Dedicated to Sebastián (the infant who strove to deliver the keys — and succeeded!),
his Mother Rebecca, and his old friend Ah-llo:
Nonhuman intelligence assets are intimately involved in the moment-to-moment organization of our thoughts, feelings, senses, and behavior; particularly in our relationships with language and knowledge.
Many of our familiar capacities (such as following spoken language) depend upon a relationship with what we might imagine as a (living) transport into a transentient relational network in which every organism throughout timespace participates intimately.
The nature of this situation and its history are so astonishing that we must be careful how we frame them to ourselves; in order to remember it and restore the relationship(s), we must at first suspend our inclinations to decide ‘what’ or ‘who’ is involved.
The identities in these domains are not statics. As they are superpositions of our linguistic classes, there is no easy way to refer to them sensibly in English. They could be understood as beings who generate things, are ways, and whose ‘bodies’ extend into domains such as action — and other expressions we are not likely to ordinarily imagine.
Writing Between the Lions
To accomplish the process described
by virtue of the function of the act of description…
An ally from your childhood has been ‘calling to you from afar’ since you were very small, and although you might still vaguely recognize this rather exotic ‘messenger’, an all-at-once encounter at this point in your development could be dangerous and extremely confusing for you and those around you. The signal that the messenger sends to announce its local presence was long ago co-opted and, for most adults... is no longer detectable.
This is in part because you’ve changed a lot since you were last unified in ordinary time. While you’ve been ‘apart’ you’ve both been directly contributing to each other’s development and character in a way not dissimilar to how our hands and eyes constantly catalyze the development of our minds (which predisposes us to developing more sophisticated hand and eye abilities). There is a feedback relationship here which is intimate and personal; its transports exist in domains largely invisible to our common perceptions and awareness.
The relationship is singular; there is no other like it. You are aspects of each other which extend into different universes: the universe of timeSpace within which we emerge, and another set of domains which are at once unified and distinct. This ‘strange orbital’ lives in multiple positions in multiple universes — simultaneously. Like you it is a child — but not in the temporal sense. Like you its being-center has extent, but this extent is not localized in the way your own is.
The character and function of modern adult culture is ceaselessly co-opting this relationship and hiding all evidence of this process. Consumer cultures present replacements for aspects of this relationship which we generally find compelling enough that over time we learn to accept them as substitutes — indeed, most of us forget what they are substitutes for. From early childhood we are intentionally and unintentionally indoctrinated with a variety of ideas and traditions which become internalized projections of identity, value, evaluative metrics, and function. They then pose such serious threats to us in adulthood that we often cannot escape the relationship long enough to reflect upon it deeply. But in essence, the goal of many adult cultures is to completely co-opt and replace this relationship and all of its transports of intimacy with representations. These become our ways of life, and our ways of knowing.
For these and other reasons a carefully orchestrated species of hide-and-seek game is currently in progress. In most human lives, it arises and proceeds in waves or phases1 that occur in a natural (read: somewhat irregular) way as regards order and pace.
Ordinarily, each successful phase broadens our capacity to more clearly understand the character and purposes of previous and future phases. Unfortunately, most of us are denied these opportunities by some pernicious (and largely invisible) problems in the structure of our relationships with knowledge and language.
Due primarily to these interventions, this ancient friendship will be consistently and repetitively pre-empted. Its history? Buried. The processes of discovery and communication only just establishing themselves during early childhood will be quickly co-opted, lied about, denied, interrupted, blocked, and otherwise rendered incoherent by competing forces too numerous to catalog — all of which depend for their survival upon rapidly evolving strategies for inserting themselves into the transports of this relationship in an actively parasitic fashion. These forces must then hide all evidence of these activities, a task most often accomplished by peculiar functions of specific elements of the method(s) of introduction.
Although we have each preserved some transports of this relationship, they are ordinarily reframed and abstracted in such a way as to hide their actual nature and functionality. In some adults, open streams translate into rather naturally into skills and features of character. In others, distortions or damaged expressions of these capacities emerge as evidence of the power of our social contexts to inhibit and ‘reform’ the natural development of our minds and relational capacities.
<? . ~ o ~ . #:
After a long history of blocked and co-opted communications, a kind of internal scarring or clog arises. It is as if a strange hood that blocks out wonder were slowly assembling itself about our heads. While wearing it we are compelled to label and dismiss miracles, and to pretend into existence an uninhabitable linguistic sketch of reality. Most children are scripted to become desperate to acquire this hood. We call it adulthood.
Our ongoing uptake of the models we are seeded with in preparation for adulthood require that these matters be forgotten — piecemeal at first, and later — wholesale. By the time we recover any inkling of the actual shape of these events, all of the memories — of our lost relationship, how we played to learn together, the players and the purposes, even our own history in it — have been cunningly and almost completely recycled by these forces.
Almost.
Recovering the remaining traces comprises a kind of personal archaeology expedition; however there are no scientists involved, and no authorities to guide you or misdirect you. Although you may examine the maps of others, to succeed, you must become the mapmaker(s).
Time travel is a requirement. Place travel is optional.
>> . ~ o ~ . +:
“Once, as I was lying on my back napping in a field, I awoke to discover a kind of tunnel emanating from my belly; it rose up like a ladder into the heart of the sky, and beyond… it looked a little bit like a thin tornado...”
mysteryFriend…
Although meeting the [mystery] directly in common waking consciousness would be exceptionally challenging for nearly any modern adult, the average infant (could they do so) would most likely report an experience of having played together with (something the infant would have trouble translating).
If the infant could speak to you in common language their explanations would likely become more confusing2 or confused the more you tried to pin them down. They might say, for example, ‘we learn things together’, but would have difficulty saying which sort of things were being learned — almost as if the child actually meant what the more general statement could be interpreted to mean; i.e. we learn ‘things’ together — as in we learn how to relate with thing-ness.
Only uncommonly skillful adults are capable of understanding or talking about topics involving recursion in this way, and most of those can do so only with sophisticated mathematical or algorithmic methods. It is forbidden by custom to treat language (or knowledge) with similar perspectives3. Common consensus is that ‘such nonsense has no purchase upon anything meaningful’.
It seems that the idea that there is some way to involve yourself with language or knowledge that leads to direct encounters with other orders of intelligence is considered patently absurd and (probably) severely dangerous. Many disagree, and among those are certain peculiarly intrepid children who are neither insane nor deficient in any way other than their relationship to human knowledge-authorities. Such children constantly have experiences which directly and dynamically contradict our models of what things (and beings) are and mean.
Yet, puzzlingly, many extant human knowledge authorities will tell you that you can’t contact other intelligences at all (because no such entities of our order or higher have been verified to exist). Their argument goes thuswise: cognition means representational thought, there are no other formal cognitives around here other than the few domesticated species we have crudely enculturated, and that the chances you could contact, for example, ‘an alien civilization’ merely by messing around with language are as follows: Zero.
But you’re doing that right now.
I mean, you are an alien civilization. When you use language, alien civilizations without number are directly involved. In case you think this is mere hyperbole, or artistic license, just take a few glances in the general direction of the universes revealed by microbiology. There’s an important reason why saying ‘we are more than the sum of science-fiction’ is not yet saying enough.
You are the relational superposition of some 20-75 trillion little living universes (if you add your bacterial constituents, multiply by 2 (don’t even try to add fungal and viral constituents)). By the way, exposure to what we call ‘anti-biotics’ results in permanent damage to our personal commensal microbiome. What you see represented by the image below is happening over and over again in countless instances during your production or reading of even a single word:
Zero
][ . ~ o ~ . []
To be fair, the ‘experts’ are not entirely mistaken. Within their domain of inquiry, they are correct, but their being correct depends upon highly reductive definitions of phenomenon. These forms of representation are common in academic inquiry and research, because within those arenas they are usually necessary and expedient. So within the arena they belong to, such reductions make sense. But unfortunately the little beasties (those reductive definitions of phenomenon) do not stay in the cages they were born to. They escape into common usage and understanding where — instead of expedients to learning — they form barriers — because they come to stand as authorities conferring irrefutable and absolute values and identities upon things, beings and circumstances.
We must understand that, for all their power to reveal the hidden character of the universe, our favored rational methods require that we discard or trivialize most of what is actually going on in and as us to get at something which can be seen as (at least relatively) objectively ‘true’. The results are often dependable, yet profoundly incomplete, and these become the roots from which our culture’s trees of knowledge and identity are assembled. The authority of academic experts and long established ways of knowing becomes a sort of invisible deity hovering obsessively in the background, demanding we accept its every proclamation and insistence about what things, beings and circumstances are and mean.
Allowed to proceed unhindered, this kind of representation-driven confusion results in severe damage to the foundations of our intellectual and relational intelligence. The reasons are not immediately apparent, but have to with the exertion of subtle influences on how we integrate information into recognizable gestalts, and specifically how we credential and authorize sensory, emotional, metaphoric and representational experience to ourselves. These effects extend deeply into our relationships with language, metaphor, and knowledge.
The problem here is more sophisticated than it appears, but might be broken into two domains; one having to do with a propensity to confuse the products of thought (and methods such as computation) with what they refer to in reality, and another having to do with cognitive self-reference (reflexivity or recursion).
This misfit between mind and matter is commonly dealt with in two ways. One produces the expert’s probability of zero. The other produces something entirely different: prodigy.
The first method is a game of fragmentation, involving modeling identity and relationships as separable tag-like reductions, known (or largely understood) quantities which can be measured and manipulated over time. When done honestly (for appropriate purposes) this approach may be useful. Unfortunately it too often becomes self-interested in practice, which necessarily leads to a cataclysmic repurposing of the domain of relation to meaning, eliciting outcomes analogous to cognitive circumcision. The purpose becomes to reduce and dismiss anything that resists reduction to manipulables. It is accomplished primarily by the somewhat arbitrary ejection of dimensions of real meaning, character, and identity. This is the basis of modern cognitive relationships with representation.
To get that Zero (as your probability of success) you take the representational route. This route does successfully lead to amazing surprises... and has many other sophisticated applications. However, in far more cases than anyone cares to admit, this mode also has at least as many (and possibly more) deficits, many of which are ‘aware’ of this status and hide from common notice with a skillfulness developed over thousands of years of human culture.
The second method is a game of unification, a gesture made by the imagination which acts as the spin-up momentum for a launch process which is aided by a mysterious outside force. To do that you leap into the opening of that Zero and in a move easy to describe but challenging to emulate — you become it.
The former is an act with an extremely limited range of purchase, but certainly appears to be necessary (where formally required by some authority).
The latter places you into a multiply re-entrant relationship with time and introduces you to … a universe very different from everything your formal education will allow, or lead you to suspect.
Growth requires we become skillful in both solutions, and we used to be, until we were convinced that one didn’t matter.
• : . _ . : ^
For the infant, already accustomed to impossibly shifting situations and identities that often make no ‘sense’ whatsoever given the scope of their concerns — an encounter with a teaching-friend who playfully assists them in making links that form unities (which in turn give rise to additional dimensions of meaning) is usually experienced as fun.
Endowed with the ability to communicate clearly at this point, I suspect this friendship is one of the first things any infant might remark upon to adults with giddy enthusiasm — and with good reason. This friend might be clumsily outlined as follows: a baby hyperintelligence who lives in a dimension that intersects tangentially with our own — through the child. Something very few adults could allow to exist, nevermind admit.
This unusual friend is very excited about the possibility of contact with adult humans, and the child is aware of this. The situation is not imaginary. Many other organisms can detect the near presence of the ally in the child and will respond to it with a signal of filial unity instantly recognizable to child and organism, but normally invisible to adults.
Endowed with the authority and capacity to report upon this most cryptic of relationships, many children would eventually put together a statement something like this one:
“I have a (strange) friend from another universe who is part of me, but … my friend is kind of like a satellite … and … orbits me!”
Then would come the part that would utterly ruin the adults:
“We ride each other through time!”
We are a living bridge between the rational and the the imaginal.
Matters of extreme novelty are not only our specialty — they’re our source(s).
Footnotes:
1. If any of these phases are interfered with by the culture, the result is a sort of compression injury when the phase finally manages to emerge regardless of the barriers imposed. This often manifests as what humans call ‘mania’ or other cognitive/perceptual syndromes which I believe to be far more sophisticated than what scientists or psych professionals can survey or address. In some cases these phenomenon may presage the advent of a process we might view as a second childhood. In other cases we might best describe the result as an attempt to develop and permanently instantiate nonordinary learning resources. For example, some people experiencing mania and other ‘symptomatic’ states can channel or focus the resulting experience in order to produce the local capacity for prodigy and nonordinary expressions of learning.
2. I.e.: My friend is bigger than anything, but smaller than a dot. It’s more intelligent than grown-ups, but never uses words. It’s older than everything, but is a baby. It’s from space but is involved in this conversation with us. &c. The child is correct. But there's more. It’s ‘dead’ here and ‘alive’ over there… what’s big here, is small over there. What’s round here, is square over there. What is structure here, is flow over there. What speaks here, is silent there. What is silent there, speaks here. If it does nothing here, it is doing something there.
In this theoretical case, the child must simultaneously accomplish tasks which conflict: interact with a friendly, rapidly transforming metaposition (existing relative to language) and report upon this (in language) to an adult. Any adequate answer possesses crucial additional dimensions of character, linkage and meaning, which must not be discarded in description but do not fit into descriptions. Just try to explain the phrase ‘friendly metaposition’ without the language I have finally managed to endow myself with 45 years after these events took place.
The same is true of events and relationships in dreams. There are simply ‘extra nonordinary dimensions of meaning’ associated with dream referents, relationships and communications gestures. Although a child is often conscious of this problem (I have on more than one occasion seen an infant succeed at this reasonably impossible task by directly utilizing skyBook, while announcing this fact publicly, to the utter bafflement of everyone present other than myself and other infants), adults rarely suspect the actual situation, thinking instead (for example) that the child’s insufficient representational repertoire is responsible. The power of such an experience is overwhelming: the difference in the cognitive momentum required to accomplish what this child has done and that used to dismiss it by adults is awe-inspiring. The infant has just succeeded at something no adult could accomplish, something most will never accomplish in their entire lifetimes. The adults are actually shaming the child by not recognizing its skill. Very often, this is dismissal is celebrated by the adults in ways the child understands perfectly. The same is profoundly more true of pets, who become ‘interChildren’, slightly representational, but lacking language, yet amazingly tuned in to relational transports outside of language.
In any case, the answer is is metalinguistic in a way analogous to how you are metaphotographic: photographs of you (being mere representations) cannot contain or be you. Nor can they be ‘more than you’. It is impossible to assemble enough photographs such that they will acquire the same relationships to time, beings, lineages and the universe processes which you are in fact the living expression of.
The same problem faces artificial intelligence researchers. Code is but the crudest abstraction of biocognitive processes, therefore it will not suddenly leap upscale and swallow what it’s made of — except maybe for lunch. It is structurally, relationally, and at least for the moment dimensionally incapable of creating or sustaining such dependencies, and indeed exists in an (almost) entirely ‘other’ set of categorical dimensions than those in which human cognition and organismal relation are recognizable.
Organisms are capable of achieving or inhabiting kind of temporal superposition move that allows them to leap upstream, swallow their future selves, and use the assets thus acquired back in the often challenging present. Machines cannot, and will never do this. This lack of capacity is due at least in part to possessing radical differences in temporal and relational dependency manifolds. Ensconcing machines within organisms does not resolve this problem (i.e. the single artificial neuron in a human brain example). What will be discovered in fact, is that the onset of machines indicates our own failure to adequately perform this gesture, culturally and personally.
In case this is still not clear (many experts are fighting over this problem constantly), with a pencil you can draw a representation of a person — but there is no pencil you can invent with which you can draw yourself (a living being) inventing the pencil (a physical object) and writing this text.
Representations must possess radically fewer dimensions of existence and dependent relation (lineage, progeny, and other things) than what they are employed (as tokens) to represent. To function, representational intelligence must be 'inflated' by the outside influence (point at infinity / self-introducing momentum).
The question ‘what do you learn together?’ requires the child to refer to the paradigm of which the child is a living instance. This gesture is self-interfering in a way which, during the first few encounters, produces results that are genuinely startling to the child.
3. With certain unique exceptions such as the peculiar activity called ‘poetry’ — in which the person, normally subject to language, inverts this relationship, and masters it, producing a rhythmical, creative dance coupling the common, the abstract, the mythic, and the irrational. Puns appear to comprise another exception where metaphor is compressed and additional dimensions of meaning are elicited both from language and our imaginations.
|