When Graham recently invited me to contribute to his new anthology on consciousness, The Divine Spark, I was pleased at the invitation but didn't really know what to submit. Then I ran across two rather peculiar essays that I had written in the fall of 2011 while writing my memoir, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which was published at the end of November in 2012. For various reasons, I eliminated them from the final draft of the book and relegated them to the limbo of some backup hard drive.
One, titled “This Just In . . . ,” is a speculation on Terence's Novelty Theory that was prompted by an unusual announcement by a group of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. In September 2011, these researchers announced that they had observed an extremely anomalous phenomenon, the detection of neutrinos that travel faster than light, in clear violation of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. This event, if proven to be true, would have certainly been novel, or at least the measurement of it would have been novel, so it seemed like an excellent opportunity to muse on the Time Wave (TWO) and Novelty Theory and the nature of Novelty itself. The Time Wave, or more accurately the basic tenets of its construction, was downloaded into Terence's bemushroomed brain while we were in the grip of our shared psychedelic/shamanic odyssey at La Chorrera, Colombia, in April 1971.
The second essay, titled “The Day the World Ended,” was written a few weeks after the first, on October 28, 2011, which happened to be the date that some Mayanist scholars had postulated was the real correct date for the end of the Mayan calendar, not December 21, 2012. This essay provided a good opportunity to reflect on humanity's seeming mass obsession with the End Times and the associated eschatological hysteria that infected the collective zeitgeist in the years and months preceding the postulated end date of the Mayan Calendar, December 21, 2012. Now, nearly two years downstream from that much anticipated and much dreaded event, we can look back on that date and wonder just what got into our collective heads. It was arguably the greatest non-event in human history; viewed as a cultural phenomenon, it can tell us little about the nature of time, eschatology, or history, but it can tell us volumes about our problematic human nature, and our endless capacity for distraction and denial.
Over the last few days as I have been working on this section, a research group1 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva has reported that they have detected a population of neutrinos that apparently travel faster than light. The group reported an “anomaly” in experiments in which a beam of neutrinos sent 454 kilometers from Geneva to Italy arrived at the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. This is an infinitesimally small amount of time (a nanosecond is a billionth of a second), but nevertheless, it can be measured accurately, so the researchers claim. This announcement has rocked the world of physics, as well it should, and now other groups of researchers are piling on to either find the errors in the measurements (as well they should) or verify the results. This is the way that science is supposed to work. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is one of the most extraordinary claims to come out of physics in a good long while. So therefore, independent confirmation by other research groups is the first step. Most likely, there is an error somewhere in the measurements, the math, or some other factor (these experiments are extremely delicate) but the researchers claim to have repeated the experiment multiple times and are standing by their results. If, however, the experiment is confirmed, it's extremely big news, because it means nothing less than the complete collapse of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and with it, much of the foundation of modern physics.
I decided to comment on this development in midstream, because time does not stop in the real world and interesting things are constantly happening. And much of what has preoccupied Terence and me has been the nature of Novelty, and that preoccupation led to the Time Wave theory. The Time Wave that Terence conceptualized (or channeled) at La Chorrera purports to be a mathematical construct that describes the structure of time, a map of novelty and its “ingression” (to use Whitehead's term) into the continuum, that is, into reality. I am actually one of the harsher critics when it comes to TW0, or Novelty Theory as it has come to be known. I do not believe it's a real theory, and there are gaps and loopholes in the conceptual foundations of Novelty Theory that on close scrutiny are extremely hard to defend. However, much of the TW0 “theory” is based on Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics, which is much more carefully reasoned. And based on Whitehead, I'm willing to grant that there is such a thing as “Novelty” (which, loosely characterized, means that occasionally there really is something new under the sun), and that, somehow or other, Novelty does “ingress” into reality. But some of the more animated discussions that Terence and I had about Novelty Theory were precisely about the questions: what is a truly novel event, and how does it “ingress” into the continuum, and how do we recognize it when it does (or more specifically how does the Time Wave map it or identify it)?
Now we have been handed, in the lovely waning days of September 2011, a report of an event that may be truly novel! We have been given the gift of a case study. We can watch novelty unfold in real time, so we can learn something (maybe) about just how novelty does express itself in reality and how that really plays out in our experience of reality. Much of the controversy over the Time Wave (and the subject of many an argument between Terence and me), had to do with the question of how one “fits” the wave to time, how to set the “end date” which you have to do because the theory postulates that there is a definite instant, a moment in time in which the wave collapses presumably at the instant of the Ultimate Novel Event, whatever that might be. Some have referred to this moment as the Singularity, but this is a deliberately vague term and possibly is misleading as well. The concept of the Singularity implies that at some point we cross a threshold where all of our assumptions, about causality, time, space, and virtually everything else, no longer apply. The Singularity could be just about anything, so the term is not particularly helpful in predicting what it's likely to be.
As anyone familiar with TW0 and Novelty Theory knows, Terence settled on the exact moment of the winter solstice on December 21, 2012, as the end point for the Time Wave based on a number of criteria and assumptions that may or may not be valid. This date corresponds to the generally accepted date for the end of the Mayan Calendar as well (though ever-industrious revisionists have recently come up with a much more alarming, because more imminent, date for the end of the Mayan Calendar of October 28, 2011.2 About this, we shall see, it's just around the corner. But that's the subject of another conversation and probably another rant.).
In his conception of Novelty Theory, Terence favored what might be called the “punctate” theory of Novelty. Novelty ingresses into the continuum as dramatic events that have a global impact. Events like the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, or the assassination of JFK, or the crucifixion of Christ, or Hurricane Katrina, or the terrorist attack of 9/11/2001 (though of course he did not live to see the latter two). But his idea was that these kinds of events had an enormous impact on history and the subsequent unfolding of human affairs, so they were truly “novel” and thus could be used as markers when trying to fit the Time Wave to the major novel events of history (and on larger scales even geological and evolutionary events, such as the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid in the so-called K-T extinction event that is thought to have spelled the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago) and thereby arrive at an End Date for the Time Wave.
In contrast, I argued in favor of the “gradualist” theory of Novelty. Major historical or geological events like these may appear to erupt into time, but it's an illusion; it ignores the necessary chain of cause and effect that leads up to the dramatic event. Which is truly the novel event? When the bomb detonates over Hiroshima, or when it is first detonated in the desert at Alamagordo? Or when the first sustained fission reaction is triggered in the Field House at the University of Chicago by Oppenheimer's group? Or when Einstein first conceives his Theory of Relativity and comes up with the famous equation E=MC2, which provided the mathematical framework that enabled the invention of the bomb? Or some even more ancient event, perhaps Democritus's early intuition that the world is made of atoms in the 4th century BCE? Is the assassination of Kennedy more novel than his election, or his birth, given that it would not have happened without these preceding events? Is the crucifixion of Christ more novel than his supposedly miraculous birth, and his remarkable career, prior to his crucifixion?
You can see my point: Novelty does not erupt into history as much as it oozes into history, and this makes the identification of truly novel events much more problematic. The wave becomes much harder to fit against the historical, geological, or evolutionary record because there are very few punctuate points against which to lay the map. And there is no way to quantify these events, no criteria that Terence ever defined whereby we can say a given event is more “novel” than another on some kind of measurable scale. This is, to my mind, the major and probably fatal flaw in Novelty Theory. Science works on measurement and quantification; to qualify as a scientific theory, it must be validated using measurable, quantifiable, and ideally mathematical criteria. A true theory must also state what will invalidate it; it must postulate what new data or new discovery will disprove it. (And here it is worth noting that no theory can ever be regarded as proven. All theories are provisional, some more than others, but there is always the possibility that new data will come along that overturns the theory. You can disprove theories but never definitely prove them.) The Time Wave does none of this. Thus it is not really a theory. It is a speculation, an interesting idea, a hallucination or fantasy; but it is not a theory. Terence never provided a quantifiable definition of Novelty, I don't really think he knew how, and I'm not sure anyone does. But the result is that unfortunately, Novelty in the Novelty Theory was defined as whatever Terence postulated it to be. So, interesting as it is, TW0 is utterly useless as a map of time, a predictor of events, or in any way as a mathematical theory that describes something fundamental and profound about the world.
So now, thanks to those industrious scientists at CERN, we have a rare opportunity to study the ingression of Novelty into our continuum. And the same questions apply. First of all, it's important to note that they are probably wrong. There is some error, somewhere, in the measurements or the design of the experiment. This is the conservative and parsimonious position to take for the moment, the provisional position. More data, please, from independent and unbiased researchers! What if such data is provided? That would be fantastic! We all hope that this discovery can be verified, especially us science fiction nuts, because if verified, it opens the way to the wildest of science fiction canards, faster than light travel and even time travel. Oh, we so want this discovery to be true!
If it is found to be true, if the consensus emerges that (until disproven, see above) this discovery holds up—that is, it can be independently verified under carefully controlled conditions—then it is novel indeed. It means the complete collapse of everything we thought we knew about physics since Einstein postulated the Theory of Relativity. Begging for the moment when the actual novel event took place. Presumably, if true, neutrinos have been traveling faster than light ever since there were neutrinos to do so, so these events have been occurring everywhere for about 13 billion years, give or take a few billion, ever since the Universe took form. So, neutrinos traveling faster than light? Nothing novel there. What was novel was the measurement of the phenomenon; so was the first measurement event the truly novel event, or the umpteenth measurement? After the initial measurement, the researchers scratched their heads and figured that they had made some mistake. They went back and checked their data, repeatedly. Ran the measurement numerous times, finally felt confident enough to report it to their colleagues. The New York Times (and the global media machine) first published the report on September 22. Was that the novel event? Colleagues immediately shouted, “Pshaw! This can't be true!” and got to work to try to verify it (or actually, to knock it down; Nobel prizes and careers depend on this, in a big way). But suppose another group verifies the data. They are “me too” runners up, but their work is essential; the theory can't become the scientific consensus until at least one other group, and ideally several groups, verify this data. Just what event, exactly, out of this series of events, does one fit the Time Wave to, that defines the emergence of the novelty? I submit that it can't be done.
And further: one of the unspoken assumptions always looming in the background in discussions of the Time Wave and the Ultimate End Date, the ultimate novel event, is that the event is going to be either a catastrophic global event (though if the Time Wave purports to describe the structure of time for the entire Universe, it's hard to see why anybody should get too excited about some global catastrophe here on Earth, such as an asteroid impact or even a supernova; after all, we're pretty small potatoes on that scale). But the assumption has been that, on Earth, the End will be marked by some global event, either a catastrophe, which we'd rather didn't happen (most sane people, anyway, do not look forward to global disaster and the death of millions), or some kind of more hopeful scenario—the benevolent alien Space Brothers show up in their mile-wide ships and provide gentle advice and advanced technology to help us get our act together (the Childhood's End scenario), or a wrathful Jesus comes riding in on his golden chariot to smite the wicked and take the righteous up to heaven for an eternity of harp playing and bingo, or whatever they are going to do up there to pass the time (no sex or drugs allowed, remember!). Or the embryonic AI lurking in the Internet will suddenly cross the threshold into self-awareness and realize, in about three nanoseconds, that the reason things are so screwed up is because of the damn monkeys running all over the place, fouling the nest, so it will pull the plug on the whole show by causing all the world's nuclear reactors to go into critical meltdown while simultaneously launching the entire nuclear arsenal of the world's superpowers. All of these events would certainly be dramatic; all of them would be novel enough to qualify as a validation of the Time Wave if they occurred at or close to the postulated End Date (if the date is off by a few weeks, months or even years, we can still grant that the theory is verified; Novelty Theory, after all, is nothing if not an inexact science). All of them would have really dramatic consequences for life on Earth, if there was any life left, post-End Date. None of them is very likely to happen.
But now we have a discovery come along that might, just might, demolish the foundations of physics as we know it. If verified, that is an enormously significant discovery. It might even qualify as the Ultimate Novel Event, or at least the most novel event to come along in historical memory. What difference will it make to our daily, humdrum, dreary lives? Practically none. A thousand years from now, it might mean that we will have FTL starships and time machines. That's certainly wonderful, and to be hoped for.
But in the first year of the second decade of the third millennium CE, it's not going to make a damn bit of difference, except that it will give physicists plenty to ponder and the rest of us geeks plenty to yak about. We will still have global warming, vast unemployment, widespread disease, poverty, wars, famine, and even unhappiness. It will not make a damn bit of difference to the way we live our daily lives. And yet . . . and yet, in some respects, you would have to say that if verified, this discovery, in some lab in Switzerland, amounts to a novel event that changes everything. Most importantly it changes (or will change) the way we think about and understand the world. But perhaps that is Singularity enough; a fundamental re-understanding of reality and the way it is constructed will not immediately change the way we conduct our daily lives, but over time, as that understanding permeates the collective world view, it may indeed have profound impacts. The pity is that no one alive today is likely to live to see any of those impacts. So perhaps this is indeed how the world ends, as T. S. Elliot said, not with a bang but a whimper.
And as I review this piece and reflect on it, I can't resist mentioning another novel event, one that also took place in a Swiss laboratory a few decades ago, that has had a much more profound impact on human history than this discovery is likely to do, at least in any foreseeable future. That discovery, of course, was Albert Hofmann's accidental (?) discovery of the remarkable properties of his new molecule, LSD. Now there was a novel event! We had better keep a watchful eye on those Swiss; you never know what they might get up to!
The time has come to step away from my reminiscences, time to return to 2011 for a moment to note an event that is most germane to the theme of our story, and thus, too important to ignore.
I'm referring, of course, to the end of the world. It's supposed to happen today, but I expect most of us will be too busy to notice. Hopefully we'll be able to catch it on the ten o'clock news, except we won't because it's well off the radar of even the most eclectic journalists.
According to some Mayanists, who pay close attention to matters related to the Mayan calendar3 and thus its imminent end, the calculations that postulate an end date of 12/21/2012 are in error, due to the discrepancies between the Mayan and the Julian calendars. After the necessary corrections needed to bring the two calendars into sync are made, it turns out that the real date is today, October 28, 2011.
The calculations needed to reconcile these discrepancies are not trivial. It seems that there is not one Mayan calendar, but at least three. There is the Mayan Long Count calendar, which is a nonrepeating, vigesimal (base 20 or base 18) calendar defining the number of days that have passed since a mythical creation date that correlates to August 11, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar or September 6, 3114 BCE in the Julian calendar. There is also the 365-day solar calendar, the Haab, also used by the Maya as well as other Mesoamerican civilizations. Then there is the Tzolk'in, a 260-day calendar based on thirteen twenty-day cycles. These two calendars measure days but not years. The combination of a Haab date and a Tzolk'in date represents a specific date that does not occur again for fifty-two years. The two calendars based on 365 days and 260 days repeat every fifty-two years. For periods longer than fifty-two years, most Mesoamericans relied on the Long Count calendar. There is controversy over the correlations between the Long Count calendar and the Julian and Gregorian calendars. In the Long Count calendar, the B'ak'tun, the largest subdivision of the calendar, is 144,000 days, or 393.4 solar years. Creation was initiated in 3114 BCE with the beginning of the Long Count, thirteen B'ak'tun, and the count will end with the end of the second cycle of thirteen B'ak'tun, on December 21, 2012, or perhaps on October 28, 2011, or perhaps on December 24, 2011, or perhaps it already happened sometime in February 2011.
The fact is, nobody knows what the correct calculated date of the Mayan Long Count calendar is, as there is no consensus on the correlations to the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The most accepted correlation is the so-called Goodman, Martinez, Thompson (GMT) model, in which 584,283 Julian days is equivalent to the thirteen B'ak'tun. According to this correlation, creation started on September 6, 3114 BCE (Julian) or August 11, 3114 BCE (Proleptic Gregorian). The completion of another Long Count of thirteen B'ak'tun corresponds to December 21, 2012.
Most credible Mayanists do not interpret the end of this cycle as corresponding to the end of time. It was an occasion to celebrate the end of a long cycle, but was not viewed as a doomsday event. From the Wikipedia article, Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Florida, believes: “To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday event or moment of cosmic shifting . . . is ‘a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.’”
“There will be another cycle,” says E. Wyllys Andrews V, director of the Tulane University Middle American Research Institute (MARI). “We know the Maya thought there was one before this, and that implies they were comfortable with the idea of another one after this.'
I certainly make no claims to be an expert on the Mayan calendar, nor am I a mathematician. The endless debates over the correlations with the Julian or Gregorian calendars and the reasoning behind the arguments seem opaque to me. The reason for this is partly because I have not bothered to study them in great detail to draw a conclusion as to which one is “right.” In fact, they are all wrong. They have about as much relevance to our current historical, and existential, crisis as the disputes of medieval theologians who tried to calculate the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. It just strikes me as the wasted effort of a number of excellent minds that could have been better occupied spending their time on other matters. To that we can add in the insights of other theorists who claim to have privileged information from extraterrestrials, extra-dimensionals, or other unverifiable sources. And there is the 2012 “franchise” to serve and a chance to cash in on that—have you purchased the iPhone app yet? There is still time to sign up for the latest workshop, pilgrimage, seminar, or combination package in some exotic location such as Palenque or Tikal. You had better get your reservations in soon because slots are filling fast, and frankly, you're not going to be able to find a parking place.
As the brother of Terence McKenna, arguably the person who has done more than all the Mayanists to seed the meme of 12/21/12 as the end date of history into the collective consciousness, I suppose I could be accused of being at best unsporting and at worst an annoying curmudgeon on this issue. I have to plead guilty on both counts. Certainly Terence's selection of 12/21/2012 as the end point of the Time Wave was a matter of convenience as much as it was the result of a serious mathematical analysis. The Time Wave and the Mayan calendar have nothing to do with each other, but they have been conflated in the delusions of the current cultural Zeitgeist.
The Time Wave is so wrong in so many ways, and I have previously discussed some of them. The Mayan calendar may end today, or it may end on 12/21/12 or some other date, but trust me on this: the only people who are going to take this seriously are those who either have a financial stake in the 2012 mythos or those who are so completely deluded that they are ready to grasp at any straw to avoid honest consideration of our current environmental and historical crisis. For the rest of us, the event will be noted as a human-interest story presented as a wrap-up item by chirpy bubble-headed anchorpeople at the end of your evening newscast. We will awake up on 12/22/12 faced with the same set of intractable and horrifying problems that we were faced with the previous day. Jesus is not coming in his chariot of fire to save the righteous and smite the wicked; neither are our space alien brothers going to materialize in mile-wide ships over the major cities of the world to hand over the keys to galactarian citizenship. God knows I wish they would; if I'm wrong and it happens, I'll be the first to queue up to eat a mountain of crow. Nor is there going to be a massive asteroid impact, a supervolcano eruption, a gamma ray burst from a distant supernova that wipes out 99 percent of terrestrial life. These things may, and probably will, happen someday. I just don't believe they can be predicted. As a rule, this is not the way that Novelty ingresses into reality. With rare exceptions, such as global natural catastrophes that occur every few million years, Novelty ingresses more locally, and more slowly, than these disaster scenarios would have us believe.
As a species, we are extremely adept at denial. We can expend enormous effort on developing models to predict events that a moment's reflection will tell us are extremely unlikely. This is far preferable, certainly a welcome distraction, from the depressing contemplation of our current existential crisis. Every great civilization, every historical era, probably believes that it lives at the end of time, and that the end of its particular exceptional situation will define the end of history. The fact that this has never happened—that somehow history just rolls on whether or not civilizations rise and fall, continents and cultures are devastated by plagues and famines, environments or economies collapse—is dismissed in our longing for some resolution to our dilemma, some final outcome no matter how catastrophic.
What we should be doing is doubling down on the problems we face, now, and trying to figure out what we do about them, if anything is to be done, now. It's what we need to be doing, yet it is so damned hard. We are like the dysfunctional Congress of 2011; it needs to focus on jobs, jobs, jobs but instead wastes time on culture war issues, passing yet more restrictions on abortion, naming a post office, all the other trivia that fills its agenda while meanwhile Rome burns. We are a stupid species. Darwinian mechanics is not kind to stupidity, the dumb do not survive, and if we destroy ourselves due to our own stupidity (as it appears we are bent on doing), then perhaps that's for the best. The problem is that we have now developed toys and technologies (but not the wisdom to use them) that can bring down a good deal of the planet with us when we finally do implode, or more likely, explode.
We yearn for an escape from the prison of history. We long for what Eliade called the Eternal Return, a mythical, timeless era outside of time, before history, or after it (there is really no difference). Linear, historical cultures are trapped in history in much the same way that each individual is trapped in the time frame of his or her life. Every life has a beginning and an end; we are pushed along, inexorably, by time from the moment we are born to the moment the plug is pulled and the sheet drawn up. Nobody has ever escaped from time, though all of the world's religions are scams predicated on the notion that if we toe the line in certain ways, pay homage to the authoritarian structures, accept the dogma, behave ourselves, and of course have “faith,” somehow we are going to beat the system. This may serve the agenda of whatever authoritarian hierarchies run these institutions, but it's a lie. Every person confronts their own personal Singularity at the end of time, the end of their own personal history. This is the only eschaton we can realistically look forward to. No one can say, definitively, what happens to consciousness when that Singularity is breached, whether it is extinguished forever or translates into some sort of virtual reality, whatever that means when talking about post-death survival. Someday, we may understand this. Someday, technology may advance to a point where it's possible to consider uploading one's consciousness or “soul” (whatever that is) into some kind of virtual environment maintained by supercomputer networks that are vastly more powerful than anything we have today. If that day ever comes (and I don't expect to see it in my lifetime) it will mark the collapse of all of the world's religions, and this is an unintended consequence to be relished.
Until that day comes, here we are, trapped in our own personal history that is in turn nested inside our cultural and national history, and that in turn is embedded in biological, evolutionary, geological, and cosmological history. It's not going to end today, or tomorrow, or on December 21, 2012. Like an insect stuck in amber, we are imprisoned in time, and rather than waste energy trying to escape, or predict its end, we should rather devote our efforts to making the time we are afforded the best it can possibly be.
History ended today. I am looking forward to tomorrow's sunrise.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/22/world/europe/AP-EU-Breaking-Light-Speed.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=faster%20than%20light%20particle&st=cse
2. http://www.calleman.com/content/articles/end_of_creationcycles.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_calendar_ending#2012_and_the_Long_Count