Having worked on biosemiotics for 10 years since earning my PhD in environmental philosophy on interspecies communication and ethics, I’ve found increasingly fascinating the various traps of thinking and premature conclusions awaiting the intrepid explorer of consciousness, reality, and the self.
This conversation traversed various levels of metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, ethics, political theory, and policy. It became a poetic invitation to remember that nature is alive with meaning—because neither we (nor anything we could create) could violate the principles of affordances: We are because the world is. Without the semiotic scaffolding provided to us by the good graces of our planet’s unique laws and structures (biology, ecology, etc), and those of our universe’s chemistry and physics, there would be no self to speak of.
When we realize the various ways in which our thoughts, emotions, bodies, and actions are deeply, fractally, ineluctably not our own, then the questions revolving around responsibility become complex. Rather than going away, our awareness and gentleness is called upon even more deeply.
By listening more acutely, feeling more fully, and embracing our place in the web of life, we might just rediscover the ways in which the more-than-human world – both skin-out and skin-in – speaks to us.
