Naked Cognition: based on the Microbial Anthropology and Information theory

A supplementary article for “Homo rehabilis: who reduce themself to Nature"

“To accept as the subject of debate what one believes to be the wrong category is in any case a risk: to pay attention it, is to keep any illusions about its reality. [...] For by dealing with the illogical theory, the criticism will first be forced to so to speak pays tribute to it. The specter, carelessly evoked in the hope of being decisively exorcised, even if it disappears, will once again appear, moreover, more closer with us than expected from the place where it first appeared.” (Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Le Totemisme aujourdhui”, retranslated by me from the Japanese translation by Norio NAKAZAWA. )

As this sentence, written by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the book criticizing the concept of totemism as an illusion, suggests criticism is necessary but very difficult.
Things that do not exist are seen as if they are there, and when that misconception is shared by people, the logic of the discussion is dragged by the “things that do not exist” and goes in circles, it will not progress.
I wonder why things that do not exist in the first place appear to exist. The mechanism of this phenomenon can be understood by taking the example of the digital signal processing.

Harry Nyquist, a physicist from Sweden, showed that when converting an analog phenomenon into digital signals, the original signals can be reproduced by sampling at a frequency higher than twice the frequency component contained in the original signals of the analog phenomenon. This is called the “Sampling theorem”, and the number of half the sampling frequency is called the “Nyquist frequency”.
If the original signals before sampling contains frequency components higher than the Nyquist frequency, a “mirror image that do not exist in the original signals” is generated with the Nyquist frequency as the axis of symmetry. This is called “aliasing” or “folding noise”.

The noise and distortion caused by “folding” during signal processing make phenomena that are supposed to be there invisible due to the overlapping waveforms, and make things that are not there appear as images and sounds. “Moire” that occurs when certain conditions are met in photographs taken with a digital camera, “high-frequency false color” that causes errors at high spatial frequencies, and the reverse rotation phenomena of car tire or electric fan blades occuring in captured videos are well known as prominent examples of such noise.

Since our cognition using any languages or signs is also to be said a digitizing process that contains sampling and quantizing, it is possible to assume that: the same thing is happening in our minds, and things that do not exist appear to “exist” in this way.
If we hypothetically apply Nyquist’s “sampling theorem” in signal processing to how humans perceive the world, we can see that: if the bandwidth of the observer’s perception for the phenomenon actually occurring in front of them is more than twice the bandwidth of the informations that are included in the phenomenon, it will be possible to recognize the phenomenon occurring in front of them as itself is.
If the width of the observer’s perception is narrower than twice the bandwidth of the informations that are included in the phenomenon, “folding noise” occurs in the observer’s mind, distorting the original perception of the world. This is where the “lie” as an alias (false signal) arises.

This “lie” is not a lie that you know and dare to utter, but a “lie” that you utter while misunderstanding the fact that it is true. Therefore for the person who said this, and for those who heard that, it is difficult to distinguish between what is a lie (something that does not exist) and what is true (a phenomenon that actually occurs). These lies are called “half-truths” by the anthropologist and poet Dr. Loren Eisley in his autobiographical essay “The Night Country”, at a short piece entitled “Instruments of Darkness.”
The “half-truths” that appear in our minds in this way, are the false signals that make things that are not there appear to exist. Like the witches Shakespeare depicted in his play Macbeth, it manipulates humans skillfully with words, and makes us into “dark tools”.

“They are projections from our own psyche, smoking wisps of mental vapor that proclaim our subconscious intentions and bolster them with Delphic utterances — half-truths which we consciously accept, and which then take power over us .Under the spell of such oracles we create, not a necessary or real future, but a counterfeit drawn from within ourselves, which we then superimpose, through purely human power, upon reality. Indeed, one could say that these phantoms create a world that is at the same time spurious and genuine, so complex is our human destiny.” (Eiseley, Loren. “Instruments of Darkness.” The Night Country.)

The “folding noise” that occurs when the observer’s recognition range is not sufficiently secured for the phenomenon occurring in front of them, and the false signal as “half-truth” that occurs when the noise overlaps with the actual phenomenon, are half-voluntarily accepted as a plausible “double reality” and it covers a wide range of human social conventions.
Then, what exactly is the “width of recognition” that is necessary to prevent such noise from occurring?

In order to recognize the natural phenomena in front of us as they are as much as possible, we need a recognition width that is more than twice the bandwidth of the informations that are included in the phenomena. If we just look at Nature with the limited recognition that I am only human, it will certainly produce folding noises. “Human” is a very limited, so-called irreversibly compressed, cognitive state established by humans to facilitate social life, and is not suitable for observing nature as Nature itself. (“人間 Ningen or Jinkan”, which ordinarily means human in Japanese, is mainly symbolizing of the human interrelationship or the human society.)

What we are learning from observing humans as Nature itself is that about 90% of the cells that is making the human body function as life are those of microorganisms and viruses, and in terms of the ratio of genetic information, about 99% is derived from bacterias, and the overwhelming majority of the elements that making up one's “self” are the microbes. In other words, you are not only human. In order to accurately observe nature as Nature itself and the world as World itself, it is first necessary to grasp this kind of perception in an actual feeling of body.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has aptly wrote, “The notion of humanity in general derived from ethnographic reduction will no longer have anything to do with the notion of humanity in general as it was once conceived. When we come to understand life as the action of inert matter, it will become clear that the inert matter possesses properties very different from those hitherto thought to exist.” (Lévi-Strauss. “La Pensée sauvage”, retranslated by me from the Japanese translation by Yasuo OHASHI), it is beginning to become clear that the notion of general humanity that is being derived from molecular biological reduction is very different from the notion of general humanity that prevalent in today’s societies.

When humans attempt to recognize their own social structures and motivations for their actions, if they do not fully take into account the fact that the overwhelming majority of the elements that make up themselves are microbes and viruses, their cognitions will be superimposed by the folding noises, make illusions, and any debates based on them may go in circles, it will not progress forever.
A human being is a certainly self-identifiable personal existence and at the same time, in deeper bandwidth cognition, a forestlike ecosystem based on the complex interrelationship of microbes or viruses: thus our societies or any activities are something as shadows of their mandaralike inter-activities that are more mysterious than our myths. And in recent years, the scientists have begun naming some archaeas after mythical devines. In my deductional opinion, a part of microbes may be dreaming that our human activities are just their dreams. This is a little key clue to feel and think about Today what’s going on.

I am a native Japanese speaker and the original version of this article was written in Japanese. This translation was done by myself and may contain some errors due to lack of well writing skill in English. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns about the meaning of the texts.

The original Japanese texts are published in following page.
https://homorehabilis.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html