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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
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PART 4: Bubbles
Proportionally (scale) if the Political Bubble is the size of an atom, the Historical Bubble is the size of molecule, the Evolutionary Bubble is the size of a seed, and the Cosmic Bubble is the size of a solar system. (2002©Paolo Soleri)
Bubbles: virtual "membranes" approximating boundaries of different domains. The domain embracing the immediate past and the present I label the Political Correctness Bubble (PCB). The domain embracing a past reaching back into human history I label the Historical Fitness Bubble (HFB). The domain embracing (reaching) a past reaching back into the 3.5 eons of evolutionary history of life on Earth I label the Evolutionary Coherence Bubble (ECB). The domain that encompasses the cosmos at large, reality, I label the Cosmic Relevance Bubble (CRB). All the bubbles have one and only one point in common: the present, ever changing, as it consigns itself instantly, instant after instant, to the past. One's assessment of things "present," and consequently her course of action, is influenced if not defined by the position in the bubbles domain where the person is "located." For instance, the behavior promoted in the PCB is more than often devoid of meaning for the behavior that the ECB would promote. The discrepancy denotes an incoherence ill-fitting the evolutionary drift. Therefore, an incoherence if prolonged might conclude in the death of the evolutionary drift itself. The bubble expedient can help to find the appropriate, coherent compass in occasions big and small if we never forget (as we habitually do) that we, as stardust, will find relevance -- that is, grace -- only in the conclusive act of total knowledge, that is, in the resurrectional conclusion. No conclusion and a very specific conclusion, no grace or meaning. Only a fatal endless unraveling via an endless chain of lost occasions. Feasibility deprived of desirability. 2/17/99 The Historical Fitness Bubble (HFB) Waste, pollution, environmental disruption, and segregation have been the shadow projected by our presence in search of food, shelter, and dominion. But for most of our presence on the planet, let's say 3 million years, the impact has been absorbed by the vastness of its biosphere. No longer and mainly because of two agencies: population and Howness. Population growth has been the direct consequence of Howness: How to make something into something else in gender and in size. The scientific and technological revolutions have been nothing short of magic, putting to shame the shaman and the witch doctors of animism. What has emerged at the very beginning of the creational process of reality is Howness. With the quasi-miraculous tools of depth vision, larynx sound-making, and the versatility of the hand (from tool-making to caressing to piano-playing) in their double task of executing the brain direction and as maker of the brain itself, our species has opened the safe of the universe to find in it the dim but indispensably rich ancestry of our presence. In terms of historical fitness, we should carefully calibrate our endeavors in ways that seem to work for and not against the progression of more Mind being extruded from matter, a theotechnology of sorts. (Technology is present at the very beginning of things, of the universe itself, that is.) The price of civilization and of the extraordinary fruits it has generated, science and technology, as we regard them now, has been too high, especially if we now think of plunging into the rematerialization of life promised by hyperconsumption. The historical fit we may be seeking seems to relate more to the not so noble drives history has showered upon civilization and culture. Personal opportunism, greed, hypocrisy, envy, ill will, hatred, the enemy at every crossroads, etc., and in the past two centuries or so, racism and xenophobia. Civilization was the invention of cities in an almost runaway mouth-to-tail cartwheeling of the mind and the toil of generations succeeding generations. The Urban Effect is not really the invention of man from point zero. All organisms are Urban Effects, the unbelievable coming together of the miniaturized and the complex. Man as a hyperorganism is the coming together of trillions of events, all spatial events, by the way. Without an implosive miracle of such an extravagant nature, no organism would exist in the biosphere. (The microchip is now accomplishing a similar feat on the silicon matrix.) Getting away from the city is not only counter-culture and counter-civilization, it is counter-life. One has only to imagine what the global hermitage generated by unleashed cyberspace would deliver. Three billion enclaves (fragments of families) "served" by 3 billion rubber-wheeled stock. Self-segregation "served" by impossible logistical grid in perpetual gridlock. Suburban and exurban sprawl are promising the Garden of Eden and are in the process of delivering despair: physical absurdity and mental anguish. We must halt the folly. 3/10/99 The Evolutionary Coherence Bubble (ECB) It was with the first sparks of consciousness millions of years ago when tiny flakes of the noosphere began to manifest an utterly new presence on the planet. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the first to use the term "noosphere," and the electronic envelope now being knitted around the globe is a powerful presence. Cyberspace produces not only a great wealth of information but also great financial wealth. Now this new source of wealth put to use will greatly influence the destiny of the species and of the planet. What is going on now is paradoxical. The computer, an ephemeralizing instrument by definition (that is, in its ability to generate intellection via Miniaturization), is on the side, so to speak, generating a new powerful wave of materialization. A large chunk of it is poured into the form of habitat that shamelessly blankets our "beloved" nature with what I call the global hermitage skin. This exurban metastasis taxes life, human and not, greatly. It is a devolution into the sink of materialism that might turn out to be fatal for body and mind. Eventually, the sooner the better, we must turn to the city, one of the most crucial inventions of Homo sapiens, and seek in it the guidance toward a transcendence of the hedonistic dream constructed on the delusion of the Garden of Eden. A Garden of Eden stuffed with all the magic gadgetries the super shopping mall, virtual or not, throws relentlessly at us from infancy to death. A congested civilization is, by physical laws, a civilization of gigantism, as our so-called cities testify. The one million or so Phoenicians' metastasis is occupying 400 square miles of desert and "growing." Such gigantic pseudo-structures are logistical nightmares, wasteful, polluting, and segregational. There is no evolutionary coherence to be found there. There is delusional "well-being" draining away the core of the best gift we are in the process of creating for ourselves and for the reality from where we come: the animation of matter. The Evolutionary Coherence Bubble shows wrinkles. Its pressurization is defeated by the hole we might punch in it, in our hyperproduction-hyperconsumption drive. Slow down and ponder could be a good slogan for the first steps into the millennium. The Cosmic Relevance Bubble (CRB) With the gusto we exhibit in improving the wrong thing, that is, encouraging and improving wrongness, we are digging for ourselves personal and "luxurious" graves, and the cosmos couldn't care less. In fact, closer to us, the biosphere itself wouldn't care less. Mindlessness has no cares as it has no aims unless we define as aim the population opportunism of the species. Absurd as it might sound, only reality filtered by the brain-mind might eventually give aim and meaning to a reality foreign to even the notion of them. If ever brain-mind reaches that point, the cosmos will be infected by the bug of transcendence. From there on is the Mistero Tremendo. Only the Urban Effect can take us from here to there, the singularity of intellection becoming a cosmic event. The cosmos could be transfigured by such intrusion. 1/26/99 Arcology and Bubbles In the PCB, arcology is politically incorrect. It goes against the American Dream and its bucolico-nostalgico images necessarily based on hyperconsumption. In the HFB, the call is for the urbanization of populations for many reasons. Produce more wealth and financial flux, generate a sense of belonging and of sweaty defense, and maximally, to take Homo erectus into the domain of Homo sapiens, starting with a written alphabet and reaching into cyberspace. The homosphere taking shape courtesy of MCD. In the ECB, the coherence is in the carrying on and transposing the Urban Effect emblematic of any and all organisms and/or populations of them, to the habitat of man, a hyper-organism of sorts, more than ever dependent on Miniaturization-Complexification-Duration to develop its own inventive, imaginative, anticipatory, and, now and then, creative assets. All things that only the urban presence is able co generate. The tribal mode is a static mode even when, out of environmental graciousness or because of it, it becomes a hedonistic way of existence. In the CRB, the track biosphere-noosphere could or ought to see an exponential ephemeralization of reality to the benefit of a remotely possible revelation of the ephemeralizing reality to itself. 4/5/99 Cyberspace and Bubbles A clear instance of Howness coinciding with Techne, and in the extreme, is cosmos technology, the ultimate bubble, the triumph of Howness. The PCB In a high pitch of transformation, silicon Techne is the Pandora's Box of information being mined explosively for "fractalized" understanding. In the PC mode, we give in, no questions asked, to the new ephemeralizing tide, and a lot of detritus is foaming at the very crest of it. The excitement is contagious and understandably so. The Techne is nothing short of "magic." Even the corporate giants are giggling while fracturing. We are in the anything-goes phase, grace will come later?! The HFB The alphabet and the book are the vociferous ancestry of silicon. It is hard to imagine civilization without them, at least the technoscientific civilization of the last part of the ending millennium. European-American history is the history of Howness coming of age in exobiological terms from the water wheel on, naturally boning up on the extravagantly complex cradle offered by the technobiology of the flesh, the protracted, blind food-chain venture. That we now toil around attempting to go from mineral to consciousness "directly," leaving brain and flesh out, is a sufficiently incredible leap of know-how and faith. Never too soon if this feat were to succeed and all the animistic constructs of 4 million years of human history were to fall, falling angels, and eventually become historical curios. The ECB If it turns out that the backbone of evolution is to bring the mineral up to the mental, which possibly makes the mental no longer the actors in the evolutionary progression but the author of what comes next, then anything that fuels the powerhouse matter-Mind fits the coherent postulate, that is, that Mind might "absentmindedly" leapfrog from mineral to Mind -- dangerous, but if it is possible, it is desirable. The flesh is too tender for the monstrous challenge of cosmic space. It might have to surrender its primacy to that which cyberspace seems to offer in a crude, oh so crude, way at present. The CRB It is where the initiation to noncarbon-based intellection has or could have a field day, a cosmic field day. I call this "initiative" the animation of reality, to which ought to follow the revelation of such animated reality to itself. The slow apprehension of itself (reality) transforming into self-knowledge and in a possible acceleration of the process out of its own incremental will to access the condition where knowing is Being, the self-revealed reality of a conclusive act (the Omega Seed). 4/30/99 Outer Space and the Cosmic Bubble The cowboy theology has infected outer space via the Lucases and the Spielbergs. It is the one single and singular malignancy that eventually will have to be quarantined. We, the species, are the lone cowboy facing the adversary, the cosmos, but we will have to leave the gun and its progeny in the dead-man corral of political correctness and historical fitness. The ECB has to find immunizing ways before we step into the CRB. Our bullets and our missiles have to metamorphose in the space habitat, small cities of light moving in the endless darkness of cosmic space. We will probably not find enough glamour in the quest for an "equitable planet." Part of the human family will have to exit it. An unarmed cowboy galloping into the Mistero Tremendo of space, heroic in its technological splendor, to find the neonoospheres and to ignite the cosmos itself with in tellection. Then from there looking back to the planet cry our eyes out at its own beauty and utter loneliness. A speck of green and blue light drifting away from an eventually dying sun. As long as the male is at the controls, the gun-toting judge of the peace will prevail as it is prevailing in the USA 2000. Equity and excellence will also be out of bounds. The corral keeps them out, the corral of coercion. By going out into space, the cowboy might find in the glamour of the ventures the dimension he now is deprived of. The dimension of religio surrounded as he will be by the indifference and deadliness of reality at large. The feminine will then have a better chance. The male toy gun made feckless. The cost of the space "adventure" would put a dent in the plutocratic binge we seem to be in favor of, in favor of the lean civilization we might want to enter for the grace of equity and excellence: the art of living. We would "escape" into space to cleanse our act and from there proceed, "back to nature," the planet and us in it, and forward to make the cosmos live and eventually conscious. Glamorizing mayhem and blood-spilling will not be taken out of our system by the meek and the saintly. It will take the menace of the raw, immense space to siphon away the cowardice of the gun from the fabric of the macho man entropy. The loneliness of space may prevail on the aloneness of violent man and his killing by proxy (gun) power. To remain a coward or to break out and find companionship in peoples and stars. Religio is not for boys and guns. Feminine! We need your gentleness and compassion. Addressing the wrongness plaguing Homo sapiens now is a noble task. But unfortunately the addressing is just about marginal, and it is oriented by political correctness and also by historical fitness toward the worsening of the present condition. Hyperconsumption is one of the best indicators of that. Its perniciousness is exemplified in the automobile frenzy we live by. Two hundred and twenty-two million private vehicles for 260 million people is a tragic condition that the rest of mankind wants to emulate. It is incoherent, and the ECB is in a state akin to consternation. It would be if its task were the well-being of the human genome. In fact, if it could care, it still wouldn't care less. 5/8/99 It is delusional to think that the hyperlean frugality of Homo sapiens' engines can metastasize with impunity on the relatively vast landscape of the planet's skin. The hyperconsumption tide is on a collision course with the emergent, lean phenomenon of consciousness, give or take 3 million years. This is more or less the rationale from the evolutionary coherence nested in the CRB. 5/28/99 If informing becomes unimaginably fast, decision-making will not accommodate the biotechnology, the flesh, not for long anyway. The light of consciousness will outshine itself, but its loco will not be in the turtle speed of anthropos but in the lightning speed of a new "chemistry." The reconfiguration of space, that is, the Becoming will, MCD gone critical, create a universe where equity will have no significance that we, creatures of "carbon," can conceive. The whole 4.5 eons of life's evolution becoming overnight a small museum piece. The "overnight" itself an archaic saying that our interpretational turtle concocted. The "triumph" of MCD would make D passionately transparent!? Or will the information machine incarnate a new dimension of frustration, the bully machine in the china shop of the ingenious, nostalgic, sentimental, molding-away human world? Pity, a charitable attitude, novel to the bullying around, will have to tend to the transition. The PCB would turn to dust. The HFB would lose its mooring. The ECB would have to revise its tempo. The CRB would perhaps have a giggle, a happy sign of compassion gone cosmic, a modest exorcism of MCD gracious about its own genesis: the dance of space. So "informatique" the computing monster will turn out to be a loving monster? The answer may have to come from the esthetic, the esthetogenesis of reality, knowing grace? 7/30/99 Millenniums and Bubbles Within the PCB, the Y2K phenomenon is emblematic of the Western-generated punctuation of the Becoming. "Even" computers are getting into the act. The urgency of the before and after -- before millennium, BM, after millennium, AM -- puts the animistic imprimatur on what to do and what not to do. The injunction presented by the dust-to-dust predicament forced underground by the manipulative power of Homo technological has a rebirth of phoenician size with the Y2K crisis. Somehow the slogan comes back in new garments from dust to flesh to silicon (and its progeny, the PCB fancy-fashionable garment). The silicon and progeny shakeup is a sort of revarnishing of the Historical Fitness Bubble, its indispensable precursor. The scientific-technological revolution accelerated in the North American continent by the exiled European colonizers. Historians, the a posteriori wise men and wise women, pinpoint the Protestant ethic: Labor and love thy God. Nurture and fit man to "God's love," to the age of the automaton and the birth of the thinking machine. In the ECB, the whole machinery of evolution might get the shock of its life, or at least an intimation of things to come, like the taking over of evolution itself, first by the Howness of the carbon-cycle magic, then by the silicon and progeny magic. "The play goes on," says brave evolution. The actors are changing roles and the whole hierarchy of values and their personae. There will be a "tearing apart" before the emergence into the new epoch if animism accepts a grand finale, asY2K might be the anticipatory bell of troubles inside the house. "I am young," says the machine. "1 make mistakes," she says. "But look," she adds, "knowledge and wisdom might be inched further; if you embrace me, you carbon little sissy will gratefully oblige." The CRB may be pulled into the act almost precipitously if the silicon and progeny youngsters are up to their unanticipated task. The millennium and all of its Catholic-Protestant arrogance clothing a purely expedient new beginning resonate through the cosmos. If, if, if ... 8/2/99 Arcosanti (Is an Urban Laboratory for a Lean Society (AULLS]) and Bubbles In the PCB, it is a sort of anachronism. Here we are, Westerners all bent on buffeting and pampering ourselves into the new millennium. We are in a hurry. We even dismiss the end of this one by robbing it of a full year (the year 2000). So proposing leanness is as popular as proposing a wood stove in a shining kitchen. Besides, marrying AULLS with the free-enterprise credo tight mean a loss for democracy and a possible breakdown of the ecofinancial miracle we are experiencing (for a small minority yet). For the time being, AULLS is like swimming against the flow. It is not politically correct. In the HFB can be found all the pros and cons of distributing limited resources to large groups of people. Ego and ignorance constantly and effectively put up obstacles to the march toward Utopia. The "extremes" of socialism and communism, the second in particular, committed suicide at the hands of unscrupulous and cruel leaders. On a broader take, the animistic entrapment has vigorously exorcised the equitable for the sake of parochial and pretty capricious gods. Capitalism, the least capricious of them all, should have the chance of turning evolutionary if it could find the way to become worthy of the Love Project still in its troubled infancy. AULLS in HFB is more of a form(ality) than a contextual imperative. Leanness remains for millennia more of a necessity than a virtue. Better to light the candle to God the thrifty than die of envy, destitution, and hunger. In the ECB, the lean becomes the thing. In it, the profligate is not the end product, the lean is. In living reality, the extravagant expenditure of all sorts of resources to produce nonabortive results seems to be almost a sacrificial constant for the sake of progenies that are the miracle of thrift and leanness. "Dust" made into life and consciousness via reconfigurations of ounces or pounds of "simple" compounds. Micro-organisms, nuts, bread, rice, flesh ... It seems to be saying that if ever there were a future, the future belongs to the lean up to the exotic singularity of the nothingness of space containing all of its own astonishing history. That is why and where AULLS can be found in the CRB. In its loose infinitesimality, it might broadcast the right sound, the sound of premonition and grace. The lean is the bestness of Howness in which the superfluous is "personified" entropy. And the esthetic is there in the eye of the essential, the most "effect" with the least means. The formula holds true for both the beauty of nature and the esthetic of brain-d. 12/4/99 The Lean Hypothesis Becoming reality is space, the unknown agency, in metamorphosis. Space is unknown to us as it is unknown to itself. Unknown to itself because it is self-creating. For a possible if remote aim., space could (eventually) know itself (and us in it). Until then, space has not the wherewithal to define itself. It knows not. As reality is space, space knows not. The Mistero Tremendo of self-creation. A CRB initiative. 4/14/99 To have an impact in the CRB, most of our sphere of influence has to be automated, that is, no longer controlled and constrained by the will. It has to carry itself on and on with no external mandate. The only master it has to observe is the self-imposed stop sign. Only an automated intellection can pervade the cosmos at large, and only an automated intellection can find the ways into transcendence (i.e., the next step into automation) and by it, keep the door open to the next automation and on and on. 10/18/99 An organism's orchestration is on automatic pilot. It seems to be one of the virtues of innerness. If the noosphere were ever to become an organism, then it would have to run on automatic, an awe-full thing to contemplate. A fearsome beast with the makings of an angel. A space-made automaton ready for space, the cosmos. CRE had better be on alert. Things may never be the same again, not at least before Duration, full Duration, I mean. If ever the Cosmic Relevance Bubble were to contract, infinity itself would be out of business. But it was never in business in the first place anyhow. That is one of the self-limitations of space after all, of the plenum of space. 10/22/99 First we must rid ourselves of the notion that space is a sort of universal container. Space is the plenum of reality. It is primeval and the only stuff of reality. Reality is the ever changing geometry of space. From the animistic prospect (the belief that the cosmos had an intent that is at the core of its origin), the whole process of development is a process of specialization that in turn is the expedient way by which Howness creates reality. The bubbles, as part of the same, segregate in such a development process the Political Correctness Bubble, the Historical Fitness Bubble, and the Evolutionary Coherence Bubble. But from the original intelligence point of view, the view from the Cosmic Relevance Bubble, those other bubbles and their content are expedience, not substance. If we drop the animistic bias and dismiss the "creator," superfluous and therefore pretentious, just a fruit like many others of the expediency of Howness, then specialization is he bootstrap methodology of a cosmo-democracy. The noble opponent of theocracy and its vested interests. As expedient (devices) the bubbles can be judgmental: The PCB says, "I am the center of the universe." For everything will be ordained by the PC source. The other bubbles can operate similarly. The HFB mandates a history of reality totally determined on anthropos terms. The ECB would ordain the greening of the universe. Reality as a cosmic mold, CRB, could be the expression of the "anxiety of transcendence" via a slow germination of the self-awareness reality is in the process of creating. 1/8/00 Minimalism and Reductionism Minimalism is the posture that wants to do the most with the least. In the cosmic relevance bubble, this may turn out to be the only way to get at the revelational conclusion, space (exponentially) transmuting itself into Duration while shrinking into naught: The less (space) becomes less-er to produce more and more (the Big Crunch scenario). Reductionism is the posture that proposes the idleness of more than what is strictly necessary without being preoccupied about the meaning of the aim of such leanness. In terms of Howness, minimalism. and reductionism agree. In terms of desirability, minimalism is the song of songs. Reductionism is mute. It is as if most of space in its tiny bits, quarks, muons, etc., were reciting mindlessly the mantra "Be Thyself" that makes for the operational constancy of reality. The laws of nature are mantra imprinted. But that recitation does not stop at particles and subparticles. It is a habit carried on throughout reality, throughout the cavorting of space; and the Becoming depends on the power of the mantra that allows for the appearance of the new, the Becoming in action. The joy and the anguish to become different on a mantra of conservatism. Life is the battlefield where conservatism (mantra operational) and animation are face to face. So it is that you and I are brothers and sisters of the "original" hydrogen cloud. We are made of it and of its mantra, "Be thyself," and of all the escapades space has devised to produce the Becoming. The countermantra is "Becoming Other." Mutually complementary or adversarial. 9/17/99 Since in my hypothesis space is both the content and the container, love, as the rest of reality, is not a manifestation of space or an emergence from space, but simply space at its exotic best. Enter the bubbles: the CRB of love. For water, the indispensable space configuration, for life to be present there is the attraction of two drops of it on a marble top so strong that, space permitting, they fuse "instantly" into one, and the distraction of running and running away from itself to moisten anything in sight that is not its own constitution or impervious to its invasiveness, rubber for instance. A remote hint of what the Capulets and Montagues as legitimate space manifest would do in medieval Verona. A lot of work for space to move from the watery to the bloody and, needless to say, from the bloody to the passionate-compassionate. If the water-carbon cycle is anticipating the vaster cosmic cycle of self-awareness with the eventual triumph of attraction over distraction, then love and religiosity con-fuse into each other. It would turn out to be universal and compounding knowledge, the bubble of self-revelation, the cosmic bubble of resurrection. Naturally, the journey through Verona would be just a flick of fire spent by (bloody) love on its way to the spaceless plerome of its successful holding onto itself fully and finally.
Now we experience love personally, locally, parochially. Then love would be experienced (in Omega Seed) catholically, cosmically, conclusively, that is, at the exhaustion of space in the "Know thyself" of the cosmos (the geometry to end all geometries).
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