- ID
- 65dd854a-b66a-440e-be1d-ede458eae4ae
2023-02-07 - Tuesday
DONE Talk to Emma about Challenger camp dates @emma
CLOSED: DEADLINE:
DONE Vet appointment for [[id:dab0e5e9-390c-421c-8c93-bf768afcbecb][Mr. Jackson]] surgery
CLOSED: DEADLINE: <2023-02-07 Tue 7:30-8:30>
DONE Follow up with Cheryl about taxes
CLOSED:
DONE Follow up with Johanna Barrett about tall ships
CLOSED:
DONE Pay Osborne's bill
CLOSED:
Total was $580, put it on the Citi card
Timeline
- Note taken on
I had a wonderful catch-up call with Jacob this afternoon. I kept thinking
that the lack of conversations since the holidays was the beginning of the end
of our contact. But when I jumped on the call today, not only was Jacob
on, but Chip Molter was there too!
- Note taken on
I don't usually read the Harper's that Johanna subscribes me to when it
comes. But the last issue had an excerpt from Olga Tokarczuk which discusses
how science is generally bad at future prognostication. There's usually a
required subtlety to thinking about the future where life evolves much more
slowly or insidiously than most people expect. Thus, rather than flying cars
we end up with ubiquitous communication.
On that plane, science fiction writers have historically been able to make
those subtle jumps much easier than pure logic. It takes a certain romanticism
to predict that people will largely remain unchanged even as we develop new
technology, and that human problems will persist as technology changes.
But that's a diversion from Olga's main thrust, which is that scientific
paradigm shifts are hard for science to detect. Heliocentrist was considered a
belief -- a heretical belief -- for a long time. Thinking about this, our
current understanding of the body's association with other living things comes
from a Western theology that trumps the individuality of each human as primal.
But we are beginning to discover that our gut biome may actually be finely
tuned to ourselves. That bacteria on our skin is important to certain
biological processes.
That begs the question, what if we are not individuals. What if we are the sum
of many living parts and that our myopic view of ourselves as individuals is
cloudy our ability to see how inter-dependent all living creatures are,
especially with regards to fungus and bacteria. What if the poly-self is our
heliocentric world shift? Have we misunderstood oursevles?