Emergence of Homo undulans -- through a grokking dynamic?

Encountering Otherness as a Waveform (Part #10)

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The possibility of wave language as being fundamental to a new mode of engaging with otherness, or to any sense of identity, invites the speculation that it might be effectively the basis for a new human "species": Homo undulans.

Grokking: The argument for emergence of a new "cognitive species" was previously the focus of an earlier speculative exploration in the light of the science fiction theme of "grok" (Authentic Grokking: emergence of Homo conjugens, 2003). As noted there, the term was introduced into science fiction by Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961) as meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with" -- connoting understanding in a global sense involving intimate and exhaustive knowledge, possibly akin to synaesthesia. It is described by Heinlein as:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed -- to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science -- and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

It has been taken up by cognitive scientists, philosophers and neuro-cosmologists -- as well by practioners of zen. Its German origin as verstehen implies a special form of sympathetic, experiential and intuitive understanding. Milo Clark (The Art of Grokking, 2000) summarizes his use of it, in contrast to the unwitting perpetuation of conditioned thought, as:

For my purposes, to grok extends beyond ordinary and even extraordinary levels of comprehension moving far into the vestigial core of being human and possessing, as well as using qualities rarely engaged these days. We may grok more from our reptilian brain segments than from the later evolutionary lobes. As we move beyond transcendent experiencing to genuine transmutations of consciousnesses [plural intended] of being, we move from understanding to grokking -- and then stay there, leaving behind all which is behind without, in any fundamental way, negating the qualities of knowing personally, individually and collectively the histories of humankind on this planet -- now quite lost, barely available through ordinary processes, education, etc. to most. Meditation practices pursued to realization, first levels of samadhi, for example, provide some sensing relevant to and transferable to ordinary, daily life which helps to break, to free from the lulling dualities dominating most.

Also spelt as "groking", Bill Hayashi has explained it as "moving from a merely conceptual, mental understanding to a personally felt and experiential knowing" (Groking: Transformational Knowing, 1997). For Obafemi Adewumi:

Groking occurs naturally when we practice whole body listening. To grok something is to grasp it: to get the marrow, the inner meaning, the crux, or the gist of it. It is to get the essence of a communication or sharing such that we are able to recreate it in our own language. By practising groking, we can all become contributors to the planetary evolution. Groking enables us to learn quickly and to share what we have learned with others. [more]

Homo conjugens: The earlier argument suggested that beyond Homo sapiens lies a species, Homo conjugens, that is fecund in ways that Homo sapiens could only project into biological reproduction. The emergence of Homo conjugens would then signal a new way of engaging and joining with the world. The characteristics of that species were described there under the following headings:

-- Paradox and ambiguity | Dualism and polarity | Intercourse | Consummation | Enactivism
-- Reflection-within | Reflection-without | Environment | Instrumentalism | Possession
-- Inter-personal relationships | Group activity | Commitment | Paradigm shift
-- Time-binding | Language | Self-constraint | Dynamic | Playfulness | Humour

Homo undulans: The argument above with respect to "wave language", and cognitive identification with a wave modality, provoked a search for a more appropriate species qualifier -- beyond "conjugens". "Undulans" (deriving etymologically from "wave") is currently used in the distinction of a range of species, for example: Marginella undulans (a species of sea snail), Heteropsis undulans (a species of butterfly), Blepharisma undulans (a species of heterotrich ciliate), and Gyrodinium undulans (a species of algae).

Of far greater relevance to the above argument is the description of Homo undulans as the theme of a penultimate chapter of the very detailed study by Daniel Dervin (Creativity and Culture: a psychoanalytic study of the creative process in the arts, sciences, and culture, 1990). Appropriately he relates this to a "third birth" of "self-creation", discussed at length in his final chapter. For Dervin, with respect to Homo undulans:

On his most rudimentary level, Einstein has taught us that, even more than vacuums, nature abhors straight lines. At least Relativity abhors them... So a straight line put under pressure, as it were, of scientific observation is recreated as a curve. Does the awareness of curvature also mark the beginning of creativity? One can be grateful, in any case, to Einstein for locating in the bending of light and the curving of space some faint correspondence to that "vain, diverse, and undulating object" that [Michel de] Montaigne described as man, adding "tis hard to find any constant and uniform judgment on him" (p. 244)

Dervin relates this to a view of John Ruskin (The Nature of the Gothic, 1853):

John Ruskin had maintained that the best in us "cannot manifest itself but in company of much error." To err means to go astray, to divagate, to wander; but an errant knight is on a quest; and an errand bespeaks a message to deliver... Freedom -- what Ruskin is talking about -- is a deviation, and he finds it supremely manifested in the Gothic" " examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters... but do not mock them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone".... In any case, it is not so bad to find the universe just a trifle more gothic than the uniformity of Newton's machinery would have it be. Curves, bends, warps, whirlpools, and spirals endow it with a sort of independent creative life apart from our own straight-mindedness, which now looks more deviant than normative...

A psychoanalyst, having referred to the concept of working through as linear, expressed his discomfort with it.... Rather the analyst suggested the metaphor of the double helix, and the term working-over, a repeated upward/downward spiraling -- closer to Montaigne's undulating humanity. (pp. 244-245)

Dervin then continues:

... in the psychological sphere, the abnormal (trauma) -- like the bend of light particles, the swerve of evolution into neoteny, the narcissistic blow in the artist's early years, the gaps and uncertainities of natrual creativity... can all be entertained as indigenous to the normal curves of our human nature -- or so I think, not wanting to exempt myself from the wavering principle of uncertainty. (p. 249)

Through the appropriate emphasis on "undulating" (as a characteristic of "wave language"), and through a sense of embodied cognition, this usefully suggests cognitive implication in the body in movement -- most obviously dance, as noted above. This is consistent with the arguments of Mark Johnson (The Meaning of the Body: aesthetics of human understanding, 2007; The Body in the Mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason, 1987), and with George Lakoff (Philosophy in the Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought, 1999). Undulatory locomotion is the type of motion characterized by wave-like movement patterns that act to propel an animal forward and is the most primitive of vertebrate locomotor patterns.

"The Law of Undulation" is the title of a chapter in a work of C. S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters, 1942, chapter 8) with respect to the Christian experience of life. It has been creatively visualized by Dani Herman (Law of Undulation, Prezi, 20 November 2012). It is a theme for numerous Christian commentaries (R. Penman Smith, The Law of Undulation, Morning by Morning, 21 March 2013; Deeper Waters, The Law of Undulation, ubfriends.org, 4 July 2010; William Femi Awodele, The Law of Undulation, 2011). The chapter notes:

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation -- the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

The "law" also features as central to the work of Japanese architect Ikuro Adachi at the Institute of Form-Undulatory Energy (The Law of Undulation: contemporary Earth culture and its future, 2007). "Undulation" is an explicit feature of a wide variety of fitness exercises.

As a principle "undulation" had been promoted earlier by the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (The American Scholar, 1837):

That great Principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity -- these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of Nature because they are the law of spirit.

For Emerson, the ideal life has "undulation" -- a rhythm that balances, oralternates, thought and action, labor and contemplation (Lewis Leary, The Maneuverings of a Transcendental Mind: Emerson's Essays of 1841, Prospects, 3, 1978). As noted in this regard by Barry Albert Wood (Emerson as a Process Philosopher, University of Toronto, 1963):

Emerson' s "all-dissolving unity", then, was the Soul, or as he called it in one essay , "that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other"... Words cannot describe the unity because words depend upon variety, upon classifications, divisions, and contrasts. To descend to creedal statements about the central identity of all things is to substitute "tropes" for "principles" ; it is to limit the vision to the clutter of immediatee things and fail to expand the mind to the infinite circle of the All. It is to create a static world of distinct things arranged in a pattern rather than to see the eternal undulation that dissolves the pattern in process. (p. 59)

In an interview with Vlady Stevanovitch (Les Arts Martiaux et le Tai Chi de la Voie Interieure, 1987), he was questioned on his use of the term Homo Fluidus Ondulans, to which he responded:

C'est une plaisanterie. J'aime bien me moquer de toutes les sciences. De la chinoise aussi. Il y a, cependant, une réalité faite d'énergie, d'ondes, de forces qui s'attirent et se repoussent. L'homme aussi a sa place dans cette réalité. Il est lui-même une source d'énergie et il subit et utilise l'énergie de l'espace environnant. J'évite de parler de cosmos. Gardons les pieds sur terre. En définitive, toute notre recherche consiste à libérer notre propre source d'énergie et à nous mettre à l'unisson avec les forces de la Nature. Dans la pratique du Tai ji quan, chaque mouvement que nous faisons est guidé par cette recherçhe-là.

Alternation: Homo undulans is also appropriately consistent with earlier arguments for recognition of the neglected role of "alternation" in sustainable development of any kind. These were presented in a collection of papers (Policy Alternation for Development, 1984). That on Metaphors of Alternation (1984) effectively offers further examples of "wave language" for which a case had been previously made (Liberation of Integration, Universality and Concord -- through pattern, oscillation, harmony and embodiment, 1980). It is also consistent with a more speculative development of the argument (Sensing Epiterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): embedding of "extraterrestrials" in episystemic dynamics? 2013). Of interest is the reconciliation in French of "otherness" with "alternation" through "alterité" and alternance -- the latter being upheld as basic to the democratic process.

Given the importance variously accorded by physics and mathematics to complementarity and correspondences, the question is what greater cognitive role might these modalities play in the encounter with otherness of a necessarily elusive nature (Theories of Correspondences -- and potential equivalences between them in correlative thinking, 2007; Functional Complementarity of Higher Order Questions: psycho-social sustainability modelled by coordinated movement, 2004) ?

One pointer is offered by the manner in which the insight articulated in one proverb can be found denied in the articulation of another -- suggesting that a more fundamental insight of another nature is to be found in the alternation between those perspectives (Michael Rogers, Contradictory Quotations, 1983; Contradictories: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases, 2010; Max Cryer, Preposterous Proverbs, 2011; James Barnett, 15 Pairs of Contradictory Proverbs, The People's Almanac; Nigel Barber, Proverbs That Contradict Each Other: why folk wisdom contradicts itself, Psychology Today, 2012). This pattern was explored systematically in the Human Values Project, structured in terms of the "value polarities" between which human behaviour oscillates. It is this alternation which suggests that the wisdom implied by proverbs, and associated with "Homo sapiens", will come to be embodied more consciously by "Homo undulans" -- perhaps following the capacity of a "Homo conjugens" to "conjugate" contradictions.

Missing from any such alternation (as implied by the form of the sine wave) is the manner in which the most elusive wisdom emerges through constraining such variation within a "higher" form of order. This can be suggested by constraining the "linear" (sine) wave into the "circular" form implied by the Ouroboros -- with its implication of an elusive centre (as in animations below). The paradoxically transcendent nature of such a "centre of gravity" can be variously discussed (Paradoxes of Engaging with the Ultimate in any Guise: living life penultimately, 2012; Implication of Indwelling Intelligence in Global Confidence-building: sustaining the construction and dynamic of psychosocial reality through questioning, 2012).

A sense of the value attached to such an implicit centre of gravity is evident at the most embodied level, namely in the appreciation of the gravitational pull associated with centripetal force felt by a person in the process of circular motion (on roller-coasters, etc) -- and in contrast to that of centrifgual force. Far less evident is the manner in which this is experienced in "psychosocial orbiting", as discussed separately (Orbiting Round Nothingness across Communication Space, 2012).

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