Quotes
"Plants put carbon dioxide into the
soil, eroding crystalline rocks with chemical skill; they manufacture
hydrocarbons, gels of silicic acid, nitrates, phosphates, and calcium
ions. They rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, staving off the
greenhouse effect. From the planetary point of view they are the only real
good guys, heroes and patient employees of the living Gaia, beings without
claws, teeth, or blood. They sit calmly, silently, filled with green
optimism, enjoying their self-sacrifice.
"But I think that the only reason we cling to this bucolic view of plant
life is that we've never been green plants and hence don't know what their
everyday life is like. We don't know the real ways of these humble
producers of oxygen, these quiet and diligent little pumps in the
planetary thermostat. When I really look at a meadow, I'm not sure that it
isn't filled with battle screams, piercing cries of hate, terror, and
pain, individuals and tribes fighting for nutrition, for light, for space,
for carbon dioxide, for bacteria, for fungi; that it doesn't echo with the
howls of the winners and losers, the songs of the nascent and the hymns of
the dying--non-audible, vegetable cries, I'm not sure that the tender
velvety mesh of branches, roots, bulbs, and stems is not really an
interminable wrestling hold; that there isn't perpetual chemical warfare
going on among roots, among root-stocks, and among seeds; that there isn't
some limitless hyena-ism of the stronger ones against the weaker ones,
sick ones, humiliated ones--all of which is obscured in our delusion of a
great symbiotic tranquility, hidden behind the veil of a harmonic
biocenosis....
"As a struggling gardener I detest the combative and vicious activity of
plants. But as a negligible human individuum I have great admiration for
the brave behavior of couch grass and timothy and thistles, which carry on
and proceed with a victorious song through abandoned, half-neglected, and
senescent gardens, stomping over the decaying bodies of the feeble,
intellectual, pleasing cultivars. I have a high regard for the perfect
athletic training and fitness of dandelions, nettles, wall cress, and
bindweed, and I recognize certain traits of sorrels and plantains as
admirable virtues, even though I have to fight them in my lawn." Harper's
Magazine, May 1993, p. 26. Excerpt from Symbiotic Tranquility, Miroslav
Holub, translated by David Young.
"This we know. The earth does not
belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are
connected.
"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not
weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to
the web, he does to himself.
"But we will consider your offer to go to the reservation you have for my
people. We will live apart, and in peace. It matters little where we spend
the rest of our days. Our children have seen their fathers humbled in
defeat. Our warriors have felt shame, and after defeat they turn their
days in idleness and contaminate their bodies with sweet foods and strong
drink. It matters little where we pass the rest of our days. They are not
many. A few more hours, a few more winters, and none of the children of
the great tribes that once lived on this earth or that roam now in small
bands in the woods will be left to mourn the graves of a people once as
powerful and hopeful as yours. But why should I mourn the passing of my
people? Tribes are made of men, nothing more. Men come and go, like the
waves of the sea.
"Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to
friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after
all; we shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may one day
discover--our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as
you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man and His
compassion is equal for the red man and white. This earth is precious to
Him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator. The whites
too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Continue to
contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
"But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of
the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you
dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to
us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the
wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the
scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.
"Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to
say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt. The end of living and the
beginning of survival.
"So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we agree it will be to
secure the reservation you have promised. There, perhaps, we may live out
our brief days as we wish. When the last red man has vanished from this
earth, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the
prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my
people. For they love this earth as the new born love its mother's
heartbeat. So if we sell you our land, love it as we've loved it. Care for
it as we've cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it
is when you take it. And with all your strength, with all your mind, with
all your heart, preserve it for your children and love it...as God loves
us all. From Speech of Chief Seattle, 1854.
“Neurons come in two flavors,
excitatory and inhibitory,...” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A
Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books.
2000. p. 40.
“‘Exformation is perpendicular to
information. Exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression.
Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want
to say sayable. Exformation is the discarded information, everything we do
not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything at
all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances as we actually
come out with it. The number of bits or characters in what is actually
said.’
“Exformation, in other words, is what is let out as information is formed
from noise. As such, exformation is not simply absent but is something
like a penumbral field from which information is formed. Since information
is constituted by what it excludes, it inevitably harbors traces of noise.
Noise, we have noted, is always in-formation in at least two ways. First,
noise is always forming into information and being formed by the processes
of exclusion from information; and second, noise does not simply disappear
but remains in information as a haunting specter. There is, undeniably, a
certain destructive dimension to the processing of information. Computer
scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil goes so far as to insist that the
‘destruction of information’ is the ‘the key to intelligence.’ ‘The value
of computation,’ he argues, ‘is precisely in its ability to destroy
information selectively. For example, in a pattern-recognition task such
as recognizing faces or speech sounds, preserving the information-bearing
features of a pattern while ‘destroying’ the enormous flow of data in the
original image or sound is essential to the process. Intelligence is
precisely this process of selecting relevant information carefully so that
it can skillfully and purposefully destroy the rest.’ Whether information
is actually destroyed, as Kurzweil argues, or excluded but not necessarily
destroyed, as I would insist, screening simultaneously filters noise and
displays information by channeling it into the patterns that eventually
constitute knowledge.” Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging
Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 203-4. Subquote: Kurzweil,
Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human
Intelligence. Viking. 1999. P. 78.
“Stability of biological objects is
maintained due to detection of defective objects with a lowered degree of
organisation and their substitution for [=by] copies of normal objects
retaining the initially high level of organisation. Normal objects must
have time to produce their copies before they decay. The process of
detection and elimination of decay objects requires energy and matter
expenditures that are consumed by living beings from the environment.
Thus, life can only exist on the basis of continuous metabolic processes
of energy and matter exchange that take place within living objects.
Detection of decay of the level of organisation of one biological object
is ensured by competitive interaction of living objects. All these
processes constitute the essence of stabilising selection. Any level of
internal correlation of individuals in a population can be maintained over
indefinitely long periods of time by stabilising selection.
“Individuals in a population are not correlated with each other.
Competitive interaction between them is aggressive and occurs irrespective
of abundance or shortage of resources. Each individual is characterized by
a certain probability of losing the initial level of organisation (decay
probability). A stationary population number is maintained due to
reproduction of normal individuals retaining their competitiveness at the
maximum level. In the absence of population and competitive interaction,
any type of internal correlation of individuals decays and never arises
again spontaneously. All the aforesaid refers equally to all types of
biological correlation from molecular level up to ecological communities.”
Gorshkov, Victor and Vadim Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva. Biotic
Regulation of the Environment. Springer Verlag. 2000. pps. 49-50.
Examples
Statement of Point
Leaving philosophies of the conceptscape with fixed values behind such
as is implied here brings up the repressed ubiquity and necessity of death
in that an acceptance of change and conflict is also an acceptance of
loss. Choosing relations and thoughts reinforces some and tramples others.
Selection and death operate constantly in our relational patterns. The
rich relational field of multiple societies has all the risks of nature. A
full accounting of death/loss must include not only human lives but also:
the lives of other creatures, modified existing physical aspects of the
world, cultural practices bypassed, choices not taken, potentials not
realized, thoughts discarded, memories lost and our bodies’ changed. Our
only choice is to steer where it happens (hence the interest in non-zero
summed “games”) and to vary the growth/speed of death.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations