CONCEPT
The Ecological Thought
Not a thought about ecology but a form of thinking — taking interconnectedness as fundamental and following implications wherever they lead, even into discomfort.
The ecological thought, as Morton defines it in the 2010 book of that title, is a cognitive posture that takes the mesh as its starting point. Everything is connected. This sounds like mysticism. In Morton's hands it becomes rigorous philosophy with radical implications. The ecological thought does not romanticize nature, does not oppose nature to culture or wilderness to civilization. It insists these oppositions are obstacles to ecological awareness because they divide the mesh into categories the mesh does not respect. The mesh includes human minds, AI systems, institutions, carbon cycles, microbiomes, cultural practices — all constituting each other, all propagating perturbations through relationships extending in every direction.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Applied to AI, the ecological thought reveals what standard discourse obscures. That discourse organizes around the human/machine relationship as if those were the only nodes in the mesh. The ecological thought insists: AI is a perturbation in the mesh of relationships constituting cognitive culture. The mesh includes the user and the tool but also educational institutions that