Karol Bojnowski

ZANES BRAIN (A NOVEL)

THE WRITING EFFECT

[The cognitive mindbox Homo sapiens are in]

If you were a fish would you know you lived in water? When it comes to cognitive science the average person shrugs and rolls their eyeballs. Its hard to care about something that seems so esoteric, but what if I told you your mind was shaped by something so sublime that youd be hard pressed to grasp the full implications. WARNING, the medium your thoughts swim through IS NOT your own! Thanks to scientists like Dr. John Searle, Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at University of California- Berkeley, some key points about us Homo sapiens have been established. These points are rather remarkable. It turns out that the big step between civilization and more primitive forms of human society is written language. He says writing constitutes civilization. It is the infrastructure of civilization itself. Writing is a virtual reality environment for the human mind. The key word is virtual. It has affected who we are, how we think, how we remember, how we organize. We arent born with it. Homo sapiens must learn how to live as civilized human beings. Advanced forms of civilization, such as killing others because we disagree with them, marriage, or becoming a newspaper editor, are only possible because of written language. Written language shapes our cognition. What does this mean? Let me give you an analogy. Writing is a pair of invisible glasses placed on us at birth. We dont see the glasses or have any sense we are wearing them, but we operate based on what we see through them. The written word doesnt create the world beyond the glasses; it creates the associations we experience inside our skulls when we look at the world through its invisible lenses. These glasses select and organize what we see from a much larger potential. By greater potential I mean that not only is there more information we could perceive, but also that our ability to perceive operates within a limited species-specific spectrum. For example, we know x-rays exist outside our senses because we have discovered their effects. So not only is there more than meets the human eye, the limited information we are capable of perceiving is distorted by our lineage of written language. While pondering these ideas I made an astounding connection. Do your best to imagine the 4.5 billion year timeline called life-on-earth. Humans branched off from their common ancestor with chimpanzees 57 million years ago. We naturally evolved our collective view of the universe by seeing it through our particular species-specific physical senses. My point being that if a bat had our brain capacity it would naturally have a different cognitive picture of the world because it uses echolocation. Of course its the same world different species cognate so differently. Humans slowly evolved through stages of non-verbal and verbal forms of communication as they continued their

domination over other species. Roughly 5,000 years ago an incredible new technology sprung up rather simultaneously in five places around the globe. This technology is undoubtedly the most formative technology man has known. It is called writing. As this form of communication developed, so did the shape of cognitive reality for our species. While researching I was struck by the causal relationship between the history of writing and who we are as a species today. It turns out that from the period writing began roughly 5,000 years ago until about 500 years ago, 99% of mankind was illiterate. Remember the content of paragraph two. If writing shaped civilization and human cognition, it means that a handful of men from our ancient past shaped our human cognition and created the formative matrix of how we view ourselves in the world today. If this is true, the implications are astounding. I call these men THE ONE PERCERNT, or TOPs. TOPs were mostly rulers and their religious leaders. What effect did TOPs control of the code have on our species? One only has to identify the most influential ancient texts to find the seeds of our current cognitive matrix. The few people able to write 5000 years ago did not enjoyed freedom of press. Even today one must be careful with dispensing code running counter-current to the cognitive matrix. As we explore this idea we mustnt forget we are looking for our cognitive box from within it. Here unfurls a walk along the razors edge. Is it possible that because of the cognitive box created by TOPs, Homo sapiens are destroying the planet from which they evolved? Todays superrich are still served at the expense of all other life on earth. Since writing began, the shape of civilizations wealth has been a pyramid with a pointy, one-percent top. Why is that? Like it or not, it turns out that religion was a key tool used to create Homo sapiens cognitive box. Written religion, as distinct from oral, was effectively employed for thousands of years to develop a few Homo sapiens ideas of who God was. The ideas about creation that were passed from mouth to ear for millennia were brutally stamped out, much like enemies are today. Rather suddenly, God was delivered whole in the form of a mysterious new code that few could decipher. It was thus for five thousand years. When the written text was forced upon humans by the kings sword and God was relocated off-earth the psychological split of Homo sapiens from the planet from which they evolved was underway. Is it possible that this cognitive disconnect created in the minds of men has effectively caused mass extinction, suffering and destruction of the planet to serve relatively few Homo sapiens? The idea of a patriarchal, separate, all-powerful creator with Homo sapienslike qualities is the suspect of this investigation. It may be the most destructive idea our naturally egocentric species has ever conjured. It psychologically splits us from the planet from which we evolved, thereby freeing us to emulate our idea of this creator at the expense of all other life forms, who are in fact, our genetic brethren. Homo sapiens hallucination of a male character in-their-own-image exerts a powerful influence over our civilization today. He is a significant part of the background matrix influencing human behavior on a broad scale. The projection of this Gods power over us has barely been diluted by new information skimmed from the oil-driven technology

revolution of the past hundred years. For thousands of years TOPs naturally used writing to create a civilization to their advantage. The cognitive infrastructure of civilization resulted in a world where relatively few humans are still behind the most powerful lobbyist in congress or the big businesses driving *development in China. What we call capitalism is the outgrown of Homo sapiens natural propensity to desire power and wealth. It is strictly an evolutionary process, although no innocence is implied. Today as most Homo sapiens cringe or starve, a few are making record breaking profits. The collective mind of Homo sapiens remains manipulated to the advantage of few at the expense of all. We humans remain unaware of the cognitive box we are in. New information pumped from the oil-driven technology well of the past hundred years is struggling to affect five thousand years of cognitive conditioning. Its time to double our efforts on shinning the light inward. To break free of One Percent Paradigms we must intentionally reinvent ourselves from inside our cognitive box of illusions. Our transient oil-based technology blip has provided tools with which we have glimpsed beyond ourselves with clarity of perception that transcends the very language that delivered us to our present. The window through which we gaze may be as brief as the oil blip relatively few Homo sapiens currently enjoy. The moral obligations attached to the employment of our diminishing oil supply is not the subject of this paper, however, the ultimate brutality visited upon life on earth by those controlling it is one impetus for this writing. The point here is to explore the ways in which our cognition has and is being shaped. It seems suddenly ridiculous to be held captive by a tyrannical cognitive model created by a few ancient, male Homo sapiens. Unless we re-write the code and update the data base with new information drawn from our diminishing, oil-driven technologic revolution; what David Deutsch calls the enlightenment; we will continue to serve the few at the expense of our brotherhood of stardust, time, and mutation. The Writing Effect holds real power over humanity. It remains the magic spell that shapes human cognitive reality. The fact that this technology was edited by the selfinterests of the founding keepers-of-the-code seems to be lost in the matrix of the cognitive reality we now share. The ideals behind the code were delivered by sword wielding armies of Homo sapiens. The cognitive reality is intact. Today we are the proud fathers of over twenty thousand nuclear warheads pointed every which way. As Homo sapiens continue their unconscious, slow-motion leap toward emulating a false God, they jump from a globe that was once home toward a virtual world where anything is possible; or is it?
* Words such as development are an excellent example of how written language can be used to manipulate cognitive reality. Destruction-of-the-planet-to-make-money would have been a more accurate, but less profitable definition.