Photographer: Lyndsay Abel | Source: Unsplash

Preamble

Philosophy as presearch continues to inspire me and it’s one way to bring the midwife of wisdom out of the cave in which it’s been trapped of late. We are in the presearch phase of understanding worlds and before committing too much energy into one hypothesis, I want to conduct an exploratory analysis of worlds in toto.

Presearch happens in disciplinary caves all the time: statisticians conduct exploratory data analysis; engineers test scaled prototypes, scientists play with toy models. Back in the philosopher’s cave, the footnotes to Plato are notorious for their thought experiments.

Why not abstract a tangle of features from data analysis, thought experiments, engineering prototypes and create a new discipline? Why spend time, energy and effort barking up the wrong tree when a simple calculation or heuristic can tell if you’re terribly wrong.

Think about this way: detailed observations are needed to convince a skeptic that the planets go around the sun rather than the earth, but a quick observation tells us that the planets are different from the stars, since they are the only moving objects in the sky besides the Sun and the Moon. So a quick heuristic will tell us: pay attention to the planets. That’s a big win right there.

Let’s don our Roller Coaster World Explorer jackets, shall we?

Stuffistan

Like monopoly, we start our game at Go, where it’s written in bold letters: we understand the universe but we don’t understand the world. It remains an absolute mystery as to why a world presents itself in front of our eyes when we open them. Every answer I know seems to presuppose the solution to the mystery.

Of the worlds we inhabit, the social world is the one best understood, for we learn about by being in it and by being bombarded by information about it. For example, almost all media is ‘social media,’ i.e., media about the social world:

1. Most news, most TV shows, most movies are about the happening of real or imagined humans in society.

2. That media is both the lens through which we learn about the social world AND;

3. That media is also part of the world, an important component determining the future shape of society.

Not just media: all the things we make and throw contribute to the world. From pens to plastic bottles, objects of many types and sizes help us grasp the social world and create it at the same time. In the modern world system, our societies are constantly being destabilized, renewed and reproduced by massive flows of social things. We live in Stuffistan, in which stuff pays homage to humans by being everywhere: homes, streets, offices, playgrounds and of course, trash dumps, landfills and ocean wastelands.

The Anthropocene is nothing but Stuffistan in disguise.

Stuffistan is very good at assimilating the worlds of the past and it does so surreptitiously, by computerizing astrological charts and online matchmaking portals that select for caste and gotra. Here’s a question:

What does it mean to be an Indian inhabitant of Stuffistan?

Which we can answer only after answering a prior query: what was there in India before Stuffistan took over? There are many versions of our pre-Stuffistan history, but one orientalist response is: India is the land of ‘caste, cows and curry,’ hitting three big markers of the Indian subcontinent as far as the rest of the world is concerned:

1. Caste — unique approach to organizing human relations. There’s nothing like it anywhere else and arguably, nothing as discriminatory.

2. Religion — a bewildering array of religious practices and divinities that overlap but never reduce to one reigning deity.

3. Food — spicy, pungent and colorful.

Behind the CCC stereotype is the idea that “India was different.”A civilization that operated with an entirely different logic. It’s one thing when strange behaviors are exhibited by tribes in a remote corner of the planet; they are not considered worthy of inclusion in proper history anyway. It’s another thing when an entire subcontinent with a long history appears to think differently about the basic questions of human life. Or so it appears.

Different from whom?

But Stuffistan has grasped this alien Indian world in its paws and both the differences and the commonalities are being incorporated into its kingdom.

To give just one example, cement production increased a hundred times after independence. What’s all this stuff doing to our minds? How is it reorganizing our world?

Learning to Caste

Photographer: British Library | Source: Unsplash

Caste is full spectrum dominance, regulating how you work, whom you marry, what you eat and how you behave. In short, a behavior generator. One might say that historically, caste was Indian society, or at least the part of Indian society that’s remained stable while kingdoms and empires come and go. Not that stable means static: caste relations have changed over the centuries with jatis moving up and down the ladder as their fortunes change. There are also those who think caste is a modern invention, a product of colonialism.

Whether an ancient organizing principle or a product of imperial categorization, it’s clear that caste has been and remains important. But is it as important as it was a hundred years ago?

It’s definitely a resilient institution.

Most Indian marriages are still within caste. Discrimination based on caste remains all too common — try getting an apartment in Malleswaram with a lower caste name. And when it comes to politics, caste has become a fundamental organizing principle — instead of vanishing and being replaced by an economic identity, caste is how politics gets organized.

On the other hand, the relationship between caste and livelihood is more tenuous than it used to be. Of course, there are systematic correlations: a prestigious occupation like computer engineering is biased towards the upper castes, but computer engineering isn’t a religiously mandated preserve of the upper castes. Similarly, the fight over reservations in government jobs and the public sector are about access to the modern economy, rather than cordoning off sectors of the modern economy for particular castes. To that extent, an earlier model of caste as a hereditary system of organizing livelihoods is no longer true. Caste provides advantages and liabilities in the modern economy instead of determining livelihoods in that economy.

The transformation of caste shows the divergence between economic mobility — however constrained — and social mobility. Not that different from race in the US.

Which brings me to the question driving this essay: does a closer look at Stuffistan help us say something new about caste?

Of course, new can mean many things. It can mean a description of caste based discrimination as it manifests in the capitalist system. It can mean changes in occupational profiles for particular castes and sub-castes: for example, how the replacement of animals by tractors in farming means certain occupations (e.g., skinning) are no longer viable and those caste groups have to find alternate occupations. It can mean understanding how caste manifests as differential access to political power.

I have another goal in mind: can we say something new about caste as a system?

Quick answer: yes. Longer answer: if we probe the impact on caste of Stuffistan — aka flows of matter and information — we will unearth a whole range of questions that haven’t been posed, let alone answered. Starting with the name: ‘caste system’.

I find that every Indian (or at least every Indian I know) uses the phrase as if it’s transparent, that while we may disagree on how bad it is, we assume that we are all talking about the same thing. We may disagree on whether it’s a rope (harmless) or a snake (harmful) but seemingly, we all agree that:

1. Caste is a thing out there

2. As Indians we have a privileged viewpoint through which we can see its contours

3. We are all seeing the same thing even if we disagree on what it means

That’s a pretty remarkable consensus if true. Let me also add: whether true or false, it’s in the very nature of ‘systems’ to make us think that way.

What do I mean?

Systems Ontology

Photographer: Ibrahim Rifath | Source: Unsplash

A system in the sense of ‘caste system’ is meant to be a regulator of all social life: how we live, whom we marry, what we eat, whom we defer to and so on. The idea is that in the archetypal caste milieu, i.e., a standalone village, caste organizes the five W’s: who, what, where, when and how:

1. Spatial: who lives where and how, and which spaces they can access.

2. Behavioral: how do I behave when faced with a social situation: do I fold my hands, do I step aside etc..

3. Livelihood: what do I work on and who are my customers?

4. Reproductive: who do I marry.

And so on. If you add these components, it’s clear that in its previously dominant setting of a standalone village in an agrarian society, caste organizes the basic elements of social ontology: space, time and the body. That’s what I mean by the term ‘system.’

Let’s consider a village as a ‘realm,’ i.e., a portion of the world that can be studied in its own right. Caste is an organizer of that realm. Therefore, we can ask questions such as:

1. If caste is a ‘thing’ what kind of thing is it? Clue towards an answer: caste is a system, and therefore it’s the kind of thing a system is supposed to be. So we are let to ask a second, more general, question:

2. What kind of thing is a system?

3. What is our knowledge of caste and how do we acquire it? Which is related to:

4. How do we get to know systems and what form does our knowledge of systems take?

Behind all of these is the ongoing concern with worlds and weltists and the most abstract version of the above two questions:

What is a world and how do we get to know it?

That’s too big an apple to swallow in one bite. In this essay I have more modest ambitions: start exploring our knowledge of caste. Or rather, how we succeed or fail to know caste.

Far and Near Ignorance

There are two types of ignorance: distance ignorance and intimate ignorance. What the two mean is somewhat evident from the labels:

1. Far ignorance is ignorance that comes from unfamiliarity and lack of data. For example, if I ask you ‘is it raining on Venus right now?’ you have no way of answering that question. You may not even know what it would take to answer that question — does Venus have clouds? does it ever get cold enough for the steam to condense?

2. Near ignorance is when familiarity breeds contempt. For example, parents are notoriously incapable of seeing their children’s faults. Not because they don’t have access to contrary evidence but because they are selective about what they notice. Even closer home, we are often ignorant of what we don’t know — everyone thinks they are well above average in looks and intelligence.

I have another way of placing the two forms of ignorance. Far ignorance is the typical state of the universe while near ignorance is the typical state of the world.

Consider Galileo peering at Jupiter through his newly constructed telescope — he had no idea what he was going to encounter and would have accepted whatever he saw. As it turns out, he noticed little specks orbiting the fifth planet — they were Jupiter’s moons. But he would have been equally accepting of fireworks emanating from the center of the planet.

The universe is not what we inhabit, not in any serious sense of that term. Yes, we ‘know’ the earth is in the solar system which in turn is in the Milky Way and so on, but this nested conception is a product of theory construction, not intimate knowledge. As Arthur C. Clarke said in one of his famous stories: ‘The Stars are not for Man’ — as powerful an expression of ‘distant ignorance’ as can be.

In contrast, we feel the world in our bones. Is it windy or is it hot? Should I trust him or not? We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the condition of the world. Here, the problem of ignorance stems from knowledge. I believe I know everything that’s there to be known about the world around me. Am I not alive?

The world is what we inhabit, and therefore we know it by virtue of existing.

The experience of near-ignorance as ignorance is emotionally and spiritually transformative. It can be uncomfortable as well as exhilarating. You can see that in the intense turmoil over Black Lives Matter in the US right now, where many white people are suddenly acknowledging that people of color have been treated terribly for centuries. Was that mistreatment ever not in front of people’s eyes? Of course not, but now is the moment that the veil is being parted. But if you tell them statues of Jefferson and Washington need to come down — not so soon!

Near Ignorance Fleshed Out

This might be controversial, but I believe the basic problems of far ignorance have been solved through a combination of mathematics and instrumentation. We know what we don’t know, we have some sense of how to make progress and there are standards for determining truth and falsehood. In contrast, consider how we struggle with climate change and deforestation and any number of problems in front of our noses.

Why’s that? There are many reasons of course, but I want to point out three challenges that come from nearness:

1. Familiarity: everyone believes they are experts on the affairs of the world. Everyone knows how to run an economy. Everyone knows which caste or religion is evil. Everyone knows how to make the earth greener, richer, cooler. And at one level, we are all correct. There’s privileged access coming from being embedded in the very world that’s being studied. At the same time, there are blind spots where we don’t know that we don’t know.

2. Morality: every affair in the world comes with a moral stance: Either it’s OK to cut down trees to spur development or it’s bad to cut down trees in order to plant factories. I am not saying these conflicting moral stances are equally correct, but it sure seems impossible to use moral feeling to decide who’s right since all parties to a conflict have equally strong passions. When it comes to caste, it’s almost impossible to set aside moral judgment, and yet it might be important to do so. While retaining our sense of solidarity. Tough problem.

3. Temporality: our immediate environments change over time but we adapt to those changes and don’t realize what’s new as a result. Change in the anthropocene is slow in the time scale of days and fast in the time scale of years: there were barely any cell phones in India in 1992 and almost everyone has a cell phone today. Caste has changed substantially since 1992, but we have to step back a little bit to observe a change.

Just to reiterate: both ‘what is caste’ and ‘how do we know it’ have changed in the last thirty years while remaining familiar throughout and our moral judgments about caste have also changed. The underlying story: caste, like religion, has been fully absorbed into the capitalist system, i.e., Stuffistan. In my next essay, I will explore the consequences of that absorption.

First of all, apologies. I said I was going to explain things EL5 style from now on, but this essay is full of jargon. Think about this way: it’s the easiest way for me to get a few thoughts on paper. Once that’s done, I can take those thoughts apart and reassemble them brick by five year old brick.

The World Comes First

'Umwelt,' is the German name for the 'life-world,' the world as experienced by a living organism. Then there's the bare term 'welt' which is a delicious double entendre, standing for world in German and a painful injury in English, which is a terrific way of expressing the Buddhist (and more generally Indian) intuition that all of Samsara is suffering.

So a 'Weltist' is simultaneously a world-maker, someone who understands the essence of worlds and someone who tries to do so while minimizing suffering. Or liberating us from suffering. Or is it the person who inflicts suffering? Those are some of the meaning worth drawing out as we explore the nature of worlds.

But why worlds?

Because we take worlds for granted. Science reduces them; literature shrinks them and philosophy ignores them*. And yet, without the world we would be nothing. Literally. The weltist returns to the world from the universe. They are more worm than eagle.

How do we engage the world? By chewing our way through the underground of philosophy, science, literature, architecture, code and contemplative traditions.

Strange New Worlds

Wherever you go, there you are. Sounds like the title of a new age book and it is the title of one, but there's a core truth to the statement. The world envelops us, making its fruits available when we need them and sending tigers our way when we aren't looking. It's always there. Switched on 24/7.

We understand the universe very well. We can peek into its origins nanoseconds after it burst into existence. We can predict the motions of planets and control photons so they bend around walls. In contrast, we barely understand the world. We have done a terrible job of protecting the one on which we live. We have no idea why there's one in the first place - how can there be a world in the middle of the universe? Or more than one world - countless many. These are just two of the puzzles that immediately come to mind; a thorough search will certainly reveal more.

The counter argument is that there's no such thing as the world - it's only an illusion projected by our mind and therefore incapable of moving anything from A to B - all the heavy lifting is done by the particles of the universe.

I find that criticism hard to accept - if there's one thing we trust, it's the world. We know that the world just works, that it is the mark of the real. The world isn't a blooming buzzing confusion of clotted elementary particles - it's the ground of meaning. Without the world presenting itself as a meaningful array, there would be nothing else. It's the precondition for knowledge, for to grasp something is to already understand that it's in the world with you.

For the same reason, the world is the precondition for existence: to be is to be in a world.

There's no such thing as being without a world. The reason we can't think beyond the big-bang or understand what it's like to be dead is because it's thinking beyond the world.

The world is what we can take for granted.

It's only when we reflect on boundary cases - the universe before the big bang or the world before my birth - do we understand that our activities are predicated on something that's invisible. Not because it has special optical properties but because it's not an object of vision; instead, it's that which makes the perception of objects possible.

Is there a science of those possibility makers? Understanding worlds as worlds comes before we inquire into specific aspects of worlding.

Or to use an Indian turn of phrase: the study of 'samsara qua samsara'

Why is the world so hard to see? Because:

1. It’s transparent.

2. It’s the bedrock of trust.

3. It’s too familiar

Transparency

There's transparency to the world's presence. Whether fighting or fleeing, there's an ease to our being - we are never at a loss. As I scream my mother's name while being swallowed alive by a tiger, I am under no illusion as to what's happening. True illusion is rare and incomprehension is conspicuous by its absence. The world - or what we often emphasize as the real world is the best user experience we will ever have.

Of course, some might argue that the transparency is a consequence of natural selection, that those who stood mystified as the tiger leapt towards them are gone forever.

While it's a compelling argument, I am not convinced. I believe that there's a genuine sense in which the world is transparent to us, within the constraints binding us as a species - and that freedom is not unique to humans; it's in the nature of being alive. Compare the transparency of the world with the opaqueness of our screens. Who hasn't experienced a line of 0 and 1s that don't make sense or some other textual or visual detritus on their screens? Nothing like that ever happens in the sensorium.

There's a better version of this argument: while the sensorium is transparent, some things that make a big difference to our lives aren't in it. Like bacteria and viruses. We don't experience them at all. Why not? Why is our experience limited to objects of a certain size? Moral: let's not be too hasty and identify the world with our conscious experience (see below).

Of course, it's not as if the absence of a science of worlds prevents us from doing chemistry or neuroscience or any other specialized science, but at some point our questions about quarks and quasars take a turn towards the world. Or so I believe. What is this first science and what are its main questions?

Trust

Modern philosophy starts with Descartes meditations on certainty. He wanted a secure foundation for knowledge and the only security he was willing to accept was that of certainty. What was in the slightest bit uncertain was suspect. What if the devil intervened between him and a snake and made it look like a rope?

In contrast, that we can take the world for granted brings another cognitive virtue to the forefront: trust. That which is taken for granted is often the most trustworthy. You take the ground beneath your feet more for granted than the house built on that ground and the house is more taken for grated than the bed on which you sleep.

Which is also to say that if you had to ask yourself why the bed is creaking, it's more likely the wood is falling apart than the house is shaking, for you trust the house's sturdiness more than the bed's. Of course, it could be an earthquake in which case the normal hierarchy of trust is inverted and the earth is the most treacherous of the three.

Which feels like a traumatic betrayal of trust. Here’s the problem:

1. Finding a foundation of trust is essential to life in the world

2. Learning that even the most trustworthy entity is ultimately fragile is profoundly destabilizing.

It’s the paradox that drove the Buddha crazy enough to leave home and family for the uncertainties of the forest.

Familiarity breeds ignorance

Finally, its intense familiarity makes the world hard to study. There's no science of the world as such; in fact, we are at a loss to explain why there's a world in the first place. Where in this vast universe of galaxies and quarks is the world into which we awake in the morning and from which we slip away at night? With all our sciences, we can only study the world through surrogates - consider something as vivid as the redness of a summer rose: where in our measurements of reflection and wavelength is the color red? For that matter, where's the rose?

The physical universe is without character or meaning, while the world is filled with both. We can't study the world indirectly. Ah, you must be thinking: he's talking about the mystery of consciousness, the strange presence of seeing colors and smelling perfumes in a universe of colorless and odorless photons and molecules.

You would be wrong. The world can't be reduced to consciousness or to matter. They are both correlates, not the real thing. The scientific study of consciousness has to be replaced by a new 'first science': the study of the world.

At the very least we need a way to acknowledge that bacteria are part of the world but not part of our consciousness.

Disclaimer

There's an intuition and then there's the explanation of the intuition. The intuition is simple: there's something to worlds which is obvious, profound and mostly overlooked.

I am quite confident about the intuition.

The explanation of the intuition tries to tease out what I find intriguing about the intuition. But the initial explanations could all be crap. That an elephant is like a snake or a tree is a good explanation even if partial, but to say an elephant is like paste makes sense only if you have its dung in your hands.

Starting next week I will weave the readings I mentioned in last week’s essay into my posts.

Photographer: Markus Spiske | Source: Unsplash

In my previous essay, I arrived at an unoriginal idea: that the computer is a mental telescope through which we can view the world. I didn’t say the universe is a computer because that would be really unoriginal but more importantly, because I am not interested in the universe. I am interested in the world, or more accurately, worlds, the personal and collective realities experienced by humans and other creatures.

To be honest, my love for the world can be traced to the German word for it: umwelt. If you tell someone you are interested in the world, they are likely to look at you funny but if you tell them you’re a weltist, and suddenly you are halfway important. I make worlds for a living, what about you?

Back to the mental telescope: now that I have a hammer, I am looking for nails.

Photographer: Kelly Sikkema | Source: Unsplash

I am reading Paul Edwards’ wonderful book on the role of computer models in the creation of climate science. There are many many things to say about the book. If I have the time, I might review the book in detail one day, but for now, let me stick to the main insight I gleaned from reading the tome: all the structures of modern climate science are products of the computer era. Obviously true for the data collected in observatories and sensors across the world and the computer models that crunch that data, but less obviously so for the international organizations created to make sense of that data and the political controversies surrounding the impact of global warming.

Don’t believe me? Consider two pieces of evidence:

1. The IPCC report.

2. The main line of criticism: climate change is “only a theory.”

The White Space of Truth

Click on the link to the IPCC report, check out the summary for policy makers and if you’re feeling really masochistic, download the PDF and read it. And then step back and ask yourself: how come I am able to access years of work by a network of scientists across the world with a click of a button? Do you think any of this would have been possible without the internet?

Computing via design has also changed our perception of reliability and truthfulness. This is what the IPCC website used to look like:

IPCC website October 2018

I am not talking about 1995. This is what the website looked like in October 2018 when the IPCC released the blockbuster 1.5° C report. It’s as if the scientists intoned to themselves: “we are in the business of producing the truth and we don’t care how it looks.” When I first downloaded the 1.5° C report, the document was clearly a PDFed word document. Yes, the future of the planet depends on the design sensibilities of Bill Gates.

Here’s how the website looks like today:

IPCC website April 2019

They must have hired a UX consultant: clean layout, lot’s of white space, readable fonts. The new design sensibility is reflected in the report as well; it’ no longer a PDFed word document. Bill Gates has morphed into Steve Jobs.

What’s my point?

The IPCC report is an artifact of the computer era: its manufacture and distribution follows the patterns of knowledge production in the 21st century. Truth needs the facts, but it also needs a feeling: in the age of alternative facts, any vehicle of the truth should feel trustworthy and accessible. White space and clean lines promote trustworthiness and accessibility. The shift in design sensibilities reflects a new awareness of the terrain the report inhabits: that it’s inherently a political document and therefore must seduce its readers as much as it conveys the facts.

It’s Only a Theory

The US right wing pioneered a line of critique that one might call “it’s only a theory,” first to dispute evolution and then to cast doubt on anything that endangered the bottomline of their capitalist masters: smoking, pollution, climate change. The doubters recognize that everyone believes two things:

1. Math

2. Facts

If a claim is deductively true (or appears close to being so) everyone believes it. If a claim can be directly verified, everyone believes it. This is not the place to ask about the meaning of “deductively,” “verify” and “belief.” I will pretend as if these are terms that you may not be able to define but you know a case of deduction, verification or belief when you see it.

Magical science happens when 1 and 2 above combine seamlessly. Physics manages to make that happen every once in a while. The General Theory of Relativity is a good example: Einstein himself proposed three tests of the theory that followed directly from his theoretical principles and in 1919 the bending of light was directly verified to Einstein’s everlasting fame. Theoretical physics of the Einsteinian variety is a priestly science: rational magic that dazzles the faithful.

In comparison, climate science is a proletarian discipline, grounded in thousands of data collection efforts and an even larger number of computer models. Unlike General Relativity which sprung unaided from the mind of a genius, climate science exposes its innards to the world. Like other entrails, the sight isn’t pretty. The data sets are noisy. They are in different, incompatible formats. Ocean acidity measurements collect one kind of data. Air temperature readings collect another kind of data. Historical records are full of gaps. Similarly, the computer models have to simplify the real world in order to be tractable. You need higher order models to calculate whether the simplifications of the lower order models omit important parameters. The edifice is laid one brick at a time. Infinite regress looms on the horizon. Both the facts and the models are manufactured with great effort.

Climate Science is an archetype of the late twentieth century-early twenty first century knowledge economy where the widget is manufactured via the labor of thousands (if not millions) of unknown workers, mediated by computing devices and managed by large multinational institutions that not only have a marketing and sales budget, marketing and sales may be as important as manufacture.

It’s not romantic science but it’s eminently useful and eminently political. That’s a big part of what the computer is doing to knowledge.

No different from Google.

I disagree. In our lifeworld, our umwelt, entities appear as concreta and as universals. A person standing in front of me is both Anil (concrete) and a man (universal) and I have no problem perceiving him as both. The Naiyayikas had a point when they said that the universal (maleness) is located in the same location as the particular (Anil). But how do the universal and the particular come together? What is the nature of their conjunction? Isn’t putting universals and particulars together lead to the same sort of problem that Descartes faced when he tried to put the body and the soul together in the Pineal gland? We have to try to understand these issues, which are both philosophical and scientific.

One slight detour: Cognitive scientists have long studied the fact that we categorize entities in nested categories: dog → animal → living thing. We could argue that identifying Anil as a human or vice-versa is just an extension of the categorization problem; an individual such as Anil is just a special case of a category, namely, a category with one element — Anil. But an individual is not a category. You can point to individuals — they have location and shape and size — but not to categories. Unless you are a Naiyayika and believe that the category is colocated with the individual.

Umwelts → (The world of) Affordances → (The world of) Regularities.

Umwelts are life-worlds, the world as experienced by me as a subject or by a dolphin or a tick as a subject. The bacterium e.coli is not part of my umwelt and nor am I a part of its umwelt, though aspects of my gut might be. However, we both have a mutual affordances; e.coli bacteria pick up signals from my gut and my gut in turn is sensitive to the acidity created by e.coli. Therefore we can say that e.coli is part of my environment, even though it is not part of my life world. Now, there might be entities that are not part of my environment now, but could be so in principle. Suppose in 2100, there is a new kind of beings, say, intelligent robots. They are none right now, so we can’t say that our environment contains intelligent robots, but they would be part of our environment in 2100. Let us call the space of all potential environments our cosmos. Then regularities are all the affordances that we could potentially pick up in that cosmos. We can therefore state the relationship between umwelts, affordances and regularities as:

Umwelts → Environments → Cosmos.

We will need to be a little careful in defining the space of all possible environments. It is true that computers were not a part of the environment of our ancestors that arose in the Cambrian explosion, but they are the part of our environment. So, can we say that computers are part of the cosmos of our ancestor? That would be too broad a definition. We might be better of restricting the cosmos and its regularities only to those environments that are adjacent possible environments.