‘Aboriginal Physics’connotes our pre-Enlightenment/Medieval understanding of the ceaselessly unfolding ‘fluid’ world in which we formerly saw ourselves and all things as being included.  The Enlightenment brought with it a different way of ‘seeing’ things — ‘seeing’ the world not by the flow itself, but by way of ‘representations’ that ‘froze” the flowing dynamical forms of nature; representations such as maps, diagrams and later ‘photographs’, whereas aboriginal or medieval ‘physics’ – an implicit rather than explicit field of study – saw ‘dynamics’ as a fluid-unfolding wherein the persisting patterns-in-the-flow were not yet given static ‘local’ form as frozen ‘representations’.  A storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere in medieval times was still ‘seen’ in terms of ‘the flow that was always there’ that spawned ‘swirlings’ within itself, while in Enlightenment representation, the same storm-cell came to be ‘seen’ as a ‘local system’ with ‘its own local agency’.

Something radical happened to our manner of ‘seeing’ and understanding in the transition from the Aboriginal/Medieval worldview to the Enlightenment worldview, the notional ‘parentage’ of ’cause’ and ‘result’ was inverted.   In our ‘Enlightenment’ way of ‘seeing’, changes in the habitat are understood as being ’caused’ by the actions and interactions of ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems (the ‘inhabitants’), but in the Aboriginal/Medieval way of ‘seeing’, the APPARENTLY ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems  (‘inhabitants’) were understood as being both animated by, and created by, the changes in the habitat.  Today, many people would say that ‘storm-cells’ in the flow of the atmosphere ‘stir up’ (’cause’ change in the flow of) the atmosphere, but the fact is that it is the changes in the flow that not only animate the behaviour of the included cells, but create those cells.   Similarly, we may see the Colorado river as the cause of that huge ‘irregularity’ in the terrain we call the ‘Grand Canyon’, but the fact is that the Colorado river, like any other river, is the ‘result’ of irregularities in the terrain, … and we may see the trouble-makers in the streets of Paris in the summer of 1789 as the cause of irregularities in the social terrain, but the fact is that the trouble-makers were the ‘result’ of irregularities in the social terrain.

This inversion in the direction of sourcing or  ‘parental relation’ of habitat-dynamics and inhabitant-dynamics, accompanied by the reduction of the reciprocal habitat-inhabitat relation to a one-sided inhabitant-causal view, has permeated Western Enlightenment-perception generally. (more…)