- 08-24-2023
While novelty theory is something I've been working on since the early 70s, inspired by psychedelic plant experiences in the Amazon to attempt to look at time and really deconstruct it and attempt to understand what it is. And this has been a wild intellectual ride leading to some pretty be, easily stated conclusions. One is that novelty, which is my term for complexity or advanced organization novelty increases as we approach the present moment. The Universe you and I are living in is a far more novel and complicated place than the early Universe was. Well, some people would say, well, that's just a consequence of the unfolding of developmental processes.
But this asks the question what are developmental processes? Why should the Universe have a preference for order over disorder? Especially when we have something called the second law of thermodynamics which tells us exactly the opposite? Physicists believe the Universe is running down ultimately into a state of disorder. But what I see is everywhere the emergence of more and more complex forms languages, organisms, technologies always building on the previously achieved levels of complexity.
So that was one of my insights. Coming out of that insight, was the further understanding that this process of complexification through time is not proceeding at a steady rate. It actually follows a kind of asymptotic curve. In other words, it's happening faster and faster. And this was a revelation to me because it allowed me, philosophically to contextualize the human world and to understand that human technologies, languages, migrations, art, movements, ideologies are not something different from nature.
They're the same download of process that we see in the movement of continents, the evolution of new species of animals, except that these human novel, emergent situations are happening much more quickly. So I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty producing engine, a kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms physical, chemical, social, whatever and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for further complexity. Well, this explains our present circumstance. It explains the rush toward all forms of new technology and social organization in the new millennium. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if the Universe is complexifying, faster and faster epoch, a time will come when this rate of complexification is occurring so rapidly that it will become itself the overwhelming phenomena in the world of three dimensional space and time.
And I call this the Omega point or the transcendental object at the end of history. And I believe it is not that far off that with the emergence of global Internet, a human population of several billions, an electronic neosphere, that we are now within the shadow of this transcendental object at the end of time. Our religions sense it. That's what gives them their apocalyptic intuitions. And I think the ordinary man and woman in the street sense a kind of built in acceleration to time itself.
Well, rather than dismissing that or treating it as a psychological perception or something unique to our society. I took it as a basic perception about physics and have built elaborate mathematically defined theories around this idea and then have found, to my astonishment, incredible congruences with other work. I'm thinking of the Mayan calendar and its curious, countdown like quality toward an extremely unique event that the Maya felt would occur in the same time frame that my own equations predicted, even though at the time I was unaware of the Maya. So what we have here is a new model of time based on a very real intuition that I think most people share, which is that time is speeding up, that human beings are part of that process and that the culmination of that process is now within the ven of historical time. In other words, I believe it will happen in 2012, in December, coincident with the same events that the Maya placed at the end of their calendar.
Even if I'm wrong, even if it's 100 years or 500 years later, these are still spans of time that, when compared to the life of the planet, are fractions of a percentage. So whether you believe, as I do, that we can know the precise moment of this transformation of the world of time, or whether you believe it is simply coming soon and fast, really doesn't make that much difference. We are all gathered here at the end game of developmental processes on this planet. We are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us away, awakening to what the de noma would be.
Now we stand close enough to it that I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative.