C5. Belated Cosmogony

Indeed, both life and time-receptivity—in their intimacy and congenitality—can be mutually defined as nothing but self-interments.1 Only by retreating inwards, into fluency with its own system-states, does the organism progressively separate itself from the causal absolutism of the surrounding milieu, obtaining ever more functional leeway and behavioural lability via increasing delamination from its immediate environs. (This is why the CNS has long been seen as the organ of individuation.) The ability to do things is arrived at in this way: this goes for the capacity to digest the outside world as much as the possibility of motile—rather than sessile—modes of life within it. Locomotive autonomy—across all relevant modalities, whether bioenergetic or biomechanical—is bequeathed by potentiating implosivity. First emerging as the outpouching of a complexifying gut, then as the innervating escape into the organism’s own CNS-simulation, and finally as the deposition of an empowering yet finitude-entrenching recognitive encasement, evolution’s ongoing investment into its own systemic insularity migrates outwards from gastronomic, to phaneroscopic, to juridical domains—all in step with incremental chronognostic range. Again, orienting yourself on the planet would be impossible without all these layers in play. Orientation has a prehistory.

And of course, after the archenteron’s gastrulating introversion into a complexified alimentary tract, the neurulation of the nervous system provides the frontier of collapse shared by all eumetazoans. The centralizing nervous system and its spinal support represent the next portentous stage in the sealing off of the organism into its own globally enclosing world-model.

For only by variegating the ways in which a system reliably and differentially actuates and effects itself (thus further generating criteria of saliency and relevancy for adaptively beneficial representings) does a robust and differentiated external world increasingly arise without (in parallel with the divarication and tumefaction of axonal projections and sensory arrays within). Therefore, the centralization of nervous architectures (the centripetal involution of simple radial cnidarian neuroid nets into segmented bilateral annelid systems, etc.) presents, across phanerozoic time, the procedural building of a world (or ‘worlds’, depending on one’s phyletic ecumenism).2 Since 1925, this world-generating structure has been referred to as a chronotope, a term that emerged from the intersection of biosemiotics, neuroanatomy, and earth systems science in Soviet proto-cybernetics. Proposed by the Russian neurophysiologist A.A. Ukhtomsky (1875–1942), it refers to the way in which the organism nervously generates, and inhabits, its own globally unified space-time through the active coordination of inputs and excitations. With an explicitly acknowledged Kantian heritage, Ukhtomsky’s notion of the chronotope (хронотоп) highlights the fact that time and space (and hence a coherent world) are outcomes dynamically generated by the complexifying CNS.3

This conception therefore confirms that the more the organism implodes intradermally—exaggerating its synaptic architectures of fluency with itself—the further an extradermal universe will explode for it. (This is the consecration of what Charles Sanders Peirce called a ‘phaneron’. Ergo, the phaneron, properly considered, is a phanerozoic inheritance.)4

The CNS, accordingly, represents an egress from immediacy (and a chronotopic escapement) to the exact degree that it is the generation of an entirely artefactual reality (‘kept honest’, and thus teleofunctionally utile, by the ‘constraining affordances’ of incoming sense-data).5 It is, then, paradoxically, a self-propelling reality escape—via informatic and chronotopic invagination—that endows the interned organism with the power over reality first presaged by the emergence of brain-masses in predatory flatworms, and which blossoms forth in the simulative universe of the encephalizing craniate cortex.6 A cosmogony belated by some 13.3 billion years. Indeed, it truly is a form of ‘egress’ in that it is only via productive forgetting that such a system generates salient (and therefore adaptively utile) worldedness.7 The CNS operates as an emulator that doesn’t emulate its own emulating procedures (i.e., we do not experience ourselves as a ganglia stack), and in consequence we (as system-denizens) feel in direct and immediate contact with the reality emulated (or within which we are interned). A nervous system, then, is a ‘reality escape’ precisely in so far as it is a generator of ‘artificial reality’. Redacting upstream processes in its own pipeline of world-manufacture, nervous enclosure makes naive realists of us all.

What then is the spinal column, if not a megalith raised to the mineralizing trace of the organism’s diaspora into its own bloating sensorium—each level of axial segmentation a monument to further neural self-entanglement—dorsally fulgurating our cephalocaudal axis, an outward memory of inward collapse? Indeed, despite the fact that cephalopods exhibit extravagantly complex nervous organization, the most integrated and encephalized CNSs belong unequivocally to vertebrates, for whom metameric spinal regionalization repeats into compartmentalizing brain.8 A pulsing paradox, intelligence enters the worldly scene by emigrating into its own chronotope.9

Nature attempts to escape itself by creating a nervous system. Indeed, when the patient of this phyletic reality escape becomes, in some small degree, capable of reflecting upon itself as such, it first attains the ability to model itself modelling and, by conjointly becoming capable of directed intervention, exhibits minimal self-consciousness. Capturing the fallibility of one’s perception forces one to reflect on the distinction between oneself and world. Apperception pieces itself together henceforth as escape velocity, or jailbreak, from claustrophobic union with inertial world-immersion: for, by migrating the abiogenetic energetic gradient of ‘intradermal’ and ‘extradermal’ into properly temporal and modal dimensions, via the inauguration of language-use and coterminous expansion of working memory, mere attentional economy involutes into executive function, goal-directedness—and mental time travel.10

Baptized by evolutionary psychologists as ‘proscopic chronesthenia’ or ‘autonoetic consciousness’, the tendency to actively manipulate futures presents the most ostentatious reality egress since our ancestral cerebrospinal entrapment.11 (Debate persists concerning nonhuman capacities in this department.)12 Becoming first able to wield subjunctives and conditionals, intellect now feeds on newfound disequilibrations between ‘the possible’ and ‘the merely actual’ such that it cannot but orient itself toward redesigning the world, because it can now not only imagine things otherwise but also reverse-engineer their workings.13 Moreover, the ability to talk about the possible—rather than being trapped within the exigent present—is what extends the human chronotope or Umwelt to encompass immense illimitable spatiotemporal distances, allowing it to prospect unseen, unexampled, and non-present perils and possibilia.14 Eventually triggering rational prognosis (which first coalesces with the late-mediaeval emergence of insurance industries, financial markets, and speculation upon them) the ‘Art of Conjecture’ is incepted, and possible futures increasingly come to infiltrate the present.15 This increasing tilt toward the long term is the core characteristic of modernity.

Indeed, having been cranially outsourced by the seventeenth-century invention of calculus, and fully automated with the explosion in computation following the Second World War, simulation (at last fully externalized from the CNS via prosthetic delegation) now comes to progressively reverse-engineer the very structure of possibility itself.16 For a science that incrementally relies on simulation (in the form of forecast) is a science that, at least in part, creates its own objects. This, in turn, engenders the tendency for us to live, more and more, in a world entirely of our own making. The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ progressively collapses, as we see today in fields ranging from synthetic biology to genome editing, from climate engineering to nanotech to materials research.17 Now unfurling on a global scale, prediction computes contingencies and provokes real-world preventative procedures, yet the exponential thickening of predictive infrastructures breeds ever more—and ever more novel—contingencies to predict.

Risk escalation is utterly endogenous to the world-interior of advanced modernity, as the friction of its mechanism (just as it is with the gigantized external sensorium of planetary computation, so it is with individual nervous systems: recalcitrance is systemically ineliminable, inasmuch as no model can exhaustively model itself modelling without falling into infinite—and thus impossibly expensive—recursion).18 This is how the project of planetary forecast progressively parochializes actuality, ghettoizing the ‘merely real’. Reality escape attains a whole new significance as in silico realities begin to exert causal efficacy upon our own. In ‘the petabyte-scale period of science’ we no longer passively model nature but unavoidably remould it: the artefactual nature of nervous world-manufacture spills out of the skull as computational science unleashes an artificialization of nature on a planetary scale.19 Nervous organ maturates into technoscientific organon. Chronotopes, perforce, have a tendency to leak.20

Many of these notions were already present in Ukhtomskii’s neurological conceptions and those of his Soviet compatriots. Ukhtomskii had postulated that the organismic chronotope—by facilitating increasingly long-range control over its environment—was the initial trigger behind life’s tendency to reformat its surroundings at progressively greater spatiotemporal scales.21 Yet it was Ukhtomskii’s contemporary, the biogeochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii (1862–1945), who fully elaborated this suggestion in his cosmist notion of the incipient noösphere (ноосфера). Vernadskii followed Louis Pasteur in noticing that organic chemistry, because of its chiral features, is defined by dissymmetry in space,22 further arguing, however, that biotic matter is likewise identified by dissymmetry in time. Life produces its own time, or, life is the generation of a temporal arrow.23 Directional time is, then, the collective secretion of earth’s biosphere (биосфере—another term popularized by Vernadskii). This temporality-generative ‘symmetry breaking’ at the core of living process neatly explains the seemingly directional nature of macroevolution, which Vernadskii explicitly links to cephalization and the ‘evolution of matter in a single, headward direction’.24 Cephalization, Vernadskii concluded, converges upon homo sapience, which is inaugural of the noösphere, or, in a phrase that Vernadskii borrowed from the American geologist Joseph Le Conte, that psychozoic era of terrestrial history defined by the wholesale capture of earth systems by intentional activity.25 Vernadskii’s noösphere—a downstream product of cephalizing chronoreceptivity—announces a globe turned artefact, with eventual erasure of the distinction between frontal cortex, higher nervous function, and geocosmic mass.26 A relentless promulgator of orthogenesis, Vernadskii’s fellow traveller Teilhard de Chardin wrote of how cephalization provides the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ of time, whereby ‘nerve ganglions concentrate; they become localized and forward in the head’:

Life is the rise of consciousness, we have agreed. If it is to progress still further it can only be because, here and there, the internal energy is secretly rising up under the mantle of the flowing earth. Here and there, at the base of nervous systems, psychic tension is doubtless increasing […] the active phyletic lines grow warm with consciousness towards the summit. But in one well-marked region at the heart of the mammals, where the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found they become red hot. And right at the heart of the glow burns a point of incandescence. […] We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn. After thousands of years rising below the horizon, the flame bursts forth at a strictly localized point. Thought is born.27

He went on to claim that,

[s]ince, in its totality and throughout the length of each stem, the natural history of living creatures amounts on the exterior to the gradual establishment of a vast nervous system, it therefore corresponds on the interior to the installation of a psychic state on the very dimensions of the earth.28

This, then, is how bone armature interlocks with discursive architectonic (as its phanerozoic precursor) and consequently also with the deep upswells of terrestrial history as well as the longest-range futurity. It is how we came to think like a planet. It is why the sun’s downward onslaught of insolation triggers synapsing spines to tendentiously rise; for the uphill struggle inherited by all negentropic systems is simultaneously, and ineluctably, also a falling inward. And the outward marker of life’s coiling collapse, the great monument raised to implosion, is the cephalocaudal surge of the spinal cord and its vertebral mast; in this way, the conglomerating backbone and its axon fasciculations become legible to us as the legacy trace of the influx of time into the organism’s being. And so, although spines rise from the planet, scraping cautiously skyward toward the star that initiated their uphill struggle, this apparent phototropism (growth towards light) is in fact an instance of chronotaxis (departure into time—escapement from the immediate and orientation within a history grander than oneself) volatized by the congenitality of agitation and anticipation at the dawn of life.29

The spine is a tautegory for the long-durational gestation of futurity—a symbol that expresses its object not by mediating it but by manifesting it. But if, in becoming sensitive to time, the organism also conquers it (as exampled all the way from the rudimentary cell’s heat-shock proteins up to humanity’s present-day apparatus of cosmological forecasting), this feedforward encroachment of future behaviours into present ones, this lurch into futurity, also comes at a price.