Human Iterations

(#6: Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

This is something of a corollary to #5, as well as the final component and summary of the more outright concept-building theses. Here on out it's pretty much all heads on critiquing of Primitivism's functionality as Anarchism or even just anti-authoritarianism. But criticism can't take place in a vacuum, all critical efforts are ultimately couched in some underlying conceptual framework. Even if it's just an unspoken or unrecognized piece of populism. The point in constructively covering fluidity, dynamicism and chaos/complexity theory in this manner is to shed off macroscopic cultural and sociological constructs by addressing the root nature of their operating environment.

We live in a watery world. Every particle interacts with everything else. The patterns of "structure" that emerge from this turbulent fluid do so in a (relatively) constantly shifting, redundant, and interdependent way. Organic, you might say.

The intensity of interaction –more specifically the interrelating change of relative position– found in systems defined by a distribution of particles is the basic premise for the generation of information structures within the system. In the seminal "game of life" demonstrations programmers seeded low level algorithms in a complex environment and turned up the intensity of the environment's internal interactions. The consequence was "spontaneously" "generated" more "complex" or "diverse" informational “structures.” A whole “complex” ecosystem of interacting informational systems.

But of course "complex" can be something of a misnomer given its modern connotations of rigidity and... well, plain unnaturalness (think of the thick owner's manual to a car or a vast board of circuits). Instead it might be better to consider the hurricane. Or the chaotic feedback found in a small backyard creek; the ripples and eddies forming from smaller masses of interactions and they, themselves, interrelating. Sometimes to form greater agglomerations.

This is a far better representation of the human body, the animal cell, bioregion or net ecosystem. We are each hurricanes in a way. Fractal agglomerates of the positional information of particles in a fluid muck. We thrive with motion and connection. Plop us in stellar vacuum or granite mountainside and, with no connection or absolutely rigidly controlling connections, our informational patterns don't do that well.

Our bodies cease to be as chaotic. Dynamic.

And without dynamic integration to the world we have no channels to exist through. We cannot touch.

And without the capacity to touch the world we cannot understand.

We all recognize 'understanding' as more than compartmentalized knowledge. More than a tally sheet of discrete informational structures built out of rigid neurons. Something more generalized. Something vaguer, but more tactile. The impression left by a lover's skin.

The refraction and internalization of the external. The breaking down of a self that might have been discretely itemized by the empty other, not in acceptance or allegiance to emptiness, but through the blossoming enrapture of the other into the self. Until there is no hollow, deathly, meaningless other. Only the universalized self.

This is the arrow of understanding.

Given that the only tangible truth is the internal, understanding is birthed not by attempts to kill of the internal, but reaching out and finding truth by making everything internal.

To take in truth. Reality.

To breath in a lover's sweat and eradicate the lies between you. Between you and you.

Technology, on the other hand, is defined by process. The process of poking a stick into an ant mound or hunting a bear or applying linguistic constructs or working through a math problem under a certain axiomatic framework or chugging through Javascript or poking an object and recording the responses you notice... it doesn't matter. Regardless of how dynamically some technology functions in a given situation, it's no more than the details of applied interactions. Codified processes. There doesn't have to be any degree of contact through them. The channels can be left empty, the same processes of interaction can be under-utilized or embraced.

Technology is not understanding.

But here's the trick. Technology can facilitate the capacity to experience. Which is the basic requirement for the creation of understanding.

A hearing aid. Glasses. A microscope. A telescope. Pictures of animals from far away. Pictures of plants. A fine saw blade revealing the layers inside a quartz rock. Satellite contour mappings of valleys and water systems across an entire continent.

The more venues for and the stronger the tactile connections, the greater the capacity for experience.

Today we can actually feel individual molecules with our hands. We can caress the fringe star clusters of distant galaxies with our eyes. We can see the insides of our own bodies and recognize the pheromones dripping off our shoulders. See sound waves. Pick apart flavors and the patterned buzzing of our own nerves.

Understanding is perhaps simply the most dynamic and abstract fluid impressions of the external, it's that which most effectively mentally grasps the fabric of existence.

We actively want greater understanding, thus we've strived for science.

When what we call 'science' gets rigid or imperialistic in the classic sense it becomes useless, but in its most dynamic it allows us channels to press up against the face of reality. More intense experience of reality giving strength to understanding. We want to touch the world around us so that we can get a stronger feel for reality. Into those nooks and crannies that require stronger dynamic channels of information.

Can there be modes and forms of understanding without industrial or even agrarian technology? Obviously yes. But increases in technology facilitate understanding. Confined to some frail bundle of six senses within a limited framework of allowable experiences there comes with that an inherent limitation to understanding. If you bound off sections of the world. Outlaw the advanced technology necessary to reach into and grasp the microscopic or the unbelievably macroscopic and distant... you ingrain a limitation on possible experience and thus understanding.