Podcast 032 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 6)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 1:05 "I think that Maxwell’s Laws of Thermodynamics are only part of the story, and that you also have to look at the work that Ilya Prigogine did in the 60’s and 70’s where he showed that there is this principle-which they called different things, but, basically, it was random perturbation to higher states of order… Sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms." 2:30 "Language is in conquest of dimensional expression-or, something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space of higher and higher dimension." 2:50-4:33 Terence uses Novelty Theory to describe the history of biological evolution in terms of an increasing ability to exist in and perceive higher and higher dimensions of being."…better eyes, better muscles, better coordination, better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal axis." 4:40 "What spoken language is about is the recovery of memory at a later date-it’s a data recall system. And you talk about the past… and you strategize from it… When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit, the game is out in the open-the purpose of these endeavors is to keep the past from slipping away." 5:42 "The primate conquest of time (through time-binding technology) is the phenomenon that we call human history. This is apparently what we’re about, this is why we speak, why we write, why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation-because we are binding time. Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say, ‘What would satisfy this drive?’ Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself." 6:54 "To make this leap to the full-coordination of 4-D requires some kind of machine symbiosis… It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet, and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis, and become, instead of semi-cannibalistic primates, machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass, and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons, and this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment." 7:55 In the preceding podcast (In the Valley of Novelty – Part 5, 35:27), Terence says that two important facts about nature have been overlooked by science. The first one (discussed in Part 5) was the increase of Novelty/complexity through time. Now, Terence begins talking about the second one (the acceleration of this complexification). 8:05 "This process of producing Novelty… is not going on at a steady rate. It’s going on faster and faster as we approach the present. It’s like what mathematicians call a cascade… The early history of the universe is dull news… stars are condensing, galaxies are ordering themselves-this is the stuff of millennia, tens of millennia, greater spans of time… Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show." 9:42 "When you reach the last million years, it’s as though this process of the emergence of Novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line-the hominids-but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude. So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years-languages are changing, pottery designs [are changing]-and as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious. What Novelty Theory is saying is: this is not an easily explained phenomenon." 10:56 "Human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature. Human history-25,000 years is all it is-is like a shimmer, an aura, something that flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes cosmic, or whatever it is that it’s going to go." 15:08 "We even talk about downloading [sic] ourselves into machines. Well, as we sit here [in the summer of 1998], we’re functioning at about 100 hertz.