Beginning the Journey from Where we Stand - Conscious Awareness - Sentience

"I was like an unconscious clod of earth. There was nothing in me except the instinct to eat and drink and sleep. My days were a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without interest or joy.
...she led me out to the ivy-covered pumphouse and made me hold the cup under the spout while she pumped. With her other hand she spelled w-a-t-e-r emphatically. I stood still, my whole body's attention fixed on the motions of her fingers as the cool stream flowed over my hand. All at once there was a strange stir within me--a misty consciousness, a sense of something remembered. It was as if I had come back to life after being dead!" - Helen Keller

A journey of ten thousand miles begins with just one step,
Yet we can only begin from where we stand,
And we can only measure with what we have, which is ourselves.

Our ultimate point of reference, our "zero point", is our own awareness, which is to say: consciousness (and the multiple processes of the subconscious which support it). This is the framework within which all our direct sensations are integrated, and within which all our indirectly obtained information is processed and understood.

Awareness - especially conscious awareness - is the rock on which Cosmotechnicphilosophy is built, and we build on this rock because there are no other rocks available to humans. This is where we stand, and where all our journies must set out from.

As awareness is the proximate framework of all our experience, then it is awareness and especially consciousness that is the primary sacred measure of all value in Cosmotechphy. So, our first step must be to define our own consciousness and then to identify who or what else also posesses consciousness.

Consciousness is defined in Cosmotechphy as: "An integrated subjective awareness of sensation(s)^[1]. Consciousness often, but not always, includes: an integrated sense of agency over voluntary movements, and an integrated sense of ownership of the sensory and motor body."
As these terms are defined in Cosmotechphy - consciousness is synonymous with Sentience.

([1] - aka "qualia" in the Western tradition of philosophy of mind.)

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Insensate, Sensate, Sentient, Sapient

As We Find Them
"Tho' some stones may yet sing, lacking rhyme reason or motive in their greetings,
Trees thrust thoughtless greens up into light, and dumb roots delve down dark deep,
While an ape or dolphin, an elephant or crow, might love or mourn, shape a tool, or even sign to speak,
So, we must converse with our cousins on Earth, to school for future seasons of unthought stranger meetings." - Preacher John

Dividing reality into these four categories provides the context we need to look for conscious awareness outside ourselves. In order to allocate any given being into one or other of these categories we can make use of a number of aspects that we find to be associated with sensation, awareness and consciousness:

1) Taxis, Tropic and Differentiation Responses - Movement, directional growth or differentiation responses that reliably correlate to external stimuli. Normally mediated at the molecular level in individual cells or groups of cells. Such as: phototropic growth in plants, chemotropic growth in fungi, movement (by biased-random-walk) in the chemotaxis shown by some bacteria (such as E.coli), and spore formation in response to unfavourable conditions in some bacteria (such as B.subtilis).
2) Analogous Anatomical Structures,: whose activity is correlated with a) sensory perception, and/or b) processing or c) cognition in humans, or other known living organisms assessed as having such.
3) Analogous Electrochemical and Physiological Activity: patterns that are correlated with a) sensory perception, b) processing or c) cognition in humans, or other known living organisms assessed as having such.
4) Analogous Reflex Responses:
5) Analogous Instinctive Behavioural Responses
6) Analogous Acquired / Learned Communicative and/or Manipulative Expression both Symbolic and Other,
that shows strong equivalence to: the wide variety of intentional communication types understood by humans, or assessed to be in use among other living organisms. Tested and observed to correlate with responsive interchanges, as predicted by modelling those Expressions as meaningful Communication.

Insensate - this category applies to objects / entities that show none of these phenomena 1) through 6) over long time periods.
Sensate but not Sentient, nor Sapient - beings that show 1) i.e. they move, grow or differentiate in response to stimuli, and may have some

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The Sacred Person / The Unique Perceptor

Awake! and Begin!
"Forged in the heart of stars,
Sown by cataclysm across the vasty deeps of space and time,
Fallen into and onto the fiery births of planets,
And raining down upon them in blazing showers of meteorites,
Washed to and fro in primordial seas,
Thrown together, beginning and living and dying and living and dying,
Down endless aeons of change,
Billions of years pressing their weight like a spear upon its tip,
Until:
You awoke and all-that-is pressed against you,
And you unto it.
Overwhelmed, you wailed and screamed aloud,
A flood of noise, a cacophony of light and heat and cold and touch,
And so you were born, another eddy in the great tidal rush of Being,
Another spangled mirror of the Real,
One more theme in a vast and endlessly branching symphony,
Another pair of eyes with which the Universe looks upon itself,
And howsoever similar you might be to any other,
In truth there shall be none just exactly like you, not before and not since,
And in your coming into life and your going through it, there shall be none whose adventure will be just exactly the same as yours,
And without you the Universe would have been that much less alive, and that much less wondrous,
There will be days when this is hard to remember, and days that make this truth seem like a lie, for the great tide of the Real is bold and careless, and will sweep you along like foam upon the wave,
But you are in it and of it and know it, and together we shall build from the light of our little mirrors a great blaze of knowing loving, that will light and warm us in the roiling, churning of it all" - Preacher John

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The Sacred Question
It has been said that Truth is a pathless land,
Even so, a thoughtful question may open up many paths,
Therefore, let there be questions!

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." - Richard Feynman


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Reciprocity

"Zi Gong asked, saying, "Is there one word that may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?"
The Master said, "Is not reciprocity such a word?" - Confucius

"Love, love is a verb, Love is a doing word" - Massive Attack

Reciprocity is the cornerstone of good ethics and the basis of all hopes for peace and cooperation among people. Reciprocity is an expression of compassion through action, motivated by the sacred value of living people.
The aim of reciprocity is to reduce suffering and promote fulfillment (eudaimonia) for all sapient beings we encounter or may have influence upon, and it should also inform our treatment of non-sapient but sentient beings.

Cosmotechphy embraces reciprocity and all of us who seek to do a Finder's job must hold it as the most basic principle of how we treat other people.
The principle of reciprocity is well known in many forms, across history and in many human cultures, philosophies and religions, but it is perhaps most famously known in the english speaking world as the two rules:
The Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
The Silver Rule: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you"

The Silver Rule is found paraphrased in the medical ethic of "nil nocere" - do no harm.
This ethic must be upheld by all Finders of Cosmotechphy in regard to sapient beings.
The only exception to the Silver Rule as regards sapient beings would be: in a situation where a Finder or other innocent persons were threatened with or were incurring harm at the hands of an aggressor; if there were no other useful protective options available - such as non-harmful restraint, or escape, or blocking - then a Finder may, ethically, cause harm to that agressor solely in order to bring an end to that agression.
In such situations: a Finder acts ethically in prioritising their own safety and survival and that of any other innocents - ideally the Finder will employ less-than-lethal force, in proportion to the threat by the aggressor. However, in some instances only fatal force will succeed in ending the aggression. Obviously, wherever serious physical violence ocurrs there is always the possibility of fatality (intentionally or not), and even if fatality arises from action ethically taken in self-defence or in the defence of others, it is deeply regrettable.
Every death of a sapient being is the loss of a Unique Perceptor of Reality, and even in the relief that comes with the end of aggression and danger we must remember that, so:
"Conduct your triumph as a funeral." - Lao Tzu

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The Sacred Symbols of Cosmotechnicphilosophy

Hold these in your heart, and your mind's eye. Not for themselves, but as signs that open the ways of useful thought and balanced action. Take care to look through and past the sign itself, to the road beyond it. Do not get stuck staring at the finger which points to the Moon!

All of these represent the Guiding Principle of Balance between Inspiration and Reflection, Desire and Compassion; but each of which has a number of additional specific meanings and associations - some of which are distinctly different from the meanings attached to them by others. These sacred symbols function as mnemonics, aide memoires, points of focus for reflection and a means by which we may easily recognise one another.

It is not that any one particular instance of these symbols is sacred in and of itself, but rather all instances are sacred through the meanings Cosmotechnicphilosophy attaches to them. Through invocation of meanings in the mind these symbols encourage a state of useful, directed thought. Which is to say that; if physical instances of these symbols are lost or destroyed it is of little consequence, so long as they survive in our minds together with their associated ideas. It is important to remember this, particularly when they are defaced or destroyed by people hostile or ignorant towards us, or our mission.

Also, debate within Cosmotechnicphilosophy as to their meanings or associations should be treated as a stimulating excercise, in open-hearted friendship, encouraging thought. Where disagreement might arise as to these meanings, we shall excercise the Discipline of Neckerism, and if necessary we shall cheerfully agree to disagree. These symbols must never be held up as emblems of entrenched dogma, and they shall never stand as flags to rally people in aggressive, preemptive, physical attack against other sapient beings. These misuses are anathema to our mission.

The Flower and Seed / The Fire and the Pool (two infinity ∞ symbols, crossed, on a circle) - if coloured should be red on blue-green*:


"To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour." - William Blake ...

This symbol represents emergent concepts, processes and phenomena, whose interactions, when understood holistically, are often found to give rise to further emergent concepts, processes and phenomena - that are greater than the sum of their parts - such as:

- The Four Dimensions of space-time, as directly experienced by humans - together delineating the Universe.
- The circle of the Seed represents the speculated unification of all Four Fundamental Interactions during the Planck Epoch, shortly after the Big Bang (and also represents their possible future unification in theory - should we attain a quantum theory of gravity); whereas the four petals represent the Four Fundamental Interactions individually: gravitational, strong nuclear, electromagnetic and weak nuclear. Overall, the Flower and Seed shows the unfurling of the petals - which is to say, the sequential separation of the Four Interactions, as speculated to occur by symmetry breaking, shortly after the Planck Epoch.
- The apparent wave / particle duality of quantum mechanical scale objects.
- The apparent phenomenon of superposition, and coherence / decoherence in quantum mechanical scale objects.
- The four nested levels of the structure of matter at microscales: elementary particles (e.g. quarks, electrons), hadrons (e.g. protons, neutrons), atoms and molecules.
- The four nested levels of structure of living multicellular organisms: organelles (e.g. mitochondria, cell nucleus), the eukaryotic cell itself, organs and the living organism itself.
- The four nested levels of the structure of matter at macroscales: stars, solar systems, galaxies and galaxy clusters.
- Two crossed DNA double helices within a cell nucleus, representing the diploidy of eukaryotic animals.
- The Flower of Conscious Sentience emergent in living beings.
- The Flower of Conscious Sapience emergent, in turn, from Sentience.
- The Fire of Curiosity and Desire, tempered by the Pool of Compassion and Empathy. The Fire and Pool overall in this context representing humans' Sentience.
- The Flower of Inspiration and Imagination arising from, and in turn giving rise to, the Seed of Reflection. The Flower and Seed overall in this context representing humans' Sapience.
- The Fire of Hypothesis, tempered by the Pool of Observation. The Fire and Pool overall in this context representing Science.

*In the Chinese system of colour this blue-green is referred to as qing (pronounced "ching").


The Interrobang ‽:


"Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter" - Shakespeare (Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45-47)

In Cosmotechnicphilosophy the Interrobang, like the other symbols, represents** the Guiding Principle of Balance between Inspiration and Reflection, Desire and Compassion. Beyond that it specifically represents modes of thought:

- In the exclamation! mark; the sacred Idea.
Whether that Idea be an immediate sensory or emotional Perception or Intuition; an artistic, spiritual or technical Inspiration; or a scientifically testable Hypothesis.

- In the question? mark; the sacred Question.
At the personal and interpersonal level it represents compassionate enquiry. Whether introspective or communicative.
Beyond the personal; the sacred Question lies at the heart of our mission. To put it another way, the engine at heart of our mission is the process of expanding the horizons of our Questions.
Every Finder has the right and the duty to address Questions to concepts (including axioms), processes, choices, ideas and actions. The sacred Question represents all forms of enquiry; especially scientifically formulated Experiment - which serves to address Questions to testable Hypotheses - by generating Observable data. It is through the process of the Question, especially Empiricism, that we arrive at an understanding of the relations between those Ideas we grasp Intuitively and those Ideas we arrive at as Postulates, and their derivatives.

The Interrobang as a whole represents variously:
- An exhortation to discard or transcend a falsely held dilemma or axiom. Also denoted by: the Japanese and Korean term "mu", or Chinese "wu", or the phrases "not applicable", "unask the question", or "this dilemma is obsolete", or "the axiom prevents a truthful answer" (i.e. the axiom or its application is incorrect). In other words the Interrobang is analogous to Alexander's sword, severing the intractable Gordian knot.
- Human Sentience = Curiosity and Desire, overseen by Compassion and Empathy.
- Sapience = Inspiration and Imagination, overseen by Reflection and Testing.
- Science = Hypothesis tested by Experiment and Observation.
That these paired concepts are intertwined at the "root" of the Interrobang is no coincidence.

The Interrobang also denotes the Discipline of Neckerism.

**Outside our mission, the Interrobang is used at the end of a sentence and denotes a rhetorical question. We do not use it in that sense. To avoid confusion, if it is used in writing, it should be used at the beginning of the relevant sentence or paragraph - where, together with the context provided by the text, it denotes tone in keeping with its associated meanings in Cosmotechnicphilosophy.


The Taijitu ☯:


"The universe, like a bellows, Is always emptying, always full: The more it yields, the more it holds." - Lao Tzu

In Cosmotechnicphilosophy the Taijitu, like the other symbols, represents*** the Guiding Principle of Balance between Inspiration and Reflection, Desire and Compassion. Beyond that it specifically represents the inherent wholeness of everything which includes and transcends superficial appearances of difference, and also the continually self-renewing nature of existence, for example:

- The virtual Particle-Antiparticle pairs created and annihilated in the Quantum Vacuum Fluctuation (aka Quantum Foam) that is ubiquitous throughout spacetime; according to the predictions of Quantum Mechanics, and current observations.
- Matter creation and annihilation in general, which is to say the transformation of particles from energy to matter and vice versa. Which is also congruent with the transformation of bosons to fermions (and vice versa). The smaller inclusion of the other within each larger body is a "doubling-up" of this reference to the interchangeable nature of matter-energy.
- Overall the Taijitu represents the Endless Now of direct human experience, with the continual "death" of the past through change - which then brings the "future" to life. Hence it is also a symbol of:
      - Death and rebirth / reproduction in all senses, from the micro to the macro, from bacteria to stars, and indeed universes (the theory of other universes budding from a black hole / white hole / wormhole, i.e. a nested multiverse, see also - the World Tree).
      - Both the boundary between Self and Other**** and the inclusivity of (aspects) of Self in the Other and vice versa, and the encompassing Universe that contains both self and other at once.
      - The continual Becoming of Life in the sense of the continual loss and replacement of individual atoms within living things with other atoms, a turnover of components which nonetheless sustains the coherence of the Emergent pattern of Life.
      - The continual Becoming of Consciousness in the sense of the continual change within the thinking mind, as it interacts with the Other. Which is to say: the constant flood of sensory input interacting with the writing and re-writing of memory - which nonetheless sustains the overall coherence of the Emergent pattern of Consciousness.
      - The overturning, modifying and sometimes reviving of ideas, processes and practices, by groups of people, such as those of us engaged in the Mission of Cosmotechphy.


***Outside our mission, the Taijitu denotes the Yin-Yang duality/unity of the Tao (aka Existence / Being / Life) as conceived in Taoist philosophy. Which point of view, together with some of the early poetry of Taoism, may be felt as analogous to the meanings associated with the Taijitu in Cosmotechnicphilosophy.
****The Other used in this context to mean "everything which is not the Self".


The World Tree, Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge, The Bifurcating Path



"Time and tide wait for no-one, but sweep us on down forking ways." - Preacher John

In Cosmotechnicphilosophy the World Tree, like the other symbols, represents***** the Guiding Principle of Balance between Inspiration and Reflection, Desire and Compassion. Beyond that it specifically represents a contemplation on the changing nature of reality with the progression of Time, hence:

- As the Bifurcating Path, it represents the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Theory where collapse of the Quantum waveform is denied, and instead at each Quantum event (that appears to an Observer inside each Universe to be a collapse of the possibilities in favour of just one state) a hypothetical Observer located in a speculated objective "ur-Reality" would perceive that the Universe branches into two daughter Universes where each carries a new reality with one or the opposite state. This branching occuring at every Quantum "collapse" event, so our Bifurcating Path has a myriad of ways.
- As the World Tree, it represents the theory of other universes budding from a black holes / white holes / wormholes, i.e. a nested Multiverse of Universes.
- As the Tree of Life, it alludes to the Evolution of Life on Earth (and probably elsewhere in the Universe, perhaps including Sol system).
- As the Tree of Life, it alludes to the importance of caring for the trunk (Earth and Humanity in toto) that supports us as we branch out into Space.
- Again, as the Tree of Life, it alludes to the idea of each life involving an endless series of choices, moving along different branches of possiblities, always in the same direction i.e. from root to branch, so that each person's life will describe a unique pathway along the branches of the Tree through their LifeTime.

*****Outside our Mission associations may vary, sometimes they may coincide with or echo the associations within Cosmotechphy, sometimes not.


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