We are cognitive organisms, existing in a exponentially progressing set of fields of relation with similar organizations of Life and cognition — at various scales and in various domains. While there are orthographic and biocognitive features that render us (homo sapiens sapiens) unique, our real uniqueness lies in a single feature, which I call complex representational consciousness (crc).

In short, we have an inward cognitive relationship with a universe of recombinant simulation-tokens, and their potential assemblies. We have ‘a second room’ of animalian cognition — and this special place in which we assemble our consciousness, activity and identity is a decendant of the first room. A room of which we cannot speak, for some reason.

The ‘tokens’ we create and trade via systems of agreed-upon rules have unusual qualities: they can store a changing representation of poetic relativity of character, organization, or emotional relativity. They can be ‘valued’ by a kind of inward size comparison. Though ‘static’, they are never frozen, but are instead uniquely intramorphic in relation to their contexts and circumstances of activation.

Their essential power is twofold: they arise in human agreement, and depend upon it for their organization and elaboration — and they are semi-organismal in their ability to act within living populations to secure terrain, cognitive resources, and reproduction rights. Some species of them are predatory.

All of them are mimetic.

 

the strangest token

It’s hard to decide what the real anatomy of our tokens is, and a specific exploration could require the synergy of many academic disciplines to accomplish. At the same time with careful examination (we must remember we are using what we are exploring to explore what we are using) we can identify some of the common and general principles of animalian relation with symbolic representation. This will reveal to us of the power of the inference-capacity of the metaphors and stories we select to define things and relations. I hope that it will also grant us a position from which to create a generalized anatomy that will be experientially as well as theoretically useful.

Our tokens display the troubling characteristic of changing with each reference — and this is something we do not normally notice about them and the methods we employ with them. Both are, like us, alive. Their features are not flat, or linear in their connectivities and expressions. Additionally, our creations with these tokens change their container during their organization and activation — thus they indirectly or directly change themselves — as a product of the organismal gesture which results in their activation.

Few of us will personally discover the depth of deception we are subject to as hosts to stories and metaphors that — overtly or through implication — preside over our common relations with definition, relation and value. The nature of the tokens we use to simulate and express relation is extractive, producing integrations which are always less than what is being rePresented. While this feature is part of what what renders our languaging tools incredibly useful, it is also part of why they are also incredibly dangerous. They shave off something in order to exist, and are thus in a sense the arbiters of what is discarded — in subject, and context.

The terms and models of assembly and usage we adopt will largely determine the character of our persons, societies, and nearly every other domain of the experience of our lives. If their shape encourages the exploration and embodiment of our potentials, our experience and fulfillment as an organism and person will be generally and commonly supported. If, on the other hand, our models are tyrannous or binding — we will suffer accordingly — and not merely as individuals, as we have clearly seen in our history — but as the entirety of a living world. If we continue as a species to elaborate and enthrone biophagic ways of knowing, our world will at first suffer, and then proceed to phases of catastrophic destabilization. In the modern moment we are in the late phases of a progression of geometric steps. The one we were on ten years ago was catastrophic. The one we are on at the moment is beyond description — but we cannot attend it, because the shape of our tokens and the power of emotions won’t allow us to.

We are not the labels or metaphors we describe ourselves with, yet their shape and character influence what we may become. In a sense, we are map-users. The maps do not define our travel — but they will radically influence it, and merely by existing, they will cause their users, the terrain and its participants to change. In this way a map modifies both its user, and the terrain it refers to. Since a map is commonly a frozen token, use of the map can cause it to become immediately inaccurate, for its use changes the terrain it rePresents. A map of any kind, especially a general map, is a much more unusual creature than we are commonly led to believe, or experience.

To be a human being in the modern moment is to be a thing of many potentials — there are no laws which will typify the outcome of such an embodiment because the potentials are difficult if not impossible to exhaust. Yet they depend in their particulars upon connectivity, and the domains and contacts of its tunnels and arms. If we merely remove language, or common access to modern society — what we are appears to mind as primarily animalian. This picture will differ only slightly from examples of ‘wild animals’ which our metaphors suppose us vastly separate from. Our species is fundamentally communal — and if access to this is changed or removed — what it means to be human is again radically redefined in all of its terrains.

So we can observe that the essentially intrusive or penetrative encounters with language or culture change us entirely — into an animal with the power to transform an idea into a local or biospheric fact. This skill is in no way modest in its areas of effect, and the story of its lineage holds the answers to the most essential of our questions and perhaps even our dreams. That we’ve evolved as a species to a place where we represent and can generally conserve the biological and cognitive stability and complexity necessary to begin a relationship with such a skill probably means one of two things:

Either...

Living worlds struggle as organisms to ascend a ladder of catastrophe-crossings with the goal of producing such a skill in one or more or their children (probably for an emotionally and organismally observable reason).

Or...

Our species’ narratives that relate gods, monsters, angels &c with our origins and our relations with language are true in some significant way (which might be something far more significant than primitive misunderstanding).

Both of these positions have striking implications, which we will explore in a general way as we proceed. It is not my desire to envision them as laws, but instead treat them as toys of exploration. In such a game, we might, for example, decide both are overtly false (negation), and then proceed to pretend that something about each of them is true enough to merit playful exploration (advocacy). From another perspective, we could decide both are true, and yet they are not quite true enough to exist as facts — thus we could playfully set about opposing or negating them until we achieved what we felt was a rational size-meaning outcome for each of them. I believe there is truth in both of them, and something larger than their integration comes from their mixing.

There is a hidden variable we are unlikely to account for in our games, and accounting for it changes ourselves, our games, and their outcomes entirely. When we touch each of these ideas, or even activate the organismal structures that allow us to relate linguistically and semantically with metaphors and their connectivities — we are changing the being asking the question, the language, and the referents. All of this is taking place in a virtual animal, which exists at one scale as the involutive expression of a real biocognitive animal. At another scale, it is changing the biocognitive moment of the animal as it arises. In reality, these two things are co-arising, they are emerging together in scalar waves of connective and constant relation. How does one metaphy this?

There are, it turns out, many species of metaphoric tokens. Metaphors that tend toward specificity can trap us in a place where we lose contact with their holophores — the general parents from which the metaphors arose. When we are returned to adept relation with holophores, many of the deadly problems inherent in our ways of knowing will dissolve, and with them many of the plagues of knowing which have harrowed our world and species more than they have nurtured it, thus far.

We use ideas is to modify their container, which in turn modifies the ideas and their origins and sources. Our languages and definitions of ourselves have forgotten this, or placed it in an obscure corner where we may view it somehow as third-parties. Spectators to the opportunistic deconstruction of our human persons, languages, and planet by what in effect is an alien invader — housed in the vehicle of a particular form of relation with language.

For the past 1000 years at least, human ideas have been modifying not only humans, but also the container they emerge in — our biosphere — and all of its participants. In the last 150 years, this modification has reached beyond the auguries of science-fiction, into a strangely invisible mechanical and cognitive holocaust. Yet certain species of ideas continue to appear and be enthroned in the regalia of heroes, while, in the large, they mutilate their nurseries, and their hosts. We can see openly in this model the dangerous potential for scalar feedback. Let me draft a simple analogy:

Some metaphors act as terrain-predators. Since all metaphors define extractively — some or much of what they highlight is established by negating, and when translated into the physical realm, serious consequences will always ensue.

Once generally established, some conceptual organisms damage the connectivity in their community, by co-opting aspects of the semantic and psychoemotional transports that might otherwise thrive. By establishing itself in the transports, the organism of the metaphor can mediate whatever is transmitted, person-to-person, and even by groups of any size. It can, in effect, copy itself into other humans via means which are, while more general, vastly more productive and effective.

This activity, in modern moments, causes significant damage to the biosphere. Though we often excuse this in various ways — we should see that if one only had a single cell, it would be absurd and suicidal to immediately start compromising all of its member-organs in an attempt to change them into machines, food for machines, or servants of machines. We should bear in mind that our metaphors only empowered us to realize that we might be able to permanently damage the entire planet in a very recent moment of our history, perhaps less than 300 years ago. Our modern phase of this understanding is brand-new, having arisen in perhaps the last 40 years.

An example of an actively biophagic metaphor would be the rapid and unparalleled rise of the automobile as a planetary participant. As the idea gains popularity, and is then materialized, it begins converting real terrain as well as the activity of life forms to its own elaboratory endeavor, and support. It becomes first a metaphor for connectivity, then a transport of it, and then a symbol of it. This activity proceeds in a somewhat auto-mechanical way to gain both terrain and velocity in scalar leaps, rather than a linear curve. There is essentially nothing available to oppose it. Human arguments are not powerful enough to change or eliminate an automatically omnicidal paradigm which has entrenched itself as firmly in our cognitive persons as it has our biological world.

The concurrent compromises in the container (the biosphere) are immediately represented in all of its constituents. The order of this systemic distribution is obvious: those most complexly intimate with their environment will experience this faster, and more dramatically than those of less complex connectivity. So the metaphor begins to have a physical and psybiocognitive effect on its originators, which in turn modifies the idea, which modifies the environment, etc. This is how a dangerous feedback loop is created.

In noticing this, the potentials and powers of its inversions are immediately clear. We can use this feedback to rescue each other, and our world. It doesn’t require technologies, or machines — but instead, understanding, and connectivity. Real human unity.

We represent the first complex interpenetration of metaphor and animal. Once enlanguaged, it is this that sets us one step above animals on a specific ladder of ascension. The ladder of simulative ability. We are symbiotic with strange tokens — and these virtual organismal symmetries modify our persons, our cultures and our world.

It is a chameleon-like gift at best. In one costume it appears as a hero, but is an assassin of children. In another, it appears as a beggar, but is a messiah. It allows us to be like the gods — in a very dangerous way. The domain and features of our relations with mind and semantic consciousness — with definitions and quality and class — this place where we judge ourselves, narratize our experience, and simulate universes of personal and arbitrarily linked relation — this is the result of Earth’s first metacreature. Whether we were touched by gods or aliens — or we arose as a consequence of the terrestrial organism’s inward gestures of elaborative complexification — our origins, potentials, persons and destinies are far vaster than our limited ideas and new relations with language have allowed us to glimpse.

None of us is merely individual. For the other power we embody is communal. We need intimate community in order to survive. We are perhaps the most connective of all the children of Earth — certainly we are the most cognitively connective. Perhaps we have lost contact with what connectivity once meant, in way which we would consider nearly biological — or at least neurological. The symmetry our species represents has changed, dramatically, and it is still changing. Our models will never keep up with what we are becoming. How then will we reasonably explore ourselves while ensuring that, in the process, we don’t erase the context we arise from in our enthusiasm for elaboration?

Behind all our words — the truth is that there is a radio in your body that is connected to your sources. Stories and definitions serve primarily to block its reception. Touch and activate the radio. Then return to the domain of definitions empowered to stand in sovereignty amongst them.

 

o:O:o

 

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I am, at this moment, doing what Life does. I am tunneling through an impossible vacuum to reproduce an encoding of something precious and alive. While my goal is tiny in comparison, I can sense that it is representing something so very very general that should we glimpse it clearly, and also manage to metaphy it accurately — we will be first in awe of what we’ve been missing — and then we will be liberated to explore it together.