knowledge,
terrain, organisms...
Like organisms, knowledge and ways of knowing conserve
the active desire to accrue and hold terrain, survive, and reproduce.
In order to accomplish this, they must — like organisms in
an ecosystem — develop and elaborate strategies
of terrain acquisition, rescource transformation, reproduction, and defence.
Once established in the rich and vital gardens of
human individuals and collectives, our ‘ways of knowing’
and their products — ‘knowledge’ — act in
a fashion which can be at least primitively illustrated with the
analogy of inoculating a petri dish.
In this purposefully oversimplified model, the ‘media’
of the petri dish is the cogniscium of any given human being, or
assemblyof us — up to and including that of the entire species,
in any given moment. The organisms represent forms and ways of knowing,
and their metabolic by-products might be seen to represent specific
knowledge. Knowledge is, of course, what we use to justify action. As you know, so shall you do.
petriGame:
Once properly prepared with nutritive media and inoculated
with randomly sampled organisms from common ‘dirt’, an
interesting dance often ensues: The organism predominantly disposed
to prosper in the media immediately undergoes explosive (logarithmic)
growth, forming distinct and connected colonies. Other organisms
may fall back to near nonexistent quantities even if they blossomed
briefly before the vital rise of the dominant organism reduced their
integration with their environment.
Effectively, the media and occupants comprise two
aspects of a single organism. We might see the media as
a secondary membrane for the unity of the assembled organisms.
As the environment modulates in response to the changes emerging
from biorelation, it is being radically altered by the dominant organism, and it
is, in turn altering that organism within itself.
As this process proceeds, the dominant organism begins to experience the local terrain in terms of
‘more non-media than media’ from its metabolic perspective.
Soon this turns into a situation of toxicity. Then the dominant
organism perishes due to the fact that its
environment is not being diversely and symbiotically regenerated. In some cases, other organisms remaining from the original inoculation rise to
take advantage of the new terrain.
In this way a rather magical precession of species
of organism emerges from the inoculation in waves, each one radically
changing the media, and thus the potentials, threats and opportunities
of it successors.
Originally this effect led early microbiologists to
believe in pleomorphism — the idea that organisms may become
other organisms. Once what was going on in the dish was more clearly
understood, it became clear that rather than changing shapes in
cycles, the medium contained multiple organism-types which emerged
sequentially according primarily to opportunity as embodied in the
circumstances of »organismal co-relation mediated (media) by ‘environment’.
Literally: en viron ment.
This method produces colonies which can be sustained
by human intervention. Once a dominant colony forms — a small
portion of comparatively pure (in the sense of containing only a
single organism-type) inoculate can be taken from a selected colony
and transferred to a freshly prepared and sterile dish. This process
can be repeated, such that each successive transfer can be presumed
to be more pure than its precursor.
In this way human beings are able to isolate organisms
which would prove incredibly difficult to interact with at our common
scale. Interestingly, because ‘the speed of individual and
population time’ is radically different at the scale of microorganisms
— each of those dishes is a unique universe of cellular evolution,
occurring at an incredible and exponentially increasing pace.
I often imagine the petri-dishes and animal cages
of laboratories as billions of island-universes, where evolution
is happening at entirely different velocities from those we might
suspect in our theories. The other strange thing about those island
universes is this: I'm not sure they were meant to evolve in
isolation, in a single media, with no transport to other
organisms or relations. I mean, what happens when evolution
is forced to occur in a mechanically flat terrain, comprised
of a human model of a cognitively and biorelationally void
environment? What do organisms which (very rapidly) evolve in a
falsified environment lacking their anciently co-elaborated transports
of relation with other organisms — become?
The problem here is obvious. A paramecium observed
amongst its consorts or found in nature is an animal. But
an animal separated from its consortia, or raised in isolation —
is not at all the same form of being as its native counterpart.
The specificity of naming things deludes us here because a creature
isolated and observed is not the same ‘species’ as one
allowed the congress, liberties and necessities of relation which
will consistently emerge in novel and living recombinance in any
environment from which the force and result of human ideas has
been subtracted.
Those things in the dishes aren’t what we’re
telling ourselves, at all. The limitations we enforce with our need
for mechanistic ‘precision’ are not actually limitations,
but a gross shaving away of relational dimensions, transports of
unification — whole universes of dimensionality.
o:O:o
Like various species of animals in a complexly interlinked
series of scalar ecologies, our knowledge and ways of knowing vie
for the available resources in a living universe of human minds
— the human cogniscium of Earth. If the ocean of sentience
our species represents could be seen as a culture-dish — our
cogniscium would represent the media in which ways of knowing and
knowledge prosper. The result of this ongoing genesis is written
in our human experience as well as the organismal record of our
living planet. It is so elemental to who and what we are, that without
access to these terrains in ourselves — we are at once less
than human and less than animalian.
At any scale of person or community we select we may
observe the constant and ceaseless emergence of change in our lives
based upon the ‘facts and theories’ arising from some
particular garden of knowledge. We can spread our view over the
entirety of our recorded histories and see much the same general
story at play. Can we notice and select amongst these distant sovereigns
or are we, as we are commonly scripted to believe, merely the participants
in a system whose size and complexity dwarf our hope of affecting
it?
o:O:o
Our modern human relationship with knowledge is alike
with that of bees, tending imaginal gardens where the touching the
flowers change what it means to be what one is whenever
one collects pollen.
What we have in our model is a completely immersive
environment — where the imaginary flowers vie for the opportunity
to change the bees into conservators of their structure.
The bees endlessly tend these nonexistent flowers, until even their
planet begins to express the symmetries from the imaginary garden
— in terms of toxin and machine.
The bees cannot be bees — primarily because
far too many of the inward flowers they tend and defend are actually
only stories of flowers. A sort of invasive species of
story that competes with the terrain required by actual flowers,
who would, granted attention...return something priceless to the
bees who tended them...
o:O:o
I have a great time flipping a lens back and forth
over this question: is biology more about its mechanics and forms
or more about its relational-ness? I mean — which of those
two models is more generally and specifically alike with organismal
emergence, reality and function?
If we decide on the former, we end up with exploding
libraries of names, catalogs and formalized systems of comparative
agreement-elaboration. If we decide on the latter — we don’t
really know what we’ll get. Direct experiential contact with
the sources of our queries is one promising possibility. An elemental
transport to the real unification of knowledge is another.
In Nature, biology, form, and cognition are really
a single entity unlike the sum of these definitions. The lenses
we apply to gain mechanical understanding will tend to
avoid or deny the primacy of this generally accurate perspective,
because if they didn’t — existing ideas about biology
or cognition would lose their cultural survival assets.
o:O:o
mimicry
and knowledge:
an impostor at the gathering...
In exploring terrains that highlight organismal activity
and communication, mimicry has consistently been the invisible yet
omnipresent alien at the dinner-table of my questions and
experience. Like a cowbird in the nest of our personal and communal
sentience, the alien arrives at the table of our every interaction,
bold as my own hands and eyes, consuming the lion’s portion
of the transports of unity and resources we believe we are working
to assemble and share.
Somehow, the more the alien consumes, the more
desperate we become to assure ourselves of its non-existence.
As the alien at the table grows absurdly fat (vast
in many simultaneously growing domains) on our work and resources,
it grows exponentially less available to discovery according
to a variety of amazing techniques which it effortlessly and recombinantly
deploys.
On of my favorite examples of this is the creation
of a circumstance where a kind of rearward anti-gravity is developed
and sustained with the very effort and resources expended by the
hosts to insure this doesn’t happen.
In a human being or culture this sort of effect is
simple to set up and cause to become explosively self-expanding.
Here’s how it’s done: the guilt-weight of previous errors,
re-magnified into our perception not only keeps us from addressing
the errors, it tends to cause the sources to fade from our perceptual
access entirely with time and progress. The result is a progressively
self-obscuring historical myopia, in part based upon the embarrassment
that would result from a clear view of the histories of loss and
suffering needlessly ensuing from the result of having somehow unknowingly
invited the presence and increasing costs of the alien at the table.
Mimetic organisms will consistently deploy this and
similarly stealthy potentials in order to establish and elaborate
a psybiocognitive resource-and-momentum sieve which is
deployed in the interests of their own survival, elaboration and
reproduction.
What has been a secret — and for far
too long, is how we can turn this from catastrophe to impossible
prosperity, fast — for every living organism on Earth —
not merely our own species.
It’s possible to turn tail on the alien at the
table — with results beyond our wildest hopes and expectations.
o:O:o
This relational sieve employed by our fictional ‘alien’
is established first by the subtly coercive control and modulation
of any transport of sentient connectivity — the most
general first. This includes language, speech, media, ways of knowing,
and knowledge itself. The resultant modulations in behavior of the
participants and their established transports of unification allow
a ‘nonexistent entity’ to boldly siphon off the gold
of co-procreative organismal assembly.
This gold is then re-invested ever-more adeptly and
surreptitiously in order to further accrue domination of resources,
transports, terrain — and especially modes of replicating
itself into new frontiers, which will be invented in the hosts and
their environment when existing terrains are overpopulated. So we’re
talking about something elementally explosive — it
proceeds and grows in algorithmic leaps of scale, domain of effect,
velocity and outcome. Our alien is like a magnifying glass that
‘ever-more rapidly invents new dimensions to simultaneously
magnify’.
[mark of process]
o:O:o
:: next ::
o:O:o
My experience and observation leads me to relate with
knowledge the way I might relate with an alien animal of
almost impossible form and potential. Exploring from this and related
perspectives, knowledge and the gardens of its lineage can be seen
as a transtemporal organ of an extremely strange sort —
a recombinantly sourced element of biocognition. Like my
own liver, or heart — and their billions of constituents and
universes of relations — knowledge is at once the goal, basis
and produce of biology.
