What is a conceptual ecosystem?

What is a conceptual ecosystem and how do you walk through one?

The idea of a conceptual ecosystem is a picture for understanding – a tool for understanding – how our ideas about the world and about ourselves relate to and interact with how we live our lives.

It is a way to see how ideas are not just ideas, but parts of our reality, as real as stones and persons are helium, in the sense that they cause and shape and interact with, and even make up the very fabric of reality.

Generally speaking, ecology is the science of interdependency. It studies life as a system of living systems, all of which shape and are shaped by their relations with all other systems. As a hard, biological science, ecology studies biological ecosystems: dynamically organized, kinetic arrangements of organisms and flows of energy and nutrients. Originally beginning as the empirical study of how one organism’s life and behavior depends upon the life and behavior of another organism, ecology has become the name for a whole universe of disciplines and subdisciplines: all of which are pursuing their own cognitive niche to study one of the infinite implications of holistic interdependency.

Human ecology studies interdependency of all live insofar as it pertains to the existence of human beings and their mysterious, deeply troubled, but also hopeful and divine, condition on planet earth. Human ecology is itself a vast interdisciplinary project because of all the complicated problems and questions that our ways of living are currently throwing up at us to respond to.

This book is a work of philosophical ecology, which is a kind of human ecology concerned with how our concepts about how we live are themselves parts of how we live. Philosophical ecology studies conceptual ecosystems, as structural aspects of our environment which serve to transmit, interpret, codify, relate, synthesize, reject and ignore, or illuminate, the flow of information through ecosystems.

All organisms, in order to maintain in the world as biological-thermodynamic survival machines, need to exchange energy and nutrients continuously, in order to resist the force of entropic heat death. Not only nutrients, to rebuild cellular structure, and energy, to metabolize continuity of form which marks the essence of all living beings, but also information is essential to the manifesting of life. To be alive is to be self-organizing, which means to have an inside and an outside – that is, to have a skin. To have a skin is to be semipermeable, which all life must necessarily be, insofar as all life needs to get energy from the larger environs and to release digested energy back into it. But to be semi-permeable is to let some things in and to shut other things out.

The ability to be selective about that process is the seed of perception, hence perception is synonymous with life. As life intensifies – and it is the essence of life to do so – perception also intensifies, by extending itself, internally and externally, and temporally, into the past and the future. At some point concepts appear as particular ways that perception and reality coalesce into deeper levels of unity. And like all living things, concepts develop as systems of concepts which relate and interact with each other and with the non-conceptual, material world, again, in order to intensify life.

Information implies knowledge, which coentails meaning and along with purpose. The ancient and eternal questions of philosophy – what is truth? what is goodness? What is beautiful? – are forever refracted through the dazzling infinite implications of the flow of information through your body, your community, your economy, your planet, your cosmos.