Friday, November 25, 2011

whiteRabbit


Video - Excavating an ant megalopolis

organelle | “The kingdom of the insects on Earth dwarfs our human population to insignificance. Although we share the same surface area, insects are barely aware of human presence unless we swat them, cropdust, step on an ant mound, or examine them under our microscopes. As far as the vast insect world is concerned, contact with humans is a rare and usually traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of insects.

Likewise, perhaps a species of greater intelligence, greater technology, and much smaller population coexists with us on Earth, living who-knows-where, and only infrequently do they step on our "nests" of humanity, or examine us under their microscopes. Perhaps we cannot even recognize the presence of the "Others" unless it's a case of deliberate interference on their part, a rare and traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of humans.” — Charles Miller, from Home Field Advantage, The Anomalist: 8, Spring 2000

My own experience is that even a single instance of what we call ‘an insect’ is ‘more than any alien we could invent’, and so are the animals and plants, funguses, bacteria, etc. The unified body of the insectoid intelligence of Terra is so far beyond anything we can model it puts the sum of our fantastic fictions to shame. The problem around Earth is not ‘where are the aliens?’, it’s the opposite: Why is everything everywhere swimming in aliens whose intelligence and prowess we cannot credential?

Allow me to suggest that as a species, humanity is ‘missing a crucial idea’ from our lexicons of ‘what stuff is’. The crucial idea is simple: the game is about transtemporally distributed multi-sentience. Forget competition, that’s a token standing in the way of us seeing what’s actually going on around here.

Now, and for the last 4.5 billion years, the only game in town has been this: pure alien. The unfortunate cause for the ignorance and isolation of our species from each other and our potentials is simple: we’re taught to be xenophobic, and to have hysterically violent responses to novelty. As a species, we enact these ‘ways of knowing’ catastrophically, such that our intelligence actually inverts and becomes a sophisticated mimetic momentum which we are bound to feed and accomplish in our minds and world. The ‘opposite of knowing’ — omnicide.

It is crucial that we understand: we live right now in a universe where a local life-form as ‘simple’ as a slug is already billions of ‘times’ more elegant than the sum of technology our species will ever produce. It’s hard to explain how significant this is, because understanding it clearly changes what a human mind is and may become. The truth of our planet is so beyond our understanding that we must find a way to step outside all of what we’ve come to know, before we can have any hope of glimpsing what is right here, now, accessible and present. We don’t have to discard what we believe we’ve learned, but we do need to be able to set all of it completely aside, and go look — together, in person, at what and who is actually going on around here. It’s nothing like the models we’ve been pretending around. At all.

1 comments:

nanakwame said...

This I understand, diversity = narcissism is strange rumination of my species.  diversity = life; there seems to be a mother crow who has given birth on the wire across from me - the natural predator to pigeons.

"and to have hysterically violent responses to novelty"
I don't know about all that; I know supremacy blinds and is evil

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