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Does A Donut Have Agency? - Ep 16
38 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we discuss agency and the theory of agency by exploring the conceptual definitions as to what is agency, agency in archaeology, and the contingencies of agency. Tune in as we go back and forth about this sticky subject!
Side note: stick to the post-outro song for a little surprise
Sources
- Dobres, Maria-Anne and Robb, John, 2000. Agency in archaeology.Gardner, Andrew. 2007. Agency.
- Rizvi, Uzma. 2011. Archaeological Encounters: The Role of the Speculative in Decolonial Archaeology.
- Silliman, Stephen. 2001. Agency, practical policies and the archaeology of culture contact.
Contact
- Show
- Twitter: @idigitpodcast
- Email: [email protected]
- Alyssa
- Instagram: aal.archaeology
- Twitter: Lyssakemi
- Michaela
- Instagram: mm_digitalized
- Twitter: m_mauriello
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to iDicket Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the iDicket Podcast, a podcast where we talk about the student perspective of navigating the world of archaeology and anthropology. I'm your host, Michaela, and I'm your host, Alyssa.
PhD Pressures and Election Anticipation
00:00:24
Speaker
Ah, the sweet sound of week seven in a PhD program.
00:00:29
Speaker
Tonight on the menu, we have a watermelon white cloth. Nice. And over on my end, we have a parasiter. A parasite? Parasiter! Not the glorious Oscar-winning movie. Incredible. I mean, little do I know. I do have some blinking lights in my front lawn area, my porch.
00:00:52
Speaker
Hmm. I'll have to check the basement on that. I'll be back. It's week seven over here in my PhD program. Um, I'm feeling it. You know, we got a week left until the election. Oh, this is going to be out by then, huh? By the time this gets released, we will know what happens. Oh God.
00:01:16
Speaker
Current me is like in existential pain while also doing school. So that's cool. How's future me doing? Did you make it? Was everything fine or did the world blow up?
00:01:37
Speaker
Let me know.
Imposter Syndrome in Online Schooling
00:01:38
Speaker
We got a lot of messages in the iDigit discord this week about imposter syndrome. And so I feel like everyone's feeling a little loony right now. It might just be that time of term or everything. I think it's the time of term and especially with schooling being online.
00:02:07
Speaker
And I think that does not help alleviate anything because you're not able to go in person and get the feel of things physically as you are emotionally. You're more in your head than normal while being online all the time.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're all reaching like our max for online things right now. Yeah, it's good that you only have a 10 week program. Yeah, thank God. Because yeah, our break is from November 20 to January 11. So we have a decent sized break.
Exhaustion from Stacked Meetings
00:02:41
Speaker
Oh, that's so nice. And we need it.
00:02:43
Speaker
I need it. Definitely. Yeah. I was talking to my advisor earlier this week. He just like asked, how are you doing? And I was like, Oh, you know, but we were talking about how with everything being online and on zoom, you can just stack meetings like right after each other. And so as a result of that, you're just going and going and going and never stopping or taking a break.
00:03:10
Speaker
where you would normally be like walking to a different meeting or like going to lunch or whatever. You just sit in front of your computer for the whole day. Yeah, it's intense. I think I'm doing more work now than I would have been if I wasn't on Zoom. And I think that's good and also not great at the same time. So I need to work on
00:03:36
Speaker
Not. Take a break. On not. On not. Yeah. I think we all need to work on not. Yeah, I'm currently doing that.
Winter Scarcity and Personal Projects
00:03:49
Speaker
How's, how is your, you, were you working this week? Did you have work this week? Or not really. I, um, right now, because it's becoming winter in a way, work is kind of scarce, especially for being a part-time variable as myself.
00:04:05
Speaker
And so there's just not really any work right now. And I'm just like, what do I do now? I'm kind of like, I have some projects like I want to do my digitization project and luckily we have this discord. So it's just planning for that. And I've been really like thinking about life too. And I'm like, I know where I am is not where I want to be long-term and trying to think, not think, but like,
00:04:33
Speaker
kind of solidify my research approach and what I really want to do.
Value of a Paid PhD
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like during this time, I'm grateful to be in a PhD program because it means I'm not on the job market. And so if you can get a paid PhD somewhere, like hella do it, totes worth, especially just because I feel like we're both the type of people that just enjoy learning too. And like, even though it's a lot of work, it never feels like I shouldn't be or like I don't want to be doing it, you know,
00:05:08
Speaker
Like, I'm overwhelmed with how much I have to do, but it's never like, oh my god, I don't want to read this. Because every time I start reading it, I'm like, oh, this is interesting, but I have to speed read. I can't spend time on it. It's like, oh, this is so interesting, but gotta go fast. Yeah, gotta go, gotta go fast.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, so that's that's the only thing I'm running into is just like reading too slow. And then because I read so slow, and there's so much to read, it just takes up all my time, which is fine. But yeah, yeah, if I could read a little faster, I think my life would be better.
Understanding 'Agency' in Archaeology
00:05:44
Speaker
We're gonna separate this episode into three parts as normal. We're going to be talking about the different definitions of agency, agency in archaeology,
00:05:55
Speaker
and contingencies with agency. Do you have like a written down definition of agency? I don't think that exists. So the big question is, what is agency and who has it?
00:06:10
Speaker
For example, do people have agency? Do things have agency? Does a river have agency to get to the ocean? Does a donut have agency? You know, like what is agency? And
00:06:29
Speaker
There's different things you can think about to get around this topic, such as does agency mean something has an effect or an impact on something else? Is that what agency is? Or is agency the goal or intention of something?
00:06:51
Speaker
Or is it like the power of something?
Exploring Agency: Effect, Intention, or Power?
00:06:57
Speaker
These are like kind of key words to use to start thinking about what agency is. We had a talk with Ian Hodder a couple days ago just about general agency and whatnot. And one of the students in our cohort brought up like the coronavirus as an example.
00:07:15
Speaker
And does the coronavirus have agency? Because the coronavirus is smart in that it adapts in ways that allow it to keep spreading. But it also requires us in order to do so because we are the hosts for it. Does the coronavirus have agency even though it's a small bacterial whatever, not a conscious human being?
00:07:45
Speaker
Does agency have to do with consciousness or does it just have to do with like the power to do something so like coronavirus would have the power to infect and spread and etc etc? Or is agency like the conscious decision to make a choice to do something?
00:08:04
Speaker
I think I need to know when was the talks of agency, when did they first come about? I know the philosophers were like, what is life? Do we even exist? Do we have free will? Those are the beginning thoughts, obviously, because we're all just like, I don't know what I'm doing on this planet. What are we really doing here? There was a lot of self-questioning with Aristotle, of course.
00:08:28
Speaker
And some human actions could be defined as voluntary rather than determined. And then that just keeps going with this thought, like looking back on this free will. But when did the term agency come about?
00:08:44
Speaker
I do not know. I don't know either. I know that we started talking about agency and archaeology like during post-processualism. Basically post-processualism is when archaeologists start trying to get at the individual behind the artifact rather than just the data of the artifact.
00:09:10
Speaker
And so an example of this is like when you find a stone tool and all of its fragments around in a context.
Agency in Archaeology: Beyond Artifacts
00:09:22
Speaker
And you can put the fragments back to the core of the stone tool to see exactly where the person in the past decided to chip off each individual piece.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so that is an example where you can like physically see the decisions that were being made by the person making the thing. That's kind of like the idea behind agency and archaeology is trying to get to the reason and the root of why people decided to do the things that we can see in the archaeological record. Another argument against this is like how do you know
00:10:03
Speaker
what anyone does or the reasons why they did it because you're not there. You don't see it happening. During the readings with Dobris and Rob, they said it started in the 1900s with free will thinking and thinkers with Locke and Hume or so.
00:10:20
Speaker
But who like who came up with this word? That's my question because I have some beef with them This is this is gonna be a difficult conversation that so one thing that Mr. Ian hotter said during the class everyone was talking about like oh agency is like the decision to do something so like I
00:10:43
Speaker
a river doesn't have agency because it's just following gravity. It's not like making the conscious decision to move towards the ocean. That's just what it does because of the laws of everything, right? And so a person chooses to do things or chooses to go against the norms or chooses to make a decision.
Global Protests and Triggers for Change
00:11:04
Speaker
And the example that we started off with class in class were two examples of
00:11:12
Speaker
people setting themselves on fire in protest. One was Homer Derabi in Tehran in 1994.
00:11:22
Speaker
who she was protesting against the treatment of women and basically after she did so like nothing really happened like the event happened and then it kind of fizzled out with like no impact and then the other example is
00:11:42
Speaker
Tunisia, which basically started the Arab Spring. And so he burned himself in protest of how the government was treating everyone. And that just erupted into a big national protest. And so we're talking about what is different about these events to where one fizzles off and doesn't really do anything to impact the rest of the world.
00:12:08
Speaker
quote, unquote, or blow up into a big event. And we kind of brought up the George Floyd protests also as an example of this. Black people have been abused by police for so long. Why was it this particular instance that
00:12:28
Speaker
caused change or that people like finally started to listen and like react to it. We were throwing out ideas and some of it was that because George Floyd died in a period where everyone was at home just absorbing information with nothing to distract them from
00:12:52
Speaker
these events that were happening aside from reading the news and scrolling on social media and everything's being posted, you can't get away from it. That's kind of a reason why it had the impact it did. In this instance, what is agency? What part of the situation is agency?
00:13:14
Speaker
Is agency environmental factors that contribute to something happening and then reacting? Or is agency the individual people who decide that it's something they want to care about and then that's spreading? Or is it the agency of the person who posted the video and got people angry?
00:13:39
Speaker
Like, was their intent to start a revolution? Probably not. Was it anyone's intent? Probably not. Reading this definition of agency by Gardner from 2007 is that it says, agency is treated as the capacity that all humans or agents have to actively shape and transform their world, has to have a degree of self-consciousness or awareness that sets them apart from other species. And I think with that case,
00:14:07
Speaker
I'm actually questioning agency in that because when you were saying, was it the individual going and seeing this and wanting to make a difference or would agency go in lines with empathy?
00:14:25
Speaker
I don't think empathy because people could have intent for malicious reasons also. That's true, that's true.
The Existence of Free Will
00:14:35
Speaker
Because when you're saying to help, I think so that's why it's like to help you see something in danger or in agony and you want to go help it. But then why wasn't that a reaction prior? Oh, prior.
00:14:51
Speaker
Like prior to, like if we're talking about George Floyd, why didn't that empathy kick in all the other hundreds of times that this has happened before? Maybe it is the environment. Maybe it is the environment. Yeah. And just like the setting and I don't think that if we were not in a pandemic,
00:15:14
Speaker
Maybe that this wouldn't have as big of an impact where people are just sitting at home. Let's talk about agency versus free will. What is free will? Do we even know what free will is? What is free will? Do we have free will? Do we have free will? There's a question. Theoretically, it's being able to do things on our own accord
00:15:45
Speaker
with our own self-consciousness and awareness that we own, that we have. So a choice.
00:15:51
Speaker
Free will is choosing to act in ways which you see fit in any given situation. Would you say your choices are also determined by the culture that you grow up in? And arguably you don't have free will because every choice you make is influenced by something you've encountered before the choice was made.
00:16:15
Speaker
I wouldn't say no directly. But I feel like as humans, we're just so dependent on, I want to say the advice, I'm just gonna say the advice, the advice that we gain from others around us in our society and our community, in our culture, to be able to perform and continue on through our lives. Because if we don't, we're dead.
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah. So would a person born in the middle of nowhere with no external influence have free will? Would they even know what free will would be? And does free will come from language? Does a person born without language or anyone to interact with
00:17:06
Speaker
Think? Stuck in the middle of nowhere. Not stuck. Born in the middle of nowhere. But who gave birth to you? Were you just dropped off? Was anybody taking care of you?
00:17:16
Speaker
obviously hypothetical situation here. But yeah, you wouldn't survive. Okay, so but if you ended up surviving, but like the fact that we even need to do a hypothetical, like makes it just a complicated thing to think about, you know, because like, in this world of binaries, we have
00:17:41
Speaker
life and death. We have agency and nothing like Oh, in one of the readings, there's a quote by Ian Hodder from 87. And he said, since societies are made up of individuals, and since individuals can form groups to further their ends, then directed intentional behavior of individual actors or ideal ideologies can lead to stroke can lead to structural change.
00:18:11
Speaker
Indeed, societies might best be seen as non-static negotiations between a variety of changing and uncertain perspectives. So this kind of brings us to the notion of individual versus individual. Basically, that's the idea that people are made up
00:18:35
Speaker
of the totality of their relationships. No one person is just them. They are a conglomerate of everyone that they've interacted with. And they're all kind of entangled to use Ian Hodder's favorite word. They're all kind of entangled together. Yeah.
Agency, Choices, and Relationships
00:18:55
Speaker
And you can't make a person without entanglement with other people. I would just have to say that there's just no easy answer for what is agency.
00:19:04
Speaker
It's all overlapping. And I just want to say, you just basically change it to fit your meaning. That's what I've been observing in all the readings about it. Exactly. It's like, well, as long as you define what you are meaning by this, and it goes along the lines of what agency is overall, and not making over generalizations of the term, that would render it useless, as Doberst and Rob would say.
00:19:34
Speaker
Yeah. I think like the general definition of agency just has to do with like choice, being able to, to choose one way or the other. Yeah. And it's a decision based on like the relationships between you and the people around you. It gets like very, if you, if you go into like, okay, like what are these relationships? Who is a person? What is a personhood? Who is a individual? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Once you go deep, then it gets a little.
00:20:04
Speaker
sketch, but yeah, exactly. A little sticky, but a little sticky. I think we should go into the stickiness with archaeology after this break. All right. And that's the sound of the second white claw of the night. Cause we're going to be talking about agency in archaeology. Oh man. But I mean,
00:20:32
Speaker
I mean, that's what archaeology is, you know, just trying to think about the past and how people have once been and lived. We're never going to know the actual answer because even if we have written documents, these are not accordance to everyone.
00:20:48
Speaker
that was alive that time in that area. I think that's like the main takeaway from these ideas of agency is that it made archaeologists realize that you can never really know
00:21:03
Speaker
what was happening, whereas before people would just project their biases onto an artifact and be like, yeah, that was a guy who did this thing. And then agency makes you think, okay, well, why did he do that thing? Why is this here? Was it even a man? Like, that sort of thing. So I think agency, or even if you can't define agency, it at least gets you thinking about these things.
00:21:32
Speaker
And I think that's what's important about it. And that's the end of the TED talk. Yeah, it's definitely takes away from the biases of previous archaeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, who we have talked about before in detail in I think it was episode eight about scientific racism.
00:21:55
Speaker
Maybe that was episode nine. He was considered to be the father of modern archaeology because he applied the scientific method to archaeology and he was one of the first. But he kind of went around Turkey and said, hey, this is Troy or Ilium. And I'm going to start taking these artifacts from like the late Bronze Age and I'm going to smuggle them over to my friends and we're going to be fine. And so that's what he did. What's considered to be new archaeology was with agency in archaeology.
00:22:22
Speaker
that argues that archaeology be based explicitly on anthropological theory, which I found to be an interesting point in this article that I was reading, because
00:22:34
Speaker
That's very important because that's when you start thinking about like, who was this person? Why were they doing this? Why were they living the way that they were? And really thinking about the past rather than just, oh, they're savages because they don't have cars like us. It's like, well, no, really, tell me more. In Gardner's 2007 article about agency, they wrote
00:23:02
Speaker
Why did people come from Culture X and make pots the way they did? They're not considering how people themselves not only interpreted or responded to such factors, but actively generated them. So it was like you were saying, how, when, where, who, what, why, all those. And does someone just decide to design a pot one way?
00:23:28
Speaker
Or do they bases off of other people or previous versions of the thing? And they just update it a little bit. Like, yeah. Does a design ever come out of nowhere? And that's where you use serration. So why were they building the pots the way they were? Were they basing it off of anything?
00:23:55
Speaker
And that goes along the lines of serration, which is a relative dating method used to place artifacts in chronological order. Artifacts are closely similar in form or style and are placed close to one another. Typology. Stylistic serration. It doesn't always mean it's simple to complex and it doesn't mean it's complex to simple. It's just different styles.
00:24:22
Speaker
in the pots and stuff? And is it even from the same area where they influenced, where they doing trades? And I think that really helped with the this type of mindset helped with the thinking and looking into different lifestyles people are having. And they can actually like, oh, there was actually trade during this time and to a few thousand years ago, blah, blah, blah. I'm just curious, like, I wish I could be on a fly on the wall in
00:24:49
Speaker
like archaeology classrooms or something in like the 1800s and see like what was being taught. I kind of didn't like it though. You take your sledgehammer and you go up to the temple and then you take it. Okay, okay. Can I slam my sledgehammer into the temple? Yes. Okay. You find the prettiest piece of the temple you could possibly find and then you just sledgehammer it.
00:25:18
Speaker
One other thing that's kind of interesting when thinking about agency is when a person did a thing, did they intend for it to have the consequences when they did it? And I think that's something fun to think about, a fun mind exercise.
00:25:38
Speaker
Um, one funny example we had in class, which is kind of, yeah, it was really funny. So the example was, so you're crossing a road, right? And all of a sudden you catch a bullet that was intended for the president of the United States. Oh, not this again.
00:26:03
Speaker
It wasn't your intent to catch a bullet. And it wasn't the intent of the shooter to catch you with the bullet. But as a result of that, there are unintended consequences.
00:26:17
Speaker
So applying this to archaeology, when someone decided to create a new design on a pot, they just liked how it looked. But then everyone else around them also liked how it looked. And all of a sudden, everyone's making the same pot. And then that same pot gets traded.
00:26:36
Speaker
across the continent and then someone in a different continent has that pot and then that pot serves as a tribute to the god in the local continent and now that pot is like a religious symbol. Was that your intent when you first created the pot? Probably not.
00:26:58
Speaker
It's just so interesting. I don't know.
Decolonizing Archaeology through Agency
00:27:03
Speaker
It definitely gets you thinking and that you shouldn't take everything at face value or just like, hey, this is what it looks like. It's like, okay, but why does it look like this? Go deeper. It's like, oh, all right. Go a little bit deeper. What about this? It's like, but why? Keep going. Then even when you think you're at the bottom, you can still go. And then even when you hit the bottom, you realize that that bottom isn't the only bottom.
00:27:28
Speaker
There are many other bottoms that could also be possible. And that's the most important part. And you kind of see this as a way of decolonizing archaeology, too. It's like you're not taking one person's interpretation as all knowing that's it. They know exactly what happened in the past. Agency kind of allows you to
00:27:55
Speaker
think about all of the alternatives to that, and now there's not one over-rating theory of how a civilization is supposed to be and how people in this position act, etc., etc.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think agency is very good in that respect and that it allows you to recognize that you do go into the field with these biases. Like we grew up in California in the United States in capitalism as women and we project these onto everything we interact with. We project these
00:28:37
Speaker
these experiences etc on everything we interact with and knowing that allows you to step away and kind of think about okay well what are the alternatives and be open to speculation and not claim anything as fact because we have we don't know yeah we'll never know but it's an it's important even though we'll never know it's important to try to know to try to find out
00:29:07
Speaker
Yeah, make sense of some things. We are nothing without our history. And as we've seen throughout history, those who write the history books are in control. And oftentimes they leave out a lot of what's happening. And so we need to continue to question these interpretations of history and try to get as close to the root as we can
00:29:36
Speaker
And with that, we'll be back after this break.
00:29:41
Speaker
Okay, so thanks for listening to our banter. But yeah, none of this makes sense, but it's fine because we're trying. And so an interesting thing to think about, the idea of entanglement.
Human Actions and Environmental Entanglement
00:29:58
Speaker
Entanglement is basically from the beginning when people decided to pick up a tool, they started to be entangled with things.
00:30:08
Speaker
And when the tool would break, they would make something new in order to fix the tool or make something new that was better than the tool. And then from that, you go from plowing to
00:30:23
Speaker
having a cattle and a cart, to having sedentary civilizations and agriculture, to having cities, to having governments, to having et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, smartphones, global warming death, you know? Like, so basically we're on this trajectory path towards just accumulating so many things to where it impacts our environment and we can't reverse it.
00:30:52
Speaker
So entanglement started with the first human who picked up a tool and it will never untangle ever. Would you say that we are more entangled now than ever before? Yes. And I feel like as time keeps progressing, we're going to be like in 10 years, we're going to be more entangled than as we ever have before.
00:31:16
Speaker
And I think it's only going to increase. Exactly. And if you think of, this was one of the examples in the lecture last night. So you pick up a pen, right? A pen seems like it's its own object, right? You can move it around, write with it, whatever. But if you think about the pen and all of the parts of the pen, where did the metal in the pen come from? Where did the ink in the pen come from? Where did the plastic in the pen come from? They all came from different areas of the world sourcing cheap labor.
00:31:46
Speaker
emitting fumes into the planet, into the atmosphere, all these different things. When you're done with the pen, you throw it in the trash, it exists forever because plastic doesn't biodegrade. And so everything we own has so many different things entangled with it. Nothing is its own object, especially in today's world. They're all connected.
Consumerism and Waste Impact
00:32:11
Speaker
And so if some factory in China decided to stop producing one part of this pen, all the other pens would fall apart because they wouldn't have that part of the pen. And that's how interconnected our networks are today, is that when one thing stops, it affects the entire world and production of that thing.
00:32:37
Speaker
And another example was like the idea of Christmas lights.
00:32:43
Speaker
how like Christmas lights weren't really a thing until recently, right? They, we used to use candles or whatever other means of celebrating Jesus's birthday. But Christmas lights have like the plastic and the copper and all of that and they've somehow become this integral part of decoration for the holidays where almost every country
00:33:09
Speaker
where continent uses them. And so factories that produce them produce billions of pounds of Christmas lights every year. And then when you're no longer using the Christmas light, you just throw it away and then it either gets recycled or it doesn't. And so now we're dependent on Christmas lights because no one's going to stop making Christmas lights because of
00:33:34
Speaker
all of the income it brings and it's part of the joy of holidays or whatever. So we'd rather keep using Christmas lights than face the impact of the Christmas lights on the environment and on how much plastic is being produced and how much waste is being produced. Like we'd rather just keep using Christmas lights.
00:33:57
Speaker
And now with the use of fairy lights and people just wanting the aesthetic of decorating the room, their house, without being like, oh, it's Christmas time all year round. It's like, no, I just wanted for the aesthetic. Exactly. So that also contributes to that production.
00:34:13
Speaker
And when you think about where every single, like I have so many things in my apartment. I was telling my partner the other day, I was like, how did we get so many things? Like we live in a studio apartment and we don't even have enough room for all this stuff. Like why do we have this? Where did it come from? Why are we so reliant on things? And what are the impacts of buying these things on our environment?
00:34:41
Speaker
And is there any way to stop it? You should watch the minimalism documentary. Yeah, exactly. You could participate in minimalism or...
00:34:53
Speaker
use recycle or whatever. I mean recycling is like a whole other idea. We have this international, sorry I'm just going to keep going off on tandits, but we have this international student who is living here in Palo Alto now and she was so surprised with how quickly Americans accumulate trash and then it just disappears the next day.
00:35:20
Speaker
And the rate at which you accumulate is just gone the next day and you don't have to think about it. But in other countries, the trash you create sits with you. It stays in your house, it stays on the streets, it stays wherever.
00:35:35
Speaker
You don't just get rid of it. But in America, it's like an afterthought. You don't even think about where your trash goes. All of the trash that we produce either goes onto an embargo ship and is sitting in the ocean right now or gets shipped to Southeast Asia or China. Trash doesn't disappear, but we just think of it as disappearing.
00:35:59
Speaker
I would have to comment on that. I moved into my house in August and I still have cardboard from the furniture I bought that I built and that was holding some furniture that I purchased.
00:36:13
Speaker
in my garage because we get recycling that comes around every other week. So we want to get rid of our normal recycling and then fill it up as much as we can with the cardboard, but we still have so much cardboard that's just sitting there. And then I'm just like, I never want to have to buy anything again.
00:36:30
Speaker
that's going to consume cardboard. And I haven't really even needed anything other than just food and stuff. So I tried to not purchase things that I don't need. And even with food waste too. Yeah, even every
Comfort vs. Environmental Action
00:36:44
Speaker
time they buy... And the plastic bags. Exactly. They do so much plastic wrapping in the grocery store. It's like, I'm literally going to use it for two minutes and then throw it away. Why? Yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, we we definitely have an entanglement problem. It's just increasing at an exponential rate to where we're increasingly dependent on things where we can't not be because we don't want to be uncomfortable. Yeah. And that goes with agency. Why do we even have the free will to choose if we are comfortable or not?
00:37:22
Speaker
Are we not comfortable because of our society and our environment? Why are we not uncomfortable? I feel like we do have the ability to stop, but because of where our values are as a global society, which is money,
00:37:43
Speaker
I don't think we're going to, even though we have all the resources, we have all the means to get to the root of the issue and stop, I don't think we will because it's too much work. It's too hard, too uncomfortable. It will inconvenience you where we don't need to be the inconvenienced anymore.
00:38:06
Speaker
Basically, you can blame all of your problems on the first human who picked up a tool. And that is what I'll leave you with. It's definitely something that doesn't come across your mind naturally. You really have to think about it because thinking about it
00:38:29
Speaker
causes discomfort in your brain and your brain hole is just like, what is going on? And you're just like, I don't really even know, but why? Yeah. And so having these types of conversations and just learning about it, doing the readings and trying to like catch up on it is, I think it's really important. And especially just like not taking things for face value and just really thinking about why do we do the things that we do?
Free Will Illusion and Historical Continuity
00:38:58
Speaker
What influences it? And see if you have the agency to change it.
00:39:05
Speaker
But is it even your own free will to change that? I was like, is that you thinking that or is that something else? Or is it me telling you to change? Yeah. In conclusion, we don't have free will. Existence is pain. Existence is pain. And you can blame everything on the first human who picked up a tool. And yeah, we're all just gonna be buried in things soon.
00:39:33
Speaker
I'm just going to keep thing in. Yep. Things got to thing, you know, soon we're going to put our, we already have things in space. You know, the things are going to spread to other planets too. They already have actually, we already have trash on Mars. So, you know, humans just, just thing it up until there's nothing left to thing.
00:39:54
Speaker
cause that's with their, when they pass away, but other humans will keep doing it. Yep.
Listener Feedback and Engagement
00:40:01
Speaker
Yep. So for this episode, we will be providing our articles that we have been reading and be sure if you have any comments, let us know. You can hit us up on the I dig a podcast at gmail.com on our Instagram, on discord, on Twitter.
00:40:18
Speaker
Let us know if it hurt your brain a little bit because I'm in pain, but please let us know and please let us know what your brain is thinking because that would be interesting. Yes. Let's think it up together. Let's think it up. Actually, no, we don't want to contribute to the things. Let's think it up. There we go. All right, guys, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye. Bye.
00:40:50
Speaker
The show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:41:27
Speaker
And so there's a bobcat that's across the street from us, and whenever she's shy, I look up at her, she looks at me, and I start spsss at her. I'm like, spsss, come here, come here. And she's like, cross the street, mind you, as I'm doing these loud spsss, and she just stares at me, and then she saunders over.
00:41:51
Speaker
And so then she comes to our front yard and then she gets nice scratchies. And then Jade goes into the back to get the catnip, as we were just talking about the catnip earlier, because catnip is there to prevent mosquitoes. And there's a lot of mosquitoes out right now, as we all know.
00:42:10
Speaker
And so she runs to go get the catnip and then leaves the door open. She's like, I wonder if she'll go inside. And do you know what? She wouldn't. She did. She went inside. The music is killing me. And so.
00:42:27
Speaker
As she went inside, I was just like, she finally did it. And Jade's coming back in with this giant pot with catnip. She's like, to catch a cat, like to catch a predator, the cat version. And that's about it. And then the cat went in the house, then it went to Jade's room, and then we had to get her out of there. And then she started smelling the catnip when we put her outside. And then she got her cat stoned. And then she definitely was smelling that catnip.
00:42:58
Speaker
The end. The end. And she's still outside. Legend has it. She's still smelling that catnip till this day. Why? Which has been like 10 minutes. Anyway. So funny.