Fast fools

Doomsday ClockUnlike the genetic type of text, the external symbolic type can be reproduced, modified and shared almost at will. The symbolic species can thus develop external guidance systems. Such a system amounts to a common heritage which remains external to the individuals guided by it. Each of them can read and internalize its symbolic ‘maps,’ incorporating them as habits and expressing them in real time as actual behavior. If the maps or texts fall out of synch with current experience, they can be changed promptly and purposefully – no more waiting for natural selection to guide the development of the guidance system. In this way cultural evolution makes a jump to warp speed, so to speak, compared to its biological predecessor.

Evolution has speeded itself up before, for instance with the advent of sexual reproduction. This innovation enlarged the space for variation of the genetic code: now each new individual represented a remix of the genotype, consisting of parts drawn from two genetic texts. Space for variation (or polyversity) is a prerequisite for evolution to be guided by selection; the advent of cultural variation, mediated by symbolic coding, entails a leap into hyperspace. But it also entails the challenge of learning to navigate this greatly expanded space.

Navigation, as before, is guided from within the organic system, so an external guidance system has to be partially internalized in order to do its job. To inhabit a cultural universe, or to adapt one’s habits to it, takes time. As the technology of producing, transferring and retrieving texts improves, they proliferate far faster than they can be incorporated into our behavior. No wonder we humans are so much more bewildered than our wild cousins, who aren’t distracted by symbolic media or inundated by floods of information. But they do suffer, to the point of extinction, from the effects of human bewilderment and our proliferation.

We are bewildered because we are still wild at the biological core of our being, and the core process of all learning – including evolution itself – works by trial and error. Cultural evolution through the proliferation of external guidance systems has enormously amplified the possibilities of trial, the polyversity of success, and the effects of error. The question now is whether we can learn enough from our trials to avoid being overtaken by the consequences of our errors.

One early attempt to map the urgency of this complex situation onto a simple graphic device was the Doomsday Clock, introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947. On this clock, ‘midnight’ stood for a nuclear holocaust, and the imminence of the danger of such a catastrophe was represented by the position of the minute hand. Starting at 7 minutes to midnight, the Clock (i.e. the minute hand) was moved forward or back every few years to indicate changes in the global situation, as seen by conscientious members of the scientific community. In January 2007 a new dimension was added: the clock was moved up to 5 minutes to midnight (closer to ‘Doomsday’ than it had been since 1988), taking into account this time the threat of a gradual global-warming holocaust along with renewed dangers of a sudden nuclear catastrophe. The irony in all this is that the faculty which enables us to reduce such a complex situation to a simple symbol is the same faculty which enables us to make such a mess of the situation in the first place. By learning to map the implicit intricacy of life onto simple explicit symbols, we set the stage for artificial intervention into complex natural processes. Now we are learning how lethal such intervention can be.

How to design a guidance system

The genome is the body’s internal instruction manual for becoming what it needs to be in order to pass on the instructions. The subject of this instructional text has been ‘designed’ by the billion-year dialogue between the organism’s ancestors and their changing circumstances. But developmental and evolutionary processes are unlike expert human designers in one crucial respect: they do not look for short cuts that would reach the intended product without going through the infinitely patient dialogue process. Rather than specifying the structure of their devices to suit their intended function, they incorporate a measure of vagueness and indeterminacy, so that the intentions develop along with the organism, the ends along with the means. If the purpose (or ‘meaning’) of a life were already fully determined before it begins, nothing new could happen among the living, except maybe novel styles of failure.

Where to?

Before the beginning of guidance, you are here now, there is nowhere else. Guidance begins when a difference appears between where you are and where you are heading: then you have forward and backward, front and back, start and finish. Guidance develops as paths proliferate.

So there you are, trying to imagine a story in which you might be a character who makes a difference – or at least, even if you’re only an extra, a story with a plot, one that goes somewhere.

Molecular coupling

The structural coupling between an organism and its ecological niche is mediated by various kinds of signs. The most immediate or purely physical form of this coupling occurs at the molecular level when allosteric proteins fold into one of two possible three-dimensional structures depending on the presence of a molecular ‘partner.’ These proteins couple with complementary shapes, and this allows them to act as ‘switches’ to facilitate chemical reactions within living cells. Some of these reactions act as signals for other actions, contributing to the guidance system at the molecular level. At this level, ‘everything that gets done in an organism or by an organism is done by proteins’ (Loewenstein 1999, 72). But the system guiding the behavior of the whole organism is irreducibly semiotic.

Bottleneck

What does it take to be well guided? One principle is this:

A good guidance system must be simple enough to be decisive, and complex enough to be careful.

Simplicity is required because attention is limited. The fewer decisions you have to make consciously, and the less time it takes to make them, the more well-marked your path. Conscious thinking slows down your response to your situation: its one advantage is that it allows you in the long run to improve your set of habits. Your investment of time and effort – in considering possible courses of action, and turning some of them into habits through actual or anticipated practice, to the point where they become ‘second nature’ – is repaid when your body can handle now-familiar situations on its own, leaving your conscious attention free for more significant things.

Consciousness is the narrow neck of the Klein bottle of mind. Passing through this bottleneck, intention becomes the experience of conscious will, perception becomes the experience of conscious awareness of the world, and the implicit model of the world becomes an explicit description. It is a bottleneck because working memory is so limited, attention so narrowly focused and conscious decision-making so slow that very little “content” flows through it – but its emergy is high in transformity.

Evolving consciousness

Living systems are self-organizing; inquiring systems are also self-critical. All are texts which revise themselves in dialogue with their contexts. Over generations of interpretant symbols, the types of these texts evolve.

Let us inquire into the role of consciousness in this process. Thomas Metzinger begins here:

First, let’s not forget that evolution is driven by chance, does not pursue a goal, and achieved what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems in a blind process of hereditary variation and selection.

— Metzinger 2009, 55

But if evolution has achieved ‘what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems,’ why can’t we say that this was (and is) an intrinsic ‘goal’ of evolution, a final cause, before anyone considered it? Surely a real tendency (or intention) does not need to be consciously chosen in order to guide a process in a general direction. Why not say that a ‘goal’ of evolution is the development of guidance systems, of what Peirce calls self-control? Wouldn’t any real guidance system, no matter how primitive, have a tendency to optimize itself? After all, no process can be driven by ‘chance,’ although chance may contribute to the variation which is necessary in order for selection to operate. Nothing can be driven unless in some direction, and that directedness may itself evolve, from vague tendency to preconscious intention to conscious purpose, from natural selection to ethical inquiry.

Passing by

Turning to page 41 of The Restored Finnegans Wake, where

one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages

, we find somebody being asked to tell once again

that fishabed ghoatstory of the haardly creditable edventyres

which form the matter

of the most commonfaced experience

. But who is this somebody now?

it is a slipperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone

whose turn it is to tell the old ghoatstory.

Packed into those words indentifide and idendifine are intimations of dendritic branching, dividing, defining, ending, teeth, finish and faith, as well as identity. The body it seems is itself a ghost of an old goat who will ever scape the sword of would-be certainty: it would pass right through, as the body passes through time without making a mark on it.

Another Irishman, W. B. Yeats, composed for his own tombstone a remarkable epitaph:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Since he died in 1938, Yeats could not have known that his epitaph bears a striking resemblance to the shortest saying in the Gospel of Thomas, 42:

Jesus says: ‘Become passers-by.’

(5G)

There is much that can be (and has been) said about this saying and its various translations (see Meyer 2003, 59-75); but let us add a few suggestions. First, the two words of this saying link identity (‘become’) with dynamic itinerancy (‘passers-by’), and thus compress the concept of semiotic closure into an expression the size of a mustard seed. In another context, this same seed could sprout an expression like that of Dogen: ‘Impermanence is the buddha-nature.’ Moreover, the Coptic root of the word translated ‘passersby’ is derived from the Greek parago, which is remarkably similar to the Sanskrit word paragate, which appears in the mantra at the climax of the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra, a very brief and essential Buddhist scripture. According to Thich Nhat Hanh (1988, 50), paragate ‘means gone all the way to the other shore.’

The whole mantra is Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. Nhat Hanh translates ‘Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svaha!’ (the last word being a ‘cry of joy or excitement’). This is also related to Tathagata (‘thus-gone’) as a title of the Buddha. (Leighton and Okumura (2004, 103) render it as ‘the one who comes and goes in thusness.’) Thomas 42 could then be read as an exhortation to seek enlightenment – especially in the Zen context where practice is enlightenment and enlightenment is practice (rather than a “state” that you aim to arrive at and dwell in eternally). There is also a parallel Islamic saying – ‘This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there’ (Meyer 2003, 70) – which may spring from the same source as Thomas 42.

Life depends eternally on chaotic itinerancy: try to fix it and it founders. The point is not to stand on the other shore, or to be Somebody, but to be thus gone.

The nerve bible

Laurie Anderson (1995) calls the body the Nerve Bible – the most intimate of scriptures.

Elaine Pagels (1979, 62-3) cites gnostic sources for several ‘mystical meanings’ of Biblical images, which interpret them as references to the human body:

  • Paradise = womb
  • Eden = placenta
  • river flowing forth from Eden = navelcord
  • Exodus = passage out of the womb (Red Sea = blood; and what was Paradise has now become the land of bondage!)

She also cites examples of interpretations running in the other direction:

  • ‘pregnant womb of any living creature’ = ‘image of the heavens and the earth’
  • cry of the newborn = ‘spontaneous cry of praise for the glory of the primal being’

Gershom Scholem likewise notes the organic nature of Kabbalistic imagery:

… to the Kabbalist the unity of God is manifested from the first as a living, dynamic unity, rich in content. What to the Jewish theologians were mere attributes of God, are to the Kabbalist potencies, hypostases, stages in an intradivine life-process, and it is not for nothing that the images with which he describes God are first and foremost images pertaining to the organism.

— Scholem (1960, 94)

What the Kabbalist calls ‘the not yet unfolded Torah’ (Scholem 1960,
49) is what Gendlin calls the implicit intricacy. In Kabbalah the sefiroth which constitute the divine life itself and its creative power are symbolized as a language of revelation hidden behind the explicit language of the Torah, yet so precisely implicated with it that ‘if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world’ (Scholem 1960, 39).

Arthur Green (2004, 38) says of the first sefirah, Keter:

There is no specific ‘content’ to this sefirah; it is desire or intentionality, an inner movement of the spirit that potentially bears all content but actually bears none.

The sefirot are implicit all the way down to the Shekhinah – which is still haunted by Plato’s ghost:

While the inner logic of the Kabbalists’ emanational thinking would seem to indicate that all beings, including the physical universe, flow forth from Shekhinah, the medieval abhorrence of associating God with corporeality complicates the picture, leaving Kabbalah with a complex and somewhat divided attitude toward the material world.

— Green (2004, 53)

Subconscious observation

Gombrich shows in Art and Illusion that painters achieve the illusion of “realism” (accurate representation of visual experience) by learning techniques that take advantage of the viewer’s visual instincts, especially his need to make some familiar sense of what he sees; they don’t do it by “painting what they see” with an “innocent eye.” For subtlety of seeing, then, we might look more to a tracker (see Rezendes 1999) than to a painter. In a similar vein, Peirce remarked that the “character sketches” usually found in successful novels are not particularly subtle compared to the observations of a truly skilled reader of people.

But then it is to be remembered that the first and most genuine element of observation,—the subconscious observation,—was not the principal task of those literary artists. What they mainly had to do was to translate observations into words,—and to draw character sketches which the not too fine reader would recognize as agreeing with his own subconscious impressions.

— Peirce (RLT, 184)

The role of the reader, then, is to play along, which she can’t really do if she takes ‘too fine’ an interest in the details of the artist’s work. That would be a reader’s error comparable to the error of premature precision in dialogic. In both cases, these are errors because the ‘subconscious element of observation,’ as Peirce called it, is far ‘finer’ than the crude models consciously made.

That subconscious element of observation is, I am strongly inclined to think, the very most important of all the constituents of practical reasoning. The other part of observation consists in moulding in the upper consciousness a more or less skeletonized idea until it is felt to respond to [the] object of observation. This last element is quite indispensable if one is trying to form a theory of the object in hand, or even to describe it in words; but it goes a long way toward breaking down, denying, and pooh-poohing away, all the fineness of the subconscious observation. It is, therefore, a great art to be able to suppress it and put it into its proper place in cases where it attempts impertinent intermeddling. Do not allow yourself to be imposed upon by the egotism and conceit of the upper consciousness.

— Peirce (RLT, 182-3)

Perhaps ‘the fineness of the subconscious observation’ is the ‘implicit intricacy’ of which Gendlin speaks. This may not be a way out of the ego tunnel, but it can bring some light into it.