By the Late John Brockman (2 page)

Hans Ulrich Obrist,

London, April 2014

Dedication

Foreword: Ever Brockman

John Brockman

Part I

Part II

Part III

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Also by John Brockman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Man is dead.

The choice is between the present and the past. The choice is between choice and no
choice. There is no choice.

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.

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.

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.

The abstractions of man characterize phenomena without regard to the operant activities
of the phenomena. It is a limited system of classification.

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.”
¹
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.

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

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.

In this evolutionary stage, a stage beyond space and time, the interval is closed
forever, and man ceases to exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .”
¹⁰
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.”
¹¹
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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

Who’s crazy? Mankind went out of its mind. There is no mind out of which to go. Who’s
crazy?