Voll
eY Ball: [don’t let it ‘fall’]
— (together)
We believe that our species probably
rose to complex sentience in groups, and that the ties between members
of these groups were usually extremely intimate and emotionally profound.
In fact, I think we’ve grossly underestimated the necessity
and power of community amongst sentient animals in general, and humans
in particular.
These ‘groups’ are
not merely collectives — they comprise (and exist as) distributed
organisms; and in symmetries of this sort the loss of an ‘individual’
is more like the loss of an organ than the loss of ‘a
member of the group’. Each member acts as a unique conservator
of memory, relation and learning in many simultaneous dimensions —
for the entire group — and to lose one is to lose both the emotional
relationships and whatever unique benefits that member (who was also
a community) represented, possessed, developed or shared.
Complex human languaging and the
biocognitive changes that emerge in its wake are the results of the transmission
of culture — they are not inherent to our form of animal or
our biology. Proximity to a source of ‘copying’ is crucial
to our form of intelligence — should even a single gap in the rhythm of this transfer ever occur, the generations following
this gap would have to reinvent language and knowledge from scratch. Thus we may observe that we
require precisely these sorts of relational intimacies established
by our distant progenitors in the modern moment — they form
the enabling transports allowing us to transfer the skills, cached knowledge, and languages [as well as errors]
that comprise our representational heritage amongst our emerging
generations.
During childhood we experience
‘uptake’ of representational modes and habits of relation as a result
of enculturation with family, peers, and larger assemblies —
and without this phase in which we acquire conserved lexical and pragmatic
skills our intelligence remains essentially animalian. This means
that our practiced mode of ‘intelligence’ is neither intrinsic
or biologically inherited — it is imposed from without as a cultural
inheritance. The necessary brain and nervous-system complexity are inherited, but the particular ways these assets will be developed, activated, and employed will be based almost entirely on culturally stipulated tracks. Unfortunately, these tracks act more like organisms competing to survive than they do like the assets they advertise themselves as. In many cases we end up serving as a vehicle for the conservation of some concept, cultures of function, or some fashion.
o : O : o
This mother is carrying an organ of herself.
‘Memorials‘
To our common experience, during passage into and ‘through’ time, beings,
sensations and circumstances retreat into dissolution somewhere beyond
the event-horizon of now; but death is the most significant
expression of this change. The confusion and pain of sudden permanent
separation from a beloved or habitual source of relation or attention
results in shock, and it is from this shock that the desire and necessity
of caching ‘memoria’ arises, as an extrinsic transport
of ‘re-connection’ that ameliorates a portion of the shock
while at the same time serving other more subtle purposes. One of
these purposes is the cognitive pre-figuration of internal memory,
which is then practiced into new internal potentials through consistent
experiential ‘re-relation’ — or the ‘force
of habit’. This is the birthplace of the representational intelligence
which our species is still in early phases of experience and competition
with.
To give you an idea of the power of these intimate group-or-family-based relationships, imagine a square configuration (representing a group) of 4 dots (each representing an individual). If we now connect all dots with straight lines, we will get 6 lines; 4 edge lines, and two lines forming an X in the center. Imagine that each of these lines represents a relational way of seeing the world (interpreting and relating with experience) which is dependant upon one’s connectivities both with another member, and with the group as a unity. If merely one of the members of our 4-dot group dies, our previous library of 6 ways is instantly reduced by half, to 3! Now, in reality, the interconnections between individuals which comprise a group are far more sophisticated and multi-dimensional than this flat model. The actual outcome of a single death in a group which lives and hunts, works and feeds together can be extraordinarily profound.
Once an expected relational presence
is established in personal or communal experience, the resultant separation-shock
can be at least marginally assuaged by hypostasis: one imbues
a real or imaginal token with connectivity-power such that it acts
as a ‘radio’ to the lost element. Constant re-relation
with this tokenized ‘holding vessel’ allows us to partially
compensate (emotionally) for the loss. For this reason, the death
of a child, companion, or leader eventually inspired first the conservation
of the corpse, and later a forest reasons for the
creation of effigies. This practice was eventually so commonly employed that dolls (and statues) of living beings probably acted as local hypostases of a distant individual — particularly leaders. Statues were not statues: they were, in most cases, one-way radios to the departed other.
Hypostasizing behavior partially resolves
the matter of separation for the extended group as well as the
local ‘family’ since both now have ‘access’
to the departed (or distant) member through the hypostasis of the corpse or doll.
Additionally, these vehicles act as cognitive ‘calls’
to memory — their consistent presence and enaction potentials
form a lens through which the lost ‘family member’ is
rendered into local time-presence. This results in regeneration of
the relational element — a precursor to ‘memory’.
Through reflective interaction with the tokenized remains of lost
or distant elements, group members obtain and conserve vehicles of remembering
and storying. These activities combine to create an entirely
new petal on the flower of relational culture within the group.
In our own time and cultures,
a physical limb which is lost is often replaced with a prosthesis.
We speak then of a similar principle, in cognitive terms — one
that applies simultaneously to individuals and groups, and is emotionally
connective in basis. The lost member or members can be made to ‘appear
with us in effigy’, and thus ‘a portion of their function
and relationship’ is brought back to the local moment from places
in the past, and places which exist apart from our common experience.
Dolls are at once an emotional
prosthesis and a vehicle for the caching of relation into a transportable,
re-experienceable token. The primary dimension of transport is not
space, but imaginal time. Further, relations with extrinsic tokens
forms the substrates of behavioral habit required to assemble both
memory and representational cognition. Lastly, as we shall explore
in process, we have and continue to use them to reduce the overpowering
magnitude of the gifts of our organismal sentience, which, in direct
experience, are actually terrifyingly profound.
These
somewhat clinical noticings are not even the beginning of this mystery,
one which leads right past the noses of science, philosophy and religion
alike — directly into places and potentials we consider ‘impossible’
in the modern moment.
o : O : o
Death,
Separation & Tokens
In the second study, scientists working in the forests of Guinea observed two chimp mothers carrying around the bodies of their dead infants for weeks after their deaths. One chimp carried her dead baby around for more than 60 days, an unusually long period, according to the scientists. During the period, the babies’ bodies slowly mummified as they dried out. The bereaved mothers used tools to fend off flies [BBC]. — How Chimps Mourn Their Dead: Reactions to Death Caught on Film, Discover Blog: 04.29.10.
I’d like us to think of
the hypothetical creatures I speak of (our distant ancestors who existed
in the phase between animal and representational) as ‘nothing
more’ than complex animals — a dolphin, gorilla, whale,
or tiger are all this kind of animal. As we consider these ideas more
carefully together, we must bear in mind that we are speaking of animals
capable of experience analogous to human emotions, but who do not yet possess formally representational memory or language.
They were complexly
cognitive, but not representationally sentient — yet —
and possessed nothing akin to formal representational memory as we
understand and experience it. It appears incidental, but there are
few examples of pure predators which display the depth of filial unity
common to animals who browse — hence perhaps the ancient and
crucially important ‘mystical’ polarity of ‘Lion
and Lamb’ — the group-predator and the group-browser.
Tightly knit animalian groups
will be seen to display a variety of responses to sudden change or
loss of members. Some of these appear to have minimal ongoing consequences
for the evolution of representational intelligence, but there is an exception I find telling: observe
enough chimps in this circumstance and you will eventually see a mother
chimp mourning her dead child in what appears to be a distinctly ‘human-like’
fashion. She may, for example, drag it to a chosen private place and
coax the corpse with familiar gestures as though hoping to convince
it to return to life. This mourning often lasts long enough to threaten
the life of the mother, and it disrupts the entire group enough to
create significant pressure to transform the behavior into something that is at least survivable in the wild, which this situation is not. In the emotional chaos that ensues when a child dies, whatever bonds the child may have had within the group are surely expressed within the group; but the mother’s are deeper, and pre-exist those of the child.
It is a small leap from this position
to carting the skeletal remains around, and this is almost assuredly
the source of the form of caching behavior we eventually elaborated
into memory, language and what we call ‘intelligence’.
Certainly we were already capable of caching food in terrain, and
it’s a very small (but complicated) step from that skill to
caching of the corpse of a loved on as a form of ‘memory-food’.
The ‘starvation’ this staves off is the ever-dwindling
‘relation-treasure’ that the departed member was the local
transport of while living. Without this ‘food’ supplied
by ‘re-meeting’ a token representing the lost member,
the rich nurturences of shared history, reflectivity and experience
fade suddenly to naught in the rushing flow of novelty that is the
life of every conscious animal.
In a more settled environment,
remains can be ‘enjeweled’ or otherwise enhanced to ‘show
off’ the new status of the departee. All of these behaviors
are troublesome from a survival standpoint (at least until such caching
pays off in problem-solving terms) and require an inordinate
amount of precious attention to sustain. Yet some of this
peril can be ameliorated if we exchange the actual remains for a token
— and here we arrive at the protoform of a doll. What is ‘carried’
or conserved is ‘more general’ and acts a localized structural
reduction of what was relationally proximate and then lost. The barriers
to survival posed by hauling or enthroning corpses can be done away
with almost entirely if one merely carries a rock or stick in which
the departed entity is hypostasized.
o : O : o
It is a simple matter to see if
this theory has any purchase on reality — we can observe animals and humans
experiencing and responding to loss, or exploring the potentials of
caching in more general terms. It is this very generality which is
so rare and useful; the ability to see that the ‘classes’
of organisms on Earth are not as we paint them, and that our own species
are not only not distinct — our main distinction is that we
reflect (in the sense of a living mirror), and thus we each uniquely
sum local experience, rather than merely ‘receiving it’.
Indeed, we sum and re-express, reflect, sum and re-express —
endlessly.
In discussing these matters with
Sarin’s owner, I was impressed as she related her experience of the expression
of matriarchal hypostasis in her cat, Mexi. After
the mother cat had given birth, homes were eventually found for her
various kittens — an event adult humans consider ‘normal’
yet which would most probably be experienced as a catastrophic separation by any
animal that rears young (particularly a human being). Throughout her
life thereafter, Mexi would occasionally gather together a number
of toys (balls in socks) that matched the number of the missing
kittens. After assembling her ‘family’ in doll-form,
she would hold one in her mouth, and make the kitten-calling sound.
Although this is an instance of memorial hypostasis in a predator,
the house cat is actually a nonordinary animal due to its history of
domestication, as well as its common experience as part of a human
household or group.
On another occasion I witnessed
a young blue jay practicing ‘caching’, which he might later
deploy as a strategy for hiding and re-membering food which was found
but could not be easily transported or eaten. He dug a modest hole
in the ground, moving wood chips and other debris away. Then he placed
a small, smooth piece of blue glass in the hole, and buried it. When
he was finished, he found three flattened sticks, and made a marker
for the cache, placing the first horizontal to his perspective, the
second vertical, and the third horizontal. They were arranged bottom
to top, smallest to largest. Atop the final stick the bird placed
a dried berry. It then briefly surveyed its craft and departed.
The effect was profound, and surprisingly
akin to what we have been doing with our own dead for thousands of
years. So much so that I must wonder how much our species learned
from nothing more than proximity to common birds. The jay was learning
to create personalized extrinsic caches with geometric recognition-markers
assembled from nearby detritus. It was a young bird. Probably about
5 months old. This was an instance of a learning-game which would
later be translated into caching food, an activity I have witnessed
amongst corvids (the family to which ravens, crows and blue jays belong)
many times.
I believe that the animals destined
to become Homo Sapiens were caching food long before we acquired the
common habit of caching the dead, but we did not have the same emotional
bond with food or toys as with departed members of family or group.
It is relatively easy to see how the already present skill acquired
in tending a food cache could be transferred to the preservation of
departed members in order to partially compensate for emotional anxiety
or pain.
o : O : o
gapTag
Our own lexical memory is a sophisticated
elaboration of precisely this form of caching. The creation of effigies
of the dead was probably (according to common archeological evidences)
preceded with keeping the corpse itself as effigy, and this could
easily have been the first formative ‘caching gesture’
that led on toward complex representation. It may in fact turn out
that whichever species of animal first begins creating
dolls — is the one that will go on to become formally
representational cognitives. The ‘whole toy’ of this behavior
is actually a form of emoto-cognitive vehicle for playing various
kinds of tag across various sorts of ‘gaps’, particularly
the one we know as death.
As it turns out, there are extremely
few communal animals who could survive while carrying the corpse of
a departed relative — or manage to protect it. Even if the corpse
can be cached — it must be protected from predators and scavengers,
which requires survival resources better spent upon the living members
of the individual and group. Subtracting these resources from active
access would prove deadly in nearly every case. It thus requires a
significant degree of behavioral luxury in order to successfully manage
such a task; without this resource the investments of time and energy
required become functionally toxic to those involved in it.
Given these noticings, we may
imagine that whichever of the branches of our animalian ancestors
first perfected dollmaking became the competitive leader in the race
toward representational cognition [Rc], because experience
with extrinsic tokens led to the ability to substitute imaginal tokens
— to metaphy experience and history [memory].
This approach might also explain
why creatures who clearly possess the necessary relational complexity
for [Rc] do not display it: whales and dolphins do
not exist in an environment where dolls can be crafted and sustained,
nor do their evolutionary adaptations endow them with simple ways
of accomplishing this. Neither can they preserve their dead, because
in the ocean this would be functionally impossible. Only the animals
who ‘broke the waters’ and came to dwell on land would
have this opportunity, in general, due to the nature of the undersea
planet and the fact that few of these animals remain in small areas
of terrain, which would probably be a requirement during the founding
of this sort of activity.
Of all the animals with manipulative
appendages, it is the hands of simians which are most suited to dollcraft.
Yet before we could ‘craft’ artifacts at all we acquired
the peculiar hypostasizing abilities that were the precursors to the desire
for them. In these phases a natural object sharing some dimension
of relation with the departed member could become a transport first
to memory, and then to direct experiential relation. Re late i on.
A form of re member ing a portion of a distributed self which had
departed into a mysterious dimension.
It was the peculiarly profound
emotional intimacy between members of protohuman groups coupled with
the circumstantial luxuries that allowed them to conserve the corpse of a departed member
that resulted in the first formal extrinsic caches of beings. These were the
protoforms of memory, and without that precursor, a species will develop
general problem-solving skill, but is extremely unlikely to develop
anything akin to representational thought. Our kind of ‘thinking’
requires tokens, and before we were able to sustain these imaginally,
we sustained them extrinsically.
o : O : o
Contact with dolls made in effigy
acts as an cognitive lens, focusing the necessary attention away from
survival matters toward a universe of mystery, history, memoria and
emotion. This allows us to begin the process of re-generative awareness
we refer to as memory. Without the awe-and-emotion inspiring hypostasis
of some sort of corpus, funerary artifact, or doll, the swarming novelty
and challenges of moment-to-moment existence rapidly erase most if
not all cachings of previous experience.
Only once we are able to craft
or carry an extrinsic token of a lost member do we obtain a transport
to ‘re-member’ the departed loved ones, sovereigns, teachers,
circumstance, villains, heroes and healers. Consistent relation with
the ‘toy’ acts as a signal regeneration lens — an
amplifier for any extant internal caches, formal or non.
This form of cognitively-charged
object acts as a magically envitalized ‘radio’ which is
always tuned to the lost element or being, and is not merely (as we might prematurely assure ourselves) an imaginal
artifact . The ‘doll’
or toy, made of ‘unliving matter’ becomes a associative
transport to the dimension of ‘separation’ itself; being
in fact a member of the ‘class’ of separate, nonliving
entities. The most impossible thing for us to understand is the most
important: these toys act as actual radios to another dimension, and
that dimension is inhabited. In other words, these were not merely
toys, but a technology of gap-crossing.
The skillfulness we enjoy with
relational intelligence is based in systems of making, characterizing
and arranging doll-like toys — stick figures crafted according
to a single general schema we’re taught or often culturally
forced to emulate. Once we began carting corpses and crafting dolls,
we were on the road to being able to create the kinds of inwardly
simulative hypostasis we call memory. This leads to more complex modes
of simulation, prediction, and tool-making/usage.
For thousands of years we’ve been stuck with slow dolls that
act to preserve themselves in precedence to accomplishing
the goals for which they were created. To our inward eye, they appear
as a transport to direct contact with and conservation of intelligence,
yet are in nearly every case merely highly-artifacted terrain predators
who dump the cognitive and attentional momentum we direct at them
into their own dominance and reproduction.
Something is wrong with the general
schemas by which we assemble our toys of memory and knowing, and the
way it is wrong is causing a variety of catastrophic doll-explosions
in the cogniscium of our species. We are being eaten by our ways of
knowing, and their terrain needs in coupling with the ever-amplifying
toxicity of their enaction is burning the sentient library of our
world like it was a luxury snack.
The big secret is that anyone
can invent new schemas, and some of these can be so adept that
they can outperform the entire history of human learning-modes almost
immediately.
It’s time we had some very
different dolls.
o : O : o
Tie
a Knot in the Water
Try to make a doll out of water
and you encounter directly the problems posed by memory for animals.
The rushing poetics of conscious relation are impossible to preserve
as static entities because experience itself will cause whatever we’ve
thus far erected to morph toward an ever-progressing circus of change-states.
If we pretend consciousness is ‘like stone’ then we believe
we can carve it into formal effigies of experience and relation —
but if at the root it is more like water, this may be a grave and
explosively costly mistake.
In terms of relational intelligence,
formal caching isn’t the best strategy, and if it were, we’d
see more instances of it enacted with high precedence in animals.
While it can be useful in some circumstances, if granted it too much
precedence these practices begin to consume the natural flexibility
and momentum of regular old biointelligence, transforming it into
resources to support their own reproduction and dominance.
The truth of the water is movement,
and in order to make a doll out of it, one must first to slow it down
somehow — by freezing, for example. Both reality and consciousness
are elementally liquid, and relational dimensions are arising, changing
and departing at millions of scales of size, location and speed —
always. Not only are these matters like liquid because they ‘flow
in streams’ but also because the whole universe we speak of
is hyper-reflective. This means that each token is constantly changing
in reflective co-emergence with its near and distant neighbors: our
lexicons are, in a sense, alive in this way.
Caching strategies that cause
their own significance to increase dramatically when re-enacted will
threaten the survival of an organism more easily than they will assist
it with new ‘understandings’, because ‘understandings’
are bold reductions of sentient awareness, and require
inordinate biocognitive resources to sustain and defend.
In effect, such strategies lead rapidly to explosive problems with
feedback, and it could be argued that much of our heritage of representation
arises from a terrified response to the self-referencing aspects of
intelligence in general. Our forms of common relational consciousness
are sublimely vulnerable to explosively progressing feedback problems
of the sort that form the basis of some of what we refer to as ‘mental
illness’.
Additionally, formal caching modes
do not compare admirably to direct sensing
— using a lexicon to parse circumstance is exceptionally slow,
as well as extremely costly in biocomputational terms — and
in general this form of intelligence is not granted utilization
precedence at the scale of the animal because its outcomes
are consistently arrayed against the survival of those who enact
them, and this violates the most basic definition of intelligence.
I’ve saved the deadliest danger for last. Caching only works relatively well in circumstances that are largely predictable. Nature, in general, is unpredictable. The first species that begins caching, is going to necessarily develop an antagonistic relationship with the novelty inherent in nature, and thus they will attack novelty in an ongoing attempt to establish ever-greater degrees of predictability. This is of course catastrophic. Whatever attacks the living environment attacks itself in myriad dimensions. The problem is simple: once you begin to value prediction, it quickly becomes apparent that nothing is more predictable than dead terrain. Movement in that direction will grant the appearance of rigor to your predictive games.
Appearing to our eye to grant
us impossible prowess far above the ‘animalian norm’,
in reality the more common outcome of cached knowledge is the complete
sacrifice of meaningful and powerful relational transports in favor
of a few mechanistically reductive tokens whose enaction will generally
abhor our human and organismal natures in a systematically predatory
way.
For these and related reasons,
caches must be denigrated in comparison to experiential contact
and learning — yet our human relationship with knowledge has
rarely embodied this potential. This is exceptionally suspicious —
more so when we consider that any other system of relation is most
likely to cost us our minds, liberty, lives and planet.
