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games of knowledge unification...

When human beings passionately pursue questions their activity results in change in a vast spectrum of formal and informal dimensions. The character and positions from which they begin these pursuits will have a formative effect on their travel and the outcomes. When the products of these pursuits are primarily frozen, defend themselves, and require terrain and active conservation in living hosts we might aptly call these imaginary tokens artifacts.

If we clumsily compress digital sound or image data as we render it for recording or copying we introduce loss-artifacts — reductive distortions of their source. If we recompress the artifacted product — we can quickly arrive at an outcome which is either ‘pure artifact’ (there is no existing source-data left) or ‘mostly artifact’ (containing a negligible and useless amount of source-data). Yet there is a way in which all of communication becomes subject to this once we employ artifactive vehicles for encoding and communication. More shockingly, this ‘lossy compression’ is the kind of thing our own intelligence is built with, and on. A metaphor is a form of extremely lossy artifact — an audaciously radical reduction in nearly every case, and this poses dangers native to our specific form of intelligence which we have never really been empowered to explore or avoid.

Ironically, part of the reason we have been blind to these dimensions is that we do not yet possess generally accurate metaphors and models of them. Many of the artifactive threats resultant from our learning and caching activity exist in terrains that our most speculative minds would be inequal to the task of imagining, and some of our common agreements about truth and the shape of reality are more absurd than the reductions we find in cartoons. We face in every moment of our human lives and experience new and deadly-serious problems with the enforced compression of meaning, relation, and character required by the cognitive juggernauts we know as Science, Religion, Commerce, Technology and Law. Our very ‘learning’ is entirely subservient to these behemoths, and most of our human experience and relation will elaborate them and their terrains over ourselves and our world in nearly every instance.

Much of our modern experience is more about information than it is about meaning, though in the modern moment the species of information we encounter is more mechanical in general, so the basic definition of this term has changed dramatically over the last 75 years. Before machines information was primarily organismal and relational, i.e: informal — which meant that information (structure) and meaning (content) were generally co-equal. Yet this is not the case with the highly abstracted vehicles and paradigms we will encounter and be effectively if not overtly forced into congruence with. With the advent and rise to cognitive prevalence of ever-more mechanical methods, transports of relation, and human experience, these matters and their constituent momentums have all but obliterated our organismal and human character, identity and imagination.

We might call to mind that stimuli is information to any organism at any scale or size we may examine. Sentience is the reductive reHighlghting of relational isomorphisms in a cognitive dimension, and is a game of rapid attentuation which leads to adaption in the biocognitive organism itself, as well as its sensory modalites and abilities to make or sustain new integrations of existing or available potentials.

Human beings are particularly maleable; they become what they are surrounded by and can sustain amongst themselves as knowledge, activity, and tradition. If the majority of the stimuli one encounters is primarily predatory, mechanical, or mechanico-predatory in character, purpose or source — this radically alters the relational and elaborative opportunities of the being in question. In this sense, organism and environment are unified. But with our species, knowledge changes us, which changes our world, which changes the meaning and function of the knowledge — if we cannot openly acknowledge and attend this, the result is a bridge of fire — where each step is twice as deadly and precarious as the last.

Human knowledge is radically altering our environment — and at the same time — we are the environment being altered.

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‘Knowledge’ is unique from of information, which we could agree is, so far as we know, only emergent from abstraction and agreement amongst human beings. It seems a bit surprising to recognize that all the surety of science, medicine and mechanics are imaginary — yet in basis they are. These terrains of knowledge are really simply toys, which we conserve and deploy more often in their own interest and elaboration than for ours.

Had we the opportunity to see them from a position a few hundred years into our own future, this peculiar aspect of our supposed ‘expertise’ would be immediately be embarrassingly and perhaps humorously apparent. Such a perspective would grant us the understanding that toys are not meant to stand over us, but instead dissolve and recombine liberally to produce the travel we call learning. A good toy makes no copy of itself, but instead provides experiential access to its source.

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Surely our sciences are not toys — after all, they accurately and adequately illumine to us the ‘facts’ of the universe we inhabit. Yet the ‘most factual fact’ of any form of knowledge is almost infinitely non-factual when compared to the ‘accuracy’ of its the sources it but partially reflects.

Just as a matchstick is not the Sun, a fact cannot supercede the incredible and general ‘truth’ of an organism like you or me, regardless of how convincing arguments to the contrary may at first appear. In ‘fact’ the simplest organism is ‘billions of dimensions more true’ that the most accurate fact that human intelligence could ever construct in terms of any sort whatever. Ways of knowing do not ‘trump their sources’ as our modern modes of representational cognition imply. Rationalities are endless in number, and those which humans commonly credential comprise the tiniest mote of the potentials available to us — thus we must never be convinced that some definition of some process, relation, or being is adequate, factual, complete — or even useful.

The only way to actually understand anything that might be sought is to establish direct experiential connectivity with the lineages, realities, participants and transports of what is being sought. Names and systems will never suffice, primarily because they are ways of limiting perspective for the sake of agreement, rather than transports to novel perspectives or radical integrations of existing potentials. Systems of knowing and their gardens of facts — are really toyboxes of filters. We deploy tokens in order to avoid getting our minds dirty with direct contact.

Somewhere in the boxes of the toys we’ve lost or ignored there exist ways of changing perspective that lead to radical and explosively accurate integrations — and these are vastly preferable to answers...every time. Those sorts of toys have to do with games of unifying the others, rather than allowing their polarities to spend our effort in copying them, or aiding them against one another...

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Knowledge and Language...

Knowledge has a lot to do with the language it’s expressed in, and we are scripted from birth in our individual cultures to value some languages far in excess of others — particularly the highly sophisticated languages of science, philosophy, mathematics, and computation, a newly emerging child of the former triad.

Languages modulate and change in service of the agreements they encourage, sustain, or silence in human populations — at any scale from the individual to the planet; yet these agreements in their turn re-generate vast changes in language. The relationship is scalarly co-emergent. Neither has formal precedence, yet Knowledge as a momentum is more concerned with changing language than vice versa.

The relationship between a given language and Knowledge can be seen primarily in the domain of poetics, which we might call the dimension of character. Languages with strongly conserved poetics retain aspects of imaginal relation such as gender in objects or relations. Languages which prefer function give precedence to compression, repeatability, and more formalized and tokenized relational dimensions in general.

The latter species of languages produce a kind of exhaust as a result of their compression. The exhaust is toxic to the essential sentience of the language’s hosts, and if a language of this sort gains precedence — one that values object over organism in its most essential roots and activities — then the people who are host to it will actually become a planetary phage based in cultural agreement and activity. Since sentience is a gift of the vast biocognitive diversity of Earth — any language or way of knowing that results in attrition to the anciently conserved biosphere immediately results in permanent attrition of a similar sort in every participant of that unified organism.

Because Earth is a unified psybiocognitive hyperstructure, and some languages overtly deny this potential by their form and agenda — it is possible that the empowerment of a single human language over most or many others could result in the extinction of most or all of the animalian biosphere — merely because its logics and preferences are myopically self-agrandizing in direct opposition to clearly observable reality.

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Seeing the ‘person’ of which the organs of knowledge are a part grants us a more tangible relationship how these gardens of get formed, what they and their organs are about, and what we might be might actually be able to do with them.

What would we learn if we were able to understand, or directly contact the sources of what we believe to be knowledge, and ways of knowing? One thing we’d discover is that we have direct experiential access to something like a living transport of knowledge unification... and an explosive dimension of entirely new ways of learning-travel whose real opportunities and potentials dwarf the sum of human storying...entirely.

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symPole foundations...

If we make a big garden, and call this ‘knowledge’ we can see that in human experience and activity it is comprised of separable subGardens. This isn’t the same as separate gardens — since they are all essentially unified — but is a way of changing our perspectives on the garden of knowledge as a whole to reveal, or highlight (illuminate) different aspects of its character, functionality, identity and embodiments.

Seeing an idealized arrangement such a family is useful, even if it is inaccurate in terms of scale and relation. An intentionally primitive and playful starting model is offered below:

An idealized model of the significant source-gardens
of ‘ways of knowing’.

Fig. 1

To simplify our explorations, I’ve condensed and reduced the available ways of knowing into 5 ‘kinds of garden’. These generally correspond to their analogs in our cultures, experience and our own understandings. The blue elements represent formal knowing — products and artifacts of formal knowledge such as learning-modes, applications and outcomes. The red elements represent their informal sources and counterparts. In this game, red is the source of blue, and blue tends to dislike and dominate red once established. The ‘green dots’ in the images indicate terrains of relational crossover betwixt formal and informal — the transports via which they continuously inform or affect each other.

Using these little imaginary linking-toys, we can assemble some perspectives on how they interact, co-emerge, and relate. Each ‘perspective’ uniquely emerges with its peers, children and sources — in an endlessly recombining dance which is more akin to living music than diagrams or theories..

None of these ‘ways of knowing’ are actually distinct from any other — in fact they form a singularly unified garden. Our ideas of them as ‘being separate’ are a result of how our perspectives and systems of valuing oblige us to relate with them, and are not evidence of their actual distinctness. In this sense, each ‘one’ of these ‘gardens’ is actually a perspective on the whole of knowledge, rather than being actually separated as in our model.

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Strangely, although the informal has an affinity for and values the formal — we may notice in our direct experience that the opposite is commonly not the case. The ‘more sophisticated’ forms often actively despise their sources, relations and peers. This seemingly small mystery holds vast libraries of treasure, if we can merely explore it adeptly — and it is treasure of the sort that can save a living planet, and all of its cultures — without radically changing them toward any enforced model.

Some of these ‘formal children’ of informal parents actively despise, attack, or oppose their informal ancestors or other ring members.

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Here’s the key to the schema employed in the diagrams available below:


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Click on the [blue] name of any garden to briefly explore its characters, sources, and relations with knowledge and its peers.

The models presented above are toys of concept, and are thus meant to generally illustrate a schema of relations, rather than as accurate precendence-graphs of the displayed participants.

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While we’re making toys, it’s interesting to explore the lineage of these gardens, and how they emerged from what we can probably agree was a unified progenitor. This ‘expanded animalian awareness’ divided itself into three children, who ever more distinctly become Common Knowledge, Art and Spirituality.

From the incessant relations and reflections of this trinity the articulate and rebellious twins of Science and Philosophy emerged into the family.

This results in a game of echoes and novel recombinance as the existing and new members change each other — as waves of shared complexification echo across the ‘boundaries’ between the gardens. Not all of this interaction is friendly.

Here is a toy of the process described above, rendered into an idealized animation.

 

 

The players:

Black: The progenitor of complex human sentience.
Green: Art
Brown: Common Knowledge
Gold: Spirituality
Red: Science
Blue: Philosophy

Note: This pattern is re-experienced and uniquely recapitulated by every human child born into any culture with language. It is further uniquely recapitulated by every scale of human assembly, from the formal scale of the family — to informal conversations amongst strangers. Communities, nations, corporations— each of these social organisms has a different yet generally similar relationship with this pattern of knowledge-emergence.