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<p>In followup to the aphorisms related to "Life which wills to
live" and "I am who you think I think I am"...<br>
</p>
<p>I have recently been reading Ed Yong's book "An Immense World"
which is nominally about the animal kingdom's extremely wide and
varied <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt">Umwelt</a>
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.<br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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 ???. <br>
</p>
<p>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)...</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Homo
Sapiens</i>. Maybe those here who have a subscription to <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.innerbody.com/huel-vs-soylent">Soylent or Huel</a>
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? <br>
</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.organism.earth/library/document/glimpsing-the-global-brain">"Global
Brain"</a> in the Francis Heylighen/Cliff Joslyn sense following
an architecture not unlike <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.numenta.com/resources/books/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/">Jeff
Hawkin's 1000 Brain</a>s? But if I factor in <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/">Ed
Yong's perspective</a> 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?<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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