{"id":14431,"date":"2026-01-30T14:27:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T19:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=14431"},"modified":"2026-01-30T14:40:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T19:40:01","slug":"beyond-species-solipsism-or-are-we-alone-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2026\/01\/30\/beyond-species-solipsism-or-are-we-alone-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond species solipsism, or, Are we alone yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m sharing a little fragment of <\/em>The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds<\/a>. This particular piece comes close to the beginning of the “Theoscene” chapter<\/a> (reader’s guide here<\/a>), where I make the case for a broadened understanding of the “more-than-human worlds” of the book’s subtitle. This version omits the notes and adds some paragraphing for online readability. The book can be ordered here<\/a>. Write to me if you cannot afford to buy it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are we alone yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Insofar as the very notion of an Anthropocene represents the culmination of an onto-\u00adepistemological humanism, a centering of collective humanity as the leading actor on the world stage, this question \u201cAre we alone?\u201d haunts the Anthropocenic imagination. Logically speaking, the question invites a series of answers, each of which has emerged in different guises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blaise Pascal\u2019s famous line \u201cThe eternal silence of these infinite spaces,\u201d that is, of the heavens, \u201cfrightens\u201d or \u201cterrifies me\u201d exemplifies an affirmative response to the question: yes, we humans are alone in this universe. For whatever reason, there is no other species that is our kin. We stand alone, and this marks our significance, our greatness, or perhaps our tragedy. We have no one to turn to except the figments of our own imagination and the results of our own creativity. (Presumably, AI would lie within that span.) Pascal went on to reason that the benefits of believing in a God, one whose inhabitation of those spaces would temper that fear, outweigh the benefits of disbelieving in such a God. But the very fact that he was able to raise the question tells us how far down the road of a species solipsism elite European thinking had reached by the seventeenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indigenous cultures around the world would likely recoil at the very question. Who is \u201cwe,\u201d they might ask? Do we not already inhabit a world rich with kin of many kinds? Setting these two in dialogue with each other suggests a range of other potential responses. At one end, then, we could simply answer yes and accept our human aloneness with solemnity, grace, befuddlement, or arrogant pretense; let\u2019s call this the ultra-\u00adhumanist<\/em> option. Secondly, we could answer no, that there are others out there and that we might one day, or have already, been in contact with them; the only thing preventing us from knowing this is the distance of Pascal\u2019s heavens. Let\u2019s call this the extraterrestrial<\/em>, or distant more-\u00adthan-\u00adhuman<\/em>, option. The very fact that there are hundreds of billions of Earth-\u00adlike planets in our own galaxy, not to mention the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, suggests that the chances of us being alone in the universe are astronomical (no pun intended). <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Thirdly, we can answer no, that we aren\u2019t even alone here<\/em>, as we have so many companions with such rich ways of making sense of their own worlds, neurocognitively similar or different from us and with sensory systems comparable in varying degrees; let\u2019s call this the near more-\u00adthan-\u00adhuman<\/em> option. (Where chatbots and other forms of technical persons might figure into this will be an open question.) Finally, we can push the latter approach further to simply ask, Who do you mean by \u201cwe\u201d? <\/em>and What do you mean by \u201calone\u201d?<\/em> Not only are there furry, finned, winged, webbed, vascular, rooted, and mycelial others; there are the many others of our dreams, our visions, and our mythological narratives. The question barely computes. Let\u2019s call this the always much-\u00admore-\u00adthan-\u00adhuman<\/em> option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If these options were marginal, we could confidently pursue the ultra-humanist position, but they have never been marginal, and they are not that in the broader world today. The question then becomes what to do with the other-\u00adthan-\u00adhumans in our midst already. What is their ontological status relative to ours? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If some of them are, like us, the kinds of evolved biophysical life forms studied and confirmed by evolutionary science over the last several decades, then what status do we assign those which are not \u2014 the spirits, deities, or whatever else, by all the names they have come and gone with \u2014 and how do we draw whatever boundaries may separate these categories? Are there empirically verifiable, scientifically researchable entities \u2014 \u00adparticles, molecules, genes, organisms, and other measurable or theoretically positable forces \u2014 and then, in contrast, other kinds of things that humans posit, but that elude empirical verification through science? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a long and distinguished tradition of bifurcating the world this way (to use Whitehead\u2019s term), distinguishing the empirically real from the imagined or merely experienced, and I have already made the case for rejecting this tradition. At any rate, some scholars today argue that this way of thinking overly privileges science as a way of knowing, at the expense of Indigenous and non-\u00adwestern ways of knowing. Yet the belief in multiple ways of knowing hardly makes things easier for us, for as long as we lack an agreeable means to bring those alternative ways into commensurability, that is, into a common framework of understanding whereby their differences can be navigated. If non-\u00adwestern ways of knowing (and many western ones, too) posit gods, spirits, or other forces as real entities with which we humans maintain relations, is there a common language for speaking about those relationships?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ontological turn in anthropology has returned these questions to the forefront of that field. It is in the study of religion that these questions of ontology become particularly acute, even if they are conventionally left aside so that the study of religion can continue without too much discomfort. At the broadest, however, we can distinguish \u201cessentialist\u201d presumptions from \u201cconstructivist\u201d challenges. Where some presume that the gods, spirits, angels, or other divinities \u2014 \u00adsome if not all of them \u2014 \u00adare what believers say they are, or at least are something apart from human constructions, with some sort of agency of their own, others have long argued that they are nothing but social productions fabricated, imagined, and enacted into presence through individual and collective human activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This opposition may be deeply ingrained, but it is not irreconcilable. Human activities clearly produce religion, but that does not necessitate that there aren\u2019t other things at play \u2014 \u00adagencies or \u201cactants,\u201d to use Bruno Latour\u2019s agnostic formulation, with some of these being \u201cnatural\u201d or accountable through current science and others not. If we are to follow our Whiteheadian premise, introduced at the outset of this volume, that the greenness of the trees is no less ontologically significant than the molecules, electromagnetic waves, and neuro-\u00adsensory processes that deliver that greenness to us, then we have to admit that the religious experiences of billions is real experience even if the theories that account for it are contestable (was it God who spoke to me, or my wish-\u00adfulfilling unconscious mind?). In this sense, the fact that millions of people around the world swear they have seen and even interacted with ghosts, spirits, or deities is an empirical fact of the same ontological status as the fact that scientists have failed to capture those ghosts in an empirically replicable way. And the reality that unidentified aerial phenomena continue to be witnessed, by reliable witnesses like military pilots no less, and that some of these appearances seem to deny what we know about current human technological capacities, is an empirical fact about which theories still elude any consensus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[At this point, the book goes on to critically examine one of the recent popular articulations of a certain brand of theory of religion, Tanya Luhrmann’s <\/em>How God Becomes Real, finding its analysis a little unsatisfying. It then begins an exploration of art and music that pushes at the boundaries of the “more-than-human,” including the visual art of Hilma af Klint and Oberto Airaudi and the work of Afrofuturists including musician Sun Ra and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I argue that the work of these artists pushes us toward a sense of “immanent utopianism” that enables an expanded sense of kinship, emplacing us within timescapes in which futures and pasts become newly meaningful, even if they remain somewhat fraught and contestable.<\/em>] <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sharing a little fragment of The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds. This particular piece comes close to the beginning of the “Theoscene” chapter (reader’s guide here), where I make the case for a broadened understanding of the “more-than-human worlds” of the book’s subtitle. This version omits the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[691847],"tags":[350268,628500,692779],"class_list":["post-14431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-spirituality","tag-adrian-ivakhiv","tag-the-new-lives-of-images","tag-theoscene"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-3KL","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":14209,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/08\/28\/new-lives-is-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":0},"title":"“New Lives” is here","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 28, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just gotten my hands on an advance print copy of The New Lives of Images, and it looks and feels wonderful to hold and handle. I'm quite happy with what Stanford University Press has done with the book -- the artwork, the typography, and the entire editorial and publication\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/08\/nli-hardcover-1.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10862,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/06\/26\/scenes-in-the-image-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":1},"title":"Scenes in the image-world","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 26, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Here\u2019s a preview in section headings of the book I\u2019m currently writing. It presents a way of thinking about images, what they've done for people, and how all of that figures into the contemporary world of digital media. It then applies that way of thinking to three sets of images:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Visual culture"","block_context":{"text":"Visual culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/image_nation\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/p003_ramones77_cbgb012h_godlis.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":14119,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/06\/25\/the-new-lives-of-images-readers-guide\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":2},"title":"The New Lives of Images: reader’s guide","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 25, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I created a (post-publication) \u201creader\u2019s guide\u201d for my last monograph, because it was really three (short) books in one and I didn\u2019t think all readers would be equally interested in all three of them, so I figured a road-map would be helpful. My new book, The New Lives of Images,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/06\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/06\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/06\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/06\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":14049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/04\/17\/forthcoming-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":3},"title":"Forthcoming books","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 17, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share the news that both The New Lives of Images and Terra Invicta are now available for pre-order. The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds is a theoretically and empirically rich study of images, imagination, and the digital. It's the fourth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13546,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2024\/03\/22\/anthropocene-dust-up-what-it-means\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":4},"title":"Anthropocene dust-up: what it means","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 22, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed \"Anthropocene epoch\" might seem confusing. Here's a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/03\/image-2.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7452,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/04\/10\/anthropocene-aesthetics\/","url_meta":{"origin":14431,"position":5},"title":"Anthropocene aesthetics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor's coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway's \"String Figures\" lecture and Bruno Latour's 11 theses on capitalism.\u00a0 \u00a0 Last week, Lee led us through an\u00a0exercise\u00a0that helped to contextualize the minuteness of the period in which humans (and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/files\/2014\/04\/anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture-300x206.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14431"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14445,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14431\/revisions\/14445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}