One condition that tends to create biological (and cognitive)
hyperconnectivity is crisis, and the other is thriving diversity
of embodiment in a localized unitySystem. As Earth grew more complex,
more complexity could be conserved in individuals and in the biome
itself, in new and novel living libraries of ways. One
such general evolutionary milestone resulted in the first animals,
which were, in a sense, communities of organisms now permanently
bound together, within a membrane they mutually supported, nurtured
and protected.
This complexity, embodied and conserved across many domains of implementation
and scale, creates the potential for integrations that our species
has somehow failed to notice the general or specific significance
of. It is, in the final analysis, a personal significance rather
than a legalistic one. It is one we must experience directly, as
children in a game of rescue. Handing us tokens or theories fails
in this domain.
More cogent to my line of discourse is that the natures and features
of our cognition, and our minds are also congruent with this principle,
at their scales and in proper perspective. When we actively recognize
that our biosphere is our body — and our mind — moment-to-moment
— we are more often empowered to inhabit the position of protector
instead of persecutor or victim — for some profoundly important
and simple reasons.
The first is that regardless of our logics or terms, the Earth herself
recapitulates these observable characteristics of relation and connectivity
consistently, at every scale, as do our bodies, and even our minds.
And our world is, as many before me have noticed, a very
small bubble of possibility. Like a living library, it is a container
that holds biotime in uniquely embodied reflective rings of living
participants. If there is anything rare, or of value, it is these
participants, particularly more complexly evolved animalian forms.Yet
the very foundations of our metaphor, and our systems of tokenized
relation — our semantic foundations — generally deny
these features their obvious reality. Strangely, such questions
are relegated to experts and philosophers, instead of individuals,
or societies — but it is within our human persons and societies
where the potentials to address these matters are either present
or missing.
Modern humans (as a class of humans) may mourn the loss of an ecosystem
or species from a heartful perspective, or a kind of general moralism
— but we do not generally get it that such sacrifices
come out of our own lives, in every possible domain, simultaneously.
Individual humans are mourning this quite seriously, and for very
different reasons than ‘experts’ will ever supply. For
in the individual is conserved a deep imprint of the history of
Life on Earth, and within this imprint, the truth of living relation
is boldly inscribed: it is not possible to harm a distant other
in a connective and locally unified system. It never was, and it
never will be. And it is the individual who must ceaselessly and
silently endure the effects of our activity, often without the ability
to describe or be heard about the incredible and constant disturbance
of self and circumstance our modern paradigms demand as the price
of our survival.
Nature is not flat — what we participate in is a self-referencing
organization of living and cognitive systems. Wherever we distribute
punishment or erasure, especially if something rare or precious
is used up in the process, we’re lining up to receive it in
the same moment. We are so profoundly connected to the inside
of our living planet, that when we burn a forest, or eliminate (or
viciously stress) another ecological ring-member, a scalar reflection
of this activity is distributed to the entire population, not only
in a linear cause-effect cycle, but also in real-time. Meaning now.
Human organizations, such as nations, communities, families and
even companies are congruent with this general principle in their
every implementation. Every scale and participant of the biosphere
could be said to consistently structurally reflect its environmental
context, in many domains and scales of local symmetric congruence.
This congruence arises from hyperconnectivity across scales, time,
and apparant domain.
What is happening on Earth, in scales and domains of living symmetries,
is a liquid phenomenon. Our conscious relations with time portray
these features as solid at our scale of reference. Change this value
sufficiently as a constant of perspective, and our meaning systems
(and many of our valuing systems, particularly those that aspire
to objectivity) evaporate into absurdity.
This doesn’t imply the universe is absurd, it implies problems
with our understandings of two terms: Time, and Life. In our rush
toward mechanical and technically defined expressions of progress,
we failed to conserve a proper respect for systems, peoples, cultures
and creatures in general. An essential implication of some root-metaphors
(which are sources of knowledge-relation) is that ‘shaving
nature’s designs’ is a good idea, and this is echoed
in our ethics and activities of the past 1000 years at least. But
in the past 500 the effects have progressed geometrically rather
than linearly. We have, as a technologically empowered species,
adored the shaved version of a living system too much. So much,
in fact, that we have torn apart a system of living diversity required
for our survival. We are not yet in a position where we can unilaterally
admit this — how can we hope to respond?
Outwardly, this is serious enough to be a holocaust, but its effects
in our minds, and our biocognitive persons are more direct and significant
than we might imagine. The obverse is also true, the protection
of the biosphere results in vast and immediate benefits for all
participants. Arguments that favor the biosphere not needing protection
contain a suicide seed — they will eventually, left unchecked,
erase their proponents from living history. Even a biosphere without
humans needs protection, but one with our version of human inhabitants
requires much more. Any living world needs organismal protection
from something very specific: the wanton erasure of her constituents
by a cognitive or mechanical predator, sudden environmental shift,
or extraterrestrial impact(s).
It is not tangential to notice here that ideas about human liberty
cannot be properly forged without a structurally congruent and realistic
reflection of their living contexts, for it is here we find the
sources of the keys to cognitive, personal, social and biospheric
potential. And in these potentials lie the roots for any real exploration,
empowerment or embodiment of human liberty, which must be activated
as cognitive as well as physical or intellectual potentials in our
own lives, and lifetimes. The nature of the biocognitive world we
participate in is not tokenized, and thus is not essentially
congruent with our knowledge-systems. Such living universes
resist frozen models in their every implementation. When
we tokenize our experience or understanding, even as I am doing
here, we gain formal knowledge — but formal knowledge
always requires that reality be shaved in order to fit
a specific system of relational templates.
These frameworks of formal knowledge are not accurate compared to
what they represent, but are instead approximations — and
their nature is to force the exclusion of certain domains of knowing,
and of experience. They act as filters. Part of this shaving process
results in machines, or mechanizations — which occur in physical
as well as intellectual and cognitive domains. Our ways of knowing
were more flexible when they were more poetic, and the mechanization
of our lives, and the very roots of our tools of understanding has
had profound effects upon the shape of our relations with each other,
our world, and knowledge in general.
If Nature abhors anything, it is not the vacuum, but the token.
Where we have tokens, nature has templates. Ours are specific, hers,
general. If we examine a certain domain of difference between a
rabbit and a toy rabbit, we may construct a reasonable analogy.
The rabbit complexifies and reproduces, it is biocognitively connective.
The toy rabbit, can actually cost living rabbits to reproduce,
and can inhabit terrain that once-living rabbits required
— it can utilize the work-effort and cognitive natures of
humans to reproduce itself, and cause them to organize their planet
to generally aid in such reproductions.
In a very real sense, the toy rabbit is a mimic, and a terrain predator.
It is dead assembly, requiring the resources of living assemblies
for the maintainance of its transports, and terrain. If we examine
the automobile as an example of this, we see a far more direct and
deadly set of evidences.
What becomes the truth of our living experience, is almost instantly
translated into the cognitive and intellectual reflections of such
momentums in ourselves. A simple addiction to wrongly-founded tokens
is enough to destabilize not only a species, but an entire animalian
biosphere.
Many have wisely said that the system of Life is a tree —
one cannot subtract branches arbitrarily and have no effect. Yet
we must revise this to the degree that it functions to immediately
change our experience and activity in relation to the living world,
and each other. Our own minds are emergent from the biodiversity,
atmospheric and environmental relation — moment-to-moment
— that we experience and participate in. We are sacrificing
our world, minds, and children — often with no idea the process
is occurring, or its scale or meaning.
Yet the remedy is near at hand, a simple reshaping of some metaphors
could be enough to effect our rescue from thousands of years of
stolen history, and from the catastrophic outcomes of burning the
libraries of living complexity from which we emerge. In this reshaping,
we will rediscover what our powers are in unity. And they are beyond
our wildest stories.
