By RUBEN BAUER NAVEIRA*
What will our lives be like post-nuclear war?
Faced with the tragic historical moment we have reached, this article proposes that we think about the unthinkable – what our lives will be like post-nuclear war. And it consists of five parts, to be published in five consecutive weeks, always on Fridays.
There is no 'reality' unique to men
What would you, reader, think of me telling you that there simply is no reality in itself, because the nature of each person is to create their own reality, and that goes far beyond mere interpretation or psychic bias, but rather by biological determination? What if I also told you that people do not adapt to changes in their external environment, because any changes that occur in them were actually caused internally, not by external events?
So, this is not an explanation to understand some phenomenon that we already understand, it is instead a profound paradigm shift, and that is why we will, preliminarily to the other parts of this text, address such issues with the degree depth required.
More than forty years ago, Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela proposed a refoundation of biology as a science, rejecting the current explanation, of Darwinian origin, of the phenomenon of life based on physical chemistry (molecular interactions), and redefining life no longer as a universal phenomenon (something identical in all living beings), but singular, particularized for each individual (each living being).
Each living being would be endowed with an autonomous sense of self-preservation, that is, a kind of identity of its own. Immersed in its environment and its variations and changes, the living being permanently readjusts its internal correlations (its regularities), and can even lead to physiological changes, always in order to preserve its own organizational pattern – its identity. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela called their theory autopoiesis (the perpetual self-production of the self).
In short, the conservation of identity (internal to the living being) is the ultimate vital process, not adaptation to changes (external to the living being). The result of any “adaptation” to external changes will be determined not by these, but by the internal dynamics of identity conservation – even though to an external observer it may appear that the living being has “adapted to the environment”, when in fact it has updated yourself internally in order to remain congruent with your environment (in the terminology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, to remain “coupled” to your environment). Or again: any conservation of adaptation to the environment is subordinated to the conservation of identity – it can be said that the living being “changes in order not to change” (it updates itself, appearing to adapt, in order to preserve itself as it already is) .
Living beings, in the course of their “natural drift” (coupling) in congruence with variations in their environments, end up establishing internal correlations (that is, creating regularities) as ways of referencing external patterns of variation. This corresponds to saying that each living being specifies (creates) “its” external world, “its” reality, which is by no means universal or absolute to all of them. Researchers have proven that even bacteria are capable of establishing internal correlations as a way of referring to external variations, such as cold-hot or alkaline-acid; Subjected to ambiguous circumstances (conflicting stimuli), each bacterium is capable of “deciding” individually.[1]
The conservation of identity (autopoiesis) and the conservation of adaptation depend on each other, but do not determine each other: this is a consequence of the one that precedes it; on the other hand, if the conservation of adaptation ceases, the interactions of the living being in its environment become disintegrating interactions, with which autopoiesis also tends to cease and the organism to die. Or even: since the conservation of identity occurs in the production and renewal of internal regularities, the counterpart of the conservation of identity is an inertia of these regularities which, in the face of changes in the environment, tends to constitute an obstacle to the conservation of adaptation.
Here are some examples:
(i) In the 1940s, experiments were carried out with salamanders in which part of the muscle of one of the eyes of a larva was sectioned and then inverted (rotated 180 degrees). After developing into adulthood, insects were successively arranged in the same position relative to the salamander: when covering its inverted eye, the animal projected its tongue and perfectly captured the target; when covering its normal eye, the animal projected its tongue into the void – in the exact opposite direction to that of the insect.[2] The internal correlations between the retinal cells and the nerves that contract tongue motor muscles remained unchanged, regardless of the external “reality” “seen”.
(ii) This experiment with salamanders had already, in a similar way, been carried out on human beings: at the end of the 19th century, George Stratton fitted himself with glasses with lenses that made him see the world upside down. After about a week of severe disorientation, his vision returned to generating images in their usual positions; a few more days and he removed his glasses, so that for several hours everything was seen upside down again until, finally, his nervous system recovered its original correlations.[3] In summary: after an abrupt external change, the process of reconfiguring internal correlations to recover congruence with the environment requires time.
(iii) In an experiment on TV, Alain Bombard presented two glass basins: one with polluted water in which an octopus was swimming with ease, and the other with clean sea water; When transferring the octopus from polluted water to clean water, it writhed, prostrated itself and died.[4] That animal had had all its life time to adjust its internal correlations in order to maintain congruence with the polluted water in which it was born, and practically no time to update these correlations in the face of the sudden change to clean water.
(iv) Also an episode similar to that of the octopus had already happened, inadvertently, with human beings: from December 1944, with the approach of the end of the Second World War, the Nazis began the massive transfer of the remaining prisoners in their concentration camps to the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, overcrowding it. When liberated by British troops in April 1945, there were around 60 prisoners there. The soldiers, sympathetic to the survivors' skeletal condition, gave them their high-calorie rations, and about 14 died right away. Subjected to extreme hunger, their bodies, in order to survive, had reset the level of electrolytes in their blood to a minimum, and the abrupt production of digestive enzymes led them to hypophosphatemia (low phosphates), which led to cardiorespiratory failure.
Far beyond bacteria, salamanders or octopuses, man, as he is not only social but also civilizational, constitutes a particular case among living beings.
The theory of autopoiesis It then explains the transition from prehistoric man (animal) to historical man (animal and also civilizational) by considering language as a biological phenomenon. What distinguishes man from other animals such as dolphins (which maintain an eminently auditory language) and chimpanzees and gorillas (capable of learning the rudiments of sign languages from humans, such as those used by deaf-mutes) would not be their abilities. cognitive learning capabilities, but rather their superior vocalization capabilities – which led to the emergence of language, and only then did advances in learning take place.
Many animals are capable of communication (ants, for example), but language is a particular case of communication, which emerges when the communications themselves can become elements of the environment, that is, when they become referenceable through specific internal (in this case, neuronal) correlations. Once they become elements of the external environment, they also begin to operate as disturbances (variations in the environment) for individuals, disturbances whose compensation relies on the coordination of individuals' behaviors in reciprocal coupling.
In other words, communications begin to form descriptions of the environment, descriptions with which one can interact: two or more people engaged in the task of digging a hole distinguish in language, in a consensual way, elements of their world such as “stone” , “earth” or “shovel” and, when interacting with these distinctions, they coordinate their conduct. But, from the moment one of them starts calling the hole a “cistern”, “silo”, “pit” or “garbage bin”, a new consensus emerges regarding that common world.
It was by having developed this ability to interact in a recursive way with his own internal neuronal states (capacity for abstraction) that man began to indefinitely expand his cognitive domain (learning); and, by having language, there are absolutely no limits to what he can describe.
The characterization of autopoiese it requires that there be physical production (cellular, molecular) of the organisms' components by themselves – which, due to scientific rigor, would not apply to societies. Given this restriction, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela preferred to call “autonomous” (instead of autopoietic) situations such as: two or more living beings become coupled, mutually specifying “environment” for each other; such coupling facilitates their individual autopoiesis; interactions between them become recurrent, and the conduct of each one ends up becoming a function of the conduct of the others; Finally, this reciprocal coupling ends up becoming stable – this is when a so-called autonomous unit emerges: a colony of insects, a flock of animals, an ecosystem, a human society.
The person who makes the leap from biology to sociology and shows that human social systems are also self-producing is Niklas Luhmann. Already in the 1960s, Niklas Luhmann was dedicated to understanding legal systems, and saw them as self-referential. The identity of these systems derives from a principle of impartial application of laws, regardless of whether or not they are in line with the circumstances of the moment.
Since the legislative bodies for updating laws do not have enough resourcefulness to be able to keep up with the pace of changes that occur in all dimensions of societies, throughout the world legal systems are becoming outdated, by subordinating the compensation of any disturbance arising from the environment (society) to the conservation of their historically consolidated identities.
With the advent of the theory of autopoiesis, Niklas Luhmann was finally able to have the bases he was lacking to consummate his theory of society, by which both social systems and psychic systems (people) are formed by processes of meaning production (Sinn) that, continuously and recursively, produce those systems (with which Niklas Luhmann converts the very notion of system from spatial to temporal, from a constitution by physical components to a constitution by events).
What distinguishes psychic systems from social systems is the nature of the meaning-producing processes (in psychic systems, states of consciousness; in social systems, interactions). Both operate in a closed (autonomous) way in the conservation of their identities, and they form distinct domains, mutually dependent on each other for their own generation and conservation, but not determining each other, which implies that there is no direct causality between the actions of people and the constitution of social systems – social systems have a “life” in themselves.
Thus, just like living beings (autopoietic systems), social systems are self-maintaining, or “self-conserving”. Any contingencies in the external environment only occur as disturbances, and any internal changes to compensate for these disturbances will necessarily be subordinated to the conservation of identity. The social system creates “its” reality (its “world”) by perpetually establishing and readjusting internal correlations as modes of reference to external patterns of variation: for millennia, for example, navigators entered the seas terrified at the prospect of falling. by the edge of the world – a world that was then, for everyone, flat; For millennia, too, men who saw the Sun rise on one side of the sky and set on the opposite side believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth – it was after inventing a telescope and proving Copernicus' thesis that it is the Earth that rotates. around the Sun that Galileo came to dramatically suffer the inertia of tradition, and the risks of proposing a reality (a world) diametrically opposed to that of others. It is worth asking ourselves: which of the contemporary “realities” will not, in the future, be equally reduced to the condition of beliefs?
This process by which we humans subordinate the understanding of the world to the conservation of our historical identities is too subtle for us, and therefore goes unnoticed by us. In the groups I facilitate, I usually propose an exercise: I ask people to form pairs with others they know little or nothing about, and I give them the task of getting to know the other person, asking them questions and writing down their ideas on a sheet of paper. questions and the answers given.
Once the task is finished, I tell them: “Now forget the answers you wrote down, what matters here are the questions that each of you asked. Ask yourself now: why did you ask “these” questions? What does each of them have to do with “your” life?” In the discussion that follows, a seemingly “neutral” question like (for example) “where do you live?” Pulling the thread can lead (for example) to that person deciding to live close to their place of work to reduce travel time, but they would like to live in another location, which is still far away. That (the advantages and disadvantages of where she lives) is an open and important question in her life. When asking “where do you live?” to a stranger, she is, somewhere between consciously and unconsciously, seeking to answer “her” life question.
Another example: an anecdote circulates in alcoholism treatment circles, according to which, at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States, the monitor proposed to the assembled group an experience of direct contact with objective reality. He then took two glass flasks and filled one with water and the other with alcohol; He took a small worm and dropped it into the jar of water: the worm sank, a few seconds later it began to move, reached the surface and undulated to the edge. The monitor collected the worm and this time dropped it into the bottle of alcohol: it sank again, but remained inert; Moments later it began to disintegrate.
After some time, all that was left of the worm was a cloudy region in the middle of the crystalline liquid. The monitor then asked: “Did everyone see it?” Yes, everyone had seen it. “And what conclusion can we reach?” A hand went up: “I understand that if we drink alcohol, we will not have worms.” That alcoholic had updated his internal correlations (come to an understanding as to what he had seen) in a way that referenced who he was – an alcoholic.
To an external observer, this person's behavior may seem “irrational” (someone who sees the death of a living being immersed in alcohol does not realize that alcohol would be harmful to life) – but this is because any judgment by an observer is gives from his identity, observer. The understanding that arises from the alcoholic's identity is in no way “irrational”, it is the understanding specific to him, in his rationality as an alcoholic.
From this understanding of the nature of living beings, people and societies, provided by the theory of autopoiesis, we can now adequately address the delicate question of the causes and consequences of nuclear war.
*Ruben Bauer Naveira He is a pacifist activist. Book author A new utopia for Brazil: Three guides to get out of chaos (available here).
Notes
[1] According to ADLER, Julius, TSO, Wung-Wai. “'Decision'-making in Bacteria: Chemotatic Response of Escherichia coli to Conflicting Stimuli”. Science, vol. 184, pp. 1292-1294, 1974.
[2] According to SPERRY, Roger W. “Restoration of Vision after Crossing of Optic Nerves and after Contralateral Transplantation of Eye”. Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 8, pp. 15-28, 1945.
[3] According to STRATTON, George M. “Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image”. Psychological Review, vol. 3, pp. 611-617, 1896; “Upright Vision and the Retinal Image”. Psychological Review, vol. 4, pp. 182-187, 1897; and “Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image”. Psychological Review, vol. 4, pp. 341-360, 463–481, 1897.
[4] Extracted from page 25 of GUATTARI, Felix. The Three Ecologies🇧🇷 Campinas: Papirus, 1990.
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