EFTA01193978.pdf

wir By the Late John Brockman EFTA01193978  BY THE LATE JOHN BROCKMAN HARPER EFTA01193979  DEDICATION THESE WORDS DO not belong to the author anymore than they belong to the people quoted in the book: Norbert Wiener, Karl Lashley, George Kubler, J. Z. Young, John Lilly, Marshall McLuhan, Stewart Brand, Heinz von Foerster, Edward T. Hall, Alfred North Whitehead, W. Grey Walter, Kenneth Sayre, Rene Descartes, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Niels Bohr, Rene Dubos, D. and K. Stanley-Jones, John Lucas, Carlos Castenedas, Soren Kierkegaard, Wilder Penfield, R. G. Bickford, Edmund Carpenter, Werner Heisenberg, Sir James Jeans, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wallace Stevens, Leon Brillouin, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Gertrude Stein, Max Born, J. Andrade e Silva, P. W. Bridgman, R. Buckminster Fuller, Sir Arthur Eddington, William Empson, C. G. Jung, Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats, John McHale, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Ihab Hassan, T. E. Hulme, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, David Pears, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Victor Gioscia, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Norman 0. Brown, William Shakespeare, E. E. Cummings, Paul Valery, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller. These words belong to the reader. JOHN BROCKMAN EFTA01193980  FOREWORD: EVER BROCKMAN SINCE THE 1960s, John Brockman's pioneering activities have been diverse and multidirectional, marked by a fearlessness and fluidity of thought. He has been a writer, a literary agent, a junction-maker between science and art, a curator, an avant-garde-film programmer, has worked in industry, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and for the White House. He is also the founder of Edge Foundation and editor of Edge.org, an important platform for the exchange of knowledge between different fields that aims "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge." Stewart Brand has called Brockman an "intellectual enzyme . . . an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things." As Brockman himself puts it, "I look to . . . those who through their empirical work are changing the nature of ourselves and reality, whether they are scientists or not . . . people who are using technology and new communications ideologies to radically reboot the whole idea of human communication." First and foremost, he is driven by the question: "Who . . . will take us to the epistemological crossroads where everything has to be rethought? My entire career has been in pursuit of this vision." Central to this approach is Brockman's fundamental opposition to the separation of art and science. Instead, he sees art as science and science as art. This way of thinking beyond the boundaries is a guiding theme that defines his activities, which focus on establishing networks "whose authority was derived from their persona and their ideas, not from their institutions." He "celebrates thinking smart versus the anesthesiology of wisdom," where experts ask questions not "in front of their peers in their academic discipline or their field, [but] in front of people who are their equals in other areas." This is why, when I first met him in the summer of 1998 at his rural farm in Connecticut, he became one of my great inspirations, reinforcing my conviction that pooling knowledge across disciplines is the future. EFTA01193981  In one of our many conversations over the last fifteen years, Brockman remarked that "Life is the theatre of one chance." His life and work have been greatly informed by this idea. In 1964, he met the artist and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was running the Film-makers' Cinematheque for underground cinema. Brockman was already working with underground film-makers, and video artists, which was at this time a revolutionary art genre. In 1965 Mekas invited him to take over the Cinematheque and to initiate an Expanded Cinema Festival there. He invited many great New York artists working in all fields, including Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Claes Oldenburg, to make a work integrating film for a special performance. These activities led to an invitation from leading scientists in biophysics, computation and cybernetics to bring a group of New York artists, filmmakers and musicians to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for what was probably the first art- science symposium—an event that would have a lasting impact on his thinking and methods. Out of his experiences in the avant-garde art world of New York, Brockman's writings were quickly evolving. His first book, By The Late John Brockman (1969), was introduced in 1968 as part of a six-evening avant-garde program at the Poetry Center at the 92nd St Y in New York. Preceding and following Brockman on the program, respectively, were evenings by John Cage and Jorge Luis Borges. This was the era of "The Living Theatre," of Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty," and the management of the Poetry Center had trepidations about Brockman's event, and rightly so. Brockman's "reading," a performance piece orchestrated in collaboration with Ken Dewey's Theatre X and artist group USCO, was an attack on the values of the Poetry Center itself. The evening turned into a riotous affair—enraged audience members stopped the show five times, closing the curtains, stealing the scripts, harassing the performers, turning off the lights. By The Late John Brockman, his second book, 37 (1971), and a third book intended as volume three of the trilogy, were published together in a paperback in 1973 under the title Afterwords. They were a response to the idea of cybernetics. The first looks at all human theory through the lens of information theory; the second examines Heisenberg's theory of EFTA01193982 indeterminacy, and the third investigates the limits of words as tools for understanding. When Heinz von Foerster, an architect of cybernetics, along with Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann, reviewed the trilogy in 1973, he commented: Brockman takes the mystery of language and puts it right back into its own mystery; that is, he ex-plains the mystery of language by taking language out (`ex-') of the plane of its mystery, so as to become visible to all before it slips back into its plane. This in itself is a remarkable achievement that has been denied to almost all linguists, for they stick to the description of the plane without seeing that it is the plane that holds their descriptions. . . . All who are concerned about the violence committed in the name of language will appreciate the useful uselessness of Brockman's un-book. Von Foerster's appreciation of Brockman's writing is not a surprise. While Brockman began writing his trilogy in 1966, von Foerster led a movement that began in 1968 to develop "2nd order cybernetics," or "the cybernetics of cybernetics." Von Foerster wrote in 1973: a brain is required to write a theory of a brain. From this follows that a theory of the brain, that has any aspirations for completeness, has to account for the writing of this theory. And even more fascinating, the writer of this theory has to account for her or himself. That year Bateson and Mead increasingly talked about patterns and processes, or "the pattern that connects." They called for a new kind of systems ecology in which organisms and the environment in which they live, or which they study, are one in the same. They were henceforth to be considered as a single circuit. "It was only after Afierwords was published in early 1973 that I met Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Heinz von Foerster," remarked Brockman. In April of that year, a group that included von Foerster, Bateson, Zen philosopher Alan Watts, and dolphin researcher John Lilly convened the EFTA01193983 legendary AUM ("American University of Masters") Conference in Big Sur to study G. Spencer Brown's book Laws of Form. The premise of the "American University of Masters" was that it was comprised of those maverick intellectuals whose authority derived from their persona, ideas and work, and not from their institutional affiliations. Brockman, on the strength of his trilogy, was summoned at the last minute to replace the keynote speaker Richard Feynman, who had been hospitalized. Later, in New York, on a visit to Brockman in New York, Bateson told him, "The cybernetic idea is the most important idea since Jesus Christ. And it's an idea that's foreign to almost every so-called intellectual among mainstream thinkers." However, it was an idea that was pervading the art world at this time. John Cage, for example, was interested in how ideas and patterns move through cultures, while Nam June Paik's videos were, in Brockman's words, "an example of the cybernetic idea in action." "The cybernetic idea was not about `a' and `b,"' he recalled. "It was about a process and the process was the reality." Each of his books is made as a process, performance, or experience, recalling the Duchampian idea that the reader/viewer does at least fifty percent of the work. Brockman takes this idea even further in his belief that the reader owns the words, which makes his books highly performative in the moment of reading. In this, his writing anticipated the ideas of Bateson and Mead concerning the necessity of considering the ecological nature of the organism and its environment as a single circuit. Brockman calls it "undifferentiated activity." "The entire work is performance piece that in all parts are the whole, undifferentiated as activity, where you can't tell who the subject is, you can't tell what the subject is." To him, the writing is demanding, physical, and exhausting, requiring constantly keeping in mind the complete work, i.e., the single circuit. In the first edition of By The Late John Brockman, it is not only the content that is highly experimental, but also its format and layout. Each page contains a single paragraph comprised partly of quotes from works by figures from Marshall McLuhan to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett and E. E. Cummings, that is disconnected from its predecessor. A front-page review in the San Francisco Review of Books stated: EFTA01193984  In short, sharp strokes of words, he breaks through the very forest of meaning by denying meaning, eschewing traditional forms of activities, thoughts and emotions. It is not what he says that is so valuable; it is his whole manner of negating what can be said. His words backtrack on themselves, stalk their own meanings, and thrash about in the underbrush of our sensibilities. There is a total devastation of language, isolating and withering the very hands our dreams are made of. Preempting the ebook by many decades—or conversely, recalling ancient scrolls—the first edition was printed on one side of the page only. Brockman had told his editor at Macmillan: "It is obscene to print on both sides of a page." Although the reception to Afterwords in 1973 was decidedly mixed, comments when it was nominated for the long list of ten books for the National Book Award, ranged from "Trashiest specimen of newly proliferating genre of electronic dada" (Kirkus), to "The best book since Wittgenstein's Tractatus" (Alan Watts); from "Terrifying . . . depressing . . . cerebral . . . icy" (Vogue), to "There are certain writers whose thought is so important that it doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not. A verbal tension so powerful, an ascetic appetite so huge and consuming forces us both to accept the vision as a revelation and to resist it as a duty" (San Francisco Review of Books). The publication of Afterwords was followed by a volume of essays entitled After Brockman: A Symposium, in which artists, poets, writers, and scientists wrote about the importance of Brockman's trilogy. Later that year, Brockman, at thirty-two, retired from writing (although he has managed, over the past forty-odd years, to publish forty-five books in his various roles as editor, producer, impresario). Afterwords is part of a great lineage of experimental volumes that invent new formats, from Laurence Steme's Tristram Shandy, written in the 1750s to 1760s—the first example of a book using variations in typography and deliberately blank pages—to Cage's A Year from Monday, an aphoristic collection that inspired Brockman's interest in the book as experience. The artist Richard Hamilton once remarked that we only remember exhibitions that invent new rules of the game. This welcome new edition of EFTA01193985 Brockman's Afterwords is a thoroughly inspiring reminder of the fact that this observation can also be applied to books. Hans Ulrich Obrist, London, April 2014 EFTA01193986  CONTENTS Dedication Foreword: Ever Brockman John Brockman Part I Part II Part III Acknowledgments Endnotes Also by John Brockman Copyright About the Publisher EFTA01193987 John Brockman 1941-1969 EFTA01193988 I EFTA01193989 Man is dead. EFTA01193990 The choice is between the present and the past. The choice is between choice and no choice. There is no choice. EFTA01193991 Man is dead, and all the categories that created and characterized human existence must be reconsidered. The key to elimination of words? Ownership. Replace all words pertaining to ownership with words concerning functions, operations. What did man own? Consciousness, feelings, emotions, mind, egos spirit, soul, pain, etc., words resulting from centuries of belief, and no longer useful. EFTA01193992 Consciousness does not exist; indeed, there is no reason to believe that it ever did exist. Not conscious, not unconscious. If consciousness does not exist, there can hardly be a state of unconsciousness. EFTA01193993 Man is an abstraction. Human abstractions are based on the past, on behavior, not on operant considerations of what is happening. Considerations of the present? Patterns. Transaction. Activity. Doing. Considerations of the past? Behavior. Environment. Man. EFTA01193994 The abstractions of man characterize phenomena without regard to the operant activities of the phenomena. It is a limited system of classification. EFTA01193995 How to deal with what is happening? Search for rhythms and patterns. Man is dead. The analysis moves from the study of fixed entities that are capable of ownership to the transaction of the species with environmental forces. Look to the transaction. "The world about us is accessible only through a nervous system, and our information concerning it is confined to what limited information the nervous system can transmit."' The brain receives information and acts on it by telling the effectors what to do. The loop is completed as the performance of the effectors provides new information for the brain. It is a new feedback loop, a nonlinear relationship between output and input. EFTA01193996 Man always dealt with what had already happened, believing that it occurred in the present instant. What he thought was happening coincides approximately between steps two and three of the loop. "Man was aware only of the past, and never aware of the activities of his brain, where there are order and arrangement, but there is no experience of the creation of that order. Experience gives us no clue as to the means by which it is organized. If the organization were produced by a slide rule or a digital computer, consciousness would give no indication of that fact nor any basis for denying it. If the brain is capable of producing such organization, then it may be considered the organizer."2 EFTA01193997 To understand these notions, it is necessary to explore the concept of the interval. The interval refers to the moment of the creation of the order of the brain's activity. The activity of which man was never aware, the inaccessible present, the direct experience of the brain. "The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and unexpected bearers. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal, it is a past action, no longer embraced by the `now' of present being. The perception of a signal happens `now,' but its impulse happened then. In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected."3 This instant, the interval, constitutes all that is directly experienced. It was for man the abstraction, his Achilles' heel. EFTA01193998 In this evolutionary stage, a stage beyond space and time, the interval is closed forever, and man ceases to exist. EFTA01193999 Man ordered his experience in terms of psychological considerations of the nonexistent mind. But the ordering of experience is always on the here- andnow level. The interpretation of the ordering is always at the there-and- then level. Be aware that the brain's operation is a continuing activity of ordering in the here-and now. There was always ordering in the here-and- now while man deluded himself with considerations there-and-then, considerations of a world that didn't exist. A world that never had existed. The world of the past. A fractional instant, and yet the past. Because of that interval man was able to exist. Man, a relic of the instantaneous past. Man, an instant too old to exist. Things not existent should be of no interest to us. All those things rendered unto man are based on a system that deals with illusion. The interpretation of the ordering of the brain takes place while new ordering is continually happening. It is almost as though there were two parallel planes. EFTA01194000 Almost. We might even assume there was a choice between living in one plane or another. Actually, there is no choice. There is no choice. There is only the ordering and arrangement, the here-and-now. Some of us, most of us, cannot recognize this level and continue by blindness, by inertia, by pretension, the delusion that we are men. It's a mistake. Man is dead. Man never existed at all. Our awareness as experience is past experience. Dreaming. EFTA01194001 Man is dead. It's a world of information. Information in this context refers to regulation and control and has nothing to do with meaning, ideas, or data. "Any system is said to be able to receive information if when a change occurs the system is capable of reactions in such a way as to maintain its own stability."4 Information is nothing but an abstraction. As an abstraction it will allow for new observations and associations, for discernment of patterns and organization. Note that the reference is to a reaction to change. The concern here is only with the reaction, the effect. Information is a measure of the effect. This refers to how the control center of the organism, the brain, reacts to change in order to maintain continuity. EFTA01194002 We are dealing with activity integrated on the neural, the brain level, i.e., the present. Thus, when discussing information, we are talking about the brain's response in terms of present, direct experience. This response is always effected without consent or awareness. There is no choice. There is no information unless there is a change. "Information does not exist as information until it is within the higher levels of abstraction of each of the minds and computed as such. Up to the point at which it becomes perceived as information, it is signals. These signals travel through the external reality between the two bodies, and travel as signals within the brain substances themselves. Till the complex patterns of traveling neuronal impulses in the brain are computed as information within the cerebral cortex, they are not yet information. Information is the result of a long series of computations based on data signal inputs, data signal transmissions to the brain substance, and recomputations of these data."5 Information is an abstraction to be used for measuring the communication of pattern, order, and neural inhibition. EFTA01194003 What is the information from an electric light bulb? No information. What is the information from a book? No information. "To speak of a change as giving information implies that there is somewhere a receiver able to react appropriately to the change."6 Be concerned only with the changes in the operations of the receiver, the brain, in terms of the transactional present. Do not confuse information with signals or the source of signals. "The mind of the observer-participant is where the information is constructed, by and through his own programs, his own rules of perception, his own cognitive and logical processes, his own metaprogram of priorities among programs. His own vast internal computer constructs information from signals and stored bits of signals."7 Information is a process. There are no sources of information; there are no linear movements of information to the brain. EFTA01194004 Information is an abstraction. Information is a measure of effect. Information is a concept that allows for relationships not previously possible. Effect deals with the construction of information from both incoming signals and bits of signals stored in the operant circuits of the brain. The incoming signals are transmitted by both internal and external receptors. "Effect involves the total situation and not a single level of information movement."8 There are no single levels of information movement. The total situation is the neural situation, the process of the nervous system. This system is operational. "All that's traceably happening is a shimmering array of pattern shifting occurring in a centerless, edgeless network. It's measurable piecemeal: trivial. The whole is unmeasurable indeed except through effects."9 Information is the measure of effect, the measure of the ordering of the brain's activity in the transactional present. EFTA01194005 Communications theory is the study of messages. In this system, the message is nonlinear. The communication, the message, is pattern, order, neural inhibition. The message is the change in neural activity. It can be considered as a program, and a "program is nothing else but a set of commands: "do this; do that . . ." which in other words means: "don't do this; don't do that . . ."I° We are dealing with the transmission of neural pattern from "a brain and its outputs, through a specifiable set of processes to the external world, through a portion of that world with specifiable modes, media and artificial means to another body, another brain."' I We are dealing with a set of relationships which allows us to conceptualize the communication of neural experience. The difference between human experience and neural experience is the difference between illusion and reality, between choice and no choice. EFTA01194006 In talking about the state of consciousness, do not deal in there-and-then considerations of interpretation of the ordering and arrangement of the direct experience of the brain. The ordering and arrangement are a continual functional happening. The ordering and arrangement are all that is actually happening. Nothing else ever happens. The ordering and arrangement are to be measured in terms of information. EFTA01194007 The most significant, the most critical, inventions of man were not those ever considered to be inventions but those which appeared to be innate and natural. Man never understood to what degree all of nature was man-made. One such major and crucial invention was talking. Talking was probably man's most important invention. It was, undoubtedly, considered to be innate and natural until a man, making a new observation, exclaimed, "We're talking."12 At that point no one had ever heard of such a thing. Still, talking was an invention that changed the way the brain worked. Talking, a man-made invention, provided information modifying the operation of the brain without any awareness. There was no choice. For thousands of years man was molding himself in a certain manner, but the pattern was not invented until a man said, "We're talking." EFTA01194008 Man is dead. Credit his death to an invention. The invention was the grasping of a conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized. The invention was man-made. It was the recognition that reality was communicable. The process was the transmission of neural pattern. Such patterns are electrical not mental. The system of communication and control functioned without individual awareness or consent. The message in the system was not words, ideas, images, etc. The message was nonlinear: operant neural pattern. It became clear that "new concepts of communication and control involved a new interpretation of man, of man's knowledge of the universe, and of society."13 Man is dead. "We're talking." EFTA01194009 The system can be comprehended only by killing off man. We are not destroying a phenomenon. We are replacing one system of abstraction with another system of abstraction. Man was nothing but a model, a technique. It is now necessary to construct a new model, to invoke a new system of abstraction, no more truthful than the old one, no closer to any ultimate answer. An abstraction is only an abstraction. The insanity of man is that he believed in his humanity as the very basis of reality, as the ultimate end to evolution. But "it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress."14 Man is dead. EFTA01194010 This is the end of the doctrine of specific causation. There are only the simultaneous neural operations of the present, the all-at-once, the here-and now. No more talk about the environment. The only total situation is in what the brain is doing. There is no past, there is no future, there is no time, there is no space. The beginnings, the endings, are all bound up in the multiplicity of neural operations. The unity is methodological. Break through the limited framework of subjects and objects. It's all happening at once, bound up in a universe of simultaneity. EFTA01194011 Who's crazy? Mankind went out of its mind. There is no mind out of which to go. Who's crazy? EFTA01194012 "The supreme abstraction of the brain was indeed the mind. . . . From the confusion of metaphysics and psychoanalysis, abstractions of abstractions, the thinking brain has turned to the first possible glimpses of itself."15 For years man understood that animals did not act through a consciousness; now it is evident that man himself, the human animal, did not act with a conscious sensibility. It's all a question of breaking through to new systems of abstraction. EFTA01194013 "Neither the presence nor absence of consciousness can serve as an exclusive criterion either for the presence or absence of any other characteristic in a particular thing. . . . The only way a particular individual can be determined to be conscious is with reference to his observable behavior."16 Behavior is a consideration of the past. The present is in the activity of the brain. Analyzing the patterns of the present turned the world of man inside out and upside down. Insanity. Who's crazy? EFTA01194014 "Cogito ergo sum. " 17 I think therefore I am. But the only conclusion to be derived from thought is that the brain has direct experience. We are not concerned with the existence of thought but with the activity of the brain. EFTA01194015 There is no conscious self, there is no subconscious, there is no mind. Indeed, the word mental is an "unfortunate word, a word whose function in our culture is often only to stand in lieu of an intelligent explanation, and which connotes rather a foggy limbo than a cosmic structural order characterized by patterning."18 Be concerned with discerning operant patterns on the neural level. All experience can be accounted for in terms of neural operations. "Only by renouncing an explanation of life in the ordinary sense do we gain a possibility of taking into account its characteristics."19 EFTA01194016 This system of abstraction, based as it is on operant considerations, goes beyond linear systems. Nonlinear processes are composed of interacting elements. Common Western language lends itself to pictorial interpretations. But, "the description of many aspects of human existence demands a terminology which is not immediately founded on simple physical pictures."2° Nonlinear processes can be represented by operant mathematical symbols. Common language is a poor substitute. Pure mathematical symbolism allows us to "represent relations for which ordinary verbal expression is imprecise or cumbersome. In this connection, it may be stressed that, just by avoiding the reference to the conscious subject which infiltrates daily language, the use of mathematical symbols secures the unambiguity of definition required for objective description."2' EFTA01194017 "A measure of the sum of the parts is larger than the sum of the measure of the parts. F(a +b) >F(a) +F(b) F = measure function of squaring F(a +b) = (a +02=a2±b2±2ab and F(a)= a2, F(b)=b2 therefore a2 +1)2 +2ab > a2 +1,2 The product 2ab is nothing else but the measure of the interaction of the two parts a and b, namely the interaction of a with b and b with a.s22 To consider this interaction, start with effect and work backward. EFTA01194018 The operation of the brain is a nonlinear process. It is a system of self- organization where given sets of oscillations pull themselves together into a particular frequency band. EFTA01194019 Man is dead. We are now concerned with the concept of process. "In return for the renunciation of accustomed demands on explanation, it offers a logical means of comprehending wider fields of experience, necessitating proper attention to the placing of object-subject separation."23 Instead of "man" and "not man," move the object-subject separation one step back to objectify a universe of simultaneous operations: the process of interaction of "man" and "not man," integrated on the level of the neural activity of "man." In this system there is "not only a universe, but there are also elements capable of observing this universe."24 The observation is through a nervous system similar to that of the observer-participant in the universe under consideration. Reality is no longer to be found hidden in the subjects and objects of "man" and "not man." EFTA01194020 For discussing integration at the neural level we must look to the interval. The only way to capture that moment is with the death of man, the death of the concept of the individual. It has been demonstrated that the brain responds to change in terms of the information it has already received. "The past experience of the person determines the manner of his response to a given stimulus. The primary direct effects of stimuli commonly have little bearing on their ultimate expressions."25 The brain continually functions during the moment man termed the interval, this functioning being dependent on its physiological construction and stored information. There is no interval. There is only what the brain is doing. EFTA01194021 Media do not exist. Media must be considered as a single level of information movement, which is a consideration of the world of the past. There are no linear movements of information. Information is a process. Its whole is measurable only by effect. Be concerned with process, with transaction, not with media. Media are in the world of the past. They are the received signals from there-and-then. The medium is not the message. The medium is the confusion. The message is operational. It is a process. EFTA01194022 Information is a process. Not words or ideas, or "I like it," "I don't like it," but the total effect of experience, of the brain's operation. Not ideas or opinions, but the changes brought about by the experience, the neural involvement. Information is a nonlinear relationship established between output and input, the simultaneous universe of experiential feedback of information. Points of view are beside the point. EFTA01194023 If media do not exist, neither do separations such as fonn and content, concepts which belong to the treatment of signals there-and-then. In the simultaneous operations of the brain there is neither form nor content. There is information that directs the brain's activity. All imagined considerations of form and content are considerations of the interpretation of the ordering of direct experience. This is in the past. Be concerned only with the ordering, with the present. EFTA01194024 No more talk about media, no more talk of the senses, of perception, etc. Such considerations are presented within a conceptual framework that does not allow us to account for contemporary experience. Be concerned with activity integrated on the neural level. It is a process. "The only unit of currency in the process is the neural impulse or permeability wave."26 In studying the transmission pattern of these waves we learn that "each local area of the cortex interprets the message according to its local pattern of response. Nothing in the message itself can indicate its source of origin."27 On the integrative neural level there are no visual images, no sounds, no taste, no physical feeling, no odor. "It matters nothing whether these trains of neural impulse arise in the ear, the eye, or any other sense organ; they are all the same, they have no more individuality than the elemental dots and dashes of the telegraph code. There is no more of a sound or sight or pain in a nerve impulse during transmission than there is love or grief in the underground lines of the telegraph."28 EFTA01194025 "The qualities of a neural impulse bear no relation to the sensory stimulus which sends them on their way. Only the quantity or frequency varies."29 Forget about signal source; forget about sensory source. The eyes see nothing; the ears hear nothing. Our sensory receptors are capable of transmitting neural impulses that are variable only in two ways—"namely, the diameter of the conducting fiber and the strength of the sensory stimulus. The former determines the speed of travel; the latter, the frequency, or distance between members of the procession."30 The eyes see nothing; the ears hear nothing. Give credit to the brain, where there are no pictures, no sounds. There are only electrical neural impulses. "It is these purely physical phenomena, whose qualities are fully prescribed by certain numerical data and determined by the semipermanent structures of the anatomy, which constitute the unit of currency in the nervous system. There is no other form of activity of nerve, no other physical movement in the tissues of the brain, out of which the processes of thought may be constructed."3I EFTA01194026 The brain is the organizer. Seeing, hearing, perception—all take place in the brain. The brain, which sees nothing, hears nothing, knows nothing. Each of the sensory receptors has a reception area in the cortex where neural impulses are received and acted upon in terms of a local pattern of response. "If an operation could be devised to change the pathway of the optic nerves so that they delivered their messages to the auditory reception areas of the cortex, and to divert the auditory nerves to the visual area, the patient would hear noises when the lights were turned up, and see patterns and colors when the bell was rung."32 EFTA01194027 "The mechanism whereby a sensory receptor which has important information to convey can transmit this information to the cortex of the brain, along a neural axone which is as featureless as a telegraph wire, has interesting properties of a quantitative nature. Two methods are available whereby the stark yes or-no, which is all that the nerve can carry, may be elaborated into the wealth of sensory detail which actually reaches the brain. One method is to vary the number of nerve fibers engaged in the work of transmission: twenty fibers will convey a message more efficiently than ten fibers. The other method is by modulation of the frequency of the impulses as they follow each other along the single track.s33 It becomes a question of frequencies, or numbers. EFTA01194028 Man created a dehumanized, computerized world, a world in which he was nothing more than a number. But it was really the other way around: numbers representing neural patterns had somehow become humanized. From an unambiguous and objective representation of patterns of activity, the number became transformed into "man" and "not man." This arbitrary object-subject separation assured ambiguity, vagueness, and illusion. EFTA01194029 How does the picture get put together? It doesn't. All that is happening are volleys of neural impulses. What is the point of attempting to correlate patterns of neural activity to mind, feelings, emotions, etc.? Dispense with these abstractions. They are from another epoch. They are of little usefulness in dealing with operant phenomena. EFTA01194030 The basis of living systems is self-organization. The brain organizes its activity in a continuous fashion, always in the present. It incarnates the operations it has performed as operant circuits. It exists and can be talked about only in operant terms on what it does. What it does depends on information it constantly receives informing it about changes in itself, environmental forces, the physiological functions of the body. It uses this information to adapt, to change, to maintain its stability and continuity. Information is not to be confused with the source of information. It is not power. It is an abstraction. It is not energy. It is an invention. EFTA01194031 A mathematical theorem holds that for any formal system capable of producing arithmetic there is a truism proving the system which cannot be proven within the system. For man there was consciousness, the system for which there was a truism proving the system which could not be shown to be true within the system.34 All man was sure of was that he was conscious. End of discussion. He could never tell whether this consciousness was the result of a digital computer, religious incantation, etc. EFTA01194032 Information is a measure of effect. Start with effect and work backward. Information is a measure of the operant response the brain makes in terms of its nonlinear experience. Information relates to direct neural coding, to brain imprinting. Understanding the nature of nonlinear communication through the process of information closes the gap, gets rid of the interval. Every instant becomes the ordering of the brain in the simultaneous, continuous present. Even the notion of instants, of time, disappears. EFTA01194033 The evolutionary significance of all this is unbelievable, for man. It is the end of importance. It is the end of man. EFTA01194034 This exercise merely presents a system, a methodology. No truths are to be found here. The author doesn't believe a word of what is set forth and is not interested in formulation of new dogma. It is the formulation of a system, an abstraction from reality not to be confused with reality. Reality as a whole is unmeasurable except through effect. The unity is in the methodology, in the writing, reading, in the navigation. This system cannot provide us with ultimate answers, nor does it present the ultimate questions. There are none. EFTA01194035 The static, fixed, linear system is now superseded by one that is operational and nonlinear. "It is important to observe that if the frequency of an oscillator can be changed by impulses of a different frequency, the mechanism must be nonlinear. A linear mechanism acting on an oscillation of a given frequency can produce only oscillation of the same frequency, generally with some change in phase and amplitude. This is not true for nonlinear mechanisms, which may produce oscillations of frequencies which are the sum and differences of different orders, of the frequency of the oscillator and the frequency of the imposed disturbance."35 There is no information in a linear system. The only way to consider such a system is in terms of the nonexistent past. EFTA01194036 Don't look for beginnings, for endings. Navigate through reality with no pretense of knowledge. The unity is methodological. The unity is in the activity and will not lead to any final answer. It is a path. "All paths are the same: they lead nowhere."36 Keep moving. EFTA01194037 Man was oblivious to the changes taking place as a result of man-made actions. Had that level been appreciated, television sets might have been viewed in a different light. Within the linear construct he could not see the information patterns. Deaths were caused by fits induced by the flicker of faulty television tubes.37 Scientific institutes warned that sitting within four feet of color television sets could cause cancer.38 Yet the same old questions were asked: "Did you like the program?" All the while the information of the television experience was coding the operation of the brain. EFTA01194038 Consider that the experience of television violates innate biological rhythms programmed into the genetic homeostatic constitution from the earliest evolutionary eras. These biological rhythms are invisible, yet nevertheless are information in terms of the experience of the brain. The most obvious and perhaps least recognized rhythm is the day / night, light / dark flicker. The experience is a constant input of information for the brain,39 effecting change without consent or awareness. Note also recent experiments indicating that "in all animal species gonadal activity is increased by light rays reaching the retina. . . . As is the case for other biological cycles, interference with the natural cycles of light exposure can result in physiological disturbances. . . . Until the last century, man lived in the dark for long hours during the winter months, and this is still true in many primitive societies. Modern man, in contrast, was exposed to bright light for sixteen hours a day throughout the year. In view of the fact that light rays can affect hormonal activities, and that many, if not most physiological functions are linked to circadian and seasonal cycles, it seems possible that this change in the ways of life had long range consequences for the human spec ies."4° EFTA01194039 Television, as direct experience, can be considered in this instance on two levels. First, it is a potent source of light. The cathode-ray experience is the only instance where man looked directly into a light source for any sustained period, possibly averaging four hours a day. Light is actually projected onto the retina by the cathode-ray tube. Second, man responded not only to light perceived by the senses but also to factors of biological rhythms such as the day / night flicker. Television alters this rhythm violently. Man talked about the violence evident on television programs. In light of the above considerations he might have developed a "Theory of Neural Programs, Television, and Violence," which hypothesized that "due to circumstances beyond our control, this `program' is out of order," which is to say that "there may well be limits beyond which the natural rhythms are not amenable to frequency synchronization with new environmental periodicities."4I Violence. EFTA01194040 "We're talking." The direct experience of the brain is communicated. Communicated through information. Man ceased to exist when nonlinear extension of experience was comprehended. It always existed, but now, once again, it's time to say, "We're talking." Thought control? Absolutely. There is one hundred percent thought control. Indeed, any considerations on this level are beyond man's morality. It is a question of a major leap in evolution. EFTA01194041 We are beyond space and time; we are beyond good and evil. There is only information. It is the control, the measure by which the operation of the brain changes. There is always complete control. EFTA01194042 Man was always blind to considerations of the present. In the transactional present, man's brain was continually coded through information. This information was of man's own devising. Man determined what he would be, what he would think. This ordering took place in the present. But man, who made the mistake of confusing abstraction and reality, deluded himself into thinking he was conscious, and then proclaimed that this consciousness, this delusion, was reality. There are several stumbling blocks to communication between linear and nonlinear systems. The major one is that linear systems do not exist. All that exists are the operations of the brain, the direct experience, a nonlinear oscillation. EFTA01194043 Instead of looking to the world of man, to the linear abstractions, to