What next?

  Sethren, that’s the Jeroan taxonomy dealt with.  So what? you will say.  Just stood up like that, it don’t amount to a can of beans.  Why you should say that in an American accent, sethren, I do not know, but you do, you do.  And I have no quarrel with a can of beans.

  Taxonomies are powerful things.  None more powerful than Linnaeus’s, who gave us the whole kingdom of biological life, laid out just so.  And from the other end of the telescope, Mendel, who gave us something just this side of nothing, but an infinitesimal so powerful that it can anatomise all that Linnaeus named.

Moi

  And then there is Jorge Luis Borges.  Here is his taxonomy of animals, which I’m sure you know, but has that strange quality, that every time you come across it, there seems to be something there that was not there before, while the list is no longer, and nothing is missing:

(a) belonging to the emperor,

(b) embalmed,

(c) tame,

(d) sucking pigs,

(e) sirens,

(f) fabulous,

(g) stray dogs,

(h) included in the present classification,

(i) frenzied,

(j) innumerable,

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

(l) et cetera,

(m) having just broken the water pitcher,

(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

  This may at first seem unscientific.  However its purport is to demonstrate that a constant of all taxonomies is fallibility.

  I have suggested

Demon    thing    act    concept    map narrative    praxis    Culture

and you, sethren, could well ask, but then, what kind of thing in your taxonomy is a scientific law, or a mathematical proof, or a rule of thumb such as that of a good man of Cork, John Punch: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”.

  I could try, sethren, like the scholasticists of old, or like Procrustes, to fit these succinct, recognisable, bounded and coherent cells of the metaverse into the Jeroan taxonomy, thus:

  A scientific law is the sequential coupling and obligate linkage of  a series of concepts, any of which may and probably will themselves be composed of a series of concepts, possibly recursively until, once you get down to simple enough concepts, demons begin to appear; ergo, a concept (in the sense of the Jeroan taxonomy).

  Same goes for a mathematical proof.

  And for a rule of thumb.

  But that is all trivial circularity, sethren.  What we need to do next is to explore the ways in which the descriptees of this taxonomy, collectively evoculture, co-exist with and within the collective of human organisms.  The space that they configure is the metaverse, which is continuous, through the nexus of all functioning human neural substrates, with the rest of the universe.  Evoculture must account for not just stone knapping and sewing, but family, friendship, art and science, agriculture and warfare, love and hate.  All right, all right, sethren, do not flee.  Quite right, this is the work of ages, and I do not intend to even attempt it, especially as summer has now been deferred until at least July and we may all die of vitamin D deficiency before the sun shines again.  While our fuckhead Prime Minister talks of more wars and his soft pink lust for fracking.  Evoculture must account not only for the wonderful in humankind, but also for the criminals who have superseded bankers, and the political class.

  What I shall try to do, sethren, and that very briefly, is to delineate, not with a fine camel hair brush, but with a yard broom dipped in road grime, some ways in which evoculture might account for human nature a lot better than sociology or religion does.  And I am too pessimistic (though not about the political class), for tomorrow the sun shines.  A pic-nic, maybe, sethren.  Away with you, while I call up Fortnum & Mason upon my phone.

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.

Running ape meets Evoculture

Knuckle, senescent white male

  Time, sethren, to consider the organism.

  The organism.  Raise your right index finger where you can see it clearly.  Keep it there, and rotate it clockwise as seen if you were looking out along your arm, which you aren’t, thus demonstrating the potential independence from the real  world of the ideoverse, where you are looking along your arm.  Dogs can’t do this, and only in part because of anatomical shortcomings.  Now rotate that finger about the metacarpophalangeal joint, the proximal knuckle, sether, bottom, bottom, no, not your arse, sether, and the wrist, and then about the elbow.  Just watch those interdependent hierarchies of concepts whizzing past in your ideoverse.  Metacarpophalangeal doesn’t often get much of an outing.  It’s hardly a familiar demon, but look how it’s hogging the limelight here.  Alas, in vain.  What chance does metacarpophalangeal (its last desperate mememe) have of ousting knuckle from any gang of demons.  Not room for both, I’m afraid, and anyway, there’s only one metacarpophalangeal joint in the human hand, there are fourteen knuckles.  Without the praxis of anatomy, I guess the metacarpophalangeal joint would be long extinct in the metaverse.

  With luck, your finger tip is now in contact with your nose, or thereabouts.  Or maybe your mouth.  Whatever, you are touching the human organism.  So are you sether Albert, but I should stop if I were you unless you want to be taken away for a good talking to by yon community police person.

  Try to imagine this organism upon which you have your finger, without Evoculture.  If you had been raised by a pack of wolves, or dogs, or even dolphins, were you sufficiently aquatic, that is exactly how you would be.  Totally devoid of Evoculture.  You would be a wolf, or a dog, or a dolphin but, in all categories, physically very ill-equipped.  If you were a wolf or a dog, you might be able to compensate for your inadequacies with the evolved hand, pulling out thorns for instance.  Your vastly superior processing power might prove useful in some situations, but that’s doubtful.  It, your brain, has access to very little of the stuff it has evolved over three million years to process, so the possibility of, say, doing a little building work round the lair may well not occur in the neural substrate, and would probably not be socially rewarded even if it it were translated into action.  To dolphins you would be even more useless, even though dolphins might have a developed but wholly proximate ideoverse, unlike dogs.  By wholly proximate, I mean the ideoverses are wholly organism-based.  Such ideoverses could for instance result in complex social interactions, games, hunting cooperation, even meeting groups of Evocultured-up human organisms for joint ventures, hopefully involving killing third parties, fish, rather than the humans killing the dolphins, as found among the Faroe- and Japanese.  But nothing uses the environment of the dolphin’s brain to evolve.  Nothing.  The downside of flippers, maybe.  On the other hand, put a human baby in a dolphin’s environment and the downside of everything else, including hands, becomes apparent.

So, the organism without Evoculture.  Homo sapiens with nothing but the brain and the real world, the world before the hominins.  Little more than a running ape with a good cooling system.  That’s what you would have your finger on, sethren, if it wasn’t for Evoculture.

  I want to call this human organism something that differentiates it from what we know the human being + Evoculture to be.  I want to call it the Ho!?, but Ho!? In our street culture, and that’s where we fucking are, sethren, has connotations.  Ma ‘ho.  Not good.  But Ha!?.  I like Ha!?.  The grunt of surprise, followed by that hardest concept, that concept at the heart of Evoculture, the question.

  The question goes back through evolutionary history.  An African Hunting Dog asks questions.  Want to hunt?  Tougher than me?  Scared?  But the repertoire is limited.  The Ha!? asks the question thus.  The two of us are looking in the same direction.  Concerning that which is before our eyes, what is the case?

  Or rather, it’s not the Ha!? that asks that question.  It’s the Ha!?-Evoculture symbiosis.    

Demon, act, concept; a circularity appears

  What, you may ask, is the difference between a concept and an act?

Apple tree; damn concept, damn demon

The high-jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  It is an act that takes place entirely within her ideoverse.  But her ideoverse is continuous with not only the metaverse but also the universe; the boundary of the  ideoverse can shift, from the hallucinatory interiority of sensory deprivation, to being immersed in War and Peace, to receiving the actual light from the edge of the visible universe.  Meanwhile her body, the body of another human being, as perceived by me, is discrete. By and large, when it moves, it all moves.  It is not materially distributed.  However, in the ideoverse, the body is being constantly revised, instantaneously reconfigured, and the revisions and reconfigurations need have no direct isomorphy with the body as seen by another.  In the ideoverse our bodies can shrink, expand, distort, lose bits, gain bits.  Sure, by and large our sense of where our bodies are and how they are arranged is pretty accurate, otherwise we couldn’t do back-flips (later, sether Albert, and not in my robes) or interact with other human beings in a polite and sociable manner.  But drugs, trauma, pain, starvation or sleep can discombobulate us.

  When the high-jumper does her little hop, her run-up, her three lengthening strides, her spring, her turn, the backward arch and snake-like flow of her body over the bar, all ‘in her head’, before she starts the real thing, it is not really just in her head.  Her ideoverse is distributed about her body, singing gently in the motor nerves, alerting every muscle to its contraction and just as vital relaxation, an immensely complex sequence.  It is only the final stage, the firing of the muscles themselves, that is suppressed.  Then, “Now,” and the kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons begins, she runs, she jumps, she clears the bar.

  There’s your act.

  Initially, in the neonate, acts are spontaneous.  The arms and legs flex and extend, the eyes and head move as they have in the womb.  But pretty soon intentional acts emerge, albeit with a random element.  The hand grabs the thing.  The head turns, the eyes search for Mama.  And much later she may be able to jump over a bar higher than her head.

  Such acts are the stuff of behaviour throughout the animal kingdom.  And we remain capable of such acts, spontaneous, involuntary or practised and overlearned (playing the Goldberg Variations, for instance) throughout or lives.  But early in a baby’s life its ideoverse will begin to be occupied by demons.  This is not in itself an evolutionary innovation.  A dog can tell a ball from a beanbag.  Demons occupy dogs as well as humans.  But the demons are sterile.  A ball, let us say a yellow tennis ball, has evolved in the metaverse, and the metaverse is continuous with seven billion ideoverses, all of them human.  No ball ever evolved in a dog’s brain.  Nothing did.  No ball ever went out of one dog’s brain, through the world, and into another dog’s brain.  Dogs do not have an evolving culture, they do not have Evoculture.

  Dogs do have a culture.  African hunting dogs when they are running down prey have distributed roles which are integrated.  The pack of hunting dogs sleeps in the sun.  One wakes up.  It whines.  It goes around trying to rouse the others.  If it succeeds with one, the rousing behaviour multiplies until all are awake.  They stretch and yawn and begin to move, vocalising, making social contact, building up energy, tending this way, tending that, sniffing, scent cues giving direction and then they are off, moving at an economical trot, and the hunt begins.

  All this is a network of acts, a sequence that has evolved.  Each dog will experience arousal, interest.  The scent cues will be demons that evoke prey species, or not, the vocalisations will elicit excitement.  You could maybe say that in each dog there is the natural concept of a hunt.  But I doubt it.  The hunt is merely learned acts in sequence, distributed about the pack.  An individual dog may dream about hunting, who knows, and  the dreaming is likely to be a rehearsal, with variations, and in that sense the dog will learn from the rehearsal.  But the dream will be a succession of acts analogous to the high jumper’s run-up.  Nothing will change apart from, probably, its role in the distributed acts of the pack, as it develops from tyro to old hand.

  So a dog is capable of a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.  It couldn’t survive if it wasn’t.  And the behaviour of the pack can gang these acts into a higher order effective sequence.  But there is no evidence that in the dog’s brain, two loci of irreducible difference become interlocked and superimposed, making a third locus of irreducible difference.  There is no evidence of a concept in a dog.

  You can say to a dog, “Walk”, and it will look alert.  You can get its leash, and it may go into paroxysms of excitement.  You can open the door, it will rush out, tugging at the leash.  Acts, one after the other, sethren.  There is no evidence from the demons walk and lead that there is in the dog’s brain a third locus of irreducible difference, the concept walk.  In the economy of a dog, there would be no use for such a concept, since for dogs even demons are untransferable, or at least to other dogs.  Acts suffice.

  A dog can recognise a human, but it has no concept of a human.  A human can build up a concept of a dog fairly quickly, if an in-the-world dog is available.  The demons which congregate around the demon dog, a certain size, hairiness, oblongity, something fourish about the legs (the scientific concept four may not yet be developed), tail, conformation of eyes and ears; may not at first be transferable, nor sufficiently exclusive.  The infant may see a cat, and take it for another dog.  But soon the demons which differentiate cat from dog will become apparent, and with time and maturity the once-infant will be aware of the scientific concepts cat and dog, and be able to instruct another infant to recognise the distinction, first naturally, then, hopefully, scientifically.  A human being can, natural pedagogy, transfer a duplicate of a concept from her mind to the mind of an infant, through the skilled and watchful manipulation of demons.

  Dogs cannot do this.

  So that  is how a concept is different from an act, sethren.  But a bigger question arises, a more troubling one, that may be a weak link, an inapposite joint which could bring the whole architecture of Evoculture crashing down in a cloud of dust.

  I have been emphatic, some would say arrogantly emphatic, in fact they have said it; that I am an idle and ignorant wastrel, a loudmouth, ranting garbage in a layby on the Huddersfield ringroad; one of those self-taught gobshites who reads half a book and then comes up with a tortuous narrative, without discipline, without data, without peer review, and chooses to think of it as a hypothesis.  You know better, my disciples — all two of you as there seem to be today.

  So be it.  I have been emphatic that the evolution of culture can only take place at the level of the demon, the locus of irreducible difference.  And this morning, this very morning, the morning when Big Ben has been stopped in its mighty bongs in the furtherance of a myth fostered by the criminal classes, politicians, bankers, the defence and extractive industries, a myth that coheres round the corpse of a dead woman, long demented, this very morn, I was looking at an apple tree.  And I was thinking, that apple tree, that’s a concept, that is.  There are demons that make it a tree and not something else.  If, for instance, I noticed that some of its twigs had turned to pure gold (yes, sether Pritchard-Achebe-Wajda, there would be structural problems) I would begin to question the pure treeness of it.  Likewise if it started waving its branches at me, and then began to walk towards me, shedding clay from its roots as it dragged them over the lawn.  Likewise if from its blossom grew oranges.  If any of these features became permanent in apple trees, then the concept of an apple tree would have to evolve or die.  But I think it is quite clear that the evolution takes place at the level of demons.  A concept, apple tree or green triangle, cannot spontaneously evolve into an entirely different concept, purple tetrahedron or sea anemone.  It can only evolve demon by demon, locus of irreducible difference by locus of irreducible difference.

  That’s not the problem.  That part of the hypothesis is secure.

  The problem is that, if an apple tree is both demon and concept (demon when I’m running through a list of trees looking for a medlar, concept when all its constituent demons are remarked) then so is a needle a concept.  In fact, what is not a concept?  Red?  Red is a demon, but it is also certainly a concept, because we can anatomise it; locus on the electromagnetic spectrum; locus of process in the visual cortex.

  We make this journey, demon, thing, act, concept, and are dragged kicking and screaming straight back to the beginning again.  Am I fucked, sethren?

Mañana.