What's the engine, what's the deed?

  I am pondering the relationship, sethren, but I’ll be brief, between act and concept.  Which is at the heart of human behaviour?  Like, among human beings, ordinary human beings, us, not great leaders like — I traverse the contemporary horizon, nobody comes to mind — like Babur or Justinian; among ordinary human beings, what is the effective working group?

  It’s like some real problem comes up, a public meeting is called, at first there’s a keynote speech, then come the ranting idiots who you get at any public meeting, they say the same thing each time, regardless of the context, the obsessives, the monomaniacs, genuine victims who have no theatre in which to fight back, sterile ideologues, racists and Decent People Like Us.  When they’ve all calmed down, or become exhausted, or flounced out, people stand up and say sensible things, give useful information, outline possible solutions.  You too thought you might say something once or twice, but you were a bit undecided and the moment passed, the focus had shifted, somebody more decisive and with a clear and practiced delivery was already on their feet.

  By the end, two or three sensible but mutually exclusive conclusions have been reached and resultant courses  of action outlined.  First you go with one, then with another.  Like most sensible people, you are undecided.  No solution is perfect, and none without its good points.  The meeting is adjourned, to be reconvened the following week when a decision has to be taken.

  You are an active citizen and want to see the right thing done.  What do you want to do next?  What you want to do, and what most people want to do, is to get together with the nucleus of your social environment, friends at the school gate, workmates, drinking mates; a small rabble of probably homeless probably druggy probably alcoholic certainly scruffy and unkempt scroungers who congregate in the hour before midday in a layby on the Huddersfield ring-road.  You know who they are, you know what they think, how they talk, what they want out of life, how they think things should be.  They’re not all alike, by no means, an odd and even some might say eccentric bunch, but you can work together, bees in bonnets are permitted but it’s easy to stop their buzzing with a joke, you’re good enough friends that nobody’s going to flounce out, even if they get angry, and by the end of the day, or the evening, or by the time the kids get tired of playing and want to go home for their tea, a consensus has been reached.  It’s provisional, it’s not bound by a vow of unity, when the next public meeting is convened minds might be changed, but by and large it is in this kind of group that work gets done.  Variation arises, selection takes place.  Acts ensue, in the metaverse certainly, and probably in the world.  A hand is raised, or not raised, in assent, to be counted.

  Clearly, the variation is only initiated, whenever it occurs, in each ideoverse.  But each ideoverse, when you are within the nucleus of your social environment, is wide open to the local zone of the metaverse, through eyes and ears, watching faces, expressions, registering tone of voice, emotion, and receptive and retentive of the demons, acts, concepts flying between you.  Your own ideoverse can reflect on the same things when you are alone, and indeed the evolutionary process may work much faster.  But the result may not be effective as an act.  You mention it to a mate in passing, at the water cooler (there’s a concept upon which a whole analysis of civilisations could be built.  Which the fuck of us has ever seen a water cooler?  Do we even have them outside the US conclave, Londinium?) or in the queue for MeatyBits, for which I hear we will soon be able to swap Big society food vouchers.  You outline you lucubrations to your mate in passing, and he observes, that’s fucking garbage, you daft twat.  Think on.  Or possibly, think on’t.  And you do.  And you realise that it is possible that, untrammelled by social context, your what we used to call the mind has run away with what we used to call itself, and it’s a good thing you mentioned it first to your mate rather than standing up on your hind legs in a public meeting and making a complete dick of yourself.

  It’s only an analogy, sethren, and we know that analogies are usually worse than useless.  But I am looking for the grouping in which demons get most evolutionary work done, and I have concluded, for the moment, that it is the act.  An act is not only a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.  It is also:

  an established network of demons that provides its members with a functional pattern that does work, in the ideoverse, the metaverse and/or the world, and this work gives its constituent demons a bigger chance of being selected and so surviving.

  You know, sethren, when Richard Dawkins appeared to me on the road to Damascus all those decades ago, and I brooded upon logical certainty that in any area of knowledge, assumption, belief, if a fraction of Homo sapiens is correct about what is the case, then the vast majority must be in error, and questioned how this could be, given that we are a species blessed with the capacity to reason; and I began to realise that it might be because human culture is an evolutionary process, and cares little for truth (as we humans care little for truth) and pits everything on survival (pathetic fallacy is debilitating but tempting when discussing evolution); at that time I thought of the dominant collective of culture as the apparatus, as in intellectual apparatus.  That the ability to produce thought, ideas (my thinking was primitive, atavistic then) depended not only on the processing power of the brain, but on the apparatuses that worked within it.  And in my thinking here, the apparatus was the key unit.  An apparatus was:

  an established network of demons that provides its members with a functional pattern that does work, in the ideoverse, the metaverse and/or the world, and this work gives its constituent demons a bigger chance of being selected and so surviving.

  It could even be shortened to app..  But sadly that is already taken.

  Sethren, this was meant to be the briefest footnote.  But as usual I have wondered.  When the intellectual infirmities of age become too apparent, just hit me over the head with a hammer.

See God, time to play

Shiva and Parvati (and Nandi, leant on) - Wiki

  Sethren, it has been a long climb.  Now we are at the top of the mountain, face to face with God.  Who is a very big demon indeed.  About the same size as nipple was when we were two days old.  And as abstruse as nipple is flesh.  Gods used to be like people, ancient people in warmer climes than the Huddersfield ringroad, descended from ogres and monsters but now, save for poor Hephaestus, perfect.  Oh ye who have seen Parvati and Shiva glowing in the bronze and can only ease the sense of yearning by laying a hand on nature, on the warm rough hide of Nandi, as I lay my hand on this frigid metal here, this bus stop, to short myself to earth, to rotate my coordinates to stable up and down and left and right, in the face of the vision that stretches before me.  God now is so abstract that the alliances of demons that once, for four thousand years at the most, were attracted to Him in such numbers that they were like the atoms of a whole galaxy wheeling round a black hole, have all but deserted him.  They have flittered to other more primitive gods, the kind that walked the earth when Solomon built his temple, if he ever did, tyrant gods or sentimental mummydaddy gods, leaving God as nothing but the answer to any question to which we do not know the answer.

  So what is this vision I see, sethren?  It is what we are when what God stood for is almost wholly dissipated.  It is the vision of what a human being is.  It is an organism that is the environment in which Evoculture evolves.  And if that sounds to you derisory, know that it is the total fucking miracle, far beyond magic, beyond turning water into wine or healing the sick or hearing a voice in a cave or in a dungeon, the total fucking miracle of a space so huge inside a head, and inside every head and extending into everything that goes on in the physical universe, an ideoverse open to the metaverse where exists, and only where exists, everything.  Nipples, all gods, all poetry, music, all pigment, emoticons and Twitter, Darwin’s Origin of Species, all politics, medicine, economics, sex and those photographs of spaces that give an inkling of the size of the neural substrate, those reaches of seeming for ever thousands of light-years distant.

  That is what we can see from the top of the mountain.  It’s not going to change or lives much.  The wind is still cold, we still have a Prime Minister who attests that he is Green, yet cannot see the simple connection between fracking and the ruin of the Earth.  For as I have said, Evoculture does not care for us.  Like all evolution, it is merely a pattern of its own survival.  It has made us what we are reciprocally with what we have made it; Dubai.  Which clearly, grotesque idiocy that it is, evolved in the matrix of its own destruction.  Because half of what we are is the process of demons, and demons are dependent on now.  That is all.  They have zero, zero, zero, foresight.  Our Prime Minister as a person knows that fracking is almost certainly deeply damaging to our species in the long term.  But as a politician, he is merely a transducer of a certain summation of demons, a myth, and he trumpets idiocy on behalf of all of us.

  Now we are at the top of the mountain, certain things become apparent.  Look at three concepts.  Red triangle.  Blue triangle.  Blue circle.  From this it follows that while the potential number of demons may be finite, the number of concepts is infinite.   Also that, while demons may be loci, concepts are processes of the architecture of the neural substrate.

  And we shall look at them next.  And see how concepts themselves ally, and form myths, truths, lies, praxes.  And how such alliances are themselves environments for the evolution of culture; but evolution at the level of demons, sethren, always and only.
  Soon it will be time to play.

Throttle people, make bread and love

 

Skellig Michael - Wikimedia commons

    Supposing all you say is so, so what?  We are still beset by unwholesome weather, and eat muck.  And now we have been told by our noble leader that social security leads to infanticide.  Sethren, our noble leader may have the mouth parts of a six foot tapeworm, but he also has a first class degree from Oxford.  PPE, admittedly.  I have no more idea than you what cutting-edge intellectual content resides in a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford.  Nugatory, one would imagine.  But enough to rule.  And the tyro tapeworm clearly had enough brain to master it splendidly.  A first class degree.

  Sethren, the mouthings of the great leader may evince stupidity, but they are designer mouthings, crafted by years, centuries of evolution to embody a gargantuan gormlessness.  Not his. Ours.  Our  stupidity, sethren.  The stupidity inheres not in the crafting of these obvious, children’s picture book, fatuous lies.  The gargantuan stupidity is in us, who are the butt of this ludicrous mendacity.  And yet we believe in it utterly, and remouth it and remouth it continually, as if we ourselves were not as withered grey-green carcasses on the Huddersfield ringroad, but plump pink tapeworms whose every comfort is eternally assured.

  Surely, sethren, our so thoroughgoing stupidity needs some explanation.  The last person to try to explain it was Karl Marx; false consciousness, opium of the masses; spot on, old Karl.  But a century and a half ago.  The Communist Manifesto was published nine years before The Origin of Species.  Nobody has attempted to explain our moronic collective credulity since then.

  I will.

  But first the building blocks.

  An act.  A kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.

  In the human world, maybe in the Hominin world (and I read on my phone yesterday, sethren, that Sahelpithecus is likely to represent the divergence between Homo and Chimp, seven million years ago or thereabouts), in the human world, an act is seldom isolated from a thing.  “Manus amimam pinxit, my pen is in my hand” as the old fascist put it.  There is not much that we do with our bare hands.  Throttle people, make bread and love.  But by and large a human act is an obligate symbiont with at least one thing.  It is the nexus of doing and done to — obligate symbiont, Sether Albert? Have I not mentioned it before?  Oh.  No I fucking haven’t, then.  Two different kinds of organism living in a cooperative relationship upon which both are completely dependent; trees and root fungi, mammals and their gut bacteria; human beings and politicians.

  Think of sewing, sethren.  Sewing without needle, thread and two bits of material to be joined, is not sewing.  But a needle and thread and so on cannot be sewing without kinesis, fingers, musculature, neural substrate.  Most human acts can only exist in the context of things.  And most things can only evolve in the context of acts.  The old joke goes, when a simple lad had finally been taught to add two apples to two apples and get four apples, he asked, “does it work with pears too?”  Does the concept of obligate symbiosis work with acts other than sewing?  Pears, sethren, pears.

  At the level of demons, there is no distinction to be made between an act and a thing.  An act is a thing.  Sewing, like a needle, is a demon.  Sure, as with a needle, other demons consort with the demon sewing, many more than the minimal ones we associated with a needle.  We could anatomise the demon sewing into quite a lot, or if you prefer, a whole bunch of demons.  But if you are running your eye over the contents of a design technology course to see if it is suitable for one, oh ye paupers, of your profligate quantity of offspring (whom, because you may rely on social security, you are quite likely to go home and slaughter) and in the midst of a list of course components, joinery, web design, you note for the fraction of a second your eye overflies it embroidery before the epicentre of vision moves on to automobile aesthetics; then embroidery occurred as a demon; not totally unexamined, because there will be a locus in the neural substrate which awakes and leaps to life screaming me, me, and would be only too delighted to call up other demons into the workspace, needles, coloured thread, the Bayeux tapestry, whatever the fuck you like as long as you are going to take notice; but not a chance.  The automobile aesthetics demon is already having its microsecond flicker.

  So, at the demon level, things and acts are not differentiated.  But, you will say, we humans can distinguish between a thing and an act.

  Sethren, we can distinguish between a trillion things and another trillion things, had we but world enough  and time.  We have no difficulty telling the difference between angels and fairies, between cricket and baseball, between a virus and a bacterium or a gigue and a saraband.  But we do it at another level.  We shall come to concepts in time, sethren, but you will not be amazed to know that concepts, like everything in the metaverse, are also alliances of demons.

  For it is only at the demon level that evolution can take place.

But, you may say, the ancestral organism became the hippo and the whale.  Surely it is at the level of species that things change?

That is what we see, because we cannot see genes.  Darwin didn’t even know they existed.  But it was genes, sethren (and epigenetics, of course).  Evolution takes place at the level of the cell, and it is only the sum of cells that is the organism that represents the, to us, apprehensible species.

  And you will say, but culture doesn’t have to be like biological life.  Just because evolution takes place at the level of genes, not the level of the hippo and the whale, there is no reason why culture should follow suit.

  Agreed absolutely, sethren.  Give me another explanation that will lead to an account of why we believe the simple lies of our Great Leader, an explanation that does not rest on metaphor and religious platitude, and I will go along with you.  Until then, the evolution of culture takes place at the level of demons.

  The question still lies open, can there be a non-kinetic act?  Clearly.  Acts can take place in an ideoverse unexpressed by any kinesis.  You cannot look into the face of the beloved and know of whom they dream.  The raven surveyed the meat, the string, its perch for several minutes before it acted.  The high jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  This, sethren, is why I call it an act, not an action.  All that we do happens in the theatre of the skull.

  Sethren, tomorrow, sabbatical.  I go to the monastery of Skellig Michael to watch and pray for a week.  You must wander the streets of Huddersfield alone.  Watch the behaviour of your fellows, and ponder my words.  Dwell on our stupidity in especial.  When I return, and if, in like case to the Earl of Groan, I am not consumed by puffins, then concepts.