Let us imagine for a moment that the Earth is actually a single
organism. We shouldn’t have to imagine this, but
science, philosophy and religion as they influence our modern stories
and metaphors have long implied that this is not really so —
and in many cases this potential is overtly denied. After all, it
hasn’t been proven. How a living planet could fail
to function as proof of its own existence is not too difficult to
imagine — our ideological models and stories, have, in their
foundations, labored long in open denial of the experienceable reality
of such a potential. Ideas along these lines have long been considered
metaphysical, ‘unscientific’, blasphemous — and
any other implicitly or overtly negative adjective we may care to
apply. For some reason, this idea has been incompatible with modern
western religion throughout most of its history. And a large part
of this has to do with the metaphoric relationship we decide upon
and embody with animals. If we cannot locate the sentience in animals,
we will certainly fail to locate it in their container-animal.
Yet vastly different versions of metaphoric and direct cognitive
relation with such a planet-animal, or god, are conserved in many
indigenous religions, as well as those of the birthplaces of our
civilization in ways as overt as our implicit or specific denials.
In the relatively brief moment of past 60 years, integrations from
the fields of cellular biology, systems theory, and peculiarly inquisitive
people from every walk and class of life have led to the potential
for us to leap out of the bonds of our scientific reverse-superstition,
and begin to glimpse many of the vistas which, once common in experience
and metaphor to living humans, were lost in historic cataclysm and
our evolutionary rush toward the relationship we now experience
with complexly symbolic representational consciousness, or what
Julian Jaynes would call the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. But
this mind is not broken down, at all. It is merely obscured, like
the Sun during the cycle of night. We will return to and expand
upon some of these topics as we proceed.
I wish to train our focus in a general way upon how Life depends
upon diversity, and how complex cognition arises only from
its continuing graces. As a single organism, Earth is expressive
of diversity because this is one of the most essential and general
of the elemental characters of Life’s strategies — present
in the domains of form, organization, connectivity, context, and
nearly any ‘portion’ or scale we may examine. Even two
beings which are from the same template — even twins or clones
— express this diversity in dramatic departures from statistical
or real similarity.
If I could underling any single axiom it is that our species
was born during what may have been Earth’s most bountiful
moment of diversity, and our cognition, as well as the general features
of our consciousness were born there as well. When we realize
the true impact of this, we can see that our attack on biodiversity
and the general stabilty of the biosphere, coupled with industrial
toxicification, resource-rendering, and direct genetic manipulation
are destroying the nusery our minds emerge from. As they do this,
these minds — in us, change in synchrony with their disappearing
sources. As biospheric terrain fills with dead machines, so too,
does the cognitive health and activity of our own people shift,
degrading as it loses its constituent systems — not just in
individuals — but in a planetary animal.
Yes, Life is a game of survival, elaboration, reproduction —
perhaps even some competition — but diversity is the living
treasure with which each of these domains are enriched. The game
is not as competitive as we have been led to believe, and not in
the ways we believe. Life’s diverse embodiments lead to overwhelming
expansions of uniquely expressed connectivity transports. In these
transports, cognitive as well as physical, Life can preserve its
conservations across the gap of death. Diversity melded with complexity
of connectivity are the basis of hypercognition — the essential
activity of organisms which exist across many populations, and scales.
Simplifying all of this what we discover what Earth as an organism
or system has long known and practiced — that biocognitive
diversity is sustainably robust in dealing with systemic threats.
Some such threats are inherent: they arise within the activity of
the biosphere’s inhabitants — but it is rare for a single
lifeForm or ecosystem to accrue the necessary velocity to bring
a threat to bear against the entirety of the biosphere. Most of
the threats are systemic, such as sudden environmental shift in
response to a geophysical or contextual circumstance of the Earth.
In reality, these two domains weave together, co-emerging, and informing
each other’s structural and characteristic changes.
The environmental membrane in which life as we understand it exists
is tremulous at best. Its ongoing stability, however apparently
dependable, is, in reality, exceptionally permeable. Change is its
rule, and when large scales of change come rapidly, Nature, and
living systems do something much like what humans do: they rely
upon carefully prepared and very diversely conserved resources.
It is the diversity and connectivity of such resources that will
determine the speed and effectiveness of recovery for any
organism. But the organism which is Earth is in a situation where
these resources are being expended not to resolve systemic crisis,
but instead enforced by the arrogance and greed of a fairly small
number of the willing, leading a vast number of the unknowing.
For the Earth — and perhaps most of her children, the critical
domains of diversity are form, connectivity, and scale. In embodying
diverse scales of expression in the evolutionary conservations of
myriad animalforms, Earth is functionally nurturing a variety of
positive consequences obtain for the biosphere and its participants.
Connectivity amongst unique member-systems is the birthplace of
our cognitive natures, and our languages. I am not suggesting that
Earth ’decided’ to experience our species’ development.
I am instead stating that any living world would necessarily endeavor
to produce life similar to Homo Sapiens. The reason is simple, and
has to do with organismal reproduction. In order to reproduce, an
organism with a finite lifespan must produce a kind of a cell which
can, one way or another, cross space and time. Earth has already
produced many such cells, and some of them are doubtless travelling
through both mediums as we speak — but we are the first child
of Earth to accrue the potential to move ourselves and our siblings
first to off-planet ecologies — and then to the stars.
When a planet has succeeded in establishing itself as a complex
organism with many scales and domains of connectively diverse forms
— it is more delicate than when in a simpler state of relatively
hardy tinyLife. An analogy would be that of a pyramid. The roots
of the pyramid are stable — removing stones may have a local
effect, but it will not cause the entirety of the structure to dissolve.
The higher upon the pyramid we build, however, the less true this
becomes. This untruth grows geometrically as we proceed up the pyramid.
If we remove random banks of stones from the completed pyramid,
eventually, the majority of the complexly supported body
of the structure will disolve. Even here, the roots will likely
remain, even if buried beneath the rubble of what they supported.
The activity of our species in the past 500 years has removed many
random banks of stones from the pyramid we are atop of. In in ecosystems
— which we must remember are cognitive systems — the
result is scalar waves of destabilization. These waves erase
whole lineages of biocognitive libraries while causing severe,
and often uncorrectable stress in many scales and domains of the
remaining living participants — not merely locally —
but in the entirety of Earth’s biosphere. What is lost during
such events is essentially far more irreplaceable than we might
imagine, or than our common understandings and metaphors would imply.
It is the rarest of possible treasures we are burning, and most
of us aren’t really aware of the significance of this event.
The more complex the participants of a planet are, the more they
rely upon biospheric diversity and connectivity at every possible
scale. For human beings, one of the most biocognitively complex
creatures on our world, this has implications of profound and lasting
import. We are the most reliant of nearly all the animals
of our world upon the thriving of a diversely complex biosphere.
Supposedly unlike animals, we have representational minds, and these
emerge from their contexts, echoing those contexts in their general
and specific organization and elaboration-activity. When our living
context is being eradicated, we suffer cognitively first, and physically
soon thereafter. We think that emotion connects us to the understanding
of the suffering of others, but it is our biology that connects
us — and our ways of knowing.
Since emotion in human beings is highly contextual, what happens
inside ourselves when our containers are mechanized, and we find
that the natural world around us is succumbing to our technologies
and commerce? What happens is that we become contextually threatened.
We may sense there is a great threat, and cannot find one that others
will acknowledge — so we generalize it, and undergo relationships
of constantly increasing stress, until it becomes clear what the
real threat is, or we become medicated or socialized out of perceiving
any.
There is never a situation where the wholesale sacrifice of animalian
populations, ecosystems, or human cultures is not an irreplaceable
loss in the history of a living world. But the primary benefit of
preservation and biospheric nurture is pragmatic. More diversity
means that there is a better likelihood of systemic survival in
the event of catastrophe. It also means an opportunity to organize
something like our species — because the complexity we enjoy
is a direct recapitulation of whatever environment we are born in
and encounter, moment-to-moment.
It is crucial that we as a species understand this single feature
of our nature and container: when Earth’s biocognitive conservations
are embodied diversely enough across many scales of size and domains
of relevance — the biosphere as an organism is vastly more
likely to survive the sudden changes that occur consistently in
cycles of relation with the Sun, as well as the unexpected changes
which exist as outcomes of penetration by a celestial body — or
penetration by extraterrestrial microbial invaders. A serious penetration
causes the terrestrial organism to fall backward down the
ladder of sentient ascension — and biocognitive complexity
— sometimes so dramatically that it is hard to represent the
effect in mere words. Thousands of billions of life-years of complexity,
impossible and magical accruals and conservations which cannot be
replaced, are eliminated in the tiniest of instants. The organismal
Earth which emerges from such an injury is a crippled and literally
terra-fied animal. Its ability to regulate its internal health,
connectivity, and cognition is a shadow of what it was. It is like
any animal severely injured by an accident — medics are not
coming, in the planetary sense.
Life wants to survive as a general system, as well as in
the sense of an individual or system of many scales of participants.
The conservation of diversely embodied evolutionary complexity catalyses
incredible potentials in living systems which afford them the opportunity
leap gaps before they arise. This is accomplished by organizing
the benefits of many scales cognitive complexity and diversity into
connective rings of virtually local unification. When Earth
as an organism thrives, this thriving is generally communicated
to all participants. In the domain of human consciousness and experience,
this translates directly into the luxury of liberty and self-elaboration.
It translates into the liberty of cognitive and socio-cognitive
fulfilment. It is the source and hope of any defintion of liberty
which conserves the desire for a sustainable and compassionate exploration
of our inheritences as children of our world, who must, in fact,
comprise a single family.
