One of the more startling problems for science and research is simple to state, and almost impossible to clearly understand. We become what we do. This means that our developmental flexibility is immediately involved in any action we take.

This may not clarify the problem, for knowing this does not seem to commonly awaken the awareness of the ramifications.

To state them somewhat prosaically: we do not so much study what we examine, as we become the developmental and active likenesses of our purposes and the perspectives we bring to and acquire during these processes.

We are so developmentally sensitive that, for us, the world takes on the likenesses implied by our models (losing its intrinsically infinite potential and ‘collapsing’ into our models). We will take those results within us, in a manner of speaking, and we are changed by them. We will then project that likeness upon the world, seeing the world through the lenses of our changed structure and our agendas. The resulting artifacts of this strange recursion continue in this fashion to feed back into our own developmental activity and likeness. Problematically, we enforce our projections upon the world and other living beings, and beings cannot be reduced in this way and survive… except as representations.

In a world without significant representational crises, humans will most often relate to the world and other living beings as living beings. In worlds with representational crises, humans become like the agents of their representations and proceed to transform their cultures and planet into tokens of process, identity, value, relation, and meaning. Little numbers moving around in dead machines.

So we become more and more like the purposes and methods we employ to learn. As regards science, many of these are explicitly inhuman. That is to say: our relationship with science bears the explicit threat of transforming us, over time, into the kind of ‘alien’ our strange science fictions and paranormal fascinations imagine: a vastly cerebral demon whose inquisitions are mechanical and soulless.

Science is a way of learning. We do not want our lives, minds or bodies to be rendered in its image. In fact, we should be extremely careful about which methods of learning we use and how we authorize them, both to ourselves, and culturally. We must have methods that produce habitable, intelligent, sustainable, environmentally probiotic developmental paths.

The world, our lives, and our minds will become like the paths we choose and a dead world in the image of a computer chip or a data graph is the wrong end for a paradise as alive, vital, dynamic and enthralling as Earth. So, too, for a species as potentially astonishing as ours.