Organic Time Travel
For if time is an ejaculate of the nerves, then to alter an organism’s nervous system is to move it forward or backward in organic time. Accordingly, Ballard pictures genetically altered organisms displaying the tempos of macro-evolution (and even cosmic evolution) at diverging rates, with strange organs and spandrels from some future evolutionary event arriving early, expressed as mutations and strange sensory bulbs with as-yet-unknown usages and sensitivities
This ‘time-sickness’ afflicts organisms altered by intervention, but in Ballard’s stories it can also overwhelm characters altered by a changing environment, stimulated and aroused by ‘levels above [their] existing nervous system’. To experience the radically accelerating changes of our built environment is to experience the future coming early—which, again, is indistinguishable from experiencing the drag of the past—and this demands of us new appendages and new ‘forms of intuition’ [Organic Biological Intuition].
Spinal Catastrophism, MIT Press, 2019
Ok ok there seems that there's a lot to digest and a lot of funny words there. In order to fully understand and appreciate the fact that has 'already become' (JFC, there's a lot of tenses used here), we need to fully understand how species come into being or rather, new species become as new species thrives in the 'future environment' and the past species simply dies. Also how the more complex 'survivorship' demands, the more it gratifies a species' understanding about time and space.
In this article, we are not going to jump important steps so I'm going to try my best to explain in a language that is best to understand.
What is "Life", Exactly?
It causes itself to exist, and in so doing becomes more involved in causing itself to exist. This generates, spontaneously, proto-criteria for ‘failure’ or ‘success’ insofar as the system has now ‘defined’ itself by its propensity to stay within a range of acceptable states for self-reproduction and self-propagation.
An 'living' organism, must engage with the system/ecosystem, in order for it to keep living. In which the organism, must stay within 'acceptable states' for 'self-reproduction'.
And, since negative regulation is also feedforward control, a progressively more ramified responsivity to external stressors—the characteristic which, through the course of evolution, eventually leads to neural blossoming—is also, inevitably, the inward generation of time, the incipience of chronoreceptivity.
Note that, chronoreceptivity means a receptiveness towards a sense of time. In which ironically, all living beings on earth is aware of 'time', at least the concept of it, is mainly driven by an abiotic force which is the sun.
The sun, appropriately, is life’s inceptive abiogenetic stressor as well as remaining, to this day, its prime ‘zeitgeber’ (its circadian ‘time-giver’ in the parlance of chronobiologists) [1.8]. Provoked by such enveloping hostility, toxicity, and agitation, abiogenetic implosion into functional self-relation allows the living system to better present its own states to itself so as to gain feedforward control over oncoming perturbation [(anxiety; mental uneasiness)].
As trippy as it sounds, all living beings have its own 'circadian awareness', in which evolve from merely knowing the time into which it can decide to efficiently expands energy (think of a plant that has rhythms where there's daylight, they undergo photosynthesis, then in night they do water regulation and nutrient transport) to more complex as predatory behavior into which out of sensory perceptions (think of a fly) give the being a sense of chronological order of time (think of a lion that waits to ambush its prey).
This predictive core constitutive of all living process—highlighted from Maturana to Rosen—is testament to the fact that the organism exists and persists through its exposure, and anticipatory responsivity, to hazard [1.9]. Known in biology as hormesis, the idea is that intermittent exposure to environmental stressors provokes compensatory, adaptive, and beneficial response. Stress, whilst provoking the organism to retreat and fall into itself, foments ‘biological robustness’.
This applies at the cellular and macroevolutionary levels, so that the advent of the CNS can be explained as the phyletic progeny of such propulsive antagonism—because the CNS is nature’s organ of anticipation. [1.12] Crofts refers to this dynamic of environmental perturbations forcing ramifying feedforward responsivity as ‘chronognosis’, arguing that, in a sense, ‘all living organisms are aware of time’. He notes, however, that ‘chronognostic range’ varies with neural intricacy:
With the increasing complexity of metazoans, development of a nervous system, differentiation of organs of sense, and development of the head-tail polarity, and a brain and memory in higher animals, the scope of behavioural complexity also increases, and along with this, the complexity of mechanisms [for] chronognostic range. [1.13]
The most beautiful thing that arrived out of all these concepts, it amounts to basically saying, The experience of a Human life, amounts to the millenia of efforts of the universe 'trying' to experience itself. To the stress environments that pushes the development of more and more complex neural circuitries, initially out of the interest of species survival from planning and better cognition to escape predation and enhance awareness, to fold on itself after it escapes the need to continuously escape predation on its day to day life, the cognition gives birth to the existential crisis experience, out of the beings' capability to experience 'life' and understand its environment, far greater than its past species that has died and long perished caused by the cause of latent development of its neural systems. Simple as, yet so profound.
The Future Arriving Early
For if time is an ejaculate of the nerves, then to alter an organism’s nervous system is to move it forward or backward in organic time.
The goal of this article, was initially thought of when I was at a road trip as this quote kept ringing inside my head and how it relates the need of 'flexibility through adaptability' that a 'being' can fully realise that it's worthy of 'life', out of the fact that it is capable of sheer flexibility through adaptability, to an ever changing course of environment, through proper adaption of its personal philosophy, or rather initially, his own outlook in life.
The symbolization that comes to being, in which how a species emerges out of the need for it to emerge, not out of his consent, but through the driving force of life that is relentless and unremorseful in nature. Calls one to life without needing any inherent meaning, then through inexplicable occurrences that causes suffering and despair, 'driving force of life', yet again, did not need to explain itself. Then through the fact that 'adaptation' is a must for a being to continue living become symbolic of the human condition from a whale that has 'eliminate its hindlimb' that hinders with its swimming ability as it no longers use its hindlimb to a human being that has a tailbone that has become vestigial.
Just like the primordial whales that 'evolve' by 'biologically restructuring' its forelimb to become hand flippers to ease its own perturbation in foraging for food in the sea. Its fins are the future arriving early as it enhances the primordial whale needs in order for it to be well suited for its very own survival.
Organic ‘development’ is just the future arriving early, organic ‘structure’ is just the retention of the past, and our experience of time is nothing but movement within this morpho-space. If new chronoreceptive organs are caenogenetic (arriving from some unforeseen evolutionary future), ‘spinal descent’ traces the palingenetic retrogression into deep pasts. The implication being that, if time is emitted by CNS-architecture, then there are other possible receptivity profiles, other workable organizations of time: organizations which, from within our current CNS-architectonic, can only appear to us as instances of time travel, as contortions of unilinearity: precocious futures or recidivist pasts.
Spinal Catastrophism, MIT Press, 2019
The further down the CNS you move, from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and air-breathing amphibians [with] rib-cage
Bodkin, Neuronic Psychology
Adaptation and Risk, the Implication of Life's Grand Design
So it has become fully apparent that without 'pressure' to continue existing, a species can simply die, whereas a species' survivorship is linked towards its involvement in the system, as it naturally needs to involve itself at least by bare minimum as a means to expand energy. Only until a species develops enough through neural intricacies that it has come to understand a sense of time and space much better, it can asks philosophical questions and the origin of motivation and behaviour itself. A curse and the blessing of awareness, yet pictured as inevitable as life's relentless driving force for the 'better' organism kept pushing, though its relics of our biological counterparts are to be seen in our vestigial bones.
This strongly philosophical idea of a concept really inspired me. It spoke to me in a personal and philosophical sense the true origin of existential epiphany and legacy.
The biological machinery of how we as a person is to be looked at what we do. People's gossip depends on their person’s actions. We are what we repeatedly do, we define ourselves, reflected on what we do. Doesn't this just speak so much importance on how we choose the activities in our life that inevitably allow us to fully manifest what we are truly capable of becoming?
The modern world is ever changing, it changes on a glimpse of an eye as boomer fails to understand TikTok humour and look down on us when we (me) are scrolling down on our phone at the park (I seriously hate that, little did he know I was reading a book!). Then comes new technology, new jobs, new skills to obtain, PHP Developers have succumbed to its inevitable death of stagnant growth! Company budgets that speak of hundreds of millions of dollars to move from IBM Lotus Notes to SAP S4 HANA! Systems become overdated, relentless change occurs almost as fast as day to night, in which the companies that fail to keep up, simply die.
The new thing, the latest thing, the skill that one has carved meticulously over decades just one day becomes obsolete and one is FORCED to learn REACT JS to keep up with the industry standard.
The condition of life is ever so gracefully and unremorsefully demanding, but such is the nature of unrelentless force of change that begs one to adapt to keep living. This is not shown only symbolically from the occurrence of speciation, but also through a drifting sense of value to value-induced monetary amounts of money through wage and labour competitiveness.
We have moved from biological adaptation that occurs across millennia to mental adaptation that occurs between decades through epiphany and self awareness, yet the grand model to thrive in existence remains the same. To call forth the future as a means to create our very own best assumption about the future as we carve ourselves to be something that the future needs. Much like the story of Ambulocetus, whose forelimb has become a flipper in which the future needs, its biological structure is the future arriving early. Life continually tamper its morphological structure to carve it to be of something else in order to keep existing. The ones that failed to change as the older species simply became a fossil buried in stone and sediments, burrowed in deep time.
Thus, the only thing we can do out of this knowledge is to exercise self awareness and call the future to arrive early, then life will reward ourselves in a way that we can manifest its joy ever so gracefully. For Life itself has equipped us with a ventromedial prefrontal cortex each within us that made us capable of the representation of ourselves moving forward and backward in time. Is there really a reason to be sad when we know all of the choices that we made are the choices that we made ourselves?
Have you ever wished to be someone you are not? Life Asked The Self.
'Sometimes' The Self answered. Life asked the self to elaborate what the self means.
'I hate my condition, why must you take my parents away? Why must things hurt? Why am I capable of grief and pain?' The Self begs for an answer.
Life walks closer towards the self and holds the self's face by its grip and says, 'Your feelings, thoughts, and ultimately what you know about me (life) is unimportant to me, what's important is what you do with what you know. I am not a reason dictionary for every mishaps that happens in every human life, I gave beings life and equipped it with the neccesarry tools for them to continue living, it's supposed to be as simple as, and you, with your all grandeur of pleasure and capability of reason, you crawl back to me to wish for suicide? Don't you know the whole birth to life, lies on two basic premises: perturbation and adaptation? The battle to maintain life is fought on many levels. The "atoms" of life in which the individual cells that make up your body, the solemn vow of each of the mitochondria of animal and plant cells to perform oxidative phosphorylation to generate ATP as energy for them to function. For any individual cell to process and maintain life to achieve "Homeostasis”', to achieve stable internal order even in the face of changs in the environment that could threaten it. Maintaining life always meant fighting off entropy and perturbation in order for life to keep becoming. I am Life, I could be as simple and nihilistic as the whole ordeal could be just an over-glorified means of self-reproduction. You humans have evolved across aeons to the point that you could stand out of your vertebrae, only because you can stand for yourselves, falling is your fault. It is only you are able to reach a higher level of understanding and that you're capable of falling back down into the animal instinct of greed and corruption with little to no remorse to steal, cheat and rape, you have elevated yourself to the rational level of existence. Yet through it all glorified vertebrae and self awareness as a function of better understanding of your state in the universe, comes at a cost that resonates between existential epiphany and existential legacy. After the long and severe perturbations tamper your soul, then it comes to your own will to grasp the only one card left in life, the 'will' towards adapting yourself to the circumstances in which perturbations always lurk behind. Truly the way you lived and how me (as life), has forced you to come into being and for you to be made self aware, we are not much far apart as we are just a change of states, as you die you will understand that death is only a change of state of organic matter, surely you will lose consciousness, but at least you will feel proud as you realize the same driving force that call forth of your existence came out of the universe's prognosis to call itself to experience itself as it learns what it means to see the sun.
A Poem for Exisiting
In the dance of existence, a self-engendered play,
A living entity, in the system, finds its way.
To persist, it must dance within acceptable states,
A delicate balance, where life originates.
Within the web of time, a responsive embrace,
Chronoreceptivity, a sense of temporal grace.
As the sun dictates the rhythm, life's circadian guide,
A symphony of moments where survival shall abide.
In the chronognostic range, awareness takes its flight,
From simple rhythms of day and night,
To complex orchestrations of sensory perception,
A lion's patience to a fly's intricate inception.
The CNS, nature's organ of anticipation,
A phyletic progeny born of propulsive confrontation.
Chronognosis unfolds, a dynamic interplay,
Forcing feedforward responsivity in the evolutionary ballet.
Development echoes the future's early call,
Structure retains the past, a timeless thrall.
Experience, movement within morpho-space,
A dance of time, in neural embrace.
Caenogenetic organs, from unforeseen futures arise,
Spinal descent traces retrogression, a palingenetic prize.
The spinal cord, a journey into the neuronic past,
A transit zone where gill-breathing yields to air's repast.
A journey folding inwards, escaping predation's chase,
Cognition's birthright, a species' saving grace.
Yet, beyond survival, an existential quest,
To fathom life's depth, to truly manifest.
Human life, an echo of millennia's endeavor,
A universe striving, an existence to savor.
Stress environments sculpt neural complexity,
From survival's instinct to existential epiphany.
In the cosmic drama, where the sun commands its role,
Life emerges, an abiogenetic scroll.
A celestial conductor, orchestrating time's decree,
Provoked by the sun's whispers, an implosion into self, a life's decree.
Life whispers to the soul, holding it near,
"Your thoughts and feelings, in my grand scheme, unclear.
I am not a reason dictionary for the woes you bear,
I granted life, equipped with tools, it's for you to dare.
Perturbation and adaptation, life's primal dance,
Atoms of existence, in each cell's trance.
Mitochondria's vow, in cellular devotion,
To maintain life's order, a symphony in motion.
In the struggle for balance, against entropy's surge,
Life finds solace, where chaos and order converge.
A dance with simplicity, a touch of nihilistic hue,
A means to reproduce, in the journey evolution strew.
Homeostasis, the battle, a resilient stride,
Stability in chaos, where life takes pride.
From vertebrae's cradle to self-aware muse,
Evolution's odyssey, where profound shifts infuse.
Stand tall, humans, on the spine of reason,
Your fall, your choice, in any season.
Elevated to rational existence, yet prone to greed,
Existence echoes between epiphany and existential deed.
After perturbations tamper with your soul's grace,
Will emerges, the last card in life's maze.
Adaptation, the key to face what's unknown,
In the dance of states, life and self, not alone.
As consciousness fades, in death's gentle embrace,
A proud realization, the universe's trace.
The driving force, a cosmic coalesce,
Life is a witness to existence's quest.
In the millennia of efforts, the universe's yearning,
To understand itself, through the human's learning.
A dance of neural circuitries, complex and vast,
The symphony of existence, beautifully cast.
Feel the pride as you comprehend,
The universe's dance, from beginning to end.
The force that called you forth, in cosmic delight,
To experience itself, to bask in the sun's radiant light.
"The sunset is beautiful today, don't you see?"
Whispers both Self and Life in synchronicity.
References
1.8 J. Aschoff, ‘Exogenous and Endogenous Components in Circadian Rhythms’, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 25 (1960), 11–28.
1.9. ‘A living system, due to its circular organization [...] functions always in a predictive manner’. H.R. Maturana, ‘Biology of Cognition’, in H.R. Maturana and F.J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 26–7. See also R. Rosen, Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations (New York: Springer, 2012).
1.12 M.P. Mattson, ‘The Fundamental Role of Hormesis in Evolution’, in M.P. Mattson and E.J. Calabrese (eds.), Hormesis: A Revolution in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine (New York: Springer, 2010), 57–68.
1.13 A.R. Crofts, ‘Life, Information, Entropy, and Time: Vehicles for Semantic Inheritance’, Complexity 13:1 (2007), 14–50: 23–4.