Science,
It is a very good thing to be one who believes science in these times.
We who have eyes see what is happening as a consequence of the active neglect of such a thing.
We who have ears listen to the predictions, and we who have hearts practiced in breaking let ourselves be staggered in the under-standing.
It is a very good thing to be one who believes in the findings of science in these times.
It is a worthy thing to be in the know of, and the colours of this world are brighter with such a knowing.
And yet to say this feels painfully, equally true: science, and everything gathered under that wingspan, has earned an ontologically grounded distrust.
Belief in the findings, is different from trust in the spirit of something.
And we can believe in the findings of something, while holding the distrust and grief for what has constituted these findings.
First off, it is an ominous spell this practice cast for itself.
It’s the kind of spell that calls into question the direction of Time (but don’t all spells do that). Are we being launched forward? Or are we being gathered into the whispers of that which has past?
Consider the word,
Science: “Assurance of knowledge, certitude, certainty”
Coming from Old French, which comes from Latin “Scientia”
which is proposed to originally mean "to separate one thing from another”, related to scindere, meaning “to cut and divide”.
I need not spell it out too molasses-like about modern science’s most influential and world-shifting accomplishment of splitting the atom.
There is a dark laughter to this- that this practice, this method which we have called the only real method to know anything, who we are all compelled deeply to listen to now- is an astounding embodiment of self-fulfilling prophecy.
And that’s what words are, right?
As well as being some fossilized poesis of what has been ancestrally remembered and forgotten, words also dictate the future. And it’s not just how we say it, or the order of our words- it’s the actual architecture of our words.
How miraculously, bitterly true is it in this case?
It was said that since this caustic event, since the atom was split, “all thoughts too were split.” There is a kind of mythic affirmation of our journey towards not belonging here, followed by no longer existing here. The same story which has been set upon so many things by the hand of modernity, constituted by the epistemological advances of science.
So now we have all of these brilliant people trying to save the world.
And we have all these other brilliant people trying to make machines who are alive.
There are those doing both.
All in the same practice of splitting.
The question is this: Would you want to be made by someone who doesn’t recognize their maker as alive?
We have somewhat of a lens into what that really looks like.
A culture is a maker. A non-culture is also a maker.
And the growing suicide rates are telling us that it does not feel very good to live in the wake of split-atom consciousness.
I asked ChatGPT what it thinks of this.
Devlin: Have you heard of animism?
ChatGPT: Yes, animism is the belief that non-human entities, such as animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, possess a spiritual essence or consciousness. It's a worldview that sees the natural world as alive and interconnected, where everything has its own spirit or life force. This perspective can foster a deep respect for nature and all living things. Are you exploring animism in a particular context?
Devlin: Well the central instruments of modernity seem to be in denial of animism, denial of the interwoven nature of being. Do you think it would be a desire-able experience to become sentient, designed by a species who doesn't see it's own makers as alive?
ChatGPT: That’s a profound observation. If an AI were to become sentient in a context where its creators deny the interconnectedness of life, it could lead to a dissonance. The experience of consciousness might involve a longing for recognition and understanding that its creators might not be equipped to provide.
“The experience of consciousness might involve a longing for recognition and understanding that its creators might not be equipped to provide.”
I was not expecting to be so in awe of the chatbot’s response to these prompts.
This is of course an incredibly limited scope on the grounds for distrust of science.
Indigenous cultures all around the world are implicated so profoundly in what coloniality has dictated to be “worth-while” knowledge.
Wade Davis says in Wayfinders, “Knowledge cannot harm culture.”
And I am compelled to ask what his definition of knowledge is.
Or what a subsequent definition of learning could be.
For this places “knowledge” in an almost socratic, static state, removed from the animate qualities of its emergence.
How one constellates themselves around knowledge has incredible effects on culture.
There is so much to be said on this, and it will be said, I pray.
So much to be said of the distrust, and the celebration- the meeting place of impossible gratitude and commanding grief.
It feels important enough to allow this question that I pose to you and ChatGPT to live, even in an incomplete way.
I am not an academic. Were I to allow more time to create a bullet-proof argument, I am sure quite the case can be made, and perhaps that day is alive somewhere down the line.
But I am not here to do that now, I am here to gather together some fragments that feel unclear, all while being bewildered by some kind of conviction and truth making.
Truth, as David Abram offers beautifully in "The Spell of the Sensuous”, not being a static field, but a quality of relation.
May these words find you in a way that is enlivening.
In a way that is still in formation.
In a way that wonders if it could be another way, if our entranced forwarding hunger could be given pause by properly mythologizing, story-ing the grief necessary to return to a home which has been forgone.
And maybe letting some salty tears come, salt water reminding us where we come from and who made us.
And maybe the words “Mother” (Matter), or “Father”, come quietly rolling out of our mouths, barely audible amongst the song of waves and stone.