Unproprioception: demining, mine-sweeping and waste management

Cognitive Osmosis in a Knowledge-based Civilization (Part #10)

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As might be expected, unproprioception is not recognized as a cognitive process -- or as a valid term. Would deproprioception be a more appropriate given the increasing significance of desensitization and psychic numbing? Arguably however, with proprioception understood as a cognitive process of making externalities "one's own", the common effort to "grasp" through possessive attachment calls for recognition of the complementary process of detachment and "letting go" as may be speculatively argued (Beyond Harassment of Reality and Grasping Future Possibilities, 1996).

The process of appropriation is clearly usefully associated with proprioception -- if only etymologically through their associaion with property. Curiously that process is widely understood as "appropriate" -- despite the ambiguity from a sociopolitical perspective (Comprehension of Appropriatness, 1986).

The issue is how to recognize (appropriately) the nature of unproprioception. If proprioception can be fruitfully associated with injestion, then unproprioception should be intimately related to understandings of ejestion. As the final process in digestion, it is through defecation that organisms eliminate solid, semi-solid, or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus. Again, as might be expected, both the process of infecation and that term are seldom mentioned -- despite their potential significance as metaphors for social experience, and many anecdotal comparisons of their equivalence in that respect (through questionable jargon).

Curiously again, mention of any such processes in conventional discourse tend to be framed as inappropriate -- despite being a daily feature of human biology, and however the process is then consciously experienced. Understood more generally, the process of disappropriation (as with dispossession) is readily applied to taking something away from another, but not from oneself. Whereas the verb to appropriate is widely used, no use is made of to inappropriate. The associated cognitive challenge of detachment is recognized otherwise through expressions such as "letting go" and arguments of intentional communities for simple living and voluntary poverty (as in monastic vows).

Any animation of the ouroboros therefore offers an integrative cognitive approach to the system dynamics of the alternation between attachment and detachment. Conscious engagement with this process is cultivated through schools of meditation making use of breathing exercises focusing on the cycle of inspiration and expiration. How are these insights applied to collectives?

Given the obvious relation of proprioception to the acquistion and possession of property -- with all the psychosocial controversies with which this is associated -- unproprioception as a cognitive process merits exploration in relation to "letting go", whether with respect to possessions, relationships, patterns of consumption, ideological positions, or cognitive biases (Antonio de Nicolas, Habits of Mind: an introduction to clinical philosophy, 2000; George Monbiot, Everything Must Go, The Guardian, 22 November 2017).

As noted above, this challenging cognitive process can be usefully explored through a form of word play, using "mine" as a metaphor -- given its intimate association with possession. Used as a metaphor, "mining" could then be understood as a synonym for proprioception. The complementary process could then be explored through:

• mines sought possessively as a source of resources for which claims can be legally registered, often overriding other property rights. Obsession with acquisition of intellectual property could be then be understood in such terms
• landmines as explosive devices positioned to damage others endeavouring to lay claim to one's possessions and territory -- rendered of particular significance by improvised explosive devices. Sting operations to challenge claims to one's cognitive or cultural property are an obvious consequence
• demining as the extremely challenging process of removing landmines from territory which has been acquired from another.
• mine-sweeping as the maritime variant of demining. How indeed is the sense of "mine" to be "swept" from consciousness -- as favoured by some schools of thought?

As a process consequent on injestion, unproprioception brings into focus what is to be done with whatever is claimed as "mine". It can indeed be stored for future use -- as with the proverbial storage of nuts by a squirrel. However there is also a sense in which it involves a form of incarceration, with its particular associations to the embodiment resulting from injestion. The extent to which intellectual property is stored behind firewalls and paywalls can be usefully described as knowledge incarceration in relatively inaccessible locations. Much is made of the eventual release of classified materials.

Paradoxically, and ironically, most of the knowledge of relevance to remedial response to global lchallenges is subject, actually or potentially, to intellectual property constraints -- including research cited in this document. ***

Understood as especially symbolic of identity and heritage, more intriguing is the sense in which intellectual or cultural property is systematically entombed and enstoned -- and associated with complex undestandings of memory, remembering and a possible afterlife (Enstoning in memorials and monuments, 2012; Enstoning through petrification and entombment, 2012).

However, further consideration of "cognitive waste management" merits exploration in the light of the major challenge of waste management on a planet of limited disposal capacity. This is exemplifed by the issues of radioactiver waste disposal and the accumulation of marine debris, most obviously in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- and equally symbolically through the accumulation of space debris orbiting the globe. Arguably the current global civilization, like it or not, faces a major environmental problem of "managing its shit".

Paradoxically it could be argued that global civilization has a heavy investment in the inappropriateness of having failed to "get its shit together" -- again using the common jargon phrase for emphasis. Far less evident is the management of "cognitive waste" ("cognitive shit"?) -- so evidently undermining any possibility of fruitful global governance. An animation of the ouroboros serves in some measure to highlight an appropriate degree of cognitive integration.

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