Ending in Aweha!
Critical psychologist Dennis Fox requested a link to a critique I wrote on a Bruce Arrigo and Christopher Williams paper one year after I first contacted him. Before sending it, I read through the dense, common lingo and discovered a need for some clarification. The rest of the anarchaos critique exhibits a linear development of anarchaos psychology, more self less social.
Anarchy as a dual quality incites polar, chaotic responses. What results from the incitation is a term, a fixed concept of stabilization and order – a strange attractor. Everyone is waiting for it, but I consider it more organic and personal, something in the brain and something wholly evolutionary – homoplasic neuropathy, right now.
What is homoplasic neuropathy in reference to anarchaos? It’s neurological damage caused by similarity of naturally, divergent characters.
What is similarity of naturally, divergent characters? Based on an evolutionary paradigm, divergent phenotypes and genotypes are advantageous to reproductive fitness. This is reflected as species variation in physiology and morphology, with humans and their culture at an apex of selective, environmental cohesion.
But an inversion has surmounted. One communicative device has bound human sociality to homoplasy, changing our neurological topology and sensitivity to initial conditions by rearranging human evolution through chaos.
As anarchy is popularized, a strange attraction to chaos distorts, damages and begins to restore the brain using homo-exogenous cues of political, environmental and social mimicry. What looks like a reliable power, or powerless structure of mutuality, diversity, cooperation and kindness is actually a temporary status. For example, attraction to a 3D vibrational facade and the depth of the structure easily fractures, as can be seen with energy dependent hierarchies figuratively and literally. The product glows green, so alive and graphically vivid as to appear real. There’s no need to touch because my eyes have seen the movement before. Except not like this, not in these random revolutions and nearly back-to-start-bounces before stability.
The divergent instinct of brain and genotype faces a phenotypic, neurological dilemma – social illness or mental adaptation? Are ‘we’ static or flexible? If we’re indeed at another convergence of human evolution, will it involve an anatomical or environmental pressure called ‘illness’ or ‘adaptation’ as propagation? Couldn’t the inspiration for the next state of human evolution be both physical and social? Mutated brains and fluid, sensory perception?
What is neurological social illness? Instead ask, what if 600 million people were bonded by the same connection? Neurons physically adapt to intercommunicative, exogenous cues – zeitgeber. We’re all connected randomly throughout our day, synching to particular patterns of attraction and interconnected media. There are stable sources of information online, those attracting the most attention, locations where people meet and visit without ever saying a word. A conversation with a piece of plastic, digitized expression and image, not included. Without you connected, are we alone? Is this a truly exogenous cue, or are we again resorting to endogenesis by keeping communication inert and hoping for telepathy? Solitude is what led to sociality. Solus setus atque socius, alone different from friend.
How does neurological damage lead to free sociality? When communication is dependent upon what we know about each other – or social cognition – there’s less influence from us on what constrains it – difference. That is, when someone aware can grab free sociality and mold the process for anarchic purposes, a social reification occurs. Free sociality is yet to be determined on the interweb but’s happening by mentally adapting publicly rather than deeming it a social illness.
At a time when Darwin and Freud (among many other semioticians) entered the academic and theoretical frame, ‘illness’ had become foray, the classification of inert being. There was Darwin, who aimed to describe life in a consistent, survival pattern, and Wallace, who viewed survival with similar consistency but derived from extraspecific influences as well. This pattern placed time into an entirely different framework, treating a person’s life as common while placing more emphasis on how different each acted and where it came from – umwelt. A stable society makes for unstable individuals. Freud enters and decides illnesses are commonly unique, in that everyone has one, just rooted and sprouted in different developing brain areas. Not only are we physically-delineated from nonhumans and each other, we’re also so individual as to possess one of infinite patterns of personality including the illness. A society full of neuroplastic organisms who believe they’re so very different now have one very common thing waiting to be noticed – awe or aha?
I was watching “The Atheism Tapes” and a conversation between Jonathan Miller and Daniel Dennett. After a wave of interesting discussion about evolution, creation, ratchets and fear, Dennett says this, “the hindmost may be a great many people…and we might have the chaos that these people fear.” He’s referring to chaos as an embodiment of atheism and Miller knows it when he smiles and says, “that’s it!” and points to a “whoa-ho”ing person off-camera. I also watched his episodes with Richard Dawkins and the others (Arthur Miller, Colin McGinn, Steven Weinberg, Denys Turner) and while he’s quite gestural, Miller was never quite as satisfied at any moment as with Dennett. The talks are plural, engaging and intelligent while retaining candor.
Awe and aha.
