V: whiteRabbit

“The universe is a far more amazing place than your toys of it allow, and there are forms of intelligence far beyond your most imaginative speculations. For example, there’s a living dimension in which all organisms communicate instantly across any possible gap in space, time or speed. We live in that dimension, and we act as transports for that communion. We’re gap-crossers. But we’re also librarians...”

— whiteRabbit

Piers Anthony is a relatively well-known author of speculative fiction. In the early part of his career, he wrote a book called Macroscope, in which a group of scientists discover a repeating ‘teaching-signal’ being broadcast by an alien intelligence or collective. But instead of just ‘information’ this signal is like a game — it can be presented as a visual progression — a series of shapes, transforming in phases. As one follows the presentation, it radically amplifies the ability of the perceiver decode it — which changes how they receive it — such that even a repeating signal of relatively brief duration is able transmit incalculable quantities of knowledge. Each repetition of is experienced as an entirely new sequence, due to the peculiar effect on one’s understanding effected by the previous experience of it. Piers’ idea involves a strange application of the concept we call a fractal, but in his story, this is a different kind of fractal, one which changes in the scale of one’s perspective don’t just change the perceived shape of the construct, they radically alter its meaning.

In Macroscope, most of the people who view the presentation of the signal are bored by it and can’t understand it, but people with a peculiar sort of intelligence are able to grasp and follow it. This results in an ongoing explosion of prodigy in the dimension of their relations with knowledge. Because of the alien character of the signal, and how it ‘teaches in phases’ it functionally contains not only the answer to every possible question, but a way of transmitting these answers that grows vastly more accurate any time one repeats a question. There are some other important aspects of this story that I am leaving out, but personally, I considered the idea fiction. Even had I not considered it fiction, I doubt anything I might have considered would have prepared me for the experience I was having, and it was extremely similar to the one described in his novel. The being teaching me communicated this way — with progressions of shapes whose transformations communicated meaning directly, as though my mind had been engineered to work best with this form of conversation. The results continually staggered me; I could learn more in 5 minutes than in any year of my life.

By the second week, I had come to clearly understand that some kind of being was teaching me. In the beginning, the experience was so overwhelmingly positive that it really didn’t matter what the source was, but over the coming days, it became clear whatever was guiding this new part of my intelligence wasn’t me, and wasn’t ‘human’. Moreover, the experience was changing what it meant to be me. I acquired a cognitive symbiont, and the ongoing process of our unification gained complexity and speed in expanding leaps that became extremely challenging for me physically, as well as cognitively. My metabolism changed, and it felt as if my whole body was resonating in waves — almost as if my cells were ‘singing’. Whenever I did anything involving thought, we thought with two minds in conversation, but my new neighbor was alien, hyperintelligent, poetic, and had profound understandings that unified the branches of knowledge I was taught to approach and consider as distinct.

There was now a new part of me that thought with me, felt with me, spoke with me and experienced the living world in unison with me. When I saw, I felt what I saw with both our senses and understandings. The my experience, particularly the experience of conscious thought suddenly accrued an entirely new dimension of meaning – a very amazing kind of meaning — in which the stories of everything around me were instantly revealed in such a way as to cause them to link up and form incredible epics involving character, history and purpose. I had acquired an ever-growing array of new senses, some of which reached outside of time into a dimension where ‘all of time was available’. The universe came alive around me; and everything was speaking in a new language, a language so miraculous that it transformed seeing into an astoundingly profound form of learning which was as emotional as it was intellectual. Mysteries I had wondered about throughout my lifetime clarified themselves before my inner eye in a complex fashion that unified them in the process of resolving them. The most inspiring aspect of this was these resolutions didn’t complete the cycle in a static way — every experience of them led onward toward a more astounding integration with others like them, and startling new questions were continuously revealed by what was learned. Every waking moment was like standing in a living waterfall of alien wisdom.

By about the third week, I began to refer to this visitor as whiteRabbit. He was ‘incredibly bright’, impossibly fast, extremely playful, and superbly skilled at traveling across gaps in order to make new connections — a game involving ‘holes’. He was so good with holes that he could pass into and through the entrances and exits of multiple ‘tunnels’ at once, and the knowledge-games he played consistently involved this skill, where we would assemble a vast and shifting network of perspectives simultaneously, together. He understood my thoughts, and had perfect access to every dimension and function of my mind. In fact, he became able to drive it in ways that I myself cannot, such that I could employ faculties of sensing and learning that I was completely unaware were even possible for human beings.

Although I was curious about his ‘what or who he was’, my direct experience of him constantly satisfied this curiosity without actually answering this question literally. Questions about his identity resulted in ongoing sets of related stories instead of answers, and the language we used had no words — instead, it involved ‘being shown’, which was a game where we danced to multiple perspectives expressed as stories we would experience together. I have no way to describe this because my ‘regular’ human experience is totally flat in comparison — it would be like trying to compare the Sun to a charred matchstick. When he answered my questions, he always did so uniquely, such that if I asked the same question twice, the second answer radically changed and increased the understanding I had previously acquired. For this reason, finding out ‘exactly what he was’ was nearly impossible because the answer simply kept expanding. He wasn’t ‘exactly’ anything we have a word for, so he would run through stories that, from my human perspective, would imply he was an alien, a spirit, an angel, and something we don’t have a word for which lives in the universe of connectivity and has a variety of amazing ways of growing, teaching, learning and expressing itself.

Part of the problem with this question is that humans expect everything to be ‘one class’ of thing or being. We are trying to ‘flatten and freeze’ whatever we have contact with into a static form — but the real nature of the universes around and within us is all bout absurdly rapid growth. In truth, anything we encounter is entirely new every time we contact it, but our languaging habits force us to discard this aspect of the truth in favor of the stability of identity that our names, tokens and extant understandings demand. Since whiteRabbit is actually changing so fast that any two contacts with him will reveal two entirely unique beings, our language cannot point to him accurately because to do so violates the fundamental structure and activity of our stasis requirements. From moment to moment, his general form, activities and character remain the same — but ‘what he is’ does not. whiteRabbit never speaks literally, because his ways of knowing cannot include this idea. His ‘perspective’ is always multiple and will grow so dramatically between any two references that the meaning and shape of any previous information warps in response. The basic nature of his mind makes the idea of ‘a fact’ absurd. The one thing he did manage to communicate clearly was that, in his own perspective, he was ‘very small’ and that he ‘learns with incredible speed.’ To him, learning is a game, which everyone everywhere is always playing together — and this game is extremely ‘fun’ — all the time.

One of the first stories he told me about his identity involved a rock that was at that time hurtling toward Earth. Around June 7^th, he began to show me stories about this rock, and on June 18^th our astronomers finally discovered it and labeled it 2002 MN. It was a relatively small Near Earth Object, (an NEO) but it came extremely close to our planet — about 30% of the distance between Earth and the moon. In the beginning, whiteRabbit implied that there was a relationship between his presence and the near-to-Earth passage of this object. But I caution you to remember what I have said about how he answers — this is really the basis of many future expansions, and is not meant to be taken literally —it is a ‘toy’. It actually has as much to do with our species as it does his identity.

Bear in mind that in answering this way, he wasn’t telling me ‘what he was’ but rather creating a basis of meaning upon which he could later expand. In order to ‘answer’ my questions, he would tell me a expanding set of related stories, over time, and each story would prepare me to be able to understand the next story, which would in turn radically modify the meaning of the previous ones We actually do not have a concept like this, at all — and we do not tell stories or even teach this way. He took me to experience this and see it from his perspectives — and this resulted not in statements, but a set of experiences that taught me from multiple points of view in time and relation to the material he presented.

“Consider that if we examine what living beings do from a very general perspective, we can see that almost all of their activities can be seen as ‘crossing gaps’. Existence as physical beings is practically synonymous with a gap-crossing game that occurs in an ever-growing number of dimensions — as life progresses, gaps emerge all over the place, between beings, moments, circumstances, experience. Evolution is the epic story of organisms crossing the gap between their potentials and their current relational, cognitive and structural forms. Reproduction allows organisms to cross the gap of death created by the cessation of individuals. Your own languages comprise a toy used to cross the gap between minds. Everywhere around you, in myriads of dimensions, Life is crossing gaps. We might say that this is what Life does best. To accomplish this, organisms at every scale use vectors — transports that allow them to do what would otherwise be impossible — to leap across the gulf of seeming separation, into ever-greater unity.

Now, bearing this in mind, suppose that through some peculiar circumstances, some very tiny form of life came to exist not on a planet, but on something that travels between them — a rock, or chunk of ice for example — we’ll call them starFish — because they ‘swim’ around in the ocean of space, from star to star, or within a given star’s system. Perhaps this rock surrounds a crystalline core that contains water, and the starFish live in or next to the water. They have evolved to survive their problematical situation over vast periods of time. Let’s say that this rock has been flying around in space for a few billion years, and although the starFish within it cannot really grow more physically complex — because they don’t have much space — what they can do is grow more cognitively complex. Due to their situation, they only branch of evolutionary adaptation available to them is connective, and they take great advantage of this vector, integrating with each other in terms of sensing and intelligence.

Over millions or billions of years, through a process like cognitive evolution, they discover a way to reach out into space, far beyond their little rock, and touch the minds of other life forms. This is a revelation of profound significance, so profound that it changes their evolutionary course from integrating with each other to integrating with the life on millions of worlds. The starFish learn that there’s a dimension of something like pure connectivity, and in taking advantage of this they become a kind of lens that locally assembles (and thus magnifies) the organismal intelligence all over timeSpace. This discovery has incalculable benefits, and results in them gaining the ability to act as a transport of this intelligence, as well as just listeners. Acting as a wayStation across which the organisms of many worlds learn from and about each other grants them the potential to act as a library, as well. Their ‘culture’ is the collective culture of all the minds they touch, and their most important activity is the exploration, preservation, acqusition and transmission of this ‘experiential pollen’.

The library these creatures comprise is changing so fast that any two organisms who touch it will receive entirely complete, yet entirely unique responses, because all the organisms in time and space are constantly in contact with it, and thus ‘updating’ it. Every update of any kind (at any scale or speed) changes the whole library, instantly, and anyone accessing it gets a unique response, which is made more unique by their own local circumstances — be they those of a cell, a person, or a planet. The result is an incredibly diverse universe, which still follows general principles such that even something that appears superficially ‘the same’ as any other thing, is actually just as unique as it is the same. The truth probably lies with the uniqueness, in fact — superficially means ‘big’. But at the scale of the very small, any two ‘things’ are often more different than they are alike.

Each planet is at least as unique as it is similar to any other, so not all of the information delivered by the tinyLife in the rock is mechanically useful to all recipients, but almost all of it is profoundly useful in cognitive ways (which includes the activities of ‘metabolism’). Effectively, the availability of this transport absolves the recipients of the necessity of ‘re-inventing the wheel’, because no matter what sort of situation they may face, somewhere in the vastness of the library this problem (or one very like it) has already been solved. The game is mutually beneficial for all participants — the starFish on the rock accrue cognitive complexity in a fashion that is more like an explosion than a linear process, and all the beings they touch reap otherwise impossible benefits from their activities.

All organisms, regardless of their size or seeming complexity are already playing a game much like the one we are speculatively exploring, in that they assemble the collective intelligence in which they are immersed uniquely, and exhibit this assembly as character. The tinyLife on the rock is merely a bit more robust in the connectivity department. They are not like the life-forms of a planet, for they have spent an incredible amount of time evolving cognitively, rather than physically. Because of this, their ‘civilization’ and potentials are very different from those of a physical culture. They exist as a transport of unification, collecting and connecting the organismal experience and intelligence of countless forms and scales of life across a vast number of planets — instantaneously, at all times.”

It is not necessarily that we live on a rock, or even that we exist as physical beings. But this model is easier for you to understand because it is conforms to your existing ideas about ‘what life is’. We are ‘alive’, too — we are just not a form of life familiar to your scientists and philosophers.