Self-referencing and the CSO (part three of three parts)

The ways in which we presently accept and gather the information used in our actions presents four major concerns: (1) the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the primary referencing sources that inform most of humanity’s actions today and the essential survival information available from biophysical Reality; (2) the unrealized imprudence and recklessness of making an imagined reality the basis for action in Reality; (3) the rejection of presently available lifestyle choices for ways of life that would more naturally gravitate toward and accept biophysically based referencing as having supremacy over self-referencing; and (4) the seemingly absolute, even monumental, supremacy of our present self-referenced reality defining what we call “personal success” and even in remaining alive within its structures [1].

Before we can understand how the distortions and dysfunctions of self-referencing in the Consciousness System of Order (CSO) works, or doesn’t work, it is necessary to understand how referencing functions in the Living System of Order (LSO): A reference is that to which we refer in formulating an action, and by ‘we’ I mean the thing acting; this could be anything that responds to energy from a pebble to a vulture to a human.  The referencing conditions are the context within which the action takes place – but more than context – the source of all the pertinent information, and primary forces, that informs the action [2].

Referencing in the Living  System of Order:

To what do living things refer when formulating an action?  The answer will be the basis for the referencing system of living things.  Broadly the answer is: (1) genetically formed physical and behavioral options as (2) potentiated by environmental events and processes: genetically mediated behaviors, like reflexes, instincts and behavioral patterns are triggered by environmental events.  Animals with large brains add a level of complexity by being able to refine genetically derived patterns based on learning specific responses to environmental details that present in evolutionarily unaddressable time-frames, are inconsistent within evolutionary time-frames or insufficiently energetic to drive evolutionary change, but still are usefully exploited to survival advantage; these learned references are still made to environmental processes and events.

Referencing in the Consciousness System of Order:

In the broadest strokes, the first and primary characteristic of the CSO is that it captures the complex learning which is characteristic of large brained animals and stores it in various forms that frees the learning from being locked in the singular brain that experienced the learning in the first place.  It does this though the communication systems of humans, communication systems that not only allow the learned event to be processed as a Story framed in the communication system, but also can attach motivational elements to Story to make them more memorable: more possible, efficient and desirable to be repeated and more dominating as a referencing source.  Different versions of Story begin to compete as the basis for action.  The success of the individual in the community becomes a combination of the effectiveness of actions in the ecology and the attachment to and support of a version of Story that is valued by the community.

In the originating and must functional form, the community Story is a specialized adaptive mechanism that rapidly adjusts, with incredibly sensitive fine tuning, the whole community’s behavior to the deep subtleties of local and regional ecologies.  Humans become the behavioral chameleon, but without the chameleon’s limitation of only being able to change within a genetically coded range of pattern; human possibility is essentially endless.

“Endless possibility” restrained and retained within strict ecological boundaries produces increasing refinements of detail.  It produces art, religion [3], music, refinements of language, poetry,  science, human diversity and social complexity, all functioning as integrated responses to climate, local biodiversity, the ecologically mediated sources of essential materials and foods, landscape and general habitat.

“Endless possibility” unrestrained and unbounded by any guiding design other that its own most previous iteration is a formula for chaos, the origin of madness.  Distinctions dissolve and form with only the basis supplied by Story rather than Story responding to distinctions pressed forward by ecological Reality [4].  Without a referencing structure attached to biophysical Reality, Story can no longer adjust behaviors into environmentally adaptive responses; it hasn’t done this for a very long time.  And it leads people to believe that they have created their own world separate from and better than the ecological world of the earth’s narrow living space; that it is the created world to which we have a true allegiance and to which we must make our adjustments.

This last is, of course, true; we must form our behavior compatibly with the social, economic and political realities that have immediate impact on us, but it is also required that we have mechanisms to make those social, economic and political realities comport with the biophysical designs of the big kauna Reality delivered up by the chemistry and physics of earth’s physical and biological processes.  That we could create a Story that the biophysical processes of the earth are secondary to our economic processes is proof enough of the incomprehensible dangers of self-referencing delivered up by the CSO.

The three primary systems of order, Physical System of Order (PSO), Living System of Order (LSO) and Consciousness System of Order (CSO) function on different order giving principles.  The ordering principles of the PSO are distributed through all of matter/energy as physical properties and forces of interaction. The ordering principles of the LSO are a specific set of principles from the PSO unique to the surface of the living earth and the new centralized information handling and storage system of the DNA/protein nexus.  The nature and capacities of the DNA/protein nexus set the limits for what life can be and create the structure for the possibilities for life within those limits.  What cannot happen within the design of DNA selection, storage and implementation as protein construction cannot be part of life.

The ordering principles of the CSO are more challenging still.  As with the LSO, the PSO is the base.  The LSO with its genetic implications and limitations is substrate.  And just as the central organizing principle of the LSO is unimaginable given only the PSO principles as a reference, so the CSO principles are unimaginable as direct consequences of the functioning of PSO and LSO principles.  Information that existed as only uncaptured and uncapturable byproducts of PSO and LSO processes, information that was not information at all since it had no form, other than the fleeting occurrence as part of some more ‘earthy’ event, no device capable of realizing it and no place for it to be gathered; this nebulous effluvium ‘leaking’ inauspiciously from biophysical events has been turned into a new source of information for the CSO, and the CSO turned into a new way to organize the events and processes of the world.

The self-referencing consequence of CSO processes has carried us to the brink.  And in a natural irony only CSO processes that can create the Story that will reconnect us to the biophysical reality from which comes the humorless decisions of survival.  In the companion essay to this one, Changing the Story (in three parts) I try to offer suggestions.

[1] This is like playing a game in which the rules are made inviolable by the other players and no one is allowed to leave the field of play.  Stepping back with perspective may make it clear that the rules are artificial constructions, that the playing field is artificially bounded and that other rules could adapt the game more satisfactorily to the increasing demands of the surrounding conditions, but the constant, unrestrained application of the rules in the moment makes change appear impossible.

[2] ‘Pertinent’ has two quite different meanings in this context. In the non-CSO situations pertinent refers to the energies that have a direct physical influence and the energies that can be perceived by sense organs and thus, through nervous system activation, activate actions disproportionate to their base energy levels. For the CSO, pertinent can refer to these same cases as well as to relationships, both real and imagined, to the content of Story and thus activate actions without reference to actual biophysical relationships.

[3] Not religion as we think of that behavior today – in fact, there is no single word or readily available concept in my understanding of our present language that really circumscribes my idea of what “religion” was in its formative origins.  The best I can come up with is that it was a Story-based device that motivated the community to non-intuitive adaptive necessities of the ecology.  The behavior of religion was a Story guided adaptive continuity with the ecology, the community and individual behavior.

[4] As I’ve intimated in this and other essays, ecological Reality can be considered trivial from the point of view of the present Story and the conditions of life generated by it.  Getting a job, making enough money; dealing with banks, healthcare and family; economic and political actions that seem so potentially dangerous; what is a river minnow, a mountain top or a change in some ‘parts per million or billion’, or whatever, compared to letting my family down by not having a big Christmas? 

I can only answer that that big Christmas would not be so much fun without safe or adequate food, clean water and oxygen in unpolluted air.  We, humans, have become fully capable of tipping over the ecological balances that allow complex life to exist.  The only thing that stops people from understanding this reality is that our present self-referenced Story says that the earth is infinite and also that God will protect us – along with a supporting cast of other illusions.

Changing the Story, Part Three

The combination of themes #3 and #7 from the previous two essays are pivotal to the functioning of our present Story and so I am addressing them in some detail.

(3) Belief in agency (human agency and supernatural agency) rather than events being moved by the immediate and direct action of preceding events and the statistical properties of randomness.

(7) The belief that humans are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a fully independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can (moved properly by acquisitiveness).  Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of effort.  Circular reasoning is generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort; failure equals sloth.

Agency is both one of the most powerful themes and one of the least thought about or realized.  The human world seems to operate on pure agency: we imagine something, study the possibilities, design a method, gather the requirements both informational and material, execute the details of the plan and produce the result; looks like agency through and through.  But what if this is not how things really happen?

When agency is combined with #7 – individual self-reliant units of action – an image of how the world should, and must, work is formed: an every ‘man’ for himself image.  When selected bits for story are gathered and the missing pieces rationalized, it is a powerful and compelling narrative.  Woven together with God given rights, human exceptionalism, the practical and social utility of material possessions and the attractiveness of personal superiority, the narrative begins to concretize into an unbreachable bulwark against criticism or the concerns of those who have not attained equal levels of impunity over the masses and nature.

The trouble, of course, is that the narrative and its supporting structures are just wrong in every detail, but most importantly and least obviously in its most basic assumption of agency.  But, if agency is not the explanation, then why does it seem to be?  There are several reasons, a central one being a fallacy of inductive reasoning: only recognizing the class of cases that support such a view.  Another failure of reasoning comes from the uncritical acceptance of the independence of action.

Viewed from the perspective of distance it is clear that the conditions of a society, the state of technological development and the general process of idea formation combine together to produce the possibility of particular changes, ideas and “discoveries.”  Any look at the history of new ideas finds several people discovering the same thing independently within, often, only months of each other [1].  And for those who have made an impression on recorded history, there are certainly many more who would have produced the discovery (possibly in even better form) in a few additional months or years.  This is clearly the case with scientific and technological developments and there is no reason that the process should be any different for commercial enterprises.

In this revised Story theme the society sets the tone, the technology and intellectual environment supplies the tools and the population supplies the people.  The people who find themselves in a position to reap the greatest benefits realize that theirs is the good fortune bestowed on them by accidents of birth, genetic good luck, being passed over by disease, abusive treatment or other debilitation and generally being in the right place at the right time.  A plot-line in this alternative theme would be that while the desire for success and the effort expended for it can be seen as personal virtues, and that a person can take pride in them, such positive qualities belong not to the person alone, but to the supporting community as well (that personal action is nothing without the community within which it occurs is so obvious that it is often missed – does a man alone on a desert island printing a million dollars make a noise!?).

A subplot would be that the person in the focus of success recognizes the supporting structures and accepts the benefits with humility making sure that the larger community is compensated for its contributions.  In this Story millionaires/billionaires would be immoral thieves stealing from the community, taking vastly more than their actual contribution to either the community or its economic system; stealing from the only source available, the compensations that should rightfully be made to others for their contributions supporting community. It is understood, in this subplot, that all productive action arises from the whole community through its supporting infrastructure: physical, intellectual and emotional.

In this new Story, agency is a short-hand for the summary of history and present state creating a focus for action into which walks a single person, group or community.  This only appears to be a more difficult idea because it is not well formed in our present Story, but is still an important part of the Story of many other societies and has been a central part of the Story of ourselves from our past. Very particular historical trends have led us US of Americans to the peculiar design of our present Story.

Self-reliant individualism is just as fragile an idea when removed from the protection of its dominating story; and for many of the same reasons (it is expected that a society’s Story would be broadly internally supporting).  The origin and metaphor for such an idea can be seen with great clarity and emotional affect driving from eastern New Mexico into west Texas (especially effective from the seat of a motorcycle – an ‘individual and self-reliant’ form of travel):

The “empty” plains, cactus meadows, mesas and arroyos gradually give way to fields, clearly carved from the native soil.  The fields surround isolated stands of various farm buildings, which in turn surround a house, usually at the end of a narrow gravel track, well off from the paved farm road.  It is easy to see why the inhabitants of that house would feel that they had “done it all themselves.”  The present Story doesn’t count the laborer, the subduing of the Kiowa, the education and inculcating of work ethic and so much more. 

The farmer can look at the fields of Sorghum, seeing in the distance the raw scrub country of the Llano Estacado, and feel a pride both justified and unjustified.  With his work-rough hands, sunburned skin and eyes, his various injuries and suffering all summarized in the miles of red fields that represent not only his labor, but the money that will pay the loans, the workers and suppliers; all of ‘it’ on his and his family’s shoulders: it is easy to not see the army of others that made it possible, easy to see the payments made to bankers, taxes, to farm laborers, to services, insurance, suppliers and others as payment more than enough, easy to ignore the debt to the larger community that, frankly, cannot be seen from the front porch or the seat of the tractor.

But this farmer is no more individual, no more self-reliant, than a baby in the womb; it is a self-serving illusion.  Acting in self-interest is not self-reliance.  He or she is surrounded by literally millions of people without whom all that is taken pride in would be impossible.  And in an ethic of this part of the country – “charity from no one and a helping hand to all (unless you are not sufficient like me)” – an argument can be even be made to the farmer that those millions are owed a compensation for their contribution. 

The first on the list is the governing structure that enforces contracts, guarantees certain economic protections, combines the taxes of multitudes to improve roads, to make towns possible, to create a climate of safety so that the doctor, lawyer, hairdresser, auto parts store, gas station and a hundred other businesses are just 15 miles down that improved road.  At the other end of the continuum of contributors is the meat marketer and meat-eater that buys the beef feed by the sorghum from the nearly endless and lovely red fields. And less obvious, but just as vital, is the social stability created by education, communication, challenges to bigotry and a broad social expectation for the acceptance of others as honest brokers.

An interesting and vital twist to the present Story is that the farmer has some justification for believing the theme of individual self-reliance; the farmer doesn’t have to be crazy to have that crazy idea.  The great danger comes when investment bankers, politicians and the like try to cloak themselves and their actions in that part of the story.  They have to be insane to believe that they are individual, self-reliant or anything other that a cog in a machine from which they have found a way to steal [2].

* * *  

The other themes in our present story can be similarly treated, but I will only briefly rewrite them in forms for the Story that I am proposing as more appropriate to reality.

(1) Humans are a species with exceptional qualities, but so are all the others; our adaptations are just more powerful and therefore more dangerous than most.  We must actively arrange our lives, communities, societies and productions to function compatibly with ecological reality.

(2) Human life has no special permission for our activities.  The mystery and beauty of earth, life and universe require no imagined supernatural entity to give them validation.  That we have come to exist by the billions-to-one chance motion of planet and molecule is more awe-inspiring and spiritually engaging than an imagining distilled out of our own needfulness and lack of understanding.

(4) Humans create hierarchies of value as a way of organizing behavior.  It is natural, but unjustified, to assume that one’s own community and ways of being are superior to others.  But since each community (ethic group, racial identification, etc.) considers itself to be superior to another that, with equal justification, considers itself superior, then the table is set for either conflict or laughter.

(5) It is in the biology of humans to follow, in general terms, the evolved primate patterns of social organization (it is this fact that makes ape and monkey social behavior seem so familiar to us).  However, this normal part of our biology needs to be tempered by the incredible power of our numbers and technology.  We need to be aware that our biology can be easily fooled now that we are out of the woods and that a small consistent percentage of people will attempt to dominate others by methods fair and foul.

(6) The biology of humans makes easily identifiable differences the basis for worth and value; that is why all societies develop “badges” of various kinds.  The bases of worth and value are determinative of the motivational structure – the incentive system – of the society.  Material possession as raison d'être is characteristic of a degenerate social order and must be struggled against as it continually presses forward its form of easily identified difference.

* * *    

With these 5 new themes, with some distillation of the above argument to replace the present #3 and #7,  with the process of plot and subplot filling in the holes as elements of the themes are made into narrative,  then a new Story structure would form. I leave it to the reader to tease out how these new themes would address and modify our actions on the specific issues that we face today.

[1] Chuang Tzu and Socrates, Newton and Leibniz; Darwin and Wallace; Marx and Henry George; Michelson, Lorentz, Poincare, Einstein, Planck, Minkowski; the list of mutual and multiple discoverers/uncoverers would be endless.

[2] I do not intend hyperbole. It is true insanity to consistently believe and act in denial or violation of reality – regardless of whether those around you are also so acting. 

Changing the Story, Part Two

In what follows I have taken the 7 major themes of the Story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, here in the US of America, from the previous essay and suggested plots and subplots that have been developed from each of them; then attached identifiable issues from present experience to the plot-lines.  There can be, and should be, questions about the correctness of the assignments: that there is considerable crossover among the categories implies that some refinement is necessary, but for now these will do to begin the process.

It is important to remember that the full themes are not to be seen as the collected structural parts of a coherent narrative, but as a reservoir of elements from which bits and pieces can be selected.  This seems pretty clear as one reads through them.  Very often aspects of one theme will contradict aspects of another or one theme will lead to quite different subplots for the same issues – a little like the Christian Bible.

(1) Belief in the human right and responsibility to dominate the earth  (without any consideration of any need to integrate actions into the material and energy economies of natural cycles).  This belief, combined with #4, takes on the special form of ‘American Exceptionalism’

Plots and subplots: Whatever can be said to “improve” human life takes precedence over other interests. Human beliefs trump all other realities.  The “way of life” currently lived is necessary and natural.

Specific issues in today’s world: land-property and mineral rights; manifest destiny; extractive industries; factory farming; road building; damming of rivers; climate change issues and denial; oil/gas drilling; pipeline construction; mineral/energy exploration; imperialism (combines with #4); war and military growth (competition for domination); space programs; soil loss and degradation; energy generation (hydroelectric, gas and coal fired, nuclear, all solar based forms); life-style standards that exceed the earth’s productive capacity; environmental degradation and biodiversity loss; 6^th extinction event; GMOs.

(2) Belief that human life is specially anointed by a non-material superior entity that (who) created the universe and then created humans as its (his) material representative. (another, slightly less metaphysical, form of this belief is that humans are the culmination of the evolutionary process – what evolution was proceeding toward from the beginning.)

Plots and subplots: humans are responsible to the prescriptions and values of an entity beyond earthly concerns; humans are both supreme on the earth and a servant of God; humans who have all the right God-given values are “good”, those who deviate from those values are variously “evil;” God judges human action by his rules, revealed to and reported by a Select Order, rather than arriving at behaviors that comport with ecological reality through an adaptation process.

Specific issues in today’s world: abortion; religious “liberty”; “marriage” issues; all manner of social behavioral prescription and proscription; drug use; religious fundamentalism; population growth/control; religious belief conflicts and controversies; challenge of atheism.

(3) Belief in agency (human agency and supernatural agency) rather than events being moved by the immediate and direct action of preceding events and the statistical properties of randomness.

Plots and subplots: An agent, a conscious intelligence, must be the source of all organized, “non-random”, actions; if an event seems to be purposeful, then an agent must be directing it.  Humans are to be the controlling agents for a large set of earthly actions and some supernatural intelligence must be the controlling agency for all other actions.

Specific issues in today’s world: meaning of freedom and liberty; socialism-communism as inherent evil; early childhood, public and university education; affirmative action; healthcare, health insurance, medical issues (epidemics, life extension), exotic medical procedures; rejection of evolution and “materialist” science.

(4) Acting on a “natural” hierarchy based on how much a living thing is like one’s self and one’s community: some humans are more “human”, more worthwhile, than others.  Some can be considered as having the same worth as animals, and animals are valued (and feared) in relation to how much they display human-like appearance and behavior.

Plots and subplots: humans who are worth less than others can be treated by different standards; some humans can be effectively enslaved, often seen as for their own good; defective nature of those who differ from assumed social and sexual norms.

Specific issues in today’s world: immigration; racism and bigotry; inferiority and subjugation of women; social injustice, LGBT issues; nationalism; patriotism; animal suffering; human rights issues; militarization of domestic police forces; class warfare; stop and frisk (and its many cousins); gender based pay rates; women’s healthcare.

(5) The human leader principle: another, more CSO based, system of valuing (while still tied to primate group dynamic principles) is based on accumulations of power-related objects and behaviors: defined in the US American society as wealth and charisma. Ultimately, this has to do with the biology of leadership and its adaptation from primate social evolution into human communities. (Charisma is interesting in this context, not a mystical quality, but the product of display of confidence and the ability to rapidly read others and appear to be like them – a specialized form of imitation, magnified in effect by attractiveness. Confidence without empathic connection is considered boorish, empathic connection without confidence is considered weakness and attractiveness without the other two is considered frivolous.)

Plots and subplots: leaders have the right, and are expected, to tell others what to do; their success by social standards demonstrates their special status.  Leaders have special qualities and special knowledge that make their decisions superior to others.  The human need for a social organizing principle.

Specific issues in today’s world: pop culture devotion; celebrity fetish; pop culture demonization; cult and cult-like identification; authoritarianism; the Tea Party; megachurches; being the “good German”; my country right or wrong.

(6) The accumulation of material possessions is the measure of worth and value: wealth and power trump all other human achievements justifying much that would be called sin or crime without the actual attainment of wealth.

Plots and subplots: the human worth of a person can be seen in their material possessions and lifestyle.  A rich criminal must be taken seriously, but a poor laborer not at all; ‘getting ahead’ is a valid reason for devaluing other people.

Specific issues in today’s world: corporate power and corporate personhood; shame from poverty, pride from wealth; concentration of economic power; corporate criminality; international trade; internet access; national debt; multi-tiered justice (sic) system.

(7) The belief that humans are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a fully independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can (moved properly by acquisitiveness).  Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of effort.  Circular reasoning is generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort; failure equals sloth.

Plots and subplots: a person has the right to all they accumulate by their own effort; Private property is a central value; no one has a responsibility to any other person, to community or to the ecology; the have-nots just don’t work hard enough or want to work hard enough; acting in self-interest operates the ‘invisible hand’ to improve everyone’s life.

Specific issues in today’s world: wealth inequity; welfare; corporate welfare; tax policy/progressive taxation, taxes as theft; poverty; plutocracy; free market ideology; the shift of greed from deadly sin to virtue; banking power; social safety net; social security; marginalizing the middle class; smothering the poor; guns, ‘stand-your-ground’ laws; response to human needs (biological need, social need and actualization need); institutional surveillance/privacy loss (competes with #5); homelessness; unemployment and under employment; prison policy and more.

(N) There are a number of specific issues that don’t seem to me to fit neatly into any of the categories, although several themes may speak to aspects of them, the above themes don’t clarify, define or organize action for them except, perhaps, only by denying, rejecting or being inadequate for their consideration as issues. This accounts in part for our ambiguity toward them: institutional secrecy, terrorism, eco-terrorism, financial terrorism, failing infrastructure, loss of reserve currency status for the dollar, return to a multipolar world/loss of US hegemony, education in an environment of controversy, need for a reliable epistemology, cloning animals (and possibly humans), genetic control and eugenics for humans, economic collapse, ecological collapse.

If your favorite issue is not included or wrongly placed, you too can play the fun game of taxonomy.

* * *    

If you unconsciously and uncritically accept the Story and its themes, then trying to correct a plot or subplot that you recognize as destructive, or otherwise unfortunate, is difficult, if not impossible.  And many of the subplots are becoming clearer and clearer in their consequences to “real life,” but arguments surrounding the subplots are still being framed by the dominant Story.

Real issues with no clear category are especially difficult to think about or act on appropriately. Many issues can and do cross categories.  This is naturally the result of issues having more than one consequence, the filling in of ‘empty spaces’ to rationalize a narrative and the artificial nature of categories in general. In particular themes 2 and 3 are brought to the service of actions created in the other themes as a justification. Some issues have a positive relation to the underlying assumptions of a category and some have a negative relation.

Several of the issue/category relations result in paradoxes – as one might expect – when the natural fit with the category contradicts the underlying assumption of the category: for example, theme #3 assumes agency, but the natural fit with insurance must also recognize that insurance is structured on actuarial data based on statistical probability.

What we face is an array of real issues that must be acted on and a collection of Story elements to which we appeal for guidance in forming the actions; and the Story fails to address the Reality of the issues.  We either attempt the utterly impossible, change the issues to match the Story, or we attempt the supremely difficult, work backward from the issues to remake the Story more appropriate and responsive.

There are two lines of development in human thought to which we can appeal.  The first is the 3 to 4 thousand year history of philosophical discourse on how best to live: the world’s religions have produced a reasonably consistent underlying framework of values; secular moral philosophers have produced a complementary body of values that in large measure agree with summary religious values (combining points of agreement and tossing the outlying prescriptions).  The second is the increasing, science process driven, understanding of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and the overall ecological processes by which life organizes and survives in the hostility of the universe.  Humanity, and the rest of life as presently organized, is approaching the moment when the present Story (and especially the Story as manifest in the US of America) will utterly cease any relevance to the issues that irrevocably control our fate.

Changing the Story, Part One

(preamble) The big Story that we presently  tell ourselves about ourselves is largely a product of modernity: the U.S.A. Story and the rest of the developed world.  They are closely related, but not the same as we are seeing more and more everyday as the “U.S. government” displays its arrogance and distain for other nations, as well as its own people.

But, it is too easy, to say ‘US Government’! What is meant is the power centers vying for control of both specific regions of power and, ultimately, power over as much as is possible with the present technological and economic designs.  These power centers are not always obvious – see essay: A Creeping Encroachment. The first rule is to not be recognized as arrogating power until it is a fait accompli.  At present all those jockeying for power are blaming ‘the government’ for its failures, by which they mean the others vying for power, failures that they claim they will correct.  Of the various factions some are business/corporate in origin, some are more ideologically based and some are more purely political – power for power’s sake – but almost none are what they present themselves to be to the public.

 None are the US Government per se; that responsibility is still Constitutionally with The People even as they have effectively been removed from power through economic marginalization– and in part as a result of a long and torturous process of giving up. Ultimately, however, the final consequence of the following argument is that the power still resides in The People and they will implement that power in whatever form they perceive it.

I wrote in another essay: unless the Story is changed, the play stays the same with only a change in the players.  But changing the players is so much easier; we hope they will deliver the lines in some new and evocative way – though they never do.  Without a different Story presented as a different play, the lines and the outcomes remain the same.

A different play! Now there’s the rub.  What is to be the plot?  What will be asked of the actors?  Will the present company be able to do it well? Do it at all? The present players will demand good roles! Perhaps it is better to stay with the same old play and just let the theater close when it has gone stale.

All the present efforts seem to be to create a “new” play that is still the same old play with new characters; many of the same actors in different makeup, the same plot, the same situations, the same dramatic moments, the same jokes, the same meanings, the same messages… all the old and reliable niches for all the old and reliable people doing all the old and reliable things.

Before a new Story can be told it is vital that we actually know the details of the present Story; some parts need to kept, though perhaps changed in their relations to other parts. Other parts discovered, rediscovered, created from whole cloth or through wild serendipity added to the play.  We must know the old play completely to be successful, but a major theme of the old play is that it not be examined critically: such examination is described in the present play as sacrilegious, unpatriotic, mean spirited, intellectually elitist and deeply suspicious: all such efforts have been accused of attempting to destroy “our way of life.” --- And, of course, that is true.

* * *

What is the present Story and how does it work?  What are the major themes, plots and subplots of the play?  First and foremost we must be prepared for a very complicated, convoluted, contradictory and cryptic interweaving of elements, putting the most complex 19^th century Russian novel to shame.

It is both tempting and commonplace to believe that there is some pervasive pattern of order in the organization of human idea – some pattern that has origins other than in random variations settling into arrangements that are the least fragile – but commonplace or tempting as it can be, such a belief (or hope) is false.  Human stories are like the perceptual phenomena of filling in the gaps.

Story is bits and pieces that can be strung together into linear narratives, but Story, as we must understand it, is non-linear – many parts can be combined in many ways – if the elements are seen as coming from the general story (valid parts of Story), they can be contradictory without dissonance.  Just as we fill in the gaps in an image or visual sequence, we fill in the gaps between and around story elements and believe that the gaps were never there [1].

The swirl of events draws up various elements of Story as cognitive mapping needed to explain or guide potential responses, blending the biological, the learned and the imagined into a tangle that it is our habit to rationalize into a coherent narrative. Story, as it functions in daily life, becomes a trove of interrelated anecdotes ranging from official narratives that “everyone” is expected to give, at least, lip service to, to stories that define one’s family, kinships (of all sorts) and habits.

I am thinking of Story as largely unarticulated foundational idea – unarticulated and perhaps unarticulable in the normal course of the consideration of our thought.  A good model of Story might be as an interface for ideation in language laid on a biological armature.

Untangling the various elements of Story is more taunting than explicating the human genome.  The genome, for all its variations is structured on an understandable framework and functions within understandable boundaries.  Story doesn’t exist in a fixed place with fixed relationships and yet it is still the underlying informational structure for human action.  What follows is a monumental presumption – the attempt to clarify some of the major themes and plots of, especially, the U.S. American Story.

* * * 

Big themes of the US American Story:

(1) Belief in the human right and responsibility to dominate the earth  (without any consideration of any need to integrate actions into the material and energy economies of natural cycles).  This belief, combined with #4, takes on the special form of ‘American Exceptionalism’

(2) Belief that human life is specially anointed by a non-material superior entity who created the universe and then created humans as its material representative. (another, less institutional, form of this belief is that humans are the culmination of the evolutionary process – what evolution was proceeding toward from the beginning.)

(3) Belief in agency (human agency and supernatural agency) rather than events being moved by the immediate and direct action of preceding events and the statistical properties of randomness.

(4) Acting on a “natural” hierarchy based on how much a living thing is like one’s self and one’s community: some humans are more “human”, more worthwhile, than others.  Some can be considered as having the same worth as animals, and animals are valued (and feared) in relation to how much they display human-like appearance and behavior.

(5) The human leader principle: another, more CSO based, system of valuing (while still tied to primate group dynamic principles) is based on accumulations of power-related objects and behaviors: defined in the US American society as wealth and charisma. Ultimately, this has to do with the biology of leadership and its adaptation from primate social evolution into human communities. (Charisma is interesting in this context, not a mystical quality, but the product of display of confidence and the ability to rapidly read others and appear to be like them – a specialized form of imitation, magnified in effect by attractiveness. Confidence without empathic connection is considered boorish, empathic connection without confidence is considered weakness and attractiveness without the other two is considered frivolous.)

(6) The accumulation of material possessions is the measure of worth and value: wealth and power trump all other human achievements justifying much that would be called sin or crime without the actual attainment of wealth.

(7) The belief that humans are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a fully independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can (moved properly by acquisitiveness).  Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of effort.  Circular reasoning is generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort; failure equals sloth.

* * *

The next essay will look at these big themes in more detail and begin to offer suggestions as to what another Story might be.  The third essay in this series will attempt to see the present Story and alternative Stories in both real political and biophysical terms.

[1] Dawkins’ and Blackmore’s concept of ‘meme’ is closely related to these ideas, but is too tied to the analogy with biological genes.  Genes interact complexly, as do Story elements, but new genes are not created out of nothing to fill in gaps that didn’t even exist previously before they were juxtaposed. My concept is that an information handling system, new to the universe that I call the Consciousness System of Order (CSO), has formed with the human nervous system as its primary substrate (for now).  Information is handled in completely new ways that result in new and previously “impossible” probability structures for what might exist.  And even though the CSO resides primarily in the human nervous system, we are not even remotely ‘in charge’ of it.

New Oxford American Dictionary (Apple computer): Meme: “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.”  Webster’s New World College Dictionary: “Meme: A unit of cultural information as a concept, belief or practice, that spreads from person to person in a way analogous to the transmission of genes.”

More On Self-referencing (part two of three parts)

I remember the moment with a clarity, familiar to old people, that shocks for its detail and sensation of ambience, a moment 49 years before this most recent fleeting summer of 2013.  It was 1964.  I was in the throes of, what I now realize was a developmental mental illness, the emotional rejection of adulthood; it simply looked to be too awful, too painful, too unacceptable a place to be; but enough about my general condition!

It was the early afternoon.  I was standing, not on the sidewalk, but in a flowerbed just outside a classroom.  Not that it matters much for this present moment: the class was ethical philosophy.  I was pondering over how one was to know what to do; not ‘do about’ any particular thing, but just what to do about anything. 

It was early June; Florida is always very bright in midday June.  The classroom was in a one-story building of classrooms arranged around a central interior courtyard, on the modern conception of the Greek model.  Covered walkways protected the students from sun and rain.  My classroom was on the south side of the building and so it was necessary to stand in the flowerbed to be in the sun, to feel its direct heat.

The simplicity of the answer came like a tiny thunder-clap: humans can think anything within the structure of their language – in essence, any combination of words that follows basic syntactical rules can be constructed as an idea in a human mind/brain.  And (a big important ‘and’) anything that can be thought can be believed and (again big) acted on.  This was not about right or wrong, only about primary possibility.  Right or wrong was a secondary attribution: anything that could be thought could also be considered right or considered wrong. 

That humans can think, and therefore believe, anything possible within the vocabulary and syntax of their language, while incipient, is not especially informing [1].  It simply reminds us that human thoughts cannot be the basis for the kinds of truth needed to organize our actions in the Real world.  If the machinations of ethical philosophy teach us anything, it is that staying within the language systems and ideations of human creation does not and cannot be the principle guides to behavior. 

There are two other sources for understanding, both strongly conflated with the primary problem of human idea creation, but, none-the-less, the only other options: (1) the biology of the human animal and (2) the biophysical Reality within which evolution and adaptation have taken place.  Sustaining and supporting our biological natures and habits (what I call specieshood) and integrating our human communities (since we are biologically a community animal) into local, regional and global ecologies must be the primary “right” things to do.  This is what every other organism in the history of life on earth has done with greater and lesser success for 4 billion years.  Within this framework an immense variety of species specific and special qualities have had ample room to manifest, from 150 feet long dinosaurs, to gaudy male peacocks, to aspen forests made of ‘a’ single connected tree, to bioluminescent angler fish living in the otherwise photon-free deep ocean and a few billion more.

The Consciousness System of Order (CSO) of humans, with its “thought processes,” is one of those species manifestations.  And it is human thought that organizes our beliefs and actions in the world; a process that has almost (almost) completely disconnected its essential informational basis from the primary biological and physical sources upon which actual Reality rests. The gestalts of concerns that most people recognize as organizing and moving their lives seem to have almost nothing to do with the energy and material flows in the biosphere; the diversity of species integrated with biophysical cycles into ecosystems; the production of oxygen and the earth’s ultimate biological building block, glucose, by the world’s photosynthesizers [2]; and the absolute dependence of the vanishingly rare living state on the integrity of the earth’s incredibly thin living layer as it has formed and functions in the solar system.

* * *

Our world today is so completely self-referenced that we can no longer see the biophysical referencing systems that actually determine our existence.  How foolish would we think a bear that created a prosthesis that appeared to be a layer of fat rather than eat sufficiently to have the real fat needed to over-winter in hibernation; and if that bear, that refuses to prepare for winter hibernation, stays awake and finds, kills and eats, the other sleeping bears… but there are people so completely self-referenced that they would call this “smart;” people who are so far removed from the Real that they cannot see the madness in it.

Of course, a bear cannot create a prosthesis that mimics a layer of fat, but people can and do create all manner of things using the CSO tool of imagining.  From sandals to boots, rolled logs, to wheels, to carts, to wagons, to cars, to….  to killing people and eating up the fat of their lives.  Without sandals one must walk very carefully indeed over rough and thorny ground.  With a 4x4 tricked-out land-crawler one need pay the ground almost no mind at all.  Consider the difference in the experience of a particular place when walking through it compared to passing through it at 120 miles an hour on a Ducati.  As much fun as the hot Italian motorcycle is, the experience is multiple layers of self-referenced process (almost) completely removed from any actual place; even though a motorcycle brings you closer than a car, and a car closer than an airplane, and an airplane closer than a TV set.

* * *

But what is self-referencing, really? Let’s begin first with referencing: the ubiquity of referencing is such that it goes almost completely unnoticed most of the time.  It exists in all acts of comparison, in every measurement – even if poorly referenced. Referencing forms the basis of all action, adaptation, evolution, etc.

Examples: gravity is a primary reference for many actions, both biological and cultural: the strength of bone and muscle; the application of muscular force; the strength, shape and application of construction materials.  The electro-magnetic spectrum is the primary reference for all biological energy transitions, as well as the basis for almost all of human long distance communication (and much else).

Reference, then, is that to which we refer in formulating an action, whether the ‘we’ is an electron responding to a proton, a beetle evolving a color within a particular ecological niche or a human thinking that they are thinking their way out of a problem.  Self-referencing is peculiar to humans: it is referring to our own imaginings, or their products, as though they were substantial realities as we formulate actions.

Here is an example of self-referencing replacing natural referencing: in order to act in sustaining relationship with the ambient environment, materially simple communities referenced the many seasonal biological changes, land forms and weather events as the primary information underlying their social, political, economic and spiritual activities.  Another way of saying this is that the environment supplied the broad outline of options and humans adapted specific behaviors to define niches within which to integrate with environmental functioning.  Either way of saying it points out the essential referencing function of the environment.  Since human communities were sensitive to, referenced closely, environmental events, community behaviors changed as environmental conditions changed by the principles of adaptation – trial and error responses testing for workable, if not optimal, solutions to changing conditions.

Humans developed more power in the environment. They began to replace certain ecologically derived biological processes with their own actions, like gathering seeds specific to their own uses and putting them to grow in numbers, in places and with desirable properties selected from the native population of plants.  Conditions began to obtain that never existed before.  The process of adaptation was not just to native environmental changes, but to changes in the immediate environment directly created by human action.  Of course, environmental changes driven by human action had long been a part of the human adaptive regime, but these were not creative changes so much as systematic responses as whole ecosystems responded to the expansion of a new and increasingly powerful organism.

What was new was the shift in essential referencing from the self-sustaining, billions of years old, natural ecology of this little part of the solar system to a very specific activity within that ecology created by human activity.  This was not a trivial shift; it began the shifting of sources of referencing for human action and adaptation from the primal forces of the earth’s biosphere to specific human activities.  Of course, early agriculture and animal husbandry did not remove humans from the need to adapt to environmental events as a major referencing source, but the process was begun (it really began with fire and tools, but changing the primary relationship with food was that start of exponential increases in change rates).

Land clearing, irrigation, food storage infrastructure, need for and development of new community expectations for labor behaviors – and all of this taking place in a pre-scientific, really pre-rational world – led to needs for explanations around the new events and processes associated with these creations.

Formerly myths and Stories were laid over the presentations of information from the environment, that is, the environment was still primary, but as communities grew less dependent on immediate environmental detail, the myths and Stories separated their detail from environmental action, became equal to and then superior to the environment as an immediate informing source.  Once this transition was strongly developed, human behavior was more self-referencing than referenced in the ecology.

The ecology took on the appearance of substrate and was even seen as a commonplace triviality upon which the interesting and real events of life took place.  Most people reading the preceding sentence will find it more than understandable, might very well feel that it correctly describes reality; that real life is separate from the earth’s ecology and its arcana.  Such an impression derives from the completely self-referenced worldview characteristic of the ultimately insane disconnection of human life from the events and processes upon which the origin and continued existence of all life depends.

(The next essay will look at this last observation in more detail, examining referencing as it functions in the CSO.)

[1] Conversely, limits can be put on what can be thought and understood in the general population by controlling the meanings attributable to words and what words and images are allowed to be used in public communication. Of course, this has been long understood.

[2] Here is something worthy of religious awe: every organic molecule constructing every living thing begins as water and carbon dioxide being combined by the energy of the sunlight captured by chlorophyll.  All the fats, proteins, complex carbohydrates, and other macromolecules begin as glucose made in chloroplasts.  And then, the oxygen released into the atmosphere by this same photosynthesis is used by essentially all living things to “burn” glucose back to carbon dioxide and water as (almost) the exclusive source of energy for all living processes – including the thought processes of those who ignore this reality.