Everything I am now is because of Max. I had nothing when Max into my life, he gave me everything. Now, I have everything but I don't have Max. That's the irony and brutality life played with me. But that's how of the law of impermanence works.
People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.
Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet. I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.
Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths - symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.
One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."
It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!
No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.
On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.
We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.
One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.
The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?
People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.
Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet. I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.
Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths - symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.
Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been - and continue to be - a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve on their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungi (mykes) and root (rhiza) - which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web." This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of the plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.Robert Macfarlane last year with this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (which I still have to finish) opened our minds to new truths and in turn, his book turned out to be one of the top books of the 21st century. Merlin Sheldrake repeats history this year with this book with this story of mycorrhizal networks.
[---]
The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy.
One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."
The World Wide Web appeared to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than a Swiss watch. Today, network science is inescapable. Pick any field of study - from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies - and the chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.Simard's paper and her catchy concept of wood wide web found its way into James Cameron's Avatar as Pandora where symbiotic networks and relationships thrive.
It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!
No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.
It's the narrative that we tell that needs to be examined. I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon. Once again, it may be more helpful to ask why this behavior has evolved in the first place: who stands to benefit.Yes, it is that ridiculous and hilarious how our language biases us into mindless ideologies that affect our thinking and makes it close to impossible to change our minds.
Today, the study of shared mycorrhizal networks is one of the fields most commonly beset with political baggage. Some portray these systems as a form of socialism by which wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to older and larger "mother trees". Some describe networks in terms of "biological markets," in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange, engaging in "sanctions," "strategic trading investments," and "market gains."
On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.
We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.
One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.
The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?
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