which
kind of old are we?
How long is a year in evolutionary time? Well, to find out we’d
have to count every participant, at every scale. We would then know
the number of lifeYears in a single solar year on Earth. Seeing
this absurd and magical number, which I suppose to be greater than
10 to the 100th power, would probably leave us startled. Each year
it would be a very different number, however absurdly large it was.
Many ‘individuals’ would contain many scales of constituents
— thus, many scales of lifeTime. Noticing this means that
a species that is 100 years old, is actually 100 times the (total
number of participants who existed for each year) years old.
In such a game conservation of accruals happens in the connectivities
and bodies of individuals and populations of every kind and scale.
Members of a species like ours, one which specializes in symbolic
conservation of accrued complexity, are biological, cognitive, and
psychological examples of precisely this form of temporal relation:
one which uses time like a scalar accelerator. As groups and as
a species, we do not learn at the rate of one human being’s
year per year. So when we hear from academia that our species is
150,000 years old, and our line is around 4 million years old —
we should realize that these figures actually imply something quite
different. To understand how old we are, we’d need to do something
like take each of those 150k years, and multiply it by individual
human lives to determine a humans-per-year velocity of time-relation.
But if we did this, we’d be making a mistake — were
humans separate from other life forms? From the Earth itself, as
an organism?
We will explore such
questions in process. For the moment, we may observe that as a species,
we are older than we think. In 2003, one year
on Earth results in over 6 billion
life-years of human experience. That is a significant acceleration
of complexity accrual, especially when we observe that as cognitive
animals humans are evolutionarily elaborating a new domain in planetary
expression — one that is symbolically representational, and
systemically conserved. We should remind ourselves often that small
catastrophes can crush such conservations, and probably have more
than once in our history as a species.
So we are older than anything we commonly imagine, as a species.
Yet what we are comprised from, the domains of scale that coallesce
in us are infinitely older even than us for two reasons —
time passes faster for them (vastly) and their populations make
ours seem like a speck. We divide Time into ourselves, to gain evolutionary
speed where it is physically impossible to do so. But cells and
their associations are doing this on a scale that renders human
evolution into a crawl, even with the adaptations of language and
technology.
We use population, to
change what Time means, in evolutionary terms. We are timeCreatures.
And thus it is with all the scales of life. Any extant species is
older than the local organization of the Sun — even though
the Sun ‘was here first’. How much each of the members
of a species shares in this resource is open to question, but we
cannot believe this is not what is happening. Each of us, each living
thing, represents the forefront of a wave reaching back (at least)
to the first moments of Life on Earth.
At the same time, we
are not even children yet. Language is changing us faster than any
organism in Earth’s history changed, and while it is changing
us, it is changing Earth. Because of the rapidity of this change,
there is no state of ‘adulthood’ in such an equation,
the target is moving too quickly, and everything is being changed
by this movement. But in terms of human generations, what we are
today is most likely far far younger than we imagine.
The consciousness we experience today in the West is primarily the
product of a scant 10 human generations of 50 year lifespans. Those
10 sit atop another 50 that take us back 3000 years the
one of the likely moments of emergence for the progenitors of the
simulatory consciousness which is our experience today. Seen in
this light our lack of commonly accessible memory for events only
50 generations ago is fascinating. It seems the transition from
living reality to myth takes only some 20 or 30 generations — a
surprisingly tiny span.
When I was a young man, listening to the stories of my parents,
grandparents, and occasionally great-grandparents it occurred to
me that as one went back even a scant few generations, what people
thought and how they acted and lived appeared to become more unsane
with each generation of travel backward. Perhaps this is a reflection
of my own lineage or speculative biases, but there is evidence that
my youthful intuitions were more correct than I might have imagined.
4 generations ago, the world was indeed a very different place,
and what it was to be alive within it was also radically different.
A mere 60 generations ago, human beings had minds very
different from our own. Their experience of what it was to be human
was unlike ours in significant ways, and their experiences of language
and expression also differed dramatically. Perhaps as little as
500 years ago, language was primarily something one made or heard.
In many places, it still is. Writing and reading are actually highly
specialized skills, and our relationship with them as a species
is far newer than we imagine, for the phases of this relationship’s
arisal are not alike with our systematic and statistical understandings
— they are instead the record of something more like a penetration,
by something that was then and still remains as alien and threatening
as it is empowering.
We are sitting upon a mountain of unexamined history which represents
of the ladder of our rise to representational sentience. We do not
know what happened in the garden where our sentience and our ability
to metaphy was born. Nor do we know why we do not know.
The answer given by most is that it happened too long ago —
somewhere between 150,000 and 40,000 years ago. This seems enough
to quiet the questions in most of us. There are exceptions, however.
It’s actually possible that most our complex cognitive accruals,
at least in the domain of consciousness, are actually of a much
more recent origin than we suspect.
Our models, stories and general positions of relation to our metaphors
imply we are sophisticated, and we are — but perhaps not in
the way we imagine. When we invert the bubble of understanding and
glimpse the real terrain there we will inevitably discover an entirely
new universe. Most of what is here to be explored, is ignored. It’s
hiding behind labels, and systems of knowing.
