Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer on Imaginal Empathy, Consciousness and Re-Enchantment

That reminds me of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation and how it's so easy to read a book like that in which nature is presented as this, or Area X is presented as this like, this kind of nature that breaks apart identity, that breaks apart meaning, that turns us into other creatures and other things and spreads us out over the landscape as horrific if you come at it with this mindset of there's like a candle inside of my skull that is me and if it goes out, I'm no longer me.

Um, but that when you approach those, that kind of what, what might appear as horror when you approach it with the lens of like, I am so many, or what is me or what is, what is the consciousness of me or the, the self, uh, as something multiplicitous as something shared, um, then suddenly the, the kind of, um, the, that, that sort of possession by the many doesn't feel as scary, but maybe still feels a little bit scary.

And yeah, I guess I'm curious, and this is probably a big question without a set answer maybe for either of us, but how would you articulate Your working current feeling about what mind is or what consciousness is

such a good question.

And, you know, I, I would say that I live in the question and have no certainty.

I've been very interested by a bunch of different books that have been written recently, especially Michael Pollan's most recent book.

um about um different theories of consciousness i do believe that we have conflated brain and body with mind and for me mind is something that is i inhabit i walk into with many other beings and is not contained or possessed by my singular soma um is the ecotone where many different species are thinking together um i also am very um I am compelled by the paradigm that says our brain is like a radio that picks up a signal.

And that's why things can glitch in and out.

That's why sometimes people will have dreams that seem to correspond.

It can explain a lot of the glitchiness that our mechanistic paradigms can't explain.

And I've been very curious in my own life experiences I've had that don't seem to map onto the idea of my brain as being in my head and in my body.

I also look at all of the indigenous traditions, the history of folklore, of myth across the world.

I think of Julian Jaynes and this kind of bicameral pantheistic mind whereby we heard voices in our heads and the gods were in our heads speaking to us.

where people regularly report hearing the plants talk to them, hearing ancestors talk to them.

These are not aberrant experiences.

It's only in recent history that we have narrowed our epistemological frame.

to a Euro-patriarchal paradigm, whereby we only know things when we can measure them, when we can quantify them, that we have disregarded most of our ways of knowing.

And all of those other ways of knowing are deeply porous and intertwined.

to call in a term from feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad, that mind is something that doesn't belong to beings, but emerges when beings interact in the ecotone and the overlap of beings coming together.

How would you answer it today?

Yeah, well, I very similarly.

So I yeah, let me let me.

Let me think on that question a little bit.

But as you were speaking, I was bringing up your wonderful essay, Supercellular, in Emergence magazine.

And you quote Evan Thompson in that essay, who's writing about her misconceptions about what mind is.