Writing
Writing as a Verb
"Writing is an action. To write is a verb. Don’t worry about being a writer, or about how it is done, or when you should write, or what comes first, or any of that. Simply write. Conduct the action. The rest will fall into place around that." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing as Craft
"I say: 'Making makes the maker.' If you write something, you're also rewriting your own code. You're working on yourself. You're developing as a writer. There's no wasting time in writing, because it's like being a woodworker. Every time you pick up the sandpaper, the plane, or the chisel, you're learning something about the material you work with, about where to place your hands, about how to work with the grain of the wood, about where you could improve your craft . . . One of the big mistakes people make is they say, 'I want to be a writer.' What they should say is, 'I want to write.'" -- Adapted from Ray Nayler: Interview at Utopiales 2024
Writing as Habit
"I get up every morning and write for an hour before going to work. Sometimes, I’m able to write in the evening as well, or on weekends—but the core of my process is that hour in the morning. I don’t do word counts or anything like that—I just make sure I get that hour in. I often begin writing by going back over what I wrote the day before, reshaping sentences, adjusting rhythms, getting back into the world I was trying to create. This seems, also, to help me avoid writer’s block. I’m not concerned with speed, and I’m not at all prolific: what I want is to do my best for the reader. I want to give them an immersive, absorbing world that they can be in. So I take my time, and because I enjoy being in that world myself, I’m in no rush to finish the story and leave." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing and Memory
"I think that memory is the subject that I seem to return to most. That seems appropriate, because in the end memory and language are the materials a writer works with, the way a painter works with paint and light. I’ve long been fascinated by memory, and the strange ways it changes form, and I’ve come to believe that it is not a storage system at all: it is a functional organ of the self, constantly helping us to generate our current self-image and to help us find equilibrium in a complex world. The meanings found in memory are like the meanings found in history: they may be tangentially related to the real events that occurred, but they only use those events as raw materials: their real purpose is, like history, to help us better understand our present moment." -- From Q&A With Ray Nayler on "The Demon of Metrazol"
Drafting
"I will draft and re-draft a story until I am satisfied with every word. I often start a new day of writing by editing the story from the beginning. By the time I finish a first draft, it is often, technically, a thirtieth or fortieth draft. This slows me down, but it ensures I am happy with what I’ve built, in the end. Maybe this is the architect in me. I do it for myself, and I also do it out of respect for the reader. I want to build a world for them to live in . . . I started writing because I wanted to create worlds to live in for myself and for my friends . . . That’s always remained my aim—to create worlds for my friends, and I view readers as my friends and confidants. I want to transport them." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Death of Fire Station 10"
Writing as Emergent Process
For me writing is process. The real composition of a book is in the writing itself. Plot and theme and character and setting and everything else come together in a way that is emergent and hypercomplex, and the narrative pathways which are opened and closed as they do so can’t be perceived in some kind of initial planning process.
I always have a sense of where I am going, but the characters and situations they create and respond to soon have their own sense as well, and we work our way through it all together, inside that process of composition. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
On Criticism
"It’s good to ignore unwarranted criticism and rejection. It’s better, though, to ignore praise and publication. Just continue on your way." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing as the Building of Rhetorical Machines
"I see writing as the building of complex rhetorical machines that change the way we see the world. A good piece of literature should alter the way we see our own world slightly, but forever. As a science fiction writer, I make machines for thinking about the world by demonstrating how it might be otherwise. My goal is to create a machine that offers a glimpse of a different world’s internal workings—the meshing of its gears, the pattern of its structure. That glimpse, I hope, will push the reader to ask questions about the machine of the world they live in, and its underlying structures." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Writing as Listening
"Writing, for me, is a form of listening. I know that sounds strange, as the act of writing seems more related to speech, but for me it is primarily about listening and reading. The goal of writing a good story for my readers provides me with a structure for my exploration of the world—a reason to listen, to attend more closely to what others have said and are saying. I see myself as a researcher whose primary task is to find out more about the world, and our existence on it, so that I can more richly communicate those discoveries to the reader and build them a better story." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Curiosity as Ethics
"I think curiosity is a kind of ethics, in fact. C.S. Peirce said it best: 'In order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think. There follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.' I think 'Do not block the way of inquiry' is a moral imperative. Inquiry is movement toward truth, no matter how far off that truth may be. Reactionary forces have always been, and always will be, blockers of the way of inquiry, who seek to stop the progress of thinking and lock us in an end-state, a state of error that suits their purposes." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Writing as Social Critique
"I would never tell another writer what to do. People are free to write whatever they want: that’s really the beauty of art. People do, and can, and should, write fun stories about nothing at all. But for me, I think a lot of the motivation for my writing is tied up in my thinking about and considering problems in the world or thinking through an element of science or philosophy that interests me. I don’t mean necessarily suggesting solutions to them, but turning them over in my mind. That’s just the way my mind works, and it’s where my inspiration comes from." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Getting Everything Right
"I’m a perfectionist in my work. I demand a lot of myself, because I want to write the stories I would want to read. And when I read, I want everything about a story to feel real. Everything . . . I want to create worlds my readers can enter into completely and believe in fully while they are inside them. That means I want to get everything right: from the science I am exploring to the human relationships. I feel like I can’t neglect any aspect in favor of another." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Relationship with Readers
"In general, I’d like my readers to know that I am always thinking of them. William Sloane, who wrote the amazing To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water and was a brilliant editor and publisher as well, said in his book The Craft of Writing that 'the relationship of writing is a one-to-one relationship. There is the writer and there is the reader. One of each.' That thought lies at the core of everything I write. I view it as a partnership, and I respect the time and the effort they put into it. It inspires me to work hard, and hopefully be worthy of their time." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
What I Write About
"I’m interested in philosophical ideas, and science, and using those things to speculate about what might be, or could have been, or about how what is happening now could be different. But at the core of it, I am interested in what it is to be human. There is so much we don’t understand at all about ourselves—even about something as simple as what it is to be a self, an individual, an entity on this planet relating to other humans, to our environment. Why am I me, and aware of being myself? How does that work? How did this thing called life, and then this even more complex thing called consciousness, emerge from inert matter? I’m continually aware of the extraordinary wonder of that, and of how amazing it is to be here at all. And I believe that relationships—the way we treat one another—are the most meaningful part of living.
Communication is at the heart of it all. So all of my stories are, at the core, about the conscious being and their communication with other conscious beings. And the stories are written, after all, because I am a conscious being seeking communication with other conscious beings. I think it’s easy to forget that strangeness at the core of life, but it’s always there, underneath the surface of the day-to-day—that brute fact of being alive among others who are alive. Maybe if we thought about it more, we would be better to one another." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Writing Atmosphere
"When I was a kid, I didn’t look for stories to read: I looked for worlds to live in." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
"I think of it this way: the reader and I are in a car together, moving down a road. The road is the plot. The reader is the driver, not me. But I built the road. I constructed the buildings, and all of the scenery along the route. Most of my work was done before the reader got here. All that remains is for the reader’s eye to take in the details of the landscape along the way: for them to turn their head a bit from the main plot and glimpse an alleyway where figures converse in semi-darkness, a plane passing overhead, a boat on the river, something moving behind the curtains of a house we pass. The plot is not enough: as the reader moves down the road of the plot, they have to feel like they are traveling through a real world. They need to feel they could turn the car off the main plot and drive elsewhere, knock on any door they pass along the way and have someone answer." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
"The mood, the feeling of the piece, [must] continue from its opening moments to its closing scenes . . .You can have plot without a theme, amazing characters without a great plot, or a great idea without any of those, but atmosphere demands consistency: a total saturation of tone." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
The Uncanny
"The uncanny is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It makes the mind recoil slightly, then come back again like a tongue probing a damaged tooth." -- From: Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
Condensation
"This is a very personal definition, but for me [condensation] is a metaphor, image, or sign that, much like the symbols in dreams, has multiple meanings and implications, and is an amalgamation of many of the underlying themes of the work. In T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” there are many moments, but certainly the opening lines are a perfect example: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Or think of the owl in Twin Peaks, or the backward-talking dwarf. Think of the nursery rhyme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or of the song the working-class woman sings while Winston Smith and Julia are meeting in their secret room. Or the mission and the bell tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. These symbols don’t resolve themselves: they just hang, forever, in the reader’s or viewer’s consciousness." -- From: Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
Writing against Reduction
"I don’t think writing, if it is good, works through reductive didacticism – it works instead by creating a theater in which complex concepts play themselves out – not to resolution, but through increasing levels of complexity that engage the mind of the reader while leaving things at least partially unresolved. Good writing reveals complexity. It leaves the reader enriched, but not certain. It leaves them thinking." -- from Better Dreaming Conversation VIII: Suzanne Palmer and "Number Thirty-Nine Skink"
Writing as Architecture
"I see fiction as an architecture for asking complex questions, not a place for providing answers. And that works well for me, as “providing answers” isn’t generally something I am interested in doing. Fiction can be a more open space for exploration than non-fiction, perhaps—though I think non-fiction can be engaging and open in its exploration of the world, and I don’t see a strict binary relationship here. I should mention that I want more than just a philosophical sandbox: I also want the book to be engaging and entertaining. Balancing all those elements is a pleasant challenge." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Writing and Entertainment
"All storytelling is an architecture for asking questions. Storytelling is also about entertainment, and entertainment has a value of its own, which should not be discounted. But remember that the word “entertain” is from the Old French entretenir, which means to hold together or support. What it holds together and supports, I think, are the audience and the questions." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Writing as Ethical Practice
I always want to end my books on an empowering note that gives control back to the reader and makes positive action feel possible.
You can have a very dystopic vision of the near future, but it should still move people toward action.
Writing has a function in the world and a purpose. It should not disempower people.— From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
"Writing is an action. To write is a verb. Don’t worry about being a writer, or about how it is done, or when you should write, or what comes first, or any of that. Simply write. Conduct the action. The rest will fall into place around that." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing as Craft
"I say: 'Making makes the maker.' If you write something, you're also rewriting your own code. You're working on yourself. You're developing as a writer. There's no wasting time in writing, because it's like being a woodworker. Every time you pick up the sandpaper, the plane, or the chisel, you're learning something about the material you work with, about where to place your hands, about how to work with the grain of the wood, about where you could improve your craft . . . One of the big mistakes people make is they say, 'I want to be a writer.' What they should say is, 'I want to write.'" -- Adapted from Ray Nayler: Interview at Utopiales 2024
Writing as Habit
"I get up every morning and write for an hour before going to work. Sometimes, I’m able to write in the evening as well, or on weekends—but the core of my process is that hour in the morning. I don’t do word counts or anything like that—I just make sure I get that hour in. I often begin writing by going back over what I wrote the day before, reshaping sentences, adjusting rhythms, getting back into the world I was trying to create. This seems, also, to help me avoid writer’s block. I’m not concerned with speed, and I’m not at all prolific: what I want is to do my best for the reader. I want to give them an immersive, absorbing world that they can be in. So I take my time, and because I enjoy being in that world myself, I’m in no rush to finish the story and leave." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing and Memory
"I think that memory is the subject that I seem to return to most. That seems appropriate, because in the end memory and language are the materials a writer works with, the way a painter works with paint and light. I’ve long been fascinated by memory, and the strange ways it changes form, and I’ve come to believe that it is not a storage system at all: it is a functional organ of the self, constantly helping us to generate our current self-image and to help us find equilibrium in a complex world. The meanings found in memory are like the meanings found in history: they may be tangentially related to the real events that occurred, but they only use those events as raw materials: their real purpose is, like history, to help us better understand our present moment." -- From Q&A With Ray Nayler on "The Demon of Metrazol"
Drafting
"I will draft and re-draft a story until I am satisfied with every word. I often start a new day of writing by editing the story from the beginning. By the time I finish a first draft, it is often, technically, a thirtieth or fortieth draft. This slows me down, but it ensures I am happy with what I’ve built, in the end. Maybe this is the architect in me. I do it for myself, and I also do it out of respect for the reader. I want to build a world for them to live in . . . I started writing because I wanted to create worlds to live in for myself and for my friends . . . That’s always remained my aim—to create worlds for my friends, and I view readers as my friends and confidants. I want to transport them." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Death of Fire Station 10"
Writing as Emergent Process
For me writing is process. The real composition of a book is in the writing itself. Plot and theme and character and setting and everything else come together in a way that is emergent and hypercomplex, and the narrative pathways which are opened and closed as they do so can’t be perceived in some kind of initial planning process.
I always have a sense of where I am going, but the characters and situations they create and respond to soon have their own sense as well, and we work our way through it all together, inside that process of composition. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
On Criticism
"It’s good to ignore unwarranted criticism and rejection. It’s better, though, to ignore praise and publication. Just continue on your way." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
Writing as the Building of Rhetorical Machines
"I see writing as the building of complex rhetorical machines that change the way we see the world. A good piece of literature should alter the way we see our own world slightly, but forever. As a science fiction writer, I make machines for thinking about the world by demonstrating how it might be otherwise. My goal is to create a machine that offers a glimpse of a different world’s internal workings—the meshing of its gears, the pattern of its structure. That glimpse, I hope, will push the reader to ask questions about the machine of the world they live in, and its underlying structures." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Writing as Listening
"Writing, for me, is a form of listening. I know that sounds strange, as the act of writing seems more related to speech, but for me it is primarily about listening and reading. The goal of writing a good story for my readers provides me with a structure for my exploration of the world—a reason to listen, to attend more closely to what others have said and are saying. I see myself as a researcher whose primary task is to find out more about the world, and our existence on it, so that I can more richly communicate those discoveries to the reader and build them a better story." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Curiosity as Ethics
"I think curiosity is a kind of ethics, in fact. C.S. Peirce said it best: 'In order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think. There follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.' I think 'Do not block the way of inquiry' is a moral imperative. Inquiry is movement toward truth, no matter how far off that truth may be. Reactionary forces have always been, and always will be, blockers of the way of inquiry, who seek to stop the progress of thinking and lock us in an end-state, a state of error that suits their purposes." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Writing as Social Critique
"I would never tell another writer what to do. People are free to write whatever they want: that’s really the beauty of art. People do, and can, and should, write fun stories about nothing at all. But for me, I think a lot of the motivation for my writing is tied up in my thinking about and considering problems in the world or thinking through an element of science or philosophy that interests me. I don’t mean necessarily suggesting solutions to them, but turning them over in my mind. That’s just the way my mind works, and it’s where my inspiration comes from." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Getting Everything Right
"I’m a perfectionist in my work. I demand a lot of myself, because I want to write the stories I would want to read. And when I read, I want everything about a story to feel real. Everything . . . I want to create worlds my readers can enter into completely and believe in fully while they are inside them. That means I want to get everything right: from the science I am exploring to the human relationships. I feel like I can’t neglect any aspect in favor of another." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Relationship with Readers
"In general, I’d like my readers to know that I am always thinking of them. William Sloane, who wrote the amazing To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water and was a brilliant editor and publisher as well, said in his book The Craft of Writing that 'the relationship of writing is a one-to-one relationship. There is the writer and there is the reader. One of each.' That thought lies at the core of everything I write. I view it as a partnership, and I respect the time and the effort they put into it. It inspires me to work hard, and hopefully be worthy of their time." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
What I Write About
"I’m interested in philosophical ideas, and science, and using those things to speculate about what might be, or could have been, or about how what is happening now could be different. But at the core of it, I am interested in what it is to be human. There is so much we don’t understand at all about ourselves—even about something as simple as what it is to be a self, an individual, an entity on this planet relating to other humans, to our environment. Why am I me, and aware of being myself? How does that work? How did this thing called life, and then this even more complex thing called consciousness, emerge from inert matter? I’m continually aware of the extraordinary wonder of that, and of how amazing it is to be here at all. And I believe that relationships—the way we treat one another—are the most meaningful part of living.
Communication is at the heart of it all. So all of my stories are, at the core, about the conscious being and their communication with other conscious beings. And the stories are written, after all, because I am a conscious being seeking communication with other conscious beings. I think it’s easy to forget that strangeness at the core of life, but it’s always there, underneath the surface of the day-to-day—that brute fact of being alive among others who are alive. Maybe if we thought about it more, we would be better to one another." -- From: Lightspeed Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler, "The Swallows of the Storm"
Writing Atmosphere
"When I was a kid, I didn’t look for stories to read: I looked for worlds to live in." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
"I think of it this way: the reader and I are in a car together, moving down a road. The road is the plot. The reader is the driver, not me. But I built the road. I constructed the buildings, and all of the scenery along the route. Most of my work was done before the reader got here. All that remains is for the reader’s eye to take in the details of the landscape along the way: for them to turn their head a bit from the main plot and glimpse an alleyway where figures converse in semi-darkness, a plane passing overhead, a boat on the river, something moving behind the curtains of a house we pass. The plot is not enough: as the reader moves down the road of the plot, they have to feel like they are traveling through a real world. They need to feel they could turn the car off the main plot and drive elsewhere, knock on any door they pass along the way and have someone answer." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
"The mood, the feeling of the piece, [must] continue from its opening moments to its closing scenes . . .You can have plot without a theme, amazing characters without a great plot, or a great idea without any of those, but atmosphere demands consistency: a total saturation of tone." -- From Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
The Uncanny
"The uncanny is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It makes the mind recoil slightly, then come back again like a tongue probing a damaged tooth." -- From: Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
Condensation
"This is a very personal definition, but for me [condensation] is a metaphor, image, or sign that, much like the symbols in dreams, has multiple meanings and implications, and is an amalgamation of many of the underlying themes of the work. In T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” there are many moments, but certainly the opening lines are a perfect example: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Or think of the owl in Twin Peaks, or the backward-talking dwarf. Think of the nursery rhyme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or of the song the working-class woman sings while Winston Smith and Julia are meeting in their secret room. Or the mission and the bell tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. These symbols don’t resolve themselves: they just hang, forever, in the reader’s or viewer’s consciousness." -- From: Worlds to Live in: Atmosphere
Writing against Reduction
"I don’t think writing, if it is good, works through reductive didacticism – it works instead by creating a theater in which complex concepts play themselves out – not to resolution, but through increasing levels of complexity that engage the mind of the reader while leaving things at least partially unresolved. Good writing reveals complexity. It leaves the reader enriched, but not certain. It leaves them thinking." -- from Better Dreaming Conversation VIII: Suzanne Palmer and "Number Thirty-Nine Skink"
Writing as Architecture
"I see fiction as an architecture for asking complex questions, not a place for providing answers. And that works well for me, as “providing answers” isn’t generally something I am interested in doing. Fiction can be a more open space for exploration than non-fiction, perhaps—though I think non-fiction can be engaging and open in its exploration of the world, and I don’t see a strict binary relationship here. I should mention that I want more than just a philosophical sandbox: I also want the book to be engaging and entertaining. Balancing all those elements is a pleasant challenge." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Writing and Entertainment
"All storytelling is an architecture for asking questions. Storytelling is also about entertainment, and entertainment has a value of its own, which should not be discounted. But remember that the word “entertain” is from the Old French entretenir, which means to hold together or support. What it holds together and supports, I think, are the audience and the questions." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Writing as Ethical Practice
I always want to end my books on an empowering note that gives control back to the reader and makes positive action feel possible.
You can have a very dystopic vision of the near future, but it should still move people toward action.
Writing has a function in the world and a purpose. It should not disempower people.— From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
Genre and translation
Science Fiction, Time & Historical Consciousness
Again going back to Borges, since he is who I am reading right now: In his preface to the 1969 revised version of Luna de enfrente or Moon Across the Way, one of his first books of poetry, originally composed in 1925, he writes: “No hay obra que no sea de su tiempo.” That is, “There is no work that is not of its time.” As much as science fiction claims to be about the future, about an alternate past or about an alternate present, I believe it is always primarily concerned with its own historical moment, and its speculations are devised as a refractive instrument for the reexamination of that present moment.
I think that almost any reader who picks up Where the Axe Is Buried will understand, after reading it, what I see in this present moment that moved me to write this book. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
Science Fiction as Predicative
"For me, SF is not predictive, it is predicative. SF uses the raw materials of science not as a set of facts, necessarily, but as grounds for a shift in the world upon which it predicates (founds or bases something on) a set of events, often using that predication in a parallel manner as commentary upon the present world.
I think Mary Shelley puts it perfectly here, in the first paragraph of her preface to Frankenstein: 'The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.'
I think that sums it up almost perfectly. Mary Shelley is not attempting to predict anything: What she is doing is using a theoretical possibility which, as she defends earlier in the paragraph, is considered plausible, but which she makes no claim to actually being possible, to “afford a point of view for the imagination” and that, which is perhaps the seminal impulse of science fiction, remains, for me, its core impulse. That’s not to say that science is not important – it’s just to say that the importance of the science figures, for me, primarily in its role as a ground for the furtherance of the predicative imaginative impulse.
As a writer, I write everything from meticulously researched hard science fiction based in biosemiotics, to weird-story type time travel tales in which the science is absolutely unexplained hokum. I don’t think the predicative element is greater or less in either." -- From: Better Dreaming: Conversations in Science Fiction
Science as a Structuring Metaphor in Science Fiction
"The creosote bush is not a single, continuous organism, but rather a clonal colony. The original stem crown splits and fragments over centuries into segments, genetically identical to the original, which produce new branches along their outer edge—like a tree trunk with the center rotted away and only the outer tissue producing branches. The oldest known plant among the creosote, nicknamed 'King Clone,' may have started from a seed almost 12,000 years ago. Now it is a ring of living plant tissue about 50 feet in diameter, tapped into an extensive system of roots that are both its own, living roots and the pathways of its ancient roots carved out over millennia, which have since died.
But there is more to the story: in fact, when the seeds of the creosote initially grew, they sprouted in places where the root systems of Ice-Age trees had been. Those root systems led to deep water, and following them down into that soil made it easier to get to that moisture. So now, when you look at a creosote “forest” (it’s hard to use that term for something that would rarely be more than knee-high), you are looking not only at a series of creatures who may have begun their life cycles before the Mayan pyramids were built—you are also looking at a map of an even older forest, the forest which was there before the creosote came. That primeval forest’s root pathways still inform and nurture the present structure. It is, in a sense, a “ghost forest”—but it isn’t a ghost; it is a history. This scientific fact is fascinating in itself, but it is also a metaphor, to me, for how history “haunts” and shapes the present, which grows within the system that history long ago established. Even an extinct system influences the shape of the present system.
I think in some ways the key to science fiction (I mean science fiction as a subset of speculative fiction) is that it uses science both in its 'factual' sense and in its metaphorical senses. The metastasis of Darwin's ideas about natural selection into a justification for exploitation is a good example of how misunderstanding and misusing scientific theories, as well as failing to see the flawed systems in which those ideas are rooted, can stunt our discourse. But the creosote example is, for me, an illustration of how nuanced scientific understanding of the world can encourage more complex ways of thinking, and how we can then use the richer metaphors of science as tools for examining our human condition." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
On translation
"I think in some sense, translation is very much akin to writing: Writing often starts, for me, with a vague idea, a set of images, a feeling-tone that I want to communicate—and that I understand intuitively, because it is my own. This initial mass, this aggregate, this set of incoherent but connected things, has to be structured in order to be understood by others. The act of writing is, to a great extent, the act of passing that vagueness through an apparatus that weaves it into a coherent whole for the reader. It has to be given grammar, form, rhythm, structure, pacing. It has to be worked on, transformed from this pre-linguistic mass through language and form to become a text that can connect with the reader.
Similarly, translation has that same reader as its final target. It has to pass, in a sense, through the membrane separating one linguistic and cultural world from another. In order to do that, and to arrive at its destination in a form that can be interpreted by the reader, it must, like that incoherent idea, be reformed in the new language. It must be given the grammar, form, rhythm, structure, and pacing of that target language.
The difference between writing and translation is that in writing, the membrane stands between a single personal, mental world and the culture at large. In the case of translation, the membrane is between the Russian cultural world, for which the story was written, and the target culture." -- From Translator Interview: Ray Nayler at Samovar
Again going back to Borges, since he is who I am reading right now: In his preface to the 1969 revised version of Luna de enfrente or Moon Across the Way, one of his first books of poetry, originally composed in 1925, he writes: “No hay obra que no sea de su tiempo.” That is, “There is no work that is not of its time.” As much as science fiction claims to be about the future, about an alternate past or about an alternate present, I believe it is always primarily concerned with its own historical moment, and its speculations are devised as a refractive instrument for the reexamination of that present moment.
I think that almost any reader who picks up Where the Axe Is Buried will understand, after reading it, what I see in this present moment that moved me to write this book. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
Science Fiction as Predicative
"For me, SF is not predictive, it is predicative. SF uses the raw materials of science not as a set of facts, necessarily, but as grounds for a shift in the world upon which it predicates (founds or bases something on) a set of events, often using that predication in a parallel manner as commentary upon the present world.
I think Mary Shelley puts it perfectly here, in the first paragraph of her preface to Frankenstein: 'The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.'
I think that sums it up almost perfectly. Mary Shelley is not attempting to predict anything: What she is doing is using a theoretical possibility which, as she defends earlier in the paragraph, is considered plausible, but which she makes no claim to actually being possible, to “afford a point of view for the imagination” and that, which is perhaps the seminal impulse of science fiction, remains, for me, its core impulse. That’s not to say that science is not important – it’s just to say that the importance of the science figures, for me, primarily in its role as a ground for the furtherance of the predicative imaginative impulse.
As a writer, I write everything from meticulously researched hard science fiction based in biosemiotics, to weird-story type time travel tales in which the science is absolutely unexplained hokum. I don’t think the predicative element is greater or less in either." -- From: Better Dreaming: Conversations in Science Fiction
Science as a Structuring Metaphor in Science Fiction
"The creosote bush is not a single, continuous organism, but rather a clonal colony. The original stem crown splits and fragments over centuries into segments, genetically identical to the original, which produce new branches along their outer edge—like a tree trunk with the center rotted away and only the outer tissue producing branches. The oldest known plant among the creosote, nicknamed 'King Clone,' may have started from a seed almost 12,000 years ago. Now it is a ring of living plant tissue about 50 feet in diameter, tapped into an extensive system of roots that are both its own, living roots and the pathways of its ancient roots carved out over millennia, which have since died.
But there is more to the story: in fact, when the seeds of the creosote initially grew, they sprouted in places where the root systems of Ice-Age trees had been. Those root systems led to deep water, and following them down into that soil made it easier to get to that moisture. So now, when you look at a creosote “forest” (it’s hard to use that term for something that would rarely be more than knee-high), you are looking not only at a series of creatures who may have begun their life cycles before the Mayan pyramids were built—you are also looking at a map of an even older forest, the forest which was there before the creosote came. That primeval forest’s root pathways still inform and nurture the present structure. It is, in a sense, a “ghost forest”—but it isn’t a ghost; it is a history. This scientific fact is fascinating in itself, but it is also a metaphor, to me, for how history “haunts” and shapes the present, which grows within the system that history long ago established. Even an extinct system influences the shape of the present system.
I think in some ways the key to science fiction (I mean science fiction as a subset of speculative fiction) is that it uses science both in its 'factual' sense and in its metaphorical senses. The metastasis of Darwin's ideas about natural selection into a justification for exploitation is a good example of how misunderstanding and misusing scientific theories, as well as failing to see the flawed systems in which those ideas are rooted, can stunt our discourse. But the creosote example is, for me, an illustration of how nuanced scientific understanding of the world can encourage more complex ways of thinking, and how we can then use the richer metaphors of science as tools for examining our human condition." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
On translation
"I think in some sense, translation is very much akin to writing: Writing often starts, for me, with a vague idea, a set of images, a feeling-tone that I want to communicate—and that I understand intuitively, because it is my own. This initial mass, this aggregate, this set of incoherent but connected things, has to be structured in order to be understood by others. The act of writing is, to a great extent, the act of passing that vagueness through an apparatus that weaves it into a coherent whole for the reader. It has to be given grammar, form, rhythm, structure, pacing. It has to be worked on, transformed from this pre-linguistic mass through language and form to become a text that can connect with the reader.
Similarly, translation has that same reader as its final target. It has to pass, in a sense, through the membrane separating one linguistic and cultural world from another. In order to do that, and to arrive at its destination in a form that can be interpreted by the reader, it must, like that incoherent idea, be reformed in the new language. It must be given the grammar, form, rhythm, structure, and pacing of that target language.
The difference between writing and translation is that in writing, the membrane stands between a single personal, mental world and the culture at large. In the case of translation, the membrane is between the Russian cultural world, for which the story was written, and the target culture." -- From Translator Interview: Ray Nayler at Samovar
The self And society
The Outside Point of View
"I spend the majority of my time as an 'outsider' looking in on societies I don’t entirely understand, and also drifting further from my own society, in some ways. Living as a foreigner for so long, that also influences my outlook. I spend much of my time reading, speaking, and interacting in languages other than English, in societies very different from my own, and I think that sense of 'alienation' is something I use in my writing. Being abstracted from my own culture also, I think, allows me to see it more clearly. I can bring an outside perspective to my own upbringing and culture that I could not have before I lived away from it for so long." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
The Self in Translation
"What I have learned from my extensive time outside the United States is that individualism, in the firmest Western sense, is a sham. We aren’t individuals; our ability to communicate is collective: it relies on a system of common traditions, values, and background knowledge underpinning all communication. We are totally embedded in that system. When we move to other systems, we must shift our own behaviors to adapt to those systems, if we want to be understood. Learning to communicate in another culture isn’t about “common ground” at all: it is an act of translation. It is seeing ourselves from another perspective, and shaping our signals to the grammar, vocabulary, and syntax of the new context. That sense of communication across cultural divides as an act of translation and of self-alteration has stayed with me ever since, and certainly informs my writing." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
The Self in Place-Time
I: "What I am also [interested in] exploring is the way in which the individual is embedded in history, and how historical positionality conditions us: how our choices are shaped and limited by the opportunities and happenstances of the world-moment in which we live, and our position within that world-moment. I call it 'the self in place-time,' playing on the Einsteinian concept of space-time. We inhabit, of course, a position in space-time, as physical beings, but that position in space-time becomes a 'place' when it is suffused with human culture and ideology.
Space has a shape that is physical—there are 'things' that really exist, both technological and natural, that do not go away when we stop believing in them, and these are the physical elements of the world. But there is also human culture, human political structure, human ideology, which turn 'things' into 'objects' and turn that 'space' into a 'place.' A good metaphor for this might be the difference (often uninterrogated) between a 'house' and a 'home.' A house is a physical structure consisting of materials and constructed in such a fashion as to provide for living. It is a space. A home, on the other hand, is that same space once it has accrued an identity as a 'place' in which human beings are carrying out (and narrating) their lives.
Human beings who live in a house suffuse the materials of it with meaning and turn it into a 'place.' But that place is also given meaning by its position within human-structured culture. A home in Berlin in 1939 is not the same as a home in Kansas in 1893, though they may be referred to by the same word. And neither one of those homes, even those same physical structures, unaltered, would be the same 'home' today. Each place-time provides a different set of constraints and possibilities, and the people who live in them must function within those parameters." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
II: "Philip K. Dick had a simple, elegant definition of reality which I love: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.' I think this is a perfect definition, and it works on many levels: first of all there is the fact that things in the world exist, whether or not we perceive them: Mount Everest is there, in all its physicality, no matter what my set of beliefs is. Even if I did not know it was there, it would be real. It is real, as a thing, even in the absence of consciousness to perceive it. Everest exists in space-time. But there is another level here to reality: Human constructions. These are also reality. They are structures built up of ideology and traditions, structures, like the metaphor earlier of the creosote, seeded into the extinct systems of even older structures. These structures may not be physical, in the strictest sense, but they are real. They are actualities. They don’t go away even when we, as individuals, stop believing in them. They exist in place-time, the world created by the accretions of human culture. Charles Sanders Peirce puts it perfectly: 'A court may issue injunctions and judgements against me and I care not a snap of my fingers for them, I may think them idle vapour. But when I feel the sheriff’s hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality.'
These actualities define place-time. I can cease to believe in the values of capitalism, but it remains the driving force of our present economic realities. I can fail to recognize that my host family in Turkmenistan cannot understand my actions, but that won’t make my actions intelligible to them. I can deny the importance of nation-states, but they will continue to exert influence on the fate of billions. I can claim that racism doesn’t exist in the United States, or that I am not a racist, but racism will still be a powerful, structuring force in our history and present society—a force that has shaped me and every other person who lives in that place-time. I cannot escape my position in place-time’s mesh. I am 'of' the world in which I exist, though I can push against it.
So, what kind of freedom am I left with? I do not think the answer is 'none,' but certainly the fantasy individuality of the Western subject is a Cartesian farce. Tolstoy demonstrated this in War and Peace more than a hundred and fifty years ago. He laid it out for us over more than a thousand pages, but we still haven’t absorbed the full measure of that novel and its message.
What, as individuals trapped in the warped grid of place-time, can we do to make a difference? This is the question I ask myself every day. It is the question that drives me to keep writing." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Individuality and the Collective
"This collective / individual binary is false . . . the entire Cartesian sense of individuality is false: Our ability to communicate is collective – it relies on a system of common traditions, values, and background knowledge underpinning all communication. Our lives are embedded in the collective. And adding to that thought, I think that our ability to make change is reliant upon our concrete connections to the collective in which we exist. It’s precisely that connectedness to community that gives us relevance.
This is something that the ancient Greeks understood, but that the West appears to have forgotten. For the Greeks the ‘polis’ is not the city as we think of it today, the physical place, but rather the collectivity of individuals who compose the ‘polis.’ When Herodotus speaks of Athens being evacuated in the face of the Persian onslaught, he is not saying that the city was emptied out – he is saying that the city moved its location, leaving their houses and temples behind.
Aristotle’s often quoted but little understood statement approximated as “Man is a political animal” really might be better translated as “Man is of the city.” The human is a part of the ‘polis’ – the community. Human activity in isolation is meaningless activity. So, rather than being mutually exclusive, we could say that it is precisely the collective which gives the individual meaning, and the individuals of the collective which, taken as aggregate, give the collective meaning. They emerge, and they succeed or fail, only together. Our modern, “Western” sense of individuality is a betrayal of the original Greek sense in which it was meant.
Enlarging and enriching our sense of community appears to me to be the primary task before us as a species, and understanding our interconnectedness is the work we must do to succeed in that task." -- From Better Dreaming
Dependent Co-Arising, Systems Theory, and Interdependence
In Buddhism, the concept of dependent co-arising emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things. Our lives are intertwined with the world around us. We breathe the world in and breathe it our, it is fundamental to us and permeates our entire being at all moments. This view, which is also a scientific fact, is completely at odds with individualistic, largely western, perspectives that accentuate individual "freedom of action" over any sense of collective responsibility. But this kind of -- often destructive -- radical individuality is finally being questioned. Our current scientific knowledge about the interconnectedness of life's complex systems differs significantly from that of the mid-twentieth century, when concepts of interconnectedness were still a recent, fringe concept emerging from ecological and systems theories, and were more easily dismissed.
But despite advancements in systems theory and increasing awareness of the importance of ecological connections, there is still widespread resistance to a shift toward a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be free when also interconnected to all others. I think people are resistant because the move from an individualistic to an interconnected framework requires a total reevaluation of our ethical, moral, and economic perspectives. There is a deep discomfort, especially among those who profit from radical individualism's outdated, destructive, and false framework, with the implications interconnectedness has on our responsibilities toward the environment, one another, and all living beings. -- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast).
Freedom, Control & Political Responsibility
I think the concept of control is one which we, as human beings, have always been concerned with. We’re looking for a balance of some kind: a structure that is capable of enabling us to live well, but also does not suffocate our freedoms. What does that structure look like? What limits need to be placed on it so that it does not encroach on our freedoms? What freedoms do we want to have? What does “freedom” even mean within a cooperative structure?
How does surveillance impinge upon freedom? How might surveillance support freedom, at some level? During the writing of Where the Axe Is Buried, I reread Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and a number of other ancient works.
Consistently, the concerns of the ancients remain our concerns: How do we organize our political life? I think one answer is that we must constantly continue to work at it—that it is a continual process and struggle. Technologies, from the stone axe to the chariot to the Greek phalanx to the Macedonian long spear to the airplane, the rocket, the nuclear bomb and massive computational power, all shape and often threaten both our potential future freedoms and our present structures.
I believe only total, knowledgeable engagement of the population offers a positive way forward. That engagement is always going to feel like argument and struggle, and that is precisely what it has to be in order for us to make progress and not simply cede control to others.
— From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
"I spend the majority of my time as an 'outsider' looking in on societies I don’t entirely understand, and also drifting further from my own society, in some ways. Living as a foreigner for so long, that also influences my outlook. I spend much of my time reading, speaking, and interacting in languages other than English, in societies very different from my own, and I think that sense of 'alienation' is something I use in my writing. Being abstracted from my own culture also, I think, allows me to see it more clearly. I can bring an outside perspective to my own upbringing and culture that I could not have before I lived away from it for so long." -- From: Q&A With Ray Nayler on "A Threnody for Hazan"
The Self in Translation
"What I have learned from my extensive time outside the United States is that individualism, in the firmest Western sense, is a sham. We aren’t individuals; our ability to communicate is collective: it relies on a system of common traditions, values, and background knowledge underpinning all communication. We are totally embedded in that system. When we move to other systems, we must shift our own behaviors to adapt to those systems, if we want to be understood. Learning to communicate in another culture isn’t about “common ground” at all: it is an act of translation. It is seeing ourselves from another perspective, and shaping our signals to the grammar, vocabulary, and syntax of the new context. That sense of communication across cultural divides as an act of translation and of self-alteration has stayed with me ever since, and certainly informs my writing." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
The Self in Place-Time
I: "What I am also [interested in] exploring is the way in which the individual is embedded in history, and how historical positionality conditions us: how our choices are shaped and limited by the opportunities and happenstances of the world-moment in which we live, and our position within that world-moment. I call it 'the self in place-time,' playing on the Einsteinian concept of space-time. We inhabit, of course, a position in space-time, as physical beings, but that position in space-time becomes a 'place' when it is suffused with human culture and ideology.
Space has a shape that is physical—there are 'things' that really exist, both technological and natural, that do not go away when we stop believing in them, and these are the physical elements of the world. But there is also human culture, human political structure, human ideology, which turn 'things' into 'objects' and turn that 'space' into a 'place.' A good metaphor for this might be the difference (often uninterrogated) between a 'house' and a 'home.' A house is a physical structure consisting of materials and constructed in such a fashion as to provide for living. It is a space. A home, on the other hand, is that same space once it has accrued an identity as a 'place' in which human beings are carrying out (and narrating) their lives.
Human beings who live in a house suffuse the materials of it with meaning and turn it into a 'place.' But that place is also given meaning by its position within human-structured culture. A home in Berlin in 1939 is not the same as a home in Kansas in 1893, though they may be referred to by the same word. And neither one of those homes, even those same physical structures, unaltered, would be the same 'home' today. Each place-time provides a different set of constraints and possibilities, and the people who live in them must function within those parameters." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
II: "Philip K. Dick had a simple, elegant definition of reality which I love: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.' I think this is a perfect definition, and it works on many levels: first of all there is the fact that things in the world exist, whether or not we perceive them: Mount Everest is there, in all its physicality, no matter what my set of beliefs is. Even if I did not know it was there, it would be real. It is real, as a thing, even in the absence of consciousness to perceive it. Everest exists in space-time. But there is another level here to reality: Human constructions. These are also reality. They are structures built up of ideology and traditions, structures, like the metaphor earlier of the creosote, seeded into the extinct systems of even older structures. These structures may not be physical, in the strictest sense, but they are real. They are actualities. They don’t go away even when we, as individuals, stop believing in them. They exist in place-time, the world created by the accretions of human culture. Charles Sanders Peirce puts it perfectly: 'A court may issue injunctions and judgements against me and I care not a snap of my fingers for them, I may think them idle vapour. But when I feel the sheriff’s hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality.'
These actualities define place-time. I can cease to believe in the values of capitalism, but it remains the driving force of our present economic realities. I can fail to recognize that my host family in Turkmenistan cannot understand my actions, but that won’t make my actions intelligible to them. I can deny the importance of nation-states, but they will continue to exert influence on the fate of billions. I can claim that racism doesn’t exist in the United States, or that I am not a racist, but racism will still be a powerful, structuring force in our history and present society—a force that has shaped me and every other person who lives in that place-time. I cannot escape my position in place-time’s mesh. I am 'of' the world in which I exist, though I can push against it.
So, what kind of freedom am I left with? I do not think the answer is 'none,' but certainly the fantasy individuality of the Western subject is a Cartesian farce. Tolstoy demonstrated this in War and Peace more than a hundred and fifty years ago. He laid it out for us over more than a thousand pages, but we still haven’t absorbed the full measure of that novel and its message.
What, as individuals trapped in the warped grid of place-time, can we do to make a difference? This is the question I ask myself every day. It is the question that drives me to keep writing." -- From: A Conversation in Progress: Professor Earl Jackson, Jr. and Ray Nayler
Individuality and the Collective
"This collective / individual binary is false . . . the entire Cartesian sense of individuality is false: Our ability to communicate is collective – it relies on a system of common traditions, values, and background knowledge underpinning all communication. Our lives are embedded in the collective. And adding to that thought, I think that our ability to make change is reliant upon our concrete connections to the collective in which we exist. It’s precisely that connectedness to community that gives us relevance.
This is something that the ancient Greeks understood, but that the West appears to have forgotten. For the Greeks the ‘polis’ is not the city as we think of it today, the physical place, but rather the collectivity of individuals who compose the ‘polis.’ When Herodotus speaks of Athens being evacuated in the face of the Persian onslaught, he is not saying that the city was emptied out – he is saying that the city moved its location, leaving their houses and temples behind.
Aristotle’s often quoted but little understood statement approximated as “Man is a political animal” really might be better translated as “Man is of the city.” The human is a part of the ‘polis’ – the community. Human activity in isolation is meaningless activity. So, rather than being mutually exclusive, we could say that it is precisely the collective which gives the individual meaning, and the individuals of the collective which, taken as aggregate, give the collective meaning. They emerge, and they succeed or fail, only together. Our modern, “Western” sense of individuality is a betrayal of the original Greek sense in which it was meant.
Enlarging and enriching our sense of community appears to me to be the primary task before us as a species, and understanding our interconnectedness is the work we must do to succeed in that task." -- From Better Dreaming
Dependent Co-Arising, Systems Theory, and Interdependence
In Buddhism, the concept of dependent co-arising emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things. Our lives are intertwined with the world around us. We breathe the world in and breathe it our, it is fundamental to us and permeates our entire being at all moments. This view, which is also a scientific fact, is completely at odds with individualistic, largely western, perspectives that accentuate individual "freedom of action" over any sense of collective responsibility. But this kind of -- often destructive -- radical individuality is finally being questioned. Our current scientific knowledge about the interconnectedness of life's complex systems differs significantly from that of the mid-twentieth century, when concepts of interconnectedness were still a recent, fringe concept emerging from ecological and systems theories, and were more easily dismissed.
But despite advancements in systems theory and increasing awareness of the importance of ecological connections, there is still widespread resistance to a shift toward a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be free when also interconnected to all others. I think people are resistant because the move from an individualistic to an interconnected framework requires a total reevaluation of our ethical, moral, and economic perspectives. There is a deep discomfort, especially among those who profit from radical individualism's outdated, destructive, and false framework, with the implications interconnectedness has on our responsibilities toward the environment, one another, and all living beings. -- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast).
Freedom, Control & Political Responsibility
I think the concept of control is one which we, as human beings, have always been concerned with. We’re looking for a balance of some kind: a structure that is capable of enabling us to live well, but also does not suffocate our freedoms. What does that structure look like? What limits need to be placed on it so that it does not encroach on our freedoms? What freedoms do we want to have? What does “freedom” even mean within a cooperative structure?
How does surveillance impinge upon freedom? How might surveillance support freedom, at some level? During the writing of Where the Axe Is Buried, I reread Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and a number of other ancient works.
Consistently, the concerns of the ancients remain our concerns: How do we organize our political life? I think one answer is that we must constantly continue to work at it—that it is a continual process and struggle. Technologies, from the stone axe to the chariot to the Greek phalanx to the Macedonian long spear to the airplane, the rocket, the nuclear bomb and massive computational power, all shape and often threaten both our potential future freedoms and our present structures.
I believe only total, knowledgeable engagement of the population offers a positive way forward. That engagement is always going to feel like argument and struggle, and that is precisely what it has to be in order for us to make progress and not simply cede control to others.
— From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
the mind, consciousness, and memory
On the mind
"The human mind is as alien to us, in many ways, as the sea floor. We have difficulty, when speaking of consciousness, in even describing it on its most basic levels. Not only do we not know how it is possible that we think and feel and are alive – we can’t even agree on the definition of “alive” or “think” or “feel.” And when it comes to things like understanding just how it is that communication works — how a weightless, non-material set of symbols can pass from one mind to another and sometimes alter the course of a whole world, but not strictly be composed of energy or matter at all — the mystery really seems impenetrable." --From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
On Consciousness and Memory
"We've come in our society to think of memory as a record of events, but I don't think that's what memory is. I think memory is how we adapt to the direction in which we perceive our lives to be headed.
Basically, life initially evolved to live in a physical world of movement. Consciousness emerges as a necessity for managing that movement, a helmsman who organizes incoming information and responses to that information in order to facilitate complex movement in a physical space. And consciousness becomes more and more complex as you have more complex movement and planning. Once you have to start managing things in a cultural space, consciousness becomes of necessity highly complex. And culture does not begin with humans--many animals have culture. Humans, however, have an incredibly complex culture, and therefore we need to have a large degree of consciousness to manage our individual positions within that culture.
Memory is a tool for creating a self consistent with personal identity and personal goals. When you look back on your memories, you realize that they probably don't reflect what happened. Instead, what they are is a mirror, reflecting the self. They give you a sense of continuity, but I would even say it's a sense of trajectory within the cultural world.
To have a trajectory in the physical world, you have to know where you put your foot, what your body position is, and where you want to move. This is essentially not unlike what we do all the time in culture: we change our own trajectory based on who is around us, what possibilities are available to us for our lives. We use memory as a tool to maintain coherence in our actions. In fact, we don't need to use it consciously because it is designed to do what it does. It automatically changes itself and changes its meanings to reflect what it needs to reflect at that moment to maintain the coherence of the self and its trajectory.
That’s why you have memories where you are looking down into your own face. It’s clear that this memory is impossible. I see a child who is me, and I’ve never seen this child in this way. How could this be a 'true' memory? Of course the answer is that it isn't a recording: it is a construct. I think a lot of people have memories where they are disembodied and looking at themselves from above or watching themselves talking to someone else. This type of memory is almost cinematic, allowing you to tell a story and see how things could have happened or why." --Adapted from Ray Nayler: Interview at Utopiales 2024
Memory as Narrative and Navigation
Memory is not a record of events. Memory is a story that the mind tells itself about where it is now, why it is there, and what possibilities it has for future movement.
Every time you access a memory, you’re accessing it from a different point in your life, and that memory reflects what it needs to reflect about where you are now. It’s a navigational tool.
Memory helps us establish why we’re here, where we are, where we might be capable of moving in the future, and where we come from. It shifts, because we shift. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
Thinking as Dialogue, Dialogue as Thinking
Thinking is inherently dialogic.
Information is a difference that makes a difference. You cannot communicate anything between two things that are in exactly the same state. Meaningful communication always involves a change of state.
Even our internal thoughts imply more than one self. You have conversations with yourself, and you win. That means there must be more than one of you, or more than one "state" of you. Who did I convince when I convinced myself?
Communication between two people is thinking, and it’s often superior thinking, because two people with different worldviews exchange more information than the different internal selves of one person can. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
technology
The Human Being and Technology
"If you asked me for a definition of what a human is, I might respond that the human is, more than anything else, a technological animal. From the moment we picked up a rock and used it to alter our interaction with our environment, we have been shaping technology—and have been shaped by it. -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
On the Future of AI
Paul Virilio famously said, “when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” I would add to that: when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck, you populate the islands of the Pacific and Australia, you write The Iliad, The Odyssey, you enable colonialism to extend its reach across the Atlantic, you drive the whale nearly into extinction, you kill off the dodo and the Steller’s sea cow, you invent the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, you turn millions of humans into sailors and create cultures around the sea and seafaring that never existed before, you invent naval warfare, Viking piracy . . . this list can go on for as long as we want it to. The point is that the consequences of technology are predictable only in the near, and at best the medium, term. In the long term, technology will do things that fundamentally alter the capabilities of humans, but also alter what it means to be human in the world, because it will alter what we can do, think, tell stories about—everything.
I’m not scared of AI or hopeful. I don’t think those words really matter: it’s like asking whether it made sense to be scared or hopeful about the printing press, or the first written alphabet. Humans continually invent things that are immediately beyond their control, and we are doing so again. The world those inventions bring about is something it is very interesting to ponder—but I think only the most arrogant of us would think it is something we can control, predict, or describe. That would be like a mastodon hunter on the Eurasian Steppe 30,000 years ago somehow managing to perfectly describe the future political structure of Caribbean pirate crews. One of our fundamental flaws is that we always seem to regard both the future and the past as being somehow more interpretable than the present moment. They aren’t! They are just as hypercomplex as this day on Earth is, and we don’t very well understand what is happening, much less what has happened or will happen.
I’m not saying that we should be helpless or passive in the face of AI and the things it is doing to us: we need better, future-oriented thinking that mitigates risks and damage to society and our personal freedoms in the short and medium term. But in the long term, there is no predicting what any of this will give rise to." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Artificial Intelligence, Authority & the “Immortal Turk”
I think the concept I introduce in the book of the “Immortal Turk” is worth introducing here. It’s a reference to the Mechanical Turk—the fraudulent automaton of a Turkish-costumed person at a chess table that was supposedly able to beat anyone at chess, but was really just a cabinet concealing a man inside who was a chess master, and who determined all the moves of the “automaton.” The Mechanical Turk even had doors that could open into its supposed system of clockwork gears, to “prove” to doubters that it really was a machine.
That is what artificial intelligence is, at its core. It is a way of concealing the biases of decision making behind a mechanized process, and then presenting the products of that process as both original and correct. It has been shown in multiple studies (and in real-life situations where people drive off of docks and over cliffs because Google Maps told them to) that people have a strange trust in the accuracy and neutrality of computers.
But that perceived accuracy, and neutrality, is nothing more than the drawer of the Mechanical Turk being opened up onto fake gears: Behind all of these “artificial” intelligences are human beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns. Open enough drawers, dig down through enough layers and there is always a human being behind the process.
The idea of using artificial intelligence as a part of the political process is not a futuristic invention—it is already upon us. The decisions of these supposedly automatic mechanisms will be presented as ideal, as neutral, as unbiased. They will not be. There is always human motivation, bias and avarice hidden in the cabinet of the Immortal Turk. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
Surveillance, Technology & the Present Moment
Everything is an influence. Where I am living at the time, what I am reading, what is occurring in the world at the time, what films I am watching. It can be hard to pin down. But while I was composing Where the Axe is Buried, we were seeing a massive extension of surveillance and control capacities worldwide, being used by governmental, corporate and other entities.
In many ways, I think you could say that during the composition of Where the Axe Is Buried, the feared totalization of surveillance that seemed a futuristic concern, a worry on the horizon, became fully integrated into the present medium in which we exist. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
"If you asked me for a definition of what a human is, I might respond that the human is, more than anything else, a technological animal. From the moment we picked up a rock and used it to alter our interaction with our environment, we have been shaping technology—and have been shaped by it. -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
On the Future of AI
Paul Virilio famously said, “when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” I would add to that: when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck, you populate the islands of the Pacific and Australia, you write The Iliad, The Odyssey, you enable colonialism to extend its reach across the Atlantic, you drive the whale nearly into extinction, you kill off the dodo and the Steller’s sea cow, you invent the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, you turn millions of humans into sailors and create cultures around the sea and seafaring that never existed before, you invent naval warfare, Viking piracy . . . this list can go on for as long as we want it to. The point is that the consequences of technology are predictable only in the near, and at best the medium, term. In the long term, technology will do things that fundamentally alter the capabilities of humans, but also alter what it means to be human in the world, because it will alter what we can do, think, tell stories about—everything.
I’m not scared of AI or hopeful. I don’t think those words really matter: it’s like asking whether it made sense to be scared or hopeful about the printing press, or the first written alphabet. Humans continually invent things that are immediately beyond their control, and we are doing so again. The world those inventions bring about is something it is very interesting to ponder—but I think only the most arrogant of us would think it is something we can control, predict, or describe. That would be like a mastodon hunter on the Eurasian Steppe 30,000 years ago somehow managing to perfectly describe the future political structure of Caribbean pirate crews. One of our fundamental flaws is that we always seem to regard both the future and the past as being somehow more interpretable than the present moment. They aren’t! They are just as hypercomplex as this day on Earth is, and we don’t very well understand what is happening, much less what has happened or will happen.
I’m not saying that we should be helpless or passive in the face of AI and the things it is doing to us: we need better, future-oriented thinking that mitigates risks and damage to society and our personal freedoms in the short and medium term. But in the long term, there is no predicting what any of this will give rise to." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Artificial Intelligence, Authority & the “Immortal Turk”
I think the concept I introduce in the book of the “Immortal Turk” is worth introducing here. It’s a reference to the Mechanical Turk—the fraudulent automaton of a Turkish-costumed person at a chess table that was supposedly able to beat anyone at chess, but was really just a cabinet concealing a man inside who was a chess master, and who determined all the moves of the “automaton.” The Mechanical Turk even had doors that could open into its supposed system of clockwork gears, to “prove” to doubters that it really was a machine.
That is what artificial intelligence is, at its core. It is a way of concealing the biases of decision making behind a mechanized process, and then presenting the products of that process as both original and correct. It has been shown in multiple studies (and in real-life situations where people drive off of docks and over cliffs because Google Maps told them to) that people have a strange trust in the accuracy and neutrality of computers.
But that perceived accuracy, and neutrality, is nothing more than the drawer of the Mechanical Turk being opened up onto fake gears: Behind all of these “artificial” intelligences are human beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns. Open enough drawers, dig down through enough layers and there is always a human being behind the process.
The idea of using artificial intelligence as a part of the political process is not a futuristic invention—it is already upon us. The decisions of these supposedly automatic mechanisms will be presented as ideal, as neutral, as unbiased. They will not be. There is always human motivation, bias and avarice hidden in the cabinet of the Immortal Turk. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
Surveillance, Technology & the Present Moment
Everything is an influence. Where I am living at the time, what I am reading, what is occurring in the world at the time, what films I am watching. It can be hard to pin down. But while I was composing Where the Axe is Buried, we were seeing a massive extension of surveillance and control capacities worldwide, being used by governmental, corporate and other entities.
In many ways, I think you could say that during the composition of Where the Axe Is Buried, the feared totalization of surveillance that seemed a futuristic concern, a worry on the horizon, became fully integrated into the present medium in which we exist. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
life as communication and biosemiotics
On life as semiosis
"Life’s substrates are energetic and material, but information is key to it all, and the informational, semiotic, communicative functions of life remain poorly explored and understood. I think it is amazing that, for me to be alive and typing this today, living tissue has had to transmit, receive, and interpret a constant stream of uninterrupted information lasting 3.7 billion years . . . At no point between life’s starting point 3.7 billion years ago and my and your complex awareness right now has that chain of informational exchange and interpretation been interrupted. If it had been, you would not be here to think of that interruption’s consequences.
We are, all of us, the living continuations of a 3.7-billion-year-old chain of communicative events. We spend much of our lives thinking of ourselves as individuals with a beginning and an end—but we are so much more than that. We are embedded in, and embody, an ancient and dynamic system far more complex than our present understanding allows us to understand." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
"Life’s substrates are energetic and material, but information is key to it all, and the informational, semiotic, communicative functions of life remain poorly explored and understood. I think it is amazing that, for me to be alive and typing this today, living tissue has had to transmit, receive, and interpret a constant stream of uninterrupted information lasting 3.7 billion years . . . At no point between life’s starting point 3.7 billion years ago and my and your complex awareness right now has that chain of informational exchange and interpretation been interrupted. If it had been, you would not be here to think of that interruption’s consequences.
We are, all of us, the living continuations of a 3.7-billion-year-old chain of communicative events. We spend much of our lives thinking of ourselves as individuals with a beginning and an end—but we are so much more than that. We are embedded in, and embody, an ancient and dynamic system far more complex than our present understanding allows us to understand." -- From Don't be afraid of your own depth, an interview with Eliot Peper
Animal Intelligence
The Human / Animal Tapestry, Interspecies Trust, and Interspecies Empathy
I recently heard a story from Yogi Hendlin, an academic specializing in biosemiotics, about a community of villagers on the coast of Sri Lanka. In 2004, these villagers, who had worked with elephants for many years—watched as the elephants broke free of their enclosures and began moving toward higher ground. The villagers immediately followed them.
Shortly afterwards, the deadliest tsunami in modern history tsunami struck the region. The villagers who had lived with and trusted the elephants survived the tsunami, while countless other coastal communities did not.
What's compelling about this story for me is the way it illustrates a profound level of trust; the villagers did not know what the elephants knew, but they did understand that the animals they lived with had access to knowledge they did not. They understood that the elephants knew something valuable about the world that they could not themselves perceive. That trust prompted them to follow the elephants, and ultimately saved their lives.
What I found myself reflecting on, after hearing this story, was the villagers' openness to other forms of intelligence and perspectives. It is an openness that, taken further, would ultimately lead to a very different relationship with our biosphere, ecology, and the other species that inhabit our planet.
Throughout history, human beings have been intricately intertwined with various species, in a complex tapestry of relationships which includes both negative and positive interactions.
Think of our complex relationships with the cat, the dog, the horse, the rat, the pigeon, the raccoon, the crow. These animals, and so many others, are woven into our culture. And we are a part of their cultures as well. Some relationships, such as those we cultivate with dogs and cats, have evolved into deep bonds of mutual reliance. Others, such as the relationships we have with the pigeon, the rat, the crow, the raccoon, and other animals who thrive in our urban and suburban spaces, are a result of how we change the environment, destroying some habitats but also opening up new spaces species who have the tools to be able to do so are able to take advantage of.
Other human-animal relationships, such as our relationships with the animals such as the chicken and the cow, which we have massively altered so that they can better serve as a supply of food, are much more exploitative. And there are relationships with animals like the horse, the donkey, the mule, and the ox which are more mixed.
The villagers' relationship with the elephants, their trust in the elephants' abilities to perceive a world we cannot, is a striking story. But it is nothing new. It has a parallel in our ancient and complex relationship, for example, with dogs. An interesting fact is that domesticated dogs bark, while their ancestors, wolves, do not. Why? Because of our selection of barking dogs, who could alert us to potential dangers they perceived before we could, as companions. Dogs, like the elephants in the story, served as a trusted sensory extension, granting us knowledge about things we could not perceive.
What I believe is implied in both the elephant story and our ancient relationship with dogs is a trust we humans have long held in animal intelligence. An implicit acceptance of the fact that intelligence--and by extension selfhood--extends beyond human beings. Pet owners, for example, inherently understand that our animal companions are intelligent selves, not instinct-bound automatons. They express needs, and we respond accordingly. We likewise express needs and emotional states, and they respond to us. We sustain complex emotional relationships with them over a lifetime, finding a common language that allows us to communicate intricately with them. That language is based in trust and empathy. -- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast).
I recently heard a story from Yogi Hendlin, an academic specializing in biosemiotics, about a community of villagers on the coast of Sri Lanka. In 2004, these villagers, who had worked with elephants for many years—watched as the elephants broke free of their enclosures and began moving toward higher ground. The villagers immediately followed them.
Shortly afterwards, the deadliest tsunami in modern history tsunami struck the region. The villagers who had lived with and trusted the elephants survived the tsunami, while countless other coastal communities did not.
What's compelling about this story for me is the way it illustrates a profound level of trust; the villagers did not know what the elephants knew, but they did understand that the animals they lived with had access to knowledge they did not. They understood that the elephants knew something valuable about the world that they could not themselves perceive. That trust prompted them to follow the elephants, and ultimately saved their lives.
What I found myself reflecting on, after hearing this story, was the villagers' openness to other forms of intelligence and perspectives. It is an openness that, taken further, would ultimately lead to a very different relationship with our biosphere, ecology, and the other species that inhabit our planet.
Throughout history, human beings have been intricately intertwined with various species, in a complex tapestry of relationships which includes both negative and positive interactions.
Think of our complex relationships with the cat, the dog, the horse, the rat, the pigeon, the raccoon, the crow. These animals, and so many others, are woven into our culture. And we are a part of their cultures as well. Some relationships, such as those we cultivate with dogs and cats, have evolved into deep bonds of mutual reliance. Others, such as the relationships we have with the pigeon, the rat, the crow, the raccoon, and other animals who thrive in our urban and suburban spaces, are a result of how we change the environment, destroying some habitats but also opening up new spaces species who have the tools to be able to do so are able to take advantage of.
Other human-animal relationships, such as our relationships with the animals such as the chicken and the cow, which we have massively altered so that they can better serve as a supply of food, are much more exploitative. And there are relationships with animals like the horse, the donkey, the mule, and the ox which are more mixed.
The villagers' relationship with the elephants, their trust in the elephants' abilities to perceive a world we cannot, is a striking story. But it is nothing new. It has a parallel in our ancient and complex relationship, for example, with dogs. An interesting fact is that domesticated dogs bark, while their ancestors, wolves, do not. Why? Because of our selection of barking dogs, who could alert us to potential dangers they perceived before we could, as companions. Dogs, like the elephants in the story, served as a trusted sensory extension, granting us knowledge about things we could not perceive.
What I believe is implied in both the elephant story and our ancient relationship with dogs is a trust we humans have long held in animal intelligence. An implicit acceptance of the fact that intelligence--and by extension selfhood--extends beyond human beings. Pet owners, for example, inherently understand that our animal companions are intelligent selves, not instinct-bound automatons. They express needs, and we respond accordingly. We likewise express needs and emotional states, and they respond to us. We sustain complex emotional relationships with them over a lifetime, finding a common language that allows us to communicate intricately with them. That language is based in trust and empathy. -- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast).
Secular Buddhism
Buddhism, The Presocratics, and Control
I don't think it's a coincidence that the Buddha's first sense of discontent—the moment that launches him into the world and sets him on the path to enlightenment—takes place in a garden. A garden is, after all, the quintessential human-controlled space: a place where we try to harness nature, organize it, and bend it to our will. It's a symbolic expression of our desire to possess and dominate the natural world.
The Buddha saw through the illusion of that control. His awakening begins with the recognition that, no matter how much we try to structure and manage life, certain truths remain beyond our influence. Old age, sickness, and death—these are the three realities he identifies as catalysts for his profound existential crisis.
This crisis, in many ways, mirrors those experienced by Western thinkers like Heraclitus. In the 5th century BCE, the philosophical divide between East and West was far less pronounced than the divide in which these ideas are currently embedded. Despite cultural and contextual differences, the core intuitions of the presocratics and the Buddha are remarkably similar: a deep sense of the interconnectedness of all things, the relentlessness of change in the world, the flow of one thing into another.
These are intuitions that are not only philosophically profound, but also scientifically sound. What’s so compelling about early Buddhism, especially when examined through the lens of the Pali Canon and stripped of its later religious accretions, is how many of its core ideas align with modern scientific understanding. The Buddha, seen as a philosophical figure rather than a religious icon, articulated truths we're still grappling with today in our philosophies and rediscovering through empirical research and observation in our science.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
Buddhism as a method of Inquiry
I view Buddhism as a philosophy. My personal view is that religion, in general, is what forms over time as a kind of encrustation on philosophical ideas. Someone introduces a new model for understanding the world—something revelatory and insightful. Over time, others seize upon that insight—whether for profit, power, or simply out of lazy intellectual habit—and it becomes ritualized, dogmatized, and fixed. The result is that the model, the insight, becomes pointless. ossified into ritual. The useful part is the original insight itself, as a stimulus for further thinking.
This is how I see many of the Buddha’s teachings, especially as they appear in the early Pali Canon. Concepts like the self as an ever-shifting aggregate, the concept of dependent co-arising, and other foundational ideas. They are, at their core, power philosophical tools for understanding the self and the world. I consider myself a secular Buddhist in that sense: I don’t take the teachings of the Buddha as sacred truths, but rather as an invitation to deeper inquiry.
And in that spirit, I’ve accepted the Buddha’s invitation. He says, “come and try”—not “believe.” He invites us to explore, to think, to test these ideas for ourselves. I’ve found that invitation incredibly valuable, especially when brought into conversation with other traditions and thinkers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, the 19th-century American philosopher; systems theory; Gregory Bateson's work; and the field of biosemiotics and semiotics more broadly.
For me, Buddhism is one frame among many in the search for understanding. But I think it’s crucial to recognize that this is all a kind of bricolage. A creative assembling of what’s useful. You take what works for you and move on. The danger is getting stuck—falling into ritual or habit when the original goal was exploration.
Peirce has a quote that he said should be written on the walls of the city of philosophy: “Do not block the way of inquiry.”
In my view, that sentence should be the mantra of a truly thinking person.
When you do these things, your thinking begins to ossify. The moment philosophy becomes doctrine, it loses its value.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
I don't think it's a coincidence that the Buddha's first sense of discontent—the moment that launches him into the world and sets him on the path to enlightenment—takes place in a garden. A garden is, after all, the quintessential human-controlled space: a place where we try to harness nature, organize it, and bend it to our will. It's a symbolic expression of our desire to possess and dominate the natural world.
The Buddha saw through the illusion of that control. His awakening begins with the recognition that, no matter how much we try to structure and manage life, certain truths remain beyond our influence. Old age, sickness, and death—these are the three realities he identifies as catalysts for his profound existential crisis.
This crisis, in many ways, mirrors those experienced by Western thinkers like Heraclitus. In the 5th century BCE, the philosophical divide between East and West was far less pronounced than the divide in which these ideas are currently embedded. Despite cultural and contextual differences, the core intuitions of the presocratics and the Buddha are remarkably similar: a deep sense of the interconnectedness of all things, the relentlessness of change in the world, the flow of one thing into another.
These are intuitions that are not only philosophically profound, but also scientifically sound. What’s so compelling about early Buddhism, especially when examined through the lens of the Pali Canon and stripped of its later religious accretions, is how many of its core ideas align with modern scientific understanding. The Buddha, seen as a philosophical figure rather than a religious icon, articulated truths we're still grappling with today in our philosophies and rediscovering through empirical research and observation in our science.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
Buddhism as a method of Inquiry
I view Buddhism as a philosophy. My personal view is that religion, in general, is what forms over time as a kind of encrustation on philosophical ideas. Someone introduces a new model for understanding the world—something revelatory and insightful. Over time, others seize upon that insight—whether for profit, power, or simply out of lazy intellectual habit—and it becomes ritualized, dogmatized, and fixed. The result is that the model, the insight, becomes pointless. ossified into ritual. The useful part is the original insight itself, as a stimulus for further thinking.
This is how I see many of the Buddha’s teachings, especially as they appear in the early Pali Canon. Concepts like the self as an ever-shifting aggregate, the concept of dependent co-arising, and other foundational ideas. They are, at their core, power philosophical tools for understanding the self and the world. I consider myself a secular Buddhist in that sense: I don’t take the teachings of the Buddha as sacred truths, but rather as an invitation to deeper inquiry.
And in that spirit, I’ve accepted the Buddha’s invitation. He says, “come and try”—not “believe.” He invites us to explore, to think, to test these ideas for ourselves. I’ve found that invitation incredibly valuable, especially when brought into conversation with other traditions and thinkers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, the 19th-century American philosopher; systems theory; Gregory Bateson's work; and the field of biosemiotics and semiotics more broadly.
For me, Buddhism is one frame among many in the search for understanding. But I think it’s crucial to recognize that this is all a kind of bricolage. A creative assembling of what’s useful. You take what works for you and move on. The danger is getting stuck—falling into ritual or habit when the original goal was exploration.
Peirce has a quote that he said should be written on the walls of the city of philosophy: “Do not block the way of inquiry.”
In my view, that sentence should be the mantra of a truly thinking person.
- Do not block the way of inquiry.
- Do not accept ideas that halt your questioning.
When you do these things, your thinking begins to ossify. The moment philosophy becomes doctrine, it loses its value.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
Hope
Epistemic Change
What’s giving me hope right now? Well, I think we touched on it a bit earlier. We are in the middle of an epistemic change. Human beings are finally beginning to recognize the limits of what our planet can sustain. That growing awareness is starting to shift how we think about ethics and how we consider the consequences of our actions.
I genuinely believe that these shifts in thinking could eventually lead us toward healthier, more sustainable ways of organizing our world. That gives me hope.
At the same time, I recognize that humans aren’t especially good at responding to abstract threats. We often need to see the problem up close—"see the beast," so to speak—before we can collectively change our behavior. Because of that, I think things may get worse before they get better. But I do believe we will make those changes, eventually.
I also think science is moving in a hopeful direction—becoming more systems-oriented and increasingly aware of its own limitations, more conscious of what it does and doesn’t yet understand. That humility and self-awareness in scientific thinking is important.
So overall, what gives me hope is the sense that we may be entering a more sensitive, ecologically driven era—one less defined by exploitation and more guided by responsibility. Of course, this shift isn’t universal. Not everyone is on that path. But enough of us might be.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
What’s giving me hope right now? Well, I think we touched on it a bit earlier. We are in the middle of an epistemic change. Human beings are finally beginning to recognize the limits of what our planet can sustain. That growing awareness is starting to shift how we think about ethics and how we consider the consequences of our actions.
I genuinely believe that these shifts in thinking could eventually lead us toward healthier, more sustainable ways of organizing our world. That gives me hope.
At the same time, I recognize that humans aren’t especially good at responding to abstract threats. We often need to see the problem up close—"see the beast," so to speak—before we can collectively change our behavior. Because of that, I think things may get worse before they get better. But I do believe we will make those changes, eventually.
I also think science is moving in a hopeful direction—becoming more systems-oriented and increasingly aware of its own limitations, more conscious of what it does and doesn’t yet understand. That humility and self-awareness in scientific thinking is important.
So overall, what gives me hope is the sense that we may be entering a more sensitive, ecologically driven era—one less defined by exploitation and more guided by responsibility. Of course, this shift isn’t universal. Not everyone is on that path. But enough of us might be.
-- expanded and edited from comments in If This Goes On, Don't Panic (Podcast)
human culture and society in the natural world
Pluralism, Lived Experience & the Human World
I spent two decades of my life living in countries outside the United States, and I think what that has done more than anything else is open me up to the idea that there is never one way of seeing things, never one way of doing things, never one way of structuring and organizing the human world. I am learning Spanish right now for a future assignment and was reading a collection of poems by Borges. In his poem “Amanecer” or “Break of Dawn,” I came across these wonderful lines: “el mundo / es una actividad de la mente, / un sueño de las almas / sin base ni proposito ni volumen.” In English: “the world / is a mental activity / a dream of souls / without foundation, purpose or volume.”
Borges is paraphrasing Berkeley and Schopenhauer here, and his intent may be more spiritual than mine, but these lines feel very true to my experience. The physical world is real—that is, the world of air and plants and animals and all of the systems in which we are embedded. But the world humans live in is not exactly that world. In fact, we are totally unsuited to life in that world. Our niches, the places to which we are adapted and in which we live out our lives, are the social and technological castles we have built within that real space.
Those castles, made up of language and culture and technology, obscure the natural world and shape what we are capable of seeing. What living in many different places and speaking different languages teaches you is that the human castle is nowhere the same—everywhere, it is a highly localized mental activity of the souls (I use this term loosely) who inhabit it.
As a writer, I am interested in exploring those castles, and also in exploring what lies beyond and between them. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
I spent two decades of my life living in countries outside the United States, and I think what that has done more than anything else is open me up to the idea that there is never one way of seeing things, never one way of doing things, never one way of structuring and organizing the human world. I am learning Spanish right now for a future assignment and was reading a collection of poems by Borges. In his poem “Amanecer” or “Break of Dawn,” I came across these wonderful lines: “el mundo / es una actividad de la mente, / un sueño de las almas / sin base ni proposito ni volumen.” In English: “the world / is a mental activity / a dream of souls / without foundation, purpose or volume.”
Borges is paraphrasing Berkeley and Schopenhauer here, and his intent may be more spiritual than mine, but these lines feel very true to my experience. The physical world is real—that is, the world of air and plants and animals and all of the systems in which we are embedded. But the world humans live in is not exactly that world. In fact, we are totally unsuited to life in that world. Our niches, the places to which we are adapted and in which we live out our lives, are the social and technological castles we have built within that real space.
Those castles, made up of language and culture and technology, obscure the natural world and shape what we are capable of seeing. What living in many different places and speaking different languages teaches you is that the human castle is nowhere the same—everywhere, it is a highly localized mental activity of the souls (I use this term loosely) who inhabit it.
As a writer, I am interested in exploring those castles, and also in exploring what lies beyond and between them. — From BookPage interview with Laura Hubbard
ETHICS AND BIOREALISM
Belief as Action
I like Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of belief: a belief is an idea that a person is willing to act upon.
The real beliefs that you have are expressed in the way that you act in the world. You do not believe something if you do not act upon it.
You may claim to believe something, or even think you believe something, but your actions reveal the beliefs you actually live with. Those beliefs may even be inaccessible to you consciously, but they are the touchstones of your actions. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
Ontological Recognition, Reality, and Responsibility
If the world is actual and real, then the suffering of other beings in the world, and their thoughts, and their perceptions of the world, are just as real and important as mine. I’m tied to them in this way that is real. That’s the core for me. That’s the root of ethics.
My sense that the world is real—that beyond my perception of things and my own existence, there are things in the world—has never changed.
If the world is real, despite our different perceptions of it, and it doesn’t go away if you don’t believe in it, and you can still bump your leg against it, and so can everyone else, then we’re all here together, and we’re all just as important as one another. We have a responsibility to treat other beings with care and compassion.
Ethics is acting in the world as if other beings are just as important as you.
What created the universe, or how it came to be, what consciousness is, what life really is, why I feel like I’m here in this complex way—those things are quite mysterious. Science has not answered them in any sufficient way and is not very close to answering them.
But for me, the belief that the world is real fundamentally ties me to a sense of responsibility to other sentient beings in the world. If their suffering and their perceptions are just as real as mine, then I am bound to them.
I focus on how we act in this place, how we do better in those actions, and how we better interpret what we are capable of interpreting here. What matters to me are the immediate questions: how do I treat my daughter, what kind of world will she live in, what will nature look like if we act or don’t act? — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
Moral Scope, Sentience, and Harm Reduction
It is not possible to do no harm. Existence itself causes harm.
The moral imperative is to do no excessive or unnecessary harm.
Human beings are part of the environment. Many indigenous worldviews understand this clearly: humans are embedded in environments in which human activity can be part of thriving rather than destruction.
A predator causes harm, but not unnecessary harm. It performs a necessary function in its environment.
Necessary suffering and unnecessary suffering are not the same thing, even though all suffering is real.
Ethical life is about reducing unnecessary suffering while recognizing that complete purity is impossible. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
Ecology, systems thinking, and biorealism
Ecology, Sentience, and Systems
When we say “save the dugong,” we are not saving the dugong. We are trying to preserve the entire world that allows the dugong to live.
You cannot save whales without saving krill, feeding grounds, migration routes, and the ocean itself.
Caring about sentient beings requires caring about the systems in which they live. Even if your moral focus is on individual sentient experience, you must protect ecosystems, because that is how sentient beings survive and thrive.
This is not mystical interconnectedness. It is simply how reality works. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse
When we say “save the dugong,” we are not saving the dugong. We are trying to preserve the entire world that allows the dugong to live.
You cannot save whales without saving krill, feeding grounds, migration routes, and the ocean itself.
Caring about sentient beings requires caring about the systems in which they live. Even if your moral focus is on individual sentient experience, you must protect ecosystems, because that is how sentient beings survive and thrive.
This is not mystical interconnectedness. It is simply how reality works. — From Sentientism #242 Interview with Jamie Woodhouse