Some quotes from the first chunk of Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton:
But go up a level and something very strange happens. When I scale up these actions to include billions of key turnings and billions of coal shovelings, harm to Earth is precisefly what is happening. I am responsible as a member of this species for the Anthropocene. - p8
Since their age [Hume and Kant] we have thought it sensible that the is some kinds of irreducible rift between what a thing is and how it appears, such that science handles data, not actual things. - p15-16
You can’t know a thing fully by thinking it or by eating it or by measuring it or by painting it… This means that the way things affect one another (causality) cannot be direct (mechanical), but rather indirect or vicarious: causality is aesthetic. As strange as this sounds, the idea that causality is aesthetic is congruent with the most powerful causality theories (the Humean ones(, and the most powerful theories of causality in physical science: relativity theory and (to an even greater extent) quantum theory. - p16
OOO believes that reality is mysterious and magical, because beings withdraw and because being influence each other aesthetically, which is to say at a distance. - p17
… whether the thing itself becomes fish food or human food or something a human can measure, the thing remains in excess of those forms of access, and the is no intrinsic superiority of human ways of accessing the thing. This is the basic premise of object-oriented ontology: Kant was correct, but his anthropocentricism prevented him from seeing the most interesting aspects of his theory. - p18
A human is made up of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. Lungs are evolved swim bladders. Yet a human is not a fish. A swim bladder from which lungs derive, is not a lung in waiting. The is nothing remotely lunglike about it. Let alone my bacterial microbial biome: there are more bacteria in “me” than “human” components. A lifeform is what Derrida calls arrivant or what i call strange stranger: it is itself yet uncannily not itself at the same time. - p18
When I think of myself as a member of the human species, I lose the visible, tactile “little me”; yet it wasn’t tortoisees that caused global warming. - p19
Computational power has enabled us to think and visualize things that are ungraspable by our senses or by out quotidian experience. - p25 § Scientists are now beginning to figure out something we’ve known in the humanities and arts for some time: one is entangled with the data one is studying. - p29
Thoughts are functions or brains or something, perhaps in the strong “eliminative materialist” sense: if we can explain mind in terms of brain there is no mind at all: the mind is a pure illusion. The mind, on this view, isn’t even an emergent property of a brain. - p31