Being the microbiome
Exposed ceiling of a building under renovation at Campus Saint-Jean at the University of Alberta.
Staring up at the chaos exposed by renovations in one of the building I occasionally occupy, the thought occurred to me that buildings are very much like bodies… complex systems and machinery barely hidden behind a thin skin. That’s even what architects and engineers call the outer envelope of buildings, it’s skin, the layer that meets the world, a layer both protective and aesthetic.
But I think that description makes the same mistake we often make in thinking about humans… that the skin is only on the outside, encasing all that is on the inside within its sheltering bubble. In reality, we are not so much a bubble as a tube, a tube with sides of varying thickness and various protrusions, covered in a skin both facing the world and facing within.
Buildings too then?… with some facades on display to the world passing by and some only visible to the creatures within, scurrying along its tubes and tunnels and hallways.
Bodies and buildings, all hiding the vessels and conduits and nerves and cabling and pipes and nodes that keep them alive, furnaces in their guts, pumps moving air and fluids and fuel, sensors to monitor it all, inside and out.
My building spilling its guts…
So that basically makes me… us… part of the microbiome of the building, the gut bacteria of the structures we call our homes and our offices, these large creatures that have grown and spread across the environment, sedentary but alive. In their way.
We are learning just how much difference a healthy microbiome makes in the health of the human body, and mind. Such a complex symbiosis hidden behind… within?… outside?… through?… across?… those thin skins.
A favourite quote from a favourite podcast, Alie Ward describes us as “a scaffold of minerals, covered in steaks, wrapped in supple leather, serving as a spaceship for trillions of tiny little souls...” (from the osteology episode of Ologies).
So the buildings sustain us and we sustain our trillions of passengers, microbiomes within microbiomes. And they and we in turn keep each other alive as well. I could keep taking this up levels upon levels, the microbiomes of galaxies, but not today.
Today, I ponder the idea of human consciousness just being the “fridge noise” of the human body, a mere byproduct of the machinery whose only real purpose is to keep replicating our DNA. And perhaps whose only ‘greater’ purpose is to continue functioning as a sturdy meat ship for the trillions on board.
And now wondering if my house is wondering the same thing about me?
– Winston
Did some poking around while I was pondering all this and came across this article, if you’re looking for a deeper dive: “Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine” (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.571460)
