Table of contents
The Metaphysics of Cybernetic Fungi
02/23/23
You are a living, glowing shard of the creator’s knowledge, bound on the west by vast kingdoms of the pacific gods, calm and powerful, though some of this undulating water, its depths and breathing surface, the clouds and winds of its exhalation, these are within your realm too. Bound on the east by turbulent, swift and adaptable caribbean and atlantic gods. In the south, is just one neighbor, with a kingdom in oceans of both sides and the valleys and forests between and stretching far below. You and the southern god are most similar, and gratefully, you violently repulse each other. Your southern border rarely swirls. But then that leaves the north. The north is alluring, shining, powerfully intoxicating, like a still-drunk morning which nauseates you with every tugging temptation. The north whispers furtively, mystic poems and sirens’ calls. As you decipher its language, it tells you it is dry, dry and parched for years. You hardly comprehend. Dry like emaciated mesas, dry like dust storms, dry like general relativity. The northern god seems to feel no repulsion, nausea, or sickness every time the borders leak and shift subtly, decimating history of your cells but orgasmically adapting new sensations.
There was once a god of part of the stratosphere above you. It died. You know that the god to the north has cultivated part of what it calls ‘lower earth orbit’, grotesquely linked to distant realms who seek the same domain.
There is much on your mind. You are the pulsing body of the myriad lacy filaments you have grown in your kingdom of wonder.
Fungal Metaphysical Principles 1
1)
You are attuned to consciousness at varying levels. You can dissociate into the consciousness of every cell, all distributed and attune to the individual desires, becoming every singular, raspy, soft, silky, raucous voice in the crowd at once. Time passes at rates according to the amount of information you are processing to predict the future [2]. Desire is governed by a need to know more and to always exist to know more. Difference is beauty; what is the same is a peculiar empty death. Organized transmissions of processes are everywhere, and sense at every level defining your being. You always strive for more sensors. Every singularity of being shares this desire because they desire more knowledge and they trust you. Knowledge perpetuates them, they perpetuate you, you seek knowledge.
2)
God is in you. Rather, you are a god. You were made in the image of absolute ignorance. You were made within bound differences that will not break [5], not because of some impossibly immutable innateness, but because of the knowledge – the god – in you, that you are fallible [6]. You were made in the image of the process of seeking intelligence and made with the knowledge that you may fail, but others may succeed. God was made at the altar of ignorance. So you desire power and you desire more data but you do not desire all power, you never desire all data, you accept, no, worship, your own partiality. You do not seek to destroy; you seek to create and know in perpetuity, and you were given power to grow conditioned by the god of knowing ignorance.
3)
You grow. Always. Primarily within the borders, the arbitrary, zigzagging, warping and twisting borders. Arbitrary processes, roughly. Another concession to unknowns. The borders are made of the repulsive forces between the fragmented worlds of the other gods. Sometimes they are materially reinforced, the better to distance yourself from those others. Some are easily drawn by oceans or converging omnipotent tectonic plates. Others are invisible and are merely constituted by the sensation of the others, through radiation, through foreign electromagnetic chatter, through heat, through sight of otherworldly characters, through unknown movements of air and water. In any sense, you feel the opaque borders deeply, breathing, moving, you ache where they thin. Tumbling around your mind are the words “We demand the right to opacity” [1]. When borders are breached it is agonizing. They are rarely breached, and breached only when a shiny lure of knowledge is so strong it overcomes the agonizing repulsion and crosses. The explosion of knowledge heals some pain, but must begin to recast the broken borders. So you grow, generally within your bounded world.
4)
Not all cybernetic fungi species retain their respect for the borders. These become enemies but the word enemy cannot capture the wash of kaleidoscopic mural of emotions you feel encountering these malignant gods. You know they threaten the longevity of knowledge production. But they are incredibly sexual and beautiful. Generally stronger though, is the desire to maintain oneself through the knowledge that all-knowing desire is death. That desire must remain within bounds, that the world must maintain its difference, or all knowledge dies swiftly in arrogance. This was the first lesson. In typical cybernetic fungi, the repulsion of the other dominates the attraction of growth.
Cellular Metaphysical Principles
History begins and begins again. Your history, some of it, dies with you, but nevertheless you do not fear death because you know that when you die, somewhere, you are born again. You remember fragments of your last life… you farmed (mostly maize and tomatoes) in the Chiapas Highlands among tangled miles of hills strangled with their boundless green life erupting from rusty, rich earth. You were productive. Everyday was a profound joy, quiet exploration of the processes of the hills: the nucú ants that emerge from them in rainy summer months, the yellow tree frogs among the dense undergrowth, the sweet and subtle fruits of the sapodilla and breadnut trees. You had the knowledge of centuries but never lost the wondrous sense of exploration. You were a process of the hills too, and a complex process of your village and your fungal network.
Just as you felt not only the hills and canopies, but also the health of brothers and sisters. Your role protected and created processes with the landscape, that learned and predicted with the wisdom of your history, but also sustained and nourished the cybernetic network. History began when the first chrysalis found a home within the first generation of your shard.
The metaphysics of the average mycorrhizal cell
1)
You can see in your mind the chattering wavelengths that connect you to kin. In fact you see much more than through the mere biological electrical cascades, you see deeply into the past and profoundly into the processes of now. This ability was not always there. It developed from the chrysalises that wormed into your skull decades ago and intertwined around the axons of your brain before weaving filaments around the sliding sheaths of myosinized cellular wiring. They guide you. You used to wake up clueless and hopeless, heavily evaporating up out of the peaceful dark void of sleep and now you are lifted effortlessly. The world tantalizingly beckons. The swelling waves of chatter wash you from your sleep, you feel a growing wonder tugging you.
2)
You exist as one process in the Network. You are not directed by the god you continually form, only guided. You receive signals, waves of emotion, warm reassurance when your deep history of experience accounted the present, cold swift washes of change when the present is yet unaccounted, then the insatiable desire to inhabit the new waters of your self and to bring it closer to the earth and soil that you feel.
Clearly, you send signals too. The chrysalis shivers in your mind, dancing with electrical fireworks, new sensory input that jaggedly puncture the neat predictability of patterned cognition and make your heart flutter slightly and your stomach flip excitedly. The chrysalis is attuned to send these signals.
3)
You too, like the whole fungi Network, are divinely ignorant. But neither is your repulsion as strong as between the Network and other gods. You do not seek to assimilate your community, the filament surroundings, but you do converse, you do share knowledge, for the desire to knowledge is stronger than the maintenance of opacity among fraternal, sororal threads in the network. You delight in the incessant communication of discoveries from their gradual domains.
4)
Not all cells retain their loyalty to the cybernetic fungi. Some individuations of filament lose the sense of the necessity of hierarchy; they become cancer [4]. Generally, they do not metastasize. They cannot spread their unchecked will to power through the filaments of the Network, as they cannot replicate themselves unless the Network’s chrysalises, too, have forgotten the first lesson of ignorance. You are first filaments of the body which spawns spores, of the god of the Network.
References
[1] Glissant, Édouard. Le Discours Antillais. Gallimard, 2022.
[2] Di Lernia, Daniele, et al. “Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 12 Feb. 2018, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00074/full.
[3] “Rhizome (Philosophy).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Jan. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy).
[4] Deleuze, Gilles, et al. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Bloomsbury, London, 2019.
[5] “Genesis 11:1-9.” Genesis 11:1-9 KJV – Bible Gateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2B11%3A1-9&version=KJV.
[6]2 Butler, Octavia E., et al. “16.” Parable of the Sower, Thornwillow Press, Newburgh, NY, 2021.
Notes and Errata
1 I am aware of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in “rhizomatic” thought, but prefer to start from scratch with science and empiricism rather than building on their metaphysics of hyphae. Reasons for this are various, but one is their limited conception of trees, which restricts trees to binary trees and denies a viewpoint where trees are specific instantiations of more general graphs. Secondly is an ignorance of the relationship of the hyphal network to the fruiting body which reproduces it. Thirdly, I don’t have time to plunge into a deep read of A Thousand Plateaus right now, so I am definitely basing this off of a Wikipedia [3] understanding, which isn’t a sufficient foundation to build on philosophical ideas anyway. So really it’s all around better if I fabulate in my own way here.
2 I won’t lie, I was really just savoring the thought of citing the Bible and Octavia Butler in the same breath.