By the Late John Brockman (5 page)

“Man created his world and was molded by his use of it.”
⁵⁴
Nature was a man-made phenomenon. The invention-realization of the nonlinear extension
of the brain’s experience—the socialization of mind—is on the same level as that of
the invention of talking. Man did not realize he was talking until the day a man said,
“We’re talking.” By understanding that the experience of the brain is continually
communicated through the process of information, it can be seen that the extensions
of man are to be viewed as communication, not as a means for the flow of communication.
As such they provide the information for the continual process of neural coding. The
interval is closed. No more individuals. No more man. It’s a process. We construct
a loop where output provides the information for input. On the species level the output
(behavior) is environment. The input is the neural impulse. A change in environment
(output) provides the brain with information it needs to maintain its continuity through
adaptation, or a change in its operations (input). Man was the creator of “mind.”
Man determined his evolution. Man died. Dead and gone.

Dangers exist because the frames of reference which enable the deciphering of the
patterns of communication are not easily understood. Man, living in a nonexistent
illusory world of the past instant, could not readily discern the patterns of the
activity of his brain. Change took place too rapidly. Man changed himself into non-existence.
Man is dead.

A word from the author: It is not the easiest activity to escape the human race and
then effect the destruction of mankind. Perhaps the death of an abstraction is the
most difficult death. The brain is conditioned by the activity of an abstract way
of thinking, by the information it receives. These patterns do not die easily. Their
destruction is the ultimate violence. What remains is the ghostly dreamworld of man—a
world, an abstraction, in which participation is no longer possible.

The brain tends to respond to new experiences in certain stereotyped ways. The prior
responses to experiences determine response to new experience. There is a tendency
for operational patterns to rigidify, inhibiting the acquisition of new experience.
All coding, all neural imprinting, takes place in the present. The operational imprint
can be said to be a measure of information, the adaptive change. This imprinting is
continually happening. Man was never aware of it; he was never asked to give, and
never gave, his consent to it. There was, there is, no choice.

The most important feature of the age of electric technology is the moving of information.
This is not to be confused with words, images. It has to do with control, with the
extension of the central nervous system outside the body, into the world as the world.
New technologies effected a change in the operation of the brain. Telephone companies,
electric companies, construction companies, hardware manufacturers, etc., were all
in the same business: moving information. Telephone companies based charges on time;
electricity companies charged for power; television manufacturers charged for a product.
None of them based charges on information, on the evolutionary effect of their products
and services upon mankind.

Electricity is the unitive factor that can make all brains in the world perform the
same operations simultaneously. Through electronic technology, millions upon millions
of brains can act on the same information at the same time. Information is a measure
of a change in the brain’s activity, a frequency modulation. Every brain working the
same way, on the same frequency, the same wave length, performing the same operations
simultaneously. Not brotherhood, but unity.

The past is illusion. “The future is not.”
⁵⁵
It is even necessary to stop talking of the present, which implies other aspects
of the abstraction of time. Time, which cannot be directly experienced. Time, which
does not exist in the neural world. Considerations of the interpretation of the ordering
of the brain’s experience pertain to the world of the past. The past is illusion.
There is no sequence. There is no specific causation. There is only the ordering and
arrangement of the experience of the brain in a universe of simultaneous operations.
The past is illusion. Sequence is simultaneity.

The brain is a terminal machine in the process that is itself the dynamic, the reference
point. This reference point is not to be found as a substantial basis, but in considerations
of function and operations. It will be found in the process of transmission of neural
pattern. It is through observation of operations, measurement of information, that
this dynamic situation can be dealt with. Observation and measurement, not classification
and categorization.

The brain is constantly synchronizing with new rhythms. As such it programs itself
as a self-organizing system called evolution. This constant transaction with new rhythms
and the ordering process is the level to which attention should now be applied. Not
sex, not unconscious urges, not iconic archetypes, not metaphysics. There is no purpose.
There are no goals.

Man always valued his identity, but knowing who he was proved only to tell him what
had already happened. People are no longer important or worthy of any consideration.
Man is dead. No more people, with their loves, fears, longings. It has been said that
“a man thinks he amounts to a great deal, but to a mosquito he is only something good
to eat.”
⁵⁶
Do not recognize people’s feelings. Human feelings do not exist. Respect no one.
People do not exist. No more dreams, no more illusion.

“I am in love.” The neural impulse does not necessarily bear relationship to the sensory
stimulus. Stereotyped neural programs can be activated in any number of different
situations. “I am in love.” Faces, bodies change but the same love remains, the same
feeling. Such stereotyped programs are established by prior experience which both
encodes and rigidifies the operant activities of the brain, delimiting the range of
potential responses. “I am in love.” All pleasures, all love exist in the brain. Neural
programs. Not heart.

Every movie is the first movie. Every lover is the first love in terms of the simultaneous
operations of the brain. The brain most likely has an operant circuit for the experience
of orgasm. Whenever an appropriate partner happens along, the button is pressed . . .
bzzz . . . the circuit is activated. The acquisition of experience by the brain inhibits
acquisition of new experience. It is an ordering and rigidifying process. The bzzz
activating the orgasm circuit gives form to what is already happening in the brain.
The brain can set off this circuit with or without the active participation of the
partner. Some of man’s finest moments occurred when he was fast asleep. Bzzz. The
neural impulse is not necessarily determined by the nature of the sensory input. Any
variety of stimuli will do it. The explicit operations of the brain will one day be
readily available at the press of a button.

Electrical stimulation of the brain has triggered experiences that cannot be distinguished
as being different from real.
⁵⁷
In other words, the brain is not capable of distinguishing between the real and the
illusory. “By appropriate electrical stimulation of cell aggregates of living human
brains, phenomena can be evoked which have reminiscent aspects (in some instances
memorylike in the old sense of the term), characteristics which at times rival ordinary
afferent sensory stimulation in their vivid insistence and intrusion upon the stream
of consciousness, and at still other times rival effective responses appropriate to
the content of the phenomenon elicited.”
⁵⁸
For the brain, there is no illusion. Reality is whatever the brain is doing. Electrical
stimulation can activate programs of prior experience. In the process of decoding
and deciphering the functions of neural activity, it seems a realizable possibility
to be able to enjoy such pleasures as the orgasm a hundred, a thousand times a day.

For the brain, there is no illusion. There is no line marking arbitrary divisions
such as good and bad, normal and perverse, sanity and insanity. Reality is whatever
the brain is doing. On the neural level there is no insanity, there is no negative
mode of thought, there is no perversion, there are no impossibilities, no responsibilities.

Given that the genetic structure of the organism stabilized ages ago, man’s evolutionary
growth and development became a function of his own activities. Information passed
through generations of brains. The effect of this information is environment. Environment
is past experience; environment is illusion. The environment included man. Man never
knew what was happening. His knowledge, his awareness, was illusion. To ask questions,
to decode, to decipher the transactions, look to the environment, the effect, and
work backward. The efferent motor activity, the output, or environment, related by
feedback of information to the afferent neural impulse, the input. Forget about man.
The brain is only a terminal, not an originator. Look to the environment and measure
how the brain changes through the transaction with the forces that are nonlinear extensions
of its own experience.

The brain is not a repository for ideas. No brain ever had an idea in it. Realize,
then, that man molded himself, and that nature was therefore manmade, reality being
in the operations of the brain. All things considered to be innate and natural were
in effect functions of the ordering of the simultaneous operations of the brain. The
key to nature lies in the study of man’s communication.
⁵⁹
Man, the most social of animals. The Golden Rule said, “Do unto others.” But there
is no “other.” There is no self. The division is gone. There is unlimited involvement.

In the name of God. And God created man in His own image. And man created God in his
own image. But now the only image to be considered is operant, one which cannot statically
exist in a fixed place. It is to be located in the operations of the brain, not in
a place, not in a time. Space and time, which cannot be directly experienced. in the
universe of simultaneous operations there is only information. Man was not aware of
direct experience. These dimensions are beyond space and time. They are the dimensions
of direct experience, dimensions not accessible to the individual mind, not accessible
to man.

Did man evolve into God? Being everywhere, every time, in the universe of simultaneous
operations? Where man went, so went man’s information.
⁶⁰
The physical transportation of man became trivial compared to the transmission of
information beyond space and time. Man-made technology changed the way every brain
works. The understanding of how the brain orders its operant imaging processes created
gods out of men. But there is only the universe of simultaneous neural functions.
What of gods? No time for them, no space for them anymore.

No more art, no more artists. Actions, not objects. Ritual, not possessions. The real
artistry is in deciphering the process of neural coding. This navigation threads the
way through the clues strewn around the environment and sets processes in motion to
allow patterns to reveal themselves.

This exercise is not dealing with ultimate definitions. It is presenting hypotheses
that are to be used only so long as they are functional. Any hypothesis is limited
by its parameters. For any system there is a truth proving the system which cannot
be shown to be true within the system. For man this was the ordering of the brain
by direct nonlinear experience, which man interpreted as consciousness—the consciousness
that could never say how it became conscious. Ideas never reveal what the brain is
doing. There is no consciousness, no unconsciousness. There is only what the brain
is doing. But since this is known only in terms of an ordering of the brain, a transaction
not accessible to the individual in question, the system goes beyond the individual
brain and into the evolutionary process, where the activities of a multiplicity of
brains serve as terminals for a continuous flow of information. For every system there
is a truism proving the system which cannot be shown to be true within the system.
Man is dead.

Man is dead. The dying, the death, was self awareness, self-consciousness, self-esteem.
It’s a myth. It’s over with. Man sought self expression, individuality, personality.
But his image of the world was a function of the experience of his brain. The brain
is capable only of acting on information within the parameters of its construction.
It is not a “free agent.” What must be analyzed is the process, the operant concept
of what something is doing, rather than static, fixed states of being. Considerations
of individuality and personality only beg the pertinent questions.

The notion of freedom is simply absurd. Where there is no choice, there is no freedom.
Antagonists, protagonists. Illusory abstractions. All functions of similar operant
brain-imaging. Me and you, we and they, good and bad, subject and object. Antagonists
and protagonists: It’s all a question of self-identity, of ownership. Ownership of
ideas.

It is no longer possible to relate to political considerations—a province of man,
the illusory past. Democracy, communism, socialism, fascism: all gone. Liberty, freedom,
police states, welfare states: all gone. Beyond freedom. Man was never free. He was
a prisoner of his biophysiological functions. He acted in terms of the construction
of the brain and the information it received. The information that was received without
consent or awareness. The notion of free man, the notion of individual choice, is
no longer valid.