Nature(s),
maps & metaphors
o:O:o
From one perspective we can see that nature is arranged in symmetries
of local unity which are very inclusive of diverse domains of scale
and relation. This is more the nature of our experience, than it
is a feature of our metaphors and ways of knowing. Seen from this
vantage, it’s apparent that one of the primary qualities of
life is connective — and diversely so, in most cases. Nature,
and her biocognitive children, can be modeled as organized in networks
differentiated by structure, character, connectivity, organization,
and scale. The study of these sorts of things is found in nearly
every discipline, but particularly (and generally) in domain of
what we call systems theory — the study of features of organizational
character and distribution. This is a discipline largely concerned
with maps, networks, and related metaphors of the visualization
of organization, content, and context in systems of every possible
sort.
Living systems are not theories, however. Strangely, we authorize
our metaphoric tokens to rule over a biological world — yet
the tokens arise from what they are ruling over, and are thus necessarily
subtractions of what they pretend to be expansions of. In terms
of complexity and accuracy — in other words, in terms of what
the tokens supposedly offer us — organisms and their collective
intelligence have been evolving not for millions of years, but for
countless billions of lifeYears. Our tokens, on the other hand,
are less than a few seconds old, by comparison. Organismal knowing
is sentient, connective, general, and extremely accurate. Token-based
knowing is fraught with traps, predators, and intrinsic logjams
of competition for terrain dominance. Why do we trust our tokens,
and why do we credential their sources with such singular fervor,
even when they overtly demonstrate their essential hostility to
Life? In other words, why would we empower a ruler who functionally
despised those they ruled over?
To begin to explore these questions we must first more clearly examine
what the natures and features of organismal knowing are, and then
examine some of the same principles as regards our tokens —
meaning our languages, logics, and games with meaning. We can recognize
a distinction between semantic meaning and organismal meaning in
that the latter contains the former. Semantic knowing depends upon
the recombinant manipulation of pseudo-static symbols which are
virtual in nature. This occurs within the field of organismal knowing,
which depends upon connectivity-webs for its sources and assemblies.
The former is but a tiny child of the latter, yet it acts with incredible
rapciousness, and open tyranny towards its source(s).
The cognition and activity of living organisms is an expression
of something very general — much more general than a network
— yet this metaphor is useful for making toys with which to
examine the principles which the living world expresses as uniquely
embodied constants. Using the metaphor of a network as a toy, and
then expanding it such that its structural reflections and connectivities
will be seen in their crossings of flat boundaries allows us to
have a much better perspective on what it means to be alive, and
human. With access to these lost birthrights, we can retrieve the
opportunity, as individuals and species, to explore the real fulfillment
and unities our hearts long to participate in, as well as to survive
the increasingly dangerous intervention of formalized language in
our evolution — an event which is, in the modern moment, singularly
catastrophic. This outcome of our encounter with language isn’t
obligatory. We don’t need to get rid of language, but instead,
to overstand it. In a world where language can erase the whole story,
we must be careful to accrue experiential mastery with its sources
and features, before we set its frozen idols above our children,
ourselves, and our living world.
Most of our term (with which we metaphy or recapitulate experience,
consciousness or knowledge) emerge from a long experience of their
referent from before they were sustainably metaphied. Thus
we experienced networks as families, ecosystems, societies and groups
long before we had a general term for them. A known forest
or a flock of birds, once familiar and metaphied, became an internal
simulatory experience of a relational network of real and potential
participants — thus creating an internal representation of
essential meaning-elements and characters which formed a kind of
recombinant family. Internally simulating such a network results
in a changing inward reflection which is largely creative in nature.
It refers to things outside, using inward tokens which change each
time they are activated or referred to, and whose features modulate
in response to change in their local and distributed connectivities.
The metaphor of a ‘network’ is relatively new to our
modern mind, at least as a general term. Since a metaphor is in
a sense a network of connectivities and relations amongst tokens
of some sort — this metaphor metaphies itself — it is
a kind of meta-metaphor. I call this a holophore, although this
is an instance of a secondary holophore — the primary of which
is connectivity. It is this specific domain of metaphor on which
the greatest dangers and potentials of our human experience with
language depend for their form and function. This cannot be emphasized
deeply enough — the meanings, relations and activities of
the tokens that represent connectivity
prove to be crucial in shaping the outcomes of our technologies,
societies, and persons. It is their shapes and features, and our
ability to elaborate them or be frozen in their headlights that
will decide if our species’ terrestrial inheritance is erasure
or the stars. These tokens are never re-presenting connectivity
itself, but instead a charactered extraction of what they point
to. This means that they will never be accurate —
and thus must be employed as pathfinding tools, rather than idols.
Where they are ensconced as idols, atrocity follows with startling
frequency — and this is a signal from the organism or society
in question that the transports of connectivity have been compromised.
The culprit, in most cases is a form of preditorially motivated
cognitive organism. We could call it a species of metaphor, that
exist to control terrain and transports. They cause radical structural
change in the holophore they are ensconced in, as well. An analogy
would be mechanical plants invading a garden. In order to take over
the transports — such as bacteria and insects and people —
such invaders would representationally mimic those features over
whose terrain they desire dominance. In cognitive gardens, this
sort of activity is most of what is happening, for almost anyone
living in a modern technological society, whether in poverty or
wealth.
Our inward tokens are like organisms, whose structure is treeLike.
They are as alive and as locally unique as their hosts, and the
networks they internally comprise and outwardly participate in are
not flat, but instead cross many barriers of scale and domain. Their
real shapes are never solid — they are more like song than
stone. Long ago, and probably in various unique and indigenous societies
or communities, there were a few peculiar ‘key holophores’
which had a common expression as well as a mysterious or sacred/secret
aspect. They were like metaTokens, and they changed not to fit experience
or knowing, but in reflection by containing it. These were alike
with the cognitive version of the holophrases which were part of
our earliest encounters with language as a user and host.
“A holophrase is a construction (one or more words that work
together) which means something, not necessarily having any relationship
with the meanings of the individual words, if indeed they have any
meanings.”
— John Paul Riquelme, The
Way of The Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats:
Figuring Death and The Imaginary in The Fictive and the Imaginary.
A specific holophrase in use by a child may indicate ‘form
of significance’ rather than specificity — so, for example,
anything in the environment which has the significance similar to
‘new and exciting’ might elicit the holophrase of ‘big’.
Newness and interest-value are expressed with the ‘emphasizing’
paraphiers of the term big — which is still incompletely
‘understood’ (according to adults) at this point in
the child’s linguistic development. Yet there is an implicit
form of logic in the choice and application of holophrases, and
this logic is not at all primitive, but instead, in many cases and
circumstances, it can radically outdistance its formalized counterparts
in terms of efficiency, problem-solving, and ease of application
across many domains of relation.
Holophores were a species of primal ingredient, such that any token
that could be made already contained them by necessity of its own
formative lineage. During the cognitive and linguistic development
of our species, we underwent phases of punctuated enlightenment,
often in response to a crisis — or the sudden integration
of previous accruals on the ladder of our ascension to relational
sentience. The result of each of these phase-passages was a new
form of container in which to examine or express our cognitive activity
—and coupled with this we would experience congruent modulations
in our holophores. But almost all of them, seen in their human contexts,
created or were in response to crisis. In our own infancy, this
process was generally and uniquely recapitulated during our cognitive
and psychosocial development.
As encoded ‘things’ these keys
were not really metaphors at all. They were container-metaphors,
recapitulating our cognitive experience of the organizations of
living and metaphoric symmetry-principles. They could be applied
to anything and be relevant, because what they denoted in relation
to their targets was connectivity with a central principle, or original
source. Sometimes they were expressed structurally, as in pyramids
and other scalar assemblies of sequenced relation. Whatever might
be found, it would never be found to be separated rom them, but
instead to be examples or localized instances of the hyperphore.
Over time, as our species complexified cognitively and intellectually,
we accrued general and specific lexicons which related to these
key-containers, until, eventually, the general membrane underwent
a division — knowledge could be locally housed. It no longer
game from one’s god, or the gods. The species of the hyperphores
we were ensconced in changed, dramatically, in a relatively brief
period of time. Each living human being underwent a general recapitulation
of these changes in our species until they either got stuck on the
ladder somewhere, or passed the common denominators of their own
time. The story of this is more profound than bibles or sciences,
and it is one we must rediscover in our world, ourselves, and each
other – for nowhere is it hidden, and nowhere will it be found
missing.
Arranged properly upon a tree before our eyes, the sequence of ‘first
metaphors’ — in reality a sequence of holophoric membranes
changing with their contents — would reveal themselves as
the roots upon which all later semantic and even biocognitive complexity
depend for their formative character. As such, their specific sequence
and character are crucial for us to decode. We needn’t seek
far for such tomes, however — for they are written in the
shapes of our letters, the forms of our hands, the glories in the
iris of our own eyes. If we may examine our selves and world from
perspectives that value connectivity first, what we will see revealed
is windows, not tokens — and each of them are alive.
We need not wait for experts to empower each other to explore these
terrains — we each contain this lineage, and our lives and
stories recapitulate it uniquely. Instead the planet herself is
crying out for our awakening, and she is crying out in her children,
and in ourselves If not to save herself, to save us. What we need
is each other’s understanding, nurturence, and support. Seems
simple enough in theory. But there are obstacles in the place of
our progress, and they live within the ways of knowing from whence
they derive and enforce their authority. It is an authority which
despises Life, whilst claming to champion it. It is, in the final
analysis, a mimetic authority. By understanding this deeply, as
well as the stories that led to this, we can defuse it. If we don’t,
it will happily erase our planet, and our species in its everyday
operations.
In most of their languages and artifacts human cultures consistently
encode the general shape of their holophores or root-metaphors for
connectivity, and hyperconnectivity. They also tend to record the
character and perspectives of this relation. These were the relational
foundations upon which other metaphors were built, and their character
was crucial in the cognitive environment of any culture or society,
as it remains today. What they were recording, in general, were
the shapes and features of the steps on the ladder to the complex
representational sentience we may experience in the modern moment.
We believe these features highly evolved, but I believe they are
not yet in their infancy in terms of their penetration into the
human animal. Time is longer, shorter, and more twisted than we
think as it may relate to these matters. Hopefully, this will become
clearer as we proceed.
These holophrases essentially formed a ladder, upon which our species
climbed arduously, often paying great prices to attain the next
rung. In contrast to this, our own languages exist only as late
arrivals. Over time, as our species lost experiential contact with
the events and relations that led to the character of our holophores,
these underwent compression, and became symbolic —
alike with a charactered and contextual bowl,
in which a simulation is taking place.
The bowl’s character is important, because it influences what
is seen in the simulation within it.
In our own personal infancy, there was a first metaphor. In other
words, there was a genesis-moment when, for the first time, we established
a changeable standing token with which we could ‘store’
(in a way which elaborates itself) relation-characters for a specific
set of experiential and cognitive connectivities. The general features
and character of the singular and essential psybiocognitive holophore
embodied as a result of this moment would lend its general shape
and character to every future metaphor, and be represented in the
creation of any holophore arising after it. This moment was experienced
as something like a crisis of illumination — an essential
penetration of our personal cognitive membrane — by something(s)
from outside us. It was a crisis, because what came into us grew,
and took over terrain, rapidly. As we grew beyond the moment of
penetration and co-emergence, the specific and unique character
of this genesis would come to inform the shape and character of
every branch of knowing, experience and expression which would rise
from this penetration.
To know, affected the organism in every domain. Attention, consciousness,
the cycles and meta-cycles of metabolism, perception — the
entirety of scalar carousel embodied in organismal symmetry was
and is still deeply affected by this confluence. It was as if a
celestial suitor had penetrated the egg of ourselves, bringing with
him a new domain of meta-sense. A place inside, where relation could
be ‘toyed with’ via the transports of tokens and connectivity.
Unlike our modern ideas, these tokens are not things. They are,
and act like the organism with whom they are symbionts. Ensconced
in a human mind or collective, the tokens of language are organismal,
alive, and pursue goals — just as if they were players in
the game of cells and virii. Some invaders become symbionts. Others
destroy the host. Either way — the game is one of competition
for terrain.
In encoding these general holophoric principles in language, art
and architecture, the cultures involved were singing about their
newfound understandings, but they were also fulfilling a central
principle of biocognitive systems: to preserve part of their accrued
identity within transports, and another part within membranes. Ancient
and indigenous peoples were encoding the most difficult things to
understand, in artifacts they hoped would be intelligible to future
generations, in whose bodies they themselves or their ancestors
might later be found to be living. These are encodings of universal
principles, and lie structurally beneath the domain of metaphor,
in the place where the meaningshapes of metaphors are assembled
from precursors. Their function is connective, rather than existing
primarily to specify.
