colonial cultures
society and reproduction

As a society grows, individual roles become increasingly specialised and individuals more socially dependent. Social cohesion and development is achieved by means of a shared cultural narrative that replicates in individuals, inside other cultures, and in new colonies.

Modularity - it's life Jim, just not as we know it.

Our environment is made up of all the matter and all the lives surrounding us. We are a part of it, not apart from it. And even though we've evolved an environment to suit us, still it's that which determines our fitness and health.

Evolution has no interest. The environment does. Life changes, it selects.

Life inside us and surrounding us, is social. Virus, microbe and animal blending together, it has been social for billions of years. It's this that gives rise to what we know and recognise as being us.

Where others reproduce us, life is good being social, individual parts of a whole.

Life needs awareness in order to survive; so each life is an individual with an individual awareness. How else could it be? Besides our technologies we're really not that different to other creatures.

We say we do not flock. We live in societies not cultures. We are proud to be individual.

So differentiated from the rest before we can stand we fight to be free. It's something we line up and die for. Nonetheless we unthinkingly craft our behaviours in anticipation of the culture through which we think they'll be interpreted.

Growing in a matrix, to which we adapt, we peer through the pattern it provides, to make sense, of the world and of us.

Our culture transforms and translates the environment that selects genetic success. It provides a conceptual framework in which individual perceptions of reality develop, and it expresses its society's perception.

Reality becomes, and perceptions change, building us layer upon layer; individual records of experience.

In the same way that machine code is more primitive than a word processor, sensory awareness is more primitive than social awareness, and language more primitive than culture. The primitive appears to dominate. If we don't know where we are we travel in circles, running like hamsters, milling like ants.

Cultures support the narratives of our lives, keeping us innocent, victims and victors, defending our right from what's wrong.

It's perception that drives a being's response to it's condition, and it's this that drives societies to respond as a whole to threats of attack. As our bloody revolutions show, in the end responsibility is seen both as individual and collective.

In virtual safety, evolving absorbed in hives, nodes of a network blooming, bodies and minds adapt and pass on.

As they shepherd us on, the narratives that surround us both excite and depress. But altruism emerged from conflict not the other way around, so though evolution will continue within and without us, still we must choose while we can. No game theory can contain us while we can cheat.  ►