ORGANELLE

“I’ve always thought that Edward was the 3rd direction. You got forward, backward and … edward.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Compass

∞ It struck me then, that our categories are malfounded. They depend upon taxonomies, rather than relationships, stories, ideas… and principles. The old languages seem to have been founded in reverse… so that the categories were themselves meaningful. I could think of endless examples, but one that springs to mind is the difference between the idea of ‘a beaver’ and the idea that ‘this is the animal that helped found the world of land’. These are nothing like the same idea. And it seems I am speaking about a single word… but this is because the common idea of ‘animal’ is almost completely wrong.

I mean, we’re animals. But »other animals are thought of as simple, idiotic, disposable, pests, resources, not possessing consciousness or intelligence… all of which is and has always been: simply wrong.

When I sometimes try or am asked to speak to people about trees, ordinary people who have no real sense of trees, things get confusing because they think of them as something like ‘a living object we call a tree’.

They think of wood. Or paper. What can be had by killing the tree. Or they notice its beauty, that there’s something majestic there — perhaps even divine — but they have no access to this in their imagination. So they do not experience it. One of my friends said ‘Dude, it’s just a bunch of trees’.

There are problems beyond mere category here, but what if the category of plants was »sensed and known to mean ‘those beings that connect and enliven all other beings’. Or even ‘network plant aspect of all the animals’. If the meaning of the category is broken, the result is insanity. Intelligence becomes almost formally impossible, except in extremely narrow contexts.

I feel compassion for those who cannot yet see or sense the tree. But it’s like watching someone suffocate in an atmosphere that is fine to breathe because they were trained not to inhale (in a certain aspect of their being). And even I am like this, too. It’s just that I am aware of it.

And I know that both the categories are broken and that our languages are ‘dead inside’. There’s nothing »in the meaning of the word ‘tree’» to remind us or alert us that we are in the presence of something more astonishing than all of science. A being that is a travel-way for intelligences we have been too timid to imagine. A living ladder to other worlds and minds. This and far more than this is ‘tree’ to me.

But I was trained like everyone else to pretend nonsense-ideas about identity and intelligence in nature were ‘facts’. Interestingly, the ‘facts’ exclude 99.99…% of what’s actually going on. And the ‘facts’ in English are not the ‘facts’ in Blackfoot or Navaho.

Something is wrong with our idea about facts. And it should really bother us that the words with which we name things like the sky, mountains, dreams, the sun, animals, plants, and places… are dead inside. Because when we speak a dead language, we lose access to the »meaning of identity. Its roots. The communion. Everything goes dark and we become like a machine that learns to dismiss everything such dead language cannot encompass. Until we hear stories like ‘You’re not actually conscious, it’s just a metabolic side-effect of brain metabolism. Dismiss it. It’s illusory’.

Well, let’s suppose that’s true for a moment, even though it’s patently absurd. If true, it means that the illusory consciousness that is actually just a side-effect of chemistry… states that it is illusory. In which case, nothing is not illusory, including the statement made by this strange ghost-thing …

Over many years I have been rewilding my experience and understanding of language so that English words, for me, refer to stories, principles, ideas. And, of course, there are rich histories in the etymology and comparative etymologies between languages. But very old languages are medicinal in this regard, for in them we see the reflection of minds incapable of anything resembling the abstraction (read: ideas without relationships/skeletal models) that is status quo in common English and its everyday usage. The »really old languages are unimaginably rich. Compared to them, ours looks not only tragically and unnecessarily impoverished… it’s almost an anti-language.

Dead words speaking.

∞ “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Well, that’s one difference, but it’s not »the difference. Another difference is that they will tend to be aware of the forces oppressing them, rather than, for example, cheering wildly whenever a new oppression is introduced, and getting physically married to the object-vector of its introduction. Most slaves served masters, but machines are not masters… indeed, we have learned to »serve nothing more than prostheses and figments of function, and in this matter, slaves are vastly more available to their own humanity, nature, intelligence, and potential to invert the frameworks that crush and cripple them — than we who serve nothing more than devices.

∞ “I would like to begin with what we have already touched on, the fundamental importance of attention. If what it is that exists comes into being for each one of us through its interaction with our brains and minds the idea that we could have a knowledge of it that was not also an expression of ourselves, and dependent on what we brought to the relationship, is untenable. It may seem obvious, though, that the task of the brain — what we have a brain for — is to put us in touch with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.

But this conclusion is not quite as obviously right as it seems. Different aspects of the world come into being through the interaction of our brains with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, and precisely »which aspects come into being depends on the nature of our attention. It might turn out that for some purposes, those that involve making use of the world and manipulating it for our benefit, we need, in fact, to be quite selective about what we see. In other words we might need to »know what is of use to us — but this might be very different from understanding in a broader sense, and certainly might require filtering out of some aspects of experience. Without experiencing whatever it is, we would have nothing on which to ground our knowledge, so we have to experience it at some state; but in order to »know it, we have to ‘process’ experience. We have to be able to recognize certain qualities that enable me to place it in a category of things that I have experienced before and about which I have certain beliefs and feelings. This processing eventually becomes so automatic that we do not so much experience the world as experience our representation of the world. The world is no longer ‘present’ to us but ‘re-presented’, a virtual world, a copy that exists in conceptual form in the mind.

Much of our capacity to ‘use’ the world depends, not on an attempt to open ourselves as much as possible to apprehending whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, but instead on apprehending whatever I have brought into being for myself, my representation of it. This is the remit of the left hemisphere, and would appear to require a selective, highly focused attention.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, What Do The Two Hemispheres Do?

“As a computer professional who witnessed the birth and expert counterfeiting of ‘the internet’, I watched with trepidation as rapid-fire communication often laid waste to… infested and compromised our personal relationships. I resisted ‘the smartphone’ for more than 10 years, because I could smell the danger there. And it smells like death.

More than 20 years ago, I was aware of the potential in such communications, for bad actors to masquerade as those we know. When I receive a text, I do not presume the sender. I never did. Instead, I bear in mind that … in cyberspace … one does not know the identity of the originator of a signal. Nor their intentions. While it is impossible to be circumspect enough to protect the relational membrane in technological communications, it is helpful to remember that the messages we receive sometimes, and soon … often … are not necessarily from the person whose identity they advertise.

“Hello, how are you?” is a phrase used by scammers and criminals worldwide. Recently, I received a text saying “Tomorrow is Halloween, how do you intend to spend the holiday?” This was not a message from a known interlocutor; it was a gambit to validate my phone number.

Soon, our technologies will allow unknown and undesirable others to so closely mimic us as to be effectively validated by the appearance of association with us. We must take care, and develop ways to validate our communications companions. Because it won’t be long before my voice, even my face, can easily and effectively be counterfeited.”

— WS 876, in recent communications

“Silence is often profound, especially in wise relation with self and others, in part because it naturally includes all that cannot be (or should not, situationally) ‘spoken’. In a sense, to speak is to lie, in part due to the fact that declarations (I am making one here!) are untrustworthy explicits in the mind of the dreamer…”

— unsaying it

“By the time you’re talking about it, you’re usually defecting from it.”

— someone was saying this

When the irony in human behavior or agency becomes trenchant, right next door you will find monumental insight… gently tapping at the window-frame…

Two people walk into a room. None leave, but there’s only one left. How is this possible?

When it comes to things that matter, the way we use counting is very often wrong. Because we count by categories, not essence. Examples? If two people are in a room we think there are two people there. But people of what? Our people? The behavior of the people forms all kinds of things, and many of them are not human. This is because ‘what counts’ isn’t the body or the category, what actually counts is the relational manifold and how they form, correct, or defect from the possibilities of their existence together. All of us have had the experience of feeling »more alone among groups of humans, or even in a ‘2-person’ conversation. For objects that are commodities, explicit counting appears ‘accurate’, but in actual human experience, ‘what counts’ is rarely numbers. It’s the spirit that unifies or divides us, and the ways in which this becomes true over time.