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The Alien Is Under Construction
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tomas w
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Mar 21, 2005 13:02 PST
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Dear Friends,
More interesting thoughts from Colin Bennett.
http://www.phenomenamagazine.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Area+51&action=page&obj_id=2751&type_id=3&cat_id=132&sub_id=0
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The Fighting Temeraire, 1838. Colin Bennett Returns
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Monday, March 21, 2005
By: COLIN BENNETT : Phenomena Contributor
The Alien is Under Construction
Part 1: The Answer to Fermi’s Question
“Referring to alien life, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question
where are they? The answer is quite simple – the alien has not yet been
assembled within the system of cultural allowances."
Colin Bennett An American Demonology
“I am sitting in a video conference at Kavli Institute of Theoretical
Physics at UCSB with Peter Galison's face on a big screen and three
actors reading from his book ‘Einstein's Clocks & Poincare's Maps’ all
about clock synchronization in modern technology!”
Jack Sarfatti, author of Destiny Matrix
1. The Old Ufology: Measurement as Truth
Apart from a mention of Postmodernism, there is nothing like the word
metaphysics to raise fire and steam from the nostrils of the “nut and
bolt” gurus of the Old Ufology. C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” problem is
acute within Ufology in general. The Victorian station master mechanical
“scientists” who think that they are preachers of the Word of God hardly
refer to literature, philosophy or the arts for conceptual modeling if
only because unfortunately, these days a degree in science or a training
in engineering or technology offers little or no knowledge of such
things, and can therefore hardly be called an education proper. The
concept creation (with brilliant exceptions such as The Tao of Physics)
of most of the “scientists” of the Old Ufology is on average limited to
that of a mid-1950s garage, factory, or workshop where documents, dates
and times and angles are put together in superficially “rational”
production sequence, with hard-wired calculable inputs and outputs.
Putting a head into the Old Ufology is to put it into a modular workshop
full of earnest and sober and superbly dull engineering project managers
and scientific civil servants. They all appear to be banging away with
hammers on many and various documentary anvils of old-fashioned
bureaucratic mechanical science. Like the characters in Kafka’s novel
The Trial, many are obsessed with the minutiae of old case histories and
archives in a manner reminiscent of the anonymous author of the
fourteenth-century mystical treatise Swester Katrei, who considered how
many angels could sit on the point of a needle.
When the future digs up these Old Ufology skeletons from the nuclear
dust, surely the first thing to be seen will be databases as big as the
Ritz. These will be confused no doubt with anthills, which they are
indeed, for all practical purposes. The future will probably think about
them as we ourselves stare in wonder at suddenly deserted Mayan temples
and wonder what they were for, and why they were abandoned so quickly.
The Old Ufology must be an unusual case of where, whilst the phenomenon
studied is becoming increasingly evident, the numbers within the various
study groups are declining. Perhaps this happened to the Mayans, but
compared to Mayan culture, and despite the efforts of a few valiant
gifted individuals, the Old Ufology as it stands is a very crude affair.
Its intellectual sophistication is not great, and it spurns higher
studies such as Postmodernism. Yet all around it the waters of
Postmodernism and other kinds of advanced interpretational
multi-disciplinary studies are lapping around its tiny 19th century
island. Soon the Old Ufology, as in Turner’s painting, The Fighting
Temeraire, will be towed into the breaking-up yard of modern history.
In addition to being rooted in 19th century mechanical concepts,
compared with the above, the Old Ufology at the grass roots level is
perversely anti-modern and anti-intellectual in the bargain. The mere
mention of Barthes, Borges (or Vallee or Sontag) on UFO discussion lists
such as the MUFON-dominated UFO Updates List angers the Old Ufological
bureaucratic ledger clerks who appear to think that the mere making of
countless long lists of past cases is what “research” is all about. Many
such “investigators” (almost none of whom have had a UFO experience)
pile up more case histories, documentation lists, and security
classifications than pancakes on a Shrove Tuesday.
But in other areas things are very different. Here for example is the
kind of wider culture the Old Ufology is isolated from. It is an example
of what is happening as far as discussion between New Physics and the
Arts is concerned. It is taken from the description of a conference
recently held (Mar 03 2005 - Mar 05 2005) entitled Science, Theatre,
Audience: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. The Conference was
co-hosted by the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
(http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu) and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced recently that the Nobel
Prize in Physics has been awarded to David Gross, Director of the Kavli
Institute.
Read the following and guess what is missing – Ufology and the UFO!
“This conference will address questions in a dynamic range of
presentations, special events, and meetings that will bring together,
and enable discussion among, scientists, specialists in drama and
narrative studies, playwrights, novelists, biographers, and science
journalists who ordinarily do not have the opportunity for such
interactions. The schedule will be designed deliberately to place
specialists from different areas in contact and conversation with one
another so that, for example, a expert in narrative with expertise in
temporality and cognitive dimensionality can be in discussion with a
cosmologist with expertise in the physics of space-time, or an
experimental physicist can converse with a performance specialist on
enactment, embodiment, and performance demonstration.”
Talk like that to Stanton Friedman and you would get naught for your
comfort!
The proposed X conference (April 22-24 2005
http://www.paradigmclock/X-Conference/speakers.htm) organized by Stephen
Bassett reflects hardly anything of such advanced Postmodern complexity,
though it has to be said that speaker Richard Dolan has recently
contributed two fine papers on UFO politics which bring the subject into
the big picture.
Spurning such rich connectivity, Old Ufology has fallen into that
classic form of decadence that affected late Rome and Byzantium alike:
it has become little more than a bureaucratic document cult dominated by
office memorandum classifications and vast and intellectually passive
Victorian-style lists and data-bases. These are used more often than not
as an excuse for not thinking analytically. This extremely
unsophisticated and limited mechanical view is hopelessly tangled in the
minutiae of times and dates, places, and angles and minute office
nomenclatures of ancient government documentation. This garage-view is
probably the reason why the Old Ufology has not entered a single
university department. This view is so inward-looking that some Old
Ufologists still believe that scrambling around in countless old ancient
archives will suddenly reveal the key “solution” to the UFO problem.
Such garage-rationalism playing the great cultural “physical evidence”
game has resulted in some of the most amazing spare-parts directories in
all human history, with many books on UFOs rivaling the great Baedekers
of the 19th century. This was a time when major social-scientific
processes were thought to be fully understood; the world of appearances
was safe and well: it was a world in which doctors cured people,
policemen arrested criminals, and governments defended freedoms. In the
19th century, when a train hit a wall, it left a hole fit for its size,
as distinct from our own Boeing 757, which left a hole in the Pentagon
wall fit for a decent motorized ice-cream cart. Certainly the 19th
century would not have lost completely the wings and the engines, which
in the Pentagon case appear to have disappeared into limbo or
hyperspace, or perhaps were not there in the first place.
If Charles Dickens would have problems understanding such aspects of the
early 21st century, he would certainly have recognized the nut-and-bolt
school of Old Ufology who think that practical science sixth-form
science is the only way to Truth. Once Jesus told us how to behave
ourselves, and now it is the men who tell us to measure things. They are
the Way and the Life. Measurement as Truth is an Orwellian dictate if
ever there was. Scientists who still see the universe as a well-oiled
machine running on regular number sequences are like a set of
wallpapering circus clowns trying to seal leaks on the walls of the
Grand Cooley Dam.
Many people, particularly those who have had a UFO experience, or indeed
a mystical experience relating to such a thing are quite rightly
refusing to let the Cartesian mechanicals of the Old Ufology hijack the
UFO experience.
The Cartesians themselves are in trouble. The problem is that no longer
are social and scientific processes described by visible hard-wired flow
diagrams in which one thing was seen to be quite mechanically connected
to another, each stage of which could project-managed, measured, and
predicted. A radio and TV engineer of a previous generation would check
for voltage levels and current flow; he would “look” for a leaky
capacitor or a burnt-out coil. Such visible connections have long ago
vanished into the VLSI chip alone, and discussion of current flow and
voltages in such a device is now almost meaningless as information.
Almost no one can know what happens in a chip in the finite sense, just
as we now do not know what we are eating, any more than we know what
happened on 9/11, or indeed who governs us. Despite the best efforts of
over forty years, we are still unable to put together a single
“factually correct” twenty-four-hour frame of a single Lee Oswald day.
As the film The Matrix shows, the deeper we go into a system the more
complicated it becomes. This because it appears that Nature does indeed
move the goalposts since Nature appears not to like being observed too
closely.
There is no doubt that the point-to-point wiring Lego-land universe of
the strict Cartesians has slipped from us. When we cannot possible
conceive an impossible number of finites as are in the chip, we create
an image. The chip is now only meaningful as an image of control and
complexity; its vast inner connectivity is quite beyond finite
conception at any one time by any one individual. This situation is
getting worse (or better –it depends on the point of view!) by the day.
As chip density increases, “knowledge” of finite processes in the
traditional sense will slip from us.
Thus have we become controlled by such image-engineering rather than
“facts.” We reason by images; they possess almost our entire
consciousness. There is no OFF switch for Television and its stream of
images. Whether we possess a set or not is now irrelevant. As such,
situations and events are no longer seen as factual or objective. They
are seen as reflections of groups and personalities, performances and
theatres. Current Western metaphors, for example, are essentially
consumer-oriented. Most are derived from showbiz and entertainment,
media, personality cults, advertisements, and the glamour industry. By
comparison as an attractive proposition, the scientist rates zero, and
few metaphors are minted from scientific ideas. Despite massive cultural
propaganda, scientists in general are still regarded as vaguely
B-feature threatening, with the white coat and the hypodermic needle
never very far away in the unconscious. To many, the phrase “facts and
statistics” sounds vaguely like an old Communist threat from the grim
cardboard suits of the old Leonard Brezhnev commissars.
The Iron Age “science” of MUFON, for example is positively retro-cult
Soviet. Some MUFON “research” papers are a reminder of clogs,
jute-sacking shirts, and thick grey toilet paper on which a Commissar
could an essay on Dialectics of the Industrial Collective before putting
such a thing to its proper use.
Having had a UFO experience, I for one refuse to let such Victorian
station masters take over the UFO experience and stalk the planet as if
they were Lords of all creation.
2. Granny in the Disco
These echoes and impressions were most evident in the recent Peter
Jennings TV programme. The reactions to this programme by Ufologists
showed that even after fifty years of an intense presence, TV is little
understood as a visual medium. As such “fact” relates to TV as much as
“fact” does to a distorted Picasso face, or a Dali landscape. Each and
every TV appearance is necessarily a performance, not a telephonic
analogue communication designed to impart specific “factual”
information. TV is essentially a non-cerebral medium: it is about what
things look and sound like, not their “objective” worth, which matters
little on the screen.
But for better or for worse, if you are not on TV regularly, you are
nobody. Style and performance are the key to success on TV but Carl
Sagan, the John De Lorean of Ufology is no longer with us (RIP).
Ufologists and scientists score zero on style, and even less on
performance, and the lacklustre result was predictable. On this
particular programme, the role of Ufologists was predictably that of
rather dismal small-town solicitors full of MUFON common sense and
practicality. Like MUFON itself, they came off as sober, reliable, and
supremely boring. The sceptics “performed” as usual: acting the role of
rather faceless, mediocre and plausible “hard working” folk. Thus
opposing shades of opinion were delivered by people whose personalities
made the Rock of Ages look like the Woodchopper’s Ball. On this TV
showing poor pedestrian scepticism fared no better. Like MUFON,
scepticism was very much the baffled granny in the disco, with time and
era strobing over her face.
None of these pseudo-credible images had anything to do with “fact.” TV
is never able to deliver fact, no more than is a still photographer able
to deliver the “truth” about a face. What we got was grainy images
struggling for prime time, not “facts” at all.
Not even the Communists in their heyday could make TV deliver
information in this old hard-wired sense of “facts.” Though of course
not politically communist, nevertheless the Old Ufology speaks in the
language of this era, which George Orwell might have called Docubox.
This is an old communist pre-consumer language game in which there are
no similes, metaphors, or images, just archive box numbers and security
classifications, and the analogies to collective-farm production
statistics from way back when down Comintern Lane. As Arthur Koestler’s
novel Darkness at Noon shows, this was the language of Soviet Commissars
in the 1950s. In this sense, many of the resulting list-strewn Old
Ufology texts are enough to make warthogs roll over and die, cross-eyed
with grief. Even the Dean Martin songbook comes off better as a measure
of the beloved “real.”
Nowhere in this palsied Cartesian machine is there ever expressed a
sense of awe, wonder, or magic. The commercials in the Peter Jennings
show were of a lot more interest compared to all those dour faces giving
us low-grade commercials from their own culture which were highly
suspicious accounts of “how the universe works” and what is “real” and
what is “fantasy.”
Yes, like TV, Old Ufology is dead in the advertising water.
The UFO is worth more than this tatty TV. It represents still an
exciting, romantic and deeply mystical phenomenon; it is intellectually
erotic, and powerfully inspirational. Its analysis involves disciplines
of many vital cultural sectors. As far as being a symbol is concerned,
its history and effects, its scandals, and its associated conspiracies
have also a glamour that rivals the greatest stars of stage and screen.
After some fifty years, the UFO remains very much a futuristic Star
performer, and this irresistible fascination is still very much with us.
As an entertainment phenomenon alone, the UFO and all its associations
still occupies a major sector.
We heard nothing of this on the Jennings show. We heard old men, old
ideas, old science, and very much Old Ufology. This TV show was a fine
expression of Spengler’s Decline of the West in terms of the fall from
ethos to technos.
3. Assassins and UFOs as Stars
Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Agatha Christie would properly have
understood the lowering of the significance of “objective fact” in our
TV-controlled consumer cosmos. For them, criminals (especially
assassins) came from a definite somewhere. They did not appear (like for
example Lee Harvey Oswald) to have just stepped out from a bubbling
chemical bath trailing wires to press cartoon triggers at cartoon
people. Many (such as Hinckley and Sirhan Sirhan) were motivated in the
main by media images over and above mechanical political or social
drives. Oswald’s politics were a veritable collage of many different
political spectrums derived from both Left and Right positions. He spoke
on local radio, and he gave TV interviews. After his arrest, when
countless microphones and TV cameras were pushed into front of his face,
he beams, and is immediately transformed from a nameless waif and stray
into a regular Star Trek TV manikin.
Oswald knew he was doomed, but for him, being a Big Star, if only for a
moment, beat almost anything as an experience. This was his moment. He
had conquered death through Stardom, which is the highest of all highs,
quite demolishing past and future, all relative values, and much else
besides.
Just like Oswald, hardly a single assassin had much to do with that
bundle of well-understood spanner-mechanisms that most identity with the
material world. All were concerned with how they were perceived by the
world as a performer. Their guilt and innocence in the traditional sense
came secondary. Their motivation was derived from those image-conflicts
in the sub-texts to the material world that “objectivity” denies. With
objectivity those conspiracies that make up all matter and experience
cannot be seen. The advertising structure with thoughts and events is
concealed. The “observer” is blinded whilst the moves take place, and
the motivating suggestions are put covertly put in place. Such an
observer has no reconnaissance capability. Deep background becomes zero.
Our foolhardy observer will get blinded and wiped out. Authority says
(and science is Authority if it is nothing else) forget Michael Faraday,
Oliver Lodge, and Marconi, and all the immeasurable richness associated
with those names. Just watch the needle swing on the multi-meter, and
that’s all you need to know, period. Make further enquiries about how
and why the needle moves, and you will get into terrible trouble. George
Orwell come back soon, all is forgiven!
But once our intrepid observer replaces the singular molecular idea by
the idea of information, he remembers the trail back to the source
context that has been airbrushed out of the comrade’s official
photograph. The universal lights are switched on again. What does he
remember? That Faraday’s inductive “lines of force” are a metaphor.
Since our whole and entire electrical culture rests on the pillar of
this single metaphysical assumption, it is rather important that he does
remember.
4. Looking for Orthon
As regards images again, a great deal of the energy of Old Ufology is
expended on casting out those reprobates who dare to go near to the
borders of the absolutely ridiculous by claiming for example that they
met a man from Venus. Traditional Old Ufologists in general say that
such people are “bad for the image” of Ufology. But the strange thing
about such so-called “fantasists” as George Adamski is that they arouse
fear out of all proportion to the physical and intellectual threat they
represent. Of course the likes of Adamski (and Corso) are plain liars to
simple-minded mechanicals. In their binary colonization, there are only
shades of black and white.
Some future computer, if asked to design something that aroused maximum
bourgeois outrage would possibly come up with George Adamski’s
extraterrestrial Orthon as a good candidate. The mechanism of the
rejection of such “absurd” figures for mechanical acceptance is build
around the need not so much to deny Orthon, but to bring him back to
garage-proportion of the lower middle class in order to preserve proper
trading relations. Most scientists (bless their impoverished test-tube
souls!) are from this social group and often exhibit paranoia of the
worst curtain-twitching kind as concerns “odd” folk with “kook” claims.
The atmosphere of say, Donna Kossy’s books Kooks and Strange Creations:
Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes
is that of a respectable mother nervous about her kids wandering to the
wrong side of night town.
It might therefore come as a surprise to Ufological outsiders that
Ufological groups do not consist of the mad, but those often too sane to
think properly. These people often carry out Maoist-like “outing” of
what they term eccentrics, weirdoes and oddballs. These are described
usually by the mechanical metaphor of “noise in the system.” Roswell
witnesses for example have been threatened, pressured and interrogated
as much as by believers as by skeptics.
This is a typical petite-bourgeois filter as applied by respectable
traders who have earned their first money the hard way. Whilst most,
quite rightly, say power to their hard-working, elbow, there is no doubt
that people such as Adamski arouse the greatest trading fear of all:
that someone somewhere might be getting something for nothing.
The Fortean, or holistic or Post-modern view is that the claim for the
“reality” of Orthon is neither “true” (in the sense of our binary
colonization) or “false” but is a kind of intermediate form of
information. The function and “reality” of such a form can be defined in
terms of the level of profound disturbance such elemental figures as
Orthon cause within the focus of the mainstream Ufological investigating
groups. This is sufficient for Orthon to be judged as a candidate for
rejection as regards most levels and frequencies of perception.
When we imagine we create a form of life. Such forms are a vital
functional component of all thinking, but unfortunately due to the
decline of the older systems of education and their replacement by
little more than technical training, the great imagination or “shaping
spirit” as Shakespeare and Coleridge knew it, is now little understood
as part of the process of cultural construction.
We all live in a fluid of inspirations supported by the most outrageous
of individual and national fantasies, without which we would all be
spiritually very dead. A man claims he has seen a moth-winged fairy in
traditional doublet and hose. A woman says such things do not exist. In
the subtraction between the pushes and pulls of belief claims, a little
something is always left over.
This we might call a liminal, or half form. It “lives” in the liminal
region between fact and fiction, a kind of information life we are
encountering more frequently in our Post-modern age.
Orthon exists in this liminal region, together with countless other
forms, such as Bigfoot, or indeed (as we shall see) a performance by
Marilyn Monroe. The half-life energies of these partial forms are rarely
sufficiently strong to make a fully scheduled appearance. But
occasionally these shadow figures summon up enough energy to make a raid
on the mechanical world sufficient for the kind of momentary appearance
described by Jacques Vallee in Passport to Magonia. Such fast transient
events also shed light on the puzzling lack of both predictability and
stability in psychic experimentation discussed in the book such as The
World of Ted Serios by Jules Eisenbud, and Mind-Reach by Puthoff and
Targ. Also, in the various Field Guide series of books by Loren Coleman
and Patrick Huyghe, (such as The Field to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other
Mystery Primates Worldwide) the various animal forms reported are
bewilderingly incomplete. There is no food swathe, no evidence of
fights, illness, urine, fur
or faeces. There is no mass of DNA from saliva, sweat, or wounds, and
there are no corpses or evidence of lairs or nests. Yet the Bigfoot
variants are seen. This quite defies the rationalist hubris in the
embarrassing titles of books such as the Road to Reality and the Theory
of Everything in which all kinds of determined numerical completeness
are verified, predicted, and claimed.
Such partial anomalistic forms appear as a kind of life within what
might be termed an Octave of Appearances. The discovery of liminal
events along and within this Octave is as spectacular as the discovery
of radiating materials, and at the moment is as little understood as
radiation was at the time of the Curie’s great discovery.
5. The Brenda Equation
Mechanical groups of a techno-scientific complexion “reason” by
simplifying causal models to the levels where the equations work. They
then identify this model with what they term “reality.” Let us imagine a
bus with a brake failure going down a hill in a blinding snowstorm. It
is full of fighting drunks, with a Lindy-Hopper Revival freak being sick
near the driver’s compartment and a coke addict trying to cut throats on
the back seat. Add old Brenda Parsons trying to exit via the luggage
compartment.
This situation is far too complicated for an equation. Moreover since
the scene will never be repeated in quite the same form again, it is
unique. Like the appearance of Orthon, the scene is a snowflake event, a
fast transient. Yet the value of such “fantastic” ephemera such as
Brenda is profound. Such stories, not facts, constitute the heart not
only of our vital learning system, but our moral life. We mentally
navigate not by singular linear connections but by images, if only
because the stories that throng through lives are different forms of
being.
People are atmospheres, smells, tastes, and emotion; their days are
thronged with imagination and fantasies of varying levels of substance.
Surprise, wonder, the whole range and spectrum of wonder, fear, hope,
ambition and love make both the day and consciousness a tragi-comic riot
of instabilities and uncertainty. Perspectives and frameworks, focus and
concentration all shatter and reform within a minute; all aims, plans
and predictions are automatically subverted, modified, changed utterly.
To believe that a lined of “objective truth” can be ruled through this
morass is the greatest rationalist fantasy of all. We no more navigate
by “fact” than plan our day down to five-second segments.
Yet in its inability to describe our bus manifestation, science reduces
the whole affair to a mass moving down an inclined plane. It will
inevitably get rid of multifarious imagery of the scenes as described,
just as it strips willfully the rainforest of its foliage.
But images, once raised up, are most rare and precious things; they
survive the most powerful attempts to reduce them to a waterless desert.
They breed, have a life beyond themselves, quite defeating all attempts
to curtail and restrict them.
Already, having read the above paragraph, Phenomena readers are forming
their own vision of the fighting drunks, the Lindy Hopper, the crack
addict, and poor frightened Brenda. Despite themselves, and independent
of whether they like the story or not, they will give these characters
different faces and clothing. They will see them all as being of
different ages and dispositions; they will, despite themselves, create
possible life histories for all of these characters.
Just one of the wonders of the human makeup is that all this creativity
will appear automatically if only to assist the process of reading this
article. After absorption, these fast-breeding images will remain with
Phenomena readers for the rest of their lives, whether they like it or
not and they have not paid a penny for them! Despite all attempts at
rejection, dismissal, this thumb-nail bus drama (created in thirty
seconds) will be developed and reproduced, recast and dramatically
amplified with new story-lines and possibilities in that infinite
horizon which is consciousness. The scene will enter dreams, and will in
turn breed and interact with much more complicated stories from other
sources, and survive even death. It will mutate, it will undergo cell
division, thus be capable of self-replicating modeling using ever
metaphor available. There will be half Brendas and no drunks; the Lindy
Hopper will have changed sex, accompanied by every shade and
fractionalization of the addict and the bus and the weather.
Infinity will be complete when Brenda is “found” in the “real” world.
She will give a description of the scene (more accurate than my original
thirty-second sketch!) and she will be asked leading questions. Did she
see me there at the time when I was described her? Well says she:
almost, or perhaps, maybe or she might have been mistaken. We are
reminded of the hands of The Hands Of EscherEscher:
Here is the information life of Orthon being formed as he is conceived.
It is also the life of the “fictitious” Brenda, and many such who have
“appeared” throughout history.
What power is represented here by means of this miniscule invention of
the snow-covered bus! Of course, after this article appears, I will get
an email from someone who claims that they were on the actual bus
concerned here. Some might even claim they saw me, cowering between the
Lindy Hopper and the coke addict.
Thus with even momentary images, we are into an infinity compounded of
mind and invention whose complex may well be a good model of how
advanced alien consciousness and intelligence works. It is unlikely that
our “alien” will be some version of a good bourgeois holding some kind
of super-spanner in the MUFON sense. Should we see such a spanner it is
likely to be a deception within a hoax within a quadruple-take, as most
likely happened to Adamski. The idea of an alien hoaxer, a criminal
alien, an alien psychopath, all on different cultural levels and mostly
unaware of one another gives us pause for thought, as does the idea of a
skeptical alien!
Alien life at an advanced stage may well have fled to a limitless media
net such as this form of half disembodied Escher-life here described. As
such, it will be capable of and every kind of metaphysical
transformation. Mere mechanism will never ever express or comprehend the
rules of a god-game such as this. The idea of a good bourgeois alien
signaling with some kind of Morse-key from a distant planet (in real
time!) is an expression straight out of Wells or Verne, both essentially
pre-Einstein-ian mechanists.
What we must always bear in mind is that the really great thing about
human beings is that they will never ever behave themselves. We really
must not expect the alien do otherwise. One of the few certain things
about the universe is that whatever it was designed for, it was not
designed for that bourgeois conceit called good clean mechanistic
behavior.
6. Jesus and the Measurement Men
Applied systems always try to make human beings behave themselves. Jesus
Christ tried to get us all to conform to a certain pattern, then came
along men who tried to get us to measure things as the one path to Truth
and Reality. Fortunately, like the universe around them, most human
don’t take readily to measurement culture. They prefer smells, touch,
and personality, mad humor, completely crazy thoughts, and irrational
actions and behavior. This is bad news for both Jesus and the
Measurement Men and equally bad news for the Theory of Everything and
The Road to Reality. Trying to make discrete linear sense of that
incurable and incorrigible mess called a sentient being is extremely
dangerous. Attempting to clean up human beings and stop them believing
in Orthon rather than Christ or supposed “scientific fact” often opens
the classic route to the Gulag and the concentration camp.
Fact has no such power as the fac
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