From an ant’s-eye view, Nature is the domain of gods and
giants — universes of incredibly alien diversity are everywhere
appearing — at scales local and distant in size. At the ant’s
scale, terrain is thousands or millions of times vaster than ours,
time is different — everything shifts in relation
our scale, speed and attitudes of approach. Much of what might be
sensed as nearby motion harbors danger of injury, predation or crushing.
The world of Life as seen from the ant’s scale, contains vast
catalogues of participants of enormous size. Some of these creatures
feed upon ants. But there is a single creature that does something
literally unlike with Life, as a general biocognitive momentum.
This creature exterminates ants, and builds artifacts which change
their biological, cognitive and experiential universe in bizarre
and often deadly ways.
Let us switch scales to the large. From the perspective of a blue
whale, most of the universe of life is small, or even
tiny. Yet again, there are universes organized by the small (humans)
which are embodied specifically to eliminate whales, and
these momentums have nearly succeeded. This would be something like
rats organizing themselves into collectives who variously persecuted
and exterminated humans from airships of 2 to 3 times our size or
smaller.
The primary expression of human relationship with whales is not
predation — predation is something that we can observe in
many scales of living symmetry — it is instead extermination,
something that happens only with technologies of knowing and
their mechanized or industrial artifacts and metaphors. The most
serious threat to each of the species at risk or erased by human
behavior is virtual, arising in our cognition, and flowering in
our activity. At the core of these momentums are simple models of
value couched in metaphoric relationships between tokens. For the
whales, these tokens have proven deadly, and almost exterminative.
If animals use representational systems of knowing, however different
from our own they may be, we can be fairly certain that they are
wondering what went wrong with the monkey-people. They are probably
desperately hoping that they do not succumb to the same fate, or
fall victim to one of the many bizarre machine-rituals which the
monkey-people are constantly at labors to elaborate and support.
Somehow, our species has earned the dubious distinction of becoming
the authors or parents of mere systems of relation, which
result in life-eating machines that exhibit a terrifying mimicry
of part of Life’s reproductive agenda. These are
irreal constructs, which functionally demand and obtain authority
over real living organisms, and their natural symmetries of scale.
Instead of using their own energies and resources for reproduction,
they use the biosphere’s, as well as the living forms, activities,
and resources of its children. They are virtual tyrants
Our species’ dances with the tokenization of our relationships
and connectivities with our world is costing the living planet its
future, and this cost extends deeply into the terrains of our human
minds, and our individual lives, in ways we may not yet see as obvious,
yet which are consistently expressed in each moment of our own biocognitive
activity, experience and elaboration.
In humans and our societies, the containers of such tokens are alive,
and thus, the tokens we choose come to life, informed by the abilities
and potentials of the animalian consciousness which contains and
transports them. When we empower mechanized tokens over those which
are more inclusive and flexible, we end up with a devastating cost,
which grows geometrically over time, and is expressed in atrocity,
and the mutilation of people, cultures, ecosystems, and our planet.
Living planets do not build or support machines — their domains
of expression are chemistry, uniqueness, biology and cognition.
Earth is unlikely (at best) to be found forcing the expenditure
of irreplaceable resources in order to specifically torture or erase
her children (which are her body and mind), or whole domains of
related children for the sake of a few briefly embodied machines.
Yet one of her children is doing this .
Earth, and most of her children, creatively generate universes of
living cognitive jewels each instant, at countless billions
of scales. She’s been doing this, purportedly, for at least
a thousand million years. Machines are not her game. Children
are. When we value machines over children, we’re paying predators
of our own creation to erase us, and our world.
We might observe that we relate with flat maps cognitively in a
way that results in a species of inward machines, which tend, over
time, to result in outward machines. Once these are thoroughly
entrenched, they form a kind of expanding catastrophe-clock. Given
time and resources, they will erase a living planet, and their living
parents. As time progresses, due to their effects of presence upon
the organisms who created them, this circumstance will increase
geometrically in two domains: velocity of expansion, and deniability.
The presence of machines literally breaks the minds of
organismal sentience-networks — with noise, or by essentially
replacing living connectivity with mechanized (co-opted) transports
which mimic what they replaced.
Such a process grows less obvious to its host in a geometric spiral
— partially because it first co-opts the organismal
features required to detect or resolve the circumstances correctly
— much in the way an auto-immune disorder may create
a structural breakdown in the system in place to defend against
it.
