We have all been told that human knowledge is so overwhelming now that we begin to depict it in graphs of ideas, illuminations like the fabulous computer tracings in color of the connections among brain neurons as they record history and hope in circuits of trillions inside our skulls, the idea that I tried to capture in my worship thesis called "The Bone Chalice." Some of the variations of individual loopings are on Google Images, arranged differently when the computer was given different instructions, but all symbolic/artistic depictions of something to believe, to be seen, instead of being described in words. No one can see these tracings in the mush of neurons in a skull.
The computer generated portrait of a human connectome -- the presumed electrochemical ties between neural cells in the brain -- is a stunning portrait of the capacity of thought in one mind -- what I used to call the thought-fire in the 'bone chalice," the web in the head.
The next computer image of tracings is completely virtual, that is, it does not exist in a form we can see because it is about relationships among narratives published in one magazine, called "Nature." All of these dots, putatively called scientific papers, are depicted as docs with the relationships among them traced by reference and influence. It must be arbitrary to some degree according to the humans deciding the subjects and relationships, but it is still impressive and even beautiful, partiicularly in its video form which is capable of showing development over time.
This Nature article also uses the method of computer generated connections. It is about the connections between individual thinking people who write narrative scientific manuscripts deriving from each other's work. It is a way that humans together amount to far more than any one person.
Another accumulation of connections has not been computerized, so far as I know. I'm talking about the presenting bonding between two people. We talk about "six degrees of separation", which is similar but not quite the same. What if all the people I have had a relationship with were shown as dots and then the filaments connecting us, not just me to them but the ties among them?
We know that somehow the "frame of expression" (my phrase but Porges description of how two people present to each other, noting breath, heart beat, muscle tension, voice, and -- most of all -- gaze/eye contact, a phenomenon called "empathy" that allows some of us to "enter" each other, something like the intimacy of sex/attachment, and to create something virtual that is trans-human, fluid and creative. The web of thought as organized into disciplines is something like that interconnected empathy, at least if it's read with understanding and extended with a new "paper".
One thinker estimates that there are over 250 disciplines when once there were three recognized categories in major thought: theology, medicine and law. In the beginning all three looked pretty much like theology. That is, the disciplines were believed to describe tha knowledge of god, the fundamental categories of the universities as well as the universe. Humanities were peripheral. Now the art of depiction and presentation has become the means of grasping the huge morphing body of thought. I would love to see a computer graphic of the disciplines or even of the humanities.
The trans-individual connections have developed parallel to the mapping and interacting of knowledge. The internet has shaken the university monopoly on how we think, but presented the new problem of false relationships. This was aways in existence, but kept to a minimum if only by capacity.
Now a third process develops in a new way. In the beginning of hominins, the virtual space created by relationship (which can be shared by, for instance, a person and a dog so that they understand each other) is formed by the mother/infant bond, growing from nurturing interaction like feeding, cleaning and comforting. Then the bonds of attachment that form in the ideal family extends through the genealogy. Continuing the hierarchy and heterogenity of relationship, humans organize themselves by occupation, residence and goals. Eventually, responding to ecology, they become tribes and nations, and even develop the United Nations or the institutions they call "religion."
What we now realize that though these ties are "real", they are always a bit illusion because the "real" is electromagnetic code that is carried in our DNA which develops and is borrowed from all the codes around us, even the ones that are not human or even mammal or any preceding form of life as evolution tries to tell us. We are in part even the result of the molecular isotopes of the mineral elements around us. Most of these codes are kept at "arm's length" by our skins and only conscious in small percentages, single digits, which we can handle only in concept bunches that are given names and become "real" to us, even though they are only what the neural cells of the brain and the rest of the body can perceive and weave into what it already knows, what parent taught it.
Our lives interweave with other lives -- plants, animals and microbes -- mostly time-limited as individual entities, but often intense and significant to the human mind. We are the first creatures capable of considering our own survival as a category but doomed to death as individuals, no matter how dear we are to others. We can stand apart and imagine what might happen if this or that were changed, but we don't necessarily agree about what works and even what ought to survive.
But we are also capable to an exquisite degree to what the original "learning" excluded: the simple enjoyment of the flow of sensory code as we walk in the world, the beloved beauty of what is around us from sky to sea, day and night, summer and winter, in the great twirling pulse of the planet whether we are there or not. These computer-generated tracings are part of it.
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