Daydreaming

Your browser lacks required capabilities. Please upgrade it or switch to another to continue.

Loading…

The weather is nice today. Not too hot, not too chilly. The air has that chill, but the bright sun more than makes up for it. It'll be a nice drive. I get in the car, and make myself comfortable. It's been a while since I've driven a car. The engine chirps to life, eager and ready for further instructions. Or so I imagine. I'm starting to see things in a different light lately. I'm actively trying to understand objects. I reverse out, and pull out on to the road. A prod of the throttle gets me going. Again, I could feel the car expressing emotion, a happy emotion. The first corner approaches, and I tap the brakes. The pads are cold, and the braking action is abrupt. I sense disappointment from the car. Turn the steering wheel, let the car rotate, and get on the throttle far earlier than I should. The steering briefly goes taught as torque steer protests, and the engine heads to the redline, eager to impress. It feels playful today. Very well. [[Indulge|P-1.A]] [[Take it easy|P-1.B]]

I trust what I feel, and indulge the car. I've felt objects talk and communicate ever since I was young, but I'd attribute it to a mild form of early onset madness. I thought it was funny, but in the context of the last decade, perhaps I'm onto something. How hard would it be to get funding for my research? Enough daydreaming for today, back to the task at hand. As the car warms up, the brakes and tyres come up to temperature and I sense a steady stream of information. I enter a flow-like state, fully concentrating on this communication between the car and I. I know exactly when to brake, how much power to apply, and how much steering lock to apply in the corners. It's wonderful. I'm very close to my destination now. I'm in the Aravalis, threading through the narrow roads on the hills, looking for my spot. I've been spending time at the edge of mixed vegetation cluster, with the intentions of understanding my surroundings. [[I find my cluster and park up.|P-2]]

I trust what I feel, but I decide to take it easy. I have enough to think about. I've felt objects talk and communicate ever since I was young, but I'd attribute it to a mild form of early onset madness. I thought it was funny, but in the context of the last decade, perhaps I'm onto something. How hard would it be to get funding for my research? Enough daydreaming for today, back to the task at hand. I'm very close to my destination now. I'm in the Aravalis, threading through the narrow roads on the hills, looking for my spot. I've been spending time at the edge of mixed vegetation cluster, with the intentions of understanding my surroundings. [[I find my cluster and park up.|P-2]]

I park up at edge of the road, pick up my bag and approach the cluster. I've created a small camp for myself in a small clearing in the middle of a few silver-oak trees. Grevillea robusta, as they're known. No relation to the coffee, but the trees do enjoy some from time to time. I find this wordplay very funny. <<linkreplace "It's just me isn't it?" t8n>>\ Sigh. Maybe the delivery isn't right? I should mull this over. I should ask some silver-oaks for advice, they do seem to be love a good joke. The wild wheat plants in the cluster have a particularly dark sense of humour. Once I'm done setting up in my little clearing, I look for the NeuraLink within the dried leaves. I connect my laptop and wait for my presence to be acknowledged. It takes 10 mins, sometimes an hour for the cluster to recognise me. We're still not sure how they can differentiate between people and animals, but we believe its something to do with a combination of sound, smell, and acidity. This might take a while, I might as well lie down and relax. The grass is still damp from the dew in the shade of the tree, but crisp in the sunlight. The smells remind me of my childhood, spending hours running around in the park. [[What's a NeuralLink?|P-3]] <</linkreplace>>\

Good question. I don't know either, but I know what it does. It's a small credit card sized piece of electronic circuitry which when spliced into the roots of a plant, tree, or fungi, reads many kinds of communication taking place within the floral network. It's one of the few commercially available devices for researchers and artists to use. I don't know how it works, but it can read electrical impulses, detect vibrations, and track transfer of nutrients. In short, it allows humans to view the activity taking place within a cluster of plants, trees and fungi. What does it tell us? Nothing useful if I'm honest. [[Why use it then?|P-4]]

I'm not sure. I really don't understand how many things work if I'm honest, but it's just convenient to believe in a few things and just go with it. Let's be real, we really don't understand how anything works. We're all trying to figure it out right? Science will always be wrong and right at the same time. When it's proven to be wrong, you best be paying attention, because that's when it gets interesting. It's a slippery slope when you really start thinking about it. Why do we exist? <<linkreplace "Huh?" t8n>>\ Stay with me for a minute. Life started on this planet-somehow-and it's been evolving and changing and existing ever since. The definition of life itself is strange, but we'll get to that later. So somewhere in the short history of this planet, humans started existing. It wasn't an easy life, but we made the best of it. It was rather difficult to survive, but we did it. At some point in our history, survival ceased to be an issue. We had won the game of life so to speak. We were in control of our own destiny and the natural order could do little to stop us. <<linkreplace "Right..." t8n>>\ And now, we're effectively in charge of the future of this planet. There are no natural threats. We've completed natural selection, what comes next? Do we go to another planet and start again? Are we to completely cut ourselves off from non-human entities for some kind of strange lonely existence? Look for aliens? Are we as a species, just bored? [[Wait. The NeuralLink. What does it do?|P-5]] <</linkreplace>>\ <</linkreplace>>\

Right. Yes. Sorry, as I said, it's such a slippery slope to become philosophical about this. <<linkreplace "Philosophy doesn't pay the bills." t8n>>\ Good point. At least not yet, we'll get there one day. So the NeuralLink helps us see the network that connects so many natural entities together. We can see how trees and plants speak to each other and interact with their surroundings. We see matter being transformed into energy and energy being transformed into matter. It's beautiful. <<linkreplace "Nice." t8n>>\ Oh, it's a lot more than nice. Now it's important to remember that us humans function at a different temporality to other beings. Sloths for example, can take up to a month to digest a single meal. Time works very differently outside a human purview. Sometimes it can take upto a few months, or even a year to truly understand the communication networks in a cluster. [[Didn't we already know this?|P-6]] <</linkreplace>>\ <</linkreplace>>\

Kind of, yes. The research around this has only recently started to pick up. We're only on the very brink of understanding what this really means. There's this quote by one of the researchers which sums it up very well–"We've been living amongst aliens since the beginning of our existence." The human race has been doing it's thing, stumbling through industrial revolutions, and making a mess of everything we touch, all while being completely oblivious of the machinations of a far more...god-like? I think that's about accurate, a god-like system which has been working away. <<linkreplace "God-like. Really now." t8n>>\ Sure, in a way. This system, if I can call it that, comprises a large part of about 90% of all living entities on the planet. We're only 0.01%. It has different goals to ours, and a completely different kind of intelligence. You know we've been developing "AI" and other kinds of machine intelligence? Those are simply trying to replicate human models of intelligence. There's many kinds of intelligences, most of which we're not even aware of. We thought we were the masters of this planet, turns out we're the fools. [[The fools?|P-7]] <</linkreplace>>\

You know how there once existed communities with close ties to nature? Indigeneous communities around the world were ridiculed for their culture, their customs and their beliefs. They knew something the rest of the world, with their machines did not. To live on this planet, we need to co-exist with others who also happen to live here. We were to be a cog in the machine, instead we went and built our own machine, competing with the very system which invested in our survival. <<linkreplace "Philosophy alert." t8n>>\ Oh yes sorry, I slipped again. The enormity of what we have yet to discover does tend to make on quite philosophical. I'm trying to make sense of all this, but I'm still not there yet. [[NeuralLink Alert|P-8]] <</linkreplace>>\

The NeuralLink beeped softly with a negative chirp. Not good. I've been coming here nearly everyday for the past month or so, trying to integrate myself within the cluster. I need more time before the cluster is comfortable with my presence. The NeuralLink won't work unless the host is willing to accept my physical presence. This was bound to happen. I'm 50km away from where I live, and I probably have a different sensorial pattern as compared to entities in this area. A city dweller like me probably feels alien to a tree living deep in the country. It took me weeks to even successfully splice the NeuralLink into the root. That's okay though. It's a different temporality which I need to adapt to. I've been spoilt by instantaneous responses–which really isn't healthy at all. Contemporary computing and social networks haven't been good for my mental health and there's been a real changes since I've quit. Somehow I'm not surprised that technologies and platforms built solely for economic profit are unhealthy for their users. I much prefer values associated with this new era of non-human intelligence. To engage with this intelligence we play by their rules–slowness, care, reciprocation, balanced power relations, focus on local, and widespread connectivity. [[Is it worth it?|P-9]]

Absolutely. We can work with the planet and it's entities to help fix the mess we've created. Once we're able to communicate with this intelligence, we can co-creatively build solutions to breaking down non-biodegradable materials such as plastic, help fix air and water pollution, regain food nutrition, grow sustainable materials, and so much more. We will have to unlearn the last few centuries to reap the benefits of this new era. <<linkreplace "Like solarpunk?" t8n>>\ Yeah, something like solarpunk, but with the primary intent of communicating and working other entities on our planet. For starters, we'll soon be able to read data trapped in historical sources such as rocks and geological structures, create bespoke materials for a variety of purposes, figure out sustainable and cheap food production. <<linkreplace "How?" t8n>>\ Well, the first stage of this process already started when we first started farming crops. The 'domestication' of plants implies a mutual transactional relationship wherein we keep the plants fed with nutrients, and subsequently took advantage of the produce. Most interactions have been transactional so far, but moving forward the intent is to work with, and facilitate future innovations together. [[Intent is an interesting word.|P-10]] <</linkreplace>>\ <</linkreplace>>\

It certainly is. Us humans have a particularly shifty definition of the word, and it is something we will have to work in order to have a successful working relationship. Intent is a key aspect of this relationship, and is a critical building block of the trust between natural entities and us. Also–we will most certainly struggle with viewing situations through a non-human perspective and to work collaboratively for the greater good. The capitalocene has convinced a large majority that individualism is key to success. As a species, we're probably not using the potential our collective intelligence carries simply due to the fact that our metric systems are skewed toward producing economic value. The goal is economic wealth, vast sums of it–and not growing together. Sometimes, I feel like we're limited by the mental models and structures we've created for ourselves. We still need to answer questions we've been avoiding. Do we exist solely to survive? Make money? Be happy? Are the answers to this question invisible to a human lens? I believe so. After all, anything we create is defined by the goals we set.