Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson
This talk was recorded in December of 1988.
Robert Anton Wilson’s talks have always been a favorite of mine. How could I not like listening to someone who says things like, “Not even Kafka dreamed up the idea of a government inspecting the urine of its citizens.” In today’s podcast we hear his take, back in December of 1988, on the changes that have begun to enter our lives as a result of the proliferation of personal computers and the Internet. Since this talk was given four years before the introduction of the World Wide Web, it is surprising at how relevant it remains yet today.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today I am pleased to be able to play another talk by the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.
00:00:30 ►
The talk that we’re about to listen to was recorded in December of 1988,
00:00:35 ►
and back then, personal computers were still a new thing.
00:00:39 ►
In fact, most people were just then learning how to use one, as primitive as they were back then.
00:00:44 ►
Most people were just then learning how to use one, as primitive as they were back then.
00:00:50 ►
And that was four years before the World Wide Web made the Internet a tool for everybody to use.
00:00:55 ►
So when you hear Wilson sounding like a kid in the candy store when he’s talking about personal computers,
00:00:59 ►
well, that’s how we all felt back then.
00:01:05 ►
And please keep in mind that a significant number of our friends here in the Psychedelic Salon weren’t even born yet when this talk was given.
00:01:09 ►
Which means that you are basically going to hear a voice from what seems like the Dark Ages right now.
00:01:15 ►
So my challenge for you is to see if you can pick out anything that he says that is still relevant yet today.
00:01:22 ►
You see, this isn’t all going to be an old computer history lesson today.
00:01:27 ►
And now, here is the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.
00:01:32 ►
The likelihood that somebody will penetrate the IRS computers with a virus
00:01:40 ►
to wipe out records selectively or wholesale is almost a certainty.
00:01:44 ►
That’s the opinion of one of the authors in Reality Hackers magazine,
00:01:49 ►
which is sort of the house journal of cyberpunk.
00:01:54 ►
And it’s very interesting.
00:01:56 ►
When I woke up this morning, picked up the L.A. Times,
00:01:59 ►
the first thing I saw on the first page is there’s been another
00:02:02 ►
ghostly electronic intruder wandering through the Pentagon again.
00:02:08 ►
Did you see that story today?
00:02:10 ►
Somebody penetrated the Pentagon again and has been manipulating records and altering things.
00:02:21 ►
That’s the second time in two years.
00:02:23 ►
that’s the second time in two years the last time was in 1986
00:02:26 ►
there was a chap whose ghostly electronic traces
00:02:31 ►
were found at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories
00:02:34 ►
and they started tracking him
00:02:36 ►
and they found he’d been in through the Pentagon
00:02:38 ►
and wandered through the Naval Data Center
00:02:41 ►
in Norfolk, Virginia
00:02:43 ►
and he’d been into Lawrence Berkeley Labs,
00:02:46 ►
where they do all the advanced nuclear research
00:02:48 ►
to find better and better ways to kill more and more people.
00:02:53 ►
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories is the epitome, the acme,
00:02:57 ►
the synecdoche of modern American civilization.
00:03:02 ►
They have the best brains on the planet,
00:03:04 ►
or some of the best brains on the planet,
00:03:06 ►
and they’re paying them fantastically high salaries
00:03:09 ►
to turn their intelligence to one project alone,
00:03:13 ►
how to deliver more and more explosive power
00:03:16 ►
over longer and longer distances
00:03:19 ►
in shorter and shorter times
00:03:21 ►
to kill more and more people.
00:03:24 ►
This is the triumph of human intelligence. shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people.
00:03:28 ►
This is the triumph of human intelligence.
00:03:32 ►
We’ve arrived at the point where people can become millionaires.
00:03:39 ►
Scientists can become millionaires by working on a project that is that socially useful.
00:03:44 ►
And if we give them a few more years, they’ll learn how to kill everybody by pressing one button without delivering anything anywhere.
00:03:46 ►
And then we’ll have achieved the goal of Western civilization, I guess.
00:03:51 ►
I am going to read a passage from my favorite author.
00:03:56 ►
All writers love to read their works aloud.
00:04:02 ►
This is Schrodinger’s Cat is set in a series of parallel universes
00:04:08 ►
there are a great many physicists who believe
00:04:10 ►
that there really are parallel universes
00:04:12 ►
that was a concept that started in science fiction
00:04:16 ►
but it’s now taken very seriously
00:04:18 ►
especially by the younger generation of physicists
00:04:21 ►
and especially by the ones who did a lot of acid in the 60s
00:04:24 ►
and this parallel universe one of my favorite novelists appears with a
00:04:33 ►
different sex because every everything that can happen does happen according to
00:04:39 ►
this model in quantum mechanics as long as the Everett Wheeler-Graham model
00:04:43 ►
everything that can happen does happen so everybody who’s born male in this universe
00:04:47 ►
is born female in another universe.
00:04:50 ►
Everybody born female in this universe
00:04:52 ►
is born male in another universe.
00:04:55 ►
And that is the thought for male chauvinists and feminists to ponder tonight.
00:04:59 ►
If they don’t ponder anything else, I said.
00:05:03 ►
Simon Moon once met the famous computer expert in Unistat,
00:05:08 ►
Wilhelmina Burroughs,
00:05:10 ►
granddaughter of the inventor of the first calculating machine.
00:05:14 ►
Have you noticed that the computers are all getting weirder lately, Simon asked, testing her?
00:05:20 ►
The programmers are getting weirder, Ms. Burroughs said, not falling into Simon’s trap.
00:05:27 ►
I knew it was bound to happen as soon as I read a survey,
00:05:30 ►
back around 68, I think it was,
00:05:33 ►
showing that programmers use LSD
00:05:35 ►
more than any other professional group.
00:05:38 ►
You look like an acid head yourself,
00:05:40 ►
she added with her characteristic bluntness.
00:05:43 ►
Well, as a matter of fact,
00:05:44 ►
I have dabbled a little trip now and then.
00:05:46 ►
No pattern of abuse, surely.
00:05:49 ►
That’s what they all say, Ms. Burroughs sniffed.
00:05:52 ►
But the cookie glitch pops up more and more places every day.
00:05:56 ►
I’ll wager you’ve seen it by now, haven’t you?
00:05:58 ►
Of course you have.
00:06:00 ►
Does everybody know the cookie glitch?
00:06:03 ►
Now, there’s a few people who haven’t encountered the cookie glitch yet.
00:06:06 ►
I first heard of it around 1976 from a guy working in the computer department of Bank of America in San Francisco.
00:06:15 ►
You’re working on an ordinary program on the computer,
00:06:19 ►
and suddenly the screen goes blank, and up comes a little box, and it says,
00:06:22 ►
Give me a cookie.
00:06:24 ►
And you can’t get
00:06:25 ►
the damn machine to do anything until you figure out how to respond to that. And the
00:06:30 ►
correct answer is just to type, tap out on the keyboard, a cookie. And up comes a box
00:06:36 ►
saying, yummy, that was good. And then the computer goes back to work. And since I included the cookie glitch in this book,
00:06:47 ►
that cookie glitch has become much more widespread.
00:06:50 ►
It sometimes makes me wonder about the responsibilities that a writer has
00:06:54 ►
and the danger of talking about certain ideas.
00:06:58 ►
Forget that thing about penetrating the IRS computers.
00:07:01 ►
I’m sorry I brought that up at all.
00:07:01 ►
Penetrating the IRS computers.
00:07:02 ►
I’m sorry.
00:07:04 ►
I’m sorry I brought that up at all.
00:07:11 ►
I’ll wager you’ve seen it a few times, haven’t you?
00:07:12 ►
Of course you have.
00:07:15 ►
Yes, but certainly that’s harmless humor, wouldn’t you say?
00:07:19 ►
Ms. Burroughs peered at him with insectoid intensity.
00:07:28 ►
Are you aware, she asked, that millions of previously law-abiding citizens have stopped paying their credit card debts?
00:07:33 ►
First they get a little postcard that says, here, I’ve got one in my purse.
00:07:38 ►
She rummaged about in an alligator bag and showed Simon a postcard that said,
00:07:45 ►
Congratulations, you are one of the lucky 500 whose debts have been canceled by the network.
00:07:48 ►
Keep your mouth shut and play it cool.
00:07:57 ►
Lucky 500, Ms. Burroughs said with a roomy cackle of skepticism.
00:08:01 ►
Lucky 10 million is more like the truth.
00:08:07 ►
This postcard was turned into diner’s club by an honest man, and you know how few of them there are. A check showed that his tapes had been erased and there was no record
00:08:12 ►
that he ever owed anything. God alone knows how many others there are who have taken advantage of
00:08:17 ►
the scam. Well, Simon said, maybe there are only 500. Maybe it was just a one-shot by some joker with a Robin Hood complex.
00:08:27 ►
I am an expert, Mrs. Burroughs reminded him,
00:08:30 ►
ignoring the fact that he was an expert too.
00:08:33 ►
I have no idea how many there are out there in Unistad
00:08:36 ►
who’ve taken advantage of the network’s liberality,
00:08:39 ►
but I’ll wager there are millions.
00:08:41 ►
Lucky 500.
00:08:43 ►
That’s just to make the marks feel that they’ve been specially
00:08:46 ►
selected as the network leads them down the primrose path to anarchy
00:08:50 ►
the title of tonight’s entertainment is preparing for the 21st century
00:08:57 ►
and to prepare for the 21st century you’ve got to be aware
00:09:01 ►
that computer viruses are going to play an increasingly large role in all of our lives.
00:09:11 ►
Since you all like the cookie glitch, there’s another one that’s very popular.
00:09:19 ►
I heard about it from a friend of mine.
00:09:27 ►
I heard about from a friend of mine, if at a certain bank, if you’re part of the day staff, when you use the computer, you type in your name and your identification number
00:09:31 ►
and it starts programming.
00:09:33 ►
At night, if you’re working late, you come back after dinner, you type in your name and
00:09:39 ►
your ID number and the computer type prints out on the screen crazy man what’s your sign
00:09:46 ►
and usually it just goes to work after that but sometimes it follows it up with another
00:09:52 ►
one if you try to get it to go to work it asks scored any good grass lately
00:09:56 ►
and there are even computers that occasionally startle people by saying
00:10:03 ►
i’ve been wanting to tell you what lovely eyes you have.
00:10:08 ►
Now, how do you react when a machine makes a pass at you?
00:10:13 ►
Well, there’s even a, my favorite virus is a purely humorous and harmless one.
00:10:23 ►
If you exchange software with friends, which of
00:10:27 ►
course is against the law and nobody does it except everybody who owns a
00:10:31 ►
computer, if you exchange software with a friend this is likely to pop up in your
00:10:37 ►
computer sooner or later. Somebody writing on viruses said the only safe rule is don’t take software from anybody.
00:10:48 ►
Just say no.
00:10:50 ►
I thought that was Nancy Reagan’s slogan, which is very confusing when you consider, you know,
00:10:56 ►
all the evidence that the CIA is the main importer of cocaine.
00:11:01 ►
And, you know, they were running a bank in Miami.
00:11:08 ►
and you know they were running a bank in Miami the the World Finance Corporation in Miami turned out to be the main laundromat for cocaine money from the
00:11:12 ►
CIA’s favorite South American dictators and the CIA owned the bank that came out
00:11:17 ►
a couple years ago the Dade County District Attorney tried to prosecute and
00:11:22 ►
he found that the CIA was blocking his prosecution every step of the way.
00:11:26 ►
So Nancy says, just say no, and the CIA says, just fly low.
00:11:30 ►
And so it goes.
00:11:34 ►
I digressed, as usual.
00:11:37 ►
That’s deliberate, by the way.
00:11:40 ►
The way to approach the 21st century is to realize that linear thinking has completely collapsed
00:11:46 ►
and we’ve got to learn to think in nonlinear modes like modern art.
00:11:50 ►
I’ll get back to that thought in a few minutes.
00:11:52 ►
I was about to tell you about the subgenius virus.
00:12:01 ►
How many people here are members of the Church of the Subgenius?
00:12:06 ►
Oh, that’s good,
00:12:10 ►
that’s good. It’s encouraging to see that the truth is reaching the masses at last.
00:12:19 ►
The Church of the Subgenius was founded by my good friend J.R. Bob Dobbs of Dallas, Texas.
00:12:26 ►
Bob was a simple aluminum siding salesman until one day in 1957,
00:12:30 ►
he was in an elevator that got stalled between floors in Palm Beach,
00:12:34 ►
and the only other passenger on the elevator was Elroy and Hubbard.
00:12:41 ►
And because they were stuck between floors and they didn’t know when they were going to get rescued,
00:12:47 ►
Hubbard revealed the secret of power to J.R. Bob Dobbs. And so now Bob has his own church and millions of zombies out on the streets proselytizing.
00:12:53 ►
And he’s well on his way to being as rich as Hubbard or the Pope or Roger Nish or any
00:13:00 ►
of the people in that racket. The secret of power,
00:13:10 ►
all you’ve got to do is send a dollar to the Church of the Subgenius and they’ll send you a pile of literature that looks like absolute gibberish.
00:13:14 ►
If you pass that test, if you can find the grain of truth in that,
00:13:18 ►
you will then send them $10 and they’ll send you an even bigger pile of literature
00:13:21 ►
that looks even more like gibberish.
00:13:24 ►
If you can make sense out of that, they’ll sell you more for bigger pile of literature that looks even more like gibberish. If you can make sense out of that,
00:13:25 ►
they’ll sell you more for $100 and so on.
00:13:28 ►
Eventually, if you get through all the subgenius literature,
00:13:31 ►
you’ll achieve slack.
00:13:33 ►
And when you have slack, all your problems will be solved.
00:13:38 ►
The universe, as the Chinese think,
00:13:41 ►
the universe consists of yin and yang.
00:13:44 ►
That’s a very primitive approach
00:13:46 ►
modern physicists say it consists of positive and negative charges which is much more sophisticated
00:13:52 ►
the deep metaphysical truth was approximated by my friend malek lips the younger in san francisco
00:13:59 ►
at the head temple of the discordian Society, House of Apostles of Aris,
00:14:06 ►
on the site of the beautiful future San Andreas Canyon.
00:14:10 ►
And that is that the universe consists of hajj and paaj,
00:14:15 ►
an equal balance.
00:14:17 ►
And that’s symbolized by the Discordian sacred cow,
00:14:19 ►
which some of you must have seen by now.
00:14:22 ►
That looks like the Chinese yin-yang,
00:14:24 ►
except on the yang side it’s got a pentagon representing the acme of bureaucracy,
00:14:31 ►
and on the yin side it’s got an apple representing the golden apple of Aries,
00:14:35 ►
the goddess of chaos, and also representing the apple of Eve,
00:14:39 ►
which led to the beginning of human curiosity and evolution.
00:14:43 ►
And it also represents the apple that used to disappear
00:14:45 ►
from the stage of the Flappish Burlesque Theater in Brooklyn
00:14:48 ►
when Peaches LaRue did the split on top of it
00:14:51 ►
at the end of her striptease.
00:14:57 ►
There’s a lot more heavy metaphysics
00:15:00 ►
in The Sacred Cow or The Hodgepodge,
00:15:02 ►
but that was only an approximation.
00:15:04 ►
It was J.R. Bob
00:15:06 ►
Dobbs who discovered the universe consists of something and nothing. And that’s pretty, well,
00:15:12 ►
you know, atoms in the void is the way Lucretius put it, but in the I Ching, it’s yin and yang,
00:15:20 ►
on and off signs. But if you take anything like, say, this glass,
00:15:27 ►
which the naive among you will think is full of water.
00:15:34 ►
Never drink water. Fish fuck in it.
00:15:41 ►
This glass of mysterious liquid,
00:15:45 ►
which some of you are naive enough to think is water,
00:15:47 ►
when you look at this, you see something.
00:15:49 ►
When you look around it, you see nothing.
00:15:52 ►
So the whole universe, if you stop to think of it,
00:15:55 ►
consists of always you seeing something
00:15:57 ►
with nothing all around it, right?
00:16:00 ►
If you look at me, you see something.
00:16:02 ►
I hope, I hope I’m not as translucent as George Bush.
00:16:05 ►
And then you look around me, you see something, I hope. I hope I’m not as translucent as George Bush. And then you look around me, you see nothing.
00:16:08 ►
And if you can find the perfect balance between all the something in the universe
00:16:13 ►
and all the nothing in the universe, then you’ve got slack.
00:16:17 ►
And when you’ve got slack, then you can get something for nothing.
00:16:23 ►
And when you’ve reached that level of enlightenment,
00:16:25 ►
you can start your own church and get as rich as Bob Dobbs or Rajneesh
00:16:29 ►
or the Pope or the Ayatollah or any of those people.
00:16:34 ►
Anyway, that’s a brief introduction to subgenius theology
00:16:38 ►
that did not reveal the secret of power, except indirectly,
00:16:42 ►
for those of you who have spiritual insight have detected it
00:16:45 ►
in the midst of my words. And in case you didn’t get it, I’ll make it more clear with a parable.
00:16:51 ►
Once there was a poor Hindu boy named Rajneesh. And he lived in terrible poverty in India,
00:17:01 ►
where things were very backward in those days. And he read in the newspaper that
00:17:06 ►
a Hindu had come over to the United States and found so many seekers after truth that he was
00:17:12 ►
able to buy a Rolls Royce. You know who that was? That was Krishnamurti. He was the first one to get
00:17:18 ►
a Rolls Royce out of all the seekers in the United States. And Rajneesh read that and he had this flash of darshan or satori
00:17:27 ►
or something like a light bulb going on over his head.
00:17:30 ►
He said, in America, there’s a seeker born every minute.
00:17:36 ►
So he came over here and pretty soon he had 93 Rolls Royces.
00:17:44 ►
Right? 93.
00:17:46 ►
Everybody was going around asking,
00:17:48 ►
what the hell does he need 93 Rolls Royces for?
00:17:51 ►
Well, what’s the point of 93 Rolls Royces?
00:17:54 ►
Well, every time he got another Rolls Royce,
00:17:56 ►
he’d take a picture, a Polaroid snapshot of it,
00:17:59 ►
and he’d write on the back,
00:17:59 ►
fuck you, and send it to Krishnamurti.
00:18:02 ►
That’s the way you play the guru game.
00:18:07 ►
That’s the way Bob plays it anyway.
00:18:10 ►
The subgenius virus that’s going around,
00:18:14 ►
which was the beginning of this tasteless and regrettable digression,
00:18:19 ►
the subgenius virus,
00:18:22 ►
you’re just innocently doing whatever you’re doing with your computer,
00:18:26 ►
maybe looking at Mac Playmate, maybe doing the payroll for your company,
00:18:34 ►
maybe word processing, and suddenly the screen goes blank,
00:18:37 ►
and you think, oh, Jesus, what did I do now?
00:18:40 ►
What key did I touch?
00:18:41 ►
What’s happening now?
00:18:43 ►
And while you’re trying to figure out whether you should push this one or push that one
00:18:46 ►
or wait and see if it’ll correct itself or call the repair shop,
00:18:50 ►
up on the screen comes J.R. Bob Dobbs’ face.
00:18:54 ►
And it says, fuck you if you can’t take a joke.
00:18:58 ►
And then it goes blank and starts programming again.
00:19:03 ►
The penetration of the IRS is virtually a certainty.
00:19:07 ►
Who said that?
00:19:08 ►
Oh, that was Michael Synergy in Reality Hackers.
00:19:14 ►
Have you ever seriously considered the sex life of the Norway rat?
00:19:20 ►
This randy little rodent, this voluptuous vermin,
00:19:26 ►
this sex-starved invader-brate
00:19:31 ►
has been multiplying at an alarming rate throughout human history.
00:19:36 ►
And this is especially astounding
00:19:37 ►
because human beings keep trying to get rid of the Norway rat.
00:19:41 ►
The Norway rat is so smart
00:19:43 ►
that he’s managed to arrange things that the wrong people
00:19:45 ►
get blamed for him. The Norway rat did not originate in Norway. The Norway rat originated
00:19:51 ►
in Southeast Asia, probably in the vicinity of what’s now Cambodia and Thailand, the golden
00:19:57 ►
triangle where all the opium in the world comes from, or most of it. And the Norway rat followed the biblical injunction to be fruitful
00:20:07 ►
and multiply, and eventually found there wasn’t enough to eat in that area, so it migrated
00:20:12 ►
northwestwards into India and kept on spreading its way through the Near East until around the
00:20:18 ►
13th century of the Christian era. It arrived in Europe, bringing bubonic plague with it,
00:20:26 ►
era, it arrived in Europe, bringing bubonic plague with it, which made it one of the most unpopular animals on the planet. Ever since then, human beings have been trying to get
00:20:31 ►
rid of this critter. But it goes on being fruitful and multiplying. In the 18th century,
00:20:39 ►
it arrived as far north as Norway, and the Norwegians have been blamed for it ever since.
00:20:44 ►
It’s not only called the Norway rat in popular speech, the scientific label is Mus ratus norvegicus. And the poor
00:20:52 ►
Norwegians had nothing to do with it. They were just one of the poor people who had to give it
00:20:57 ►
hospitality temporarily while it was eating their grains and whatnot. The Norway rat continued its steady increase in migration and a westerly
00:21:09 ►
and vaguely northerly direction. In 1776, it had infested Philadelphia to the extent that the
00:21:17 ►
delegates of the Continental Congress were all complaining about the rats in the hotels and inns there. In 1849, Sutter discovered gold in California,
00:21:30 ►
which was the beginning of the vast migration that brought all of us here.
00:21:34 ►
And by 1859, the Norway rat was found in San Francisco.
00:21:39 ►
I don’t have a date on when it arrived in Los Angeles,
00:21:42 ►
but I guess it must have been a few years before San Francisco.
00:21:46 ►
The Norway rat was found in Hawaii in 1872.
00:21:51 ►
So it’s now back on the doorstep of Asia.
00:21:54 ►
It has circumnavigated the globe in the last 3,000 years,
00:21:59 ►
in spite of all that the human race can do to get rid of it.
00:22:02 ►
Now, do you think you are that smart?
00:22:03 ►
Do you think you could survive the whole human race trying to get rid of it. Now, do you think you are that smart? Do you think you could survive the whole human race
00:22:05 ►
trying to get rid of you and prosper and spread like that?
00:22:08 ►
This is a very intelligent little animal.
00:22:11 ►
And lately, the Norway rat is increasingly found on transcontinental jets.
00:22:17 ►
They are learning to travel faster.
00:22:21 ►
Just like us.
00:22:25 ►
Pretty soon, there will be space colonies up there.
00:22:28 ►
The Russians have a permanently personed,
00:22:31 ►
or should I say entitied, colony.
00:22:34 ►
You shouldn’t say personed because that suggests human chauvinism,
00:22:38 ►
which I’m trying to avoid by starting out with the Norway rat
00:22:42 ►
before I talk about human evolution.
00:22:42 ►
which I’m trying to avoid by starting out with the Norway rat before I talk about human evolution.
00:22:46 ►
Schrodinger’s Cat begins with one of my favorite sentences
00:22:50 ►
of all that I have ever written,
00:22:52 ►
and like all writers, I have an insatiable appetite for my own sentences.
00:22:57 ►
But Schrodinger’s Cat begins with the sentence,
00:22:59 ►
the majority of Terrans were six-legged.
00:23:02 ►
Very few people ever stop and think about that,
00:23:05 ►
any more than we stop and think of how we have served
00:23:08 ►
as hosts for the Norway rat
00:23:09 ►
and its steady progression across the world.
00:23:12 ►
The majority of the intelligent entities on this planet
00:23:17 ►
are six-legged.
00:23:19 ►
If you get a hole in your screen doors,
00:23:21 ►
you’ll find out what I mean.
00:23:24 ►
J.B.S. Haldane, a great British biologist and mathematician,
00:23:29 ►
he was once asked, if you admitted a mind behind evolution,
00:23:33 ►
what would you say is its outstanding characteristic?
00:23:37 ►
And he said, an inordinate fondness for beetles.
00:23:42 ►
There are more species of beetles than there are of all the other insects on the planet,
00:23:46 ►
more than there are of all the mammals on the planet. There are more individual beetles on
00:23:50 ►
this planet than there are individual anything else’s. And so when you try to contemplate the
00:23:57 ►
mind behind evolution, remember it likes beetles. There’s not much sign that it likes you.
00:24:15 ►
In Thailand and Cambodia, where the Norway rat began its peregrinations and infestations about this globe of ours,
00:24:22 ►
sometime around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
00:24:28 ►
Somebody discovered that if you put copper and tin in enough heat,
00:24:31 ►
you get something entirely new.
00:24:33 ►
This was the beginning of synergetic thinking.
00:24:37 ►
Bucky Fuller did such a good job of popularizing the word synergy
00:24:40 ►
in the last 20 years of his life
00:24:42 ►
that I’m sure everybody in this audience knows what synergy means.
00:24:47 ►
Synergy means the type of situation
00:24:50 ►
in which you put two and two together and you don’t get four,
00:24:52 ►
you get eight or 16 or something else.
00:24:55 ►
It’s a non-additive relationship.
00:24:58 ►
And the word synergy comes from metallurgy
00:25:00 ►
because it was in metallurgy that we first discovered
00:25:03 ►
when you put two things together,
00:25:05 ►
you don’t get the sum of the two,
00:25:06 ►
you get a much higher and unpredictable result.
00:25:11 ►
And that happened first in somewhere around Cambodia, Thailand,
00:25:14 ►
when they found out that putting copper and tin together gives you bronze.
00:25:21 ►
It had to happen in Thailand area because that has an inordinate amount of the world’s copper
00:25:29 ►
and tin so even if the even if there weren’t any early experimenters with a theory or putters
00:25:35 ►
without a theory just by sheer serendipity enough copper and tin was bound to fall into a fire
00:25:40 ►
that bronze was bound to come out sooner or later. But that gave birth to the Bronze Age.
00:25:47 ►
And when we talk about the Bronze Age, we mean a mutation in human consciousness and behavior.
00:25:53 ►
We mean a total transformation of the human species. The Bronze Age, which Alvin Toffler
00:25:59 ►
calls the first wave of civilization, created human beings entirely different than tribal civilization
00:26:05 ►
and people from
00:26:07 ►
tribal culture can be distinguished
00:26:10 ►
very clearly
00:26:11 ►
from people from Bronze Age
00:26:14 ►
culture and every
00:26:15 ►
respect there are differences in
00:26:17 ►
the whole style of life
00:26:19 ►
Bronze Age
00:26:22 ►
culture begins with
00:26:23 ►
the building of huge cities,
00:26:27 ►
irrigation works, and the creation of a divine king
00:26:31 ►
who is almost always considered a direct descendant of the sun.
00:26:35 ►
The Inca in Peru was considered a descendant of the sun,
00:26:38 ►
so was the king of the Aztecs.
00:26:43 ►
Hirohito is still considered directly descended from the sun
00:26:47 ►
by pious Shintoists.
00:26:49 ►
In the 17th century, within the Christian world,
00:26:53 ►
Louis XIV was still called the Sun King.
00:26:56 ►
And these Bronze Age Sun King civilizations
00:26:59 ►
spread across the world in a couple of millennium.
00:27:04 ►
After bronze was discovered,
00:27:06 ►
it only took about 3,000 to 4,000 years
00:27:09 ►
before most of the world had been entirely transformed.
00:27:12 ►
All the tribal peoples were being exterminated or incorporated,
00:27:15 ►
and the world was one great, big, vast conglomerate
00:27:18 ►
of agricultural Bronze Age civilizations,
00:27:21 ►
all of them fighting one another.
00:27:22 ►
Bronze Age civilizations, all of them fighting one another.
00:27:32 ►
The biggest of all at one point was the Roman Empire,
00:27:36 ►
but far bigger than that by 1750 was the British Empire,
00:27:39 ►
which was the first empire of which it could be truly said,
00:27:43 ►
on the British Empire the sun never sets.
00:27:47 ►
That’s because God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark.
00:27:50 ►
Or at least that’s what they say in Ireland.
00:27:59 ►
Around 1750, well, in 1765, actually,
00:28:04 ►
James Watt was looking at his mother’s tea kettle and watching the lid pop up and down as the water heated.
00:28:07 ►
And he thought, gee, the water is turning into steam.
00:28:10 ►
And the steam is making the top jump up and down.
00:28:13 ►
If I had enough steam, I could make it jump higher.
00:28:16 ►
If I had enough steam, I could make that turn a wheel.
00:28:19 ►
And that’s the way we got the steam engine.
00:28:21 ►
And the human race mutated to an entirely new level.
00:28:25 ►
Industriality, as Alvin Toffler calls it, spread across the world.
00:28:29 ►
The old agricultural civilizations were quickly replaced by industrial civilizations.
00:28:35 ►
And that took a matter of 200 years.
00:28:39 ►
The first wave civilizations, the Sun King, Bronze Age agricultural civilizations
00:28:45 ►
took millenniums to spread across the world.
00:28:47 ►
The industrial civilizations did it in only two centuries.
00:28:51 ►
There’s an acceleration factor there.
00:28:53 ►
We’re going from millenniums to centuries.
00:28:57 ►
The rate of change has increased tenfold.
00:29:00 ►
By 1950, most of the world had been incorporated into industrial civilization.
00:29:07 ►
The agricultural civilizations that survived were colonies of the industrial civilizations.
00:29:13 ►
Around 1950, in 1948, John von Neumann invented the first programmable computer.
00:29:22 ►
And I often think that’s why we’re all alive today.
00:29:27 ►
Von Neumann was one of the great minds of the 20th century.
00:29:32 ►
He invented quantum logic,
00:29:36 ►
which I consider one of the greatest advances
00:29:40 ►
in human intellectual history.
00:29:44 ►
We had been brainwashed, at least in the Western world,
00:29:47 ►
for over 2,000 years to believe that everything in the universe is either true or false.
00:29:54 ►
That’s Aristotelian logic, which is based on the children’s game of guess which hand it’s in.
00:29:59 ►
We started out with guess which hand it’s in, and in the Orient, they developed I Ching out of that.
00:30:05 ►
But the Orient was a little more subtle than the Occident.
00:30:07 ►
So in between yin and yang, they put a moving line.
00:30:12 ►
Aristotle persuaded the Occidental world we didn’t need the moving line.
00:30:16 ►
And so we got an either-or logic, either true or false, without anything in between.
00:30:21 ►
And von Neumann invented the first three-valued logic in the the western world which is equivalent to the moving line in the yi jing and that was his answer to
00:30:31 ►
the schrodinger’s cat problem which brings me back to the book i was reading from earlier
00:30:36 ►
you see it’s all one seamless web as alan watts used to say um the schrodinger’s cap dilemma is this. If you, by the way, Schrodinger called this a fiendish
00:30:50 ►
device. Many people, when they hear about this, they think Schrodinger must have had a morbid
00:30:56 ►
mind. Actually, he was trying to highlight in a significant way the fundamental problem of quantum
00:31:02 ►
mechanics, which is that quantum mechanics works very efficiently.
00:31:08 ►
Almost all modern technology is based on quantum mechanics,
00:31:11 ►
and yet there are no two physicists who agree with each other
00:31:14 ►
about what quantum mechanics means philosophically,
00:31:17 ►
what it means in respect to our view of the reality in which we live,
00:31:21 ►
or if there is a reality.
00:31:24 ►
And if you use Schrodinger’s fiendish device, as he called it,
00:31:29 ►
you’d have a box with a cat in it and a poison gas pellet,
00:31:33 ►
and you’d have a radioactive metal decaying.
00:31:36 ►
And at a certain point in the radioactive decay,
00:31:39 ►
there’d be enough atoms ejected that the poison gas pellet would be exploded.
00:31:43 ►
And when the poison gas pellet would be exploded and when the poison gas pellet explodes
00:31:46 ►
the cat dies now uh the idea of physics is uh that you should have theories accurate enough that mesh
00:31:55 ►
with reality well enough that are isomorphic enough with sensory sensual space-time experience
00:32:02 ►
existential experience that you can predict from the theory of physics
00:32:07 ►
what will happen in space-time sensory-sensual experience.
00:32:10 ►
That’s the goal of physics.
00:32:12 ►
And so if you sit down and solve the problem
00:32:17 ►
in terms of the equations of quantum mechanics,
00:32:21 ►
you take any time after you start the experiment,
00:32:23 ►
say 15 minutes, and you the experiment, say 15 minutes,
00:32:25 ►
and you solve the equations for 15 minutes, and you find the state vector in the equation
00:32:29 ►
collapses to two values. That always happens in quantum mechanics. So you’ve got an eigenstate,
00:32:36 ►
as it’s called, in which the poison gas pellet has been exploded because there’s been enough
00:32:42 ►
atoms ejected, and you’ve got another eigenstate in which the poison gas pellet hasn’t exploded.
00:32:47 ►
Therefore, you’ve got a dead cat and a live cat.
00:32:51 ►
Now, the cat remains in this mixed state.
00:32:54 ►
The cat is both dead and alive until you open the door and the box.
00:32:59 ►
This is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
00:33:02 ►
When you open the door and the box, the quantum uncertainty collapses and the cat becomes either dead or alive. But as long as you leave
00:33:09 ►
the door closed, the cat is both dead and alive. That’s the theme of my novel, Schrodinger’s
00:33:15 ►
Cat. You see, that’s why William Burroughs is a male in this universe and a female in
00:33:19 ►
that universe. Every possibility is equally real. Schrodinger invented this Goddanken experiment,
00:33:27 ►
or Goddammit experiment, I think is the English translation of that,
00:33:31 ►
to bring to the forefront of discussion. Do we believe the equations of quantum mechanics,
00:33:36 ►
or do we believe common sense? The argument for believing common sense is how the hell can a cat
00:33:42 ►
be dead and alive at the same time? That’s just sheer nonsense. Even if it’s elegant mathematics, it can’t refer to the real world.
00:33:50 ►
The argument for believing quantum mechanics rather than common sense is quantum mechanics
00:33:55 ►
works, and the whole history of science has been a continuous onslaught against common sense in
00:34:01 ►
which one by one everything we believed in common sense turned out to be untrue as Einstein said common sense is what tells us the earth
00:34:09 ►
is flat so you pays your money and you takes your choice you can believe
00:34:14 ►
quantum mechanics so you can believe common sense von Neumann decided not to
00:34:18 ►
believe either quantum mechanics as it was then understood or common sense he
00:34:23 ►
proposed that the universe has three
00:34:25 ►
values. It’s not just true or false, like in Aristotle. It’s got the three values of the yin,
00:34:31 ►
yang, and a moving line. Or in English, yes, no, and maybe. So there’s a universe in which the cat
00:34:39 ►
is dead, and a universe in which the cat is alive, and the universe in which the cat is in the maybe state.
00:34:47 ►
And if you stop to think about it,
00:34:51 ►
most events in our lives are in the maybe state.
00:34:54 ►
Very few things collapse definitely into a yes or no.
00:34:57 ►
We try to force them to collapse into a yes or no because we’ve been trained by Aristotelian logic
00:35:00 ►
to want to get yes or no answers.
00:35:02 ►
But if you’re rigorously honest with yourself,
00:35:06 ►
you will discover that a simple question like, did you have eggs for breakfast last Wednesday,
00:35:12 ►
does not have a definite yes or no answer. Well, you can do is say maybe. You can ask the people
00:35:16 ►
you live with, and you’ll get three different opinions. No, it was Thursday you had eggs. Yes,
00:35:21 ►
it was Wednesday you had eggs. Most things remain in the maybe state.
00:35:26 ►
In addition to clarifying quantum mechanics with that wonderful insight, or confusing physicists
00:35:31 ►
thoroughly with that bit of obfuscation, whichever way you want to look at it, von Neumann went on to
00:35:37 ►
design the first programmable computer, as I said, ushered in the information age. And he also invented game theory,
00:35:45 ►
which is an elegant system of mathematics,
00:35:48 ►
which he started out to explain
00:35:50 ►
the best possible strategy for poker players.
00:35:53 ►
And as he expanded the mathematics of it,
00:35:55 ►
he discovered he had a system for telling,
00:35:58 ►
for making decisions in business competition,
00:36:01 ►
because business is a great deal like poker.
00:36:04 ►
Business depends on getting the
00:36:06 ►
right stuff in your hands. It also depends on not letting your competitors know what you’ve got in
00:36:11 ►
your hand until you want them to know. And very often it depends on letting your competitors think
00:36:15 ►
you’ve got something in your hand that you don’t have in your hand at all. You see the analogies?
00:36:21 ►
And after von Neumann was through developing mathematical game theory to cover business,
00:36:28 ►
he discovered that it fits war games too.
00:36:32 ►
As a matter of fact, the word war games comes directly out of von Neumann.
00:36:36 ►
And so they started programming computers to solve war games.
00:36:39 ►
They fight wars on computers instead of fighting them with us.
00:36:44 ►
And that’s why we’re all alive here tonight.
00:36:49 ►
Because when you use von Neumann’s game theory
00:36:54 ►
with the computers that grew out of the von Neumann revolution,
00:36:59 ►
and you feed in a scenario to a computer,
00:37:02 ►
and you ask a kind of question that somebody like Ollie North or Dr. Strangelove
00:37:08 ►
or Henry Kissinger might ask.
00:37:10 ►
Now, if we use this strategy, can we kill all the Russians without getting killed ourselves?
00:37:14 ►
And the computer will solve the problem and come up with the answer,
00:37:17 ►
no, you get killed too.
00:37:19 ►
And they say, oh, damn it, back to the drawing board.
00:37:22 ►
So they spent five years working out a new strategy
00:37:24 ►
to blow up the
00:37:25 ►
other half of the world without blowing ourselves up, and they feed it into the computers, and the
00:37:28 ►
computers say, no, you get killed too. And so they keep postponing the nuclear war, and that’s why
00:37:34 ►
we’re all still alive. You never realized you were alive because of John von Neumann, did you?
00:37:41 ►
After von Neumann invented the programmable computer another mutation occurred and we
00:37:50 ►
entered a new stage of evolution which we call the information age and that is rapidly phasing out
00:37:56 ►
the industrial age i remember 15 years ago i heard buck Fuller say, pretty soon nobody will be going to offices anymore.
00:38:06 ►
They’ll all be working at home.
00:38:08 ►
And Fuller had lots of reasons for believing that
00:38:11 ►
based on the way the computer field is developing.
00:38:14 ►
But Fuller also pointed out there are many parts of the world,
00:38:17 ►
especially Southern California,
00:38:19 ►
where the number of cars on the road is becoming absolutely suffocating.
00:38:29 ►
If you left the computers out of your projections entirely and projected the population growth of Southern California, the people pouring
00:38:34 ►
in here every month from all over the country and all over the world and the number of cars
00:38:39 ►
and so on, you would come up with a projection like in October 1993, everything gets stuck.
00:38:46 ►
There’s one gigantic traffic jam and nobody can move.
00:38:50 ►
And in three days, some people will leave their cars and stagger down the San Diego freeway
00:38:55 ►
looking for a pizza hut where they can get something to eat.
00:38:58 ►
And then we’ll never get untangled because of all the empty cars clogging the way.
00:39:03 ►
I was talking earlier this evening to a man
00:39:06 ►
whose field of specialty is transportation problems.
00:39:09 ►
And he says that there are many people in that field
00:39:13 ►
who are working on ways to accelerate the computer revolution
00:39:16 ►
so there’ll be more and more people working at home.
00:39:19 ►
There’s even a word for it now.
00:39:20 ►
There wasn’t a word for it when I first heard Bucky Fuller talk about it.
00:39:24 ►
The word is telecommuting. You don’t commute by car to the office you
00:39:29 ►
send your information into the office from your home computer and they send
00:39:33 ►
their information back to you and that is what is gradually replacing the
00:39:38 ►
Industrial Age telecommuting and it’s some people think it’s going to be
00:39:43 ►
accelerated by more and more stringent laws
00:39:46 ►
to get people off the highways
00:39:48 ►
because the traffic situation is getting to the point where it’s critical.
00:39:54 ►
The computer is not only keeping us alive by preventing a nuclear war,
00:39:58 ►
but it’s changing our whole way of regarding work and going to work.
00:40:03 ►
Going to work for more and more people
00:40:05 ►
means you get out of the bedroom and walk to the study
00:40:08 ►
and start hitting the keyboard.
00:40:12 ►
Another way of looking at this process,
00:40:15 ►
I’ve been talking about four stages of human civilization,
00:40:17 ►
the tribal stage, the Bronze Age, agricultural stage,
00:40:21 ►
the industrial stage, and the information age.
00:40:26 ►
Each one was ten times faster than the one before. We seem to have spent hundreds of thousands of
00:40:30 ►
years in the tribal stage and about six thousand years in the agricultural stage
00:40:37 ►
and a couple of hundred years in the industrial stage and we’re going through
00:40:41 ►
the information stage in a matter of decades but but to make this
00:40:45 ►
clearer i have some figures which i got from the french statistician george andola
00:40:52 ►
andola using information theory to estimate information and all sorts of
00:40:58 ►
symbolisms converting everything into binary you can calculate the information in a painting, for instance.
00:41:06 ►
You can calculate the information in a television show.
00:41:09 ►
Although, you usually find there isn’t much.
00:41:13 ►
But how many people here are prisoner fans?
00:41:15 ►
Am I the only prisoner fan in the…
00:41:17 ►
Ah! I know it, I know it.
00:41:19 ►
My audiences are always full of prisoner fans.
00:41:22 ►
If you consider the first 70 seconds of the prisoner,
00:41:26 ►
there’s more information in that 70 seconds than there is in the average one-hour drama.
00:41:31 ►
And that’s one of the clearest illustrations of what information means in information theory.
00:41:36 ►
Information is what you don’t expect next. Information is that which you can’t predict.
00:41:42 ►
And Claude Shannon has a very elegant mathematical equation for it.
00:41:46 ►
But if you think of the information
00:41:47 ►
in a Beethoven symphony
00:41:49 ►
as compared with Baroque chamber music,
00:41:52 ►
or the information in the first 70 seconds
00:41:54 ►
of the President compared with
00:41:55 ►
the first half hour of a George Stevens movie,
00:41:59 ►
you have a pretty clear idea
00:42:00 ►
of what information means mathematically.
00:42:05 ►
Anderle calculating all the information
00:42:08 ►
in the world in 1 A.D. Why he picked 1 A.D., I don’t know.
00:42:12 ►
It’s a symptom of Western chauvinism. Westerners
00:42:16 ►
are still hung up on the historical figure
00:42:19 ►
of Yeshua ben Yosef, whom the goys call
00:42:24 ►
Jesus Christ.
00:42:26 ►
They can’t even get his name right,
00:42:28 ►
but they date everything from what they think was his birthday.
00:42:32 ►
And that’s off by at least four years and probably nine.
00:42:36 ►
But anyway, this liberal rabbi with a weird sense of humor,
00:42:41 ►
Yeshua ben Yosef, is the starting point for Angela’s calculations.
00:42:48 ►
How many of you saw The Last Temptation of Christ?
00:42:52 ►
I thought Scorsese created an entirely new art form
00:42:56 ►
that combines the movie with the happening.
00:42:59 ►
Some people are very cynical.
00:43:00 ►
They think, you know, Scorsese showed the film
00:43:03 ►
to some of the leading fundamentalists
00:43:05 ►
on television, some of the leading televangelists, to get their approval, he said. And of course,
00:43:11 ►
they didn’t approve it. They all went through the roof screaming and hollering and telling all their
00:43:16 ►
followers to go out and picket the movie. And so Scorsese got millions and millions of dollars
00:43:23 ►
of free publicity. He didn’t have to pay these idiots anything.
00:43:26 ►
They gave him the publicity free.
00:43:28 ►
And most people think, gee, that was a shrewd business move on his part.
00:43:32 ►
But it was more than a business move.
00:43:34 ►
It was a great artistic maneuver to incorporate the opposition into the work of art.
00:43:41 ►
Because when you go see The Last Temptation of Christ,
00:43:44 ►
first you’ve got to pass these idiots on the street
00:43:47 ►
who are yelling, don’t go in, it’s a work of Satan.
00:43:50 ►
Protect your soul, don’t be contaminated.
00:43:52 ►
The devil is behind this.
00:43:54 ►
And Universal Studios is the center of hell and all that stuff.
00:43:58 ►
And this is not the Messiah.
00:44:00 ►
He’s a terrible man.
00:44:02 ►
He’s not like the Messiah should be.
00:44:04 ►
And then you go into the movie
00:44:05 ►
and you see the same people in the movie and they’re saying to yeshua ben yosef or jesus
00:44:10 ►
crossed however you want to pronounce his name they’re saying you’re not our idea of a messiah
00:44:14 ►
you don’t behave like the messiah should behave we don’t trust you and then they crucify him
00:44:19 ►
and when they’re all through crucifying him and the movie is over you come out and they’re outside
00:44:23 ►
the theater again yelling he’s not the real Messiah.
00:44:26 ►
He’s a fake.
00:44:26 ►
He’s a phony.
00:44:27 ►
We don’t like that kind of Messiah.
00:44:29 ►
And so you’ve got this wraparound, this strange loop.
00:44:32 ►
They’re in the movie and outside.
00:44:33 ►
They’re in the movie and outside the movie at the same time commenting on themselves.
00:44:38 ►
Scorsese has created a whole new art form.
00:44:41 ►
I tried to do that years ago.
00:44:43 ►
I tried to write a play that would provoke a riot, and it didn’t work.
00:44:48 ►
But I’ll try again, because Hazy has inspired me.
00:44:52 ►
And anyway, starting from the birthday of Yeshua ben Yosef, 1 AD,
00:45:02 ►
Anderle calculated how long it took information to double.
00:45:07 ►
And since we’re starting from the birthday of Jesus Christ,
00:45:12 ►
as they call him on the late 40 channels on the TV screen,
00:45:16 ►
I call this 1 Jesus,
00:45:18 ►
because scientific units are always named after someone,
00:45:21 ►
like the Ohm is named after Ohm,
00:45:23 ►
the Farad is named after Faraday, and so on.
00:45:26 ►
And it took 1,500 years to double, and we got two Jesus by 1,500.
00:45:33 ►
At that point, well, power had been moving steadily westward
00:45:39 ►
from Thailand, Cambodia, from the beginning of the Bronze Age.
00:45:43 ►
By 1 AD, power was definitely centered in Rome,
00:45:46 ►
and so was knowledge, because all the knowledge of the world was coming into Rome through the
00:45:51 ►
Silk Road, which went to India and brought in the knowledge of China, too. By 1500, the center of
00:45:57 ►
knowledge and power was the northern Italian city-states, especially those where the Medici
00:46:03 ►
Bank ran things and built
00:46:05 ►
all those great northern Italian universities where the
00:46:08 ►
scientific revolution began with Leonardo and Galileo
00:46:11 ►
and so on. The next doubling
00:46:14 ►
which gave us four G’s occurred by 1750
00:46:18 ►
and by then the center of knowledge
00:46:20 ►
and power was in the British Isles.
00:46:24 ►
If you were to make a graph of the discovery
00:46:26 ►
of the chemical elements, the 92 elements of which everything in the universe is formed,
00:46:31 ►
you’d find the first nine were discovered in Asia before 1 AD. Then there were a few discovered in
00:46:37 ►
Southern Europe, and from then on they were all discovered in Northern Europe until we get to
00:46:41 ►
modern times when they were all discovered at the University of Berkeley,
00:46:47 ►
except for a few at Caltech.
00:46:49 ►
But that’s running a little bit ahead of the story.
00:46:54 ►
You find this westward trajectory whenever you study the advance of knowledge and the accumulation of power and capital.
00:46:57 ►
Capital is knowledge.
00:46:59 ►
That’s one of the most fundamental errors in the modern world is to think capital is money.
00:47:04 ►
That’s one of the most fundamental errors in the modern world is to think capital is money.
00:47:16 ►
Just imagine what would happen if all the money, stocks, bonds, checks, etc., vanished overnight.
00:47:22 ►
Now, we’d have a hell of a state of chaos where people were fighting over who owned what and so on. But the world where the fundamental human world would not be changed
00:47:26 ►
everything we’ve created and our upward rise from the caves would still be here all the industrial
00:47:32 ►
plant all the scientific laws all the books all the paintings all the music would all still be
00:47:38 ►
here but imagine if all the real capital disappeared all the real capital which is
00:47:43 ►
human knowledge if all that disappeared we’d have no roads’d have no cars, we’d have no stereos.
00:47:50 ►
We wouldn’t be cooking our food because that required knowledge to learn how to cook food.
00:47:55 ►
We wouldn’t have cups and plates and sauces and tables and so on.
00:47:59 ►
We would be back in the Stone Age again.
00:48:03 ►
So that’s the difference between money capital and real capital.
00:48:06 ►
Real capital is knowledge that benefits or accelerates some aspect of human life.
00:48:13 ►
Money is just tickets for the exchange of capital.
00:48:16 ►
And it is capital that has been moving steadily westward and mildly northward throughout history.
00:48:22 ►
So by 1750, we had four Jesus, and the center of power and knowledge
00:48:27 ►
was the British Isles. By 1900, we had eight Jay, or eight Jesus. It had doubled again, and the center
00:48:35 ►
of power was very definitely the Boston, New York banking firms and universities. In 1892, Brooks Adams wrote The Law of Civilization and Decay,
00:48:48 ►
the first book which pointed out this westward trajectory of capital. He didn’t connect it with
00:48:53 ►
the westward trajectory of knowledge, but he did notice this westward movement of capital,
00:48:57 ►
and he predicted that by 1950, the British Empire would collapse and be replaced by an American Empire, which has happened.
00:49:06 ►
As a matter of fact, knowledge doubled again by 1950, and we had 16J.
00:49:16 ►
By 1960, knowledge doubled again, and we had 32J.
00:49:20 ►
By 1967, knowledge doubled again, and we had 64J.
00:49:25 ►
By 1973, knowledge doubled again and we had 128J.
00:49:31 ►
The periodicity is 1500 years, 250 years, 150 years, 50 years, 10 years, 7 years, 6 years.
00:49:43 ►
And looking at the number of patents granted every year,
00:49:47 ►
the number of new mathematical theorems published every year, and so on,
00:49:50 ►
it’s moving faster and faster.
00:49:52 ►
Its knowledge is probably doubling every couple of years now.
00:49:56 ►
The von Neumann computer, about which I was waxing so lyrical a few moments ago,
00:50:02 ►
is already becoming obsolete.
00:50:05 ►
The von Neumann computer is a linear sequential device
00:50:09 ►
and can only think about one thing at a time.
00:50:13 ►
If your brain operated like a von Neumann computer,
00:50:16 ►
you couldn’t chew gum and walk across the street at the same time.
00:50:20 ►
You’d have to stop chewing gum before you could walk across the street.
00:50:24 ►
You couldn’t remember a movie and eat your food at the same time
00:50:29 ►
if your brain was a von Neumann computer.
00:50:31 ►
The human brain does hundreds and sometimes thousands of processes simultaneously.
00:50:37 ►
And that is beginning to happen with the connection machine,
00:50:42 ►
which was designed by Daniel Hillis of MIT.
00:50:46 ►
There are 30 connection machines in existence now,
00:50:49 ►
but they are duplicating as fast as the Norway rat.
00:50:53 ►
And they are going to replace the old linear computer
00:50:58 ►
because there’s a connection machine at MIT which does 16,000 processes simultaneously.
00:51:09 ►
There’s a connection machine belonging to the Thinking Machine Company which does 64,000 processes simultaneously.
00:51:14 ►
The number will be going up faster every year.
00:51:18 ►
The speed of travel has increased 1,000 times since 1900.
00:51:25 ►
Speed of communication has increased a thousand times since 1900. Speed of communication has increased a million times.
00:51:29 ►
Everything is moving faster.
00:51:31 ►
We are moving on a wave of tremendous acceleration
00:51:34 ►
that seems to be built into the human species.
00:51:37 ►
When I spoke earlier about the Norway rat,
00:51:40 ►
I was trying to indicate that this randy little rodent
00:51:48 ►
seems to have a genetic program for ubiquity.
00:51:51 ►
It was not satisfied with one environment.
00:51:55 ►
Most mammals never get more than 10 miles from the place where they’re born.
00:52:03 ►
The Norway rat has spread itself over the whole planet and, as I said, is now found in intercontinental jets and I’m sure will be found in space cities within the next 15 years.
00:52:07 ►
The human race seems to have a similar program for ubiquity,
00:52:10 ►
for going everywhere,
00:52:12 ►
and another program that the Norway rat doesn’t have
00:52:15 ►
which is for continuous mutation to different levels of functioning
00:52:18 ►
with an acceleration factor built in.
00:52:23 ►
Hundreds of thousands of years of tribal life,
00:52:25 ►
a few thousand years of agricultural life,
00:52:28 ►
a few hundred years of industrial life,
00:52:30 ►
and now a whole new stage of evolution is opening up.
00:52:34 ►
People who try to calculate these trajectories
00:52:36 ►
in terms of the accelerations involved
00:52:38 ►
all get a little bit woozy after a while,
00:52:40 ►
and they end up sounding a little bit goofy,
00:52:43 ►
which sometimes happens to me now
00:52:46 ►
that I think of it. Terence McKenna, whom some of you may have heard of, Terence McKenna
00:52:52 ►
calculated a great many trajectories and decided that in the year 2012, we’ll be going through
00:52:57 ►
a new evolutionary mutation every nanosecond. I don’t know what the hell that means, but that is the way the trajectories are pointing.
00:53:06 ►
It’s a kind of curious coincidence and an amusing coincidence that Jose Aguilar, studying the Mayan
00:53:14 ►
calendar, concluded that there’s a new rock group called the Harmonica Virgins are going to appear
00:53:19 ►
that year. But did I get that a little bit mixed up? Oh, it’s the harmonic convergence, yeah.
00:53:25 ►
But it’s the same year, 2012.
00:53:30 ►
Before the French Revolution,
00:53:32 ►
average human lifespan was 27 years.
00:53:37 ►
When Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England,
00:53:40 ►
the average lifespan among the working class was 37 years.
00:53:44 ►
That was about 100 years after the French Revolution, a little less than 100.
00:53:51 ►
Around 1900, average lifespan throughout the Western democracies was 50 years.
00:53:57 ►
Now it’s 73 years and increasing more rapidly all the time.
00:54:09 ►
more rapidly all the time. In England, a 1976 survey showed there were over 300 people alive in England who were over 100 years old. Ten years later, in 1986, they found the number had increased
00:54:15 ►
to 3,000. There is more research being done on life extension in this decade than throughout all human history previously. We are all
00:54:25 ►
going to live, barring accidents, we are all going to live a lot longer than
00:54:31 ►
anybody ever lived in previous history. While these accelerations are going on,
00:54:35 ►
we are going to be going through mutations equivalent to the changeover
00:54:39 ►
from tribal to agricultural to industrial to the information age. We’re
00:54:44 ►
going to live through
00:54:45 ►
changes of that magnitude. And how are we going to adjust to it? Well, that’s what Alvin Toffler
00:54:51 ►
calls future shock. How do we adjust to it? Well, we are mutating too. I want to say a few words
00:55:00 ►
about the evolutionary function of stupidity. I have been rather critical of stupidity in some of my books,
00:55:07 ►
and some people think I have a grudge against stupid people or something like that.
00:55:12 ►
Now, far from it. I’m one of the stupidest people I know,
00:55:15 ►
and so how can I dislike the stupid?
00:55:18 ►
I know I’m stupid because almost everybody has definite answers
00:55:22 ►
to most of the questions I’m still uncertain about,
00:55:25 ►
so they must all be a lot smarter than me to have arrived at definite answers already.
00:55:29 ►
I’m surprised at how many people there are between the ages of 18 and 24
00:55:34 ►
who know so much more than I do, for instance.
00:55:39 ►
But the evolutionary function of stupidity is that it forces the intelligent to get more intelligent.
00:55:48 ►
It’s the pogroms that have created the legendary and probably somewhat factual intellectual acuity of the Jewish people.
00:56:00 ►
Einstein created relativity and escaped from Hitler.
00:56:04 ►
Einstein created relativity and escaped from Hitler.
00:56:08 ►
The Jewish people have created thousands of important ideas and escaped from thousands of pogroms.
00:56:11 ►
To take a less horrendous example,
00:56:16 ►
consider the outstanding example of stupidity in the 1960s,
00:56:20 ►
the banning of LSD research.
00:56:24 ►
At Harvard, Timothy Leary had reversed the recidivism rate
00:56:29 ►
of Massachusetts convicts in a study. He had shown that convicts given LSD in the proper set
00:56:35 ►
and setting detached from their conditioned and imprinted criminal programs and developed entirely
00:56:41 ►
new neurological circuits and became law-abiding citizens.
00:56:45 ►
A follow-up study a year later showed that 80% of Leary’s convicts were still on the streets,
00:56:53 ►
not convicted of new crimes.
00:56:56 ►
The national average is that 90% of convicts are back in prison one year after release.
00:57:02 ►
The recidivism rate in this country is 90%.
00:57:05 ►
Leary almost entirely reversed that.
00:57:08 ►
This was the biggest breakthrough in the history of behavior change.
00:57:12 ►
So naturally, the government made it illegal.
00:57:15 ►
If one expects stupidity of the government,
00:57:18 ►
one could predict a result like that.
00:57:20 ►
There were a lot of other researchers doing fascinating things with LSD.
00:57:24 ►
They were curing alcoholism with it at several hospitals, for instance.
00:57:28 ►
And people were learning languages faster than ever in some research.
00:57:35 ►
When all this research was stopped,
00:57:37 ►
this drove the researchers who were fascinated by these consciousness mutations into other areas.
00:57:44 ►
So John Lilly invented the isolation tank or the float tank.
00:57:48 ►
And it turns out with the float tank,
00:57:50 ►
you can produce fantastic changes in consciousness.
00:57:53 ►
It has been shown, you can measure it with modern devices.
00:57:56 ►
You can show that people’s brainwaves move down from beta
00:57:59 ►
through alpha to theta to delta while they’re in a float tank.
00:58:03 ►
When you get down to delta, your body is being shot full of endorphins,
00:58:08 ►
which means that your immunological system is given a big boost,
00:58:12 ►
and your brain is being shot full of new neurotransmitters produced by the delta state,
00:58:17 ►
so you’re going to come out of it, and for the next three days,
00:58:19 ►
you’ll be getting new ideas you never thought of before.
00:58:23 ►
How many people float regularly?
00:58:26 ►
You know what I’m talking about. Floating, no matter where you go in the modern world, you
00:58:31 ►
find there’s a place where you can rent a float tank. You find them in, not just in
00:58:37 ►
California, you can find them in backward places like New York. You can even find them
00:58:42 ►
in Berlin. There are places you can go in and rent a float.
00:58:46 ►
Others who were driven, well, Stan Grof was doing LSD research in Czechoslovakia. He came
00:58:53 ►
to the United States because he was seeking greater scientific freedom. Well, I guess
00:59:00 ►
Stan was naive in those days. When he found out he couldn’t do LSD research in the United States either,
00:59:07 ►
he started researching other techniques,
00:59:11 ►
and he’s developed a whole new technique based on Reiki and breathing
00:59:14 ►
and yogic techniques together with music at a decibel level,
00:59:18 ►
never before heard on land or sea, even at a heavy metal concert.
00:59:22 ►
And this produces fantastic consciousness changes, too.
00:59:25 ►
Others went into biofeedback. even at a heavy metal concert, and this produces fantastic consciousness changes, too.
00:59:27 ►
Others went into biofeedback.
00:59:30 ►
Tim Leary, being an Irishman,
00:59:32 ►
refused to let the government tell him what the hell he could research and couldn’t research
00:59:34 ►
and went on fighting until they put him in prison,
00:59:37 ►
whereupon Leary got cured, as they say in Texas,
00:59:40 ►
and since he came out,
00:59:42 ►
he’s been engaged in the creation of computer software to change consciousness
00:59:47 ►
and many of the people in the biofeedback field have gone on to work on direct brain change.
00:59:54 ►
Biofeedback requires a lot of concentration and hard work and so on
01:00:01 ►
and why bother with all that if you can build in a shortcut?
01:00:05 ►
And so we’ve got machines like the endo max you just plug the two electrodes to your mastoid bones
01:00:12 ►
and electric current flows through your hypothalamus and you immediately start
01:00:16 ►
generating neuropeptides like there’s no tomorrow and the neuropeptides act as neurotransmitters in
01:00:23 ►
the brain so you get a lot of new ideas in the next couple of days,
01:00:26 ►
and they act as neuropeptides and endorphins in the body
01:00:31 ►
and give your immunological system a boost.
01:00:34 ►
Others have come up with devices like the Synchro Energizer,
01:00:37 ►
which uses flashing lights and sound at the same rhythm,
01:00:41 ►
and it turns out you can adjust just by turning the dial.
01:00:44 ►
You move your consciousness from the beta state to the alpha,
01:00:48 ►
to the delta, to the theta, to the delta,
01:00:51 ►
and at each level you’re in a different type of reality.
01:00:55 ►
It turns out that throwing molecules at your brain
01:00:58 ►
is a very clumsy and inefficient way to alter consciousness.
01:01:01 ►
What we’ve got to do is work on the electronic level.
01:01:04 ►
As Tim Leary has been saying lately,
01:01:07 ►
electrons are to the 80s, what molecules, what are the 60s.
01:01:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:15 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:01:21 ►
I’ll bet that if you’re a long-time listener here in the salon,
01:01:25 ►
that when Wilson was explaining his theory of knowledge doubling in ever-smaller time frames,
01:01:31 ►
it probably brought to mind some of Terence McKenna’s time wave ideas, as it did to Wilson himself.
01:01:37 ►
I’m not sure if a connection can actually be drawn between their ideas or what it even means,
01:01:43 ►
but maybe that’s something that you’d like to
01:01:45 ►
think about on those long nights when you can’t get back to sleep. Also, I should point out that
01:01:51 ►
Reality Hackers, the magazine that Wilson sang the praises of just now, morphed into Mondo 2000,
01:02:00 ►
which, as our longtime fellow slaunters also know, is the magazine in which I first learned about this guy named Terence McKenna.
01:02:07 ►
And had I never read that article in Mondo,
01:02:10 ►
well, you and I would most likely not be together in cyberspace right now.
01:02:15 ►
So a big thank you goes to Are You Serious and Queen Moo
01:02:18 ►
for publishing such groundbreaking magazines.
01:02:22 ►
Well, as much as I’d like to continue this little commentary right now,
01:02:26 ►
I think that it, well, it may be more productive for me to ponder Wilson’s idea that there actually
01:02:32 ►
could be an evolutionary purpose for stupidity. And looking at the state of today’s world,
01:02:40 ►
I certainly hope that the colossal stupidity we see being exhibited by politicians the world over
01:02:46 ►
is going to lead to a breakthrough somehow.
01:02:50 ►
Well, I can at least dream about it, can’t I?
01:02:53 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:02:57 ►
Be well, my friends. you