If Earth were (as Lewis Thomas poetically speculates) like a single,
incredibly diverse cell — what would happen when one species
started making machines who’s functioning and reproduction
erased themselves and the incredible diversity preserved
over thousands of trillions of living generations?
What would happen if this occurred with extreme suddenness
— in what amounts to the blink of an eye?
Seen from the perspective of a sentient world, this would be far
more than shocking. One moment, the garden-body-I-am is relatively
stable and diversely thriving, as it has been for eons
— then — in the next instant, 1/10th of it
is paved and 68% of the children-I-am have been replaced with machines,
their transports, and their maintenance costs.
On awakening to this fact, most of the gardens-of-I-am are discovered
to be burned or poisoned, at varying scales of severity, and at
different scales of size. Countless billions of life-years of complexity
are strangely missing,
and with them, a large portion of the planet’s biological
and cognitive self.
For the planet, and all of her children, this is a holocaust
of bizarre and terrifying origin. For the first time in the history
of Earth, one of the children is threatening to end complex
life on Earth. They’ve been doing this, and pretending something
else is happening, for at least 300 years — a tiny fraction
of a terrestrial moment. In the last 50, however, industrial humanity
began to gain the ability to scalarly amplify this activity. The
cost thus far has been approximately 35% of the Earth’s animalian
and ecosystemic biodiversity.
Our arrangements and arguments have actively opposed the understanding
that as our Earth’s biodiversity perishes, we experience this
crisis individually and collectively in realtime. Cognitively and
physically, we will consistently be pressed to more generally reflect
our environment, moment-to-moment — and when it is dying,
each domain of our persons is aware and connected to this event.
As the effects of our ideas and their implementations are
distributed to the entirety of the living organisms of Earth —
complex sentient organisms such as we represent are first in line
to encounter these effects — because we are hyperconnective,
and are evolved specifically to serve this particular purpose. The
purpose of sensing.
If Earth is sentient, the erasure of biodiversity she has suffered
in the last 50 years is like being shot in the head — or having
a severe stroke. When She awakens from such an event, most
of herSelf is missing, and place of what is gone is something that
mimics certain features of life, but is not Life. Machines, their
transports, and their supporting regalia.
A significant portion of her mind is gone — almost
all of the complex elements in this mind have been functionally
if not completely destroyed — and the remaining populations
will sustain Life, but not complex cognitive endeavor — which
had been embodied and activated within the missing biocognitive
children and their associations. Earth awakens in a coma.
Humans — amongst the most complex of her children (and thus
her biocognitive body) are still present, but they are — as
a general class of organisms — cognitively diseased, and are
doing something like what immune-system disorders do in the human
body — they virally deploy mechanistic paradigms against themselves
and their living environment. Not only are the humans malfunctioning
(as Life), they are perishing from their own activity. Instead of
responding, they are taking the entirety of Earth’s body with
them. In a biocognitive organism, this often results in dementia
—formally, in terms of biology, and cognitively, in terms
of organismal effect. So if Earth is complexly conscious after such
a cataclysm, she is probably, much like any animal, extremely confused,
and possibly missing important sections of her brain, and thus,
her mind. Vast domains of connectivty are gone. They will not be
returning, either.
It is through the power of such an analogy that we may begin to
really understand the significance which our ways of knowing, and
our implementations of these models possess. Those which are mechanical
in aspect, organization and activity can be useful as tools, but
they are deadly as the masters of humans. I is not machines which
are the essential problem — they are merely its expression
in the physical domain. The problem lies in our semantic relationships
with language and Life. Language, is not what we’ve been led
to believe it is. Niether is Life. Strangely, we ourselves turn
out, upon close experiential examination, to be something that formally
puts the lie to every definition of human I have ever encountered.
What we know about ourselves is not only mistaken, it is founded
almost entirely of mechanized presentations of quality, separation,
judgment, and values. To call this absurd would be an understatement.
We are trapped in cages of knowing estranged from our true natures
and features. These cages are eating us alive — heart, body,
mind, soul and planet. Frankly, they are eating everything in sight.
If it moves, they eat it. It is almost as if something in the nature
of the mechanized model desires to rule over all domains of movement.
