Long Now

Today, we’re going back in the Long Now archives for a talk from artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, originally recorded on Apr 7, 02015. You’ll hear his original pitch for the monumental art project Centuries of the Bristlecone, launched at the Nevada Museum of Art earlier this year. Join Long Now Talks on Sep 29, 02026 for Art & Science at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, which will feature an update from Keats along with hydrometeorologist and Long Now Research Fellow Anne Heggli and paleoclimatologist and dendrochronologist Adam Csank sharing their work on our Mt. Washington property in Eastern Nevada. More information and tickets here: https://longnow.org/talks/02026-heggli-keats-csank/

In his Talk, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe presented a riveting critique of linear time, and gave a persuasive invitation to step sideways, to slow down, to notice the cracks in our temporal systems. Through Yoruba cosmology, slave ship histories, and decolonization strategies, he invited us to look at the space between the tick and the tock, to sit in the uncomfortable and incomplete. Only here, in what Akomolafe calls “parapolitics of the untimely,” can we ask, “What does untimeliness make possible?”

**This evening is made possible with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation.** How do the binary electronic signals of neurons give rise to subjective experience? Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane joined science historian Claire Isabel Webb to explore this question from an unexpected direction: geometry. Plotting the collective firing rate of neurons in 3D space, Miolane's Geometric Intelligence Lab at UC Santa Barbara found the result created a torus. When they trained an artificial neural network on the same task, it converged on the same shape. Miolane posits that biological and artificial intelligence may be reaching for a universal computational design. In this fascinating conversation, Webb and Miolane discussed how geometry is the most ancient branch of physics; it is the language we use to describe the curvature of spacetime and the General Relativity of the universe. Might it also map the universe inside us?

What if we redefined “profit” as maximizing human flourishing? Eric Ries has seen the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy at every company he’s worked with. Mission-driven companies, however, are the outliers: demonstrating stronger profits, better talent, and deeper loyalty. So why don't we build differently? In the long arc of economic history, our current definitions of profit and value are relatively new, held in place by normative consensus. But we can flip the script. By using what Ries calls “mission transmission,” we can build companies around a coherent set of values, where profit becomes the natural extension of those values, rather than the only goal. “Start with the thing you have the most agency over," he said. "You can decide the purpose of your work.” We built this system, Ries urged, so we can rebuild it better.

The ocean is not empty. It is a vast storage facility of memory agents. Ocean bodies use the chemical signatures of seawater for memory and intelligence in ways we can barely imagine. In her Talk, Melody Jue said our struggle to understand ocean memory comes from our terrestrial bias. This bias shapes what we try to protect and the technologies we develop. We must, she said, “deterritorialize the sensorium.” For example, the vertical depths of the Pacific carry thermal signatures of ancient ice ages. Arctic glaciers are laced with matrices of microbes retaining genes from before the Great Oxidation Event. Whale songs are also memory agents, passed down through generations, preserving the cultural histories of the planet's largest creatures. Corals hold memory, too. Those exposed earlier to changing ocean pH are more resilient to acidification. Meanwhile, human cultural memory is in danger of disappearing alongside these ecosystems. Jue pointed to Indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge at risk, like the Ama divers’ fishing tradition, as abalone populations drop. To better translate the ocean sensorium, Jue worked with interdisciplinary artists, musicians, divers, and researchers to develop soundscapes that help us “smell” with our ears, remapping chemosensation through synesthesia. Don’t miss the moment in the Talk where she plays two original music pieces that use the density and flow of sound to mimic chemical gradients of seawater. “The ocean teaches us humility,” Jue concluded. “It makes us confront our preconceptions about the planet and sensation.”