PODCAST: Worlds of Work—Part 2, Working on Distant Worlds, and Our Own
Our time on Mars, in our most recent podcast, also helps this week’s thought experiment, in this podcast. In thinking about other worlds, it is natural, but hazardous, to think in terms of humans—either thinking what it would be like when humans reach a different world, or thinking about a world’s inhabitants and their work as being human-like.
But this thought experiment is how work gets done on other other worlds. From this experiment, we’ll initially exclude human work on other worlds. We can now leave them behind, like the Voyager spacecraft heading for other solar systems and ask, again, “How does work get done there?” (We will, though, return to Earth sooner and more forcefully than expected. Certainly sooner than I expected. Experiments are like that.)
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The physical work and physiological work that humans have done for eons remains central even as so-called “cognitive work” has arisen. This continuity of work through transitions is crucial. For the reality of this transition is different from its surface appearance. Cognitive work has always been part of so-called physical work, among humans, among animals, and among creatures more generally. All such “physical” work requires aims and skills to be carried out moment by moment, and all of these are done by cognitive work (or by something that looks just like it, in organisms that work wonders without a brain).
All cognitive work that we know of is carried out by physical processes and physical work, both internal and external. And these forms of physical work are tied directly to the nonliving work on this planet or any other. The “thinking” you do for work is pointless, worthless, and not work at all until it is instantiated in action, deeds, and products, even thought products. This work always requires physical work, whether that is typing on a keyboard, viewing a screen, listening to and recording sounds. Each of these requires use of products made with extensive physical work. Each of these requires physical work: the keyboard you use is designed for your physical work, and your motor learning, anatomy, physiology, and neurons have learned and adapted to that keyboard. The internal and external physical, physiological, and neurophysiological work performed is extensive and intensive, even if its familiarity makes it seem negligible and invisible.
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The hazard in our own thinking about human work lies not in the stars, but in the idealizations that human work is now limitless and effortless, that our minds can create anything–without cost. Motivational strategies often convey this fallacy. So do breathless nuggets that new work is like nothing that has ever been. Quiet quitting, working remotely, quitting remotely, working quietly. The forces and rhythms of work that matter have done their work since the Universe began and do it every moment of every day, every working moment of your own work. Humans work not apart from that.
Keep seeing nature in work and work in nature.
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