193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night

Within the context of Jainism, there's a commitment to an epistemic or a knowledge-granting worldview, which is called Anikantavada. And essentially, this translates to something like multifacetedness or many-sidedness, the idea that no particular perspective or knowledge system is complete. It's impossible, in other words, for any person or tradition to get it all right, to map it all perfectly. So the Jain epistemologist and practitioner is instead committed to the idea that we need to learn how to cultivate an understanding of as many perspectives as possible.

That is, I learn a bit about Buddhism, as much as I can in fact about Buddhism. I learn a lot about science, I learn a lot about indigenous philosophy, I learn a lot about iterate that across as many perspectives as you can imagine. So Anikantavada, many-sidedness, when we become more sophisticated philosophers, people, and epistemologists, we learn more about many different worldviews and we patch them together into one overarching framework that is significantly more complete than any would be on its own. Greetings and thank you, future fossils, for your immense patience.

With this episode, the last month has been such a crucible of two sick kids that I can even- Yeah, just thank you. But here we are, and I hope that you agree that this episode is worth the wait. I was originally going to release this as two, but it just felt right to drop a monster on you. I guess it's Halloween appropriate at this point.

This is a very special episode for me because of the extremely unlikely circumstances surrounding this. I have known Kimberly Dil for many years now, and she's one of the only folks in my Austin, Texas cohort that I watched grab the ring and go all the way through into academia and become a professor. But there's also a weird twist which is that she is the partner of one of my favorite musicians, Kishi Boschi, whose work inspires me immensely and whom I was lucky enough to interview for a feature on the cover of Performer Magazine, got on even a six years ago or something now. And in that interview, actually, Kauru said he felt that with the lowering barrier to entry for musical creation, that eventually the great cycle would turn back around to an appreciation of physical praxis and the actual sensory motor work of playing instruments rather than just allowing a brain helmet to read your thoughts and transfer it into music, which, let's be clear, is a super exciting development I've been tracking for a while now.

But yeah, finding out that the two of them had gotten together felt very good because I think you will note in this episode that, as with many other episodes of Future Fossils, we spend a considerable amount of time exploring the cross-currents and interweaving of the maid and the born, the organic and the artificial. Kimberly is such an erudite, articulate, poised, well-read, thoughtful, and caring person, and I'm really, really glad that I get to share her work with you and I'm sure that you will just feel her love of teaching and of wild places and the actual matrix, right, the mother. Gaia, within which all of this is going on, so yeah. But first, I want to thank new Patreon supporters, Gene, B-Tabs, Katie Nuttley, Ryan Leach, Rex Washburn, and Patrick Moynihan.

Thank you all so much and thank you everybody who has been supporting this show with what may feel like a trivial monthly donation, but they add up and without you, this would not be possible. I am not selling ads on Future Fossils. This is an entirely listener-supported program, as all great wonderings probably must be. Thanks, and for those of you who are patrons, you know that the Future Fossils Facebook group has been absolutely popping off.

I mean, in a way, I almost feel as though this show is as much an online community as it is an archive of recorded audio conversations. So yeah, it's been a very toying season, but I am immensely grateful for you. Also, I need to give a special shout-out to my father-in-law, Kevin Taylor, who helped me edit this episode. It's starting to look like Future Fossils will be a family operation moving forward.

Thank you, Kevin, and I'm extremely excited to share not just this episode, but another two that I have in the queue right now, one with evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, Simon Conway Morris, and one with business coach, improviser, wizard, and general badass, Robert Pointen. Those will be coming out in relatively short order after this one. Once more, thank you for your patience and enjoy a leisurely walk through the woods with me and Professor Kimberly Dil. A casual conversation between people who have known each other for a long time, but are making a commitment not to play inside your baseball and lose all of the people who are entrusting us with their attention.

All right, Kimberly Dil, it's a pleasure after all of these years of chasing you like a unicorn through the woods. So finally, I'll catch you on Future Fossils. How are you doing? I'm doing well.

Thank you. It's great to finally be able to have this conversation with you. And so much has changed over the years that I think it will be really exciting to figure out how we have changed intellectually and as people and how that's informed our worldviews, really. Indeed.

So actually, that's a good place to start. I met you in Bolden Creek Cafe in Austin, Texas, and decided to speak to you on the occasion of you having an extraordinary tattoo, and then was delighted to realize that you were at the time a philosophy student, and we dove right into all of that. So really, I don't expect that will have changed, but it would be great not necessarily starting on that day in that interaction, but it would be great to get you to introduce yourself and kind of who you are and where you live emotionally and intellectually for people before we get into any kind of specifics. Yeah, so if I recall on that day, you were also wearing a fantastic t-shirt.

It had some sort of prehistoric creature. I can't remember what the creature was precisely, but I was like drawn in by that t-shirt and I thought that was quite cool. So there was residents there. We both were clearly showing our nerd hood on our sleeves in my case, both literally and for you and your shirt.

So at that time, I was doing my PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and I was specializing in environmental philosophy and ethics, focusing primarily on biodiversity conservation, but really also looking at the human psychological relationship with biodiverse environmental spaces. So why is it good for us, for example, to immerse ourselves in green environments? What does it mean to be connected to the land? And how can answering these questions really inform how we ought to relate to, say, conservation efforts more generally?

So fast forward at five, six, seven, however many years it's been, and I'm continuing that work now as a professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. So my interests really haven't changed, honestly, all that much. Since that time, although, of course, whenever you dive into any sort of field, you're understanding of the subtleties really deepens. So now I think a lot about indigenous justice and how human justice connects to and ties with conservation efforts.

I also think a lot about the philosophy of technology. So, for example, in a world of simulations, what reason do we have to go hiking? That kind of thing. So all of these questions are fresh in my mind, but they're definitely related to that original project.

Yeah, so before we get into all of that, because that's very awesome, juicy and timely. I think the first chat that we ever had was you were working at the time with Galen Strossen. And for folks who don't know, I don't expect them to know because I don't think I've actually ever brought him up on the show. But Galen Strossen has had kind of an impact in the philosophy world through some writing in the critique of Free Will.

And as I recall, our early conversations kind of focused less on the environmental philosophy and more on the discourse around non-dual philosophy and around the esoteric and contemplative. Because I think around that same time I was writing for a blog called Globalish where I was writing a lot about non-dual philosophy. So I would love to start actually, maybe we'll start there in a circle background later, but I'd love to start in understanding how those things are related for you and how this rather long standing argument about the nature and reality of Free Will has figured into this kind of more concerted and long standing interest in all of the other things that you just mentioned. Yeah, so we must have met even earlier than I'm recalling because you're right at the time, basically a PhD typically takes six years minimum in philosophy at least.

I don't know about other fields, but the first three years of my PhD, I spent studying the philosophy of mind and perception pretty strictly speaking. So I hadn't gotten into environmental ethics yet. So that means we met around 2014 or something like that. So a few years earlier than I remember.

And at the time I was working with Aylen Strossen, as you mentioned, who is very much a proponent of a theory called panpsychism, which is a sort of idea that states in order to solve the problem of consciousness, that is, how does this fancy stuff consciousness arise from really basic material stuff like, you know, atoms and quarks and chemicals and biological processes. That's been a mystery in neuroscience and philosophy for a long time since we started thinking about this stuff. And so a panpsychist like Aylen Strossen just says, hey, let's get rid of the distinction between matter and mind. Instead, let's envision that mind is imbued or fundamental to matter in general.

That's not to say that rocks or quarks are conscious and that you and I are conscious, but they have the basic building blocks of consciousness interwoven into them in a sort of fundamental way. So that's panpsychism. Consciousness is in everything in the universe. Pan just means all, so it's in all things.

And so naturally, if you're a panpsychist, you're going to dissolve any debates that are centered around a commitment to dualism as between the difference between mind and matter. So if you take that seriously, questions about free will start to kind of evidence to a certain extent because the notion of free will itself arises from a presupposition that there's something unique about human beings. Maybe that's our capacity to be rational as Plato thought. Maybe it's us having souls as René Descartes thought.

But all of those understandings of what makes us different from say the natural world, from material processes presupposes that dualism that we're calling into question right now. So if we backtrack and we're a panpsychist, we think there's one kind of fundamental stuff in the universe, matter and mind, are one. Well, now questions of free will are a little irrelevant because we are about one expression of the natural world. And so when we start to frame it in this way, you can see how my interest in the philosophy of mind naturally led me to an interest in environmental ethics.

Because I became really interested in this theory of mind called the extended or the embodied mind. The notion that the mind is extended throughout the body into say the gut, but also into the environment in which one finds oneself situated. And that environment can be comprised of lots of stuff, obviously natural phenomenon like trees and grass and birds, etc. But also the people in our lives, the relationships that we find ourselves embedded in that create who we are.

So that notion of panpsychism ultimately led me to thinking more about the more than human world as the philosopher David Abrams calls it. I just want to dig a little bit more into just as a clarifier because I feel like this is going to come in handy in a few moments where I want to take this conversation. But the issue, you say of the way that panpsychism and non-duality kind of obsolete these arguments about free will and determinism have been very lucky in the last few weeks to have an ongoing correspondence with a popular science fiction writer who will remain unnamed because their affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute has not yet been announced. But this is somebody who's written really compelling stuff speculative fictions in which they have created scenarios that question the nature of free will and consider that psychological impacts.

But when I started talking with him about the way that his work has come up in other conversations about the possibility of retro causality and super determinism and physics, you know, this notion that the flow of causation is not simply from the past into a future that is indeterminate. It made him very uncomfortable. And so like this has been on my mind recently because I've been trying to articulate to this person I hold in great respect and was kind of like shocked to find was not like willing to go there in spite of what it seemed like from his work that there doesn't have to be a conflict. A conflict between these partial perspectives that you know there's a way to think of free will as something like computational undecidability.

This is the way a lot of the physicists I've talked to think about it that for all ethical purposes and I'm curious how you how you sit with all of this for all ethical purposes. We can go ahead and treat it as though it exists and in some sense it does but that it's also equally kind of true that showing how free will emerges as a sort of artifact or by product of certain methodological approaches to the world does not hand the trophy over to determinism either that you get empiricism tracking these cause and effect relationships in a really robust way up to the point where you get stuff like quantum physics where there seems to be something fundamentally random about reality and physicists talking about particles making choices. But then if you go the other way into an esoteric or contemplative or phenomenological method and you pursue the subjective experience of choice then eventually you run up into the other thing which is that you find that you don't have agency over everything in your experience. And so there's like a kind of a Mobius band that seems to require a non-binary logic in which these paradoxes are resolved the way that Penn State English Professor Richard Doyle talks about them as resolved in a higher order logical framing.

And so I guess why I bring all of this stuff up is because you've got this paper three criteria for environmental authenticity a response to the simulation problem and to sort of call the shot and before I turn it back to you and give you a chance to provide some exposition and lay this argument out for people. That it seems to me like the way that you're thinking about simulation is a little bit different from the way that I'm thinking about simulation in that the way like Richard Doyle talks about the eco-delic experience that's conferred by psychoactive plants and fungi is one in which we realize that why panpsychism sort of works at least in my understanding is that everything that we think of as matter is construction of a cognitive process that's generating representations of the world in order to navigate the world. It's an evolutionary product, our experience of an objective reality. But the same is true of our experience of the inner landscape is that in a way it doesn't make sense to ask questions about reality being a simulation of the brain.

Basically what I'm getting to is it seems like the quote unquote real and the quote unquote virtual collapse in a kind of non-dual framing in the same way that the other dualistic categories that you've mentioned do. Anyway, with that on the table, it just has like a me flying the banner of my house. Nonetheless, I think that you're making some really important distinctions here and I don't disagree with the way that you're using simulation and go. So this is a really key paper and I want to hear you talk about it.

Yeah, that's just mulch from which to grow your idea. Yeah, luckily I'm a mushroom so I can use that and sprout many things. I think so just to sort of backtrack a wee bit to the beginning of the view that you articulated. So essentially saying there doesn't have to be a key distinction between determinism, the idea that every causal process in the universe is like a set of dominoes.

It's a cause and effect that only has one direction both in time and in space and we are slaves to it for lack of a better term. So that's one view versus free will the notion that humans have ultimate agency over our actions and our decisions and the way that we co create our experience with the cosmos. Maybe those are not as actually as at odds as they seem. So in philosophy, there's a view for that right it's called compatibleism.

The notion that really at the end of the day, there are some deterministic processes that are at work. But as you said, they're probabilistic right they don't give us just one set of outcomes that will inevitably come to pass. Instead, there's this kind of quantum stuff going on such that there are a few possible realities that could collapse and depending upon how we interact with our world will choose or not choose one over the other. However, we're not as free as we seem by the same token because as I said earlier, all of the sort of material processes that feed into who I am Kimberly deal the sentient being are most of them out of my control.

We think about the fact that I'm born to a particular set of parents that I did not choose. I have a particular genetic inheritance that determines at least to some extent my psychology and the place I grew up San Antonio, Texas, all of the individuals who I interacted with inevitably shaped my interests, the experiences that I was exposed to as a child. And of course, if we iterate those kinds of processes over the course of a lifetime, we see that most of that which comprises me is not actually within my control at all. It's environmental, it's experiential.

So that's compatibleism that both of those things can be simultaneously true. So when we think about the possibility of simulations and we utilize that framework of let's just call it non dualism, this idea that sometimes things that seem in contrast are actually not that opposed at all. I agree with you, the virtual world is not in any sense separate from the natural world. It's really an extension of growth, a fruit, an expression of human creativity, which is by itself natural.

And of course, our creativity, because it's partially deterministic, has been the causal product of an evolutionary history that extends far beyond us. In other words, to put it more simply, computer programs, simulations, and the internet are naturally selected for as tools because they work in an environmental landscape that we have to learn to navigate as apes as homo sapiens. So all of that can be true. So what I'm basically saying in this paper about simulations in terms of mourning us about becoming too immersed in them, so to speak, is the following.

We have pre-existing relationships with natural entities, whether we know it or not. So for example, for breakfast this morning, I had onigiri, which is made of rice, it had some carrots and mushrooms and some omeboshi, some plamen there. So the very nutrition that is energizing me in this moment that enables me to speak to have this conversation is comprised of environmental entities, rice, plum, carrots, and mushrooms. And those entities are living organisms.

They have, if we're panpsychists, a kind of sentience attached to them. And so this is true for all environmental entities that comprise the landscapes in which were situated. The problem, I think, if we spend too much time immersed in virtual platforms is that we don't tend to the environmental entities with whom we stand in relationship. That is, we owe them something because our very existence is causally dependent on them feeding us in a very, very literal sense.

And that can be in terms of our nutrition. It can also be in terms of the oxygen that we breathe, which is of course produced by what kinds of entities. For the most part, plants, algae, and forest species more specifically. So as human beings, we're causally entangled to quote the great mycologist, young douguine, be Merlin, sheldrake, within a web of life upon which we depend upon which we owe our very existence to.

And so as an environmental philosopher, I take that step a step further by then claiming that we have moral or ethical obligations to care for those entities that give us life. That is, we take this principle of interdependence, of panpsychism, the notion that all these species have a degree of sentience, and we say we reciprocally owe them something in return. Of course, this is not just my theory, and this is why earlier in our conversation, I said all of my work in environmental ethics eventually led me to say indigenous justice, because many Native American and First Nations peoples have been articulating this set of views for a very, very long time. These are part and parcel of what my PhD advisor Kyle Powis-White, who is an Anishinaabe philosopher and scholar call traditional ecological knowledge systems, knowledge systems that are practical and so far as they help people survive in environments.

But they're also philosophical because they commit us to a form of panpsychism, a form of relatedness, of relationship, of moral duty and obligation. So I'll just stop there for now, we could dig more into that, but essentially in this paper what I'm saying is, if we spend too much time playing games and both literally and figuratively, then we forget to pay respect and reverence to our elders. And I conceive of those elders not just as humans who are older than us, but as the more than human entities and environments like mushrooms and trees who gave life to the very possibility of our existence in the evolutionary chain of being. They are our grandfathers and grandmothers in a very literal sense and we owe them something.

We owe them what I call reverence. Yes, thank you. I just want to unpack this paper a little more, give you an opportunity to say, okay, so you've cut the three criteria for environmental authenticity. And you talk about, again, this is straight out of the abstract, that authenticity plays an important psychological, cultural, personal and epistemic role in the lives of human agents.

So, you know, when I read through your arguments here about basically the psychic emotional aesthetic, talk about the transformative power of the authentic nature, something to me seems missing that came up actually in what you just said, which is a bit more pragmatic and has to do with the way that simulated environments in, say, a video game are not actually providing the biodiversity upon which we depend as organic creatures. And so that's kind of a different thing, you know, because I mean, there are a lot of people, you know, just so you know where I'm from my head is going with this. I've been having a lot of really interesting conversations in the future, fossils, Facebook, lately, about these arguments about what constitutes art due to the explosion of interest in AI assisted visualization software, right, like the mid journey and Dolly and crayon and these other things that take text and render images or video. And there's one person in the group in particular who says that there is a difference of kind, like a really fundamental and important difference between the kind of randomness and mistake that enters the creative process of an artist using more, what are at least at this time in history, more familiar tools and the way that randomness enters the creative process when you prompt a machine to generate an image.

And for me, I don't see a meaningful difference between those things because I've been exploring the idea of these tools as a kind of divinatory instrument as a way to kind of like, you know, I've been using an Android app tarot card deck now for years and years, like since I met you, Galaxy tarot, and the randomness in or, you know, my buddy, Romine Nazer just published his own Oracle card deck app. That's really cool. The way that random number generation, you know, allows you to shuffle the deck and pick a card out doesn't seem to me to be substantially different whether you're using an app or whether you are using an actual stack of paper cards. And, you know, this gets into questions like the stuff that my buddies who host weird studies podcast have talked about in terms of regarding the eaching as a kind of analog computer that nonetheless does digital kinds of computations.

So anyway, all that being said, that stands off to one side of all of the other ways that you have argued here that there is a meaningful difference between the simulation and the authentic article, the genuine article. And it's not purely, at least as I'm understanding you here, that one of them exists in a digital substrate and the other one does not. And so, yeah, I just, I would, I mean, again, like I'm just like rolling a ball of ideas together and kicking it over to you. Again, luckily I'm in mushroom.

And, and you know, so just as a sort of personal anecdote that maybe will help people to make sense of where I'm coming from to a certain degree, you know, I love trees and I have struggled my life for the duration of my life, I probably will with some form of depression from time to time. And I found that immersion in especially biodiverse landscapes that are forested are extremely healing for me. Of course, there's just so much data in environmental psychology that explicates or tells us why that is the case. There is in fact a what I call transformative power to biodiverse spaces for the human psyche and body so much literature has been written in the Spain.

We could also talk about that later. But all of the work that I write is essentially motivated by that sense of reciprocity wanting to give back to these biodiverse landscapes that have saved me on a quite literal level. And so that's the human perspective with which I approach all of my work. And so I started to contemplate why is it the case that I don't achieve the same degree of restoration when I play video games, for example, I love video games.

I used to be I would say a video game addict. I was very into World of Warcraft back in the day. So much so that I think my ultimate time log on that platform was months of total gameplay. I mean, I spent a huge portion of my latter teen years in that really simulated world to a certain extent, but none of my time playing World of Warcraft healed me to the same degree that backpacking things were happening.

And so I started to contemplate when writing my PhD dissertation, like why is that? Both of them are interesting, immersive, and exciting experiences. So what is it about this one set of experiences that is embodied and three dimensional that is just proving so much better for me in terms of my what I call psychophysiological health, my psychological well being and my bodily well being, my somatic experience. And so, you know, I think that this paper is actually to kind of contradict something you said earlier with no malice at all, of course, we're philosophers.

We love to disagree. Bring it on. I think it's a highly practical piece because I'm kind of diagnosing what I think are the features of say a forested landscape that enable them to be so healing for the human psyche and body. And so the first criterion that I articulate is called historical origins.

So an authentic forest as compared to a virtual forest has authentic historical origins in the following sense. If I read the tree rings on an old growth redwood or sequoia, that is going to tell me certain facts empirically speaking scientifically speaking about what that tree has witnessed in a sense, what its life cycles were like, how the sort of hydration cycles of that area were and how they differed from year to year, how old it is. And by the way, for those of you who are not immersed in ecology, the study of a tree's rings is called dendrology, and it's taken very seriously within forestry sciences as a metric by which we acquire data. So the historical origins that appear to us in the experience of looking at a redwood's rings actually tell us facts about that particular redwood's history.

So in this sense, connecting back to what you said earlier, by touching the rings of a redwood, we are able to causally extend ourselves into the past to reach out through time and a sense and to understand what it was like 800 years ago. In this geographical space of Northern California. And so there's the sense in which trees from my perspective transcend time. They are time capsules.

They are the Earth's original historians, aside from rocks and geology. They're the first living historians. And so there's something about that that I think we ought to acknowledge as important to the scientific method. And as partially explaining why being in the presence of a giant sequoia that's say 1000 years old is so compelling to us experientially phenomenologically.

It's all inducing. It's inspiring. It inspires specifically a sense of wonder and reverence. And by the way, these are two emotions that I take very, very seriously in my work.

And I'm working on two articles right now about the importance of immersing ourselves in landscapes that induce reverence and wonder because I think these emotions are necessary for the psychophysiological healing of our species. And I often think that it's a lack of immersion in these spaces and a lack of these emotions, which is responsible for rises in, for example, mental illness globally. So that's the first criteria. And so I see that not just as philosophically interesting, but as psychologically explanatory.

It like really tight noses and elements of our experience in these spaces in a way that is transformative. And so if we think about the other two criteria, I don't want to get into them. I suppose too much, but the second one is also highly practical. In fact, in the way that you articulated earlier, the second criteria is called connection to world.

And so some listeners might be thinking, oh, that's just a philosopher trying to sound fancy. But here's why explaining this feature of ourselves and of the state of the world is so important. So within the context of philosophy, there is a branch of study called epistemology. Epistemology is essentially the study of knowledge.

What is it? How do we acquire it? So if you're an empiricist, you're an epistemologist who is committed to the view that we acquire knowledge through our senses, that is through data, through sense experience, whether it's by observing ants on the ground in order to be able to logically explain what's going on, or by utilizing a telescope to acquire data about the spectroscopic imprints of distant stars. That is, what is their chemical composition?

In both of these cases, we're using our senses to acquire data. So I'm an empiricist. I love science. I'm committed to that kind of view.

There are other views, but we won't get into those right now. And so one sort of important feature of being an empiricist is hoping that the senses actually reveal something about the world that you're attempting to explain. So for example, here's a case in which my senses mislead me. Imagine that I'm hallucinating that there is a red apple on the table before me, but in fact there is no red apple.

Well, in this case, I have a sensory experience. I see the redness and the shiny skin of the apple, and yet my senses are not actually tracking. That is they are not in fact connected to the world. In this case, the experience that I'm having is said to be hallucination.

Hallucinations as a title just track a disconnect between perceiver and perceived between self and world. Of course, an empiricist like me who thinks at times we can get it right, we can actually represent the world to some accurate degree. Doesn't think that our perception is perfect. Things go wrong all the time.

And in fact, our perceptual experience is inherently limited. We partially represent the world. But that's okay. So long as we have a partial map that can help us get around.

That is that can help us to feed ourselves and to cultivate tools and forms a representational symbolic expression, i.e. language that enable us to talk to each other and to cultivate healthy social relationships, which we need as human beings. Then we're good to go. We just need a partial map.

So here's where criterion two comes in. I argue that in order for an experience to be genuinely restorative, the way that things seem to us in our experience, that is the phenomenology needs to to to some degree accurately represent the way the world is. So when I open my eyes and I return to that grove of sequoias, I see the sequoia. I reach out.

I touch the sequoia. There is a connection forming between me, the subject and the tree that I perceive. So what happens in the case of a simulation? We're reaching out and we're touching something.

But that something can be said, let's imagine a virtual sequoia, to be an expression, a representation, a simulacra that is parasitic on the existence of some other being out there in the world beyond it. So if I see a virtual sequoia, I'm having a meaningful experience. I don't deny that. I'm seeing something beautiful.

I'm learning something about it. But all of the information or data that's contained in that simulachron, that representation virtually of the sequoia requires for its causal dependence, the original entity that it represents. So in the paper, I call this relationship and it's a causal explanation, a parasitic representational relationship. The virtual simulachron requires the original for its representational content.

And thus, it's not telling you something about it, qua simulation. It's telling you something about a different entity out there in the world. But the appearance of the virtual representation purports to be something it's not. That's what makes it inauthentic.

And again, I don't think that there's something inherently wrong or bad about simulations. They can be fantastic educational tools, but they are not replacements for these biodiverse forests, for example, that they search to represent. So yeah, and if you actually address the next thing that I was going to ask you, which is for me, I see people arguing about this stuff online. There's always that part where people say, okay, legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, you get something out of exploring a simulated wilderness in that game that does induce off and that allows the triggers that exploratory dopamine circuit where we live in a world that is so defined by human agency.

I think both you and I want to take the nonhuman turn and question the role of that agency in design processes, given everything that you've already said about the way that our awareness and our desire and our intent are conditioned. But nonetheless, people say, oh, whatever difference there is between this stuff and these people tend to be people that have lived through a rapid evolution from like Super Mario Brothers on the NES to nearly photorealistic games in which we have jumped people asking whether the uncanny valley even exists anymore. We're getting close by it to what you just said that simulacrum does depend parasitically on the other thing. However, there's two pieces here that I want to ask you to unpack a little more.

One is not to say that anything that you just said wasn't pragmatic, but it is precisely the parasitism on real biodiversity by the technological surround, all of the energy manufacturer and the server farms, et cetera, that form a set of largely invisible externalities that are intentionally hidden from view in the way that modern civilization hides death and decay and all of these other processes of the living world and sort of irreducible realities of the biosphere. And so the problem with all of that, as I see it, is that so do modern humans depend on this enormous and occluded infrastructure. I remember talking with Jeffrey West, the SFI physicist who made the point that if you look at metabolic, the slope of body mass to metabolic rate in all mammals, that everything falls on this really nice line except human beings because we are now so dependent on our technological infrastructure that we're utilizing something like 35 times the expected caloric impact. And so, we have the most expected caloric input per unit mass of any other mammal of our same size that we're basically like your average modern human is something more like a virus that cannot reproduce without the genetic replication machinery of a host cell.

And so there's a sense in which I feel like the people having this conversation are in some way, again, this points to your interest in extended cognition and the way that cybernetism's Gregory Bates and talked about mind at large and the mind extending through the cane of a blind person and so on. And so it turns you and I are both willing to make that the person is in this web of interdependent co-arising, that what we actually are is not necessarily obviously, but also very profoundly different from what a person was 1000 years ago. When Christians Fagrel wrote his book on the Anthropocene, one of the things he talks about, and this kind of gives us a ladder into your other paper on dark skies and questions of wildness and so on, that wild spaces in the Anthropocene basically exist through the decision to keep them wild, that nothing is untouched and yet just like a last thought to stack on this, there was in a similar kind of way never a truly wild biosphere because even if you think about like Gaia theory, even the atmosphere and soil and all of these things that we take for granted as wild emerged out of the processes of living organisms to construct a stable environment for themselves. And so the atmosphere is an artifact.

And so I don't know, I'm not trying to contradict you in any way, but what I was getting at earlier was that there are certain subtle things like petrocour, like the smell of the earth after rain that gets complicated when you realize that for instance, artificial sweeteners nonetheless trigger in the brain, a response that stimulates the pancreas' production of insulin. And so the fact that it's aspartame or whatever on some level does not matter because you can still become pre-diabetic drinking diet soda. And yet there are other ways that simulated things like you might be able to reproduce the smell of soil after rain, you can certainly reproduce the parkland is a great example of this, that it's doing something for us aesthetically, even though we know it's a fabrication that's like some kind of effort to recreate the aesthetic of the wild spaces in which we evolved. But yeah, so I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is I feel ambivalent about this stuff and that there are, to me, what really seems to matter again about everything that you're saying is less whether we can point to a dependence on this invisible substrate upon which whatever agent it is, or whatever phenomenon it is, we're engaging depends.

And more on whether or not the simulation is even capable of doing for us all of the things that the original is capable of doing. I think that's a good place to stop for now at least if you bookmark what you were going to say because I feel as though that distinction is contingent upon an instrumentalization, what can the natural world do for us? What does the natural world do for us? Can a simulation do the same thing for us and to what degree?

In both of those cases, the characterization is one of asking, what do I get from these biodiverse faces? What can I get from a simulation? And so again in philosophy that's called an instrumentalization. How can I turn this into an instrument to meet my needs?

But I guess I fundamentally reject as an ethicist an instrumental environmental ethic. Instead, I'm committed to what's called relationalism. And so in this paper, three criteria for environmental philosophy, I've talked about two of the criteria. The third criterion is the relationality condition.

So the idea that there's something about an authentic space, person, entity, whatever it may be that facilitates the growth, the development and the maintenance of ethical relationships in a way that contributes to the flourishing of the things that are being used. And so one of the sort of questions that drives my sort of entire conception of biodiversity conservation is asking again, what do we owe to these biodiverse faces that have given us so much? And by giving us so much, I don't just mean like the clothes on our back and the food in our bellies. I also mean listeners can't see me at the moment, but I'm lifting up my hands.

I have these two appendages on my hand called thumbs that have made the very cultivation of all artistic artifacts, technological artifacts, and so many of those features that make us human possible. The reason Ape's developed thumbs was why? Well, because it was selected for in order to help us climb trees in our early evolutionary history. Literally the body map of homo sapiens is interrelationally caused by the existence of tree species.

And so in that sense, we are not just so to speak, viruses that are feeding on the planet as a whole. I think that's too much of a pessimistic characterization. We are instead the children of a biodiverse landscape that owes more respect to its biotic parents upon which our existence is contingent. And so I think as an ethicist, when we mythologize about our place in this gaiax fear in that way as children of gaiax, as earth, the mother, and as homo sapiens, the daughter, the son, the queer child, in that way we see that we owe these species something.

And so I also want to return to something you said earlier that really inspired me. It resonates a lot with how I conceive of myself and my own life and how many of my friends do as well and my peers and my colleagues. And so I think that when you play Breath of the Wild, which is an iteration of the Fantastic Zelda franchise, one of my favorite games, if not my favorite game of all time, is Zelda Ocarina of Time. I love it so much.

I love Zelda, love the mythology. I think that you're right to say there's something wonderful and healing and restorative about playing those games. And I absolutely agree. I think in general, whenever we create mythos or stories about humans and our place in the cosmos through the fictional narratives that we tell ourselves and each other, we do something that I like to call in my work, re-enchanting the world.

And so I think that we can be able to build a landscape with a sense of relationality, with a sense of meaning and purpose and aliveness. But for me, that plays a very particular purpose in human life. More specifically, it should be a tool for my perspective, by which we learn to relate more effectively to those environmental entities and people with whom we already stand in relationship. So for example, when I play Zelda, it should inspire me from my perspective to go out into a forested ecosystem and to relate to it like I might relate to Kokubi Forest.

They're enchanted as comprised of living sentient organisms that are more than nearly human. That motivates me to do a few things, to learn about them. So there's an epistemic motivation to gain knowledge about what trees are like and how they grow and how they're related to mycological, micro-risole system, etc. It also, I think, should motivate new actin ways to conserve it.

Because now I see that all of that centience is imbued with value. That is, it's worth conserving in itself. Not just because of what it does for me, but in itself, it has a value. And so when we start to reframe our relationship to the natural world in this way, we don't have to draw that dualism between humans and the more than human world.

We don't have to see ourselves as parasites, because honestly for a human, parasitism is a choice. Right? We also have a lot of very regulative, anthropogenic or human practices, which contribute to the rewilding of the more than human world. So in that article, in Defense of Wild Night, I actually redefined wildness, not as a lack of human or anthropogenic presence or influence, but as a lack of toxic anthropogenic influence.

Any anthropogenic influences that are regulative, like indigenous fire ecology, actually contribute to the wildness of a space. So wild is not equivalent to chaos on my view, wild tracks a complex diverse ecosystem that's comprised of many different organisms with many different forms of sentience, that are flourishing in equal measure and to an equal degree. When we have a species that's present in a space that is doing too much, that's taking too much, we say that space has an invasive species, which is just to say it's no longer playing a role in the flourishing of the ecosystem as a whole. So I guess, yeah, maybe we just have some different background views.

Not at all, actually. I'm glad that you first of all identified that the argument I was making was an instrumental argument. But I also want to say that I agree with you very deeply. There's a limit to which an instrumental value actually gets us somewhere.

When I had Sophia Rocklin on the show, I think it was back in like episode 56, she and I were talking about how the idea of ecosystem services, which is another thing that Chicago brings up in the Anthropocene, is this question of how it is that we might deploy the way that the civilization and the civilizational economy thinks about value to conservation efforts, that the problem is that no model of the world is ever a complete representation. And so whatever value we might assign to a hectare of Congolese rainforest, one of her points was, there is always going to be on some level invisible labor performed by that rainforest because our understanding of it is constantly evolving and changing and in certain ways, anyway, becoming more complete, but you can't ever get to a complete one-to-one map. Also, I brought this up in the first conversation. I have Kevin Kelly on the show who was advocating for a kind of mixed reality future in which there is a simulated correlate to everything in the physical world.

And I was like, well, you can't do that. And one of the reasons you can't do that is because the maps ultimately change our behavior and thus change the physical world that they're attempting to represent. So there's like a number of different ways in which models and other representations are inadequate. And it gets scary for me when we talk about, I hope to get Gregory Landua on the show at some point soon.

I've been flirting with him for a while about this. He's the head of this web three company that's trying to find ways to incent conservation activity through a decentralized autonomous organization on the blockchain. And this, maybe it's just my ignorance of his project, but it worries me because as soon as you make something visible to the market, and I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about this before we really get into the dark sky stuff, although it's relevant, then suddenly you're like trading futures in it and financializing something like there are completely valid complaints about the way that, for instance, domestic familial quote unquote labor, you know, the work of raising children is not respected. It's not compensated in the way that is fair relative to the sacrifices that people have to make in order to do it.

But on the other end, I can't imagine a pleasant future in which the invisible labor of parenting is made visible to a market that wants to trade and like we lose something important. So I guess that gets coming back to your comments on the difference between an authentic and a simulated thing is that as soon as we're trading something, we're not actually seeing that forest anymore, we're seeing a financialized low fidelity simulation of it. And so, you know, just to be clear with you, like I see a pragmatic or instrumental argument about what the forest can do for us only being valuable up to the point where that critique kicks in and this other thing, which is the intrinsic value of wild spaces or of the nonhuman organisms that live in them or for that matter, even the humans that are doing extraordinarily important, but economically visible work under the radar of our course representations of our world all reside. And I'm so glad that you brought up the Aboriginal fire ecology stuff.

My friend Stephanie Crabtree worked on this stuff, a Queensland and I think we're just like the Mar-2 people of Australia that the way that they steward the lands was through creating this heterogeneous patchwork through control burns that when they were removed by British colonial forces from the land, the biodiversity actually crashed and was not restored until those people were allowed to live back on their land again. So I don't really know that I'm trying to stress a particular point here, but I do think that that's kind of more what I meant by saying that there are ways that are not always necessarily understood by us, and that's in terms of our dependence on an environment that we can't adequately model, and that's where I feel like the instrumental argument fails and the relational and that piece of it kicks in as a support, and that those two things are not in conflict with each other, but actually allow a more diverse toolkit of ways of communicating both an intrinsic and an instrumental value to this stuff. Yeah, and that's a great point, and I do make this more explicit in some of my written work, but that's why I'm not an intrinsic value or an eco-centric value theorist, I'm a relationalist, so in order for a relationship to thrive, both constituents, which I call relata in that relationship, have to thrive. So that means that of course humans have to thrive by participating in ecological conservation or restoration efforts, and the biodiverse entities that we work to conserve also have to thrive.

So you're right to say that in a sense we get some instrumental benefit, food, waters, psychological restoration, well-being, etc., but they also thrive. So that's why I like relationalism because it's not dualistic. Instead, it places the value in this sort of unseen, micro-risal network of causal energy flows, really, the space between humans in the natural world, the space between trees and mushrooms and fungi, and so in that sense it's a distributed value theory, and it's one that tracks with the Norwegian philosopher Arne Nes calls the biotic web in which we all find ourselves embedded. It places value in the web itself, not just in any particular node that serves to constitute the exchange of those webs.

So I like relationalism, I think it's highly sophisticated, it's non-dualistic, and it's also very ethically motivating, which makes me rather happy. And then to something you said earlier, you know, a lot of people in environmental ethics have criticized purely instrumental value theories on the basis of just what you articulated. It's called the income-insurability hypothesis, the notion that you can't ever place a monetary value on, for example, a piece of the Amazonian forested landscape. It's impossible to compute that in the first place, and then moreover, as you say, there are so many unseen ecosystem services that we just are not able to characterize, partially because some of them are just not economic, right?

Not everything is reducible to an economic value, and in fact, it's a pretty difficult philosophical claim to justify that everything is reducible to an economic value in the first place. Most philosophers probably would not agree with that claim, they would get off the boat pretty early on. And so this has been articulated by so many philosophers, Brian Norton, my PhD advisor, Sarkar, and a lot of activists, of course. So Vandana Shiva, the great Indian activist, who does a lot of work to, for example, call out Monsanto in doing just that, placing economic values on seeds and their distribution amongst other things.

So I think that's a great argument, and it's one that you can just find pepper throughout the literature, really at this point. But yeah, I just wanted to come back to before we sort of close out this part of the conversation, the importance, again, of relationship building. Because if we take that notion seriously, we're going to leave more space for, for example, the diversity of perspectives in terms of how we represent the same forested landscape. That is, we don't have to worry about there just being one model of what a forest is like, that's going to be relative to or dependent upon the person whom you ask.

So for example, if we were just to use two perspectives to simplify the conversation, and this is a conversation I work on a lot in my teaching and in my written work currently, let's contrast the way that a scientist who is a forest ecologist might characterize a Sequoia landscape versus a indigenous person and a lonay person who has a certain mythology, a traditional ecological knowledge way of relating to that landscape. We might expect that there's going to be a lot of overlap between those two representational worldviews, but there's also going to be a lot of divergence. And I think one of the nice things about relationalism is that it leaves space for what I call a patchwork ecology or a way of linking up diverse worldviews that are variously naturalistic into a coherent tapestry and sort of pattern that is piecemeal has a lot of different perspectives woven into it. You can clearly pick them out and yet they're all interconnected in so far as their part of one giant model of say the forest.

And this idea as with most of my ideas did not just come from me. It was inspired by my study of forest ecology and fire ecology. As you mentioned previously, most people who practice fire ecology practice what's called a patchwork fire ecological prescription. That is they don't just burn the forest wholesale they pick out chunks depending upon what species well in which regions of the forest.

And just as a little bit of like personal background I used to work with a forest service as an education coordinator and part of my job was to work with fire ecologists by going out on backpacking journeys into the southern Utah landscape in order to figure out say where juniper had become a bit invasive and was choking out the native white pine trees and so where we needed to prescribe fire and controlled burns in order to manage that ecosystem. So that's one place that inspired this patchwork ecological narrative. The second place comes from my interest in Indian philosophy. So one of my areas of specialization that I haven't mentioned thus far is a lot of Indian philosophy especially Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.

And I teach it quite often I'll be teaching at this spring at Santa Clara University and upper division class on Indian philosophy. Within the context of Jainism there's a commitment to an epistemic or a knowledge granting worldview which is called Anikantavada. And essentially this translates to something like multifacetedness or many-sidedness. The idea that no particular perspective or knowledge system is complete.

It's impossible in other words for any person or tradition to get it all right to map it all perfectly. So the Jain epistemologist and practitioner is instead committed to the idea that we need to learn how to cultivate an understanding of as many perspectives as possible. That is I learn a bit about Buddhism as much as I can in fact about Buddhism. I learn a lot about science.

I learn a lot about indigenous philosophy. I learn a lot about iterate that across as many perspectives as you can imagine. So Anikantavada many-sidedness. When we become more sophisticated philosophers, people and epistemologists, we learn more about many different worldviews and we patch them together into one overarching framework that is significantly more complete than any would be on its own.

So often in the West we sort of we hear this sort of a what do you call it a parable or a tale that explains this perspective. And I think a lot of people accidentally attribute it to Buddhism or Hinduism, but it's actually a Jain metaphor. The idea of the elephant and the eight blind men. Right?

The idea that if you have eight men who cannot, let's throw some women and queer people in there too. We have eight blind people and they're all feeling different parts of an elephant and explaining what they feel. They might say something like the following. One person holds the ear and says an elephant is like a delicate and soft blanket, a bit hairy but really soft and nice and all enveloping.

Then the person who grabs the tail says no, an elephant is actually like a rope. Very long and narrow. Another person grabs a foot. Oh, no, it's like a giant rock with pebbles attached to it and so on and so forth.

From the outside perspective, it seems kind of silly for any of these particular people to claim that they know what an elephant is like. Instead, we patch all of their perspectives together and we get a more complete view. An elephant is in fact, like all of these things and like more than any of them have access to perceptually. So that's a Jain parable and it's one that I think really nicely characterizes this really pluralistic theory of Anakantavada, which motivates most of my work in philosophy currently.

Excellent. So yeah, that's where you and I probably get along most deeply, which is in a commitment to pluralism. And there's a way that this whole conversation now that you've made that explicit is self-referential in that the importance of a heterogeneous cultural landscape or biodiverse ecosystems or the even like, I think about the way that water takes more than one path. Water is under the effect of gravity.

So there is a sense in which there is, it all has to obey a kind of like a trend line. But there's like this other way in which that innate multiplicity goes like very, very deep. Anyway, without beating that particular point to death. Well, may I just say really quickly, yeah, just in response to that, I think that this sort of commitment, as you've said to multiplicity, to epistemic multiplicity is a natural consequence for a person who really cares about biodiversity, ecology and science, right?

Because if we think about the health of a particular ecological region, we see that biodiversity is a marker of ecological flourishing and health. And so if we take the sort of memetic selection, that is the cultural gene, so to speak, of the human species seriously, as an expression of evolution, then we would also say that the exemplar of health in a human population is that population's capacity to hold multiple diverse perspectives in mind, simultaneously, without any one of them becoming invasive, or what we might call dogmatic. And one of the interesting features of all of this is when you look at the world, as it is, we see that regions that have more linguistic diversity in say, India, also have the highest diversity of the world. Also have the highest concentrations of ecological diversity.

That is biodiversity. So there does seem to be a correlation here between multiculturalism and biodiversity conservation. And so I think that's a really important point, especially in a landscape where, politically speaking, we're always threatened by dogmatism. And so I just wanted to make that a little bit more explicit.

I don't know if this is quite as obvious to the listeners after everything we've said or not, but that feels to me like, in my mind, like we've been dancing around Blade Runner for this entire conversation. And one of the things that characterizes that series from its origin and filicade dicks, novel duangroids, dream of electric sheep, is how a world in which we're asking all of these questions about the nature of the simulacrum as is like instantiated through these replicant bioengineered human-related figures exists, meaningfully in a human future that has utterly destroyed the bias here. And now it depends entirely, although kind of somewhat counterfactually, on a substrate of purely technological subsistence. And so one of the things that shows up in both of the Blade Runner films is that humans live in a kind of fallen realm, kind of like the video game nerd reference point, but in like Final Fantasy VII, how there's all of those people living under the disc in Midgardes, like they can't see the sky, right?

That we have completely encapsulated ourselves within a world, within a built environment, and have the pets that people keep in Blade Runner are artificial. No one can afford an actual owl or snake. And in Blade Runner 2049, there's this whole thing about living in the wake of nuclear disasters and so on, where even though there is just off stage, there are the off-world colonies and there are communication satellites. And so we kind of depend on all of this stuff out in space and in unconquered and unspoiled spaces.

We've lost any kind of contact with it. Like everyone left on Earth is just staring at dust. And it was just funny because like, I mean, it's not funny, it's tragic. But I remember a couple years ago when there was an especially bad set of wildfires that passed through California and up the West Coast, everyone kept taking pictures of Silicon Valley and that area and being like, look, it's Blade Runner 2049.

And I remember trapped under this layer of smoke and dust. And just this is like the image that comes up for me when you're arguing the importance of the conservation of the restoration of dark skies, because there's something, again, like there's something really awe inspiring about going out to a place like Burning Man, but the human impact on the Playa leads to these horrible white-out dust storms that mean you can't see your hand in front of your face. And so there's a weird sort of irony or paradox involved in pursuing this modern impulse to express ourselves creatively that in a way that overwrites everything else. And so I feel like I'm just sort of embellishing what I see as like some of the points that you're making here, but this is when I want to give you some time to really unpack in Defense of Wild Night.

Yeah, so one of the reasons I wrote that article three criteria is to avoid what is called the Calling Ridge dilemma, right? The idea that when a new technology becomes ubiquitous or entrenched and you finally see the repercussions, the negative repercussions of that technology, well, then it's too late because that technology is ubiquitous. A great example would be fossil fuels and petrol and cars, gasoline and the US and cars. We only started to see the negative offshoots once they were ubiquitous.

And so I'm kind of conceiving of this article as being a precursor to the ubiquity of simulations, even though they really are in some sort of nascent form everywhere in terms of our phone and our computer use. I'm cautioning about us. I'm cautioning us to not get too entrenched in them without taking these other considerations seriously. And, you know, I guess as a philosopher, maybe it comes across as a little bit judgmental, but I think it's important to consider this stuff because as you say, oftentimes we're so enchanted by the delights of the senses, whether they be simulative or festivaly when we're immersed at Burning Man, that we forget that there are repercussions to our actions.

And while you were talking a little bit about, you know, why out at Burning Man, I was thinking about how much I've struggled for the past, maybe six or so years with attending and teaching at festivals, because I also see these repercussions iterated there. So, for example, we'll have a festival when we talk about a lot of environmental conservation and indigenous justice, and yet all of the performers on stage are wearing polyester and glitter. Those are petroleum derived materials, right, that are directly contributing to climate change. And right now I just can't participate to a certain extent because I worry so much about how deeply seated sometimes when I'm in the world.

How deeply seated sometimes our hypocrisy can be the people who are bearing the brunt of climate change first are not those of us who are privileged there are people of color and people who are, you know, already economically disadvantaged in the global south, and so it is those unseen people, those people who generate the clothes on our backs the very food that we eat, Indian farmers and the Punjabi cotton belts right who are extremely, in some cases, poor. Those are the people that are affected first and if we don't keep them in mind and care for them, we're living in ignorance we're delighting in ignorance, it's heavy to talk about but it's something we have to talk about when we worry about this stuff. Yeah. Okay, so with that, night skies.

Yeah, I think that this is a perfect segue because, you know, I'm thinking about the parallels between being delighted and chanted by the glittering lights at Burning Man and perhaps not seeing the sort of negative ecological and social consequences that we just talked about. And the way that we light our cities right we're enchanted by artificial light as a species and to some degree rightfully so I mean the sort of inception of electrical lighting systems in urban city scapes first came about as a way to mitigate for example crime and physical harm so if there's a pothole in the center of a street and there is no illumination, you're going to fall into the pothole and terrible bodily consequences might occur. Also, crime tends to go up in spaces that are not well lit by bright city lights right so the original reasons that motivated the ubiquity of that particular technology high pressure sodium bulbs to like our cities was not in itself a negative motivation it had a lot of positive motivations behind it. However, there are so many negative consequences to living in artificially illuminated city scapes.

Some of them are ecological and some of them are biological for human beings so we can think about all of those features along a few different metrics. So in this paper in defense of wild night I talk about the importance of regulating the way that we light our cities so that we can return to semi darkness in order to preserve both human health and more than human biodiverse health. So I guess let's just start by talking a little bit about the consequences to humans and then you know we can talk about that and then perhaps we can segue to the ecological consequences more generally of over elimination of our nights. So one of the primary sort of physiological problems with living in these really illuminated light landscapes is that it interrupts our circadian rhythms more specifically high pressure sodium bulbs which are those super bright lights you see illuminating highways and LEDs along a blue spectrum so like the very bright white lights or fluorescent looking color tones.

These tend to have a super detrimental effect on the way that our circadian systems function and our circadian system is essentially the way that our bodies regulate our sleep and waking cycles. So historically speaking a homo sapien a human being would wake up around the crack of dawn. Why is that? Well because back in the day you wouldn't have curtains and so bright sunlight would filter through whatever sort of shelter you found yourself situated in and would wake you up.

Likewise around the point of sunset and darkness after for example sharing stories around a campfire another form of artificial illumination humans would go to bed rather early in relationship to what I think most modern humans would consider an early bedtime. So our bodies evolved in order to be awake during the day and to sleep at night where a diurnal species that is where a daytime species that's contrasted with a nocturnal species such as bats and foxes and other creatures of that foresty nature. So it's so interesting when we think about the actual physical empirical evidence that shows why this is so bad for us this artificial illumination the World Health Organization otherwise known as the who now characterizes nighttime lighting as a carcinogen because their studies have revealed that night shift workers who are exposed to a lot of artificial high pressure and sodium bulbs and LEDs that are blue have extremely high rates of cancer compared to their diurnal working partners right the people that play the same role but during the daytime. And it's so statistically anomalous that it's pretty difficult to deny that it has something to do with the way that their circadian rhythms are functioning right.

So that's one of the major health consequences it interrupts our sleep cycles we don't get as good of rest as we would if we didn't have so much artificial light but also it's a carcinogen it really really affects night shift workers in a way that is disproportionate. And unfortunately with the exception of some medical practitioners many night shift workers tend to be people of color or people people from lower economic brackets. So it has this way of sort of reinforcing economic disparity that is really problematic. It's a health threat right.

So that's one of the sort of empirical ways in which nighttime illumination is worrisome but there are also some more sort of intangible effects that still really matter to us as human beings so for example being able to aesthetically perceive a starry night sky is I argue similar to the way we immerse ourselves in forests. It's transformative in a positive psychophysiological way that is when we see starry skyscapes right we feel certain emotions like wonder awe and reverence that actually play an important psychological role and help to restore us in some senses reduces anxiety increases feelings of positive well being and increases feelings of what some psychologists have called positive connectedness and that's a marker of well being more generally. So did you want to talk about either of those two features before we continue either the sort of like basic empirical effects of nighttime lighting on the body or otherwise definitely yes I have no disagreement with anything you said how could I but it strikes me that what's missing and what you've said so far. I would kind of file under what a night sky versus artificial lighting is doing to us and by extension for us.

And so again it strikes me that the arguing for this on the basis of its transformative effects or arguing for it on the basis of its health benefits leaves out this other point that you've stressed earlier in the conversation which is the relational piece of it and if we're going to draw an equivalence between an argument for conserving a dark sky and argument for conserving old growth forest. I'm curious to hear you speak on how you understand what it is that we owe the sky in the same way that you're talking about what it is that we owe trees rather than making that other kind of argument. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah so in a sense because the sky is first of all it's a heuristic right the sky is perspectival it's relative to a viewer on the planet earth.

This celestial sphere as viewed from the planet earth right so this guy itself is kind of an abstract entity it's not a genuine object in the world. It's just a way of characterizing how we see the stars that are beyond our solar system as well as other planetary bodies our sun our moon etc in this solar system. So this guy is a heuristic it's a useful way of modeling our perspective of the world. So in that sense I actually don't think that we have ethical obligations to the sky however we do have ethical obligations to each other and to biodiverse entities that require natural darkness in order to flourish.

So currently I'm working on an article for a book that's forthcoming on dark sky conservation from a many perspectives sort of way of characterizing the conversation is hosted by two astronomers who are editing the book Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor and they're also lighting engineers. So this article that I'm writing is called preserving darkness in the wild wood and it makes that conversation between forest conservation and dark sky conservation more explicit by looking at for example the way that biodiverse species like trees bats foxes etc. require natural darkness because they do have circadian rhythms trees actually have sleep cycles they're not at all hours energetically working in the same fashion and bats of course as nocturnal species require natural darkness in which to hunt navigate or to pollinate if they're a sort of herbivore species like a fruit bat. So there are many senses in which our sort of conversations about the preservation of natural darkness are motivated by the same considerations pertaining to biodiversity conservation and social justice that I talked about previously.

Also in this conversation I think we also need to think about the obligations that we have to ourselves because when we think about ethics we often think about ethics as being a solely other focused enterprise but really when we kind of shift the conversational landscape to think about self care and healing and psychological and physiological well being. So many of us know that we have duties to treat ourselves well too and some of those duties to treat ourselves well require immersing ourselves in experiential environments that are going to contribute to a sense of well being. One of those environments is darkness we need natural darkness in order to thrive partially because of the affordances to view celestial bodies like the stars partially because it's psychophysiologically good for us and partially because darkness as an entity mythological entity in itself plays such an important psychological role in the way that we conceive of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. And so the technologies globally are driven by conversations about the dynamic dance between dark and light.

And I think that when we over illuminate our lives we end up playing this kind of ecological bypassing to play on that famous Facebook phrase that's always popping around spiritual bypassing when you pretend that there's nothing wrong with your life or you pretend that there's nothing sort of boundary less than us in your relationships or whatever the case may be I think when we neglect natural darkness on an ecological level we also bypass this important ingredient that has contributed to the evolution of the human being themselves. We understand this in so many ways but let's just think of a few simple cases. The development of mathematics as an enterprise was first and foremost articulated in order to help seafarers navigate. So you view the stars you notice there's this one star that doesn't move we call it Polaris in the West and we kind of create these celestial calculations that help us to measure the shifting of the seasons and thus how we can orient ourselves on an orient less ocean when we're out seafaring right so even the development of mathematics required the stars which require darkness.

And so there's a sense in which I think even our intellect our capacity for high degrees of rationality and reason developed in a co-create a fashion in relationship to dark night skies. Let's also think more sort of fantastically about the development of those mythologies that we keep talking about that keep cropping up. Mythologies developed as a way to entertain ourselves and to convey information around a campfire at night as ways to characterize how to manage potential dangers in the darkness or to think about how it might be the case that the darkness holds a gift. The shadow of the other world in some mythologies is actually a portal into magic.

So this notion of magic and re-enchanting the world as I keep saying requires that mystery that's only afforded by darkness. So we have a scientific characterization, we have a psychophysiological characterization, we have a mythological characterization and an ecological. Those are four dimensions along which natural darkness is not just important but imperative. With its loss all of these areas of human well-being and more than human well-being are threatened on a very, very real level.

So something you said a moment ago really I feel it deeply and I feel like this is a good spot for us to find myself resonating a lot with Doug Rushkoff because I feel like he and I do something kind of similar on our shows which is we just come into these conversations with this sort of anxious, unresolved thing. We come in with a question that no matter how much we discuss we can't seem to like find a satisfying answer to it. And for me that question is about something you said a moment ago with respect no longer feeling like you can participate in the way that festival practice of festivals has been expropriated by a capitalist society and is creating all kinds of horrible externalities. And yet it's, you know, maybe that's something that you and I feel is especially acute given how much time we both used to spend in festival that's seen.

But it doesn't seem to me to be a difference of kind from any manner of participation in the systems that I characterized earlier in the conversation as kind of invasive or parasitic. This last question for you is kind of just like I'm not one of these people, I hope this is clear by now, I'm not one of these people that regards humankind as other than nature and thus can be, you know, I'm not like an anti-natalist that thinks that the world would be better off without. People, there's you and I've already made really clear that there's there are plenty of other ways of being human that are much healthier with respect to all these questions. But those ways are often very hard for those of us who were raised in the West who were not brought up within systems of traditional ecological knowledge who are dependent for our livelihoods on, you know, playing the game with, you know, like, like, I have friends in the south end of the state of New Mexico have been trying to convince me to come live on their commune.

And so much of it sounds so wonderful in my heart longs for a world in which, you know, child rearing, for instance, is again something that a village does rather than to isolated and overwork parents who have to depend on making so much of what used to be what used to happen naturally in human societies becomes transactional. You know, you're hiring house cleaning and babysitters. Part of that is that I'm assuming a deliberate burden because I don't want, I don't want my children growing up forming deeper emotional relationships with hired caregivers than they have with their own parents. And there's something really tragic about my friends who work in child care where I've seen that kind of thing happen.

And what am I really saying? I'm saying that I'm curious how you have managed to resolve or not resolve the inherent tensions of feeling the way that you do ethically, but also they're not being really an outside of these systems. And they're inherent structural injustices. There are small steps that we can make to exit them sort of, but I'm thinking of a really excellent conversation only to in the show notes between the room soup and her medics podcast hosts, where they were talking about the challenges of exiting here and how it gets back to you brought up Buddhist philosophy and there's that strain of historical development where you go from earlier articulations where there was more emphasis placed on this notion of being able to escape the wheel of samsara, you know, to like stop reincarnating.

And then later on, it's more about accepting the one taste of everything and seeing that samsara is not other than nirvana. And like, that's basically all I've got. That's like the lifeline that I'm holding on to. It ain't right, but maybe I'm a catfish that has to live in this shit and metabolize it.

And this notion of purity or the dream of some kind of escape from all of the horrors of modern civilization is actually doing us a disservice in some way. But not like, yay ho, saddle up and just embrace living in the belly of it. But anyway, that's my question to you. I want to explore how you've processed all this stuff intellectually emotionally.

Yeah, so first and foremost, I would like to say I owe a lot to festival culture, the transformational arts scene, so to speak. So my criticisms are not wholesale. There's so much beauty in those communities that has inspired me and continues to inspire me in my work. What I wish those communities and that all communities would emphasize is perhaps becoming a little bit more like trees in the following sense.

Trees grow very slowly and they conceive of change on a pretty massive time scale in comparison to how a single human lives his or her or their life. And so in this sense, I guess I don't expect these radical transformations to occur quickly. In fact, when we expect that a radical act ought to be quick, we're forgetting the etymology of the term radical in the first place, which really means to cast down roots, it's rootedness, right? And a rooted being, especially a tree, takes its time.

Likewise, I think in general, we ought to take our time. And that means really thoroughly considering all of our choices, which I know sounds like a huge burden, but this is where it begins. This is the practice of mindfulness. This is the teaching of the Buddha when we're told, for example, to chop wood and to carry water.

It's not glamorous and it's not swift. It is a slow and painstaking but beautiful process that connects us to the elements of the earth upon which we depend for our sustenance. So within the context, for example, of how I live my life very imperfectly because I'm not in the light and lightening being quite obviously, I hope, still quite judgmental in some ways. I'm sorry, festival community, but our clothing choices.

That's a simple way to start, right? Are we utilizing materials that are sustainable? Are they petroleum derived? Are they cotton, which is still pretty water intensive?

Are they hemp? Are they bamboo? Who made them? This takes a lot of work, but honestly, this is the chopping wood and the carrying of water that has to occur in order for our systems to change in a mass way.

We have to think about the food that we eat and where it comes from, how we transport ourselves, what our livelihoods are. Do they contribute to the upliftment of all sentient beings or even just Gaia? Maybe all sentient beings is too tall of an order if you believe as I do in astrobiological life, which we can say for a different conversation sometime. I love astrobiology.

But just Gaia itself are my actions contributing to the slow upliftment, minor though it may be, of the beings on this planet at this time. And so that takes a lot of work, but I guess as an individual, I'm not so dissuaded by the burden or the possibility of doing that work. I think it's in those small steps that I find my nourishment. So to speak, as you said, we find ourselves in the shit.

And as I've said multiple times throughout our conversation today, as a human, I also kind of conceive of myself as being kind of mushroom-like and kind of tree-like. These and mushrooms are interdependent beings who thrive on compost. They thrive on taking that, which was, that's no longer useful, the dead decaying matter of the forest, and transmuting it into life that can nourish through its oxygen-giving needles or through the sustenance that it provides to other beings in the forest. And so I just think it's in slowing down.

It's in taking seriously the mindfulness practice. It's in being considerate, considering each of our actions and how we relate to each other, striding as much as we can to live in integrity with our values. That's where the magic happens. For me, that's where the enchantment occurs.

So I don't expect these systems to collapse in my lifetime, but I also don't think they have to. Instead, we're learning how to transform the systems that are into co-creative processes that distribute that flourishing and that well-being throughout all of the Rolada with whom we come into contact. So for example, if I make a decision to save my money and to buy four outfits per year, which is honestly what I do, I don't buy a lot of clothing. But when I do buy clothing, I buy it from fair trade practitioners or artisans who are going to benefit.

You know, I love fashion. So I'm just going to use this and use this sort of transformational art scene as an example. There's a movement in the transformational art scene and amongst many individuals whom I know to work on only purchasing either secondhand or slow fashion that's made from sustainable materials. So that means we need to make peace with the fact that we're not going to look novel every day.

If I only purchase four fair trade clothing pieces per year, my wardrobe is going to be limited. But now my wardrobe is also imbued with sustainable fabrics that have directly contributed to the well-being of the artisans who produce them. That means that fashion becomes an expression of what? Living in right relationship with the people and the plans and the entities that are providing you with a literal cloth on your back.

Right? So we have to start thinking in that way. We have to slow down, become more comfortable with a minimal lifestyle. That might be a little bit less exciting to a certain extent, but it's more sustainable.

No one said sustainability was kind of like the way that capitalism is full of lights and glamour, right? It has a beauty to it, but it's a softer, slower beauty. And I hope that our culture learns to shift in that way on a mass scale to live in a way that's more reverential, that has more appreciation for all of the entities that contribute to our life. Does that kind of answer your question?

Yeah, I mean, it's precisely to what my buddy Ming-Gen Liu, who is a post-doc at SFI, who's biogenes of chemical cycling. And we had a conversation I'll send you because you being a mushroom person, obviously. I think you'll appreciate he said in this, and this again speaks to the point that I've touched on a couple of times in conversation about, they're not being a kind of Eden to which we can return, but that problems that we're having with pollution and so on are in a way just new folds on very old problems. And he gave the example of how a lot of the fossil fuels that we use today come from a time in the carboniferous period.

It's why it's called that. When early, early forests on the planet did not yet have micro-risile networks underground that were conveying nutrients in those systems. And so these trees were just dying and there were no fungi at the time, but there were none that had learned to digest the lignin in the wood of those trees. And so that layer of Earth prehistory is the deposit of all of the dead bodies of these trees that nothing had ever learned to decay.

That cycle had remained open. And so there's like, you can just imagine a forest in which logs fall and are never eaten. That was our world at one point. And so he felt very optimistic that everything that we are doing to pollute the planet now is basically just the catalyst for learning new ways to close manufacturing material and energetic loops in the biosphere.

And that there isn't a fixed essential status to pollution. That what is pollution is relative to the ability of beings to metabolize it. So even when people talk about all of the horrible things that are produced by the internet spam email, or for that matter even like a light pollution, I mean this is kind of, I'm not trying to end this conversation on a provocation. But I remember being not that far from where you live now on Mount Diablo out east of the bay.

A few years ago, I guess it's 2010, and my friend and I were taking psilocybin mushrooms up there. And she was standing over the hill and she was complaining about how she couldn't see the sky because of all the artificial light. And there's just a part of me that like, yes, we live in this world in which artificial light is a carcinogen and it's toxic to us. And yet there's a part of me that wants to remain open to the possibility that it is something that our guy in super organism or whatever that we are embedded in and participating in is doing on purpose.

Like what if light pollution is actually our planet communicating with other biospheres? This is just a crazy trip or rant here. But like this something about seeing the polluted world that we live in with a bit more sort of open-endedness or humility or beginners mind, that one both allows us to renegotiate our relationship to those things and find ways to thrive amidst them. But also, you know, Michael Crichton talked about in Sphere, how like if you were a bacterium that found its way into the fuel cell of a communication satellite, you would think that you're like dying from being poisoned by that fuel.

You might think, oh, this is a tragedy, or this is a weapon when really it's something else entirely. This is where I think that perspectivalism becomes so important, that notion that we can be pluralistic, right? Maybe there are many different ways of thinking about a common set of phenomena. And for the record, I'm not a romantic about the past.

I don't think that we should go back to some sort of pre-agricultural way of being as a species. I do, however, think that there are lessons from pre-agricultural history that we could integrate into the present moment so as to contribute to the flourishing of more species and of human beings in a more equitable way. And as a person, again, who's pretty motivated by Buddhism and equanimity, I think we should do that if we can do that. So, yeah, perhaps that's a perspective, but the perspective that I hold as an individual who's particularly concerned about forest biodiversity conservation and the justice of residential Indian and Native American populations is thinking about how these pollutants negatively affect all of those beings, and the relationships that in here between all of us.

Also selfishly, my access, like your friends, to visuals of the star unites' eye, and thus that ongoing sense of restoration and a sense of felt connectedness to our cosmos as a whole. So, in that sense, I think it's my job as an individual, a mushroom, tree, philosopher, and ecologist in some senses to hold the perspective of conservation. And, for example, one of the sort of proposals that I have in Indefence of Wild Night is not to get rid of nighttime lighting altogether, but to use it more strategically. So, for example, splash lighting that is motion-activated, utilizing low-pressure sodium bulbs, which don't have the same consequences that are detrimental on the human or the more than human body, in order to just partially illuminate buildings in a way that's aesthetic and beautiful, in a way that, for example, draws the eye to the heavens by using splash lighting at the base of buildings, so that in a spectral way, it tapers off into darkness, that's allowing the eyes to foveate up towards the stars.

So, how can we use light as an artistic project to illuminate our urban spaces in a way that's also artistically restorative, as well as ecologically restorative? I also have this really fantastic proposal that I'm super stoked about, which is the utilization of photo luminescent paints and bioluminescent fungi. In order to illuminate city scapes that are, for example, high in humidity, and I mean that very, very seriously. So, the species by Cina Chlorify, for example, is a bioluminescent fungal species, and they would grow fantastically in say Portland or Seattle.

China, there are so many regions in the world where it could find it's literal and figurative foothold along footpaths, and you might say to yourself, like, bioluminescent fungi, how the hell is that going to help me see in the dark? Well, there's a ton of data that has been, for example, codified and collected by Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life, the great mycologist whom I mentioned previously, who has basically shown that coal miners prior to the inception of photo luminescence like bulbs would actually navigate the coal mines effectively by utilizing bioluminescent fungi. They said that the fungi glowed so brightly that they could see their hands stretched out before them in the dark. So, there's a very real sense in which, though fantastical, these proposals have some really serious potential embedded in them.

And though I'm very obsessed with biodiversity conservation, I'm not opposed to technological advancement. As you mentioned, I don't think they're dualistically opposed. They're complementary, or they can be complementary, and we should utilize our technological advancements in a way that contributes, say, to conservation. So, I'm very, very enchanted by Dovian, I believe that's her name.

She is a lighting design engineer in the Netherlands, I believe I could be wrong. But she has created a sort of kinetic lighting sculpture that harnesses kinetic footfalls to disturb photo luminescent bacteria in a bowl to glow whenever the kinetic sculpture moves. So, there are all of these potentials for alternative lighting that will help us to navigate at night, that will actually be beautiful, right? That are interesting from an intellectual and artistic perspective, and that don't have the same negative consequences that high-pressure sodium bulbs do.

And by the way, all of this stuff is actually being tested in some regions of the US. So, for example, there are a few streets in San Jose, in Silicon Valley, near which I live, that use low-pressure yellow sodium bulbs instead of high-pressure white LEDs or bulbs. And the reason that they're doing that is because the city of San Jose has been collaborating with the Lick Observatory, a really wonderful astronomical observatory that is located on a mountain near Silicon Valley. And thus, they need darkness in order to be able to utilize their telescope effectively.

So, this stuff is happening on the ground, really all over the world. I was recently at a conference in March at Oxford University hosted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where I got to talk with a bunch of individuals from astronomy, engineering, urban planning, recreation, etc. that are all thinking about these issues very, very seriously, and they're implementing them on a policy level. So, many people, I think, are dreaming about this topic together at the moment, which is rather exciting to be able to participate in that conversation.

Awesome. So, before we close out, anything that we have not addressed in this, I feel like we've managed to take it pretty far in a lot of different directions, but nonetheless coheres. But are there any unasked questions or unspoken links out to anything that you want to make sure that you get on record before we part today? I mean, I think there are always going to be just so many unasked and unaddressed questions.

I would say, you know, people have been thinking about these topics for so long, especially theorists of color, philosophers of color, indigenous philosophers, and really, the most important sort of suggestion that I have, both for myself and for anyone who's thinking about this stuff seriously, is to have conversations with individuals who have different worldviews from you. I think, again, that pluralistic, multicultural perspective is imperative in order for us to move forward in these conversations in a way that's going to do the least harm on a practical level. And in order to have those conversations, we have to open ourselves up to some potentially very uncomfortable dialogues, because a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about today is the product of a very particular cultural inheritance, which, you know, many activists and philosophers have called colonialism. It stretches back farther than just British colonialism.

I think it has its roots in like Roman Imperial colonialism, but we don't have to talk about that right now. Anyhow, we just always have to remember that as theorists, philosophers, scholars, thinkers, whomever, we are always embedded within a context and it's important for us to think critically about that context and to diversify by talking to people who come from very different contexts. Great. Well, on that note, if you have people that you think ought to be on this show, then kindly let me know.

I find myself suffering from having less time to research guests than I would like, or that I used to have. And, you know, one of the kind of unfortunate side effects of that is feeling like there are so many amazing people that are working in these spaces from marginalized groups that, as a matter of respect, I don't feel like I should have on until I've managed to familiarize myself with the work. So it just keeps getting kicked on down the road. But maybe the way to reconcile that would be to find people like yourself who are more familiar with their work that I can invite back on as like co-hosts for conversations that you want to have with people that you feel deserve more attention.

So if you're ever up for that, I totally am. And I think it would be a whole lot of fun. And thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, I would love that because for me, it's just I'm a student of perspectives in general.

Most philosophers would not agree with what I'm about to say. So don't take this representative of the field as a whole, but for me, philosophy really is the project of learning how to understand a variety of perspectives in a way that's charitable, and then also learning how to articulate your own as though it's a participant in that conversation. So any conversational opportunity to talk to people who have a well-developed, interesting, different perspective is one that I'm super happy to take on. So yeah, I love that.

In other words. Awesome. Professor Dil. Or I guess I can call you that, right?

Yeah, that's what my students call me. Yeah, it's been awesome. Yeah, thank you so much. My life had such a good time and it's so good to talk about you.

Super great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, maybe one day we'll have a conversation about more like sort of Monday and street level stuff, but I always enjoy being able to just like blast into philosophical hyperspace with somebody and you're good for it.

So thanks. Yeah, me too. Thanks again for listening. Look at my bio on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook for links to all of the art, music and writing and other things I do.

Please rate and review future fossils on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Consider signing up for my sub-stack where I publish monthly digests of all of my new creative work so that you don't have to be on social media to appreciate it. And have a wonderful couple weeks before we're back with Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris. Thank you.

I love you. Goodbye.