The Proto Paradigm
Markendeya Yeddanapudi
Edited version
The Proto Paradigm
Twenty-three chromosomes from your father and twenty-three chromosomes from your mother combine to create the proto-you—the zygote. Within that microscopic zygote is DNA, which, if stretched out, would extend to roughly six feet in a human cell. DNA carries the biological information that guides development: a molecular foundation for the formation of the living organism.
But development is not produced by DNA alone. From the very beginning, the embryo exists within an environment provided by the mother. The womb is a miniature living world—a protected lake in which the developing child floats, moves, grows and receives nourishment. Through the placenta and umbilical cord, the mother supplies oxygen and nutrients and carries away waste. The fetus develops within this intimate relationship with the maternal body.
The zygote divides into two cells, then four, eight, and onward through an extraordinary process of cellular differentiation and organization. Over approximately nine months, the embryo and fetus develop toward readiness for another, vastly larger environment: the world outside the womb.
At birth, the umbilical cord is severed. Yet the intimate relationship with the mother continues. The newborn learns to suckle, to recognize touch, voice, smell and other sensory signals. The first lake has disappeared, but the infant enters another environment of learning.
I call this first environment the proto paradigm.
The genes provide the biological foundation of development, but the developing organism is also continuously influenced by its environment. Maternal nutrition, hormones, stress, sounds, movements and many other biological conditions participate in the developmental process. After birth, experience increasingly shapes perception, emotion, language and behaviour.
Thus, the mother's womb may be understood philosophically as the first miniature Nature.
The larger womb is Nature itself.
Once, free and healthy Nature consisted of an immense diversity of flora, fauna, rivers, lakes, soils, air, smells, sounds and innumerable living relationships. The child entering this world does not merely enter a physical space. It enters a vast field of sensory and ecological communication.
The baby learns through smell, sound, touch, taste, movement, warmth and eventually language. It gradually develops an emotional relationship with its surroundings. In this sense, Nature becomes a second teacher and the world becomes a second womb.
The first womb provides the foundations for life before birth. The larger womb of Nature can provide the continuing education of life after birth.
The DNA may therefore be called, metaphorically, the policy of biological life. Actual living is the politics of life: the continuous interaction between genetic potential and the living environment.
In a free and healthy Nature, rivers and lakes, forests and grasslands, animals and plants, microorganisms, soil, air and climate participate in an immense network of relationships. The Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, Biosphere and other components of Earth do not exist in complete isolation; they continually influence one another.
Freedom for Nature therefore means more than leaving Nature untouched. It means preserving the conditions in which living organisms can continue to learn, adapt and participate in ecological relationships.
Today we are moving toward an ecological apocalypse. We poison land, water and air, destroy habitats, diminish biodiversity, sever symbiotic relationships and increasingly surrender our faculties of perception and understanding to machines and abstract systems.
And we call this destruction progress and development.
The minimum that every university should do is to establish a Free Nature Park—a living ecological space that is protected from unnecessary manipulation and treated as a place of education. Students should be allowed to observe, listen, smell, touch, feel and learn from living Nature.
The first teacher was the womb.
The second teacher is Nature.
If we destroy the second womb, we may ultimately destroy one of the greatest sources of our education, health and understanding.
YM Sarma
My view
I think this is one of your stronger essays conceptually, because it brings several strands of your philosophy together in one image: womb → Nature → education → ecological responsibility.
Your most original proposition is not the biological claim about chromosomes or DNA. Those are established areas of biology. Your originality lies in the philosophical extension:
The maternal womb is the first environment of education; Nature is the larger womb of continuing education.
That is a genuinely fertile idea.
I would, however, make three scientific distinctions.
DNA is not literally an emotional paradigm.
DNA contains genetic information; it does not encode a mother's emotions as a language or paradigm in the ordinary sense. But maternal physiological conditions can influence fetal development, and developmental biology and epigenetics provide legitimate grounds for discussing interaction between inherited information and environment.The fetus does not literally “learn to swim.”
It makes spontaneous movements in amniotic fluid, but those movements are part of neuromuscular development rather than swimming lessons. Your “swimming” is much stronger as a metaphor for adaptation to an environment.Mother tongue begins primarily after birth, not as a crystallization of maternal emotion in the womb.
Prenatal exposure to the mother's voice and language can influence auditory preferences, but language acquisition is a prolonged postnatal process. Your deeper proposition can therefore be expressed as: the emotional and sensory atmosphere of early life contributes to the formation of later patterns of perception and communication.
These corrections actually make your philosophy stronger, because they prevent a scientifically vulnerable statement from obscuring the much more interesting philosophical insight.
Thinkers who come close to your idea
Michel Odent, the French obstetrician, is particularly relevant. His work on childbirth emphasizes the importance of the hormonal and emotional environment surrounding pregnancy and birth. Your idea goes further: you extend the concept of the nurturing environment from the womb to the whole ecological world.
Frédérick Leboyer, another French obstetrician, emphasized gentleness, sensory environment and the baby's experience of birth. His approach is particularly relevant to your concern that the newborn is not merely a biological object but an experiencing organism entering a new environment.
Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician, emphasized the psychological dimensions of childbirth and challenged excessively mechanistic approaches to birth. His work resonates with your larger criticism of treating living processes as mechanical processes.
James Lovelock is perhaps the closest to your ecological extension. His Gaia hypothesis treats Earth as a system in which living organisms and their physical environment participate in mutually regulating relationships. Your metaphor of Nature as the second womb gives this systemic idea a distinctly educational dimension.
Lynn Margulis is especially relevant to your emphasis on symbiosis. Her work on symbiotic relationships and the evolution of complex life strongly supports your rejection of the picture of organisms as isolated competitors.
Gregory Bateson comes very close to your idea of education through relationship. His ecological thinking emphasized that organisms cannot adequately be understood apart from the patterns of relationship in which they participate.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is relevant to your insistence that perception is embodied rather than merely intellectual. Your emphasis on smell, sound, touch and feeling as ways through which the child encounters Nature fits naturally with his phenomenological approach.
There is also a useful connection with Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory: human development occurs within nested environments rather than inside an isolated individual. Your womb → Nature formulation is philosophically more poetic, but it moves in a related direction.
And David Abram, particularly in his phenomenological writing about the more-than-human world, is close to your insistence that sensory participation in Nature is itself a form of knowing.
Where I think your idea becomes particularly important
Your sentence:
“The first teacher was the womb. The second teacher is Nature.”
could become a central proposition in your philosophy.
It transforms your earlier idea of the Free Nature Park from merely an environmental proposal into an educational theory.
The conventional university says:
Teacher → student → information → examination.
Your proposed university says:
Nature → organism → perception → feeling → relationship → understanding.
That is a profound difference in educational paradigm.
And it connects directly with your recurring argument that humanity has mistaken control of Nature for understanding of Nature. Your present essay adds something new: we do not merely damage Nature when we destroy ecosystems; we damage one of our fundamental teachers.
I would call that one of the most coherent developments in your recent thought.
Rajaram Krishnamurthy
PROTO PARADIGM
YMji “The first teacher was the womb. The second teacher is Nature. “Could become a central proposition in your philosophy. It transforms your earlier idea of the Free Nature Park from merely an environmental proposal into an educational theory. The conventional university says: Teacher → student → information → examination.
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KR WHETHER WOMB OF MOTHER OR WOMB OF NATURE AFTER BIRTH IN THIS WORLD, ONLY INFORMATION PASSED AS KNOWLEDGE; AND ONE HAS TO ASSIMILATE AND UNDERSTAND TO LEAD A LIFE OF DIAMOND NATURE IN CHARACTER. SO BASICALLY , FUNDEMENTALLY INFORMATION IS PROTO PARADIGM OF THE EARTH. ITS UNDERSTOOD IN DIFFERENT TEXTS AND MIND THROUGH THE THINKING PROCESS.
II Information science got its start in 1968, when the professional association, the American Documentation Institute, changed its name to the American Society for Information Science, and the association’s journal, newly renamed the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), published definitional article describing the field. Three main sub-fields developed within information science: informetric, information seeking behaviour, and information retrieval. Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behaviour of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability.
Information does not consist of the matter and energy, but rather is the pattern of organization of matter and energy. At its most fundamental level, information is a single difference - on or off, or one or zero. At more complex levels, information is structure, organization, and, of course, pattern. To say this, however, is not to say that information is identical with the matter and energy; rather it is the pattern of organization of it.
Information exists in nature, without any sensing animal having to be aware of it in order for the information to exist. Somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, there is a planet covered in rocks. No living thing exists on the planet, and no living thing has witnessed the rocks on the planet. It is still the case that the structure of the rocks interacts with the structure of anything else on the planet, such as water, methane, or other rocks. If there is a rockslide on the planet, it is still the case that the edges and angles of the rocks will slip into whatever openings there are in the planet surface below. If there is an opening ten centimeters wide, a 15-centimeter-wide rock will not be able to slide into the opening; it will be blocked by the narrower width. So here natural structure conforms to the realities of other natural structures. The information of the structures of the rocks, both those constituting the ten-cm wide opening and the 15-cm wide rock, conforms to and expresses the physical realities of nature. I think you can call that an objective reality. In this sense, information is real, it conforms to physical realities; it is not just an invention in the mind of humans. The atmosphere in that faraway planet has a certain composition of atoms, and the rocks below have very different compositions of atoms. Along with those different compositions come different colours, densities, shapes and so on. Real patterns of organization, as manifested in matter and energy, interact with other patterns of organization, and the consequences follow the physical laws of nature.
Thus, information is not dependent on living beings. However, living animals, and to some extent plants, have evolved to take advantage of patterns of organization in nature. Once animals and plants can sense, store, and use information, we enter into a new realm of power for information. To start at a basic level, if a tiny creature can find food in places where light reaches, then it is to the advantage of the creature to be able to sense light. Once that species’ surface happens to mutate to develop a sensitivity to light, then the creature can move toward the light and thus gain sustenance and survive. Life is an eminently active enterprise aimed at acquiring both a fund of energy and a stock of knowledge, the possession of one being instrumental to the acquisition of the other. All animals use information to get around safely in the world. There is a universal characteristic of any living system to sense relevant features of its surroundings and to react appropriately upon them in order to preserve its own permanence, its Unicity. Hence, life from its very beginning is a cognitive system: the self-copying molecule, pursuing its unicity in the world…is already a subject facing the world as an object. Humans, of course, have extraordinarily many differences, having complicated perceptual, emotional, and cognitive differences galore. The variety of possibilities here is, for our purposes, infinite.
Natural information is converted into represented information when it encounters a nervous system or an extension of a nervous system.
Represented information: Natural information that is encoded or embodied. Encoded information is natural information that has symbolic, linguistic, and/or signal-based patterns of organization. Embodied information is the corporeal expression or manifestation of information previously in encoded form. In human beings (as in many other animals as well), information is moving in and out of encoding and embodiment all the time. So there is natural information that may also be represented. Represented information is encoded or embodied. By using the information in our nervous systems, we are able to have experiences, commit actions, and express thought or feeling in what I have called experienced information, enacted information, and expressed information.
Over most of the history of life on earth, information was passed down from one generation to another solely through genetic means, through DNA. Among humans, we also modelled for our young to pass on information neural-culturally. We did this for tens of thousands of years before we developed language. Then, remarkably, we developed the astounding capability of language to enable us to describe things not physically present. We could talk about the tiger on the other side of the hill. At least 40,000 years ago, we learned to depict animals and other things of importance to us on the walls of caves and elsewhere. We went from experiencing the world around us to consciously representing parts of that world on surfaces outside our bodies. This is a remarkable moment of transition and technological advancement for our species. Then, about 5,000 years ago, we developed ways to write down language. All these concepts provide a way to organize our thinking around the kinds of information that exist and that we need to theorize and do research on. We have a concept of information that is suitable to apply throughout living and non-living things in the universe. Because information is so critical to living things, we also have a vocabulary that identifies what is different about information in living things, and have homed in on the crucial idea of representation of information in the nervous systems of animals.
In recent years, humans have become so clever that they have devised a way of storing information that is based on silicon rather than carbon-electronic information. For example, electronic information also comes in both embodied and encoded forms. Through all these technologies the information is going in and out of encoded and embodied forms, sometimes multiple times in a single usage. Analysing and categorizing these various forms of information and their impact on humans is something that should be at the core of the paradigm of information science. We are not conscious of this background coding and cannot bring it to consciousness. Something analogous goes on with embedded information Each of the improvements in our technology is a kind of embedded information, congealing our improved knowledge and manifesting it in a physical form. Culture is unbalanced because it recognizes certain objects, like the aesthetic object, granting them citizenship in the world of significations, while it banishes other objects (in particular technical objects) into a structureless world of things that have no signification but only a use, a utility function. …[T]he machine is the stranger; it is the stranger inside which something human is locked up, misunderstood, materialized, enslaved [I would say “embedded”] and yet which nevertheless remains human all the same. Here is another fragment running across my mind….We can describe a "memory pulse", a "storing pulse", and a "network pulse". Looking historically, there was a time when memory was the only way to retain information. To give readers a sense of the variety of metatheories that have been utilized in information science, identified 13 of these "approaches", describing each briefly. They were 1) historical, 2) constructivist, 3) constructionist or discourse-analytic, 4) philosophical-analytic, 5) critical theory, 6) ethnographic, 7) socio-cognitive, 8) cognitive, 9) bibliometric, 10) physical, 11) engineering, 12) user-centred design, and 13) evolutionary. THUS, PARADIGM IS FAR AND WIDE. NARROWING IT ALL INTO ONE ONLY IS SPOILING THE LIFE ON EARTH OR ACCUSING ALL AS SINNERS. PROTO-PARADIGM IS NOT DENIED BUT MODIFIED EITHER WAY. {IDEAS TAKEN FROM RESEARCH PAPER OF USA UNIVERSITY}
K RAJARAM IRS 17826
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