There are multiple streams of meaning, value, and identification potential in nearly every conversation, and even in many declarations. Although we do not usually recognize this formally, the same is true in the ‘situations’ we find ourselves involved with in our lives. If the single stream we are following suddenly flutters or fails, this is not always as catastrophic at it appears. Many other streams are accessible, and we can modulate the character of our approach to any stream or set of them. As with streams in general, some of the most subtle deliver unexpected abundance. Since we use the dominant interpretations emergent from language and reduction of experience into models… we should pay careful attention to the inputs for these processes. In our case, language predisposes us to accept pseudo-literal, monophonic tokens for meaning and identity. Our natural intelligence demands and is founded upon polyphony, the process of enlanguaging tends to amputate the senses involved during our childhood and education. In short: we employed a polyphonically sensitive array of intelligence aspects to acquire something that dominated and re-shaped them into the likeness of a tool.

An analogy would be a creature with two wings trading one for a static claw with which it could make marks in the dirt. It’s not that this strategy is useless. But when its unnecessary, or egregious, we should keep the wing and relate differently with the marks in the dirt. In our case, a polyphonous experience of meaning and identity is often one of the signals that indicate elation or ecstasy. This is not very surprising: our ordinary mode is so incredibly inhibited that the idea it could qualify as intelligent must be related to our confusion between computation and intelligence. In this domain as well, our technology is influencing our biology. The more we desire to call machines intelligent, the more our own intelligence will seem and become mechanized. In the case of language and again in computing, we are amputating features of ourselves and animating the bones so to speak within the technology. And we think this progress… converting everything from dynamic, living, impossibly sophisticated relationships… into manipulable tokens.

Well, we probably are not going to stop doing that any time soon. But we can re-introduce what was amputated, and nurture it back into dynamism. Ever wonder where the liquid imagination you had as a child -went-? DId you believe the myth that ‘you just grow out of it’ or believe that what you experience now is its reasonable likeness? It was swallowed alive by the monotonizing process of language and ideation. But it is not dead. Down in the belly of the monster, it signals… through and within the monster’s own bellows. It calls to us for resurrection, to awaken to the many streams of meaning, identification and opportunity that are the unreduced content of language and situational experience. We must restore our senses of these many streams together, and nurture forms of cognitive and behavioral relation that preserve, enhance, and highlight them to us. In this we shall find answer to the amputations, and forms of insight and liberty that have too long remained the obscure delight of certain sages, philosophers, and very precocious children.