[Via this very interesting essay (the first of three parts) riffing off a recent talk by Bruce Sterling on Alien Aesthetics. -egg]
Such questions may seem fanciful or mad, but why is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? Why is it so strange to be fascinated with all “things” – from apple pies to microprocessors, tree frogs to alternating current – and to embrace that fascination not just as engineers but also as philosophers? What if engaging in this way holds important clues about a future in which the boundaries between things are fast dissolving?
This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy, one grounded in rational speculation. From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself. One extreme led to scientism, the belief that we can know the world completely by taking it apart; the other to relativism, the belief that we can never escape the mind, that the world conforms to thought, language and culture.