Here's an idea.
Everything is interconnected.
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For the last couple of weeks, I have been playing "Everything,"
the game, by David O'Reilly.
I haven't been playing "Everything"
meaning every thing, but we are going to talk about that later.
If you haven't played "Everything," the game,
don't sweat it.
We're going to talk about lots of things besides "Everything."
But just so everything's clear, I'm
going to do some background, a few things on "Everything."
I'm done now.
I promise.
"Everything" is a consciousness simulator and open universe
exploration game.
In it, you inhabit, rhinos, pinwheels, lenticular galaxies,
the West Nile virus, and more.
No humans, though.
Tractors and apartment buildings, yes.
People, nuh uh.
As these things, you jaunt about,
singing, dancing, and discussing the nature of existence
with fellow things.
Occasionally, things play recordings
of the late great British philosopher Alan Watts.
ALAN WATTS: You are in relationships
with the external world that on the whole
are incredibly harmonious.
"Everything's" website says Watts
describes what everything itself is about,
which raises a question.
What is everything about?
Many of Watts in-game clips discuss
a we're all starstuff-style idea that humanity,
our consciousness, our bodies aren't
a result of the Big Bang, but part of it, a continuation.
We all share some common genesis with a universe of stuff
and so are interlinked with it.
Thus, in the game, you sail upon those invisible links
to experience the perspective of countless objects able to loop
powers of ten-style from galaxy to atom and back again.
But-- and here I play the role of skeptical commenter straw
man--
who gives a flying fish?
Everything's atoms or whatever.
Great.
I'm not about to befriend a fire hydrant, because suddenly we
have something in common.
I'm definitely not fixing to become one.
What gives?
Why does it matter?
And OK.
Fair.
But also perhaps the point.
"Everything" may betray the story
of how difficult it is for humans to appreciate
the non-human, which it is.
It's tough.
Throughout the game, Watts talks about how
appreciating our interconnectedness
with the world is both difficult and necessary,
a deep and abiding respect for all things, beings,
and processes, which result from our cosmic genesis,
a matter of great importance.
And I agree.
But I also disagree.
Watts's ideas about sameness are attractive,
but they also allow us to retreat
from an earnest appreciation of non-human things.
If we are all on some level the same,
we have permission to avoid appreciating things
on their own terms, because we already are them-ish.
We have license to fall back on what's
good for the goose is good for the gander,
except not geese, but humans, and
like all conceivable objects.
"Everything's" gameplay is the opposite of this.
It gives us endless opportunity to appreciate endless things
as themselves, connected, but wildly different.
So by combining philosophy and gameplay that are at odds,
what do we get?
What's so worthwhile about being things?
Ah, this is something philosophers
have struggled with for literal millennia.
"Everything" creator David O'Reilly conveniently
lists five of them in the game's credits.
Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
and Arthur Schopenhauer each struggled
with appreciating things as things from a human perspective
and also with why doing that is one, cool, and two, useful.
So what we're going to do is talk
about these dudes and their ideas
to outline the epic struggle of understanding how me, you,
chain links, post-it notes, and pollen are interconnected,
but fundamentally different.
Finally, we'll talk about one guy O'reilley didn't name check
and about why it's neat for you and me to consider what it's
like to be a tire or a tree.
Today, "stoic" means one thing--
unflappable, like Yoda or Judge Dredd,
two people I never thought I'd put in the same category.
But the original Stoics from Greek and Roman times
were a multistage branch of philosophy concerned
with personal ethics, how individuals
should act based on logic and an understanding of nature.
They wanted to maximize virtue.
And really, don't we all?
For them, nature isn't just dirt and trees, also
the name of my indie rock band.
Nature is everything.
They believed that a natural order
arises from the operations of the universe, which
is a living, rational entity, an animal outputting
pneuma, the breath of life that creates the human soul,
holds inanimate objects together, determines
the course of all events, and gives power to deities.
Stoics also believed in a cosmopolitanism
that all humans, as cogs in the universal machine,
are interconnected.
Seneca used the word "fellowship," writing "what
is required of any man is that he
should be of use to other men."
Marcus Aurelius said humans as rational beings
are residents of a cosmic city and should work to benefit
their fellow citizens.
Aurelius and Epictetus both also wrote about impressions.
As rational beings, humans can accept or deny
the impressions given them by the world,
the snap judgments formed in response to appearances.
Many of Aurelius's works contain reminders to erase impressions.
The Stoics emphasized calm and rationality
in the face of all things, except when shouting
about impressions, I guess.
Deriving their stone-faced reactions
from a belief about the fundamental nature
of existence, we may then say that Stoics are more like Yoda
than Dredd.
Poker face is born of virtue arrived
via deep understanding of an elemental universal force
and not because, you know, it's tough.
Still, we might say isn't it ironic
that a cosmology about literally every atom in every corner
of all existence was the grounds for self-help advice that
amounts to just be cool, honey bunny?
Just be cool.
Despite their complex physics and best efforts
at taking things seriously, the Stoics
had a hard time getting away from one particular thing,
humans.
And this gets us to Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who was born in Massachusetts-- what,
what-- in the early 19th century.
He was a Transcendentalist, and they emphasized self-reliance,
believing that it's only when people escape institutions
like politics and organized religion
can they be their best, most pure, and perceptive selves.
Insight, the Transcendentalists thought,
is arrived not through careful study or empiricism
or experience, but by living simply in the woods,
thinking, being alone, focusing not on worldly artifice,
but on one's individual essence.
Emerson, like other Transcendentalists,
believed in the One or the Oversoul, an organizing
force which produces and unites nature and humanity.
In seeking independence via nature,
we can almost paradoxically appreciate
the interconnectedness of all things
and rediscover what Emerson called Unity, often
with a capital U.
But even as Emerson argues that people should get away
from people-- and hey, totally, yeah, here
for seclusion-- he can't shed his anthrocentric frame.
His argument resembles the Stoics,
an appreciation for leaves, raindrops, crystals, and nature
leads principally back to being a person who may not
have any friends or fun, but who is calm and capable of thinking
real good.
And speaking of no fun, Arthur Schopenhauer
was a German philosopher working in the early 19th century,
just before Emerson.
He was an idealist.
And generally, they believe reality
is mentally constituted, that there's nothing knowable
outside conscious experience.
His most famous work is called "The World
as Will and Representation."
And in it, he says that while there
may be some force that unites all things, what he calls will,
that force is neither logical nor rational nor beautiful.
In fact, it's sort of a blind, struggling urge to exist.
And good news, it forms our subjectivity.
Schopenhauer is a renowned pessimist.
Though other objects may objectively exist,
Schopenhauer said humans only interact with representations
of those objects, organized by our mental capacity to reason.
Our will, our subjectivity lets our representation,
our bodies recognize and interact
with other representations.
But here's the crazy part.
Schopenhauer asks-- so wait.
When we experience, say, a bicycle pedal,
we are interacting with its representation
via our representation.
But knowing that we have both representation and will,
might the pedal also have representation and will?
Might all things-- is it possible
all objects have an interior existence,
an urge to exist as we do?
It's impossible to know.
But holy snakes, what if they do?
This is the question that "Everything" seems to answer,
if a bit cheekily, as your will moves
between representations, which waddle alongside rocks
and trumpets to hear about their anxieties.
Yes, "Everything" says.
All things have an interior existence.
"Everything" then takes another step, though.
If things have an interior existence,
what if they used that interior existence
to do Stoic or Transcendental philosophy
or Watts's brand of Eastern philosophy?
What if interconnectedness, fellowship, unity,
or self-reliance exists for objects?
It's just maybe people can't or never bothered to notice.
This brings us to one final dude.
Ian Bogost is a philosopher still living and writing.
You may remember him from our Snapchat video.
He's an object oriented ontologist
concerned with the existence of non-human objects.
And he's also a video game designer.
Bogost proposes what he calls tiny ontology, the belief
that all things equally exist.
Not, he points out, that all things exist equally.
Things occupy different stations in their respective existences.
But they all equally exist.
People, CO2 molecules, nations, and agent Dale Cooper
all fulfill the requirements of existence
in that they simply are.
This simple existence, however, is something humans
have a hard time appreciating, especially
as we are inundated with stuff.
To counteract the nonstop barrage of, well, everything,
Bogost says in his book "Play Anything"
that we develop an ironic reflex, which distances us
from things, makes it so we don't have to appreciate
their being earnestly.
He calls this reflex not paranoia,
the mistrust of people, but ironoia,
the mistrust of things.
What he proposes as a salve for our ironic inflammation is
playing objects, turning our experiences of them
into a game. .
And he doesn't mean play as in have fun or do
whatever you want, but as uncovering novelty.
Think about how you play an instrument or play a sport.
It's not always a blast.
And there are rules.
But you still play.
You try to master and be clever within a system.
To play objects, then, makes your experience of them
like a game, but not as in the opposite of work.
Many games are, in fact, very laborious.
More strictly speaking, Bogost sees games
as experiences that set aside the ordinary purposes of things
to find enjoyment in structured constraint.
So putting this all together, where Bogost encourages
us to play anything, to set aside
the ordinary purposes of things to appreciate what is novel
about their existence, such that they become a game,
"Everything," the game, lets us play as anything, symbolically
abandon our humanity to pilot the existence
of things to appreciate the novelty of their perspective
and purpose, to in a way encourage
us to think with things and also as them,
as an endless variety of differences and viewpoints.
Being human, it may be impossible, tough,
or simply uncomfortable to appreciate
the viewpoint of stuff.
And Bogost says as much, writing "to treat things
with respect and intrigue, we don't
need to understand their motivations or inner lives.
We just need to pay enough attention
to discover what they do and how they work,
to discover what they obviously and truly are,
and then to make use of them in gratifying ways."
And so we may ask, does the game "Everything"
make a case for the appreciative use of stuff
or an appreciation of the inner lives of stuff?
Does it encourage a particularly human gratification?
Or does it lobby for what the "Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy" calls a radical empathy,
not just for people or beings, but all things?
I'm not totally sure.
I'm not totally sure such a thing is even possible,
as the history of philosophy has demonstrated.
But I will say this.
Humanity has a regrettable past, as Alan Watts points out
in one of the game's clips, of designing laws and systems,
which make humans not human, in an attempt
to justify hating, treating poorly, or flat out killing
them.
It may stand to reason, then, that this radical empathy
for all things, including the non-human,
is batting with the weight on emotionally,
stretching and building sets of muscles which
allow us to feel and feel for things, even when we have
permission not to, where we have through inundation
and desensitization learned not to.
It may be, given the field of objects
we apprehend daily, that an attempt to feel
for them appears impossible or fruitless.
But "Everything," smashing together
the thoughts resulting from a long, long struggle
with the importance of things, may be saying something
about that impression.
And you know what they say about impressions.
What do you all think?
Is everything literally interconnected?
What is the nature of that connection or disconnection?
And how does it make you appreciate or not all things?
Let us know in the comments, and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding the pace of money
determining the pace of life.
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