By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  There are only nonlinear phenomena. The communication of direct neural experience is an invention more important than the wheel, the steam engine, nuclear energy. The trip through the internal mappings of the nervous system is far more exciting, far more important, and far more dangerous than the journey to the moon, and the farthest reaches of outer space.

  It is a question of searching for questions. This exercise is not setting forth rules or formulating dogma. It is an attempt to create a working model, not with an eye to truth but to convenience. The only rules applicable are those that are convenient to use. In this system there is no interest in, there is no possibility of, truth. There is no longer a solid base, a substantial reality, from which to make pronouncements. We move toward an always inferred, unknowable reality with the symbols, the frames of reference, available to us. What we find is only a model. Man was such a model. Man, the model, is dead.

  It is no longer necessary to say yes to life, No one is there to listen; no one is interested in you, no one is interested in your words.

  II

  No man’s land.

  Progress is merely decreation. “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so. This principle is purely destructive, it takes something away.”1 Decreation: “A person can doubt only if he has learned certain things; as he can miscalculate only if he has learned to calculate.”2 The advances of civilization are gross exaggerations; a function of the language with its built-in commitment to the accretive historical model. Flat earth: round earth. It isn’t a one hundred percent accretive advance from one to two: one hundred assumes and decreates ninety-nine. Round earth assumes and decreates flat earth. Invisible assumes and decreates visible. Events assume and decreate matter. The relativistic universe assumes and decreates the mechanistic universe. “Progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious:”3 decreation. Is it simply that “progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology?”4

  “A no man’s land, or better said, a no signals region extends between past and future.”5 Universe is finite: no space-time continuum. A voice out of the past? The reliving of an experience? Don’t call it memory. Is it possible to remember? “A seeing into the past? It does not show us the past. Anymore than our senses show us the present. Nor can it be said to communicate the past to us.”6

  Universe is finite: a process of decreation: the passing of the created into the uncreated. Decreation: the created passes into man-made invention. Reality passes into description.

  The end of the waste system. The waste: the generalizations of previous epochs. Decreation: getting through the history of words. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so. “The point is that unnecessary units in a sign language mean nothing.”7

  The accretive principle: the predominant way people live, like the oldfashioned idea of making a living; amounting to something. Stuff starts at one point and goes through accretive increments of time, of space, of history, etc., to get to another point. Universe: no accretion; no accumulation; no development; no continuity. Neither before nor after; neither behind nor beyond; neither here nor there; neither inside nor outside; neither from nor to: No direction; no between: no communication.

  Universe: a verb. Not existing in time, but time itself and not the time of past, present, future. Time undifferentiated in activity, not time of being. Universe: a decreated world: “a moment in time / and of time. / A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: / transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time / but not like a moment of time, / A moment in time but time was made through that moment: / for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment / of time gave the meaning.”8

  Awkwardness: The only way to fit the uniqueness of insights into current laws. Awkwardness: stymied by perception, by knowledge Awkwardness: “the primary advantage thus gained is that experience is not interrogated with the benumbing repression of common sense.”9

  Universe is finite: objectified expression of activity: the assumption of the positive-negative abstractions particular to the subject-predicate proposition; the assumption of the process of subject-predicate. No ultimate subject: the unity is unitless. “Where you end / And I begin / Or any else, in fine, / On such dichotomies depend / There’s no one left to draw a line.”10 Subject-predicate: noun’d. Noun: negated. Syntax: confused.

  “A noun is the name of things . . . why after a thing is named write about it.”11 The major accomplishment of science is that it has never produced an objective fact, never proven the existence of an object. No nouns: no objects, no people, no propositions, nothing. Living with “the growing terror of nothing to think about.”12

  Undifferentiation of activity: no division of activity into parts. No differences; no between. “To be without description of to be.”13

  It is impossible to pay less than one hundred percent attention. It is impossible to do less than you do. Universe: verb. Do: always one hundred percent: the do of do; the do of not do. Activity: always one hundred percent: the activity of activity; the activity of nonactivity. Experience: always one hundred percent: the experience of experiencing; the experience of not experiencing. You can’t do less than you do. Doing: complete, obligatory, always one hundred percent, whether the focus is the part or the whole; the totality or the selection obscuring the totality. “I am” is doing: don’t call it being. “I am not” is doing: don’t call it nonexistence. “I think” is doing: don’t call it thought. Do: “The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.”14

  Undifferentiated activity. Don’t call it Life. Don’t call it Man. Talk “of gods and man destroyed, the right / To know established as the right to be. / The ancient symbols will be nothing then. / We shall have gone behind the symbols / To that which they symbolized.”15 Use unambiguous language for objective description: elementary physical laws are all expressed by statistical formulas. “All the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures.”16

  The description is the thing. The most important thing is the next word; the to-be-said. Not a word and yet another kind of word: “a refinement of general language, supplementing it with appropriate tools to represent relations for which ordinary verbal expression is imprecise or cumbersome.”17 No ultimate subject. “Just by avoiding the reference to the conscious subject which infiltrates daily language, the use of mathematical symbols secures the unambiguity of definition required for objective description.”18

  Get through the history of words. “Throw away the lights, the definitions, / And say of what you see in the dark / That it is this or that it is that, / But do not use the rotted names.”19

  Universe: verb. The coupling of observer-observed system. The doing of man-environment. The doing of “I think.” Universe: not observer, not man, not I. The unity is unitless, an expression of undifferentiated activity. “We need no longer discuss whether light consists of particles or waves; we know all there is to be known if we have found a mathematical formula which accurately describes its behavior and we can think of it as either particles or waves according to our mood and convenience of the moment.”20 It “exists in a mathematical formula; this, and nothing else, expresses the ultimate reality.”21

  “Our task can only be to aim at communicating experiences and views to others by means of language in which the practical use of every word stands in complementary relation to attempts at its strict definition.”22 This exercise sets forth exact notions with the inexact language of the spurious names and generalizations that have crept into the language as truth. There’s no other way. “There are no precisely stated axiomatic certainties from which to start. There is not even the language in which to frame them. The only possible procedure is to start from verbal expressions which when taken by themselves with the current meanings of their word
s are ill-defined and ambiguous.”23 Welcome the contradictions, welcome the confusion . . . as you would success.

  The coupling of observer observed system is finite. The observation, the measuring operation, is irreversible. The real world measured itself out of existence. “The model need not be that of an objective, immovable world around us. Philosophers of our time cannot ignore the fact that Interaction be tween observer and observed is finite and cannot be made as small as desired. Observation and perturbation inevitably go together and the world around us is in perpetual flux because we observe it.”24

  “A physical quantity must not be defined by verbal reduction to other familiar conceptions, but by prescribing the operations necessary to produce and measure it.”25 Universe is finite decreation of the outside world, independent of us; decreation of the outside world not directly accessible to us. The description is the thing. The description: a mathematical formulation, the statistical expression of coupling. “The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulae and the phenomena they describe is not a step toward, but a step away from reality.”26 Universe is finite: not a word, and yet another kind of word, and “the word must be the thing it represents.”27

  No nouns: “the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of change is completely abandoned.”28 The unity is unit-less: “An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject of its experiences. It is subject-superject and neither half of this description can for a moment be lost sight of.”29 Unitless unity: the negation of one. Unitless unity. the operation, the statistical expression of coupling, of activity. Unitless unity: “The poet and his subject are inseparable.”30 There is no ultimate subject. “Before the birth of Doubt / We—you and I—were one, / Who now, alack, / Are both undone!”31

  “To measure is to disturb.”32 “We used to imagine that there was a real universe, outside of us, which could persist even when we stopped observing it.”33 The negation of the empirical notion of antecedent observation: “we can never catch the world taking a holiday.”34 Observation and perturbation inevitably go together and “the method of pinning down thought to the strict systematization of detailed discrimination, already effected by antecedent observation, breaks down.”35 “Each observation destroys the bit of the universe observed, and so supplies knowledge only of a universe which has already become past history.”36 We cannot abstract ourselves from the world. We form together with it, an inseparable whole. There are no actors and spectators, but a mixed crowd . . . “reject, absolutely renounce the idea of an objective real world.”37 The concern is with “our observation of nature, and not nature itself.”38

  Description is the thing. Decreation of the idealized real world, the thing world, the people world. “Experiments are the only elements which really count.”39 Coupling of observer-observed, an event: the matter of fact. “The elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things and facts.”40 Physical phenomena: not things made of matter. Coupling: the matter of fact. “Do not look behind the facts since the facts themselves make up the doctrine.”41 Physical phenomena: coupling: the matter of fact. “To confront fact in its total bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience. Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.”42

  Unnecessary units in a language mean nothing. The unnecessary unit: an invention. The real world: an invention. Invention: a question of decreation. Invention: a question of realization, not intention. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so. “We approach a society / Without a society.”43 We are compelled to assume the existence of an entity only by decreating that entity. Invention by decreation.

  Concepts are the impersonal effect of an epoch. Names are included in conceptual exercises either to impress the reader or to support a notion so weak as to require a name with which to tyrannize the reader. “The first idea was not our own.”44 Not one idea in this exercise is original. They are the ideas of the reader, not the author. There is no author. Not one idea in this exercise is original.

  The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. “Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present.”45 The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.

  Everything has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description. The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to consider it. Asking or telling: there isn’t any difference.

  “Why is a contradiction more to be feared than a tautology?”46 Success in this exercise is confusion. Knowledge is tautological. “Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.”47 The decreation of reality: as it is known; as it is not known. The decreation of reality: the invention of reality.

  Make or do: You can’t do other than do. Each observation destroys the bit of the universe observed, and thus supplies knowledge only of a universe which has already become past history. Make-create: spurious conceptions of the empirical notion of antecedent observation. Make-create: accretive advance from nothing to made; from nothing to created; from nothing to thing. Make-create: a real world taking a holiday. You can’t do other than do. Doing: do. Not doing: do. Make-create: do. Not making-not creating: do. Observation and perturbation inevitably go together and the world around us is in perpetual flux, because we observe it. You can’t do other than do.

  Nothing comes before performance.

  “Concepts which refer to distinctions beyond possible experience have no physical meaning and ought to be eliminated. This principle should be applied to the idea of physical continuity.”48 No nature at an instant. “An infinitely small distance cannot be measured . . . we should especially emphasize the impossibility of physically defining a continuum in space and time.”49 No accretion. It is impossible to locate a thing, stuff, etc., in space at an instant of time. No pictures. Experiments, measurements are what count. These “events must be treated as the fundamental objective constituents”50 . . . an “analysis in terms of doings or happenings.”51 No nature at an instant. “Nature is such that it is impossible to determine absolute motion by any experiment whatsoever.”52 No nature at an instant: no movement; no change; no distance; no speed; no development; no continuity; no creation; no from; no direction; no there; no before; no accretion.

  No nature at an instant. But “what can be described can also happen”53: the description is the thing. “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.”54

  “The past has another pattern and ceases to be a mere sequence— / Or even development.”55 No accretive time: a unique seriality of incremental creative advance. Physical phenomena cannot be represented in the accretive spacetime continuum. No nature at an instant: no pictures: no mirrors. “No pictorial interpretation on accustomed lines, but establishing relations between observations.”56 These relations are represented statistically. Their expression, a consequence of the coupling of observer-observed is independent of time and place; independent of development; independent of seriality.

  Measurements, experiments are what count: nonaccretive discrete energy values for discrete states (S) of experience. The measurement (S) destroys the bit of the universe observed. Observation and perturbation inevitably go together and “the world around us” is in perpetual flux because we observe it. No accretive states of experience: S2+S3+S4, etc. To measure is to disturb. Every measurement is Sl. There is no S2. There can be no addition, no comparison, no creation, no reproduction, no difference. A no-signals region extends between past and future. “One picture of the scenario about the caterpillar stage does not communicate its transformation into the butterfly stage.”57 No-signals region: no difference. No accretive states of experience.

  The end of the beginning, of first,
of last, of before or after, of between. A no-signals region extends between past and future: no man’s land.

  It isn’t necessary to be aware of concepts in order to live them. Knowledge makes no difference: measurements are what count. Knowledge makes no difference: “to know is to measure.”58

  The doing of “you do.” I, you, she, he, they, represent the concept of the static unchanging subject of change, advancing through accretive states of experience in a space-time continuum, There’s nothing for you to do. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”59