I want to introduce a term from molecular chemistry as a way to think about minds and intelligence. The term moiety refers to something whose actual identity is locally incomplete. There are other interesting ways to state this. For example, that my identity is actually an emerging wave of relation between factors local to me, factors local to participants and contexts, and the astonishing interplay that happens when the peculiarly recursive metarelational participation of a living being is involved, particularly a human being. “...This definition allows for a recursive nature, where moieties may contain functional groups which may contain moieties, etc. almost without limit (by definition, a functional group or moiety must have more than one atom, and the combination and structure must be of interest in itself).” As an example, I would like you to think of your mind as something shockingly complex, but locally manageable. In this example, your brain and its peculiar nature and structure (which actually includes your body and, moment-to-moment, myriad relational and physical extensions that go largely unnoticed, unnamed, and unrecognized) is an organ involved in eliciting your ‘mind’ which actually participates in every phenomenon in all of time... to -some- degree. In other words, mind must be at once a local, personal phenomenon, and also a transphysical, transtemporal phenomenon of endlessly distributed peculiar moieties throughout all of timespace, organism and matter. You are at once entirely yourself, and nothing like yourself. You are at once a peculiarly sophisticated instance of all moments of mind, and all possible and existing minds... and a very simple, locally obvious human person. I am asking you to imagine this, and to think of the term ‘moiety’ as a way to refer to the fact that you accessibly participate in (infinitely self-distributing) extrinsic and intrinsic moieties of relational co-emergence not only in the moment, but in all possible moments. This is the nature of mind. Consciousness as you experience it, and thought, are epiphenomenon of this. They are like a single hair sticking out of a star of actual power and activity. The possibility of mind emerges from intricately transrecursive (transcendental) moieties and their enstructuring effects on focal subjects, ramified and informed by the infinite subtleties of context, environment, and culture. Interestingly, human culture has no reasonable models of this, except those that are either pseudo-religious, and thus stupidifying, or hyper-abstract, and thus too academic or sophisticated for easy access. I am working to learn how to change that... because the actual nature of human intelligence is more sophisticated and astonishing than the sum of our stories, religions, and sciences. Until we begin to understand this, our own cultures must necessarily prohibit the recovery, discovery or development of -nearly all- of our relational and intellectual faculties. These faculties in their native, naked function have the capacity to resolve any problem or set of conjectures with nearly impossible speed, effectiveness, and immediacy. Any set. Now. And they are locally accessible to any human person of ordinary intelligence and passion. But they are not allowed by the models and ideas we continually remind each other of under threat of dismissal, destruction, or neglect. Moieties. Groups of cells with multidimensonal recursive relations with other groups. It’s nature’s ‘quantum mechanics’ but with minds, instead of particles. It’s us. And more than we can say or yet imagine.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:56:10 +0000
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