Inside-Outside

How the Anthropocene is Changing our Minds

I have been writing and presenting how the Anthropocene is changing our minds. Some of this has to do with the deep, underlying ways in which we organize our conceptions of reality. We rely on deep, metaphysical mental models that operate below the radar of consciousness. These can be thought of as the very foundations of mind that make thought possible, or alternately as the architecture of mind. This particular architecture of mind that operates today has been around for approximately 3000 years. There is evidence that it is changing.

One of the features of the current mind is the way we organize reality into insides and outsides. We unconsciously employ metaphors based on concrete models to do this, and our language reflects this, as Johnson and Lakoff have shown. We conceptualize insides as smaller than outsides, for example, because in the concrete instance, that is always the case — what fits inside must be smaller than what is outside of it. In other words, we apply the metaphor of “container” to organize reality around categories of inside and outside. This is an example of what Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness.”

The new realities of the Anthropocene are challenging the way we organize reality. One of those ways has to do with insides and outsides. Consider, for example the COVID-19 outbreak. It is challenging the naive notion that our immune system is “inside our bodies.” The reality we are encountering is that a healthy immune system is part of a larger, “outside” healthy environment. Cutting down a forest is the same as carving out a piece of lung; and our relationship to animals, specifically factory farming and the depletion of wildlands, is compromising our immune systems.

We see the same in the discourse around social isolation as a response to the outbreak. We expect that we can keep ourselves safe, by keeping our bodies “inside” our homes. This too is a metaphysical illusion that may be able to “flatten the curve” but won’t address the underlying problem, which has to do with centralization and institutionalization of health care. Widespread problems need widespread solutions. Health care education and practice should be democratized and broadly distributed throughout the society. Patents protecting medical devices should be eliminated. Medical services should be released into the public domain, and much more practices should be allowed to be done by competent citizens in their own home.