UR Part of It

The dominant cultural influences of our times, Christianity, Science, and Capitalism, define a range of human identity that leaves us collectively with a vision of personhood as being separate from our deeper experience of spirituality in religious terms, being an objective material observer of experience in scientific terms, and being a private engine of material acquisition in an industrially powered social economy of monetized exchange. This leads to a sense of self as irreducibly disconnected and separate from the living natural world and the subjective world of deep experience out of which religious and spiritual systems emerge. Social and political change advocacy, and eastern spiritual thought, often focuses on opposition to the sense of self as hyper individual and argue for non-individual or collective definition and experience of self as an alternative. I do not see this competition as winnable by either side of the debate and thought it would be valuable to validate the reality of both ways of relating to self and world and integrate them in a framework of philosophical precepts.

In this exercise I will start with defining objects, later working back to awareness of objects, then to shared awareness and meaning in a field of interrelated objects, and finally to an exploration of the nature of human consciousness, in a way that provides a foundation for development of a way to bridge the gap between humanity and nature.

911 didn't change everything, that's just a political slogan, but human extra-biological force amplification really did. Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, concludes that rates of development of modern civilization depended on geographic differences in productivity of the soil, water, climate, plants, and animals. Building on this fundamental biological capacity, recent developments of science and the industrial revolution have resulted in escalating amounts of extra-biological force being available to human beings. This has changed how we live with each other and how we relate to the natural world. The biologically destructive aspects of our collectively increasing power are becoming ever more obvious and now require our full attention.

Using a biological entity model as a symbolic representation of the complex system of interrelationships that make up the total ecological system of life on our planet is a more accurate way of describing the relationship between human beings and nature than the previous models that portray nature relative to the needs and fears of human beings. This gives the earth entity status and places human beings within that entity as a part of it.

Each species and each individual entity within each species plays a role in the web of life that is part of the living entity of planet earth. The Autopoetic theory of life proposed by Maturana and Varella defines living systems as a ?those systems which (a) maintain their defining organization throughout a history of environmental perturbation and structural change and (b) regenerate their components in the course of their operation. Autopoietic systems realized in the physical space are living systems.? Each individual entity within a species is a self-maintaining and producing process and as such has a degree of autonomy within the context that it arises. Each species is a collection of autonomous individuals that share similar characteristics.

All behavior can be judged relative to the purpose of expanding the scope of consciousness in the service of life. Imagine a scale that has a zero as a neutral point where an action is neither positive or negative in it's effect, negative 10 is the most negative point on the scale, positive 10 is the most positive point on the scale. Individual actions that effect single individuals would occupy the middle range of the scale from 0 to 3.3 in either a negative or positive direction, group action would range out to the 6.6 range of the scale, and systems would range all the way out to 10 on either side of the scale.

Consciousness, extra-biological power, and inseparable biological existence are the primary facts of modern human life. Identity and human systems need to adapt to the fact of extra-biological force and develop systems to manage the effects of extra-biological power that exceed the bounds of our biological self. The following will describe the rational, and some principals, for the development of a new governmental system that takes these three primary facts into account. I will refer to this new system as Bio-democracy.

Once a biological species achieves self-consciousness and is able to create power they can control and direct that exists outside their inherent biological capacities, they must develop an identity and organizing systems that enable them to use that power as a generative conscious trans-species force in nature. To the degree that the extra-biological force effects the living world, which includes humans, the concept of the governed and the constituents of a governing system must expand proportionally. If such conceptual and operational expansion does not occur extra-biological force will be used as if it is a private genetic based characteristic that is an adaptation to the environment, like faster reflexes or larger teeth, which can be passed through reproduction and used to compete for our species niche within our eco system. The error in this way if looking at the power we produce does not have a large environmental impact at low levels of extra-biological power but is magnified by increases in power as it accelerates. Human industrial activity induced Global climate change is one of the most obvious signs that our level of extra-biological power production and how we use it has become an environmental force and not a private biological possession.

Given all the problems we face environmentally and socially what do we want the future to look like? What is your vision of a positive future?

Let yourself imagine what we could be and share that vision in the comments section below.