ORGANELLE

“I am a materialist but I don’t like the word ‘materialist’ because it suggests that we know what ‘material’ is.”

— Sir Roger Penrose

“I agree with you that, given something resembling trustworthy intelligence and motivation, a »very small group… could probably move the entire human planet right now. It’s as if the structure of humanity at the moment… is in a bizarre array of tipping points… all lined up for a tiny push…

… yet I do not know if I have it in me to understand precisely how to implement such a thing. Perhaps because it must, I think, be discovered… rather than declared…

… so I think that the group that explores this arises before any specific plan… or rather, that forging such a group is the plan.

And the purpose of the group is to play at discovering the accessible opportunities and vulnerabilities of structured fictions (in general), and actual, real-world situations (where they play at manipulating the structure and its roots) in which their understandings are tested and evolve…

Having achieved reliable success at small time/place scales… in other words having gone into actual contexts, successfully transformed them (and departed)… from there they would proceed to propagation (skill transfer to other similar groups)… and expansion of their capacity to act at scale, in the extended social and cultural environment.

I imagine an incredibly creative human intelligence unit. The improvisational, altruistic opposite of a highly trained criminal, medical or military team — that could capture techniques from these specializations… but redeploy them in ‘operations’ of radical altruism, education and liberation…”

“Humans use each other and the natural world as distributed sensing arrays. When we became aware of the degree to which this is true, astonishing new opportunities emerge quickly from the ensuing enthusiasm, wonder, and beauty of retrieving the associated faculties from their current prisons in culture.

Armies and sports teams, fashion trends and news transmission all relate to the forgery of the essential magnetism of our desire to express the fact that other people and organisms comprise ‘our own extended senses’.

The pivot upon which the opportunities dance is the awareness of this, and the »agreement, within some group, to learn to use it to generate otherwise impossible opportunities for noble purposes. We do something extremely similar nearly all the time, but are not yet trained in understanding what is happening, our role in it, or how to retrieve that which draws us together and motivates our participation.”

— an anonymous informant

“Humans have broad-web and close-web sensing that go haywire when the social contexts in which they are existing are counterfeited, incoherent, abiological, or simply fake.”

— infraheard

“Humans are the dollhouse of the sky.”

— toyMaker

“Humans are a peculiarly unusual animal. One of the primary analogies that represents some of our inborn qualities in Nature is hive organisms, as they are one of the few creatures on land that assemble something resembling our cities (though corals might be another analogy in the waters).

There are a vast plethora of ‘problems’ with ou species, but one of them is that we are divided — internally, personally, cognitively and emotionally. Our societies reflect this conflict. We may imagine that the tensions resulting from these divisions are the origins of many of our best and most terrifying qualities.

Our cultures are not intelligent. And, because of this, few individuals will be exposed to models of intelligence that actually result in something resembling the term. But for our kind of animal, it strikes me as likely that the actual intelligence or lack of it is not so much in individuals (though we may usefully examine them or look there for it), but rather… in our »networks.

We are a network animal (this should be obvious as nearly all of our social constructs are networks/networking. Part of what we may take this to mean is that if our networks are misguided, their errors and the results of them will be expressed by the individuals participating in them, as is natural.

The message here is simple: until we become capable (and this must be our purpose in participation in human networks) of discovering what actual intelligence looks like and is concerned with, we will inherit and express the diseases resulting from the failure to establish intelligent priorities and forms of human networking. Our societies are a conglomerate of commercial and political idiocies, and until and unless we form and sustain intelligent human networks… this will be our primary ‘inheritance’ from them: devastating ignorance.

But it is our nature to long for and strive toward intelligent associations and social structures. One challenge is that the existing cultures and societies must resist or transform such attempts in order to ‘survive’. But they are not yet alive. In terms of our social networks, they are crude emulations of features common in nature’s networks. And it is nature we must return to if we are to become able to understand and emulate the actual basis of our real or possible intelligence.”

— an anonymous informant

“Human cultures are not individuals. They cannot be expected to make rational decisions, understand risks, anticipate the future, or even make choices that make sense in terms of the planet as a whole, ecology, or expectations related to personal behavior. The idea that such things can be litigated is, at least in my perspective, insane.

But there are certain facts that individuals and groups can become aware of and/or concerned about. And these individuals and groups are capable of forming rational orientations, organizing, and taking action.

This preface was forged to introduce a simple fact that some individuals and groups may become aware of and oriented to prepare for, or, perhaps, ameliorate. That fact is this: Earth’s ecologies and the homeostasis upon which animal life depends are delicate. They cannot sustain the geometrically increasing burden of catastrophic intrusions and compromises that modern human activities enforce.

Everyone understands that water turns to ice in a way that is referred to as a change in phase state. This change is radical and sudden. Earth has undergone a variety of these changes over evolutionary history; many were the result of catastrophic events such as near-earth object impacts, volcanism, or sudden methane release. Human activity has set the stage for a variety of risks, many of which may result in a shockingly fast phase-state change of our environment. Life as we know it is unlikely to survive any such change, and it can happen in a week, or a month, or a year. Nations and collectives, because they are not individuals and are only marginally intelligent as groups, are incapable of responding to these threats. In fact, they are likely to continue to catalyze and exacerbate them.

For this reason it falls to us as individuals, to forge the intelligence necessary to guide and correct our collectives. If we prove unable or unwilling to do this together, we should expect that history will record the results in death tolls that are far beyond what we expect or consider possible.

The anciently conserved ecologies of earth, the plants and animals, the oceans and waters of our world are unimaginably precious and delicate. They were, prior to our industrialization, robust and seemingly permanent. This is no longer the case. What we now face, not just as a species but as a world, is an array of threats far greater than anything usually suggested even in science-fiction. And it is in this context we must redefine and reorganize our humanity, our cultures, our purposes… and the possibility of human intelligence. Now. Because we have traveled far past the tipping point, and are now in a situation where… in many simultaneous dimensions… we are in free-fall… toward futures that cannot be called futures. They are graveyards… and the planet will most certainly and directly demonstrate the costs of the unimaginable hubris and ignorance our species has and continues to demonstrate. Not in the distant future… but within our own lifetimes.”

— an anonymous informant

“Honestly, when the fuck did you become an highly trained virologist or epidemiological expert? You think you understand the actual situation… because you have »opinions? Or have some spin you wish to apply to anecdotal reportage?”

— infraheard

“Holophores are the fundamental elements underlying human experience, meaning, and ideas. One of them is the identity/meaning of ‘The Universe’. Another is The Sun. Another is The World. Over historical time, the meanings associated with these fundamental identities underwent a process of impoverishment, where they lost crucial content and associations as human minds traveled away from direct participation in Nature, into a state where a crude representation was substituted for what was, previously, a complex and intricately connotated identity.

But it is possible to ‘return domains of meaning’ to our existing relationships with the entities that the words ‘The Universe’ refer to. Another holophore is ‘animal’; whatever you believe animals are, mean, or do… informs everything else you are capable of thinking or believing, since, for humans… we are animals and the other animals are mirrors through which we can learn about ourselves.

An example of a holophore ‘correction’ is ‘What are organisms?’ Most humans think ‘organisms are from Earth’. This can’t be right. So another way to think about them is as a unique mode of timespace. In this view, every form and individual organism is a mode of timespace that expresses the character of timespace (and, transforms time itself, locally and distributively). So organisms can be understood both as ‘the living face of timespace) and ‘makers of time’ in that they invent new modes and relational dimensions of time by existing, developing and relating with the fundamental context of being. This makes them ‘organs of our extended body/mind’, rather than ‘creatures’ as is the common view/idea.”

— an anonymous informant

“Hilbert worked with AE at AE’s request because he was so frustrated at being unable to complete the equations (it is a pretty brutal calculation!), but then decided to race AE to the finish line!

Being a much better mathematician than either AR or AE’s helper Grossman, he worked out the correct formulation slightly earlier. He completely acknowledged it was all due to AE, however…”

— infraheard