I was at a local Green Party meeting the other day1 where we were all asked to identify ourselves and to say something about why we wanted to be involved in the upcoming election campaign. (I’m the sign delivery guy.) I tried to respond thoughtfully, which takes time as you know, but when this aging Natural History wonk got as far as, “I like people as individuals, but as a species, not so much”, I had to pause . . . searching for words to express my ever-deepening appreciation of geological time and my ever-heightening alarm over species extinction.
When the pause got a bit long, the questioner kindly but summarily thanked me for my contribution.[another pause . . . ]
Why that pause was long is the question I’m trying to address in this post. As an outward gesture, the Wonk’s Pause is often just meant to express “this ain’t easy to talk about”; but what goes on under the surface tends to be largely non-verbal as well, with perhaps only a smattering of word-fragments that serve as signposts for the inner journey. This covert behaviour, as we might call it, internally ‘choreographs’ our silences with unseen conceptual modelling and, in my experience at least, these vague feelings and interior manipulations2 have attended my subliminal geography, or my e-motional/sensory/reflexive landscape if you prefer, as other obligations would allow, for three-quarters of a century in the endless loops and spirals that us touchy-feely craftsman types call pre-verbal ‘thinking’. Prior to this campaign meeting I’d been exploring my Humans-vs-Nature conceptual territory long enough for whole continents of interpenetrating conceptual diversity to emerge from the unformed e-motional seas of my childhood. (You can explore the results at your leisure on the rest of this website.)
For what it’s worth, here are some of my personal observations of the in-tensional components of cognition (re-flexions) and memory (re-tensions): I feel this covert behaviour, as we might call it, as an outwardly still and silent ‘choreography’ of conceptual modelling and, in my experience at least, these almost imperceptible feelings and non-contracting manipulations2 inhabit an under-the-surface (subliminal?) personal geography of recollected e-motional humours, inborn attitudes, and non-visceral sense impressions. While I was working in the design-build industry in particular, it was often apparent to my meditative ‘mind’s eye’ that the whole body (if only as addressed by ‘action potentials’ below the threshold of act-ual muscle contraction) can become involved in my nonverbal modelling and ‘thoughts’; but have you ever noticed that even your face and eye muscles can, oh so subtly, get into the ‘act’ of re-calling an image: of imagination? I won’t go into more detail here, but while the argument in this post requires a close connection between cognition and behaviour in general, it does not require them to be as closely connected as I personally perceive them to be.
Ok, maybe me trying to put my inner world into words is no harder than it is for many other thinking folk, even those savants oriented to vision and the written word, but consider this: it’s not just that my understanding of population ecology doesn’t allow me to see us as having a ‘place’ within coevolving Nature3; or that my introspections of subtle-behavioural phenomenology, and my wildly leaping adventures in juxtaposing their creative aspects with those of evo-ecology, doesn’t persuade me that human intelligence is anything but superfluous to Nature’s intelligence; but my verbalisation difficulties persist also because the aforementioned lifetime insight practice (as a hands-on builder and designer to begin with, and through formal sitting meditation starting in my fifties)4 is clearly facing a compromised creative intellect which makes us feel, ironically, superior to the eco-evolutionary intelligence which created us. (Long sentences for long thoughts you see.)5 And I also think this ‘evolutionary compromise’ is what fails us when we try to bring these Humans-and-Nature likenesses and unlikenesses into focus.
But, before I go on to make the case that there can be value, if not immediately then well down the road, in entertaining such long thoughts—and in any case there’s unarguable value in shelving them well before political meetings become imminent and summary thank-yous are needed so meetings can return to the business at hand—I now want to make an effort to demonstrate the importance of these Self Knowledge exercises in general, and of scaling them up to the species level in particular.
(By the way, I’m also the guy in the orange circle above, waving the orange sign for a Fridays For Future event in Bracebridge Ontario. As you can see, the ‘wonk’ here, counterintuitively you might say, is actually attending most enthusiastically to the ‘business at hand’. Who’d have thought?) [long pause . . . ]
Here are my thoughts on the importance of self-knowledge in its ‘humans as a collective’ meaning: My psychology at at this stage isn’t concerning itself with the particular actions people might take, it’s focused on what moves a people to act in general. Moreover, since I’m talking about collective action now, we must set aside (for now) the Self-Knowledge that meditation practitioners have already established as key to personal transformation, and to a more deeply-grounded, confident, and resolute ‘right action’ by individuals (we needn’t get into the individuation/interconnection brainteaser here). The dharma ‘teachings’6 do not address collective action for the very good reason that coordinating a group of ‘actors’ means having a shared ‘story’, and Self Knowledge, according to the teachings, is all about being released from ‘illusory’ story-lines and identities. (I know from personal experience that collective action can go more smoothly when key individuals demonstrate a bit of mindfulness/insight, but this is not the same thing as understanding the wider politics involved, and ‘sustaining’ a shared story.)
Although stories and other artforms are ‘ideally’ the springboards for all our most wonderful human adventures, nevertheless the history of human story-lines fomenting collective action is not encouraging. When ‘identity politics’ is all about defining groups of people in terms of other groups then the human adventure becomes a nightmare for those ‘others’. But our present effort, restricted as I said to defining human beings in terms of ‘other species’, is (or at least it should be) a more inclusive over-story; and so far, I would say, our narratives here have been both more cogent and more limiting, in their evidence-based way. It’s encouraging still that, again historically, the one method we have for uncovering the objective truth of our stories—which is to say it uncovers narrative truth with the strongest confidence possible outside that certainty arising from meditative practices which uncover the ‘subjective Truth’ of our direct (released from desire) experience—is the discipline we call the scientific method . . .
So here are my thoughts on the importance of self-knowledge in the population-eco-evolutionary meaning: In the population ecologist’s view, technology’s niche-transcending capacity means that modern humans are not a species in the co-adapted sense. I’ve dealt with this in the previous post7 where I talked about ecological identity in terms of the gene-rational ‘familiarity’ an organism has with Natural environments that can and do change, and I used this wording because familiarity can either ‘show up’ as co-adaptation in a competitive-exclusion-maintained niche8, or ‘not show up’ in the case of infestation due to geographical introduction or displacement; and this is the human predicament using words we can understand at the gut level.
But these two common ‘animal attitudes’9 that alternately shape our unexamined sense if human identity with respect to the Natural World—Adaptationism vs Extractivism—don’t exhaust the possibilities for a collective human identity, and on this website I’ve promoted a third possibility, which challenges these assumptions out of our animal past. I’ve been referring to this possibility as the Extremophile Choice, because ‘extremophile’ is also an ecological term, although in our case it must be a considered a ‘choice’.10 We’re essentially saying here that technology’s intra-generational evolutionary capacity, unfolding inescapably and increasingly as a niche-transcending capacity, obliges us to interact as little as possible with a progressively rewilding world.
Could such a choice, if it can be a scientifically validated, ‘unlock’ our nascent collective transformation, and ‘right’ our political actions, in a more deeply-grounded and resolute way? If this ‘non-co-evolved-species’ identity were to be accepted widely, I think we might expect, at the very least, a better resistance to political policies of the extractivist vain; but perhaps even our policy initiatives from the adaptationist perspective (which assume the development of ‘humanised ecosystems’) might be held to a higher standard of ‘evolutionary sustainability’. It might be too much to hope, I’m afraid, that public action and legislative confidence will also reach the deep level of groundedness we associate with Knowing Oneself at the personal level, because ‘knowing who we are’ as a species takes a different kind of practice; and this level of eco-evolutionary understanding will probably never be wide-spread among so variously specialised animals11 such as us. [very long pause . . . Maybe you should look at footnote-11 if I’ve lost you here.]
I hope now I’ve dealt with the motivational and policy-initiative importance of Self Knowledge scaled up to the species level, and in a way that piques a reader’s interest. So can I move on to those long but hesitant thoughts now? A wonk can’t show you this in his writing but, at this point in my attempt to move on, a very long pause was needed because we’re finally getting to that “compromised creative intellect” irony I referred to a while back.
To begin, it’s crucial to understand that the key to accepting any ‘scientific truth’ is not just the ascendancy of evidence in its favour; for, in the popular consciousness we’re concerned with here, what we’re calling ‘acceptance’ involves a more commonly intuitive believability, and this is even slower than the scientific process in accepting a ‘proven truth’ (though such acceptance can’t be resisted indefinitely). This said, I have come to think that our science arguments in the case before us—proposing that Natural Selection is equally and independently as ‘intelligent’ as Homo sapiens—might not be found acceptable by either process for an obscure, or at least a counterintuitive, reason. Here’s a classic example to illustrate our ‘innocence’ in regard to human exceptionalism: the usual argument for anticipating a future after all for Homo sapiens in a thriving biosphere, for not limiting our expectations to the two subsistence alternatives of all other animals—infestation or co-adaptation12—is the age-old claim that our creativity, unlike that of lower animals (we think), and unlike natural selection (especially and quite literally as implied by the use of lower case), involves . . . foresight. 13 Common sense or innocence? Anyone who has looked close enough, and long enough, and who has learned to be free enough from the interference of desires or conceptual fixations, will have a problem with this venerable claim.
Because here is where our psychological and ecological ‘self-knowledges’ came together in my wonk’s pause; and where the proposed genetic ‘creative intelligence’ case and the presumed techno-cultural creative intelligence case—the only two sustained creativities we know of—connect in such a way as to reveal that “compromise which ironically makes us feel superior”, but which in my thinking fails us when we try to bring such ‘unnatural connections’ into explicit focus.
- THE GENETIC CREATIVITY CASE: Let’s start by laying out Nature’s undeniable ‘creativity’ in a four-step recipe (algorithm?) that involves 1) minute wanderings of embryonic DNA replication being 2) transcribed to various organisms that are 3) selected naturally as coadapted species which are 4) distinguished by non-adaptive sexual traits14 in the virtuous spiral of ecosystem diversification that we call ‘biological evolution’.
- THE CULTURAL CREATIVITY CASE: Supposing we say then that my aforementioned 1) covert manipulations haunting our inner geography15 correspond to the wanderings of embryonic DNA replication, and these are 2) being expressed as overt behaviour and its various structural-social productions,16 and that these in turn are 3) selected by diversely associating in-tensions17 as 4) concepts that are specified by otherwise nonfunctional language behaviour (if only fragmentary) 18 in a similar virtuous spiral of techno-cultural diversification.
Can we agree now that we have here a set of four ‘believably similar’ steps in the only two cases of continuing creativity that we know of? And can you then see one difference in the second case, the human case, that might be viewed as compromising? Well here is what I see: our inner geography of covert manipulation behaviour is not so distinguishable from our overt behaviour (and it’s more consequential structural-social productions) as embryonic DNA’s chemically dissimilar inner wanderings are from those structural-motor protein organisms that are ultimately transcribed from it. And to me this means…
Our inner-life has a stronger resemblance to our direct experience than Nature’s genes have to organisms. Is this why we become easily ‘attached’ to our thoughts? [very very long pause . . . ]
In fact, let’s meet again in a next post: A Wonk’s Pause-2 (how the compromised Human intellect came to be, and it’s consequences)
***
Notes and Citations:
1) We were frantically mobilising to hit the campaign trail if our Provincial Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, decided to call an early election. Seems he might want to do this while his “beer in every store” program is still newsworthy and Justin Trudeau is still in power Federally. Ok, we can all understand the cynical logic of bribing an electorate with beer, but why would a Conservative Premier want to have an election while a Liberal Prime Minister is in power? Well it’s simply because you don’t need to campaign on policy if you can leverage hate and misinformation on the coattails of a larger Federal Conservative campaign which amounts only to “f*** Trudeau” and “axe the [carbon] tax”. (Cynicism loves simplicity.) The Greens are pretty big here where I live. Only two other ridings in Ontario have ever elected Greens: Guelph’s Mike Schreiner and Kitchener Central’s Aislinn Clancy; but last election cycle we came close to sending Matt Richter to Queen’s Park and breaking the Conservative stranglehold that’s existed since Parry Sound-Muskoka’s founding. So yeah, this little meeting was a big deal; and the business at hand was not something to be punted down a rabbit hole by the musings of a 75yrs old Natural History nerd who’s conditioned himself to think in million-year terms.
2) Here is my six-layer anatomy of behavioural intelligence from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice (referred to as DDEC in the rest of these notes):1 Except in the heart and the gut, smooth muscle tensions and other autonomic body responses are literally e-motional. Thus emotional affect meanings of objects and events arise involuntarily from prevailing states of body chemistry, and they are associated with direct input from the superficial senses as well as with voluntary motions and tensions of the skeletal muscles. Then, forming five more layers of felt intelligence, ‘motional effects’, whether overt, covert, innate or learned, evolve into whole ‘ecosystems’ of meaning when: 2 postures and programs adapted for direct survival impart reaction meaning to objects and events; 3 the body’s ‘measuring’ of extension, distance, and resistance to movement or deformation imparts exploration meaning to objects and events; 4 the action of moving and rearranging the ‘parts’ previously explored imparts manipulation meaning to objects and events; 5 our mirror neuron reflection, or personification of ‘other selves’, imparts imitation meaning to objects and events; and 6, by transposing all these direct interactions to altogether separate ‘closed behavioural fields’, particularly in the mouth and throat (language: essay 35) but perhaps also in the eyes and face (imagination: essay 43), for meta-level manipulation and composition (thus a covert displacement of meaning-4 objects and events), motor-program-traces are abstracted and associated as mental constructs to articulate formal meaning: we call this “thinking”. [The last three layers are clearly highly developed for, and the last layer—experienced as indirect mediation—is probably unique to, technological intelligence.] Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/20/old-buddhas-gift-part-3-young-buddha-gets-absurd/ and https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/21/old-buddhas-gift-part-4-young-buddha-explores-the-subtle-body/
3) “In systemic ecology, both the living and non-living components of the environment are considered in depth. Systemic ecology will often look at non-biological aspects of the environment such as the transfer of matter and energy through different trophic levels as well as biogeochemical cycles. … Population ecology focuses on the interaction between species or populations and between populations and their environments. This branch of ecology does consider non-biological factors, but it is primarily concerned with the living world. Population ecology can be studied on multiple scales including individual organisms, populations, and biological communities.” See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2023/02/09/once-you-see-it-you-cant-un-see-it/
4) When a meditator calls what he or she is doing a ‘subjective science’ this is not just a bit of a stretch, it’s a contradiction in terms. So I hope to assure you there is real objective research going on in real universities now that suggests what I have written about this in this blog, drawing from my own experience, has some merit. (How the Body Shapes the Mind, Shaun Gallagher, Published online, Feb. 1, 2006; also: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, November 13, 1992 by The MIT Press.) Fortunately however, what I am saying here about comparing Natural and Human Intelligence doesn’t require you to accept my introspective ‘evidence’ for a literal interpretation of what Dogen calls ‘the bodymind’. Really, this development for me was important mainly as a way to give a sense of ‘substance’ to the supposedly unique creativity of Mankind so that we can understand that the ‘substantial creativity’ of Nature Selection is not just equivalent to ours but, in one particular I talk about later, it’s even more efficient.
Here are some other writers who have explored the body-mind connection: — Bargh, Jan. 2014, p. 34. Brain areas that respond to textures also light up when someone is having a “rough” or “smooth” social interaction. (Box insert, “Why Some Social Science Studies Fail”.) — Gottlieb, Anthony. Aug. 30, 2016, A Dream of Enlightenment, Ch. 6. ‘The Best of all Possible Compromises’. — Fernando, Chrisantha. Aug. 2013. From Blickets to Synapses: Inferring Temporal Causal Networks by Observation. Cognitive Science, Vol. 37, Issue 8, pp. 1426-1470. — That robots, like children, learn from “the shape of the body and the kinds of things it can do” has been recently demonstrated by Angelo Cangelosi of the University of Plymouth in England and Linda B. Smith, a developmental psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Source: Diana Kwon, Scientific American, March 2018 (volume 318, number 3), “Self-Taught Robots” pp. 26-31. — Colarossi, Jul./Aug. 2013, pp. 17-19, — Merleau-Ponty, 1967, pp. 356-374. — Kwant, 1967, pp. 383, 387. — Berman, July 2004, p. 132.
5) The first bit, about humans not having a coevolving “place” is easy enough to understand and I’ve laid it out in many different ways elsewhere in this blog (see note 3 above); and the second bit, about genetically coevolving Nature being “intelligent” in it’s own right, and therefore not needing our human kind of intelligence, can be understood after we bring “insight” into the eco-evolutionary argument (referenced in the same post I asked you to “see” above); but, although it is also alluded to in the above post, I’ve not properly dealt with the third bit in this blog yet. This is because under-standing the compromise in human creativity (when seen in the light of Nature’s genetic creativity) involves insight “practice”, and whenever someone tries presenting Self-Knowledge as a simple verbal understanding that someone will have no end of trouble. Hence the pause.
6) Thich Nhat Hanh’s “engaged Buddhism” may be an exception, philosophically; but in practice, meditation involves watching how thoughts arise in the mind and then allowing them to pass away without getting ‘caught’ in a continuing story-line. ‘Collective action’ needs a ‘story’ so that all the actors know their ‘parts’, and so it’s difficult to find a place here for the immediate uncalculating ‘right actions’ taught in the dharma. Coordinated movements, like group walking meditation or bowing ‘routines’, that are common enough during retreats have all been ‘thought out’ beforehand so that the individual can focus on his/her body only without being part of goal oriented discussions. But also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/08/01/old-buddhas-gift-part-5-the-sympathy-of-bodymind/ and: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/08/02/young-buddha-part-2-the-living-world-is-overturned-along-with-mankinds-inner-world/
7) See previous post on this website: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2024/11/22/human-coadaptation-vs-infestation-a-false-choice/
8) The idea that two similar species cannot coexist if their ecological niches completely overlap, also called the competitive exclusion principle, or Gause’s Law, lies at the core of the science of population evo-ecology in the same way that Occam’s Razor lies at the core of evolving cultures and languages. Of course neither of these principles are in fact “laws”, because evolution in both creativities is always testing the limits of what’s possible; but still, the One Species, One Niche principle has profound implications for our understanding of Humans and Nature, where the human technological ‘strategy’, by its very nature, subverts the principle. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2020/07/27/one-species-one-niche-why-humans-destroy-nature/
9) Are we humans a co-adapted species in an environment we are familiar with (or to); are we an infestation species, introduced to an unfamiliar environment; or are we something altogether unprecedented—certainly we’re not a species like all the others. In the ecological/psychological argument offered here, the short-sighted adaptationist 1) believes that we can take part in fully diverse co-adapted systems without depleting them, and the extractivist 2) is under the delusion that our apparent infestation is really just ‘Nature’s brand-new Intelligence’ in the early stages of improving upon what came before. But what about the futurist 3) who intuits the “wrongness” of extractivism but also the limits to ecological adaptation as a human destiny? Gene Roddenberry and a succession of Star Trek writers seem to prefigure the Extremophile Choice argument, especially with the “Prime Directive” trope and a noninterference attitude in general that a Star Ship captain must adhere to. But even in this futurist ideal the fundamentals of evo-ecological science, available in textbooks from the 1970’s, take a back seat to other more popular scientific principles, as against the almost infinite improbabilities of natural selection, humanoids have evolved on nearly every inhabited planet.
10) If Mankind is a species at all, we can’t be fit into any one of the ecological strategies to which convergent evolution typically constrains species in Natural ecosystems: we are irresistible hunters, specialists and opportunists at the same time, and omnivores who can also make use of the sun’s energy directly like plants. Like those species of worms and shrimp called extremophiles, that live around black smoker hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor, we can thrive in conditions that typical life-forms can’t even endure; and like certain microbes that live within deep mantel rock and polar ice caps—let’s call them non-coevolved extremophiles—humans can make use of ecologically unproductive spaces into which even the detritus of the world’s ecosystems never enters. But, unlike any Natural species, we are also ‘adaptive extremophiles’: in theory, we can extend our homes and farms around the globe unchecked by either elemental conditions or ecological competition. I won’t pretend this vision of our distant future is anything more than a working hypothesis based on some very general ecological principles; nevertheless, whether or not any ecological terms can fit a non-species, maybe this vision can help us choose a direction.
11) We technological animals must become specialised in countless diverse ways compared to any other social animal. Even ants. The average citizen doesn’t follow science close enough to sort truth from misinformation in today’s social media free-for-all; that’s why we invented governments. So by what political sophistry can the oxymoronic idea, that a diverse citizenry is ultimately the responsible party in specialized matters of science, be justified when our elected ‘leaders’ mandated to heed the science don’t tell us the truth, just because we, not knowing the truth, may disagree with them when it comes for an election? All the average citizen in a democracy needs to know at election time is: which leader is most trustworthy? (And without democracy there can be no trust, and therefore no social animal in the first place.) At this pivotal time in Human and indeed Natural history it is truly alarming that the primal covenant between citizen and government is being compromised by a modern democracy’s assumption that “the people know best” in all cases. This is no truer today for the ‘Climate War’ than it was true for the threat of wars and pandemics in the past! Like it or not, those who put themselves forward as political leaders assume this pledge to heed the experts. And, notwithstanding the pressure from economic interests, notwithstanding the illusory escape of deferring to ‘the people’, the political leaders of the day will be held responsible by future generations for their failure to inform the public about, and to take the required action to address, the defining challenges of our time. Like Global Warming. Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/06/04/a-short-diversion-from-essay-selections-after-the-2022-ontario-election-the-meaning-of-leadership-for-human-beings/
12) An animal’s niche is maintained by it’s structural/behavioural under-standing of inter-species ‘familiarity’; that is, its ecological ‘identity’ either shows up (co-adaptation), or does not show up (infestation), depending on the gene-rational familiarity an organism has with Natural environments that can and do change. Keeping this simple one-species-one-niche rule and its occasional failure in mind we must conclude that, for a uniquely exploratory and technologically adaptive ‘species’ such as ourselves, ecological familiarity doesn’t last long enough to allow maximally diverse co-adaptation in the Natural systems we ‘infest’. (Farmed systems are another story.) See previous post on this website: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2024/11/22/human-coadaptation-vs-infestation-a-false-choice/
13) The Extractivist understanding of technological evolution mistakes its learning-from-trial-and-error with ‘foresight’ because the trial part isn’t recognised as mental ‘reproduction’ and the error part is somehow seen as ‘intentional’. On the other hand, the Adaptationist understanding doesn’t take technological evolution into account at all; its ‘short-sightedness’ doesn’t recognise that ecological familiarity is an ‘animal truth’ that, for a technological ‘species’, doesn’t last long enough for Natural adaptation to reach maximal diversity.
14) In our continuing evolutionary analogy, it’s not overt language, but covert activity in general that corresponds to the shadowy, abstracted, gene-pooled design space of an ecosystem’s non-somatic (germ plasm) chemistry. In fact, the implied correspondence between genetic ‘code’ and verbal code is misleading: the first is a chemical precursor for amino acid sequencing of proteins, and the second, a changeable convention that, to the extent its vocal details have no relevance as behaviours in the real world, assigns verbal behaviours to thought behaviours as arbitrary handles. It’s only because, at our accustomed scale of relating to Nature, the codons of DNA exhibit alternative sequencing, while sexually selected traits appear as a messy subset intrinsic to ‘fixed’ species, that we don’t recognize the latter as the properly correlated ‘conventions’ that handle Nature’s Darwinian work. Indirect verbal behaviour specifies the partial and tentative, but directly useful, covert behaviour of which it is a subset, and so ‘thought’ unfolds bivalently according to the body’s own ‘universal grammar’. Just so, to avoid tentative reproduction, sexual traits, not directly related to survival, are selected ‘as a convenience’ to decisively speci-fy traits that are. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/24/young-buddha-speaks-part-1-kick-starting-a-verbal-selection-process-for-ramifying-thought/
15) This view of language, as a ‘mapping’ of bodily movements, goes back at least eight centuries before Dogen, to Augustine. It has been criticised by none other than Wittgenstein (possibly because his own ideas were so similar) for assuming that the meaning of a word is the object for which it stands (‘ostensive definition’). But, in a way affirming his own philosophy, the mind of the Saint went deeper than reason alone can penetrate: “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their attention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes … Thus as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and … I used them to express my own desires” (Confessions, I. 8). This “natural language of all peoples” can “point out” much more subtle meanings than ostensive objects, and hold words to their grammatically “proper places”, because our “bodily movements” are not ad hoc conventions, not code; they are meaning itself. [True code is hard to find in nature. Other than sexual traits, which might be seen as naturally selected conventions on the evolutionary scale, the only hint of biological code, in this ‘conventional’ sense (and on the organismic-scale) that I am aware of was demonstrated in 1992 by W. J. Freeman, when he showed that long term memories of sense impressions in the brains of rabbits (and presumably humans) are formed in arbitrary association with chaotic attractor states of electrical activity.]
See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/21/old-buddhas-gift-part-4-young-buddha-explores-the-subtle-body/
16) Tools defined, and the two domains of intelligence: A persistent means to an end, a.k.a. a tool, is any structure or behaviour that is adapted and maintained: 1 by gene selection pressure arising from elemental conditions and ecologically emergent resource partitions to support bio-associations; or: 2 by behaviour conditioning pressure arising from direct experience and psychologically emergent conceptual categories to support human cultures. (See Occam’s razor.)
Interpersonal instruction certainly does look a lot like Darwin’s “descent with modification” when we recognise, in both domains, how the potential for ‘mutation’ and ‘recombination’ in the transfer is such a lively source of novelty. But analogy is a job half done, because when this intentional breaking of category lines admits an awareness of broader connection (‘the Lion King’ invites a deeper understanding than the words courage, or leadership, would convey independently), a diligent philosopher must still re-draw (more precisely we hope) the metaphorically altered lines—and this is half the work again. So when we reflect that the whole theatre of genetic selection consists in mortal transactions among bodies spatially distributed as species, the elegance of our cleverly superimposed analogy shouldn’t tempt us to lose sight of the incongruities involved in a behavioural selection process where conditioning takes place sequentially, within and between bodies, as spatially distributed ‘theatres of ideas’.
With this caveat now held steadily before our minds, we see that, if ideas are to be likened to species (‘categories’ that constitute human cultures on the one hand and bio-associations on the other) then, in our shared Grand Theatre of embodied theatres, language becomes in its turn a kind of cultural ‘sexual selection’: words shepherd the ‘evolution’, and ‘ecological maintenance’, of cultural categories. [See following note 17] Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/26/young-buddha-speaks-part-2-a-far-more-voracious-creativity/
17) And, in keeping with the cultural reality whereby immortal ideas are distributed among our mortal bodies, this verbal shepherding of behavioural evolution must take place at two distinctive levels: ideas are first taught-out, and then thought-out, with words, before they are acted-out in a test of their cultural fitness. I’m afraid our reasoning must be particularly acrobatic at this ‘mortality’ level of the evolutionary analogy. We mustn’t confuse the deaths of mere bodies in Nature with the ‘extinction’ of concepts, for the only sanctioned confusion of bodies is with our ongoing performance—the cycles of thought-behaviours that arise and pass away without regret—and it’s our culturally ‘inbred’ habits, or concepts, that align best with species:5 we feel their at-risk status for a time, but we hope for their continued adaptation, and allow for this by promoting thought’s give-and-take, and by making room for (civil) experiments in thought’s expression. [Liberal minds throughout our confused human history have held that the right to express a particular behaviour, and the survival of that behaviour to the point where we allow it’s repetition as a preferred, or ‘immortal’, idea, must always be tested in the court of public debate and legal process; but the right of survival for the body which is its personal theatre, on the other hand, must remain beyond question. So while the line of creative frisson that runs between idea and act-uality deviates in its layered texture from the simpler germ-soma interface of phylogeny, still I hope the analogy can take us beyond my primary message of a ‘personal’ respect for the Natural world, and help us also to frame this mortality confusion better.] Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/16/young-buddha-at-home-part-3-pandoras-box/
18) sexual selection is a meta-evolution that plays the same role of speci-fication in ecosystems that symbolic language (meta-learned behaviour) plays in human cultures. Neither of these meta-evolutions produce traits that directly adapts bodies or ideas to the physical or conceptual ‘environment’. In fact, just as bright feathers and bird song can further expose an organism to predators, spoken words expose our ‘innermost thoughts’ to criticism: the selective pressures of a wider public. But how else can species or concepts ‘enter the creative fray’ without risking their individuality?
