On The Lethal Results of Representation:

I have been studying a specific vector in the topic of the Origins of Modern Human Consciousness now for about 18 years, primarily independently. My interest was piqued during a nonordinary experience in 2002, which began with an attempt to write a paper on this topic. That attempt ‘failed’ in the sense that the purpose was obliterated by sudden, unexpected contact with what seemed a complex nonhuman intelligence.

My purpose here is a short introduction to a specific danger involved in representational cognition. Representation results in the production of a token-system that can be easily ‘grasped’ (this is a left-hemisphere motivation) and ‘manipulated’ abstractly (in a disembodied way) or even mechanically/analytically. Nouns are a form of this kind of representation. They collapse complexly non-local and otherwise deeply ambiguous features of knowledge, relation, and identity into »a token. The result can be easily and conveniently »transferred to others who speak our language and participate in the representational systems in which we are active members.

( By the way, the ambiguity that exists prior to the process of representation is the inviolable precursor to the possibility of meaningful relation. When that evaporates? The results are uninhabitable and disembodied. )

The result can be easily and conveniently »transferred to others who speak our language and participate in the representational systems in which we are active members.

Here’s the problem: beings, living places, and relationships that become the target of our representational ‘addiction’ — die or are obliterated by this behavior. This occurs directly (as in wiping them out), indirectly (they die as a result of neglect, for example, a romantic relationship that becomes objectified) and/or relationally (we no longer relate with the beings, situations, obligations, response-abilities that are otherwise natural to us as living beings).

So it is that our governments are actually forms of anti-society. The structures take over our active, meaningfully mutual recognition, response and participation. ‘Social Media’ is largely the opposite of social interaction. Porn isn’t sex. Money obliterates value, movies can kill dreaming, and Amazon might actually mean the end of the Amazon itself. Forever. Photographs of animals begin to compete with the ecologies they require and the survival of the animals themselves. Billions of photographs per minute begin to compete directly against those taking them — for »survival, and, over time, begin to prevail in this competition!

Data on human beings is, to a representational culture, far more valuable, useful, and important… than the human beings that generate it, and we are now in the phase of the evolution of consciousness that is the opposite of consciousness itself: our species has become so fascinated with representations, that we have forgotten all of these things and are now relating, primarily, with dead tokens that produce dead, simulated relationships. Small wonder then, that some suspect ‘we are living in a simulation’, because the contexts we find ourselves enmeshed in are almost entirely representational, and this is not survivable — it’s mechanical.

Most of the ancient skybooks (bibles, and so on) contain severe admonitions regarding representations, and are particularly severe in their urgent assertions that representations »of the divine comprise a lethal mistake that invariably leads to disastrous consequences. This is, in part, due to the fact that our ancient ancestors were profoundly aware of this danger and, for this reason, generally resisted forming certain kinds of representations (though some societies did the opposite). The onset of written language was evidence that the aspect of our cognitive anatomy and inclinations that is most interested in advancing this process had gained ascendancy.

If we are aware of this problem, we can learn to deal intelligently with representations, and, perhaps, the lethal consequences they initiate and sustain. We moderns are not likely to suddenly divest ourselves of our involvement in representational cognition, any more than we would return to pre-linguistic mental behavior, but recognizing this is the first step toward relating intelligently and prophylactically with the dangers that are otherwise invisible to us due to their increasingly profuse penetration into every aspect of our lives, roles and behavior.