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.
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