Horror in the Face of the Divine

A magic world comes into being when one is driven by hidden forces to act in a certain way, or as in the example of the pea weevil larva, the innate path appears to be a magical phenomena. But is not the larva impelled to burrow into the pea based upon instinct? Uexküll says ‘It is quite sure that we are here dealing with an activity which, though conforming to a plan, is yet utterly senseless from the weevil larva’s point of view, for no sensory stimulus of the future beetle can possibly reach its larva.’ (Uexküll,68). In the case of the little girl who shouts at the match stick “’Take away the witch, I cant bear to look at her horrid face any more.”’(, 67) her magic world seems vastly different from that of the larva. While the larva is acting upon something innately determined, and as yet hidden from view, the little girl experiences a kind of magic that seems to arise from her imagination. That I feel is the distinction which I am having trouble with. How can one take imagination into account with regards to an insect that is compelled to burrow into a pea? Uexküll doesn’t elaborate upon imagination as playing a part in the magic world of a human beings, and to me that is a crucial part of it, or at least something I would like to explore further. It is surely baffling how one species can be innately driven to take action regardless of any external forces that might dissuade it. It is magic perhaps, and yet how can that be compared fairly to the case of a human being? The magic world of the larva and that of the little girl seem to me so vastly different in nature that one simply cannot compare or contrast them; however, the problem is also due in part to what Uexküll presents to us at the beginning of the book. ‘We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed’ ( p.14). One is bound by the confines of her umwelt, unable to conceive of the umwelt of any other living creature. There is no objective reality beyond the subjective one which each of us inhabits. The umwelt of anyone or anything is an impenetrable and in many ways magical world simply because it is unknown and irrevocably closed off to us. I suppose this is why we cannot really speak of the magic world of either the larva or the little girl, because how could one climb out of the umwelt in order to peer into someone elses? It is unknowable and shall remain so, it seems. Could Teilhard’s theory of the noosphere as the unification of all human thought provide a way in which human beings might see beyond their respective umwelten? He states, ‘We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. (Teilhard, 252). Is the final stage of noogenesis, the transcendence of umwelt on a cosmic scale? Uexküll presents to his reader the definition of umwelt, saying, ‘We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.’(p.6) So in a certain sense the examples of the larva and the little girl, absurd as it seems to place them in juxtaposition to one another, is evidence of the magic that is everywhere amongst life and which remains inexplicable. It is however all the while quite evident that there are several differences between Teilhard and Uexküll which may make it impossible to equate their philosophy. Uexküll was investigating not only human life, but he studied in depth the world of animals, while Teilhard wrote of human consciousness. I should hasten to restate my question, asking instead, if the noosphere could be the transcendence of all human umwelten? This might result in total disaster, unspeakable damage might ensue, for as Uexküll warns us at the end of the book when speaking of nature ‘Should one attempt to combine her objective qualities, chaos would ensue.’(p.80).

Magic Worlds

A magic world comes into being when one is driven by hidden forces to act in a certain way, or as in the example of the pea weevil larva, the innate path appears to be a magical phenomena. But is not the larva impelled to burrow into the pea based upon instinct? Uexküll says ‘It is quite sure that we are here dealing with an activity which, though conforming to a plan, is yet utterly senseless from the weevil larva’s point of view, for no sensory stimulus of the future beetle can possibly reach its larva.’ (Uexküll,68). In the case of the little girl who shouts at the match stick “’Take away the witch, I cant bear to look at her horrid face any more.”’(, 67) her magic world seems vastly different from that of the larva. While the larva is acting upon something innately determined, and as yet hidden from view, the little girl experiences a kind of magic that seems to arise from her imagination. That I feel is the distinction which I am having trouble with. How can one take imagination into account with regards to an insect that is compelled to burrow into a pea? Uexküll doesn’t elaborate upon imagination as playing a part in the magic world of a human beings, and to me that is a crucial part of it, or at least something I would like to explore further. It is surely baffling how one species can be innately driven to take action regardless of any external forces that might dissuade it. It is magic perhaps, and yet how can that be compared fairly to the case of a human being? The magic world of the larva and that of the little girl seem to me so vastly different in nature that one simply cannot compare or contrast them; however, the problem is also due in part to what Uexküll presents to us at the beginning of the book. ‘We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed’ ( p.14). One is bound by the confines of her umwelt, unable to conceive of the umwelt of any other living creature. There is no objective reality beyond the subjective one which each of us inhabits. The umwelt of anyone or anything is an impenetrable and in many ways magical world simply because it is unknown and irrevocably closed off to us. I suppose this is why we cannot really speak of the magic world of either the larva or the little girl, because how could one climb out of the umwelt in order to peer into someone elses? It is unknowable and shall remain so, it seems. Could Teilhard’s theory of the noosphere as the unification of all human thought provide a way in which human beings might see beyond their respective umwelten? He states, ‘We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. (Teilhard, 252). Is the final stage of noogenesis, the transcendence of umwelt on a cosmic scale? Uexküll presents to his reader the definition of umwelt, saying, ‘We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.’(p.6) So in a certain sense the examples of the larva and the little girl, absurd as it seems to place them in juxtaposition to one another, is evidence of the magic that is everywhere amongst life and which remains inexplicable. It is however all the while quite evident that there are several differences between Teilhard and Uexküll which may make it impossible to equate their philosophy. Uexküll was investigating not only human life, but he studied in depth the world of animals, while Teilhard wrote of human consciousness. I should hasten to restate my question, asking instead, if the noosphere could be the transcendence of all human umwelten? This might result in total disaster, unspeakable damage might ensue, for as Uexküll warns us at the end of the book when speaking of nature ‘Should one attempt to combine her objective qualities, chaos would ensue.’(p.80).

Animal nature

There is nothing definable or tangible about the barrier between humanity and the animals. Animal nature is inherent in human nature, however humanity has fundamentally distorted animal nature, for between animal nature in humans and that same nature in animals there is a vast and essential difference. What we percieve in ourselves as animal nature, when brought into the realm of human consciousness, takes on an extra quality, what Uexkull describes as a magical reality. Thus man has always seen his animal side as dangerous, impure, chaotic, even evil, in a way that the natural world itself cannot be. In mixing the brute physicality of nature and mankind’s infinite talent for abstraction, mystification, creation, and destruction, humanity has muddied its own waters. We appear to ourselves as a conflagration of the “higher” of “human” side, self-consciousness, reason, creation, achievement that goes beyond the scope of nature, and the “lower” animal nature, the immutable forces of life, evolution, and the pure physical existence from which we emerged. Thus even as mankind sees itself as superior to animals it nonetheless is able to perceive, by the very same self-reflexive capabilities that define it, its own inescapable impurity. Animal man is worse than an animal, he is nature given the freedom to act, to create and destroy, and to define and execute good and evil, wonder and terror beyond anything nature could produce. In a sense, then, what we see in the non-self-aware physicality of the animal realm is an enviably pure and innocent state of existence. For, not knowing itself as separate from its nature, the animal is able to live without contradicting itself. To us the animal appears conscious of itself as one, complete being, as opposed to the chaotic multiplicity of human consciousness. Thus, when Agamben writes about the miniature from a thirteenth century Hebrew bible, which portrays the righteous after the last judgment as anthropomorphic figures with human bodies and animal heads, he plays upon a fundamental paradox within the way we, as human beings, see ourselves. The idea expressed in this image that at the end of history, when mankind has completed its long and arduous act of self-negation, the pushing out of the animal from the human, there with be a breaking down of the barriers between animals and men, reveals this paradox. Mankind has, since its emergence from animal existence, desired of some level to re-unite with the animal realm. Whether this unity is achieved, as in the Hebrew tradition, by the complete banishing of the animal from the human (an act that, inasmuch as it returns man to a state of unity with himself, complete self-knowledge, and complete innocence, returns him to the animal state) or through some more primal return to animal consciousness by embracing the fluidity and chaos of our own animal nature, it is nonetheless essentially a regression into the purely physical world. We shun animals, domesticate them, laugh at or pity their ignorance and suffering, yet on some level we envy them, and despite everything we have created, the world we have built for and around ourselves, we cannot help but wonder if they are, ultimately, happier. 

A Continued Thought on Evolution in Real Time

“The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself” (Teilhard, 221).

          This quote (as well as the paragraph above it in The Phenomenon of Man) reminded me of an article I came across over a year ago entitled: Top 10 Possible Next Steps in Human Evolution. The fact that we may be able to predict our evolutionary paths is a testament to how (self)conscious humans have become. And it is the evolution of consciousness itself that has allowed us to make these predictions. 

          What really jumped out at me from these “possible” paths in human evolution was number 5: Brain Rewiring. The author, Eva Fauen, (whose credibility I know nothing about) writes that our memories have already adapted to the way knowledge and information is stored and we more readily remember where we read or see something rather than the actual content in its entirety. “The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself”. She believes our reliance on technology may reduce the need for a very detailed memory in humans.

          As I attempted to remember where I had first found this article (which sort of contradicted the claims that Fauen makes in that I could only remember the content and not where I had found it…), I came across several other pieces of writing on the same topic. Is Google Wrecking our Memory? By Clive Thompson maintains that we evolved to use “transactive memory” thousands of years ago. By this scientists mean we store information in our significant others, family members, coworkers and friends depending on their strengths. So that, in theory, when we work together, we are able to more efficiently remember facts or details of past events. This phenomenon is an unconscious action taken by the human brain. It happens casually: a group of friends studying for a test will collectively cover more content than a person studying alone, a couple recounting a past event will jog eachothers memory to create a more complete and detailed description, etc.

          

          Thompson claims that we now use search engines like Google to fulfill our transactive memory, "We’re dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people—and, now, other machines". This statement makes me wonder how this type of human reliance on machines will affect a collective consciousness (if there is one), collective knowledge and most importantly collective memories. Will entire memories be stored in machines?

          Juan Enriquez thinks so, "It's not completely inconceivable that some day you'll be able to download your own memories. Maybe into a new body. And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well. And, this might have just one or two small ethical, political, moral implications. Just a thought..."

          Though he jokes about the implications of such a technology, the same questions are relevant now.

          It seems as though the very machines humans have brought into existence could be changing the course of our evolution. So now the same circularity, addressed by Teilhard, in using human consciousness to talk about consciousness may become true of our relationship to technology. Which will advance which? Or who will advance who?