Human Exceptionalism and The Madness

(This a new editing of an essay published in the Dissident Voice in about September, 2008.  It is exactly what I wish to say today.)

If an invasive species spreads ‘out of control’ because of adaptations new to a region and lack of any evolved relationships that inhibit it, we use a disease model for the ecology.  If a group of cells goes “mad” and reproduces uninfluenced by the existing order of organs and metabolic function, we call it a cancer; cells made by the body, but “foreign” and deadly to its proper functioning.  The hominid genus, Homo, developed a new, powerful adaptation that overrode historical evolutionary function, rapidly spread into all bio-zones and ultimately began geometrically increasing in population, and increasing on a variety of other measures.  These changes we humans have claimed with pride: our spreading growth and dominance of the earth’s physical space and material sources.

Every species acts in the world as an ‘exceptional’ entity; that is, no species is shy and retiring in the face of ecological success.  But every species is on essentially equal footing with all other species in the sense that they are using the same basic tools for adaptation and are functioning on the same basic time scale.  One species might evolve a generation length that speeds up adaptation rates, but only a little.  Another might increase the costs for breeding, making more demands on the quality of the individual genotype, but again within the same order of magnitude typical of other species.

But, Human Exceptionalism is the result of an actually exceptional condition.  The human adaptation is new to our immediate region of the universe.  We are not on an equal footing with the other species of living things.  Our capacity to respond to environmental conditions has gone from the generational change rates of biological evolution (DNA/protein mediated) to the change rates of Consciousness Order processes (mediated by ‘story’).   This new process of adaptation is orders of magnitude faster, it is also orders of magnitude more fine-tuned to detail and it confers levels of power to action previously impossible for biological entities.

These questions suggest the dilemma: (1) Is such an exceptional adaptation a disease on the body of the biological world?  The human species has increased from a few hundred thousand living by evolutionary rules to 7 billion as our adaptation expresses its geometric growth potential. (2) Can an exceptional adaptation be inhibited to remain within the restraints of the biological world and still be exceptional?  Other species with powerful adaptations fit into the biological order, but none have been as revolutionary as this one. (3) The Consciousness Order adaptation contains the enigmatic capacity of awareness with the seeming potential to decide how to use our adaptation; how might we, and can we, decide to self-limit our total impact on the biological world?

Our actual exceptionalness fuels the dangerous Exceptionalism of our behaviors and beliefs.  This is really tricky: We are truly exceptional with the most powerful adaptation, as far we know, in the whole universe, yet for the survival of our world we need to be humble in the face of our completely obvious totally huge outrageous wonderfulness.  Basically, we can do anything we want and it seems that nothing can stop us.  We have learned the rules of physics – except for a few that we will get soon enough.  We are learning to make genes dance for us.  We can suck the energy right off the sun and stuff it into computers that can do a billion billion calculations a second.  We’ve got TV and refrigerators.  Perhaps there really is no reason that we should be humble!

Except for one little thing; well, maybe two or three.  The surface of the earth is the ultimate Exception in the universe, not us. We humans are only passengers on, and in, a space that is among the most rare of physical stabilities. Even in the fullest explosion of our hubris there is no way that we could, with our own efforts, make the earth’s surface a living place or sustain it if the subtle designs of our solar system began to change.  We, as the saying goes, ‘live at the pleasure’ of our biosphere. That is Reality.

And yet, we do not act in that reality.  Consistently failing to believe and function in The Real is insanity.  The natural Exceptionalism of a species to act in its own interests (this a part of the living condition and not to be confused with its counterpart in the Consciousness Order) is compounded by our ability to tell stories about how special we are.  The design of belief as a guide for behavior allows us to hold such stories as truth… and voilà: Human Exceptionalism at a pathological level.  Our real and remarkable capacities lead us to believe in imagined powers far beyond our true relationship with our world.  A thing of great power, with little appreciation for the consequences of that power and almost no ability to control itself is a great danger to itself and others.

There are, of course, many ways that we are not exceptional.  Our form and function are biologically based, we are animals with an evolutionary history that powerfully guides our behaviors.  We are food for other organisms just as other organisms are food for us – part of the food web.  Plants supply us, along with every other aerobic organism, with oxygen and glucose (at base, the only food there is on earth); there is no other source. 

It is unimaginable that a “primitive” tribal community could forget that they depend on the land, water and air to sustain them and yet we “moderns” forget; we even argue that it somehow isn’t so. Almost nothing could be crazier.  There is no question that the vastly complex societies in which we live separate us and seem to protect us from an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous natural world upon which we depend. 

That world is difficult to know about and to care about when we have so little experience of it, when we have so little occasion to learn to love it: When the cost of food is going up, the mortgage payment is a little harder to get together each month and your kid gets sick.  Some tiny disembodied half-figure yells from the TV screen that the problems will be fixed if you let them control the world, or some part of it.  It seems silly, with such pressures, to think about plants making the oxygen that we breathe.  Truly, the Madness is compelling.  Ask any recovered madman or addict.

My argument is not to change the world.  There is no way to move from the Madness that envelops our societies and our species.  I think our trajectory is set.  But I recognize this understanding in hundreds of people, and know that there are millions and even possible billions that feel these things; people who suspect that what they see and live is madness; wonder at their own sanity for wondering about the world they live in.  I want to say to them that there is a way to live with at least some dignity and with less than more of Madness.

Life has always been a crapshoot.  But living as a full member of the species of your birth can make it a purposeful and fulfilling one – no matter how it goes down.  It can be done!  Every one of us has the human pedigree. We were all born as full-fledged members of the honorable human, hominid, primate, mammalian, vertebrate, animal, multicellular, living lineage.  We all have the absolute right to specieshood, it is really our only inalienable right; and it is the basis from which we can act with sanity for a sustainable biosphere. It should inform our political and economic actions and responsibilities. And that would make us very special indeed.

We have been led to this pass in part by the sense of our exception from nature.  And yet the greatest expression of our powers would be in reconnecting with the realities of the biophysical order.  If one or a hundred successfully recover their specieshood, there is no gain for all, though there is for each of them.  If it should be a thousand or a million not only is the quality of their lives better – even in a dangerous world – but more might discover how to join in.   The realist in me says that the personal gain is well worth the effort, but there is no hope for the multitudes of us.  The dreamer says that this is the only way: discover and become again a member of your own species, and if enough succeed the world will be changed.

Being Aware of Awareness

Preamble: There is but one paradox: that there can be paradoxes; all the rest are the spawn of this one.  Just as with the equations of General Relativity, the very most potentially interesting explorations give impossible solutions.  Awareness is “impossible,” yet it is what informs these words and allows the passing on of these “ideas” to another nervous system.  Our only “solution” has been to assume that the universe, itself, is aware, that some how this capacity of matter has been concentrated in the human species to such an extent that we have generated the whole consciousness process.  But, of course, this is just easy foolishness: the first second-level paradox is that awareness is the only tool with which to study awareness.

Awareness is compellingly real, but is not directly observable.  The physiological counterparts are broadly obvious – brain is necessary and electrical/chemical action can be correlated in various ways.  There is every reason to believe that nervous system processes are causal. But, what does it mean when a measurable process “causes” something as insubstantial as awareness?

The evolution of structures, processes and behaviors can offer some clues: Bird flight became possible because of the design of the down covering of the nascent temperature regulating of dinosaurs.  Bones are owed to cartilage framed fishes needing to store calcium for trips into calcium poor freshwater, as a way to avoid sea predators – added stiffness, along with an equally complexly originated structure, the swim bladder, allowed for the teleost fishes to be so successful; and created the base from which came the land vertebrates.

Awareness may be of analogous origin.  But before considering that option; one of the most common arguments made today is that awareness (often considered equivalent to consciousness) is the natural consequence of complexity and thus even attributable to cells (or perhaps even responsive protein).  There are many occasions when increases of quantity result in a change of quality – too much of an essential nutrient can turn it into a poison – and examples in which changes in quantity retains a relationship with quality, i.e., the more quantity the more quality (within the normal range of occurrence).  However, it is more likely, when this argument is used for awareness, that several aspects of responsiveness and behavior are being conflated.

The vast majority of living responsiveness is more parsimoniously analogized with a lever than with what we call conscious agency.  Evolutionary process is, itself (even with the newest understandings of genetic complexities and integrations of function), ultimately driven by the relatively simple proposition that the phenotype must perform satisfactorily in the totality of the ambient environment to remain alive and to send its genotype on to the next generation.  The new evidence that the genotype can be more directly responsive to selected aspects of the environment doesn’t change that basic formulation.

Homo sapiens, and very possibly other members of the genus, began using information in a new and unprecedentedly powerful way.  I call this the Consciousness System of Order (CSO) and treat it as a design of order, not as a subjective product of nervous system complexity.  And while there is ample to play with in this less ambitious model, we have not even begun to recognize or explore this potentially comprehensible idea, rather we are drawn to the confusions and paradoxes of being aware of our world.

It is here that I have to attempt to disarticulate consciousness and awareness.  It is clear that other species from other genera and families, even other classes and possibly other phyla, have some elements of awareness, but significantly do not function within the CSO [1].

The great apes, the dogs and even complex mollusks like octopus show behaviors that suggest awareness, that is, they “rush” to the solution of problems without going through (obvious) random problem solving processes; and these solutions seem to be mediated by learning: stored experience seems to organized in such a way that it can be quickly scanned and options selected relevant to the perceived problem.  While this may not suit everyone’s notion of awareness it does describe the behaviors that we humans typically judge as “aware” behavior in ourselves and other organisms: that is, complex, situation relevant behaviors that are not organized and driven solely by genetically based instinct or random actions stumbling on to behavioral solutions [2].

There are great advantages and great dangers in approaching life with the various forms of “awareness.”  Instinct has been genetically tested, random actions are not fooled by misperceptions, but when the nervous system is organized to sort through experiences related to the present ambient perceptions, appropriate behaviors can be formed far more rapidly than by any other method when dealing with a complex environment.  Or… the organism can be misled, guided in directions so misdirected that behaviors systematically fail when selected by “aware” solutions.  There is nothing about awareness that assures veridicality.  In fact, awareness is the only source of disconnection from Reality.

* * *

Awareness is such a consistent feature of our experience that it is impossible to imagine an experiential life in any other form, but experience, in the broadest sense of information storage and change in response to events, is a feature of all living things.  Even our subjective experience of “knowing about” and “evaluating” perceptual and thought events may very well not be unique to humans.  When my son’s dog “wants” to play ‘chase the ball’ she first brings me a ball and drops it at my feet, then, if I make no appropriate response, she touches the ball with her nose and ‘dances’ a bit with her front legs.  That failing she then pushes the ball toward me usually bouncing it off my foot and then chases it for the foot or two that it rolls.  And finally she will try to set the ball on my foot.

This is unlike the instinctual behavior of a sandwasp that digs a hole, finds and stings a spider, returns to hole, plants the spider with her egg in the bottom, covers the hole and flies away; if the wasp is interrupted in any way it must start over again from the beginning. The dog can pick up her behavior at any point in the normal sequence, change the sequence in response to my actions, extend or shorten parts, leave at any point or opportunistically take advantage of circumstances to press her case, like setting the ball on top of me without any of the preliminaries if I lie down on the ground.

All of my ‘operational’ assessments of awareness are meet, short of the dog saying, “Hey you, get off your butt and throw the damned ball.”  And she almost does that by getting agitated, when ignored, to the point of making snappy little barks.  I have, therefore, reason to believe that she is seeing the world in designs around her desires in ways not remarkably dissimilar to mine other than that I filter my perceptions through the artifice of language.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that the subjective experience of awareness, that we even more reasonably believe to be common to almost all humans, is experienced in varyingly similar forms by many other creatures with complex nervous systems.  Certain other species may, possibly, experience direct environmental awareness to a greater intensity than typical of most humans since we run so much of our “awareness” through the variously distorting veil of language processes.

* * *

If awareness existed only in the human species, its consideration would be deeply problematic; but since it is completely reasonable – even compelling – to assume that awareness has an evolutionary history, then we might usefully apply the typical biological questions to its development and function.  We may still be at our limits to understand awareness directly – as we might, say, understand the function of the immune system – but we can, perhaps, recognize (I have to avoid saying things like ‘be made aware of’) the naturalistic and functional origins of a biological capacity with survival value.

This separates awareness from the Consciousness System of Order, which, while it requires awareness processes, is a completely new way of identifying, selecting, organizing, storing, distributing and implementing information; and is unique to our genus.

[1] If everyone had a different name for everything, the discovery of the process of evolution or any other systematic process would have been unlikely if not impossible; we need to have a consistent (and accurate) taxonomy of consciousness experience in order to develop a veridical theory and understanding of awareness and consciousness processes.

[2] For science and philosophy to deal with an idea the terms of that idea must be operationalized, that is, they must be defined as objectively measurable behaviors.  It needs to be realized that general considerations of ideas do the same the thing only without transparency; each person has “operations,” often in the form of analogies, underpinning concepts and ideas that are believed to be broadly understood, but deeper examination usually shows that common terms are not supported by the same analogies, metaphors or other operators for the ideas. 

“Good” science and philosophy operationalizes concepts in ways that thoughtful people can understand and often agree with; “bad” science and philosophy operationalizes concepts with behaviors that don’t apply meaningfully to the concepts.  This has been an especially difficult problem for the concept of awareness.  There are people who don’t want any organism other than modern humans (and supernatural beings!) to be aware and so they operationalize the meaning of awareness in conditions that only humans can meet.  The goal should be to operationalize awareness in behaviors that best distinguish it from the behaviors that are central to other concepts.

Human Happiness

There is a longstanding disputation between the acquisition of material comforts and possessions and the attainment of personal and interpersonal happiness; but even as we might write about or think about these things symmetrically, they are not at all in symmetry.  It is possible to attain material possessions while having little or no personal or social happiness; on the other hand, it is impossible to attain happiness without some reasonable, though often small, measure of material comfort and safety.  This difference is at the root of a terrible confusion.

Because some level of material ‘wealth’ is necessary for happiness, a weakness in human logic accepts the possibility that increases in wealth might be the very basis of that happiness: if a little wealth is required to be happy, then perhaps greater wealth will allow even greater happiness…because, ultimately it is happiness, in all its various forms, that we desire to be the primary condition of our lives. 

Who would not agree with this: “If I could be fully satisfied with the conditions of my life, comfortable with its past and happy with its continuing form, there is little more that I could think to wish for beyond perhaps having these experiences with a pleasurable passion.”  Since this leaves out any detail of what might insure these forms of happiness, I might be led to assume that any opportunities in life that would lead to the greatest personal satisfaction would be our most desired options.

But, you can imagine that many people would say: “If I had to choose between the perfect new car and being really happy, I’d pick being happy for sure!”  Then they go right on doing a wage-slave job with an authoritarian boss, damaging their health with stress and lack of sleep, and try to soothe their discomfort by getting the perfect new car. 

Their neighbors see the early moments of excitement and pleasure and assume that the new car really made them happy, since even though they live only a few feet away they have never talked about anything of personal importance.  Its ‘Joe Versus the Volcano’ without the (unhappy) rich guy sending Joe on an ocean trip with a (unhappy) beautiful woman.

Of course, it is not this simple, while, of course, being just this simple.  First, the not so simple part: the complexities of the world that we have made – for we have made it, there is no getting away from that – have made the discovery of and the recognition of happiness and satisfaction difficult, even without the temptations of material possessions. A remarkably large number of people don’t even know what happiness is or what they might do to pursue it.

This has come about by both accident and design. The accident is that humans have the capacity to change faster than they can keep up, but do not have the capacity to realize it or to slow down; of course, some individuals do, just not the species as a whole.  The design is that a confused, unhappy public is much easier to prey upon than an engaged, informed public.  The accident is that as the world gets more complex due to our numbers, technologies, economics and politics the effort required to keep the public grounded in reality grows exponentially and finally beyond possibility.  The design is that the power of the masses is nullified by their confusion and disarray to the studied advantage of an elite; an elite no more grounded in reality, but more organized to dominate – controlling the world is their ‘new car.’

And just as simple…  The life in the body is the same life that animated a Cro-Magnon, the same life that first crossed the Bering land bridge, the same life that buried the dead of the black plaque, the same life that marched with Grant or Lee to Appomattox, the same life that gave birth to all the billions born and the same life as in all the billions born.

We cannot live life for another, we never could.  If we take the abundance of life that we are born with and demand that it have opportunity, we will be living in a way to honor those that carried life to us through the struggles of time.  We are born without a promise other than the chance to live as the species that we are; the rest is peacock feathers and foolishness.

Understanding in this way will not change the world, but may change your life; and changing your life is the only way to change the world.  If you stay the same and most others follow suit, then how ‘in the world’ could there be any change?  If change is left to others, then the changes will derive from their understanding, needs and desires, not yours.

See your life as large; it has come to you from 4 billion years of unbroken struggle and determination, through the billions of individual lives and the millions of species that formed it and allowed it to be.  Realize what it is for; it is not to be miserable, but blissful, and if it is not blissful – and in these times it will often not be – then begin the process of discovery to make your life as happy and blissful as possible in this time.  A hint to begin: blissfulness will not come by doing more of what makes you miserable.

Origin of Agency

Humans typically understand the events of the world in terms of agency – the source of an action or process. This is slightly different than the idea of cause and effect, but it is an important difference. For example, those cause and effect relationships assignable to Newtonian physics, billiard balls and planets, are not normally thought of in terms of agency, or our ideas of agency are a separate consideration in those actions.  We understand that momentum, gravity, friction, elasticity, mass, rotational forces, etc. predict the detail the movements, yet we still ask about the “reasons for the motion,” the agent; who or what set them in motion.  We are not especially satisfied with the answer that ball ‘B’ is in motion for the reason that it was struck by ball ‘A’; we want then to know what caused ball ‘B’ to be in motion in a particular direction.  And again we are not satisfied if we are told that it was ball ‘Z’ that struck ball ‘A’ and set it in motion, quite at random, toward ball ‘B’.  Simple cause is not enough; we are asking questions of agency.

The need and habit of assigning agency to events, not only serves our immediate purposes; that is, we organize complex events, about which we can know little, into speculations of simple agency as a way of predicting the behaviors of biophysical events, plants, animals and other humans; but we also have been led, by the complexity of the world, into attempting to assign agency to events well above our pay-grade as really really smart forest hominids.

To understand our larger relationship with agency, we must first deal with what many have come to think of as the First Agent; really the last agent of all; the human notion of agency ultimately desires an agent:

New Oxford American Dictionary: God, noun, 1 [without article ] (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.

2 ( god) (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity : a moon god | an incarnation of the god Vishnu.

The typical view of Christians and many others is that God is an actual entity, a conscious entity with qualities not unlike those of human beings: desires, interests, concerns, goals, powers for action, empathy, capacities, but all greater, grander and more mysterious than held by humans.  In the most simplistic form this God is an ageless male person, “living” in some undefined domain in the universe, generally assuming an appearance of late middle age, often with a beard, but capable of any form –  not unlike the “pagan” gods of the Greeks and many others (and sometimes resembling Charlton Heston or Morgan Freeman).

Alfred North Whitehead’s view of God was as the absolute unity of all actuality.  This can be taken to mean a sort of Grand Unification Theory of the physical and moral universe, the most basic organizing principle, but definitely not an entity in any way limited to the human pattern; in point of fact, utterly unlike and unrelated to any human aspect and, as such, completely inaccessible to human understanding.

Contrast Whitehead’s view with the particular Christian view of Jerry Falwell, that God was a supernatural entity that sent plagues, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados to smite people who pissed ‘him’ off.  Coincidentally, the people who pissed off God were the same as those that pissed off Falwell; it is unclear to the rational person who was guiding whom.

How can the organizing principle that relates all the forces of the universe into the orderly lawful system upon which our planet and its special living passengers ride, so utterly beyond human comprehension, be the same as the childish imaginings of a sick son of a bitch who sees justification for his prejudice and meanness in those imaginings. Giving them the same name is just nuts!

Falwell makes a good foil, but I could just as easily use the God of my mother: an old bearded man who protects her in the night, and has since she was orphaned at an early age, and who gathers the dead who have left her around him in a wonderful afterlife.  It is not as dramatic, and not at all mean-spirited, but still just as contrasting.

But this is not a missive to deny the existence of the supernatural, though it is in part about the confusion created for us by these ideas.  I take it as a certainty that humans are an organism evolved as part of the overall process of evolved life on this planet, though an organism with a new adaptation for the handling of information.  A property of this adaptation is imagination; in fact, imagination is one of the central forces of the adaptation.

It is natural and useful for imagination to create Stories about power centers that “explain” how the world works. Human action, from individual disease response to collective action in adversity, can be strongly influenced by such stories – giving such stories great power in human life, quite independent of their ultimate veridicality – so of course, humans have created stories of Gods, that once believed, become essential for a sense of stability and safety.

What this really teaches us about is how humans organize the ideas of agency and belief – how we imagine the forces that make things happen in the world – and nothing about the existence or non-existence of anything supernatural.

It seems both reasonable and “clear” that agency works in the world; that is, each moment is not in random relationship to the previous moment, but is in some causal relation; it is in our comprehension of the nature of that causal relation that our differences and confusions occur.  The greatest error is to take a complex system like human experience and apply it, uncritically, to the rest of world’s working.  First of all, we have almost no clue as to the actual workings of human experience and so applying the “lessons” about which we know nothing to less complex situations about which we know little is a poor beginning indeed: this is, of course, what we have done.

Assigning causes is one of the most common activities of human cognition.  Most intelligent animals assign causes over short distances and within very narrow time frames; we, on the other hand, do so over the greatest of distances imaginable and for the duration of the known universe.  We have made the assigning of cause an essential part of our responses to the world.  But, this is not an easy, obvious or direct process; and the ways in which we do it are not always strongly related to the actual processes and structures we are trying to comprehend with causal statements. The cognitive processes by which we assign causes (or agency) are limited by either the quality of the information that we enter into the considerations, the weak, often distorted, existing structures of understanding upon which we make judgments or both.

It is also obvious (a combination of ‘reasonable and clear’) with a little refection that the “causes” of any, even a simple, event spread out rapidly into an unfathomable infinity if we try to trace them in detail.  And then we are led to attempt the distinguishing of the causes of substance from the causes of happenstance.  How much easier it is to say that “Johnny (or Sergio or Wong or the dog or the god) did it.”

As a way of putting a little flesh on these bones, I’m reminded that Aristotle, all those many years and thoughts ago, puzzled with these ideas.  He produced a model of causality made up of 4 parts and we are still benefited by being familiar with them:

Aristotle’s four causes: Material Cause – the material used in the change or event; Formal Cause – the rules by which the change or event occurs; Efficient Cause – the agent or agency which performs the change or event; and Final Cause – the motive for the change or event.  (example: the growth of a tree: Material Cause – CO₂, H₂O, minerals, sunlight; Formal Cause – DNA, ecosystem conditions; Efficient Cause – sexual process that produced the seed; Final Cause – momentum of life force.)

This is confusing enough as it is, even when honest efforts are made to make clear the causes of any event, but when we add the human tendency to use complexity as a cover for self-advantage this becomes extremely dangerous.  I know of a child (even children do it) who when slapped for taking a cookie surreptitiously from the cooling rack said, “Don’t slap my face, it didn’t take the cookie; slap my hand, it took it.”  Almost needless to say this bit of cleverness from a tiny tot got the child off with only minor troubles and still in possession of the cookie.  This same gambit is used in much more grievous situations.

Using Aristotle’s model for understanding causes immediately puts us onto seeing cause arising from a system rather than from a single event.  I would think that understanding the systemic causes, untangling the web of types and complexity of causes would be a priority for an animal that lives by its wits – correctly understanding the world’s events being the most wit-ful thing we could do.  But I would seem to be wrong.

It is the long time, and perhaps biological, habit for humans to fold the complexity of systemic cause into a version of Aristotle’s Efficient Cause and to look for and be satisfied with assigning agency; this has a natural origin in human experience where a human person seems to generate the motive, collects the knowledge, tools, materials and then performs the action.  We then see this as model for how the world works when, in fact, it is not even the way humans work.

And so we are presented with our two primary ways of assigning causal agency: the naïve ‘direct agency’ in which a single identifiable agent does the deed, and ‘systemic agency’ in which a collection of causes are arranged in a particular way to account for the change or event.  We have come to a time in our history and our power over the world when the naïve use of direct agency with its creation of religious behaviors and beliefs, its usefulness in political expediency and its unacceptable levels of injustice, must be understood and replaced except for the most benign occasions.

Since you have read this far, you will have no difficulty in seeing how these ideas relate to Trayvon Martin’s killing, Fukushima, lying Limbaugh’s limp laments, the general state of political crudity, the madness of the religious right, the rejection of science and enlightened knowledge in general and more.  The conflict between direct agency and systemic agency, the use of direct agency in controlling perceptions and power advantages, the tendency of systemic agency understanding to expose such controls, these and more are seen as the layers are peeled back on understanding our relationship to agency.

Note 1: George Lakoff discusses these same ideas of direct agency and systemic agency in his book ‘Whose Freedom.’ He relates them to strict father and nurturant parent families and seems to see them as secondary effects.  My view is that how our societies relate to agency and the most basic processes by which humans form concepts of agency are critical to the nature of our societies.  It is my suspicion that strict father v nurturant parent families are not the direct agents in defining political differences.

Understanding Consciousness

There are three great order giving systems functioning in our world – by ‘our world’ I mean, quite simply, the place in the universe where life, and consciousness, are possible.  They are: the Physical System of Order (PSO) which is all of the processes, known and unknown, of an orderly universe.  The Living System of Order (LSO) which is made up of the specialized applications of principles and physical structures that, under very particular conditions of physical order stability, organize matter into the discrete, self replicating units of living things.  And the Consciousness System of Order (CSO) which is a way of organizing information, using a variety of supporting physical structures, such that it resides both within and beyond the confines of a living structure. Initially the consciousness order was mediated by the human nervous system, but increasingly is being both stored and implemented beyond it.

The Living Order organizes in ways that are impossible (extremely low positive probabilities) for the Physical Order, but, under the special concentrated conditions of the living state of matter, living organization can produce an immense variety of different forms all on the same basic pattern: a paramecium and an elephant are essentially the same thing when compared to a quartz crystal. 

The central process of the Living Order is evolution and the information nexus is DNA/protein.  By this I mean that life is primarily an information phenomenon that organizes molecular structures and processes through the designs of molecules that have been so situated in the process that information about the functional continuity (success) of certain structures is selected and stored in them and that their designs function to implement the information that they contain [1].

The Consciousness Order organizes in ways that are impossible for both the Physical Order and the Living Order – again, impossible means extremely low positive probability.  But, as with our understanding of the living state from a few hundreds of years ago, still largely a confused concept in our thinking: thinking about the tool that is doing the thinking, we are drawn immediately into a metaphysical realm since there seems to be no physical handles to hold.  The brain is clearly the underlying instrument, but its pink and grey white jelly doesn’t translate easily into the myriad activities that it has organized out of our biological actions in the material world.  And such language and ‘ideas’ have led to the most massive misunderstanding and misguided functioning associated with any organism – ever.

It is my argument that we need to step back a bit – actually quite a bit – from the ways that we have considered consciousness and awareness; we need to first understand consciousness as a system for handling and ordering information.  The first step forward again is to see the consciousness order in its relationship to the other “new” system of order in the universe, the Living Order.  The Living Order presents the model: information that was never collected, that was never consistent enough, dense enough or never relational is the general and vital information of life.  This information is manipulated in a system of order that selects what information will be stored, the form in which it will be stored and the form and manner in which the stored information will be implemented: the nature of the DNA/protein nexus establishes the forming and limiting conditions.  Processes and structures as distant from each other as the citric acid cycle, the actions of a hummingbird’s wing and an octopus eye all find their way to fruition through these same molecular narrows.

Since humans have created an immense variety of ‘things’ and behaviors that seem so unlikely in the Living Order, the immediate suspicion must be that a new system of order is functioning…and so it must have analogous properties, but made up on different patterns.  There must be processes of selection, organization, storage and implementation that are all related through some information nexus that holds the system together as a system.

Just as life has taken on a “life of its own” in relation to the physical world, then it can be expected that, at least, the possibility exists that a new system of order – if it is a fully functioning system of order – might take on a new place in the universe.  And a new place it is in the sense that a new order of probability relations exists that did not exist before.

What makes this view important is that these designs for the ordered handling of specific classes of information generate consistent systems within which orderly and understandable classes of outcomes can be expected.  As such it is a pragmatic and evocative “theory of consciousness”, not one intended to assign physical order processes, living order processes and consciousness order processes together into a common consensus or, at another extreme, seek for some ‘vital principle’ and ‘infusion of soul’ to explain the patterns of action that arise from ways of organizing information that did not exist previously.

The basis of the Consciousness System of Order requires only the PSO and the LSO, as we currently understand them, and the specialized consistencies that allow for a complex nervous system; questions of the subjective experiences of conscious awareness are not the central concerns of this idea.  However, leaving aside awareness in no way renders the consequences of this idea trivial.

Most of the academic considerations of consciousness have to do with issues of dualistic and monistic “theories”, the mechanical, chemical or structural correlates of “conscious” behavior and increasingly the attempt to find some deep physical basis, often in quantum phenomena, that “explains” the subjective experience.  The CSO in the model presented here is concerned with the consequences in evolution, the behavioral products and the ecological consequences, of this new way of selecting, organizing, storing and implementing information.  Most studies of consciousness are concerned with making awareness sensible (a tautology?); this model is concerned with making religion, politics, economics and human ecological relations sensible.

I will, in later essays, look at some of the academic arguments about the nature of consciousness: Pinker vs. Fodor, some of the implications that quantum mechanics may have, various field theories and some of the larger “universal” notions; but it is the properties of the CSO as it functions in the world that are ultimately the most compelling.  I will end this essay with an example.

The element Iron, Fe, functions in the PSO in a variety of ways.  It is the largest element formed commonly by stellar nuclear behavior, has quite stable isotopes and is therefore one of the most common of the heavier elements.  As a “heavy” element it tends to accumulate at gravitational centers and so seems to make up the core of “cool” astronomic bodies like planets.  The transitional nature of its electron structure allows it to combine with a number of other elements in several different “oxidation states.”

In the LSO iron atoms are captured in macromolecular cages and their capacity to exist in several oxidation states are exploited in a variety of ways, most significantly, to allow a liquid to be supersaturated with oxygen at levels orders of magnitude over normal saturation levels; and thus animals can be large and their blood is red.  Iron is not “used” in this way in the PSO outside of the LSO.

In the CSO iron is mixed with a variety of other materials, other metals and some non-metals in exact proportions in precisely controlled procedures to produce irons and steels with defined properties (as well as used in thousands of chemicals).  These materials are used to produce structures and objects in the millions and billions that could not exist in the universe without the intervention of a specialized information handling system capable of selecting, organizing, storing and implementing information of the properties of the iron atom.

Life, the LSO, has existed on this planet for nearly 4 billion years as a system of organizing and handling information in the ways unique to life.  The CSO has existed on the planet for, at most, a little over one hundred thousand years; and has been for that time expanding its information base as it develops and more fully inflates its structural designs.  It is this understanding that we must contend with; that we are made in part of a new way of organizing information, a way that is untried in the history of the universe and clearly – just look at how we deal with a single element – one of immense and unprecedented power.

Just as the organizing power of life seems to be irrepressible when in conditions of sufficient stability to allow it at all, the organizing power of the CSO is similarly irrepressible – and its most irrepressible qualities may be quite independent of the subjective qualities that we have been so eager to understand.  It is the properties of consciousness as a process that selects, organizes, stores and implements information in ways, new to the universe, with which we must come to grips.

Here are links to some more of my essays that deal with these ideas:

Most Things Must Be Explained Together

It is Really Pretty Simple

A New Way of Understanding Our Situation, Part Two

Living Well in Specieshood

[1] It should be noted that one of the conditions that allows the PSO and LSO to function in sustaining relationship is compatibility of time frame.  Large scale PSO changes on the earth take place over durations to which LSO system can adapt and integrate.  The adaptive processes of the LSO are sensitive to levels of change in the PSO that allow the LSO to extend its adaptive range rather than constantly being overwhelmed by them.  It will be seen that this cannot be said for the adaptive designs of the CSO.

A Meta-trip To Video Game Land

When beginning a metacognitive journey one should be at least as diligent as the mapping application on a mobile phone and ask whether to use one’s present location as a reference – or not.

The first and most important recognition (cool! re-cognition!) is the fluidity of meaning associated with words.  Every word is a potential point of bifurcation in a journey of understanding, but some words just jump out and slap you as you read (and think).  In those cases you are presented with two options: attempt to discover the active field of meaning intended, expected or that limits the producer of the words; or to, more or less rigidly, apply your own field of meaning and see how the conceptual structure develops within your limits of present understanding.

I have just read a rather astounding interview article that offers most forms of opportunity to practice these skills: it is called ‘Can Computer Games Save Us All? New Research Shows How Gaming Can Help Cure Our Social Ills.’

Terrance McNally interviews game designer Jane McGonigal.  Applying my mapping tool, I find that my present location is quite far from the destination that the article is describing; the road is both long and with unmapped regions.  Though I am willing to be shown the way, in fact, I lack confidence that such a place exists at all.

*  *  *

Let us begin with this simple assertion: that experience – and the form of experience – matters in the subsequent behavior of a person.  A person whose experience is primarily associated with hunting and gathering essential food and material with the assistance and company of intimate, life-long associates will be different in important ways from a person whose experience is more fragmented into a wide variety of ways to obtain essential needs and whose associations are also highly varied in form.

In other words, it is axiomatic that people who do not spent 20 to 40 hours a week playing video games will have a different experience of life than someone who does.  The question should be: “How are these experiences different?” and not only: “Are there bad consequences associated with, especially violent, video games?”

A second axiom can be called forth: as an evolved organism, humans have, albeit of considerable latitude, consistent traits that define expected patterns of species’ behavior.  In other, somewhat less academic sounding, words: “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Well yes, unless it is taught to ride a bicycle and use a toilet – we’ll not get into the hazards associated with claws and toilet paper.  The problem for humans is that most of us have been taught to ‘ride a bicycle!’  All of our many forms of bicycle riding cloud our perception and understanding of ourselves as a bear in the woods.

And so, just what sort of bicycle riding is video gaming?

Academic research is its own form of bicycle riding, but that is the importance of metacognitive practice – to remain aware of the bicycle we are on as we roll around in our cognitive space.  One of the first and most important of metacognitive recognitions is that we habituate very quickly to consistent and common practices; this is one of those ‘expected patterns of species’ behavior’ and a damned useful one until it isn’t; and it isn’t when habituation prevents us from realizing what is most important in a question.

Social scientists are wary of ‘big picture’ questions; they are extremely difficult to research well, often requiring expensive, large, longitudinal correlative studies.  Most real social questions have political and economic implications, and thus those same dangers.  It is easier, safer and more rewarding to pick narrowly defined questions that can be studied with reasonable budgets in reasonable amounts of time.  This doesn’t mean that ‘big picture’ questions don’t get attention, only that they must be sewn together from often ill-fitting pieces cut out for other purposes.

With these thoughts as background, let us begin.  First the title of the interview article, ‘Can Computer Games Save Us All? New Research Shows How Gaming Can Help Cure Our Social Ills.’  The words themselves DEMAND attention: “save us all”, “new research”, “cure our social ills.”

I’ve seen the TED Talk by Ms. McGonigal, and I have to say that it looks like a propaganda piece conflating the fact that spending many hours a week doing anything will have powerful consequences, the supposition that ‘socially positive’ experiences can (and should) be designed into video games and that if everyone played such games for something like a full-time job, the world would be a better place.

Before getting into the research, what is my present location on the cognitive map?  First and foremost I don’t assume that all experiences are essentially neutral accept for duration; I think there are great differences between hiking for 3 hours in the desert and 3 hours playing a video game based on desert warfare.  I think that 20 hours a week spent working with 2 or 3 other people on a farm producing much of one’s own food would have dramatically different consequences for a person’s general thought process and sense of self compared to 20 hours a week spent sitting at a computer ‘earning’ the money to buy that same food (this is not to ignore potential differences in food quality, but that is not the subject).  I do assume that how, and with whom, one spends one’s time is vital to what a person ‘is.’ I also predict that there can be little objection to these views since I am only assuming that the different conditions of life would produce differences in experience and self-expression.

I further have a few expectations for the people around me, expectations that may or may not relate to the above assumptions.  And that is key, what experiences do the people around you need to have so that they meet your expectations, and what experiences do you need to have so your expectations are reasonable in light of what humans are.

Now we can talk about video games and how they might fit into the human experience.

The research is largely uninforming regards the questions that I have, primarily are video games in general good for our lives or not?  (if you think such a question inappropriate, remember that we arrogantly ask and answer that kind of question for other species all the time.)  Research questions are more like: do specific types of violence (or helping behaviors) increase or decrease in relation to specific amounts and types of video game playing? 

And the results are in for that one: specific types of violence increase and helping behavior decreases with increasing amounts of exposure to violent video games (An update on the effects of playing violent video games, Craig A. Anderson, Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004) 113–122).  The effect is stronger than a number of health relationships for which, we as a society, have taken serious action.  But like so many of the forms of experience in which we engage today, there is vast infrastructure and wealth associated with their continued delivery.

But Ms. McGonigal’s message, a message I have largely rejected above, contains another much deeper aspect; it is made of two parts.  First the trivial, though powerful: the digital world is here to stay and will develop more and more powerful forms.  The second is the one: that digital experience, understanding and daily practice will both enhance our human understanding and change who and what we are – that games are just the weak secondhand smoke of the deep full-lunged drag on the digital universe.

I can see that I’m going to have hit the ‘locate’ feature on my metacognitive mapping application, though I am certain that I will not be in Ms. McGonigal’s town; I will be some place other than where I think I am right now.

Dangerous Moves

In the French movie Dangerous Moves, two soviet era Russian chess masters, one a young expatriate and one an old man, play for the world championship in Geneva.  The deeply insightful ending contains the real and perhaps not fully intended meaning of the film.  The old man is dieing from a failing heart muscle.  The young man, with whom he has a long and very complex competitive relationship comes to see him in hospital.  They exchange no greeting and no wishes seemingly appropriate to the moment.  The old man’s wife is ushered out of the room and the two, one seated and one on the bed, begin. The old man, “You Start.” The young man, “K4.” (White, king’s pawn to king’s 4).

This is an intersection of realities: Life and death. Love and cynicism. Companionship and isolation.  Experience and habit.  Responsibility and self-indulgence.

In the history of the human species certain occasions standout as significantly more real than others.  Many of them have to do with staying alive and with passing on one’s genetic material; passing on one’s skills, intellectual attainments and aspirations have become important to us also.  Underlying these expectations are the assumptions – unspoken and unspeakable – that allow a wolf to chew off its own foot to escape a trap or send a man who cannot swim into a raging torrent to try to pull his child to safety.

It has been, for most of the time humanity has been evolved into something like our present form, these kinds of events that anchored our existence [1]. There is nothing like the perspective of walking among a pride of lions, dodging a charging bison or needing to dive in shark-thick waters to gather one’s food to focus the mind.  These define a relationship with living in the world unattainable in the typical course of life in economically “developed” societies, and account for the surprise and incapacity to act appropriately when some part of serious Reality finds us [2].

We talk with some certainty, and glibly, about how the pressures of the modern world are just another form of survival like the past, perhaps even more demanding, challenging and “manly” than the “easy” troubles of life in the immediate.  I say, hogwash.  It is the difference between a video game and a real sword-wielding madman; “defeating” him and moving on to find the secret ring would be the last thing on your mind.

The Real of reality eventually comes to all of us – or almost all of us, it is possible to never have a real experience and then be taken unawares from behind by a speeding bus – but most of us have few brushes with reality in our bubble-lives of ease and safety; we seldom get wet in the rain, travel any considerable distance on the power of our own legs or know the motivating lash of hunger.

For most of us the Real of reality comes only in overwhelming and ‘unavoidable’ moments; birth, death and the traumas of life, injuries and accidents of fate, that are supposed to visit others, yet sometimes find us.  This form of relationship with Reality is distorting beyond all understanding: living in the mini-reality of economic activity, only occasionally intruded upon by the vast machinery of the biophysical Reality that is the underlying truth and finally dominating presence of this earth.

This is not to say that what happens to us is not real to us. Making the mortgage payment, finding well-compensating employment, buying the car that is just the right amount more desirable than the neighbor’s, winning the chess tournament: these are all real to us.  But they are so completely abstracted and distant from the forces that organize and allow life to exist on the earth that our being cloistered in them, these human constructions seemingly larger than Reality itself, is a madness exploded into the firmament.

As the old man’s heart muscle is tearing itself to pieces, he answers back, “B3.” (and the younger man’s only and deepest response is to calculate the next move!)

[1] Disclosure: I have been in two absolutely life threatening situations while mountaineering.  Both of which had to be worked out over some time, with considerable effort and an unwillingness to die.  Also once I spent a delightful 30 or so minutes with a mountain lion following me: I alone and on foot, in perfect ambush country, many miles from any form of shelter; it trying to decide how much work I would be to invite to lunch, and me explaining with my every motion that I was way too much trouble to take on.

[2] Like the danger of ecosystem collapse, for example.  A people living in touch with Reality would be adapting to it even before they see it coming.  We, on the other hand, have so organized our ways of gathering experience and our systems of power that we don’t even realize that our food comes from the soil or that a high quality life is different from being devoted to fending off death by any means necessary.