A Theory of Biomechanical Enlightenment: Metastability, the Interoceptive Sensorymotor System and Consilience

AI is a form of machine learning that requires an unsustainable and exponentially taxing amount of human and environmental resources. I argue that rather than a top down control type of technological approach to AI characteristic of modern science we look to the nature of the complexity of life itself and seek an organic and bottom up form of enlightenment, an Animal Intelligence. Rather than an artificial intelligence let us explore the perceptual faculty that we share with all living beings and each other as a form of intrinsic Animal Intelligence.
I call this cognitive shift biomechanical enlightenment and contrast it to the 17-18C enlightenment project of the development of abstract reason, whose power and violence is what fuels the Metacrisis or Great Mismatch we are experiencing today.
Where abstract reason focuses on the laws and principles organizing nonliving matter and required the objectification and repression of nature and the body, in the current paradigm shift we are seeing the maturation of a complimentary form of the physics of complex living organisms, a somatic approach that begins from within life itself and the human body that we all possess.
This new form of enlightenment is an embodied form of cognition and involves a very significant shift In our perceptual faculties. This shift is simple and straightforward; rather than reliance on our exteroceptive sensory motor system, by which we know things from the outside-in, we explore, develop and activate our interoceptive sensory motor system, by which we know things from the inside out or from within. We can call this form of cognition Consilience, a form of inductive reason by which we understand the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Biomechanical enlightenment then involves the activation of a right hemispheric phase shift in the oscillations of the brain. This is induced by conscious metastability in the myofascial synergy of the deep core. This is not abstract. It is our postural system and is always already functioning in the background, most often without our conscious awareness. This myofascial synergy is the core of our interoceptive sensorymotor system. It’s integration is bodywide and involves a coherent and complex system of systems that at the same time is a singularity: our axial line and energetic core.
Conscious integration of this system produces an embodied awareness of a pattern of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Our axial line is a structure that we share with the chordate phylum that includes all vertebrates. Our axial core is also a design principle found throughout nature. Awareness of it forms the basis for comprehension of and affinity with complex living systems throughout the natural world.
Our axial line is an anatomically concrete and specific body wide synergy called the deep core. It is fairly simple and by understanding just a handful of bones we are able to activate the system consciously. This induces a kind of consilient awareness. Consilience is a right hemispheric form of integrative and holistic awareness that allows us to perceive and interact with the whole systems that are around us. Our own body provides the template for this complex systems awareness but does so in a way that is nonverbal.
This form of cognition is right hemispheric. It is embodied and so is a form of animal intelligence but it is in many important respect superior to the verbal narrative of the left hemisphere’s analytical functioning. This right hemispheric activation balances the left hemispheric dominance that is our fundamental problem. (I am no neurologist but however the brain is actually mapped in reality we are talking about an embodied antidote to the abstract and reductionistic habits of mind that are both the strength of modern reason and the cause of our excesses.)
These several bones, which I describe in three bones theory, are each very distinct and meaningful grip- or lever-shaped servomechanisms that coordinate the arrays of muscles, other bones, nerves and many other tissues that radiate out from them. These bony servomechanisms are our somatic coordinative centers.
Each bone is at the center of a major juncture in our structure and is the largest and most prominent part of the area. When we simply activate these coordinative centers in the context of the larger axial structure, we experience a form of whole body self awareness. Biomechanically this is our postural musculoskeletal system. This is the system that holds us together and stabilizes us from the inside out. Because it is self directing, self balancing, and self coordinating, it is also self aware. It is however not verbal and presents as a sort of animal intelligence.
It is neither counterintuitive nor unnatural for us to participate in this awareness. Each major juncture is not only a motor juncture composed of complex bony joints, it is also a sensory station that provides for rich sensory awareness. Together this is the interoceptive sensory motor system as well as our postural core. This system is where integration occurs for us and the bony servomechanisms facilitate easy, natural, and intuitive inter-subjective co-operation of the bodymind. These are the biomechanics of Consilience.
This interoceptive sensorymotor metastability is the basis for the phase shift in the brain that activates right hemispheric function, taking our cognition to a higher level of coordination. Philosophically it is not hard to imagine, following the extended mind hypothesis, a kind of collective intelligence or Gaia mind emerging through a process of human cultural and environmental adaptation which reflected this mode of perception. This would likely not require the dominance of technology and a technocracy or any other form of hierarchical elite.