By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  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.

  Political considerations are trivial. The leaders of governments throughout the world thought in terms of control, believing power to be the key. But there is always complete control: Information is the key. The direct nonlinear experience of the brain is communicable. Information passes across the arbitrary boundaries of mankind as though they never existed.

  The so-called emotional states of man were nothing more than habit. Fear. Love. Longing. Hate. Pain. Pleasure. Joy. Press the button, and the brain will activate the program. So too with man’s noblest feelings. Dignity. Honor. Altruism. Patriotism. Habit. The human habit.

  There is no choice with information. It is a measure of effect, a measure of the change in the brain’s operations. As the brain functions in a universe of continuous, simultaneous operations, it may be said information is always circulating in the system. As information is a measure of control, there is always one hundred percent control. There is no choice.

  It is interesting to note that research into the activity of the brain shows that the program of operations in terms of direct experience becomes imprinted as an operant circuit. It must be remembered that the operation of the brain is activity of which one cannot be aware. These imprints exist in the simultaneous universe of operations. It has been demonstrated through electronic stimulation of the temporal lobe by implanted electrodes that the imprint of a previous program can become activated. Illusions of familiarity of a déjà vu nature, as well as interpretation of shape, clearness, and speed, are activated by stimulation of the temporal cortex and subsequent electrical discharge on only one side of the brain, the side responsible for minor handedness.61 We also know that the flicker experience of a frequency of that of a movie (twenty four frames per second) could excite this same area of the brain through exaggerated electrical discharge.62 Considerations of individual “mind” only beg questions that may be readily explored through analysis and observation on the operant level. Operant observations and analysis are impossible within the abstraction system of man.

  Discern the patterns by measuring output and relating it to input. How a change in the environment is related to a change in the brain’s operation. The relationship is nonlinear; the measure of the relationship is information, a measure of the change of the brain’s operations. It goes beyond the abstraction of the individual. In a way man could not see, he was animated by his extensions. He was the terminal, not the originator. It all went through him. It wasn’t life; it was process.

  It comes down to rhythms. Reality is to be found in the process of neural activity. Systems of abstraction are developed which allow the functioning phenomena to monitor their own activities. This monitoring, rather than being an observation of extant activity, is actually new activity. It is represented by frequencies, rhythms, numbers. When man tried to find the ultimate material basis of identity, he got down to the level of molecular spectra, only to find neither materials nor mechanisms, but a self-organizing pattern of frequencies. A process. A whole which can be represented by operant mathematical symbols, but which can be talked about and measured only in terms of eject. Who am I?

  There are not, there will not be, any footnotes in the body of this exercise. Ownership is a human habit The author presents not ideas, but information. Not words and images, but a transaction that can be measured only in terms of information. It may appear inconsistent to use the linear format of the printed book to convey the message that there is only information The entity “book” is an arbitrary representation of reality, not dissimilar to symbolizing operant patterning as “man.” On the neural level we can see how “book,” an extension of man, fed back signals telling the brain what to do. There is “a sense in which we can say that there is communication of information between man and his products.”63 This is process. It is integrated on the neural level. It is nonlinear.

  Language. This exercise is using language to say that language does not exist. There is only information controlling the direct experience of the brain. The currency of the nervous system is the neural impulse. The key to language is to be found in the operations of the brain. The universals of language are the universals of neural patterns. Different languages cut up reality in terms of their own bias. Mathematics must be included in this consideration as a language. However, “it may even be in the cards that there is no such thing as ‘Language’ (with a capital L) at all! The statement that ‘thinking is a matter of language’ is an incorrect generalization of the more nearly correct idea that ‘thinking is a matter of different tongues.’ The different tongues are the real phenomena and may generalize down not to any such universal as ‘Language,’ but to something better called ‘sublinguistic’ or ‘superlinguistic’—and NOT ALTOGETHER unlike, even if much unlike, what we now call ‘mental.’”64

  The trap is in the concept “language.” Whatever is happening can be considered perfectly well without ever using the conceptual framework of “language,” which by its nature makes it difficult to consider the transaction, the process. We are not concerned with the linear system of “man and man’s language,” but with experience on the neural level, the only direct experience. Words are not directly experienced. Man never experienced words. He experienced another man talking, radios, books, televisions, telephones, etc. The experience was never that of language. We move from the relationship of man-man talking, man-radio, man-book, man-man thinking, to a study of the transacting process that can be considered in unambiguous, numerical terms when dealt with on the level of operant, neural activity. Yet this exercise uses words. “When we talk about reality we never start at the beginning and we use concepts
more accurately defined only by their application.”65 It’s part of the process. The author is aware that for every system capable of producing a logical truth, there is a truism proving the system which cannot be shown to be true within the system.

  Reality is not words, not the construct of language. Reality is in the nonlinear function of neural activity. The only real phenomena are operant and nonlinear. Words can be considered only in terms of the illusory past. Man thought the choice was between ideas that were expressed through language. The choice for man really concerned information, how the usage of various language patterns would change the way the brain worked. Since man could never be aware of the activity of his brain, there was no choice. Silence.

  Real control had nothing to do with the kind of control exercised by national governments. Control is through the process of information. Man’s technologies, viewed as communication, as feedback extensions, relayed back signals telling the brain what to do. While governments exercised their traditional prerogatives, the process continued unnoticed. No democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, what kind of information was desired. Nobody ever voted for the telephone. Nobody ever voted for the automobile. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for television. Nobody ever voted for space travel. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for nuclear power.