cellWorld
Any planet which produces life or is colonized by living matter
becomes a living planet. The population-size, status and diversity
changes the complexity of the emerging planetAnimal, but regardless
of the statistics this kind of ‘rock in space’ is
no longer a rock.
Sentience is the relational emergence of various
forms of awareness as living beings parse and express their linkages
with other organisms and environments (including imaginal terrains
such as metaphor). Much of this activity is concerned with the
establishment or extinguishing of transports — and it is
the domain of transports in which sentience is fundamentally sourced.
This is generally true regardless of the scale or assemblies of
scales we select to examine — in the domains of an organism,
a set or series of linked sets of organisms, or a meta-organism,
such as a living world. It is as obvious in the intracellular
folding and generation of proteins as it is in the intellectual
foldings of the membrane-bubble of meanings and metaphors.
Sentience is not necessarily related to the apparent biological
or neural complexity of a single form or system of interacting
forms, but is instead a coalescent process or emergent property
embodied most likely in matter itself, but quite definitely in
living beings pursuing the goals implicit in organismal symmetry
and relation with medium, subject, and circumstance.
At its core, this is a game of shapes, speed, size, colors and
relation, similar to the games of chemistry and physics, but vastly
extrapolated in complexity by its powers of insubstantial assembly, synthesis and creative mimesis. On a very elemental
level there is discernment in terms of energetic and physical
coupling, emulation, rejection, or neutrality. So it is in living
matter in general, as we see in the dances of proteins, cells,
receptors and the generally shape-and-charge-specific nature of
interactions and observable organizations in these domains. This
is echoed in all the creations of animalian sentience: including
languages and modes of assembly.
Life is, in a very real sense — a sort of ‘magicalized’
matter with the ability of reflection, relation, reproduction
and communion. Like matter, ‘Life’ is essentially
unified — in a great diversity of forms and potentials for
connective learning. From one perspective, we might model Life
as ‘natural’ an outcome of the energetic interactions
of elemental chemistries as the formations of stars are in the
solar nurseries — a kind of deterministic clockwork-child.
This is the root of our common models, especially in the semantics
of our economies, sciences and cultures.
But the cognitive abilities of living matter are unique, and in
some domains they are absolutely unique in each instance of any living ‘thing’. This is only one of
the many distinct ‘supra-material’ qualities of living
matter, existing as it does at least an order of complexity away
from its non-living sources and constituents in its manifestation,
behavior, and beauty.
We would not really expect (for we have not been enabled to) that
something as unspecial as a fly, person, or dog might contain
(by structure, and connectivity — or reference) a universe
as complex and unique that the one it appears to inhabit. Yet
we might be mistaken in our idea about inhabiting and its meanings
— as opposed to the accessible reality that opposes such
meanings. The dog and the universe are co-extant. Neither
formally ‘inhabits’ the other — at all —
except in our models that only allow interpretation of experience
from one of many infinities of perspectives.
The constituents of living worlds, being continuously subject
to sudden or temporal expiration (death), utilize idiosyncratic
and synergistic mechanisms in scalarly symmetric processes of
accrued momentum-focusing aimed at conserving and enhancing the
store of living (generational) complexity as expressed in bio-energetics
(chemistry), behavior, and biocognitive complexity across the
barriers of individual death. I
refer to this as sentience-lensing.
The purpose of this activity is clear: across the boundary of
birth and death and their waveLike generations; the only treasure
which can be preserved outside of form itself is behavioral, bio-chemical,
(emotional) or informational complexity which was in a sense the
‘fruit’ of the lived time of a being or symmetry (or
hypersymmetry) of beings. This is preserved as much in the environment
and transports of organismal circumstance as it is in living populations
or individuals of any specific scale. The fact that it is alive
in the transports is of earth-shattering significance to the idea
of intelligence, human and organismal. It means we have direct
and personal access to a library older than the Sun — as
long as we don’t burn down the library.
Whatever useful aspects of this hard-won complexity which can
be inherited and magnified by further generations have the potential
to enormously improve the survival and reproduction opportunities
of progeny, and thus amplify the power of the accruals to ensure
survival of the environment and its participants. Life
assembles a sort of inwardly folding ladder where the product
of diversity and complexity achieved and sustained is re-folded
into — and thus magnified in — the expression of each
new generation. With their arisal this ‘new magnification
potential is also suddenly available to all living participants
— having found physical, emotional and psybiocognitive embodiment
in the ‘new generation’, and thus, by proxy, ‘in
all inward and outward transports of connectivity’ associable
with the newcomers.
As ‘waves’ of living individuals and assemblies of
populations arise and depart, their experience — encoded
in the transports of sentient and biocognitive connectivity —
arrives in each living generation as a resource, and the breakers
of these waves result in the local and distributed availability
of evolutionary potential that is beyond the impossible. This
potential ‘leaps’ in richness, availability and complexity
each time such a wave arrives. Allowed to continue unimpeded,
this results in vastly more evolutionary potential being available‘in
the wave’ in each new generation — the content and
frequency having increased by many factors compared to the previous
generation — even in very small scales of time (and moreso
in creatures with longer lifespans). The dance itself is complex,
and is replete with temporal backflows, feedback oscillators,
and even has a variety of atemporal features of transport and
communion.
During organismal lifetimes, and sometimes at the point of their
departure, various intentional and circumstantial opportunities
arise or exist to transmit, or bequeath —either
physically or symbolically — certain elemental momentums
and products of their ‘winnings’ to extant or future
generations. And this we are aware of, mechanically metaphying
‘genetics’ as The transport. But this idea, founded
in a deterministic and separationist perspective, is misleading
even where it is correct. In our rush to find ‘the magic
transport’ — we missed the whole garden of transports,
deciding that this particular transport, being so mechanically
fundamental to all of organismal embodiment, must be
the ‘holy grail.
This ability is perhaps the single most ubiquitous feature of
organismal activity and assembly. Human endeavor is one
of the boldest examples of this: we emulate (and conceptually
as well as mechanically integrate) living and extant natural technologies
and methods of resource modulation in all our thought, science
and industry. One aspect of this dance we are predisposed to misapprehend
is contexts — for we exist as much as identities in contexts,
as we do in persons.
All species and scales of local (and distributed) organismal Life are
connected in this process of ‘complexity gardening’
– and, as we shall see – ideas of species or even
separation, are, in some very real domains of exploration –
almost totally meaningless, if not dangerously mistaken.
If there is competition, it is competition to sustain the nursery,
not to sequester resources and eliminate them for others. The
context of the competition radically alters the meaning of the
term — as well as how we should come to understand it, if
we are to merely survive its arisal as a social, biological, poetic
and personal metaphor.
o:O:o
We can see how, if a world held but a single species —
for example, a bacteria — the actual expression of that
living planet’s (a planetAnimal’s) cognitive ability,
or ability to actively parse itself or other structures, would
be related in a precise way to the behavior, abilities, populations
and survival of this singular form and its physical, cognitive
and energetic connectivities.
Once ‘infected’ – a world of inanimate chemistries
now possesses (if a ‘world’ can be said to ‘possess’)
an incredibly unusual potential: that of parsing itself,
storing and conserving and enhancing this information behaviorally,
genetically, and in other modalities within an extant population
of beings. Once enfertilized, a planet as a complete organism
desires to continue to elaborate itself and to reproduce
— just as each of its scales of constituents do.
It has become a living egg — penetrated by light from a
local star (and occasionally by incoming objects) this egg gives
birth to ever-more diverse assemblies and symmetries of living
children — inside a vast membrane, on the surface of her
‘shell’.
Earth is a significantly fascinating animal and is complexly
‘communicative’. Our species has a very different
position and role with(in) this animal than is commonly surmised.
It is crucial that we stop erasing her before we have come to
understand that our own complexity and survival does not merely
rely upon our world’s animalian and ecological condition
— it arises directly from and as an analog of that condition
— in all persons, assemblies, moments, circumstances, and
relations. We can attack no animalian or ecological ‘resource’
without attacking our source. Whatever humanity writes in the
biome, is instantly written in all of what we ourselves are and
experience.
When we can reMember this together, and reCognize the implications
and opportunities there manifest — we will possess a significant
portion of a sort of ‘key’. This key is a key of rescue,
rather than unlocking. The rescue it can accomplish is the repair
of human knowledge, and the return of our ancient and purportedly
‘impossible’ birthrights of sentient connectivity.
o:O:o
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