By the Late John Brockman (6 page)

Political considerations are trivial. The leaders of governments throughout the world
thought in terms of control, believing power to be the key. But there is always complete
control: Information is the key. The direct nonlinear experience of the brain is communicable.
Information passes across the arbitrary boundaries of mankind as though they never
existed.

The so-called emotional states of man were nothing more than habit. Fear. Love. Longing.
Hate. Pain. Pleasure. Joy. Press the button, and the brain will activate the program.
So too with man’s noblest feelings. Dignity. Honor. Altruism. Patriotism. Habit. The
human habit.

There is no choice with information. It is a measure of effect, a measure of the change
in the brain’s operations. As the brain functions in a universe of continuous, simultaneous
operations, it may be said information is always circulating in the system. As information
is a measure of control, there is always one hundred percent control. There is no
choice.

It is interesting to note that research into the activity of the brain shows that
the program of operations in terms of direct experience becomes imprinted as an operant
circuit. It must be remembered that the operation of the brain is activity of which
one cannot be aware. These imprints exist in the simultaneous universe of operations.
It has been demonstrated through electronic stimulation of the temporal lobe by implanted
electrodes that the imprint of a previous program can become activated. Illusions
of familiarity of a
déjà vu
nature, as well as interpretation of shape, clearness, and speed, are activated by
stimulation of the temporal cortex and subsequent electrical discharge on only one
side of the brain, the side responsible for minor handedness.
⁶¹
We also know that the flicker experience of a frequency of that of a movie (twenty
four frames per second) could excite this same area of the brain through exaggerated
electrical discharge.
⁶²
Considerations of individual “mind” only beg questions that may be readily explored
through analysis and observation on the operant level. Operant observations and analysis
are impossible within the abstraction system of man.

Discern the patterns by measuring output and relating it to input. How a change in
the environment is related to a change in the brain’s operation. The relationship
is nonlinear; the measure of the relationship is information, a measure of the change
of the brain’s operations. It goes beyond the abstraction of the individual. In a
way man could not see, he was animated by his extensions. He was the terminal, not
the originator. It all went through him. It wasn’t life; it was process.

It comes down to rhythms. Reality is to be found in the process of neural activity.
Systems of abstraction are developed which allow the functioning phenomena to monitor
their own activities. This monitoring, rather than being an observation of extant
activity, is actually new activity. It is represented by frequencies, rhythms, numbers.
When man tried to find the ultimate material basis of identity, he got down to the
level of molecular spectra, only to find neither materials nor mechanisms, but a self-organizing
pattern of frequencies. A process. A whole which can be represented by operant mathematical
symbols, but which can be talked about and measured only in terms of eject. Who am
I?

There are not, there will not be, any footnotes in the body of this exercise. Ownership
is a human habit The author presents not ideas, but information. Not words and images,
but a transaction that can be measured only in terms of information. It may appear
inconsistent to use the linear format of the printed book to convey the message that
there is only information The entity “book” is an arbitrary representation of reality,
not dissimilar to symbolizing operant patterning as “man.” On the neural level we
can see how “book,” an extension of man, fed back signals telling the brain what to
do. There is “a sense in which we can say that there is communication of information
between man and his products.”
⁶³
This is process. It is integrated on the neural level. It is nonlinear.

Language. This exercise is using language to say that language does not exist. There
is only information controlling the direct experience of the brain. The currency of
the nervous system is the neural impulse. The key to language is to be found in the
operations of the brain. The universals of language are the universals of neural patterns.
Different languages cut up reality in terms of their own bias. Mathematics must be
included in this consideration as a language. However, “it may even be in the cards
that there is no such thing as ‘Language’ (with a capital L) at all! The statement
that ‘thinking is a matter of language’ is an incorrect generalization of the more
nearly correct idea that ‘thinking is a matter of different tongues.’ The different
tongues are the real phenomena and may generalize down not to any such universal as
‘Language,’ but to something better called ‘sublinguistic’ or ‘superlinguistic’—and
NOT ALTOGETHER unlike, even if much unlike, what we now call ‘mental.’”
⁶⁴

The trap is in the concept “language.” Whatever is happening can be considered perfectly
well without ever using the conceptual framework of “language,” which by its nature
makes it difficult to consider the transaction, the process. We are not concerned
with the linear system of “man and man’s language,” but with experience on the neural
level, the only direct experience. Words are not directly experienced. Man never experienced
words. He experienced another man talking, radios, books, televisions, telephones,
etc. The experience was never that of language. We move from the relationship of man-man
talking, man-radio, man-book, man-man thinking, to a study of the transacting process
that can be considered in unambiguous, numerical terms when dealt with on the level
of operant, neural activity. Yet this exercise uses words. “When we talk about reality
we never start at the beginning and we use concepts more accurately defined only by
their application.”
⁶⁵
It’s part of the process. The author is aware that for every system capable of producing
a logical truth, there is a truism proving the system which cannot be shown to be
true within the system.

Reality is not words, not the construct of language. Reality is in the nonlinear function
of neural activity. The only real phenomena are operant and nonlinear. Words can be
considered only in terms of the illusory past. Man thought the choice was between
ideas that were expressed through language. The choice for man really concerned information,
how the usage of various language patterns would change the way the brain worked.
Since man could never be aware of the activity of his brain, there was no choice.
Silence.

Real control had nothing to do with the kind of control exercised by national governments.
Control is through the process of information. Man’s technologies, viewed as communication,
as feedback extensions, relayed back signals telling the brain what to do. While governments
exercised their traditional prerogatives, the process continued unnoticed. No democratic
populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, what kind of information
was desired. Nobody ever voted for the telephone. Nobody ever voted for the automobile.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for television. Nobody ever voted
for space travel. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for nuclear
power.

There are only nonlinear phenomena. The communication of direct neural experience
is an invention more important than the wheel, the steam engine, nuclear energy. The
trip through the internal mappings of the nervous system is far more exciting, far
more important, and far more dangerous than the journey to the moon, and the farthest
reaches of outer space.

It is a question of searching for questions. This exercise is not setting forth rules
or formulating dogma. It is an attempt to create a working model, not with an eye
to truth but to convenience. The only rules applicable are those that are convenient
to use. In this system there is no interest in, there is no possibility of, truth.
There is no longer a solid base, a substantial reality, from which to make pronouncements.
We move toward an always inferred, unknowable reality with the symbols, the frames
of reference, available to us. What we find is only a model. Man was such a model.
Man, the model, is dead.

It is no longer necessary to say yes to life, No one is there to listen; no one is
interested in you, no one is interested in your words.

No man’s land.

Progress is merely decreation. “
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter
necessitatem
. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so.
This principle is purely destructive, it takes something away.”
¹
Decreation: “A person can doubt only if he has learned certain things; as he can
miscalculate only if he has learned to calculate.”
²
The advances of civilization are gross exaggerations; a function of the language
with its built-in commitment to the accretive historical model. Flat earth: round
earth. It isn’t a one hundred percent accretive advance from one to two: one hundred
assumes and decreates ninety-nine. Round earth assumes and decreates flat earth. Invisible
assumes and decreates visible. Events assume and decreate matter. The relativistic
universe assumes and decreates the mechanistic universe. “Progress is always a transcendence
of what is obvious:”
³
decreation. Is it simply that “progress in any aspect is a movement through changes
of terminology?”
⁴

“A no man’s land, or better said, a no signals region extends between past and future.”
⁵
Universe is finite: no space-time continuum. A voice out of the past? The reliving
of an experience? Don’t call it memory. Is it possible to remember? “A seeing into
the past? It does not show us the past. Anymore than our senses show us the present.
Nor can it be said to communicate the past to us.”
⁶

Universe is finite: a process of decreation: the passing of the created into the uncreated.
Decreation: the created passes into man-made invention. Reality passes into description.

The end of the waste system. The waste: the generalizations of previous epochs. Decreation:
getting through the history of words. We must not assume the existence of any entity
until we are compelled to do so. “The point is that unnecessary units in a sign language
mean nothing.”
⁷

The accretive principle: the predominant way people live, like the oldfashioned idea
of making a living; amounting to something. Stuff starts at one point and goes through
accretive increments of time, of space, of history, etc., to get to another point.
Universe: no accretion; no accumulation; no development; no continuity. Neither before
nor after; neither behind nor beyond; neither here nor there; neither inside nor outside;
neither from nor to: No direction; no between: no communication.

Universe: a verb. Not existing in time, but time itself and not the time of past,
present, future. Time undifferentiated in activity, not time of being. Universe: a
decreated world: “a moment in time / and of time. / A moment not out of time, but
in time, in what we call history: / transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment
in time / but not like a moment of time, / A moment in time but time was made through
that moment: / for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment / of time
gave the meaning.”
⁸

Awkwardness: The only way to fit the uniqueness of insights into current laws. Awkwardness:
stymied by perception, by knowledge Awkwardness: “the primary advantage thus gained
is that experience is not interrogated with the benumbing repression of common sense.”
⁹

Universe is finite: objectified expression of activity: the assumption of the positive-negative
abstractions particular to the subject-predicate proposition; the assumption of the
process of subject-predicate. No ultimate subject: the unity is unitless. “Where you
end / And I begin / Or any else, in fine, / On such dichotomies depend / There’s no
one left to draw a line.”
¹⁰
Subject-predicate: noun’d. Noun: negated. Syntax: confused.

“A noun is the name of things . . . why after a thing is named write about it.”
¹¹
The major accomplishment of science is that it has never produced an objective fact,
never proven the existence of an object. No nouns: no objects, no people, no propositions,
nothing. Living with “the growing terror of nothing to think about.”
¹²

Undifferentiation of activity: no division of activity into parts. No differences;
no between. “To be without description of to be.”
¹³

It is impossible to pay less than one hundred percent attention. It is impossible
to do less than you do. Universe: verb. Do: always one hundred percent: the do of
do; the do of not do. Activity: always one hundred percent: the activity of activity;
the activity of nonactivity. Experience: always one hundred percent: the experience
of experiencing; the experience of not experiencing. You can’t do less than you do.
Doing: complete, obligatory, always one hundred percent, whether the focus is the
part or the whole; the totality or the selection obscuring the totality. “I am” is
doing: don’t call it being. “I am not” is doing: don’t call it nonexistence. “I think”
is doing: don’t call it thought. Do: “The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify,
but plainly to propound.”
¹⁴