Yeah, the delusion that we can describe anything in definitive way of saying what it is permeates our culture. All we can ever do is describe experience of a thing/event, not the thing/event itself, which must, of necessity, be forever unknowable. This is an entirely relational interaction with whatever aspect of reality we can encounter - and hence more animistic.
What we assume to be rational knowledge is only one aspect of the relational interaction - and an impoverished one if that is all we assume we need to 'know' the thing/event. That's the thing with materialism - by its very nature it tends to 'know' a thing/event by its material expression and its utility.
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I think relational, in the animist sense, is very literal - you relate and interact with other people / environments / creatures / spirits / etc. as fellow beings with agency, not as mere objects of utility (or psychological projections, for that matter).
In traditional societies, this comes from taking shamanic experiences, and a life embedded in nature, at face value.
Maybe I have a hard time getting my mind around animism because I haven't had experiences that would lead me to think that way. I suppose it would be different for people who experience animism in their lives.
If I go back to my model, I think I would add to it that in the model, experience is somehow wedded to "that which is unknown."
I am imagining being alive ten thousand years ago in a hunter gatherer culture where I grew up with the experience of animism. In my model, experiencing talking plants or animals is, like all experience, inherently wedded to "that which is unknown," also known as mystery.
I like Julian Jaynes' ideas from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, where he speculates that perhaps pre-modern humans heard their "inner voice" as if it were coming from outside of themselves. Over time, according to Jaynes, as the two halves of the mind connected with each other more completely, the inner voice started to sound like it came from within the self, rather than from some external source. I think even if the inner voice/experience is entirely created by nervous system tissue (the brain, the body, etc), that's not the end of the story, because the brain and the physical body themselves are wedded to "that which is unknown" like everything else. Typically, when I am thinking about something, I feel like my ideas are coming from some location within myself. But because the experience of ideas is wedded to "that which is unknown," there may be some other unknown factor in the arising of the ideas that means the ideas haven't originated entirely within myself. But because the other factor is mystery, we can't say what it is.
So, in the model I've been working on, a mystical experience of an animal talking could mean that the animal does have consciousness of some sort, or it could mean that the experience is an illusion of animal consciousness that's happening because of the relationship between experience and mystery. And those two options aren't mutually exclusive of each other, so they could both be true. The main thing in the model is that there is "that which is unknown", and it's in some unknowable way related to knowledge/experience; it is by definition outside of my experience and therefore it is mystery.
I think if I were to live in a traditional society ten thousand years ago, I could live "as if" the animals and the trees and mountains had their own consciousness. And it might be useful and beneficial for me and my people to live that way. And it may be useful for people to live that way today. But that doesn't mean that mountains, trees, cars, etc DO have consciousness. It also doesn't mean that they DON'T have consciousness. The model would say that the relationship between experience and "that which is unknown" may very well make things weirder and more mysterious than the explanations we can think about now.
Alex's question at the end of the podcast:
What do you make of animism vs idealism? Does the "vs" make sense? Or are we talking about two different categories?
I think the model I've been working on may be a form of idealism. "That which is unknown" is something outside of experience. I don't want it to have ontological reality or material reality or physical form, so I don't know if that is a kind of idealism or not.
If my model is a form of idealism, then it would follow that, when thinking along the lines of the model, animism would also be a form of idealism, since animism would indicate some degree of consciousness outside of human experience. Whether plants and animals and everything else have consciousness or whether the talking animal is an illusion of sorts happening in the human mind, we don't know how any of it works.
"On the other hand, if we understand dependent arising properly, we know that as things appear they are also empty; from the moment things are empty, they also appear."
(Source --
Journey to Certainty: An Exploration of
Mipham's Beacon of Certainty)
Another way to say it in my model:
Everything that we know is as mysterious as it is known. We tend to focus on the known aspects. And we tend to try to convert the mysterious into the known. These tendencies are extremely useful in making technological advancements. But there may be times when it is useful to try to hold a space for the unknown and to try to see how the truly unknown may influence one's experience.
Interesting reading list at meaningness website. (Note, I don't mean to support this guy's
ax-grinding atheism, but some of his ideas are very interesting to me and others may enjoy looking at his stuff.)
Edit(s): Added meaningness link and cleaned up typos.
Edit 2: Changed some wording.