root:division:branch
If I could
place any two accurate timelines side-by-side, each showing their
milestone events in their proper relative position, I might put
our species’ rise to complex sentience on one, and our relationship
with language on the other. These two ladders, seen in relation,
would, I believe reveal some startling symmetries, and imply an
even more startling story. But it would not be written in the statistics.
The statistics are only meaningful when the general shape of their
context is clear, and this is never statistical. Somehow we must
accrue a poetic understanding of the story, for the ladders to make
sense in relation, and to allow us to see what their milestones
might mean.
Over time, the elaborative
organismal momentums of the biosphere are reaching in unity for
each step in a generally elaborative ladder together, and encountering
obstacles, windfalls, setbacks, and cataclysms in the process —
at every scale from the organelle to the biosphere. In effect, this
ongoing game which focuses the powers of conservation near the top
of the ladder (where the efforts of scalar waves of participants
are assembling) might well result in precisely the kind of animal
we are, planet we have, and even our relationships with language.
I believe the specific characters of the large events that make
up this ladder are demonstrably written into everything around us,
our bodies — even our languages. We need to know more about
the shape of the planet’s ladder in order to understand our
own place in it.
In order to explore
this terrain, we need to have some figurative markers of phase and
timelines to compare to each other. They do not have to be accurate
in their specifics, but instead merely demonstrate the general shapes
of different common theories in contrast. What we want are some
toys that allow us to variously visualize potentials.
For the sake of simplicity,
we will posit that human consciousness underwent 5 generalized phases
of complexification which represent radical revisions in both experience
and meaning over the last 200,000 years of human cognitive evolution.
First, we need a kind of index-key for the phases.
(click images to get a window with
a larger version)
Fig. 1: A possible ladder of sentient ascension.
A generalized ladder of ascension denoting 5 phases. The left branch
bears my own speculative labels, while the right bears a condensation
of Julian Jaynes’ model. At each phase-step, the inward relations
with self, tokens of any sort, and environment change dramatically.
We might speculate that this requires adjustment in the organism,
and that the process of achieving a new step is thus a crisis of
sorts in itself.
Each new phase contains the previous phase as an inward connective
reference, and extrapolates a position of ‘observation’
in relation to the last step. Thus the Analog Me observes
the Analog I as being inwardly present and alive — but this
position is actually within the Analog I, within the Animal. Overall,
what is happening is that scalar magnifications of biocognitive
accruals are being inwardly torsioned against each other —
and thus energetically organized. More interestingly, with each
inward replication of the previous schema — biocognitive time
is also being magnified — because there are more distinct
positions of temporal reference available with each step.
I do not necessarily mean to portray 5 specific phases, coming into
linear existence across time. The reality I expect begins with something
like a chreode of the fifth phase, which is uniquely assembled at
multiple scales across time. In essence, a 5-tier flower in which
each successive tier fades more firmly into existence as the tiers
below it become more firmly established. Such an evolution is ‘happening
simultaneously’ throughout time, but we experience the effects
linearly, as the new potentials come first into vague focus, become
opportunities, and and are then uniquely accrued in individuals
as a reflection of a growing general accrual in populations.
~#~
With this admittedly general and somewhat arbitrarily
defined index, we can examine some figurative maps that illustrate
in broad strokes four ideas about the evolution of consciousness:
Fig. 2/3: Figurative
timelines of the arisal of complex human consciousness from 4 perspectives.
These models are
general in part because I do not know their specifics of circumstance
and event. But each is useful in offering us a graphic map which
we can then expand, integrate, add to, and correct.
In the gradual model, changes accrue like differently sized grains
of sand, closely following some general trend, response, or principle.
In the punctuated and bicameral models, crisis plays more significant
role: it compresses time and the nature of success such that new
integrations will often arise suddenly from previous conservations
at such boundaries. Larger systemic crises are largely responsible
for the dips in the punctuated graph-line — but they likely
also trigger greater connectivity amongst remaining populations,
which in turn results in an evolutionary focusing-effect. This effect
may in part be responsible for the generally entheoried leaping
motion of apparent evolution in cognitive and physical domains.
Jaynes’ model is considered radical primarily because it posits
a very rapid shift in our relations with written language, consciousness
and metaphor which occurred only 3400-2800 years ago.
~#~
Though
we are speaking about cognitive evolution rather than physical evolution,
we can imagine a a similarity of principles amongst both sorts of
maps, and thus speak in similar terms. Regardless, the two are both
perspectives on a single nameless road shared by all of Life. Gradual
and Punctuated models are really two species of the same thing.
There are few theorists who would discount the role of local and
systemic stress and crisis, thus most who cleave to gradualism are
actually moderate believers in punctuated evolution — whose
adherents see evolution in terms that take the shape of hills and
valleys as conservations, opportunities, and advances are tested
within and against the biomial environment.
Creation generally posits us as having been made in god’s
image — which already complete, could not require much if
any evolution. To do so would imply God was evolving, which, at
least in the West, is an idea too rarely and uncommonly explored.
This is part of the schism between creation and science —
christianity, for example is still resisting the holophore of evolution
— in every domain. Their idols are frozen, or have become
so, over time and long reference to tokens. Yet their power is staggering,
even as idols. On the other hand, the metaphors we have for evolution,
which have in many cases become holophores are uncommonly cruel
and mechanistic. They exchange the majesty and poetry of what we
are for statistical models. As we stand in stark recognition of
the mutilation of ourselves and our world by the functional results
metaphors such as this, we may not wonder so deeply at the resistance
of spiritual systems of any kind to such an overt assailant of what
we are, nevermind what is sacred. Yet, if God is evolving...a very
different picture emerges, which we shall examine in due course.
Jaynes
sees us our consciousness as suddenly born in the crisis of the
worst possible kind: the evaporation or disappearance of experientially
accessible gods. A series of phases of loss in one set of shared
domains, transposed into local consciousness by another. Positing
that the gods are essentially hallucinatory is, I believe, an academically
inspired misconception. Had Jaynes been speaking of something he
had experiential understanding of, he might have significantly corrected
this. In his favor, I note that however unpopular his models are,
they are vastly more popular than they might have been had he decided
that the gods were real. To do so he would have been forced to ascend
or descend (according to one’s perspective) into exceptionally
dangerous and complex terrain. I doubt significantly that such matters
failed to occupy his imagination or exploration, however.
My position
is one which integrates the broad strokes of Jaynes’s theories,
but is more concerned with the general shape of stories
than with timetables. I believe not from my research but from my
experience that God(s) ‘spoke’ in our minds, as individuals
and collectives in differing ways as we evolved as a species. Not
necessarily always in an auditory sense. And I’m fairly certain
that in the modern moment, and the ecclesiastical paradigm —
we have boldly misapprehened the general nature of the things we
refer to with the word God, or Angel.
Like Jaynes, I believe that a cycle or long family of crises led
(in)to the foundations of what we modernly experience as consciousness.
I think we must examine these terrains cautiously in terms of equating
them with familiar holophores, dogmas, or concepts. There is something
alike with bicameralism going on, but it is not what we
at first think. There is/are God(s), and a similar admonition applies.
There is a gradual domain of evolution and a punctuated domain,
and probably an anomalous domain as well —yet they contribute
to a simple and unified braid we have not yet commonly metaphied.
When we change the scope of our questions, and examine time or size
from new perspectives — we will find clearer access to new
ways of standing under the majestic immensity which is our personal
and cognitive universe. As far as terrains go, for the last 1000
years at least — most of inward elements of self and unity
have been under direct and obvious assault. It is my hope that knowing
something of this story will further empower us to silence this
assault, and go on to pursuing the questions we embody and live
to explore.
Much of what we may become, and perhaps at least part of the foundation
of the story of how we relate with language and consciousness is
also written in the story of the development of our brains. As areas
of the brain underwent elaborative reorganization during our species’
evolution, another tale of hidden milestones and emergences was
being played out. The features of this landscape are not organized
merely within the sphere of the brain, but also in our relation
with space, time, light, vibration — our bodies — the
holophores at the core of our metaphoric world. What we see in reality
is a changing animal in changing contexts. Half of this animal lives
in its container, half in its body, half in its connectivities.
We are three halves which inhabit an infinity we comprise. The mathematics
of our common familiarity fails us, as do our logics, at such thresholds.
I believe
we are in the unique position of being able to reconstruct a more
accurate picture of the answers to many of our most ardent questions
in these and related domains. They are a single question, and they
actually have a single answer — though I quail at the thought
of the contortions necessary to encode it in text! It is a living
answer, and trapped in text — it departs from synthesis toward
exegesis. We must instead touch it directly, within our own persons
and societies. In this, its shape will clarify itself, and empower
us to together explore not the potentials of our codicils —
but of the miraculously connective creature we are and exist within
as an expression of.
Returning to the brain, before we depart I want to touch upon the
relationship between the hemispheres. It occurs to me that as our
relationship with our hands grew more complex (for our hands and
fingertips were gaining sensitivity, and thus organismal complexity
of relation was growing) this may have tended to select for greater
neuronal density in the hemisphere dominant in this activity. There
still exists today a dominant relationship with where language is
located in the brain, one of its markers specifically relates to
hand position in relation to the arm during writing. Some 5 - 30%
of individuals differ in various ways from the norm, but 90% of
us or so organize language skills in the left hemisphere. This may
imply that as relationships and complexity of manual interaction
accrued character, a resonant expansion in the hemisphere undergoing
such constant energetic activation could eventually result in not
only the necessary hemispheric biospecialization for language, but
also for knowing. Recently, as a species, we got very excited with
the metaphor of the brain as ‘two halves’ with variously
located pseudo-organs. While this may represent a leap in our formal
understandings, it is still a very primitive, and often too specific
picture of an organismal unity that has evolved to the point where
it embody new modes of evolutionary adaptation and conservation.
Returning
to speculations on the more general features of hemispheric specialization,
it is also possible that across time one hemisphere (such as the
right) acts as a staging or testing ground for features which it
then sets up more permanent adaptive relatives for in the left hemisphere.
Once established, these act as new domains of connectivity and reflection
for the right hemisphere. When these are structurally reflected
there, this acts as a new domain of reflectivity and relation for
the left — etc.
It does
not have to be the right side that is specialized in this way, but
a bilaterally organized creature might first evolve to ‘fill
in’ the potentials of a duplicative hemispheric symmetry.
Once this initial complexification was established, the next phase
of the general evolutionary chreode could well be interhemispheric
regression. This would be a process of reflection and inclusion.
One figurative generalization of such a‘footsteps strategy’
is illustrated below, along with a secondary model. The models are
vast simplifications, not meant to be accurate but instead to represent
a potential which while unlikely to be primary, may well be involved
in hemispheric specializations.
In this
model the Right represents organizational paradigms whose power
is in integration, and in the Left we find complex paradigms whose
powers are in specificty.
Fig. 4:
• A model of hemisphere-sharing in complexity development.
(click to enlarge).
This purely speculative model shows how new integrations might be
explored in one hemisphere (for example the right brain) and then
transmitted as organizational intention to the left for permanent
establishment or more dramatic elaboration. It is unlikely that
our neural development follows a specific path such as this, but
but the evolving brain may well utilize such a strategy, possibly
testing and establishing back and forth between the hemispheres
over evolutionary time.
I note in passing that modern embryology research indicates a greater
density of left-hemisphere neural tissue, and this greater complexity
is better suited for the connectivity-needs of simulation and language.
During its development, the brain is surprisingly flexible about
how and where particular resources are located, though development
will generally follow a common template if possible. If not, the
organism will bioheuristically shift its organizational localities
and pathways according to circumstance, obstacles and opportunities.
I’ve been birdwalking here, riffing as it were
on this idea about a stepwise cross-hemispheric accrual of a sort
of protofractaline complexity. But outside of my birdwalk about
the hemispheres is a far more interesting, powerful, and obvious
implementation of precisely the paradigm I’ve described, but
it doesn’t happen at a scale we are used to attending: it’s
the planet, doing precisely what we talked about above — but
the organismal universe replaces the ‘second hemisphere’
in our toy above. Additionally one might notice that each ‘hemisphere’
has ‘something very strange’ at its core — which
is like a mirror of the other hemisphere, which contains —
of course a mirror — so at the core of each side of this relationShip,
we find a tesserectine infolding reflectivity — which begins
by reflecting the other side — which is already reflecting
this side — ad infinitum (meaning: moving inward, faster and
faster).
o:O:o
What we have long called ‘evolution’
has long postulated a rather nihilistic separation between
the players and their essential unityForm — but the fact of
the matter is, the sum of the players absolutely cannot fail to
form a biocognitive unity – for if any feature is everywhere
obvious around and with(in) us it is that, in joining, one to another
— in living celebration of the thus-far sustained heritages
of diversity, connectivity, and complexity — local and distributed
unities emerge like waves of living flowers from an ocean of water,
air, fire and stone...
And, like us, the unities thus formed express unique powers of co-assembly,
communion, and identity.
I am constantly
reminded that
it is the entire animal (within the animal...) of us which is evolving
— at differing speeds, in different domains — yet with
a generally shared story. The brain, body, mind, and environment
are never truly our entheoried individuals. Nor are the hemispheres.
We should imagine that our consciousness has much to do with the
story of their interdependent activity, and the specific events
that led to the specializations we both struggle with and enjoy
— an epic whose pages and players are uniquely inscribed in
each one of us. Together, in a ring, we are better empowered to
explore their potentials. We must never allow the tools to degrade
or master the transports of our human connectivity, our curiosity,
or our liberty.
We have
looked at many toys and maps — we will continue to play liberally
with them as appropriate. Proceeding apace, we will eventually stop
making models and examine what they are referring to. On our way
we shall continue to expand and explore our metaphors, our relations
with them and their sources. At last, we shall come directly to
the ‘events of import’ in the ascent to sentience of
our species, and the potentials held out to us by their stories
and what they symbolize.
o:O:o
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