Sentience:
Every organism is an instance of sentience
as much as an experiencer and expresser of it, and any given assembly
of organisms at any scale we may select is alike in this regard.
Thus any single organism is as much an instance of the sentience
of its world and environment as it is ‘a participant’ or ‘individual’.
I use the term to mean organismal relation with self, others and
environment in a very general and informal sense, and I wish to
highlight the precedence of non-locality and scalability in my usage.
Most of sentience, and its infinite dimensionality is fundamentally
relational. Subtract relation, and there’s not much
left to discuss.
I consider sentience to be an assembly-event shared
across every possible scale and dimension, more than it is a ‘property
possessed’ by a given organism or assembly. I share the perspective
that sentient beings of any possible kind are sacred, as this is
my own direct experience, and in general I include in my own understanding
a precedence for linked genesis and purpose over ideas of competition
and individuals.
To my eye, the sophistication of a given instance
of sentience is directly proportional to the complexities of relation
and symbiotic unity that empower and sustain it. A lot of its source
lies in dimensions we do not credential — hyperconnective
dimensions which have more to do with spirit than science or biology.
Additionally, sentience assembles itself from a vast
multiplicity of simultaneous ‘scales’ or domains of
size, speed, and relation. The human being, a complexly representational
sentient, is amongst the most delicate and malleable of terrestrial
instances of animalian sentience for precisely this reason: we are
‘hyper-relational’, and imaginally relational, as well
as being animalian cognitives. We experience and express changes
in other beings as changes in self — emotionally,
spiritually, and intellectually.
I believe the purpose of our species is deeply involved
with this, in a way akin to how our own immune systems are involved
in sustaining the life of our extremely complex physiologies: we
are the only species complex enough to be capable of protecting
all other species, and the animalian biosphere itself. I consider
this to be one of the fundamental reasons planets produce representational
cognitives such as human beings. Yet all scales of life are
sentient, and their assemblies reach ever beyond our models of sentience,
into dimensions of relation so intimate and complex that they comprise
hyperstructures which lie completely outside the sum of our models.
googleDef
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Cognition:
Classically defined, cognition is sentience with additional domain of self-aware thinking. This requires a representational substrate, thus excluding all non-formally-representational organisms.
I use the term to refer to the transports and ‘knowing
modes’ of organismal relation as they relate to formal and
informal symmetries, and the recombinantly co-creative dances that
therein arise to embodiment, conservation, and enaction. I believe
this to be the activity of instances of a hyperstructure which transcends
local presence in timeSpace, and is as inclusive of contexts, histories
and transports as it is emergent from or with(in) any given participant. It is my perspective that non-representational organisms may act as agents in cognitive symmetries which are unavailable to our study because we cannot adequately conceptualize them yet.
The living realities of organisms are
so hyperbolically miraculous in their real character, purpose and activity
that the sum of our sciences, fictions, religions and myths combined
appear pallid and contrived in comparison. Our models are miniscule
and reductive compared to what they point to, and the antidote to
this is direct contact, and unified experiential exploration of
these anciently evolved and ever-so-delicately conserved gardens. The cognitive behavior of organisms (in general) represents an emanative recapitulation of something
which is ‘preternatural’ or spiritual in nature — if one unlinks matter from
structure and it is revealed to be energy. Unlink organisms from
their structure and they are revealed to be vessels for a flow that is shared amongst them. Cognition is
the activity of myriad scales and dimensions of vessels in relational
and cooperative emergence.
googleDef
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Biocognition:
In general, this term refers to organismal activity
which assembles itself into knowing, whether at the scale of human
metaphoric cognition, or the chemico-energetic sentience of cellular
organelles. I see it as the purposeful and organized behavior of organisms active in problem solving, relational restructuring, or otherwise identifiable progress or defence, beyond what we might expect from simple evolutionarily-inspired behavioral paradigms. The model supposes that human cognition is not as significantly different from biocognition and is a peculiar outgrowth of it involving exceptional focus on representation. Biocognition has little in common
with our models and metaphors, which are in general too flat (antiscalar)
and unipolar in their perspectives. It is not locally ‘housed’
so much as it is locally assembled, expressed, and enacted —
thus any organism has transports and organs which are not local
in time or place, and is a living reflection of the activity of
these transports as well as those of localized, formal or semi-permanent
character.
Environment is an organ of biocognition, and is consistently
optioned by all participants as a form of extrinsic ‘memory’,
such that catastrophic changes in environments (which always occur
at multiple simultaneous scales) are akin to ‘inheriting a
stroke’ in the sense of a severe and often irreversible loss
of conserved memorium-stratas. Human beings are amongst the most sensitive creatures in terms of their inner relationships to environmental change; for our own cognitive basis is assembled in both the real and the metaphied world of our experience and reflections on it.
The term lays precedence on a vast spectrum of scalability,
and should generally be understood to refer to multiple simultaneous
histories, scales, locations and participants emerging in synchrony
as and with(in) any instance or assembly of organismal experience.
We speak of the body as comprised of cells, but the actual symmetries in question have many scales and extend beyond the individual deeply into history, the environment, and the future.
It is a perspective that leads into the possibility of modeling atemporal hyperstructures of
living beings, rather than being forced to focus on individuals — and as
far as animals are concerned, assemblies of impossible complexity
are most often what individuals are.
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Psybiocognitive:
I use this term to refer to a being or symmetry of
beings who are psychologically bio-cognitive, like humans. We are biological, cognitive, and psychological to the degree that we may choose to evaluate the functions of our own minds according to principles belonging largely to that discipline.
I believe all organisms
possess, experience and express analogs to our ideas about ourselves,
such that if we experience ourselves as possessing psyche we can
be certain its progenitors and catalysts are present at every scale
of organismal embodiment and relation — however primitive they may
appear at our own scale. In general it is my experience that this
apparent primitivity is more akin to impossibly generative momentum
than it is to something worthy of any denigration due to seeming
simplicity.
What we refer to as the psyche — an element
of the emotional and memory-based hyperstructure of a human being,
is observationally present in even the simplest animals —
and is in fact an outcome of historical relations and common co-emergence,
which insure that environment, participants and relations are a
single animal by the activation of emulative and responsive reflection
amongst these three. I suggest that this feature of cognition is
present at every possible scale, and in transports between any possibly
distinct element or assembly as well. In this case, an organism
is psybiocognitive in that it experiences and expresses a form of
meaning-relation based in identity and memory, it is biological
(not an artifact), and it is cognitive — to be what it is
is to be engaged in knowing as action.
A machine which can function and sustain itself may
be technically cognitive (it can demonstrate goal-based discernment),
but the identity and biology aspects of such a construct cannot
be more than simulations. An organism is never mechanical, the metaphor-mixing
we commonly agree to sustain breeds atrocity as quickly as it breeds
ignorance of our own natures and potentials.
All organisms are essentially psybiocognitive hyperstructures
— and I am experientially convinced that complex animals and
especially humans fit this sort of model more than they do our concepts
of ‘animal’ or ‘human’. The term is a melding
of emotion, memory, circumstance, identity, biology and cognition
— and refers to the source-character of the awareness of organisms,
in general and complex or distributed organisms in particular.
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Representational
Cognition / Cognitives:
Organisms are cognitive, sentient and embody and express
many forms of intelligence. Some of these forms are general, and
shared by all organisms, others are unique to the size, scale or
function of a given organism or sub-class of them. Many animals
have and display what we consider to be rudimentary representational
skills, yet it is not their habit to assemble universes around the
conserved artifacts of representational consciousness. In this our
species appears unique — at least if we believe it is a possession
we somehow acquired. I do not find this to be the case, and believe
that the whole opportunity to have representational consciousness,
in terms of biology and cognition, is the result of incredibly diverse
relations with organismal environments and participants of many
kinds. I believe our human consciousness is the result of the environments
we are immersed with(in) and that the complexity of our consciousness
is directly related to the biodiversity and intellectual diversity
we encounter moment-to-moment.
Representational consciousness is a property emerging
from our ability to metaphy, and the character of our associations
with metaphor, which generate the peculiar and preclusive schemas
which are our only choices in terms of ways to assemble meaning
and value. Fundamentally this involves the establishment of an imaginal
universe or ‘bag’ if you will, in which various forms
of assembly and relation take place such that the contents of the
bag are practiced, relationally elaborated and conserved. Formal
memory precedes thinking, and thinking will always emerge once such
memory is regeneratively established.
Essentially we found or were able to invent a kind
of inward mirror — and in this mirror we play with toys that
allow us to distinguish entities and momentums, ascribe them values,
and ‘parse’ our experience through the multiply recombining
lenses of metaphor and relation-schemas. The topologies and linkages
in our imaginal universes are representational, in that they utilize
metaphors as vehicles for meaning-content, and also for communicative
conservation, i.e: culture.
The arisal of a representational cognitive on a diversely
populated planet is and has been a direct threat the to biosphere
itself, and to the entirety of the animalian populations of our
nursery for at least the last 1000 years, and has become so virulent
in the last 150 so as to constitute a global extinction event. It
is not so much that this form of consciousness is ‘bad’
or wrong, but rather that there are modes of relation with it that
function more as disease than intelligence-lens, and our species
has a subtle predilection for precisely this species of relationship
in these dimensions. Since the inception of our ability to metaphy
we have struggled with elemental questions about our sources, purposes,
the meaning of separation and death — the fundamental questions
which our form of consciousness is prone to assemble. Generally
we presume these questions unanswerable, and are scripted in industrial
cultures to replace them entirely with mimetic analogs.
In acquiring this inwardly reflective dimension, we
accrued potentials far beyond our capacity to understand or apply
intelligently. Like an infant given something that can create or
destroy many universes rapidly, we have been fumbling in the darkness
of our own models far too long. Adeptly understood and explored,
the potentials of representational cognition are an impossibly profound
gift of access — but if we are purposefully divided from their
sources and the organismal intention that assembled them in terrestrial
biohistory we are forced to make models that oppose not only our
progress but our very experience of what we are and may become.
To understand the potentials of this acquisition we
must re-model their sources more accurately, and preferably continue
this process indefinitely. Our common models infer that precedence
lies in the individual in terms of consciousness, and yet the truth
is far beyond this flat perspective — especially because habits
of relation rapidly emerge as biocognitive attenuations in the structure
of the organism. Environment and organism are ‘more than unified’,
and any participant we may select is as much an instance of
environments as it is an individual being. Representation in
our imaginal universes implies false separations for the purpose
of establishing distinctness. When we allow these separations to
become dogmas and ‘knowledge’ we have been conned by
the spurious sophistication of the toys we use to explore these
gardens. Yet there are many other ways of directly experiencing
and relating with these cognitive momentums, and we can together
easily discover and remember our common abilities and heritage when
we have new models and perspectives to play with. Gaining access
to how we assemble knowledge grants us immediate skills that are
extremely flexible and general — they comprise a key that
unlocks something we as yet have no metaphor about except in poetic
or spiritual terms, and it is akin to access to a living library
existing as a sort of garden outside of time.
For better or worse, our species is Earth’s
first and only complexly representational cognitive. We must understand
the perils and opportunities inherent in this circumstance from
the most inclusive of perspectives — and the only perspective
of that nature is one which continually expands, preferably exponentially,
and in a growing number of domain-perspectives. This activity we
agree to and sustain is a form of cognitive division/distinction
which is at as explosive in terms of reproductive progress as it
is aggressive in acquiring, dominating and holding terrain. The
terrain in question is our world, our lives, our cultures and our
experience because we enter these gardens in order to assemble meaning
of every possible sort — but especially value comparisons
such as those we depend upon as the foundation of our entire panoply
of problem-solving modes.
o:O:o
Intelligence:
We must distinguish between human intelligence and
that of other sizes and forms of life in that our human criteria
for intelligence have to do with representation, memory and creative
linkage of disparate tokens, transports of relation and contexts.
Animalian and organismal intelligence is far more sophisticated
than our representational variety, such that the awareness of the
organism in coupling with its environment produces inordinately
adaptive symmetries in response to circumstance. It is not inordinately
fascinated with the production or preservation of tokens in general.
Nonrepresentational intelligence is sophisticated
in profound excess of even our most ‘advanced’ models,
and its power in this regard lies in generality. Too often we allow
our ideas about superficial complexity and size to inform our judgments
of merit, when in fact simpler and smaller structures have many
benefits the vaster collectives depend upon for their moment-to-moment
sustenance and apparant sophistication. My perspective is that the
general intelligence embodied in a single organelle in any common
cell is likely to vastly exceed the sum of mechanical intelligence
our species could ever produce. This implies that most if not all
of our most fundamental suppositions about these topics are catastrophically
misfounded, which is my direct experience.
We might generally define intelligence as an attenuation-game
between an organism or assembly and a challenge of some sort. This
relates it directly to the domain of parsing and resolving matters
of connectivity — sometimes called ‘problems’.
The sensing, testing, engineering and enaction of intelligent responses
comprise the realities to which our ideas of intelligence refer,
and we must be cautious not to prefer our models to direct observation
of what they refer to only vaguely.
In human terms, because we are representational cognitives,
we are vulnerable to a situation where our intelligence violates
the essential meaning of its own definition in that it becomes a
direct threat to our own survival. This can only happen with an
artifact, and is extremely uncommon in the non-simulative intelligence
of other organisms on Earth. Simulation then, bears with it incredible
opportunities and deadly threats. The opportunities must be sifted
from the threats, and we must never allow mimics of intelligence
to own the terrain of our real potentials for exploration, unity
and understanding. They far exceed every example we have ever seen
embodied, and it is crucial that we are equipped to discern a mimic
from a transport in this domain, since the majority of the garden
is solid mimic in our time and circumstance.
By this I mean to say that human ‘ways of knowing’
are, like organisms, self-interested — and our history is
a long record of our consistent inability to gain ascendance over
the power of our own value-models and simulations of circumstance.
We must not allow modes and toys of knowing to rule out our ability
to far exceed them, for in every case this is not only our potential
but our desire and our destiny.
True intelligence is inclusive of all possible forms
and transports of learning, meaning and knowing. It caches little,
and spares no time for making copies of reproductions of copies
of things. Just as a good vehicle will dissolve and lead to a far
better vehicle faster with each cycle, so too will real intelligence
disdain artifacts in favor of access, for in such activity the very
source and heart of prodigy are everpresently renewed.
googleDef
o:O:o
Terms
relating to representational consciousness:
Semantics is a tool. When applied as a paradigm to
populations via the transports of enlanguaging and enculturation
it deploys hidden threats whose nature it is to occlude their own
presence. Cognitive Activism deals fundamentally with the principle
that it is possible to re-establish direct experiential contact
with the sources of learning and knowledge by more deeply understanding
how we form concepts.
In general this requires we re-model our concepts
about concepts, and include a few positions that our modern understandings
exclude or deny. By creating and exploring new metaphors about what
metaphors are — we change the very foundations of our own
representational consciousness, as well as our access to cognitive
and unitive potentials which are so vast as to comprise an undiscovered
universe of opportunity and novelty.
When we have access as cultures and a species to the
foundations of how we assemble our paradigms and schemas of relation,
our natural animalian intelligence is free to co-operate with our
evolutionarily conserved representational intelligence. The result
is far more than explosive, and puts the sum of our wildest and
most openly speculative ideas to shame in comparison.
When we do not have access to new ways of understanding
and expressing our own representational consciousness we invariably
suffer the silencing, atrocity and erasures that result of elementally
misconstruing the toys we use to distinguish, value and compare.
having this access returned is the cognitive equivalent of gaining
wings, filled with eyes.
The following 6 terms relate to these and related
concerns directly.
o:O:o
Hypostasis:
Without hypostases there is
no such thing as knowledge, names or ideas — the ‘concept’
of associating a formal structure with an extant circumstance or
object is itself a hypostasis. But there are many unique ways to
achieve this, and the characters and features of the ways we select
and celebrate together prescribe the characters and products of
their outcomes when enacted.
Before we may perceive or reflectively
relate with any kind of imaginal assemblage at all, we must first
assemble a vehicle of sorts — a kind of ‘crystal ball’
which acts as a both a lens and a filter. It reduces
incoming stimuli and the essential organismal character of what
is perceived until a sort of doll remains — and then it
highlights this reduction as having meaning--value precedence over
that which it is a reflection of. It is with the repetition
and elaboration of these kinds of activities that we gain the deceptively
simplistic precursors which lead on toward complex representational
intelligence — the form of reflective awareness which we believe
differentiates us from animals.
When we speak of our hearts
as an inward dimension where emotion ‘is the authority in
truth’, we recall the more elaborate and complex figurations
of earlier civilizations who had many such inward organs —
nearly all of which were considered staging areas for the assembly
of non-human and non-local channels of intelligence.
A hypostasis, then, is a kind
of bubble — and to form it requires that we employ a membrane
of some sort — as when I distinguish a flower from the ‘great
everything’. The character of these membranes defines the
elemental functions and connectivities of the bubbles they enclose.
All the myriad ways of making, storing, recalling, trading and sustaining
these bubbles converge at a variety of scales: the person, the group,
the family, friends, a nation — the planet, &c. At each
scale, each instance is entirely unique, yet at the same time generally
alike with all other instances.
The sum of these comprise our
modern lexicons — and our ways of knowing. Taken together,
these appear to be our most fundamental references of comparison,
acting as ‘measuring devices’ in the non-ordinary dimensions
of meaning, relation, value, &c. If these are authentic, they
result in prodigy when enacted. If our lexicons are instead
primarily mimetic, they consume intelligence and worlds when enacted.
In
general, a vehicle for the manifestation or conservation of an imaginal
symmetry of any sort.
0: A size-speed-form of embodiment. A star is then
a hypostasis of it’s parent-scale, the galaxy. Humans and
other organisms exist as biocognitive hypostases of the
Terra-Sol family. Living worlds such as Earth give birth to and sustain biocognitive
hypersystems as
‘organs of knowing’, and we in turn create imaginal hypersystems
[terms, conceptual lexicons and such] in similar fashion.
This perspective is a metaphoric gloss on the related concept of hyponomy (hyponyms) in linguistic terms; i.e. Apple is a hyponym (subinstance) of Fruit.
1. A reductive vehicle for the conservation or re-presentation
of circumstance, experience and identity. All ‘terms or concepts’
are hypostases first, and conceptual only in relation to their functions
as vehicles for the assembly of meaning.
Semi-organismal in basis due to their dependance upon animalian hosts, hypostatic
entities have ’life’ in the dimension of human biocognition
(seen as a unified field). Thus conceptual hypostases act somewhat like
organisms in the environment of human cognition — the cogniscium of our species. This means that they actively compete for resources, attention, terrain (human minds and action), and reproductive opportunities.
This perspective has some features in common with the theories of memes.
2. A real or imaginal vehicle, such as a doll, idea,
word, mathematical term, metaphor, &c — seen from a more
general perspective. Such vehicles are used to assemble, test and store knowledge,
ways of knowing, and agreement about the meaning and necessities of
human existence.
3. An internal stage, where psychoemotional figurations
come to life and proceed through various adventures of relation, comparison
and development. To speak of ‘my heart’ as ‘a kingdom
of emotion’ is to associate an imaginal universe with an inward
‘place’ in the body — real, imagined, or both.
Long ago it was believed that each person was
an assembly of hypostatic organs —
so to speak — where celestial intelligences would contact and
advise, strengthen, weaken or inspire them. The chart referenced
above refers
to the
Greek hypostases as they developed over time, according to the perspective
of Julian Jaynes. It tracks the development of these inward
dimensions as they evolve from nearly pure experience toward ‘spaces’
within the self that are eventually ‘integrated’ or ‘owned’ by
the individual.
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Uniphore:
A uniphore, like the term universe is a term
intentionally used to describe everything. Child, ‘that which
is seen’, and God are examples of common uniphores. The surprising
fact is that what we call ‘the subject’ of a sentence
is often a way of speaking about everything at once — yet
we pretend not to notice this, and thus the idea of a uniphore is
not common in communication, even though it is constantly deployed.
It is likely that during the early uptake of representational
cognition in our species the primary meaning-gestures were uniphores,
akin to the holophrases
of young children — terms used so generally that they primarily
act as vehicles for the character used to express them, rather than
pointing to a particular thing, event, or circumstance in a the
way our later verbalizations do. By expressively varying the character
of the referential gesture, one can refer to everything at once,
and still be referring to a specific aspect of theEverything.
Holophrases are preserved throughout life but acquire
sophisticated meaning and relation values as we grow more deeply
encultured. When we use ‘cool’ to enthusiastically indicate
some quality sought or admired we are using a holophrasic technique,
although the tem ‘cool’ is not precisely a holophrase
in this example. A uniphore is the precursor to formulating a holophrase,
which is a precursor to metaphication and representational intelligence.
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Holophore:
A holophore is a term that there cannot be other
terms without. Hidden in our languages are root semantic elements
without which formal language collapses. Holophores commonly have
unique meanings for each person and culture, such that, for example
‘animal’ may mean something similar to many different
people — but the personal meanings for each are entirely unique
as much as they match a schema. Similarly, the ‘sum’
of a holophoric entity from any culture of any size will be at once
entirely unique, and also akin to a generalized ‘definition’.
An example would be the idea of connectivity.
Without connectivity, we cannot metaphy at all. Relation
is another example. Without relation the entirety of all human lexicons
dissolves. Perhaps the most fundamental single concept to all of
human language is separation. It turns out that what we
think we mean by this term informs and prescribes nearly all potentials
of any lexicon we may assemble or enact as ‘knowing’.
Thus it is that certain terms aren’t merely
terms, but the roots upon which language, logic and comprehension
are founded. This circumstance leads onward to the exploration of
a set of ‘first concepts’ somewhat akin to a child’s
syllabary.
All lexicons have root elements which are
required to found their progeny upon — and whose meaning and
relational characters establish the character and function of the
lexicon. The first 10 numbers are an example of a mathematical codice
of numeric holophores. They are necessary precursors, have an order
of arisal, and none could be suddenly ‘done away with’
— in general — without destroying mathematics as we
understand it.
If we were to follow the penetration of representational
cognition in our earliest ancestors (who could in fact be cellular)
we would find that the ability to conceptualize is based upon an
incredibly small assembly of significant experiential elements.
Once established, this basis is painted with poetic or relational
meaning, and becomes a metaphor — or concept. It is then folded
and recombinantly intra-reflected as these lexicons elaborate, which
is their nature in representational cognitives like ourselves.
Let’s return for a moment to the holophore of
‘separation’. Without this seemingly simple idea —
there could be no other ideas — for we would be unable to
distinguish betwixt entities of any sort in any dimension. What
this means is that the character of our ways of communicating —
even our reasons — inherit the character and meaning-relation
aspects of our take on ‘what separation means’. If we
have a fundamental misunderstanding about separation — of
any kind, in any dimension — this misunderstanding will be
folded, translated and explosively magnified in all of our other
ideas, terms and ways of knowing. Such a circumstance resolves in
catastrophe: the artifacts of the error soon overwhelm any native
general accuracy, and intelligence itself collapses, crushed by
the necessity of sustaining self-magnifying errors over something
more akin to actual relational intelligence.
If we had a complete and ordered tree of the first
12 concepts required to assemble our common forms of representational
consciousness [a relatively simple thing to produce], we would see
something akin to the lineage of primordial holophores from which
human metaphors arose over evolutionary time. Each of these would,
with a few exceptions, be simply a way to say ‘everything’
(a specialized uniphore) — from a unique instance of character
(filtering) and perspective. The meanings attached to them —
primarily the informal and thus hidden meanings — are folded
and filtered to produce the seemingly endless barrage of concept
that is our modern human heritage and perhaps too often our burden.
The meaning of this is at least as shocking and useful
as anything that could ever come from physics: when we modulate
our agreements about the meaning of a holophore — we are literally
changing what species of mind we are an instance of. Inaccuracies
in our agreements about the meaning of holophores form the hidden
basis of our metaphors such as ‘god’ or ‘animal’.
When these roots are misfounded or too severely abstracted, this
error is grossly magnified by our common or cultural ‘foldings’
of these holophores into metaphors, understanding, and action. The
result is commonly atrocity, founded in absurd relational understandings
built upon even more absurd ‘pseudologics’ — particularly
those that drive war.
For example, if an ‘animal’ is a ‘mostly
disposable mechanical process’ then it is a simple matter
to exterminate or torture them en-masse without any more remorse
than one might experience throwing away magazines. Similarly virulent
forms of this resulting myopia are active at the roots of nearly
every possible flavor of human wrongdoing, particularly those of
cultures who punish the victims of their own abusive paradigms with
silencing, imprisonment, torture, rape, genocide and cognitive if
not physical extermination.
The understanding and exploration of the power of
holophores in establishing or changing our elemental access to our
own intellectual and cognitive potentials comprises an entirely
new frontier in the domain of learning systems and our species’
relationships with language and meaning. The power to know and intentionally
modulate holophores in small groups is the power to change a world.
Some common holophores: Separation, Metaphor, Love,
Time, Space, Hand, Organ, Animal, Distance, Light, Gap, Star, Planet,
Universe, Family, Cell, Eye, unityThing, Character, unityPlace,
unityWay, Connectivity, Holophore.
o:O:o
Metafication
/ Metaphying :
To metaphy is a hypostatic act of inventing or presenting
to self or others a concept which stands for some aspect of perception
or theory. When I point to the brightest thing in the clear mid-day
sky and say ‘do you see the Sun?’, I am asking about
many more dimensions than are apparent, and ‘making names’
about phenomenon is part of this process. Agreeing about names is
another.
So when we make a metaphor for a phenomenon, we are
making what we consider a ‘term’. To do this is to metaphy,
and the process is metafication. If we say ‘it’s snowing’
we are metaphying our experience of the weather by relating to a
previously cached metaphor. This is a first-stage rendering of a
descriptive gesture, as opposed to a second-stage rendering such
as ‘snow is like floaty rain’ — which is a simile
including the metaphor ‘snow’.
Metaphication is discussed in greater detail in the
essay: What
Are We?
o:O:o
Metaphor:
The product of the metafication process. A toy of conception and
a vehicle for the communication of conception, assembled from previously
cached metaphors and foldings of holophores linked according to
a generally formal paradigm. A fundamental difference in my use
of this term is that I use it to indicate a cognitive organism,
as much as a toy of reference. It is my experience that ideas and
ways of naming or knowing are cognitive organisms at the
scale of the individual, culture, group or species.
There are many scales of metaphor, and the term is
used very generally in my work — for example there is the
human metaphor of ‘desk’ and there is the way that any
terrestrial organism is a biocognitive metaphor in the solar-terrestrial
hyperstructure. Metaphor itself, is a holophore, and changing our
understandings of what this means — what can be done with
such things — grants unique forms, speeds and scales of intentional
access to this radically alters our intelligence, potentials of
learning and our consciousness. Classically speaking if we say the
clouds are fluffy gods we are making a metaphor and if we say the
clouds are like fluffy gods we are making a simile. Both are considered
figures of speech, but I use metaphor to mean something much more
general and closer to ‘vehicle of reflective knowing’.
googleDef
o:O:o
Simile:
I see these as second-stage metaphors which refer
by including an extant metaphor and establishing likeness. It is
a more obvious recapitulation of the process of metaphication, and
is generally informal in expression and application.
googleDef
