From Silicon to Slime
August 12, 2024 at 10:55PMThis illuminating conversation between Willa Köerner and Claire L. Evans explores the overlap between biology and computation. Could an ant colony, a tree, or even our imagination be considered a computer? Can humans drastically shift their understanding of the world, “align [their] interests with what living organisms and systems naturally do,” and create more collaborative, sustainable solutions? Also, what can we study in the world’s history, as well as consider in today’s science fiction, that could help us recontextualize the present? A great interview between two insightful thinkers.
If you start thinking about things at an even smaller scale, really, nothing is solid. Everything is porous. I’m obsessed with this book by Laura Tripaldi, a nanotechnologist who writes about the intelligence of materials and what happens when they come into contact with one another. Nanotechnologists don’t talk about hard divisions between surfaces. They talk about “interfaces,” because where materials touch, on the nano-scale, there’s no strict surface. It’s all interactions of particles, which act on and transform each other. So really, at every scale, we’re already in a state of flux. We just don’t see it.
I guess I’m just excited by ways of understanding the world that implicate us in the mess of it all. It proves in an irrefutable way that the modular, isolationist human framework of reality is an inaccurate representation of life on Earth.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/12/from-silicon-to-slime/
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