Prometheus Rising Chapter 7 The Time-Binding Dialectic Acceleration & Deceleration

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Prometheus Rising Chapter 7. The Time-Binding Dialectic Acceleration & Deceleration

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: 2023-5-4 Status:📚

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Highlight(pink) - Location 1178 The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time. The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary. The first two-circuits are based on negative feedback, in the biological sense. They maintain homeostasis—that is, they return, over and over, to the same ecological-ethological balances. The function of negative feedback is to return to such a steady state. The time-binding semantic circuit is not based on such steady-state positive feedback. It is a mechanism of what cyberneticists and biologists called positive feedback. It does not return to a steady state, but constantly seeks a new equilibrium at a higher energy level. (Negative feedback returns to a fixed point, like a thermostat. Positive feedback seeks a moving goal, like a guided missile.)
Highlight(pink) - Location 1186 The first two circuits maintain that which is (more or less) constant in human affairs. They are totally cyclical, and relate directly to the cycles found in history by Vico, Hegel and similar philosophers. The third circuit has always been hemmed-in and heavily sanctioned with rules, laws, prohibitions, taboos, etc. because it breaks up such cycles. It leads, if unleashed, to an upward-hurtling spiral. In societies where the third, semantic circuit has been partially unleashed—it has never been totally freed in any society—the upward spiral immediately appears. This used to be known as “progress,” before that word became unfashionable.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1191 The upward spiral (whether we call it “progress” or not) is characteristic of what Karl Popper calls Open Societies. These are secular, humanistic societies—cultures relatively free of taboo and dogmatism. Such freedom, up to and including the present, is only relative, because many taboos are unconscious and pass themselves off as “common sense” or “common decency,” etc. Whoever challenges them is by definition a “heretic,” by definition a “traitor,” or by definition “an irresponsible nut.”

Highlight(pink) - Location 1196 It was historian Henry Adams who first conceived the idea that there might be a mathematical expression describing the rate of change of human societies. Under the influence of Newton’s physics, Adams suggested—and he was very tentative about this: a fact to be remembered by those who ridicule his “naivete”—that the utilization of energy might move forward as the inverse square of time just as Newton’s gravity functions as the inverse square of distance. Accepting the anthropology of his day, Adams assumed humanity in its present form was about 90,000 plus years old. He then reckoned that it took most of that time to arrive at Galileo, the scientific method, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and the great leap forward in energy utilization characteristic of the “modern” age, or the Open Society. Since 300 is the inverse square of 90,000, Adams assumed that the next great leap was happening while he was writing, around 1900—300 years after Galileo. Looking about him, he decided this next jump to higher energy was occurring in the researches of the Curies, who had discovered radioactivity. As many commentators have noted, it is impossible to read Adams on this subject without feeling that he is very accurately forecasting the Atomic Age. Adams went further, with the exhilaration of a great idea. Since 17 plus is the inverse square of 300, he predicted that the next great evolutionary stage would begin in 1917 plus. And, since the inverse square of 17 is 4 plus, he predicted the next step in around 1922. By then, he said, we should have infinite energy at our disposal. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1208 Nevertheless, Henry Adams was on the right track. His math was just over-simplified. Also “on the right track” was Henry’s brother. Brooks, who was also looking for “laws” in history. Brooks observed a pattern which may or may not be entirely true but is as approximately true as the similar generalizations of Vico, Hegel, Marx and Toynbee. Every civilization. Brooks Adams proposed, goes through four stages: 1. The monopolization of knowledge by priests. E.g., the Egyptian priests kept written language a secret among themselves, as did the Mayan priests. 2. The monopolization of military power by conquerors who made themselves States or governments. E.g., “a French bastard” (Tom Paine’s description of William the Conqueror) lands on the shore of England with a superior technology—warriors on horse versus native warriors on foot—and he becomes King. His relatives and sycophants become Lords-of-the-land. 3. The monopolization of the land by these land-Lords. The extraction of tribute (“rent”) from those who live on the land. 4. The monopolization of the issue of currency by National Banks. The extraction of tribute (“interest”) for each piece of currency put into circulation. Most civilizations seem to have gone through at least three of these stages, not always consecutively. Some have passed through all four.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1219 Brooks Adams also noted that centralized capital (the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few inter-related families) seems to have been moving steadily West throughout recorded history. The first major accumulations are to be found in Sumer; the center of money-power then shifted to Egypt, to Greece, to the Italian peninsula, to various parts of Germany, and then to London. At the time Brooks Adams was writing (c. 1900) he saw the balance teetering between London and New York, and he predicted that the decline of the English Empire would shift the balance to New York within the first half of the 20th Century. He seems to have been right. Brooks Adams had no theory as to why this Westward movement of wealth had been going on for 6000 years. He merely observed the pattern.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1224 The shift is still continuing, in the opinion of many. For instance, Carl Oglesby in The Cowboy vs. Yankee War, sees American politics since 1950 dominated by a struggle between “old Yankee wealth” (the New York-Boston axis, which replaced London after 1900) and “new Cowboy wealth” (Texas-California oil-and-aerospace billionaires). As of 1997, it looks like the Cowboys are winning; which is what one would expect if there were a real “law” behind Adams’ East-West migration of capital.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1228 One night in 1919, Count Alfred Korzybski awoke from a vivid dream, tears of joy streaming down his face, with a vivid sense that the passing of signals from generation to generation—the third circuit time-binding function—was what distinguished us from the other primates. Korzybski originally suggested that time-binding could be defined mathematically. He dropped this idea later—his math was as inadequate as Henry Adams’—but it is worth looking at for a moment, to retrace the steps by which the actual Law of Acceleration was discovered. What Korzybski assumed at first was that if all the inventions, discoveries, etc. of some hypothetical first generation of humans could be represented by P, and the rate by which the second generation could surpass this by R, then, mathematically, the sum total of inventions, discoveries etc. at the end of the second generation would be PR. Quite true, algebraically. Then, after a third generation, the stockpile would be PRR. And after four generations, PRRR.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1235 Generalized, this becomes PR1, where (t) is the number of generations from whatever generation you have picked as your base-line. The curve of PR1, if you put it on graph paper, ascends more rapidly with each generation. Korzybski was looking straight at what Alvin Toffler later called “Future Shock” and was trying to write a mathematical formula for it.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1239 Many variables in economic-technological history do, in fact, fit Korzybski’s PR1 function; but others do not. The math, again, was too simple; and everything does not change at the same rate. Nonetheless, Korzybski, like Henry Adams, was groping toward the truth: acceleration is real, and it is intimately connected with time-binding, the passing of signals between generations.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1243 What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of negentropy out of stochastic processes. Our understanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon. A stochastic process is a random series, but it is a special kind of random series. In a stochastic process, some agent or agency is making selections—picking out of the randomness a pattern that is not random. A pattern that is not random is known mathematically as information. Information can also be defined as organization, or as coherence. Gregory Bateson has defined information as “differences that make a difference.”
Highlight(pink) - Location 1249 Information—coherence—“differences that make a difference”—Korzybski’s Time-Binding—these are all aspects of the unpredictable. If you know something already, or can predict it easily on the basis of what you do know, it is not information for you. Conversely, if you don’t know something, or can’t predict it, it is information. The dynamism of evolution, we repeat, is the selection of information, coherence, out of a random series of events.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1263 Information is also known mathematically as negative entropy or, in a widely used abbreviation, negentropy. Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1265 Evolution is always a matter of at least two stochastic processes, each one acting as “selector” of the other(s). That is, in non-living systems, where no such “selection” is involved, entropy (lack of coherence) steadily increases, as stated in the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. In living systems, due to stochastic co-selection, negentropy (information) steadily increases. In Schrodinger’s phrase, “Life feeds on negative entropy.” Life is an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1270 This process accelerates because it is, as Shannon demonstrated mathematically, logarithmic. Logarithmic processes are such that if you put them on graph paper, the curve rises more and more all the time. Hence, the accelerations noted by Adams and Korzybski are human increments in a process that has been innate in evolution all along. The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1274 World-wide wealth in terms of “Real Capital” (plants in operation, actual known resources etc.) has been doubling every generation since economists started collecting statistics in the 18th Century. Where does this wealth come from’? According to orthodox economists it comes from land, labor, and capital. According to Marxists, it comes from land and labor alone, and the capitalist is a thief who has inserted an artificial bookkeeping system into the process. Both are wrong. Land and labor alone, and land, labor and capital together, can’t produce new wealth if they are all organized by a fallacious idea, such as searching for oil where oil is not. The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas: that is, negative entropy—Information. The origin of these coherent (workable) ideas is the human nervous system. All wealth is created by human beings using their neurons intelligently.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1281 A neurotic young man once went to a Zen Master and asked how he could find peace of mind. “How can you lack anything,” the Roshi asked “when you own the greatest treasure in the universe?” “How do I own the greatest treasure in the universe?” asked the young man, baffled. “The place that question comes from is the greatest treasure in the universe,” said the Master, being more explicit than is common for a Zen teacher. Of course, as a Buddhist, the Master had taken a vow of poverty and did not mean exactly what we mean here. But he knew that the brain produces all that we experience—all our pain and worry, all our bliss states and ecstasies, all our higher evolutionary vistas and trans-time Peak Experiences, etc. It is also “the greatest treasure in the universe” in the most materialistic economic sense: it creates all the ideas which, socially employed, become wealth: roads, scientific laws, calendars, factories, computers, life-saving drugs, medicines, ox-carts, autos, jet planes, spaceships …

Highlight(pink) - Location 1289 If you are not alone in the wilderness, lift your eyes from the page and look about. All that you see, whoever theoretically “owns” it, is the time-binding product of the materialized or manifested ideas of creative men and women. It is all negative entropy. Coherent order. And it is moving toward higher and more coherent order at a faster rate-of-change all the time. Of course, if you are alone in the wilderness, you will also see coherent order, but in this case, the rate-of-change toward higher order is much slower. That is, those stochastic processes which we call genetic drift, evolution etc. are co-selecting higher order at a different time rate than those stochastic processes which we call human thought, invention, culture etc. (This is why it is so hard to reach agreement about whether the natural processes are intelligent or not. As Bateson points out, if we accept any ordering process as intelligent, then the biosphere is indeed intelligent; but if we save the word “intelligence” only for those ordering processes that move at the same speed as our brains, then Nature is merely mechanical, not intelligent. To an extra-terrestrial with a different time-sense than ours, this question would not arise at all.)
Highlight(pink) - Location 1298 Most of what we perceive in the human environment is made up of concretized ideas, in the above sense. Look again at a human community; you are seeing the historical human mind manifesting itself.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1300 All ideas are not equally good, of course. All manifested ideas (human creations in the biosphere) are, therefore, not equally good. This is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a distinction between wealth and illth. This distinction did not become accepted and incorporated into our language because people, at that time, were not ready for it. Wealth, in Ruskin’s sense, consists of all those artifacts (concretized ideas) which enhance human life, or life generally. Illth consists of those artifacts which destroy, demean or degrade life. A factory that pollutes the air or water is illth in this sense; so is a bomb, a sword, a pistol, a tank of nerve-gas. The Westward migration of Capital noted by Brooks Adams was a migration of both wealth and illth.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1306 Obviously, under primitive planetary conditions—finite space and finite resources—the illth was perceived as necessary to protect the wealth. Territorial politics are much the same among domesticated primates as among other mammals; the primates are just smarter at building more omni-lethal weapons faster. This was originally a survival trait, an Evolutionary Relative Success, because primates are born without the physiological, inbuilt weaponry (lethal teeth, claws, horns etc.) of other mammals.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1310 Since the Age of Reason in the 18th Century, the exponential increase in wealth (life-enhancing ideas manifesting) has led to more and more Utopian yearnings. At the same time, the equal and opposite increase in illth has led to more and more dystopian and apocalyptical fears.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1312 One’s expectations about the future—utopia or dystopia—are always based on what one thinks is the dominant force in evolution. This whole book, not just the present chapter, is based on the belief that an overview of evolution shows beyond all doubt that the wealth-producing faculty (the search for higher coherence) is the deciding factor. The illth-producing faculty is an archaic mammalian survival system rapidly becoming obsolete.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1316 ❗️ The highest historical concentration of wealth (real capital, and ideas generating new capital) now co-exists with the highest concentration of evolutionarily advanced nervous systems. In California, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. Arizona, Texas, the Hawaiian Islands, Japan and all around the Pacific, where East meets West, the world of 2000 and 2010 and 2050 is being created by persons who are veterans of a gigantic Neurological Revolution—the psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s, the graduates of the Consciousness Movement of the 1950s-70s, the synthesizers of modern psychology and ancient Oriental mind-sciences. These persons are called the Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson, one of their spokespersons. They are denounced as the Me Generation by Tom Wolfe, a time-traveler from New York, i.e., from the neurological past, from a culture crystallized before 1950.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1322 This “Me Generation” is the temporary high water mark of the time-binding function. Moving steadily Westward—away from Tradition, away from Dogma—they are the products, as Edmund Burke said of the first Americans, of “the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestants.” Every heresy that left Europe produced newer, wilder heresies in the Eastern Seaboard, 1600-1800. Those that were “too far out” had to move further West and produced the 1000 Utopian communities (anarchist, evangelical, free-love, etc.) that were attempted in the mid-West during the 19th Century. Those who were even further “out”—out of the traditional mode—moved further Westward in the last 30-70 years.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1327 All of the fallout of this migration seems weird to the Eastern states, and even weirder to Europeans. It all became much weirder still when it hit the Pacific and began to interact with Oriental neuro-sciences and brain-change arts, like yoga and Taoism and Zen. It swallowed the Oriental lessons whole, without becoming Oriental entirely. It remained Western—the dissidence of dissent etc.—and it has been gaining momentum and direction for two or three decades now. It aims at Higher Coherence and Higher Intelligence.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1332 This is the new Power Elite. As youngsters, these Aquarian Conspirators made the Youth Revolution of the 1960s, which—whatever its excesses and blunders—permanently changed and improved student-administrator-teacher feedback in our universities; liberated our Puritan culture for some healthy hedonism; imported a dozen varieties of Oriental neuro-science (and two dozen varieties of Oriental humbug, alas); launched the ecology movement (the first planetwide perception of the difference between wealth and illth); recreated a true love of the wilderness and of wild creatures: pioneered flex-time and other liberations from economic robot-hood;* launched Women’s Lib, Gay Lib, Child Lib and generously supported Black Lib; ended the Vietnam War; spread holistic medicine throughout our culture; etc.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1340 Virtually all the computer manufacturing firms in Silicon Valley (the peninsula south of San Francisco) have flex-time. The employees choose their own working hours. The same group is now leading the computer revolution; spearheading the drive toward Space Migration; supporting the Hunger Project, which will abolish starvation in our lifetimes; leading the Longevity revolution and the search for immortality; etc. And they are all very conscious of being part of the Intelligence Intensification explosion which is the major topic of this book.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1345 This type of “Western progressivism” (or Utopianism) came out of the mid-East and is the distinct contribution of the Jews, which is why all reactionaries are intuitively anti-Semitic. As William Blake wrote of this tradition:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer’d: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded & remain confirmed that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.’

This vision of the infinite in everything is common to East and West; what is distinctly Western, out of the Jews, is the voice of honest indignation against every institution which would deny or demean the infinity within each human soul. The release of our full human potential—to let the light of Prometheus shine everywhere—is the distinctly Western mystic tradition and does not appear in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or any Eastern religion.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1356 Thomas Jefferson developed his view that “all men are created equal” from the perception of the infinity within each of us, which he learned from the Scottish philosophers, Reid and Hutcheson. (It was also from Hutcheson that Jefferson got his idea of “unalienable rights,” which Congress in the interest of stylistic elegance altered to “inalienable rights.”) The Scottish Enlightenment, like the French and English Enlightenment, was the beginning of the materialization and manifestation of the Judeo-Christian vision of the Heavenly City. It was also this 18th Century Illuminati circle which introduced the concept of progress—the conscious formulation of the symbolism of Prometheus. This vision has been under so much attack in recent decades that to defend it at all will seem archaic and eccentric to many readers. Nonetheless, evolution is real: quantum jumps do occur throughout the biosphere and throughout human intellectual history. We are riding a mounting tidal wave of rising consciousness and expanding intelligence which is accelerating whether we like it or not.

Highlight(pink) - Location 1364 By and large, most people—and especially most ruling elites—have not liked this acceleration factor. The migration of capital (i.e., ideas) Westward has been largely a flight from oppression, an escapist movement—as critics today describe Space as “escapist.” Everywhere, everywhen, the rulers of society have tried to put a brake on the third circuit, to decelerate the acceleration function, to establish limits on what was printable, discussable, even thinkable.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1367 The Greek myth of Prometheus Bound—the Titan who brought Light to humanity and is eternally punished for it—is the synecdoche, the perfect symbol, of how the third circuit has been handled in most human societies.
Highlight(pink) - Location 1369 The peculiar way most societies have imprinted the fourth, socio-sexual circuit—the weird taboos which restrain us all, in every tribe, however technologically “advanced”—is part of the acceleration-deceleration dialectic. The fourth circuit has been largely imprinted to serve as a brake, holding back the free activity of the time-binding semantic circuit. This is the historical function of taboos and “morality.”

Highlight(pink) - Location 1373 EXERCIZES

Compare Greece in the 4th Century BC, Rome in the First Century AD, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, England c. 1600-1900, New York c. 1900-1950, and California today. Note the accumulation of wealth corresponding to the accumulation of heresies, innovations, cults, kooks, pioneers, inventors etc.
Imagine you put a penny on the first square of a chessboard, two cents on the second square, four cents on the third, etc. How much will you have to put on the sixty-fourth square’? This is how time-binding works, in relatively Open Societies.
Read the denunciations of Galileo by the orthodox of his time.
Read the denunciations of Beethoven, of Picasso, of Joyce by those who knew in advance what music, painting and novels should be.
Are the most important scientific ideas of 1997 going to be published in Scientific American in 1997, or in 2017?
Research how many years passed between the publication of Einstein’s paper on Special Relativity and the acceptance of the idea by the majority of physicists.

Notes

Amount: 13

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