INFO-PSYCHOLOGY.
TIMOTHY LEARY.
Preface.
To First Edition Life on the Planet Earth, through the instrumentality of the human nervous system, has begun to migrate from the Womb Planet, to escape from gene pools, to establish colonies in high orbit, from whence it can more accessibly contact and communicate with Life in the Galaxy.
Rocket-ships have attained the escape velocity necessary to ascend beyond the gravitational pull of the womb-planet.
Radio-telescope "dishes" now look out to the stars, ready to receive eletro-magnetic messages from intelligent neighbors.
Electronic signals are now transmitting through interstellar spare the message of human readiness to exchange and communicate.
The suspicion grows that we, who are about to leave this small satellite of a peripheral star, are neither alone nor isolated.
Within the life-time of many who read these lines, it could happen: our pioneer families will leave the solar system; interstellar messages will be received; contact will be made. The galactic discussion will begin.
It is about time to prepare for life in s.p.a.ce as members of new, consciously selected gene pools.
It is about time to develop a philosophy, a psychology, the language to enable us to listen, understand, and respond intelligently to our interstellar neighbors.
The language is quantum, digital, psychogeometric.
Some among us will protest that human intelligence and human resources should be used to solve the agonizing terrestrial problems of unequal distribution.
These larval protests, however sincere, are embryonic, understandable and myopic.
The crisis of suffering and scarcity which now threatens humanity is not material. It is neuro-political warfare.
It has been called spiritual, psychological, philosophic It is best described as navigational. Humanity has not yet deciphered the genetic code. The compa.s.s, the guide-book is now being prepared.
Men and women who know from whence they come and where they are going, who share a vision beyond the local-mundane will emerge from the larval gene-pools and as cyber (pilot) individuals, who learn quickly, work effectively, grow naturally, socialize lovingly and evolve gracefully. It is probably true that species coast along on serene stupidity until faced with an evolutionary challenge; at which point individuals leave the primitive collectives and become very smarter very faster.
This book, a simple-minded attempt to provide a perspective of biological evolution on and from this planet, presents hundreds of neogenetic ideas for which some individual from every gene-pool are now ready. The transmission is presented in machine-printed letters although the topics discussed are electro-magnetic and quantum-physical. The reader should expect, therefore, that hir conditioned symbol-system is going to be jolted with unexpected and novel symbol combinations. This is exactly the situation that will exist when Higher Intelligence begins to talk cyber-quantum with a species of mechanical thinkers.
A human from the twentieth century would find it a most difficult and delicate task to explain "now" to a tool-maker from the sixteenth century. The sophisticated reader can avoid being irritated by some of the metaphors in this book if cultural time-lag is kept in mind.
Some good-will and open-ness towards the future is necessary in interspecies dialogues of this sort.
The importance of this post-terrestrial guidebook is that it exists. Here is a first attempt to prepare humanity for the outward journey, for post-terrestrial migration to the Info-Worlds.
Other and more sophisticated Info-psychologies will follow. Is there any more interesting or vital thing to do than to create futures?
The first attempt is deliberately eclectic and translational - linking the religious-occult to the scientific; the antique to the futique; the legends of the past to the data of the present.
We have suggested eight periods and twenty-four stages of neurological evolution as a didactic metaphor to antic.i.p.ate, to specify, to order, to personalize, to familiarize the immense post-mechanical, meta-personal, post-Newtonian electron fields which are to be imprinted.
The ill.u.s.trative metaphors are not important. What is crucial to humanity"s graceful mutation is the understanding and personal application of Einsteinian, neuro-genetic, quantum-physical perspectives of who we are and whom we choose to become.
THE EVOLUTION, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.
1. Info-Psychology Is the Science Which Studies the Evolution of the Nervous System from its Terrestrial-Mechanical-Collective Stages to its Post-Terrestrial-Quantum-Cyber Stages.
The psychologies of the Industrial Age, (1850-1975), while claiming to measure thinking, consciousness and behavior, for the most part studied the adjustment-maladjustment of human beings to social rituals and culturally defined constraint systems. Appearing at a time when feudal theology was losing its meaning for the growing cla.s.s of semi-educated, mechanical psychology provided a comforting rationale for domestication, a soothing pseudo-scientific language for supporting the values of the factory culture.
Industrial psychology, in spite of enormous, state-supported bureaucracies and its priesthood mystique, produced no verifiable theories for explaining human behavior nor any methods for solving the cla.s.sic problems of human society - crime, war, conflict, alienation, prejudice, stupidity, boredom, aggression, unhappiness, and philosphic ignorance about the meaning of life.
At the same time the psychology of the Industrial Age was becoming a priestly tech no-religion, the chemical, physical, information and biological sciences were quietly producing theories, facts and techniques which have profound implications for the changing of human nature.
Neurology locates the source of consciousness, memory, learning, and behavior in the nervous system - a one hundred billion cell bio-computer for which the body is transportational robot.
Clearly if we wish to understand and improve our mental, emotional and behavior functions, the locus of investigation is the nervous system. The person who can dial and tune the receptive, integrative, transmitting circuits of the nervous system is not just more intelligent, but can be said to operate at a higher and more complex level of evolution.
Pre-cyber humans maintain a rigid taboo about discussing or tampering with their nervous systems - a phobia which is based on a primitive fear of the unknown and a superst.i.tious reluctance to learn how to know. It is now evident that the nervous system is an incredibly powerful instrument for conscious evolution which can be understood and employed for genetic tasks by those who accept the "pilot" responsibility.
Ethology which studies animal behavior in the natural and experimental setting, has demonstrated the robot-instinctual nature of neural discrimination and the role of imprinting in determining when, and towards what, animal behavior is initiated.
Industrial Psychologists have failed to apply the findings of ethology to the human situation. The fact that most human emotional, mental, s.e.xual and ethical behavior is based on accidental imprinting of the nervous system during "critical" or "sensitive" periods of development is unsettling to mechanical-age cultures. If individuals learn how they were imprinted, they can learn how to re-imprint or reprogram their brains.
Neurochemistry has recently discovered that neurotransmitter chemicals which facilitate/inhibit nerve impulses and synaptic connections determine consciousness, emotion, memory, learning and behavior.
Psychopharmacology at the same time has discovered botanical and synthetic psycho-active agents which facilitate/inhibit states of consciousness, accelerate or dampen mental function, and permit cyber-persons to re-program.
Information Sciences: Around the turn of the century quantum physics presented three startling concepts which were to change human life. They can be paraphrased and popularized as follows: 1.Einstein"s Relativity equations suggested that everything (and everyone) is moving at velocities and directions which can best (or only) be determined in relationship to other coming units. The social and psychological implications are obvious.
2.The equations of Quantum Physics suggested that everything in the universe is made up of bits or elemental units of information. Solid Newtonian matter now becomes waves or clouds of on/off probabilities. Realities could be explained metaphorically as screens of digitized patterns.
3.Werner Heisenberg contributed a third idea which defines an Information Universe. His "uncertainty" axiom holds that our observations fabricate the subject matter, i.e. realities. We can only know what our sense-organs, our measuring instruments and our paradigms or maps describe.
These three principles which define the Info-universe were first expressed with paleolithic tools, chalk formulae on black boards. Almost no one could understand or accept this hallucinatory world in which everything is continually changing, is relative to viewpoint and dependent on our psychological att.i.tude and info-technology.
We can now see in retrospect that the historical genetic task of the Roaring 20th Century has been to dissolve our psychological attachment to solid, Newtonian structures and to familiarize us, to help us, feel comfortable inhabiting these digitized Info-worlds.
The task of personalizing and popularizing new "mystical" philosophic themes has always been a.s.signed to special genetic castes -- artists, writers, poets, bards, minstrels, story-tellers. So it was the Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, Pointillistes, Surrealists and others of this rowdy group who persuaded us to accept visual reality in terns of shifting planes and shimmering colors.
The jazz musicians gave sound to the Quantum principles. They improvised, syncopated, piloted. Best of all they harmonized, they learned how to form cyber-societies, pilots flying formation, attuning their subjective info-flights to those of the other musicians in the group.
Did not each decade of the Roaring 20th Century produce its quantum-appliance, its homey, comfortable, even addictive method of digitizing reality and projecting it on records, tapes and electron screens?
What a series of electronic product innovations! Waves of new digitized data inevitably surfing our species of Farmers and Industrial workers into the Quantum-Cyber future!
Radio! Film! Movies! Television! Portable sound ca.s.settes! Computer! Self-administered psychodrugs! Microwave ovens! Compact Disks! CB radios! -- Each preparing us to live choicefully, extravagantly in the Info-world!
These Einsteinian and other discoveries have predictably traumatized those psychologists who are committed both professionally and theologically to static, Newtonian, concepts of human personality.
These four sciences provide an impressive convergence of evidence suggesting that the brain is a bio-chemical-electric-computer in which each nerve impulse acts as an information "quanta" or "bit"; that the nervous system is structurally wired into genetically pre-programmed circuits designed to automatically select and relay certain perceptual cues and to discharge rote reactions; that imprinting of models accidentally present in the environment at critical periods determines the tunnel realities in which humans live.
We are led to conclude that the human being, at this stage of evolution, is a biological robot (biot) automatically responding to genetic template and childhood imprinting.
The unflattering portrait of h.o.m.o sapiens suggested by the evidence from these "new" sciences -- neurology, ethology, neurochemistry, and psychopharmacology -- is, of course, quite unacceptable to psychologists and religious leaders who enunciate theories about "man"s" separate, superior and "chosen" status among living forms.
We need not be surprised at "man"s" flattering, self-appraisal. Since the "island realities" which we inhabit are defined by genetic template and imprint we can only evaluate ourselves in terms of the symbols which our nervous systems have created.
If we can imagine an anthropological report about h.o.m.o sapiens written by extra-terrestrial scientists from a more advanced civilization, we can a.s.sume that humanity"s inability to solve its psychological, social and ecological problems or to provide answers to basic cosmological questions (e.g. why are we here and where are we going? Note: For some interesting speculative answers see Breaking the G.o.dSpell and The Sapiens System both Falcon books) would lead to the conclusion that h.o.m.o sapiens is a species capable of very limited robot-reactivity and that Intelligent Life has not yet evolved on this planet.
Such an extra-terrestrial survey could also report the emergence of a rudimentary intelligence, as evidenced by the Einsteiman perspectives of the sciences just discussed and by the implications of four other sciences which have significance for human destiny in the future: astronautics, astro-physics, genetics and quantum physics.
Astronautic: The significance of extra-terrestrial flight has not yet been fully understood. The Apollo missions were more than technological triumphs or nationalistic achievements. Genetically and neurologically the beginning of a species mutation has occurred -- equal in importance to the first amphibian movement from water-to-land early in biological history.
There can be no question that humanity has begun its migration to interplanetary and eventual interstellar existence. The effects of this transition on the nervous system and the DNA code will be profound. Just as amphibian and land-dwelling organisms mutated rapidly, developing the neural and physiological equipment for the new environment -- so will humans mutate rapidly living in High-Orbit.
Exposure to zero-gravity and to extra-terrestrial radiation are two of many physical stimuli which will trigger-off the genetic and neurological changes necessary to adapt to interstellar life.
The psychological effects will be dramatic. s.p.a.ce migration requires accelerated, relativistic, multi-dimensional flexibility of which the nervous system is capable. It is inevitable that extraplanetary humans will be as advanced beyond current earth-dwellers as "man" is beyond the cave-dwelling ancestors. The beginnings of this process of exo-psychological adaptation can be noted in several lunar astronauts and E.V.A. veterans who returned claiming cosmic insights (Mitch.e.l.l), philosophic revelations (Schweikart), and rebirth symptoms (Aldrin).
Astro-physics has also produced facts which stretch the limits of psychological vision. We learn to our delight that we are not alone -- that perhaps as many as half of the 100 billion or more stars in our local galaxy are older than our sun, making it highly probable that more advanced forms of intelligent life are around the neighborhood. Humans have so far been neurologically incapable of conceiving of Higher Intelligence. Even science fiction writers, with very few exceptions (Stapledon, Asinine, Clarke and others), have been unable to specify the manifestations of superior species, except as technological extrapolations and bizarre extremes of current human culture.
Whatever the mind can conceive it tends to create. As soon as humans accept and neurologically imprint the notion of higher levels of intelligence and of circuits of the nervous system as yet unactivated -- a new philosophy of evolution will emerge. It is natural to call this extra-planetary perspective of human evolution Exo-psychology -- human nature seen in the context of an evolving nervous system, from the vantage point of older species which now exist in our extra-terrestrial future.
Genetics has revealed that DNA blueprints which reside in the nucleus of every living cell are remarkably similar from species to species. Astronomers and exo-biologists have discovered the molecules which are basic to life in outer s.p.a.ce and in other star systems. The DNA code can now be seen as a temporal blueprint unfolding sequentially like a tape-spool, transmitting preprogrammed construction plans. In the individual this code unfolds through predetermined stages from infancy, through childhood, adolescence, maturity, menopause, aging and death. A fixed time schedule similarly unfolds in the evolution of species.
The DNA code contains the blueprint of the past and the future. The caterpillar DNA contains the design for construction and operation of the b.u.t.terfly body.
It has long been known that individual ontology recapitulates species phylogeny -- that the human embryo, for example, repeats the evolutionary cycle; grows gills, is covered with hair, etc. The psycho-neural time-perspective implications of this fact have never been seriously studied.[1]
Geneticists are just now discovering "unused" sections of the DNA, masked by histones and activated by nonhistone proteins, which are thought to contain the blueprint of the future. Evolution is not a blind, accidental, improvising process. The DNA code is a prospective blueprint which can be deciphered.
Just as an engineer could study the flow-charts of an auto-a.s.sembly plant and see how a car is put together in a sequence of future operations -- so can the histone-masked sections of the DNA code be studied to determine the sequence of future evolution. The instruments for deciphering the DNA message are neurological and neurochemical. The science which studies the two-way communication between DNA-RNA and the nervous system is called Neurogenetics.
Astronomy and astronautics persuade us that interstellar travel lies ahead in humanity"s future. Extra-terrestrial existence will involve an advanced, mutated nervous system and inevitable contact with superior intelligence.[2]
Neurogenetics is a new science (with a respectable journal and membership dues) which studies the psychology -- i.e. the consciousness and behavior -- of DNA-RNA. Neurogenetics may be called a branch of exo-psychology if we a.s.sume that DNA contelligence is not restricted to planet earth, but, indeed, was probably originated by and designed to return to extra-terrestrial intelligence. (See Freer"s book Breaking the G.o.dSpell.) It is becoming clear that the nucleus of the atom is a complex organization of powerful forces which operate according to relationship-laws (excitement, charm, spin, parity, resonance). Just as the DNA code, located in the nucleus of the cell, is the genetic brain which, via RNA, designs and manufactures bodies and nervous systems, so can we conceive of the nucleus of the atom as the elemental "brain" which designs and constructs atoms and molecules according to quantum logic.
Quantum physics: It is now conjectured that all matter and energy in the universe operates in a "general informational field" which can be understood in terms of the relativistic interaction among the basic forces that exist in nature: *gravitational *electro-magnetic *strong force (subatomic) *weak force (radiational) Primitive psychology was based, at best, on Newtonian "laws" and, for the most part, was geocentric (closet Ptolemaist). Even the most poetic Freudians, Behaviorists and Transactional a.n.a.lysts have not allowed their theories of human behavior to be influenced by the Einsteinian revolution which has dramatically changed our understanding of the structure of the universe.
Quantum-psychology begins to study the "psychology" - i.e. the consciousness and behavior - of atomic particles and to relate electronics and atomics to human consciousness and behavior. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler"s work suggests that the atomic nucleus can receive, remember, integrate and transmit information at extremely high-velocities and can probably engage in most of the basic social behavior that we observe in living organisms.
Interpersonal, emotional (i.e. motional), intellectual and social affairs at the electronic level and their transception by the nervous system define neuroelectronics.
Interpersonal, emotional, intellectual, and social events at the subatomic, nuclear level and their transception by the nervous system define neuroatomics. Eric Drexler"s essays on nanotechnology provide a breathtaking atomic perspective of cyber-navigation at this level.
Our understanding of atomic and nuclear processes has been limited by our language-logic-imagination-philosophy which tends to be Euclidean, Newtonian. We inevitably "psychologize" nature and personalize atomic events. Our laryngeal-muscular minds, imprinted in primitive childhood, cannot conceive of what we cannot conceive of; cannot experience what we have never experienced.
Our dialogue with DNA and our conversations with atomic-subatomic and astronomical energy signals must, however, be two-way. We must open our "minds" to decode the signals which are being sent to our nervous systems by DNA and by quantum structures. When we geneticize our psychology, i.e. think like DNA-RNA, we see the current human condition as a transient phase in the evolution of the nervous system. Since DNA creates us, it is logically diplomatic and theologically conventional (image of G.o.d) to relate our psychology to the laws and designs of molecular intelligence. Since the nucleus of the atom designs atoms and molecules, it is logical to relate our psychology to the laws and structures of nuclear physics and astronomy; to think of ourselves as "atoms" or even "stars" radiating, decaying, attracting, repelling, receiving and transmitting along frequency spectra, resonating, forming molecular social structures, possessing a characteristic electro-magnetic personality, moving through energy networks with relativistic form, U.S.W.
Since our primitive psychological systems based on Newtonian geocentric principles have done little to enlighten or harmonize human philosophy, does it seem too fanciful to suggest that we should, in the future, base our psychological concepts on the laws and structures of physics, chemistry, and astronomy; and seek to explain human behavior in terms of natural rather than national inter-relatings?
Primitive, geo-centric, egocentric, socio-centric psychology, ignoring the laws of bio-chemistry and physics, constructs a philosophy of mammalian emotions, Euclidean laryngeal-muscular symbols, and parochial values to explain "man and his universe."
Exo-psychology views human destiny in terms of an evolving nervous system, designed by DNA intelligence (which uses planets as temporary embryonic nesting sites, in an interstellar migratory process destined to extend life-span, life-scope) to become symbiotic transceivers of quantum-physical contelligence.
[1]The theory of serial imprinting suggests that psychology recapitulates phylogeny. That the individual nervous system repeats the evolutionary sequence. That the baby imprints an invertebrate reality, the crawling child a mammalian reality, the pre-school child a paleolithic reality, the adolescent a domesticated-civilized reality.
[2]Some astronomers now state that Superior Intelligence does not exist in the universe because "they" have not contacted us or responded to our radio signals. Such conclusions ill.u.s.trate the negative bias of conventional science. There is, of course, no scientific basis for claiming or denying the existence of Higher Intelligence. Time-dilation factors complicate the matter; if a s.p.a.ceship were hurtling towards us at close to light-speed, millions of years would elapse on earth for every year in flight. There is no basis for dogmatic statement.
THE EVOLUTION, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.
2. Info-psychology (Psi-Phy) Is the Psychology of Quantum Physics: Philosophy Based on Scientific Fact.
The theories presented in this transmission might be called Science Faction, or Philosophy of Science, or Psychology of Physics. Psi Phy.[1]
They are scientific in that they are based on empirical findings from physics, physiology, pharmacology, genetics, astronomy, behavioral psychology, information science, and most important, neurology.
They are fictional in the Wittgensteinian sense that all theories and speculations beyond the mathematical propositions of natural science are subjective.
They are factional in the sense that current advances in s.p.a.ce Migration, Neurologic and the Life Extension sciences have already gone beyond the fantasies of most science fiction writers. Science Fact is now farther-out than Science Fiction. We are now creating a future which is more incredible than 2001. O"Neill s.p.a.ce cylinders are more complex and advanced than Clarke-Kubrick s.p.a.ce-ships.
This book was written in various prisons to which the author had been sentenced for dangerous ideology and violations of Newtonian and religious laws.
Other philosophers (notably Christian theologians, statistical materialists, Marxian dialecticians) make different interpretations of the currently available corpus of scientific fact. Such theories, however popular, are equally fictional. History suggests that philosophies accepted as academic dogma or enforced by punitive legal sanctions are not necessarily any less fictional than those which are persecuted and censored. Indeed, there is some sociological evidence that science fictions are forcibly suppressed only when they are more likely to accelerate human evolution than the defensive orthodoxies which they challenge. We think of Socrates, Bruno, Copernicus, Darwin, Pasteur, Sakharov.
[1]"Everyone writes science fiction ... most write it without having the slightest idea that they are doing so." Joyce Carol Oates.