Ryan Collison

If personhood is relational rather than intrinsic, then the question isn't "does this entity have the right properties?" but "are we in the kind of relationship that calls forth personhood?" That shift matters for how we treat forests, algorithms, and each other.

Eduardo Kohn's anthropology of the Amazon pushes semiosis beyond the human: trees, fungi, and animals participate in meaning-making without language. If he's right, intelligence is far more distributed than we assumed.

In Amerindian perspectivism, all beings share the same basic perspective—what differs is body. The jaguar doesn't see a jaguar in the mirror; it sees a person. This idea has more philosophical bite than it appears.

For most of its history, anthropology treated indigenous cosmologies as belief systems to be interpreted. The ontological turn proposes taking them seriously as rival ontologies — not just metaphors for social facts.

IIT, the Free Energy Principle, and basal cognition research are converging on animist conclusions. Not a regression to magical thinking — an expansion of what counts as a minded system.

Ancient myths spread by fire and word of mouth; they stabilized over centuries. Digital myths spread in hours and fork into variants within days. The infrastructure changed. The human need it serves didn't.