By the Late John Brockman

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062326782
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

A radical, experimental work that challenges the boundaries of poetry, philosophy, and science. First published in 1969, this new and expanded edition of John Brockman's first book, By The Late John Brockman, also includes the full text of 37 (1971), and Afterwords (1973).

This edition features a new foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery and author of Ways of Curating.

John Brockman

1941–1969

I

Man is dead.

The choice is between the present and the past. The choice is between choice and no choice. There is no choice.

Man is dead, and all the categories that created and characterized human existence must be reconsidered. The key to elimination of words? Ownership. Replace all words pertaining to ownership with words concerning functions, operations. What did man own? Consciousness, feelings, emotions, mind, egos spirit, soul, pain, etc., words resulting from centuries of belief, and no longer useful.

Consciousness does not exist; indeed, there is no reason to believe that it ever did exist. Not conscious, not unconscious. If consciousness does not exist, there can hardly be a state of unconsciousness.

Man is an abstraction. Human abstractions are based on the past, on behavior, not on operant considerations of what is happening. Considerations of the present? Patterns. Transaction. Activity. Doing. Considerations of the past? Behavior. Environment. Man.

The abstractions of man characterize phenomena without regard to the operant activities of the phenomena. It is a limited system of classification.

How to deal with what is happening? Search for rhythms and patterns. Man is dead. The analysis moves from the study of fixed entities that are capable of ownership to the transaction of the species with environmental forces. Look to the transaction. “The world about us is accessible only through a nervous system, and our information concerning it is confined to what limited information the nervous system can transmit.”¹ The brain receives information and acts on it by telling the effectors what to do. The loop is completed as the performance of the effectors provides new information for the brain. It is a new feedback loop, a nonlinear relationship between output and input.

Man always dealt with what had already happened, believing that it occurred in the present instant. What he thought was happening coincides approximately between steps two and three of the loop. “Man was aware only of the past, and never aware of the activities of his brain, where there are order and arrangement, but there is no experience of the creation of that order. Experience gives us no clue as to the means by which it is organized. If the organization were produced by a slide rule or a digital computer, consciousness would give no indication of that fact nor any basis for denying it. If the brain is capable of producing such organization, then it may be considered the organizer.”²

To understand these notions, it is necessary to explore the concept of the interval. The interval refers to the moment of the creation of the order of the brain’s activity. The activity of which man was never aware, the inaccessible present, the direct experience of the brain. “The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and unexpected bearers. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal, it is a past action, no longer embraced by the ‘now’ of present being. The perception of a signal happens ‘now,’ but its impulse happened then. In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected.”³ This instant, the interval, constitutes all that is directly experienced. It was for man the abstraction, his Achilles’ heel.

In this evolutionary stage, a stage beyond space and time, the interval is closed forever, and man ceases to exist.

Man ordered his experience in terms of psychological considerations of the nonexistent mind. But the ordering of experience is always on the here-andnow level. The interpretation of the ordering is always at the there-and-then level. Be aware that the brain’s operation is a continuing activity of ordering in the here-and now. There was always ordering in the here-and-now while man deluded himself with considerations there-and-then, considerations of a world that didn’t exist. A world that never had existed. The world of the past. A fractional instant, and yet the past. Because of that interval man was able to exist. Man, a relic of the instantaneous past. Man, an instant too old to exist. Things not existent should be of no interest to us. All those things rendered unto man are based on a system that deals with illusion. The interpretation of the ordering of the brain takes place while new ordering is continually happening. It is almost as though there were two parallel planes.

Almost. We might even assume there was a choice between living in one plane or another. Actually, there is no choice. There is no choice. There is only the ordering and arrangement, the here-and-now. Some of us, most of us, cannot recognize this level and continue by blindness, by inertia, by pretension, the delusion that we are men. It’s a mistake. Man is dead. Man never existed at all. Our awareness as experience is past experience. Dreaming.

Man is dead. It’s a world of information. Information in this context refers to regulation and control and has nothing to do with meaning, ideas, or data. “Any system is said to be able to receive information if when a change occurs the system is capable of reactions in such a way as to maintain its own stability.”⁴ Information is nothing but an abstraction. As an abstraction it will allow for new observations and associations, for discernment of patterns and organization. Note that the reference is to a reaction to change. The concern here is only with the reaction, the effect. Information is a measure of the effect. This refers to how the control center of the organism, the brain, reacts to change in order to maintain continuity.

We are dealing with activity integrated on the neural, the brain level, i.e., the present. Thus, when discussing information, we are talking about the brain’s response in terms of present, direct experience. This response is always effected without consent or awareness. There is no choice. There is no information unless there is a change. “Information does not exist as information until it is within the higher levels of abstraction of each of the minds and computed as such. Up to the point at which it becomes perceived as information, it is signals. These signals travel through the external reality between the two bodies, and travel as signals within the brain substances themselves. Till the complex patterns of traveling neuronal impulses in the brain are computed as information within the cerebral cortex, they are not yet information. Information is the result of a long series of computations based on data signal inputs, data signal transmissions to the brain substance, and recomputations of these data.”⁵ Information is an abstraction to be used for measuring the communication of pattern, order, and neural inhibition.

What is the information from an electric light bulb? No information. What is the information from a book? No information. “To speak of a change as giving information implies that there is somewhere a receiver able to react appropriately to the change.”⁶ Be concerned only with the changes in the operations of the receiver, the brain, in terms of the transactional present. Do not confuse information with signals or the source of signals. “The mind of the observer-participant is where the information is constructed, by and through his own programs, his own rules of perception, his own cognitive and logical processes, his own metaprogram of priorities among programs. His own vast internal computer constructs information from signals and stored bits of signals.”⁷ Information is a process. There are no sources of information; there are no linear movements of information to the brain.

Information is an abstraction. Information is a measure of effect. Information is a concept that allows for relationships not previously possible. Effect deals with the construction of information from both incoming signals and bits of signals stored in the operant circuits of the brain. The incoming signals are transmitted by both internal and external receptors. “Effect involves the total situation and not a single level of information movement.”⁸ There are no single levels of information movement. The total situation is the neural situation, the process of the nervous system. This system is operational. “All that’s traceably happening is a shimmering array of pattern shifting occurring in a centerless, edgeless network. It’s measurable piecemeal: trivial. The whole is unmeasurable indeed except through effects.”⁹ Information is the measure of effect, the measure of the ordering of the brain’s activity in the transactional present.

Communications theory is the study of messages. In this system, the message is nonlinear. The communication, the message, is pattern, order, neural inhibition. The message is the change in neural activity. It can be considered as a program, and a “program is nothing else but a set of commands: “do this; do that . . .” which in other words means: “don’t do this; don’t do that . . .”¹⁰ We are dealing with the transmission of neural pattern from “a brain and its outputs, through a specifiable set of processes to the external world, through a portion of that world with specifiable modes, media and artificial means to another body, another brain.”¹¹ We are dealing with a set of relationships which allows us to conceptualize the communication of neural experience. The difference between human experience and neural experience is the differ...