The following hypothesis won’t be correct, but only at best insightful. From where I stumble through life, no human knowledge will ever be free of distortion, because we can’t pin down the nature of a morphing and multi-dimensional infinity. Therefore, I don’t want to construct a stable theory of reality. I’m offering a playful metaphysics instead, a suggestive cartoon (cartoonish in comparison to the dynamic world), a caricature that exaggerates certain features of reality that more conventional stories and theories have tended to downplay by exaggerating other features.

Metaphysical trips such as this are only built for the short haul. My exaggerated intention is to remove a dogmatic beam from the field of perception. Call it a cultural floater that is blinding us to wider potentials. What I’m doing feels practical, not academic.

Also, I’d like the reader to realize that these essays are not rationally planned. At this point in the essay I’m only pursuing a metaphor that now and then crystallized over the past few months. So I write my way deeper into this vague sense of a vaster formulation hiding in the fog of my own ignorance. I want you to know this, because this is an exploratory journey into the wilderness of ignorance, and I want you to ride along as it unfolds, not as a spectator reading a conclusive script.

OK, let’s start by comparing the animal skull (including the human brain and all its imaginative capacities) to a flute of a subtle order.

Consider how the winds of change are always blowing, consider the conveniently located blow holes in the head and how these shifting currents enter the head, which resounds with sound and fury.

I’m suggesting that the skull is similar to a flute in this way: It can produce intelligent sound, but is not by itself intelligent. In other words, a flute produces, but doesn’t compose its own music.

It’s almost impossible to “prove” such a claim. The claim is intended as a pair of glasses that can be worn to see how far this analogy might stretch.

What would this analogy look like if we took it playfully seriously for a moment?

So we understand what it means to say that a flute isn’t intelligent by itself. But I’m suggesting that the brain doesn’t produce intelligence by itself either.

And I mean something more subtle than the old Watchmaker putting down his work tools and picking up a human skull to blow a few chords.

A brain operating “by itself” refers to a tendency among human animals (as of late) to get lost in the virtuality of the brain (in constructs such as national identities, creeds, and so forth), which is not an intelligent thing to do. It hasn’t always been like this. We used to live in accord with a wider world that kept our delusions in check. There’s no sign of intelligence the moment the brain loses its responsiveness to larger realities. No sign in the algorithms of personal interest that keep the brain firing in restless circles from morning to night. How can the brain be equated with intelligence if the brain’s activities are stuck in habitual grooves heading towards war, self-deception and earthly destruction? What is intelligent about a brain so clever that it imagines living on a dead planet, rather than restoring vitality to the very planet, which is its own body?

This isn’t the usual argument that humans are dumb. I’m saying that thought alone merely leads to stupefying complication and not a wider relationship to reality’s complexity. I’m saying the brain’s activities by itself (without some connection to a wider complexity than itself) runs on automatic pilot and spirals down towards chaotic noise.

While this happens, we tend to live in our heads, enhanced as of late by computer virtuality, deluded into thinking that the brain is the source of intelligence, and not in fact, as we are pretending here, a flute of a more subtle order that plays intelligently only when it orients itself to the currents of an orderly world.

So now you can at least wear the lens for a moment and see a gulf forming between brain and intelligence. And we can imagine the brain as a kind of flute that produces beautiful and intelligent sounds, but only if it encounters a reality larger than itself. We’re not calling this reality God for the moment, because that tends to generate the brain’s stupefying stock image of a controller who manipulates everything like a puppet master. It’s more subtle and interesting than that but I can’t see it clearly enough in this fog yet. We’ll see it better if we fill in the analogy a little more first.

By the way, I love the brain and its products, I love thought, language, logic, technical ingenuity, the sense of Self, this whole imaginary capacity. I love all these sounds the flute makes. I love the flute itself, but I don’t love a flute when it’s played poorly.

OK, let’s say that this flute forms in a field of some sort. Again, no need for a stock image of a creator hovering over the field. All we need to know is that the flute finds itself in a field and that the wind is side-swiping it. Sounds of misery and harmony are produced, depending on the coherent or incoherent orientation of this flute/skull to these cosmic currents.

If the flute isn’t free to shift in harmony with life – if it holds to rigid beliefs and almost inanimate prejudices – then we hear discordant misery.

So, the flute is imbued with intelligence, but isn’t intelligent itself. It sits in the field like a dumb, wooden block. Ideas and thoughts, too, although extraordinary creations, are only inanimate constructs, objects that need to be metabolized into a vitalized way of being, before they can be called intelligent. There’s nothing smart and lively about a complex abstraction that sits there in an unopened mind. Words, too, are just dumb sounds or lifeless definitions on a page, until intelligence (unlocatable as wind) can re-animate them in the way a flautist becomes the intelligence of a flute.

Again, we don’t have a stock image of this flautist yet, and hope never to have one too precise. But there is something vague here in the fog that serves this role, and I’m going to feel it out.

Now let’s also imagine that the brain/flute is a dense pattern in the wind itself, a formation inseparable from the immaterial wind that blows through it – the flute itself is a derivation of this force of life, like an atmospheric whirlpool that becomes dense enough to materialize as a seemingly independent “thing”, though it is not.[1] This is why the material world is orderly, designed (without a separate designer) to house intelligence. There’s a certain intelligence built into the matter of the universe, because (according to this fairy tale) matter is a derivation of mind, not vice versa.

So, what intelligence plays the material of the world? What musician do we have in mind? Not the watch maker, not monkeys at a keyboard either. Something else is crystallizing here.

How does intelligence relate to the inanimate objects of intellect? How does an idea re-animate itself and not merely pass before the eyes like raw data in a computer?

Let’s not say that the musician is the flow of Being itself either, even though this is closer.

How does the word “Being” become something more than a watery image of God? How does this word become something more than a dumb sound plastered over a huge ignorance? How does the word walk off the static page and demonstrate itself?

When I think too hard the meaning of “Being” becomes too foggy. The word loses its intelligence. Let’s not think harder, let’s look more intensely.

What are these trade winds that constantly nudge the human brain free from its stubbornly inanimate conclusions, this force that through the green fuse doesn’t love a wall, this animated question mark?

Behold, I feel most alive when rote knowledge no longer works. Then I see more intensely, but it’s not a choice to look harder. Something stirs these old bones to Be more interested, a form of Being that is not defined, but wildly active, and shape-shifting, not knowable as knowledge, but only knowable as living and dying.

This primordial energy of being blows through these holes in the human skull, and it’s this alchemical merger of an immaterial current and a material construct already imbued with a potential to resonate and transfigure this current into an idiosyncratic tune, which is the human voice, the wolf’s howl, the bear’s moan. This is the merger of mind and matter, Being and Construct, Intelligence and Intellect, instrument and inspiration, which erupts as an un-self-conscious individuality (not a mere self-concept) and Earth’s bold experiments in speciation.

The free individual (whether bear, human or mosquito) appears as an aurora that flares into brief life where the material and the immaterial fuse harmoniously into something more than brain, into a human animal mind, a holographic reflection of an immaterial source. If the material brain is not quivering with larger harmonies – if the brain’s constructs, ideals and conclusions can’t morph in rhythm and harmony with the immaterial shifts in chords and tempos — then con-fusion prevails and nothing but the tuneless chattering of a mostly inanimate and mechanically repetitive brain can be heard (although flickering still into harmonious auroras when its orientation to the world coheres for a moment).

Now I finally understand a poem I wrote a long time ago. The words became dead objects, and have only now become a re-animated relationship to the static contents of consciousness, to brain, to matter itself. It’s a “charmed” relationship. It’s not these illusory projections of the machine, these many Selves that seem so lively, but are mainly rote reactivities. The real individual acts in ways that the Pavlovian Self does not understand:

Coyotes

A splayed sound along the spine
Rises like a charmed snake
It’s not a symbol, but a sign
Of something briefly come awake

Pavlov’s dog was all alone
He growled but would not salivate
The brain is but a kind of bone
That quivers in a charmed state

We’re saying that the brain is primed to make intelligent sounds. But the aurora of the individual needs to be charmed into rising first.

One last thing I need to retrieve from the fog for now. Why are these flutes becoming stuck in orientations that make nothing but evil sounds? Why do the other animals, our brothers and sisters, and why did our ancestors more often than not, remain mostly sane, mostly coherent with the larger world? Why have we gone so mad?

Let’s imagine it like this. Perhaps the flute develops a certain note so profoundly that it monopolizes its attention. A technological note develops that hypnotizes itself with its own profound power, falling into a sub-reality. Virtuosity condenses into virtuality. Virtue sickens into a virus. The flute gets stuck in the concrete. And here it might be worth noting a distinction between crystallization and condensation (or concretization). We’ll leave it foggy for now.

At any rate, these “dense patterns” of immateriality (which the physicists seem to call “collapsing wave functions” but I don’t know what I’m talking about), which we call matter, can only add their unique alchemical crystallizations to the simmering primordial soup of the universe by dissolving or dying, seeding the universe with these composting bodies of insight. Thus, the life and death of matter plays a role in the performance of an infinitely learning immaterial reality.

That’s why the universe seems very uninterested in something as dull as an ultimate conclusion, pre-determined potentials or any specific meaning to this song of life. All of that has condensed into a literality that has lost the fluidity of Being.

But if we imagine, instead, a Materialist Vision, where the instrument itself created the music all by itself, a random composition by three bored Shakespearean monkeys – if we imagine that there are no winds of intelligent animation (such conjecture!!), none of this immaterial crap, but only these wooden bones of the flute forming by chance until a musical note appears by statistical inevitability, becoming increasingly complex through the wonder of accumulating accidents, until monkeys write symphonies, then mind here is nothing but a chimera, a false front, a kind of illusory steam produced by the engines of an order that just happened to form. This is the prevailing story – one of humanity created in the image of a computer.

Take your pick or invent your own. But for me, I find the materialist vision too dull for a universe this wild and musical. Regardless, intelligence is whatever it is that can listen to all this sound and fury, these fusions and confusions, and somehow learn to adjust the instrument’s orientation, and make glad tunes that magnify the symphonies of nature.

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[1] “To start from the whole and to say the parts are abstractions from the whole; they have no independent existence. Now, I think you can get a simple image of that if you look in water and see a whirlpool or a vortex. See, it looks like an entity, but it isn’t. It’s nothing but a constant pattern of movement in the water.” – David Bohm dialogue seminar, (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/nature-of-things)

“We speak of a whirlpool, but one does not exist. In the same way, we can speak of a particle, but one does not exist: particle is a name for a certain form in the field of movement.” – David Bohm in “Post Modern Science and a Post-Modern World”