All languages contain a core set of meaning roots that invisibly include their identity in all other identities. These are ideas whose existence and meanings inflect all others, and are secretly required ingredients in our experiences of meaning, identity, and possibility. I call them holophores. An example is the sun. All human ideas, activities, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and methods involve the sun. If what the sun ‘is’ or is understood to be changes… all meanings and identities will also change. The sun is intimately (and in multiple ways and functions) involved in all human thought, but it does not explicitly appear in every idea.

The problem is this: over time, our holophores, once rich in associations, identity and connotation, become damaged. As our cultures place ever-greater emphasis on literality, they are shaving away the diverse correlations and correspondences that originally endowed these terms with sufficient profundity and scope that they could underlie all of human representational cognition. Representation is a form of data compression. The form is almost never examined and is usually crude. This results in data loss with each pass or iteration, which we might understand as human generations. Over time, our holophores have been denuded of nearly all of their original meanings, and what remains is largely a ghost of the primitivity of structure the methods of compression relied upon. Artifacts. In the sense of the leftovers of endlessly repeated lossy compressions.

And our intelligence is based on these.

Science and computation are examples of processes that will tend to strip holophores of entire domains of correlation and meaning just by their common goals and functions. Dreaming, art, and play are examples of processes or activities which tend to repair holophores by reconnotating them in the most creative and general of ways. So, too, other disciplines such as linguistic study, polyglossy, spiritual practice, or almost any skillful endeavor. Each endeavor uniquely enriches certain holophores according to its relationship with them. The strange ‘meaning-euphoria’ reported by users of psychedelic drugs can be meaningfully understood as a direct experience of the re-connotation of holophores, and the experience of the results of this repair on the entire cogniscium of the person or people involved. A major part of what our development is about involves both the repair and evolutionary enrichment (rather than impoverishment) of holophores. They are, after all the roots of meaning; damage to them is multiply inflected in all other terms and ideas. Repairs to them will similarly ‘correct’ and thus tend to revolutionize all other terms and ideas.

By understanding how these roots work, we can learn to repair and develop them together, and this can actually repair and radically improve our relational and intellectual intelligence, dynamically. If we continue to ignore this, each generation will suffer the latest wave of crippling effects as the bases of meaning for human beings are abstracted toward identities as data or function. This is the natural result of the goals of science and computation, but it is bleeding into the poetics of our human intelligence in ways that are catastrophic and invisible. We must draw attention to this and resolve it together, with and for each other and our world.