“The phrase ‘the tree of knowledge” should call us to awareness of something fundamental about our minds, memories and languages. For human knowledge borrows the structure of a tree for nearly all of our linguistic and hierarchic arrangements of identities and relationships.

This is no mere accident. It’s a product of the evolutionary relationship between our species and actual trees.

The tree-structure implies the structure of our categories, which form a root aspect of how we imagine and understand identities. Categories are a low-level distinction that generally precedes our derivations of identity, and people with different categories not only derive different identities for their members… they do so for different »purposes.

The structure of a tree not only provides a template for organizing knowledge, but the forms of distinctions we are capable of making, since these are enhanced or delimited by our categories and the purposes underlying their distinction, as well as the ‘unifying principles’ necessary to understand the relationships between these distinctions.

There is a cognitive technology at play here; but few of us were ever exposed to its features or trained to manipulate it. Instead of understanding these matters, and thus being empowered to form improved foundations for our understandings of language and identity, we largely ‘subscribe’ to the prefab templates forged over history by cultures we belong to or are exposed to.

When we can only subscribe to prefab trees, we are blind to the nature of the intelligences that can create, manipulate, modify and invent them. And if we are blind in a way that affects how we perceive or relate with »identity, then our minds are truly hobbled.

Perhaps the most crucial feature of this structure is the ‘trunk’ — the fundamental unifying principle — that endows the categories with unique aspects of character… or deprives them of these. It is here we can innovate together, by introducing these matters into our awareness, and exploring the possibilities that emerge when we can consciously engage them for mutual benefit and the chance to return to the prodigy our minds are made for.”

— an anonymous informant