1478 lines
98 KiB
Plaintext
1478 lines
98 KiB
Plaintext
/qix/taperave
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/lizi/conspire
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/qix/necro
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/qix/taperave
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Transcript of a tape recorded Tue night /Wed morn , around 9 Dec 1992,
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transcribed that evening.
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SIDE I
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testing, testing...
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Okay. For lack of anything better to do, and to fill in the next seven hours
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or so, I'm going to sit here and record some tapes over the top of tapes that
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I recorded at the ISEA afternoon.. at the Institute of Modern Art. The reason
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I am sitting here frustrated for another seven hours or so is because I have
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to wait until I can catch a bus out to Griffith to log on to the net again. I
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had what I thought was a very good idea this evening, and that is.. an
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electronic zine devoted solely to interviews conducted by email, or, in other
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ways through the net. First person I want to interview is Jagwire X, who
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interviewed Andy Hawks in one issue of Scream Baby. Hmm.
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..and, just being frustrated at.. the stupidity of having something like the
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net which permits instantaneous communication, instantaneous performance of
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all sorts of things, and the reality of my situation here with no computer and
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no phone link, having to wait hours and then having to commute for about an
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hour in order to get to a terminal where I can start to do things. That
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frustration has made me ask myself, what do I actually want to do, what sort
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of things do I want. One of the first things I was thinking about is this idea
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of moving overseas.. I've toyed lately with the idea of moving to California,
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simply because it's a place where so many of.. the people whose ideas I find
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interesting live - like, um, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Avital Ronell,
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FM-2030, the Extropian people - and also it's a place where a lot of social
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processes are happening which I find interesting, such as American rave
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culture and the whole "New Edge" business.. and that's made me ask myself:
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Where *specifically*, in the world, would you consider moving, if you were
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going out of Australia.. and the two places I've thought of are Berkeley and
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Oxford. Berkeley for all the reasons I just mentioned - and also because if
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you're in the United States - if *I* was in the United States I could travel
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overland to future events like Phenomicon.
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And the other place - Oxford - the only reason at all I would consider
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moving to Oxford is basically because that's the home of the Institute for
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Psychophysical Research - in other words, it's where Celia Green's group is.
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There's no other particular attraction at all, for me, to being in England.
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The fact that I would still consider Oxford against everything else in the
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United States is a sign of how unique I think the IPR is, I've simply never
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heard of a research institute anywhere else which has its apparent qualities.
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So.. so that - yeah well, I don't think there's a good chance I'll be moving
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to either of those places any time soon, at the very best what I might be able
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to do is duplicate my achievement of '91, perhaps get a return trip to London,
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in which I can visit both places again, perhaps for a bit longer this time..
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But this leads me to write down on my list, "MONEY", and have a little pointer
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to "Drug Trials", so when I start making phone calls, like phoning Kevin
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Solway and phoning various other people, I should make sure to phone Clinical
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Sciences at the hospital.
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Okay. Now. As far as net access goes.. at the end of the year there's
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probably going to be about a one-week period where labs at all of the
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universities will be shut. So, during that period of time, my only form of
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access.. my only means of getting messages *out*, in any case.. will be
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through people like Jack and perhaps Kevin, perhaps Lara, who have modems. One
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sort of thing I could do I guess would be to set up a forward from lambada to
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Jack's account, the only problem is I wouldn't be able to get on to reset that
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and since his account disappears on December 31st.. hmm.
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And also in the longer term, I do think I need something better than I have
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now. I was thinking before, I *do* want a Unix account so I can do things like
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telnet and ftp and decompress and so on.. Now at Nyx, if I get shell access,
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as I understand it I would be able to do all those things except telnet, and
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if I can reach Nyx then I can telnet anyway. And my other options are, in
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trying to get a local Unix account, are.. buy one for $500 at Griffith, or,
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um, enrol at UQ again next year, part-time, in a subject which allows me to..
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in a computing subject which would give me net access. A third possibility I
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guess would be to enrol part-time and then try and get an account at the
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Prentice Centre again, but this time as a student and not just as a member of
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the general public. I don't know whether they'd look favorably on me having
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grepped the password file once, though. Hmm.. and of course there's BrisNet to
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consider as well, but BrisNet isn't very attractive for me so long as I don't
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actually have my own modem and computer. I can try and save in order to get
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Blinky back from Lara.. If I was to buy a phone and a computer and an account
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at Griffith that would be almost $2000. Hmm.
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Okay, the question of moving overseas really is relevant even in the short
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term, even if only in the long-term is when I would actually be able to move,
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because it raises the question of how.. deeply would I want to set down roots
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here in Brisbane. For example I could try to aim for a situation analogous to
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Dayalan's in '91, that is having apartment somewhere and my own little
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computer terminal in it, and so on, and that could be a sort of a safe base,
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which I could make my.. material centre of operations. That would require a
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certain amount of energy invested in constructing a sort of a stable, "safe
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haven" here in Brisbane, whereas if my long-term future really does lie in
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Oxford or Berkeley, then I should perhaps consider only temporary arrangements
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here, with a view to only settling down once I get over there.
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And for what reasons does anyone ever want to settle down anywhere anyway.
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It's only to get what security there is, in a very simple survival sense,
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having a place where you can store your material possessions, and.. yeah,
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generally not being susceptible to things like landlords raising rent or
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deciding to kick you out, although as far as governments are concerned you're
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alwys vulnerable to that..
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Now, my drive to get the texts of my favorite books online, at least.. and
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also, my hope of getting things like my diaries available at ftp sites or some
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sort of archive like that.. is part of an attempt on my part to make it
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possible for me to move around, and still be able to access all the things
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that I want to be able to access. This is where I think FM2030 would be
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useful. I still haven't seen "Telespheres" I don't think, the only book I saw
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when I was in Indiana was "Upwingers". But the idea of.. not being fixed in
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space, means that wherever you may happen to move you still need to be able to
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reach everything that you want.
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And as far as the serious aspect of GAIA 2000 goes, the Earth Summit in
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cyberspace, I think FM really has the agenda for that [garbled], because he is
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concerned with things like the megapolitical situation, if you want to call it
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that, and the sort of things which the UN would already consider to be on its
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agenda, but he's striving to interface those with topics which are still only
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being considered in futurist circles, such as the concept of a telespheral
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world, and a "smile-squared" agenda.
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So the focus there, would be on people like FM2030 and Barbara Marx
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Hubbard.. I think Earth Summit number one is already doing whatever anyone
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might be doing as far as "saving the Earth" goes, in the conventional sense..
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um, that plus Greenpeace - It'd be interesting to know more about what sort
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of net access Greenpeace has, because they have their internal communications
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network which I saw a bit of, but I haven't seen evidence of a direct
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Greenpeace presence on the Internet. So, um, hmm.. A source of information for
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NGOs and the nature of their connection to the net, might be, um, various
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documents on the political ftp site, like the list of political addresses
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around the world, that might have some email addresses in it as well. And then
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there are also some documents that I've got on disk, under the names ECONET,
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PEACENET, and GLASNET. I'm not sure where I got those from, I downloaded them
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from somewhere when ftp from QUT was still working, and they listed
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organizations which were on various alternative electronic nets, around the
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world.. so that would be something else to add - and I still need to find out
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about the damn model UN, what the hell is it.. and what's its relationship
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toi the *real* UN? ..and for that matter, what does the real UN do with *its*
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net access, because it has its own domain, un.org, so perhaps - perhaps I
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could consider interviewing the UN rep who has been mentioned a few times when
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I do a "whois un.org" - I'll just write that down, "whois un.org interview".
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Now, well it's still only 11:30 so I'm not doing much for passing time.
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I hope Kelly gets back within a few days because I want to discuss with her
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either me moving out or us getting a phone here right now, because I'm getting
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tired of not having a phone, basically.
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In particular I wouldn't mind the opportunity to phone occasionally to, some
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of the people in America, perhaps like Scotto or Max More or whoever..
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because, although that is very expensive, at least that way I don't have to
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commute. So it's expensive as far as money goes but it saves time.. I could
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save money as well if I did Gordon's scheme of going to Redcliffe Airport or
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wherever it is, and doing a sort of a phone-tapping thing, but that again
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requires travel to get out there.
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I should ask myself, can I *briefly*, or concisely, or clearly state, what
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"Alpha and Omega", as a project overall, is about? I remember when John
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Esposito was talking to me and Nathan, or before that, I was thinking that I
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might explain my goals with this - my ultimate goals - as being to
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"immanentize the Eschaton, or a reasonable facsimile thereof". So, the idea as
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I have explained it at various times in the past, is to have "Alpha and Omega"
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as a novel which exists in draft form on the Internet, which is anticopyright
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so anyone anywhere can print it, and the novel will describe the event at the
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end of the century, and it will also try to bring about the event. So the
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whole idea is to try to achieve the superior coordination which might make
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possible important things on a large scale.. but I do have to ask myself -
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what can.. what really significant can a mass of people achieve except in
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opposition to some sort of dictatorship. In terms of, an extropian sort of
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agenda, or even a.. something like.. I have imagined that you could try to do
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a paranormal-type.. or.. a paranormal experiment or an occult operation on a
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planetary scale, through the means of the sort of global multimedia
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intercontinental event that I have vaguely envisioned. Now with something like
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that you might want masses of people for some reason or other, but to make
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progress towards the singularity in a technical sense, requires discoveries,
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which don't come from masses of people, they come from individuals. So in that
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sense what is needed is a way for individuals to communicate with each other,
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which I guess is what CafeNet-like projects are about.. A lot of the
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individuals who might make technical contributions would already be in
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universities - but, on the other hand, the existence of things like, people
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making a living as programmers at home shows that there is a place for the -
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the what? The technical hobbyist, who is somewhat removed from the centres of
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their profession.. so I'm thinking here of the relationship of, say, someone
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who might be writing shareware in Brisbane, like Kevin - although without the
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philosophical aspirations as well - compared to programmers who work for large
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corporations or who are on university faculties, and who have access to
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something like the Internet in its full range. The first programmer can
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nevertheless come up with something which is significant and, even if it's
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only a small part, can still be crucial in the development of some larger
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system. So a similar thing will probably apply with something like
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nanotechnological design, so there's every reason to push for something like
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CafeNet, for *that* reason as well, so those people can also contribute to the
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collaborations which will bring into being new generations of software and of
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hardware. Hmm.
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But to return to "Alpha and Omega" - so, the idea is.. Well, I could compare
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it to something like "The Book of the SubGenius", which has this fictional
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aspect, but certainly you can lead a SubGenius lifestyle, even if "Bob" isn't
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a real person, simply by making yourself a "Bobby" for one thing, or more
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creatively by creating your own SubGenius spinoff. But either way, Ivan Stang
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clearly has dreams or schemes of.. a TV revolution - he says somewhere in
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"High Weirdness by Mail", that "Not only will the Revolution be televised, but
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it will *be* the television show!" So I think he's.. he's plotting something
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like, what if Bob Black were head of network programming on CNN - something
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like that - inundating the world with artistically contrived messages in order
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to, break the hold of the Conspiracy on our minds, so to speak. So he's
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conspiring or plotting, or he's trying to bring about the means for him to get
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in that sort of position; I don't know whether he'll get there or not, or how
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high a profile "Bob" will have in 1998... But "Alpha and Omega" is similar to
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that in that it is trying to set a very specific time - the 24-hour period at
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the end of 2000 - in which something significant could happen, if people
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managed to coordinate their efforts beforehand. Now, the actual event that
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might happen could be any number of things. I listed these in part 6 of the
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Scriptures, as I will be putting them out shortly, but.. but the
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possibilities, even the mundane possibilities, are very very broad - and so
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that's why the input of others is so crucial at this point.. because what I've
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managed to dream up, is a framework, which I think is more detailed than any
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previous.. attempt of this nature, in terms of setting a Date with Destiny.
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But at the same time the specifics of what is to take place have been left
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entirely up in the air, simply because I can't quite decide myself what I
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would want. So, it's like I'm creating a framework which other people will be
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able to come along and inhabit. And my specific ideas for what I would like to
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happen on that date, have generally revolved around something to do with GAIA
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2000, that's the sort of thing towards which I might actually work, in an
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organizational sense. My other projects - the ones which have to do with,
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conceptual progress I guess, research - I don't believe can be assigned a date
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in that fashion, that simply has to be an ongoing thing. So in a sense, this
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is - I'm partly anxious to try and get at least a first stage of "Alpha and
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Omega" out of the way, so that I can concentrate on research again. But, the
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fact that I thought of the ideas and that noone else is going to bring them to
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at least that first stage of fruition means that I have a responsibility to
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try and, crystallize "Alpha and Omega" enough for other people to understand
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what it is that I'm on about, there.
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Okay, so thinking it through a bit, my current agenda maybe could be divided
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into the Research part and the Organizational part. The Research part
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encompasses philosophy, science, and perhaps at some future date something
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like magick. Um, that's the part where I'm trying to find, what is real, why
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is it here, what are the limits of possibility. The other part, the
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Organizational part.. is currently all within "Alpha and Omega", in a sense.
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That's the part.. that's the future role which I can imagine myself playing,
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in a sort of a futurist-activist sense.. trying - agitating for things like
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life extension research and the construction of telespheral infrastructures.
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Something like Li Po, in the draft of a draft of "Alpha and Omega" I guess.
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So, what should I be doing now. I have a list of dozens of things to do on the
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net, little things like trying to get talk.psychedelic going, interviews with
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various people and so on..
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Actually this seems a germane moment to go off on a little digression about
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the problem of this perspective of urgency. I've acquired from Celia Green,
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and the same idea is in Kevin Solway and I guess in a few other places as
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well, that given the brief amount of time that I may have, and the possible
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positive returns that may exist given sufficient effort, then I ought always
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to be thinking of stripping unnecessary activity from my life. So, to a
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certain extent this happens all the time simply as you get bored with things,
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but this means actually making sacrifices, making decisions, prioritizing as
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Rez would say.. deciding to forego certain things which might otherwise be
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pleasurable in the interests of pursuing some more important goal.
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So for example, something I used to think about when I was 16 or 17 and I
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was thinking about trying to end death, and the idea of some sort of global
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campaign to do that. And I was thinking, here I am, 16 or 17, or 18 or 19
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later on, and millions of people around the world are still dying every day,
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and I'm not directly doing this thing, of being an anti-death activist. Should
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I be, somehow, doing something more, trying to think of a way to do something
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more than simply talking about the idea with the occasional person? And, hmm..
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I just had a thought a while ago, that if the world requires such urgency
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then, somehow that says that it isn't perfect, from my perspective anyway, or
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some - what's the relevance of this point, there's this idea that there is no
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hope for anything, which I mentioned briefly on leri-list recently, and which
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I see in Kevin Solway as well, and which is also in "Schismatrix" for that
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matter, although it is not the ultimate philosophy [there] and that's one of
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the things I want to ask Bruce Sterling about.. The proposition that the Regal
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puts forward in one of his short stories, that "the emptiness of the Kosmos is
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absolute and in time it kills us all. That's pure terror but it's also pure
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freedom." And the other idea that "Futility is freedom". So the idea is that
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no enterprise succeeds from the perspective of eternity. Or, to put it in
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Celia-Green language perhaps, that we are doomed to finitude in all of our
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enterprises, which I think is what that would amount to. So, for example,
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Terence McKenna I think is, or in his wilder moments anyway, envisions 2012 as
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being an entry into an eternal state of being - roaming in the fields of the
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imagination, however you want to put it. The point is that he.. yeah, McKenna
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is another person with this same idea, on a cosmic scale, he's saying that
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there is an opportunity for us, as a planet or as a species, to enter into an
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eternal condition, but that it is not a foregone conclusion. That it will
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require "cognitive activity", he says somewhere is the essence of what is
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required - we have to understand our situation, or else we cannot pass the
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death of the species in the way that an individual who doesn't understand the
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nature of consciousness presumably has trouble at the moment of death,
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assuming that there is some sort of passage to another state of being which
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opens, which again is one of McKenna's propositions in the essay I
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transcribed. Whereas, the posthuman philosophy which the Regal puts forward in
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Bruce Sterling's story, is one of ultimate despair and freedom arising from
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that despair - you can do anything you want, because it's all hopeless anyway
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in an ultimate sense.
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So, to my mind the attraction of the second philosophy - the only attraction
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that I can see - is the freedom of action that it implies, because if nothing
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matters in an ultimate sense - so in other words there is no ultimate payoff
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possible for any [course of] action - then you really are free to do whatever
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you want. On the other hand, the attraction of the point of view which says
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that there *is* something to strive for with an infinite payoff, is that it
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opens the possibility of an infinite payoff. Of course there are philosophies
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as well which would say that there's an infinite payoff for everyone, I guess,
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and that's not just philosophies in the sense of possible philosophies, but I
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think that some brands of Buddhism.. or at least - probably Buddhism, at
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least, say that everyone achieves Enlightenment ultimately. Exactly what
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Enlightenment is and whether it's desirable and whether it's an infinite
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payoff of sorts is a valid question, but, placing it in that category for the
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moment, that is an example of a world-view in which it doesn't matter what you
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do and you still get everything in the end, or everything worth wanting in any
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case. If the world is like that, then it really doens't matter what I do and
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there's a happy ending to it all.. The cases that I'm considering, or.. that I
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want to think about more, are the ones where there is an infinite payoff for
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the right path being taken, but it's not a certain outcome, and the one where
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there is no infinite payoff at all.
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Now to actually decide whether the world falls into either of those
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categories falls into my Research agenda - the limits of possibility in
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particular. I would like to be able to get some idea of possible
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epistemologies - what are the ways which the world might be? because at
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present I feel as if I don't even have a single adequate ontology or candidate
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metaphysics which does justice to everything, and that the main sticking point
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in that as always is the mind. Because material things existing in space can
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be conceived of in geometric or other mathematical ways whereas the content of
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thought is..ore puzzling. That is not to say that it is ncecessarily beyond
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mathematical modelling, but simply that I don't feel the same clarity of
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perception when I contemplate thought or my own thought, or models for that
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thought, as I do when contemplating potential models for material reality, or
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matter, or physics. So, the relevant fields might be phenomenology, or
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semantics, or some things arising out of cognitive science, but I definitely
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want to see something which either accounts for the mind and relates it to
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the physical paradigms, or subsumes the physical paradigms - because that's
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always a possibility, that someone could advance a philosophy or a metaphysics
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in which the concepts of physics as we know it are somehow secondary to the
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account of mind given. That could be perhaps a pantheistic sort of philosophy
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in which mind is omnipresent, the sort of thing which is described in "The
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Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker, or it could come out of a philosophy
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arising out of esotericism, if I understood them better I might be able to
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judge that question better, in which the world as we see it is held to be
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entirely the product of magickal operations, most of them performed.. not
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consciously, or not.. with.. the thought that they are magickal operations. A
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similar outlook would be the one mentioned by Charles McCreery in one of his
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books, where he says that it seems perfectly possible that you could have a
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world in which you have discarnate entities, or at least not incarnate in the
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sense that we are, having minds and then bodies, which possess the
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capabilities of psychokinesis or materialization or similar things, that they
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collectively create a world, and then for some reason repress the knowledge of
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these abilities in themselves, or perhaps use the abilities without being
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conscious of those abilities as.. or in the fashion that I just described
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them, so it was just something that we did - we brought the world into being
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or the mind brought the world and us into being, and only now through us is it
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looking around and saying, What is this? How did it come to be here? This is a
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bit like the idea I outlined in trying to understand one of Rez's posts on
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leri..
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Okay, a note for the future: whatever form my living arrangements take place
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in the further future - whether I'm mostly here in Brisbane or mostly in
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oxford or Berkeley or whether I'm some sort of global nomad - I know that I
|
|
can do my best work on the net, in the sense that whatever it is that my
|
|
talents are I've been able to exercise them more fully in the past two months
|
|
of net activity, than I ever have in any other medium I've ever had access to.
|
|
So this means that it's important for me to have a proper Unix account
|
|
somewhere which I can have access to, so that i can do things beyond sending
|
|
mail and reading and posting news, which makes validation of the Nyx account
|
|
important, because that is a free Unix account, I presume once you have shell
|
|
access, which you don't have to pay for and which I should be able to reach
|
|
from anywhere in the world. It's all very well to actually buy an account at
|
|
Griffith or to get one as a result of being enrolled in a subject but that's
|
|
not a long-term arrangement. The Griffith account only lasts a year, and the
|
|
UQ account only lasts a semester. So - *get the Nyx account validated*.
|
|
|
|
Another future note: one of my goals definitely is mass Internet access or
|
|
mass access to whatever the world net becomes, even for people who don't buy
|
|
their own hardware.. in fact that is especially an important option to take
|
|
into account.. anyhow, the point is that CafeNet-style projects and
|
|
communications centres projects as I originally conceived them, in the form of
|
|
public communications centres, video arcades, or like computer labs
|
|
transplanted to downtown urban area, would appear to be the only way, given
|
|
existing accessible technologies, to achieve that. At some future point it
|
|
might be possible to have a wireless mobile-phone-like connection to a portable
|
|
laptop etcetera and so you might not need a walk-in place like that, but
|
|
certainly at present that would require a cheapness and sophistication of
|
|
technology which doesn't appear to exist, and so - not on a commercial scale
|
|
anyway - and so this is the importance of emphasizing any
|
|
communications-centre style project. So one thing I should consider doing is
|
|
repeating my post of the first week of '92, which was the initial sort of
|
|
nucleus of CafeNet, and asking again for contacts. There was the guy in
|
|
Holland in particular who sent me a long list of details about a cafe he
|
|
wanted to set up, but the cafes don't interest me so much, because even then
|
|
it's still too much of a bother. You need somewhere like a lab where a lot of
|
|
people can go.
|
|
|
|
Okay.. just finishing drawing up, in nice big letters on a large piece of
|
|
paper a sort of agenda for myself. In the middle I've got "A.O as project -
|
|
Formal structure: 24 hours - McKenna - Leary", so that's what I was talking
|
|
about before. The formal structure of "Alpha and Omega" is the specific date
|
|
and structure that it provides for this attempt to.. do something. End the
|
|
world. happily. And then the specifics of what I'm trying to do, partly
|
|
through "Alpha and Omega", so in other words the content to put into that
|
|
structure, on the Organization side I've got two sections, "GAIA 2000" and
|
|
"The Posthuman Condition", which are the classic two sections of AO. And
|
|
they're also two different but potentially complementary political agendas.
|
|
GAIA 2000 is the Earth Summit in cyberspace, and so that's referring to
|
|
ordinary New-Age aspirations, you might say.. you know, uh, no more sickness,
|
|
war poverty or hunger, peace on earth, save the environment, and so on. And
|
|
then the "Posthuman Condition" section is about things like Space Migration -
|
|
Intelligence Increase - Life Extension, in other words trying to go beyond the
|
|
human condition and the classic limitations which still exist no matter how
|
|
much economic and social progress is made. So in the first section I've got
|
|
"?" and "politics" and "the Last International", and, the reason I've got that
|
|
there is that that sort of Discordian politics, is the most neglected
|
|
political stream in a sense - probably because it's the most extreme, calling
|
|
for things like the abolition of work, and so I would want somehow to
|
|
highlight that possibility even if wasn't the sort of thing that I ultimately
|
|
agreed with, simply to give it a better hearing. Because all the classical
|
|
political strategies, whether it's violent revolution led by a vanguard, or
|
|
democratization and the election of people to do stuff for you, or what have
|
|
you - workers' councils', the net analogues of that are pretty easy to imagine
|
|
- but they're all there - they are strategies or ideas which can be called
|
|
upon, which I may actually choose to dramatize in writing "Alpha and Omega"
|
|
and which may ultimately be appropriate if the whole thing goes ahead.
|
|
But. Anyhow, I have down the bottom in the list of organizations, "SubGenius
|
|
Foundation", "Otisian Congress". This has to do with actual organizations or
|
|
associations in real life which I would consider relevant to what I'm trying
|
|
to do. I mean, other people are going to work through different means -
|
|
[SIDE 1 ENDS, THANK "BOB"]
|
|
|
|
|
|
SIDE II
|
|
|
|
- but I'm talking about looking for an organization, or an association, which
|
|
might be compatible with the way I'm considering operation. And the two things
|
|
which come to my mind are the SubGenius Foundation, because it has the
|
|
potential to evolve into a really global grouping which still preserves as
|
|
much of the Discordian spirit as is possible on such a scale; and the idea of
|
|
the Congress of Weird Religions, which Mal was discussing with me today. It
|
|
may fall to the Otisians to actually organize the real thing. My particular
|
|
creation <garbled> is the Committee of 333.. these are all just ideas I'm
|
|
throwing around a bit at the moment, but, um, I think so many of the other
|
|
things here, like GAIA 2000 and so on, it's just too good a joke to waste,
|
|
it's just a joke, particularly the way it interfaces with Campus Crusade for
|
|
Cthulhu and maybe this can link up with Scott's plans, somehow. Hmm. Anyhow,
|
|
so, so.. so.. notes for the future.
|
|
Other things in GAIA 2000 section: alt.save.the.earth plan. Since - oh,
|
|
and I've also written "emphasis on net aspect as Real Life already exists". So
|
|
the point here is that if I'm going to be working through the net - this is
|
|
actually what I wrote in t15.txt in the Scriptures, that the point is to bring
|
|
about a historical event in which the Internet enters real-life history, so if
|
|
the point is to do something using the resources of the net, something which
|
|
has been potential but which resoucres haven't been used to actually do it
|
|
before, I don't want to simply try and create, say, an "online World Future
|
|
Society" because a World Futurist Society already exists. What I should
|
|
instead be doing is concentrating on creating online interfaces *between* say,
|
|
the World Future Society and the Lindisfarne Association, things of that
|
|
nature.. associations which can only link up through the means of the net.
|
|
Okay, so moving on to "Posthuman Condition", I've written "5th Plateau",
|
|
"Extropian Institute", "Upwingers", "SMIILE". The last three are sort of
|
|
self-explanatory but the Extropian Institute I'm particularly interested in
|
|
because it's the first organization which seems to have Up-Wing or posthuman
|
|
aims. At present as far as I know it is mostly a mailing list and the
|
|
*Extropy* magazine, so the extropian corporations or TAZs or nation-states,
|
|
whatever they turn out to be, still haven't come into being, but this will
|
|
certainly be a nucleus of them, in some respect. I don't know how
|
|
organizationally evolved UpWingers is, I suspect that extropians may already
|
|
have outpaced it actually, but that's just a supposition.. The 5th Plateau,
|
|
hmm.. that might serrve to bridge the GAIA 2000 - Posthuman Condition gap, by
|
|
taking Maslow's hierarchy of needs and then adding the need which I think
|
|
Barbara Marx Hubbard identified and which is also identified in "The Human
|
|
Evasion", the need to transcend the human condition as it is, the point once
|
|
again being that politics can rearrange existing resources, it can change who
|
|
orders what or even *whether* anyone orders anyone to do anything, but
|
|
politics alone does not lengthen the human lifespan, or dispel ignorance about
|
|
our position in the universe, or even invent a new means of production.
|
|
I've also got in the Organization section "Truths during the event". Now
|
|
that's referring to the possibility that - to use a specific example - suppose
|
|
I became convinced that an important thing, or *the* important thing to do,
|
|
was to try to communicate certain ideas, certain key memes, in the course of
|
|
that event. This would mean trying to influence the entertainment or the
|
|
multimedia aspect of it so that at certain critical moments, certain thoughts
|
|
were communicated - so for example, I could run through "Poison for the Heart"
|
|
and pick out certain aphorisms, and have them flashed up on screens at raves
|
|
happening around the world, things like that. So that's another thing which
|
|
could fall into the scope of Organization.
|
|
It seems to me that the thing which characterizes the Organization half is
|
|
that in some sense you suppose that you already know what you're doing or
|
|
what you're trying to achieve, and it's a matter now of working out how to do
|
|
it. So for example in GAIA 2000 you're working out how to save the world -
|
|
how to keep things sustainable, and so on. The question is one of logistics in
|
|
all of these - even the logstics of transcending the human condition or
|
|
developing nanotechnology, the goal - of thorough control of the structure of
|
|
matter at the molecular scale - is *there*, and what is needed to be developed
|
|
is the logistics of how to get from here to there. Whereas if you look at the
|
|
other half, the Research half, this is where the unanswered questions are, and
|
|
the point of these investigations is to get a clearer picture of things, um,
|
|
in case there's some new factor which invalidates, or otherwise supersedes or
|
|
should be added to the ones which are already present within the organization
|
|
half. So up the top I've got Philosophy first of all, and then I've written
|
|
"Objectivism" and then "Nietzsche" and "Stirner", and then "foundations of
|
|
Mathematics". Now Objectivism - just out of all the philosophical *systems*
|
|
that I've ever heard of, is the one which makes the most sense to me. I think
|
|
radical skepticism is in a sense superior to Objectivism, intellectually, in
|
|
that total uncertainty seems to be the chief proposition that I can be certain
|
|
about in my current state of being or state of knowledge - but that's not a
|
|
system. Objectivism is a system, and as systems go, as I said it's the best
|
|
I've ever heard of. I added Nietzsche and Stirner as a sort of a tribute to
|
|
Solan I guess. When someone on talk.philosophy.misc asked, "Who do you think
|
|
is the best philosopher?", Solan wrote Nietzsche, largely for his critical
|
|
insights, he mentioned Stirner for some reason, I think from the perspective
|
|
of morality, and mentioned Ayn Rand I think in terms of systematic
|
|
consequences of the philosophy. Something like that. So - I should add
|
|
"skepticism", there. Skepticism and Objectivism, and a note to look at
|
|
Nietzsche and Stirner again.
|
|
Fopundations of Mathematics, is the form of applied philosophy which
|
|
interests me most, because I'm very interested in the ontological status of
|
|
mathematical entities... Um, yeah, I don't even feel as if I can say very
|
|
clearly what the state of affairs is there since I lack the technical
|
|
knowledge of mathematics and also the.. a settled enough line of thought, or a
|
|
definite angle from which to address this, since there seem to be so many
|
|
approaches to that question: intuitionism, constructionism I think is another
|
|
one, or, let alone more radical ideas like something analogous to, Penrose
|
|
crossed with Philip K Dick, in which you might have the Platonic forms being
|
|
real but emerging from the specific somehow, so that the specific exists
|
|
first, and then the activities of the mind, in generalizing and perceiving
|
|
mathematical forms actually brings them into being, so that the act of
|
|
percxeption is actually the act of creation. This is the problem of
|
|
perception, it's the general problem of reality as well.. do the things.. what
|
|
things exist before we think they exist? do we bring them into being as we
|
|
think about them - and that's related to the, the sort of generalized magickal
|
|
possibility that I was talking about on the other side, the idea that the
|
|
world is in fact totally the creation of mind and that the worldviews of the
|
|
present century in which mind is an epiphenomenon of matter are in fact
|
|
intellectual errors arising from the extreme, or.. the particular form that
|
|
the magick has created here, the particular world that has been created here
|
|
is one in which a heavy reliance upon things that are already there, so that
|
|
the application of the creative faculty (assuming that such a thing is
|
|
fundamental, for the purposes of this) - so that the applications of this
|
|
hypothetical magickal creative faculty become rarer and rarer, and so it
|
|
starts to seem as if the structure which has been created, preceded the
|
|
creative faculty - but of course it really could be that way, and it really
|
|
could be that there is a natural order to things which determines all
|
|
thoughts, actions and perceptions, in which case there really is no such
|
|
thing as creation, or, let alone magick in the Crowleyan sense.
|
|
Anyhow, next category after philosophy is Research, and I've got categories
|
|
here for Matter and Mind under that, which is a bit redundant there.. okay, so
|
|
matter is basically Physics, and what's there is "Quantum Mechanical
|
|
metaphysics", "Fundamental Theory' - so in other words actually having a
|
|
Theory of Everything, just in physical terms, and then - I've written
|
|
"Prigoginic levels" as well, which is just a sort of vague reference to
|
|
projects like the Principia Cybernetica - I should - I'll make a note of
|
|
*that*, "Principia Cybernetica", "cybsys-LIST" - um, and the general attempt
|
|
to work out a formal theory of emergent properties, spontaneous orders and so
|
|
on. Since that could address every level of the hierarchy that seems to exist
|
|
in nature at once. Then there's mind: "cognitive science, neural nets,
|
|
phenomenology, semantics, methodological solipsism (knot theory)" - that's my
|
|
personal.. favorite, um.. yeah, the mind is the more complex of the two in
|
|
terms of planning how to address it because there seems to be much less
|
|
agreement about the mode of investigation. Hmm..
|
|
Okay, continuing with research: "IPR", in a little square box. Above
|
|
"Anomalous phenomena: database, typology".. I still don't know in detail the
|
|
IPR's research plan, program, but I would think that it would possibly be the
|
|
best in the world as far as the category of paranormal phenomena goes, given
|
|
the intellectual quality of the people there and the number of years which
|
|
it's been going. So I'd sort of rely on them to provide some good ideas at
|
|
this point. "Magick - question mark", "Occult - question mark": sooner or
|
|
ter I'm going to have a go at something here, like either, I don't know, go to
|
|
some wiccan circle and see if anything happens or perform the Mass of the
|
|
Phoenix on 200 grams of LSD the way that Robert Anton Wilson did -
|
|
*micrograms*, that is - um.. but um, because those are the sort of things
|
|
which, accoding to the philosophy of them, you cannot just approach them
|
|
intellectually, you actually have to do things if you want to be a magician.
|
|
"COMPLEX: Maps of everything, maps of the maps". This is saort of a general
|
|
reference entry calling for the synthesis of all existing information in forms
|
|
that are accessible, so this is like World Wide Web in particular.
|
|
And then at the very bottom of the sheet I've got "Historical trajectory -
|
|
possibilities - panspace". So, part of the reason for the philosophical
|
|
investigation - metaphysics, and mathematics - is to form a clearer picture of
|
|
possible worlds - that's probably related more to logic than to mathematics
|
|
actually, "Logic and Kripke". <writing> But.. the idea of seeing the possible
|
|
forms that the world might take is the preparatory step before deciding
|
|
between them. So I want to say, okay, the world may be .. may possess an
|
|
idealist metaphysics or a realist metaphysics or something else.. so then,
|
|
okay, now I have range of possibilities. Now the world presents this aspect to
|
|
me, is it compatible with one of these or all of these, some of them, none of
|
|
them? So that's astep towards actually trying to find out the truth. Then the
|
|
"historical trajectory".. this relates to the question of infinite payoff - I
|
|
might actually write that in alongside this: "Infinite.. payoff". So the
|
|
question there is.. multifold. The first one is: Is there an infinite payoff?
|
|
of some sort. If yes, then the next question is, what do we have to do to get
|
|
it? And if no, then the question is, what now; if we're necessarily finite in
|
|
some respect; and - and I wonder, if we were necessarily finite, could we even
|
|
know it? I wonder of knowledge of[one's] finitude, absolute knowledge of
|
|
finitude - absolute knowldeg seems to imply a sort of limitlessness, because
|
|
absolute knowledge would not be able to be doubted, there could be no
|
|
criticism of it which could cast any doubt. So therefore if a person was
|
|
capable of absolute knowledge then in that respect at least they would not be
|
|
finite. Yeah. It would be somewhat ironic if that was the only respect we were
|
|
not necessarily finite, and we could know it! Knowing it would be something at
|
|
least. But it's also possible that we can never know any of these things.. but
|
|
anyhow, so there is this question: if there is no path out of finitude, what
|
|
do we do? That i think, would become more of an individual question, for me
|
|
anyway.. maybe if I spent years of my life convinced that the human condition
|
|
was necessarily limited in a certain way, then maybe I would start to think in
|
|
social terms anyway.. because I would know that the horizons *were* limited in
|
|
a certain respect. But at this stage I'm not even - I mean, even given the
|
|
vagueness of the term, infinite payoff, it nonetheless suggests the idea that
|
|
there is a possible trajectory to human existence which would carry it beyond
|
|
the human condition as we believe it to be into some transcendent state; for
|
|
example, Leary's scenario, McKenna's scenario, FM2030's scenario. And.. the
|
|
meaning of "Panspace", that last entry after "Possibilities" and "Historical
|
|
trajectory".. that was my term made up for something even bigger than
|
|
superspace.. since superspace after all is sort of a phase space of possible
|
|
geometries with a particular topology, that of.. um, or not topology, but
|
|
possible 4-spaces out of general relativity whereas panspace was to be a much
|
|
bigger domain, more like the class of all sets or the class of ordinals, and
|
|
so the idea of translating panspace to physics or to reality, is to say that
|
|
this is the range of possibilities within which we dwell, and one way of
|
|
conceiving the infinite payoff is to say that it would constitute an entry
|
|
into panspace. I guess I might as well jst put it as "becoming God", in that
|
|
sense, but.. that would imply achieving unlimitedness in every way that you
|
|
can be unlimited, whereas perhaps we can be unlimited in time but not in some
|
|
other respect. So, panspace is my designation for the potentially achievable
|
|
ultimate, the payoff itself, the payoff, the ultimate degree of freedom
|
|
attainable would be freedom in panspace. Hmm..
|
|
|
|
Another observation which just occurred to me. This is the way .. that I
|
|
always used to think and plan.. in my first year at college people would come
|
|
into my room and they would be freaked out by all these flowcharts on the
|
|
walls, which were talking about things of a similar magnitude, ah, you know,
|
|
that in the next twenty years there would be things like artificial
|
|
intelligence and space colonization and so on, and I was, and I was just
|
|
trying to put them all up there next to each other so I could get an idea of
|
|
the totality. And part of my depression in this year, I think is related to..
|
|
becoming preoccupied with distractions. I think the net for one is a great
|
|
provider of distractions.. there's just so many things you can get lost in,
|
|
like exercising your wit satirizing newbies, or inventing little in-jokes and
|
|
then stretching them out. The other factors in my depression, what were they:
|
|
"Bob".. Nathan.. and America.
|
|
Now.. let's see. "Bob". When I was reading "The Book of the SubGenius",
|
|
early on, with no one else around me - no.. contacts who knew about it - I
|
|
remember I was very resentful at different times, because.. I think just
|
|
because I didn't like what I was being told, or the message that I was picking
|
|
up, which seemed to be saying that utterly *everything* is fucked. Hmm. So
|
|
that was one.
|
|
I mentioned Nathan because he I think had a viewpoint like the one that I
|
|
characterized as the "Regal" one, the Posthumanist one out of "Schismatrix",
|
|
the Hassan i Sabbah one, the idea that futility is freedom, that the cosmos
|
|
kills us all in time, although he had a Lovecraftian sort of slant on this.
|
|
And it's interesting that he may in fact have changed his mind as his concepts
|
|
have evolved in recent months, he talks about "returning to the Light" and so
|
|
on now. But um.. in particular "seeing the Void", whatever it was that
|
|
happened the first time I took mushrooms, I was *very* depressed after that ,
|
|
and that was because I saw all of my integration of concepts and my experience
|
|
and so on which I was planning to communicate in "Alpha and Omega", leading
|
|
back to nothingness. That was what I thought I had seen, or that was the slant
|
|
I came to put on it the more I thought about it in the next few days. This
|
|
idea that, there is only one mind, and that the whole of the complexity of
|
|
existence is its evasion of the pointlessness of that existence. I'm not even
|
|
sure if that concept makes sense, that.. that a sort of an empty mind could be
|
|
repelled by its own nature. But certainly there was this elemental repulsion
|
|
from this state, which makes me think of Barbara Marx Hubbard talking about
|
|
how in becoming a mystic, and aligning yourself with the Creative Intelligence
|
|
at work in the universe, you come to introspectively identify with the
|
|
creative.. *motive* or desire or drive, and I wonder whether she means having
|
|
an experience like that, in which you yourself become, or face, this utterly
|
|
featureless void and, are driven away from it or are recreated from it.. hmm.
|
|
And then, the third thing was America. Um, or my travles in general, so I
|
|
should include London as well. Because I was very depressed for a great deal
|
|
of that, and that .. hmm. Possibly what I was seeing there was the reality of
|
|
large urban centres, or something like that; the nature of life.. I thought of
|
|
saying "animal nature", and perhaps it's true in a sense, like the guy in
|
|
London was saying, that all the people are after is money, sex and drugs,
|
|
that doesn't exactly facilitate the "life of the mind". So, um.. the lack of
|
|
opportunities for elevation, I think that above all depressed me - I certainly
|
|
wouldn't have expressed it that way to myself, but, just the circularity and
|
|
evident pointlessness of what people were doing.. just seemed to be leading
|
|
nowhere.
|
|
And then there's Kevin Solway, aswell, who's interesting, because on the one
|
|
hand he has himself a tremendous purpose, and a purpose to which he would like
|
|
to call other people, in what he expresses as "the survival of wisdom". But on
|
|
the other hand he does his best to destroy what he would see as false or
|
|
futile hopes, not through mockery as the SubGenii would do it, but through
|
|
explanation and devaluation. So the explanation comes from rendering
|
|
transparent - or simply comprehensible - processes which were controlling a
|
|
person, whether it's political, religious, or something to do with love. By
|
|
trying to expose the inner workings - true motivations, and so on - once
|
|
you've truly understood those concepts, presuming that they're accurate, they
|
|
are then a part of how you view those things, and if.. if for them to operate
|
|
in the way described you had to be unconscious of the mechanics of that
|
|
operation, they can no longer operate in that way, because you are now
|
|
conscious of it. So.. I think that some of his propositions are intended to
|
|
have that consequence.
|
|
So that was explanation. And the other part was devaluation, and that is the
|
|
method of trying to make you feel shame or disgust at something in which you
|
|
might previously have taken pleasure, I think again the foremost example is
|
|
love.. Not simply the *rhetoric* which he uses to address it, say in talking
|
|
about "the evil of love" or phrases like "despicable game", I don't know if he
|
|
uses that specific phrase - but also in his analysis of the motives of it -
|
|
and this links back to the first category of explanation, that, by say
|
|
explaining something which was taken to be elevated or spiritual or a higher
|
|
pursuit, and explaining it as being say just another means of achieving
|
|
happiness, it is thereby devalued somewhat, and in some cases he would attempt
|
|
to explain such things like religion, politics again, things into which people
|
|
may have pured a lot of passion as truly debased activities which have been
|
|
rationalized as exalted. Hmm.
|
|
So, to a certain extent his thoughts have been at work within my own psyche,
|
|
so.. So, yes, the contradiction here is this - or, I don't know if it's a
|
|
contradiction, but anyhow - what.. the principal object of his attack I think
|
|
is in fact the desire for happiness. That if you can kill that or extinguish
|
|
that, then you are free. And that is the condition which he is aiming at, I
|
|
think.. I think that would be a quality of being "fully human", in the fashion
|
|
he intends that term to be understood. But. Or not, but, but okay, How does
|
|
that relate to my own goals. I've taken to calling them extropian, the
|
|
particular category I'm thinking of.. whether I should call them UpWing or
|
|
perhaps simply posthuman, transhuman, I'm not sure, because extropian is a
|
|
specific cluster of concepts.. I'll call them posthuman. Okay, what am I to
|
|
make of my posthuman goals, the ones about transcending the human condition..
|
|
for example, physical immortality. Um.. now, one motivation of trying to
|
|
extend one's life, is to ensure one's own future happiness. If you could be
|
|
assured that you weren't going to die, that would be the anxiety of death
|
|
gone. There might be further anxieties about, say, whether you were going to
|
|
spend that eternity in a hell of sorts, but it is nonetheless another
|
|
expression of a desire for happiness, a desire to get things the way you want
|
|
them to be. So, an attack on happiness as being in general something not to
|
|
strive for.. because .. now, now, what is the because? The argument seems to
|
|
be that happiness, or, he says explicitly, "Happiness is the cause of
|
|
suffering, and suffering is the cause of happiness". ..so that happiness is
|
|
the cause of suffering, because when happiness goes away you suffer, and
|
|
suffering is the cause of happiness, because when the suffering goes away, you
|
|
become happy. Whereas the extropian sort of goals almost like trying to the
|
|
limits of .. possible happiness. For example, make it eternal, rather than
|
|
something that ends when you die. Hmm. So, if that were possible, would it
|
|
invalidate the argument against happiness in the first place or is there
|
|
another argument against happiness?
|
|
Because I think Kevin is saying that truth - Absolute Truth - and happiness
|
|
cannot coexist, because the absolute truth is that all things are transitory,
|
|
but happiness .. wishes for eternity. <moan of contempt at this phraseing> Oh,
|
|
no, that's, that's not a .. it's - so long, so long as there is still a desire
|
|
for infinity, perhaps, in some respect.. this I think is where I perceive a
|
|
difference between him, and Celia Green. Celia Green would appear to consider
|
|
the infinite payoff still possible in a sense which might be conventionally
|
|
considered positive. She does her own share of destruction of illusions, or
|
|
seeking to expose true motivations and so on, but nonetheless, she still
|
|
writes things like "The most exciting thing possible is actually true", which
|
|
is not an outlook of *cosmic* cynicism. Whereas Kevin writes things like,
|
|
"Life appears overfull of beautiful things, but is very poor underneath". So I
|
|
think he would hold to this - Buddhist? - view that happiness is necessarily
|
|
transitory and doomed to extinction, or even interestingness for that matter;
|
|
anything in which one might take pleasure or joy.. and that because he wishes
|
|
to value truth above all, and since truth and happiness cannot coexist, then
|
|
he will value truth to the exclusion of - happiness or personal satisfaction.
|
|
And for this reason he demands that the desire for happiness must die.
|
|
Whereas, because Celia Green would not say that the infinite payoff is
|
|
necessarily impossible, .. or even given her contempt for happiness as it is
|
|
conventionally conceived - for example saying "happiness never sounded
|
|
interesting" and so on - even seeking interestingness is a form of desire -
|
|
and perhaps I should be using the word desire more often than hapiness here..
|
|
To continue: so, she is saying that truth and the realization of an infinite
|
|
desire, or a core desire or any desire - the true realization, can conceivably
|
|
coexist... Well, she doesn't say it, but it seems to be an implication of her
|
|
open-ended approach. Kevin has an infinite aspiration of sorts, in the
|
|
survival of wisdom, because he is saying there in effect that he wants wisdom
|
|
to continue into eternity, so that is an infinite desire of sorts; but,
|
|
wisadom here seems to be, um, the knowledge that desire is pointless and ought
|
|
to be extinguished. So the desire is, to carry the knowledge that desire ought
|
|
to be extinguished, into eternity.. or, to.. for that to always be present in
|
|
consciousness.. that knowledge, or supposed knowledge. Now, Celia Green wants
|
|
people to cultivate centralised psychology and in particular the existential
|
|
perception.. which is just the awareness that existence is there, that things
|
|
are real and the concomitant percpetion of total uncertainty. Now, does that
|
|
amount to the same thing as, wisdom, as Kevin would conceive it? Is there a
|
|
difference here? Because as I have portrayed Kevin's wisdom it has concerned
|
|
mostly desire but I simply selected that aspect of it out, in particular. For
|
|
example, he himself writes somewhere, that "The wise man knows nothing and is
|
|
uncertain of everything, and yet ironically for this reason he knows
|
|
everything". Perhaps that should read "knows everything that can be known.. by
|
|
a finite being".
|
|
Now.. it seems to me that, Celia Green talks of the existential percpetion
|
|
as having certain consequences, and.. although she doesn't draw this
|
|
connection explicitly, among those are the various despairs that she lists.
|
|
..which were, what: "The despair of urgency, the despair of significance and
|
|
the despair of being itself". Now.. it took me a while to understand those.
|
|
The despair of urgency is the despair that arises upon perceiving one's own
|
|
apparently finite lifespan, or resources and in particular time, which causes
|
|
one to be urgent about whatever it is that you're trying to do. The despair of
|
|
significance is simply not knowing what's important. The despair of being
|
|
itself... N ow that might be.. a perception that existence is necessarily
|
|
flawed or frustrating, that in all possible worlds it must be inadeq -
|
|
[TAPE RUNS OUT]
|
|
necessary part of a happiness..
|
|
|
|
|
|
/lizi/condest
|
|
X-NEWS: wattle alt.conspiracy: 14534
|
|
Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.0 1/9/90 VAX/VMS V5.5; site qut.edu.au
|
|
Path: qut.edu.au!news.qut.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!
|
|
zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!uunet!mnemosyne.cs.du.edu!nyx!mporter
|
|
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.destroy.the.earth,alt.slack
|
|
Subject: Re: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?
|
|
Message-ID: <1992Nov9.033532.23410@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
|
|
From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
|
|
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 03:35:32 GMT
|
|
Sender: usenet@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu (netnews admin account)
|
|
References: <1992Nov6.003254.22217@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
|
|
Organization: University of Denver, Dept. of Math & Comp. Sci.
|
|
Lines: 583
|
|
Xref: wattle alt.conspiracy:14534 alt.slack:2414
|
|
|
|
I am posting, with the author's permission, a detailed response to my
|
|
original "Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?" posting which I received via
|
|
email; I am posting it on Usenet because I think it is a very good
|
|
exposition of all the reasons to be *extremely* skeptical about the
|
|
story I was told, and similar tall tales.
|
|
|
|
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 16:54:06 -0800
|
|
From: Cosma R. Shalizi <lizi@ocf.Berkeley.EDU>
|
|
To: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu
|
|
|
|
Article 1049 of alt.destroy.the.earth:
|
|
From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
|
|
Subject: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?
|
|
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 00:32:54 GMT
|
|
|
|
I started writing this article about the events of last night intending to
|
|
send it off to a mailing list to which I subscribe, but I am posting it to
|
|
Usenet News instead because it's not really on-topic for the list, whereas
|
|
here I think it is. I am not a regular reader of alt.conspiracy or
|
|
alt.destroy.the.earth, so perhaps these topics have come up here before.
|
|
Anyhow, on with the story...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Before I read this morning's mail I want to have a go at describing some
|
|
strange things that happened last night. I was walking home from the train
|
|
station and overtook a guy who had been walking along slowly ahead of me
|
|
(it was about 12.30 am). He said a few things by way of talking a little,
|
|
but I was thinking about net-related matters and it was damn cold anyway,
|
|
so I said I wanted to keep going.. so then he pulled out a $10 note and
|
|
gave it to me. This slowed me down a bit. We did end up talking for a few
|
|
minutes, in the course of which he told me a bit about his life: briefly,
|
|
he was born in Algeria just before the Revolution, a "pied-noir", so
|
|
neither the French nor the revolutionary Algerians would accept his
|
|
generation; he went to Europe as a young man - said he knew London and
|
|
Paris like the back of his hand; now he was here in Australia, married
|
|
with five children, and his advice to me was 'to follow your mind, not the
|
|
money or the carrot'.
|
|
Anyhow, after we separated, a few minutes later I ran into *another*
|
|
guy, who was hurrying past until he saw me and stopped to say hello. I
|
|
recognized him after a few moments: we had spoken in a cafe a few times -
|
|
then he was telling me of the necessity of space colonization, so the
|
|
human species doesn't have all of its eggs in one basket. We talked a bit,
|
|
and then a bit longer (but it was mostly him talking and me listening),
|
|
and I will have a go at summarizing what he told me:
|
|
He is now homeless - but he has a list of dozens of addresses that he
|
|
tries to visit every day. Basically his aim is still to try to save some
|
|
fraction of the human race from extinction, but his preferred means have
|
|
changed and this time I got to hear more of his worldview. He began by
|
|
saying how we're all living in a sick society, citing as an example an
|
|
incident within the last few days where he had seen a street kid carrying
|
|
several ?ounces of pure speed, who was handing it out to anybody who
|
|
wanted it. "Now how do you think that sort of stuff gets on the streets?"
|
|
he asked.
|
|
1. Even if this happened, there is an exceedingly simple explanation.
|
|
Selling drugs makes lots of money. Giving away free samples, as
|
|
laundry-detergent makers know, can be quite effective - especially
|
|
when the product is addictive. In other words, the answer to his
|
|
question is, "Free enterprise at work."
|
|
After a few other examples, he went on to say that this overall
|
|
sickness was largely attributable to universal corruption - "the police,
|
|
the government minister, the US senate". "Kids don't believe the teacher,
|
|
they don't believe the minister, they don't believe their parents. If you
|
|
lie to a five or six-year-old, they may not really have an idea of what a
|
|
lie is just yet, but they know they're being deceived."
|
|
"Overall sickness ... attributable to universal corruption?" Hogwash.
|
|
I could just as plausibly say that universal corruption is
|
|
attributable to society's overall sickness, or attribute both to a
|
|
"degenerative virtue." ("Virtue" in the now archaic sense of "specific
|
|
property.") Most five or six year olds _very well indeed_ what a lie
|
|
is - certainly I and my friends did.
|
|
He went on to say that a state of massive denial is near-universal -
|
|
people don't want to see how bad things are, how bad they are getting, or
|
|
what is just around the corner - which, he said, is nuclear Armageddon. He
|
|
recounted a few stories about the way geopolitics supposedly really works;
|
|
eg the Russians saying to the US, "OK, we give in, we surrender, just so
|
|
we don't have to fight a war. But as the price you're going to have to
|
|
support all these people that *we've* been supporting" - (I think he was
|
|
talking about ex-Soviet Central Asia here) - "that's the price *you'll*
|
|
have to pay for getting us to drink Coca-Cola and accept the rest of your
|
|
shit."
|
|
This story in re the Russians is, to be blunt, bullshit. Certainly, for
|
|
a long time the US more or less implied that, if, by some miracle,
|
|
Communism "withered away" in a Soviet-bloc country, then the Marshall
|
|
plan would be repeated, but by the time the Cold War ended, the US was
|
|
too poor to follow up on this. We sure as Hell aren't supporting Soviet
|
|
Central Asia. Mind you, this was how the sharper people on the US side
|
|
predicted the Cold War would end from the beginning - that the US would
|
|
win because Russia would go broke first. They neglected to consider
|
|
that the US might also be broke. The Soviet government couldn't even
|
|
keep itself fed, much less make deals with the US.
|
|
For me the most interesting geopolitical story he told was his version
|
|
of China 1989. The US began by trying to entice China, with things like
|
|
aerospace technology transfer, and later exchange student programs, all
|
|
carefully calculated to try to spread the American system. "Several
|
|
thousand exchange students were sent to China, and there were no
|
|
restrictions on what they could take - sports cars, flashy clothes - and
|
|
of course your ordinary Chinese hasn't seen anything like this..." (This
|
|
is all meant to suggest what he said of course - it's not a word-for-word
|
|
quote, I didn't have a tape recorder running.) Essentially, their presence
|
|
was such a stimulus to the Chinese students, who in turn were a stimulus
|
|
to the urban workers, that the 1949 "democracy movement" turns out to have
|
|
been the result of American conspiracy. So *then*, the Chinese government
|
|
"made a really heavy decision: they sent in the tanks, and they shot their
|
|
own children, in order to send the message, that they were prepared to use
|
|
the bomb." (ie "if they were prepared to do that to their own children,
|
|
what would they do to America?") This action apparently reined in the
|
|
interference of the American government in China.
|
|
Urk. Taking "sports cars" from the US to _China_? _Exchange
|
|
students_? No. What happened was that, following the power struggles
|
|
after Mao's death, the Chinese leadership fell to people who recogn-
|
|
ized that capitalism is a very good way indeed of industrializing -
|
|
after all, it grew up with it. So they set up parts of the economy
|
|
as more or less capitalist, and it worked. People got richer.
|
|
Rich people - especially rich, young, highly educated people - tend
|
|
to demand a voice in the government. You may have noticed that many
|
|
of the Tiananmen protesters carried placards of Mao - lots of them
|
|
were people who believed the rhetoric about a _people's_ republic,
|
|
etc. The message the Chinese government sent was to its own people:
|
|
Dissent and be crushed. In re the exchange students: Many more Chinese
|
|
students went and studied in the West than Westerns went to China.
|
|
On their return, these may well have had some ideological influence -
|
|
but the 1989 movement was not brought on by Americans flashing
|
|
their Levis and trolling in their Pontiacs. (The idea that "the
|
|
average Chinese" has never seen anything like a motor car is so
|
|
incredibly wrong-headed and patronizing that I won't bother to
|
|
comment.)
|
|
Later on he briefly praised the virtues of Chinese civilization - "4000
|
|
years; America is just 200 years old, it's just a little brat", and
|
|
"they've never invaded or raped and plundered another people, they've been
|
|
nonaggressive for four thousand years"; he even advised me to go to the
|
|
library today and read some books on Chinese history. He then contrasted
|
|
East with West, saying "the fucking American government, it's out of
|
|
control..."
|
|
5. China has a fascinating civilization and history. He doesn't know
|
|
squat about it. 4,000 years is _barely_ defensible if you count
|
|
illiterate villagers with semi-interesting pots as civilized.
|
|
Try more like 3,500 - whereas Europe, dating from Crete, can claim
|
|
at least 4,500. But that, and the fact that "American civilization,"
|
|
as opposed to a subspecies of Europe, doesn't exist, is a tangent.
|
|
The main point is that Chinese culture originated in a region much
|
|
smaller than the present main-land China, and it spread by the
|
|
usual methods - invasion, rape and plunder. The classical age of
|
|
Chinese philosophy was the Warring States period (c. -700 (memory
|
|
fades) to -221). During this time China was, in fact, a bunch of
|
|
warring feudal states, the rulers of which filled their time much
|
|
as rulers always have - with depravity, taxation, war and general
|
|
cruelty to commoners. Chinese schools of philosophy - at least the
|
|
ones which prospered - all claimed to have ways out of the chaos.
|
|
The school whih got itself put into practice was the Legalists,
|
|
who were, after Plato, the second group of people to elaborate
|
|
a totalitarian ideology. It delivered what it promised, and unified
|
|
China as a vast prison-camp. There was a revolt, a brief relapse
|
|
into anarchy, and what emerged was the Han empire. This based it-
|
|
self on a mixture of Confucianism and as much Legalism as it
|
|
could get away with. Chinese history is a succession of dynasties,
|
|
between which it was divided into squabbling principalities that
|
|
set their people to killing each other with as much gusto as any
|
|
other section of the human race.
|
|
As to their not being imperialistic, it is worth noting that
|
|
(as always, through the usual methods) the Tang dynasty ruled, in
|
|
addition to modern China (not including Tibet) modern Indo-China,
|
|
Korea, and so much of Central Asia that Li Po, the second greatest
|
|
poet of the dynasty, was in all probability born in Afghanistan.
|
|
It took the trauma of the Mongols to turn the Chinese even temp-
|
|
orarily isolationist. No doubt they will recover from this fairly
|
|
soon.
|
|
As to the East vs. the West - modern Europe (including its colonies,
|
|
such as the Americas and Oz) is the spoiled grand-child of old Asia.
|
|
It owes a lot to China and India and Mesopotamia and Egypt and
|
|
Persia. But it has definitely made its own, unique contributions:
|
|
modern science and its application to technology; the ideals of
|
|
representative democracy, the secular state and toleration; the
|
|
creation of truly global civilization. Some other ideas, which I
|
|
consider truly and deeply bad, it must take the blame for: nation-
|
|
alism and Marxism, for instance. But the fact is that not one of
|
|
the older nations is as it was. The Islamic world today, for in-
|
|
stance, is not the unified empire from which the West learned
|
|
mathematics, science, philosophy and even theology, but a fragmented
|
|
bunch of dirt-poor countries wasting themselves in ridiculous and
|
|
bloody quarrels, and a handful of oil principalities maintained by
|
|
the West. China today, certainly, is _not_ the China that was.
|
|
I don't know how clear all this sounds, but anyhow, his essential
|
|
allegation is that there is an inner core of extremely powerful people in
|
|
America who are planning to launch the missiles soon (when he mentioned
|
|
this he would look at his watch, and say things like, "I hope we have at
|
|
least two years" - I don't know why he looked to the watch, perhaps for
|
|
dramatic emphasis).
|
|
For the love of Cthulhu, WHY??? If the US launches, everyone else with
|
|
nukes launches too - AT US!!! Power-hungry people are not usually
|
|
thrilled by the prospect of ruling of radioactive rubble while watching
|
|
their thyroids swell. And why not know, why wait two years? Why not
|
|
wait eight? Or have done it the moment Ronnie came into office?
|
|
(Of course, I can here the answer: "I don't know why they set their
|
|
time-table like they do...")
|
|
He told me that because of a 50-year secrecy act of
|
|
some sort, you can't find out, say, who the first 300 people in the CIA
|
|
were, since it is held to be a matter of national security.
|
|
Again, false. The political appointees - Director, Assistant
|
|
Directors, etc., are matters of public record - they are appointed
|
|
by the President and confirmed (or not confirmed) by the Senate.
|
|
Requests for the "first three hundred people in the CIA" under the
|
|
Freedom of Information Act _might_ be turned down on the grounds of
|
|
national security. For a wonder, he's right about the 50 year limit
|
|
on this - but as the CIA was founded in 1947, if he can hold out
|
|
five more years, he can know for certain. Since it _was_ so long ago,
|
|
they might give the names to him anyhow. Definitely they couldn't
|
|
hide behind the national security clauses for the first 300 in the
|
|
Office of Strategic Services, the precursor agency of the CIA, since
|
|
that _was_ founded more than fifty years ago.
|
|
(This is where
|
|
he gave me a recap of Oliver North's appearance before the US Senate -
|
|
saying how North had said he was ordered to do what he did, but he
|
|
couldn't say who gave him his orders, since he would then be executed for
|
|
treason, and so the Senate agreed because North was thus following the
|
|
letter of the law stating that you can't divulge these names.)
|
|
This is false - utterly, utterly false. North claimed that some of
|
|
his orders came from his immediate superior, Admiral Pointdexter;
|
|
others he refused to say. He didn't have to say he'd be shot for
|
|
treason if he revealed them, for two reasons: A. The fifth amendment
|
|
to the U.S. Constitution gives any person the right to refuse to
|
|
testify if testifying would incriminate him, and B. The Congress
|
|
(not just the Senate) granted North immunity to prosecution on
|
|
the basis of his testimony _before_ he began to testify. Certainly,
|
|
no Senator with half a brain _approved_ of North's actions, or his
|
|
hiding them. Sen. Inoyue (?sp?) compared him to the defendants at
|
|
Nuremberg. I can say all this with utter certainty, because, like
|
|
anyone else with half a brain in this country (not many, alas) I
|
|
watched the hearings as they were broadcast. Unless your friend
|
|
cares to claim those were all a show, the real hearings were quite
|
|
different, and he just _happened_ to find out about them...
|
|
And
|
|
presumably it is these people who are the only ones who have the capacity
|
|
to launch the missiles - and I think he assumes that they intend to do so
|
|
because he can't see any other reason for continuing to produce them. And
|
|
the fact that nobody even *knows* who the power-wielders are - he said -
|
|
was why he was looking for schemes to make a safe haven for part of
|
|
humanity to make it through a nuclear apocalypse, rather than trying to
|
|
avert the missile-firing altogether.
|
|
"Presumably," indeed. The only person with missile-launching
|
|
capability in the US is the President - though I've no doubt there
|
|
are some fall-back arrangements in case he's in Washington when it
|
|
gets vaporized. Of course, the elaborate apparatus of cyphered codes
|
|
and keys and all _could_ just be a ruse, but he hasn't given us any
|
|
reason to think so.
|
|
There are two reasons the bombs keep getting made. First, the military
|
|
budget in this country is a gigantic - if not terribly productive -
|
|
jobs program. There are communities, and definitely companies, whose
|
|
livelihoods depend on new bombs, new missiles, new bombers and new
|
|
submarines. Until someone finds a way to effectively convert them
|
|
to civilian production, any US government which makes serious cuts
|
|
in "defense" risks loosing the next election ignominously. Second,
|
|
bombs are made of radiocative materials. They decay. Fifty, even
|
|
twenty year old nukes aren't reliably usable, and must be replaced,
|
|
if arsenals are to be kept up to strength. (Personally, I see _no_
|
|
reason not to let them wither away, but...)
|
|
He used the phrase "the serpent's head" a few times, as in "You have to
|
|
find the serpent's head and chop it off,
|
|
At least he knows his Mao: "Though a serpent be a thousand (meters?)
|
|
long, to kill it one need only chop of the head." (Quoting from
|
|
memory, and no doubt distorting it.)
|
|
if you want to do it that way."
|
|
This is either ungrammatical or meaningless.
|
|
He said thousands of people around the world were trying to find out who
|
|
these top people were, but "they went underground 20 years ago... And
|
|
these are really ruthless people. They shot their own president on TV,
|
|
after all!"
|
|
"20 years ago" means 1972 or thereabout. Kennedy - he was bound to
|
|
show up here, wasn't he? - was shot in 1963, i.e., they were "above
|
|
ground" when they orchestrated the assassination of the President.
|
|
This seems improbable. So does their date of disappearence - a cabal
|
|
running the US could _never_ afford to be visible; certainly if they
|
|
could have managed this for the first 25 years (counting from the
|
|
start of the CIA), there was no reason for them to hide in the age
|
|
of Nixon.
|
|
I am pretty sure he said at one point that he knew seven
|
|
people who had been shot dead in the course of such investigations (as he
|
|
was talking, he was contantly looking around us to see if anyone was
|
|
approaching). Whether these seven were people he knew personally, I'm not
|
|
sure.
|
|
Indeed.
|
|
I briefly mentioned the Internet, saying "couldn't you reach all these
|
|
millions of people you say you can't work out how to reach, by putting
|
|
your information out there". In trying to explain the net, I said that it
|
|
was a computer network linking mostly universities all over the world. He
|
|
said, in effect, that it was still probably not enough - that you could
|
|
tell all the college students the truth, and people would just panic
|
|
Of course. I saw this coming, too. There's never anything sensible
|
|
and construcive you can do against Them, and people are such insecure
|
|
and feeble little sheep that a conspiracy theory (!!!) will send them
|
|
raving off into the night.
|
|
("You'll probably start to panic when you realize how bad thngs are", he
|
|
warned me at the beginning; and indeed I was shivering violently
|
|
throughout a lot of the conversation, but I think that was because I was
|
|
standing there in the cold in just shirt, shorts and thongs.)
|
|
Glad to see you, at least, had a firm grip on reality...
|
|
"The
|
|
students might try to start a revolution, but in that case the people who
|
|
run the show would just go ahead with their plans now, rather than later."
|
|
Indeed - why _not_ now, rather than later? Why wait? So there can be
|
|
a few million more people in the Third World to kill?
|
|
"On the bases where they have these weapons stationed, once they're
|
|
getting ready to launch, those places are completely sealed off - no
|
|
communications from the outside world. They wouldn't know what was going on."
|
|
No. They are in communication with the NATO command centers - places
|
|
like NORAD and SAC and so forth. This is essential - command _must_
|
|
be able to give orders and get feedback, and for this reason we can
|
|
say that the same is true of the Russians and Chinese.
|
|
This is why he emphasized the necessity of finding "the head of the
|
|
serpent" - if you knew who the conspirators were, and got the names to the
|
|
right people, they could perhaps stage a coup and head the thing off. But
|
|
he saw no way of finding out who they were. When I said, well isn't it
|
|
better to give it a go, rather than say, I can't stop the bombs from going
|
|
off, I'll try to save a few at least; he said no - if people are gong to
|
|
die, you should let them die peacefully, rather than have them spend their
|
|
last days in panic and terror.
|
|
How considerate of him. So he goes and talks about this horrible
|
|
conspiracy to a person who just explained to him that he can reach
|
|
nearly every technogeek on the planet...
|
|
After all, when "5000" bombs went off it
|
|
would be "like the planet passing through the sun"
|
|
Wrong. Bombs are big, destructive things, but _anything_ humans
|
|
can do at this point pales to insignificance beside, say, a big solar
|
|
flare. If we were to somehow drop the planet into the Sun, the atmo-
|
|
sphere would go, as would the oceans, soil and rock would melt if not
|
|
vaporize, etc. If every nuclear bomb were to explode simultaneously
|
|
with every reactor melting down, we wouldn't get anywhere near there.
|
|
From the alt.destroy.the.earth point of view, this is a crying shame,
|
|
but it is true.
|
|
- "all the oxygen in the atmosphere being destroyed".
|
|
This is, as we say in the trade, lizardshit. Oxygen - and every other
|
|
kind of atom - would have some interesting things done to it in the
|
|
immediate vicinity of a blast, but even a few miles away the chances
|
|
of it getting "transmuted" are very, very low. You'd have to worry much
|
|
more about getting engulfed in a firestorm - and no, the bombs would
|
|
not set off enough fires to burn up all the oxygen.
|
|
I had to this point not expressed any
|
|
criticisms of what he had said, simply in order to find out what he might
|
|
say, but the idea that after such an event everything would be over and
|
|
done with stuck me as absurd. "It might be over quickly in the major
|
|
population centres, where the bombs go off directly overhead, but if
|
|
you're outside..."
|
|
It is absurd. You're right. (You had me worried, though, Mitch...)
|
|
In any case, I didn't get much of a chance to argue
|
|
this, because at this point *another* guy happened along, who overheard us
|
|
talking about bombs, and said "You have more to worry about than atomic
|
|
bombs these days... There's the electromagnetic bomb." When I asked him
|
|
what that might be, he said it "used" electromagnetic radiation to "turn
|
|
one atom into another". "It's a bit like alchemy." I asked him for
|
|
details, and he said "It changes the number of electrons that the atom can
|
|
hold... You happen to have run into a drunken physicist."
|
|
There isn't an electromagnetic bomb. There certainly can't be one
|
|
that does what he described. Electromagnetism is the force that
|
|
holds the electrons in the atom, and governs interactions between
|
|
atoms, but the number of electrons an atom can hold is determined
|
|
solely by the number of protons in its nucleus, and is, in fact, equal
|
|
to the number of protons in its nucleus. This number gets changed in
|
|
one of three ways: A. Radiocative decay, B. Nuclear fission or
|
|
C. Nuclear fusion. Electromagnetism is so much weaker than the
|
|
intra-nuclear forces as to make it impossible to change nuclei with
|
|
it. If this person was a physicist, it was either only in the sense
|
|
an incompetent hack like Fritjof Capra can be considered a physicist,
|
|
or he making fun of you and your friend to the point where he probably
|
|
ruptured his lungs laughing afterwards. (I have serious problems
|
|
restraining my sarcasm - no real offense intended. May I recommend
|
|
J. Trefil's _From Atoms to Quarks_ as a nice, non-technical intro-
|
|
duction to the wonderful world of atomic and subatomic physics? It
|
|
got me interested in this business in the first place...)
|
|
Now this "electromagnetic bomb" idea might be defended by the usual
|
|
"Oh, that's the _old_ theory. In my new one it is clear that-" But
|
|
it so happens that the current theory of electromagnetism, quantum
|
|
electrodynamics, is the single most successful theory in physics
|
|
today. There is a wonderful and not at all technical explication
|
|
of it by one of its founders: R. Feynmann's _QED: The Strange Theory
|
|
of Light and Matter_. The evidence needed to abandon it would have
|
|
to be compelling indeed - and it's not forthcoming.
|
|
The first guy said, "Oh well, I don't want to hear about it if there's
|
|
something even worse,
|
|
Typical.
|
|
it doesn't change our situation..." and said something about the
|
|
importance of dealing with the conspiracy behind the weapons machine. The
|
|
second guy said, "Oh well, if you're talking about conspiracies, the
|
|
military-industrial complex isn't the *real* one", and I said, "So what
|
|
is? The Committee of 300?" but it turned out he just meant the Masons.
|
|
"You don't get anywhere in US politics without being a Mason.
|
|
In re the Masons: crap.
|
|
(The first
|
|
guy had already said that *they* have lookouts everywhere, in the fof
|
|
organizations which are backing or banking the group which is planning to
|
|
use the bombs: such groups include the Illuminati, the Masons, the Roman
|
|
Catholic Church...)
|
|
Of coure. Just how far back does this merry little cabal go, and
|
|
what were they planning to do _before_ nukes were invented? This
|
|
couldn't, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, predate
|
|
the discovery of the nucleus in 190-something. (THE ILLUMINATI???)
|
|
At this point I coldn't stand the cold any more and didn't want to
|
|
pursue any of these matters right there and then, partly because I wasn't
|
|
sure *where* I would want to start asking for clarifications,
|
|
justifications, etc. So I simply got the second guy's number (I haven't
|
|
yet phoned him; it's now only 9 am); and I may well run into the first guy
|
|
again, if I keep my eyes open.
|
|
Okay. I have basically attempted to describe what I heard without
|
|
inserting too many critical comments. About the only factor I haven't
|
|
mentioned so far, I think, is that the first guy also said a few times that
|
|
he thought the whole thing was probably Satanic ("this is the devil's
|
|
planet now"), which I guess means that he has an outlook similar to that
|
|
expressed in (for example) the Australian book "The Cosmic Conspiracy",
|
|
which alleges that human geopolitics is a battleground for cosmic forces
|
|
of Good and Evil (not a rare claim, actually).
|
|
Indeed. This is probably one of the most blatant and disgusting
|
|
forms of human _hubris_ - the idea that a bunch of plains apes are
|
|
the focus of the Power That Be, who have nothing better to do than
|
|
intervene in our sensely and bloody quarrels. It was marginally
|
|
defensible to to hold such views in the time of Augustine; by the
|
|
time of Hegel and Marx it had become embarassing to persons of
|
|
sense; today it is probably pathological. (N.B. people holding
|
|
such views _never_ think the world is in the hands of Good at the
|
|
moment.)
|
|
Anyhow, if you inhabit a
|
|
reality-tunnel anywhere near that of consensus reality, you can probably
|
|
think of lots of reasons not to believe this world-picture. I know I can
|
|
think of all sorts of arguments against the idea of a (possibly satanic)
|
|
conspiracy to bring about a nuclear apocalypse.
|
|
"Reality-tunnel" seems altogether appropriate for such world-views
|
|
as his: Narrow, blinkered and dark.
|
|
But, I also recognize that
|
|
my major motivation in thinking up counter-arguments is simply that I do
|
|
not *want* to believe in such a conspiracy, since to put it mildly it
|
|
makes life somewhat more difficult.
|
|
True enough, but that doesn't invalidate the arguments. The fact that
|
|
geometry originated in measuring land for taxation purposes does not
|
|
make geometry invalid for anarchists or objectors to taxation. Your
|
|
friend's statements of fact have proven either false, dubious on the
|
|
basis of other evidence, or simply lunatic.
|
|
What future for extropian hopes such
|
|
as indefinite life extension wheneverything's gong to go up in a few years
|
|
anyway? And the problem is, how can anyone who is *not* a member of the
|
|
hypothetical conspiracy prove that the conspiracy is *not* there, unless
|
|
they actually are part of the "inner core"?
|
|
Proving such negatives is indeed difficult. But consider this: How
|
|
can you prove that invisible, intangible pink furry gremlins that
|
|
feed on petroleum aren't what _really_ make cars go, and that they
|
|
live in the cylinders of the engine? Is there any reason to believe
|
|
in this conspiracy? No. Is there reason to think this conspiracy
|
|
is a piece of paranoid raving? Yes. Would it be rational to believe
|
|
in it? Only if you have a preference for more rather than less
|
|
falsehood and insanity.
|
|
You can remove the part about Satanism and still retain the idea of a
|
|
conspiracy whose aim is global genocide. This idea I have actually seen
|
|
expressed before,
|
|
It's not _that_ uncommon. At least a few science fiction novels on
|
|
this theme, besides the usual paranoid screeds...
|
|
in the final chapter of "High Weirdness by Mail", of all
|
|
places. In stark contrast to the cuttingly sarcastic reviews which make up
|
|
90% of the rest of the book, that whole last chapter is devoted to
|
|
excerpts from a newsletter called "Further Connections" put out by Waves
|
|
Forest (PO Box 768, Monterey CA 93940, USA). Here are Ivan Stang's comments:
|
|
"One of the Robin Hoods of suppressed data. Anyone who wants to
|
|
seriously look into the possibility that major scientific breakthroughs
|
|
ARE being hidden by THEM owe it to themselves to send for his info, which
|
|
includes listings and addresses for many fringe research groups not
|
|
covered in this book. Not funny at all... horrifying, yes;
|
|
outlandish-sounding, HELL yes; but funny, no. Very persuasive, sobering,
|
|
almost poetic essay/rants with attached bibliographies on the various
|
|
technologies and metaphysical discoveries. Be prepared, however, for some
|
|
real shocks to your programming. $4 should cover expenses for the first
|
|
mailing, which contains more than 400 sources. A penny a source, folks.
|
|
You gonna pass it up? *Huh, boy?*" (I have sent away for this mailing
|
|
myself; no response so far.)
|
|
Some technological innovations might well be surpressed. But as a
|
|
test, when this mailing arrives, see if there are any references
|
|
to the "gasoline pill" story. If so, Mr. Forest (or Ms. Forest)
|
|
is one of those wonderful, gullible cranks this country produces
|
|
so well...
|
|
And some words from Waves Forest:
|
|
Imagine you are among only a few hundred masters of a whole planet's
|
|
resources, with five billion slaves surronding you, many in bad shape
|
|
because you've mishandled some resources, many others starting to wake up
|
|
to the situation. In your attempts to strengthen your psition you have
|
|
seriously mistreated a lot of them, or hired others to do so, and you are
|
|
slowly losing the struggle to keep the extent of your crimes and cruelties
|
|
a secret.
|
|
If you were in such a position, would it feel safe to share with all
|
|
citizens the advanced technolgies developed in your top-secret "defense"
|
|
laboratories? Some of these discoveries could free mankind from dependence
|
|
on your resource monopolies, and provide tools for a mass uprising and
|
|
overthrow of your regimes.
|
|
Why would the defense laboratories work on such things _in_the_first_
|
|
place_? Fortuitous (?sp) discoveries are not as common in science as
|
|
the mythology makes them out to be - and notice that now, mind you,
|
|
you have to rope in hundreds or thousands of scientists, engineers
|
|
and technicians into the conspiracy. Not just ones working on, say,
|
|
refinements in bomb technology, but alternate energy sources, advanced
|
|
communications, etc., etc.
|
|
When a man does something his fellows would strongly object to, and
|
|
decides to keep the misdeed a secret, he mentally withdraws somewhat from
|
|
the others, because now he has to watch himself to make sure doesn't
|
|
mention what he did. More misdeeds bring on further withdrawal. The
|
|
intensity of the misdeeds and the secrecy surrounding them can increase to
|
|
astonishing proprtions.
|
|
It has actually reached the point where certain very powerful men, to
|
|
ensure their presonal safety and the perpetuation of their empires, plan
|
|
to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the rest.
|
|
Since most of the general public just somehow doesn't feel right about
|
|
genocide, the blatant exterminations of the '30s and '40s have been
|
|
replaced by artificially induced wars, plagues, accidents, and "natural"
|
|
disasters.
|
|
What's a naturally induced war? An example of a artificially induced
|
|
plague? (Forest says "AIDS," then we shouldn't worry because Their
|
|
genetic engineers are incompetent - it's hard to catch and takes years
|
|
to kill. If you really want a planet-killer, look to the pneumonic
|
|
plague or influenza. I worked out a scheme for that once, and would
|
|
be happy to send you the details.) Now, about those natural
|
|
disasters...
|
|
Earhquakes can be induced artificially by precise placement and timing
|
|
of nuclear "tests". The shock waves sprad out over the globe, then
|
|
recombine at various harmonic intervals around the sphere to deliver a
|
|
strong jolt at the desired location within forty-eight hours of the
|
|
initial blast.
|
|
The physics of this is so utterly horrible I'm at a loss for words...
|
|
There's not enough energy in bombs, the shock waves don't "recombine
|
|
at various harmonic intervals" and they definitely don't delay 48
|
|
hrs. This seems like a descendant of Tesla's shake-the-earth-to-bits
|
|
scheme...
|
|
So there it is again, the idea that "certain very powerful men... plan
|
|
to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the
|
|
rest." Hell, I recall a similar idea - although the motivation here was a
|
|
religious/occult hope of achieving immortality - on the part of the Saures
|
|
in "Illuminatus!"
|
|
This is very different from blowing the world to smithereens with
|
|
nukes. I find it less incredible (in the litteral sense, i.e.,
|
|
unbelievable) but by no stretch of the imagination persuasive.
|
|
As you point out, it is not an uncommon idea, certainly not
|
|
in the fringe culture - which includes thee and me and he.
|
|
So what I want to know is this. Where did this idea originate? Does
|
|
anyone know more about Waves Forest, about the secret 600 at the top of
|
|
the CIA, about the logistical problems of organizing such a conspiracy, of
|
|
what forms this idea has taken, who communicates it, who argues against it?
|
|
I know nothing about Waves Forest; the secret 600 at the top of the
|
|
CIA are, to the best of my knowledge, the creation of his fevered
|
|
brain; the logistical problems are immense - the cabal must be at
|
|
once everyhwere, omnipotent, omniscient, indiscoverable and its
|
|
goals and structure intimately known to the conspiracy theorist.
|
|
This is a tall order to fill.
|
|
PS: If the "first guy" of my story is in fact wholly correct, and some
|
|
member of the Conspiracy reads this post, then according to the argument
|
|
he gave the bombs will be set off now rather than later...
|
|
If the conspiracy can't prevent a homeless religious fanatic
|
|
(i.e., someone who litterally believes in Satan) from finding out
|
|
about its existence, goals and methods, and can't keep a stray
|
|
technogeek & known extropian from spreading the news across the Net,
|
|
what CAN they accomplish.
|
|
PPS: I have just recalled another anecdote from the same guy's monologue.
|
|
He said he approached a few US sailors (on shore leave here, I presume)
|
|
with a similar set of claims and ideas, and asked what they thought of it;
|
|
and one guy said, "Well, if I was to give you my opinion I would probably
|
|
agree, and probably so wold my friends, but we can't give you opinions
|
|
because when we join the Navy we sign a little piece of paper that
|
|
forbids us from expressing political opinions, and we'll get shot for
|
|
treason if we violate that paper..." This is one claim (amongst many!) of
|
|
which I am sceptical - can anyone confirm or deny this? I can imagine a
|
|
courtmartial, dishonourable discharge, etc - but execution?
|
|
Sailors on shore leave are not noted for sobriety or seriousness.
|
|
Some people humor cranks like your friend, others tell them they are
|
|
lunatics. This depends on how violent-seeming the crank is, how
|
|
entertaining the rant, etc. Which is more likely: That They are
|
|
known to every grunt in the Navy, or that some drunken sailors
|
|
were having fun with a semi-entertaining lunatic?
|
|
Government employees are restricted in their expression of political
|
|
opinions - a bizarre and senseless piece of law, but there nonetheless.
|
|
(They can vote, but not volunteer for campgains, donate more than nom-
|
|
inal sums, etc.) The penalties are not, of course, execution for
|
|
treason, but getting fired - in the military, a dishonorable
|
|
discharge, I suppose. (My mother is a biochemist at the National
|
|
Institutes of Health & an ex-Trotskyite - every four years the law gets
|
|
her _extremely_ upset...). BTW, in the United States "treason" is
|
|
defined in the Constitution, and consists _solely_ of providing aid
|
|
and comfort to the enemies of the repbulic, punishable not by execution
|
|
but by imprisonment - admittedly for a fairly lengthy number of years.
|
|
Your friend might mean simply "get shot" when he says "get shot for
|
|
treason," but it does little to bolster my confidence in his accuracy
|
|
as to fact.
|
|
|
|
|
|
\qix\necro
|
|
Newsgroups: alt.horror.cthulhu,alt.necromicon
|
|
Subject: NecroMicon FAQ
|
|
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 05:13:09 GMT
|
|
|
|
The alt.necromicon F.A.Q.
|
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
Q. What is the NecroMicon?
|
|
|
|
The NecroMicon (literally, "The Book of Dead Mice") is a near-legendary text,
|
|
also known as "Al As-if". It was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul
|
|
Alhirra (known irreverently in the modern West as: "Bill the Cat"), of
|
|
whom little is known, other than that he travelled widely and may have
|
|
been the originator of the "Ackankar" cult.
|
|
|
|
Q. Where may the NecroMicon be found?
|
|
|
|
Unfortunately, the original Arab text has been lost, and only fragments
|
|
remain of the various translations that were attempted. The most notable
|
|
such translation was the work of an otherwise unknown cleric called "the
|
|
mysterious Wormius"; we even know of his name only through tertiary sources
|
|
(for example, the fine historical researches of Dr Phileus Sadowsky). Most
|
|
likely Wormius encountered Alhirra in the course of an inspection of booty
|
|
brought back from the Crusades.
|
|
It is believed that the exiled cabalist Ignatz Eliezer carried a copy of
|
|
Wormius' translation with him to Prague, where he met Dr John-D, the
|
|
famous English magician and rapper (best known in this regard for introducing
|
|
the magickal cry "IAO!" to rap, the modern form of which is "Yo!"). John-D in
|
|
turn translated Wormius into Enochian, encoded the result with a complex
|
|
multivalent substitution cipher, and sold the new manuscript to Rudolf II
|
|
of Bavaria, as the work of Roger Bacon. Over the centuries many scholars of
|
|
the occult puzzled over John-D's handiwork; perhaps the most notorious of
|
|
these was Adam Weishaupt, who as a young man was fascinated by the mysterious
|
|
"illuminated manuscript".
|
|
Rudolf's collection was broken up with the passage of time, with his
|
|
collection of rare manuscripts making its way to the venerable Jorge's famous
|
|
library in Italy. It survived the fire that destroyed Jorge's abbey and
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took his life, and along with the other remaining fragments of Jorge's
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collection was stored at a Jesuit college for many years.
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In 1912 it was discovered there by Wilfred Voynich, a Polish scientist
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and lover of rare books. He was also the son-in-law of George Boole, the
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logician, and he may have had the impression that the manuscript contained
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certain ideas of Bacon's that anticipated modern combinatorics.
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Ever since then there has been a global effort to decipher the Voynich
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Manuscript, as it is now known. A history of this effort can be found in
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"The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma", by Mary D'Empirio (ADA 070
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618; US Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service,
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Washington DC, 1978). Several times solutions have been announced, but all
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have been found wanting. The text of the manuscript itself is available via
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anonymous ftp from rand.org (192.5.14.33) (/pub/jim/voynich.tar.Z).
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Q. What is the content of the NecroMicon?
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The book is generally agreed to have contained Alhirra's metaphysical
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speculations. "Bill the Cat" appears to have outlined a baroque cosmology
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|
in which our world is one of many "fabricated" worlds, made for various
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|
purposes. Alhirra's philosophy is not unusual for its time in possessing
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|
teleological elements, but what truly sets it apart is that the purpose of
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|
our world is seen to be the performance of a giant *calculation*
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|
(ironic, given Voynich's likely presumptions about the manuscript's
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|
content, mentioned above). In this respect he is remarkably modern (see,
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|
for example, Edward Fredkin's recent attempts to view the universe as a
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|
computational process).
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From the modern viewpoint, Alhirra subsequently diminishes the
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|
attractiveness of his thought by then introducing his pet obsessions -
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|
cryptozoology and numerology. He believed that the overseers of this vast
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|
computation (the "Archons" or "Sysadmins", in occult jargon), although
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|
originating in another dimension ("the spaces between"), had incarnated in
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|
a form visible to us - as *mice*. (Hence the book's title.) He believed
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|
that their centre of operations was "an alien city in a cold land to the
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|
north" - presumably the Antarctic. Alhirra had several visions of this
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|
city from space, perhaps while scrying (these visions later formed the basis
|
|
of the "Piri Reis" map); he described the city's physical environment, and
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|
its flora and fauna, in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that
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|
the NecroMicon is also sometimes known as "The Penguin Opus".
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|
Alhirra also attached great significance to the number 42, suggesting
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|
that this number somehow lay at the heart of the planetary entelechy, but
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|
never explaining why. It is a frequent observation that 42 is twice 21,
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|
the number of characters in John-D's Enochian alphabet, but otherwise no
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|
one know what "Bill" meant by this. Colin Low has written that Alhirra's
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|
scrying technique involved the use of "an incense composed of olibanum,
|
|
storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish", and it has been surmised that the
|
|
NecroMicon was not meant to be understood except by individuals who had
|
|
ingested certain rare psychedelic plants. (For more on this line of
|
|
thought, see ethnopharmacologist Terence McKenna's article on the Voynich
|
|
manuscript in Issue #7 of "Gnosis" magazine, and the scene in Wilson and
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|
Shea's "Illuminatus!" in which Weishaupt attempts to fathom the NecroMicon.)
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|
Alhirra himself may have been unhinged by his exploration of
|
|
consciousness. He is said to have written that to free oneself from "the
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|
click of the mouse" (an unclear phrase, apparently referring to the means
|
|
of their alleged control) one must become "like that cat, dwelling in the
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|
midpoint between Something and Nothing, which is neither alive nor dead."
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|
Perhaps this is similar to the sentiment that one should be "in the world,
|
|
but not of it." In any case, Alhirra is said to have met his end while
|
|
standing on a chair, literally frightened to death by his invisible
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|
persecutors; his last words were, "Ia! Cthulhu ack-phffftagn..."
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Q. What about the Necronomicon?
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|
A. A modern superstition, in my opinion, but there are some people
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on alt.horror.cthulhu who take it seriously.
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