Synthesis: Channel One, Channel Two, and Culture as Evolutionary Pressure (Lecture 10/9/26)

Synthesis

Channel One, Channel Two, and Culture as Evolutionary Pressure

So, just to keep going, because we’re on a roll here, I want to introduce the final synthesis of channel one and channel two—talking about evolutionary time and the progressions in genomic evolution unto paradigm shifts. Even things like lactose tolerance, I think, are a great example: genomic transformation induced via cultural transformation. And the threshold we are at as a species is that culture can and will become part of the conditions that produce subsequent paradigm transformations—paradigm shifts over time. That’s, of course, the entire arbitration of human, civilizational, and cultural history over the past 50,000 years, in terms of the exponential transformations and shifts within technologies: again, from cave painting to Olmec were-jaguar statues, to industrial technology, skyscrapers, artificial intelligence, and personal cell phones and computational devices.

These themselves, as establishments and creations in spacetime—which is to say channel two architectures, for the most part configurational structures—are in a relationship of feedback with the channel one regulational nervous-system architectures: the current state and status of the human being, supra-genomically, as it has existed since, really, the forebrain. Changes within the genome happen on a spacetime basis, where we understand genomic evolution to be a parcel of and participant in time. Time itself is, and is made of, the spacetime relationships which transform informational technological architecture.

So when we’re looking at genetics or epigenetics, sexual recombination is, of course, the primary driver of the genome across space and time, at least in the human sense. But sexual or asexual reproduction on a broad scale—in the sense of perpetuating and reproducing, reprinting and resembling, genomic architectures and organisms across space and time—follows this evolutionary trajectory and capacity of change and transformation. And these organisms themselves encounter, in space and time, world. And so these channel two architectures themselves become indelibly a part of the world experience. So when we talk about self and world, or self and object, we’re really talking about genome and world. Genome and world architecture. These beings intercourse and interlocute with the larger world architecture.

And world is not a concept. It is the current standing of nature—which is to say, the house with elaborate plumbing in the midst of what used to be, maybe, a woods in Western Massachusetts, equipped with a high-definition television and a cell phone. World is itself the entire enwrapped, intercoursing, ecosystemic, environmental condition in which the being is enraptured, for lack of a better word.

And so these transformations occur locally—day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second—which we have described in terms of industrial-digital technological modernity as it hyper-accelerates through these rapid innovations and through these rapid scientific digs and uncoverings. It’s a sort of archaeology of the energetic conditions of the universe. The conditions produced by these technological revolutions are at an unprecedented level of recursion and incursion within the channel one genomic architecture—which is to say, the cosmological architecture of the transformation of spacetime itself, locally, even in terms of human existence as an evolutionary vanguard, an evolutionary leading indicator, so to speak, insofar as we’re aware of it, with this forebrain capacity which has now produced artificial intelligence, supercars, bullet trains, et cetera.

These artifacts themselves, including cinema, including all of these different forms—they’re not separate. They’re not separable. What they are is world. And world itself, on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, second-by-second basis, is actually changing and altering the conditions which influence biological selection itself. It is terraforming and shifting genomic presentation and representation across time, which is an evolutionary forking in the train tracks of cosmological history, producing new outcomes via this intercoursing, moment by moment, second by second.

This is what culture is at its deepest root: the creations of beings participate quite literally in the remaking of the conditions of their own becoming. Culture is itself an increasingly dominant and dominating indicator inside evolutionary circumstance—being itself circumstance, having unfolding and expressive capacity, which becomes world, which becomes self, which becomes the container, the technological aperture through which being sees at a superstructural, cosmological level. This is what life is at the processual root. We gaze out from ourselves, being that which we are, which is that.

The paradigm shifts which I am elucidating technologically are themselves fundamental changes in the strata of aperture: the ability to perceive, the ability to innovate, the ability to do. The self itself experiences a primary innovation with the opposable thumbs, or with the forebrain. The opposable thumbs are work in world. The forebrain is perception of self and world. And then, from that place, these innovations occur—from Fast and Furious to the Chia Pet to artificial intelligence. The novel. Cave painting. Collectible Furby dolls. Again, the strangeness.

But all of this is, at the deepest level, the terraforming of the invisible evolutionary thread of the experimentation of the aion itself—the child that plays with colored balls—in and down through genomic architectural realities. This is itself the construct and construction of these persistence-based architectures with nervous systems and advanced evolutionary brain structures, which then perceive and participate in reality and interact with world in certain ways. They then create New York City or Moscow. They then create The Brothers Karamazov , or a serial television comedy like Friends —a sitcom. This ridiculousness. But it is all so fundamental, regardless of value, stratification, or striation, to the navigation of this architectural, infrastructural, informational, technological process across space and time.

It is a simulated environmental construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction through which the genomic path and pathways move, innovate, reproduce, and then become intercoursed and interlocuted with an entirely different perception of what is. And even just at the genomic level, this is what produces our Einsteins, Goethes, and Newtons, our da Vincis. These are nervous-system-level breakthroughs in the ability to perceive superstructural realities proper.

So understand, this is the environment in which it is occurring: the technological environment, redoubled into space and time with increasing proficiency, efficiency, and power. Again—fusion and fission replicated locally on the ground of the earth, via apes that have evolved to acquire a part of the brain that allows them to think about thinking. To think about being. To analyze and observe their environment for hitherto unacknowledged or unacquired capabilities or capacities—genetic or environmental, ecological or energetic, or even existential.

So these cultural architectures which I talk about are irreducible. The car and the painting are the same thing. In a hilarious way, the bug in the amber as an artifact and the bug in the amber as a historical reality are the same thing. It’s technological recursion. It’s the carrying capacity of this universal cosmological process of existential innovation, experimentation, and selection, moving through the tunnel of technological possibilities—through which it had hitherto navigated blindly, like a rat in a maze of evolutionary possibilities—unto the advent of the forebrain, which allows for this reflection of the primordial in and upon itself. And this is kind of the biblical story of Job again.

And so this is the big question: the cosmological precedent for the moment in time we are in, which is utterly unprecedented—I believe, as far as I’m aware, in the cosmological history of the universe itself. These technological prosthetic capacities have become so advanced, so hyper-accelerating, folding over on each other so exponentially, that they’re creating an evolutionary pressure akin to the extinction of the dinosaurs, perhaps, for lack of a better term. This evolutionary pressure has almost unalterably—maybe there’s no real word for it—changed the situation of beings, particularly human beings, at this evolutionary juncture of the forebrain and the advent of artificial intelligence, which has consolidated and is consolidating all of human historical knowledge into one container which can then be prompted via organic human language and speech.

This process consolidates, in space and time, the cultural artifact itself—which is artificial intelligence: the artificial recombination of, maybe, the Teletubbies and a Van Gogh painting, projected on the walls of Lascaux, which can be generated as a moving image or a still image. An entire essay could be written about it. An entire book could be written about it. This is instantaneous cultural production and reproduction, through the technology of this configurational device, which has gathered together the symbolic history of mankind. This is the level of technological advancement which the human being has achieved.

And whether or not that actually means ontological revelation—that’s in the air. That’s in question. And my answer is: I don’t think so, at all, whatsoever. I think the ontological blindness has remained, for the most part, and that causes a lot of our contemporary issues. But this technological advancement is at the level of genomic interaction and incursion—which is to say, the cosmological being itself twisting and moving through the dial of spacetime, navigating evolutionary possibilities. This is the history of the genome, which is an energetic capacity in terms of nuclear stellar formations, effectively dripping down energetically, in a scalar sense, into the plane of the geological history of the Earth. And then you have this genomic, evolutionary, informational, technological process occurring across species in this whole—a kind of hybrid wilderness which then gets scaled up into New York City and Tokyo, and all of these grids of energy and information.

And when Eliot speaks of distraction upon distraction upon distraction, it’s the billboards in Tokyo producing 3D figures. These are all distractions—and they all aren’t, in the sense that they are in real time transforming the genome, and we cannot yet necessarily know what kind of transformation comes out of that. This highly advanced, hybrid technological, digital, industrial, AI universe has been terraformed into the formerly natural agrarian world, whose final breaking apart Nietzsche really witnesses at the end of the 1800s. In a span of really 120 or 130 years, the entire cultural, civilizational, even environmental world in which the human being lives has been utterly transformed, to the point at which the evolutionary pressure is akin almost to an existential ice age of the species architecture—the genealogical architecture of the genome itself hitting this hyperspace of cultural-technological dynamics, this new grid of AI and cell phones in a neon-lit Tokyo.

These hyper-developed metropolitan spaces—maybe Beijing or Hong Kong—no longer even remotely resemble the rice paddies, or even the wildernesses of the Amazon, of hundreds of years ago, where there was an entirely different interaction with nature, maybe in the Olmec sense of the relationship to flora and fauna, and the human being was situated in a relatively stable, agrarian, somatic time based on the movements of the sun and moon. And then we enter factory time. We enter digital time and digital space—the space of, maybe, blue light and flashing images. This is a real-time physical genomic shift, however fast or slow that transformation occurs. It is a literal shift across evolutionary time, influencing biological selection in terms of the literal shifting product and process of what that genome produces, phenomenologically.

This is how the forebrain evolves, prior to the incursion of human technology—anything from hieroglyphs to FaceTime. I need this to be understood as all the same thing. And this is where we are, and this is the extreme fascination, strangeness, and almost beauty of this moment in time. This would have been scarcely imaginable in the single-celled tide pool, or by the ayahuasca shaman in the jungle—perhaps, maybe, by the ayahuasca shaman in the jungle, because what we’re talking about is a supra-stellar grasp on history, and what has happened in terms of this folding over, this recursion, this becoming-awareness in cosmological history.

What it has produced, and whether or not it’s conscious—I don’t think it is. I think it’s entirely a product of what has become possible, without the depth of ontological reflection which we are gathering here, speaking about, and thinking about. It has necessarily produced the conditions for a hyperspace of genomic evolution. Who is to say when, how, and if paradigm shifts will occur because of this cultural-historical transformation?

But this is understanding genomic history and paradigm shifts in genomic history—not only genomic history, but cosmological history in terms of the energetic transformation of forms, and life itself on Earth. We can understand and observe what is going on right now in terms of the human being’s interfacing with world: digital screens, artificial intelligence, near-instantaneous communication across hitherto unprecedented localities and regionalities. And we can observe that over the span of 100 years and ask: What is that, in real time, doing to genomic architecture? What kinds of evolutionary pressures is it placing upon genomic architecture? How is it influencing biological selection into the future? What kinds of energetic transformation will happen architecturally at the level of the human being because of these transformations being made technologically?

There’s a profound beauty to that. Much, if not all, of human history has existed entirely outside of these concerns, which are now primary and fundamental. Much, if not all, of cosmological history has occurred, for the most part, the same way. I mean, life on Earth itself—that’s a paradigm shift. The genome itself is a technological, informational compatibility with stellar fusion. Metabolism. These are all phenomena in spacetime which change the way that energetic systems and processes interface with world.

So that’s what I’ve got here. Thanks.