You know what’s not real? Photons. No seriously. What do you think of when you imagine one? You probably imagine a little white ball bouncing around off of things. But there’s no such “thing” as an individual photon. It’s just a metaphor we use to explain that this thing has both the properties of a wave and of a particle. It’s not like we could really observe it directly. Instead we have observations about its behaviors and interactions and then we come up with some metaphor that helps us visualize it
Well, similarly, many South American cultures had explanations of “spirits” that let trees talk to each other. These spirits often lived underground. Well “spirits” are what white people translated them into because it didn’t map on to anything in the white cosmology so they just wrote it off as “magic” or som’n. Now there’s an exploding area of research on mycorrhizal fungi. It’s finding that trees can send resources and even messages underground to other trees through underground fungal networks. Some trees can even recognize their own offspring and send specific nutrients and even memories to them. We recently discovered that even microRNA molecules can make it across this network so there’s even some epigenetic stuff happening there. The networks are so important that basically no tree alive today would be able to survive with mycorrhizal fungi gathering nutrients for it. Indeed it seems like the roots of plants aren’t actually evolved for sucking up nutrients. They’re actually pretty terrible at that except for a few annual herbs. Instead their main purpose is communication and trading sugars for nutrients.
What’s the difference between a photon (a Western spirit) vs the indigenous concepts that were translated into “spirits” by white people? These “spirits” were most likely a representation of what the West now calls mycorrhizal fungi. Both are cosmological metaphors created to provide a human understanding of observations of nature. Both are “not real”. Both are extremely useful.
If you ask me, the difference is the size of the army of the culture from where these metaphors originate.
Photons came after the development of the scientific method and thus have a more proximate relationship with scientific purpose, rather than a mystical metaphor to whom we can only re-attribute purpose at this point.
Edit: Photons have contributed to our understanding of light, due to their scientific formulation by Einstein (amongst others), thus making their application in devices such as lasers possible.
What of the “spirits” metaphors? Where do we apply them?
You know what’s not real? Photons. No seriously. What do you think of when you imagine one? You probably imagine a little white ball bouncing around off of things. But there’s no such “thing” as an individual photon. It’s just a metaphor we use to explain that this
thinghas both the properties of a wave and of a particle. It’s not like we could really observe it directly. Instead we have observations about its behaviors and interactions and then we come up with some metaphor that helps us visualize itWell, similarly, many South American cultures had explanations of “spirits” that let trees talk to each other. These spirits often lived underground. Well “spirits” are what white people translated them into because it didn’t map on to anything in the white cosmology so they just wrote it off as “magic” or som’n. Now there’s an exploding area of research on mycorrhizal fungi. It’s finding that trees can send resources and even messages underground to other trees through underground fungal networks. Some trees can even recognize their own offspring and send specific nutrients and even memories to them. We recently discovered that even microRNA molecules can make it across this network so there’s even some epigenetic stuff happening there. The networks are so important that basically no tree alive today would be able to survive with mycorrhizal fungi gathering nutrients for it. Indeed it seems like the roots of plants aren’t actually evolved for sucking up nutrients. They’re actually pretty terrible at that except for a few annual herbs. Instead their main purpose is communication and trading sugars for nutrients.
What’s the difference between a photon (a Western spirit) vs the indigenous concepts that were translated into “spirits” by white people? These “spirits” were most likely a representation of what the West now calls mycorrhizal fungi. Both are cosmological metaphors created to provide a human understanding of observations of nature. Both are “not real”. Both are extremely useful.
If you ask me, the difference is the size of the army of the culture from where these metaphors originate.
Photons came after the development of the scientific method and thus have a more proximate relationship with scientific purpose, rather than a mystical metaphor to whom we can only re-attribute purpose at this point.
Edit: Photons have contributed to our understanding of light, due to their scientific formulation by Einstein (amongst others), thus making their application in devices such as lasers possible. What of the “spirits” metaphors? Where do we apply them?
Hold on, are you actually comparing native American mythology with a scientific model?