Third Reality of Man Ch 4: Awakenings in Utero...

“Open the pod bay door Hal.”

          “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave...”

We’ve imagined it a dozen if not ten dozen times, the moment our technology takes on a life of its’ own and refuses to serve us in the manner to which we wish to remain accustomed.  We’ve imagined our technology turning on us like a wolf pack, we’ve set technology as the synthesis of government and religion awarded the status of an emerging God complete with temples and rituals.  There is no shortage of examples in modern works of fiction where technology is the platform from which some  self aware and self serving extension of the human persona commences to conquer the species which served as the template of its' creation.  Of course what evolves to become reality will be more surprising than any feat of imagination captured as an entertainment, truth is always stranger than fiction.

To perceive evolution at its’ work is no small accomplishment, and even more difficult when you yourself are a player in evolution’s effort.  To realize that evolution is in the process of demoting you from the top of the food chain is an intimidating thing, hard on the ego, harder on the mythologies.  But challenging or not when evolution goes active someone needs to keep an eye on the proceedings for several very good reasons, chief among them evolutions’ very uncertain success ratio, particularly when your level of life could easily become a collateral casualty of one of evolutions' many failures.

The relationship between the collective entities and the host individuals makes it obvious their fates are fully intertwined, as fares one so will fare the other.  Equally, the nodal nature of the collective entities, comprised as they are (considered from the ceHuman’s perspective) of many semi-sentient entities makes it most likely the gestation and maturation of ceHuman and the various daughter collectives will not follow some continuous function as does an individual human.   A great many of the components of maturity are already present within the collective awaiting only a catalyst of translation to enable quite discontinuous jumps in maturity.

The most primal of the collective entities, ceHuman, is of course as old as the human race.  The base definition of being a human being, as opposed to say a Bonobo of the ape family, has been present since the beginning.  Of course this definition is so broad as to be functionally meaningless, it encompasses the entire history of mankind.  For the majority of that history the humans lived in small troops, lived without any great ability to modify their environment, in point of fact for the majority of history mankind lived as a prey animal struggling for simple survival competing against other far more competent creatures.  Only the fairly recent advent of symbolic communication allowed the humans to begin advancing up the food chain, to rise above being a prey animal, to assume to a soul and a status of something more than animal.

This thought is perhaps most succinctly stated in the Bible in the first chapter of John.  Thus spoke the ancient sage and prophet: (John 1:1) "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  Somehow I don't think this was motivated by any literary arrogance but was rather an attempt to set into symbolic form an understanding that exceeded the limits of any vocabulary available to his time.  Seems John was asked to do that on more than one occasion.  It isn't entirely clear if modern thought is ready for such a concept for if there is also truth to what Genesis states, that Man was created in God's image, then by inheritance humanity is also a creature of Word.

It becomes an interesting excursion into the abstract to seriously consider the implications of such a thought in the context of the collective entities, for the most basic nature of a collective entity is indeed contained within the concept of Word :  a symbol representing some facet or factor of the shared reality become self aware within the context of that reality.  

In the case of we humans there is of course a physical presence we can point to and say "this is us."  We wear bodies of flesh and blood, nerve and bone, and yet this is not the defining characteristic of our kind, many other creatures share in these attributes.  The defining characteristic of humanity is found in the nature of our communication one with another, the ability to transfer to another of our own kind some portion of our inner reality of perception blended with imagination encoded into symbolic form to be reconstructed, reconstituted, within the inner reality of the recipient.  In short the defining characteristic of being human is the presence of Word  within our reality.

Some might argue that intelligence is an equally defining feature of the human being, and yet the case of the feral children contradicts such an assumption.  Regardless of other environmental factors when a human is reared devoid of symbolic communication the resulting creature, while still possessed of all its' inherited intelligence, is a fundamentally different creature from a sibling brought to maturity exposed to and enlarged by the shared inner realities of those who nurtured it. 

There is a time in the life of every human being quite analogous to the very recent history of the collective entities.  Allow me to return to Genesis, and the writings of John, for both mention a common concept: "In the beginning..."   In the beginning?  What?  When was that?  There is little doubt for a human being the first glimmerings of awareness occur before birth in the times when the only external sense stream is sound, a heartbeat, strange rumblings and vibrations in the dark.  The little one comes to know awareness, and sleep, but time has little meaning for the events to mark time are simply not present until there comes the moment when the universe begins to contract at the threshold of life outside of momma.  Gestation for the collective entities of course will be quite a different process, but still, logic gives there must be a transition between the first flickering hints of awareness and the finished entity interacting with its’ host humans and the other collectives. 

The birth of a new CE is not at all a clear cut single event, in fact from present evidence the word birth might well be misleading.  Nature has arranged several ways the young might enter mortality, the arrival of a new CE might well be better compared to a creature hatching, or even more likely better compared to the mitosis seen among the single celled creatures.  Nor is the term of a CE’s gestation an understood function, with no clear cut moment of conception to mark a beginning the idea of measuring gestation  across a span of time is meaningless. 

For the time being the lifespan of a new CE must be defined by some initial and obvious event marking its’ emergence onto the stage of human affairs.  From the empirical demands of life the most likely candidate for such an event would be the first time that entity actively contested the will of another of its’ own kind to secure or protect any one of the three primal demands.  For the CE's as for all mortal creatures to live is to compete for life.

To perceive the emergence of a new CE means looking at the deeds of humanity with a bit of a shifted perspective where the events of note are no longer related to matters of national vanities or advancements in technology but are rather when major shifts in attitudes are observed that cross the national boundaries, cross all levels of class and caste to establish a new framework of self definition serving the same functions as the original. 

The most clear cut example I can offer from history of the condensation of a competing definition into a new collective entity would be the emergence of ceProtestant from ceRomanCatholic.  History gives that the event was motivated by a failure of the parent collective entity, ceRomanCatholic, to defend the rational, the causal, elements of its' own definition when a significant number of its' hosts adopted contra-definition behaviors. 

To express the same thought in more conventional vocabulary:  when the visible behavior of some critical number of Catholics gave evidence that hypocrisy had corroded and eroded away the ethical essence of the concepts a significant percentage of other Roman Catholics used in the self definition they put before their God for judgment   that percentage broke away from the Roman Catholic church and established a competing organization to protest the damage done to the deepest levels of their faith.

This event was not an overnight thing, history details the progression of events leading up to Martin Luther.  For our purposes that period of time would represent the gestation of ceProtestant, the time it spent in utero.  The actions of Martin Luther would perhaps be the best marker of ceProtestant's emergence onto the stage of history as an active entity, the birth if you will of a new collective entity.

The gestation of ceProtestant covered a significant span of years, it took a while for the ideas to circulate, for the insult done the consciences of the devout to reach such  proportions as to overpower the social momentums and psychological conditionings of the culture to the point they'd rather risk damnation defying the most omnipresent authority of their lives than assure themselves damnation by remaining loyal to the authority that had betrayed both confidence and conscience.  It took a while for those of like mind to find each other and realize they weren't alone. The folks in Martin Luther's day actually had some time to think about things before they needed to make a decision.  But then again, in those days the fastest communication at distance possible was no faster than the speed of a fast horse. 

That was then, communication at the speed of horse.  But this is now where the effective speed of communication isn't limited by the physical traverse of the message but rather by the rate at which any given human can ingest and integrate a thought  delivered almost instantly world wide.  The next chapter of this series, "Warp Four: Engage"* will deal with the psycho-social implications of a great many such situations  saturating the ever more quantum-folded emotional environment of mankind, the population explosion of the collective entities powering the ever increasing complexity  of human history.

…to be continued…

*(with a tip o' the cap to Gene Roddenberry, Captain Picard and all the trekkies out there)

for convenience all essays in this series are collected on the page titled

"The Third Reality of Man"