I empathize with his struggle "to find the places where the 'artificial' barrier between the arts and the sciences was porous, and then spend as much time as he could there." Separating arts and sciences in our education system is such an irresponsibly simplified way to look at the world.
That photo with the sprouting mushroom book is riveting.
The thought of fungi potentially being immortal is both fascinating and terrifying. (Hello flashbacks to athlete's foot!)
I loved that Sheldrake referenced Robin Wall Kimmerer.
That snippet on the history of science is very humbling to contemplate.
As biologist Lynn Margulis writes, all life is the story of “the long-lasting intimacy of strangers.”
Whether or not we have a drug to assist us, we have an urge to somehow “get outside” our normal waking consciousness, which can lead us toward social, cultural, and spiritual enrichment and teach us something about what it means to be alive. Of course, psychoactive substances can cause problems. But mind alteration is here to stay.
Reduction plays an important role in our efforts to understand the living world, but there’s a lot we can’t learn when we do that. We also need to look at the whole organism in its environment. We need to look at interactions between organisms.
The universe was not made to be categorized, classified, systematized. We are wrestling with this unclassifiable, uncategorizable universe, and it’s messy. We can’t step outside the universe to observe it. There is no perfectly objective vantage point for us to observe from. The world is the biologist’s flask, and we’re in there with it.
This is such a wholesome interview.