eusuchia

[eusuchia]

That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

[eusuchia]

summer is coming up lads..

#sorry to many generations of family I wasn't built for southern china I was born to summers of 0% humidity 100% wildfire smog

[eusuchia]

was having one of those frenetic between-alarm-snoozes dreams where everything is happening really fast and it's mixed with semi lucid 'what do i need to do today' thoughts and part of the nonsense was someone ordered mcdonald's and for some reason that was what snapped me out of it. I was like girl the boycott!! and woke up seconds before my alarm went off again

[eusuchia]

No see results option, I'm forcing you to perceive yourself. rb for more results plus

#irl for sure. you can see my tattoos there #here you can see me talking about men from shows I don't even like

[eusuchia]

I AM going to use the expensive fancy paper for my silly little diy redecorating projects. I am not going to keep it in the closet for a 'special occasion'. I am going to use it so I can look at it and think wow that's nice paper

[eusuchia]

Pet commissions are OPEN!

They’re $80/each or $110 for two, DM or email for more info. I wanna draw your fuzzy, feathery, scaly, or slimy friends!

As always, I deeply appreciate any support and signal boosting. Being an artist has always been tough, but AI sure is making it tougher, things are getting a bit scary. Please support real human artists when you can. Keep creating, everyone <3

#art

[eusuchia]

we got a little dvd/cd player so we could listen to CDs on the good speakers (through the receiver) and unfortunately deep in my heart I understand those completely insufferable audiophile guys because this sounds so much better than laptop speakers or even decent headphones its not even funny. the fucking soundscape, man

#of course I am listening to all thr Bad Music of last time I regularly bought CDs (~2006-09) #like damn. disturbed has BAD lyrics. but they sound great

[eusuchia]

2hr stencil, 2hr tattoo 🫡

#just the outlines. shading next time. my hand hurt #photolog

[eusuchia]

A Multicolored Library of the World’s Ochre Pigments Archived by Heidi Gustafson

#I love ochre #scenes

[eusuchia]

People often react to the phrase "carbon footprint" with something about how it's coined by the fossil fuel industry to direct blame from producers to consumers, but I think there's still something extremely valuable about looking at emissions per capita -

graph one: total CO2 emissions, NOT per capita, by region. By 2020, China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia are the largest players, with the entire rest of the world barely surpassing China's emissions.

Graph two: The same regions but weighted per capita.

The US is unique in being extremely emissions-intense per capita while also being large and wealthy. This graph doesn't count emissions generated in China to produce goods shipped to America - it counts those under China's emissions.

#I also feel like. despite various issues with quantifying 'personal' CO2 emission measurements (rather than industrial) #comparing that in china vs NAm is also enlightening

[eusuchia]

mbti is such a nothing burger even leaving aside the racism of the guy who created it and the insidious issues of the attempt at cataloguing human behavioural 'types'. I discovered this early on by scoring basically 50/50 on all metrics the first time I took the mbti in high school and each subsequent time I was made to do it. net zero information

#I think I have kind of a built in disdain for categorization which is weird as someone who wanted to study evolution #those guys do nothing but taxonomize. idk. #nice dichotomy idiot. what lies outside it

[eusuchia]

thots on astrology? related, thoughts on mbti?

k i like that you guys just pop in my inbox from time to time and invite me to run my mouth about topics and concepts. like truly what else is this website for.

anyway astrology (& sorry, most of what i know here pertains specifically to europe in the middle ages onward) is genuinely such a bizarro historical case of a science whose core epistemological presupposition (a geocentrist and specifically anthropocentrist cosmology) has completely fallen out of favour in both popular and professional discourse, and i don't think most people appreciate how weird it is for astrology to continue existing with this degree of popular and mainstream participation lol. like most fringe science actually bothers to have some semblence of its own reactionary epistemology to fall back on; astrology just doesn't seem to care. it would be like if the medical guilds fully endorsed the position that blood is circulated in the human body by the heart, but then also recommended as treatments for clotting disorders medical practices that only make sense on the supposition that the liver is the origin of all blood and is continuously creating more of it. like no other science that i can think of tries to have it both ways to the extent astrology does. like, one reason phrenology and eugenics are bad comparison points here is because they're very much copacetic with post-enlightenment naturalism and evolutionary transpositions in the social sciences. astrology, like, intellectually is not and yet here it is anyway. ideology innit.

anyhow i assume the reason you asked about this in conjunction with mbti is because today's astrology is largely purporting to provide psychological analysis and is therefore more similar to a system like mbti than to the historical use of star-reading as a predictive science. obviously both astrology and mbti are deeply reactionary in this respect and belong to a larger trend toward attempting to categorise, measure, and taxonomise the psyche, tho an important difference here is that mbti has hereditarian elements, which no form of astrology that i know of does. i think astrology's shift in the personal-psychological direction has to do with a few different factors, including medical astrological practice (orthodox in the european middle ages, then varying degrees of heterodox from the early modern period onward) and self-help movements in the 20th century.

but in any case it, mbti, and similar attempts at psychometry are, like, staggeringly essentialist in conception and practice, and i do think their current popularity reflects some deeply reactionary tendencies amongst people who often (not always) consider themselves otherwise progressive or leftist. it's honestly kind of worrisome how many people will jump on a project that explicitly aims to define static and immutable human 'types' as long as it's dressed in quasi-spiritual or psy-scientific terminology. like i do think we all need to pause and think about the ideological ends and consequences of how we talk about each other and our bodies, minds, and birth circumstances 😵‍💫

[eusuchia]

Thank you for answering my moving to alberta ask!! obligatory follow up question: 👁 erm. what's wrong with calgary

more oil money, more conservative, WAY more white people into the whole cowboy thing, just more 'alberta' in the way people expect. vibes are bad. cost too much money. suburban sprawl is genuinely nightmarish (it is in edmonton too but you can see a lot more of it in calgary because of the rolling hills). it's probably not actually that bad but I'm culturally conditioned to hate calgary and I do lol.

[eusuchia]

mosaic on a former carpet factory (1978) by s. lewkowicz kowary, poland

#scenes

[eusuchia]

‘Wild Concrete #58’ Hong Kong, 2013. Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze. Chromogenic print. (however long I’ve been posting here, that’s how long every spell checker says ‘chromogenic’ is either not a real word or it’s spelled incorrectly).

#scenes

[eusuchia]

a study on american fields

Large format 4x5 color film

#scenes

[eusuchia]

rate my rig: doing whatever to avoid paying $35 shipping on a $50 rug

#I just get excited whenever I get to use the voile straps #the uh. noose. is just a bag strap with lobster clasps. clipped into itself to make a big loop. and then around one arm and my neck #photolog