[FRIAM] Umwelten Was: Bard and Don Quixote

[Steve Smith]

In followup to the aphorisms related to "Life which wills to live" and 
"I am who you think I think I am"...

I have recently been reading Ed Yong's book "An Immense World" which is 
nominally about the animal kingdom's extremely wide and varied Umwelt 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt> and I am (temporarily) 
attuned/focused on an awareness that even among individuals of the same 
species/culture, what our perceptual system/sensorium takes in can vary 
quite a bit.   And beyond our sensorium, our nutritive and metabolic 
self is coupled with the world we live in.

I live in a house with a woman (Mary) of my own age who was raised in a 
somewhat similar socioeconomicpolitical context as I was, a dog and a 
cat, a handful of mice that come and go with the level of attention of 
the woman and the cat (moreso than the man or the dog) and a very small 
flux of spiders, silverfish, houseflies, gnats, and a big container of 
red-worms making vermicompost out of kitchen waste for me.

We also maintain a bird feeder just outside the picture window in our 
living room (which I refer to as BirdTV) which hosts quite a rotating 
cast of seasonal guests.

Aside from a modest charm of humming birds, most recently we started 
seeing a few (mating?) pairs of orioles and tanagers which lead us to 
begin to put out sliced oranges which seem to immensely please them.   
Our regular offerings of suet, sunflower seeds and raw peanuts (Jays) is 
tapering off but they as well as 2 mating pair of doves still come 
around to gather up odd spill from the other feeding, or maybe they just 
come for the company, the shade or ???.

On the opposite side of the house we have a small artificial pond (3 
total, cascading) hosting water irises and some reeds borrowed from the 
Rio Grande, and 4 goldfish in their 4th year...   Many of the birds that 
frequent the feeding area visit the pond as do many who we do not see 
otherwise as well as some less frequently noticed creatures (a few 
snakes, an occasional rabbit, a Raven recently, and apparently one or 
more racoons (who apparently fish out most of the goldfish when we 
restock ever few years to keep the mosquito larvae down)...

Every damn one of those (individual as well as species or niche) 
creatures has a different level of interest/awareness/concern in the 
myriad activities of each of the others (not to mention the wind in the 
tree branches, the sound of the tin roof on the library banging,  the 
traffic on the highway nearby, etc and in fact they have 'become" rather 
different than their peers through those experiences (the dog and cat 
are hardly moved by the activity of the hummingbirds and songbirds 
inches from the window, but those doves deserve a charge and a bark.  
The Ravens that hatched out in a huge cottonwood behind the house a few 
years ago are still quite present but are nowhere near as human-tolerant 
as the ones who live at the dumpsters behind the Sonic in Los Alamos.

"A" point here is that even though we humans set up well-defined 
boundary conditions to our "selves" we are still very effected by 
forcing functions at those "boundaries"  (at this point Glen might 
remind me that what I consider a boundary of self is at best fuzzy and I 
would agree).   Most folks here probably allow themselves no more than a 
cat or a dog to impinge on their world very often but even with best 
intentions, the flies, mosquitos, etc.   show up and the other creatures 
remain albeit at a further distance than I have cultivated for myself.

Maybe Elon Musk will succeed in doing what Biosphere II failed at which 
is either specifying and transporting a large and complex enough biome 
to even support the basic organism that is /Homo Sapiens/.   Maybe those 
here who have a subscription to Soylent or Huel 
<https://www.innerbody.com/huel-vs-soylent> can live healthily with 
nothing more than their existing microbiome and the (vegan?) sources of 
nutrients they represent (peas, soybeans +++ ?) I understand neither 
company recommends trying to survive without any other ("real") 
food...   Matt Damon (Mars) managed to make it home on "poop potatoes" 
but I suspect that was not a long-term viable strategy and I'm not even 
sure if Bruce Dern's (Silent Running) EcoArcs would have held enough 
diversity alone?

On the other hand (for the technoutopians here) maybe we *can* play 
whack-a-mole with enough genes to boost our core phenotype's complexity 
enough to not be as (symbiotically) dependent on the larger biome that 
we evolved in?

In a complementary tangent, as we (somebody) begins to wire up the IoT 
to Stable Diffusion models we will be perhaps actualizing the neocortex 
of a "Global Brain" 
<https://www.organism.earth/library/document/glimpsing-the-global-brain> 
in the Francis Heylighen/Cliff Joslyn sense following an architecture 
not unlike Jeff Hawkin's 1000 Brain 
<https://www.numenta.com/resources/books/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/>s?   
But if I factor in Ed Yong's perspective 
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/> 
I think we need to boost up the standard kit (weather stations, security 
cameras, humidity/ph garden sensors, ???) in the IoT sensors to include 
a much broader Umwelt?


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