut and the species of mackerel all get a representative to sit at the table with say, Britain, Norway and Denmark.
This is experimental, of course, but an experiment to find out if that could work and make human existence on the planet into a sustainable enterprise.
Gaia would be the name of the network, not any actor in it.

Latour himself sought to develop actor-network-theory further, because 'an object is what it does' can't account for change.
What an object does right now isn't all there is to an object.
Object oriented ontology picks up from there and says: well, no one, not even an object itself knows all there is to know about it - and it therefore made the whole circle back to Kant's "noumenon", the thing-in-itself.

That's actually been one of the more common criticisms of panpsychism, ie. no difference in physical states and adding a layer of conscious experience to objects that therefore isn't needed for scientific theories to bear out (even if it were true but theorhetically irrelevant) thus not worthy of scientific consideration. I think if all particles resolve to fields anyway they'd need some type of evidence to suggest that particles are somehow having autonomous experience which I don't see happening.

The bit I mentioned above to shliafu is what Donald Hoffman at least put on the line with his theory - ie. if QM, GR, classical mechanics, and everything we know to be true about the world can't be pulled back out of it then the theory fails. That would make sense because he's making claims about a layer of stuff that's a substrate to time and space and which time and space emerge from. We do have strong suggestions that time and space are emerging from something, less clarity on whether what Donald Hoffman is saying maps to it with any certainty yet, so I'd say I'm keeping an eye out with interest to see how this goes.

Also an important clarifier to reiterate if needed *I* might be discussing something relatively close to animism by way of functionalism as part of a side conversation, ie. Hoffman. Bruno Lature and James Lovelock aren't talking about that. Hopefully that part isn't causing any confusion but in case there is any confusion I thought I should clarify that.