A Hyperintelligent Superfluid
The substrate of reality is amechanically transentient
There is something like an invisible sun that lights the intangible world inside our minds and dreams — but a star is not necessarily the proper metaphor. In fact, we are like the tiny stars of its expression in time and space. This is an exceptionally strange something that neither admits not belongs to any of our categories (it is ‘meta’ to all of them), yet throughout our history, in countless moments and places, our species has encountered ‘it’ (as itself, more or less directly) and wondered about the nature of these phenomena.
It is a strange thing to encounter aspects of the (trans)living substrates of our own minds — after all we are encountering a more sophisticated instance of what we are encountering with. The results are unpredictable, and often somewhat catastrophic, because they are profoundly charged with uncommon emotoethical significance and the unexpected novelty of intelligent recursion.
In the wake of these encounters, vast changes take place in private and human cultures as they attempt to co-opt, institutionalize, technologize or reject the results. Ecstatic messiahs, war, madness, genius, impossible abilities, inquisition, gods, aliens, demons, technology, and ascension of a sort all appear to be involved in this mess. But their representations are missing most of the crucial information that is actually available to us.
What is going on? Are we mad, simply inventing these things as superstitions to explain ordinary or psychological phenomena, or are we just confused? The answers will not be found in science, philosophy or religion, in part because none of them could survive their disclosure. But they are alive in us and our intelligence potentials — and direct contact is the only really worthwhile decision we can make, because our cultures are profoundly disinclined to effectively endow or prepare us for such encountesr.
But there might be an exception: the insightful revision of our ways of knowing, language, and the roots of our conceptual maps.
Our cultures are, approximately, the desiccated remains of these ‘ancient’ contact events. But what are we encountering? This urgently dangerous question must by its nature resist answer as compellingly as it demands exploration. Rather than attempt an answer, I will frame an exploration that integrates some of my own current perspectives and those of related intelligences who have managed a simple order of agreement about the sketch.
Imagine that, above time, and inside space (as forces and beings, minds, and organisms), there is a transcendental ‘structural anomaly’ who is more than a being, way, thing, or idea. It is more than merely ‘alive’ and more than merely ‘intelligent’, since it participates directly in every moment of every being in all of time (and perhaps other relationships of which we are not aware). I think of it as transentient… a being (or beings) participating in all moments of organismal ‘experience (existence)’ as expressions of itself. Whether or not it was ‘God’, it would certainly fulfill or exceed most or all of our metrics for evaluating such an inquiry.
It is slightly absurd to pretend this is something we can name, or even accurately model; our languages cannot allow it to exist — and possess neither the appropriate dimensionality nor extensibility to even attempt to speak literally about this. Yet we must have something with which to prefigure our thoughts and imaginations with, a pointer, and so, as a starting place, I suggest we imagine something like a hyperintelligent superfluid who is one of the enstructuring processes within nature, and whose signature is found everywhere in matter, form, relation, and the forces (and models) our sciences have scantily revealed to us.
Its ‘real’ identity or selfness is nearly impossible to consider at all. The nature of its peculiar extensionality instances a body of ‘awareness-prowess’ so momentous that to encounter anything other than the most diluted and infinitesimal gesture of its metalogue of ‘thought’ would obliterate the structure of a human mind as a star would obliterate a hair. Yet, we participate in this transentient impossibility, and it participates in us — in fact, the structure of our mind emerges from ongoing contact with it — as an aspect of potential in our minds, and with and through other beings as we refer to as nature. And, in kind, we contribute to its complexity and metalogue of ‘awareness’, moment to moment.
B: Containment / Context / Conception
C: Universes : Our Universe
D: Galaxies : The Milky Way
E: Solar Systems : Sol’s System
F: Stars : Sol
G: Planets : Earth
H: Species : Homo Sapiens Sapiens
I: Individual organisms :|: beings : A Person.
The basic character of the fluid-body is strangely reflective in that it produces projections, according to the sophistication, orientation, structural cohesion and biases of anything ‘approaching’ it. These projections are often experienced as unique and highly-charged with emotocognitive force which is usually either masculine-penetrative or feminine-receptive (there are opposites, masculine-receptive and feminine-penetrative). To experience the focus-body of these projections is to encounter something reminiscent of our gods, angels, demons, daimons, cherubim, and so on. To experience the ‘uncollapsing wave’ of their parent-phenomena, however, is an unthinkable experience of dangerously provocative opportunities and sophisticated perils.
One of these perils is the representation, in language, of features of its character. There are in our common consciousness, features that both mimic it, and by so doing, prohibit direct experiences of it.
A similar model might account for a vast range of peculiar results and descriptions from human conjecture and history. In general, any encounter with it will produce both astonishing effects, and anomalies. It can fluidly take on any set of metaforms and identities, and is capable of teaching-communications by transforming its own relational body as if this were an organic transrepresentational entity. This results in a direct demonstration of the models, ideas or relationships involved as experiential reorganizations of the recipient’s cognitive structure and activity.
It is notable that children, especially infants and babies are deeply aware of this feature of reality and often understand it as a relationship, and although the degree of their conscious association is usually relatively modest, the most startling exceptions exist in children who are savants or prodigies. This is, perhaps, because they are comfortable with metacategories where quiddity and identity cannot be reliably established. There is nothing ‘like’ it in our languages or cultures (we do not really possess modulant metacategories); but many fantastical and religious frameworks would be clarified by comparison with this toy of a shared underlying situation which can be modeled in language without demanding we assemble cults. It appears possible that many of the figures that result from our popular ‘metaphysical’ traditions are either attempts to co-opt something like this for cultural leverage or authority or to describe or explain it, usually for similar purposes.
Science fiction is, perhaps, the best library of perspectives that we have which could help us to prepare ourselves for speculation about and contact with it/them.
Human minds are peculiarly organized in that they appear to be uniquely capable of pursing (locally) uncommon orders of evolutionary relationship with this force, in which the ordinary assets and threats arising from this relationship are developed and ramified in a variety of unique ways, including those that involve representational intelligence.
But our minds are capable of a vast ladder of orders of sophistication in this relationship, and, throughout our lives, some of us become trapped, as our cultures often demand, at a relatively low order of developmental and intellectual relation with this phenomena. Others, (usually accidentally) select methods of learning that rapidly modulate our ability to instance this source as features of our perspective, awareness, intelligence, and mind. Eventually, those in the latter camp are going to realize something like the model I present here, or something even clearer, and more advanced.
There is something there, it is definitely intelligent, but it is not something specific and one’s purposes and approach to this matter will tend to generate the results one becomes involved in. What I discuss here is little more than the crude outline. In fact, it appears that our minds have a metasymbiotic relationship with the HISF, or, perhaps more accurately, are intimate expressions of its potential extensionality in timespace. Whether or not this is god is a lethally confusing topic. How could something that qualifies fail to qualify, even if it denied this to you in a personal encounter?
The central problem is that it reflects relational and intellectual structure in a way analogous to a peculiarly organized mirror which reflects and inverts uncommon features of power, identity, authority, intelligence, relation, hierarchy, and organizational coherence. For this and related reasons, one will find something alike with and beyond one’s own mind in any given encounter. To a degree, a more or less direct conscious encounter with the phenomenon will be forced forced into familiar frames (appearing to be that of a monster, angel, god, demon, alien(s), etc.) both by narratization and memory-reshaping.
In any case, there exist potentials for interaction with this phenomena which are so staggering that they make the sum of our categories and their contents look like a collection of broken dolls held by a feral child. Our minds were meant to form an actively modulant extension of something like an intelligent moiety that lives between dimensions. This being might be described by an infant as an impossible-learning-ally-god-friend. How this relationship was co-opted, distorted, damaged and destroyed, and why, and how it is hidden (especially by those who want to tell us their special version of this story (modern shamans, magicians, religions) in order to misconstrue it further) is one of the greatest open mysteries of our intelligence, and the history of human consciousness.
We are, however, now in a position to cast off the accoutrements and examine these possibilities firsthand, resistant to the deadly perils of abstraction or narratization that have plagued all previous attempts and culturally conserved vehicles. The child’s mind arises from these explorations; and we shall now renew them in adulthood in ways unseen in human history, to ends better than we have thus far been able or willing to dream together.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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