°°° : Terms: LDC  

°°° : Cogito Ergo CEREBRUS

°°° : Origins: symbolic / metaphoric cognition in humans

°°° : metasymbiophore

°°° : Encounters with everyday Aliens

°°° : Co-sentience: hypersymmetric beings in scalar autopoetic elaboration

°°° : Labels, Mimicry and Cognition: Problems and Tools

°°° : Birdwalk °°°

(this text is in process, some elements are well-sketched, others are emerging)

B i r d w a l k : : k l a w d r i B

It's been said that some factions of our science are engaged in the research related to the 'quest for extraterrestrial intelligence'. Consider that, in a universe where nothing at all fails to actively belong to this definition- humans have decided that only human-like, or human-parseable expressions of this 'feature' are realistic or veifyable.

This is akin to a group of humans on a small boat, in the center of an ocean of sand, who decide that sand must be good for drinking, because it makes waves like the ones in the ocean - but isn't salty.

To an observer with even a tiny amount of cognitive independence, it is clear that humanity is and has always been surrounded by the very thing it is seeking. Intelligent life is the 'only possible variety', and as for being extraterrestrial - this is a planet filled with nothing but extraterrestrial intelligence.

The fact that those intelligences settled and thrive here is a lot more interesting than pretending that we're the only possible or detectable intelligence, locally - which is, from any rational standpoint, semantically, poetically and logically absurd. No wonder we cannot find our sources or birth-history; we cannot cognitively allow as true the natures and processes from which we, as physical, cognitive and energetic beings arise.

Interestingly, what we discover at the root of this problem is as much the rapacious definition of living processes as 'product' for consumption, as it is the basic ignorance of those who are agreeing with labels and metaphors so constrictive as to functionally correspond to cognitive slave-collars.

Consider these story-worlds with us briefly:

What is required for a world to be sentiently alive?

Take an earthlike planet which entirely lacks all forms of living matter, but is atmospherically and temperately inhabitable. Regardless of potentials, we could (possibly) reasonably asset such a planet is a 'lifeLess' and insentient instance of a set of chemical, temporal, gravitic and energetic template.

A 'sphere' of elemental chemistries obeying certain still rather poorly understood 'laws' (which are never meant to be laws in the first place - but instead stepping stones toward a position which is essentially more true). A kind of clockwork device where interactive and transformative momentums play out in linear observations in a generally predictable or metaphyable way or set of ways.

This is in fact, the activity of matter observed from the perspective of linear temporality. Poetically, we might state that an essential 'law' of nature from this perspective is that things cannot fail to elaborate in scalar fashion. From a uniquely human perspective, we might say this: Things become more and more what their sources and modulations are - in scales, over discernable distances in perceived time. But where is it written that we are so doggedly required to adopt what is popularly proffered as a human perspective?

*q: Can such a planet be said to be alive, though it lacks any discernable cellular activity? If our story-world is or will certainly be a nursery for cellular activity, is the planet then alive?

What if the inert processes that our chiastic elemental clockwork device comprises and participates in literally give birth to life - or will in the future as a certainty - is the planet then considered to be essentially alive as a being or creature might be, albeit upon a different scale?

In yet other words - how complex and interPenetrating must the activities and constituents of a living world become before we can accept with reasonable certainty (and directly experience) a given planet as being an essentially discernable holarchy - a single individual hypersystem of sentient endeavor, which - alike metaphorically with a human person, has character, grows, desires elaboration and survival - perhaps even loves?

Is there any possible arrangement of circumstance under which we might - with the great and mundane comfort sof rationality, reason and evidence - be willing to accept that the similarity between a human body and a planet is far more vastly significant than we can imagine. The reason is not in our shape, though it is evinced there - but in an essential and highly generallized template: A circle of interCommunal scales of sentient endeavor - which in turn, through their linkages and the 'geometric outcomes of the activity of the very small' create what is, in essense, an impossibility device: the human cognitive animal.

Now, many people might claim to be willing to consider a planet as a scalarly fractional reflective individual, and people (or humans) as generally alike with this template - but when they do this they most often do it in concept rather than realized experiential intimacy with the meaning of the terms. Would they consider each separate terrestrial lifeForm even as they do their own species? How is it they could fail to do so?

We find in our speculations that we can easily arrive at a participant who is indignent at the implication that they do not understand the concept of this living and distributed interSystemic and interScalar holarchy - yet such a person will most often remain inwardly convicted that they do, in fact understand.

When challenged, however, to display their understanding in an active, rather than semantic modality - 99.9999% of participants would not only be unable to do so, many would become overtly combative at the suggestion. This is a elemental in ritualized process in the some Zen traditions (which are actively experiential rather than theoretical) which could be called the Zen Interview - wherein the teacher challenges the student to answer for their presentations - in essense to prove beyond doubt the elemental nature of their experience, rather than their ideas - and to do so adeptly and consistently.

This requirement is in place because systems in equanimity are essentially difficult to disturb.

And because each answer should change, with each examination. If it doesn't, we've found a fetish, instead of an answer; should we cling to such things, the outcomes - in cognitive, experiential, or energetic terms - are generally going to oppose our desired or purported goals. Thus, in a real sense, the outcome of any significantly successful Zen Interview would be a kind of shattering or reCognition of the essenses of our perspectives, experience, biology and perception. At the roots, we find keys. Since time immemorial, we've gone to the base of the Tree to obtain celestial gifts. This is no mere fantasy. In fact, the reasons why this is so are as mechanically demonstrable as what we refer to as the periodic table. We're made of the reasons, in scales. When we come to the place where the trunk jins the root - a clue to the very nature of clues arises instantly as potential. Whether or not we can detect, credential, and follow it's tail is another matter entirely, and generally a uniquely personal one.

We would discover that an aspect of metaphor-linkage which they cannot admit is that each living element in a hyperstructure is of essentially the same value - and more, that if one burns down a tree, the lost complexity and diversity is directly translated into a loss in the locally available momentums and activities of sentience.

Thus, each living being - is akin to a highly specialized and incredibly adeptly engineered 'intersystemic floating neuron'. Such complexity is never nurseried or elaborated in time by terrestrial environments without vast cost - because there are laws that demand a general conservation of energy and momentum. And death, in so much as we understand it, stands quite highly in the court of those laws, from the perspective of living humans, and perhaps the Biome as a whole.

What this means is that destroying an ecosystem is, in terms of planetary and localized cognitive and physical potentials, akin with taking a living form or system which has been beeing carefully modulated and tuned for thousands of millions of years - and erasing not only that being or system, but all of the experiential benefits of the engineering which are stored, like a book, in that which we erase. We generally trade this incredible wealth - incalculable wealth of living lineage and mysterious mastery of elemental lifeSystems for something like a gumball - comparatively.

Now take an arbitrary human from Earth, and transport the human to our theoretical planet.

*q: Now can such a planet be said to be alive?

We are getting at an essential question about the nature of life - what it is, and what consititues a closed or individual set of lifeSystems that can or perhaps should be idetifited as an 'individual'. The method by which humans cognitively differentiate one individual 'being' from another from the same template might be referred to as character evalutation. These complex (but simply mechanical) processes occur in many domains nearly simultaneously - in practice. But it is te essential elements of unique character that enable us to differentiate between like subjects of attention or observation. When we recognize this clearly, we can see that any 'object' which is in any way 'in environmental coupling' with any 'living system' at some point is no longer essentially inert.

Let's change the vector of our questions for a moment:

Is the human on this planet ( a planet with no other life) the same human that we took from the earth?

In other words, to what degree can a human be said to be separate from their physical, energetic and cognitive environment? Without any other living matter to interact with, what are the real cognitve potentials for our experimental traveller? How much of our real cognitive endeavor and experience, is interaction with living forms - directly?

Now let's take the questions a little further:

If all the life forms of a given planet form a web which is essentially unified, do you not change the entire world and cognitive potential of all living beings when a species is anhillated?

How many species would have to be anihillated, before the thing we call a human being, is no longer the same as what we consider it to be?

In other words, is it not possible that the global potentials for cognition are a direct result of the extant complexity and diversity - as well as the status of the vehicles of those momentums in the biosphere?

It has to be more than possible. Because if you took all the other species away - what would be left would not match our definitions of human. Their experience, their cognition, their opportunities to explore their lived realities - would be completely different from our own.

So how is it that the wholesale erasure of whole hypersystems of anciently evoloved cognitive life-symmetry is not seen as the erasure of human hope, potential, and survival?

It is not science-fiction to believe that the locally available cognitive potentials depend entirely upon the state and accessibilty of unique momentums in nature, and that on a planetary level the local lifeForms exist as a singular cognitive unity, in much the same way that myriads of specialzed cellular hyperstructures exist in the human body.

We've made the mistake of believing in a separation that is functionally impossible. When you destroy vast areas of highly evolved ecoysystems, you are burning down human beings at the same time. The vectors may not be as clear as if you shot a large group of people dead, but they are certainly just as functional, when ignored.

The point is simple: Complexly evolved ecosystems are the single most valuable asset on any possible planet.

Their wholesale conversion to copies of material objects, is genocidal, and ecocidal.

We have to stop eating the world, because eating the world is eating ourselves.

End questions, Set A