What is it like to be a thing – whether a television, table or a flower? (Image: Olivier Culmann/Tendance Floue)
IF WE really want to understand the nature of the universe, then we must accept two principles. First, everything is an alien to everything else. And second, the experience of “being” something else can never be verified or validated, but only speculated about, even if rational deduction drives that speculation. In the 21st century, then, to fully understand the world in which we live, we are going to need poetry as well as science and philosophy.
We usually understand “alien” either…
