o:O:o
Introit:
Although may not be a necessity, it appears to me that any of the precursors to the habit of creating imaginal and conceptual hypostases (models) may arise in part from the experience of loss of contact with something previously familiar.
Our feelings of loss, coupled with habits we acquire culturally, result in peculiarly charged emotional and cognitive constructs (memorials). From this perspective, the incentive to invent money arises from memories of experiences of value which are no longer accessible as actual experiences. As direct experience of value itself becomes less and less common, tokens are established to sustain a kind of ‘extrinsic memory’ of value, and thus the onset of monetary concepts, tokens, systems of tokens, signs, etc.
‘Knowledge’, a form of cognitive hypostasis, probably arose as an adaptation of other ways of knowing (and experiencing) which I believe depended upon a variety of rather mysterious (but intrinsically accessible) sensing paradigms that we would modernly consider to be implausible. Many of these original practices were based on powers available primarily to small, tightly-knit social groups, and involve what I would describe as the instantiation and development of superskills — being those skills which require a super-organism (team or group).
As children, we each uniquely recapitulated this evolutionary process, generally (and uniquely) re-experiencing and re-expressing the cognitive evolution of our species in our own personal development. Our favored mode of play was in small, tightly-knit groups.
In many ways, the cultural world we (in the West) enter at the onset of adulthood is a eerie distortion of the evolutionarily-developed necessities of human social immersion.
•••
It is my contention that a plethora of problems which have plagued our species for countless generations could be resolved by a revolutionary transformation in the basis of our relationships with knowledge, language, and tokens in general. This will not be a technological revolution, no special equipment or status is required. It will be, instead, a revolution of understanding, where a more profoundly human, organismal, and successful spectrum of methods replaces a virulent, malevolent, and largely unsuccessful set of predecessors.
Prelude:
An angelFish named Sarin:
A friend of mine had an angelFish named Sarin. As I
would often inquire after the well-being of her pets, I was once privy to
an episode which took place at night, in relative darkness. Sarin
was floating happily in the bubbles, in the dark, ostensibly engaged
in a meditative ‘bubble bath’ in the literal sense.
When she turned on the light Sarin darted hysterically
around in the tank for a bit, then wedged herself between the filter-pipe
and the glass — on the bottom of the tank — burying her
head in the gravel. The significance of this behavior was initially lost
on both of us, in part because my friend had at first been concerned that illness
or injury was involved —yet Sarin appeared to recover quickly,
and soon passed the common checks for health and emotional well-being.
The next morning, while showering, I found myself pondering
the necessity of the many doors, windows, filters and dolls that stand
between us and understanding — masquerading as ‘knowledge’.
It occurred to me then that inside — in the emotional assembly-place
of ourselves and our cultures — there is an essential brightness
too fast and frightening to face directly, and thus before we can
relate with it, we first establish reductive and seemingly sophisticated
(imaginal) intermediaries.
Later still, while examining some maps — it
hit me like lightning: Sarin cannot close her eyes! When
the sudden flash of unnatural light first blinded her and then started
causing
pain — she quickly buried her
eyes in the gravel!
o:O:o
From my own experience and observation, I am led to
suspect that many organisms interpret the ‘sudden onset of
impossible brightness’ as
the sudden onset of death (this might be paraphrased as ‘the sudden appearance of everything-at-once’). Outside of catastrophe, or the presence of an extremely destructive phenomenon (i.e.: lightning), the only common exposure to such brightness occurs when caught unexpectedly in powerful reflection of the Sun.
Though not an absolute, I think this
is a generally universal organismal response which may well have
to
do with a
species of memory
humans
don't ‘formally’ believe in — memory of former
experiences with dying. Whether or not my theory is correct, of this much I am nearly convinced: in the inward dimensions
of self, relation, thought and imagination — we cannot close
our eyes. In the kingdom where we assemble meaning from experience — we ‘have
no eyelids’. The sudden onset of internal brightness is
shocking, and often terrifying — in part because it is not easily interpreted or recognized. It defies categorization by its nature. It cannot be named. It is incomparable.
Over evolutionary history
our species has painstakingly accrued a set of habits that allows us to assemble ‘false
eyelids’ from little bits of cached experience, definition
and circumstance. We now employ this habit partly as a coping-strategy. As we create and sustain myriads of forms of
conceptual ‘dolls’ (and their interrelationships) before our inner eye, the essential brightness of our sources,
our unity
and our intelligence is slowly and actively obscured.
On purpose.
o:O:o
Skip
3 steps — fall down
Somewhere in the early cognitive
development of our species we acquired ways of assembling figurative
‘records’ from extreme reductions (abstractions) of sentient experience.
Although the onset of this new behavior may have been relatively sudden, we can be nearly certain that it was a more formal expression of previously existing activities and potentials common to our distant ancestors. This ‘filtering’ skill allowed us to envision and conserve tokenizations of
experience — the necessary precursors to memory and
thought. The onset of this cognitive involution begat an entire new dimension of animalian experience on Earth; an inward dimension characterized by storms of semi-poetic figuration and invisible dances of relation and meaning.
By creating and sustaining reductive ‘sketches’ of experience,
we invented (inwardly vented) a new dimension of awareness which was largely
concerned with the classification, evaluation and comparison of tokens. We might imagine that initially this was a static collection of discrete elements, however, in truth, the result of the onset of this game was a cognitive library of profoundly relational form: any element added to the system modified all other elements in an ongoing storm of interdependent evolution. This new universe that was emerging in our ancestors was not a static list — it was, like they were, a thriving ecosystem of competition, mutuality, and relation.
We might imagine that the early experiences of this surprising potential were not much like what we experience today, in that there was no such thing as concrete (or literal) abstraction. The idea of a ‘fact’ was certainly a long way off. It seems very likely that early experiences of tokenization or conceptualization were not fundamentally mechanical or even necessarily rational, but instead involved a variety of deeply emotional and possibly spiritual aspects and functions. I believe that our ancestors experienced these nascent opportunities as both mythopoetic, and charged with an alien character that qualified as contact with a new dimension. It was certainly nonordinary, and one might profitably speculate that the process and experience were profoundly associated with the divine — and perhaps also with what many cultures now define as negative aspects of divinity. It must have been a very unexpected awakening, and it launched the very basis of sentient perception on Earth into a cascade of changes whose depth and frequency have been increasing for countless generations throughout the history of our species.
What was it that prompted such a seemingly radical departure from animalian awareness? Some would answer that it was merely the complexification of certain organs within our ancestors. But the emergence of the formally representational faculties in those ancestors was a cognitive event comparable to the emergence of workable wings in the first flying organisms. It was more than our entry into a new world; it was the permanent departure from all we had previously experienced and known, and the onset of a relationship not with a world, but with entirely new dimensions of experience, relation and activity. These dimensions had bizarre and unexpected qualities and effects; in many cases they acted more like organisms than things, and their constituents — concepts — rapidly acquired connotations and functions that were in direct opposition to those of the living environments from and within which they emerged.
In our time and culture these matters are thoroughly hidden from us. We take for granted that the words, concepts and ways of knowing we inherit are sound, useful, and relatively safe to employ — after all, by and large we know of no other possibility — we must use what is delivered to us from without since we are neither equipped nor encouraged to innovate in these dimensions. The proclamations of distant and often dead people or groups, written into our cultures and books, haunt our lives and minds in every waking moment. Many of the proclaimers were fictions to begin with, or were not actual people; they were groups who took on the authority of persons — people who acted ‘in the name of...’. In relatively modern times, the ability to form and express the needs, perspectives and desires of a fictional entity (a ‘corporation’) results in ongoing contests of atrocity generation in nearly every dimension of human and animalian life. In order to offset this, these entities don the costumes of heroes.
The resulting spectacle of absurdity and bald contradiction (visualize SUV advertisements portraying magical ‘back to nature’ moments) serves both to sever us from our inherent biocognitive intelligence, and to insure we remain largely immobilized in fascination or avoidance.
o.0.o
I believe that the general shape of the representational evolution of our species is similar to the shape that each of us uniquely recapitulated during infancy. Formal
languages came long after we had developed the schemas and precursors required by various phases of memory development. It seems we
developed
something like memory first, emotionally charactered representational thought
second, eventually resulting in the arisal of formally representational language.
You
can have some form of thought without language, but you can’t really have thought without memory (think about
it), and once you’ve got any sort of memory at all, thought
is next on the agenda, because the object-agents of memory begin to compete and express themselves through inter-reflection.
This game leads directly to comparative emprecedencing, the hierarchical organization of memoried elements according to values they acquire during their arisal and comparison to each other. This process often occurs simultaneously in multiple domains of context.
Before
an animal can embody or employ formally representational
memory potentials, it must first be able to establish and sustain a variety
of cognitive precursors which make use of figurative foundations
to
store, arrange and compare content upon. Yet prior to this
step, an animal must have established sufficient general insight and relational
structure so that the onset of representational consciousness doesn’t
kill it outright. Fumbling around with
ideas which are
actually not highly related to threats and needs in the current moment often leads
to crisis — animals do not so commonly enjoy the survivable
luxury of investing attention in places other than the now. Threat-parsing
and resource acquisition demand direct and constant attention.
The early onset of formally representational behavior in our ancestors was almost certainly a crisis, akin to having been impregnated with
a very sticky poison. For all the powers it appears to grant
its users, formal representation brings with it a variety of
well-hidden dangers. It can act like an organism-within-an-organism, and
it pursues goals of its own once ensconced in a being or culture.
In a way that mimics biology as we
understand it, ideas and ways of knowing ceaselessly pursue
their own survival, terrain dominance, and the harvesting of our
attentional resources. The first beings to experience
uptake (the habits of representational sentience) probably had an experience akin to what we associate with psychosis. They were trapped between the world of the animal and the coming world of the representational mind.
In many clearly demonstrable ways, the ascent of our species to representational
awareness effected something a lot more like a catastrophe than a
gift, and given the relationship we have conserved with these momentums
this is still the case in the modern moment. Representational cognition
caused essentially animalian creatures to respond to each other and
their environment according to organismally nonsensical paradigms
— the result was and remains to this day a terrifying polarity
where knowledge baselessly contradicts biocognition, and begins to
act predatorily on the gardens of natural relation emergent in animals
and groups.
o:O:o
For the sake of exploration, I would like to model two forms of elemental intelligence in competition in our distant
ancestors.
The first form was based in what I call active sensing, and
was a dynamically updating reflective assemblage of circumstances, relations and
environment. It was concerned with something extremely general: the information content communicated by change, particularly changes involving the gaps between things and beings, and functioned via ongoing comparisons acquired primarily through vision, hearing, scent and tactile sensing. This is like a destructible sketchpad, where, although a previous state is cached briefly, it will soon be replaced by a new sketch, and during this process, differences get highlighted.
This strategy comprises a sort of ‘dynamically updating difference detector’, and the associated aspect of intelligence has its basis in imagery and might be modeled as analogous to our peripheral vision system, which is adept at detecting certain kinds of anomalies (possibly worthy of focus) even in a very blurry or dim field. It is often unnoticed in its activities, yet it provides the crucial activating stimulus which is often secretly guiding its more sophisticated counterpart, a fact which nearly all martial artists quickly discover whether or not they understand it formally. This is the sort of intelligence that parses threats and assembles physical responses quickly enough to deal with hair-trigger situations involving rapid movement and vector-changes.
The latter form (perhaps analogous to central vision) arose and complexified relatively slowly,
and was expressed as detailed discrimination, caching, and comparison. Where active sensing was highly general, fuzzy, and fast, detailed examination revealed features of character, rich sources of data, distinctions, and could distinguish foreground and background, however, it was vastly more processing-intensive. It also took over certain cognitive resources when in use, such that its older and faster other half slowed down, creating the possibility of a collision between thought and survival necessities. This mode would eventually emerge as formal representational sentience, with all of its florid imaginal and emotorelative sophistications.
Early semi-representational sentience gained precedence in phases, as it allowed
individuals and groups who survived uptake to surpass animalian potentials
in certain extremely limited but often profoundly empowering relational dimensions. Enacting these
potentials required over-authorizing or credentialing fallacies,
a trick this latter mode acts by nature to defend and preserve. This aspect of intelligence is proto-linguistic, and in a more evolved state has an ongoing function of generating stories.
o:O:o
We might speculate that our ancestors were
not entirely prepared for the gift of representational awareness
and may have acquired it ‘too early’ in their cognitive
evolution as complex animals. The same may prove true of us. Their initial encounters with consciousness
potentials complex enough to run a rolling re-presentation of self and others
carried with them a variety of invisible dangers. Many aspects of these threats were hidden ‘ahead in time’ — such that what appeared
to be a benefit in the moment would actually result deadly costs
via unseen ramifications. Later, when these were experienced, they could be rationalized away as having to
do with some decision or action undertaken
by a particular representational animal or group, rather than with representation itself, (which few have ever thought to question the value or efficacy of).
In the modern moment, as with our ancient ancestors, a single fact has almost entirely eluded us: The onset of formal representation comprises an attack on organismal sentience in a way analagous to a parasitic infection. Once begun, this process literally changes the structure and function of the brain (and metabolism). Language-oriented cognition can attack our speed, prowess,
intelligence, survival and evolutionary potentials, our flexibility and emotional
natures — directly — by co-opting these resources into
its own preservation and reproduction. Yet this anciently conserved
relationship need not hold this single function. The fact that it
still does is the result of something more akin to an accident than
to ‘evolution’.
In order to see and surpass what
has plagued our species since the inception of these forms of knowing,
we must plumb the murky depths not merely of our evolution —
but of our relationships with tokens — in general.
o:O:o
In the early phases of representational
sentience, vulnerability to circumstance and predators probably kept
us relatively simpleminded for vast epochs of our cognitive genesis.
Without the ‘luxuries’ of play and time to dream, the
precursors to representational relation our species had by then developed
languished against the raw necessities of survival, reproduction and
terrain maintenance. We may imagine that once we were able to gain
some measure of freedom from primary predators we began to painstakingly
assemble more complex roots of representation — probably with
the help of physical objects which we might call ‘toys’ (physical hypostases of ‘ideas’). These representational seeds would later
blossom as we internalized the extrinsic toys with which we began
the game — a process that would eventually lead us to rely upon representational
sentience almost entirely.
Once we had a few of these foundations
well-established in our practice and experience, we formed sets, linking
them into families, or lexicons. This allowed us to magnify the existing
benefits by reflecting them off each other. But it also required maintenance
and constant attention. There was, as it turns out, no free lunch
— even in the dimension of representational awareness.
For any being or group, the sum
of these lexicons is the sum of local or personal ‘knowledge’,
and any socium with a vaster lexicon is functionally preeminent if
the enaction or functions of their lexicons results in advanced prowess. A creature with
a significantly vaster enactable lexicon is effectively
a God. — such a being possesses the toys of understanding
required to transform another person, community, nation or world in
nearly any dimension. This is the likely source of the ‘King’
metaphor, which is a social hypostasis of the ‘God’
metaphor. A single person who, for a group, acts as a living link
to an ineffable and hypercreative celestial intelligence.
But there are many other aspects
of our relations with lexicons and credentialing we must examine, and there are different
general ‘species’ of lexical function as well as forms
of credential. Some of these are primarily friendly to organism, planet
and intelligence, others are more or less parasitic. Unfortunately, the unfriendly species are dominant in the human cogniscium on Earth, and have been for many thousands of years. They’re
a lot more competitive than their opponents, and they have no regard for their effect on any host or population — regardless of
its size, value or complexity.
o:O:o
Land
of the invisible chalkboard
I remember a scene from a dream I once had, in which I was attempting to write the word ‘education’ on a chalkboard. I was puzzled because as I was writing the word, the letters previous to the one I was writing would begin to morph and dissolve, such that I had to keep going back to a previous letter, and re-inscribing it, and couldn’t get to the end of the word. At first I was annoyed, and tried applying more pressure, as if this would somehow make the writing ‘stick’. Eventually, however, I realized this wasn’t working and became puzzled. I then adopted a different strategy, where I would quickly sketch and return to previous letters in a pattern. This didn’t work either. Now, in hindsight, it’s very clear what was happening: the chalk, my hand, my eye, and the chalkboard — were all changing too rapidly to allow anything to be cached. Mind is more like water than wood. Tokens simply cannot be sustained in such a setting. All of the participants, all the objects — all of the settings — are in a constant state of flow.
Consider the power of the tokens we create — imaginal maps
of relational symmetries whose functions lead us to credential identity, names and
qualities — which coalesce into ideas. These ideas, many of them mere stipulations, become the lenses through which we comprehend and evaluate experience. A significant portion of this activity involves words, usually words from a single language. Without them, we are
animals — at best. With them, we change what we do and believe
in ways we are totally unprepared to examine clearly. By a strange
dance of relations with long-conserved vehicles of recording, communicating
and systematization (language and systems of knowing) we create, sustain
and modify endless inward lexicons — rulers if you will —
by which we measure and evaluate our living experiences and relations.
We are taught that this process, properly and attentively pursued, results in expertise — a sort of incomparable excellence of awareness. In point of fact, this is not true. What it results in, for the vast majority of us, is a shockingly reductive and entirely insufficient relationship with ourselves, our world, and experience in general. This idea is not difficult to prove. One need only watch a child as (s)he talks and gestures enthusiastically about a new being or circumstance in her experience. Yet once an adult has ‘named’ and ‘explained’ this new relational element, the inquisitiveness and enthusiasm often depart, sometimes completely. Fascination is, at least in part, a kind of not-knowing, and when others intervene, supplying us with their purported expertise, the heart of the actual relational experience is often sacrificed upon the altar of knowledge. Other outcomes are possible, and some children even manage to sustain their fascinations well beyond the application of expertise. Some of them will be prodigies — but why are these the exceptions? I recall a situation from my own childhood where my father explained that the Sun was ‘just an explosion in space’. Mechanical definitions of natural phenomenon leave out most of the truth — for in fact, the Sun is a progenitor of planets, and of the biocognitive children who inhabit them.
Taught to refer to inward lexicons before we can credential our own
experiences and understandings as ‘valid’, we are robbed of the potential
to explore any other form of relationship with knowledge or learning
— in general. We are not authors, nor even actors — we
are only ‘allowed’ to be readers of maps
foisted on us by the circumstances of enlightenment in the place where we
grow and come to know what it means to be alive in a human world.
We are not allowed or encouraged to question whether these maps are good, fictitious,
predatory, omnicidal — the basic and constant pressures of our
local culture and necessary survival activity make this extremely
unlikely, if not openly punishable.
Behind this tokenesque masquerade lies a miraculous ability — as a species
we somehow learned to employ our awareness in in a game of applying
imaginal separations. This skill allows us to craft
elaborately self-referenced vehicles of memory and comparison from
modern and previous moments of relational experience. The problem
is that it’s an inherently reductive game
— and it hides this feature of its nature adeptly — on
purpose. It’s also founded in fiction — a very
‘pure’ form of fiction which by its nature grants precedence
to separation and distinction before exploring generality or unity.
Though this ‘appears to be a requirement’ for representational
intelligence, it isn’t — and this single error has been
the most devastating and costly of our problems throughout all of
human history. Reverse this error, and many of the gremlins inhabiting our ways of knowing will vanish.
Long ago, during an adventure more amazing than anything we’ve
preserved stories of — our distant ancestors found some kind
of magic string that exists in another dimension — a ‘connectivity
dimension’, inside us — and the string allows us to separate,
group, name and imaginally manipulate figurines of things,
beings and events. But this was more than mere distinguishing, and
was not so much abstract during the inception: it was hyperpoetic.
Where did this strange string come from? How did we learn to separate
and sustain imaginal figures — and why didn’t any other
species pick up a similar skill?
I think our species got hold of this potential before we were sufficiently
complex to sustain healthy relations with it, and in this early intercourse
we got trapped in a decidedly unkind and probably unnecessary
cul-de-sac of intelligence. For thousands of years, we’ve
told stories about what holds us back and why we cannot resolve the
elemental matters of our sources, our purpose, and the sources of
those momentums which destroy all that is wise and beautiful about
life and mind.
Yet even with all the stories we possess, most of the important ones
have not yet been told — and many which have been told have
become confused in the tangles of time and translation. Beyond those we know and outside those which are new lie many which have been forgotten for so
long that should they be accurately re-membered... we may well find
ourselves in possession of a way of learning-in-unity so profound
that it will enable us to justify the suffering and complexity of
human history itself — in a single stroke.
o:O:o
Down at its roots, the peculiar stuff we humans call intelligence
is actually akin to a bizarre, virus-like
chain-letter based in doll transactions. The entire game of recognition and evaluation depends heavily upon tokenization and mimicry, and thus the lexical entities we craft are extremely adept
at
‘wearing the clothing’ of something far more valuable.
Since all of this occurs in a totally invisible dimension, no
evidence of these matters is ever communicated to our awareness.
Our caches of names, identities, qualities and values have to
be formally conserved and regenerated into our experience, moment-to-moment,
in order to be sustained at all. The amount of energy required to sustain these transports and
participants grows
exponentially as our cognitive terrain fills with tokens and representations
of fictive relaters, relations, tasks and seeming ‘opportunities’.
Each doll we add to the collection reflects uniquely upon all of the other dolls, and the outcome is an impossibly sophisticated (ever-more sophisticated, moment to moment) relational network of cached tokens and their connections with other tokens and symmetries of tokens. We don’t recognize this because we’re habitually sustaining it by common agreement and habit — and there’s
no known or obvious way to step aside from these momentums long
enough to survey them from a new vantage. Yet this very understanding is the beginning of a way to escape these problems — without losing or attacking anything at all.
This necessity of experiential regeneration required by the tokens we craft produces echoes, and these ‘children’
demand further sustenance as well as the ‘clothing’ of
our attention and effort. Soon, we find ourselves immersed in a explosively self-elaborating tree-like structure whose desire for growth is as insatiable
as it is phenomenal. This becomes a cognitive disease, where the crafting
of one doll leads to the necessity of crafting a hundred, which soon
leads to a variety of intractable problems such as the production and maintenance of housing for
this absurd possession. We become enslaved by these necessities of maintenance.
Sustaining, tracking and defending these explosively-growing
lexicons from change becomes our primary activity, while invention,
experiential contact with the sources of intelligence, and novel approaches to understanding
languish.
All of this should lead us to a suspicious response to the
common appearance and explosive multiplication of objects in our modern cultures which are
in fact reductive hypostases of living relations or beings.
How many beings are killed or displaced so that we can have millions of tchotchkes? While humans freeze outside, our cars and dolls have warm places to ‘sleep’?
We are dying of these errors in the physical dimension as a species, but something similar is happening in the invisible cognitive ecosystems inside is. As we proceed with the erasure of the living libraries of Earth, our cognitive equilibrium and well-being are being annihilated. These libraries are the very living
source of our intelligence, and when they are stressed or erased,
we immediately embody and magnify these effects in our cultural and
personal experience, as well as our bodies and minds — generally
without realizing this has anything to do with the ambient status
of our species, or our intelligence. Strangely, the terrifying result is that we attack our sources more severely, with less provocation, and the result is often an ever-broadening horizon of damage.
o:O:o
My experience is that it is neither knowledge nor our nature which are
in error, per se, but instead the subtle peculiarities of the modes of representational consciousness with which we are familiar
— the character and features of our approach to relation itself.
I’m not the first to suggest this, but my hope is to demonstrate
that there are ways out of these traps we’ve not yet explored,
and some of them are immediately accessible once the general shapes
of the problems involved are understood.
There are many ways of knowing (and forms of memorial conservation)
which are nothing like those we are aware of and practice culturally.
The
peculiar and specific mode of cognitive relation we are taught is tyrannical,
reductive and intrinsically conflicted; yet with the slight adjustment of a few
of its root elements, a universe of new potentials arises
instantly to our experience and access. The primary obstacle is the habit (and incredible
biocognitive
cost) of conserving and defending cached tokens of definition and comparison — which
are, in their basis entirely fictional. We do not need
to
eliminate our relationships with caching or lexicons, we do not need to discard language or formal knowledge — but we do need
to radically modify our willingness to credential these dimensions, and the techniques we employ when engaged in this. Additionally, we must remake our relationship with knowledge in a likeness more true to our actual nature — a nature so shockingly profound that the sum of human stories cannot compare to it.
I speak of an intrinsic way of learning which magnifies itself explosively
in small groups of intimately unified explorers, and which depends
for its existence upon the possession of a generally accurate model of the ladder of circumstances
and events which led to our differentiation from animals: the ladder
across which our species traveled away from what we might consider
‘pure animalian intelligence’ toward a specific polarity
of representational consciousness. It was not the travel that was
bad, but the timing, and the destination — which led to the magnification
of the problems and threats inherent in our modern ways of knowing.
Understanding the key events or phases in this ladder results in an intra-reflective
change in the way we relate with lexicons in general. That change
causes an explosion of learning-prodigy in any who experience it,
regardless of one’s seeming prowess or ignorance. And every
experience of this is entirely personal and unique — just as
the experience of any group will be.
o:O:o
The elemental character of living awareness in an animal complex enough
to be capable of sustaining imaginal figures in relational consciousness is
like fast-flowing water — it will naturally resist the formation
of static ‘particulate structures’ of any sort, rapidly
eroding anything erected unless the structure can be ‘practiced’
into common experience. Thus it is that our species found ways to
‘re-signal’ with extrinsic tokens as a precursor to the
complex representational consciousness of which our modern cultures
are but a tiny and impoverished instance of the potentials of. We probably used ‘external caches’ as memory before we had developed the internal faculty. But
this regeneration of tokens has extreme dangers, and deadly costs
— particularly in the dimensions of communication, active sensing,
and cognition in general.
The term representation parses down to ‘re-presenting’
— and it is this game of ‘practicing’ into accessible memory that leads to the ability to re-present — the common
‘re-encountering’ we may recall from games of ‘peek
a boo’ as a child was actually a playful analog of this learning process. This playful and often rhythmic triggering of the experience of recognition, stimulates the child in a variety of ways, some of which pertain to brain and cognitive development.
Whatever
intelligence we may emulate or possess lies in what we commonly enact (what we do with this purported intelligence)
and encounter, how we unify or isolate, and our relations with local
and distributed environments and beings. In our representational mode, we learn ourselves and our potentials
primarily through imaginal relations with
objects, persons, environment and circumstance — each of which
function as regenerative ‘synchronizing’ signals — but we respond uniquely to signals from other humans, particular those representing authorities or groups.
Long before our ancestors evinced internal analogs, much if not all
of what we call ‘intelligence’ and ‘memory’
was probably based upon the long conservative elaboration of a single
skill: the re-presentation of often initially fuzzy isomorphic (shape-oriented)
relationships in awareness and experience. Emotional intimacy, gained through our experience of tightly-knit social groups, granted unique
dimensions of momentum to this already rapidly expanding tree. The
majority of the earliest games of knowing depended on various modes
of tokenizing partial symmetries for later reference (as in the case
of a name or idea) or use (as in the case of tokens, hard machines,
or tools). Most of these ways of acting began with what we call games. I would not be surprised if the earliest cultural transmissions of representational precursors occurred from youths to adults, rather than the other way around, as we might modernly suspect.
With time, adventure and experience, our species came to use extrinsic (physical), imaginal, and
emotional caches for a variety of purposes,
and most of them closely linked with a process of ‘re-minding’
and later ‘re-membering’. These habits of regenerative
relation led onward to formal representation and modern human consciousness.
The story of this appears to be lost in time, but in fact —
it is written in every human hand.
o:O:o
Voll
eY Ball: [don’t let it ‘fall’]
— (together)
We believe that our species probably
rose to complex sentience in groups, and that the ties between members
of these groups were usually extremely intimate and emotionally profound.
In fact, I think we’ve grossly underestimated the necessity
and power of community amongst sentient animals in general, and humans
in particular.
These ‘groups’ are
not merely collectives — they comprise (and exist as) distributed
organisms; and in symmetries of this sort the loss of an ‘individual’
is more like the loss of an organ than the loss of ‘a
member of the group’. Each member acts as a unique conservator
of memory, relation and learning in many simultaneous dimensions —
for the entire group — and to lose one is to lose both the emotional
relationships and whatever unique benefits that member (who was also
a community) represented, possessed, developed or shared.
Complex human languaging and the
biocognitive changes that emerge in its wake are the results of the transmission
of culture — they are not inherent to our form of animal or
our biology. Proximity to a source of ‘copying’ is crucial
to our form of intelligence — should even a single gap
in the rhythm of this transfer ever occur, the generations following
this gap would have to reinvent language and knowledge from scratch. Thus we may observe that we
require precisely these sorts of relational intimacies established
by our distant progenitors in the modern moment — they form
the enabling transports allowing us to transfer the skills, cached knowledge, and languages [as well as errors]
that comprise our representational heritage amongst our emerging
generations.
During childhood we experience
‘uptake’ of representational modes and habits of relation as a result
of enculturation with family, peers, and larger assemblies —
and without this phase in which we acquire conserved lexical and pragmatic
skills our intelligence remains essentially animalian. This means
that our practiced mode of ‘intelligence’ is neither intrinsic
or biologically inherited — it is imposed from without as a cultural
inheritance. The necessary brain and nervous-system complexity are inherited, but the particular ways these assets will be developed, activated, and employed will be based almost entirely on culturally stipulated tracks. Unfortunately, these tracks act more like organisms competing to survive than they do like assets they advertise themselves as. In many cases we end up serving as a vehicle for the conservation of some concept, cultures of function, or some fashion.
‘Memorials‘
In ‘time’, beings,
sensations and circumstances retreat into dissolution somewhere beyond
the event-horizon of now, but death is the most significant
expression of this change. The confusion and pain of sudden permanent
separation from a beloved or habitual source of relation or attention
results in shock, and it is from this shock that the desire and necessity
of caching ‘memoria’ arises, as an extrinsic transport
of ‘re-connection’ that ameliorates a portion of the shock
while at the same time serving other more subtle purposes. One of
these purposes is the cognitive pre-figuration of internal memory,
which is then practiced into new internal potentials through consistent
experiential ‘re-relation’ — or the ‘force
of habit’. This is the birthplace of the representational intelligence
which our species is still in early phases of experience and competition
with.
To give you an idea of the power of these intimate group-or-family-based relationships, imagine a square configuration (representing a group) of 4 dots (each representing an individual). If we now connect all dots with straight lines, we will get 6 lines; 4 edge lines, and two lines forming an X in the center. Imagine that each of these lines represents a relational way of seeing the world (interpreting and relating with experience) which is dependant upon one’s connectivities both with another member, and with the group as a unity. If merely one of the members of our 4-dot group dies, our previous library of 6 ways is instantly reduced by half, to 3! Now, in reality, the interconnections between individuals which comprise a group are far more sophisticated and multi-dimensional than this flat model. The actual outcome of a single death in a group which lives and hunts, works and feeds together can be extraordinarily profound.
Once an expected relational presence
is established in personal or communal experience, the resultant separation-shock
can be at least marginally assuaged by hypostasis: one imbues
a real or imaginal token with connectivity-power such that it acts
as a ‘radio’ to the lost element. Constant re-relation
with this tokenized ‘holding vessel’ allows us to partially
compensate (emotionally) for the loss. For this reason, the death
of a child, companion, or leader eventually inspired first the conservation
of the corpse, and later the a forest of ways and reasons for the
creation of effigies. This practice was eventually so commonly employed that dolls (and statues) of living beings could act as local hypostases of a distant individual — particularly leaders.
This behavior partially resolves
the matter of separation for the extended group as well as the
local ‘family’ since both now have ‘access’
to the departed (or distant) member through the hypostasis of the corpse or doll.
Additionally, these vehicles act as cognitive ‘calls’
to memory — their consistent presence and enaction potentials
form a lens through which the lost ‘family member’ is
rendered into local time-presence. This results in regeneration of
the relational element — a precursor to ‘memory’.
Through reflective interaction with the tokenized remains of lost
or distant elements, group members obtain and conserve vehicles of remembering
and storying. These activities combine to create an entirely
new petal on the flower of relational culture within the group.
In our own time and cultures,
a physical limb which is lost is often replaced with a prosthesis.
We speak then of a similar principle, in cognitive terms — one
that applies simultaneously to individuals and groups, and is emotionally
connective in basis. The lost member or members can be made to ‘appear
with us in effigy’, and thus ‘a portion of their function
and relationship’ is brought back to the local moment from places
in the past, and places which exist apart from our common experience.
Dolls are at once an emotional
prosthesis and a vehicle for the caching of relation into a transportable,
re-experienceable token. The primary dimension of transport is not
space, but imaginal time. Further, relations with extrinsic tokens
forms the substrates of behavioral habit required to assemble both
memory and representational cognition. Lastly, as we shall explore
in process, we have and continue to use them to reduce the overpowering
magnitude of the gifts of our organismal sentience, which, in direct
experience, are actually terrifyingly profound.
These
somewhat clinical noticings are not even the beginning of this mystery,
one which leads right past the noses of science, philosophy and religion
alike — directly into places and potentials we consider ‘impossible’
in the modern moment.
o:O:o
Death,
Separation & Tokens
I’d like us to think of
the hypothetical creatures I speak of (our distant ancestors who existed
in the phase between animal and representational) as ‘nothing
more’ than complex animals — a dolphin, gorilla, whale,
or tiger are all this kind of animal. As we consider these ideas more
carefully together, we must bear in mind that we are speaking of animals
with emotion, but who do not yet possess formally representational memory or language.
They were complexly
cognitive, but not representationally sentient — yet —
and possessed nothing akin to formal representational memory as we
understand and experience it. It appears incidental, but there are
few examples of pure predators which display the depth of filial unity
common to animals who browse — hence perhaps the ancient and
crucially important ‘mystical’ polarity of ‘Lion
and Lamb’ — the group-predator and the ‘group-browser’.
Tightly knit animalian groups
will be seen to display a variety of responses to sudden change or
loss of members. Some of these appear to have minimal ongoing consequences
for intelligence, but there is an exception I find telling: observe
enough chimps in this circumstance and you will eventually see a mother
chimp mourning her dead child in what appears to be a distinctly ‘human-like’
fashion. She may, for example, drag it to a chosen private place and
coax the corpse with familiar gestures as though hoping to convince
it to return to life. This mourning often lasts long enough to threaten
the life of the mother, and it disrupts the entire group enough to
create significant pressure to transform it.
It is a small leap from this position
to carting the skeletal remains around, and this is almost assuredly
the source of the form of caching behavior we eventually elaborated
into memory, language and what we call ‘intelligence’.
Certainly we were already capable of caching food in terrain, and
it’s a very small (but complicated) step from that skill to
caching of the corpse of a loved on as a form of ‘memory-food’.
The ‘starvation’ this staves off is the ever-dwindling
‘relation-treasure’ that the departed member was the local
transport of while living. Without this ‘food’ supplied
by ‘re-meeting’ a token representing the lost member,
the rich nurturences of shared history, reflectivity and experience
fade suddenly to naught in the rushing flow of novelty that is the
life of every conscious animal.
In a more settled environment,
remains can be ‘enjeweled’ or otherwise enhanced to ‘show
off’ the new status of the departee. All of these behaviors
are troublesome from a survival standpoint (at least until such caching
pays off in problem-solving terms) and require an inordinate
amount of precious attention to sustain. Yet some of this
peril can be ameliorated if we exchange the actual remains for a token
— and here we arrive at the protoform of a doll. What is ‘carried’
or conserved is ‘more general’ and acts a localized structural
reduction of what was relationally proximate and then lost. The barriers
to survival posed by hauling or enthroning corpses can be done away
with almost entirely if one merely carries a rock or stick in which
the departed entity is hypostasized.
o:O:o
It is a simple matter to see if
this theory has any sand — we can observe animals and humans
experiencing and responding to loss, or exploring the potentials of
caching in more general terms. It is this very generality which is
so rare and useful; the ability to see that the ‘classes’
of organisms on Earth are not as we paint them, and that our own species
are not only not distinct — our main distinction is that we
reflect (in the sense of a living mirror), and thus we each uniquely
sum local experience, rather than merely ‘receiving it’.
Indeed, we sum and re-express, reflect, sum and re-express —
endlessly.
In discussing these matters with
a friend, I was impressed as she related her experience of the expression
of matriarchal hypostasis in her cat, Mexi. After
the mother cat had given birth, homes were eventually found for her
various kittens — an event adult humans consider ‘normal’
which would be experienced as a catastrophic separation by any
animal that rears young (particularly a human being). Throughout her
life thereafter, Mexi would occasionally gather together a number
of toys (balls in socks) that matched the number of the missing
kittens. After assembling her ‘family’ in doll-form,
she would hold one in her mouth, and make the kitten-calling sound.
Although this is an instance of memorial hypostasis in a predator,
the house cat is actually a nonordinary animal due to its history of
domestication, as well as its common experience as part of a human
household or group.
On another occasion I witnessed
a young blue jay practicing ‘caching’, which he might later
deploy as a strategy for hiding and re-membering food which was found
but could not be easily transported or eaten. He dug a modest hole
in the ground, moving wood chips and other debris away. Then he placed
a small, smooth piece of blue glass in the hole, and buried it. When
he was finished, he found three flattened sticks, and made a marker
for the cache, placing the first horizontal to his perspective, the
second vertical, and the third horizontal. They were arranged bottom
to top, smallest to largest. Atop the final stick the bird placed
a dried berry. It then briefly surveyed its craft and departed.
The effect was profound, and surprisingly
akin to what we have been doing with our own dead for thousands of
years. So much so that I must wonder how much our species learned
from nothing more than proximity to common birds. The jay was learning
to create personalized extrinsic caches with geometric recognition-markers
assembled from nearby detritus. It was a young bird. Probably about
5 months old. This was an instance of a learning-game which would
later be translated into caching food, an activity I have witnessed
amongst corvids (the family to which ravens, crows and blue jays belong)
many times.
I believe that the animals destined
to become Homo Sapiens were caching food long before we acquired the
common habit of caching the dead, but we did not have the same emotional
bond with food or toys as with departed members of family or group.
It is relatively easy to see how the already present skill acquired
in tending a food cache could be transferred to the preservation of
departed members in order to partially compensate for emotional anxiety
or pain.
o:O:o
gapTag
Our own lexical memory is a sophisticated
elaboration of precisely this form of caching. The creation of effigies
of the dead was probably (according to common archeological evidences)
preceded with keeping the corpse itself as effigy, and this could
easily have been the first formative ‘caching gesture’
that led on toward complex representation. It may in fact turn out
that whichever species of animal first begins creating
dolls — is the one that will go on to become formally
representational cognitives. The ‘whole toy’ of this behavior
is actually a form of emoto-cognitive vehicle for playing various
kinds of tag across various sorts of ‘gaps’, particularly
the one we know as death.
As it turns out, there are extremely
few communal animals who could survive while carrying the corpse of
a departed relative — or manage to protect it. Even if the corpse
can be cached — it must be protected from predators and scavengers,
which requires survival resources better spent upon the living members
of the individual and group. Subtracting these resources from active
access would prove deadly in nearly every case. It thus requires a
significant degree of behavioral luxury in order to successfully manage
such a task; without this resource the investments of time and energy
required become functionally toxic to those involved in it.
Given these noticings, we may
imagine that whichever of the branches of our animalian ancestors
first perfected dollmaking became the competitive leader in the race
toward representational cognition [Rc], because experience
with extrinsic tokens led to the ability to substitute imaginal tokens
— to metaphy experience and history [memory].
This approach might also explain
why creatures who clearly possess the necessary relational complexity
for [Rc] do not display it: whales and dolphins do
not exist in an environment where dolls can be crafted and sustained,
nor do their evolutionary adaptations endow them with simple ways
of accomplishing this. Neither can they preserve their dead, because
in the ocean this would be functionally impossible. Only the animals
who ‘broke the waters’ and came to dwell on land would
have this opportunity, in general, due to the nature of the undersea
planet and the fact that few of these animals remain in small areas
of terrain, which would probably be a requirement during the founding
of this sort of activity.
Of all the animals with manipulative
appendages, it is the hands of simians which are most suited to dollcraft.
Yet before we could ‘craft’ artifacts at all we acquired
the peculiar hypostasizing abilities that were the precursors to the desire
for them. In these phases a natural object sharing some dimension
of relation with the departed member could become a transport first
to memory, and then to direct experiential relation. Re late i on.
A form of re member ing a portion of a distributed self which had
departed into a mysterious dimension.
It was the peculiarly profound
emotional intimacy between members of protohuman groups coupled with
the circumstantial luxuries that allowed them to conserve the corpse of a departed member
that resulted in the first formal extrinsic caches of beings. These were the
protoforms of memory, and without that precursor, a species will develop
general problem-solving skill, but is extremely unlikely to develop
anything akin to representational thought. Our kind of ‘thinking’
requires tokens, and before we were able to sustain these imaginally,
we sustained them extrinsically.
o:O:o
Contact with dolls made in effigy
acts as an cognitive lens, focusing the necessary attention away from
survival matters toward a universe of mystery, history, memoria and
emotion. This allows us to begin the process of re-generative awareness
we refer to as memory. Without the awe-and-emotion inspiring hypostasis
of some sort of corpus, funerary artifact, or doll, the swarming novelty
and challenges of moment-to-moment existence rapidly erase most if
not all cachings of previous experience.
Only once we are able to craft
or carry an extrinsic token of a lost member do we obtain a transport
to ‘re-member’ the departed loved ones, sovereigns, teachers,
circumstance, villains, heroes and healers. Consistent relation with
the ‘toy’ acts as a signal regeneration lens — an
amplifier for any extant internal caches, formal or non.
This form of cognitively-charged
object acts as a magically envitalized ‘radio’ which is
always tuned to the lost element or being, and is not merely (as we might prematurely assure ourselves) an imaginal
artifact . The ‘doll’
or toy, made of ‘unliving matter’ becomes a associative
transport to the dimension of ‘separation’ itself; being
in fact a member of the ‘class’ of separate, nonliving
entities. The most impossible thing for us to understand is the most
important: these toys act as actual radios to another dimension, and
that dimension is inhabited. In other words, these were not merely
toys, but a technology of gap-crossing.
The skillfulness we enjoy with
relational intelligence is based in systems of making, characterizing
and arranging doll-like toys — stick figures crafted according
to a single general schema we’re taught or often culturally
forced to emulate. Once we began carting corpses and crafting dolls,
we were on the road to being able to create the kinds of inwardly
simulative hypostasis we call memory. This leads to more complex modes
of simulation, prediction, and tool-making/usage.
Yet,
for thousands of years we’ve been stuck with slow dolls that
act to preserve themselves in precedence to accomplishing
the goals for which they were created. To our inward eye, they appear
as a transport to direct contact with and conservation of intelligence,
yet are in nearly every case merely highly-artifacted terrain predators
who dump the cognitive and attentional momentum we direct at them
into their own dominance and reproduction.
Something is wrong with the general
schemas by which we assemble our toys of memory and knowing, and the
way it is wrong is causing a variety of catastrophic doll-explosions
in the cogniscium of our species. We are being eaten by our ways of
knowing, and their terrain needs in coupling with the ever-amplifying
toxicity of their enaction is burning the sentient library of our
world like it was a luxury snack.
The big secret is that anyone
can invent new schemas, and some of these can be so adept that
they can outperform the entire history of human learning-modes almost
immediately.
It’s time we had some very
different dolls.
o:O:o
Tie
a Knot in the Water
Try to make a doll out of water
and you encounter directly the problems posed by memory for animals.
The rushing poetics of conscious relation are impossible to preserve
as static entities because experience itself will cause whatever we’ve
thus far erected to morph toward an ever-progressing circus of change-states.
If we pretend consciousness is ‘like stone’ then we believe
we can carve it into formal effigies of experience and relation —
but if at the root it is more like water, this may be a grave and
explosively costly mistake.
In terms of relational intelligence,
formal caching isn’t the best strategy, and if it were, we’d
see more instances of it enacted with high precedence in animals.
While it can be useful in some circumstances, if granted it too much
precedence these practices begin to consume the natural flexibility
and momentum of regular old biointelligence, transforming it into
resources to support their own reproduction and dominance.
The truth of the water is movement,
and in order to make a doll out of it, one must first to slow it down
somehow — by freezing, for example. Both reality and consciousness
are elementally liquid, and relational dimensions are arising, changing
and departing at millions of scales of size, location and speed —
always. Not only are these matters like liquid because they ‘flow
in streams’ but also because the whole universe we speak of
is hyper-reflective. This means that each token is constantly changing
in reflective co-emergence with its near and distant neighbors: our
lexicons are, in a sense, alive in this way.
Caching strategies that cause
their own significance to increase dramatically when re-enacted will
threaten the survival of an organism more easily than they will assist
it with new ‘understandings’, because ‘understandings’
are bold reductions of sentient awareness, and require
inordinate biocognitive resources to sustain and defend.
In effect, such strategies lead rapidly to explosive problems with
feedback, and it could be argued that much of our heritage of representation
arises from a terrified response to the self-referencing aspects of
intelligence in general. Our forms of common relational consciousness
are sublimely vulnerable to explosively progressing feedback problems
of the sort that form the basis of some of what we refer to as ‘mental
illness’.
Additionally, formal caching modes
do not compare admirably to direct sensing
— using a lexicon to parse circumstance is exceptionally slow,
as well as extremely costly in biocomputational terms — and
in general this form of intelligence is not granted utilization
precedence at the scale of the animal because its outcomes
are consistently arrayed against the survival of those who enact
them, and this violates the most basic definition of intelligence.
I’ve saved the deadliest danger for last. Caching only works relatively well in circumstances that are largely predictable. Nature, in general, is unpredictable. The first species that begins caching, is going to necessarily develop an antagonistic relationship with the novelty inherent in nature, and thus they will attack novelty in an ongoing attempt to establish ever-greater degrees of predictability. This is of course catastrophic. Whatever attacks the living environment attacks itself in myriad dimensions. The problem is simple: once you begin to value prediction, it quickly becomes apparent that nothing is more predictable than dead terrain. Movement in that direction will grant the appearance of rigor to your predictive games.
Appearing to our eye to grant
us impossible prowess far above the ‘animalian norm’,
in reality the more common outcome of cached knowledge is the complete
sacrifice of meaningful and powerful relational transports in favor
of a few mechanistically reductive tokens whose enaction will generally
abhor our human and organismal natures in a systematically predatory
way.
For these and related reasons,
caches must be denigrated in comparison to experiential contact
and learning — yet our human relationship with knowledge has
rarely embodied this potential. This is exceptionally suspicious —
moreso when we consider that any other system of relation is most
likely to cost us our minds, liberty, lives and planet.
o:O:o
Why
animals aren’t representational
