Annotation

Actual quote: "human consciousness, from this perspective, is just a way for plants to move plant and bacterial genes around, but we have apparently forgotten this and take ourselves to be the center of planetary telos. True, we are integral to the planetary telos. The near term futures of this planet are very much linked to the consciousness, or lack thereof, of human beings. And the new thermodynamics of Margulis, Sagan, Salthe, Schneider, and Swenson et al. suggest that we indeed have a purpose: the ongoing elaboration of the void through the dissipation of ever greater amounts of information through rhythmic entrainment and symmetry breaking, an expression of the cosmos’ need to creatively destroy information to defer what systems scientist Stanley Salthe has characterized as the “senescence” of the information overload of thermodynamic systems trolling for increased entropy production. But the plants seemed to remind me that we are by no means at the center of planetary telos because there is no center, only the distributed emergence of complexity and its dissolution (cosmos). Our consciousness is an aspect, even a manifestation of, a distributed consciousness accumulating since the evolution of bacteria three-and-a-half billion years ago, and perhaps before."