> See how beneathe the moonbeams smile > Yon little billow heaves its breast > And foams and sparkles for a while > And murmuring then subsides to rest, > Thus man, the sport of bliss and care, > Rises on times' eventful sea, > And having spent a moment there, > Thus melts into eternity ! > > Thomas Moore, A Reflection at Sea Space is fundamental to our experience because cognition is deeply intertwined with physical space. The environment acts as a cognitive anchor, shaping how we experience, remember, and interact with the world. Cognition is situated, in the sense that memory is context-dependent: When a memory is formed, the content of that memory is tagged with the location, topology, brightness, temperature, sounds, smells, and other features. Henceforth, content and context remain intrinsically linked. If, like me, you have sometimes walked into the kitchen to get something, only to pause, perplexed and disoriented, having entirely forgotten why you were there in the first place, then you have experienced situated cognition. You formed a memory of a task while in, say, the living room, and then had to retrieve this memory in a different environment, the kitchen, and struggled to do so. Knowledge formation is not an abstract, internal process, but connected to features of physical space. But space is fundamental in other ways, too. As explored [[Epistemic Machines|here]], we perceive only a small fraction of our immediate surroundings and fill in the rest with predictive models. With increasing distance, other places are, progressively, unknown territory. To understand what happens elsewhere, we rely on maps, measurements, consensus, and third-party accounts. But down yonder, uncertainty reigns supreme. The cause of this uncertainty lies in the limitations of our micro-localised perspective - in our preference for human-scaled objects and the gradual discounting of things with increasing distance. But it also lies in the confusion caused by the overlap of objective, measurable space and the space of our subjective experience. Our cognition is deeply tied to the egocentric reference frame. That means that our episodic memory is tied to the reference frame centred on our body. It is encoded with location and the coordinate systems of left-right, up-down, front-back. That makes our perspective on the world point-focused. Micro-localised. We are the ***first-person shooter*** in our own video game. A protagonist running through endless corridors, always blatantly unaware of what lies behind the pixelated wall. Ignorant of the dangers lurking around the next corner. This perspective creates a concentric tunnel-vision making the world appear anthropocentrically scaled. It creates the illusion that anything close to us is more salient. That things in the distance are less important. The existential challenge we face today—the end-level-boss if you will—is neither local nor human-scaled. It is a ***hyperobject***. This term was created by Timothy Morton to describe things like evolution, extinction, climate change, or plastic waste.[^1] Things so distributed across time and space, that we cannot directly experience them. At best, we can perceive spatio-temporal fragments of them. Micro-manifestations of something much, much bigger. We don’t experience the global climate. We perceive rain, wind, heat, sunshine, a thunderstorm, or a forest fire destroying our home. Hyperobjects cannot be neatly shrink-wrapped, labeled, and categorised. Our micro-perspective fails to comprehend their transfinite nature. To make sense of them we must move from an egocentric to an allocentric world view. A view in which we capture our relationship with a larger whole. Or as John Vervaeke more poetically put it, we must reach a state in which “_the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our ego._”[^2] [[Layers|Next page]] <hr> [^1]: Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. [^2]: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, EP. 11, 19:45 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39NpjQDtqNw&feature=emb_imp_woyt