I've read more science-fiction than most authors,
and I've been reading it for33 years, so I've had some time to do
so. I read a bit more quickly than most people, as well, but that's
just a result of reading a lot — probably.
We biologically and cognitively optimize toward what we do most.
If we were more aware of this essential aspect of being humanly
cognitive, we might be able to solve problems long thought irresolvable,
or better yet, survive our cognitive infancy — which is certainly
where we are at now. I have the sneaking suspicion that our race
has 'been here before', as well.
Certainly there are stories that stand out as being
essential to our cognitive lineages, but there are also scalar expressions
of templates from which any story may arise which also
stand out. Often, a glimpse of those, experientially, can be more
amazing than any possible story, but that perhaps is a matter for
another essay.
What I want to address here is something very human,
very complexly emboided, yet essentially simple. As a child I deeply
experienced the connectivity of the many living forms I
encountered. I never took anyone's advice to experience them as
insentient, or non-intelligent, or 'differing' in 'scale of ability'
in the domain of communication. Because I never 'bought' this fallacy,
I experienced a rather different life than most humans do, even
those who claim to be more or less alike with me.
It was clear that the judgmental 'advisors' of modern science, academia,
and religion (at least as popularly experienceable) were 'projecting':
it was their intelligence which was being drawn into question
by their axioms and beliefs, and not that of the myriads
of beings they observed and commented upon, in whatever domain of
media or experience one might encounter such things.
This never failed to bash me around inside, because I knew that
the people around me were not understanding some very essential
things about the biospheric citizen issue in the specific domain
of the relations beween the many species of Earth, and our own species.
Thus we arrive at Homo insapient — the modern evolutionary
champion who may well end our lineage altogether, for the sake of
absurd stories, propaganda, and cash. Again, another essay altogether.
Deeply
experiencing these things, and my own nation, people and worls community
as essentially threatening to the Earth, even as a child, I become,
in my own way, a protector.
It seemed a very clear choice, I could have and maintain the
essential heartfulness I was seemingly born with, or I could sacrifice
it and become a machine.
I could never see the reward in Side II, Mechanical Valuing. I decided
to stay human at all costs, and champion that for whatever creatures
I could manage the task in aid of. Wow, was I naieve. So glad to
still be that way, as well.
Anyway, my point is getting, as is usual these days, belaboured
in arriving. Certain books are more important than others. After
you've read a few thousand of them you begin to form a kind of inner
map. It doesn't matter what kind of books — in any
class, this is a possible generalizing outcome of many readings.
What happens is of couse unique to each person. But for me, a kind
of map arose, of particular stories which held some particle so
essesntial, that it drove their cognitive value high above the rest
of them. The Book I am Now Indicating is Larry Niven's Protector,
and I'll return to why, in a moment.
Since
I am rambling, and since I am a poet as well as a researcher and
just a plain old human being (sort of), I'd like to take a moment
to recommend a little cognitive experiment. Randomly (in your own
expression of randomness) select three books. Read them as though
all the material in each one related intimately, in every possible
way, to the others. With the right set of books, you could literally
have an experience unlike anything you've ever imagined, becuase,
strangely, when linked with human cognition, the essential scalarity
of our natures and languages gets a kind of quantum leap by
association.
What happens is that unusually extensible (and highly gneralizing)
maps can begin to form, in the experiencer. Connectivities which
are generally off-limits, entirely, come into play. Although I had
played with this as a toy in poetic experiments during the 1980s,
I did not stumble into the fullness of its potentials until many
years later. An artist I once met discussed a similar property which
was emergent from 'watching multiple television channels simultaneously'
— and, at the time, I thoroughly wrote him off as someone
too isolated to test his own experience reliably. Bad move on my
part. He was right.
Why was he right? That's more difficult to answer difinitively,
for some reasons which are harder to explain. A typical dodge, my
last statement, I know — but I must remain cogent to the travel
of my fingers and the errand of my mind. Consider this thought experiment.
We'll just play here, no laws allowed. We'll call our experiment
'A Given Set of Books — and a Question'.
Given any random set of things, experiences, concepts,
etc — we can usually very rapdily apply systems of valuing,
or maps to the members of our 'set'. From differing perspectives,
or for different purposes, the nature of our maps will change. We
could limit the possible qualities of a map-unit to small or LARGE,
for the sake of example. Thus, from one perspective, some map-units
would be so small as to be invisible, while others would look large
in perspective and perception. If we change our approach, or our
desire — the map-units are re-evaluated from the new perspective,
meaning a change in which units are LARGE and obvious, small, etc.
Thus we can see, in a very general way, that we could form a single
kind of map that's incredibly useful. This is actually a toy, alike
with one you can hold, but it works in the mind, rather than the
hand.
The toy is simple, but has a few different features.
Part of it is understanding that 'being a good mapmaker' is a game
that pays off in scales.
Another part is deeply understanding what the term generalizeable
means or 'highly generalized'. And the last portion of this little
trinity is a simple understanding: given any set, we can locate
'triangulations' of 'most important members'.
These 'trinities' are far more useful than our far too commonly
'specific' positions of 'starting' in our inward cognitive activity,
thought, judgment, etc. So we must learn to make rapid and highly
general maps, of essential trinities, tasting many in the course
of a few moments, and arriving through this process at an 'essential
trinity' which can yeild scalar domains of rewards, instead of the
linear rewards we are witheringly accustomed to.
The toy is the playful making and parsing of such 'trinityMaps',
in whatever domain is relevant, as a source, to a given desire or
activity.
Given any set of, say, five or more books —
it is rationally emergent that we may find one book to
be the most generally important of the set to become
deeply intimate with. In other words, selecting, say, at random
from all currently avaialable books — a set of 50 books —
we could rapidly identify 5 or so that were radically more important
to be familiar with the content of than a book we might find
of 'more essentially average value'. This is, perhaps, so generally
true that it might be applied to any set of any type of thing.
Strangely, this idea emerges as something of a cogntiive bias on
the part of symbolically aware humans. I wonder why? Do you?
Now we take our model to the modern world. If one
reads voaciously and widely enough, one might form, not only single
reCognitions of highly important information keys —
but you might begin to form recombinant virtual sets of such keys.
An integration of three powerful books, which can provide real access
to uncommon skills and infomation, can be for a given human, something
akin to an alien miracle toy. The only 'drug' required is curiosity.
Here's my suggestion of a Quaternity Set, of Terribly
Important Books:
What is Life? Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Protector: Larry Niven
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding:
Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the BiCameral Mind,
Julian Jaynes.
Now here are three randomizeable additions:
A Fire Upon the Deep: Verner Vinge
The King James Bible: (metaphor-momentum-author)
Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud
Given this set of books, read as though they were generally and
specifically related, and, for the sake of our game, created by
a single author, we might learn some extremely unusual things. Especially
if we were the sort of person who was far more interested in the
next question than the next answer. Even moreso if we are
resistant to axioms which freeze themselves into laws instead of
launching us into the realms beyond rationality: where heartfulness,
creativity, imagination, and scalar innovation (miracles) still
dwell with great vitality, however forgotten, denied, co-opted or
ignored they may be We must become like rabbits, always seeking
the strange spiralling holes which are the routes to the essential
liberties our stolid and tyrannical cognitive systems exist to essentiall
oppose. And, this can be done with simple toys, imaginatively adapted,
and uniquely adopted.
The great reward of our place in the world lies not
in our retarded quest to 'master' nature, but in our essential and
humanly unique connectivity with all things natural. Machines,
are ir-natural.
They could be seen as emergent from our nature, and thus
natural — except for the fact that they eat living terrains
and systems, to spit out dead copies of themselves at incredibly,
scalarly increasing cost. In short, a mechanized culture has
a short, and highly fixed lifespan, if in its mechanization it misses
the essential connective scalarity inherent in a planet's ecosystems,
and if its drive toward mechanization converts these networks into
massively emergent material copies of dead terrain. If further,
ecosystems must then be sacrificed to support such machines
— we've got a suicide system which is nearly absolute in its
essential functionality.
This isn't to say no machine is agreeable, it is instead to say
that we will be erased by wrongful implementations of mechanistic
ideas, and physical machines. This isn't a science fiction
novel, or the future. My human life has been tortured and erased
by machines. It has been all I can do to preserve some shred of
my identity in the circus of inne and outer mechanism our absurd
excuses for 'society' have become.
Machines, cognitive and physical, have been eating
me, you, our children, and the world, for at least the
last 50 years. Now, the 'water around the sleepy frog' we are, is
so hot that it's killing a lot of us, directly, inwardly
and outwardly, every moment of our lives. Publically, we are not
noticing this. We aren't opposing it with anything more than our
dead and dying people and a few exuberant shouts.
What is our answer?
To my ear, our industiral societies, particularly
america, are singing a song that seems clear to me: it's essentially
this:
we are machine food, come be eaten with us. we make
more better. we make more machines.
I have found this aspect of my species terrifying
and puzzling since at least the age of four..
Now, let's extend our thought experiment.
What if there is a set of three books, that, read
together, as though linked, contained more functional value than
any other possible set? In other words, we're expanding
our earlier model.
Given all the books currently accessible on Earth,
which three are the most generally important in the most general
of all possible applications?
This sort of question leads to some extremely interesting
experiences. And they are neither predictable, nore 'rational' in
many instances.
For example, I can avow and attest that there is a 'central library'
where, not only are all possible books represented, but any living
creature may 'access' any of the books, in a way that is relative
to that creature's modalities of symbolic cognition.
While this place may 'have no physical location', it is an encounterable,
repeatable (across different experiencers from different cultures)
and very completely 'real' place. In as much as your eye exists,
this library exists. Yet there is no dependable record or referece
to such things in our experience in modern societies. In fact, in
many of these 'modern' societies, it is cognitively illegal, and
punishable, to believe in, speak of, or seek such things. This simple
fact leads us to an observable certainty: vast terrains of our cognitive
natures, potentials and abilities have been co-opted, shaved off,
punished into a 'more desireable' shape, or eliminated outright.
I am certain these ideas, of 'the library of libraries'
and 'the three important books' has at once inspired many modern
and departed people(s), in domains more various than we can imagine.
Interestingly, their quests and questions in these domains have
also erased more than a few of them. Possibly more than prospered
by it, for one's uniqueness can be parlayed into a variety of weapons
by an oppressor, and there is no lack of this sort of tyranny in
our cognitive evolution. In fact, this appears to be a common and
underappreciated fact.
The generality of the idea is the important thing
to see. Diversity of experience results in recombinantly scalar
tools — flatness of experience results in linearly
linked tools.
