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Encyclopedic-style entries.

art, fiction

Radiant Triangle

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An exotic animal species. Noted for its bioluminescence and the sweet and fruity taste of its “meat.” They don’t respond well to captivity, but are docile enough that they can be raised in large enclosures. They are not afraid of people. Radiant triangles are 2-dimensional and grow as long as they live. Most individuals die young, but individuals that survive for 1 year are typically able to survive indefinitely. Individuals younger than a year, making up more than 98% of the radiant triangle population, resemble fireflies in size and behavior (coming out at night, blinking, and whatnot).

fiction

Bogota

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Bogota is a roaming spirit. She has acquired some fame after her spiritual core was identified as a very specific idea: democracy as understood by the people born in 1922-1831 in la Gran Colombia. This concept of democracy includes the views of Colombians across class, religion, and race on the matter. While her spirit is composed of more ideas, this core idea alone is responsible for much of her personal complexity. This writer does not know enough of the people of la Gran Colombia himself, nor of Bogota personally, to write to much about how this idea manifests, but does know that Bogota is someone genuinely concerned with liberty and equality. Her understanding of democracy is incredibly nuanced, such as can only be had by experiencing every role within a nascent, struggling democracy (see also the Veil of Ignorance).

The process of identifying the connection involved a number of miracles, almost-divine beings, eccentric cosmoi, and otherwise improbable occurrence. The process cannot be captured adequately in anything short of a novel, but the reader may trust that the process was infallible. Bogota is the only such spirit to be perfectly identified, though other spirits have been imperfectly identified.

Bogota has never been to Earth. She has lived in Dreamscape for several hundred years. She has requested a number of books about la Gran Colombia, Simón Bolívar, and other related topics. She does not intend to visit, because it is bafflingly far away and the relevant period is already well in the past. La Gran Colombia no longer exists and she suffered an intense depression after learning about the region’s condition in 2019.

It should be noted that her name differs from the city that was the capitol of la Gran Colombia. Bogotá, the city, is pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable. Bogota is also pronounced in the Spanish style, but with the emphasis on the second o. She chose the name herself as an infant spirit.

blog

Umwelt

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An umwelt (plural: umwelten) is a given creature’s world. The creature creates their own umwelt as they learn about the outside world through their perception. The outside world is, for its part, called the umgebung.

A creature cannot learn about the umgebung without its senses. We have no other way to gain knowledge. This forces us to consider the strengths of and weaknesses of our ability to perceive. Everything we consider true about the world is dependent on the accuracy of our observations. Look around you. Your mental concept of walls and floors is probably smooth, by convenience. But walls usually aren’t that smooth at all, even though they’re more or less flat. Your umwelt does not contain the texture of the floor until you specifically observe it and incorporate it into your worldview. When you walk past a brick building, is every single brick part of your umwelt? No, you have not observed the bricks individually, but only as a whole.

These examples are usually inconsequential, but contemplate how varied human perception is. Every person represents a unique idea, an emotional framework built on experiences filtered through perception. Physical disabilities all immediately impact umwelten, but so does a kind upbringing or a cruel mentorship. Mental illness, physical illness, trauma, kindness, changes in how big or small the world seems, pure knowledge: they all can and will change a person’s umwelt forever.

You have your own umwelt. For myself, I believe most, maybe all, people should be treated with kindness and that kindness exists on some level in all people, if they should choose to access it. I want to believe that one can generally trust another. What would it take for a child soldier to believe the same things? If they had seen their kind (or cruel) parents killed, if they had been tortured until they became willing to kill, and the very act of survival turned them into the things they hated most? When that same child miraculously survives and grows up, only to become a war criminal because they could not escape that lifestyle or adapted to it too successfully? Or a young person from a rural family, promised work in a safer, more stable place, who arrive in a strange land only to be kidnapped by those who were supposed to be their provider? When they are drugged, never hearing any speech in a language they understand, beaten and abused as chattel? If we do not contemplate the natural beliefs of people in such dire circumstances, we cannot hope to understand our fellow people.

In corollary, there are also the umwelten of people like Nadia Murad, humans rights activists who are themselves victims, or Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a Catholic polymath raised in an unusually liberal climate who ignored her appointment by the Pope as the second female university professor ever to teach children and take care of the sick.

Moving past the individual, umwelten also form across species. Jakob von Uexküll, the creator of the umwelt concept, was fascinated with the umwelten of creatures like ticks and jellyfish, both of which are blind. Consider how the world you believe in would be different, had you been 1. born blind, 2. became blind after learning to see, and 3. the whole human race was blind and had never learned of such a thing as seeing. Variances in the individual umwelten are only further complicated because these variances are determined within the boundaries determined by the circumstances of our birth: species, upbringing, civilization, culture, nationality, technology, race, gender. Our experiences infuse meaning into our world that we will never be able to communicate to someone without the same experiences.

Before we even arrive at questions of language, word choice, and empathy, perfect communication is already impossible, because we cannot perceive the experiences that give meaning to words. Even when we are coparticipants or observers of a relevant experience, we have not perceived the experience as the umwelt creator did. We cannot know what they focus on, what memories they use to infuse meaning into their current experience. This means that concepts like consent and agreement, so essential for our coexistence, are only ever partial. Why do lawyers draft hundred-page contracts? Because the contracting parties have no way of knowing how much their umwelten have in common. They only have belief: beliefs about the deal they believe they are making and beliefs about what the deal they think the other party thinks they are making. When two umwelten interact, we have a semiosphere, whether we are contracting, reading this essay, or trying to be understand someone else.

Many social problems begin with the problems of forming a good semiosphere. These problems, however, are all external. A similar, but possibly greater problem, is that of the innenwelt. The innenwelt is the you that you create within your umwelt. You cannot learn anything about yourself, save what you perceive. However, there is no bound on the number of filters between the you who puts information out and the you who perceives that information. When you contemplate your own mind, you create separate selves to act and perceive. You do not perceive yourself as part of the umgebung, as you may a brick or insect. You only perceive what you yourself present. When you present information to another, if you try to learn about yourself through that information, you must wait until it passes through the other person’s umwelt and then comes back however they present it. Many of the difficulties of life amount to difficulties in forming an innenwelt. Endless stories have been written for characters who fail to form their innenwelt. Are Borges’ stories anything but his characters’ innenwelten falling apart or manifesting, in turn representing Borges’ pursuit of his own innenwelt? Even the sciences, contemplation of the umgebung, stem from the pursuit of the innenwelt: creating the self by recreating the universe (of which the self is part) within the mind.

Takeaway

Lest this be mistaken for idle philosophy, I would like to say a few things. As you become more aware of your own umwelt and the umwelten of all other life, you necessarily learn things that should change who you are. You must be conscious of your own fragility, as a weak body of flesh vulnerable to all manner of disease and injury, but also as a mind. It is a fact that a sizable percentage of what you believe is false. However, you will never know how much is false or in which way you’re wrong. You cannot know, in truth and in spirit, whether your errors are fundamental or nuanced. You do not know whether another person knows a thing, you may only believe. No matter how objectively wrong someone may be within the umgebung, they may be speak pure truth within their umwelt.

First, be understanding. It doesn’t matter if it’s a disagreement, a misunderstanding, an argument, or whatever. You do not know the condition of another’s umwelt and innenwelt (or even, really, the condition of your own). What they believe may not be True, but it is true enough for them, as they currently are.

Second, be gentle. That truth, no matter how robust or weak, is the sum of a life of learning through pain and hope, curiosity, success and disappointment. Do not force another person’s umwelt to become yours. Let them form it themselves, while providing compelling evidence that they are loved.

Third, be kind. The more I contemplate the umwelten, the more I am terrified. People hurt a lot under all circumstances. Do not add to their suffering. It may be incredibly difficult for you to beautify or love your own umwelt, but you can make things better through goodness to others.

In particular, encourage the kind, the gentle, the pure, the childlike, whose umwelten are precious and beautiful above all others. Such are often discouraged as naive, immature, or idealistic. The answer is to help them to become harmless as doves, cunning as serpents, not to turn their kindness against them. Contemplating the umwelten of such people is a pure blessing, So, I repeat what I said and end: encourage the kind, the gentle, the pure, the childlike, whose umwelten are precious and beautiful above all others.

See also

Wikipedia

Flip Flappers, reading about this anime introduced me to the umwelt concept.

Sonder, an exercise or experience in which you contemplate the umwelten of those around you. Bringing people into your umwelt as individuals, instead of as components of a collective image.

Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas, an article by Quanta Magazine featuring Integrated Information Theory, a related theory of conscious I find very exciting.

The Guilty, a film that implements this concept well without invoking it. An excellent example of sympathetic storytelling.

fiction

Vampircille

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Vampircille [vam-per-seal] are a diminutive, vampire-like sapient species. They stand out because of a biological link to planes full of energy: rather than drawing energy from their ecosystems, vampircille are able to subsist passively on an infinite energy source.

Vampircilles are generally very smol, being 40-60 inches tall in adulthood and are typically docile in personality. Each arm ends with two dexterous digits tipped by hard claws. They have two protruding fangs, from which they can produce threads.

Vampircille are natural weavers. However, the traditional vampircille lifestyle is technologically simple given their lack of opposable thumbs. As a species, they display incredible resistance to disease, heat, pressure, cold, and radiation. They can also rapidly form an armored cocoon when in danger. They can remain in a cocoon indefinitely, since they generate their own energy.

Thanks to their ability with weaving, they can create things like clothing, simple structures, baskets, and the like, but they must rely on other species for more complex manufacturing. They prefer to live in burrows with complex family structures. While pure vampircille societies lack much engineering, they are quite literate with rich intellectual traditions. They can etch in stone with their claws or, where the resources are available, write with their clawtips dipped in ink.

Many species and civilizations exploit vampircille on account of their “free” energy. While vampircille can sustain themselves indefinitely and live for hundreds of years when left to themselves, they have little to protect themselves against other sapient species. Their small size makes them easy to overpower and their cocoons are easy to destroy with tools. Furthermore, most pure vampircille societies are eventually destroyed by slavers.

Of these parasites, vampires are the most prominent. Vampires enslave and feed off them. Some vampire species are only able to survive by feeding on vampircilles. The association is so strong that vampircille’s name is derived by their relationship to vampires in most languages (including this one). While one might think it’s because they are both fanged, a vampircille and a vampire are almost impossible to confuse. It’s more that most civilizations’ first contact with vampircille is through vampircille enslaved by vampires.

Ultimately, most vampircille are enslaved. Of free vampircille, most must live in communities dominated by other species and rely on the defenses those communities provide. Pure vampircille societies are exceedingly rare. Only one is notable on the interplanar scale: the City Faille.

fiction

Biology

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Biology in B&W is best understood as a duality between body and spirit. Life is defined by the characteristics of our bodies, our spirits, and the bonds between them. (For more detailed discussion on how life is influenced by the characteristics of the body, spirit, and environment, see Umwelt.)

Spirit

A spirit is the thing that gives life, matter, and intelligence. All matter is infused with some degree of spirit, even dead earth and stone. As spirits become more sophisticated, they confer, first, life and then, later, sapience. If a spirit is sapient, it is considered a person. As a spirit develops, it grows in intelligence and power, gains ability to interface with bodies, and its individuality becomes visible.

All spirit is alive, but a spirit must be developed past a certain point to be able to bring its body to life. Background spirit, the spirit that is omnipresent in matter, is a collective of infant spirits. These spirits are not yet able to evidence their individuality or impress their image on the world, so they appear as a homogeneous energy field spanning the cosmoi. Plants, animals, and intelligent life all have spirits of cognizable intelligence.

Spirits are not created and have neither beginning nor end. Although they may exist, grow, and change with time, every spirit has existed in some form always. Although spirit gives all physical matter its form, spirit itself exists physically. It is not, so to speak, immaterial, but a more primordial form of matter than that which we can perceive.

On a personal level, the spirit is what could be called the original self. Our spirits are our emotional world and our means of accessing each others’ emotional worlds. As humans, we have sapient spirits, which enable advanced communication, contemplation, and abstraction, among other things. The individuality of the spirit stems from the ideas that make up a spirit. Plato believed that ideas had their own existence and they do, in the form of people. Spirits are composed of ideas. These ideas are, eo ipso, true: an untrue idea can appear in a spirit’s composition, but it manifests as a flaw or vacuum, a nothingness, in the spirit. Only true ideas positively manifest as a somethingness, composing a spirit. Like ideas, spirits exist in an infinite number and can grow more sophisticated ex nihilo.

Almost all spirits are a dynamic, radiant hodgepodge of beautiful thoughts and concepts. It is possible for a single spirit to grow from a single idea, but this is rare. A single idea can never be complex enough to form a spirit, so it must necessarily take on additional ideas as it grows. These ideas can be very specific. Consider the following case. There is a spirit that has been positively identified as being born from the idea of democracy as it developed in the minds of people born in la Gran Colombia after 1821 through la Gran Colombia’s dissolution. Named Bogota, she first heard of Earth and la Gran Colombia when this identification occurred, and has still never visited Earth, living several cosmoi away. Bogota exemplifies how an idea can be divorced from the context it corresponds to (la Gran Colombia, Earth), if any physical context exists. Bogota, the spirit, has always existed, before the Earth even formed, before Bolívar ever declared War to the Death. Even if la Gran Colombia never came into being, Bogota would still exist.

Bodies & Souls

A soul is the union of body and spirit. Spirits prefer to have a body. Without spirits, there is no matter, but without a body beyond the spirit, they can only influence the material world in trivial ways. Spirits are all made from a single substance, while bodies are not. Pure spirits are split into a few classifications: roaming spirits, sedentary spirits, and primal wills. Contrast with how many species exist. Both spirits and souls vary individually, but spirits’ differences are almost purely individual, while bodies differ individually and as classes.

If a spirit is joined with a body through the process of birth, the resulting soul is considered Natural Life. Birth is a special capacity of spirits that allows for a special union of soul and body. A spirit can only use this special capacity once. Birth is only possible with bodies that can interface with spirits and have no spirit inhabiting it. After birth, the spirit’s bodies prior to birth are suppressed, but not lost. These memories are gradually recovered after death. A spirit is not destroyed with the destruction of body, whether the former soul was natural life or otherwise. Spirits, after death, feel a primordial urge to migrate. This urge leads most spirits beyond the known cosmoi and, exploiting unknown mechanisms, travel to realms unknown.

The capacity of natural life to be born and die is essential for spirits. Spirits exist uncreated and live in and beyond the known cosmoi. As pure spirits, they have little ability to physically influence the world. Spirits return to this condition after death, but the process of becoming a soul matures the spirit. This maturation includes any growth the spirit underwent in terms of its character during life, but it does not end there. The matured spirit is also physically more advanced and gains little-understood abilities tied to the postmortem migration. Living beings have proven incapable of understanding these abilities and mature spirits incapable or uninterested in explaining them.

The typical development of a spirit is summarized as follows: Immature → Intelligent → Natural Life → Mature → Migration.

Those spirits that reject the urge to migrate and come to possess bodies are known as undead. There are a number of undead species. Since birth is unavailable to undead spirits, the bodies must be built to completion beforehand. By becoming undead, these spirits also lose the special abilities possessed by mature spirits (these abilities are regained when the undead return to death). This category also includes spirits whose migration is interrupted for whatever reason. As an example of this latter case, Clockwork Zombies do not choose to return to life. Their spirits are captured by a mechanical body designed to host spirits.

In contrast to natural life, constructs are bodies with a spirit that has never been born. Construct species differ from undead species because they use parts of the birth mechanism to gain a body. The process does not constitute birth and living as a construct usually does not produce the same physical maturation effects on the spirit. Consequently, this process is often caused deficient birth. Death of a construct’s body or the spirit abandoning the body also does not have the same effect as death does on spirits in natural life. Some natural life species began as construct species that evolved to support birth: golems and patchwork tsukumogami.

A body without a spirit reverts to dead matter, passively maintained by some spirit besides the former possessor. How a body gains a spirit of its own depends on the species, but a spirit cannot possess a body and form a soul unless the body can, to some degree, influence itself and give the spirit some freedom to influence the material world in a meaningful way. This is the difference between spirits that reside in unliving objects and souls; the unliving objects don’t work for soul formation because the spirit cannot make any meaningful choice that influences the physical world as a rock or river.

Not all souls fit a 1 body to 1 spirit (1:1) ratio. While n:1 and 1:n ratios are the most common, there exist species and individuals with m:n ratios. These unconventional arrangements require both a body with appropriate characteristics and a spirit with a compatible disposition.

Examples: Mons typically have 2 bodies and 1 spirit, but which 2 bodies the mon controls isn’t fixed (2:1). A mon spirit can shift possession from inhabiting one compatible body to inhabit another (their bodies being specially configured to transfer the spirit in such a fashion). Echidna has an arbitrary number of bodies that correspond to her single spirit (1:n). Tsukumogami often have multiple spirits in a single body (n:1). Blighted persons share their body in part with Blight, a primal will (1:2). While some spirits may be content to inhabit a single plant lifeform (1:1), more sophisticated plant spirits may have an entire forest as their body (1:large n).

When dealing with natural life, spirit and body matches are never that far off the mark. The existence of a soul implies that the body and spirit are highly compatible (this statement should be interpreted at a high level of abstraction). The diversity of physical bodies reflects this fact: some spirits are compatible with only one species of physical body. Furthermore, a spirit may not be able to inhabit all bodies of a compatible species, requiring an even closer match. The body and spirit must be able to physically and emotionally interface. Disease, disorder, and trauma may impact the quality of interface, but they do not erase original compatibility. Constructs and undead do not have the same guarantee, but since their spirits usually choose their bodies, the matches are decent.

By way of note, the term soul may be interpreted in some cases as the union of any group of things that has become universally and deeply integrated into each other, such that they can be described as a single object, but the biological interpretation is the default.

While individual souls are usually understood in isolation, it is important to understand that communities constitute a soul of sorts. Pulling from a previous example, Bogota is dependent on all the ideas around her for her identity: the ideas that birthed la Gran Colombia, the ideas that have come from her own, the ideas that she has lived alongside. The ideas that build my spirit themselves depend on the ideas of other spirits. My ideas, and thereby my spirit, grow as I learn about the ideas and truths of others. In turn, if I teach others truth, my life bleeds into theirs. All life flows in and out of each other. Even the spirits of the dead are influenced by the growth or decay of the ideas they left among the living. To live is to search for true ideas. It’s a collective endeavor and, for every mind lost from the collective or injured by falsehood, we are all the worse off.

List of a Few Sapient Species

See the Sapient Species Tag for all articles about specific species. The animal species tag is available for unintelligent specimens.

Natural Life: life resulting from a spirit being born into a body. Has no memory of life prior to birth. The spirit typically disappears at death.

  • Adamin
  • Axolotl
  • Blizoop
  • Elemental
  • Gibs
  • GKG
  • Golem
  • Human
  • Inclusions
  • Leviathan (abbreviated as Levy)
  • Mons
  • Patchwork Tsukumogami
  • Squiffle
  • Template
  • Vampircille
  • Vampire

Constructs: a body inhabited by a spirit that has never been born into a body. Memory is normal. The spirit typically does not disappear at death.

  • Anima, or Wild Spirits
  • Teruterubozu
  • Tsukumogami
  • Possessor (also a modifier)

Undead: a body inhabited by a spirit that has been born into a body. Undead retain their memories from life.

  • Abhartach
  • Clockwork Zombie
  • Nosferatu
  • Soucouyant
  • Teruterubozu

Species Modifiers: Species that do not have their own form, but the form of other races.

  • Blighted Person
  • Umcoeur

See also