EXRHIZO

New insights from evolutionary developmental biology and complexity science, offer liberating possibilities for society and technology

"I'm not a spiritual person," my roommate said, and best I could tell the word was meaningless to him. It comforts me to think: He must not have suffered much, working in biotech, with a secure attached relationship. Me, I was stuck, unlike him and his Coachella [TK] celebrating bros, MDMA didn't rebalanced my troubled brain.

At that time, I had been searching for a decade, with a mind split between the rational empiricism of the new atheists and Jungians that had comforted me at 19. I was ripe for conversion and struggling with women. I needed something new. Fortunately, I was in the San Francisco Bay, so one trip to burning man later, at a meetup, I found Joe Hudson.

Over the course of a number of retreats, I developed a new world view, informed by non ordinary states of consciousness, I made direct contact with a greater purpose and it changed my life.

But, our arch reductionist Dawkins is clear: the universe is purposeless, and if I experienced it otherwise, there are sound evolutionary reasons for self deception, caught as I was in an emanation of the new age, of the human potential movement, from the outside view, I'm a naive fool.

To reconcile the inner and outer, It's time for another decentering. As humans have deepened our conceptions of the natural order by stages we have dropped self centering assumptions. Galileo fought to establish the earth circles the sun. Darwin revealed our ancestors as unclothed apes. The next decentering will confront the nature of mind, but before we deconstruct our hero, let's marvel at the exquisite subtlety of human achievement.

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Navigators of the Pacific

Westerns when faced with the immense difficutlities of crossing the open ocean, without compass or clock, couldn't belive what the pacific islanders were capable of. Sailing isn't a straight shot affair, for a navigator of the Pacific to cross 120 miles between x and y, he would been to tak a zig zab pattern to his destination, through the unpredicable course of weather, the day and the night, all to find a destination only a few miles in diameter.

Amongst the micronesians, navigators held great estame. Unlike the shamans or other chiefs, they held thier position without ostentatios social defferent authority, but with a casual and modest assurance.

This standing was based on long apprentice and deep experience. While a younger apprentice would lay on the boat feeling the waves, tracking with trepidation the waves, or wind, the master navigator, stood with a relaxed assurance.

The islander conception of navigation contradicts are common shared understanding. For the navigator, once they cast out to sea, it is the islands that move, while the boat stands still. To the left or right of their destination, they mentally track islands that move faster or slower, and use these reference points to time and adjust their angles.

It would be forgivable, to judge their conception as wrong, and [tk] directly challenged their conception, saying that if they point to islandX from Y and then to X from Z, that those two lines intersect at X. The navigator had difficulty accepting this possible decentering, and we imagine easily, point to the sun in the morning, and point to the sun at night - those two pointings intersect at the sun! It violates intuition, and this underscores a key insight into cognition, and will help us show the way to

The first navigators were faced with a deep mystery. Humans must have first learned how to use various materials to help them swim, drift wood, crafted into prototype boats. The weather too would have occurred first to their basal cognition, and then later with systemizing intelligence, weaved into patterns of instruction.