- Well, this is sort of, I regard this as the freebie
 lecture that you could sit out if you had a massage
 because it's just sort of, it's something which I discovered
 as one way of putting it or dreamed up as another.
 And it's, if nothing else, it demonstrates
 the slippery nature of ideas.
 And I, depending on the audience I'm talking to,
 I present it different ways.
 Like sometimes I present it as God's truth.
 And then like in Austria, this art thing,
 I presented it as a work of conceptual art.
 So, yes, safer, right?
 So, and it is, it's a concept, it's an idea
 that small computers such as we're looking at
 came along just in time or about five years
 after I first needed them.
 And so I'll just sort of talk about it a little bit
 and feel my way into it.
 It's more fun to play with than to discuss
 the theoretics of, but if you don't,
 if you don't have some appreciation for the theory,
 then it doesn't make any sense at all.
 The basic notion is, or the way in which this idea
 parts company from ordinary science,
 is there is the idea that there is something
 which has been overlooked in the categorizing
 of the forces which shape and maintain the cosmos.
 Something has been overlooked.
 And I call this something novelty
 following Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy
 as put forth in process and reality.
 So novelty and one way of thinking of it,
 if you have a doubt, talking about here
 is pretty much something like the Tao,
 but we are gonna call it novelty.
 And it comes and goes in the world
 according to mysterious and unfathomable rules.
 And it builds structure up,
 dynastic families, corporations, nation states,
 and it pulls structure down according to some whim
 or some unimaginable algorithm
 or previously unimaginable algorithm.
 And part of what got me started thinking along these lines
 was simply trying to make mathematical models of Tao.
 In other words, taking the statements
 at the beginning of the Tao Te Ching
 and taking them as mathematical formalisms
 and then seeing what the constraints were
 on a system that operated along those lines.
 Well, eventually that led me to look at the I Ching,
 which is sort of the text par excellence
 relative to this idea that time has qualities.
 And this idea of the ebb and flow of novelty
 that I was playing with,
 I discovered was a notion that was very old in the East.
 It's not a notion that's even tolerated in Western thinking
 because science in order to do its business
 must have the assumption that experiments
 are time independent.
 That whether you do an experiment on a Tuesday or Saturday,
 this is not a valid parameter of the experiment.
 However, this idea is suggesting something else.
 It's suggesting that time actually does have a quality
 and that this quality so far introduced as novelty
 and its opposite, and I used to call it opposite entropy,
 but at Rupert Sheldrake's urging, I now call it habit.
 So this is a kind of Manichean cosmology
 in which habit and novelty
 are in a constant struggle with each other.
 One gaining dominance for a period of time
 and then the other gaining dominance
 in an endless dynamic relationship.
 The result of which over long periods of time
 is that novelty is conserved.
 I think I used this phrase last night
 in the introductory talk,
 but without explaining the ideas which lay behind it.
 But the idea is that from the psychedelic point of view
 or from this point of view,
 the universe is perceived as a kind of engine
 for producing and distilling and maintaining novelty
 and passing novelty on to yet higher states of novelty.
 Each level of novelty somehow allowing
 the emergence of properties previously forbidden
 at more constrained levels
 so that the whole thing is a bootstrapping process
 to greater and greater novelty and self-reflection.
 Well, so that's the basic notion.
 Then the idea is following the statement of the Tao Te Ching
 that the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way
 and following the ideas implicit in the I Ching
 that time is a succession of irreducible elements,
 that time in some way is made of irreducible elements
 in the same way that matter has been discovered
 by Western science to be made of irreducible elements.
 So somehow time is not simply a plenum,
 a featureless homogeneous surface
 upon which the experiments of Newtonian causality
 can be carried out.
 But actually when we look at it at the level,
 the fine-grained level of experience
 within the context of a love affair
 or a dynastic family's rise and fall or something like that,
 we see then that it's permeated with qualities.
 And in the West, these qualities were identified
 by the Greeks and called fate and said,
 to be is to be fate-laden.
 Somehow the fates impinge on our lives
 and lead us to our destinies.
 Science got rid of all this
 and then we just had flying atoms
 whizzing around in nothingness
 leading to some inevitable casuistry
 dictated by mathematics.
 Well, okay, I don't wanna say too much more
 about the theoretics of it,
 but inevitably the question comes up
 once we get into the wave,
 where did you say you got this wave again?
 And the answer is it arose from a fairly stone circumstances
 but a fairly dry problem,
 meaning I was the publisher of the order
 of the King Wen sequence.
 Now, background, the King Wen sequence
 is a certain arrangement of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.
 And this particular arrangement is very old,
 found on shoulder bones, 3,500 years old and so forth.
 So it was simply asking a formal question,
 what are the rules which produce the King Wen sequence?
 It's always called a sequence.
 It's always revered as one of the oldest
 of human abstractions, but what in fact is the sequence?
 Well, in looking at that,
 and I won't try to lead you through it tonight
 unless in a question and answer period,
 some maniac insists,
 but what it boils down to is that
 in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching,
 there is embedded a fractal algorithm,
 a fractal algorithm very much like the fractal algorithms
 that have been discovered in just the past seven
 or eight years by modern mathematics
 using high-speed computers.
 And but the interesting thing about this fractal algorithm
 inside the I Ching is that it actually appears
 to make good on the claim which the I Ching
 has always been so concerned to make,
 namely that it was a piece of prophetistic machinery
 for mapping future time.
 In other words, that it was a predictive engine
 for knowing the future.
 So what I brought out of it or what I was led to find
 within it by the promptings of the mushroom genies
 was a certain pattern,
 a certain pattern that I was able to mathematically nail
 to the wall and define,
 and then all the computer does here
 is time scale this pattern,
 and then I will become the devil's advocate for this thing.
 And I will claim to you that this undulating wave
 on the screen actually describes the career of novelty
 in time, in all time, in all places
 throughout the history of the universe.
 And we will look at big pieces of time,
 little pieces of time,
 and you will quickly get the idea
 that whether this is quote unquote true or not,
 this is some kind of weird heuristic device
 that has about it the ozone stench of other worlds,
 the seamless completeness to it that marks it
 not as a discovery or an invention,
 but as an artifact of some other order.
 Well, so now let's look at the screen
 and if I can come up with a pointer,
 and even if I can't,
 and I'll show you how this game is played
 if the software will cooperate.
 The software is very good.
 It was written by Peter Meyer.
 The idea existed before the software,
 but before the software,
 these screens that you're going to see,
 it took an entire day to make one of them,
 and it just left you red-eyed and tremoring,
 and there was the possibility
 for hundreds of arithmetic errors,
 and any one of which would throw off the signature.
 So the invention of small computers in 1977
 really opened this up for us.
 Before we ran telephone directory-sized lists of numbers,
 which we could then look up and go off,
 and then produce graphs somewhat like this.
 Okay, now I know it's hard to see,
 but the main thing you have to see
 is the line and what it's doing,
 and then I'll try and explain everything else
 and make sense of it.
 These are novelty units along this axis,
 and we've never named them,
 but you can think of them as eschatons
 or whatever, whitehead-ons.
 But this is the important axis,
 and this is the time axis.
 Now what's being portrayed on the screen right now
 is six billion years.
 Six billion years.
 In other words, a time span longer
 than most people require for the life of this planet.
 The Earth is thought to have condensed
 around five and a half billion years ago.
 And that very fact is portrayed here,
 because this, now here's a convention
 that you have to internalize,
 or nothing from this point on will make sense.
 It's very simple, but it's somewhat counterintuitive.
 It's that when the line moves down,
 novelty is increasing.
 When the line moves down, novelty is increasing.
 When the line moves up, habit or entropy
 or recidivistic tendencies are increasing.
 Okay, well, so then looking at the life of the universe
 on a scale of six billion years,
 you see why I say it's an engine
 for the conservation of novelty,
 because novelty, though there have been
 some severe setbacks like here,
 generally novelty has been conserved.
 And right now, we're down in here
 in this stochastic noise and the damped oscillation
 at the very end of the cycle,
 so close to the zero value,
 which is the maximum value for novelty,
 that for all practical purposes at this scale,
 we can be said to be next to the zero value.
 And this is, I maintain, what accounts
 for the chaotic and highly novel nature
 of modern history or the 20th century.
 It's that we are so near the zero value,
 the maximum value for novelty,
 that it's actually like there's an anticipatory image,
 see virtual space, that it is.
 Well now, let's see, God willing,
 we can make this thing zoom in.
 Zoom, yes.
 So now we have 750 million years on the screen,
 and what was previously stochastic noise
 lost near the zero point is beginning to emerge instead
 as a repetitious landscape of deep lunges toward novelty.
 So now, how to interpret this.
 This is about 500 million years ago.
 So that big down sweep was the emergence
 of very simple life forms,
 but the major career of biology
 has gone on along this sawtoothed strand.
 This is in good accordance with the fossil record.
 This is where the great speciations and extinctions
 took place after the establishment of the Cordata
 about 500 million years ago.
 Okay, now I'll restart the zoom.
 Do you begin to get the idea of how,
 what you as the viewer or the jury or whatever
 should be asking yourself is,
 does the wave fit my personal interpretation
 and understanding of novelty as we move through time?
 Because we are obviously at this scale,
 it's pretty much up for grabs.
 I mean, 'cause we're talking about such generalized events
 as the emergence of life and so forth,
 but we're going to get down on it.
 We're going to enter at some point
 the cognizable domains of known history.
 I mean, let's say since the fall of the Roman Empire
 or since the fall of Richard Nixon,
 you know, depending on how long your memory is.
 Okay, let me get this thing going again here.
 Here is the last hundred million years.
 Now, I stopped the screen here
 because there is an event in the last hundred million years
 which this thing would have to successfully predict
 in order to proceed further as a successful theory.
 It's that 65 million years ago,
 either there was an enormous volcanic eruption
 on the surface of the earth
 like nothing anybody has ever seen or imagined,
 or there was a planetesimal impact
 on the North Atlantic Ridge,
 which seems to be the more probable candidate
 for what happened.
 And this laid down the so-called iridium barrier
 and it occurred right here 65 million years ago.
 It's a perfect hit.
 In other words, the two cannot be dated precisely enough
 that we can't say that one is not precisely the other.
 So this is our first calibration here
 at 65 million years ago.
 And actually there was one earlier,
 I think 170 million years ago,
 which it also picks up, but we've shot beyond that.
 So now, and that was the event
 which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
 Nothing larger than a chicken walked away
 from this event on the entire planet right here.
 And it gave the permission for the emergence of the mammals
 and the whole phyla of the earth
 took a sudden different turn,
 which was explored along here
 until about 45 million years ago.
 And then there was some kind of carrying capacity problem
 or who knows what it is.
 This is really approaching
 the height of the speciation of the age of mammals
 occurred about 35 million years ago
 at the bottom of this trough.
 Okay, so what we're looking at here is 100 million years.
 And this is the period in which we emerged as a species
 out of arboreal primates,
 out of bipedal proto-hominids on the grasslands of Africa.
 We come out of this, but most of the action for us
 as a thinking species is on this period
 here toward the very end,
 this perfect kind of volcanic looking cone,
 which I call history's fractal mountain,
 which is sort of the signature of the whole wave
 as you'll see as we get into it.
 Okay, now let's again start the zoom,
 five million years.
 And let's look at this,
 because now what it's saying is that suddenly
 five million and slightly further back,
 there's large punctuation in the novelty on the planet.
 And we know a lot about this period.
 And strangely enough, what we know about this period
 confirms this model very closely
 because what these things are known to be are glaciations,
 which scale.
 And these low points here correspond very closely
 with the interglacial periods.
 You see what's happening is populations of human beings
 and animals are being locked up when the ice moves south.
 Then during the interglacials,
 these islanded populations are mixing
 and you're getting movement,
 progressive speciation in the fossil record
 along at the bottom of these gradients.
 And it's a technical matter to match the glaciations
 in different parts of the world with this,
 but the agreement is pretty close.
 Or a case can be made.
 45,000 years, and let's look at this.
 Okay, this is a period of time
 where we actually begin to get artifacts.
 Human artifacts of an interesting sort.
 And it's very hard to date the emergence of language,
 but it's interesting that one school holds
 that it occurred about 33,000 years ago
 and that we get this very steep movement
 into novelty here, right there.
 This is probably the heyday of the Neanderthals
 because this is where the population numbers
 of the Neanderthals seem to be the highest
 and found in the largest areas.
 But this is a glacial period, the last glacial period.
 And when the interglacial arrived about 19,000 years ago,
 you get what's called the beginning of the Magdalenian era.
 And this is a tremendous explosion of creativity,
 painting, ochre burials, ritual, musical instruments.
 All of these things are up here on this.
 And this is, I maintain, where this partnership paradise,
 this mushroom, pastoral, feminized,
 ecologically dynamic and balanced society existed.
 Along this gradient here.
 Then it broke up around 10,000 years ago.
 Drying and the factors that we discussed shattered it
 and there was a carrying capacity problem
 or something like that.
 Here, let's see this in a little more detail.
 But we're now closing distance
 with the cognizable domains of known history.
 So if the theory is going to fail,
 it should fail as the data accumulates
 and the dates become more precise.
 We're looking at 45,000 years, 22,000 years,
 11,000 years, let's look at this.
 Okay, now, what it's saying is
 that after this carrying capacity problem around 10,000 BC,
 it was somehow overcome
 and there was a very, very steep descent into novelty
 which reached its culmination around 6,300 BC.
 Well, this corresponds very well
 with the dates for Çatalhöyük in Turkey,
 which is this Anatolian town 9,000 years old
 that achieved a level of civilization
 that was not similar seen at any other site
 until a thousand or more years later.
 In other words, until there were civilizations
 establishing themselves along this gradient.
 This was the last bastion
 of the goddess partnership mushroom symbiosis
 and what destroyed these people.
 We know Çatalhöyük 5 was destroyed in 6,500 BC
 by wheel chariot people from the north.
 In other words, this spells the Indo-European bad guys
 who came from north of the Caspian Sea.
 And then you see this tremendous reestablishment
 of traditional pattern.
 Well, then along this gradient here,
 when I went to school,
 what we were taught was history begins at Sumer.
 This was what we were always told
 that it went Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt.
 And in fact, those great patriarchal river-based
 civilizations established themselves on a gradient
 down here with Egypt right here at the bottom,
 establishing a new high-water mark for novelty,
 a high-water mark that would not be surpassed
 until the Assyrians, these are all kick-ass
 chariot warfare, warrior caste, that rigamarole,
 all that's going along here.
 Then there's the great turning point.
 I mean, here again, you're seeing the signature
 of the algorithm, and I call it history's fractal mountain.
 Notice the moment is portrayed by that much of the screen.
 And now we can go into this and explore parts of it.
 Let's look at it a little closer.
 11,000 years on the screen.
 There's history's fractal mountain, 5,000 years.
 Let's look at this for a minute.
 Okay, this is 5,000 years.
 We're still targeted on today.
 And what it's saying is that there was clearly
 a great moment, a single great moment of shift
 at some point in the past when a series
 of conservative tendencies, habitual patterns of activity
 were in a sense overthrown once and for all.
 And even though there was plenty of shit
 to be slogged through from here to here,
 the plot was inevitable.
 Okay, well, so what is that point?
 Well, it's about 980 BC.
 So what was going on then?
 This is the shift to, it's essentially that moment
 when Mycenaean piracy overwhelmed the goddess religion
 of Minoan Crete and the Greeks stopped being fishermen
 and pulled their boats up on the shore
 and started to talk philosophy.
 And that set off a cascade of cultural effects
 that then reverberate to this day.
 It comes down along this gradient.
 Then down here you get the fall of Rome.
 Then since the fall of Rome, you get this series
 of wildly oscillating cultural effects
 until as recently as the European Enlightenment in 1740
 when the wave then drops to yet lower levels
 and begins to explore forms of novelty
 related to the human-machine integration
 and electromagnetic technology and so forth and so on.
 We'll look at this, but I just wanted
 to call your attention to this.
 And for another reason, there's a concept here
 which I haven't talked about yet,
 but which is good to introduce now.
 And that is the concept of resonance.
 Because this algorithm is fractal,
 because it is self-nested on many levels,
 you encounter the same topological manifold
 over and over again.
 Well, since we're looking at history,
 it's natural to make the analogical assumption
 that these repetitious topologies
 are somehow related to each other
 so that there's a suggested in this theory
 a series of natural nested cycles
 where, for instance, every 67 years,
 all the themes of the previous 4,306 years
 are somehow condensed and acted out.
 And it's the interface and interference patterns
 set up by these times, these times in the past
 and in the future, sliding against each other
 that create phenomena like fads and fashions
 and outbreaks of hysteria and weird taste things
 and ripples in the collective mind.
 Okay, so this is the signature
 of history's fractal mountain.
 Greco-Roman civilization and its spectrum of effects
 are this long cascade down here.
 Now let's look at it a little more.
 1,430 years.
 And this I wanted you to see
 because this is the period of history
 that we all know the most about.
 And strangely enough, the wave is very willing
 to make predictions in this region of history.
 This is one of those levels of magnification
 where the ebb and flow of novelty
 is predicted as very radical and highly punctuated.
 So, he looks for his crib sheet here.
 So when you go through this
 and you're trying to understand what's going on,
 you're supposed to have novelty
 occurring at the bottoms of these troughs.
 Well, this one in the 930s, in the 10th century,
 is the culmination of Islam,
 the creation of the caliphates of Baghdad.
 This was the one where Europe gets left out.
 All this mathematics and poetry and alchemy
 is being created down here.
 Then there's a series of bounce-offs, recidivist tendencies,
 until you get over to this one,
 which is about 1119.
 And what this is all about is it's the height
 of the Gothic revival and of the Crusades.
 The people who are active in the bottom of that thing
 are people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard,
 Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas of Beckett,
 Pope Adrian IV, all those folks famous
 from Masterpiece Theater.
 They were all happening right down there.
 So, then the next deep descent into novelty
 is this one here in 1355, 1354, '56.
 Well, this was the greatest demographic catastrophe
 that Europe ever experienced.
 It was the Black Death.
 A third of the population of Europe died there.
 Okay, well, then this one,
 this very steep plunge into novelty,
 the top up here is 1440.
 Gutenberg is inventing printing in Mainz near Frankfurt,
 and by the time you get to the bottom down here,
 it's 1492.
 The entire Italian Renaissance
 lies on the gradient of that plunge.
 So, you see, what the argument is,
 and it seems to emerge with more clarity
 as we have more data,
 is that history is actually some kind of process
 on a vast scale that is under the control
 of this particular mathematics of the species.
 What you get down here is the discovery of the new world,
 the lost half of the planet,
 and that sets off a round of discovery and exploration
 that keeps things novel for a while,
 but then slavery gets reestablished
 and a whole bunch of bad social habits take root,
 and it pushes it clear back up to here,
 but then this is the beginning of the European Enlightenment
 and it descends very rapidly
 with then the American Revolution,
 the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Restoration
 all down in the bottom of this trough.
 Well, then let's go forward just a little bit more,
 the 20th century is coming up.
 Now, there it is.
 Now, remember how I called it history's fractal mountain
 and we looked at it on a scale of 4,000 years?
 Well, it was this signature, something very like it,
 with just slight scaling differences.
 Within the 20th century, from 1945 to 2012,
 we're recapitulating in some weird way
 all the themes of the previous 4,306-year cycle.
 So, for instance, the way this game is played,
 and looking at the 20th century,
 we're seeing the resonances
 of the Egyptian cultural manifestation,
 and we see that they reached their culmination in 1933 to '36.
 So, what this is saying is that the quality of this trough
 is a millenarian cult based on the deification
 of a leader figure, coupled with a hysterical obsession
 with tasteless architecture.
 (audience laughs)
 And we see this set of themes played out
 both in pharaonic (audio cuts out)
 One is the resonance of the other.
 You see, of course, of course,
 that's clearly what was going on.
 Well, then remember I said that the great turning point
 in human history was when the Mycenaean pirates
 squashed the Minoan goddess-loving folks
 and set off the cultural cascade
 of Greco-Roman civilization.
 Well, in this scheme of things,
 that moment happens right up here in early 1967.
 And, of course, if you lived through that moment,
 you'd know that there was a kind of pagan revival
 right there, which then got smashed,
 and then we rode our way down
 into this long set of cascades,
 into then the wild oscillation of the present.
 And one of the things that I wanted to talk about
 a little bit tonight is how we've actually entered
 into a new kind of time.
 It began about three or four years ago,
 three, two years ago, depending.
 What it has to do with is for a long time
 we were on a descending gradient into ever greater novelty.
 As we approached this asymptotically increasing novelty,
 now we are so close to it that we have begun
 to oscillate around a mean, and this explains, you know,
 the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union,
 a number of things, and we are going to live
 in this kind of time, onto the culmination
 of the time wave itself, which occurs in 2012.
 The time wave is unable to make predictions past 2012 AD.
 One of the odd things about this revelation
 is its self-limiting property,
 because as a fractal description of a data field,
 it only works if you assume that the whole thing
 wraps itself around itself and disappears up its own gullet
 on December 22nd, 2012 AD, only 22 years in the future.
 Now, there we could talk about how could this be
 and what does it mean.
 What I think it means is that the presence
 of self-reflecting organisms, people, on this planet
 indicates the nearby presence or the potential
 eminent emergence of some higher state of organization.
 We are not simply the startled witnesses
 to this emergence of a new level of organization.
 Our presence here is the first indication
 that it's going to happen.
 It's almost like you can think of a pond.
 When the surface of the pond begins to churn,
 the smart money knows that something is moving
 toward the surface and is going to burst through.
 Well, history, human history, all this dream exchange
 and information trading and lying and so forth that goes on
 is the churning of the surface of the pond.
 And the smart money should know
 that there's a moment moving beneath the surface,
 that all this is presaging.
 And so I think this is that kind of thing,
 that as we approach the hyperdimensional meltdown point
 or the chronosynclastic infundibulum,
 precursive images of it will be thrown off.
 I think everybody's visions now tend to take
 the form of totality symbols.
 And this is because it's constellating itself
 into a totality.
 We are so close now to the transdimensional object
 that it invades our dreams, our advertising,
 our waking fantasy, our art, our mathematics.
 Everything is contorted by the attraction
 of this transcendental object.
 Blake talked about this kind of thing.
 Anyway, now, let's go in a little closer there
 because, well, to humor me, basically.
 44 years, here's 1967.
 It's pointing at today, remember.
 22 years.
 11 years.
 Five years.
 Now, let's stop it and look at it for a minute
 so we can see how we're doing.
 - This is the last five years.
 - Well, it's not so much the last five years.
 It's pointing at today.
 That's today.
 And what we've got is two years, nine months, and 16 days.
 What's it here, here, and then here,
 which we haven't gotten to yet.
 But we've been through all of this.
 So let's see how we're doing.
 Okay, to the day, to the day,
 this high novelty maxima corresponds to
 the business in Tiananmen Square,
 not the massacre, which is slightly off the trough
 and up on this side.
 But the day they put a million people
 into the square peaceably is right at the bottom
 of that thing.
 Well, okay, so then we know that that ended unhappily.
 There was a reassertion of traditional patterns,
 i.e. shooting students.
 What could be more traditional than that?
 (audience laughs)
 So there was a lot of that.
 And then that sort of peaked out,
 and then there was another try at a novel maxima.
 And at the bottom of this one,
 the Berlin Wall is torn down,
 right at the bottom of this one.
 So there's two hits in a row.
 Now, after the Berlin Wall was torn down,
 there were a series of revolutions,
 Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria,
 and then finally Romania going over the top,
 and that they became progressively uglier,
 progressively more in the traditional mold,
 meaning costing more life.
 And that last, that week between Christmas and New Year's
 of last year when the footage was coming in
 from the radio station in Romania,
 it was fairly grim.
 Well, that was as we went over the peak
 of this anti-novel or habitual thing.
 Then we started a long, slow meander downward,
 which was fairly gradual,
 and a lot of stuff seemed fairly irrelevant to us.
 It was all about the new German order and the SNL scandal.
 But then we got to the bottom of this.
 It's not quite as deep as this,
 but you wait, I'll move this arrow a little.
 Yes, there's the 27th of July.
 At that point, they're massed on the border and so forth,
 and then the invasion takes place just a few days later.
 Well, what can we say about the prognosis for the future
 based on what we're looking at?


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 2.13 sec
Transcribe: 2401.26 sec
Total Time: 2404.04 sec