Homo Sapiens Sepia
Physiological characteristics
In Homo Sapiens Sepia, colour-producing bacteria have settled in the second layer of the epidermis, the stratum lucidum. These bacteria display the current condition through colour changes on the surface of their skin in response to the microbiome of the gastrointestinal tract by these people.[1]
Internal conditions that seem to be unconscious and rather difficult to grasp for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are communicated directly and visibly to everyone by these people. They learn and practice this way of “speaking” in addition to communication by spoken language, mimic and gestures as we know it.
Self-perception and communication
This stomach-brain communication requires high concentration and very precise self awareness, since it’s not (always) possible to control the colour expressions that arise. Perhaps we can imagine this better if we try to picture ourselves as carrying a conjoined twin inside us, who is continuously speaking their own language. Or as if you had two, often contrary thinking centres, able to communicate as independent individuals with one another, as well as with other double beings of their kind at the same time. [2]
Every Homo Sepia individual seems to develop particular ways to express themselves through colour as well as their own individual style, that evolves when they are already very young. We don’t know what influences this but local contexts seem to play a part, so we might call it a slang, or a jargon.
Cultural practice
These two parallel communication levels also demand a high degree of practice and readiness from the communicating partners because they have to learn to understand and read the individual colours expressions of that partner, as well as integrate the spoken content and fit it all together. [3]
Lying, we are told, is hard. Those who master (self-)control in colour expressions could perhaps deliberately influence it or neutralize it into a hardly comprehensible misty grey. However, those who have reached this kind of mastery would probably not lie.
When in deep conversation with others of their kind, the colours of Homo Sapiens Sepia seem to synchronize temporarily and their speech becomes rhythmic. [4] They practice a sparse seriousness in their communication in ways that are quite foreign to us, but they also exhibit a babbling mode of chatter. And they have developed their very own tradition of inner dialogue.
References
- ↑ The so-called physiological colour change is achieved by changing the position of pigments within cells or by changing the shape of colour cells, the chromatophores. This change in colouration and pattern of the body surface can take place from one moment to the next and in some species (e.g. cuttlefish) takes only seconds.
In: Lexikon der Biologie. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 1999,retrieved November 29, 2017. - ↑ In contrast to Sepia people, ordinary Homo Sapiens have at least "unlearned" the ability to consciously and actively practice this other level of communication.
Walter Benjamin calls what is still subliminally present (in Homo Sapiens Sapiens, editor's note) the "mimetic capacity" and formulated the question in 1933: whether it is a matter of the mimetic faculty dying or perhaps a transformation that has taken place with it. Benjamin makes a connection to the theory of language. His thesis is that (...) this mimetic talent found its way into writing and language and exists as a "nonsensical similarity". This nonsensical similarity creates tensions between what is spoken, what is meant and what is written. According to Benjamin, language is (...) the highest use of the mimetic faculty: a medium into which the earlier powers of memorization for the similar have entered without remainder in such a way that it now represents the medium and things no longer meet directly (...) and enter into relationship with one another.
Communication through colour changes on the skin is also referred to as "embodied cognition", or embodiment.
Walter Benjamin, ”Über das mimetische Vermögen” (On the Mimetic Faculty). In: Gesammelte Schriften II. Band 1., Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1977; pp. 206-213, German edition.(...) Not our brain, but our body is responsible for part of the agility with which we deal with our world. Accordingly, information about the environment is encoded into the structure of our bodies (...). (Inner world is also environment, at least mirrored environment. Editor's note)
Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness”, Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc., 2016 / Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2019; pp. 91, (German edition). - ↑ Sepia people are a radically open, perhaps also somewhat light-hearted type of being. We suspect that emotional states tend not to settle in them because the sheer volume of information to be processed requires a high degree of permeability on several levels.
How do sepia people organize and coordinate these different levels and contents of communication simultaneously and come to conclusions, we ask ourselves.
The substrate counts, according to Antonio Damasio about similar, less obvious, but equally complex processing of physiological, emotional and mental processes of internal and external information in Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Antonio Damasio, “Feeling and Knowing. Making Minds Conscious”, New York, Pantheon Books / Hanser Verlag München, 2021. - ↑ Here one could speculate about the presumably innate musicality of the Sepia people.
Cultural Studies of Homo Sepia - open questions
Are their tender forms of "connectedness" rooted in the constant communicative interplay of Homo Sepia between "speaking" and "embodying" information? Is this special kind of communication in a deeper sense a "game", perhaps also a rapidly changing wild "role play"?
Wittgenstein understands the analogies between the activities of speaking and playing not as superficial, but as revealing a structural similarity: I will call systems of communication (...) 'language games'. They are more or less related to what we call ordinary games; children learn their mother tongue by means of such language games, and here they often have the entertaining character of play.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Preliminary Studies for the "Philosophical Investigations", Generally known as The Blue and Brown Books, (1958) Blackwell Publishers Ltd. / Eine philosophische Betrachtung, in: Das Blaue Buch. Werkausgabe Bd. 5. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 121. German edition.
...man only plays where he is fully human, and he is only fully human where he plays. /…der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man / Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1795/2000, pp. 591–595.
Do Sepia people always have something euphoric, obscure and intoxicating about them?
Are there "limits to legibility" for them too? What happens when they - like all species - lose their inner balance? Do they then remain trapped in an irresolvable conflict between their two "speaking centres"?
German quotes translated by the editor.
Weblinks
Anatomorphosen, Processes of Becoming Other, DOCK 11 Eden*****, Berlin, 2024
Searching for Homo Sapiens Sepia
