mind

An animistic conception of mind

It is not possible to distinguish mind from matter. A mind is the

product of the semantically logical interaction of unequally energised
ideational complexes within an organisation of ideas. A material
object is the product of the mathematically logical interaction of
unequally energised energetic attitudes within an organisation of
energetic situations. An idea is an element of experience. A material
object is an experiencer. Its dynamic is constantly being altered,
registering events tiny and vast sequentially. Sequence is a logistic.
Attitude is the disposition of judiciously selectively semantically
conditioned emotionally charged energy according to intention.
intention is conditioned response to the attitudes around us.

Just as what we think of as matter and energy, viewed from current

scientific perspectives, are one and the same, with matter being one of
an infinitude of dispositions of energy, so in current cognitive
psychological terms, thought is a flow of energy encoding ‘memes’ –
experiential units, or memories, which are sustained attitudes. the
commands that determine a computer’s behaviour are a flow of energy
encoding memes, too, in pretty much the same way.

The scientific assumption that mind is a product of particular

biological processes that are distinct from processes involving
inanimate matter is failing to satisfy fastidious scientists. The idea of
inanimate matter that sometimes arranges itself into complex
structures that at some point of complexity engage first 'life' and then
later 'mind' is no longer convincing. Biologists attempting to home in
on the precise point of structural complexity at which the heretofore
inanimate matter springs to life and, much further along, that the
heretofore insentient biota become sentient, and at what point
sentience is sufficiently structured to be called mind are more and
more bewildered, not less and less, the more they learn. The idea
seems to be that, while thresholds exist, all the qualities of all beings
are determined as if genetically by the inner nature of their
component parts in negotiation with their environment and not
suddenly incurred as a reward for achieving specific patterns of
complexity. Life, sentience and mind are in-dwelling in the atom and
all material beings are mentalities.

Mystical interpretations of phenomena based on the idea that we have

souls that 'inhabit' our material bodies which die when they depart
also fail to satisfy. The idea of the soul that incarnates by infusing
itself into an independently derived body which is itself 'just' a
complex of inanimate insentient molecules arises from observations of
out-of-the-body experiences and communication with the dead. But
human beings are capable of projecting, singly or simultaneously, a
vast variety of discarnate portions of themselves, or perhaps I should
say, versions of themselves; and are not normally 'dead' or mindless
while doing so.

A great deal of legitimate science has been done on the subject by

non-Western scientists, and some Western studies have confirmed
some tiny aspects of their work. Our bodies undoubtedly do actively
seek, mindfully and spiritedly, to engage an evolving 'soul' while still
in the womb, and are susceptible to possession by a large number of
different souls throughout their lives. These apparently discarnate
beings can be understood in terms of a larger context that doesn't
deny the mentality, psychicality and spirituality of the material body
that hosts them, or the materiality, carnality and even mortality of
beings such as souls and spirits. While some of them are symbiotic
with our bodies for a while, we are only just beginning to become
aware of the complexity of the human being and have not even begun
to imagine what the implications of our new discoveries are for our
understanding of other animals, plants, planets and stars when we
begin to extrapolate.

Mind is not a thing, but a system of processes and the atoms of all
matter participate in processes that can truly be called mental.
Understanding the inner qualities of atoms is a major scientific study,
and astounding progress has been made. But within the context of
current conceptions of matter which assume that there is a real
distinction between the animate and the inanimate, atoms are
regarded as inanimate, will-less, not ‘smart’, and so silly mistakes are
being made which hamper investigations in vital directions and
encourage misinterpretations that push research up monumental
blind alleys, and those which they doggedly address tend to get
mistaken for scientific truth.

That the subatomic particles that atoms are composed of are

themselves complex micro-cosmoses clustering within an atom is
quite clear. But you get the idea that some scientists are beguiled by
the tininess of atoms and the super-tininess of their inner
components to the point of imagining that they are working close to
the limits of detail, the tinier particles being too small and too
ephemeral to have much structure, and can therefore have only the
very simplest of minds. It's as if they are still looking for the simplest
building blocks of matter, which is VERY naive of them, and I will
show you why.

Atoms are not 'small' and humans are not 'big' except within a naive
humanocentric system of reference. Even within this, if you take a
line running from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large and
place humans (quite arbitrarily) at the 'mid-point' (of course there isn't
one) the Big Bang and all its consequences and implications (which I
am calling a cosmos, and which many scientists are still calling the
universe) some distance to the right and the hydrogen atom some
distance to the left all in the right proportions, you still have an
infinitely long line upon which to place hypothetical entities much
larger in proportion to our cosmos than our cosmos is in proportion to
our atom; and on the other side, there are an infinite number of
orders of smallness in proportion to which our hydrogen atom is al
but infinitely vast.

<----------|--------------------------------|--------|--------|---------------------
----------|------------->
tiny S A H
B L big

S and L are points selected for the sake of argument, A represents the
size of an atom of hydrogen, H the size of a human, and B the size of
what our scientists are calling the universe.

The hydrogen atom at A is several times bigger in proportion than an

entity small enough to be situated at S than our cosmos is to us.
There'd be plenty of room for whole clusters of these S entities to
scamper about in a cosy little corner of a single boson, or to teem like
ants over the surface of a meson, to colonise even the streams and
strata of the glitzier sort of gluon and to do so within a vast ecology of
fellow entities great and small and of course they'd all be logically
interacting. There'd be no limit to the minuteness of detail,
complexity of structure and crebrosity of mathematics, presenting at
least as great a variety and number of tractable mathematical
problems and violently intractable ones, and everything in between, as
our cosmos offers us. As soon as the experiential data of one of these
begins to impact upon another, or with any of the other multitudinous
and multifarious entities with which they share that vaaaast ecology,
there'd be mind, nicht wahr?

And you could make S or L the central point and work from there, and
there'd always be points an infinite distance to the left and right and
so on all the way –turtles all the way down, if you like, and up.

(From the big end, maybe the hypothetical entity at L would be

wondering what the blue blazes could possibly be going on inside
them dinky li'l Big Bang things (one of those things our scientists call
the Universe), of which all the gigmagae within all blooglattls within
all snijdanks within the flazwoodles of all the mega-giga-macro-
atomoids that make up the Universe-As-We-Know-It are composed,
along with a whole menagerie of other sub-giga-magic particles they've
so far discovered in their impressive and hugely expensive laboratories
somewere on the surface of the Super-Planet Kwah in the Super-
Universe of Zyth of which the big bang and all its consequences is a
mere atom. 'Let's smash it open and find out,' they might be saying,
'or knock chunks off it and think up all sorts of fancy names for
chunks of different sizes and quality of radiance. Yeah, that'd be good
science.' But that's a thorny ethical thicket I'd like to avoid right now,
and thankfully, it's not the topic of this article.)

Of course, the time scale I've taken for granted emerges for us as a
result of species-specific selections taken from an infinitude of
possible selections of reality-mapping critera. It’s humano-specific,
the result of our minds negotiating with others within our
environment, via our relationships with a wide range of animals,
plants, spirit-beings, stars and beings as yet unimagined or known to
us only in fantasy or shamanic visions, whose exchanges with us
practically constitute those realms of thought that is specifically
human, however much it might overlap with those of other species.
These selections shape our experience of our environment, and
condition and direct the effects we have on our environment, and they
determine our sense of time as much as our sense of place, form and
dynamic.

But although we help to condition everything we experience, we don't

'create' time or space or any of the logistics we discern, we only
perceive selections and we subject our selections to interpretations
that condition our relationships with them more than the objects of
our perceptual selections. So the sense we have that one thing is
smaller than another derives from an interpretation of their
interrelationships that is based upon criteria the logistics of the
selection of which are utterly mysterious. Are they indeed arbitrary or
not, or even negotiable? It is unreasonable to suppose that only one
could possibly be valid; and within others, our size scale would be so
much unintelligible maths.

We are like babies in cribs not yet sure whether the big, wavy, not yet
intelligible forms that come and go are something out there or
something we do in our heads, perhaps with our fingers, which we
have not yet proved for certain actually are those plump little things
that sometimes dance about in front of our eyes at the end of what we
think might be wrists, possibly our own.

Let's consider a hydrogen atom. Science writers mediating the hard

bits for us plebs are fond of tracing the life of an atom from its genesis
through billions of millennia of text-rich event to the present day
where it finds itself part of the duodenum of a bat in a cave deep-
dreaming the nature of moth wisdom from samples extracted from the
bat's prey, with a terrifying purposefulness that most biologists prefer
not to think about. Memory as a phenomenon is found in everything
from the water of homeopathic preparations through nicad
rechargeable batteries to angels, gods and the universes they partly
comprise, and psychics aver that an akashic record of all events in
any object's evolution exists and is at least theoretically accessible by
holding or focussing the right sort of attention on that object.
Humans have a vast amount of memory that our Primary Ego in the
Apparent world (which you might call the PEA-brain but it’s probably
best to resist it) never accesses, which includes swathes of data of
mega-cosmic proportions of which we we’re not even conscious at the
time. There's no doubt that the memory is there, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that an atom is aware of any of it.

Now memory is an interesting word. ‘-Ory’ is related to but not the

same as ‘-ary’ which means, something very like ‘array’. Library – an
array of books, commentary - an array of comments, ossuary – an
array of bones. If -ary means an array of, look at –ory. It usually ends
an adjective: auditory means arrayed for audit, for hearing;
exploratory means arrayed for exploration. But sometimes it ends a
noun: dormitory is an array of sleeping compartments, purgatory is an
array of purges, (or the place in which they happen). Memes have
only recently been discerned, isolated, named and studied as varmints
in their own right. So it's astounding that we have had such a
gloriously well-suited word like memory and its ancestors in our
languages since ancient times patiently waiting for us all to twig to the
notion that what it does indeed mean is an ‘array’ of memes.

Seen as such it becomes much easier to talk about it. We might

logically concatenate whole networks of memes selected from an array
of our own variously charged memes in constructing an outline
memory of an event from our childhood, say coming second in the
under-sevens sack race; and that isn't to say that an atom necessarily
concatenates anything according to any logical systems accessible by
us. There’s an infinitude of logistical systems and not many of them
are accessible to us yet. Given their internal complexity and the high
level of logical similarity from one hydrogen atom to another at least
from this distance, as participants in our Apparent Worldly chemistry,
it is monumentally unlikely that they're not doing it according to logical
systems other than those we use.

What memes are is a focus of much very sensitive enquiry and I won't
claim special knowledge. I'm happy to think of them as impressions
and clusters of constellated impressions that are maintained as
attitudes. That which receives impressions is sensory. An impression
is any detail of any event which impacts upon any medium. A single
hydrogen atom is continually receiving uncountable impressions from
every direction, and responding to its own internal events as well. We
can't doubt that an atom is sensory inside and out; that is to say,
sentient. Sentience isn't mentality, but mentality depends on
sentience, so some of the conditions of mentality are already to be
found in atoms.

But memories such as coming second in the under-sevens sack-race

consist of swarms and swathes of closely logicalised memes which are
interpreted as sounds, smells and images, sequences and scenes and
ideas, emotions, psychological implications and god knows what if you
wanted to go scrambling after its simplest building blocks. Would our
hydrogen atom be selecting from its staggeringly huge array of memes
as specifically as we do from ours, and supplying that much logic
however 'strange' to it and interpreting the result in self-sense-able
effects as we do? And if they did a whole array of equally complex but
utterly other things with aspects of being of which we have no
knowledge and we would never dream of, are some sequences not
mindful and others mindful? Theirs aren't, our are?

See our atom as an organism, i.e., an organised being composed of

logically interconnected parts that are enabled to function as a unified
system by means of exchange, feedback and mutual support and
control just as you find in a cell or, on a higher level, in a tree or an
animal such as a human being or, on a higher level still, in a planet
and so on to galaxies, cosmoses, clusters of cosmoses and outward
and ever outward in all directions for an infinite number of tortoises,
and that's without leaving our own time-space continuum to
investigate dimensions our brains allow us little cognisance of, though
our planet's mathematicians predict them and some shamans
describe them or at least their access points in terms of comfortable
familiarity. There is no reason to imagine that the internal organs of
the internal organs of the internal organs of atoms are appreciably
less text-rich than those of whole cosmoses, to wit: planets like Earth.
Any scene on Earth is a lot of pixels. I'm not convinced that the
cosmic is strapped for pixils to explicate vast amounts of intricate
detail within atoms. Complexity doesn't taper off to a featureless blur
as human sensoria fail to discern it. Letters don't blur on the page
when you can't find your glasses.

On the other hand, from a sufficient distance the earth with its sands
and soils, forests and farms, deserts and jungles, its stones, rocks and
mountains, grasses, trees, shrubs bushes and herbs, animals, birds,
people, car-filled streets lined with houses and all the richness and
particularity of our planet fade to a nacreous, greeny-blue, and from
further away almost all its output has become a dim sparkle, and
from a much greater distance it ceases to be distinguishable at all, if
we depend on human sensoria. We can no more assume that atoms
are made of relatively featureless energy than that the trees far away
are simpler and smaller than those close to us in a landscape.

Since one hydrogen atom behaves, chemically speaking, pretty much

like another, given a similar chemical environment; and since
behaviour results from the forces within a system at play with those
without, and those without are similar as specified above, then those
within must be similar or there'd be no consistent behaviour from one
atom to another. This indicates that the logistics in one hydrogen
atom are pretty similar to those in another. It is inconceivable that
there are no internal logistics, and they're not random. So there we
are: atoms are meme rich and ‘logisticated’ all the way to the last
‘gherkon’ (which is an entirely hypothetical, yet to be discovered
particle of exquisitely brief out-of- the-atom duration although of
relatively large size. It is probably even green and warty with an acid
tang and a texture like the inside of a tense grape, swarming with
their size-scale equivalent of our microbes and all made of micro-
atoms with whole populations of possibly but not necessarily horribly
high strangeness beings hard at work building we can't imagine what.
Perhaps it's made of 'cells' made of 'atoms' made of subatomic
particles - well of course it would be- but it probably thinks (though
not as we know it) it's a whole universe, with its rather leisurely big
bang located at its stem-end and the consequences and implications
ending precisely at the surface of its skin, except for its radiances,
such as light both self-generated and reflected, music, temperature,
gravity and who knows what politics?

Going back to the memory of coming second in the under-sevens’ sack

race, you might recall that I described the memes in the array from
which the elements of a specific memory was selected as loaded.
Emotional loading is one kind of loading. Significant indicators of the
criteria for our selections from the data on the basis of which we
construct our shared sense of the 'apparent world', vital to the
intelligibility of experience, have a different sort of loading. Those that
constitute access to other paradigms, or potential for growth or
change have others. Some are loaded for a variety of reasons not our
own. All these loadings are energetic. Memes are variously energised
and structured by their environments so as to deploy or store their
energies in various ways. Even Freud knew that, though he wasn't
using the term 'memes'. Logistics are the pattern of energetic
exchange, of flow, within any system. Energetic exchange determines
relationships such as bonds both chemical and logical (and within the
neurology of the brain these are sometimes one and the same), and
emotional (and within atoms as among humans perhaps at least some
bonds are emotional) and they also instigate activity and emotivity as
well, leading to change and growth or diminishment and the features
of life and death.

Ideo-energetic exchange among event impressions according to

complex logistics even begins to look like the fabric of the atoms our
cosmos is partly made of. It is life. It is emotion. It is psyche. It is
spirit. It is mind.

AWEN AWEN AWEN