Invisible Lives
In Between Life and Death
2022
Looking At Nature On Different Scales
Finding Similarities Between Things
What do human artefacts look like under the microscope? What happens to yeast when food starts fermenting? How is the life of our body periphery? What kind and how many insects do we kill in our houses? And what are the relations between all these questions?
Everything relates to each other at some point and at a certain level. A plastic bag is one plastic bag but is also a combination of bacteria, air, void, paint, and many other things that we don’t consider. Are all this group of stuff that forms the plastic bag constituents of it, or are they the plastic bag itself? In Ontological reductionism, everything is composed of simples. Simples are the tiniest things that can’t be decomposed and subdivided. A plastic bag is just a combination of simples arranged in a certain way, just like an insect is a combination of simples arranged in a certain way.
Can we define a clear line between a plastic bag and an insect? Does the plastic bag even exist? If we agree that it is just a combination of simples, what happens if we remove some simples from it? We didn’t eliminate the plastic bag, and it still has the same properties, but can we still consider it a plastic bag? Probably everything composes something bigger and something smaller at some point.
Can we say that we are an individual? We are composed of different organisms that form bigger organisms. We are made of air but is the air that we breathe part of us, or are we part of air? The air that gives life will transform at some point and kill us. There is no individuality nor collectivism, just a combination of different stuff, trogs.
Our reality is based on Trogs that we created, but what if we had organized things differently and seen different connections between things? For example, is there something else between a nail and a piece of hair besides themselves? Just because we don’t have a name for that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Our definitions of things are just one way to cut up the plastic reality, they represent made-up symbols within a specific context, but they don’t exist beyond us. They are just concepts. Any assortment of things will compose a thing no matter if we acknowledge it or not.
How our understanding of alive defines the idea of biological equity?
"Nothing can be transformed into another nature without having been previously converted into ash, lime or earth."
Nodo Sophico Enodato