As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.
If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us?
What is loose on this planet is language; self-replicating information systems. It may be a further rarefaction or a further hypothetization of what is happening in DNA—in other words: learning, coding, templating, recoding, testing, retesting, recoding (and the immune system does that, too)—it may be an extension of that, or it may be a quality of an entirely different order. But whatever it is, it is in the monkeys now, and moving through them, and moving out their hands and into the techne with which we have surrounded ourselves.
We have been on a decentralizing bender for 500 years, saying that, you know, “No, the Earth is not the center of the universe,” “Man is not the beloved of God,” moving ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy. The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex, and the densest and richest experience in the universe is the experience you’re having right now. Everything in the cosmos should be constellated outward from the perceiving self. That is the primary datum.
