Rösel von Rosenhof – Copper engraving – 1758 – “Historia Naturalis Ranarum Nostratium”
I’ve been eyeing the reality horizon for some time new, wondering when the realities we live in will intersect the realities we construct.
Of course this dichotomy has existed since humans began reflecting on our relationship with our surroundings – arguably since our forebears first started representing that relationship through cave paintings, songs, and stories.
Reflection is a human predilection. But up until recently, the expressions of that reflection scale back to our own experience; handprints on stone, an epic tale committed to memory, or an orchestration requiring dozens of musicians to execute.
But as we have set machines out to catalog our world and store their “memory” in vast troves of semiconductor switches, code, and “data,” what is being recorded (and potentially reflected), has much finer granularity than any human, or even human agency, could possibly comprehend.
With all of the data coming in, our human capacity can be informed by recognizing trends, but parsing the particulars is becoming increasingly more complicated. Big data sets are being collected by researchers and scientists the world over; from satellites overhead, to seafloor mounted sensor arrays below the waves; from autonomous wave gliders, to D-Tags fixed to birds, fish, and mammals.
What I find ironic – particularly in the synthesis of nature research, is that this level of inquiry would not have been possible without western rationalist deconstruction of natural systems that has taken place over the last 300 years. Now it almost seems as if we are reassembling it to recognize (if not completely understand) how complex and interconnected all of these systems are.
But given that we are dealing in massive assemblies of “data points,” the models are somewhat pixelated. And given how poorly we have treated the complex and interconnected systems, we’re now losing a lot of the pixels at an alarming rate.
There are a couple of hopeful outcomes here; that our recognition of the complexities will inform actions to slow down the losses, and that the models we are building are becoming complex enough that we have the possibility of passing on a sense of the stunning beauty of our world to those who inherit the outcomes of our decisions.
In the meanwhile, never miss an opportunity to go out in nature and enjoy it.
