O, Wow, The Whole Thing
future·@johojo·
0.000 HBDO, Wow, The Whole Thing
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<h4 id="toc_0"><em>O, Wow</em></h4>
<p>The satirical novel <em>O, Wow</em> — by yours truly — is set in a near
future. At the outset, the wounded psyche of its lead character, a comic
named Peter Dooley, is overwhelmed by an experimental technology.</p>
<p>Originally developed for battlefield communications, the nanobiotic
neural “boost” had been repurposed — too hastily, it seems — to serve
public relations efforts during a national emergency. Dooley and his
former partner, both imbued with the enhanced telemedia system, which
links psyches via maxnet wifi, became able to work in vastly accelerated
and exquisitely synchronized production of mass-persuasion spots: live, ad
hoc, online, with real-time response to ongoing polling data.</p>
<p></p>
<p> </p>
<div class="pull-left"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/sVimUKj.png" alt=""></div>
Their comic skits updated an old fable of encounters between an erratically
profligate Grasshopper and a stoic, hardworking Ant, reinterpreted to
exigencies of the moment. Their episodes were meant to help stave off
economic disaster. Even so, cascading calamities subsequently unfold as
hordes of people move out of cities made inhospitable by devastating
hurricanes, amid gathering rumors of nuclear bombs to be unleashed by
terrorists. Along the Atlantic Seaboard entire urban neighborhoods empty
into wary and hostile rural communities beyond.
<p> </p>
<p></p>
<p>Displacing Dooley’s failing ego, a quixotic persona that calls itself
Grasshopper emerges from his tech-boosted, ever-online and server-enhanced
psychic struggles. Grasshopper’s manic energies illuminate via spontaneous
tech-driven video holograms, often with cinematic surround-sound effects.
Comic imagery featuring Chaplin, Keaton, Keystone Kops, as well as
extravagant cartoon characters, seem always to swirl about him. They
enliven and challenge anxious lives of desperate fellow travelers.
Grasshopper’s notoriety soon attracts media attention. His ascendance amid
national travails is portrayed as some sort of bizarre, yet miraculously
healing, messiah.</p>
<p>Grasshopper personally disparages, but tolerates, most fellow travellers
as “Ants, — phooey!” Nevertheless, he fascinates and draws them into
unlikely escapades where some become infected with his auto-sustaining,
ever renewing, nanobiotech. They become the core of a Grasshopper band, at
the center of a traveling horde of displaced evacuees from Gotham
Seaboard.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="pull-right"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/PbOYOgR.png" alt=""></div>
<p>Following an hallucinatory encounter with a ditch bank and a rooster,
Dooley’s native persona slowly recovers itself within lingering rhythms of
Grasshopper’s on-going “hoppening”. A hyperlinked, nomadic and eerily
telepathic commune manifests about him in a small band of equally
tech-infected companions. Like him, they seem drawn to collective perches
up in trees where they gather about their Gadfly of Antdom to exult in a
gathering of effusive energies. Conjoined imaginal experience sighs in a
cosmos-embracing sentiment: “One world, one way.”</p>
<p></p>
<p>While its intended meaning is not spelled out in the novel — despite the
title being an acronym of that very phrase — I have come to regard it as
the Grasshopper band’s enthused summation of their own mutual awareness.
Individually, they have arrived at a momentary pinnacle of common
evolutional prospect, where they exult in panoramic elaboration of
possibilities among all living beings.</p>
<p><div class="pull-right"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Ur0DP7E.png" alt=""></div>[Said by <em>Midwest Book Review</em> to be “endlessly entertaining and
recommended”, <em>O, Wow</em> is available in paperback <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wow-Howard-Jones/dp/1449593461/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508689872&sr=8-1&keywords=jones+o%2C+wow">here</a>
and <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/o-wow-j-howard-jones/1019418004?ean=9780578043197">here</a>;
and as an ebook <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/4951">here</a>.]
</p>
<h4 id="toc_1">The Whole Thing</h4>
<p>The late modern era, at C4, builds a unique <em>common sense</em> notion
of reality rooted in many personal experiences socially expressed through
a rich heritage of media technologies. Gathering psychic and cultural
constituents from a range of precedent-setting forebears, C4 empirical
reality manifests out of legacies of earlier social and cultural
elaborations of pragmatic paradigm, or, <em>notions of how the world
works</em>. Such common notions — pragmatic paradigms — emerge from
social communication, enabled and constrained by available methods of
interaction, especially the unique qualities of specific media
technologies. Note that C4, an exemplar of print media, does not simply
displace earlier modes. Rather, memes of earlier realities are
reinterpreted and incorporated into the dominant mode. Those precedent
cultural patterns are adapted and reworked to suit the modern context. It
reorganizes their legacies within its more complex dynamic. (See the table
<em>Evolution of Cultural Orders</em>, below.)</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<center><img src="https://i.imgur.com/HF6X7NV.png" alt=""></center>
<p>Consequent elaborations of C4 accomplishments now open into iconic dawn,
at C5, where visual immediacy enabled by digital processing occasions a
spontaneity of responsiveness that had been impractical in the preceding
print-anchored era. The most recently dominating, although not the only,
influence of earlier C4 reality might be its celebration of <em>natural
cause</em>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This core idea first flowered in 16th century Europe from where it
aggressively spread across the planet. Its empirical root fostered new
prospects for communications and transactional technologies that first
sprouted and then flourished in commerce among competitive empires. Once
novel, even heretically curious, habits of practical thought (in the <em><a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages">Middle
Ages</a></em>, for instance, as portrayed in Umberto Eco’s <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose">The
Name of the Rose</a></em>) and resultant behaviors now daily motivate
and guide personal and collective events around the globe. </p>
<p>But our own time, in the twilight of C4 and just now glimpsing promise of
C5, seems transitional, between paradigms. The question that hovers is
“Must we yet again endure a night between?”</p>
<p>We are putting aside diminishing returns of C4 reductionist Cartesian
mechanisms and their machine-bureaucratic institutions. Burgeoning C5
blockchain ledgers and other responsively automated technologies now
promise delegated accords for newer, more organic modes of social and
commercial interaction. The older, oh, so recently “modern” ways suddenly
seem horrifically unwieldy, inadequate and prone to humany larceny and
lust in contrast with automatically elaborated and equitably managed media
forms. We foresee prospects of self-organizing interactive virtual
realities.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="pull-right"><a href="http://www.manifestorders.com/"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/QZPrqUX.png"
alt=""></a></div>
Earlier implementations of social accord have grown unworkable at many
levels, especially if one regards harmony and productivity as jointly
crucial criteria of cultural wellbeing. As discussed more fully below, and
elsewhere in <a href="https://steemit.com/@johojo"><em>Steemit</em> posts</a>
that support an ongoing project, <em><a href="http://www.manifestorders.com/">Manifest
Orders: Dimensions of Attentiveness</a></em>, a new organic view
beckons.
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Caesars-amaury-riencourt/dp/B0000CK276"><em>The
Coming Caesars</em></a>, published in 1957, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaury_de_Riencourt">Amaury
de Riencourt</a> argues that C4 Occidental culture, began about 1000 AD.
It arose in the wake of C2 Gothic invasions of decadent C3 Hellenistic
civilizations. But C4 now seems to be in ebb. If so, then here, sixty
years after that publication, we find ourselves at the end of one
millennial era and somewhat prior to the next.</p>
<p>Such inter-millennial transitions typically are tumultuous. Confusions
become pandemic as familiar patterns no longer are honored or even
tolerated. Frustration quickly grows into vengeful bouts of social
retribution. Masses of frustrated individuals, disillusioned by diminished
opportunity and fearful of “invading aliens”, clamor for a strong
champion, a Caesar, as they were called during a similar phase of the
ancient Roman era.</p>
<p>Sound familiar? If it does, says de Riencourt, it is because our receding
millennium is subject to the same evolutional patterns that shaped the
rise of other great cultures: decline, either through stages or gradually,
into destabilization that perhaps builds to extremes of civil disorder.
Each civilization differed in its own particulars of locales, prospects
and forms. But each has proceeded through organically similar phases, from
beginning, through middle, to end.</p>
<p>[By the way, be aware that due to lapse of the original copyright, a
later interpretation of de Riencourt’s book that claims dual authorship
also is available under the identical title. I am not familiar with that
derived adaptation; my comments are addressed solely with regard to the
original as penned by de Riencourt himself.]</p>
<h4 id="toc_2">Individual Roots of Group Behaviors</h4>
<p>As further considered below, according to William Powers’s <em>Perceptual
Control Theory</em> (PCT): <em>people individually behave to bring
their perceived circumstances into agreement with their expectations and
intentions</em>.</p>
<p>Consideration of individual motives within human society suggests that, <em>among
groups, personal behavior is driven in compensation of perceived
deficiencies, coupled with eagerness to repay grief in kind and with
interest</em>. Such proclivities do not bode well for any civilization
within which individual frustrations massively build.</p>
<p>People interact and transact in social groupings. Those whose
communication is only spoken or gestured (among subgroups operating at C1
and C2, such as street gangs and the urban and rural impoverished classes)
are capable of far less elaborate realization of possibilities than those
attained among more media-facilitated individuals. Those who wield books,
computers and inter-networked smart phones tend to forget propensities of
frustrated ambitions at less complex pragmatic realities.</p>
<p>Where a great mass of a populace is unable to participate in intricate
institutions and protocols of social process, threat of mayhem gathers.
All such interactions and transactions, both intra- and inter-group,
within a society are profoundly shaped by communications and interactive
media available to them. (Those who disagree must be prepared to explain
the prosecution and outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election without
Facebook and Twitter operating across a global Internet.)</p>
<h4 id="toc_3">Transitions Between Times</h4>
<p>Earlier periods between cultural eras typically have fallen into ruinous
periods called <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29">Dark
Ages</a></em>. Whether our kind, yet again, shall pass through a
valley of the shadows of our own animal natures is yet to be seen. And if
so, just how savage folks may become shall be determined largely by how
they come to regard one another. And how they behave as a result. The
possibilities range across a spectrum:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>ghastly, as imagined in Cormack McCarthy’s novel, <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road">The
Road</a></em>,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>dire, as construed in James Howard Kunstler’s <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_By_Hand">World
Made by Hand</a></em> fiction series, and on his <a href="http://kunstler.com/">website</a>,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>manageable, as illuminated by Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart at <em><a
href="https://www.peakprosperity.com/">Peak
Prosperity</a></em>,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>optimistic, as predicted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis">Peter
Diamandis</a>,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>enthusiastic, as anticipated by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil">Ray
Kurzweil</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h4 id="toc_4">Birth of the Machine Age</h4>
<p></p>
<p><div class="pull-left"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/H5zZRHn.png" alt=""></div>
Our most recent fully formed notion of reality — causal mechanism — is
epitomized in what generally is called Cartesian dualism, in honor of Renee
Descartes. It was he who famously pronounced its mantra, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum"><em>I
think, therefore, I am</em></a>. Its natural causal reality subsumed
earlier C1, C2, and C3 memes into a new, revised common sense view that
touts a notion of the world as being curiously split into spiritual and
material counterparts. In such bifurcated causal cosmos, the physical
seemingly is inspired and pondered by what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler">Arthur
Koestler</a> has characterized as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine"><em>The
Ghost in the Machine</em></a>.</p>
<p></p>
<h4 id="toc_5">Social Machines Wear Out</h4>
<p>But, ultimately, Cartesian assertions of parallel spirit and material
worlds have proven quite dubious, unsustainable and unworkable. In our own
time the so-called spiritual side largely has ceded actual social arenas
of human endeavor to purely physical machinations. This has induced great
anxiety among those, especially in religious and civic organizations, that
are rooted in antecedent C2 and C3 memes, where the spiritual was felt to
be not only ascendant, but most importantly, absolute.</p>
<p>But among C4 sociocultural institutions, the stridently competing,
complementary and equally materialistic bureaucratic machines — the <em>Communist</em>
versus the <em>Capitalist</em> — also have failed. Widespread ills,
discrepancies and moral pitfalls yet afflict vast numbers of individual
and family lives. As single persons among multitudes of fellow beings, we
each now pitifully cope within massively organized but increasingly
alienated and alienating gargantuan societies.</p>
<h4 id="toc_6">Whence the Spirit?</h4>
<p>In the earliest stage of the dualistic paradigm that birthed the modern
era, the notion of spirit was included, legacy of antecedent C2 and C3
orders. Spiritual forces — <em>God, His Angels</em> and <em>Demons</em>
— all were consigned to an unseen phantom reality apart from and said to
be working wonders within the actual physical world. They were regarded as
<em>other-worldly</em>.</p>
<p>Then empirical science gradually expanded the domain of the causally
explainable, the wholly natural realm. The spiritual counter-world grew
ever more remote and hard to discern by any actual evidence. But even
actual empirical evidence has encountered its own explanatory enigmas,
beginning late in the nineteenth century with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment">Michelson-Morley
experiment</a>. Puzzlement blossomed with the advent of both <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity">relativity
physics</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics">quantum
mechanics</a> in the early twentieth century. The two theories
separately were demonstrably true, but they happened to contradict each
other! “What kind of truth has two contrary faces?” screams outraged
reductionist materialism.</p>
<h4 id="toc_7">A Greater Whole Heals All Lesser Divide</h4>
<p>Dawning C5 implications suggest that an abiding, intrinsic wholeness
perhaps relates all things, even contraries! <em>And throughout the
entire cosmos!</em> A counter-view to reductionist C4 duality, a unified
monism of perceptual experience now awakens to invoke a new, more
comprehensively empirical paradigm.</p>
<p>Mirroring complex informational neural patterns of individual perceptions
and expectations in regard to, <em>and of</em>, organisms, holistic
thinking engages entities that act with intention from their own
individual experiences. (See <em>PCT Schematic</em>, below) Such organic
dynamic lives within each individual from moment to moment, whatever their
particular circumstances. Through it each person learns to distinguish
living and non-living entities and to respond appropriately to each.</p>
<p>At M5 we personally contemplate reality itself as being intrinsically
organic, an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism"><em>animism</em></a>.
Young children naturally respond thus until taught other “grown up” ways
of thinking. Each such moment of personal experience is constructed
(construed) out of constituent momentary events. But they are remembered
and communicated in terms of relationships that remain in dynamic relation
to others. At C5, social accords themselves become vitally responsive, not
mere C4 machines, nor just C3 enclaves of arrant privilege, nor C2
theocratic fiefs, nor even C1 pathways toward realization. All events are
understood as being contingent, conditioned by changing circumstances. All
is related within mutual, organic flux.</p>
<p></p>
<p><div class="pull-left"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/GcnOsW8.png"></div>
The new paradigm reasons thus: Humans are organisms, i. e., they are built
of organs. Each organ is made of living cells. Each cell is a construction
of proteins. Some are complex chains like DNA and RNA, among others. The
more complex ones are capable of carrying complex programmatic instructions.
And each of those complicated proteins is built of simpler molecular units,
amino acids. Each of those molecules, in turn, is an organization of
so-called atoms that are themselves made of protons, neutrons and electrons
… . (“So-called” because atoms originally were said to be indivisible. We
need a new name for such material units as are formed of sub-atomic
entities: perhaps “matom”, for material-atom, since, once divided, quantum
effects among sub-atomic constituents become startlingly “immaterial”!)</p>
<p><div class="pull-right"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/YYLg20O.png"></div>Re Whitehead's process-relational view, discussed below, within which particulars of a subatomic entity's "experiences" are subsumed, "prehended", into higher levels of organization: Such intra-channel, or "intrajectory", experiences, [My term, derived from "traject", which means "transport, transmit, or transpose".] within holarchically more comprehensive "experiences" of atoms, on up into the molecule, and then into polymers, on into the protein, into the cell, then the tissue, then organ and finally, the organism, itself, of which, at each level, each entity is a constituent. Such specific construction suggests prospect of there being "channels" or "trajects" of information conveyed up and down those particular holarchic nestings of entity within entity. Any passage of informational perturbation up or down might be likened to presumed effects of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose">Roger Penrose</a>'s "microtubules", but even more prone to being privy to nonlocal quantum effects. Ordinary local "information", then would be picked up by sensory fibers responding to extrajectory, environmental, perturbations. There seems to be opportunity for further empirical exploration of such matters.</p>
<p>This organic “one world” of personal experience arises holistically
across many levels of organized occurrence where dynamic entities interact
in concert. And we people transact with one another to create social
groups that interact through economic and political accords to generate
institutions and supra-social entities like nations and leagues of
nations. This organic “one world” thereby traces its multilevel evolution
through even tumultuous changes recorded in cultural media as well as by
personal memory. It presents, cosmically, a world in which philosopher <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Cassirer">Ernst
Cassirer</a> maintains that the basic task for each individual, as
organism, is <em>to make sense of the senses</em>. </p>
<p>This one organic world is wholly actual. This is to say that jointly and
actively, experience is both spiritual and physical! It simultaneously
manifests both aspects — the spiritually ideal, along with the physically
material — each of which seems mysteriously to underlie and facilitate the
other! And the crucial implication is that its asserted “one wayness” is
the way of <em><a href="http://www.manifestorders.com">attentiveness</a></em>.
What you experience is guided by how you pay attention to your own
circumstances. </p>
<p>World religions and civic codes typically have agreed on two
propositions: namely, that one should</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>with all one’s being, participate in — love — <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity">Divinity</a></em>,
and</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>treat others as one would be treated by others.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<center><img src="https://i.imgur.com/djWFz2j.png"></center>
<p></p>
<h4 id="toc_8">The Role of Attentiveness</h4>
<p>According to comic philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggie_Watts">Reggie
Watts</a>, “If you pay attention, the world is an amazing place. If you
don’t, then it’s whatever you think it is!”</p>
<p>You are in charge. You are the world-keeper for yourself. Your cultural
world, which helped form you (in society with other individuals) you also
now help to shape. Your own creative (or destructive?) endeavors are
communicated. They affect the experiences of others. Ultimately,
accomplishments (or detriments?) ripple outward; everyone affects
everyone.</p>
<p>Where we may socially mold shared patterns and rhythms, there also we
find common culture. But each person, tutored and shaped by his or her own
cultural moments, is individually and irreducibly unique in spirit. <em>Soul
is that uniqueness of experience</em>. There is nothing “otherworldly”
about it. Divinity resides in each personal moment, along with, and in
concert with, physically pragmatic necessity.</p>
<h4 id="toc_9">Philosophies Reconstrued</h4>
<p>This modern organic view first was systematically espoused in the
process-relational philosophy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead">Alfred
North Whitehead</a>. It has been further elaborated by a number of other
contemporary philosophers, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hartshorne%5B%5D%28%29">Charles
Hartshorne</a>, who extends and elaborates such ideas to espouse a
cosmic metaphysics of <em>triune Divinity</em>. That three-natured
Divinity is author of eternal truths that never change (beauty, ethics,
mathematics, and so on), which Hartshorne characterizes as being of the <em>Original
Nature of God</em>. Such eternal truth works through evolutional
elaboration of new possibilities by means of the <em>Creative Nature of
God</em>. Finally, Divinity manifests in ongoing actuality, in
experiences of entities manifesting as cats, dogs, humans, and so on, in
the <em>Consequent Nature of God</em>. In the words of Grasshopper, “All
that is, or was or ever may be.”</p>
<p>[For the philosophically innocent, C. Robert Mesle skillfully relates
Whitehead’s ideas to ordinary experiences in his book <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Process-Relational-Philosophy-Introduction-Alfred-Whitehead/dp/1599471329">Process
Relational Philosophy</a></em>. But I think the best, if more
rigorous, introduction to these views is not in Whitehead’s own originally
published academic lectures (1929), but in Donald Sherburne’s <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Key-Whiteheads-Process-Reality/dp/0226752933">A
Key To Whitehead’s Process and Relation</a></em> (1966). Sherburne
faithfully restructures and delivers Whitehead’s original words, but
gathers them into tutorial presentation for more effective assimilation by
newcomers. He contributes, as well, his own incisive commentary that runs
in parallel to Whitehead’s articulation of propositions and arguments. For
a satisfying taste of Hartshorne’s take on the spiritual (metaphysical)
character of the cosmos, try his <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Experiencing-Philosophy-Freedom-Paperback/dp/1438436661/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1508690043&sr=1-1&keywords=hartshorne+Creative+Experiencing">Creative
Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom</a></em> (2012)] </p>
<h4 id="toc_10">Meaningfulness of Perception / Perception of Meaningfulness</h4>
<p>Within individual experience, perception is actual, as well as latently
significant. Said another way, <em>signals are actual; their significance
is virtual, about relationships</em>. To the extent that a moment of
sensory activation resonates with remembered informational traces, forms,
of earlier moments, there is associative relationship within which it may
be said that one form suggests, or represents, the others. Such is the
nature of a sign: it represents other entities or experiences that are
“like it”.</p>
<p>Such immediacy of association, within any given sensory perception
itself, is intrinsically iconic. (Iconic: a sign that is similar to what
it represents.) Any physiological pattern of sensation is similar to those
sensory memories with which it resonates. Any one can evoke, or “stand
for”, all other associated ones, because they are perceptually similar.</p>
<p>Iconic affinities are intrinsic to imaginal consideration of memories.
Such affinities assess likelihoods among any prospect of actual
possibilities. Attentive moments, or at least their momentary sensory
patterns, are equally fraught with signification, i. e., with virtual,
relational content. And that signification extends to the “stuff” intuited
in actual physical manifestation. Signification inheres in the nature of
associative memory; without it attentiveness could mirror no intention or
purpose.</p>
<p>But degree of affinity within such association may vary widely. Some
iconic relations are so strong as to be virtually identical — twins, for
instance. Others are more vague and general, as with “legs”, the sense of
which may be triggered by any extensive projections or segments, whether
capable of walking about, or not. For instance, compare the “legs” of a
dog with those of a table, or of a journey.</p>
<h4 id="toc_11">Flavors of Meaningfulness</h4>
<p>Beyond iconic representation, significant reference also may be
occasioned in either consequential or indexical relations, as with
Pavlov’s dogs, for whom bells came consequentially to represent feeding
time. Or when a pen metonymically represents a power mightier than that of
any sword. (A metonym is a statement in which a part stands for a whole:
The power of the pen to persuade is said to be mightier than the power of
the sword to coerce.)</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce">Charles
Sanders Peirce</a> denoted three types of sign: <em>iconic</em>, <em>indexical</em>
and <em>symbolic</em>. (Note that Peirce’s use of the word “symbol” to
mean “conventional or arbitrary sign” is the converse of Carl Jung’s
usage, for whom a symbol was intimately related to the nature of what it
represents. These contrary implications have occasioned much confusion
among theorists and practitioners alike.)</p>
<p>Sensations provide the only information we have concerning events among
circumstances beyond our immediate grasp. The very fact of perception
itself carries a significant charge: it represents what incites a
perceptual moment. This significant charge is the information given in the
perception.</p>
<p>At its most elemental that charge, that significance, constitutes a
relation between a perceptual form and the actuality of its instantiation.
It is the most basic vector of experiential information — a
one-dimensional, i. e., linear, associative relation.</p>
<h4 id="toc_12">Actions are Effects</h4>
<p>Such vectors also are capable of representing more objectively actual
relations, such as a perceived or imagined target of some action. Linear
actions and relationships are the basic constituents of individual M1
attentiveness. Among earliest primate groups, sequences of M1 moments
dominate activity patterns that are emulated, learned and passed along to
others, largely through vocalization, gesture and mimicry.</p>
<p>Linear vectors of significant behavior may be simple, or they can be
chained together in long articulations of steps, such as performing a
task. And tasks, themselves, may be combined into conditionally branched
sequences that facilitate more complex projects, especially those in which
multiple individuals cooperate. M1 patterns become socialized, through
communication across groups, into C1 pragmatic paradigms of nomadic and
other linear cultures.</p>
<p>At their most basic, M1 patterns are simply patterns of direct action or
relationship. Those linear informational patterns, as memes, of course,
still live on in linear relations and actions of our higher-order cultural
modes. Everyone, everywhere, no matter the cultural mode they inhabit,
does things one step at a time, in sequence, at M1, whether fully
attentive, or not. And every project manager in every C4 industrial and
corporate setting is responsible for monitoring and maneuvering the
myriads of separate task chains that make up even the most complex of
projects.</p>
<p>[It should be noted that our culture unfortunately tends to regard lower
level paradigms as somehow inferior. To do so is inappropriate. The
criterion of superiority should appeal to organic harmony of consequences
and outcomes. Lower order paradigms are quite capable of consonant
affiliation and affinity within their own natural and spiritual
circumstance. Whatever the complexity of a paradigm, its ultimate effect
is experienced by all as either an intrinsic unity, or lack thereof. It is
we modern “civilizers” who have disturbed countless Original Paradises so
nostalgically recalled in our fantasies of simpler, yet somehow fully
conversant lives.]</p>
<h4 id="toc_13">Actions Also are Agencies</h4>
<p>In cultural activity modes, each higher order type of activity
incorporates all lower ones within a holarchy of constituent agency:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>C0: Contemplative, by intuitive knowing </p>
</li>
<li>
<p>C1: Relative, by attentively associating</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>C2: Directive, by authoritative driving</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>C3: Competitive, by characteristic valuing</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>C4: Functional, by causally inciting</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>C5: Responsive, by organically inspiring</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="toc_14">Perceptual Elaboration</h4>
<p>During personal cognition, elemental forms of perception combine with
related memories to construct (construe) more complex elaborations of
implied possibilities. (See <em>Elaboration of PCT Levels and Manifest
Orders</em>, as well as <em>Comparison of Hierarchical PCT Levels</em>,
below.) These more complex constructs , stacked levels of PCT/imaginal
feedback, include all lesser complexes as constituent moments. Such
cognitive process hierarchically builds into a nested holarchy of ever
more adequate perceptual/attentive construction. (Compare with physicist <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._David_Peat">F.
David Peat</a>’s concept of <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._David_Peat#Gentle_Action">gentle
action</a></em>, which has been compared with the mode of <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei">Wu
Wei</a></em>.)</p>
<p></p>
<center><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Cxf2hAT.png" alt=""></center>
Cognitive holarchy comprises unique particulars of any specific personal
psyche. Lower orders are construed in combinations of simpler perceptions of
actual relations. From M5 on, the farther up the holarchy of construance one
climbs, the more abstract, or virtual, become any representations.
<p></p>
<p><em>Manifest Orders</em> derive from the underlying implicate of vitality
itself, unconscious processes, at M0. Up to the most abstruse of
conceptual implication, I count eleven such levels, or dimensional
potentials for elaboration (construction). Each level presents some
cognitive context for an attentive moment, the simplest being “linear“
association between two M0 “point” instances. The next higher is an
organized “planar” collection of instances of linear association. And so
on. Each next level up is just an organizing collection of multiple
instances of the next simpler.</p>
<p>I designate each by M (for “manifest”) plus an integer, to represent its
respective informational density, i. e., complexity of its constructions:
M1 is built of M0s. M2 is built of M1s (each of which conveys its own
constituent set of M0s). M3 organizes out of gatherings of M2s (formed of
M1s bearing M0s), and so on. The orders <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holarchy">holarchically</a></em>
proceed up to M10, which is the most complex (that I can imagine!). M10 I
project to be some sort of <em>Shared Pluripotence</em>, a wisdom,
perhaps akin to that expressed among the Grasshopper band, mentioned
above, just beyond universally valid constructs at M9.</p>
<h4 id="toc_15">Engineering the Next Paradigm</h4>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<div class="pull-left"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/uqgieZa.png" alt=""></div>
The character of what actual mechanisms might underlie and explain organic
experience is perhaps most succinctly captured in the work of an
enterprising and innovative engineer, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Powers">William
T. Powers</a>. Beginning during the 1950’s, Powers challenged the then
dominant C4 behaviorist models, stimulus-response mechanisms, to arrive at a
surprisingly simple idea by which to explain actual behaviors of all living
entities: <em>Behavior arises from the control of perception</em>.
<p></p>
<p>[To gain a sense of how such a model might function in the actual neural
networks that afford cognition, consult Chris Eliasmith’s <em><a href="http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eceliasmi/Papers/eliasmith.2007.how%20to%20build%20a%20brain.penult.synthese.pdf">How
to Build a Brain</a></em>. A more complete treatment is given in his
subsequent <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Brain-Architecture-Architectures/dp/0190262125">book</a>.]</p>
<p></p>
<center><img src="https://i.imgur.com/gxn109A.png" alt=""></center>
<p><strong><em>Comparison of Hierarchical PCT Levels and Manifest Orders:
Dimensions of Attentiveness</em></strong></p>
<p>While developed independently, the upward cascade of <em>Manifest Orders</em>
seems to correspond well with levels of perceptual complexity given in
William Powers’s later extension of his original PCT formulation into a <em><a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory#Hierarchical_organisation">Hierarchical
Perceptual Control Theory</a></em> (HPCT).</p>
<p>[An exceptionally useful and succinct <a href="http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/pct/pct.html">synopsis
of Powers’s ideas</a> is available in a web posting by Bruce Abbott. Of
course, the original source is Powers’s 1973 book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Behavior-Perception-William-T-Powers/dp/0964712172">Behavior:
The Control of Perception</a></em>.] HPCT levels convey an ascending
scale of dynamic complexity given in sensory control function, while <em>Manifest
Orders</em> expound a parallel holarchic scale of informational
complexity among significant, i. e., construed, imaginal relationships
that provide the reference signal to each level.</p>
<h4 id="toc_16">Surely There is More … .</h4>
<p>Lest this functional sketch seem just too basic to account for all the
bizarre and curious exploits among members of the human race, realize that
it merely points toward a core idea. Different circumstances, as perceived
by any particular individual, will quickly adapt the core PCT organic
schema to their variously imaginal particulars.</p>
<p>For instance, a person who is perfectly content and has no pressing
concerns typically dozes off or simply stays put for the moment, perhaps
in meditation. But if they become bored, then they have ceased to be
content. Their abiding interests and proclivities likely will spark some
compensating intent to drive new behavior within their own perceived
circumstances, toward some intended goal. But still, at each moment, they
act to control their perception of their own circumstances. And they
subsequently behave to bring those circumstances into alignment with their
intended purpose. Actual behavior is a consequence of controlling
perception within particulars of a circumstance to attain or sustain some
intent.</p>
<p>Recall that socioculturally, behavior is driven by compensating redress
of perceived deficiencies, coupled with eagerness to repay grief in kind
and with interest.</p>
<p>And therein lies seed of the tumultuous history of humankind. What lies
beyond is up to us. We each enact our own proclivities within our local
human neighborhood of <em>Consequent Nature</em>.</p>
<p>The next Steemit post will look more closely at M1 and derived C1 orders
of sociocultural experience and see how memes of those orders today still
play, interact and sometimes disrupt prospects within individual lives and
human societies.</p>