WHERE HAS WRITING GOTTEN US?

Only recently have we realized that our fixation on writing is a limitation on our evidence of the world.  First we had to see that existence is an ongoing process that never reaches an end.  Then since there is constant mutation of the interactions that produce life, this produces evolution which is one thing coming out of another.  Humans are an emergent property of the planet, transient but somehow able to perceive and reflect, not just on what is written but through interpreting all the evidence around us, stretching back into the past far beyond ourselves and even the planet.

Fossils, DNA, the sedimentation and striations of stone, the isotopes of water and air, the infinite waves of ancient starlight, are all forms of “writing”.  What we call “religion” is as changing, recording, and predicting as anything else.  It is “emergent,” a species of birthing as it pushes against the world.  Some scientists are proposing that as many as two hundred species of physical/animal humans have come into being over the hundreds of millennia, some of them recent and nearby enough to share genes, their formulas responding to the conditions of time and place.  Only “we” have escaped to tell each other.

So the smoke and blood of the original hunter-gatherer bands coming out of Africa to settle around the Mediterranean gradually became what we call “Western Civilization” which has now just about reached the limit of all the resources we can exploit to maintain our existence.  Which means we will either transform again or die.  What is emerging from us?  

The proposition is that the withdrawal of the last glaciation a little more than  ten thousand years ago somehow created a possibility for modern humans to travel north out of Africa and settle around the Mediterranean (the fertile crescent) where someone discovered that the climate and fertility allowed the growing of the “founder crops” which are three cereals (emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley), four pulses (lentils, peas, chickpeas, and bitter vetch) and flax.  These joined meat and milk from herding domesticated animals.  Tubers (potatoes and peanuts) came later from the New World.

One could say that the history of religion is the history of food.  Our early Old Testament stories of the easy-eating Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel quarrelling in the fields, Jacob and Esau quarrelling over proper sacrifice (meat or grain) and transfer of ownership (pottage) across generations, are about food and land.  But most of all, the development of food that can be stored — in a way that milk and meat cannot — meant the emergence of granaries and towns.  

The concept of “containers” in the broadest sense arose both as thought systems that could contain meaning and as institutions maintaining those systems.  The environment began to be “built” by humans as dwellings, passages, walled defences, and religious structures, first as shrines and piles of stones to mark places of importance, then eventually expanding into temples where the wealth of food supported a class of people specializing in thinking out systems and designing thoughts and acts that supported their ideas.  There are early emerging separations from nature in the form of laws.  But the people were still at the mercy of climate (drought and flood, freezes), geology (earthquakes and volcanoes), and disease (the rise of zoonoses from the domestic animals).  These are also written about in the Old Testament, demanding sacrifice, prayer and obedience.

“The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with Sumerian Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC.

“Ancient history is defined in different manners, and can be defined as occurring from the beginning of recorded human history to:

• The Early Middle Ages (the end of the 4th century AD)

• The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD

• The Postclassical Era (200-600 AD and 1200–1500 AD, depending on the continent)

“Although the ending date of ancient history is disputed, some Western scholars use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD (the most used), the closure of the Platonic Academy in 529 AD, the death of the emperor Justinian I in 565 AD, the coming of Islam or the rise of Charlemagne as the end of ancient and Classical European history.”  (This is from Wikipedia.  It makes no mention of Jesus — I don’t know why.)

As nations formed, so did what are called the “Axial” religions, the mega-institutions that overlay governmental borders: Catholic Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, each with their emergent sub-divisions and resulting written doctrines.  The behavior and fortunes of their adherents varied.  But now, laying aside writing and institutions, we enter a new understanding that is much broader than anything written.

25 Beacon Street

Relying on written history, I propose to look back closely at one sub-sub-sub-division of European religion, the contemporary Unitarian Universalist Association which ambivalently claims to be a denomination or not, with congregations who claim to be churches or not (fellowships).  In some ways continuous with the effort to renew by going back to the earliest Christian groups when there were still many “species” of dogma, it tries to claim pluralism which has meant it is open to the larger culture.  If something happens in the Western world, it also happens in the UUA.  

One could characterize it humorously as a response to coffee, an adaptation of Early Greek forums inventing democracy.  As a personal indulgence I’m going to trace out the history of UU worship, this specific group which began as revolution against Calvinist Protestantism and has since hosted other revolutions such as Transcendentalism or Humanism.

First Unitarian Church of Rochester, NY

At first considering itself Christian, in the way that the first Christians considered themselves Jewish, the denomination continued as all denominations do in the pursuit of prosperity which is an attempt to guarantee survival.  It is a “denomination” (named Christian subgroup) that is dependent on writing.  It is also vulnerable to politics of law, but only covertly devoted to wealth and status, while pretending to be populist.  The coherent dynamic is education, which has until now been controlled by institutions.  Sometimes there is an impulse of “leveling”, mistaken for equality.

Contemporary Western culture is so dominated by public media and the Internet that it has somehow returned to a nearly pre-literate but highly sophisticated technical state.  Sources of wealth are shifting away from material resources and becoming a virtual system based on capital rather than materials.  Religion is leaving institutions, which means leaving stabilizing systems.  Populations are leaving the places that gave rise to their unique adaptations, which don’t necessarily work in new locations.

We are looking at apocalyptic times as global warming submerges whole islands and plagues sweep through our populations.  All our institutional systems are challenged and doubted.  Something is trying to emerge through the new systems, possibly a whole new kind of human being.  But it also clear that whole categories of people will disappear as though endangered and extinct species — maybe already have, taking their languages with them even if they were written down.  What will this do to our sense of what is sacred?

The sense of the sacred is a human attribute that emerges with the other senses when the blastophere develops in the womb.  As nerves gradually develop, connecting to muscle and viscera and centering a dashboard in the brain, each of us learns the world in two aspects: that which is inside their own skin and that which is outside their skin, transmitted to them in an electrochemical code.  The second part of this second book of a trio (I don’t want to say trinity.) will begin at this point in the discussion.  Next post.

EMERGENCE

"The Philosopher Kings"

Soft Rock Canadian Band 

“The idea that there is some eternal essence from which all reality is derived gives a sense of the eternal. But such fantasies need to be abandoned along with the equally seductive idea (for the teenage male) of Philosopher Kings. In a sense I stand more these days with Heraclitus in thinking that everything flows, nothing stands still. To go as far as Nietzsche in suggesting that Being is an essential fiction probably takes the idea to the extreme but flow as a concept and as a metaphor is the (sic) essence of understanding complexity.”

from  David Snowden  http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/6413/essential-flows/

David Snowden

“Emergence” is a formal principle like “synergy” which means two things interacting to create a third thing that is “better”, more complex.  I became aware of this first because of working with metal alloys in the bronze foundry.  They had to be molten to mix but bronze was copper melded with other metals and even silicon.  Each combination had its own characteristics.

Then I saw when working with dogs how “breeds” would mix.  Left alone, rez dogs become pye dogs (rustlers) or guard dogs (big and fierce).  I’ve watched the social development of the human rez to see what emerges.  It’s not genetic, but an alloy of systems and beliefs -- very complex, escaping the control of almost everyone who tries, somewhat impoverished by the weakened ties to the indigenous animals.

Here’s from that mysterious collection of unnamed people who write on Wikipedia.  “In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is conceived as a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. In philosophy, almost all accounts of emergence include a form of irreducibility (either epistemic or ontological) to the lower levels. . .  For instance, the phenomenon life as studied in biology is commonly perceived as an emergent property of interacting molecules as studied in chemistry whose phenomena reflect interactions among elementary particles, modeled in particle physics. . . Neurobiological phenomena are often presumed to suffice as the underlying basis of psychological phenomena, whereby economic phenomena are in turn presumed to principally emerge.”

There are three main afflictions that come from the idea of “emergence.”  One is the idea that it’s possible to get to a few basic essences as particle physics constantly pursues little bits.  Existence is bottomless and so is emergence.  Another is the idea that emergence can be predicted and a third is that emergence can be controlled.  As a sub-category, people don’t realize that emergence can change everything (the internet changed books, telephones, spying, the African continent, outer space) nor that emergence doesn’t stop.  Whatever has emerged will be the substrate for whatever emerges next and it will be equally unpredictable and uncontrollable.  That includes the human species.

I am Heraclitian and Taoistic in my response to this.  That is, seeking and changing.  Follow the flow.  There’s a lot more to read, but right now I’m going to follow the threads related to “religious naturalism”

Ursula Goodenough

“Examples are detailed in a 2006 essay titled 'The Sacred Emergence of Nature' by Ursula Goodenough”  “Science and Spirit describes her as a warm, brilliant and embracing woman, [whose] contradictions make up a harmonious whole – sort of like nature itself, and describes her book as a poetic and accessible bestseller.”  I'm sure she's a lovely person, but this interpretation is total nonsense, liberal cant and I’m tempted to be more rude by changing a vowel.  Note the commercial endorsement.  Mother Nature as product. 

Embracing nature as poetic and accessible will get you killed and eaten, as Timothy Tidwell found out.  If you think of emergence in terms of starting small and growing, what is most emergent at the moment is ebola.  If you think of emergence as something less concrete, it may be social.  It is likely to be biological in the broadest sense, like the new realization that horizontal gene-swapping among living entities is constant and everywhere, so what is emerging is (as usual) our consciousness.  It was there all along.  

Code cannot be confined.  (That goes for ideas as well as cell code.)  More practical is facing and adjusting to the major changes in the lives of people in the ebola-affected areas of Africa: political, economic, familial, emotional and in terms of relationship to the rest of the continent and planet.  The bats in SE Asia appear to be carrying antibodies for ebola.

Stuart Kauffman

So maybe I’ll go to a 2006 essay titled 'Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred' by Stuart Kauffman, although that takes me back to Edge.org where old men are still fighting the Christian God.  “Kauffman frames a new scientific world view of emergence and ceaseless creativity, which, he notes, is "awesome in what has come to pass in reality, and God enough for me and many, where God is the creativity of the universe, yielding a global ethics of respect for all life, the planet, awe, wonder and spirituality cut free from a transcendent God."   

See what I mean?  Still in thrall to the old system, chained to the negative and metaphor.  ("God is love.")  Respecting "living things" but not inanimates like the breathability of the atmosphere or the power of geology.  Actually, this way of thinking is not emergent.  The trouble with any wiki is that it’s conventional.  Because it is drawn from a lot of people, even the “cutting edge” is conventional.  And the assumption that crowd-wisdom has value or meaning is always liberal.  They reject sin (legalities) but they don’t recognize evil (malevolence).  In their systems the indifference of the cosmos is never recognized.  Anyway emergence has nothing to do with such categories as living vs. dead.

It doesn’t matter how much a creature evolves, if the planet shifts and the shift pushes the creature out of its homeostatic stream, it’s gone.  No more evolution for that little swimmer.  But its absence will make ecological space for something else.  The temptation is to describe all the possible ecological niches and even to try to control them.  But eliminating bats will NOT eliminate viruses.  It might eliminate pollenization or insect control.  Are there robots for those?

An early argument (1904-5) for the emergence of social formations, in part stemming from religion, can be found in Max Weber's most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”   Prosperity churches.  (Send money, send money, send money!) But I’m watching for “felt meaning” and for distinctions between the feeling of the sacred vs. religious institutions and technology.  Not seeing much.

I’m not going to pursue the emergence of schools of art or the emergence of the artist.  At one time I did a lot of reading about creativity but most of it was useless.  They did not deal with whatever it was that emerged in the Paleolithic mind that we now call art and creativity.  Why did they begin to strew flowers on the dead and make ornaments from bone and metal?  

The most important emergence sequence goes like this: code, cell wall, polarization between inlets and outlets, connecting structures within the cells, cells linking up into small creatures, small creatures evolving into specialized creatures, internal structures developing in the creatures, creatures forming groups, emerging internal structures of tissue enable “virtual structures” of felt meaning in a sensorium that guides actions and develops into a connectome of operations among senses and actions, giving rise to empathy and need to communicate which is an emergence of consciousness.  Sound management (speech) emerges, then writing which lets more complex history and thought systems emerge -- and so on.

“God” is an historically emergent concept based on family, kingship, and war.  This concept is an interpretation and has no reality.  Much violence has emerged from it, and this is one source of unconscious concepts interacting in ways that would, for instance, make a man believe he should kill his child or another man order all babies of a certain age to be killed.  But also emergent is the empathic and felt meaning of loving and protecting each other.  If the planetary conditions are favorable, it is possible to thrive with delight.  

Traces of ebola in Asia now.  No actual cases so far.

If planetary or social conditions are miserable, something will emerge that might be totally unexpected.  It was not the gay movement that made AIDS emerge -- it was cutting African forests for profit and building roads to take the wood to market.  It could be argued that same sex desire was set free by the pill because it undercut the reproductive component of marriage and let women earn their own livings.  Something is now emerging in Russia and something else in the megacities.  Something else among the indigenous peoples of the world -- in conversation forming a planetary sense of justice and participation.  The moguls don’t know, can’t know.  They look for profit and never see the small scurrying forces of little boys roasting little bats on sticks.

Jungle S'mores

PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS

Months ago I signed up to be automatically sent TED talks and have been startled and rewarded by some of them.  Recently they’ve been dumber and more irrelevant, so I’ve been ditching some of them halfway through. I was startled again to be presented for the first time with a chance to rate a presentation.  It was a little more detailed than a Netflix reaction.  I checked “unconvincing,” “ludicrous”, and "obnoxious.”  Partly it was the stiff presentation by a “philosopher,” but mostly it was his take on the subject, which was “consciousness.”  He was making a case -- once again -- that being conscious of thinking while consciously thinking separated human beings from all other beings and that consciousness was the most basic and pervasive nature of the universe.  

This man was discrediting all brain research as well as the concept of “emergence,” which means that interactions among previous entities can produce something new.  His assumption was that “consciousness” was something like “soul,” of a completely other nature than flesh.  I think the problem arises when people assume that “consciousness” is the primary event and everything else derives from it.  Plainly this is not true.  Consciousness is just a view point, barely outside the event. 

Even if one discards fancy psychoanalytical assumptions about unconscious entities like id, ego and libido, it’s obvious that much of what happens in a body is simply below access to the conscious mind.  Circulation of molecules, the rhythms of breathing and heartbeat, adjustment to gravity, peristalsis as food goes through the GI tract, and a fluctuating constant level of unease or harmony -- all go on without us thinking about it.  Besides that, there is an entire huge “cloud” database "on request" about what we had for lunch yesterday, the plot of a movie seen last week, or a trip taken a decade ago.  “Conscious” is just what is up for attention at the moment.

Bliss

Not that we CAN’T consciously think about being conscious, but much depends upon the Lakoff/Johnson deep metaphorical assumptions we use.  Most people equate light with conscious and dark with unconscious, so that consciousness becomes synonymous with “seeing.”  The unconscious is then unseen.  Being ignorant is being blind.  Did you “see that coming?”  Do you “see what I mean?”  Are you “enlightened?”  Having a major spiritual insight or vision is often depicted as a beam of light shining on one’s upturned face.

The “dark continent” is not just dark because of jungle (after all, a lot of it is desert) but because it is considered lacking education.  To be “left in the dark” is to not be told.  Since the Western world considers that only institutionalized learning is real understanding, only people who get good grades are “bright.”  We could go on.

I’ve moved to two other metaphors.  One is that consciousness is a process of relationship through the sensorium’s contact with the out-skin world, constantly adapting  and self-modifying in the brain as we move through that world, and also the macro-process of editing, collating, classifying, and re-combining the information we accumulate in-skin.  Many clever experiments have shown that we “see” what we expect, understand what is familiar, and cannot perceive what we have no concept of, no category to put it in or words to describe it.  Cultural historians explore the advent of concepts like romantic love or homosexuality, things many people think are realities until they wear out and are replaced by, um, "limerence" and "MSM."

Beyond that, words have judgment built into them.  I’m slender; you’re skinny.  Somehow stigmatized people think that if they just change the words slung at them, the stigma will go away.  But soon the stigma has migrated from “crip” to “disabled” to the rather desperate “differently abled.”  Still the word police are vigilant.  It’s easier than changing the actual mental categories and erasing social prejudice.  Removing the conviction that categories are real might help.  Effective thinking means always doubling back to examine the terms used.  Always asking oneself, “Is there another way to ‘look at’ this?”  The metaphor of light/sight is huge and complex if we’ll just use it that way and make sure we’re seeing a process, a moving, morphing flame rather than a lightbulb.

Process is the key to brains.  Now we can “see” it happening on our fMRI screens. A thinking brain is a “connectome” of electrochemical traffic among nodes with special abilities to sort and emphasize the messages -- not only that, but that the connectome changes constantly in response to what the sensorium is sending it.  The brain is not a room with the lights on, it’s more like a keyboard with fingers playing up and down it.  Since these nodes and neurochemistries don’t all act the same, let’s say that the brain is an orchestra conductor, guiding the melodies through the permutations of the identity symphony.  I wish I knew enough music theory to expand this metaphor.  

You may have noticed that both the metaphors of light and music are essentially about vibrations, which are a kind of code phenomena based on variation, surprise and convention, coming together and going apart.  “Vibes” and “resonance”  have become metaphors for meaningfulness for us.  “Tone deaf” means you can’t “get it.”

One’s connectome, like one’s sensorium, is too complicated and fast-moving to think about it very self-consciously, but one can change it while it moves by altering attitude -- seeing things a different way, changing the pace.  With the modern ability to record oneself in action, it’s possible to be “inside” your brain and acting, but then later to go to a critical or objective frame of reference and see yourself in action.  It’s often a shock. 

We need more terms for various connectomes.  What about hypnotized?  What about sleep-walking?  What about vegetative state?  What about so preoccupied one is oblivious to what is around one?   What about the kind of automatic driving that you can’t remember doing until something that needs attention pops up, like a cow in the road?  What about the hyper-listening of a musician?  There’s much more to human awareness than just conscious versus unconscious.  In fact, SUBconscious is a much better term.  It’s clear that “consciousness” is a product of the SUBconscious and emerges from whatever pathways and nodes are working during SUBconscious thought, which is foundational.  It implies that there might be something like a SUPRAconsciousness, a HYPERconsciousness, some higher function of the mind.

What seems to magnetize people thinking about these issues is the epiphanic and galvanizing mystical experiences that come unexpectedly.  These are certainly subjectively real.  Some claim they can reach it through yoga.  Or drugs. Magnetic currents applied to the temples.  Most people seem to think it’s a kind of super-orgasmic union with the Holy Spirit.  A very few don’t like it.  I’m working on the assumption that it is a moment when the connectome throughout the whole body is in harmony, an alignment.  

It is a phenomenon of the human mind that we can think of something more than what we can experience.  We can think of a color that is greener than green without ever seeing it.  We can think of the concepts of zero or infinity without really grasping them.  We can think of ourselves after death or before birth without experiencing it or describing it -- just raising the hypothesis.  But I would never deny that there can’t be experience, real and vivid, beyond what we can hold in our conscious minds now.  If we hadn’t thought about walking on the moon, we would never have been able to do it.  There are other TED talks and EDGE talks that address the issues more helpfully.