By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  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.

  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.

  The evolutionary significance of all this is unbelievable, for man. It is the end of importance. It is the end of man.

  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.

  The static, fixed, linear system is now superseded by one that is operational and nonlinear.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.

  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.

  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.

  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 species.”40

  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.”41 Violence.

  “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.

  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.

  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.

  Instead of looking to the world of man, to the linear abstractions, to the conscious motivations, etc., attention must be turned to a universe of control patterns, patterns of complete control, the nonlinear process of neural activity. The message in this system is the communication of pattern. “A message need not be the result of a conscious human effort for the transmission of ideas.”42 Work on the level of deciphering the patterns that have always existed but that man hardly even suspected. Consider the notion of power engineering: “The main function of power engineering is transmission of energy or power from one place to another with its generation by appropriate generators and its employment by appropriate motors or lamps or other such apparatus. So long as this is not associated with transmission of a particular pattern, as for example in processes of automatic control, power engineering remains a separate entity with its own technique.”43 Man was a separate entity with its own technique. The unity is methodological. Concentrate on communication of operant pattern. The only experience that is real is in the operations of the brain. The individual experience, the private experience, the personal experience: illusion. The end of the individual.

  Man concerned himself with meaning. His books, plays, movies, television programs, were considered only in terms of what they had to say, what they had to communicate in ideas. But experience was itself the communication, what the brain did. Man was oblivious to these changes. A story was a story—complete with plots, morals, points of view, and ultimate meanings—to fit within preestablished value systems. Considerations of story on the neural level are another story. Recent research has
shown that “the parts of the brain from which memories are evoked so easily and regularly are those we find most liable to exaggerated electrical discharge during flicker, and it is here too that in normal subjects the pattern of incoming stimuli can be seen abstracted and preserved for some time after the stimulation has ceased.”44

  The movie experience is a flicker experience of a frequency of twenty-four times per second, slightly higher and safer than the level considered dangerous for certain brains. The reflection of projected light from a treated surface, a surface encompassing up to eighty percent of the visual field, can have the effect on the neural level of an electronic brain message. Where is the meaning when we realize the emotional response is a function of the flicker experience reactivating memory imprints stored in the operant circuits of the brain? The implications of such a hypothesis are obvious. How can we merely discuss “I like it / I don’t like it” without reference to questions about the brain’s activity, a universe without I’s.

  Neural energy is not produced by the major receptors for sensory stimuli. The sources for neural energy are the gravitational receptors, the stretchingtype muscles. “The visual receptors, bringing in up to two-thirds of the sensory stimuli for the brain, are useless as a source of neural energy.”45 In this light, look to the transaction between the environmental force and the organism in terms of the information provided to the brain. The visual receptors tend to pick up light as motion. “The human eye has economically confined its best form and color vision to a relatively small fovea, while its perception of motion is better on the periphery. When peripheral vision has picked up some object conspicuous by brilliancy or light contrast or color, or above all by motion, there is reflex feedback to bring it into the fovea. . . . We tend to bring any object that attracts our attention into a standard position and orientation, so that the visual image which we form of it varies within as small a range as possible.”46

  Consider the motion-picture experience not in terms of the images of the movie, but the motion of the flickering light, the flashing on and off, twentyfour times per second. A relationship can be established between the information this experience provides for the brain and the production of new quanta of neural energy. Unlike the usual situation where the eye scans one hundred percent of the visual field, picks up motion, and brings it into the fovea, the light as motion of the movie experience can encompass up to eighty percent of the visual field. The normal reflex feedback, bringing the movement into the fovea, is not possible, as the outer muscles are locked into a pattern of stretching activity quite unlike any other performed in the daily routine of contemporary life. The information from this experience is measured by what the brain does to adjust to the change. In this case there is every reason to speculate that the experience will provide a potent source of neural energy. The source is not in what the eye sees, but in what the eye is doing: the stretching of the muscles, the gravitational receptors, providing information for the brain.

  These speculations on the relationship of the environmental force and the activity integrated on the neural level raise an interesting question. Going beyond the nonexistent linear construct of movie and into the direct experience of the brain, we can easily see that the very same movie, experienced in two different theaters, can provide the brain with significantly different information. Sitting to the rear of a theater with a postage-stamp screen will expose only about five to ten percent of the visual field to light as motion. Sitting in the first few rows of a seventy mm. theater will expose up to eighty percent of the visual field to light as motion. It appears obvious that the latter experience would be more intense on the neural level. But man, the nonexistent linear construct, could not get past the level of “What did it say?” “Was it good?” or “Was it bad?” His mind saw a movie; the experience in the present changed the way the brain worked.

  Every movie is the first movie. “Mechanisms for perceiving and responding to stimuli are at least partly generated by earlier stimulation.”47 “The information received by the brain both determines the manner of response and inhibits the establishment of new programs.”48 “The ability to apprehend the external world with freshness of perception commonly decreases as the mind and the senses become conditioned by repeated experiences. Human beings thus perceive the world, and respond to it, not through the whole spectrum of their genetic potentialities but only through the areas of this spectrum not blocked by inhibitory mechanisms and made functional by environmental influences, especially the early ones.”49 The information received by the brain from the movie experience at once serves to encode and rigidify operant programs. This encoding and rigidification as information must be considered in terms of the continuous operations of the brain. “There is reason to believe that information is stored in the brain by alteration of the storage elements.”50 Once this change is effected, the information provided by the experience of new stimuli may be to activate the programs stored as alteration of the storage elements, giving form to extant operational patterns.

  Certain programs have been coded into the brain’s operation as species information. These patterns activate the orthosympathetic systems, part of the autonomic or involuntary, muscular systems of the body. The orthosympathetic systems supply the energy for “flight or fight” responses by pumping adrenalin through the system.51 The hormonal changes necessary to perform the act are set in motion by the brain before the performance actually begins.52 Every movie is the first movie. The brain goes into its stereotyped movie program even before the ticket is purchased. The information received by the brain from the experience of purchasing a ticket may be enough to activate the hormonal responses of the movie experience. Buy your ticket: See the movie.

  We can talk about information-patterning for the brain only in the present. There is no other universe for the brain, only the all-at-once universe of simultaneous operations. Every action performed is ever present, programmed into the operant patterns of the brain as information. That’s all there is; there is no more. “What’s here’s everywhere; what’s not here’s nowhere.”53 All that is real can be found in the operations of the brain. Time and space are considerations of the interpretation of the ordering, and not of the transaction. Causality and sequence are myths. There is no first time. Sequence is simultaneity.

  “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 destructi
on 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.