We were in Lowell, Mass. and watched a type of spider who built new webs
every night, and there's no doubt about the intelligence; the physical
stratum (bridge parts) that they had to work with involved constant
problem solving. It was amazing. As Heinz von Foerster said there's
culture and intelligence all the way down to the amoeba. - This depends on
defining inteligence as negation, avoidive behaviour that can be passed on
to offspring. -
On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Max Herman via NetBehaviour wrote:
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2022 01:44:37 +0000
From: Max Herman via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Cc: Max Herman <maxnmher...@hotmail.com>
Subject: [NetBehaviour] network roots and the origins of modernity
I recently noticed an article about how spiders use their web for cognitive
tasks, hypothetically, in what is called "extended cognition." The truth of
this hypothesis depends somewhat on how you define cognition, or
intelligence, or consciousness, and how you define tools or distinguish them
from the mind.
True or false, depending on your definitions, what I like most is the image
and metaphor of a spider's web being part of its intelligence. Is not water
part of that of a fish, and the sky that of a bird?
The spider's image jells for me with Fritjof Capra's definition of holistic
intelligence in which even the planet itself has a kind of intelligence, or
trees do, sharing information and processing it in coherent organic patterns
sans brain. He also defines meaning as "experience of a context," similarly
to Bateson but adding the importance of experience in contrast to structure.
Networks go far beyond computers and electronics and predate them almost
infinitely. One newer network technology, the blockchain undergirding DAO's
and NFT's, has a very interesting precursor in Leonardo's drawing of a
landscape and waterfall. Clearly and unusually dated 5 August 1473,
conspicuously and prominently using written conventions standard for the
then-21-year-old Leonardo's father and grandfather in their notarial
profession, it is sometimes considered the first European depiction of an
actual landscape. In like spirit, Leonardo wrote later that he distrusted
the new technology of the printing press because an author's words could be
changed by the printer and their meaning lost over time. Pen and ink on
paper in an unalterable original was thus for Leonardo a guarantor of
accurate authenticity for both visual and verbal information. That up to
10,000 such pages by him have survived, perhaps only a third of the total he
produced, shows how essential he believed the format to be and how
successfully he used it.
Leonardo also compared a person's acquired knowledge in the sciences and
arts to a garment on multiple occasions in his writings. This garment could
be monstrous and deceptive, stolen, corrupting, or false, but it could also
be balanced and true to both nature and human interactions. He wrote of
those authorities who he feared would condemn his work: "you dress
yourselves not in your own work, but the works of others, and will not allow
me my own?" This and similar writings he left confirm both his metaphor of
knowledge-work as garment and his awareness of the hazards to authentic and
accurate preservation.
As modernity grapples yet again with its ingrained tendency to destroy its
own most prized achievements and indeed its very habitat -- planetary nature
-- we must look back to the roots of modernity if we hope to adapt and
learn. This is why we benefit, with or without probative documentary
evidence, from seeing Leonardo's most famous portrait and perhaps the most
famous and most networked painting ever as a portrait of what he called "the
common mother of all the sciences and arts," Esperienza, which means
experience and experiment, method and consciousness both, inhabiting and
weaving the garment of the products of art and science as it emerges from
history and nature via the bridge of all disciplines. It is this
personification to which he made recourse in self-defense from those
authorities who would condemn him, writing "Though I may not, like them, be
able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and
more worthy ? on experience, the mistress [maestra] of their Masters."
The portrait's finger-touch also points us to the garment, demonstrating the
incomplete but fundamental power of human agency to write and draw the
networks of our built environment.
The values and concepts implicit in this earliest of examples of a modern
ethic may still be those to best inform DAO's as healing, sustaining, and
unifying rather than disconnectedly profit-making endeavors, and may also
guide us to integrate human and technological systems without monstrosity.
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/leonardo/11nature/01landsc.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
https://www.fritjofcapra.net/learning-from-leonardo/
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