Terra

mom gets a new blue dress...

Sometime around 3000 million years ago, a unique change took place in the solar family. Allegorically, we might say that an ash-covered princess got a blue dress. What happened during that time was the outcome of myriad gradual changes, and it would send a shout announcing the fertility of that princess into domains our species has yet to metaphy.

3000 million years ago — give or take a passel — Earth began reflecting blue light. This was the result of the assembly-activity of her children, who had already survived against impossible odds, in an impossible environment for an impossible duration of time. Of course, they survived in general — many forms and individuals certainly didn’t. But what did survive, was always somehow exceptionally faster, and more diverse, at the game of survival.

This was so long ago that local organismal Life had not yet invented the form of Death we are familiar with. The only kind that was available was circumstantial— beings did not die ‘of age’ — and thus biocognitive ‘time’ was an entirely different affair from our experience of it. Most of the lifeForms were colonies or cells, and they were essentially eternal in various somewhat strange (to us who know death) ways — not to mention the fact that they didn’t get to conceptualize much about mortality. Simply stated: there wasn’t enough safety or complexity (then) to do so.

While it’s true that it ‘took a while’ for the blueNews to spread, the inhabitants of our little planet rarely realize the significance of that event on a cosmological scale. If we presume that light is the fastest of all possible mediums of connectivity (an idea which has already been shattered by verifiable experiment) our planet is sitting at the core of a sphere of blue light that could be 3 billion light-years in diameter. Of course, the weave and warp of space, dust, gas, gravity and other obstacles probably limit her transmission distance to less than half that — but that’s a positively vast sphere. Even if there are thousands of planets in the average galaxy generally alike with her — this reamains no small feat. [0]

Anything that can read light and trace its sources (which could turn out to be most of everything that can sense anything at all) within that sphere knows something very intimate indeed about the planetAnimal we call Earth. Her incredible fertility is no secret, and has been ‘big news’ in vast terms ever since she put on the new dress her children made with(in) her.

If life does anything at all — it appears (at least locally) to be deeply founded in transactions with ‘light’ or what we might more generally call radiant energy. We could also call it a faster media — features of the local medium which move or vibrate at different speeds from those other streams in which slowMatter arises and persists.But once there is life (and possibly before) there is cognitive energy, and this causes the previously infinite domains of relation and complexity-assembly to explode in a whole new dimension of universes of (new dimensions of universes of...). Consider how many terrestrial organisms not only read light, but transform (literally, ‘go beyond form’) it directly into energy. This means that the energy goes into the life forms, and both change in reactive assembly. There is no more intimate connectivity than to exchange energy, and all of organismal reality is constantly complexifying the optionable transports in so many domains that a lifetime would not suffice to merely begin the catalogue.

Can light know its own speed? Unlikely. But human cognitives can estimate it. Not that it’s speed is the most important characteristic. It’s probably the least important, because it probably doesn’t even succumb to speed in the way we metaphy it (which is very flat, in general). But cognition can be faster than light, because it builds hypersystems in organisms — and those ‘mere cells’ are immortal assemblers of something our metaphors fall flat in the face of. They have sources, too — and their sources are not merely the prosaic arbiters of chance, change and clockwork suggested by even the most advanced of our theorists. They are the sources of those theorists, in fact.

I would speculate that any organism that reads anything in any way whatsoever responds biocognitively to light — or at least some band of ambient energy — especially on a world like ours. At the scale of creatures of human size, we think the light of a distant world something that our eyes cannot detect, but this is generally untrue, because we have many forms, assemblies and scales of eyes — all of which are comprised of simple and complex cellular assemblies. Light and Life are intricately unified in our universe, and what changes light, changes life. When we reCognize this, we realize something potentially startling — cellular assemblies like to make eyes for more than mechanical reasons. In fact, we might playfully suggest that ‘making more eyes, of more sorts, in more domains’ is much of what organismal progress is fundamentally about.

Our powers of systemic detection as a human being — a collective organism capable of distributed sentience (and sentience-lensing) — are far beyond our most absurd speculations of superfunction. It is our mind that cannot detect the light of distant worlds, not our eyes. In the domain of the incredibly tiny, light from a distant world or sun is much vaster than at our unityScale. At some organismal scales, such light might well be more like a tempest than some insubstantial theory of connection. And this affects transports as well as participants.

In a universe as strange and alienly miraculous as the one we certainly inhabit, what we find are worlds within worlds assembling worlds — many of which are busy assembling eyes, assemblies of eyes, and hypersystems of eyes — in myriad simultaneous scales and domains.

Most of these eyesThings all around us appear to our toys of knowledge as being up to little more than trafficking in photons. There must be at least a billion forms of eyes on this planet. If aliens alike with ourselves cognitively, but physically more like jellyfish came here, they would likely engage in a shocked exchange of humor, terror, or irony that might well (when reasonably translated) equate to something not unlike this: “What the (b‘ardiK‘itI’cth!) happened on this planet!? It’s like a factory of eyes! The whole world is nothing but various scales and assemblies of light-sensors —dragging whole biocognitive ecologies around with them!”

In this case, probably having visited many worlds, these creatures would be jesting – for they would realize that almost all living planets struggle to assemble something very generally alike with the panoply of organismal variance within a template that we find on Earth. Eyes are something most cellularly-based biomes would generally develop toward, and perhaps surpass. They are part of our reason of being, and a part of what we are actually being — even apart from our ideas about it. We rarely (if ever) discuss this because the metaphors we have and are familiar with are far too flat to offer us even a glimpse of the realities and purposes we arise with(in).

o:O:o

Any complex living symmetry will evolve toward greater sensory complexity, and deeper cognitive integration with its circumstance along a generally similar if not morphologically specific path. This path will inspire the biocognitive assembly of the sensory reality of eyes long before the physical reality (an eyeOrgan) exists, through a process involving the integrative synthesis and re-extrapolation of accruals— a biocognitive process that enables the potential for extrapolative sensing.

From this sort of precursor-assembly momentum will be born the chreodes that organismal populations of every scale and domain will rush to fill, resulting, eventually, in recombinant and modular sensory arrays — and on a bright planet like Earth — this leads to eyes. In order to get to a phase where a world can assemble and attenuate eyes, it must first demonstrate (succeed in establishing) the potential to give birth to and sustain many diverse scales and domains of biocognitive relation and embodiment.

Across every scale domain and assembly, Life is sensing and reflecting, uniquely at every velocity and position. As a visible momentum, Life assembles, embodies and expresses something so essential we can only call it connectivity — we could perhaps see the term cognition as a more formalized synonym of this connectivity, because its form defies our expectations — even once we have at last glimpsed something of the broad strokes of what is really afoot.

A kind of biocognitive organismal inflorescence assembles this potential in a strangely non-linear, or scalar dance — and the flowers of these accruals are recapitulated in the forms, diversity, and new realms of sensory integration and synthesis built upon the ancestral lineages of struggle across countless catastrophic boundaries. As the complexity, connectivity, and co-enriching diversity of the biome increase — the benefits of this hyperconnectivity are ‘folded’ into each of the participants — uniquely according to their existing and integrative potentials for sustaining and enriching this planetary resource.

The story of our world, our senses and our genesis is far far more amazing than the stories we have glimpsed. The bald fact of what is present and happening here on Earth has long been hidden by a single broken tool which we claim to use to examine our universe. But nature has far better tools than philosophy, religion, or science. She has far far better toys than the wildest fantasies of mortals combined with the sum total of human knowing.

Earth is an animal, not a machine, and she does not assemble anything ‘like’ machines. And you are her, in essence — and schema, form — connectivities, and action. She builds sentient miracles of emotive and charactered connectivity. Our own bodies and minds are a recapitulation of this — and they include what they exist as an assembly of.

We are a universe of scalarly recombinant eye-creatures, seeing into domains, transports and velocities we, at our common scale, have not the vaguest sense or model of the real import of. But even though this has remained largely the case on our world for the last 3000 years, it’s about to change – and the change is going to be dramatic.