The Extinction Of Experience

I see Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was released in 1982. How time flies. I remember watching Rutger Hauer in that extraordinary final scene for the first time.

I'm in a Blade Runner frame of mind this morning, having a lovely few days in Greece. I couldn't sleep, so read on the terrace and watched the sun rise. 

Before it did, the night sky was extraordinary. There were so many stars you could barely see a small square of dark sky... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Then, very gradually, just the Morning Star before daybreak and Odysseus's wine dark sea... 

For most of us, imagination is a poor thing. We need experience to understand things. Ask any chemistry teacher. And this is a real problem for environmentalists. 

We tend to shut down our imaginative function when starting to think about a distopian future framed by biodiversity loss and climate change. It's understandable - ironically, a survival tool, I guess. 

Second off, our imagination isn't powerful enough. I've spent a lot of time wandering around some beautiful wildflower meadows over the years, but I was stunned to listen to an imagined soundscape of a hundred years ago. The birds! I never stopped to think about the noise that would have surrounded you.

This is not ancient history; we lose this kind of understanding very quickly. My parents would have walked through clouds of butterflies as children on a country walk, something I've never experienced. 

This all has a major impact on shifting baseline effect. We constantly forget what "nature normal" should look like.* Each new generation accepts a more degraded environment as normal. This effect is worsening as technology increasingly confuses the boundaries between real and fantasy worlds. We're in a doom spiral about this. Modern life means we're increasingly remote from the natural world, and as it washes away from us we understand it (and miss it) less and less.  

People's nature normal reality looks like an increasingly fantastical AI generated Disney spectacular. And invariably it's just an incidental backdrop to a game or a TikTok video. At best there's no emotive interaction with this kind of artificial world, at worst it comes to replace the real one. 

The extinction of experience; "all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." 

*This isn't a problem specific to our understanding of the natural world, incidentally. We would do well at the moment to remind ourselves of what political normal looks like.