CHAOS AND THE EMERGENT MIND OF THE POND (1991)

(An audio collage of digital field recordings of the sounds generated by microscopic aquatic insects, recorded in freshwater ponds around North America and Africa)

Beneath the water's surface are a variety of plants and small insects. At first their numbers seem sparse but multiply to immense proportions the longer you stare at
even a small segment of the pond's geography

While the sounds above water are comfortable and familiar, those occurring under the
surface shocking. Their alien variety seems unprecedented as if controlled by a
mysterious but urgent logic. The minutiae which produce these audible rasps and
sputters remain mostly unseen amongst the tentacles of plants and layers of silt but
each contributes to a sonic multiverse of exquisite complexity.

The timbres of these sounds are obviously magnificent, a tiny orchestra of homemade
percussion seemingly intoxicated by the infinite diversity of audible colors, but what
strikes my ears most readily are the rhythmic structures. They appear to consist of an
order of complexity greater than most humanmade music, rivaling the most
sophisticated computer composition or polyrhythms of African drumming.

Amid a background hum of distant chatter, the persistent clicks of several different
insects pulsate. Many of these sounds are continuous but elastic, their constancy
appears sensitive to the assertions of others. This fabric is punctuated by the
intermittent cries of something unseen or the wheezing of larger beetles carrying their air supply between their legs. Steady state bands of sawtooth resonance waft across
the distance between schools of insect thought that together form an emergent
cognition. This infinitesimal world seems complete. I stand at its edge as a voyeur
listening to the interstices of its autonomous knowing.

While I understand the scientific need to reduce the complexity of these sounds to
essential attributes, I cannot be satisfied with the standard explanation that these are
merely instinctive behaviors. Nor can I accept the assumption that the creatures
themselves are mindless specs of protoplasm forever doomed to reiterate a few
automatic mating calls or territorial assertions. The musician in me cannot help but
hear much more.

First of all, there is this sense of urgency. While every one of these sounds seems
suspended in an aura of necessity it is something beyond the mere action of
automata. I hear the purposeful urgency of joyful experience, what Alfred North
Whitehead called "the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one
arising out of the composition of many." This is the poignant urgency of self-reference
and the bringing into being of an autonomous world in the presence of others.

Then there are these emergent rhythms, these elastic pulsations of life, sounding as if
the very morphology of these little beings and the pond's macro body were dependent
upon this aquatic jazz for the maintenance of time and space: primal drummers
collectively engaged in the creation of worlds through jamming together the
stridulatory resonance of their viscera. This is a dance between periodicity and chaotic
swirl, the expansion and contraction of momentary self-resonance within the mutuality
of mind.

This is not the mechanistic modelling of a chaotic system. It is the real thing and its
vitality speaks to me. You cannot dismantle this whole with an expectation that its
guests will reveal their motivations in isolation from the party. The profuse
interconnections between these organisms betray the limitations of reductionist
thought and I am left with the realization that it is the evidence of this wholeness
manifesting as sound which I must learn to respect if not comprehend.

Bio-acousticians have hypothesized that every location on earth, inhabited by living
organisms, has a unique acoustical bio-spectrum. The chorus of sounds which
comprise these bio-spectra may provide information about the dynamics of the resident
ecosystem such that status information about the collective ecology is transmitted to its
coexisting organisms. From this perspective I can imagine the pond's audible
bio-spectrum as a strange attractor of recursive utterance, a chaotic voice that helps to
keep the ecosystem alive.

Perhaps the complexity of these tiny rhythmic entrainments and chaotic cycles of
microcosmic heart beats hover around that basin of attraction known as thought and
together bring into being an awareness which I cannot fathom. The placidity of the
water's surface takes on the sense of a membrane enclosing a collective intelligence. I
know that this is not a rational thought but I find it to be irresistible.

I'm delighted that it is through listening to the pond that I am forced to grasp its
wholeness. Our dependency on visual spatiotemporal metaphors eludes the dense
interpenetration of living things. If one is to speak of the chaos of living systems, I
prefer to hear it. Life is a vibrant plenum resonating in at least four dimensions and
not merely the topological detritus of matter.

For all of my fascination with science and delight in its accomplishments, there is one
metaphysical notion which it has not yet forced me to abandon. My direct experience
of nature convinces me that the worlds I hear are saturated with an intelligence
emergent from the very fullness of interconnection which sustains them. Every living
being is a sacred event reaching out from its unique coherence to construct a reality.
We need not anthropomorphize the life around us. Instead, we may celebrate those
mysterious occasions which have given rise to each form of mind.

One of the most fascinating scientific concepts of the 20th century has been the idea
of emergent properties: that patterns can arise from a complex process which appear
to transcend the agents which bring the process into being. If, as nonlinear dynamics
and the new sciences of complexity suggest, we cannot truly understand such
emergent patterns through isolating the component agents of their generative
processes but only through observing the dynamics of the system as a whole, then the
pond is more than a simple metaphor. Is it only a place where little creatures are roaming with blind instinct, or is this the voice of a genus loci speaking through a distributed network of autonomous beings, each perceiving a rich and complex world of
sensation?

For centuries it has been the habit of much of humanity to assert the inferiority of nonhuman life-forms. Animals were denied their own autonomy and relegated to machine status. The justification for this attitude was based upon an assumption that animals did not possess language and could therefore not be profoundly aware. A reexamination of contemporary versions of this premise in the light of current knowledge betrays a serious contradiction. To assert that human consciousness, arising out of a network of material interactions similar to those which give rise to the very existence of all life, is more important than other forms of mind not operating within the human linguistic domain is absurd. While it can be said that other forms of life do not dance within the social web of our peculiar way of being conscious, we cannot assume that they don't have their own webs and ways to self-awareness.

My view of evolution is not of a simple hierarchical ascent but of a holarchy of potentially infinite bifurcations. Some of these branches can be regarded as simple variations on extant morphologies while others, such as complex multi-cellular organisms, subsume the developments of predecessors into more complex structures. But an understanding of this complexification process cannot justify the belief that any individual species is the singular manifestation of mind in nature. Instead, I invoke Whitehead's concept of a primordial God: an immanent force self-realized through an intensification of experience and unfolding of novelty in the world.

Each cognitive entity is at the threshold of that self-realization, a unique frontier of
manifestation realized by its dynamic actuality. Perhaps all creatures are the
distributed sensors for that larger mind and each expresses a special reality into
existence through its own dynamic coherence. The pond and its creatures are an
exquisite part of the coming into being of both self and other.

The following sounds are a compilation of underwater recordings made in a variety of
North American freshwater ponds. They were digitally recorded with a portable DAT
recorder using a pair of omnidirectional hydrophones at a 12-inch separation. Some
of the sounds are at actual speed while others are slowed to an octave below their true frequency and time domains. Besides their sequencing, no other alterations of the
sounds have been made. Since most of the insects generating these sounds have not
been studied for their sound making capacities, the specific sources remain a mystery.