Communication is a strange business. There is some vague sense of internal collection to the psychology of, in this case, reading and writing. It's something I'll refer to as "we." We are not quite a group of human beings in the biological sense. There is something about what we are up to which escapes being identified just with these creatures that we are closely associated with. Yet we are not something specific in any case. We take on little roles and ride the momentum of the many effects of perception and language. We all nudge the conversation this way and that, but no one's in charge, though there are instigators.

So what am I getting at, in productive terms? In discussing what should be done in the world, we can role-play in many different ways. What "we" are can shift around and can give us some freedom in our discussions if we let ourselves break up the narrative into many roles. We can try to speak more directly for homo sapiens, for instance, or even cells and genes. [Read more…]