User:RD/9k/How Forests Think (Q618)
Main entries
- How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013)
- How Forests Think (2013, edition) -> University of California Press
Motifs or claims
- it is hard to speak of what it was, dense and difficult / forest dense and powerful [?] -> apparent purpose of the text: to take the indescribable awe of South American forests and make them describable
- Jaguars identify thinking people / Jaguars understand a distinction between living minds and inanimate objects; this is to vaguely imply that predatory animals practice respect or empathy for thinking Subjects of other species -> within the first few sentences of the book, you can see the final conclusion being carefully smuggled in behind claims that look smaller but due to their rhetorical purpose are actually bigger claims than they appear to be.
- Jaguars identify thinking people / Jaguars understand a distinction between sapients and inanimate objects / When jaguars decide which animals are meat and which animals are watching them, they make this decision because they first made a decision on which objects are thinking minds and which objects are not; this is to vaguely imply that predatory animals practice respect or empathy for thinking Subjects of other species ->
this proposition is so... biased. it is clearly trying to get to this conclusion that animals can decide to be prejudiced or not because prejudice is an inherent characteristic of the universe. but that doesn't make any sense, because if this proposition was really true as formulated, animals would have to be able to choose to stop eating meat ever again like in Kimba the White Lion, or Animal Farm. aside from the fact cats in particular cannot physically do that and be healthy, it isn't something you see them try to do either. but why not? if this proposition was the way things really worked you'd half expect that carnivores in nature actually would have decided to abolish themselves. if jaguars know that other living beings are thinking Subjects in the same way we do, then why don't they just.... stop eating meat at their own peril whether or not it brings them disease just because it's Right? they aren't deeply complex beings like humans, even despite all animals having complexity of their own, so they wouldn't lose much by sacrificing themselves as individuals if there's any chance they could have herbivores as children. human beings have gradually evolved over their existence, becoming able to digest milk or in any event noticing they can and taking advantage of it (it's notable not every population of humans has). so it's actually not so far-fetched to imagine that if predators Decided to stop eating meat you might see them evolve past that artificial constraint on them and continue to exist in a new form. so where is this entirely plausible evolutionary possibility? why hasn't it happened yet?
I know this book is somewhat literally the result of humanities students (that was explicitly mentioned in the acknowledgements) inappropriately mining the natural world for metaphors for human society, and then presenting those as an actual ontology about ecosystems with a straight face without realizing that all metaphors are not automatically true in both directions. but I still have to grill them on the literal results of their metaphors because I think it's really interesting and instructive. - Jaguars understand a distinction between living animals and dead animals -> most people probably wouldn't dispute this much.
Related
- Animal Farm led to Zootopia / Animal Farm and Zootopia take place in the same universe -> unlikely to be literally true, but it's a very interesting thought experiment if you imagine Animal Farm happened first and Zootopia takes place hundreds of years later after some sort of color revolution scenario where animals that had once lived wild and then lived as livestock in some cases later evolved into Liberal-republicanism, "properly" worshiping police officers as the defenders of ethics rather than giving in to the temptation to make everyone workers in order to get rid of conflicts and put a big scary The Central Government in charge of building a new social structure.
Ideologies or fields
- / secular animism
- / humanities, arts, and social sciences
- / ethics
- / speculative fiction
- / ecology
- / evolutionary biology