Contra Columnis Quintus XI

On the Actions of Specimens of Life Across All Kinds

Foundational Ideas which Descriptively Identify and Enable the Understanding of Life Generally and per specimens on the Way to Further Discussion of Species and Ecosystems, as a Fitting Context for the Discussion of Certain Forms of Such Possibilities which may be Rightly Called "Injust" and "Wrong" in Objective Ways Relevant to a Discussion of Rackets which I Understand to be Quintessentialized in Fifth Columnry


In continuation from X in this series, I will discuss those analogues between ecosystems, species, and specimens of life form, and this as a foundation for coherently discussing, on an objective basis, what certain "rackets" literally are, and what are their fundamental bases outside the domain, hotly contested mostly by buffoons, of moral psychology.  Later I will peel back this discussion in order to demonstrate certain truths in that causally subvenient domain (in yet one more way), which is to be done in order of its own layers of explantory and causal subvenience: Axio-ontology (True Metaphysics), Morality, Ethics, Politics (in all kingdoms and clades of life), and in this world a special form of science known as "physics" and all of its offshoots, the most "metaphysical" of which is mathematics.  In this current analysis, weighted toward objective descriptors that nevertheless will be directly relevant to the other domains I have here just mentioned, I will discuss the biological analogues between domains of life so as later to expose their relevance to the discussion of fifth column rackets of various kinds.  

Looking at the first one I listed, we mention first the respiratory system, and it is quite clear that this has different meanings on different layers of the analogy.  In terms of biological processes within the organism itself as specimen, there is the location of what is called in many cultures the "essence of life".  Surely it is not an obtuse claim, in that it is not only key in some form to most life, but represents a process of interaction with the environment that enables the organism to operate in its own process yet at the same time to economize into utility some aspect of the environment (air, for example, or gases, or oxygenated liquid, and whatever else fulfills this process, and there are analogues in many contexts which can  demonstrate such similarity as to retain the word as a metanym (let the situation breathe).  This is not a benign condition ultimately, but a fundamental "choke collar" which life in this world wears as a slave to what may be understood as the "evil air" of the demiurgic "breath".  More on that aspect in the metaphysical analysis in another series.  But this process, the respiratory, is significantly automatic for the most part.  If the organism's "higher functions" are dormant, it still occurs.  If an organism has no "higher functions" as we know them, it still occurs.  Yet it is also directly manipulable by the behavioral conditions of the organism.  Starting with the glandular and deep physiological homeostases of the body's process, breathing co-occurs with other processes involving the inner and outer conditions of the organism.  Those convergent aspects will be discussed later in terms of these other conditions.  

The digestive system is understood to include both liquid and solid materials so as to offer raw materials for the development, structure and function of the organism.  This includes, naturally, the expulsion of wastes which are necessary and otherwise consequential byproducts of this ingestion and digestion of "food".  Respiration is critical to the function of the tissues and organs which engage in these operations.  As this process is to exchange a disorganized and reorganized object of digestion (either as ingested and processed nutrients or as waste byproducts), and so requires a medium of exchange, and as respiration is also involved directly in those processes on a chemical and even physical level (the yogis know this, as do health and fitness and physiology experts) there is a direct tie-in between all these processes to which we now turn.

As the "tie in" of all these processes, each of which are essential to the life of the basic organism which has some form of them, (and if they weren't essential, they wouldn't be there at all, as I said, but more on that later), I offer the circulatory system, which I would enlarge to include the circulation of ALL materials from one part of the body to another in any form, and so the lymph, though functionally an "immune" system entity, should be understood as a functional variety of circulation, and directly depends upon a relation with it in order to carry out its functions. The same goes for interstitial fluids between and within tissues, and also within cellular structure and environments.  The "Blood" is the Life.  In it are the entire raw materials store for the organism's internal organization and function, all of them.  The circulatory system, involving all the systems of the body in such an elemental way, is their reference point to one another and to their overall order and order maintenance systems, to include all that each organ does for the body's action and potential for action.  

Now the discussion begins to go into three areas simultaneously, which are all forms of the same essential feature of life, which in a basic sense is to "act" to maintain its own existence (its "health") and so survive.  These are all forms of "adaptive response", though one is internal, the other external, and these cross-relate in dynamic ways that has required a "processing system" to navigate, control and negotiate those relations and account for their possibility for improvement.

So I'll discuss the first two in relation to one another, which are "internal and external" in various ways, and are considered "motility" and "mobility" respectively.  In terms of "motility", we mean really the capacity for motion within the organism itself.  All the muscle groups and other viscera which are involved in the transference of materials involved in respiration, digestion, and circulation are definite forms of motility, or the capacity for motion within the organism "as such" and which may simply be the consequence of physical and chemical processes which are necessarily relevant and involved in the organism's structure and function due to the raw materials involved in its constitution, and hence which are assimilated into it through various forms of homeostatic motility.  This is a natural "sea of motion" or energy transformations, already found in matter in various forms and circumstances.  Their relations specific to the generation, development, maintenance, and furtherance of life in an organism is a specific subset of these materials potential for action, as circumscribed by the needs of that organism's existence and actions, and is referred to as physiological homeostasis.  This refers to all that I first discussed before this paragraph, and then some.  If an animal with these features could just flow like a blob and absorb food through contact, these features would simply be more complex forms of what an amoeba could accomplish.

The more external expression of these factors of motility involves the locomotion and ambulation or other translocative motion of the organism both as a whole and in part.  Moving of parts of the organism with respect to other parts in a way that displaces the air or other objects of the immediate environment (and as an immediate consequence), registers as an attribute of motility shading into mobility, where in the former it is more subtle and closer to the organism's skeletal structure so that even if that structure doesn't move, motion is detected in effects on the outer world as direct physical consequences (breathing, pulsing of fluids, electrodynamic effects in some cases, in some cases digestion).  Leaving aside other behavioral dynamics like "vacuum behaviors" and behaviors which are necessary adjuncts to direct biological actions (such as various low-level nervous and glandular actions), I here just focus the reader's attention on the way that the organism acts "in situ", just as if its environment were somewhat of a neutral "pleroma".

As all of these processes are tied in within the discussion of "generation and furtherance" of life, those will be discussed later as alike with respiration, digestion and circulation they "tie in" to the other processes in a functional way that makes their discussion in tandem natural and necessary.  So before that, the further aspects of "adaptive response".

So motility is simply a gradation of the transformations of matter and energy, in the organism's body, so that structures and functions of that organism are sustained, and take forms of internal and external motions which are most directly necessary as byproducts of the homeostasis of the organism.  When those actions are taking place, however, it is not for the purpose of body manipulation of one part in relation to the other, nor of any part to the whole, nor of any of these in relation to any object in the environment, but rather it is a byproduct of the processes of the organism's homeostasis "as such".

Now with "mobility" as distinct from "motility" as I use the term, and in a way not too far from its use in biology, there is a change in the skeletal structure which is conducted so as to displace its baseline internal relation in some given sustainable relation, but not necessarily or simply as a direct consequence of the motile finctions per se.  Amoebas may represent a borderline case as they lack the cilia of a paramecium in order to be mobile yet they move, as their structure is reformed by means of the digestion and circulation of their inner fluids and organelles in constant relation to physical and chemical conditions directly outside in their environment, and so this would be an overlapping area of this distinction in the forms of motion of the organism, where motility leads to mobility in a direct way that is internalized in larger and more complex animals.

With actions of mobilization of the organism's mass still having some expressive and retroactive relations to the motilities of homeostatic actions, we'll first look at them in general forms which at least largely satisfy the distinction between these somewhat overlapping categories of change as motion of the organism.  If the organism has a steady form of projecting its form through space outside of its body, and does this as an act "in itself" and not as primarily a homeostatic expression, then we have a form of change in the organism that is not the same as simple growth and decay (development and death), of alteration (more of the modes of motile action and responses), or of increase or decrease in size (a numerical accretion or excretion of material so as to amplify or diminish the structure per se of the organism). The Aristotelian modes of "change" also do have "in themselves" modes which overlap, and the various forms of entity which express them in varied manners also demonstrate composites and amalgams of these differences in ways which are structurally and functionally overlapping (like the amoeba). Those are the "fine-structural" forms which metaphysical analysis conceptualizes as the "aetiology" of an event, the way it manifests as a complex of causal modes.  On with the essential distinction, then.

So if the organism has cause to "move" in this sense, it cannot be functional if it is in contradiction to the functions of its own motility.  That's one obvious limit that will frame the mobility of the organism so as to limit it.  You don't walk around with your head tucked into your chest or toward it if you expect your inner functions to operate optimally as to respiration and circulation, especially to and from the head (unless you have "text neck", LIKE MANY "GPS-ing" FIFTHS HAVE.  The functions of motility more importantly enable and motivate the gross and fine musculoskeletal motions of the organism for activities which are projections of their potential in seeking of a further actuality which cannot be obtained in the root circumstances from which those motions proceed.  Plant life, most of it, does this in a way similar to the way an amoeba does, and with regard to all aspects of their motility.  Animals do this far more "actively" and with more "animation".

This is not too much of a challenge for our understanding, to address mobility in this way, as it is basically the only way that this form of motion has relevance to the survival and thriving of the organism.  It must have "made it thus far" if it is "being still" without the mobility of the organism contradicting its motility, and so it is in a relative "rest" state, but if that situation starts to drift to some less satisfying form for what the organism's homeostasis has become adapted, then this will be rightly understood to be a byproduct of the changes in the environment, or in the overall unsustainability of the current relation to the environment, and not at first of the very structure and function of the organism itself in its own motility.  The organism simply seeks to adjust its relation to its environment in a way which restores an optimal or at least closer-to-optimal homeostatic condition.  Since animals as small as amoeba and paramecium do not just sit there, it is not a suprise that more complex organisms have gotten as far as they have by continuing to evolve various forms of mobilization of their obviously very useful skeleto-muscular structures.  

Blood, lymph, digestive material, cerebrospinal and hormonal fluids, interstitial fluids, and the respirative gases all benefit in various ways from the overal mobility of the organism, and the fundamental value of "exercise" is laid bare here.  It is also good for getting out of situations which are inhibitive of the organism's survival and thriving, as well as useful in seeking out situations which are optimizing of and contributive to its survival-thriving dynamic, which is simply the persistence and furtherance of its dynamic structural and functional forms that are bound by the laws of homeostatic cycles and their mediation with respect to an environment.  At least that will be sufficient for this context.  The discussion of "happiness" would take place in the study called "eudamonia".  A word which entitles another study made by Aristotle which is worthy of examination.  People throw around the word "happiness" in a way that barely has any connection to "thriving", and use it rather to mean "feeling good".  That's not how simple it actually is.  But that awaits the discussion in a moral context situated in the semiotics of a sentient animal's continuum of states between deathly misery and ecstatic joy, and will take place in a later discussion.

Let us say that the organism is simply "well-adjusted" to the environment, but that the configural situation of the organism could be an issue (such as circulation being cut off in sleep, so some turning or other motion of the body being necessary to alleviate it), or the environment as a whole which is more of the circumstance of the organism (being surrounded by circle of jackals).  The organism must find ways to adjust its bodily position relative to the situation and circumstances so as to alleviate danger (as above) and optimize gains (getting closer to a clean water source, or source of food, or area of shade or sunlight, or perhaps "becoming happy" in a eudamoniacal context).  These instantiations of mobility are all relevant to the motility of the organism, and the reverse is also true, but the motility here tends to motivate the mobility, and the reverse is an accomodating to and adjustment of conditions which are stabilizing and enhancing to the motility by the mobility.  The articulation of the forms of mobility must structurally derive from a harmonic of the functions of its inner organism, and this is to be a homeostatic relationship all its own, but not one necessarily answerable to the inherent conditions of the organism alone.  These are revised and revisible to relations to the environment even as it may change so as to be quite different from what is suitable for the organism, and in varying degrees of intensity of change.  It must have a system for processing these relations which mediates the organism and its capabilities in a truly adaptive way toward its environment vis-a-vis its innermost needs.

So these further elaborations of the changeability of the organism (mobility) parley between the less changeable aspects (motility) and the far more changeable aspects (in relation to the organism) of the environmental situation of the organism and its field of circumstances.  But this has a certain range of feasibility which may or may not obtain to any use for the organism's survival and thriving, and adjustments must be made which ensure that there is a utility of mobile actions which are answerable to the processes of homeostatic motility which motivate and justify their existence.  These conditions are developed in the "adaptive response" sysem which is most properly speaking the most active and dynamic of them all, and that is what actively governs the motility and mobility of the organism toward the objectives which satisfy its health and flourishing.  This is the "neuro-glandular" system, as I undertand them to be a complex intermingling of governing systems that process and perfect the relations of all of the organic systems in which they are embedded.  They process the allowances and potentials of the organism's other systems so as to ensure that they are not in a wasteful or organism-endangering condition, and are also capable of enhancing the baseline of the organism's capabilities so as to temporarily and more chronically achieve states of gross and subtle adaptation which are "truly responsive and adaptive", and so properly parley between the organism's suvival and thriving, health and flourishing.  This is what must obtain in order to conduct these scalar conditions in a way truly adaptive to situations and conditions in which the organism is operating, and is all an extension of its fundamental processes.

Operations of the organism over the field of an environmental condition of its situation (proximally and centrally) and circumstance (more distally and peripherally), is what it means for the organism to survive and thrive, exist in health and flourish.  These operations are strategically and tactically orchestrated and refined by the neuro-glandular system so as to reduce dangers and instabilities in the organism's operations over these fields, and is answerable to all manner of evidences and conducements to correction of those operations, and to self-corrections on those corrections on those operations.  That is what the "chakral" systems refer to if I were to reduce their descriptive content and hone their relevance to these objective demonstrable attributes of the living being qua organism.

Next I will discuss how the members of a species, the specimens, interact with one another and how they relate to their environment in certain ways that cause them to manifest in their activities as groups that which they are capable of doing within the group as individuals (i.e. their roles), and vice versa (adaptive adjustments enforced from the environment on the individuals so that the group and its role-structures are changed), so that we can see how species and specimen recapitulate and reorganize with respect to one another in their adaptive homeostasis in and with their environments.