We exist in a complex web of ever changing relations

In an interview to El País in 1981, Jorge Luis Borges said:

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited, all my ancestors.”¹

I am Borges, John Berger, Italo Calvino, David Graeber, Ursula Le Guin, Buckminster Fuller. I am Bruno Munari, Tibor Kalman, Vaughan Oliver. I am Brian Eno, PJ Harvey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye… I am every writer, every artist, friend, lover… every person that touched me and inspired me. I am Milano, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona. Giarolo, Zanego and the Mediterranean sea.

Our identity continuously evolves from all the interactions we have with others. Chinese culture uses The Five Relations as a framework underpinning their social structures for over two millennia. In Africa the term Ubuntu means humanity, and is sometimes translated as “I am because we are”. It describes value systems that emphasise the interconnectedness of individuals with their surrounding societal and physical worlds.²

Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland³ tells the strange and beautiful story of the birth of Quantum Physics. It is not a book about physics, but philosophy. He writes:

The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes

One reason I am fascinated by network graphs (like the one below these notes) is that they offer a better model for this ontological shift. From an ontology of things (entities, nodes) to an ontology of relations (connections, edges).

In Process and Reality (1929, shortly after Heisenberg’s breakthrough in Helgoland) Alfred North Whitehead proposed this view that entities are defined by their relationships to other entities.⁴ The core insight is that identity is derivative of relation. You do not have two entities that then relate; the relation is the parent of the entities. Nodes are where edges meet. Reality is a vast, interconnected web of events where an entity’s existence is inextricably defined by its relationship to all other entities, including the environment and the observer.

The notion of an individual, isolated and self-determined id-entity underpins the mindset of separation, a very unhelpful delusion behind many aspects of our Polycrisis. The extractive and exploitative system we live in is based on this idea: the false belief that we are a singular entity, separate from our bodies, emotions, other living beings, communities, and the planet as a whole. Whitehead, Rovelli, ancient wisdom and modern science tell us otherwise. We are all interconnected.