Mythrule

  Consider this paradox, sethren.  We are, as far as we know, the most intelligent species in our universe.  The history of our evolution goes back nine billion years, older than our sun.  I say this not from any religio-sci-fi-weirdness, but in the light of the speculation of Gordon and Sharov, who have applied Moore’s law to the evolving complexity of life and extrapolated back to its beginning, nine billion years ago.  Not exactly proven, but if so we got an early start in the cosmic evolution race.

  So, possibly the most intelligent species in the universe.  And we are the sole medium of all the great works of the metaverse, art and science, you know what I’m saying here, sethren, rational thought, all the big stuff.  We did all that.  Everything.  And yet we behave like fuck-heads.  Look, we have, in this land, huge wealth, of nature, of industry, of North Sea Oil.  Our political economy could be the happiest, a healthy well-educated nation, with the distinction of being populated from all the corners of the earth, living at ease with itself, none too rich and none too poor.  Whereas what are we?  A nation where more and more food vouchers are being handed out to the desperate, where those in semi-slavery have to do three jobs, with little food and sleep, just to feed their children (oh Madam MeMe, the time for corporate MeatyBits is at hand), while we give the place over to global criminals who can spend £30 million on a house, can commission pathetically hideous plastic yachts with three heli-ports and an attack submarine in the hold which they never even use.  I say this not to be contentious, heaven forefend, sethren, nor to imply that the holders of the great offices of state are the simpering wankers of kleptocrats too steroidally pumped up to wank themselves, but to point the finger at us, ourselves, at our willing complicity in this dystopia.

  That’s the paradox I will explain, sethren.  Our intelligence.  Our idiocy.

  We are governed by myth.   It evolved way back in the evolution of Homo sapiens.

  When we lived in small bands, the metaverse was small.  Our potential for variation in behaviour was constrained by the physical presence, gestures, acts, caresses, shoves and blows, smiles and glares, of the whole band.  Then, in our day to day lives, we might smell and touch everybody we knew of.

  But the human group cannot increase above a certain size, probably the size where everybody can smell and touch everybody else, until superordinate control mechanisms evolve in the metaverse, or at least the zone of the metaverse that flows into the ideoverses of that group.  Without these control mechanisms there will be no co-ordination or cooperation beyond the immediate, the proximate, the contiguous where sight, sound and touch orchestrate action.

  Once the control mechanisms have evolved and are a stable feature of the local metaverse, then individuals will be influenced and guided by them, and conditions will exist that allow such things as modes of production, division of labour, social hierarchies, to evolve.

  The myth can do that.  Let us remember William Shakespeare’s fascination with the person and the office of the king.  The person — cut the crap, sether, you know as well as I do who William Shakespeare is, this pretension to sturdy working-class complete-fucking-ignorance-of-absolutely-everything is beginning to seem like an affectation.  Oh.  Okay, the Earl of Southampton if you will.  The person of the king is the Homo sapiens bit.  The office is the metaverse bit, enacted through the H sap organism.  If this is hard to understand, consider our kingly equivalents.  Consider Tony Blair and David Cameron.  The office of Prime Minister channels great power.  The H saps T Blair and D Cameron are, I think we would agree, as exemplars of the species, fairly negligible.  If that.

  The evolved control mechanisms which allow the group to develop from the hunter-gatherer band to the mature nation state (okay, I’m telescoping here) are the praxis, the narrative and particularly the myth.

  What a myth is, sethren, I will demonstrate, again with Shakespeare, in the interplay between Othello and Iago.  But it may take some time. The sun is here, for a day or two at least, and no more does snow and moor grime make more material the car-fart born with a  boreal buffeting about our ears and noses around and around the Huddersfield ringroad by winds from Greenland’s charmless fells.  For a day or two at least.  The first Swifts have arrived, those closest descendants of dinosaurs which can only endure a few short weeks of our British summer.  And I am kept busy in the Refuge garden, our Abbot knows no mercy.  Othello and Iago may have to wait a day or two.

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.

The Mobius strip untwisted, enter the ideoverse

  Sethren, through the long hours of the night I wrestled, and could see no way forward, and was in despair.  Then this morning, creeping into the town library for a little warmth, I read a review by Peter Godfrey-Smith of a book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel.  What kind of wuss puts Almost into a title of that grandiloquence?  Make up your mind, mate.  But then I read that Thomas Nagel thinks there is still a mind-body problem.  Whereupon I bethought me, fuck that for a lark.  If such atavistic error can still be found in a book with a fifteen word title that the London Review of Books (who refused to publish my ground-breaking 17,000 word closely reasoned disquisition on the evolution of culture on the grounds that it was slightly overburdened with wordage [was a special supplement so out of the question?] saw fit to send out for review to so eminent a distinguished professor of philosophy at the City university of New York as Peter Godfrey Smith (who agreed with me, that the mind-body problem is bollocks) then it is not time to accept defeat.  It is time that loins were girded.  How does one gird, sether?  Frankly, no idea.  Let us get on.

  So, the problem.

  We set out to demonstrate that human culture, what one might call Evoculture to distinguish it from The Ring Cycle and pointillism and all that stuff, is an obligate symbiont with the human organism, and evolves in the human neural substrate.  Brain to you and me.

  If the metaverse, which extends into every ideoverse, is populated by demons, and a demon is a locus of irreducible difference.  As between needle and pin, or cat and dog

  And if a concept is the superimposition (as in red triangle) or sequential coupling (as in if… then…) of two or more demons
  And if we take the demon needle (the locus of irreducible difference with pin, awl and so on), as we did a few weeks ago,  and anatomise it into other demons, its geometry, topology, constituent substance and so on

  Then the alarming conclusion is unavoidable.  A demon is a concept.

  Yet I had asserted that culture can only evolve at the level of the demon, just as life can only evolve at the level of genetic and epigenetic material.  But if every demon is a concept, then I appear to be saying that culture can develop at the level of the concept.  And yet I have also demonstrated, I hope at least to your satisfaction, sether Albert, that a red triangle cannot mutate into a blue tetrahedron except at the level of smallest irreducible differences; at the demon level.  Here we have, if it is the right phrase, a reductio ad absurdum.   It must be resolved.
  Try this for size.

  We are looking at an ideoverse.  It is continuous with the universe, we know, but let us focus in on that bit contained within the envelope of the human organism.  And, taking that as a given, let us zoom in further, just for simplicity, into that bit in the skull, the brain, the cortex, the, for our purposes, infinite space for the accommodation of loci of irreducible difference that is made up of trillions of potential connections among neurons and astrocytes.

  Let us take nipple.  I know, sether Femina-Botox, that you think I have a fixation here, and I acknowledge it, which human being does not?  But that’s not the reason I choose it.  I choose it because, developmentally, it is one of the earliest demons.  It is the target of the neonate’s desires.  But, bingo, as soon as I say target, something takes over in the ideoverse that in a moment we will look at.  Well, yes, after a manner of speaking, sether, though I feel the deployment of the word tits is not wholly apt, and the rest of the way you put it even less so.  But yes.  The circle within a circle, and so on.  Ramifications, ramifications.

  But we are at a time when, in the neonate’s ideoverse, the resident demons are few, huge, and hopefully by and large pleasant.  The demon nipple is one such.  At this point it is a demon of a kind that all animals could entertain (except no other animal has nipples).  It is a demon unlabelled by language, unconnected to any concept.  It is just the locus where the energy of blurry sight, pheromonal stimuli, tactility of lips, palate, tongue, coalesce.  The baby has no more idea what a nipple is than a dog does. (Shut up, sether.)

  Except, of course, sether Albert, what you say, totally unsuitable to the polite company of this layby on the Huddersfield ringroad though it is, is supremely apposite.

  I am suggesting that there is a root demon nipple which, as long as we were breast fed, has formed in every neonate’s ideoverse for quite some way back along the hominid line.  And now we jump in time to ourselves, here, now, and a whole cascade of diverse nipple stuff starts going on in our respective ideoverses.  We need not rehearse it here, certainly not in sether Albert’s case.  And unless we call it into the workspace it will not be language-ised — not the kind of inelegance I usually tolerate, but it serves to put that process rather the world side of the black box, which is where it ought to be.  Though language is a great stabilising process.  The cascades of stuff that flick and flitter through the ideoverse, a bit like dreams, when nipple happens, are transient, short-lived, one taking the place of another, or side by side, drifting, dissolving, superimposing, swapping material, until the workspace fixes one, at which point there is, language being available, a process of language-isation; target; the word, the image for me an archery target, red black white blue concentric circles, painted canvas on straw (I am not a young man) the smell of straw, playing among straw bales as a child, one can get into James Joyce territory very quickly, and this is all literary, it has nothing to do with the cascades in the ideoverse set off by the word nipple.

  Try this for size.  A root demon is a locus (we have no idea of the architecture, it may be in itself quite distributed) in the neural substrate.  It responds to stimuli, both from the ideoverse of which it is a part, and from the metaverse, which mediates everything that has our attention.  Once stimulated, the root demon emits simulacra of itself, not like down a wire, but broadcast across the ideoverse.  Again the architecture of this broadcast is unknown, we can guess it will be an unimaginable complexity of parallel pathways, branching pathways, inhibitory cascades, selective destruction, and no doubt much more.  Perhaps the rarefied reaches of information theory could have a bash at describing the kind of thing it might be, I can only smear a smudge of an image.  But that’s what happens.  Some journeys are much shorter than others, nipple to target for instance.  Why this is so can only be explained by the architecture, which is plastic, dynamic, and so far unintelligible to us, even though it is going on continually just the other side of the language barrier.

  Now we are looking at an evolutionary situation.  Demons depend on selection for survival and reiteration.  Nipple ripples across the ideoverse.  It stimulates other demons.  If it stimulates nuclear submarine it, unless it is in the ideoverse of a reincarnation of a metaphysical poet, is not likely to forge an alliance which is going to go places — a bit of a dead end.  Taboo sexuality could work on it, but we are talking about what is spontaneous.  So we could suggest a whole lot of potential demon allies for nipple, the utilitarian, the erotic, the scientific (in the sense of biology, not concept), the graphic; milk, antibodies, Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid, gland,  graffiti.  But here is the problem with language, these are not language (well, antibodies probably are) they are manifestations in the ideoverse, like to the stuff of dreams, as I say, flickering and transient.

  The behaviour of our root demon, for selection, survival, reiteration, is to stimulate enough useful demons to work with it in an alliance, while repressing all the other demons that are signalling back, me, me, but, and this would have to be already evolved in the architecture, must be repressed so they don’t clutter up or negate an alliance in which they are useless or destructive.

  The formation of an alliance causes a flicker.  It will often last only microseconds.  If it is below the threshold of the workspace, its achievement will be minimal, a slight modification of the architecture perhaps.  If the workspace registers it, but takes no action, its duration will be slightly longer, and the architecture modified a little more.  And if the workspace selects it, and we’re talking very black box here, then work will be done with it and on it.

  Few demons can work on their own.  Red, maybe.  But the effective role of a demons, as far as survival and reiteration through the metaverse is concerned, is in an alliance.

  And alliance may be an act, suck.  It may be a natural concept, doggy.  (No, dear, it’s a cat).  Or it may be a scientific concept, a red triangle.

  A demon is only a concept when the workspace calls for a concept.  Then, if the evolved architecture is such that it can cascade like buggery, its chances of selection are strong (if I am looking at the mechanics of pre- and post-natal nutrient transfer, for instance).  If I am merely, one of those games that come in a box, trying to compile as long a list of body parts as I can in one minute, nipple’s just a demon.

  The reductio ad absurdum is no more.

  Just try it for size.

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.