Thursday, March 09, 2006

The word becomes text and dwells among us

Maybe the fact of the matter is that all of life as we know it and all that remains for us to discover is just the meaningless (in the context of human language models) interactions of ambiguous space-time events unfolding in a minor footnote to the overall cosmology of our expanding universe. It could be that all of our society and culture and all the million issues that we treat so seriously through our day-to-days are just meaningless results of an overactive feedback between the our cognitive structures and our environment and other people's cognitive structures. I don't personally buy this, because it fails to account for self-consciousness and free will, and if we cannot trust these simple and universal perceptions, then why should we trust the perceptions of logic and science, that are held and grasped by a much smaller segment of the population?

It doesn't really matter. Whether we claim a final allegiance to God or Man or Science or any other archtypical bugaboo, at the end of the day we are going to wind up taking our own little slice of the existential pie seriously, we will continue to rate the problems of humanity as the most significant problems, we will continue to be compelled by the questions of the human spirit and the human experience. It may be that we are destined to eradicate ourselves, or at least the current "advanced" society, before we really tap deeply the ancient well of the genome. But if we don't, then we are indeed witnessing the next order of evolution on Earth, right here and now. What will this revolution bring? Hell On Earth, or Kingdom Come? Or Both? Or Neither?

We cannot possibly begin to understand the direction we have chosen as a species until we recognize that we live in a world formed by rapid, disorganized evolution of cultural mindsets. The rules of evolution that apply to the rest of the living system may provide hints, clues and metaphors for this other process, but they are not the same at all. We cannot look elsewhere for the models of how our minds have developed and formed our cultural mindsets, because the human condition is, to the best of our knowledge, unique. Therefore we can only look to our own history for guidance. And in all our history, revealed and hidden, there is only one artifact that displays the processes of mind in symbiosis with language, shaping reality: That is text. That's why I'm here, that's why you're here, that's what this is all about. The strange and devious blueprint of mind and culture we have been leaving for ourselves.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

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