eggs
and tunnels
So, we are positing a holophore — actually one member of
a small set of them — which exists as a missing link in our
cognitive, semantic and intellectual heritage. In the domain of
semantic knowing, many of the source-terrains and participants from
which our metaphors and their underlying modeling strategies arise
will assert modally deployable perspectives of false separation,
and hierarchies of quantity and quality. They will imply or assert
the identities of various potential domains of value. The common
and sometimes laudable goal of this activity is the achievement
of a greater specificity, which (at least in the West) we generally
believe to lead, somehow, to a deeper understanding. This systemization
of knowing results in certain undesirable artifacts when implemented,
however. For all its conservational prowess, systemizations which
are essentially inflexible will tend to succumb to these artifacts
— organismal in their features and activity — which
can and will take over the system for their own benefit. As individuals
and populations, we experience this as biocognitive threat, and
it emerges in so many simultaneous potential domains that it is
something of a wonder when we can maintain any reasonable contact
with our own natures or identity within such an onslaught.
The positive answers to such a predicament emerge more clearly
we are provided with experiential access to models or maps that
offer us visual or imaginative metaphors of connectivity first.
We can see the aspects of our ideas about separation which are dangerous
or misleading. One of the first things we might notice when our
common models are inverted, is that connectivity is everything,
and Nature is deeply aware of this feature in its organizations
and movements. The right sort of connectivity can cross nearly any
gap, including those of death, and time — by storing
elements to later be retrieved within transports — and within
contexts. Our reliance upon models of individuality makes sense
— all real examples are actually unique. But our favoritism
for what we see as foreground often leads us into the most erroneous
and vulnerable of intellectual, and thus socio-cognitive terrains.
A mastery of transport and context can remedy our servitude to such
models, and heal the relationship such they they are returned to
their place as tools, from the place they don’t belong —
one which rules over what we may know, and thus attain to.
If we are playing with the right toys in the right way, we may have
a kind of cognitive gateway experience — something at once
extremely novel and unique to ourselves, and similar in a general
way with a mysteriously universal template. Our metaphoric basis
can shift, suddenly, from our common point of view (in the most
general of domains) to something like its inversion. Such an experience
is difficult to describe, and is perhaps akin with the idea of enlightenment
— but this term is too frozen and specific. I speak instead
of an experience of inversion.
We could model this as a metaphor where one perspective of mind
and experience is founded in separation — i.e. ‘I am
my body’, while another is founded in connectivity —
‘I am alive in the transports and contexts of my connectivity’.
It is not that one or the other is true, but rather that both are
true, and something more than either of them.
In the chart below, I use a flat map to explore the relationship
between a cognitive foundation which emphasizes identity, and one
which emphasizes transports of connectivity. Our desire of course
is to have a general balance, to have equivalent access to both
terrains — while being trapped by neither. Additionally we
may hope to attain and enjoy the powers of their integration, in
consciousness, activity, and games involving knowledge. We can see
how our choices about context and subject are at play in this model,
valuing either the connectivity (tunnels+contexts) or the identities
(eggs+membranes). Our common tradition of the easter-egg hunt conserves
some of this essential understanding behind the facade of a traditionally
quasi-religious game.
(click to enlarge in a new window)
Fig. 1: Conceptual foundations inform
the shape, character and activity of their products (biologies,
metaphors, languages, logics, etc). Separation is a model which
highlights identity of local subjects, implying identity as evidence
for real or functional local containment. This model prioritizes
the location of functional and metaphoric identity first in the
nodes, second in transports, and third in context. Connectivity
is a model which highlights atemporal transports, and prioritizes
the location of identity first in the transports, second in the
contexts, and third in the nodes. In balance, this bicameral paradigm
forms a system which can resolve long and short-term problems, at
any scale, with or without data. It is accessible to all complex
biocognitive animals, and probably proto-life as well. With the
integration of the two, a highly simplifiable ‘third-mind’
is empowered. While extremely general in function, this effective
cognitive symmetry (a virtual organ) can produce seemingly impossible
integrations from the slightest particle of information. We also
may note that the connectivity model values context actively, while
the separation model similarly values membrane.
o:O:o
In examining my primitive graph, we see the implication that as
we complexify semantically, humans (in modern societies) will tend
to switch from the general model in Fig.1 to the specifics-centered
one — an implication which is recapitulated in the shape and
function of our enculturization in industrial and post-industrial
societies.
In systems of knowing which locate their contexts firmly emerging
from basis in separation, metaphors and behavioral catalysts will
tend to encode for games of competition and dominance. This is the
nature of separative strategies in general. If our languages imply
this in their own organization, which they appear to, we can speculate
that something similar is happening in the experiential and semantic
realities they co-create in our persons and societies. Similarly,
if our models of relation rely upon roots based in connectivity,
we can attend matters of survival and repose with far vaster reserves
of resources. Essentially, connectivity models enable us to actually
reduce the threats that separation models enforce themselves as
heroes against.
In the separation models, Life, and identity exist in a shell, individually.
In the connective basis, Life exists in its transports and connectivities,
rather than in a shell. We should be encouraged to switch back and
forth, as well as empowered to create metaphors comprised of elemental
understandings from both of these root-perspectives. Both domains
should be balanced and accessible to integrations, since they result
in different logics, which are unique in terms of function and applicability
to understanding and problem solving.
In the adult world, the connectivity domain is largely evinced in
metaphors whose lineages lead into the history and modern moments
of science, religion and philosophy. But its significance is actively
if not intellectually discarded in the movements of our persons
and modern societies, as well as our industry and commerce.
As a modern species, the middle position in our graph has long been
dominant, and the implications of this are now coming home to roost
in a way which will prove challenging, if not cataclysmic for us
and our world. We need cognitive and experiential access to metaphors
and stories that restore our liberty and empower us to explore much
more animalian and generalized systems of knowing. W need our social
and personal potentials for unity to be set free. In order for this
to be possible, we also need a diversely embodied and thriving biosphere,
and this may be the lynchpin we are too late to preserve. Time,
in terms of 5 years, will tell the answer.
I believe that new and more generally inclusive (or unflat) metaphors
of origin, connectivity and relation will present us with windows
into a ancient set of birthrights that, while once widely recognized
and held to be of the highest and most sacred value, have been lost
in the compressions and outcomes of our species’ encounters
with catastrophe (in our history and experience), language, and
what we might call a certain species of compression which arises
in our relations with technologies and metaphors of industrial commerce.
o:O:o
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