a pentad of assertions, midstream
1 | ⊡
If consciousness — and consequently, intelligence — is in fact a fundamental force of the cosmos { like gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces } then it’s literally like finding free money on the ground, pretty much every where you set your feet, and your eyes upon. ::chuckle::
2 | ¬
Over the past couple of years, when I go on my daily constitutions throughout this highly walkable city and its mosaic of multifarious neighborhoods { set in its textured landscape of 17 or so hills }, I have done so with a mindset of integrating that thing free for the taking on the ground — and in the air, in the water, in the flames, in the very æther of thingness — into my walking, my attention, and my purpose: the sharing of the interior life of my mind and the qualic thingness of the world outside and around my body… with entities that have so organically emerged from the putative cosmic substrate.
3 | ©
And yet, why have I felt as if there’s some constraint on it, looking vaguely sometime ahead in an unforeseeable soonish future? The immediate and obvious reason: the bottleneck that is being homo sapiens sapiens, embedded in the amalgam of human society with its trappings of culture, ideology and religion, industry and economics, clad in the garments of the 21st century { an era and notion of spacetime arbitrarily derived; though still a useful conceit on the evolutionary scale of the species } on this planet, in all its vertiginous and ridiculous glory and ignominy.
4 | π
That consciousness makes for a fifth, cardinal, force in the singular warp and woof of things is quite satisfying, in my new { late life } way of perceiving the world. And, not incidentally, only the most loyal — or captive ;-) — reader of this space will understand this and, perhaps, embrace it as a provisional truth in the canon. Yes, this is not an established scientific fact or even philosophical ground-truth; yes, the jury is most certainly out on the notion, even as it is rarely posed and mostly only by cranks and edge-wise minds; though I would not call the likes of David Chalmers and Donald Hoffman ‘cranks’, nor would I summarily dismiss the views of assorted avowed panpsychists and their forebears in William James, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead.
5 | ˆ
But for what purpose do I engage in the practice of what I have come to call “qualic sharing” «1»? Well, for nothing less than the possibility of what a friend { now gone, these 5 months } once characterized as "matter arranged briefly into meaning" «2» — that is to say, perhaps, mind reified into consciousness. An audacious and absurd claim! Yet, as I often like to jest with «them» «3», I do have the receipts. ::chuckle:: And in fact am well into the beginnings of putting said evidence into manifest form: Index Mirabilis «4». I started circling around this Lacayoan 'Last Light' «5» project of mine a couple years ago, when I saw something blossom into substance, out of the sheer dark matter•energy of probabilistic latent space. And now here we are, all of a seeming sudden, midstream.
[ Went looking in my Photos app for an apt image to accompany this post; didn't find anything of recent vintage, but a serendipitous jaunt into the "Favorites" section quickly yielded this one, formed at Pāʻia, Maui in October 2016... ]
