WEBVTT 00:16.720 --> 00:21.720 Well, novelty theory is something I've been working on since the early 70s, 00:21.820 --> 00:26.860 inspired by psychedelic plant experiences in the Amazon, 00:27.700 --> 00:32.880 to attempt to look at time and really deconstruct it 00:32.880 --> 00:35.420 and attempt to understand what it is. 00:35.420 --> 00:38.880 And this has been a wild intellectual ride, 00:39.280 --> 00:43.400 leading to some pretty easily stated conclusions. 00:43.400 --> 00:52.780 One is that novelty, which is my term for complexity or advanced organization, 00:53.420 --> 00:56.940 novelty increases as we approach the present moment. 00:57.320 --> 01:02.180 The universe you and I are living in is a far more novel and complicated place 01:02.180 --> 01:04.260 than the early universe was. 01:05.100 --> 01:06.280 Well, some people would say, 01:06.360 --> 01:11.120 well, that's just a consequence of the unfolding of developmental processes. 01:11.120 --> 01:16.200 But this asks the question, what are developmental processes? 01:16.500 --> 01:20.740 Why should the universe have a preference for order over disorder? 01:21.200 --> 01:24.600 Especially when we have something called the second law of thermodynamics, 01:24.840 --> 01:27.080 which tells us exactly the opposite. 01:27.840 --> 01:32.500 Physicists believe the universe is running down, ultimately, into a state of disorder. 01:32.500 --> 01:42.500 But what I see is everywhere the emergence of more and more complex forms, languages, organisms, technologies, 01:42.500 --> 01:48.140 always building on the previously achieved levels of complexity. 01:48.140 --> 01:50.760 So that was one of my insights. 01:50.760 --> 01:54.860 Coming out of that insight was the further understanding 01:54.860 --> 02:01.840 that this process of complexification through time is not proceeding at a steady rate. 02:01.840 --> 02:06.220 It actually follows a kind of asymptotic curve. 02:06.220 --> 02:09.800 In other words, it's happening faster and faster. 02:10.660 --> 02:15.480 And this was a revelation to me because it allowed me philosophically 02:15.480 --> 02:18.180 to contextualize the human world 02:18.180 --> 02:27.340 and to understand that human technologies, languages, migrations, art movements, ideologies 02:27.340 --> 02:30.560 are not something different from nature. 02:30.560 --> 02:38.040 They're the same download of process that we see in the movement of continents, 02:38.040 --> 02:40.920 the evolution of new species of animals, 02:40.920 --> 02:49.920 except that these human, novel, emergent situations are happening much more quickly. 02:49.920 --> 02:58.700 So I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty-producing engine, 02:58.700 --> 03:07.700 a kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms, physical, chemical, social, whatever, 03:07.700 --> 03:14.700 and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for further complexity. 03:14.700 --> 03:18.700 Well, this explains our present circumstance. 03:18.700 --> 03:26.700 It explains the rush toward all forms of new technology and social organization in the new millennium. 03:26.700 --> 03:30.700 But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand 03:30.700 --> 03:35.700 that if the universe is complexifying faster and faster, 03:35.700 --> 03:43.700 an epoch, a time, will come when this rate of complexification is occurring so rapidly 03:43.700 --> 03:52.700 that it will become itself the overwhelming phenomena in the world of three-dimensional space and time. 03:52.700 --> 03:59.700 And I call this the omega point, or the transcendental object at the end of history. 03:59.700 --> 04:06.700 And I believe it is not that far off, that with the emergence of global internet, 04:06.700 --> 04:12.700 a human population of several billions, an electronic newosphere, 04:12.700 --> 04:18.700 that we are now within the shadow of this transcendental object at the end of time. 04:18.700 --> 04:24.700 Our religions sense it. That's what gives them their apocalyptic intuitions. 04:24.700 --> 04:33.700 And I think the ordinary man and woman in the street sense a kind of built-in acceleration to time itself. 04:33.700 --> 04:43.700 Well, rather than dismissing that or treating it as a psychological perception or something unique to our society, 04:43.700 --> 04:47.700 I took it as a basic perception about physics, 04:47.700 --> 04:54.700 and have built elaborate mathematically defined theories around this idea, 04:54.700 --> 05:02.700 and then have found, to my astonishment, incredible congruences with other work. 05:02.700 --> 05:13.700 I'm thinking of the Mayan calendar and its curious countdown-like quality toward an extremely unique event 05:13.700 --> 05:21.700 that the Maya felt would occur in the same timeframe that my own equations predicted, 05:21.700 --> 05:25.700 even though at the time I was unaware of the Maya. 05:25.700 --> 05:34.700 So what we have here is a new model of time based on a very real intuition that I think most people share, 05:34.700 --> 05:41.700 which is that time is speeding up, that human beings are part of that process, 05:41.700 --> 05:50.700 and that the culmination of that process is now within the van of historical time. 05:50.700 --> 06:01.700 In other words, I believe it will happen in 2012, in December, coincident with the same events that the Maya placed at the end of their calendar. 06:01.700 --> 06:06.700 Even if I'm wrong, even if it's a hundred years or five hundred years later, 06:06.700 --> 06:15.700 these are still spans of time that, when compared to the life of the planet, are fractions of a percentage. 06:15.700 --> 06:25.700 So whether you believe, as I do, that we can know the precise moment of this transformation of the world of time, 06:25.700 --> 06:32.700 or whether you believe it is simply coming soon and fast, really doesn't make that much difference. 06:32.700 --> 06:39.700 We are all gathered here at the end game of developmental processes on this planet. 06:39.700 --> 06:46.700 We are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. 06:46.700 --> 06:59.700 Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us awakening to what the denouement would be. 06:59.700 --> 07:11.700 Now, we stand close enough to it that I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative. 07:11.700 --> 07:20.040 I am very perplexed when you say that time is speeding up. 07:20.040 --> 07:29.040 As far as I can tell, such things as crystal oscillators, things which keep time, 07:29.040 --> 07:37.040 clocks, the relationship of the earth turning to the calendar, the full moon, 07:37.040 --> 07:42.040 all of the things which are symptoms of our passage through time, 07:42.040 --> 07:47.040 don't seem to be throwing themselves out of kilter. 07:47.040 --> 07:55.040 So, what do you really mean about time speeding up? 07:55.040 --> 07:58.040 Well, let me answer in the form of a question. 07:58.040 --> 08:00.040 Which lasts longer? 08:00.040 --> 08:03.040 A million years in which nothing happens? 08:03.040 --> 08:08.040 Or ten seconds with 50,000 events crammed into it? 08:08.040 --> 08:17.040 In other words, really time is only experienced by the events which occur within it. 08:17.040 --> 08:30.040 And I maintain that the early universe had very little going on, and consequently time moved very, very slowly. 08:30.040 --> 08:45.040 The character of time as we approach the present is that there are more and more physical domains and energetic domains in which change can occur. 08:45.040 --> 08:53.040 For example, the early universe was a pure plasma, a pure swarm of unassociated electrons. 08:53.040 --> 09:05.040 You didn't even have atomic systems, let alone chemistry, molecular chemistry, life, complex speciated life, 09:05.040 --> 09:09.040 and dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems. 09:09.040 --> 09:16.040 Each one of those more complex phenomena crystallized out or emerged, if you will, 09:16.040 --> 09:22.040 from the previous systems that had come into existence. 09:22.040 --> 09:29.040 So, when I say time is speeding up, what I mean really is that more and more is happening. 09:29.040 --> 09:31.040 More and more is happening. 09:31.040 --> 09:38.040 And if you ask the question, well, what would be the ultimate state of connectivity or of happening? 09:38.040 --> 09:42.040 It's when all points are connected to all other points. 09:42.040 --> 09:49.040 Somehow this concept of connectivity is intimately linked to the concept of complexity. 09:49.040 --> 09:54.040 And so really what I'm saying is that the universe is getting its act together. 09:54.040 --> 09:56.040 It's connecting the dots. 09:56.040 --> 10:02.040 It's bringing everything into co-relationship with everything else. 10:02.040 --> 10:07.040 And somehow it does this through the production of consciousness. 10:07.040 --> 10:08.040 Consciousness. 10:08.040 --> 10:17.040 Consciousness is this integrative function in biology which takes data, which may appear profoundly 10:17.040 --> 10:23.040 unrelated, and in fact brings it into some kind of a congruent relationship. 10:23.040 --> 10:27.040 We say an organism coordinates a point of view. 10:27.040 --> 10:34.040 Well, in a way, what's happening over time is that the universe is coordinating a point of view. 10:34.040 --> 10:47.040 And as it does this, it becomes somehow more aware, more self-conscious, more being-like and less thing-like. 10:47.040 --> 10:51.040 And as I said, this process is not proceeding at a steady pace. 10:51.040 --> 10:54.040 It's proceeding faster and faster. 10:54.040 --> 11:04.040 More connectivity occurs now in a calendar year than occurred in a million years, a billion years ago. 11:04.040 --> 11:16.040 So somehow, as we approach the present, we find ourselves in an ever-denser realm of activity, interrelationship, connectivity. 11:16.040 --> 11:25.040 And the result of this is more of the same, producing a shrinking globe, ever more immersive technologies, 11:25.040 --> 11:33.040 a dissolution of political, social, gender, and class boundaries of all sorts. 11:33.040 --> 11:37.040 So that's what I mean when I say the universe is speeding up. 11:37.040 --> 11:46.040 You know, before the advent of man, of human beings, the fastest changes on this planet of any consequence 11:46.040 --> 11:51.040 were genetic changes, changes in the genomes of plants and animals. 11:51.040 --> 12:02.040 Well, biologists know that for a fruit fly to add a spur to its leg, for a bird to change its plumage, 12:02.040 --> 12:07.040 you need hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years of evolutionary time. 12:07.040 --> 12:17.040 With the advent of human beings, using spoken language, a new kind of possibility was born. 12:17.040 --> 12:20.040 It's called epigenetic change. 12:20.040 --> 12:31.040 In other words, change which is not about genes, but which is about languages, customs, behaviors of human beings. 12:31.040 --> 12:44.040 Epigenetic change reaches its dramatic culmination in speech, writing, and communication of all sorts. 12:44.040 --> 12:55.040 And so the carriers of epigenetic change, the human beings, are automatically then the carriers of accelerated novelty. 12:55.040 --> 13:06.040 And so when you look at, let's say, evolution on a coral reef, and you compare it, let's say, to the evolution of political ideas in modern Europe, 13:06.040 --> 13:13.040 obviously, modern Europe's rate of change in this domain is thousands of times faster. 13:13.040 --> 13:23.040 So by moving from the genetic to the epigenetic realm, we have vastly accelerated all kinds of processes. 13:23.040 --> 13:34.040 Now we appear to be about to move from the strictly human domain to the human-machine symbiosis domain. 13:34.040 --> 13:46.040 And, of course, machines process information, make connections, and do their work at a rate thousands of times faster than any human being can work. 13:46.040 --> 13:56.040 So we see, again, a progressive acceleration of the process of creating and maintaining varieties of connectivity. 13:56.040 --> 14:00.040 And that's what I mean by time is speeding up. 14:00.040 --> 14:06.040 Your description of the process by which you develop the time-wave theory. 14:06.040 --> 14:14.040 I understand, I read True Hallucination, so I understand it took you some years to kind of work it all out. 14:14.040 --> 14:21.040 Yes, in the Amazon, all was chaos and mythic revelation. 14:21.040 --> 14:30.040 But I knew that you couldn't bring that back as a scientific theory, and my bias has always been toward science. 14:30.040 --> 14:38.040 And out of these many intuitions and revelations, I discerned a thread which was about time. 14:38.040 --> 14:45.040 It began with a conversation with this Logos entity where it said to me, 14:45.040 --> 14:51.040 did you know every day is composed of four other days? 14:51.040 --> 14:55.040 And I said, no, I not only didn't know that, it's never occurred to me. 14:55.040 --> 14:57.040 What a bizarre idea! 14:57.040 --> 15:06.040 Well, so this idea then of a time being a resonance created by other times, 15:06.040 --> 15:11.040 not immediately before or after it, as in scientific causality, 15:11.040 --> 15:14.040 but somehow a day centuries ago, centuries in the future, 15:14.040 --> 15:21.040 come together to create an interference pattern that creates the unique moment. 15:21.040 --> 15:25.040 So that was one of the basic assumptions. 15:25.040 --> 15:32.040 And then the structure on which this all was hung was the I Ching, 15:32.040 --> 15:37.040 which may seem exotic to American and European audiences, 15:37.040 --> 15:45.040 but which is of course as familiar to anyone in Chinese society as the Declaration of Independence is to us. 15:45.040 --> 15:47.040 And what is the I Ching? 15:47.040 --> 15:54.040 Well, it's a very ancient method of divining and predicting the future, 15:54.040 --> 16:03.040 based on the idea that every moment can be symbolized by a unique ideogram, 16:03.040 --> 16:07.040 which is somehow its essence. 16:07.040 --> 16:13.040 Much in the way that science believes you can explain all nature with 108 elements, 16:13.040 --> 16:19.040 the ancient Chinese took the position that time itself was made of elements. 16:19.040 --> 16:28.040 My style of thinking is scientific enough that if I were to say to somebody, 16:28.040 --> 16:36.040 I propose a revolution in physics based on what I know about an ancient Chinese divinatory system, 16:36.040 --> 16:39.040 that would seem foolish to me. 16:39.040 --> 16:42.040 It seems occult. It seems unscientific. 16:42.040 --> 16:52.040 Why should an ancient Chinese book of divination hold any insight whatsoever for modern physics? 16:52.040 --> 16:57.040 But the uncanny thing about the I Ching is that it seems to work. 16:57.040 --> 17:01.040 Even in the hands of its critics, it seems to work. 17:01.040 --> 17:08.040 So let me try out a metaphor on you, which I think makes much more clear what's going on here. 17:08.040 --> 17:13.040 Visualize for a moment sand dunes, 17:13.040 --> 17:21.040 and notice when you look at these sand dunes in your mind that they look like wind. 17:21.040 --> 17:25.040 Sand dunes look like wind in some sense. 17:25.040 --> 17:28.040 Well, then analyze the situation. 17:28.040 --> 17:30.040 What is wind? 17:30.040 --> 17:40.040 Wind. Wind is a pressure variant phenomena that fluctuates over time. 17:40.040 --> 17:50.040 In a way, the sand grains moved about by the wind are like a lower dimensional slice of the wind itself. 17:50.040 --> 17:59.040 And from photographic analysis of dunes, you can calculate the speed and duration of the wind that made them. 17:59.040 --> 18:09.040 So the dune is a lower dimensional slice of time, of the wind ebbing and flowing that made it. 18:09.040 --> 18:12.040 Well, now let's change the metaphor a little bit. 18:12.040 --> 18:17.040 Instead of grains of sand, let's think of genes. 18:17.040 --> 18:23.040 Instead of a wind storm, let's think of a billion years of evolution. 18:23.040 --> 18:34.040 It moves the genes around in a pattern which is a lower dimensional slice of the force which created the situation. 18:34.040 --> 18:43.040 In other words, on every living organism, there is the imprint of the higher dimensional force which made it. 18:43.040 --> 18:45.040 Now, somebody could say, well, that's God. 18:45.040 --> 18:49.040 Well, but in a scientific context, we don't speak like that. 18:49.040 --> 18:58.040 But whatever it is that made blind matter into whales, squirrels and human beings, 18:58.040 --> 19:05.040 it left its calling card inside each human being, each squirrel, each whale. 19:05.040 --> 19:07.040 That's the DNA. 19:07.040 --> 19:14.040 Well, the DNA codons are based on a system of 64, exactly like the I Ching. 19:14.040 --> 19:21.040 So my belief is that someone, some group of people thousands of years ago, 19:21.040 --> 19:32.040 looked into human organism, looked by meditative techniques into the center of their own beings. 19:32.040 --> 19:36.040 And they were not mystics, nor were they empiricists. 19:36.040 --> 19:38.040 They were simply curious. 19:38.040 --> 19:45.040 But at the center of the meditative experience, they saw an ebb and flow, 19:45.040 --> 19:49.040 an energy field that was in a constant state of flux. 19:49.040 --> 19:56.040 And they asked themselves, how many elements are necessary to describe this energy field? 19:56.040 --> 20:01.040 And the answer was, more than 10, less than a thousand. 20:01.040 --> 20:04.040 More than 20, less than 500. 20:04.040 --> 20:15.040 And when they finally got it worked out, lo and behold, 64 situations are all the possible potential situations there are. 20:15.040 --> 20:25.040 Out of 64 subtypes of time, you can create everything from the coronation of Queen Mary to the resignation of Madonna, 20:25.040 --> 20:28.040 out of 64 types of time. 20:28.040 --> 20:35.040 So really, what the I Ching is, is not a book of Chinese mysticism. 20:35.040 --> 20:47.040 It's a book of molecular dynamics that sees through biology to the physics that allowed biology to come into existence. 20:47.040 --> 20:57.040 And I'll argue this with anybody in the field, regardless of how hardcore and empiricist they claim themselves to be. 20:57.040 --> 21:06.040 Because I think the coincidence between the structure of the I Ching and the structure of the DNA is staggering. 21:06.040 --> 21:11.040 It's not a simple correspondence between 64 and 64. 21:11.040 --> 21:21.040 All the processes that occur in DNA can be easily modeled with the six line hexagrams that make up the I Ching. 21:21.040 --> 21:26.040 It's almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy. 21:26.040 --> 21:32.040 For 5,000 years we pursued understanding energy. 21:32.040 --> 21:38.040 And this process ends with thermonuclear explosions in the deserts of the American Southwest. 21:38.040 --> 21:43.040 We can light the fire that burns in the heart of the distant stars. 21:43.040 --> 21:45.040 We know how to do that. 21:45.040 --> 21:49.040 That's what the Western mind achieved, political issues aside. 21:49.040 --> 21:53.040 The Eastern mind was not interested in energy. 21:53.040 --> 21:56.040 It was interested in time. 21:56.040 --> 22:01.040 And they spent 5,000 years deconstructing it, looking at it. 22:01.040 --> 22:03.040 And you don't use atom smashers. 22:03.040 --> 22:06.040 You don't use enormous physical pressure. 22:06.040 --> 22:10.040 It's a different problem, and you bring different tools to bear. 22:10.040 --> 22:11.040 You meditate. 22:11.040 --> 22:13.040 You look inside yourself. 22:13.040 --> 22:17.040 You study the movement of water around pebbles. 22:17.040 --> 22:19.040 You consider the situation. 22:19.040 --> 22:21.040 You study history. 22:21.040 --> 22:29.040 In any case, the bottom line is, the people who pursued this understanding of time achieved 22:29.040 --> 22:36.040 as sophisticated a relationship to time as the Western relationship to matter expressed 22:36.040 --> 22:39.040 through our ability to trigger fusion and fission. 22:39.040 --> 22:47.040 So there's a great deal for us to learn in the West from these Oriental efforts to understand time. 22:47.040 --> 22:49.040 And it is not necessarily mystical. 22:49.040 --> 22:53.040 What I did was entirely mathematical. 22:53.040 --> 22:57.040 It's not transparent to a person who has not studied mathematics. 22:57.040 --> 23:01.040 But to a professional mathematician, it's utterly trivial. 23:01.040 --> 23:05.040 There's nothing occult about it. 23:05.040 --> 23:13.040 And I think true understanding can be communicated and formally described with mathematics. 23:13.040 --> 23:14.040 And that's what we have here. 23:14.040 --> 23:21.040 We're on the brink of a fusion of Western science with quote-unquote Eastern mysticism. 23:21.040 --> 23:25.040 Nothing mystical about it except that we call it mysticism. 23:25.040 --> 23:35.040 But the fusion of these two viewpoints is going to give us a complete understanding of the universe of space, time, matter, and energy. 23:35.040 --> 23:40.040 I want to go to this stuff about the strange attractor at the end of history. 23:40.040 --> 23:48.040 I've never ever, you know, considered that notion that we are being pulled as opposed to simply just going on forever and ever. 23:48.040 --> 23:53.040 And that's for sure something that people are going to know, huh? 23:53.040 --> 24:03.040 Well, you know, in the 19th century, if you spoke of nature having a purpose, you were thought to be anti-evolution. 24:03.040 --> 24:14.040 Because in the 19th century, there was great pain to eliminate anything like pre-formation or teleology or purpose or God. 24:14.040 --> 24:19.040 All these things they were trying to eliminate from evolutionary theory. 24:19.040 --> 24:33.040 And until very recently in scientific thought, the idea has been that events are pushed by the causal necessity embedded in the events which preceded them. 24:33.040 --> 24:40.040 In other words, if you ask the question, what is the most important event in terms of, or moment in terms of shaping this moment, 24:40.040 --> 24:44.040 the answer would be the moment just before this moment. 24:44.040 --> 24:48.040 Because it hands on the energy, the space, the time. 24:48.040 --> 24:58.040 Recently, mathematicians have evolved what they call the notion of attractors, or strange attractors in some cases. 24:58.040 --> 25:10.040 And these are processes where a dynamic is not pushed by causal necessity from behind, but it's pulled by a point in the future. 25:10.040 --> 25:21.040 You could almost say, for example, if you release a ball bearing up near the rim of a bowl, that its attractor is the bottom of the bowl. 25:21.040 --> 25:28.040 And the ball bearing will roll down to the bottom, then halfway up the side, then up the side, in shorter and shorter cycles, 25:28.040 --> 25:33.040 until it finally comes to rest in the exact bottom of the bowl. 25:33.040 --> 25:41.040 Well, from the point of view of the new mathematics, the bottom of the bowl is a basin of attraction, 25:41.040 --> 25:45.040 and the ball bearing has fallen under its influence. 25:45.040 --> 25:56.040 So, I have always doubted that evolutionary theory without purpose, without teleology, 25:56.040 --> 26:06.040 could produce as complex a world as we see around us, in as short a time, five billion years, as the life of the Earth. 26:06.040 --> 26:16.040 It seemed more as though these processes were not just wandering across a flat genetic landscape. 26:16.040 --> 26:23.040 The process of biological evolution was actually being channeled between high walls. 26:23.040 --> 26:32.040 In other words, it had some motion this way, some this, but its forward direction was inevitable. 26:32.040 --> 26:44.040 And this is the idea of an attractor, that what the universe is doing is, it is under the sway of what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. 26:44.040 --> 26:52.040 And that is this domain of hyper-connectivity, that it would be perfect novelty. 26:52.040 --> 26:59.040 And all nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty. 26:59.040 --> 27:16.040 You could almost say that nature abhors habit, and so it seeks the novel by producing various kinds of phenomena at every level in biology, chemistry and society. 27:16.040 --> 27:21.040 And so, there really is a purpose to the universe. 27:21.040 --> 27:29.040 Its purpose is this state of hyper-complexification in which all of its points become related to each other, 27:29.040 --> 27:32.040 become what mathematicians call cotangent. 27:32.040 --> 27:41.040 And it gives the universe the feeling of being imbued with a caring presence. 27:41.040 --> 27:56.040 It makes it appear as though nature is tending toward something, and it changes our own ethical and moral position in the universe. 27:56.040 --> 28:01.040 Because, you know, science tells us that we're the products of a cosmic accident, 28:01.040 --> 28:08.040 we're at the edge of an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary star system, and we're damn lucky to be here, 28:08.040 --> 28:15.040 and that's it, that's our place, a very existential notion of our place in the cosmos. 28:15.040 --> 28:22.040 But if you take this other point of view, that process is under the influence of an attractor, 28:22.040 --> 28:27.040 and that the value the attractor is maximizing is novelty, 28:27.040 --> 28:36.040 then suddenly, for the first time in 500 years, human beings are moved back to the center of the stage, 28:36.040 --> 28:41.040 because we are the most novel thing on this planet. 28:41.040 --> 28:49.040 We are everything biology is, plus technology, language, politics, philosophy, art, so forth and so on. 28:49.040 --> 28:58.040 So, suddenly, human beings become important, not mere cosmic witnesses to a meaningless cosmos, 28:58.040 --> 29:07.040 but the cutting edge of a cosmos that glories in order and is moving toward higher states of order. 29:07.040 --> 29:12.040 And at the present moment, we are the carriers. 29:12.040 --> 29:17.040 Once it was the volcanic processes that shaped this planet. 29:17.040 --> 29:20.040 Once it was the life of the early oceans. 29:20.040 --> 29:22.040 Once it was the great dinosaurs. 29:22.040 --> 29:36.040 But today, humanity represents the cutting edge of complexity and this process of moving toward complexification. 29:36.040 --> 29:46.040 So, without invoking God or any sort of myth, you give meaning to human life. 29:46.040 --> 29:50.040 What is man's purpose? To advance and preserve novelty. 29:50.040 --> 29:52.040 You know, this is an ethical position. 29:52.040 --> 29:56.040 It means you don't replace rainforests with pastures. 29:56.040 --> 30:00.040 You don't censor books. You don't lean on... 00:00.000 --> 00:07.300 people who make gender choices different from yours. No, the purpose of being a human is 00:07.300 --> 00:15.380 to complexify reality even more, to hand on a more diverse, more complicated, more multiphasic 00:15.380 --> 00:25.000 universe to our children. And when this process of complexification reaches the omega point, 00:25.000 --> 00:31.900 it will fulfill, I believe, the expectations of all of these religions, but it will fulfill 00:31.900 --> 00:43.400 it in a mature, scientific and universal way that these religions all lack, because they 00:43.400 --> 00:52.520 all reflect their parochial origins. It's certainly true that we see a limited slice 00:52.520 --> 01:00.800 of reality. And your example from Flatland, yes, anything which moves as a gradient through 01:00.800 --> 01:06.920 time, we will not discern very carefully. I mean, for instance, this is why we have the 01:06.920 --> 01:13.220 science of economics, because it keeps track of the behavior of markets, which is something 01:13.220 --> 01:20.100 you can't see or feel, but which has become very important to human institutions. It's 01:20.100 --> 01:27.300 a fourth dimensional factor that we need to coordinate into our planning. So we've created 01:27.300 --> 01:36.080 an entire science to study the movement and behavior of markets. One of the things, I'm always 01:36.080 --> 01:43.080 trying to visualize what the concrescence would be like, even though I know that in principle, 01:43.080 --> 01:49.840 it's probably not possible to imagine it. But several factors are on the horizon, which I 01:49.840 --> 01:56.960 think can be brought together to sort of get a picture of what we're headed toward. One is, 01:56.960 --> 02:03.560 for some time now, we've been involved in building complex prostheses, which we call machines 02:03.560 --> 02:10.800 and computers. They are part of us. We don't perceive them as part of us, because we identify 02:10.800 --> 02:19.200 with the flesh and exteriorize the fabricated metal. But in fact, they are a part of us as 02:19.200 --> 02:26.560 much as our political systems, our agriculture production systems, so forth and so on. So 02:26.560 --> 02:34.800 the animal body has reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities. A cheetah can run 75 miles an hour, 02:34.800 --> 02:42.720 an elephant can lift three tons, and so forth and so on. To go beyond those capacities of the animal body, 02:42.720 --> 02:52.080 you have to make a marriage with mechanical things. So we are extending ourselves through the machines. Well, 02:52.080 --> 02:59.920 one of the things that these machines do is their time compressors. You know, you and I sitting here 02:59.920 --> 03:08.640 talking are operating at about 100 hertz. If we could be magically downloaded into a top-of-the-line 03:08.640 --> 03:18.480 computer, we would run at 800 megahertz. That means we could do 800 million more things in this moment 03:18.480 --> 03:27.520 than we can do when we're wearing flesh. So it may be that we will find a way to technologically stretch 03:27.520 --> 03:35.040 time. And this will become for us like a false eternity. You may have only 10 minutes left in your 03:35.040 --> 03:42.000 life, but it may be time enough to pack in all of human history from the fall of Rome to the present 03:42.000 --> 03:50.240 moment. So we are finding ways out of the three-dimensional Newtonian prison, which says, you know, 03:50.240 --> 03:59.680 life is narrow and confined and ends at the grave. And we're doing it by becoming information 04:00.720 --> 04:10.720 that is freed from material. And somehow, this allows us to make this ascent to the next dimensional 04:10.720 --> 04:18.800 modality. Information is not time and space constrained the way we are. We talk about the difficulty 04:18.800 --> 04:27.680 of moving an object at the speed of light. Our entire planetary technology cannot achieve moving a 04:27.680 --> 04:34.960 marble at the speed of light. But we can move information at the speed of light, tetrabytes of it. 04:34.960 --> 04:42.880 We do this every day. So we see how we stand then like children at the edge of the ocean of information. 04:42.880 --> 04:47.440 And we're putting our feet in and wondering, you know, could we swim in that? What would it be like 04:47.440 --> 04:54.640 to be wet in that? What would it be like to go into that new medium? A similar dilemma must have 04:54.640 --> 05:01.760 confronted the early amphibians as they stared at the land and said, you know, could we leave the ocean? 05:01.760 --> 05:10.400 Could we go up into those places? Could we breathe air and actually make the transition to such a hostile 05:10.400 --> 05:18.080 and alienating environment as the land? And so these are major cemetery breaks. But in every case, 05:18.080 --> 05:24.560 the answer has been, you bet. And sooner or later, somebody did it. And then all succeeding generations 05:24.560 --> 05:32.560 have followed suit. What is fascinating about this particular transition is that we are conscious 05:32.560 --> 05:40.320 of the implications. We who will make the transition will in some sense, some limited sense, understand 05:40.320 --> 05:46.320 its implications. Where I don't think that was true for the animals that left the primordial ocean. 05:46.320 --> 05:55.920 They simply were behaving blind instinct and evolutionarily dictated behaviors. But the degrees 05:55.920 --> 06:06.960 of freedom accessible to us are so multifarous that we can actually appreciate for the first time our 06:06.960 --> 06:15.120 circumstance. And our circumstance is awe-inspiring. We are about to take the step out of matter. 06:15.760 --> 06:22.240 The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it's possible to imagine. The 06:22.240 --> 06:29.920 freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion years there's been life on this 06:29.920 --> 06:36.800 planet, but never life that could step outside of matter. But this is obviously what's in the cards, 06:36.800 --> 06:49.950 and we are privileged to be central to that event. You just said, uh, we're moving beyond matter. I just 06:49.950 --> 06:57.390 can't imagine what you mean. Can you try to talk a little bit more about that? Well, first of all, 06:57.390 --> 07:03.790 I can't quite imagine what we mean either. I think this is the test is to and to imagine what could 07:03.790 --> 07:15.310 that mean. Maybe the bridge, uh, concept is virtual reality. Obviously we're on the brink of building 07:15.310 --> 07:23.550 computer-assisted worlds that don't quote unquote really exist, but that which we will experience the 07:23.550 --> 07:32.190 way we experience dreams or the imagination. And I think this is where psychedelic substances come in. 07:32.910 --> 07:41.710 Shamans have always entered into a non-physical realm of information through trance. In a way, 07:41.710 --> 07:55.870 there's nothing new here. This is part of the archaic revival. Will you still love me? Will you still 07:55.870 --> 08:10.020 feed me when I'm 64? Um, are we rolling? Uh, I've forgotten the thread. What was it? Oh, oh, is it a human 08:10.020 --> 08:18.660 thing? Is it a unique, is this ascent into novelty a human thing? No. Part of what I discern here, though 08:18.660 --> 08:26.180 we humans are always ready to suffer guilt and take blame for everything going on in the universe, 08:26.820 --> 08:34.020 I don't believe this is something we are doing. I think that we are as much corks tossed on the ocean 08:34.020 --> 08:43.860 of time as our hummingbirds and prairie dogs. In other words, an event of cosmic significance and 08:43.860 --> 08:54.420 importance is going to occur not far in the future. Are we causing it? No. Can we stop it? No. Can we 08:54.420 --> 09:02.820 hurry it? No. It's built in to the structure of matter itself. One way of thinking of this is that the 09:02.820 --> 09:11.540 laws of physics are evolving to permit greater freedom. And we are...and people have said to me, 09:11.540 --> 09:18.900 well, don't you find it a little strange that such a momentous event would occur in human history? 09:18.900 --> 09:26.740 After all, human history is 10,000 years wide. The planet is 5 billion years old. Pretty unusual 09:26.740 --> 09:34.660 coincidence that human history would be happening when this cosmic event happens. No, that's completely 09:34.660 --> 09:43.540 wrong. Human history is being caused by the nearby presence of this event. In other words, if you think 09:43.540 --> 09:50.420 of the event as something which has shells of influence, some of its shells of influence reach so 09:50.420 --> 09:56.820 far back in time that they drag life out of the primitive oceans. Some of its shells of influence 09:56.820 --> 10:02.980 reach so far back in time that they define the emergence of the hominid line out of the higher 10:02.980 --> 10:10.180 primates. Some shells reach back to Egypt, some to medieval time. As you approach the present, it becomes 10:10.180 --> 10:16.260 stronger and stronger. But I would argue that the presence of human civilization on this planet 10:17.140 --> 10:24.980 is the strongest evidence we have that matter and organizational processes are about to make some 10:24.980 --> 10:38.020 kind of a leap to a new order of being. What history is is the 25,000-year transition zone. Before you 10:38.020 --> 10:45.940 enter the zone, you're an animal. After you leave the zone, you're a god. But for 25,000 years, 10:45.940 --> 10:53.300 you're kind of an animal and kind of a god. And you're constantly being swamped by your animal nature, 10:53.300 --> 11:01.140 and then great teachers are appearing and dragging people back to the right line. And we are schizophrenic 11:01.140 --> 11:08.660 in history. A friend of mine once said, he said, history is the shock wave which precedes the eschaton. 11:08.660 --> 11:15.380 And I absolutely believe that. And I believe as historical processes intensify, it's reasonable to 11:15.380 --> 11:23.940 believe that we are ever closer to the eschaton. If my ideas seem strange to someone, I ask them, 11:24.740 --> 11:34.100 can you imagine this planet in 500 years, given the propagation of ordinary historical and scientific 11:34.100 --> 11:42.340 rates of unfoldment and discovery? Can you imagine this planet in a thousand years? No. No one can 11:42.340 --> 11:50.900 imagine that, because processes are now in play which so totally rewrite the script that no one can 11:50.900 --> 11:58.580 imagine 100 years or 200 years in the future. Because the discoveries which will be made in that span of 11:58.580 --> 12:05.940 time will so totally rewrite the human experience of itself and the environment that we cannot see 12:06.660 --> 12:14.020 deep into the future. And this indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic 12:15.380 --> 12:25.540 unfoldment into a kind of cultural super space. And our own bafflement at the impossibility of conceiving 12:25.540 --> 12:32.900 any real future, given the political and social and technological forces in play, is proof of that. 12:34.820 --> 12:42.180 Before we go farther, I'd like you to attempt to give me a definition of concrescence and eschaton. 12:43.460 --> 12:49.860 Well, let's go backward. Eschaton first. Eschaton is a good word out of theology. It simply means 12:49.860 --> 13:01.460 the last thing. The last thing is the eschaton, and it is everything become one thing. For theologians, 13:01.460 --> 13:09.060 it's God. For somebody of a more materialist bent, it might be something else. But the eschaton is the 13:09.060 --> 13:16.900 last thing. Eschatology is the study of the time of the last thing. Now, what was the other word? 13:16.900 --> 13:23.060 Concrescence. Concrescence. This is a little trickier concept. I took it from Alfred North 13:23.060 --> 13:32.020 Whitehead. Concrescence is the idea of something that grows together. It concresses. It becomes more 13:32.020 --> 13:40.100 dense, more connected, more defined in space and time. And when I talk about the transcendental object 13:40.100 --> 13:48.660 at the end of time, or the coming of the eschaton, or hyper-novelty, I mean that the process of the 13:48.660 --> 13:59.300 human and biological concrescence of intent reaches some kind of maximum. Concrescence is the end of the 13:59.300 --> 14:11.220 process of becoming. Becoming is not true being. True being exists at the concrescence. The kind of 14:11.220 --> 14:19.860 being we experience, becoming, is a partial state of being, much like history is a partial state of 14:19.860 --> 14:31.700 concrescence. History definitely places us outside the world of biological intent, the animal mind. But 14:31.700 --> 14:40.020 history does not bring us into the presence of the eschaton. It's a partial process, and concrescence is 14:40.020 --> 14:51.500 what waits at the end. The eschaton is the concrescence. But we really can't have any way of knowing what that 14:51.500 --> 15:02.140 experience of that is going to be like. No. And the reason why is because asking that question is like 15:02.140 --> 15:11.340 asking a man looking east at 2 a.m. to describe the coming sunrise. He can't because it is literally 15:11.340 --> 15:19.820 over the event horizon of the future. And when we look into the future, we see that the east is streaked 15:19.820 --> 15:29.980 with rosy dawn. But we cannot conceive of the day that is about to come. All we can see is the dim glow of 15:29.980 --> 15:37.660 some kind of eschatological promise. Ask me this question in 2010, and I'll have a different answer. 15:41.100 --> 15:46.860 Back to this issue of physics and your description of the two things which are left out of their models. 15:46.860 --> 15:53.500 The way that you describe it is so self-evident and simple. The complexification, the further away 15:53.500 --> 15:58.460 that you get from the Big Bang, and the fact that everything is the complexification is speeding up. 15:59.260 --> 16:01.020 Would you talk just a little bit about 16:03.180 --> 16:10.380 the relationship of those observations to the world of the physicist and their efforts to define 16:10.380 --> 16:20.380 reality and why they're not using, including in their models, these aspects that you're pointing to? 16:20.380 --> 16:29.100 The main reason they aren't friendly toward a model... The main reason physicists are not friendly to a 16:29.100 --> 16:39.660 progressive, concrescent model like this is because you would have to look at... you would have to give credit 16:39.660 --> 16:48.460 to biology for being a stage higher than chemistry, and you would have to give credit to human history as a stage 16:48.460 --> 16:59.340 higher than biology. And physicists study physics. If you study physics, there is no biology. You don't have to deal with 16:59.340 --> 17:08.140 the issues of biology when you study physics. I mean, there is something called biophysics, but it's not well received in physics or biology. 17:08.700 --> 17:23.660 So physicists tend to discount biology. Even though life on this planet is 4.83 billion years old, physicists just discount it. They call it an epiphenomenon. 17:23.660 --> 17:34.940 Well, then when you talk to sociologists, they give no credit to physics. Science has compartmentalized 17:34.940 --> 17:42.380 nature in order to analyze it, and there is no theory of nature as such. And that's really what I'm offering. 17:42.380 --> 17:54.380 I'm offering a theory which covers physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology, linguistics, the whole thing. In other 17:54.380 --> 18:03.420 words, not saying man is some special category, not saying that we need artificial divisions, but that over the entire 18:03.420 --> 18:15.820 domain of known phenomena, this tendency to complexify through time and be faster and faster can be discerned. 18:16.620 --> 18:23.420 We need a theory of everything. Physics talks about theories of everything, but none of these theories of 18:23.420 --> 18:33.420 everything address biology, let alone sociology, linguistics, and, you know, the phenomenon of human beings. 18:35.660 --> 18:44.860 Well, the archaic revival. There is a way of looking at the entire 20th century, beginning with Pablo Picasso 18:44.860 --> 18:54.780 bringing masks back from Africa and showing them around in French cafes in 1915, beginning with Freud's 18:54.780 --> 19:04.620 discovery of the unconscious and Jung's elaboration of those discoveries. And then every phenomenon of 19:04.620 --> 19:11.420 major importance that you care to mention in the 20th century. Fascism, abstract expressionism, 19:11.420 --> 19:22.380 rock and roll, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic drug taking, rave culture, body piercing, jazz, the list is 19:22.380 --> 19:32.220 endless. What do all these things have in common? They are reversions to archaic behaviors. They represent 19:32.220 --> 19:40.780 rejections of the Edwardian gentleman with his white man's burden, and represent instead a realization that 19:40.780 --> 19:52.300 for us to survive and live with ourselves, we have to re-empower archaic values. As the century unfolded, 19:52.300 --> 19:59.500 the understanding of what this re-empowering of archaic values might mean has changed. Jung and Freud 19:59.500 --> 20:05.260 discovered the unconscious, discovered that we are not all ladies and gentlemen, but that there's a cannibal 20:05.260 --> 20:16.220 lurking within. Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD demonstrated that that inner wilderness is accessible 20:16.220 --> 20:25.340 to most people through chemistry. Well then, still later, it was understood that the key ingredient in 20:25.340 --> 20:34.860 active shamanism is psychedelic plants, psychedelic experiences. And in a way, that closed the loop 20:34.860 --> 20:44.780 between the impulse toward the archaic and the impulses of modern science and modern medicine. The key 20:44.780 --> 20:51.580 is the psychedelic experience. That's what makes the shaman a shaman. That's what made the archaic, 20:51.580 --> 20:58.620 in fact, archaic. And so, people like Freud and Jung and the Surrealists and the Dadaists and the 20:58.620 --> 21:07.100 abstract expressionists. All of these people were very close to the mark. The shaman is the paradigmatic 21:07.100 --> 21:15.980 figure. And the psychedelic experience seems to be the anticipatory experience of this eschaton that 21:15.980 --> 21:21.340 we're headed toward. You know, when psychedelics were first being discussed, it was thought that they 21:21.340 --> 21:28.620 would prepare people for death. In a sense, they probably do. But in the same way that they prepare 21:28.620 --> 21:36.140 people for death, they prepare people for transformation. It gets you used to the idea that 21:36.140 --> 21:43.260 the world is not what it appears to be. And it gets you used to the idea that the world is somehow 21:43.260 --> 21:51.740 animate, intelligent, and proceeding along its own agenda. So, in a way, shamans have always been 21:51.740 --> 21:58.780 anticipations of some future state of mankind. They're the masters of language. They are the 21:58.780 --> 22:05.900 ones who are telepathic with the animals. They are the ones who can see into the future. So this 22:05.900 --> 22:14.860 archaic nostalgia gets real focus once you realize that it is the shaman and his or her shamanic 22:14.860 --> 22:24.860 techniques that confers on them the extra-historical dimension, that that is how you get out of linear 22:24.860 --> 22:33.180 history. That's how you visit the realm of the ancestors. That's how you travel into the future. 22:33.180 --> 22:39.020 That's how you break up the tyranny of Newtonian serial time. 22:40.940 --> 22:48.540 We have 14 years until this event, measured on the calendar. And, you know, a really common, 22:48.540 --> 22:53.580 ordinary way to describe the times that we're living in is that they're very, very chaotic, 22:54.860 --> 23:01.740 filled with acts of unspeakable evil. And at the same time, there's this sort of 23:01.740 --> 23:08.700 buzz and thrust of optimism. Everything from a guy like Peter Schwartz talking about the long 23:08.700 --> 23:16.940 wave, the big booming economy, breakthroughs in, in, you know, educational levels and 23:17.580 --> 23:25.820 qualities of life. But it's definitely a dynamic where you've got extremes of good and evil in that 23:25.820 --> 23:32.540 way. Would you talk a little bit about the relationship between that dynamic as we go forward 23:33.100 --> 23:41.660 and the novelty continues to climax? Well, novelty is not necessarily good or nice. 23:42.300 --> 23:53.260 Novelty is complex. That's what it is. And so I see really a concatenation of tendencies 23:53.260 --> 24:02.140 and forces here at the end. It's only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to 24:02.140 --> 24:13.100 rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So I think it's 24:13.100 --> 24:19.340 just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it's going to be so weird that people 24:19.340 --> 24:25.340 are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the 24:25.340 --> 24:34.780 woods because eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on? It's just too nuts. It's 24:34.780 --> 24:43.820 not enough to say it's nuts. You have to explain why it's so nuts. So between now and 2012, the next 14 24:43.820 --> 24:52.140 years, I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, possible contact with 24:52.140 --> 24:59.820 extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, 24:59.820 --> 25:10.300 genocide, race-baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation. Because the systems which are in place 25:10.860 --> 25:21.260 to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The collapse of 25:21.820 --> 25:29.820 the socialist world, the rise of the internet, these are changes so immense nobody could imagine them 25:29.820 --> 25:36.540 ever happening. And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is. 25:37.420 --> 25:43.260 The fact that there is no such thing as the Soviet Union, people never talk about it anymore. But when 25:43.260 --> 25:51.740 I was a kid, the notion that that would ever change was beyond conceiving. So the good news is that as 25:51.740 --> 26:00.380 primates, we're incredibly adaptable to change. Put us in a desert, we survive. Put us in the jungle, we 26:00.380 --> 26:08.060 survive. Under Hitler, we survive. Under Nixon, we survive. We can put up with about anything. And it's a good 26:08.060 --> 26:16.860 thing, because we're going to be tested to the limits. The breakdown of anything, and this is why the 26:16.860 --> 26:24.940 right wing is so alarmed. Because what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition, all order, all 26:24.940 --> 26:32.940 sanctioned norms of behavior. And they're quite right that it's happening. But they're quite wrong to 26:32.940 --> 26:40.540 conclude that it should be resisted or is somehow evil. The mushroom said to me once, it said, 26:40.540 --> 26:47.660 this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. You don't depart for the 26:47.660 --> 26:55.340 stars under calm and orderly conditions. It's a fire in a madhouse. And that's what we have, the fire in 26:55.340 --> 27:02.780 the madhouse at the end of time. This is what it's like when a species prepares to move on to the next 27:02.780 --> 27:10.060 dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for 27:10.060 --> 27:18.780 ourselves or from ourselves. We happen to be the point species on a transformation that will affect 27:18.780 --> 27:34.860 every living organism on this planet at its conclusion. Let's pause for a second. I see how with Jenkins 27:34.860 --> 27:40.220 calling it galactic cosmology, it's like our home continues to expand. We've gone from the village 27:40.220 --> 27:46.940 to the nation-state to the planet. Now we're ready to take on the big picture. So let's just talk about 27:47.740 --> 27:54.220 the conclusions of the archaic mind, what it reaches. Well, the great watershed difference between the 27:54.220 --> 28:03.340 archaic understanding and what is called scientific materialism is the archaic mind understood, in fact 28:03.340 --> 28:13.900 perceived, that nature is conscious, nature is alive, nature is an organism full of intent. The goal of the 28:13.900 --> 28:23.500 archaic mind is to connect with, communicate with, and align itself to this greater Gaian holism, which is 28:23.500 --> 28:32.140 sometimes called nature, the great spirit, the realm of the ancestors. But this is what the archaic mind 28:32.140 --> 28:41.980 understood and was comfortable with, and in fact it is true. Our own decision to view the universe as dead, as 28:41.980 --> 28:54.700 inanimate, as unintelligent, allowed us, permitted us to dissect it, use it, and deny its validity outside 28:54.700 --> 29:01.500 of human purpose. Now the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt us. You know, 29:01.500 --> 29:09.420 we have almost destroyed our home. We have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet. So this impulse 29:09.420 --> 29:21.820 toward the Gaianic and the archaic is a survival instinct at this point. We must give reverence and 29:21.820 --> 29:29.340 credence to nature and nature's methods, because no other methods will allow us to work our way out of the 29:29.340 --> 29:36.460 present mess we're in. High temperature, high energy, resource extraction, commodification, 29:38.060 --> 29:45.020 mega-agriculture, we're at the end of the rope for these things. So the archaic holds answers, 29:45.020 --> 29:52.060 but it only holds answers if we are willing to think of the universe as a living, intelligent entity, 29:52.060 --> 29:59.980 reality, with which we are in partnership, not set against, but that in fact we are 00:00.000 --> 00:08.760 a part of a morphogenetic intent and an unfolding reality that is larger than 00:08.760 --> 00:22.880 human understanding. Imagine, larger than human understanding. So the whole entire 00:22.880 --> 00:31.760 Milky Way galaxy is a being? Well it's a kind of, it's an organism, yes, and the 00:31.760 --> 00:38.420 galaxy is a kind of an organism. You can think of it as a fractal resonance with 00:38.420 --> 00:44.480 the cell. The galaxy has a nucleus of very dense material where very mysterious 00:44.480 --> 00:51.320 processes are going on. Then it has a cytoplasmic envelope of stars and gas 00:51.320 --> 00:56.600 clouds that surround that core, and then it is an individual, very distinctly 00:56.600 --> 01:03.200 defined by the vast emptiness that lies between it and the next galaxy. Yes, I 01:03.200 --> 01:11.900 think nature builds by fractal intent, and that all organisms have a core and then a 01:11.900 --> 01:17.900 deployed surround, whether we're talking about the cell, the solar system, the earth, 01:17.900 --> 01:26.120 the galaxy. In the process of the conservation of novelty, structures are 01:26.120 --> 01:32.060 created with cores that are more complex than their outlying neighborhoods. To my 01:32.060 --> 01:39.700 mind, a galaxy hanging in space is a picture of the time wave. Every star is a 01:39.700 --> 01:45.140 data point in an enormous computer simulation of the novelty wave. That's why 01:45.140 --> 01:50.920 it has that spiral structure. You know, scientists are very puzzled that the 01:50.920 --> 01:55.580 galaxies don't fly apart. They don't seem to have enough mass that their 01:55.580 --> 02:00.080 gravitation should hold them together. And there's been a lot of talk about dark 02:00.080 --> 02:06.560 matter or some missing factor. Well, the missing factor is novelty. The galaxy 02:06.560 --> 02:14.480 stays together because the galaxy wants to be a galaxy. In other words, it wants to hold 02:14.480 --> 02:24.420 on to the level of novel morphology that it has achieved. It has an actual appetite for expressing 02:24.420 --> 02:31.100 itself in that form. That's why the galaxies are spirals. And in a sense, those spirals are 02:31.100 --> 02:39.000 very large pictures of the time wave where we can at last see it, not confused with its background 02:39.000 --> 02:48.360 or foreground. So everything organizes itself, fractally, spirally, with a dense center in its spatial 02:48.360 --> 02:55.480 domain and a dense center in its temporal domain. We are like this. Galaxies are like this. Planets, stars, 02:56.360 --> 03:03.160 bird flocks, coral reefs. But in the case of the galaxy, it's particularly easy to observe the 03:03.160 --> 03:11.560 structure because the thing is so huge that its forces dominate and damp out other forces which might distort it.