Bacteria, fungus, whale, sequoia - we do not know any life of which we cannot say that it emits information, receives it, stores it and processes it. For universal rules so incontrovertible that, by them, we are tempted to define life but we are unable to do so, because of the following countexamples. Crystal and indeed rock, sea, planet, star, galaxy–we know no inert thing of which we cannot say that it emits, receives, stores and processes information. Four universal rules, so uniform that we are tempted to define anything in the world by them but are unable to do so because of the following counterexamples. Individuals but also families, farms, villages, cities and nations–we do not know any human, alone or in groups, of whom we cannot say that they emit, receive, store and process information.
Michel Serres, Information and Thinking, 2017 # 10
Rocks, cities and mushrooms - Information flows
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- But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, wh …
What if we acknowledge our relations with every entity
Seeing connections where we don’t suspect them through the description of mimetic forms of practices reveals the transversal entanglement between different forms of matter and beings.
The question is, what do we do with such analogies between mushrooms, cities and people? Shall we try to acquire the capacity to understand the information sent by funghi or cities? So how can we learn to listen to them?
of our Imagination
