l.e. 05/15/04
Animalian
Cognition:
o:O:o
Whatever it is that drives biocognition is clearly
inspired to assemble new and more complexly relational vehicles
for itself — and the epic of the genesis and establishment
of animalian awareness on Earth represents a profound and relatively
new magnification of previously available potentials. This class
comprises the observable and ineffable sentience of all complex
creatures, including multi-cellular colony-beings, insects and those
we classically refer to as animals.
I would like for us to set aside the common idea of
animal, and exchange it for one in which any form of community-being
is included. Thus a tree, flower, jellyfish or insect, is an animal
as much as a grex produced by slime molds in sudden assembly. I
would also like for us to bear in mind that the forms of complex
organism we commonly refer to as animals (such as rodents, birds,
mammals, etc) are behaviorally divided into distinct classes of
specialization — predators, browsers, photovores, scavengers,
etc. Each class expresses and develops cognition in individuals
and groups very differently, yet each remains in general and specific
accord with the conserved relational histories and opportunities
amongst other member-groups. This is another transport allowing
the ongoing assembly of distinct scales and forms of participant
into profoundly self-magnifying sentient symmetries.
o:O:o
An‘animal’ is a superbly unified relational
symphony of once-discrete organisms, re-united in permanent symbiotic
relation after complex experience as distinct participants has
radically enriched their resources of unique biocognitive prowess.
It is in such synergies of assembly that communal organisms such
as birds or trees are able to radically magnify the sum of their
discretely constituted potentials. This is accomplished by
the ongoing generation, optimization and elaboration of myriad forms
of relational ‘arrays’ and networks — most of
which are recombinant with other local and distant forms and scales
of similar sentience. The same process is readily apparent in human
co-operatives of any scale...from individual families to the species.
Even in conversation we assemble arrays of unique elements into
something we can translate into meaning.
The result of the re-unification of distinct environmental
consorts as symbionts
is unexpectedly and explosively productive of new dimensions of
relational opportunity, which translates to rapidly expanding domains
of cognitive novelty and specialization. These new transits provide
inroads to better survival opportunity of a form that benefits more
participants with any kind of movement toward sustaining itself.
In this way, entirely novel dimensions are invented, colonized,
expanded and used as a basis for the next upward gesture. Over time,
this process establishes and sustains something we might compare
to magically elaborate trees of shared lineage and interscalar communion.
Symbiotic re-unification of previously disparate organisms is not
alike with adding two or more cell-types together, but is instead
the equivalent of multiplying the history of the universe by
itself. Wherever it occurs or is sustained the result is invariably
the direct establishment of a scalarly self-amplifying wave of progenerative
sentience.
When two individually evolved organisms begin to co-operate
intimately the resulting rise in local biocognitive potential cannot
be graphed as a static or linear entity, but must be represented
as a scalarly self-amplifying logarithm which multiplies itself
in such a way as to actively invent new dimensions in which
to continue this process.
o:O:o
Though the scale and degree of sophistication varies
widely according to size, time and circumstance, animalian cognition
is elementally similar to human cognition — which is a slight
magnification of animalian potentials with the addition of some
unique side-effects. This is to say that animals have and use an
analog of language, possess unique modal forms of memory, and also
are subject to something akin to mystical experience. They express
and elaborate a form of rationality, however vague and untokenized,
and in general are probably more like what humans actually are than
our models imply. What they lack is formal representational awareness,
and though this seems like something missing from our side of the
mirror, it seems like something icky, deadly, and unnecessary from
theirs. Animalian cognition plays with tokens only informally, and
their degree and purpose of conservation in this domain is entirely
different from ours — for reasons pertaining to survival,
rather than ‘intelligence’.
The primary problem in our modern understandings of
animalian cognition and intelligence is that in our quest to accurately
metaphy their embodiments of these ‘qualities’, the
base-forms we are comparing them to are not organismal so much as
they are mechanical, and animals are the living antithesis of this
comparator. In a sense, we are comparing an automobile to a tree
— and because the tree doesn’t act like an automobile,
we decide its heuristics are faulty. Our antiquatedly conscriptive
definitions are blinding us to what is clearly present and accessible
in their moment-to-moment activity. It’s ironic when we realize
that these same blinders apply to ourselves.
o:O:o
Animals are aware of identity, and experience themselves
as possessing unique identity-character, in ways not entirely unlike
our own, but different in scale, function and character. We might
not go so far as to call this psyche, and yet there is an animalian
analog for nearly all of the terms we ascribe to our own psychological
and social aspects or identities. Their consciousness includes a
unique version of the ‘storying’ aspect our own is co-founded
in, and they form and sustain individual and social identity that
qualifies as complex awareness of self-existence. Animals form and
experience the general and specific precursors of emotional bonds
that our own are unique magnifications of (each at their distinct
scale and in unique instance), and they are in every way fully-fledged
organismal intelligences. In groups and assemblies their relational
intelligence far exceeds the formal intelligence we continually
test them for (in order to reassure ourselves of their inadequacy),
and in fact our own intelligence is merely a child-organ of the
surviving libraries of planetary biocognition, particularly that
of the animalian scale.
A cell within a human body ‘knows how to be
and become more of what it is and may become’, and no formal
definitions are implied or required. So too, an animal in a biosphere
— or a species in an ecosystem. While each participant is
specifically unique, they are not more specifically unique than
they are generally alike — and here we find further evidence
that biological hyperstructures like Earth are inhabited by instances
of Earth at scale, rather than being comprised of truly
distinct participants — i.e ‘organisms’. There
are exceptions, as we ourselves exist as such, for we are animals
endowed with formal representational consciousness, and thus we
are not entirely animalian any longer.
The environment of a living planet is a unified vehicle
of survival and self-elaboration. In general, animalian cognition
never acts against this primordial dictate, and pays no heed to
our common characterizations to the contrary. Not understanding
what we witness, we ascribe to animalian relation the boldest sorts
of mistranslative interpretations, repeating them to ourselves until
we are utterly convinced of their veracity. In this way our species
has entirely forgotten that we dwell amongst impossible and alien
sentience. The very sentience we are seeking when we look to the
skies in the hope of contact with others akin to ourselves.
o:O:o
In exploring whether animalian cognition is the living
embodiment of an intelligence comparable in sophistication to our
own, we must not make the mistake of believing that our experimental
techniques are not generating the outcomes we observe and credential
as factual. If we were to test the intelligence of a Human (a boldly
problematical idea in itself) we would generally select tests that
were in accord with that person’s culture and habituated modes
of relation. We would not, for example, pose questions in the form
that a shark or bee uses, and we would probably not phrase word-questions
in dead or spontaneously invented languages. Our supposed ‘testing’
of animal intelligence has failed in the same way our understanding
and application of our own intelligence has failed; the comparators
we’re basing our universal perspectives on are fundamentally
misfounded.
A related matter that we must here attend is that
the character of local and historical circumstance largely defines
the living moment of any kind of organism — complexly
relational or not. In this way an organism’s ‘species’
is context-dependant, more than it is founded in physical form.
The size and speed of things, and the relational parsing and response
to environment in the moment is most of what a ‘creature’
is. A man in a prison cell is not the same creature as a man at
liberty in a forest he is intimate with, and an octopus in a laboratory
is nothing like the animal that exists in the same body when it
is in its accustomed environment — particularly an environment
entirely unstressed by mechanical invasion. When we place any
sort of complexly cognitive animal ‘under observation’,
especially in any form of irreal and unnatural ‘separateness’
— we are changing what we are examining so dramatically that
we foil our opportunity to proceed before we have begun. We then
decide that the outcomes are based on the inherent or comparative
stupidity of the creature in question, which reinforces and magnifies
our potential to repeat and dramatically elaborate this error in
future ‘research’.
Regardless of the objections in our modern rigors
of rote and research, animalian cognition is hyper-intelligent,
and consistently deploys and elaborates learning-strategies far
beyond our most advanced theories of heuristics and distributed
speed-learning. Each individual organism, regardless of its scale
or seeming complexity — is in fact endlessly connective with
conceptually impossible vistas of real and ineffable sentience.
and The reality of animalian cognition is so far beyond
our flat and antiquated models of it that a simple glimpse of a
slightly more accurate position seems too wonderful to entertain
the obvious accuracy of: Earth is a transtemporal biocognitive
hyperstructure — a form of ‘animal’ whose primary
‘identity-location’ is ‘not within time’.
Any given instance of Life here is a complete yet unique child of
the entirety of this kind of animal, changing moment-to-moment as
the whole reaches toward ever more complexly expressed awareness.
o:O:o
Let us suppose for the moment that animalian cognition
is one rapidly expanding phase-scale of the organismal expression
of a universe learning itself. Wherever it is not opposed, it will
endeavor to nurture and sustain marvelous momentums of self-elaborative
embodiment. As much a distributed momentum as it is a locally organized
reality, the powers of animalian connectivity and problem-solving
are far beyond those offered by mere representational sentience,
and are the source-garden from which the tiny subset of what we
know as human cognition emerges. We shall further suppose that these
gardens form the basis and inspiration for our own cognitive potentials.
Damage to their diversity, health, and opportunity to thrive is
immediately translated into physical and cognitive damage in our
own species — directly — because the cognitive planet
is a unified hyperstructure.
