Thursday, March 08, 2018
Why shouldn't they?
Yesterday I was screwing around with dumb architectural questions, and realized that the common bilevel is really a reversed bungalow, or a Wolagnub.
It's a wonderful word to chew on. Wolagnub, wolagnub, wolagnub.... I was still chewing on Wolagnub this morning while building an animation of neural circuits in the auditory pathway....
... and an even dumber convective thought popped out.
These disparate islands form a unity, with axon tracts constantly sending information back and forth. The islands are contained in various pieces of the brain, some down in the medulla and others up in the cortex. In reality you can't see the islands at all, and can't envision them as a single unit. They are enclaves inside unrelated structures, bounded more by function than by geography, all forming a single non-contiguous creature.
A Wolagnub sounds like some kind of alien. We're accustomed to thinking of an alien as a unitary creature contained in a compact envelope like mammals. But even among Earthlings, the single-creature envelope is not all that common. Most familiar plants are islands communicating via fungal axons and chemical squirts and electrostatic fields. A lawn full of clover may be one plant, and a forest of trees may be one plant.
Shouldn't we start thinking of aliens as similar to Earthlings in this respect? Shouldn't we start envisioning them as groups of exclaves within other enclaves, communicating in ways that we can't detect, such as slow-moving electrostatic fields? Plants do it. Why shouldn't Wolagnubs do it?
All together now: We all live in a yellow Wolagnub, a yellow Wolagnub, a yellow Wolagnub....
¶ 11:57 AM 
... and an even dumber convective thought popped out.
These disparate islands form a unity, with axon tracts constantly sending information back and forth. The islands are contained in various pieces of the brain, some down in the medulla and others up in the cortex. In reality you can't see the islands at all, and can't envision them as a single unit. They are enclaves inside unrelated structures, bounded more by function than by geography, all forming a single non-contiguous creature.
A Wolagnub sounds like some kind of alien. We're accustomed to thinking of an alien as a unitary creature contained in a compact envelope like mammals. But even among Earthlings, the single-creature envelope is not all that common. Most familiar plants are islands communicating via fungal axons and chemical squirts and electrostatic fields. A lawn full of clover may be one plant, and a forest of trees may be one plant.
Shouldn't we start thinking of aliens as similar to Earthlings in this respect? Shouldn't we start envisioning them as groups of exclaves within other enclaves, communicating in ways that we can't detect, such as slow-moving electrostatic fields? Plants do it. Why shouldn't Wolagnubs do it?
All together now: We all live in a yellow Wolagnub, a yellow Wolagnub, a yellow Wolagnub....
¶ 11:57 AM
