Sounds to me like Avatar has been imagining the world we'd live in if we did have empathy with other creatures. As a child on a mixed farm, I think me and my siblings did learn empathy from observing and interacting with the animals we raised and kept as pets. Intelligence is widely distributed through our world........that we so often fail to see it, or remain incapable of interacting with it, is a testament to our human lack of intelligence...or perhaps to the anxiety which our culture builds into so many of us so quickly.
We are all limited by language; but also by our inability to know that it is because of all our limitations, that we need empathy. Imagining that the Other feels and that those feelings are likely not that distant from our own....honours the mystery of all life. To have life is a magical gift....lacking the empathy to know that......or to grant the Other the depth of being that you recognize in yourself....is likely a sign that more abuse has been part of your life than you imagine.
By nature, we are empathic....by nurture, we often become much less so
As with a surprisingly wide array of columns and comments regarding quite different pathologies of individual ‘Issues’ -- it is informative to me, and other commenters that the seminal and ‘causal factor’ of EMPIRE forces its dystopian shadow over the widest array of all subordinate mere ‘issues’ -- which in my focus exclusively on the subject of Empires -- like “The Quiet American Empire” [apologies to Graham Greene] regarding and exposed in the 1945 to 1975 Vietnam War of Empires.
I just ordered the book and that by Peter Godfrey Smith.
Octopuses and dynamic patterning in cephalopods are a topic close to my heart.
The shifting color patterning is an incredibly beautiful and astonishing phenomenon.
(I'd been under the impression that it can also express emotion, as well as being a means of camoflage.)
Tangentially:
When I was first watching videos and reading about cephalopod patterning, several years ago, I had a dystopian dream, (which I wrote into a short story), in which clothing which mimic this was developed. Very expensive, and used in "power fashion" by a corparate manager in the story.
I'm looking forward to see how the book develops the questions of consciousness, and language. To my knowledge, the question of the relationship of brain and mind has never been answered to an satisfactory degree. The relationship is still very much open to question. I think it is doubtful that it is stricty causal in nature, although clearly what happens in the brain (and body) affect the mind. Certainly seen most powerfully in terms of age development (linguistic structures and conditioning shaping subsequent cognition).
The Hubel and Wiesel studies at Stanford on visual perception in kittens might easily be extended to consider something similar in all cognitive process, all workings of mind, thought and perception.
And it is still not necessarily a simple matter of cause and effect.
A different model might be something like the brain being the instrument that mind is played upon.
Listening to the podcast, I remembered a conversation with someone regarding language and color.
An American woman I knew in Seattle years ago married an Arab. A group of students from the Arabic community liked to hang out a coffee shop there, and she had met him when she worked there. She was learning Arabic. Somehow the question of perception came up, and as I remember (40 years later, so roughly), she said that the Arabic culture doesn't perceive or refer to things yellow in the same way as AngloAmerican culture - that they simply seemed not to even be able to see it.
Hopefully what follows might be a contribution to the discussion.
I don't intend it a hijack. :0)
I once saw an octopus crawl out of a tank at the seafood market (on the waterfront) in Busan, South Korea. I was there for one day in order my Japanese visa. At the time, I was training at Buddhist Monastery in Japan. It is sometimes necessary to renew outside of the country after three months.
(The long story follows.)
On the way over, due to budgetary constraints, I rode in the lower deck with the Korean workers, who serve much the same role in Japan as Latin Americans do in the U.S., and carried with them roped and taped cardboard boxes, goods for their families in Korea, the same pattern you might see in LAX with Mexicans flying home.
We were locked in, unable to go to the open deck.
I thought "Aha, the Korean deck", knowing the place of Koreans in Japan.
Not quite the same practice as the British Navy, or modern corporate fishing fleets, but nevertheless a slight parallel of colonialism and nationalistic advantage.
I had several hours to wait before the office of the Japanese consulate in Busan opened, and so took the opportunity to walk around the city. A luxury after the rigid discipline of the monastery.
Busan is a beautiful city, sometimes called the San Francisco of South Korea.
There is a large market on the waterfront, called the Yagaichi Market, a huge district of small shops and stalls at least 8 blocks long and 4 blocks deep: San Francisco's waterfront or Seattle's plus the Pike Market, multiplied, but still genuine working markets rather than being largely tourist attractions. Like markets and bazaars the world over, there are stalls for every kind of good: clothing, electronics, food.
Workmen carried fish and produce in oversized hand-woven backpack/baskets made out of some kind of rattan or wicker. Although Busan is a big city, the faces of men and women were farmer’s faces, fishermen faces.
On the area of the market bordering the wharf were fish stalls, with tables, ice chests, and tanks bearing a wondrous panoply of unfortunate sea creatures, some nervously jittering within their confines, others in apparent ignorance or denial, languidly drifting.
I stood for a while wondering at a table laden with a mystery marine creatures that appeared to be somehow related to a member of a wholly different kingdom, (the plant kingdom) . It looked just like a kiwano (the horned melon).
At another stall, a bored Korean woman sat smoking on stool, surrounded by iced fish, tanks with live fish, and large plastic tubs, some with hoses bringing in cold salt water from the harbor. She had a small television set up on another stool table, and she appeared half-engrossed, half-narcotized by what was evidently a Korean soap opera.
I noticed with amazement that one of the tubs housed an incredibly large octopus, taking up at least a third of the tub. It’s tentacles twisted and furled languidly and gracefully in the clear water. One tentacle came slowly, even luxuriantly, out of the tub, followed by two, and then to my astonishment, the entire thing somehow flowed over the side of the tub, landing on the cement with a wet, soft smecking sound.
It began, miraculously, to move slowly, silently, and uncannily, in the direction of the water, (the edge of the wharf lying perhaps twenty feet away the stall). It would reach out with several tentacles, grab the smooth concrete with it’s suction cups, pull itself forward, and then repeat the process.
I suddenly remembered a similar occurrence on a Jacques Cousteau special, seen decades earlier as a kid. The Calypso crew was in the Mediterranean or someplace studying sponges. At the request of Falco, the cook, Phillipe had managed to capture a goodly-sized octopus. They had put in a bucket of salt water on the deck of the boat. In a similar fashion to the one that I was watcing now, the octopus had managed to get out of the bucket, pull itself along the deck, and somehow squeeze itself through a drainage hole in the gunwale (the limitation on such defenestrations, it seems, being principally the size of the octopus’ hard beak, the rest of one is flexible as silly putty).
I was pretty darn happy about this. One of the primary reasons I’d been drawn to Buddhism in the first place was the fact that it placed great emphasis on not killing or harming other living things. When I was a teen-ager, and first really starting to look at these things seriously, it seemed like a minimal starting point for any worthy religion.
I was silently rooting for the thing. It seemed to be making great progress in its break toward freedom and a longer life. Then I noticed a peripheral movement from within the stall. The Korean woman, still smoking, had turned her head, and was impassively watching the octopus’ progress. She calmly put her cigarette into one of the slots in her ashtray, reached beside her and picked up a small rubber club of some sort, slowly walked around to the octopus, just as calmly whacked it authoritatively with the club, and dropped it back into the tub.
I figured it was a good time to go to the consulate.
Thanks, Dennis, for your support in recognizing this cancerous and still metastasizing Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal ‘Children-Killing’ & ‘War-Starting’ Empire — caused by Empire-Thinking.
BTW, I’m just starting to develop some ideas on the discontinuous nature of “The Quiet American Empire’s” history.
Sounds to me like Avatar has been imagining the world we'd live in if we did have empathy with other creatures. As a child on a mixed farm, I think me and my siblings did learn empathy from observing and interacting with the animals we raised and kept as pets. Intelligence is widely distributed through our world........that we so often fail to see it, or remain incapable of interacting with it, is a testament to our human lack of intelligence...or perhaps to the anxiety which our culture builds into so many of us so quickly.
We are all limited by language; but also by our inability to know that it is because of all our limitations, that we need empathy. Imagining that the Other feels and that those feelings are likely not that distant from our own....honours the mystery of all life. To have life is a magical gift....lacking the empathy to know that......or to grant the Other the depth of being that you recognize in yourself....is likely a sign that more abuse has been part of your life than you imagine.
By nature, we are empathic....by nurture, we often become much less so
As with a surprisingly wide array of columns and comments regarding quite different pathologies of individual ‘Issues’ -- it is informative to me, and other commenters that the seminal and ‘causal factor’ of EMPIRE forces its dystopian shadow over the widest array of all subordinate mere ‘issues’ -- which in my focus exclusively on the subject of Empires -- like “The Quiet American Empire” [apologies to Graham Greene] regarding and exposed in the 1945 to 1975 Vietnam War of Empires.
You should title this or a book of a collection of where you are going: The Gods We Cannot See.
Wonderful work Chris
Wonderful episode, thank you!
I just ordered the book and that by Peter Godfrey Smith.
Octopuses and dynamic patterning in cephalopods are a topic close to my heart.
The shifting color patterning is an incredibly beautiful and astonishing phenomenon.
(I'd been under the impression that it can also express emotion, as well as being a means of camoflage.)
Tangentially:
When I was first watching videos and reading about cephalopod patterning, several years ago, I had a dystopian dream, (which I wrote into a short story), in which clothing which mimic this was developed. Very expensive, and used in "power fashion" by a corparate manager in the story.
I'm looking forward to see how the book develops the questions of consciousness, and language. To my knowledge, the question of the relationship of brain and mind has never been answered to an satisfactory degree. The relationship is still very much open to question. I think it is doubtful that it is stricty causal in nature, although clearly what happens in the brain (and body) affect the mind. Certainly seen most powerfully in terms of age development (linguistic structures and conditioning shaping subsequent cognition).
The Hubel and Wiesel studies at Stanford on visual perception in kittens might easily be extended to consider something similar in all cognitive process, all workings of mind, thought and perception.
And it is still not necessarily a simple matter of cause and effect.
A different model might be something like the brain being the instrument that mind is played upon.
Listening to the podcast, I remembered a conversation with someone regarding language and color.
An American woman I knew in Seattle years ago married an Arab. A group of students from the Arabic community liked to hang out a coffee shop there, and she had met him when she worked there. She was learning Arabic. Somehow the question of perception came up, and as I remember (40 years later, so roughly), she said that the Arabic culture doesn't perceive or refer to things yellow in the same way as AngloAmerican culture - that they simply seemed not to even be able to see it.
Hopefully what follows might be a contribution to the discussion.
I don't intend it a hijack. :0)
I once saw an octopus crawl out of a tank at the seafood market (on the waterfront) in Busan, South Korea. I was there for one day in order my Japanese visa. At the time, I was training at Buddhist Monastery in Japan. It is sometimes necessary to renew outside of the country after three months.
(The long story follows.)
On the way over, due to budgetary constraints, I rode in the lower deck with the Korean workers, who serve much the same role in Japan as Latin Americans do in the U.S., and carried with them roped and taped cardboard boxes, goods for their families in Korea, the same pattern you might see in LAX with Mexicans flying home.
We were locked in, unable to go to the open deck.
I thought "Aha, the Korean deck", knowing the place of Koreans in Japan.
Not quite the same practice as the British Navy, or modern corporate fishing fleets, but nevertheless a slight parallel of colonialism and nationalistic advantage.
I had several hours to wait before the office of the Japanese consulate in Busan opened, and so took the opportunity to walk around the city. A luxury after the rigid discipline of the monastery.
Busan is a beautiful city, sometimes called the San Francisco of South Korea.
There is a large market on the waterfront, called the Yagaichi Market, a huge district of small shops and stalls at least 8 blocks long and 4 blocks deep: San Francisco's waterfront or Seattle's plus the Pike Market, multiplied, but still genuine working markets rather than being largely tourist attractions. Like markets and bazaars the world over, there are stalls for every kind of good: clothing, electronics, food.
Workmen carried fish and produce in oversized hand-woven backpack/baskets made out of some kind of rattan or wicker. Although Busan is a big city, the faces of men and women were farmer’s faces, fishermen faces.
On the area of the market bordering the wharf were fish stalls, with tables, ice chests, and tanks bearing a wondrous panoply of unfortunate sea creatures, some nervously jittering within their confines, others in apparent ignorance or denial, languidly drifting.
I stood for a while wondering at a table laden with a mystery marine creatures that appeared to be somehow related to a member of a wholly different kingdom, (the plant kingdom) . It looked just like a kiwano (the horned melon).
At another stall, a bored Korean woman sat smoking on stool, surrounded by iced fish, tanks with live fish, and large plastic tubs, some with hoses bringing in cold salt water from the harbor. She had a small television set up on another stool table, and she appeared half-engrossed, half-narcotized by what was evidently a Korean soap opera.
I noticed with amazement that one of the tubs housed an incredibly large octopus, taking up at least a third of the tub. It’s tentacles twisted and furled languidly and gracefully in the clear water. One tentacle came slowly, even luxuriantly, out of the tub, followed by two, and then to my astonishment, the entire thing somehow flowed over the side of the tub, landing on the cement with a wet, soft smecking sound.
It began, miraculously, to move slowly, silently, and uncannily, in the direction of the water, (the edge of the wharf lying perhaps twenty feet away the stall). It would reach out with several tentacles, grab the smooth concrete with it’s suction cups, pull itself forward, and then repeat the process.
I suddenly remembered a similar occurrence on a Jacques Cousteau special, seen decades earlier as a kid. The Calypso crew was in the Mediterranean or someplace studying sponges. At the request of Falco, the cook, Phillipe had managed to capture a goodly-sized octopus. They had put in a bucket of salt water on the deck of the boat. In a similar fashion to the one that I was watcing now, the octopus had managed to get out of the bucket, pull itself along the deck, and somehow squeeze itself through a drainage hole in the gunwale (the limitation on such defenestrations, it seems, being principally the size of the octopus’ hard beak, the rest of one is flexible as silly putty).
I was pretty darn happy about this. One of the primary reasons I’d been drawn to Buddhism in the first place was the fact that it placed great emphasis on not killing or harming other living things. When I was a teen-ager, and first really starting to look at these things seriously, it seemed like a minimal starting point for any worthy religion.
I was silently rooting for the thing. It seemed to be making great progress in its break toward freedom and a longer life. Then I noticed a peripheral movement from within the stall. The Korean woman, still smoking, had turned her head, and was impassively watching the octopus’ progress. She calmly put her cigarette into one of the slots in her ashtray, reached beside her and picked up a small rubber club of some sort, slowly walked around to the octopus, just as calmly whacked it authoritatively with the club, and dropped it back into the tub.
I figured it was a good time to go to the consulate.
Thanks, Dennis, for your support in recognizing this cancerous and still metastasizing Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal ‘Children-Killing’ & ‘War-Starting’ Empire — caused by Empire-Thinking.
BTW, I’m just starting to develop some ideas on the discontinuous nature of “The Quiet American Empire’s” history.
If there is an empathy gene or gene cluster somewhere in our chromosomes I will suggest it must be a recessive trait. Why recessive? Why not dominant?
Anyone care to comment.