Prometheus Rising (33 page)

more likely,
much more likely,
to "dissipate" into

higher coherence than into self-destruction.

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259

In other words, in the intellectual conflict between Utopians

and Dystopians, the mathematical odds actually are on the side

of Utopians. Our human world is so information-rich (coherent)

that it is almost certain to "collapse" into even higher coherence,

not into chaos and self-destruction.

Prigogine is the mathematical demonstration of McLuhan's

intuition that many seeming symptoms of
breakdown
are actually

harbingers
of breakthrough.

A note to confirmed pessimists: Prigogine's analysis is based

on probability-theory and, hence, is not
certain.
Thus, if you

have found these lyrical pages unduly alarming, take comfort in

the thought that, although human success is highly probable,

there is still a small chance that we can blow ourselves up or that

your favorite apocalyptic scenarios might still occur, despite the

general trend toward higher coherence and higher intelligence.

Meanwhile, of course, even if humanity seems condemned to

overall success, you can still mess up your personal life. Nothing

in this book is an attempt to prevent the really resolute miseryaddicts

from continuing their pursuit of frustration and failure.

The latest cosmological evidence indicates that our sun and its

planets, including Earth, condensed out of a cloud of galactic

dust and gas about five or six billion years ago.

It appears that the first forms of unicellular life—the first

dawnings of Circuit I bio-survival "consciousness"—appeared

about 3.4 billion years ago.

Vertebrates began to appear—with Circuit II emotional-territorial

consciousness—about 0.5 billion years ago (500 million

years ago).

The emergence of Circuit III human intelligence—language

and "thought"—seems to have begun about 100,000 years ago.

The fully human domesticated primate, Homo Sapiens, with

Circuit IV "moral" consciousness may be about 30 thousand

years old, or even more recent. Circuits V-VIII have appeared

within historical times.

All of these figures are subject to revision as science advances,

but the rough proportions between them are not likely to

be changed much, and these
proportions
are staggering.

As has often been pointed out, if we condense this evolutionary

scenario into a 24-hour day, beginning at midnight, life itself

26o Prometheus Rising

does not appear until a little before noon, and all of human

history (from the grunting, club-wielding ape men of Africa to

Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon) occurs in
the last half

of the last second
before midnight strikes again and the day ends.

This model is misleading in that it assumes the present is an

"end," which is highly unlikely. Even without Space Migration,

the life span of earth's biosphere is expected to be somewhere

between 10 and 15 billion years more, before the Sun ceases to

support life here. Taking the Sun's expected life span of about 20

billion years as our model to be mapped onto a single day, we

find that it's now around eight in the morning. Life has been

mostly unconscious until now—operating on auto-pilot, as it

were—but in the last million years (the last few seconds on this

model) signs of consciousness and Awakening are beginning to

appear.

"The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself,"

Spencer Brown once noted. The emergence of the neurosomatic,

neurogenetic and meta-programming circuits is the universe's

way of "seeing itself ever more clearly and totally, to decide

where it is going.

Dr. Isaac Asimov notes
1
in his
Genetic Code
that there seems

to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new

scientific principle and
the transformation of the world by that

principle.

For instance, Oersted discovered electromagnetic equivalence

—the fact that electricity can be converted to magnetism,

and magnetism to electricity—in 1820. Sixty years later, in 1880,

electrical generators were in wide use and the Industrial Revolution

had peaked; the telegraph and telephone were already

invented, and our age of Mass Communication was dawning.

Similarly, in 1883, Thomas Edison first noted the so-called

"Edison effect"—the key to electronic, as distinct from electrical,

engineering. 60 years later, in 1943, electronic technology

was appearing everywhere; its primitive form in the entertainment

sphere, radio, had enjoyed a 20-year triumph and was about

to be phased out by television.

In 1896, Becquerel noted the radioactivity of uranium. Sixty

years later, two cities had been destroyed by atomic bombs and

Prometheus Rising 261

nuclear plants were beginning to be built. (This was a contribution

to illth, not wealth.)

In 1903, the Wright Brothers got their monoplane off the

ground for a few minutes. Sixty years later, in 1963, jetliners

carrying over 100 passengers were normal.

Assuming, gambling, guesstimating that this 60-year cycle is

normal, we can predict:

Shannon and Weiner created the mathematical foundations of

cybernetics in 1948. Sixty years later, in 2008, cybernetization of

the world, as complete as the electrification of the 19th Century,

will have jumped us to a new energy-level, a new social reality,

as Toffler predicts.

Hoffman discovered LSD and the chemical control of consciousness

in 1943. Sixty years later, in 2003, every alteration in

consciousness imaginable will be possible by ingesting the

proper chemicals.

McKay had the first success in expanding life-span of laboratory

rats in 1938. Sixty years later, in 1998, longevity pills may

be routinely available in all drugstores.

DNA was identified in 1944. Sixty years later, in 2004, every

type of genetic engineering should be as routine as electronic

engineering is today.

The latest attempt to estimate the rate of information acceleration

—the manifestation of coherence—was made by French

economist Georges Anderla for the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1973.

Anderla arbitrarily assumed that all the bits of information

possessed by humanity at the beginning of the Christian Era

(1 AD) could be considered his unit of measurement. He made

that information pool one unit in our fund of knowledge.

It took until 1500 AD, Anderla discovered, for the accumulation

of bits of information to add up to two units in our "fund."

It required only 250 years more (to 1750) for our bank of

knowledge to double again, to four units.

The next doubling took 150 years and by 1900 humanity had

8 units in its information capital account.

The next doubling took only 50 years and by 1950 we had 16

units.

262
Prometheus Rising

The next doubling took only 10 years and by 1960 we had 32

units.

The next doubling took seven years and by 1967 we had 64

units. (This was coincidentally the height of the
first
Youth

Revolution, when reality maps began breaking down everywhere

on the planet and wild new maps were hurtling at us from all

directions.)

In the next six year period (1967-1973), our intellectual bank

account again doubled, to 128 units. At this point, Anderla completed

his study.

Dr. Alvin Silverstein has estimated that, if Anderla's graph is

projected ahead seventy years human knowledge should increase

a
million/old.
That is, we should have 128,000,000 times more

knowledge than we had in the year of Jesus' birth.

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Longevity drugs will probably arrive in time for you to live

through the biggest evolutionary quantum jump of all.

It is only reasonable to assume that the higher circuits of the

nervous system—neurosomatic holistic awareness, neurogenetic

evolutionary vision, meta-programming flexibility—are developing

to allow us to cope with this deluge of higher information

and potential higher coherence.

Toffler's Third Wave is only the sociological aspect of a

mutation that is also biological and "spiritual."

We are going to live a lot longer than we have expected, and

we are going to get a lot smarter.

A whole new reality will emerge from those mutations.

EXERCIZES

1. Make a list of ten areas in which your thinking-feeling is

conservative. Guess how soon the world will change so totally

that those ideas will seem not merely conservative but
irrelevant

(as the theological debates of 300 AD now seem irrelevant).

2. Make a list of ten areas in which your conceptualizing is

radical. Guess how soon the world will change so totally that you

will seem conservative in those areas.

3. Accept the longevity hypothesis. Imagine you are going to

live at least 300 years. How much of that time do you want to

spend loafing? How many different jobs would you like to work

at? How many sports, arts or sciences you never had time for,

would you then find the time to enjoy?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE NON-LOCAL

QUANTUM CIRCUIT

The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr. Deasy said. All

history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God.

— James Joyce,
Ulysses

265

A domesticated primate philosopher on an oxygen-supported

carbon based planet circling a Type G star—namely, the present

author—was once asked, "How do we think?"

"Well, we have a built-in bio-survival circuit which distinguishes

nourishment-giving Things from predatory Things..."

"But can that circuit do
all
our thinking?"

"Well, no, but then there's an emotional-territorial circuit..."

"But, but, but—"

"It's circuits-circuits-circuits all the way," I said.

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

We have made a beautiful (we hope beautiful) model of

consciousness in terms of brain hardware and software. Now we

need to remember again that, while the brain can be modeled by

a computer, the model is never the whole system. The modelmaker

or metaprogrammer is bigger than the model or program.

In what are called "out of body experiences" (OOBEs) by

parapsychologists, awareness
seems to
escape the confines of the

nervous system entirely.

Such experiences are routinely triggered by advanced yoga

practice, and they also occur spontaneously during what is called

"near-death" or "clinical death" in which the patient appears to

die, by all medical standards, but is revived by modern resuscitation

techniques.

OOBEs also occur with heavy does of LSD and with ketamine,

an anesthetic with strange psychedelic side-effects. They

are also reported in shamanic traditions all over the world and by

many "occultists" in our own society.

Example: One day in 1973, during a neuro-programming

experiment, I "saw" something happening to my son at exactly

that time in Arizona, over 500 miles away.

We can process this datum in various ways. We can say that

my "astral body" actually traveled to Arizona; this is the occultist

theory. We can more conservatively say that I developed extrasensory

perception and "saw" Arizona without "going" there;

there are many parapsychologists who prefer this third-circuit

map of the Sth-Circuit experience. We can try to aver that I only

"happened" to think of that scene while it was happening, by

synchronicity;
this is the Jungian approach. Or we can sweep it

under the carpet by muttering "mere coincidence" or "sheer

coincidence;" which is the traditional Rationalist approach.

267

268 Prometheus Rising

We prefer to say, in accord with earlier writings of Timothy

Leary and the present author and the speculations of the Physics/

Consciousness Research Group in San Francisco that such cases

illustrate a special working of what is called in quantum mechanics

Bell's Theorem.

Bell's Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary language it

amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems:

every particle in the universe is in "instantaneous" (faster-thanlight)

communication with every other particle. The Whole

System,
even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances,

functions as a
Whole
System.

Now, such faster-than-light communication seems to be

forbidden by Special Relativity, which makes a problem. Bell's