navigating reality

Ontological pluralism is a commitment to multiple realities, many of which overlap, but some of which remain (at least for now) irreconcilable. It is not a commitment to tolerance of multiple perspectives on a single reality. This latter option, as Bryant points out, would be a rather trivial form of pluralism. It is also a rather colonialist and s... See more

Instead of assuming from the get go that anyone who doesn’t describe the world in your favored language is deluded, try to get to know them, to understand not only what their world is like, but how their world is brought forth. Follow the injunctions through which they enact their world. Then, once you’ve explored it from the inside, by all means j... See more

Any understanding of the mundane world that we develop necessarily involves dimension reduction and simplification: so the story goes. We may end up with a tractable model that predicts reasonably well, but we’ll never get our error term to zero, and we mustn’t confuse our toy conceptions for a high-fidelity reproduction of “reality.”

Reality is something much bigger than our ordinary senses are capable of perceiving, and learning to be in relationship with it requires us to enter the imaginal realm. Mysticism, magic, and animist frameworks are ways of doing that, so I write a lot about those topics.

Framing is decisive. At every moment, we live and operate and relate to the world from inside our framing of it, our mental model of it. Relating to the world as made up of ecosystems will result in very different outcomes than relating to the world as made up of individuals, of discrete things that can be treated distinctly.