cellWorld: sentience lensing for mutual uplift

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From these and similar domains of observation and speculation, we can begin to see a variety of obvious patterns implied if not demanded by much of the observable terrestrial complexity coupled with our modern and available understandings of organismal history on Earth. These patterns in their most general anatomy imply that Earth is an animal, more than a ‘planet’, and that this form of animal — much like ourselves — assembles itself in waves of inward complexification that allow for the gains of the whole to be magnified into all participants, and so too with the trials. This is one of the most essential features of the kind of animal Earth is, and it is one of the most essential transports of connectivity amongst and with(in) all of her constituent-children.

1.

Living worlds tend toward the production of complex cognitive beings for a purpose, which is discernable by the each of the beings of that world in some domain and, generally speaking, must be commonly apparent in their general activity. We might observe that over time, living planets assemble and conserve ever more complexly aware sentient participants, given the luxury to do so. Their constituents cannot fail to recapitulate these purposes in their local circumstances and scales of relation, in their structure, activity, and elaboration. This feature of organismal reality has the potential to interfere with itself in various ways, at certain phase-steps of local or distributed complexity, as we have experienced and are experiencing on Earth.

At the animalian scale of perception and experience, diversity in the environment (forms of biocognitive assembly in relation and co-arisal) creates opportunities, threats and challenges. The other side of that coin is the profound potential for transcendence of those threats and challenges via the integration of cognitive byproducts of the incredible diversity of relational stimulus inherent in a thickly speciated ecosystem. It is as if a single animal is learning itself in a thousand domains of reflective and semi-competitive relation. Each is a member of the body — and thus directly connective with every other member, utterly violating the rationality of physical separation in a real domain which is neither physical nor entirely energetic: the domain of active relation. This field is the formal ground of sentience, and the birthplace and nursery for the complex embodiment of organismal intelligence we have managed to thus far sustain, and in some ways, perhaps, even embellish slightly — as representational sentients.

2.

Living worlds value complexity and diversity in much the same way complex animals such as humans not only value, but require diverse internal cellular and micro-floral ecosystems. This diversity and complexity provide flexibility and supra-animalian ability in complex cognitive animals such as humans.

Species and behavioral diversity is a transport, cache, and amplifier for evolutionary and cognitive complexity. One of the most powerful vehicles for these conservations, and perhaps even their foundation, is connectivity. A second is the ability to encode and transmit ‘information’ (progress) across many diverse boundaries — such as individual and generational death. We can visualize these two very general qualities as the opposing teardrops of an infinity symbol: but it is where they are twisted that the real miracles arise...

In choosing to convince ourselves of our intellectual separation from animals, we threw away the baby of our essentially connective natures and requirements with the bathwater of our classical terror of our animalian heritage and ancestry. As our modern activity hacks away at a living library of absurd age and impossible rarity — we are hacking away at the very sources and sanctuaries of our own cognition. And this creates a terrifying problem which is similar to attacking one’s own intelligence, with something one doesn’t expect to have any effect in this regard at all. After a very small number of these events, the subject/victim is too stupid to have any hope of discerning what it is doing, and simply keeps doing it until the repercussions erase it.

3.

The incredible biocognitive complexity embodied in the metabolic and relational activities of simple and multicellular animals, as well as the animals themselves are the product of a developmentally intelligent planet, and are in point of fact, the only thing of real value to a living world.

As this temporal-evolutionary complexity is preserved only in living forms, there is no possible way to value it economically with any sense of sane rationality. A single microorganism could easily be worth the entire GNP of all human nations since Roman times. It’s a matter of perspective and application to value them at all. Sentient beings should value each other and other beings as essentially priceless. Living planets definitely do, and there is clear evidence of this everywhere around us. We ourselves comprise such evidence.

Consider a single living frog. Alive in the modern moment, this animal represents a lineage of incredible diversity, temporal experience, biocognitive expression, and organismal metaphor. It is a living wavefront containing and representing (and elaborating) an entire an unique library nowhere reproducible and nowhere else inscribed. As a living book, it reaches back to the inception of Life on Earth. And it is not a thing – but instead an elemental expression of an unthing: it is an organism.

Like living metaphors in a transcendental language, the complexity and diversity of organisms around and within us gives rise to the pool of sentience that our own cognition is re-assembled as a unique instance of — moment-to-moment. When we erase or destabilize ecosystems, attack whole species of organisms within ourselves, or compromise the essential biodiversity and health of our planet, we are doing something akin to attacking the mind of a child — using primitive, rapacious metaphors to erase their native relational intelligence and replace them with something more ‘manageable’. In doing so we are effectively stamping out the poetry of God, and existing with(in) the poetry we are hacking away at madly — are our own minds, persons, dreams, hopes — and chances for a sustainable culture on Earth. With each blow of the blade, we become less able to notice our own hand at the grip. The fingers seem alien. We begin to pretend it is actually the work of distant others, and thus the curse proceeds to every domain of our world. Every domain of our lives, thoughts, actions and servitude to concept and mechanism.

4.

A significant portion of the foundational goal of life is to persist, and progress toward greater conservation of metabolic, behavioral, physical and cognitive (connective) complexity. In order to persist while conserving and enhancing the current store of complexity, life must be able to maintain this hard-won treasure beyond the barriers of occasional or common terrestrial crisis. (extinction) [3]

This means that what we commonly consider competition is actually in service to its opposite — mutual preservation. While seemingly a commonplace notion, its commonality hides the treasure, which is that our ideas and formulations about competition become something other than what they pretend the moment their activity or the realizations of those concepts turns against the diverse natural complexity of a living planet, or a living people.

It seems that what is done in the ecological realms (or those we refer to thus) is always done in the intellectual, cultural and lived experience of the people of Earth. Thus the nations that champion the bald and rapacious conversion of a living planet and its peoples to profit and prisoners must first succeed in entrenching itself as a mimetic hero in the minds of the vast populations of its victims, such that they will perceive in the predator as a hero.

Thus it is that a mere paradigm: i.e.: animalian diversity is at best marginally important — whether real, or active in a human population — can grow to such a degree that it erases the people who carry it as completely as it erases their nursery, children, and future.

Since a concept, in a complexly representational cognitive species, can silence an entire biosphere (which is is a participant with(in)), so if a planet is going to evolve toward this sort of creature, there must be failsafes and unknown aspects of potential involved...

5. There is no sure clock for terrestrial crisis.

It is possible for a string of crises to occur simultaneously, or linearly, with such bio-destructive power that the majority (or totality) of multicellular animal forms on earth could be extinguished with stunning rapidity. This nearly happened during the Permian Extinction. These are crises of biocognition as well, and are firmly written not only in the mechanical features of the survivors, but in their cognitive and emotional characters as well. Put simply, organismal Life on Earth remembers the great cataclysms — and generally these memories are deeply charged with terror. Encountering things similar to them, conceptually or in reality tends to trigger organismal and cognitive response as though the ancient threat were being relived — but the domain of this activity may be incredibly difficult to take notice of, or may also ‘seem’ to ‘small’ to be of real consequence — so it is rarely remarked upon or pursued by ‘educated people’.

That there have been vast extinctions in terrestrial history which were survived by complex animals does not in any way imply that many, or most such catastrophes would have the same outcome. A relatively small mechanical catastrophe could silence the entire biosphere in perpetuity. So could a war, or an act of terrorism — or a significant enough strike from an extraplanetary object.

Vast extinctions can also be unexpectedly (and often invisibly) catalyzed or directly caused by what we might refer to niche predation, which is the activity of specific scales and domains of parasitic living or mechano-mimetic momentums, unlinked from the sorts of common limiters that protect both parasites and their hosts by (more or less) insuring that the most essential organisms or mechanisms of balance and regeneration cannot be permanently disturbed, except by extra-systemic interventions.

While human thought tends to follow lines trusting the future of our race (and the other beings of the planet) to our adaptability and our technologies, our own complexity (and theirs) requires extremely delicate and specific tolerances of many variables in many domains. An analogy would be that we commonly have trouble getting ourselves into space, or getting probes to other worlds accurately — for the same general sort of reason.

Complex animals are ecologically sensitive, and profoundly environmentally delicate. 60-85% of the Monarch Butterfly population was extinguished in a single unseasonable storm in 2002. Humans are not butterflies, but the tableau is only different in scope. One must wonder if the butterflies expected the storm. Complex cognitives are even more sensitive, and delicate.

Because of this consistent fact, organismal life and the environmental transports it engineers, sustains, and elaborates are complexifying toward a position where various modes of survival-response (to crisis) are possible.

Additionally, there is another problem: the animal of a living planet comes to ‘know the danger’ of being penetrated by a large extraterrestrial object. Once this has happened three or four times (each time it is akin to being shot in the head and barely surviving) — the planet develops new domains of sensing and response, as precursors to the ability to formulate an active organismal (biocognitive) response to such threats. And this has psychological relevance for the planet and all scales of her constituentChildren.

So, for example, before the permian extinction, the diversely established biocognitive complexity of Earth was thriving, and hyperconnective — an incredibly adeptly engineered ‘sentience lens’ that required thousands of billions of years (multiplied to some term by all participants at all scales) to assemble.

The process used for this assembly is an infolding of conserved complexity, connectivity and diversity — which then results in scalar magnifications of potential (cells to multicells colonies to animalian organisms, etc). Once this is established, the sentience and expression characters of the planetAnimal are dramatically magnified — far beyond the place of becoming ‘a form of energy’. This magnification produces something we have no word for...but it is like a lens that radically accelerates and magnifies its own sentience potentials — in a game that would make a god blush. It then actively recapitulates these potentials into its children, at every possible scale.

So the planetAnimal, in one moment, finds itself diversely connectively alive, aware, and expressive of internal and cognitive prosperity. In what is for her far less than an eyeblink — (and this is seen happening with billions of eyes with(in) her, at billions of positions, velocities and scales) — she sees the things from space coming — and then they penetrate her — and then 85% of her mind, hands, eyes — thousands of trillions of lifeYears of effort — are gone.

Earth, as an animal, responds just as animals of her kind will. She begins to intentionally engineer creatures of sufficient cognitive and mechanical complexity to be able to first metaphy, and later respond to threats to the entire system.

Just as we have macrophages and immune systems — a planet will, like any evolving psybiocognitive hyperstructure — engineer a similar sort of organismal participant — albeit at an entirely different scale.

Such a participant must be able to metaphy and respond to many forms of systemic threat, in many seemingly distinct domains. And it must remain motivated to do so. If it fails to accurately metaphy its own position, or its powers, or its sources — this class of participant can act like a broken immune system, and consume the garden it arises in hope of the sustenance of.

If we were to presume (in our example) that biospheric penetration by an extra-terrestrial body is the only vast and significant threat to the nursery (which it isn’t) — we might speculate that a biosphere would actually expend quite a bit of complexity-momentum in ‘growing itself’ toward a variety of inward solutions. Some of them would be passive, and others active.

Amongst the active experiments emergent from the planetAnimal in the wake of such catastrophes throughout history — was a creature that could hear her voice, feel her feelings, see what she sees, and become what she herself had always been — a protector.

Again, we are presuming this is the only threat. To accomplish this she would need a creature capable of mechanical manipulation at a scale that dwarfed anything which had ever existed — except of course in everything she already was. She was something far beyond all machines....but she was going to need a species that could build large, strange toys...and could see into the stars at a distance...and not destroy the nursery during their growthPhases...and...

And eventually one of those species stepped up to bat, so to speak. What it really was that they stepped up to was more of a glowing celestial tree whose every branch led inward to an exquisitely unknowable -source-. At this tree they began a relationShip with a ‘family’ of sentient hyperStructures with(in) whom they arose as a sort of ‘complete and unique’ inner reflection of [4].

We might speculate that this species needed an uninterrupted (or generally contiguous) phase of growth and connectivity with its sources in order to succeed. But early on in the process, the exact momentum they were biocognitively marshalling a systemic defense to shattered the nursery again. And this would happen quite a few times. Each time it happened, it damaged their relationships with the delicate tools and stories they’d inherited at the Tree. Soon they forgot about the Tree and the Stories altogether. And, during a time of relative calm from the celestial penetrants, they actually forgot what it was they were supposed to be learning to be protecting, and from what, and why.

In fact, other threats had risen unnoticed, and largely taken over the gifts from the Tree, almost entirely, and were using them to accomplish something very similar to what they gifts were engineered to protect the planetAnimal from. Meanwhile, inside the children themselves, something similar was happening: their own immune systems were attacking them. But they could not see the relationShip — they didn’t have a metaphor they trusted, that pointed in that direction.

So they kept building machines, and copies of machines, and machines to make copies of copies made by machine-making machines.

6.

The value of a given creatureform is not reproducible, and is beyond human understanding in terms of symbolic valuation. The value of any individual living creature is similar, though perhaps not precisely symmetric. The reason for this seemingly incredible value is simple: any extant being represents its entire lineage of evolution and history, conserving within its structure and behavior idiosyncratic histories, abilities, molecular engines, and the many other and possibly un-nameable aspects of complexity that it and its biological peers have struggled so epically to preserve, expand, transmit and conserve throughout the Earth’s history. In effect, each creatureform is a unique, transforming, and living volume in an irreproducible library. A living planet values each extant creatureform overtly, regardless of evolutionary ideas to the contrary.

In terms of scarcity, and its relation to value, there is nothing more scarce in the universe at our scale than living beings. Most of space does not appear to contain them. Earth, at least locally, is an anomaly in this regard, and her conservations are beyond all possible systems of valuing, comprising the very rarest of possible rarities.

7.

A living planet has a very specific lifespan, in terms of outcomes for life there, and for the planet itself. There are two primary limiters of the length of this lifespan:

1: #S1: Solar or Near-Space Catastrophe:

a: catastrophic solar activity/solar death
b: impact from space or other trans-terrestrial catastrophe

2: #E1: Environmental Catastrophe:

Atmospheric biometabolism and regeneration is badly damaged or destroyed outright

i. Organic cause (i.e.: a radical niche-predator microbe)
ii. Action of intelligent beings disrupts processes
iii. Action of unforeseen/known natural causes

Within these two windows, all significant living activity takes place, and all hope in persistence or prosperity for any form of life is prescribed.

8.

A biocognitive planet learns through intersystemic interaction, storage and transformation – synergistically, and attempts correction and progress toward being what it is becoming. Like all organisms, the sum total of living elements which comprise a worldAnimal represent its body, mind, and spirit – in the same way the sum total of living cells in a human body are similarly representative. We must also deeply acknowledge the necessity of including contexts and environments our models and metaphors as part of ourselves — because the biocognitive moment we may experience or express is directly emergent from the entirety of local history, momentum, lineage and potential.

It does not learn through the activity of machines which replace organismal participants with mechanicals — nor does it learn when its only complex cognitive species becomes overmechanized, intellectually. The intellectual life of a planet is largely emergent from the intellectual (consciously cognitive) experience of its constituents, thus it will tend to suffer in a scalar magnification of anything largely afflicting its single complex cognitive.

The living beings of a planet, at any given moment, may be said to constitute a single evolving and clearly cognitive being, and this being is emergent, and scalarly self-referencing in activity as well as form. It is an ‘alien beyond all aliens’ — a worldAnimal — and we are certainly and observably constituents in such an animal in a way somewhat analogous to neurons in our own mind. But our models of neurons are in error, for we believe that some mechanical activity of them produces character — which is backwards. Character emerges from cognitive activity unmechanically, as a reflection of the real basis of reality — which is as emotional as it is physical or energetic.

All beings are elements in planetary metabolism and (trans)sentience. The complexity preserved in even the ‘simplest’ single living being is far more than can be represented in words, value-systems, or any form of information known to humans – because it is, in effect, a peculiar, but precise recording of evolutionary time. A mote of living bio-memory from its home planet.

A single living creature, of any sort whatever, is worth more than the entirety of the products of human knowledge and manufacture. When our species realizes this directly, we will have graduated from biospheric infancy. We must insure the biosphere survives long enough for our species to have this opportunity.

9. The goal of a living planet could be modeled as fivefold:

This is a very mechanical perspective-model of a process whose poetics are of far greater import than its mechanics...

a0: To attempt to assemble (through evolutionary symbiosis and competition) complex symbolically representational cognitives, imaginal tool-users with the ability to value and protect whole ecologies, first locally, and then by projecting them off-planet or to other worlds. These toolUsers must be emotionally poetic enough to resist mechanization.

a1: To value the attainable (as a goal) and living (as a resource) diversity and complexity highly in all activity and assembly. This not only allows for the protection and nurturence of extant life through atmospheric regulation and other vectors, but also enriches the biosphere as a whole with greater possibilities for sentience, cognition, biological novelty, resource transformation, general connectivity, innovation and symbiosis amongst extant forms.

a2: To value diverse connectivity highly in all situations, attempting always to preserve what has been accrued, embodied or assembled thus far.

a3: To attempt to ameliorate to some extent the disastrous consequences of sudden environmental flux or catastrophe for terrestrial life through a coalescent system of biocognitive self-regulation which will utilize diversity to absorb and distribute environmental shock, (much in the same way a complex animal body deals with an impact injury).

a4: To seed space with micro-fauna or proto-fauna that could eventually find purchase on a suitable planet as a hopeful fail-safe against failure of ecomigrations or generation of the migratory species.

This is accomplished through ejection of biomaterial from the upper atmosphere into space though various modalities. This also increases the functional sensing and cogniscium of the planetAnimal should it be able to produce any form or protoForm which is capable of travel in space without organismal stasis.

10.

At best, a living planet’s ability to succeed in generating persistent life is consistently opposed by #S1 and #E1 as well as

#C1: The durations between extreme terrestrial crises.

At worst a planet has the distance between terrestrial crises which either annihilate or seriously weaken evolutionary work toward generating the required complexly cognitive tool-user.

Crises resulting in the destruction of large sectors of animalforms seriously reduce the chances for success. If these crises arise from auto-mimetic sources, such as mechanical technologies and mechanized ‘ways of knowing’ emergent from a species who is the sole hopeful assembler of a biospheric migration platform — this amount of time, or ‘survival window’ can, and in function does undergo geometric compression.

This means that with such momentums operating on a living planet, eventually, a single instant of activity will decide the outcome for most or all complex animalforms on the planet, because of the geometrically self-magnifying nature of the threat.

Thus we can see with great universality, that, given a mimetic cognitive or technological basis, it is unfortunately possible to produce a complex animalform that is either hostile to, or incapable of reasonably valuing the co-existent ecologies – at least during some phase of its development.

Such a species can easily fall into a short or long phase of biospherically significant omnicidal activity. If we look only at the automobile in the modern moment, and over the last 75 years, we can immediately and personally observe that humans are, in general, currently be either hostile to their own planet and species, or phase-hostile — if only by the virtue of the real example of this single mimetically technological momentum. It‘s action in the biosphere is predatorily and domineeringly mimetic. It replaces, converts and dominates ecosystems, habitats, and environments — as well as human individuals and societies — in order to further establish its potential and momentum for scalar expansion of its replicative and mimetic agendas.

On many living worlds, the amount of time actually available to succeed in producing a persistent living symmetry (the window of sentience-opportunity) may be less than 1000k years. In fact, the living Earth has thus far had, with a few exceptions, a very safe genesis, by any reasonable standard. We could even call it miraculous.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe this will continue to be true in any domain, and there are whole armies of reasons why we must immediately acknowledge and transform our own activity in whatever domains we can discover that it runs counter to the natural elaboration, co-arisal, and inter-communal support for living systems which are emergent from ecosystems relieved of the majority of systematically expansive and consistent threats of mechanistic erasure. This also means that if there are other living planets, in the big story, most of them fail to produce persistent life, even if they manage a genesis.

11.

We might speculate in broad strokes about the embodiment-ladder of this complex cognitive tool-user — the assembler of the planetAnimal’s migratory platform (ostensibly the planetary hero in terms of species), and its progress toward and into its goal-form thusly:

Infancy:
- simple cognition, arousal of self- and group awareness and complex sensory integration modalities.

Childhood:
- complex cognition — symbolic (representational) languages – enlarged social systems - storying – tool expertise – cities – war – materialism — deconstruction

Adolescence:
- struggles related to relinquishing terrestrial ‘luxury’ in exchange for the challenges of adult (species-protector) responsibility.

Protector:
-   begins overwhelmingly to actively and clearly value ecologies and symbiosis above industry and economies.

Projector:
-   succeeds in moving whole or partial ecologies into protected off-planet domains.

Voyager:
-    succeeds in moving whole or partial ecologies over interstellar distances.

12. Solar Variance

Let’s consider a couple of hypothetical potentials that may aid us in gaining a more realistic perspective on cycles whose length and natures defy our modern and common understandings, explorations and notice.

In general, the planet has been seeking to grow in the sense of greater diversity, connectivity, character, complexity and survival opportunities. An excellent metaphor for this is the human egg-cell: once impregnated it establishes a process-momentum of charactered division — elaborating itself (and its connectivity-relations) as a new synthesis which is uniquely embodied yet follows a template established by all domains of previous activity related to animalian reproduction.

A model of the planet as a set of emergent symmetries which form scales of identity or ‘personhood’ makes sense, because during this process, the planet gains new domains of sensory awareness and interconnection with itself, and its natures and medium.

So a planetAnimal becomes, along with its emergent children, generally and specifically, ‘more essentially cognitive’ — just as the human egg-cell, once fertilized begins to do, and will continue to attend without cessation both as an individual and a participant, throughout its life and interactive/reproductive cycles. We might envision this process as a complex dance of infolding division, were each division magnifies the diversity and complexity that it arose from in environment, connectivity, and energetic conversation.

During this process of planetary maturation, long ‘solar seasons’ occur, during which some essential characters of the Sun go through somewhat regularized and also sporadic changes. This is communicated to Earth via the EM band of radiation, as well as domains of light, ambient temperature, gravity, heat and other atmospheric ‘features of medium’ we might record or examine. Many of these ‘features’ we are in no way aware of, for they operate at scales (or in domains) we cannot examine with our modern modalities of knowing. Yet we exist with organismal transports that allow us to interact with and experience these things very directly.

As modern humans, our models (and root-metaphors) have failed to link our species’ evolution, or our cognitive natures or potentials to solar output with adequate attention to this single domain’s profound and universal (even at scales) significance. Some few scholars with a mind to undoing science entirely, have presented reliable evidence that, essentially, ‘nothing in this area of spaceTime’ isn’t the Sun. DNA, planetary sentience, biocognition, languages...all of it is essentially sourced in solar energetics, which recapitulate broad features of spaceTime itself.

As an example of the solar-season effect I am talking about, we could easily model a ‘long period’ wave, in a domain related to the features of Solar output and biological connectivities with these features. This wave might be composed of ‘discrete elements’ such as are suggested by our physics, but we can throw physics and math away entirely and simply see that the earth is consistently bathed in Solar energetic output. We needn’t even name or label any element to understand this deeply. And at the cellular, and intracellular scales, as well as at animalian scales, this connectivity is not only essential, it is the source of all ‘formation’ of almost any kind at all, in energetic terms.

Let us suppose there is an ~3750-year ‘waveform’ in solar output in some domain, or a set of integrations of such waves, at various scales of time. During this ‘phase wave’ solar output rises from a baseline to a maximum, downward past the base to a minimum, and back to the baseline. Perhaps the nature or alignment of the Sun’s magnetic poles changes, rotating ‘slowly’, as part of such a process if not its primary apparent cause.

Let us further suppose that ‘certain areas’ near the low and high points of this wave correspond to dramatic times of change, and sometimes catastrophe on Earth. They may also act as the arbiters of entirely new domains of sentient evolution, however, as I shall later speculate.

If we ‘speed up time’ from the inception of life, to the present, we would likely (very generally) see something like ‘seasons’, in which there would be ‘spring blooms’ followed by ‘fallow winterings’. Life (and the connective and cognitive potentials of all participants and ecologies) would perforce follow and reflect these cycles in organismal cycles of blossoming, unity, poverty, competition, and catastrophe — as might some unique form of eternal tree in which many symmetries of physical memory exist.

At the same time those cycles of catastrophe would (in most, but not all cases) provide whole new domains of novel elaboration and unity potentials for the survivors, many or most of which would be forms of capitalizing upon the accrued conservations of the entire biosphere, as they might in any moment be rePresented.

After each cycle of catastrophe, there would be a phase of struggle, followed by a rapid eruption of greater diversity, new cognitive potentials, and biocognitive integration. Or rather, this was true until the rise of the machine.

If we do the same ‘timeline-thing’ with biospheric cognition, and linked human cognitive and intellectual prosperity with the prosperity and diversity of the living animalian ecospheres — we’d get some astounding pictures that would very likely deeply relate solar activity and the development of the biosphere, and of human cognition. And I believe not from theory but from experience that we’d also discover profound evidence of what would clearly appear to be ‘extra-systemic’ interference, interpenetration, and manipulation. With such an expansion of perspective in place we might then begin to understand why our species has worked and warred and written so epically merely to preserve records of myths and gods — and what the accessible sources of these momenta really are.

We might, from such a vantage, experientially discover that our films and literature thus far fail nearly completely in offering us realistic metaphors of our real biocognitive heritages and potentials. Another thing we’d notice, in our species, is that these ‘catastrophe events’ — occurring during a solar minimum or maximum — sometimes in combination with another sporadic solar or terrestrial event — would literally extinguish certain civilizations from the face of the Earth, and scatter many others.

Laws, fear, wars and terror — all manners of confusion and semantic condemnation would follow consistently in the wake of these crises of planetary proportion. To many survivors, I am certain it felt as if the Earth herself (and thus the universe) had been ‘stuck in the head’ and seriously injured.

I believe that this new perspective — one perhaps one alike with it — could (and will) disclose a direct and profound correlation between the birthplaces (and times) of what we call religions, and activity in the Sun. We’d likely notice that, along a waveform that was a reduced-arc version of our hypothetical Sun-wave, we’d see the rise of something akin to prophecy epidemics. And during each of those events, we’d see ‘scalar waves’ of specific individual people who were able to capitalize on these opportunities to encounter and become something far more than what we nominally consider ourselves to be, or be able to be. Yet the promise they’ve held forth in our literatures and religions is not a false one. It is the promise of our human destiny, and the birthright of every sentient being.

We might discover that each of the civilizations of advanced or primitive natures (by ‘our’ reckoning) would have recorded an intimate and incredibly diverse understanding of the Sun in their poetics, spirituality, ritual and daily moment of consciousness. As the Sun or the Earth began to change — often in domains that were ‘merely’ magnetic or otherwise invisible — these peoples largely understood and recognized the significance of these momentums, and attempted in many cases to encode ways to evade or ameliorate the terrestrial problems which these ‘universe storms ’ were already known to bring.

In many cases, perhaps ironically, those cultures who were in their natures most intimate with the Sun, and who, in the psybiopoetic bases of their lives, cultures and activities lived these relationships like children actively reading the book of a god, or a family of gods — were the very cultures which were often destroyed during the upheavals surrounding the dips and spikes in the solar output and terrestrial biocircumstance. It’s useful to notice that, in this model, we could replace a solar variation with something like ‘a large impact-event’ and come up with a very similar model, and possibly very similar cognitive effects in human (and likely animalian) populations. Many fine works of science and speculation proceed fruitfully in the exploration of these potentials, it is true — and yet the stories we should perhaps read first are those which we ourselves comprise and recapitulate.

On many occasions, as our species (in general) reached toward a place where our real relationships with the Sun and Earth could be understood and embodied — the very peoples in whom this intimate knowledge emerged were destroyed by something they’d perhaps only partially come to be able to embody their experiential understandings of. Additionally, such ‘solar cultures’ faced other threats which would by their nature always increase dramatically during crises of any kind — such as invasions, or other ‘chain-link’ catastrophes which can and often will assemble in the wake of biospheric upsets.

The shape and activity of our modern societies, as well as ‘the general shape and natures’ of our human cognitive persons are all deeply related to these stories and their specifics — the marks they left in our biosphere are ‘also written’ in the symmetries and habits of all future participants in the planetAnimal.

Let’s explore at another model, briefly — the Earth builds up incredible scalar domains of complex diversity and connectivity during the Solar Spring, and Summer, because the severe and harrowing nature of the winter (migratory animals will fail their migrations due to magnetic dysfunction, vast threats to all the various lifeScales, etc).

In order for complex animalian life to conserve any reasonable portion of its gains, there must be at once abundance and diversity — the focus of which at once locally-systemically elaborate, and also functions (very importantly) as a crisis-buffer. The nature of the potentials for radical solar or sudden terrestrial change (which doesn’t necessarily indicate cold, but rather change in some as yet unspecified domain) require that a diverse and complex symmetry exists in order to at once survive and capitalize upon reconstruction potentials (in a simple manner of speaking).

Generally this formula worked reasonably well (and sometimes famously) during its trials across the challenges emerging in timeline of terrestrial history. Even the occasional extra-systemic penetration (such as by a comet or asteroid) was survivable for enough of the complex animalian creatures of Earth to carry on the conservations and accrued connectivity potentials of the biospheric lineages which largely perished. But this is certainly not guaranteed, and no matter how tenacious we imagine Life to be — this can never excuse us from the deepest and perhaps sacred respect for its obvious desires, goals, potentials and delicacy.

If we suddenly introduce machines into the model, near the end of a (or even ‘the’) ‘solar summer’ — just before the pool of diversity is about to be required by the entire biome for basic survival — we can see the potential for a catastrophe far more deadly than anything the biosphere has yet experienced. From this perspective, the rapacious conversion of anciently conserved assets certainly and accurately appears to be the activity of a virus-like invader rapaciously converting the entire biosphere into copies of itself, and support systems for its continued copying, at rapidly increasing velocities. The truly frightening thing is that this is exactly the sort of unLife that will survive the winter, along with anything else that may. But the activity of this invader will tax every other living form, all the way to expiration, wherever possible. And the taxation is cognitive as well as physical.

Observing the planetary biota from an expanded perspective, in a compressed timeline, we might notice that something like a fire that begins, perhaps ironically, with the invention of the firearm — and then proceeds to rapidly consume whole lineages of species and ecosystems. Instants later, the automobile arises, and immediately creates the potential for whole new scales and domains of erasure. Further instants pass, and global industry and mechanization result in the direct compromise of all biospheric ecologies, and the eradication of some 1/3^rd of the complex animalian ecologies. More difficult to estimate is the impact on the plant ecologies. How does one estimate the damage of permanent genome change in the biosphere already accomplished by modern industry? What about pervasive chemical and or radioactive toxicification?

All or most remaining ecologies, especially those of the animalian and plant scales, are ferociously, systematically, and universally compromised. There is a resident biocognitive plague of mechanical conversion and at the dawn of the 21st century it remains largely unnamed, unacknowledged, and unseen by none but the species who is its source. Ironically, this happens to be the species most threatened by what is unfolding from its misapprehension of its position and potential.

A solar winter during the severe compromise in the biosphere caused by rapacious industry and mechanization could end the story of complex animalian life on Earth completely. It will at the very least reduce our civilization to the evolutionary position of warring tribes. While we in 2003 prepare for what could easily escalate into world war in order to secure ‘oil reserves’, the oil we are seeking is the very thing to which we have sacrificed many of the sentient lineages of our planetary cohabitants — as well as our own human potential, cultural and personal liberty, and cognitive complexity. In so doing, we’ve utterly failed to realize is that these cohabitants, cultures and ecosystems are required in order for us to continue to enjoy the cognitive complexity we’ve so luckily accrued. They aren’t co-habitants at all, but instead a living part of our real persons and bodies. They are the place our mind is sourced.

We’ve failed to notice that the diverse animalian life of Earth, in history and in the modern moment is the very source of our sentience, our cognition... our minds — not on timelines, but right now — moment-to-moment. Our ‘mind’ is the result of sentient scales of hyperconnectivity, and is not (contrary to our models) a noun — or possessed in a single body or species. It’s an emergence game, and a critical one for our people and planet to understand, immediately. As we allow ecologies of real and cognitive terrain to undergo conversion to mechanical systems and industrial support we are selling our own minds, as well as our bodies for something which we already possess in unlimited abundance.

Should a radical shift in the solar or terrestrial mediums be incumbent upon us during this crisis-phase — in other words, while our species is acting like a an auto-immune disease in the single cell we call Earth — our people will deeply rue the callous ideologies of science, religion and materialism which led us to attempt to murder ourselves, and found us engaged nothing but speeding up the process, and lying more desperately and multilaterally about it.

Yet if we understand the real and poetic natures of the relationships between the Earth, the Sun, and their many children...we find apparent not only a set of windows into almost magical impossibilities, we find ourselves, and the keys to our mutual personal, cultural, and biospheric rescue.

At the scale of the organelle, the incredibly minute ‘organs’ in our cells, we are literally touching the surface of the Sun at all times. We have failed to adequately understand the cellular implications of quantum theory, which, while only theory, can provide important inroads into understanding, for example, why we are cognitive creatures at all, and perhaps more specifically, why we are symbolically cognitive, and what sorts of attendable dangers and benefits this element of our natures really offers. At these minute scales the physics of EM and other bandwidths of energy (perhaps domains we have no metaphors for as well) create a situation where ‘all beings’ are functionally ‘touching’ in real time.

The nature of this connectivity, expanded as it is in a highly connective universe, creates a situation where any cognitive being —or set of them — can essentially ignore time. They can also ignore distance. And death. In this kind of ‘network’, all of those ‘obstacles’ were overcome long before the first cells struggled toward establishing a foothold on Earth. Our species has blatantly denied, ignored, and made various sorts of wars about this. It’s a really significantly serious problem, and it’s coming to a head in the modern moment that is going to reach toward either cataclysm of a global scale or radical intentional shift. The most likely time-frame for this change is extremely small. It’s on the order of 5 to 25 human years. In other words, the game is on, now.

Living systems long ago evolved complex connectivities, which in their essential structure conserve incredibly minute connectivity windows, which allow them (us) to mutually option each other’s knowledge, experience, and abilities. Humans, believing this impossible, have literally ‘forgotten how to be alive’ on Earth. We don’t realize that our linkage to the Solar momentums, as well as local environments and terrestrial energetic momentums is so complete that we are not in any detectable domain, or dimension, ‘separate’, at all. We’ve been far too busy with the domains of the ‘normal-sized’, to even notice this, though it’s clearly obvious and demonstrable in our biophysics.

The significance of such a fact is nearly impossible to overstate. It means that each living human being is born as a member in, and with sacred connectivity privileges to, all of the beings which have ever existed, or will, at any scale of ‘individual’ or ‘society’. It means that there are now experientially accessible (to infants, not experts) skills and activities that will utterly change what it means to be human. Not in the future, right now, for anyone willing to directly and non-dogmatically explore this terrain, in their own body, planet and ecosystem, as well as the various scales of social endeavor and activity of the other people and peoples around them.

It means, in essence, that the universe as we understand it is a hyperconnected sentient library which exists outside our ideas about time completely, and it is a library which ‘learns itself’ through and within the activity of living sentient beings, much as a human infant does.*

It means an entirely new world of ‘ways of knowing’.

*Consider what human activity has wrought in such a library, taking only Earth as the sphere of concern.

13. Extra-Systemic (inter)Penetration

[this section undergoing revision]

There is a rather strange story in the bible, in exodus where Moses and those he’s recently led out of egypt find their cohort afflicted by ‘fiery serpents’. Those who are ‘bitten’ die. Supposedly this is a punishment for departing from God’s side, and bemoaning their hunger — losing their faith, so to speak. Moses is instructed to cause a serpent to be cast in brass atop a staff or rod. Those who look upon the serpent, he is told by god, will sustain little harm from their injuries. This is done with little fanfare, and apparently succeeds. Those who look upon the raised serpent live.

Later in a very puzzling statement, John references this event without complex explanation, saying merely “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” But what did he mean by this remark? Is there something incredible and undiscovered that happens to human beings when they see an image raised upon a stick of some sort? Could it have something to do with a ‘piercing’ or ‘penetration’ resulting in new domains of potential and liberty?

I suggest it could — and more than this — I suggest that it is a (much more than a) metaphor that is of such general and foundational significance that it relates not only to serpents and messiahs (and their messengers) — but to planets — and even systems of them. Time and time again in terrestrial history, deadly penetration has resulted in impossible cataclysms of novelty and opportunity. Yet this is not the only outcome, and it is not the only symmetry in the passages I reference above.

In our industrialized (in dust trial) civilizations, we expect (in accordance with what we’ve been taught) that since we find little physical evidence of complex ancient artifacts we are the only civilization to achieve the level of complexity we believe we now enjoy. But our ideas about our own ‘progress’ and ‘advancement’ are grossly and very mechanically misfounded.

We are a generation who has proven itself auto-omnicidal. We will not yet admit this openly, and this is functionally equivalent with causing a geometric growth in the problems we’re facing as a result. From within such a cycle the ‘crisis point’ is ‘always arriving faster than last time you looked’. An incredibly dangerous situation. But it also provides inspiration for radical and positive response. The human species has, in the last 250 years or so, become a penetration-event that a biosphere cannot contend with or prepare to rebound from.

Our sort of penetration does not bring novelty to the nursery — but erasure. The niches of complex biocognitive diversity we are erasing are not open for recolonization by new children. They are precolonized by the cognitive and physical machines that erased the extant and potential organismal diversity in the dead gardens they now rule over.

[luxury snack]

Worse, when confronted with the clearly obvious fact, we simply do it again, faster, while claiming we’re really the champions of those we’ve sold into perishing. The victims have no limit. Every human child and adult, every biospheric participant. Our minds, bodies, dreams, hopes and souls now belong to assassins. And they don’t even really have bodies, these assassins — they are, largely, ideas and projections. Social momentums. Commerce. Industry. Big Science. Religion. Academia.

We are a planet owned by conceptual thrisps. Our human and organismal futures belong to things like ideas, but they are not things or ideas at all — they are more like cognitive artifacts — and they arise and proceed with in an endless quest to dominate and annex terrain. Thrisps sacrifice living beings and the human lives of their hosts at the altar of their reproductive progress and defense of held terrain, thousands of times per second, all around our world, without cessation — and with rapidly expanding velocities in any domain we may possibly examine.

There is nothing, essentially, which opposes the nearly absolute dominion of ‘ways of knowing’ over the myriad potentials of ways of being, and becoming. The results are always apparent first in the human cognitive biome or cogniscium, and then in the physical biome of Earth.

Unbound thrisps in the cogniscium are essentially predatory. They build alliances and make war for possession of cognitive terrain in populations, or, the entire field of the our human consciousness and endeavor. This is easily seen from a scale only slightly larger that those we are used to. At this scale, we can notice that our ideologies and endeavors emerge as very obvious and singular outputs and outcomes. We can see, from an enlarged perspective, the ‘animal of knowledge’ within the animal of our species.

Part of my position is that are not yet ‘advanced’. We have become auto-omnicidal and this has affected the base systems and root characters of our own biology, intellect and cognition in ways we could not (and cannot yet) have guessed.

It’s not entirely unclear why we’ve done this. We once experienced the direct interpenetration of gods, then there were crises, and the gods appeared to have ‘gone away’. Then decided, as we’ve decided many times before, that we wished to become gods, and thus no longer needed contact or direct exploration of our real connectivity with them.

From what we knew of gods, they existed ‘up the scale’, cognitively, as well as physically. In a similar fashion to how your own consciousness exists as an up-the-scale emergence of cellular endeavor in the many colonies (universes, really) of your organs (and relations, etc). From the perspective of cellular colonies in your liver, you are ‘up the scale’. They are ‘in you’. You are, conversely, in them. But your domains, and the scales of awareness and concern differ dramatically.

To consider such cellular organizations insentient is the very root of error. Their sentience differs, true, but there is nothing more apparent upon the good green Earth than the results of endless generations of the struggle of cellular intention to fulfill its myriad and majestic destinies. Of course, the reality was that, in most places where gods were important — there were ‘two scales’ of gods. The ‘down the scale’ gods, and the ‘up the scale’ gods.

Believing ourselves ‘advanced’ in our understandings and our embodiments and systems of understanding, we find too often that on close experiential observation our ‘advancements’ are in many cases nothing more than ‘vastly predatory over-complexification’. Science, in its drive to pseudo-mechanically map domains of human storying and experience which are essentially emergent from personal and common sensory experience has actually succeeded in the genesis and maintenance of a severe metaphoric distortion field, which complexifies in the way a window that ‘continuously shatters’ into smaller, more broken windows would.

With such a window before our eyes, we become watchers of the patterns in the window, and we tend the window directly, hypnotically ignoring the real world it is ‘in front of’. The combative marriage in between science and meme-based religions has resulted in our nearly complete separation from the metaphors necessary to lead us to personal and social experiences of our sources, which are, at this very moment, everywhere accessible in a way that would force archeologists to need to don diapers for their first glimpse of what they had, since they were born, literally, in the palm of their own hands. All our domains of ‘knowing’ are alike with this.

We ‘only build’ complexly elaborate ‘ways of knowing’, when we are, as a species, in emotional and social crisis. And thus, the invention of machines, created a ‘scalar wave’ of cognitive atrocity in our species, our cognition, our languages, activities, and in our biosphere.