Me: When we left off our last conversation we had been talking about thinking long ideas and I mentioned I had been thinking of what humans would become if we succeeded in living with power and not destroying our planet at the same time. I think I am ready to talk more about this and see where we go with it.
Tree: I don’t have any ideas about it, that is your job. I know what soil, roots, water, air, the sun, my trunk, leaves, and branches will look like and how they will be. Why are you talking about being different, you will be the same unless you are talking about a very long time in the future when your kind might look different, you might grow roots or leaves.
Me: I’m not thinking that far into the future, although being part animal and part plant would be a pretty interesting development.
Tree: So you aren’t talking about becoming like my kind?
Me: Not physically anyway
Tree: In some other ways then?
Me: I think that people would have become completely responsible for the ideas, systems, and things we create and not relate to them as if they were existing on their own independent from us. I also think we would see our bodies like they were extended into the world around us all the time and that all the things around us were also extending into us all the time in the same way. We would see ourselves as more than we are individually.
Tree: So you don’t see yourself that way now? I see you that way, you and everything else are just that way.
Me: People don’t really see themselves that way except on rare occasions when they see all the connections that are occurring.
Tree; But what about you, how do you see yourself.
Me: I see myself as in transition to seeing myself as always woven into the fabric of living things. I see it clearly and feel it fully some times but other times I see myself as separate and not connected.
Tree: So you see yourself in transition and you see others moving with you, or not moving with you.
Me: I see slow movement in most others but if we survive I think we will all be seeing things naturally and consistently as if we were always interwoven with all other living and non living things. The change would be something so useful in adapting to our environment that it would be very contagious. I also think it would be characterized as being adaptation that was not just useful to us, but useful to the whole fabric of life and that is why the adaptations would spread rapidly.
Tree: I would like to see that happen. Do you think it will happen in my lifetime?
Me: How long do you think you will live?
Tree: Another 120 years.
me: If it is going to happen you will see it well before you die
Tree: Good, tell me more about what you think it will look like. If you are right I will be able to watch this happen right here in my space of dirt and air, as I told you before there are a lot of your kind close to me all the time.
Me: It is going to be hard to flesh out what I think about this. I see it dimly now and hope I will see it more clearly as I try to bring it to life in our conversation. It will be a little bit like when I rewrote Genesis, it will take some time and a few unexpected turns. Are you OK with that?
Tree: Our kind are the long thinkers, please don’t insult my intelligence, of course I’m OK with hearing you think it through. Even when you finish, it won’t be done.
Me: What do you mean when you say “Even when you finish, it won’t be done”?
Tree: I mean that the development of your kind into something different won’t be done when you finish describing how you think it will be. The way you imagine that development today will be part of a process that changes you, and you are part of your kind, so your kind is changing in a small way as you change. That is how we trees do it, I don’t think your kind is any different.
Me: You are right about how change happens with living things. An individual turns out a little different. If that difference can be passed down to the individual’s offspring and it helps them live strongly then it will be passed on more frequently because the individuals with that change in them will do better than the individuals without that change. But with humans the problem is that the issues we will have to deal with, and the changes we will need to make ,live partly outside us as things that we create.
Tree: why don’t you start there, with the things you make that are outside of you.
Me: I think that is a good place to start. I think that the second wave of behaviorally modern humans will not relate to these things as if they do exist independent of people. I think we will see such things as existing outside the immediate cellular definition of what a person
Popular