Cognitive Ecology: Wrapping up The Human

And greetings from the Carpathian Mountains

Cognitive Ecology is a notebook of meditations on the future of life on Earth, our techno-utopian dreams, and our relationship with the living world.

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After two and a half months of weekly Sunday meditations, we wrap up The Human section of Cognitive Ecology and take a short summer break in July and August. I plan to take my own advice and live an embodied existence as much as possible away from technology and digital devices.

Recently, I learned from Mike Sowden from Everything Is Amazing that we only engage part of our vision—and subsequently our brain—when we use digital devices. This explains the deep need I’ve felt for a while to explore my surroundings and engage all my senses with the physical world. It’s an emotional and spiritual urge, and summer is the best season to follow it.

Thank you for reading my meditations on the human condition in our technological world for the past couple of months. Here’s the complete section:

The Human

• Digital loneliness

• Life and the universe

• Embodied existence

• Rewilding the self

• Embodied cognition

• Human extraction

• End users

• Cognitive sovereignty

What comes next

In the second part of the notebook, The Planet, we will explore the human-nature dichotomy and life on planet Earth.

The meditations on the human-nature relationship are already written. For the meditations on non-human forms of experiencing the world I want to spend some time in the Carpathian Mountains in July. In August, I want to read Ways Of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle.

Here’s a taster of what comes next:

There’s the godliness of a sunset, a bird flying in the sky, a tree growing from the soil, a river streaming down a mountain, a flower blooming in spring.

There’s the godliness of a planet teeming with life, nurturing and loving, holding us in its embrace.

There’s the godliness of our brothers and sisters roaming this earth as whales, bears, elephants, tigers, foxes, rabbits, beavers, pelicans and bees.

Humans are not gods. And gods aren’t only for humans.

The notebook will continue from September with The Planet and The Future. This time, the weekly meditations will go out only to paid patrons. If these meditations have been of value to you and you want to read what comes next, this is the moment to become one.