"I have not seen this species in all my 13 years at the museum, so it's a remarkable find. This crustacean is considered in the scientific community to be the first known case of a parasite that actually replaces an organ of its host." — Jim Brock, entomologist, Horniman Museum in London.
Substitution Game
Cymothoa exigua is a fascinating example of physical parasitism; but what I wish to explore with you is a nonphysical analog that infects humans. You can find supercolonies of them in nearly every one of us — in fact, what we ordinarily think of as our intelligence is largely comprised of them.
It’s a cognitive interloper rather than a physical one, and it doesn’t go after the tongue — it goes after what moves it. It doesn’t look like an insect, either; in fact, it’s largely invisible. The external aspects of it that we can recognize look like a famous person, a fashion, a definition (or set of them), some form of media, a cult, or a way of knowing. I call these strange entities thrisps. If a meme was a virus, a thrisp would be something like an insect, or micro-animal.
The first obvious symptom of infection is mimicry; the infected person (the host) begins mimicking the authorities represented by the thrisp (thrisps are highly adept at using authority in such a way as to garner access to prospective hosts).
The next phase of the infection is a preparation for transmission — during this phase the infectee advertises the thrisp to other humans in an attempt to infect them — either voluntarily, or through coercion. There need be no accessible physical evidence of this process — it happens quite naturally when humans communicate; however the methods used for communication prefigure the kinds of thrisps that a given transport is likely to develop or carry. Text is quite different from speech, for example.
Thrisps use something analogous to a network to travel between and exist within human hosts. I call this network the mimula. It has different kinds of transports, some physical — some not. Human media is always mimula, however — even this bit here.
Representational language is a primary substrate from which the mimula is comprised, and the unique characteristics of each human language have a dramatic effect on the character and function of the thrisps which emerge and evolve within it. A person who knows multiple languages is vastly more capable of defending their mind, since they can triangulate meaning (denotation and conotation) from multiple cultural contexts at once, and thus they are likely to notice — consciously or subconsciously — that each language carries and prefigures unique perspectives on identity, value, and function. Eventually this may lead to the suspicion that something is present and competing within languages that people are not commonly aware of, and these kinds of speculations can lead to an indirect awareness of thrisps and the mimula.
Fundamentally, the mimula represents transports in the environment, human culture and human activity along which thrisps can travel and within which they can organize their own analogs of culture. Any form of signaling extends and vitalizes the mimula. Thrisps vigorously colonize these transports, and the humans in which they are anchored — and they vigorously defend the transports against nearly any kind of diagnostic skill that might reveal any of this, as well as against the occasional onslaughts of other competing thrisps who want access or ownership.
Of course, like bacteria or other symbionts, not all thrisps are undesirable. But they are parasitic in that there are usually considerable costs associated with hosting them. Generally, they must continuously expend quite a bit of energy in order to completely obscure these costs for an obvious reason: their survival often depends upon their host remaining unaware of this entire domain of activity. The energy comes from us — it’s the ‘force of flow’ that funds our sensory awareness, our animalian awareness, and our human faculties of communication, observation, and comprehension.
Not surprisingly, those thrisps that are most costly and provide little benefit or direct harm are also those which are by nature the most aggressive. They also tend to be the most domineering, mimetic, and stealthy. Ensconced in human agents, they produce events such as war, genocide, ecological catastrophe, and planetary-scale catastrophes of human misrelation. Nearly all of the aggressive species must attack your intelligence and reduce it significantly prior to becoming established in you — otherwise you would immediately notice and reject them, just as you would if, for example, I told you that smacking yourself soundly in the head with a brick would make you superhuman. The vast majority of common thrisps display this ‘intelligence-attacking’ characteristic.
Inversely, those that are beneficial tend to be relatively timid. They don’t like advertising, and tend to avoid combat. Given the opportunity and the means, they act as intelligence boosters for a simple reason: it increases their access to the flow-resources that comprise your consciousness, which nourishes them. A beneficial thrisp can do more with the smallest diversion of this this flow than the entire system of predatory thrisps can do with the entirety of it. Therefore, they represent a serious threat to their more parasitic cousins, and they have largely been forced into hiding. Most of those which are willing to emerge, are immediately co-opted by their more aggressive competitors. This process is obvious in certain aspects of human culture, particularly art.
The pool of human awareness comprises an environment (like a world, but intangible) for thrisps. This pool is the Human Cogniscium. There are other cogniscia as well — for example, that of the planetary biome itself, of terrestrial insects, of honeybees, or acacia trees, or that of a single individual person. All of them are linked, such that effects in the human cogniscium have consequences for the others, and, perhaps more importantly, vice-versa. So, for example, if humans wipe out the dolphins (or any species), they inflict permanent, irreversible damage upon their own cogniscium, and thus, their own intelligence.
Although these terms and ideas are modeling toys (actually these ideas comprise a thrisp), they are uncommonly powerful. Skillful exploration and testing of these and related ideas can activate capacities which are otherwise prone to remain inaccessible due to the constrictive grip of cultural forces that arise and develop by diverting the flow-resources upon which those original capacities depended.
Understanding these matters comprises what may be the boldest cognitive experiment in human history: to attempt the active repair of the human cogniscium, and in so doing, to assemble a platform from which we might establish ways of knowing so amazing that they can easily outperform anything we’ve ever previously imagined — especially our machines.
=). ~ o ~ . ^%
Memes, Thrisps and the Mimula: The Human Cogniscium
The word meme originated with Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term “meme” by shortening “mimeme”, which derives from the Greek word mimema (“something imitated”). — Wikipedia: Meme
Languages, words, definitions, systems of evaluation, and ways of knowing form the elemental cognitive aspect of the relational adhesive that binds human beings together into cultures. This adhesive has peculiar qualities which are rarely made available for examination — in part because they comprise some of the foundations of the process of examination itself, and in part because they can be said (at least metaphorically) to have interests (survival, terrain acquisition, defense, propagation, &c.) that are best served by remaining clandestine. To whatever degree the human cogniscium represents an environment in which competition can occur — these entities compete within it for authorization (authority), dominance, and many other resources similar to those which we understand organismal competition to be concerned with. The difference is that this environment is within us and our cultures, and its competitors are not organisms, per se, but something at once simpler and more strange. All of it is invisible, except as results — in us.
The history of the human origination of these foundations of our modern cognitive experience and expression is vastly more complex than I can or wish to portray here, but the depth and character of our involvement with them is prefigured to a considerable degree by the cultural and technological environments we are born into and come to exist as expressions of.
Although historically it was relatively uncommon for ‘common folk’ to neologize — that is, to coin terms that would find their way into formal usage (i.e. formal lexicons such as dictionaries), the rapid advance of industrial and electronic technologies continues to transform this situation. Inventions like the printing press, radio, telephones, televisions and the internet each had a profound impact on the scope of personal and group access to the pool of human minds, and thus to the prize awaiting the winners of such contests: our attention. In particular, the advent of the internet has radically altered the entire field of play1.
Given these simple observations, we can reasonably surmise that the majority of us are (and have long been) users of language — or think of ourselves this way — rather than, for example, inventors. This has some rather startling implications I want to explore together.
~# . ~ o ~ . "0
Tokengnosia
Similarly to languages and terms, formal ways of knowing (like mathematics, or navigation) do not commonly emerge in whole cloth from individuals. Of course, there are many exceptions for both words and ways of knowing. For example, many people consider a single person (Newton) to be largely responsible for the formalization of physics, and another (Aristotle) for logic. Obviously, there are many ancient and modern examples of similar phenomenon2.
As regards informal ways of knowing (as slang is to language, these are to knowledge systems), the exception becomes the rule: common persons and groups are intimately and almost universally involved in generating informal ways of knowing — which emerge into our own lives and experience as habits, neologisms, traditions, fashions of action, speech, or thought. Humans form groups and subcultures rather like falling water forms droplets — it seems to be a fundamental aspect of our inherent relational nature.
Fashions and cults (subcultures) of various kinds can thus be seen as analogous to the ‘leaves on the tree of culture’. I do not use the term cult disparagingly here, only as a referent to a group of people involved in engineering or propagating a more or less ‘wild type’ ‘ways of knowing’. Most such groups are not even aware they are doing this; it is simply the rather ordinary outcome of common association. Many of these begin with nothing more than a single individual. Many seem relatively harmless; others, as history clearly attests, can have devastating effects on individuals, groups, and living beings in general. Some actually have the capacity to sterilize the planet, which, being a bit like a delicate bubble in space, is actually more vulnerable than ‘the voices of reason’ would have us believe.
Of course, there are many ways in which the big players are also cults. With nearly no exception, ways of knowing advertise for human converts, who, to a greater or lesser degree comprise what we might call their ‘body of agency’3.
In our time science has become a cult in a way not entirely dissimilar to the religious cults it makes a habit of attacking. Both are ways of knowing, and both have formal and informal aspects. Both compete for authority, attention and membership amongst human individuals, groups and cultures. In fact, as many know, science is the prodigal child of theology. While its parent must patiently suffer these attacks, the child knows no such boundaries — it wants to kill its source.
This should tell us something about the character of the child.
~# . ~ o ~ . "0
Repro-man
Problematically, human culture — languages, ways of knowing, the whole mess — is alien. If you were not introduced to (or infected with) its constituents, you would never become aware of their existence. This is a lot more shocking than it may seem at first glance; nearly the entire sum of the features of consciousness, awareness and action that you understand to be ‘human’ would never be encountered by you as a human being — if you were not immersed in human cultures. These ‘alien elements’ may not be from another planet, per se4 — but they definitely belong to another universe — one that doesn’t precisely ‘exist’ in the way we might normally use this word (you can’t find an idea physically, only evidence of it within the minds, memories and activities of human hosts and cultures)5.
Most words and definitions are similar — you didn’t invent English — or the word dog — you were infected with it by your parents, peers and culture. Without a human to notice, the word dog is not a word. In other words, your presence is required to ‘inflate’ those marks or sounds in such a way as to comprise something we can properly call a word.
If you were not taught to walk, you would probably mostly lope about like a kind of half-human or semi-animalian fashion. Children who grew up largely alone in the wilderness adopt habits of ‘communication’, movement and activity alike with their environments — not their species — get the picture?
So as it turns out, to be born human is one portion of the adventure, and the second part is an ongoing ‘uptake’ event, where our minds, habits and even perceptions are shaped by the (often conflicting) forces comprising the (often conflicting) cultures we arise within and find ourselves amongst.
The early phases of enculturation appear to significantly prefigure the basis, character and potential of our human and social experience — as well as our developmental capacities themselves. They definitely prescribe the basic cognitive and relational paradigms through which we will access, activate, and come to know our own intelligence and that of other beings.
A primary component of these cognitive substrates are evaluation schemas, many of which feed directly into the single most important representational element easily distinguished from the rest: identity.
*; . ~ o ~ . $,
The Entity from It
“Stop playing with that. That’s not a toy.”
— common adult thrisp gambit.
If you watch closely, you can see adults chipping away at the experience of wonder that their children are constantly immersed in. Perhaps more tragically, the living intelligence broiling forth into the world as their children is desperate to deepen the transports of intimacy with adults in order to create a window through which the adult can enter the child’s world — a world of endless novelty, inconceivable learning, wonder, and relational miracles.
Unfortunately for everyone many of the adults are nearly completely frozen by their constant conflict with the strangely binding glue of boredom that results from knowing what things are. This is not so much due to knowledge as it is to our common relationship to it. As we acquire knowledge, this process diverts flow from direct experience — we depend more and more upon cached experience, representations of experience, systems of evaluation, tokens. These dependencies further impoverish the flow resources required to sustain them in memory and consciousness. Eventually our mind may become something like a strange doll factory in which the arrival of any doll or any modification to an existing doll must be reflected in all the others. Like those of our modern ‘civilizations’ the energetic needs of such a monstrosity are incalculable — and thus this resource-binding quality of knowledge increases logarithmically, until, for most of us, our intelligence can barely fund itself at all, and our imagination lies straining somewhere in a corner, desperately attempting to hide from the invading avalanche of tokens and their upkeep requirements.
The resulting ongoing loss of the experience of wonder and learning drives the victims of this process to seek replacements for the otherwise effulgent novelty in human experience. They turn to the obvious cultural replacements, which await them with open ‘arms’ (read: jaws): gaming, sex, drugs, religion, adventurism, media, technology, wealth-acquisition, combat, &c. When you wonder ‘what is happening to the children’ you need only examine the teens and adults to see the answer. Their core has been torn away from them by forces they were never properly endowed to detect, nevermind contend with.
Given these perspectives, it is not too hard to understand why these adults might feel ‘put upon’ by the actively self-expanding intelligence of the child — which, unlike theirs, finds itself easily reflected in nearly anything that comes within the purview of its sensing. What the adult sees instead is comparatively dead spaceTime. It is as if the child witnesses the living bodies of beings and situations which appear to adults as ghosts of lost relation. In a choking reversal of childhood assets and capacities for learning — the adult’s intelligence has become self-compressing, and that compression is accomplished in a simple fashion: amputation of content, linkage, context, and meaning.
I cannot count the times I have seen well-meaning adults put the kibosh on their kids’ enthusiasm. “That? That’s just a sparrow. Must be a million of ’em around here.” This is the beginning of the end not only of the recipient child’s enthusiasm, but of their intelligence. A token replaces a direct experience of being, and the joy of exploration (along with the wonder of contact) is assassinated. Let me assure you of something fundamental: whatever that might have been, it was not a sparrow. And it had about as much to do with the adult’s model of it as a charred matchstick has to do with a galaxy.
‘Who, what, where, when, how, why, and which’ — these are the ‘7 ions of quest’ with which we pursue and indeed, assemble our peculiarly human and cognitively formal experience of identity. Strangely, and especially when stressed, we often habitually compress down to ‘who’, or maybe ‘what’. Much of this process is culturally and socially scripted, by which I mean to say programmed. We’re taught by example, punishment, reward and encouragement what to do and how to think about identity — particularly we are trained to evaluate — a sort of accounting process applied to matters which natively have nothing to do with our ideas — whatsoever.
When we encounter another organism, we’re trained to ask ‘what’, and similarly, when we have novel experience, we want to know ‘what happened’. But suppose that neither creatures or experiences can be reasonably encapsulated to our awareness this way? ‘What (happens) if’ this practice is a big mistake? Many people of profound insight have discovered this problem, and although few succeeded in significantly affecting it — most of them became seriously concerned about its impact on every aspect of our intelligence — from relational, to emotional, to social.
The reason is simple: all 7 terms are insufficient. Why are we reducing experience to fit within the incredibly impoverished bubble of a single term’s scope? How did this happen? Why does it persist? These and similar questions have plagued some of the greatest minds of human history, from every branch of human life and learning.
Essentially what happens to most of us is that the most trusted and beloved people in our lives prepare us for thrisp uptake; and since the thrisps that dominate them are the aggressive, self-interested variety, we are subject to the whim of those supercultures. Our preparation proceeds as our parents, peers and culture continue to shave off whole dimensions of our direct experience of sensing, imagination, identity, and relation, until we are finally prepared to be dominated by language. Ironically, nearly none of them realize what they are doing.
They are circumcising our minds.
See, you have to have undergone something similar in the dimensions of relation and cognition long before this ramifies into a physical analog. What should be glaringly obvious is nearly never noticed: if adults are chopping up the genitalia of their children — our primordial organ of physical connectivity — something must have been chopping up their minds, first.
Of course, the thrisps that inspired this activity will usually be our first acquisitions in our new role as living extensions of the local and distributed human cogniscium.
O^ . ~ o ~ . <o
(Poi) Sun-Pill
By now you have some idea how thrisps exist and propagate in the human cogniscium, what the mimula is, and you can probably begin to visualize these ideas in ways that I hope you will find fascinating as well as useful. Obviously, most thrisps simply want to survive, propagate, convert new agents, defend held terrain, and obtain further resources. Some are useful, many are harmful, and the vast majority of the common thrisps and the supercultures they comprise aren’t worth the costs they impose on us.
But nearly none of us would believe that for a simple reason: we’ve never been without them. We have no idea what it would be like. Can you imagine never having been exposed to language? What would your mind do with waking experience instead of categorize, name, classify and evaluate? Such experience would surely be nothing like our common waking consciousness, and in fact, it isn’t.
Of course, the goal isn’t (necessarily) to entirely divest oneself of thrisps, but rather to radically alter the nature of the relationship. One way to think about this alteration is as follows: thrisps ride you. The myth we are sold is that you ride them. Our common situation, cognitively, is like being physically attached to a horse that always wants to ride you, while telling you that you are riding it.
Problematically, you cannot support the weight or travel-needs of a horse.
Thankfully, every once in a while there is an amazing exception to the common paradigm of cognitive development, and a parent, or pair (or perhaps a wise or lucky mentor) manage to endow a child with something quite amazing: a secretive, exotic species of thrisp — one who adores human children and despises its own kind. Like a ticking time bomb, this thrisp will immediately submerge in consciousness and build defenses, deep within the child, and once settled it begins setting up a web within the child’s own cogniscium — a web whose strands will link it inexorably to every thrisp the child acquires.
Then, when the thrisp is mature and the host is ready, it will self-destruct. But this is no mere explosion, or suicide — far from it — it is a unification dance, and along with unifying the locally beneficial thrisps, the dance communicates the entire history of these circumstances to the host, making them permanently aware of thrisps, the mimula, and the cogniscium — and more.
Slightly before the onset of this experience, the beneficial thrisps begin signaling for the first time, and this signal unifies them, creating a ‘suddenly arising’ superculture with some very unusual capacities. The resulting metathrisp draws off all the energies previously diverted by competing thrisps, and ramifies these energies in a way that converts them into momentum. As it ramps up this process, it transfers this momentum to the child’s intelligence, effectively forming a propellant.
This propellant is so exotic and powerful that it can lift the host almost completely out of the mimula and the human cogniscium and, along with the metathrisp that is guiding this process, into a dimension of learning and relation so profound that it is impossible to describe in English. For a time prior to its expiration, this strangely evolved symbiont becomes the child’s most formidable ally — a mentor more amazing than the sum of human stories.
And that, for these fortunate hosts, is the often their first taste of cognitive liberty. This experience is so shocking and overpowering that it represents a danger to the shell-like bubble that contains the ‘structure’ of our minds — but even worse dangers await them back in the human cultures from which they have finally found true egress — because those cultures are ruled by thrisps this host is now largely immune to. The dangers are worth the rewards; most of the metathrisps are skillful enough to guide the rising awareness of the host in such a way as to preserve the integrity of the mind-bubble’s envelope.
The result is a savant.
Prodigy.
`` . ~ o ~ . M<
OrigiGame
I was one of those lucky children, but the process was a bit long for me, and it’s not complete yet. I’ve only rarely met others. Once in a while, a child thus inoculated manages to transmit the exotic self-erasing metathrisp to a friend or even a subculture of some kind.
Even without such a windfall, occasionally a child sort of ‘catches on’ to this game intuitively — but usually the thrisp supercultures they carry can adjust and hide their activity so expertly that even exceptional children often remain largely or completely co-opted throughout their lifetime. This is one of the reasons that very few teachers of spiritual or philosophical traditions produce large numbers of students who surpass them. Thrisps can convert almost any sort of input to their advantage.
Of course, you don’t need these stories to have a shot at escape. You don’t need me, skyBook, or anyone. In fact, the fundamental nature of your consciousness is set up to free you from this mess, if you can only burn through the barriers set up by the thrisps that are constantly adjusting your awareness in such a way as to never allow it to reveal their presence or activity.
Many intellectual, philosophical and spiritual traditions are aware of this problem — even though their models of it may differ, and the language they use to talk about it — if they talk about it at all — varies considerably.
Problematically, very few people appear to succeed in getting out. Nonetheless, wherever these ways of knowing exist, they exist in hope of acquiring or empowering the same kind of escape, be it sudden or gradual.
Some of these traditions are creative, and many artists have accomplished something quite like this escape in their own lives, in part due to their peculiar relationships to questions, creative endeavor, and liberty. Poets are well-known for this capacity, and I imagine that one of the reasons they were so revered in history (and are so largely reviled in modern times) is due to their inversion of the common paradigm: they are no longer language users. They have become authors — and not merely of books but of language itself. Although they are often writers, and may craft fiction or prose — I do not refer to authors of literature — but of meaning itself — and that transformation represents a radical recasting of the basis of their representational intelligence.
That reformation prepares many of them to radically exceed it, and enter the truly miraculous domains that lie beyond slavery to words, methods, and ideas crafted by others.
By the way, where are these others? Do they even exist? In many cases the authorities living children must contend with are actually ghosts. They are, approximately, the disembodied voices of dead language, competing with the embodied consciousness of living beings and their living world.
This is a competition which should never be allowed to begin, nevermind proceed.
qp . ~ o ~ . bd
Op Possessed
The metathrisp that destroys itself has a physical opposite you’re familiar with, and that opposite competes with it furiously. It’s called the internet, and it’s somewhat like the bastard child of television and printed media.
The internet is a physical and electronic extension of the human mimula. Although you may think it is free because it is electronic, this is precisely the gambit a a thrisp-network sets up to snare you. Not only is it not free — the costs are rarely accounted in any reasonable fashion — as with nearly all toxic thrisp endeavors. The internet bears such a striking resemblance to a thrisp network that it is the best physical analogy we have.
The internet, while representing a profound and provocative library-like construct, is actually largely comprised of things that have nothing to do with learning or even creativity.
Electronic media costs lives to produce, sustain and distribute. Modern human cultures are assembling a data-tsunami of inconceivable proportions, and the majority of it is comprised of endlessly duplicated and transmitted copies of vanity-data, pornography, advertising, and electronic images.
The ‘costs’ of these activities are paid in actual lives, human and non — but the nonhumans always take the brunt of the cost. Of course, the damage doesn’t end with murder, but also involves the active ongoing destruction and restructuring of our relational capacities as well as our physical environments. These costs cannot be recovered, and no amount of wealth will offset them. In fact, accounting is the wrong metaphor for murder.
What you call the internet, is actually consuming your planet, and your intelligence, while pretending to be the greatest experiment in human knowledge ever conceived. Since you cannot see the costs, you cannot evaluate the putative benefits accurately.
Where genes can be said to ‘use’ organisms to create something, it is not merely a copy of the program, as it is with information and artifacts. Artifacts use us to copy themselves, and this process is in direct competition (in many cases) with the genetic supralogue which became the metaphor we use to frame it. Copies of ideas, words and things — instead of beings is the name of this game.
What is the price of representation’s replacements for participation? Statues of authorities, where once living beings dwelt in mutual support and living wonder.
Dead tokens — occupying the gravesites of once-living children.
Photographs, texts, and displays.
Susan Blackmore on Memes, Temes and the Human Copying Capacity
