The Great River

Texas and Mexico are separated by the Rio Grande, the ‘Great River’, but for folks living in

Palestine, the Great River is the Jordan. What’s the Great River on your patch? The Mighty

Mississippi, the meandering Missouri, or the Crafty Connecticut?

Rivers divide us (on one axis)…and unite us (on another); they are like an optical filter. Turned

one way, you see the river as a barrier. Rotate the lens 90° - now you see the river as a conduit.

River-watching is like a double slit experiment. Turn the apparatus one way, you’ve got

particles; rotate 90°, ‘you’ve got mail’!

Or…they are like an osmotic membrane. They allow selected items to cross the barrier and they

block others. They can mediate flow to be bi-directional…or one way only. BTW, the ontological

entity previously known as ‘you’ is also a membrane, mediating flow between the 30 trillion

cells that form your body and the 1 trillion galaxies that constitute your universe.

Rivers crisscross the planet, branching, merging, dividing and uniting. For example, the

Mississippi River connects North and South but divides East from West. The Connecticut River

connects the Quebec border with Long Island Sound but separates the BSO from Tanglewood.

What the Cross is to Christianity and the Star of David to Judaism, the River is to Process

Philosophy (Heraclitus through Whitehead). It is both a symbol and an example of the

membranes that define entities. But it is also an agent of the flow that connects those entities.

A river is a Gestalt According to Whitehead, Being itself is the reciprocal process of

‘one becoming many’ and ‘many becoming one’. Rivers do that, all by themselves. Rivers form

Gaia’s neural network. They facilitate and regulate the flow of information (goods and services,

migratory populations) across continents.

We ‘think’ by moving electrons across synapses. Trees ‘think’ by secreting and absorbing

molecules. Some bacteria ‘think’ by varying the concentration of iron in their cytoplasm. Is it

that much of a stretch to imagine Gaia ‘thinking’ by transporting people and goods, back and

forth, from one location to another, along her network of rivers?

Wait, Gaia, thinking? Isn’t that preposterous? How can a planet, or a biosphere, think? To

paraphrase Walter Mondale (1984), “Where’s the brain?” Answer: Don’t need one, Scarecrow!

Let’s take ‘you’ for example. You are made up of about 30 trillion independent living organisms

called cells. 3% of these are neurons, cells that form tissue known as ‘the nervous system’. Each

of these cells has some sort of ‘cellular self-awareness’ but how does that up-link to you

deciding to order pistachio ice cream today instead of your usual strawberry?

Whatever is going on with you at the level of organism is presumably opaque to the cells that

make up that organism…and vice versa. Do you know what your neuron XK275P is experiencing

right now? Have you ever known what any specific neuron is experiencing, ever?

Once upon a time, you were a fertilized sex cell. Presumably, you (or something pretending to

be you) enjoyed cellular self-awareness. Over a lifetime, that one cell (you) reproduces about

100 trillion virtually identical copies of itself. Which one is you? E pluribus unum? Or all 100

trillion? Collectively? Selectively? Or sequentially?

Do you imagine that your individual neurons know pistachio from strawberry. Even if… Would

they have any sense of the complex socio-economic terrain that must be navigated for you to

get ice cream of any flavor?

Almost everything that happens depends for its meaning on a few basic organizing principles

(logoi). We are able to ‘read the signs’ because we have assimilated those principles. How

would you understand a group of folks lining up at a Baskin Robbins if you had no concept of

person, group, infrastructure, commerce, employment, alimentation, or confection?

To a bacterium, what we call the World would at most appear as chaotic qualia, possibly (but

not certainly) disguising some deeper but seemingly indecipherable pattern(s). I would expect

that whatever may or may not be going on at the level of Gaia might appear to us just this way -

the way our World must appear to a bacterium. We might not even notice it and, if we did, we

wouldn’t be able to find the meaning, if indeed there is any meaning to be found.

According to Heraclitus (above), everything flows! Rivers flow: Fluid dynamics. So does land:

Plate tectonics. Everything flows relative to everything else. Light, in a vacuum, flows at the

speed of ‘c’ while I, on a couch, flow at the speed of ‘0’. (Don’t worry though, I’m just giving

light a head start.)

But that’s not right either! Turns out, light and I are both travelling at the exact same speed. But

light is travelling through space while I’m travelling through time. So what? Well, light gets to

be ‘everywhere, all at once, all the time’ while I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go. (Guess I

should have gone to some of the many fitness clubs I joined.)

My brother’s out jogging right now in fact. He’s determined to catch up to light. And true,

because he’s moving a lot faster than me in space, he’s moving a little slower than me in time.

He is determined to outlive me. I don’t have the heart to tell him that he’s only gaining

nanoseconds.

Being is contrast. Flow rates vary (me, my brother, and a photon); spacetime is essentially a

flow meter. Everything flows and everything flows at the same rate (‘c’); the diversity of the

world is a function of ‘the variable allocation of that flow between space and time’ – the Great

River!

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