childThing
I must believe my own experience — that the
planet is a single organism, and that this organism is a child —
learning itself in phases, just as we do inside it. If our container
has not reached adulthood — have we somehow leapt past it
into a phase nowhere else locally achieved?
It seems far more likely that as a species, we reflect the organismal
status of the biosphere, and thus — we are always
children. We must, I believe, realize that children of every possible
sort are sacred for pragmatic as well as emotional reasons. They
rePresent to us the lineage of our ascension to sentience, just
as ‘adults’ rePresent to them the general shape of the
path they are likely to tread in the future. In this way both past
and present meet between the generations, as a shared conservation
which deeply influences all participants. But there is more to be
said of our failure to understand, respect and support the child,
and the positive elaboration of this metaphor in our societies and
our lives. The child is a miracle-creature. Its abilities to assemble
reality from chaos are unrivaled. Each one arrives something like
a hyperconnective alien — and immediately begins undergoing
scalar waves of biological, psychoemotional, cognitive and semantic
elaboration. It is a miracle of adaptive and expressive learning.
It was not produced accidentally. It conserves an anciently evolved
potential which is new on our planet: that of inward simulation.
Why did our species accrue this particular and significant domain
of elaboration? Though we may find speculations ranging from gods
and aliens to gradual evolution and beyond — we must instead,
as living people participate directly in this exploration, for it
defines our opportunity to explore and embody our own potentials,
build our societies, retrieve and experience our birthrights and
assure our survival.
From the perspective of a naturalist preoccupied with biocognitive
relation, we might illuminate some features of the story and meaning
of our arisal and ascension to sentience that are startling, and
yet hidden in plain sight. To do so I will create a perhaps imaginary
analog-toy outlining the general shape of a living world’s
likely development. With this we may playfully examine some of our
features of relation with our context: Earth.
Once a planet is fertilized and thus begins a symbiosis with
living forms, the world itself is transformed into an animal,
however primitive its anatomy and cognition may be. It exists
as the sum of the cognitive activity of its participants. At first
rudimentary, it gains complexity as it elaborates itself within
the membrane of its participants, and their potentials to stabilize
local environments. It is a network-animal, existing as a superstructure
of its inward children — much as we ourselves are.
Its primeval nature is perhaps analogous to a fertilized ovum.
It contains the shape of its future elaborations in the characters
and participants which are active in its moment of arisal.
This planet-animal, being a summation of local biocognition,
accrues identity, cognitive potential, and memory as a factor
of the activity and status of its populations and constituents,
as an upscale assemblage of unity. Again, we ourselves are organized
similarly, as are all animals, and probably most most local lifeForms
The experience of such a planetary animal, alike with its children,
is shaped at least in part by a recurrent experience of sudden
crisis and extinction. Given sufficient time, the planet assembles
its most valuable of resources — the ability to largely
control homeostasis, as well as the diversity necessary to better
insure recovery from local or systemic crisis. As the forms and
scales of Life diversify and complexify, the planet is at once
crafting a store against catastrophe and, like any organism, reaching
for access to greater complexity in terms of potentials for expression,
survival, and cognitive elaboration.
Let us consider some features of organismal sensing. There is
something more general, and even more valuable than eyes —
and this can be extrapolated by the connectivity of groups with
sublime efficiency. As a world gains the necessary accruals and
resources — it first extrapolates sensory organs by linking
organisms — exploring and experiencing their potentials
in connective rings of sensing at various scales. In this way
we might imagine that the planet-animal maps the potential domains
of sensory integrations — and then begins transmitting
these potentials as a form of cellular intention to the entirety
of its participants, who then ever so slightly begin to move,
first as individuals, then as waves, toward embodying these very
general commands. In this sense, a planet, like an organ, exists
as an attractive chreode — generating a generally attractive
template according to character at local, distant and tiny scales
of biomial organization.
This, in time, leads to very complex adaptations such as achromatic
eyes, chromatic eyes, ears, etc. During each of these phase-like
and sometimes sudden accruals the planet-animal is gaining velocity
toward complex sentience in leaps and bounds. Crisis, however
— is an inevitable consequence of the local solar and terrestrial
environment. It can set the entire game back more lifeYears than
the Sun has existed for. At the same time, the organizational
creativity of Life can prosper from the energies of crisis in
various domains, given survivable results.
The model is cell-like. A hypercomplexity learning itself, and
distributing systemic gains into scalar domains of inward assemblies
for organismal conservation and elaboration. It is a child, inwardly
hiding the treasures it is reaping from the energies of the Sun.
At some point in the process of planetary enfertilization, we
must imagine that a planet goes through something akin to our
own genesis, however different in scope and domain. At a certain
step on the ladder, a world most likely accrues the new potential
of self-reference, or identity. In this moment it is more truly
an animal. And this is in turn borne out in new internal assemblies
and relations amongst its inward children. From this point forward,
the planet will act biocognitively to insure not only its survival,
but its ability to reproduce. It will act as a unified organism
to preserve its gains and health. We may well wonder whether such
a creature would first organize animalian intelligence, and then
embody it — or the reverse. This is an open question, though
my experience leads me to suspect that perhaps a form of both,
and neither is true. An integration which is more.
Eventually, a circumstantially lucky planet gains enough diversely
conserved complexity to experience something akin to the ability
to metaphy itself and relations. This too, is then borne
out in the ascension of its biologies and their cognitive potentials.
We begin to see that even a generally accurate model, is most
likely one that includes gradual and punctuated ascensions upon
something like a set of stairs. In this case, each step is a geometric
one, rather than a linear one — yet behind this there is
a form of linearity. It is more a matter of perspective than math.
Rising to each of these steps requires careful nurturence, luck,
getting ‘interest’ on certain investments, and a vast
amount of living resources to at first imply, then support, then
embody the potential for the next leap.
Such a game is one of delicate tolerances which are not regularly
apparent at our common scales of reference. The achievement and
complex support of homeostasis is itself a delicate affair, and
one that can be shut off or radically altered almost without warning.
The ability to achieve new steps comes only from the unification
of survival and success at many simultaneous scales, and across
vast gulfs of simple and complex evolutionary time.
Hopefully I have crafted a model that doesn’t appear unlikely.
It is meant to be general, but I do not believe it conflicts with
any theory of arisal other than sudden creation. The only real question
is an obvious one: can a planet be the sentient unity of its constituents
in a way similar to ourselves. Whatever the answer to this question,
the difference in scale and concern would be vast. I believe the
answer is yes, and I can, like many who are perhaps obsessed with
a particular vision, find little but evidence of this in my experience
and observation.
If we were to be able to observe this process of a world first organizing
its environment, and then elaborating its participants — at
many scales over time — we would find in such a vision the
most startling of correspondences between things we would hardly
imagine to be connected. We would see that speciation is a holophore
for — everything — but especially of our own minds.
A living world’s populations and diversity are like living
metaphors embodied in a planetary mind. And catastrophe can be like
brain damage — and simultaneously, in some terrains and with
some participants, it can represent ‘help hatching’.
The activities emergent from ecosystemic populations reflect the
organizational character and circumstance of their planet in the
same way metaphors reflect the organizational character and circumstance
of we who use them. Both evolve in a container. Both acquire and
modify terrain. Both are instruments of organismal knowing. One,
however is symbolic, and it lives inside the other — who is
animalian.
In watching our compressed-time replay, we would likely also be
able to discern planetary development in the broadest of strokes.
From such a perspective we might more easily and clearly observe
the interplay between 5 factors: biodiversity, cognitive diversity,
speciation, catastrophe, and windfall. I believe that what we would
discover is that our own sentience was born of a soup made from
these ingredients, and that our species depends upon a peculiar
sort of preservation of windfall for its survival and future. We
must remember that each of these function not only at the scale
of the planet, but at every possible scale down at least to the
organelle.
Consider the real significance of a planetary animal learning itself
within its children. If Earth is such an animal, she is married
to Sol — for her every moment of animalian experience is directly
responsive to, and ultimately at the mercy of the activity and character
of the star. There are also other suitors however, inconstant, and
rude — who care nothing for the extant children — and
have and will continue to erase whole lineages of them. Anything
striking Earth — Near Earth Objects, Comets, and Asteroids
— as well as millions of smaller suitors — are certainly
as determinative in Earth’s evolution as any other factor,
however modernly irregular significant events of this nature may
be. Any significant change in solar character or terrestrial relation
to the Sun will also have effects ranging from mild to systemic
catastrophe.
What is the realm of experience of such a vastly complex biocognitive
hyperstructure? Does it have language? What is the nature of its
language if so? What are the concerns of such an organism? Can we
talk with it? Most animals will not develop even gestural language
arbitrarily, but instead through consistent play and practice with
others of their kind. The distances between living worlds may seem
impossible to us, but the distances between birds in auditory contact
would seem absurd to a mite living on a bird — yet the birds
create networks of communication that can cross vast distances with
signaling. If living worlds indeed exist as local animals, we may
speculate that there is real communication amongst them —
with or without technology. More surprisingly, perhaps, we may have
to ask questions about stars in this regard.
The planet, and perhaps the entire solar system comprise a structure
that creates children within itself. And we are alike with this,
in our biology and cognition. We can see how this could be modeled
in a simple set of scalarly relative of holophores of containment:
universe: galaxy: solar system: planet : lifeform : human : mind.
At which scale does sentience and Life arise first? Science and
our stories of the moment are still broadcasting that there is no
reason to believe that matter is sentient, and that God is either
nonexistent, or locally irrelevant to exploration and explication.
Religion wants to hand us a prepackaged God, replete with strangely
frozen codicils, and absence of experiential contact. Materialism
implies that it’s fine to simply rule arbitrarily over terrain
and others according to one’s ability to accrete wealth and
power. Philosophy can be found in each of the many gardens, like
a strange vine growing across different trees. Nearly every common
system enthrones humans above every class of life, and sees no assembly
above us either, except perhaps that of the species as a whole.
I hope that the absurdity of this position will not need underlining
in the 21st century. It's nearly erased us already, perhaps now
we can set it aside and look directly at what is obviously within
and before us.
All of this might be well and good, we could lean back and watch
the behemoths of knowledge and faith battle it out — except
that the battle is expensive. It’s price is paid in the only
currency there is: children. And, these, essentially, are the prize
the combatants each desire to ‘rule‘ over, or indeed,
to measure and define.
Part of what we are is a reflection of our planet learning itself.
As we begin to explore the real characters and features apparent
at the various scales of this incredible event, we will find plentiful
room for new metaphors, new connectivities, and new ways of knowing
ourselves, each other, and our world. We are children, each and
every one of us, and our groups are children, and we are within
a single child — at every scale and in every way a singular
linked endeavor of hopeful hypersystems.
As individuals, societies and a species, we are relational organs
in a supercreature. One more alike with our science-fictions and
fantasies than our Science or Religions will allow or support us
in supposing. This is perhaps a tragic statement about the advancement
of knowledge — but it hides its own key: lifeForms aren’t
tokens. Unlike tokens we arise as biocognitive children —
and thus with each generation we inherit new potentials, powers,
and relations — recapitulating the quest of our world for
ever-more complexly preserved and supported avenues of elaboration.
Within ourselves, and the rings we make in connectivity of every
sort, we find, generally recapitulated a metaphor for which we have
no name. We use words like God, Co-Emergence, Cosmology —
but none of them even vaguely point at the real nature of what we
are. Instead, positing it as not experienceable, or un-knowable
— we are left with frozen substitutes for what I believe to
be our most crucially important inheritances.
In the story of our own arisal — we may find cause to wonder
at the specifics of the ladder of sentience. Of its dangers, risks,
epics, and goals. In speculatively examining such a ladder, we may
touch a recapitulation of the story of a living world — however
general in shape — in our own histories and relations as individuals.
The power of such an understanding will change what we mean by knowledge
within the next 20 years.
o:O:o
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