l.e. 05/15/04
o:O:o
Human
Cognition:
When we get down near the roots of what human cognition
actually arises from we will be consistently surprised at how little
respect reality has for our stories and theories. We believe that
evolution employs speciation in separate vehicles of conservation, and
this causes us to model ourselves as special in a way that is erroneous.
While it is true that vehicles can be modeled as separate elements
we must ask ourselves whether relation has precedence over the physical
forms and mechanics which we observe and credential as most significant.
The common function of ecologies of any scale —
including the one we call ‘animal’ — magnifies
the conserved powers and potentials of the collective uniquely into each participant, and when unhindered
the common activity of these ecologies generates new and more biocognitively
adaptable expressions of themselves in ever-more diversely relational
forms. It is this sort of process that results in our complex cognition
— not merely in evolutionary history but in our moment-to-moment
activity. The precursors and potentials which comprise the the ‘intelligence’
we inherit from our history and conservations also arise here
and now in the living moment of our relations with the changed
Earth we inhabit. The ‘essential intelligence’ of the
organismal Earth as embodied in the remaining biologies is the moment-to-moment
source of our own sentience. Essentially this means that cognitively,
the current organismal population of the Earth is in form, fact,
and activity a single animal.
No matter what perspective of scale we apply, our
own cognition is an ‘assembly event’ occurring across
any sort of gap we may imagine or invent — particularly
physical and temporal gaps. The complex awareness and metaphoric
potentials we value and sustain by agreement together is not something
we inherited in ancestral time any more than it is the moment-to-moment
localized emergence of many streams and dimensions of relational
experience. Many of these streams lie close to their expresser in
time, and at least as many do not. The resulting field-symmetry
is not an acquisition of evolutionary biology so much as it is the
active recombination of conserved biocognitive relation into new
vehicles, transports, assemblies and expressions.
A living planet is a biocognitive hyperstructure.
Homo Sapiens S. became a complex embodiment of this ‘kind
of animal’ a long time ago by our standards — yet by
the temporal realities of the animal we are an organ of our ‘awakening’
took place something like half a heartbeat ago. In terms of biocognition
on a planetary scale, time is nothing like our models. It isn’t
merely that we stick to strange scales of it — but rather
that as far as biocognition is concerned there are so many transports
of temporal reality that no moment of time is separated from any
other — it’s an ocean, not a number-line. In an ocean
there is always a transport of relation between any possible assembly
of participants or terrains. Sometimes there are myriads of such
transports, regardless of the apparent distances and obstacles
we see in the between, and cognition is at least in part the living expression
of this secret.
o:O:o
The application of meaning to experience, the utterance
of a sentence or the reading of this text — each of them are
unique instances of rapid biocognitive attenuation at myriads of
scales and speeds. Our form of representational consciousness is
precisely this sort of delicately and intentionally arranged phenomenon.
It is not naturally emergent from our biology, or even our
social congress — but is instead a a set of preserved potentials
coupled with learned regimens of embodiment: lexicons and codicils
which are actively regenerated in ongoing and historical social
activity.
Consider the significance of this ‘gift’.
Our species is alone on our world with a toy that invents the universes
we must work to assemble and inhabit together. If we fail to establish
‘normative’ relations with this pool of relational tokens
our peers will consider us inhuman, and we will perish. In order
to sustain itself in our persons and cultures, this ‘gift’
must continually impress upon us its fundamental prowess and unquestionable
authority as well as the impossibility of existence without it,
and must adeptly block any attempt on our part to shift it toward
a less sovereign position. As common people, we know practically
nothing of its sources or purposes except (primarily) what we have been told
by other humans born within the last 60 years or so.
Our species is a complexly evolved animalian species
— trapped in a cage where only a single toy is visible. The
cage is comprised of us ‘grasping our one toy tightly’,
and just outside lies a living universe that would put the sum of
our most enthralling and miraculous stories to shame. The toy we
are stuck to is a specific mode of relation with representational
consciousness, and, contrary to popular understanding — endless
other modes are within easy reach. The problem isn’t that
they don’t exist or that we cannot use or learn them. It’s
that we have nowhere to learn them from — according to this
‘gift’ we currently possess.
o:O:o
Nearly all of our conceptual paradigms and the associated
inferences of our stories model us to ourselves a sort of magical
homunculus spit out almost accidentally by the congress of our planet
and gods — or, in the case of science, our planet and evolutionary
competition for better terrain dominance. Yet whether or not gods
are involved, the fact of any ascension we may claim or embody is
not located ‘in our species’ so much as it is in our
biospheric and organismal relations.
The precursors to our present cognitive circumstance
required more assembly-time than there has been linear time since
the beginning of what we call ‘the universe’, and our
form of cognitive complexity emerged as a child of the animalian
complexity we popularly denigrate only very recently. Prior to 75,000
years ago there was no such thing as a representational
cognitive (rC) on Earth, and our species of rC —
formally representational cognitives (fRc) — is so new that
it is barely getting started. The current progeny of these momentums
which we experience and express today as ’human consciousness’
is a recent variant, probably around 200 years of age at best.
Our human embodiment of animalian sentience is the
result of recombinantly emerging symmetries of relation, painstakingly
established over evolutionary time, between vast arrays of unique
scales and organismal identity and their relational transports of
growing or fading connectivity. This connectivity is the basis and
inspiration of all forms of learning, be they physical or behavioral
— and it is the gold of organismal effort and assembly beyond
the scale of the individual.
o:O:o
In exploring what differentiates our consciousness
and potentials from those of animalian cognition we must take a
new look at the specializations we’ve acquired during our
ascent to representational consciousness. The first of the major
differences is something we commonly believe to be ‘intelligence’,
but my own observations lead me to believe we have primitively misinterpreted
this characteristic. Our species is a sort of magnifying
lens in this domain — the magnification is ‘what we
are’ — and it is a summation of organismal sentience
on our world.
Once established, the animalian-scale environments
of Earth went to work assembling the next phase of this leap: re-uniting
the diversely acquired specialization in a new vehicle — the
goal being to magnify this scale of multiple individual sentience
into vessels capable of expressing what we might call ‘multiply
animalian sentience’. Over vast amounts of time, this process
was putting together new forms of ‘Noah’s Arks’
— sentient vehicles of conservation, relation and learning
— which would not merely conserve their own complex lineage-diversity
but also reflectively embody the diversity they were surrounded
by. We are an animalian ‘ark’ — cognitively as
well as physically. We very generally conserve and re-express the
relational and emotional acquisitions of the entire universe
we arise in — but especially the animalian-scale universe.
This perspective implies that our personal feelings
and features of character are real (i.e: they were never
meant to be ‘diagnosed’); and are in fact the highly
evolved magnifications of those extant and previously embodied in
the animalian and cellular sentiences of Earth. Alike with a magical
living mirror, we sum the biocognitive universes of Earth with(in)
us; unifying and expressing the symmetries of persona, function,
relation and activity around us. Each mirror is complete, and becomes
more complete in active relational linkage with others of its kind.
How does a mirror become more complete? By re-including lost parts
of itself.
If this is true, consider what happens when machines
are introduced into this equation and begin acquiring the terrain
once hallowed to organisms of every scale. In this instance, we
become the reflective expressers of ‘multiply mechanical sentience’
in the noisy and truly competitive absence of our ancestral relations
and environments.
o:O:o
We may observe then that one distinction between us
an animals is that we are magnifiers capable of experiencing and
expressing something akin to a unique summation of the organismal
history and moment of our world — at the scale of the whole,
and also at the scale of any individual participant’s actual
experience and expression. This is not unique to our species, but
becomes unique at our scale and according to our response to this
endless and stream of biocognitive momentum.
Yet the most fundamental difference between us and
animals emerges from an almost alien vector — it is our constant
and sustained congress with what we refer to as knowledge.
For many thousands of years, human animals have been subject to
a hypnotic fascination with an aspect of cognitive self-reference
that results in formal representation. During a labyrinthine series
of adventures in our early cognitive evolution, we somehow acquired
the potential to complexly represent experience, emotion,
meaning, and relations — as well as the habit of sustaining
and transmitting this activity to one another. In time these representational
habits became an inescapable aspect of our experience and awareness
to such a degree that they reshaped our species to the degree that
the term must refer to our activity in relational assembly more
than it does our physical form or position in the Tree of Life.
With our ascent to a new rung of the cognitive ladder,
we became pioneers in an explosive array of new dimensions, including
those of imagination.
Implicit in this new universe was a perilous inheritance in which
we were obliged to the assembly and application of conceptual lattices
whose features and qualities are intangible — being based
primarily in agreement and practice. This new sort of ‘fast
change-making’ toy allowed us to begin to turn need or desire
into manifest reality — first through the application of vague
simulations, and later through the establishment, elaboration and
obligations inherent in our present-day relations with metaphor,
knowledge, language, and ‘technologies’.
In the same way that winged creatures arose to inhabit
the air and new dimensions of connectivity, our species emerged
from the chaos of our early evolution with something akin to imaginal
wings. We ‘fly’ inside a dimension we don’t credential
— even though all our arts, codicils and comparators have
their genesis in these gardens, our analogs and metaphors openly
deny the most crucial characteristics of these dimensions. The ‘wings’
we developed, comprised of a strange ability to ‘divide’,
allow us to create and sustain an imaginal division between experience
and ‘another bag’ which is a representational stage
of sorts. Upon this stage we sketch and model our realities and
understandings, attending primarily to modes and forms already ‘common’
to our habit and experience.
The establishment and valuing of various ‘models’
or toys of relationally linkable separations is the very substrate
of our modern consciousness, and language stands out as the penultimate
toy of process in this terrain, because it is the primary vehicle
for the implication or enforcement of metaphoric separation. Though
there are precursors (and many of them are profoundly sophisticated)
language is the primary brush with which we paint the association
of value and meaning onto the experience, objects, and relation
we divide away from experience for this purpose.
The demands, exclusions and subtle inferences of our
native and otherwise acquired languages — their libraries
of definition, concept, metaphor and rules of relation — these
form the invisible skeletal substructures upon which the very character
and potential of our experience and activity are assembled. If the
roots we establish in our agreements are generally inaccurate, the
complexly folded children of those roots will magnify those inaccuracies
exponentially at increasing velocities in forward time.
o:O:o
o:O:o
I believe it is dangerous to formally define (de-infinitize)
human cognition, and especially to say what it can and cannot be
or accomplish, even in a single individual. What we can
say is that it represents the opportunity to establish and sustain
hyperconnective relationships across many seemingly impossible-to-negotiate
barriers. At the same time our hard-won semantic complexity
places us at the mercy of a variety of ‘reflection problems’
which are native to the modes of knowing we are currently stuck
with.
Because of our peculiar vulnerability in this regard,
our ‘rationality’ has never actually become the transport
to understanding and mastery it advertises itself as; and instead
we have consistently activated it to deliver silencing in lieu of
liberty and atrocity in the guise of heroism. This pattern of self-elaborative
imaginal terrain predation has been entrenching itself ever-more
thoroughly in our cultures over the last few thousand years, and
is at this point in history the undisputed owner of nearly every
transport and context of human experience, learning, relation-activity
and environment.
The game of using tokens to know and remember is newer
and more dangerous than we have yet been empowered to understand
or explore. In order to have the opportunities to actively examine
our position, we’re going to need some very new perspectives
on the emergence, development and elaboration of representational
cognition in our species — particularly in the terrain where
concept generates relational activity — which is, for us,
most of the terrain there is.
The truth of our cognitive natures and potentials
has never been unveiled, and the direct exploration of these dimensions
comprises a universe far vaster than than the any frontier we could
name, including space. The problem is that we don’t have vehicles,
and not understanding that this is actually a real terrain —
we do not travel in search of what we possess, but instead are trapped
on a tiny island of traditional and academic ideas.
When we agree to leave this island together what we
will discover will dwarf anything we may have previously imagined;
what waits right here, close at hand, is a universe of experience
and potential that make the sum of our storying pale in comparison.
o:O:o
Let us pause here to consider for a moment that a
human person who is not subject to enlanguaging and enculturation
by others is simply a complex cognitive animal. Such a being will
not establish any reasonable analog of what we experience and express
as human representational consciousness. To become ‘human’
(or to survive) in the eyes of our fellow animals we must each accrue
and sustain a decidedly non-ordinary relationship with meaning,
memory, signs, tokens, codicils and comparison. Similarly, a multiply
enlanguaged person is many factors more adept in terms of metaphoric
cognition because of the possible integrations from seemingly distinct
poetic sources.
The distinctions implied by the meaning-character
of different languages becomes the functional basis of our reality
once we agree that these meanings and relations are ‘most
true’. The semantics of our languages become the structure
that the content of our experience and understanding is assembled
upon. Wherever these structures are more mimic than gift we are
trapped in supporting something which desires to create more of
itself in us, at a velocity that must increase exponentially to
sustain this process.
This is the source of human-inspired atrocity.
Mechanical
Cognition: An oxymoron
Are human artifacts ‘natural’? I’ve
had so many internal and social debates on this topic that I cannot
number them rationally — and for years a solid position escaped
my every attempt to locate it, though my sense was that in general
they are not. I believe the reason for my confusion was that I could
not metaphy the problem clearly enough to actually understand the
elements and linkages of the question. The pivots are nature and
artifact. A common position in this debate is that whatever humans
make is natural, since we’re natural, and thus ‘we can
only make natural things’. The problem lies in the definition
of natural, and also what dimensions of outcome we are examining
in determining congruence with our chosen comparator.
When an animal uses a stick as a tool, we can consider
this natural without much debate. When an animal forms the stick
into something more specifically adapted to solving a relational
challenge, we can still see an entirely organic process with entirely
organismal outcomes. The artifact created is not sustained or kept
— neither is it copied. In general the artifact is a momentary
phenomenon, even if the behavior of crafting and using it is recapitulated
often or even communicated to other animals. However, something different is happening to Homo Sapiens. In our species, tools, non-tool-like ephemera, appliances, clothing, &c comprise an explosively replicating frequency of instancing — and almost maniacal march of non-organismal — and in many cases anti-organismal production. As if this were insufficient, the cost of production, replication, distribution and delivery is paid in blood. This payment is traditionally made in secret, however in nearly every case living beings must now compete directly with non-living entities created by humans (or their outcomes and emissions) for survival, attention, terrain, resources, and reproductive rights. If one stops to actually examine this circumstance clearly for a moment, the ambient absurdity rapidly reaches a crescendo.
A problem arises with human modes of awareness when
they become anti-organismal, and the problem is with representational
consciousness — the kind of consciousness in which the idea of
a ‘thing’ acquires and continues to gain precedence over the reality
of ‘beings’ — organisms — including ourselves. Although we are
‘of nature’, we possess a startling and often catastrophic propensity
to switch out of our animalian or organismal awareness into an
alien and alienating mode which is not really ‘natural’ in that it threatens our own nature with replacement. Interestingly,
this potential is not necessarily innate in our species, as we
commonly suppose, but is instead communicated from generation to
generation in a way somewhat similar to how a disease is communicated
from parents to children, or from a culture to its members. It is a contagion. The
disease takes the form of a misvaluation in which a specific aspect
of our imagination is co-opted and transformed into a kind of caching-machine,
which subsists and evolves based upon a game of diverting cognitive
and emotional resources for the purposes of its own survival, elaborating itself and eventually dominating our individual and social awareness. This game
results in a form of artifacting in our cognition, and the result
of that imaginal artifacting eventually begets something quite
deadly to organisms in general, and, specifically to us: machines.
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