2001: Explained in a Flash

2001: A Space Odyssey had an enormous impact on me as a child. It wasn't until I was in college that I began to appreciate this film's deeper undercurrents.

Here is a nicely done flash animation in 4 parts (just like the movie) that offers up an explanation of the film. They did a really good job, except in my opinion they missed the biggest metaphor of all - the sexual/spiritual one. Here's my explanation.

The Discovery ship represents the pinacle of mans technological achievment - a phallic vessel from which it ejaculates the sperm-pod containing mans best DNA - Dave Bowman, who then enters the labial-vaginal stargate. Along the way 'Dave the sperm' experiences orgasmic psychedelic splendor culminating with germinating union with the ovum of motherly higher intelligence - resulting in Dave's death and rebirth - conception of a new being, humanities next stage in evolution - the starchild. Sprach Zarathustra!

Here is a quote from my old (1994-98) website, (archived here).

Seeding space with our phallic vehicles, we oursleves perhaps have already been seeded, are already embryonically becoming that creature who will enter the labial stargate in apotheosis to concieve yet another being...

In this metamorphosis, we are forcing ourselves like the birth of a butterfly, to continually mutate and reprogram our conceptions of the cosmos. In spite of psychocultural forces, we are creating a radically in-process, holistic open-system cosmology... an infinite noosphere awaiting our imagination...

ExoBiology

[Inspired by Dr. Timothy Leary's book, Exo-Psycholgy.]

The patterns of nature have revealed themselves to be fractal and self-repeating. The morphology of one level is reflected in all levels, from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. The classic example is the shoreline, recursive and self-referential, carving the same odd wandering line whether you're looking at the rocky cliff edge from a few feet away or from several miles above. Similarly the small leaves on the frond of a fern trace the same contour as the frond itself, and the fern as a whole. Or consider the swirl of water around the drain and the swirl of the Milky Way around the massive black hole at its core. Indeed, there's a certain simple economy in nature, deploying basic rules across vast scales.

Nature is of course dynamic and the processes that transcribe these fractal morphologies are themselves iterative and self-similar. The development of the fern leaf follows a pattern that continues at the level of the frond and the entire fern. As the planets orbit our Sun, so too does our Sun orbit the galactic center. Our galaxy itself might be orbiting around the center of a local cluster. The same process - gravity and centrifugal motion - governs each level.

Life on Earth has demonstrated it's incessant ability to spread into any possible crack and crevice available. It is impossibly persistent and adaptive, evolving and migrating ceaselessly. It would seem that this is a fundamental law of the imperative of life. It just keeps going. If life migrates and adapts from one rock to another, region to region, climate to climate, the notion of self-similarity across scales implies that the same persistence would carry life from the womb of Earth off into space across the heavens until it finds an appropriate substrate in which to flourish further.

While the vacuum of space is certainly highly intolerant of carbon-based life-forms dependent upon oxygen and ill-equipped to defend against the onslaughts of unshielded solar radiation, it is perhaps helpful to consider that the only thing necessary to establish a brand new colony of life is the fundamental template - the genetic code of DNA. If the code lands in the right soup at the right time, another Cambrian explosion will likely follow. And in what we presume to be a near-infinite universe, it's only a matter of time before a fitting new womb is found. Looking down from above, one can imagine a pattern of minute bits of carbon-based genetic life migrating from planet to planet, caught on solar winds or bound in meteorites or hurtling in fuel-burning rocketry waiting to strike fallow extra-terrestrial earth.

From this level, life is much more than the individual egosomatic corporeality we mull about in day to day; more than the humble biota of our home, this third stone from the Sun. In fact, we're merely vectors, hosts for the virus of DNA. Or perhaps more poetically, the life of our planet in which we're enmeshed is just one song of a wandering minstrel passing through galaxies singing to the stars.

The transience of life we perceive and fear is only our identification with this corporeal incarnation. Everything we identify with here on Earth will ultimately perish. Thus the bittersweet moment of our human drama. Yet there's immortality stewing in our genes, passing through us like a ghost breathing life with our lungs and pumping blood with our hearts. And then it's gone. But, hopefully, not before it's been passed along to the progeny. Another carrier, another note in the song of life.

Exobiology is the study of galactic life. Exopsychology is the cognitive awareness of the post-terrestrial human. If DNA is impelled to migrate off the planet, then it follows that it may very well co-opt the abilities of it's tool-wielding, large forebrained prodigal apes to carry it out into space. The vast tracts of seemingly useless DNA in our genome may simply be dormant sections of future adaptations designed to enable long-distance, high-velocity, zero-g space travel. We may just be the caterpillar trying to anticipate and imagine it's future evolution as the butterfly. It's certainly more appealing than the thought of terrestrial life making the galactic leap on the fiery debris of a demolished Earth, victim of some wayward asteroid or nuclear apocalypse.

Our evolution now finds us at the dawn of a new millenium, seemingly quite advanced as toolmakers, yet faltering in socioeconomic and territorial games. The addictions of industrialism are drying up, impelling us towards newer technologies and efficiencies. Global networks are quickly wiring humanity for simultaneous communication and access to the data of creation and the technologies of post-history. Humans are leaving the larval phase, waking up to the somatosensory capabilities of our bodies. Interpersonal communicative and sensual fusion is increasingly common with the aid of mind and body altering technologies, nearing the simultaneity and unity of telepathic communion. Perhaps we'll have new humans among us with a little less dormant genetics and a little more neurogenetic capacity, modded out with cyborg gadgetry and buzzing with light to fly away from the hive.

What is our future? What is our purpose? Where are we going? What are we? These are the important questions whose answers reside in both inner and outer space. Stabilize the larval terrestrial game, actualize the somatosensory organism, and acknowledge the cellular, atomic, and genetic imperatives of life so we can disengage, jump the gap, and carry life to the stars.

Burning Man 2004: Moving Past the Singularity

I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.

As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.

On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.

I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.

I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com

One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.

Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!

Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.

This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.

Polymaths

What is a "polymath"? Dictionary.com:

A person of great or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study.

Polymath is from Greek polymathes, having learned much, from poly-, much + manthanein, to learn.

You could also call it a comprehensivist. Waldzell:

A polymath, as defined here, is a person with the knowledge and expertise of a specialist in several, usually non-overlapping, domains of knowledge or expertise. A comprehensive polymath, or comprehensivist, is a polymath with the ability to synthesize knowledge and expertise from any combination of domains.

Some definitions describe it as some kind of genius, but that is not necessarily the point, even if the most famous polymaths probably have extraordinary genius. Think Leonardo da Vinci. But the point is probably rather a wide range of interest and general knowledge, and a certain urge to tinker with different things. Polymath Society:

The dictionary definition of a polymath is a very learned person, of encyclopedic knowledge. There is also the connotation of having an understanding deeper than that found in an encyclopedia, that is, an expert in many fields.

Anyone can be a polymath as long as he or she has the right motivation. A polymath is not necessarily a brain. In fact, a polymath usually does not think of his or herself as being particularly smart, only curious. Curiosity and interest are the true motivation for work, both intellectual work and the nitty gritty of hands on inventing. Thomas Edison said that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. He had a passion for getting his hands dirty, for tinkering, for inventing through trial and error. The polymath makes lots of mistakes. This is how new sciences are created.

I haven't really used the word polymath much, but I've often said that I'm a comprehensivist. As mentioned, one sign might be one is skilled in several apparently unrelated areas. Which might seem puzzling to others, but which usually fits together as facets of a bigger picture, even if it might be invisible to anybody else but that person.

Of course, calling oneself a polymath or comprehensivist can also be a cover for scattering oneself over many subjects without really getting anywhere with any of them. A euphemism for Attention Deficit Disorder. Well, I'm gonna leave that alone.

The part I identify with is not particularly being a very learned person. I personally don't really have much to show for any extensive learning, certainly not in any academic field. Maybe rather the part about being able to synthesize knowledge and expertise from any combination of domains. Or the ability to span domains, and connect up different fields. People who only are specialists in one field might not notice the potentially valuable connections that field has with other very different fields. Somebody who has learned both fields might. But it is not necessarily needed to be thoroughly trained in both fields. It might simply be that one is tuned into looking for connections and synergies.

And it might be that one is looking for something with doesn't quite fit in any category, any specialized field. Something that is found in a lot of fields, but which also is a little beyond all of them. For example, a certain connection between all things. The patterns that the whole is moving in. Maybe a certain aestetic. A certain sense of something that needs to be expressed.

A few more recent writings on polymaths: Suw Charman wrote about A polymath in an age of specialists. Julian Elve about the Unpredictable Emergence of Learning. Mentions by Seb Paquet, Jim McGee. Julian adds up some key points:

* Generalist / Polymath learning exists, contributes knowledge and helps the horizontal distribution of knowledge;

* The public, linked, asynchronous nature of blogs and related technologies both exposes conversations to a wider pool of people and helps the ideas start to flow before any face-to-face meeting;

* The benefits of any specific piece of knowledge are not always forseeable until the right combination of circumstances and other people arises – in other words unpredictable emergent behaviour;

OK, so we need people who go around combining things, poking into different fields, trying to connect things up. Agents of Emergence, I suppose. Looking for synergies, looking for things that might be possible. Or maybe just fluttering about and cross-polinating things by accident.

And, yes, clearly blogging in a useful tool for all of this.

Also posted on Ming the Mechanic

Glass Bead Games

In a comment thread elsewhere, 'Sellitman' mentioned this article by Charles Cameron about Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. Now, I had no idea what that was, as I hadn't even heard of his book "Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game". And, well, there's a lengthy academic treatise about how one might possibly construct a game that is described rather vaguely in the book. But it somehow stimulated my interest, and it seems to point to something important, albeit a bit beyond the horizon of comprehension.

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Herman Hesse about a simple version of the game, which was apparently some activity he would engage in while raking leaves in the yard:

"I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind."

That sounds great of course. Now hear what Timothy Leary had to say:

In the avant garde, cyber-hip frontiers of the computer culture, around Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, around Palo Alto, in the Carnegie Mellon AI labs, in the backrooms of the computer graphics labs in Southern California, even in the Austin labs of MCC, a Hesse comeback seems to be happening. However. This revival is not connected with Hermann's mystical, eastern writings. It's based on his last, and least understood, work, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game. This book, which earned Hesse the Expense-Paid Brain Ride to Stockholm, is positioned a few decades in the future when human intelligence is enhanced and human culture elevated by a device for thought-processing called The Glass Bead Game. Up here in the Electronic '80s we can appreciate what Hesse did, back down there (1931-1942).

Hm, intriguing, but still didn't tell us what it is. Anyway, the author of the treatise inches closer with various examples and snippets of clues.

The figure of Pierre Sogol (ie *logos*) in Rene Daumal's novel *Mount Analog* is clearly a Game Player. Sogol lives in an attic studio in Paris, and a pebbled path leads through shrubs and bushes and cactus plants around this studio:

Along the path, glued to the windowpanes or hung on the bushes or dangling from the ceiling, so that all free space was put to maximum use, hundreds of little placards were displayed. Each one carried a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and the whole constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call 'human knowledge.' A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table of the elements, a key to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae, each planet and its characteristics, fossil remains of the horse species in series, Mayan hieroglyphics, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, samples of the principal plant and animal families, crystal specimens, the ground plan of the Great Pyramid, brain diagrams, logistic equations, phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies -- everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth-century Pico della Mirandola...

Ah, the concept is beginning to form. It is a way of weaving together patterns, snippets of knowledge, symbols, music, art - everything

"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created."

Cool. A meditative mind directly accessing the cosmic mystery. Quanta of lucid comprehension and primal creation wowen together into universal wholeness. A system, a language for expressing and examing all of it. Playing complex patterns, no matter the media. Linking expressions of life in many dimensions, many senses. Synestesia. A passage from Hesse's book:

Highest culture: the bead game in many categories, embraces music, history, space, *mathematics*. X is now the highest of bead game players, plays the world symphony, varies it according to Plato, to Bach, to Mozart, expresses the most complicated of things in 10 lines of beads, is completely understood by three or four, half-understood by 1000s.

So, is it a language? Maybe. Bertrand Russell has this to say about creating ideal languages:

The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples. A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols. In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.

Breaking everything down into its most simple components, in such a way that they easily can be re-combined or communicated or played.

Computers. The web. Everything is broken down into ones and zeros. Whether it is music, words, ideas, math, paintings, video, conversation, genetics. All come down to ones and zeros. And back again. And the possibilities for re-combination are endless. So does the web provide a substrate for this game? From the author:

The Web allows the direct, digitized display of textual, musical, numerical and pictorial content, and thus provides the Game designer with a medium in which -- to take an example from one of my own Games -- TS Eliot's lyric "The dove descending" can be directly juxtaposed with Vaughan William's lovely piece, "The lark ascending". The counterpoint I am after is not simply between the two forms of words, although that is present, but also between the poem as it may be read aloud and the music as it may be played -- and beyond that, to the descent of the Paraclete on the disciples' heads in the form of flame and the rain of incindiary bombs on London during the Blitz, and to the English meadow lark and its prior celebration by Shakespeare and others.

I tend to think, then, of the Web as a kind of "board" on which the Glass Bead Game or its variants can be played, not simply in natural language but by the direct juxtaposition of ideas -- verbal, musical, numerical, pictorial -- in their own nature.

But in fact this is not what is going on. My presentation of Vaughan Williams' "The lark ascending" on the web is no more the piece itself as played than the Vaughan Williams piece is the lark itself as it ascends. On the web, a performance of the Vaughan Williams and a reading of the Eliot poem can be juxtaposed by rendering them into a common *digital* language... And it is this digital language which I suggest is in practice the appropriate analytic language for the design of Glass Bead Games.

I don't know what he really did with those pieces of text or the music, but I get the idea, of how pieces can be brought together, juxtaposed, re-mixed, transferred between media, played in new ways. As he says, using the "web as an organ whose manuals and pedals can indeed range over the entire intellectual cosmos".

Too quick an answer to just let binary code be the magical symbolic language that can represent everything. Ones and zeros don't in themselves represent very much at all. Yeah, we can also split everything into sub-atomic particles, but that doesn't provide all the wisdom of how things combine and play in the universe at large. As a metaphor for having access to everything, it will work, I guess. But it would be a worthwhile venture to pursue the more full-featured abstract languages or pattern languages that might span a bigger and deeper range of life in one movement.

It is this approach which my colleague Terence MacNamee is currently pursuing, searching in his own field of specialty, linguistics, for "a more formal kind of game where there really are structural isomorphisms that are purely intellectual and have nothing to do with events" by converting his old Master's thesis -- which is about the foundations of historical linguistics in the 19th century -- into formal structures for use in games.

I can see that the analysis of syntagms in language could establish isomorphisms between phenomena that are not otherwise related, such as:

(1) Ablaut in Germanic ("speak" vs. "spoke") (2) vowel harmony in languages like Turkish (a word must have all front vowels or all back vowels in it) (3) Semitic roots ("kitab - katab - ktab" - "writes - wrote - book").

The ramifications of this make me dizzy.

I intend, then, to work on these formal correspondences, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic, in the context of linguistics from Grimm to Saussure. The result will be a scholarly monograph which I hope to publish, and a series of games derived therefrom.

Makes me dizzy too. Anyway, isomorphisms, yeah, that's good. Finding how things express certain deeper patterns, even if they might be manifested in very different media, and even though the superficial content might be different. A content and context and media independent language, facilitating the expression of infinite play. A poem from Hesse:

The pattern sings like crystal constellations, And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole, And cannot be dislodged or misdirected, Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.

We've been drowning in information. We're on sensory and mental overload most of the time. The web plugs us into an ocean of information, pictures, sounds and bits in a number of media. So, now, the thought is there that we might deal with it all in different ways. There might be more wholistic ways of surfing. Seeing the waves and the ocean as a whole in motion, rather than as a whole lot of drops. Ways of comprehending large chunks at the same time, because we know the keys that tie them together. Seeing forests we didn't before know existed, because we couldn't fathom their trees or their leaves. Suddenly hearing the music of the spheres, once we know there are spheres. Tasting the soup when it dawns on us that it is a soup. If it is a game, I wanna play.

Hypertime, Hyperself, and Googling The Akashic

*I was blown away by this tonight, so I felt like sharing it again. I hope you enjoy it.

~~

We've probably all heard about hyperspace, but what about hyper-time? Is there such a thing? Well, most likely. Each bubble universe by definition has its own space-time continuum, and so it would only make sense that other bubble universes have their own space-time continuums. Since they have their own self-contained space-times, why then would these timelines synchronize with ours? Logically, since they are separate, they wouldn't. Which means each timeline operates independently of our own. Although in a way it's a meaningless statement, while millions of years passed there, no time at all would pass here. The same could be true from their perspective. It's possible, as hard as it might be to imagine, universes with 3 time dimensions and 6 spatial ones. Better still, why not universes without space and time at all, but something altogether different and more extraordinary? Why not intelligences from realms where time and space would be completely alien to them, even restrictive from their perspective? It all seems arbitrary really, so why not an infinite number of other dimensions? I think this is closer to the true nature of things. We get something beautiful, perfect already a universe becoming more permeable all the time - higher dimensions, wormholes, baby universes, superspace, and continuing beyond all that we can possibly understand right now. A universe without end, infinitely beyond our comprehemsion for all eternity - the lasting mystery that propels us forward, upwards, outwards, always becoming more free eternally. Sounds like sweet blissful perfection to me. So it's all just semantics really what we call the universe. That's why I like Bucky's fuller Universe.

We exist and perceive Universe within certain boundary conditions. However, we have also noticed that if you change your hyperspective those boundary conditions are broken or transcended. For example Universe becomes much larger, more interesting, bigger, better. This change in perspective is because of your increased intelligence. Measuring the universe simply as a result of our physical technologies is just one part of a larger expansive process going on.

From a psychological perspective our experience of Universe has been equally if not more profoundly changed and expanded since our ancestors were struggling with fire. Imagine further the gulf between our ontological space and that of an insect or small microbe. Now imagine looking beyond our current technology and psychology, to the future of post-human intelligence vastly exceeding our own. Who is to say that these other dimensions of space described by string theory and quantum gravity will not open up to us? Who is to say that parallel universes (which apparently are right next to us - less than a micrometer, just in a parallel dimension out of our 3d space) will not become known and experienced by our future post-human selves?

If David Bohm is correct about the implicate order, then there are an infinite number of dimensions of space, time and everything else, within us and all around us. All we need is believe in them and open ourselves up to them. It doesn't require any fancy technology, only a willingness inside you to go there. You'll soon learn that our physical bodies, space and time, and all that other stuff doesn't matter very much. It's just this tiny place we happen to be in at the moment. But the next moment, the one right after now, can become the first moment you are living in infinity. Many people who have taken sufficient amounts of psychedelics to have experienced these hyperdimesnions. The best part is we don't need drugs anymore to go to these places. The helped show many of us the way, but the way out is past the drug experience. I know this view has given me some flack here on this 'psychedelic' site, but I believe ultimately that drugs are a dead end. It's kind of like an old tool that has served us well, but is now no longer necessary. We cling to it because it gave us fond memories, but it no longer serves us. We have outgrown it. We have become one with these higher spaces, we are going there in dreams, in OBE's and NDE's. Death is an illusion.

The holographic theory provides a great map to understand and integrate this beautifully simple and inclusive worldview.

According to the Holographic theory - everything is an interconnected continuum, on up thru the highest of dimensions - accessible to us right here, right now. The universe bubble we see through our eyes, telescopes and microscopes are merely the arbitrary boundary conditions defined by a combination of our physical space-time body-apparatus, technological augmentation and psychological development.

The conclusion we can draw is that given sufficient intelligence increase we can access all time vectors, continuities, discontinuities, realities, hyper-realities - the akashic record itself.

Imagine a point in which your intelligence, a vast network and continuum of information, knowledge and wisdom, begins mapping this holographic universe using hyper-intelligent "semantic", hyper-synaesthetic meta-data, to use contemporary metaphors. Is higher intelligence already doing this with our most intimate moments now? Is this higher intelligence ourselves in "the future" living vicariously through our "past selves", having not reflected yet that is in fact a hyper-intelligence capable of transcending all of it? Better still, are such distinctions between our so-called "lowly" selves and this higher self a false dichotomy? Perhaps that is what all the great sages have been trying to tell us - we are already gods, are already this higher intelligence!

As I have written before (see Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis), time being an arbitrary boundary condition, then in the super-set of all that is there is no before or after. There was no beginning, and no end. Everything and nothing both exists simultaneously as a standing wave in eternity - all of it is consciousness - iterating, enfolding and unfolding upon itself infinitely in every direction. We are already this infinite intelligence - always have been always will be blissing out on the miracle of our own existence.

Some might say that this brings an experience of an infinite number of hells. Although all these random/hellish states exist as part of a ground state of consciousness, they are not necessarily self-conscious. I think it is reflective self-consciousnes, self realization as a co-creator of the universe that creates the necessary bootstrap (quantum observer looking upon itself) for transcending these hellish states and rising up into the highest of heavens.

Some Related Articles:

Before the Beginning Was the Void
God as Consciousness-Without-An-Object
What is Reality?
Levels of Samadhi
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardachev
Super Free Will

Creating Your Own Shamanistic Starship

Message from Galactic Coincidence Control Office

Tune in, Turn On, Blast Off!

We are timespace vehicles with probability drives.

The probability fields in which we exist in and perceive may be nothing more than arbitrary creations of higher intelligence. Probabilities only expanding as fast as we are ready to navigate them.. As we begin communicating with higher intelligence we can begin to reprogram more of our own probability fields, creating our own synchronicities, luck and destiny. Those who figure this out will take us to the stars and beyond.

As we begin to reprogram and metaprogram our probabilistic realities we can accept only what we want to and reprogram the rest - transforming ourselves into higher intelligence.

Everything that exists in "our current universe", our consciousness has chosen out of the infinite possibilities available. Keep in mind there may be other intelligence's (even terrestrial) who have programmed you and "your universe" This may even include what you perceive as life, gravity, matter, time, space... Consider the possibility that these phenomena our probabilistic realities you have been programmed to operate in, purely arbitrary and nothing more.

Other entities almost certainly conceive their realities in terms of logical models of which we have the least intimation. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps "they" are already here. If the cosmobiological continuities which we seek are already "known", perhaps are controlled by... someone... something... some hyper-cybernetic energy structure - some cosmic information warp.

Seeding space with our phallic vehicles, we ourselves perhaps have already been seeded, are already embryonically becoming that creature who will enter the labial stargate in apotheosis to conceive yet another being.

We are forcing ourselves continually to mutate and reprogram our conceptions of the cosmos - in spite of psychocultural forces, we are creating a radically in-process, holistic open-system cosmology.

Read history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and religion along with mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Create your own mythology or religion. Make it historic scientific in foundation and science fiction fantasy in style. Sign on your best friend for the journey (the buddy system is a safety net).

The details of your shamanistic starship are up to you. Think for yourself and do it everyday. Strive for comprehensiveness - specialization is for insects. Each shaman must find hir own way. With practice, patience and endurance you will end up with a shamanistic starship capable of reliably taking you to worlds of beauty and religious depth that have only been available so far to humanity's great geniuses, artists and mystics. The possible destinations of your starship are infinite!

Welcome to the neopaleolithic where we poor monkeys get back to the unfinished business of re-creating our selves and going to the stars.

Life, Universe and Everything

There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.

According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.

Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.

So how big is our universe?

HUGE

So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.

According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 10³⁵ light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 10³⁵ lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10⁶⁰ of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 10⁶⁰ golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.

This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10¹⁸ light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10³⁵ light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?

3.7 billion years

Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10¹⁰⁰ galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 10²³ atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 10⁶⁰. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10¹⁰⁰ is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.

Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10¹⁰⁰ is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.

For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 10⁷⁵ advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!

Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.

So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.

"If she lost her personal wormhole and forgot her
trans-species designation code (a seventy digit number!)
she would never, ever find her way home again.
None of her descriptions of where she comes from
would relate to anything anyone else knows."

The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.

Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis

Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.

Was Universe Created By Design?

I just read this article over at Slate. Ever since I heard of basement universes and the possibility of our future selves creating them for our own amusement (see Linde Scenario), it seemed all the more likely that our own universe was created by an advanced intelligence from another universe.

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

To get a better understanding of this matter, I thought it might be wise to consult the man who has done more than anyone else to explain how our universe got going. His name is Andrei Linde, and he is a physicist at Stanford University. (He's also an artist and an acrobat, but never mind.) In the early 1980s, the then-thirtysomething Linde came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde's theory, called "chaotic inflation," explained the shape of space and how galaxies were formed. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation from the Big Bang that was observed by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. Linde has been amply honored for his achievement, most recently by being awarded the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation (along with Alan Guth, another pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation).

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

Super Free Will: Metaprogramming and the Quantum Self

By Paul Hughes

Contrary to popular belief among most brain scientists today, I will argue that free-will not only exists, but ultimately is all that remains in an ever changing uncertain universe. In order to understand the body of my argument, we’ll need to delve into quantum physics, Skinnerian behaviorism, neurological imprinting, brainwashing and metaprogramming.

Here is Robert Anton Wilson’s definition of Von Neumann's Catastrophe of the infinite regress.

A demonstration by Dr.Von Neumann that quantum mechanics entails an infinite regress of measurements before the quantum uncertainty can be removed. That is, any measuring device is itself a quantum system containing uncertainty; a second measuring device, used to monitor the first, contains its own quantum uncertainty; and so on, to infinity. Wigner and others have pointed out that this uncertainty is only terminated by the decision of the observer.

What this means, and has been proven time and again in experiment after experiment, is that without a conscious observer, quantum states remain uncertain and in a state of indeterminacy. It is the conscious observer that makes the uncertainty wave function collapse out of an either/or “maybe” into something "real". No experiment has yet been able to remove this observer from the results. Therefore without consciousness, there is no wave function collapse, and no "reality". Scientists, including Einstein have been fighting this conclusion for more than 70 years, when he said, “God does not play dice”, but experiment after experiment has proven this to be the case. The Aspect Experiment in 1982 and its dozen follow up experiments have reproduced this non-local consciousness dependent result. This is most troubling to determinist materialist as it goes against their training and every other working scientific theory. Yet the power of quantum mechanics has made itself known in almost every field of technology and industry.

So why hasn’t this shattering revelation made greater waves through the scientific community? I honestly don’t have the answer to that, other than history is full of old paradigms dying slow hard deaths. So rigid in their thinking are people and therefore scientists, that as Thomas Kuhn, the author of the book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), said, "The triumph of a new paradigm may therefore depend as much on this generation’s dying off as it does on decisive confirmation or refutation, as more traditional philosophies of science understand such things." This is an important point, which I’ll get back to in a bit.

Meanwhile, as our understanding of the brain has increased, we have been able to isolate and tie numerous psychological functions to deterministic brain chemistry. Tweak a molecule here; get a psychological effect there. Apply an electrode there; get a psychological effect here. This has led most neuroscientists and cognitive researchers, including the likes of Francis Crick, to conclude that any conception of having free-will is an illusion. Francis Crick says,

All your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free-will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

He is only partially correct, as we shall soon see.

Eastern yogi philosophers and psychonauts have said similar things as Crick. Either through advanced meditative techniques or the ingestion of entheogens, these people have temporarily transcended their neural conditioning and brain programming, and from this higher, more self-aware perspective, have correctly concluded that most of what makes up "them" is arbitrary programming, robotic behavioral patterns inserted either through conditioning or imprinting at certain stages of their life.

So what are imprints? Imprinting was first demonstrated by Konrad Lorenz in the 1930’s when he was able to imprint himself as the mother to hatched ducklings. He discovered that there are moments of imprint vulnerability where an electrochemical bond is formed in neural circuitry that precedes any further conditioning. Another way of looking at this is imprints are hardwired neurological patterns, whereas conditioning is composed of looser, more easily reprogrammed softwired patterns. Conditioning can be changed by positive or negative re-enforcement, but imprints require something altogether more traumatic. We could say that imprints form the basis of our personality and remain unchanged throughout our life, except under the most traumatic of experiences. It is here that the science of brainwashing comes in.

The most notable case of brainwashing is the story of Patti Hearst, who having been kidnapped a "rich daddy’s girl", came back six weeks later as a different person, robbing banks, and proclaiming the birth of a new "peoples liberation". This brainwashing was accomplished through a combination of drugs and extreme trauma. Kept in a locked closet for weeks, taunted by her captors, and fed only the smallest amount of food, Patti went into extreme shock, and in turn become imprint vulnerable. Unbeknownst to her, and after weeks of torment, these same captors befriended her as if they were the ones rescuing her. As they opened the closet door, they immediately started calling her a new name. Loving, comforting, feeding and taking care of her, they gave her a whole new identity and narrative. Claiming that her abductors were working for her father, she immediately came to love and accept these people, her saviors, completely forgetting her old life, and accepting this new reality imprint without question. In short, she was brainwashed.

Ok, so where does free-will come in? So far it seems like I’ve decimated every last shred of free-will and human dignity. Yes, and for good reason! Unless we understand the full extent of just how brainwashed and programmed we are, we will never have anything close to a free-will. To be free it first helps to intimately understand just how imprisoned we are by our own nervous system. Freedom comes from knowledge, not ignorance. To know thyself is the pathway to liberation and freedom, as I will now explain.

Lets start with simple conditioning. An addiction to something would be a good example of strong mental conditioning. Most people who are seriously addicted think they can’t stop their addiction, feeling they are slaves to their nervous system programming, compelling them to get more of whatever it is they are addicted to. We know that addictions can happen at both the psychological level like gambling, or in the physical (central nervous system level), like crack-cocaine. If the person has a strong enough desire to seek adequate help, they can with assistance overcome their addiction. Some people are strong enough to be able to do this without help, but the majority look for others support to get them through the thick of it. Is this desire to overcome their mental conditioning the same as free-will, or just another higher level of programming? Some would argue that there were other programs, super-programs that eventually re-wrote these lower subroutines of addiction. Or what some AI researchers like to call super-goals. Ok, this has some computational basis, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe in adequate neurological terms precisely how overcoming ones programming is not the beginnings of something more uncertain and indeterministic. Remember the indeterminate conscious observer in quantum mechanical systems? We’ll get back to that.

So what are these supergoals then? I think there are many. The next layer beyond conditioning as I mentioned earlier is neurological imprinting; hard-wired electro-chemical bonds that program behavior and our subsequent perception of reality and self. Almost everyone you’ll ever meet has never re-imprinted their nervous systems. However for those lucky or not so lucky individuals who have taken a large quantity of a psychedelic drug, what John Lilly calls metaprogramming agents in his groundbreaking book, Programming and Metaprogramming in The Human Biocomputer, these electro-chemical imprints can be re-programmed, or re-imprinted too. John Lilly described this ability to re-program our programs, meta-programs. He then goes into considerable scientific and rigorous detail describing all the ways we can metaprogram our own brain, changing our brains programming as we see fit.

The question now needs to be asked, if we are nothing more than our programs, imprints and conditioned reflexes, then who is the "we" who is doing the programming? Who is the metaprogrammer? Some might remain steadfast and say that this new higher you is also just a collection of programs, or metaprograms. In either case, for those of us lucky enough to have metaprogammed ourselves and not been metaprogrammed against our will (brainwashing), it sure feels like we are a lot more free than we are ordinarily. Any so-called free-will we have in an ordinary state of consciousness feels contrived and robotic compared to being in a metaprogramming state. So if nothing else, this thing called free-will is relative. There are states where we are more "free" than others.

John Lilly has gone further in exploring the depths of the mind and the limits of metaprogramming, and said that after a while of metaprogramming, you eventually realize there are limits to certain metaprograms, or what he also likes to call beliefs about beliefs. Robert Anton Wilson is fond of calling them catmas... with dogmas being absolute beliefs, and catmas being relativistic metabeliefs. And as you play around with metaprograms, then there is a new "self", the self that is meta-meta-programming! Programming ones own metabeliefs. Or what John Lilly also liked to call supra-meta-beliefs. John Lilly quickly realized there is no limit to this self-recursion when he uttered his most famous quote,

In the province of the mind, what the mind believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits.

In other words, as you become more aware of your supra-metabeliefs, you can continue upwards to meta-meta-meta-beliefs, ad infinitum… the neurological equivalent of the Von Neumann Catastrophe. If this relative scale of increasing neurological metaprogramming freedom is not some kind of free will, then I think the meaning itself has been destroyed, and for no damn good reason, other than dogmatic stubbornness on the part of people unwilling to let go of an old dying deterministic paradigm, against the new empirically verifiable new paradigm of quantum mechanics. All physical systems are subject to quantum mechanical principles, which are in turn subject to a conscious observer. So no matter how you slice it, the conscious observer is both separate and a part of the physical world. Consciousness it would seem is a fundamental in the universe, possibly the one and only fundamental, preceding all other observed physical properties, which are determined by consciousness.

Quoting Robert Anton Wilson again,

Since all human knowledge is neurological in this sense, every science may be considered a neuro-science; e.g., we have no physics but neurophysics, no psychology but neuropsychology and ultimately, no neurology but neuroneurology. But neuroneurology would itself be known by the nervous system, leading to neuroneuroneurology etc., in an infinite regress.

But as John Lilly humbly admitted, even though in the mind there are no limits, the body on the planetside trip has definite limits locked in by biology. So as long as we return to and operate within it, we are subject to its limits. However each day we are becoming more aware of how these genetic limits work, and soon will figure out how to overcome those limits, first with genetic engineering, then nanoengineering.

So here we are altering our own molecular DNA, and soon the entire physical world down to the atomic level. Another way of looking at this, is DNA having evolved out of the slime, is now becoming recursive enough to begin altering itself with intenationality and purpose towards something stronger, smarter and more versatile. Going further, the atomic world is now becoming aware of itself, and