[Light spoilers for context: Sheldrake is elaborating on his experience with "mycoheterotrophs" - "myco" because they depend on fungus for their nutrition; "heterotroph" because they don't make their own energy from the sun and have to get it from somewhere else.]

Mycohets are striking. Conspicuous, contrarian, they stand out from the ambient vegetation. With no reason to be green or to have leaves, they are free for evolution to carry them off in new aesthetic directions.

What would life look like if people didn't have to subscribe to capitalism?

Makes me think of the role of the arts throughout human history, where artists would exist outside of the constraints of capitalistic productivity via sponsors, and they purely existed for connection and play. It's no surprise that artists were known for being contrarian, constantly challenging the status quo. Art doesn't have to be practical or valuable; it can just exist. It can explore facets of the human experience to no exhaustion, critique the current state of affairs, and imagine a new reality beyond the status quo.

If people were freed from our constraints, where would be go? What could we do? Who could we be? Screw our rigidity, fuck our profitability, leave efficiency behind. How could we evolve?

I reflect on my relationship with queerness, existing outside of rigidity and prioritizing my connections. I try to defy the requirement to be economically productive, but it's impossible to be free of it right now. But I imagine a life, for myself and everyone, where our existence is focused on sustainability, creativity, community, and expression - much like mycohets.

Cognitive science emerged from the study of humans and so naturally placed the human mind at the center of its inquiry. [...] But how we define intelligence and cognition is a question of taste.

I loved that he took the conversation about anthropomorphism a step further regarding how humans traditionally define intelligence, because it's a huge red flag in conversations about racism, ableism, and speciesism. Humans use intelligence as a hallmark to justify exploitation, saying that some of us have a right to life that others don't. But it completely ignores the fact that all life on this planet are intelligent enough to survive in their own environments.

Brains didn't evolve their tricks from scratch, and many of their characteristics reflect more ancient processes that existed long before recognizable brains arose.

You know what else didn't evolve from scratch and has our biases built into it? AI.

Predictions suggest that when we do eventually have AI systems more "intelligent" than humans, it may apply the same logic and view us an "just animals", justifying harming or exploiting us because we are the less intelligent species (a.k.a. the Butlerian Jihad irl).