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Written by Bob Guyer
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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.
The underlying reason for viewing force we create as an environmental factor is that evolution is a biological process that passes characteristics from generation to generation and natural selection responds to the environment making species adapt to change over time, thus life persists through time and environmental change. Technology can’t be passed genetically and is a wide spread and powerful force in our modern world. Just because we have created it through our biological capability and our invention of writing that has allowed knowledge to accumulate does not bring it within our biology and make it anything other than an environmental force to which the laws of biological evolution apply.
Some of the force we have created is directed toward supporting our individual and collective biological survival, sanitation, food production, refrigeration, cooking food, protection from extremes of the weather in the form of clothing and shelter, medical services and a few other basic necessities. Much of the use of the extra-biological power not used to enhance biological survival has been focused, one way or another, on human social relations, particularly rank hierarchies. This use reflects an identity and systems approach that is exclusively focused on human entities and our interrelationships with each other as if we were not an inseparable part of our biological milieu and we don’t have power that exceeds our bounds and is in effect a force we use and a force that affects our biological milieu.
Extra-biological power isn’t private in any meaningful sense except the fact that it can be used by an individual, just like, soil, water, and air. What is truly private is within the skin, and that isn’t even absolutely private as the skin boundary is semi permeable as well. Our individual genetic material is private in the sense that each individual is the owner of it that can choose to attempt passing it on to someone else in the form of sexual reproduction, but if it were truly private reproduction could not take place because the genetic material from either potential parent could not combine.
Our as our creation and use of Extra-biological power expands in its trans-species effects on the living parts of the planet and the non living aspects of the planet that contribute to the promulgation of life our systems that manage that power must become proportionally increased in their bio-democratic dynamics. Bio-democratic in the sense that I am coining the term means emerges from a fourth truth that emerges from the three basic realities of consciousness, biological inherence through the mechanism of semi-permeable boundaries, and extra-biological power. The additional factor is that extra-biological power is not contained within the private sphere of the entity and is therefore not managed through evolution.
The implications of this for construction of system that manage extra-biological power is that as the effects of this power expand the biosphere needs to be included in the decision making about how it should be used. The only way to do that at present is to consult the biosphere through observation and research, as we have no other conscious species with which we can directly communicate our observations. Our structures of governance then need to expand to effectively represent the whole living system of our environment, which now includes the fact of extra-biological force. One way of incorporating this into our current process of democratic government would be to expand representation to include human representatives for the non-voiced living constituents who are effected by our production and use of extra-biological force.
We could add representation based on relative biomass of various living forms land plants, water plants, land animals, water animals could be four easy to define groups that would have proportional representation.
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Political System