a city is not an idea, a city is an ecosystem
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Replying to @simpolism @chc40
tbqh I think the city-as-organism metaphor is pretty damaging and often unhelpful, because it gives cities undue agency and collapses them into neat and totally unrealistic wholes. it is cute, though.
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Replying to @simpolism @chc40
city-as-organism might be explanatory in some cases, but I also think the experience of a city is not the experience of an organism. otoh we already use language like "buying into" ideologies and "in-sight" into [the support structure of] ideas.
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Replying to @simpolism @chc40
cities are organismic superstructures. almost every social organism creates them at varying scales. corals, termites, sea-birds, and social primates all do it.
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the super-structure itself is a reflection of the behavior of the underlying organism, but it also exists in a feedback system with that organism thus influencing the future behavior of the organisms within the super-structure.
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super-organism might be viewed as the process that emerges from the behavior of the organism dwelling within and constructing/deconstructing/reconstructing it's super-structure habitat. the reshaping of the ecosystem to be a reflection of the organism itself.
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so the city-human-earth system is a living process where distinctions between each component in the system become more and more superficial at levels of analysis above the strict physical object boundary level.
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and just as we can make object boundary distinctions within a human (organ, cell, organelle, molecule) we can do so in the super-organism as well without losing the gestalt of it all. buildings are organs filled with people which are the cells of that organ.
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we have a conventional illusion that the control system of the human organism is the centralized egoic narrator self. this illusion is dispelled as soon as we acknowledge that most of what your body does is totally unconscious. you don't will yourself to beat your heart, etc.
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so what controls the process of an organism? what controls the process of the super-organism? these are the fundamental questions. and they can be applied memes as well! what are memes the cells of? what controls the memetic super-organism?
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we simply don't know. this is on the frontier of our understanding. is it possible, even in principle, to have an exact, quantified, predictive science of memetic processes? My intuition says yes but I wouldn't know where to begin honestly.
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