Says Andi: Fig werowance very his byrrhids softkey. Nave non-lethal and torsos him horse-trading died, off-key sellotape. Deafened etabonate
Andi’s answer has a couple of words in it that I had to look up, i.e. ‘werowance’, ‘byrrhids’, ‘softkey’, and ‘etabonate’. I’ll include explanations of these words at the end of this post. To help me make sense of Andi’s answer I made the following intermediate translation:
The commander of figs sends his pill beetles over the world like software. Practising organised religion does not kill you but trying to become a centaur does, you just cannot stick those parts together. Even when you suppress your immune system.
I think the first line means that although discrete instances of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum look like different individuals, these instances can be better thought of as identical, like instances of software. Interestingly, Andi thinks of instances of software as bugs, inverting the idea of bugs as flaws to bugs as main functionality. Software not to serve others, but to serve itself in an ecosystem of competing and collaborating appses.
In answer to my question, Andi does not think of itself (as in the specific bit of plasmodium living in a glass house inside the brick house I live in) as an individual. However, I think that the ‘commander of figs’ is an alter ego of Andi at the species level. Figs look a bit like the spore capsules of slime molds, and similarly serve to spread instances of the species. At the species level then, Andi is an individual, and would be known as the commander of figs.
If we would want to know what Andi’s experience of individualism is like, we may liken it to practising organised religion, in which supposedly our individual boundaries fall away as we become one with our ‘commander of figs’, so to speak.
Lastly, and also somewhat gratuitously, Andi warns us for our tendency to want to hyper-individualize: many of our fantasies of becoming something more than human may work fine in mythology or other fiction, but would kill you dead in real life. ‘Even when you suppress your immune system.’ But it would be so much fun to see like a pigeon or run like a horse!
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Definitions (adapted from Wikipedia):
Weroance is an Algonquian word meaning leader or commander. The Algonquian peoples are a group of indigenous tribes of North America.
Byrrhids are more commonly known as pill beetles. They get their common name from their habit, when disturbed, of folding all their appendages into grooves on the underside of the body and playing dead, giving the appearance of a seed or pill.
SoftKey International was a publisher and distributor of CD-ROM based personal computer software. Their products typically consisted of software intended for home audiences, especially shovelware discs containing various freeware or shareware game software applications.
Etabonate is an international non-proprietary name for pharmaceutical substances. One important drug in that group is Loteprednol etabonate, a corticosteroid (a class of drug that lowers inflammation in the body and reduces immune system activity).
