← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 17. Quantum Evolution
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:⌛️
Annotations
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3123 Another perspective on domesticated primate evolution is provided by Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. For convenience Toffler reduces the muddle of human history into a model of three waves. It would be more accurate to refer to these “waves” as quantum jumps in energy-coherence level. The First Wave, Toffler says, took millennia to occur, but it finally transformed the larger part of humanity from the tribal stage (simple hunting-gathering primates) to the stage of large-scale agricultural-feudal civilizations. The Second Wave came much faster and, in a few centuries, transformed almost all of humanity from feudal-agricultural cottage economy to industrial-urban-market economy. The Third Wave, Toffler says, continues the trend toward acceleration and will happen in only a few decades. We call it “the information explosion,” “the post industrial economy,” etc. Each wave is faster, by a factor of 10, than the previous wave. And each wave is more total in that it changes more people, changes them more completely, and in the process transforms our concept of human nature and human society.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3132 Each wave that Toffler describes can be considered a new quantum state, with energy levels and reality-dimensions lacking in the previous state and totally unpredictable from the previous state. The First Wave mutated tribal men and women into serfs (or into Lords and Ladies). It created a whole new social manifold that is so subtle and pervasive that anthropologists and sociologists can spend years studying its invisible aspects. And yet this transformation is so enormous that it is also visible to the most untrained eyes: you can’t confuse a tribal human with a feudal human anymore than you can confuse a dog with a donkey. So, too, the Second Wave created what Toffler wittily calls “indust-reality,” manifesting as industrial men and women who are visibly, tangibly, as different from feudal or tribal humans as dolphins are from rose bushes or armadillos. The Third Wave, which began when Shannon and Wiener defined information and Von Neumann designed the first programmable computer, is well under way already. Home computers became as common as TV sets by the mid-1980s. Now the Net—computers “talking to” computers—is doubling every four months. This transformation, again, will be total: it will create a whole new “man,” a new “woman,” a new “child,” a new “self,” new “society,” a new concept of “work” and “energy” and “reality,” etc. The average Man or Woman of 1997 will be as obsolete in 2007 as the medieval serf is now. What we consider normal jobs, normal social roles; normal “humanity” will be as archaic as a horde of alchemists, smithies, Town Criers, courtiers and barber-surgeons arriving in our midst today.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3145 Of course, Toffler does not claim that the computer is the whole of the Third Wave, but merely that it is the synecdoche or paradigm of what is happening. In this sense, the factory was the synecdoche of the Second Wave. It was not merely the agent by which “indust-reality” spread across the world and multiplied our collective wealth (and illth); it also became the model for everything else.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3148 Our schools are mini-factories or models of factories because their main job was, when they were founded, to prepare people for factory work. The schools, in fact, were necessary because, while feudalism does not require literacy of the masses, industrialism does. Similarly, offices were modeled on factories, and kept factory-hours, even when this had little or nothing to do with how the offices could most efficiently be managed. And in general, “indust-reality,” the reality of the industrial age, moved everybody into the robot lockstep of the factory system. A free-lance writer can obviously work any hours, but the very successful (and very excellent) John D. MacDonald said in a recent interview that he always writes from nine to five, because it seems “natural” to him. The factory time-clock has gotten into MacDonald’s neurons. The present author, after 20 years in factory-like offices works any hours of the day or night when “the spirit” moves him, but never starts at nine or stops at five, to avoid relapsing into the habits of his past.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3159 “Indust-reality” is still so pervasive that it is, as McLuhan noted, mostly invisible. For instance, the feudal age never progressed beyond chamber music—trios, quartets etc. The modern symphony, with its huge orchestra, its Promethean themes, its god-like conductor (“capitalist”), its concert-master (foreman), its string section moving in harmony with its brass section, etc. is a beautiful artistic expression of modes of mass human organization appearing usually in less beautiful forms in the factory assembly-line. (The factory also demanded cities—massive concentrations of labor in one place—which made the symphony economically possible. The aristocrat could not afford, and/or could not conceive, keeping more than the very few musicians necessary for chamber music.) Beethoven’s “cosmic optimism” not only expresses the Age of Reason out of which indust-reality emerged; the very orchestras he wrote for were paradigms of industrial styles of organization.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3166 Of course, industrialism (the Second Wave) produced much illth along with its new wealth; and most of the wealth was ex-(or ap)-propriated by a minority. However much this may pain socialists, it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species. A few alpha males can always see their own advantage more clearly than the majority can see their collective interest. Nonetheless, as indust-reality has spread, socialism has followed in its wake. Whether the reader likes this or not (and the author, being up-front about his prejudices, admits that he does not like it), this also is inevitable. When huge wealth is palpably being created in vaster accumulations than ever before in history, there is sure to be increased grumbling against the alpha males, and more attempts to seize what they have selfishly ap-(or ex)-propriated. Even among baboons this pattern has been observed: the alpha male who is too obnoxious gets beaten up by a coalition of younger males and thrown out of the pack to forage alone.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3174 Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. In looking at capitalism vs. socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a choice. The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal stage.
Note: rescource based economy, we use industrialism to just automate everything.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3179 In 1977, Dr. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in physical chemistry. Perhaps he should have won a Nobel prize for intelligent optimism. Dr. Prigogine’s work deals with the processes we have been discussing—the emergence of negative entropy (coherent order) out of stochastic processes—but he has taken a giant leap beyond the pioneering insights of Schrodinger, Weiner, Shannon and Bateson. Any organized system, according to Prigogine, exists in dynamic tension between entropy and negentropy, between chaos and information. The more complex the system, the greater is its instability. Prigogine demonstrated this mathematically, but in everyday terms, what he means is that, for instance, it is easier to lead two children through a department store than twenty children. Or: A toothpick “house” of 101 pieces is less stable than a smaller toothpick “house” of 10 pieces.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3186 Instability is not always bad: in fact, it is absolutely necessary for evolution to occur. Insect societies are highly stable and have not evolved at all in several million years. Human societies are highly unstable and are in continuous evolution. Prigogine demonstrates the evolutionary value of instability by his concept of the “dissipative structure.” A dissipative structure is highly complex and therefore highly unstable. The more complex it is, the more unstable it is, mathematically, certainly; and the more unstable, the more likely it is to change—to evolve. All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence).
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3192 If that sounds grim, it isn’t really. Prigogine’s math is highly optimistic, He shows that the more complex structures—such as our world-round human society today, midway between Second Wave indust-reality and the emerging Third Wave—are mathematically more likely, much more likely, to “dissipate” into higher coherence than into self-destruction. In other words, in the intellectual conflict between Utopians and Dystopians, the mathematical odds actually are on the side of Utopians. Our human world is so information-rich (coherent) that it is almost certain to “collapse” into even higher coherence, not into chaos and self-destruction. Prigogine is the mathematical demonstration of McLuhan’s intuition that many seeming symptoms of breakdown are actually harbingers of breakthrough.
Note: “Book of Revelation Is About Renewal, not Apocalypse”
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3203 The latest cosmological evidence indicates that our sun and its planets, including Earth, condensed out of a cloud of galactic dust and gas about five or six billion years ago. It appears that the first forms of unicellular life—the first dawnings of Circuit I bio-survival “consciousness”—appeared about 3.4 billion years ago. Vertebrates began to appear—with Circuit II emotional-territorial consciousness—about 0.5 billion years ago (500 million years ago). The emergence of Circuit III human intelligence—language and “thought”—seems to have begun about 100,000 years ago. The fully human domesticated primate, Homo Sapiens, with Circuit IV “moral” consciousness may be about 30 thousand years old, or even more recent. Circuits V-VIII have appeared within historical times.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3209 All of these figures are subject to revision as science advances, but the rough proportions between them are not likely to be changed much, and these proportions are staggering. As has often been pointed out, if we condense this evolutionary scenario into a 24-hour day, beginning at midnight, life itself does not appear until a little before noon, and all of human history (from the grunting, club-wielding ape men of Africa to Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon) occurs in the last half of the last second before midnight strikes again and the day ends.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3214 This model is misleading in that it assumes the present is an “end,” which is highly unlikely. Even without Space Migration, the life span of earth’s biosphere is expected to be somewhere between 10 and 15 billion years more, before the Sun ceases to support life here. Taking the Sun’s expected life span of about 20 billion years as our model to be mapped onto a single day, we find that it’s now around eight in the morning. Life has been mostly unconscious until now—operating on auto-pilot, as it were—but in the last million years (the last few seconds on this model) signs of consciousness and Awakening are beginning to appear. “The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself,” Spencer Brown once noted. The emergence of the neurosomatic, neurogenetic and meta-programming circuits is the universe’s way of “seeing itself’ ever more clearly and totally, to decide where it is going.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3220 Dr. Isaac Asimov notes in his Genetic Code that there seems to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new scientific principle and the transformation of the world by that principle. For instance, Oersted discovered electromagnetic equivalence—the fact that electricity can be converted to magnetism, and magnetism to electricity—in 1820. Sixty years later, in 1880, electrical generators were in wide use and the Industrial Revolution had peaked; the telegraph and telephone were already invented, and our age of Mass Communication was dawning. Similarly, in 1883, Thomas Edison first noted the so-called “Edison effect”—the key to electronic, as distinct from electrical, engineering. 60 years later, in 1943, electronic technology was appearing everywhere; its primitive form in the entertainment sphere, radio, had enjoyed a 20-year triumph and was about to be phased out by television. In 1896, Becquerel noted the radioactivity of uranium. Sixty years later, two cities had been destroyed by atomic bombs and nuclear plants were beginning to be built. (This was a contribution to illth, not wealth.) In 1903, the Wright Brothers got their monoplane off the ground for a few minutes. Sixty years later, in 1963, jetliners carrying over 100 passengers were normal.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3230 Assuming, gambling, guesstimating that this 60-year cycle is normal, we can predict: Shannon and Weiner created the mathematical foundations of cybernetics in 1948. Sixty years later, in 2008, cybernetization of the world, as complete as the electrification of the 19th Century, will have jumped us to a new energy-level, a new social reality, as Toffler predicts. Hoffman discovered LSD and the chemical control of consciousness in 1943. Sixty years later, in 2003, every alteration in consciousness imaginable will be possible by ingesting the proper chemicals. McKay had the first success in expanding life-span of laboratory rats in 1938. Sixty years later, in 1998, longevity pills may be routinely available in all drugstores. DNA was identified in 1944. Sixty years later, in 2004, every type of genetic engineering should be as routine as electronic engineering is today.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3237 The latest attempt to estimate the rate of information acceleration—the manifestation of coherence—was made by French economist Georges Anderla for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1973. Anderla arbitrarily assumed that all the bits of information possessed by humanity at the beginning of the Christian Era (1 AD) could be considered his unit of measurement. He made that information pool one unit in our fund of knowledge. It took until 1500 AD, Anderla discovered, for the accumulation of bits of information to add up to two units in our “fund.” It required only 250 years more (to 1750) for our bank of knowledge to double again, to four units. The next doubling took 150 years and by 1900 humanity had 8 units in its information capital account. The next doubling took only 50 years and by 1950 we had 16 units. The next doubling took only 10 years and by 1960 we had 32 units. The next doubling took seven years and by 1967 we had 64 units. (This was coincidentally the height of the first Youth Revolution, when reality maps began breaking down everywhere on the planet and wild new maps were hurtling at us from all directions.)
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3247
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3247 THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3248 In the next six year period (1967-1973), our intellectual bank account again doubled, to 128 units. At this point, Anderla completed his study. Dr. Alvin Silverstein has estimated that, if Anderla’s graph is projected ahead seventy years human knowledge should increase a millionfold. That is, we should have 128,000,000 times more knowledge than we had in the year of Jesus’ birth. Longevity drugs will probably arrive in time for you to live through the biggest evolutionary quantum jump of all.
-
Highlight(pink) - Location 3252 It is only reasonable to assume that the higher circuits of the nervous system—neurosomatic holistic awareness, neurogenetic evolutionary vision, meta-programming flexibility—are developing to allow us to cope with this deluge of higher information and potential higher coherence. Toffler’s Third Wave is only the sociological aspect of a mutation that is also biological and “spiritual.” We are going to live a lot longer than we have expected, and we are going to get a lot smarter. A whole new reality will emerge from those mutations.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3257
EXERCIZES
-
Make a list of ten areas in which your thinking-feeling is conservative. Guess how soon the world will change so totally that those ideas will seem not merely conservative but irrelevant (as the theological debates of 300 AD now seem irrelevant).
-
Make a list of ten areas in which your conceptualizing is radical. Guess how soon the world will change so totally that you will seem conservative in those areas.
-
Accept the longevity hypothesis. Imagine you are going to live at least 300 years. How much of that time do you want to spend loafing? How many different jobs would you like to work at? How many sports, arts or sciences you never had time for, would you then find the time to enjoy?