The title of this chapter is taken from the lyrics of the theme song to a fine movie, the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway version of "The Thomas Crown Affair." If you've not seen the movie ( I recommend it for a slow Saturday night to be accompanied by a high quality light intoxicant… perhaps a brandy, or a light sativa… pick your poison of preference ) I'll kibbutz this much… it is essentially a case study in the psychology of success… and boredom.
The trajectory of this exploration has brought us to consider the internal psychology of the various collective entities. The question now in focus is how many of humanities quirks and kinks running out to full blown psychosis might have been inherited by these entities? It is a pertinent question given the relationship between the humans and the CE's. As fares one so fares the other, and as is well known to the mental health profession prolonged contact with any serious degree of mental illness is a risk. Crazy can be contagious.
Not surprisingly, these are same folks who will assert to you a good size chunk of humanity is, well, somewhat less than rational sane stable… to put it politely. But I'm afraid it would be fool's errand to ask them what sort of emotional environment the CE's might know or create for themselves. Why? Because for them to acknowledge the idea of CE's, and then consider the potentials for a less than benign circular reinforcement with their clients, their host base? That… would be a run of thought likely to discredit about half of what they think they know about the human side of the equation. For them that would be an utterly unacceptable risk to the emotional security provided by the academically cultivated certainty that allows them to work in the first place. Empathy gives they'd not likely be much help and very likely to attempt a squelch and suppress.
Seriously, put such a question in front of them and all you can really expect is to watch them buck like a rodeo bronc sidestepping and sunfishing at any and every opportunity while condescendingly vilifying whoever inflicted the discomfort on them with such a question. They know (admitted or not) just like you do that when you step into circles turning in spirals dizzy is to be expected, and dizzy is not something they can afford to be. So no.
Well, with the professional crew sidelined to a serious conflict of interest what is left for the do it yourself crew to work with? Well, what we always have of course, which are questions to test the limits of understanding so we know where to start looking for answers that might match.
To make a start… is it even rational to suspect collective entities might know emotion in any sense similar to what shapes the lives of their hosts?
Is it possible for them to even have emotions of their own since so much of what we know as emotion is based in and on the structures of our biology?
Might the prevailing sum of the emotions known by their biologically based hosts set the prevailing emotional spectrum of their lives, or does the transverse nature of their existence (hosted as they are on so very many human's of diverse emotional content) mean the human emotions average out to so near neutral a value they make little impact on their perception of life?
What might give evidence of how much impact human emotions have on the mental health and stability of the collective entities that help define the humans to themselves? Just how tight a spiral might we be talking about?
Strange questions perhaps, but very serious questions. The realms of emotion, feelings, are undeniably among the deepest and most powerful of forces responsible for motive and meaning, intent and value… primal power sources driving a self sustaining self aware homeostasis. In other words, factors that play huge in calling something alive in the first place.
To mount an exploration of the psychology of the CE's will demand an unusual set of measurements and markers. It is hard enough to navigate the inner realms of your own head without getting lost, to effectively navigate an objective trajectory across the psych space of a collective entity comprised of functional fragments of many human personas is a daunting challenge. It goes without saying such a navigation will need to work in more than three dimensions. But, with that said it is off into the realms of metaphorical geometry since it is equally obvious it all has to begin somewhere.
It has been a standing assumption in this series of essays, not to be changed at this point, that the most definitive evidence of self aware CE's involve cohesive social elements demonstrating what can only be called the survival instinct of living entities protecting their own existence against other entities of like kind when the older structure offers no more advantage to the component humans than does the newer structure challenging for dominance.
I would propose considering the assumption above as a first point defining an initial point of rotation, and opening a first line by rotating the vision 90 degrees to draw a line of compare and contrast between that point and the one other point where it is certain the CE's and the humans will share a common need, a common condition to instigate a set of common emotions: the spectrum of emotion involved with the ambition of survival.
From that first line we now have the ability to define planes, since even if the element in focus impacts both humans and CE's in their struggle to survive that element is not likely to be a point exactly on that first line, no. The difference in the scale and scope of their respective experiences makes that a very thin possibility. That element becomes a point-source (think environmental sciences for a weighted analogy of a psychological point-source) a bit away from the first line, and the line from it to the other two, just like in geometry, defines the plane whereon all three points reside.
Planer geometry… still a grossly simplified analogy of course, but… a point of view adequate to support the title of this chapter. You must have a plane to understand a circle, and where there can be a circle there can also exist a spiral given that the radius of the rotation is not a fixed value but rather one that varies to some other function of the reality it attempts to describe. With circles come arcs, a partial circle, and with arcs comes the potential to define the dynamic transforming the circle into a spiral. Both degrees of rotation and the rules of vector math (as it is used by the engineers and physicists to define the affect of force(s) impacting on some particular point at the angle the degrees describe) are now available in the toolbox of weighted analogies to attempt an understanding of why the radius began to change both where it did… and of even more import to these investigations… when it did.
And, to stretch this analogy one more notch: if in the process of working on that first plane-of-survival another primal point is found where both the CE's and the humans will, because they must, share a common motive to enable some degree of a common experience then a second plane has been created and the tyranny of the two dimensional is broken. At that point the investigation will be able to operate in three going on some yet to be determined Nth dimensional psych space where exists the possibility of real understanding.
This chapter did not get around to discussing the thought that inspired it, but it did establish the needed framework for such a discussion. So, as station control will tell the starships departing Earth for another adventure: "Lock control is released, you are…" the theme will be continued in the forthcoming chapter "…Free and Clear to Navigate."
...to be continued...
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