Ecosynthesis

The concept that biological organisms are technologies that mechanistically connect to their founding ecology in a way that produces value for neighboring organisms via complementarity.

Purpose?

6 min. read6.14.24by m.a.

You are biologically drawn to competency and innovation because of the technology you were serendipitously born into. Its motivations are premeditated communications - co-governing impulses produce natural value judgements you make with the authority that you were given.

There is no more illustrative example of this than the first impulse you ever had. Your system of self is loaded with features, but all of them rely on an initial impetus that you share with the entire spawn of life; acting as a voiceless liaison between nature’s systems and your own. Upon waking to the world your body immediately speaks in one of the great universal languages, an interface for the ages that is used by all creatures at all stations of existence - the first language you speak is one of need.

Across almost every level of the biosphere, local creatures are only a jaunt away from the resource they require to thrive in their respective settings. This resource, essentially in all cases, grows right beside them. Life not only sustains a years-long effort to grow the genome of the resource, but its systems have become apt at placing those resources next to a set of corresponding species that need them to live. Life then gives one of them the faculties to seek out the other, then pivotally, rewards the search with strength to fuel the next jaunt towards more resources. After nutrients have been consumed and transformed respectively, the ground and its constituents are rewarded for hosting the process. This is the inter-dimensional circle of nature’s mutualist construction that keeps all of life in a state of continuous improvement, withstanding entropy, birth, and death. Naturally, the human somatic system fits into this one almost like it belongs.

To take part, the human is given a set of biological instructions that lay claim to their ethnobiological heritage of gathering and replanting. These familiar guides are found in the somatic systems of others too, creatures right beside us who are seen living in the same resource dimensions we do, and who operate similarly. The human, like its wild counterparts, seeks out nutrients automatically after a biological relay is triggered. As its messages become urgent, a collection of systems is driven to work in concert. Hunger is an entire paragraph spoken in the language of need, hearing its every word is an instinctive experience. In these hunger-driven flow states, we memorize terrain, distance and energy expenditures between nutrient sources, potential threats along the path, and any other variable tied to a nutrient reward.

These instructions are built into the human system as the first communicability between Earth’s system and our own; put another way, they are life’s support communications for the child it birthed. Both what your body does in response to your needs and the impulses you experience that denote them play crucial roles in perpetuating the cycle of life that continues to support you and all others in the grand procession. Your needs are not inhibitors to your well-being, obstacles to topple over, or points for future innovation to address, but actually connective ports to a system dedicated to improving biological bodies. When acquired, induction of these resources into your personal system make the garden more palatable to everyone. You seek its offerings for your own benefit, but doing so provides a tangible benefit to the system you live in as well; and this is how life continues to rotate nutrients through the ages. Put very simply, all these bodies filter for what they are looking for and abandon the rest, then another body uses what was abandoned and creates something with it that a third body is hungry for.¹⁵⁸ In the innumerable instances this happens, Earth’s nutrients are continuously transferred again and again for use by as many bodies as possible. The backbone of this agreement between all parties is that to maintain position in this circle, all creatures are required to reach out their hand and meet their own needs. Nature’s promise in return is that this will create a better garden with each passing year for everyone involved.

This needs-based system is no less a technology than any other in the planetary suite, and one whose precepts will remain relevant to any biological organism that continues to exist. We’ve never observed any type of technology more capable of connecting resource dimensions of these sizes, and especially while each member maintains such a profound incognition of their neighbor. After performing a perfect dance for centuries beside and atop each other, many members of the eco tree will still be unaware of whose hands they trade with. ‘Needs’ is tethering stations of life that would otherwise never commerce due to barriers of speech pattern, relative size, nervous system speed, or cognitive variance. This is just as well that they know very little of each other, since in most cases, the interactions we have in the system begin with competition and likely hold that mentality for a while. This lack of information about who lives beside you is one of life’s workarounds for a system that runs exclusively with conscious actors; beings whose opinion of one another might curtail union of function and break the quiet clasp of hidden hands holding up the world. The language of needs is unwilling to accept a host of incompatibilities in its quest to unite us across our variations, and it’s been spectacularly effective, these individuals may not ever know they have a dimensional neighbor and the system will produce life year after year using their collective acts of self-preservation.

For this to work, the type of nutrients we seek must be somewhat referential across taxa. If the collection of lifeforms on Earth have any claim to the word “native” this would be its most literal definition.¹⁶⁰ Our favorite nutrients aren’t just good for us but are useful to a wide range of general dispositions, and you specifically have always played a central role in distributing them. On account of how much nutrition your form requires, your agricultural leanings have helped sustain a great number of other individuals, and your sometimes very clumsy handling of your food haul is a key component of this.¹⁶¹ While the modern mind believes it is “wasting” a lot of food as we gather and grow, in the system of you’re from, nothing is ever wasted.