The concept of evolution is recent but its catch-phrases dominate how my generation perceives its place in the universe and the pecking order of species. Much as the Batman phenomenon is a pop culture trend floating on the top of the oil slick of consumerism, the language stemming from Charles Darwin's theory percolates to the surface of our current worldview in bumperstickisms: survival of the fittest and natural selection being the two most succinct phrases we use daily to boil down the how and why, not just of our genetics, but of the very rationale for our existence.
This document is a step toward giving evolution some new language. If you watch the most recent
Cosmos series with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you'll find the producers scripted his narration by relying on bumperstickerism. This is how he explains why polar bears are white like snow: gene mutates white, nature selects white fur that blends in with snow because it protects the species. End of story.
Really? How does consciousness fit in to evolution?
We have reached a place in our history where we can transcend self-consciousness and gain a mastery of our neurophysiology. Consciousness, a condition of advanced life, is becoming more conscious. It was a mere 140 years ago that the cataloguing of physical trends led to the theory of evolution and only in the last 100 or so that psychology rose up from the ashes of astrology to generate more "scientific" language for describing mental qualities and conditions and providing a newish basis for dream interpretation.
With technology bringing brainwave analysis to the consumer, we have reached a fold in the evolution of consciousness, a self-retiterative fractal cove where the mirror-like nature of consciousness can take a look at itself from a new perspective. Technology is the harbinger of this perspective, and I propose that first and foremost the concept of what is technology and, subsequently synthetic, be re-examined. We can start by returning to earlier senses of the word "plastic," a word Darwin utilized to describe the malleability of life forms.
Revolutionize your world by revolutionizing the language you utilize every day. If you dumb your life down through bumperstickerisms borrowed from Darwinism or from any other dilution of pop culture science, you may not be able to seize the grandeur of your existence and capitalize on your consciousness. Let's revolutionize language and make a manual for proactive evolution.
In my novel-in-progress, titled Zoonomia, the main character becomes a new species by insisting to those around him he is not a Homo sapiens but a plastic monster. In what some might call my field research, I have thoroughly enjoyed taking the subway trains in New York City and looking at people as nothing other than plastic monsters.
This novel is really an exploration, even a work of philosophy, regarding how we acclimate ourselves to "reality" through language and ultimately explain our lives away. This is a problem of the current paradigm, in which monetizing and data mining is paramount to exploring and even exalting in being alive and conscious.
Language, however, is extremely plastic, just like consciousness.
In our new paradigm of future now, where someone like me can fabricate my own EEG equipment with a 3D printer and simple microcontroller--and explore deeply, for example, the narrative light phenomenon known much more simply as the dream, I think we will have the opportunity to reintroduce plasticity to the language of evolution. Not as something cheap and recyclable but eternally malleable.
Go look at yourself in the mirror. Are you not a plastic animation? Perhaps even a plastic monster?
More about my work is here:
www.metapulp.com
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