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.
o:O:o
‘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.
o:O:o
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...
o:O:o
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.
o:O:o
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.
o:O:o
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.
o:O:o
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.
o:O:o
Here’s the key to the schema employed in the
diagrams available below:
