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(The following is a modified excerpt from my novel A Conspiracy of Wizards; see An epic mythology).
The Vaznallam faces wavered and vanished, like images in a pond dispelled by a pebble. Algonion found himself alone in the spherical chamber, surrounded by diffuse light and geometric symmetry; alone in a sanitized asylum devoid of warmth. He lay there on his back in the hard, cold curve of unmelting ice…, in what he thought may well be his tomb, still weak and starving, not knowing what his fate would be, supposing it would be death. But time dragged on, hours, days, weeks, he couldn’t tell, and instead of dying he grew stronger, until he gradually emerged from his morbid stupor. Still too weak to rise, he gradually realized that, miraculously, he was being nourished by the very air he breathed, as though it were the Earth’s own breath reviving him.
Whether the Vaznallam decided to make a pet of him, or a curiosity for study, or had in fact discarded him from their thoughts altogether, his small enclosure, perhaps merely resounding with residual vibrations, undertook his education. At first he mistook it for torture.
It began when his body was still weak. He noticed, through the throbbing in his head, that the triangular panels were no longer the translucent white of ice, but rather softly violet. Then, gradually, indigo. The headache grew worse. Then blue. Still worse. Then green. He turned away and closed his eyes, trying to understand the relationship between the shifting colors of the panels and his pain, and as he did so, his physical distress lessened. He looked again and saw yellow, and eased his anguish more by trying to guess the next color. Closing his eyes, he considered the sequence, and with a sense of discovery realized the answer was orange, replacing the now mild discomfort with a surge of euphoria. But when he looked, the panels were resolving into differentiated colors, an interspersion of red and violet, and the agony blossomed anew.
Each time he resumed his effort to solve the puzzle of the pattern, the discomfort gradually eased, giving way to pleasure when he succeeded. But when he looked to confirm his success, a more complex pattern than expected appeared, along with the return of pain. And so again and again, always such that the solution logically followed from the entire sequence, from translucent white to the most recent arrangement. But each time, the pattern proved itself to be subtler than expected in the very moment of its resolution.
Meanwhile, sounds filled the air, or his mind, a scale at first, that, like the walls, demanded resolution. He hummed or chanted the solution, the next tones in the sequence, only to reveal that the progression was always more complex than the one he had discerned. This continued as he regained his strength, the only way to relieve the suffering being to solve the patterns, though no solution was sufficient. Thus motivated, he solved them ever more rapidly, heightening their complexity all the while, his mind anticipating the increasingly intricate patterns of light and sound, his body emitting the tones and timbres demanded of him.
These two challenges were all that occupied him. Until he was strong enough to move.
Without ever allowing himself to be distracted from the riddles of sound and sight, he noticed a stiffness gradually growing in his limbs. The cramp eased a little as he rose, balancing himself in the curve of the ball, and a little more as he stretched, but came back more forcefully when he sat, and even more so when he tried to recline. He rose again, and found that certain movements provided more relief than others, some approaching physical gratification. As with the patterns of color and tone, each solution, avoiding streams of pain and encountering those of pleasure, revealed a more complex puzzle, continually refining his movements.
He was soon using the entire inner surface of his cell, stepping and rolling along the curve, turning and twisting in the air, gravity always seeming to migrate toward where he made contact, as though the globe were rotating beneath him, as though it rolled to and fro along a larger curve in which it was lodged. Sometimes he evoked aspects of nature; a stalking cat, a swaying tree, an uncoiling serpent, a blossoming flower. As he perfected the forms, or as they perfected him, he almost began to feel that he was becoming these things, that his limbs were leafy and supple with sap, his body as lithe as a jungle predator’s.
These pushes and pulls swept him along, as though he were being carried by a current which flowed unseen. At first he resented the manipulations, thinking what a fool he was to let himself be made to dance on Vaznallam strings. But the thought itself provoked unease, as did all thoughts other than the ongoing resolution of the sensory riddles, until his mind was empty but occupied, focused only on the progression of patterns.
At last he accepted the forces that were moving him, for he understood that he had always been moved by such forces. He had always, in a sense, pursued pleasure and avoided pain, even when subtly so, when the pleasure was self-sacrifice in aid of others; when the pain was knowledge that indulgence today would cost too much tomorrow. Whether in mundane or extraordinary circumstances, he had always responded to a world not of his own making, in ultimately predictable ways. But now, mind and body flowing with the deepest and purest of currents, it was not the chimera of freedom that he sought, but rather the grace of surrender….
Algonion’s dance of mind and body melted his own shell of illusions. As he had continued to discern the sequences by which the patterns changed, he began to discover the pattern by which those sequences themselves changed, this subtler pattern evolving as well according to a pattern of its own, and so on, propelling him into ever deeper currents, constantly approaching the essence underlying them all.
The walls of his cell had long since ceased to exist, or ceased to matter. The sounds and patterns and sensually charged air converged, filling the space surrounding and permeating him. He merged with the tiny triangles of swiftly flowing colors, with the tapestry of tones and tendrils of tactility that he emitted and moved to, anticipating them into the limits of complexity, feeling rather than calculating each next instant. He found himself immersed in a blissful space, a woven effervescence of light and sound and sense. He would never have thought of leaving, perhaps never have thought at all, if not for Sarena’s dreams calling him back. For he suddenly felt her more intensely than ever before, felt her amidst the flowing configurations, a presence so compelling that it awoke him from his trance. And as it did so, the Paths opened up to him, the currents that course everywhere, along more dimensions than merely those of time and space.
He perceived surfaces within surfaces, forms within forms, particles in motion and the structures they comprised. He saw beyond his enclosure, saw that his small sphere rested inside a larger one, tracing intricate designs in the shallow bowl of the latter’s base. And he had glimpses of the past and future as well, some of which he knew Sarena would eventually share; currents surging through myriad possibilities, the stronger the possibility, the stronger the current, forming endless variations of the ellipse of life; some spiralling off into extinction, some drawing together into a single point of light.
He saw the streams that had joined to form him…, the trickle of his early life suddenly fed by gushing streams, a confluence of currents….
(See “Flesh Around A Whim” for a later adventure of Algono’s, in which the chaos of nature’s imps puts this training to the test, and takes it to a whole new level. Also: The Hollow Mountain, The Cloud Gardener, and Prelude to “A Conspiracy of Wizards”, The History of the Writing of “A Conspiracy of Wizards” and About “A Conspiracy of Wizards”.)
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Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!
In the land of Calambria, southeast of Parygodia, a giantess named Cholumga lived in a wide green valley in the mountains. She was as old as the earth, and as far as she could recall, she had always lived alone. Her only companions were the grass and the trees and the small wild creatures that flourished in the valley without disturbing her in any way.
Cholumga was ten times taller than the tallest tree, with eyes as luminous green as sunlight through summer leaves, and hair as red as tongues of fire dancing in the breeze. Everywhere she went, life flourished; the grass grew greener and bright flowers bloomed, and she was as carefree as the white puffs of cloud afloat in the deep blue sky.
Everything Cholumga did, she did on a grand scale. She ate whole forests and drank rivers dry, but new forests and new rivers sprang up in her wake. She roamed all through the mountains, taking pleasure in everything that she saw, and laughing so loudly that the white peaks laughed along with her. Sometimes she would just sit and watch an acorn grow into a giant oak, serenading it all the while, for her days were longer than other creature’s lives, and to her the span of time from their first to their last breath was but a fleeting moment. But her long days took their toll, and when she grew tired, she grew very tired indeed. Whenever she laid herself down to rest, she would sleep for hundreds of years.
Her bed was at one end of the valley, where she could place her head in a dark, cool cave so as to be undisturbed by the impatient sun, which rose and set to a rhythm no giantess could bear. She would pull back the green mantle of the earth and lay herself down on the smooth stone beneath, drawing the blanket of sod back over her body to stay warm and safe throughout her long night.
Once, not long after she had gone to bed, some of the little people who lived far away in Parygodia began to wander into her valley in search of land, for they had grown too numerous for their own country to support them all. The first adventurers who came over the mountain pass and gazed upon Cholumga’s lush green home rejoiced at what they saw, for they beheld a country that was rich and fertile and would provide many people with abundant food. So these first settlers came down into the valley to build their homes, without knowing that a giantess slept beneath the blanket of the land, and a bustling little village sprouted from the earth right on top of Cholumga’s belly. Fields were tilled and crops grew and sheep grazed and the people prospered. Word reached Parygodia of the rich green land nestled high among the mountain peaks, and more people came, and many children were born and thrived in the colony, and new villages spread throughout Cholumga’s valley and beyond, and a civilization sprang up while Cholumga slept.
It was a rich civilization, for even while she slept Cholumga enriched the land in every way. The crops and livestock grew so eagerly that little work was required, and many people found time to pursue other crafts and to ponder the wonders of their world. Thus they developed new skills and new arts and an ever greater ability to transform the world around them in ways which gave them pleasure and gratified their pride. Villages became cities and paths became roads, and huge monuments of stone rose on every horizon. And people practiced the art of magic, which flourished in Cholumga’s valley as it had never flourished before.
The people established an order of wizards, who were revered above all others, and whose only occupation was to ponder the mysteries of nature and to master its myriad forces. Cholumga’s breath was as fertile for the imagination as it was for maize, and so the wizards came to manipulate the elements in profound new ways. They learned to create illusions with the power of their mind, so that others would see what they chose for them to see rather than what was truly before their eyes. And they learned to cleave matter by a mere force of will, to rend it and mend it as they saw fit. And so wizards were in high demand, the favorites of princes and the true leaders of this brave new world spilling forth from Cholumga’s lush green valley.
And all this happened while Cholumga slept. The people did not know that a giant slept beneath the blanket of the land, though they might have guessed had they not become so self-absorbed. For sometimes Cholumga snored, and they could hear the rumbling of her breath rolling forth from the cave at the end of the valley, and could see its dark mist filling the once clear sky. And though Cholumga usually slept very peacefully, sometimes she would become restless and turn in her sleep, and when she did so, the world would heave and the people and their buildings would be tossed about. But the wizards said that these sounds and sights and upheavals of the earth were omens from the gods, not the indifferent breaths and restless movements of a sleeping giant, for by doing so the wizards could more easily control the people, who were eager to please and appease the heavenly powers, and so to obey the wizards who alone could fathom their will. The wizards felt wise in this deception, though they themselves did not know the truth, for through it they were able to align the disparate wills of the many people as though they were one, and thus to make their civilization ever stronger and ever more formidable, and the people ever richer, especially the richest among them, the wizards themselves. And this progress was the only truth that the wizards allowed.
And so the people called Cholumga’s valley their own, and carefully surveyed its length and breadth so as better to exploit its riches. Had they ever stumbled upon the cave where Cholumga rested her head, they would have in their fear killed her while she slept, unwittingly destroying their own magic and glory along with her. But the blanket of the land was pulled so close to the upper lip of the cave that only a narrow crack was left, and this they never found. However, not far away, at the base of a mountain rising from the boundaries of Cholumga’s valley, a team of explorers discovered another cave whose yawning mouth beckoned them to enter. And as they delved ever deeper, and the cavern opened ever wider, they felt Cholumga’s hot breath growing ever thicker upon them, for hidden passages linked these caves to the one where she rested her head. They did not know what this warm wind was, but their minds reeled from its potency, and they knew they had found a sacred place. So they returned to the capitol sprawled across Cholumga’s belly to tell the Council of Wizards of their discovery.
The Prime Mage and his ministers themselves went to see this hollow mountain wherein a hot wind which made men’s minds spin blew, and as they entered they could feel the magic of Cholumga’s breath upon them. They continued on, choosing from among the forking passageways, until one finally opened onto a huge chamber in the very center of the mountain, a chamber larger across than their largest city, and more than ten times taller than the tallest of trees. Here Cholumga’s hot, dark breath swirled like a storm captured in a crucible, and its power filled the wizards’ veins with a throbbing excitement such as they had never before known. They threw back their heads and spread open their arms, letting the fertile wind blow through them, letting its power become their own. They felt they had found the very source of the earth’s magic, and now could tap it as never before, and become the gods themselves.
But just then Cholumga’s long night ended. Whether it was that she had felt the presence of intruders too close to her lair, or simply that it was time to arise, she began to stir in her bed beneath the blanket of the land. Slowly she roused herself, her body stretching and flexing in anticipation of another ages-long carefree day. And so the earth heaved, as it sometimes did, and the people ran in all directions, like a colony of ants stirred by a stick. But then panic turned into a terror beyond anything they had known before when they saw in the direction of the cave what appeared at first glance to be an explosion of fire leaping into the sky, but resolved itself, as Cholumga’s flaming locks fell away from her face, into the enormous head of a waking giant! Looming above them like the resurrected wrath of the earth itself, Cholumga sat up in her bed, rising swiftly from prone to upright in a matter of mere hours. And even as the earth was lifted up with her, and fell away in folds upon itself, crushing the capitol and hurling the tiny people and their tiny monuments through the air, the onlookers from all through the valley were frozen in awe. As Cholumga came to her senses, her eyes clearing of their dreamy clouds, some among the people came to their senses as well, and ran in search of places to hide. But many cowered where they stood, and awaited certain doom.
For as Cholumga awoke and gazed upon the world around her, she saw that her sweet, clean home had been infested by a horde of tiny pests while she slept, and that the green carpet of the land that stretched to every mountain wall had been marred by their destructive industry. A large patch on the blanket on her bed had been stripped bare, and horrible barren growths were spreading throughout her once pristine abode. Cholumga grew enraged at this intrusion upon her home, and her shining green eyes turned a fiery red as she let out a scream which shook the mountains to their very roots. Then she cast her burning gaze upon any of the parasites she could see, and upon their towns and their fields, and such was the power of her rage that all upon which she glanced burst into flames. Standing up to her full height, her terrible beauty towering over the valley that was her home, she went on a rampage of frenzied anger, seeking out all the damage that these little bugs had done. Most of the people themselves, being so small, were able to hide, though those that hid in the towns chose poorly. For Cholumga ran about the valley incinerating all the towns and fields with her furious glare. And when she had finished, and had cleansed the valley of its infestation, she went running off over one of the mountain passes to weed out this blight upon her land.
And all this time the Council of Wizards were safe within the hollow mountain. They felt the earth shake and heard Cholumga roar, but knew not what manner of disaster had struck their realm. When they ventured out from the cave and looked across the valley, they saw it in ruins, the towns and cities burnt to the ground, the monuments crushed beneath the giant’s angry strides. People, confused and disoriented, were emerging from their hiding places, and wandering helplessly through the rubble of their once great civilization. The wizards ran to the nearest cluster of such folk and asked what had happened, and when all was told the wizards gave commands and set about spreading word throughout the valley that all survivors should come to the hollow mountain, that there they would regroup and find a way to reclaim their land.
And so the refugees staggered in haggard rivulets in the direction that the messengers had pointed out to them, bringing what stores and livestock they could, and trickled into the cave, gathering together in the great chamber in the center of the hollow mountain. And the wizards stood on a ledge above them all, and looked calm and shouted firm but reassuring slogans rich in the magic which controls men’s minds, and the crowd became subdued gladly awaiting guidance from those upon whom they depended.
At last the flow of refugees came to a halt, and all who had lived in the valley and had survived Cholumga’s first assault stood shoulder to shoulder in this great chamber in the mountain’s heart. The wizards had firm control over their minds, for though Cholumga had left the valley her breath long lingered in these caves, and its magic remained strong. So the people possessed a defiant calm and confidence in the face of this immeasurable holocaust which had befallen them, and listened eagerly to the plan the wizards had devised.
Relying on the horrible hope that Cholumga would be long occupied with the eradication of distant villages and cities, and shored up by the courage the wizards had instilled, teams of workers set out to build a trail of mock villages leading from the pass over which Cholumga had fled the valley to the face of the hollow mountain. When this work was done, all the wizards of the land gathered at the foot of the hollow mountain and cast a concerted spell upon it, such that the thick wall of stone facing the valley fractured along a latticework of cracks but did not fall. Then they moved all the people to distant caves, and told them to wait until word came that it was safe to emerge again.
And then the wizards held their long vigil, neither resting nor taking their eyes off the distant pass over which they knew Cholumga must return. Days and weeks passed, but the wizards stood their watch, until one day they felt the earth tremble, and saw the flaming red hair of the giant rising into the pass. Then, before her head was high enough that she might gaze down into the valley, they joined their forces again and cast another spell, this time creating an illusion before the hollow mountain that there was no mountain there, and that the valley, speckled with the haphazard scattering of villages, sprawled on.
Soon Cholumga’s head stood framed between two mountain peaks, and her anger, which had cooled somewhat in the course of her morning, flared again, for she saw that new sores had sprouted upon the land where she thought she had obliterated them all. Ferociously fuming she strode down into the valley and frantically set about to annihilate the growths that had sprung up in her absence. And so blind with rage was she that she did not notice that they formed a trail, nor that the valley with which she was so familiar was now longer at one end than it had ever been before. No, addled by her own fury she did not see through the wizards’ ruse, and with the full force of her forward stride she crashed into the unseen mountainside. The weakened face fell apart, huge boulders flying in all directions, as Cholumga, stunned and thrown off balance, stumbled into the great cavern within. Before she could turn around and escape, the wizards summoned all their strength, and sent the flying boulders back along their very same arcs, fusing them together again and sealing Cholumga inside the hollow mountain.
Cholumga pounded on the walls from inside her stony cage, but the walls held and she could not escape. She let loose with all of her terrible wrath, shooting fire from her eyes and dark smoke from her nose, but it could not break through the wall of thick rock. Instead it swirled upward and expelled the single boulder with which the wizards had corked the mountaintop, sending burnt rock and fire and black smoke high into the air. But she could not lift herself up through the opening she had made. For countless years she tried unceasingly to escape, pounding relentlessly on the mountainside, spitting fire and smoke through its shattered peak. But it was to no avail. Cholumga was trapped inside the hollow mountain.
So the people rebuilt the civilization on the land that had been her home, and benefitted from her magic even while she stood captured by it. But every now and then Cholumga awoke within her mountain prison, and her heart and soul flared with a giant’s just rage, and she would shake the earth and set the darkened sky ablaze, spitting such fire that it would pour across the land, and the people would tremble, for they knew that Cholumga would one day be free again.
(See also Prelude to “A Conspiracy of Wizards”, The Wizards’ Eye, “Flesh Around A Whim”, The Cloud Gardener, The History of the Writing of “A Conspiracy of Wizards” and About “A Conspiracy of Wizards”.)
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A perennial metaphysical question has reared its implicit head on this site, as it inevitably does when discussing how to strike the optimal balance between personal and social responsibility (i.e., how much do we insist that people are responsible for doing what they can with the hand they’ve been dealt, and how much should we advocate for some shared responsibility for the hand they’ve been dealt?). The question is Free Will v. Determinism: To what extent do we choose our own destiny, and to what extent is it chosen for us?
First of all, we all know that, subjectively, we have free will. I can type this now, or not. I can type the word “choose” or the word “cheese” or any other word that comes to mind. Nothing forces me to type one or the other. It may be the case that I need a keyboard on which to type, and whether I have one or not may depend on factors that are beyond my control (if I were born in a dirt poor sub-Saharan village, my lack of access to one might well be something over which I had no control). But, within the context of what is available, I clearly can choose from a wide range of actions.
On the other hand, my choices are caused by a variety of mostly invisible in-puts, past and present. Just because the causes are many and complex, and are obscured by the impossibility of tracing most of them, does not mean that they don’t exist. In what way am I ever the original force of anything? Though we experience our choices as originating within us, we know that they are affected by pushes and pulls large and small, such as the need to earn a living, to take care of the people we love, to earn respect and avoid condemnation, to satisfy expectations and to realize goals that have psychological roots that ultimately originate in some combination of the genes we inherited and the environment in which they spun out their code. In one very real sense, we are each just a very complex arrangment of dominos embedded in a forever toppling, almost infinitely complex and encompassing arrangment.
If it weren’t for Quantum Mechanics, there would be no doubt that, objectively, the universe and everything in it is entirely deterministic. A simple thought experiment demonstrates this: Imagine the entire universe at any moment in history. For the purposes of the exercise, let’s say one million B.C. Freeze that universe in your imagination and duplicate it. Now set the two identical universes to run forward through time again. How could they possibly diverge? Everything in the second was identical to everything in the first, every motion, thought, impulse, event, were identical. So the spear that the prehistoric man was about to let loose in the first, he is about to let loose in the second. It will hit the beast in the same place, with the same effect. Every particle, every current, every swirl in the suchness is identical, and so all consequences of all causes must unfurl in an identical manner, throughout time, forever. The universe is completely deterministic.
Quantum Mechanics throws a wrench in this thought experiment, because, in reality, at the quantum level, uncertainty is an essential quality of nature. Quantum particles are not in one place and moving in one direction at one speed, but rather exist in a probalistic cloud, so that when the universe is duplicated, only the probabilistic cloud is duplicated, and slight variations will result at the quantum level. These variations will create tiny divergences in reality, that presumably will accumulate and amplify over time, until the two universes are quite distinct from one another. The universe is not objectively deterministic after all (at least not according to quantum theory).
Unfortunately for those who don’t like determinism, Quantum Mechanics has very limited relevance to the issues of personal and social responsibility. And mere free will matters less than how many choices that will has available to select from. Much in our lives is, in fact, determined prior to our existence, and independently of our choices. We are born into a family, with a given socioeconomic status, in a given location, in a given culture, at a given time, with a given social institutional context, with a given genetic make-up, and our range of available choices is dramatically constrained by all of those givens. Even to the extent that we buck the odds, we do so as the result of factors over which we had no control: A role model who encouraged us to be more confident and assertive; an opportunity, or a skill we happened to learn by a confluence of chances, or an inherent natural endowment; all or any of which are just the luck of the draw.
Recognition that the distribution of wealth and good fortune in the world and in this nation has very little to do with individual merit does not mean that personal responsibility has no role to play. No social system can function without an emphasis on personal responsibility, because unless we are motivated to be productive, and law abiding, and good citizens and parents and children and friends and neighbors and colleagues, then the failure to strive to be those things has consequences. It contracts the production of wealth and expands the production of suffering. Without an emphasis on personal responsibility, we all suffer more and benefit less. Personal responsibility is, by necessity, the cornerstone of any well-functioning society.
But there is no need to confuse functionality with fairness, or a social necessity with a moral imperative. While emphasizing personal responsibility, and leaving in place a range of costs and benefits that incentivize adherence to that value, we do not need to neglect the inconvenient truth that we are not in fact born into this world with equal opportunities, and that a commitment to both fairness and functionality demands that, particularly at the bottom, we limit the costs for failure to adhere to, and increase the benefits for success in adhering to, the demand for personal responsibility.
Fairness demands it, because if one is born into poverty and fails to either claw or excel their way out, their and their children’s and their children’s children’s ensuing suffering can hardly be blithely dismissed as just deserts. And functionality demands it, because the incentives to be predatory rather than productive increase as desperation increases, and providing increased opportunities to be productive and benefit from it is a very functional restructuring of incentives. Functionality further demands it, because destitution provides a very difficult platform from which to become productive, creating multiple obstacles (e.g., childcare while training for and looking for work, and resources to be presentable and prepared in job interviews). A public investment in the facilitation of the success of those least well positioned to achieve it serves both their interests,and society’s, for we all benefit from it.
That’s what our social responsibility is: To facilitate success; to create a context in which failure occurs less often, opportunities are more abundant, and personal responsibility is rewarded even if the circumstances themselves would not necessarily have rewarded it. Personal responsibility and social responsibility are not at odds, as ideologues on the right insist, but rather are natural partners in a society that is both more functional and more fair. We do not undermine incentives to work hard and succeed by making these public investments in providing increased opportunities, but rather augment the incentives to work hard, and reduce the burdens on society of failure to achieve due to constricted opportunities and other obstacles to success.
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As Fritjov Capra, author of The Tao of Physics and The Web of Life, noted in the latter book, the dominant scientific lens through which to understand the nature of the universe may be shifting from physics to biology. Complex dynamical systems, even non-living ones, bear a stronger resemblance to organic models than to mechanical ones. It is, perhaps, a fundamentally animate universe in which we live. And the progressive patterns of that universe are repeated across levels and forms in a fractal geometry of dynamical systems. (The main contender for dominant emerging physical paradigm, meanwhile, is a mathematical model of “the cosmic symphony.” String Theory postulates that the ultimate and irreducible building blocks of the universe, from which all subatomic particles emanate, are one-dimensional vibrating strings in an 11-dimensional space! Read Brian Green’s The Elegant Universe if that idea resonates with you.)
As I wrote about in The Politics of Consciousness and Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, the evolutionary process of genes reproducing, occasionally mutating, and competing for reproductive success is echoed in the dynamics of human history, in which “memes” (cognitions) also reproduce (more rapidly than genes), mutate (more frequently and affirmatively than genes), and compete for reproductive success. And that pattern may be reproduced (and accelerated) yet again, in a new form, as the spawn of the spawn of Nature, human information technologies, acquire the ability to reproduce algorithmically adaptive packets of digital information that compete among themselves for reproductive success. Just as human cultural evolution is an accelerated version of the biological evolution, human autonomous technological evolution based on the digital transmission and processing of information is a yet more accelerated process. Thus humans are an intermediate ripple of consciousness in a series of accelerating inferior incarnations.
But it is the reintegration of these distinct ecologies and sub-ecologies which is perhaps most fascinating of all. It is clear that we humans will have to adapt our technologies and social institutions to the ecological context of the planet if we want to continue to have a planet on which to live (ignoring for the moment the possibility of extraterrestrial colonization). Not only did the Earth’s evolutionary ecology create us, but it also challenged us to imitate and integrate with it ever more perfectly and completely (like Bellerophon mounted on Pegasis, aspiring to reach Olympian heights, increasingly risking being thrown to our destruction for our hubris).
Both our technologies and our social institutions are bound to develop in directions that more closely mimic nature, not just in underlying dynamics and functions, but also in form, becoming softer and more “biodegradable,” creating more microtechnologies that scavenge the obsolete hulks of larger orga…, uh, “machines,” recycling them into the production processes. Such organic technologies are likely to utilize more flexible and viscous couplings, aspiring to and copying the natural machinery that remains far more sophisticated than human technologies. A computer that is more like a brain with synapses that are as agile as the brain’s can capture the advantages of both. An economy that is more like an ecosystem can produce less waste, utilize more resources, and recycle everything.
It is, at all levels –nature, mind, and machine– forms of consciousness and derivative consciousness we are talking about. “God” did indeed make “man” in “His” image, because the consciousness that is biological evolution created an echo of itself in the form of the human (or mammalian) mind, and that mind created an echo in turn, in the form of computers. So similar is nature’s “mind” to our own, that we use the language and mathematical tools of intentionality, designed for the study of human behavior, to study evolutionary ecology. Species develop “strategies” for reproductive success, that appear to us to be remarkably intentional: Disguises, defenses, weapons, colonies, divisions of labor; technologies and social institutions remarkably like our own.
Biologists are quick to admonish, “though we use the metaphor of intentionality, anatomical and genetically hard-wired adaptive strategies are not intentionally produced. It’s just a function of trial and error. Nature only resembles us in that way.” Remarkably enough, in one way in which religious faith hit the nail more squarely on the head than scientific scepticism, those biologists got it backwards: It is we that resemble Nature, not vice versa. The consciousness of Evolutionary Ecology precedes and produced us, the fact that it is a function of trial and error notwithstanding. While we have pitted God and Darwin at odds with one another, in reality, what Darwin described is simply one of God’s “mysterious ways” (or “avatars,” to be more precise). Just as we refer to what we have created in our own image as “artificial (human) intelligence,” we ourselves are really just “artificial (natural) intelligence.”
Nature had its own “collective consciousness” before humans were here to give it a name. It musn’t be confused with human consciousness, just as human consciousness shouldn’t be confused with whatever computer consciousness might emerge (or already exists). Nature’s consciousness is diffuse, not self-reflective, not imbued with an ego or corporeal integrity. It is not the function of a human brain, and therefore is hard to conceptualize, always reduced to that which is most familiar. But it is the Intelligent Being that designed us, as (or perhaps more) similar to the godless mechanisms of an atheistic scientist as it is to the Judeo-Christian God. And it did indeed “make us in its own image.”
Just as we have now made something in ours. It was inevitable that we would “play god,” because “God” made us in “His” image, not in the superficial sense, but in the substantive sense of being designed to “play God.” We cannot help but to create our own monster, just as “God” created “His.” The story of Frankenstein is the Story of Creation, told from “God’s” perspective, with “God’s” horror at what “He” had done. (You might recall that Dr. Frankenstein didn’t fare well in the end, a fate with which we ourselves threaten Gaia, if not Jehovah).
The concept of “collective consciousness,” and the study of the epidemiology of cognitions, predate the invention of the internet, but they gain new significance in a new age of accelerated, geographically liberated network communications. Before this creation of ours becomes an autonomous evolutionary ecology of its own, it has augmented ours, accelerating the communication and analysis of information, and thus accelerating the cultural evolutionary process.
Collective consciousness, and the human cognition which comprises it, is less about the discovery of an objective reality than about the forging over time of an evolving way of interfacing with it. Our conceptualizations of reality are not reality, but rather representations of reality, nested and overlapping metaphors that we use to map an almost infinitely more complex terrain. We argue over individual or sub-group variations in that map, over whether this representation or that more accurately and usefully describes the elusive reality we are mapping; sometimes, in essence, arguing whether it should be topographic or political, whether it should be more detailed (and thus more difficult to use) or simplified.
The construction of our maps is what has been called “the social construction of reality.” It is a shared reality, but with distributed and punctuated variation, with variation both within and between groups, but group coalescences at various levels around shared aspects of individual cognitive maps (and group coalescences reproducing shared aspects of individual cognitive maps). We have religions and denominations, political ideologies and factions within them, scientific disciplines comprised of competing schools of thought. The field of human consciousness is characterized by a combination of commonality and variation, constantly evolving, with patterns shifting according to extraordinarily complex algoriths that determine the patterns of change.
One model with which to understand this involves a tool called “cellular automata.” Cellular automata are a matrix of cells in which each can trigger changes in the state of neighboring (or otherwise interconnected) cells according to some algorithm. So, for instance, a simple cellular automata model might involve colors as states, with each cell being converted to the color that the majority of cells on which it borders has. Soon, a stable pattern of colors would emerge, perhaps all cells being a single color, or areas of particular colors emerging with sharp borders between them, But cellular automata can be far more complex than that, involving incessantly changing states rippling throughout the matrix, forming constantly shifting patterns.
Consider now cellular automata in which the shifting patterns themselves alter the algorithm by which they shift. Such is the human world. As our technologies and social institutions evolve, the speed of our communications and processing of information accelerates, and the patterns that are formed change at an accelerating rate, and according to shifting algorithms. As our tool (computers and the internet) becomes an autonomous ecology of its own, it both mimics and feeds back into the human ecology.
How these three levels of ecology continue to co-evolve, diverging from, threatening, reinforcing, and reintegrating with one another remains to be seen. Humans will undoubtedly continue the progression of how “plugged in” we are to the technologically enhanced network that binds us together, moving from desk top to lap top computers, to hand held and then handless devices, eventually, perhaps, to implants that can be accessed with a thought, and, beyond that, possibly even some technology that involves genetic engineering which moves our internet technology in a more biological direction. A human far future of organically and remotely interconnected and augmented human consciousness (a technologically accomplished mass telepathic network) is a distinct possibility.
As our technologies become more organic, not only does the process of their integration into the human ecology accelerate, but they also become the medium through which the human ecology reintegrates with the natural ecology. The acceleration of information processing and communication will inevitably be increasingly applied to the challenge of economic sustainability, which means, in effect, reintegration of human and natural technologies, reducing their incompatability and increasing their mutual reinforcement. And the increasing use of more organic technologies and social institutions may well be a major aspect of what that reintegration looks like.
It can even take on an extraterrestrial aspect, if we use genetic engineering to adapt ourselves to extraterrestrial colonization, completing the reintegration loop, our creature altering that which created us. Here on Earth, meanwhile, the reintegration of these three evolutionary ecologies holds a promise for humanity that tantalizes the imagination, as we continue to transcend limitations that we once thought untranscendable, and continue to become an ever-more conscious aspect of a larger consciousness.
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The elusive truth lies somewhere between absolutism and relativism, somewhere between the hubris of believing that one’s own fixed understandings are the universal ones that all others must bow down to, and the dysfunctionality of believing that reality (moral, factual, analytical) is whatever each decides it is.
Robin Van Ausdall recently posted the following astute observation on her Facebook page:
Media coverage of the flight attendant who removed a 13-month-old infant after her mother slapped her in the face is indicative of a larger problem: the idea that right and wrong is somehow determined by opinion polls.
To which I replied:
You have a good point, Robin, but what IS right and wrong determined by? There’s no good answer, because while the tyranny of the majority may endorse any number of horrible evils (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), any other authority to which we might defer has the potential of being the product of some smaller group’s bigotries, or even of being a brilliant doctrine gradually attenuated by time and increasingly anachronistic.
Part of the dilemma of our lives, and of our political battles, is that there is no ultimate authority to which to turn to determine what is right and what is wrong; instead, we are left to thrash it out among ourselves, with competing narratives and arguments.
It reminds me of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in which the theme was the quest for understanding what “quality” means. It seems so simple and obvious when unexamined, but becomes so subtle and profound when looked at more closely!
It’s not that truth, or “right” and “wrong” are relative, and can be whatever people want them to be. Rather, it’s that they are elusive, and disagreements concerning them are resolvable only by the parties to the disagreement, drawing on all other information and insight that may exist in the world, but without the benefit of any final arbiter.
(Of course), people can agree on a final arbiter, whether it be human agency, or some legal or moral document, or (as is usually the case) some combination of the two. That is how we govern ourselves, by drafting Bibles and Constitutions and creating clergies and judiciaries (along with executive and legislative branches to implement and modify the legal structure). The challenge is to continually refine these mechanisms for resolving moral and legal disputes, so that they continuously approach some ideal of service to human welfare, along all dimensions that we might identify.
