# Hyperobjects >[!info]- metadata >*`= this.tags`* >- Online Rating - `=this.onlineRating` | My Rating- `=this.personalRating` >- Status - `=this.status` >- Progress - `=this.currentPage` of `=this.pages`  ## Summary `=this.description` ## My Thoughts >[!quote]+ My Review >`= this.review` ### Highlights - Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it's exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. - [[Hyperobjects (2013)]], Page 112 * **Notes:** * Understanding objects within the context of hyperobjects, introducing "object oriented ontology" -> [[object-oriented systems]]ms]] * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^niP7tFP35|Monet had started painting water lilies; or rather, he had started to pain the space in which water lilies float; or rather, he had started to pain the rippling, reflective object in which the lilies float—the water. * Intentional objects: the Kantian gap between phenomenon and thing * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^yDTHIUUaR|Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your head—but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. [[DirectQuote]]]] * On the fallacy of anthropocentric thinking and finding our place in the world. * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^MTswQtd1l|What does this mean to nascent ecological awareness? It means that humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old model of the __dis-astron__, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps __it might already have taken place__. [[DirectQuote]]]] * The truth of Copernicanism: there is no center and we don't inhabit it. But there's more: there is no edge! We can't jump out of the universe. * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^3T2JAp9Sw|Synthetic judgments a priori are made inside an object, not in some transcendental sphere of pure freedom." [[DirectQuote]]]] * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^6vFWaXnFS|Hyperobjects provoke *irreductionist* thinking, that is, they present us with scalar dilemmas in which ontotheological statements about which thing is the most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or conversely, individual) become impossible. [[DirectQuote]]]] * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^J2kshkPUD|All humans, I shall argue, are now aware that they have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space. [[DirectQuote]]]] * Unpacking what interobjectivity in relation to interpersonal relationships. * Preface by saying I don't actually know that I fully grasp the concept of Interobjectivity intellectually, but I think I understand it intuitively. It's the sense that everything is "turtles all the way down," in some sense. Keep scaling up within the context of [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Idea // object-oriented ontology|Idea // object-oriented ontology]] and everything is a system of a system. * ((-j3564Car)) * The discussion of gaps and absences -> causality is a blind spot for me. There's an underpinning of philosophical rigor here that I'm missing to be able to ground this argument. There's a binary element here with respect to *objects* and *subjects* which I'm assuming relates to that which is observed and that which is doing the observing. * I think one thing this dual element might suggest is the fallacy of anthropomorphizing *consciousness*, in that if [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Idea // object-oriented ontology|Idea // object-oriented ontology]] is defined by interobjective interactions, the *subject* and *objects* have to, by definition, exist in the same system. To say that there is no "vantage point" to separate the observer from that which it observes. That's the idea of the hyperobject—we're a part of it even as we try to perceive it. It's all enmeshed. * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^nyqoXHmLB|On the view I expound here, by contrast, what is called __subject__ and what is called __mind__ are just interobjective effects, emergent properties of relationships between enmeshed objects. [[DirectQuote]]]] * Some interesting thoughts on personhood re: connectionist thinking. Consider the idea of the Turing test. If the observer reckons that the answers [to some questions posed by the observer in isolation] come from a person, then they come from a person. * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^Z0JuQP3t9|Such a form of personhood is quite attenuated: it means that in effect, __I am not a nonperson,__ since no distinction can be made between the answers biven by a machine and answers given by a person. Personhood then is an effect in the mesh—it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we find that it is full of holes. [...] Put another way, exactly where does consciousness begin to emerge from nonconsciousness? [[DirectQuote]]]] * The idea of the mesh calls to my mind some loose association with quantum physics—a thing both is and isn't at the same time, the observation being the critical element of the definition. (Is this what is meant by "aesthetic" in classical philosophy?) The other practical implication of this model is that * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^ryVNPKLwi|What is called __consciousness__ is an aesthetic effect: it is consciousness-for. Yet this does not make it unreal. When I walk gingerly over some sharp rocks, what looks like intelligence to a passing balloonist with a pair of binoculars might simply be my trying not to fall. The same applies to an ant walking over a scattering of sand grains. Intelligence need not be thought of as having a picture of reality in the mind, but as an interaction between all kinds of entities that is somewhat "in the eye of the beholder"—including, of course, myself, who feels quite clever stumbling over the glacier until my reflection causes me to topple sideways into the freezing water. [[DirectQuote]]]] * The suggestion that everything is part of *the mesh* also suggests that the reality we prescribe by way of *consciousness* can't be disentangled from hyperobjects. Which is to say, we are observing (thinking?) into existence our reality as constrained by hyperobjects. * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^VMmI8XZVA|Now since hyperobjects are by definition the largest, longest-lasting objects we know; and since they strafe and penetrate the physical body at every available opportunity, like some demonic version of the Force; is it not highly likely that the way our minds are is to some extent, perhaps a large extent, influenced by hyperobjects? So that when we think the hyperobject, we are in some sense thinking the conditions of possibility for the human mind? [[DirectQuote]]]] * [[Roam Archive/damrunner/Book // Hyperobjects#^FhaNG5U5Z|My thinking is thus a mental translation of the hyperobject—of climate, biosphere, evolution—not just figuratively, but literally. [[DirectQuote]]]] * ["] The dinosaur leaves a footprint in some mud. The footprint is not the dinosaur. ^dino * This idea pinged something near and dear to me. The idea of a "shared sensual space" that exists on vastly differing timescales. It's the essence of what I personally seek out when I feel the need to "ground myself" by going to nature. What I've previously articulated as "feeling small," "gaining perspective," or "connecting with something bigger" is in fact this same idea of a sensual space. * Hyperobjects provide great examples of interobjectivity—namely, the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space. * Interobjectivity goes a long way to describe what it means to "be" in the present. Our reality is increasingly defined by second-order translations (think, curated profiles (I.e.,*subjects*) as observed by people (I.e.,*minds*). We *are*, to the observer, the footprint we leave in the mud. But we *are not* the footprint. There is a shared sensuous connection that is interobjective (oneself, the profile, the devices, the media, the observer) but *we* are withdrawn from it. * ["] The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot-shaped hole in a rock by humans sixty-five million years later. There is some sensuous connection, then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing timescales. Now, when we return in our mind's eye to the time of the dinosaur herself, we discover something very strange. All we find there is another region of interobjective space in which impressions of the dinosaur are transmitted—tooth marks in some hapless prey, the frozen stare of the dinosaur as she looks at her next victim, the smooth scaly feel of her skin. The dinosaur leaves a footprint in some mud. The footprint is not the dinosaur. * **Highlights:** * Intro * A Quake in Being * Asleep at the switch, philosophy has allowed the default ontology to persist: there are things, which are basically featureless lumps and these things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles. * Monet had started painting water lilies; or rather, he had started to pain the space in which water lilies float; or rather, he had started to pain the rippling, reflective object in which the lilies float—the water. ^niP7tFP35 * Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your head—but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. [[DirectQuote]] ^yDTHIUUaR * What does this mean to nascent ecological awareness? It means that humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old model of the *dis-astron*, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps *it might already have taken place*. [[DirectQuote]] * Synthetic judgments a priori are made inside an object, not in some transcendental sphere of pure freedom." [[DirectQuote]] ^3T2JAp9Sw * ["] Hyperobjects provoke *irreductionist* thinking, that is, they present us with scalar dilemmas in which ontotheological statements about which thing is the most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or conversely, individual) become impossible. - [[Hyperobjects (2013)]], Part I, Page 19 ^4060c9 * All humans, I shall argue, are now aware that they have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space. [[DirectQuote]] ^J2kshkPUD * Part 1: What are Hyperobjects? * Viscosity * For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called *Away*, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility. [[DirectQuote]] * Interobjectivity * "The wiring in my house is an interobjective system. Objects such as light bulbs, a microwave oven, wire, fuses, three computers, solar panels, and plugs are distributed evenly so that energy flows among them as evenly as possible. [...] Likewise, the houses in my street form an interobjective system with the street itself and vehicles, stray dogs, and bouncing basketballs. We may scale up like this as far as we like. We will find that all entities whatsoever are interconnected in an interobjective system that elsewhere I call *the mesh.* [[DirectQuote]] * On the view I expound here, by contrast, what is called *subject* and what is called *mind* are just interobjective effects, emergent properties of relationships between enmeshed objects. [[DirectQuote]] * Such a form of personhood is quite attenuated: it means that in effect, *I am not a nonperson,* since no distinction can be made between the answers biven by a machine and answers given by a person. Personhood then is an effect in the mesh—it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we find that it is full of holes. [...] Put another way, exactly where does consciousness begin to emerge from nonconsciousness? [[DirectQuote]] * What is called *consciousness* is an aesthetic effect: it is consciousness-for. Yet this does not make it unreal. When I walk gingerly over some sharp rocks, what looks like intelligence to a passing balloonist with a pair of binoculars might simply be my trying not to fall. The same applies to an ant walking over a scattering of sand grains. Intelligence need not be thought of as having a picture of reality in the mind, but as an interaction between all kinds of entities that is somewhat "in the eye of the beholder"—including, of course, myself, who feels quite clever stumbling over the glacier until my reflection causes me to topple sideways into the freezing water. [[DirectQuote]] * Now since hyperobjects are by definition the largest, longest-lasting objects we know; and since they strafe and penetrate the physical body at every available opportunity, like some demonic version of the Force; is it not highly likely that the way our minds are is to some extent, perhaps a large extent, influenced by hyperobjects? So that when we think the hyperobject, we are in some sense thinking the conditions of possibility for the human mind? [[DirectQuote]] ^VMmI8XZVA * My thinking is thus a mental translation of the hyperobject—of climate, biosphere, evolution—not just figuratively, but literally. [[DirectQuote]] ^FhaNG5U5Z * Research speculative realist philosophy a la Iain Hamilton Grant. [[question template]]bjects provide great examples of interobjectivity—namely, the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space. [[DirectQuote]] ^GkblwLJoE * The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot-shaped hole in a rock by humans sixty-five million years later. There is some sensuous connection, then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing timescales. Now, when we return in our mind's eye to the time of the dinosaur herself, we discover something very strange. All we find there is another region of interobjective space in which impressions of the dinosaur are transmitted—tooth marks in some hapless prey, the frozen stare of the dinosaur as she looks at her next victim, the smooth scaly feel of her skin. The dinosaur leaves a footprint in some mud. The footprint is not the dinosaur. ^IAUg7f1PH * Causality and the aesthetic, the realm of signs and significance and sensation, are one and the same. [[DirectQuote]] * From this we can draw a conclusion that startlingly strikes against the metaphysics of presence (the idea that time is a succession of now points, that *being present* is being real, and so on). Instead, we discover that the "present moment" is a shifting, ambiguous stage set, like the beach washed by the tide and imprinted by the footsteps of Astraea. The appearance of things, the indexical signs on the seashore, is the *past* of a hyperobject. What we commonly take to lie underneath a present thing, its past state, is it's appearance-for some entity (a rain gauge, a sensor, a philosopher). Its causal traces float in front of it, in the realm of appearance, the aesthetic dimension. [[DirectQuote]] * Writing about music really is like danching about architecture. [[DirectQuote]] * What does this mean? Dig a little deeper here, the turn of phrase is...pleas[[question template]]uestions]][[question template]] *Essence is the future.* The strange strangeness of a hyperobject, its invisibility —it's the future, somehow beamed into the "present." [[DirectQuote]] * The future future lies ontologically "underneath" the past! Any local manifestation of an attractor is simply an old photograph, an appearance-for that exists in an interobjective space. [[DirectQuote]] * The overbearing metaphysics of presence inscribed into every timekeeping device (especially the digital ones) is, I suppose (without much evidence), responsible in some measure for the psychic distress of modern humans. There is a very simple explanation for this distress: there is no present, yet the clock screams that you must change your focus *now* and have that meeting, pull that face on the chat show, sign the divorce paper, buy the product. [[DirectQuote]] * Nonhuman sentient beings are admired (or pitied) for living in this "now." In admiring (or pitying) them thus, we only see them as instruments of our technological era, extensions of the ticking clocks of metaphysical presence. [[DirectQuote]] * The present does not truly exist. We experience a crisscrossing set of force fields, the aesthetic-causal fields emanated by a host of objects. [[DirectQuote]] [[Claim]] ^6ZLj0HWdU * Part 2: The Time of Hyperobjects * The End of the World * You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger. The presence of global warming looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps. [[DirectQuote]] * Environmentalism seems to be talking about something that can't be seen or touched. So in turn environmentalism ups the ante and preaches the coming apocalypse. [[DirectQuote]] * In a word, the notion that we are living "in" a world—one that we can call Nature—no longer applies in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of please and petitions. [[DirectQuote]] * For Aristotle, a realist, there are *substances* that happen to have various qualities or *accidents* that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. [[DirectQuote]] * "Suppose, for instance, that in the season of the Cynosure [the Dog Days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heatwave, we would not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case. * But these sorts of violent changes are exactly what global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a potential symptom of a substance, global warming. All of a sudden this wet stuff falling on my head is a mere feature of some much more sinister phenomenon that I can't see with my naked human eyes. [[DirectQuote]] * There is an even spookier problem arising from Aristotle's arctic summer idea. If those arctic summers continue, and if we can model them as symptoms of global warming, then there *never was* a genuine, meaningful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering summer that seemed real because it kept on repeating for, say, two or three millennia. * We took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more withdrawn—climate. * The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it's already here. * The more we know, the harder it is to make a one-sided decisions about anything. As we enter the time of hyperobjects, Nature disappears and all the modern certainties that seemed to accompany it. What remains is a vastly more complex situation that is uncanny and intimate at the same time. - [[Hyperobjects (2013)]], Page 130 ^2174cc - All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the "end of the world" are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space. ^957b6a * The idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, tucked up like little hobbits into the safety of our burrow, has ben exposed as a fiction. [[DirectQuote]] * There is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction. * We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery have dissolved. [[DirectQuote]] * The idea of *world* depends on all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridculous meaninglessness. [[DirectQuote]] * This is a strong argument for power and silliness of that special intangibility, I.e., "brand" or "vibes." * The aesthetics of Nature truly impedes ecology, and a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature. [[DirectQuote]] * *Ideology* is not just in your head. It's in the shape of a Coke bottle. It's in the way some things appear "natural"—rolling hills and greenery—as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred, and more over, as if agriculture was Nature. [[DirectQuote]] * ["] The reason not to interfere with the environment because it's interfering with someone's or something's world is nowhere near a good enough reason. * This is a huge point that speaks to exceptionalism and collective action. You could abstract it to say that protecting one's personal experience is nowhere near a good enough reason to not do what is best, and required. * What is left if we aren't the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul—the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Three cheers for the so-called *end of the world* then, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for them alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and non-humans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of *world.* * Instead of trying constantly to tweak an illusion, thinking and art and political practices should simply relate directly to nonhumans. * Such architecture and design is predicated on the notion of "away." But there is no "away" after the end of the world. It would make more sense to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited. * Okay, but to what end? * Whatever exists prior to the specific labor process is a lump that only achieves definition as valuable product once the labor has been exerted on it. * Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either its exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever it is, it's basically featureless, abstract, grey. * Giant parking lots empty of cars, huge tables in restaurants across which you can't hold hands, vast empty lawns. Nature is stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. Rocky Flats nuclear bomb trigger factory was sited precisely to evoke this mountainous stockpile. [...] Nature is a stockpile of stockpiles. * Objects compose an untotalizable nonwhole set that defies holism and reductionism. There is thus no top object that gives all objects value and meaning, and no bottom object to which they can be reduced. If there is no top object and no bottom object, it means that we have a very strange situation in which there are more parts than there are wholes. * "Home" is purely "sensual": it has to do with how an object finds itself inevitably on the indside of some other object. * Infinite granularity? * A sensual object is an appearance-for another object. * Some very importatnt entities that environmentalism thinks of as real, such as* Nature*, are also sensual objects. They appear "as" what they are *for an experiencer or user or apprehender*. * Reification: the act of treating an abstract object (idea, relation, system) as if it were concrete. * Phenomenology & ontology intersecting here. * In OOO-ese, *reification is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance-for another object*. Reification is the reduction of one entity to another's *fantasy* about it. * Seen from a suitably high dimension, a process just is a static object. * Nuclear Guardianship sees nuclear materials as a unit: a hyperobject. This vision summons into human fields of thinking and action something that is already there. The summoning is to nuclear materials to join humans in social space, rather than remain on the outside. * There's something about [[WhereHouse]] here. This idea that the big, generational challenges we face are already here, and community data is a way to give them shape, invite them back into the social space, and make them tractable in that sense.