NP: The singularity

[Glenn Scheper]

Understanding the Novelty of Time by Terence McKenna
http://www.bluehoney.org/Novelty.htm

 I suggest that we have entirely misunderstood the character
 of time.

 We are not being pushed by the force of causal necessity.

 We human beings, like the rest of nature, are reacting to
 the siren song of the transcendental object at the end of
 time.

 We are on a collision course with an event for which there
 is barely language to describe.

 I would like to suggest that what is happening on this
 planet is that time is actually speeding up.

 Our species is under the influence of a kind of strange
 attractor which is moving us through the temporal medium at
 an ever-accelerating rate.

 This is a law of the universe, though not one recognized by
 science.

 The early universe immediately after the hypothesized "Big
 Bang", was an incredibly simple place.

 There were no organisms, there were no molecules, there
 were not even atoms, there was only a pure plasma of
 electrons.

 As the universe cooled, levels of complexity crystallized
 out successively, each one building on the previous level
 of complexity.

 Eventually the temperature in the universe dropped low
 enough that electrons could settle into stable orbits
 around atomic nuclei.

 Then you get atomic physics.

 Those atoms condensed into stars and eventually the
 temperature and pressure in the center of stars was
 sufficient to trigger fusion, and heavier elements, like
 iron, sulphur, and carbon, were cooked up in the cores of
 the stars.

 Once you have carbon, with its four-valent bonding, you
 have the possibility of molecular complexity; an entirely
 new domain of complexification.

 Not to belabor the point, but quickly out of molecules come
 highly complex polymers, out of highly complex polymers
 come early replicating molecules, from them come
 prokaryots, the earliest living cells, non-nucleated, then
 the nucleated cells, the eukaryots, then clusters of
 colonies of cells, the earliest organisms, then more
 complex organisms, eventually higher animals.

 Out of them, binocular, bipedal primates with an opposable
 thumb.

 Out of them, language-using, ushrooms-using, orgiastic
 humans.

 Out of them, history, cities, warfare, hierarchies,
 writing, mathematics, music, and in the twentieth century
 this all knits together into some kind of global organism.

 Now, the disgrace of science is that it denies the
 importance of this phenomenon.

 For science, the most important phenomenon in the universe
 is the move toward heat, death, and entropy.

 Physicists barely notice that life represents an amazing
 and persistent exception to the rule that all thermodynamic
 systems run down.

 Life has achieved the miracle of a stability far from
 entropy through the miracle of metabolism.

 Notice that when complexity emerges out of simpler states,
 each ascent to the next order occurs more quicklythan the
 process before it.

 The effect is that of being in a kind of tightening spiral,
 one of William Butler Yeats's gyres.

 We are wrapping ourselves around a cosmic end point of some
 sort, and this is what I call the transcendental object at
 the end of time.

 It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous
 shadow over the enterprise of human history.

 This is what drives the guru to make his statement, this is
 what kindles the messiah to his mission,this is what
 inspires the painter and the dreamer and the musician.

 There is an enormous source of affection and concern for
 humanity which is calling us toward it, across the plains
 of lower dimensional time and space, and the miracle is
 that through perturbing our neurochemistryin ways which
 Shamans have always done we can turn to the last page, as
 it were, and can see there that the entire process was
 actually toward a good cause.

 We are moving toward the most profound event a planetary
 ecology can encounter.

 We are about to witness the freeing of life from the
 chrysalis of matter.

 This is what our privilege and our destiny is; to be the
 final generation of people with one foot in the material
 realm of the battered primate and one foot on the ladder to
 godhead.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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