SpaceweaverFri, Jul 31, 2009 wonder-ly: I am glad for the opportunity to further explore a-territorialism.
Territory is a concept that belongs to humanity's Neolithic heritage, where it began as a highly effective method of relating and managing survival supporting limited resources. In the evolution of culture and the modern mind, territorialism was transported by means of our metaphor machine to virtually every domain of human experience and human thought. By that, the majority of these domains are described and conceptualized using a territorial style of minding. Creating definitive and rigid borders, emotional attachment through ownership, zero sum interactivity, are examples of such a style. Remarkably, the primary patterns underlying human individuality, the so called 'self' entity you mention and the patterns guiding the bonding of individuals into social organizations, are all strongly deriving from territorial metaphors. Furthermore, the very way we form abstract concepts is basically by consolidating territories within mental spaces.
Indeed all of these only reflect on the immense utility and effectiveness of territorialism across many dimensions and contexts. It can be said that it is one of those concepts that profoundly guided the evolution of human thought and the image of being human (through the construct of self) in particular, for millennia.
The proposition of an a-territorial model of mind is an aspect of an evolutionary path which departs and eventually leaves behind territoriality as a primary organizing principle of our mental spaces. This is indeed very futuristic and seems almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, I believe that if we aim at an open ended evolutionary path for humanity, it is also inevitable. The reality of progressive hyper-connectivity combined with accelerating diversification exerts increasing pressures on our territorially derived imagery and mental-emotional organization. See for example the dissolution of gender identity, family structure, the definitions of life and death, the dissolution of cultural, societal and political borders through the internet, increasing moral ambiguity, the convergence of man and machine and many more symptoms.
A paradigm shift towards an a-territorial existential narrative for the future human is a top down conscious reflective process starting with the way we form concepts and images. As I already remarked above, it is a component of a new kind of model of mind, a new kind of humanism and of course a new kind of self (and self description) as being the organizing pattern of an individuated emotional-cognitive gestalt which is not necessarily anchored anymore to a distinct biological organism.
Developing the idea is of course a work in progress. It is still in its embryonic mostly undifferentiated phase. But there are some clues: as I mentioned in the post, one of the potentially interesting directions is searching for a-territorial distinctiveness. Making distinctions and drawing borders are very basic operations in the way we form ideas and descriptions and in the very way we generally construct representations. If we could just change our image of this abstract process, for example, to realize borders (between ideas, between concepts, between images, between emotions, between individuals etc) not as delimiting a territory for one thing to be distinct from all others, but rather as permeable selective membranes of interactivity, our whole model of mind will spontaneously undergo a profound transformation from territorial organization to a-territorial open-ended distinctiveness. Ownership will disappear, emotional clinging will disappear, rigid absolutes will disappear and, most important of all, our understanding of identity and otherness will become fluid at all dimensions. Distinctiveness will become a matter of self-organized aesthetics.
wonder-ly: I am glad for the opportunity to further explore a-territorialism.
Territory is a concept that belongs to humanity's Neolithic heritage, where it began as a highly effective method of relating and managing survival supporting limited resources. In the evolution of culture and the modern mind, territorialism was transported by means of our metaphor machine to virtually every domain of human experience and human thought. By that, the majority of these domains are described and conceptualized using a territorial style of minding. Creating definitive and rigid borders, emotional attachment through ownership, zero sum interactivity, are examples of such a style. Remarkably, the primary patterns underlying human individuality, the so called 'self' entity you mention and the patterns guiding the bonding of individuals into social organizations, are all strongly deriving from territorial metaphors. Furthermore, the very way we form abstract concepts is basically by consolidating territories within mental spaces.
Indeed all of these only reflect on the immense utility and effectiveness of territorialism across many dimensions and contexts. It can be said that it is one of those concepts that profoundly guided the evolution of human thought and the image of being human (through the construct of self) in particular, for millennia.
The proposition of an a-territorial model of mind is an aspect of an evolutionary path which departs and eventually leaves behind territoriality as a primary organizing principle of our mental spaces. This is indeed very futuristic and seems almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, I believe that if we aim at an open ended evolutionary path for humanity, it is also inevitable. The reality of progressive hyper-connectivity combined with accelerating diversification exerts increasing pressures on our territorially derived imagery and mental-emotional organization. See for example the dissolution of gender identity, family structure, the definitions of life and death, the dissolution of cultural, societal and political borders through the internet, increasing moral ambiguity, the convergence of man and machine and many more symptoms.
A paradigm shift towards an a-territorial existential narrative for the future human is a top down conscious reflective process starting with the way we form concepts and images. As I already remarked above, it is a component of a new kind of model of mind, a new kind of humanism and of course a new kind of self (and self description) as being the organizing pattern of an individuated emotional-cognitive gestalt which is not necessarily anchored anymore to a distinct biological organism.
Developing the idea is of course a work in progress. It is still in its embryonic mostly undifferentiated phase. But there are some clues: as I mentioned in the post, one of the potentially interesting directions is searching for a-territorial distinctiveness. Making distinctions and drawing borders are very basic operations in the way we form ideas and descriptions and in the very way we generally construct representations. If we could just change our image of this abstract process, for example, to realize borders (between ideas, between concepts, between images, between emotions, between individuals etc) not as delimiting a territory for one thing to be distinct from all others, but rather as permeable selective membranes of interactivity, our whole model of mind will spontaneously undergo a profound transformation from territorial organization to a-territorial open-ended distinctiveness. Ownership will disappear, emotional clinging will disappear, rigid absolutes will disappear and, most important of all, our understanding of identity and otherness will become fluid at all dimensions. Distinctiveness will become a matter of self-organized aesthetics.
Hope it makes some sense.
to be continued...