YES. I've been following some threads related to the Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has carved out and evolved an ecological niche inside of an specific area of a biological host organism: the human mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech and biology... but we're ALREADY an organic cyborg of language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well. Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best for what we are.

Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens, I've been trying to see the way that our stories and narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find these other things more "disposable" and we feel less kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-coded to sense it as well...

And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate" btw.