This is the title of an interesting article by Ian Bogost in the 7 April 2012 issue of New Scientist. In it Bogost posits the question: Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens?
Answer: It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing.
I can’t link the article as it’s behind a paywall, but here are a few salient snippets.
[E]verything is an alien to everything else. And second, the experience of “being” something else can never be verified or validated …
[W]hy should we be so self-centred as to think that aliens are beings whose intelligence we might recognise as intelligence? … a true alien might well have an intelligence that is, well, alien to ours …
[L]et’s assume they are all around us, and at all scales – everything from dogs, penguins and trees to cornbread, polyester and neutrons. If we do this, we can ask a different question: what do objects experience? What is it like to be a thing? …
[W]hy is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? …
This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy … From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself …
Despite this split, science and philosophy agreed on one fundamental: humanity is the ruler of being. Science embraced Copernicus’s removal of humans from the centre of the universe, but still assumed the world exists for the benefit of humankind … Occasionally animals and plants may be allowed membership in our collective, but toasters or [electronic components] certainly aren’t …
[W]hat if we decide that all things are equal – not equal in nature or use or value, but equal in existence? … then we need a flat ontology, an account of existence that holds nothing to be intrinsically more or less extant than anything else …
Thomas Nagel … famously asked what it was like to be a bat, concluding the experience could not be reduced to a scientific description of its method of echolocation. Science attempts to answer questions through observation and verification. Even so, the “experience” of all objects, from bats to Atari computers, resists explanation through experimentation …
The world is not just ours, nor is it just for us: “being” concerns microchips or drilling rigs as much as it does kittens or bamboo.
So perhaps the people who apologise to things when they throw them away aren’t quite so mad after all!?
For the last point in particular, thank you!