Novelty theory
(An essay by Eschaton)
Novelty Theory, also known as Timewave Zero, is an extension of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy developed by Terence McKenna from 1971 until his death in the year 2000.
Contents
Method
McKenna uses Alfred North Whitehead's epistemology:
We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such." ... The imagination is everything. [McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace]
According to Whitehead, any system is a self-referential pattern perceivable solely by intuition:
These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition. [Whitehead, Alfred North ♦ Process and Reality p. 26]
Concepts
Novelty
Novelty Theory is based on Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy.<ref>Novelty & Concrescence A page from Terence McKenna's website ♦ "I have elaborated Whitehead's notion of novelty into a formal mathematical speculation concerning the fundamental architecture of time."</ref> Whitehead defines novelty (new information) as new interconnectedness:
Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. ... The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. ... In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. [Whitehead, Alfred North; Sherburne, Donald W. ♦ A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality]
McKenna's definition is the same:
Novelty is density of connection. [Terence McKenna at St. John the Divine's Cathedral April 25, 1996]
Eschaton
The universe converts its gravitational potential energy into its gravitational binding energy:
The gravitational binding energy of a system is equal to the negative of the total gravitational potential energy, considering the system as a set of small particles. [Gravitational binding energy Wikipedia]
The Eschaton is the state of the minimum gravitational potential energy, towards which the universe is evolving:
The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl—down, down, down—until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That’s precisely my model of human history. [McKenna, Terence ♦ Approaching Timewave Zero Magical Blend Magazine, Issue 44, November 1994]
Simultaneously, the Eschaton is the state of the maximum gravitational binding energy:
...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process—it's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe. [Terence McKenna's workshop held in the summer of 1998]
The maximum interconnectedness is nonlocality:
In other words, technologies seem to be converging toward opening up the Bell-nonlocal quantum realm, where, presumably, all the intelligences of the universe are communicating in some kind of standing wave form. [Terence McKenna's interview on the Art Bell Show 4/01/1999]
The overtly nonlocal Nature will lose its objectivity and become a mere extension of the human imagination (reality warping):
The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information. [A Few Conclusions About Life Terence McKenna's podcast]
What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence," a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis," the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that the concrescence will occur soon—around 2012 AD. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination... [McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace]
Timewave
According to McKenna, when the accelerated accrual of information is graphed over time, a fractal waveform results. The waveform's last period (1945–2012 AD) is known as "timewave zero." McKenna had chosen the beginning of the final timewave by looking for a very novel event in recent history; the event he chose was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (6 August 1945). However, the 13-billion-year-long fractal wave of novelty is a wave of information, and its last period (timewave zero), during which information is generated at the fastest rate, is inextricable from computer technology, as stated by McKenna himself:
I’ve been talking about it since 1971, and what’s interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think we’ll arrive under budget, on time, December 22, 2012. [McKenna, Terence ♦ Approaching Timewave Zero November 1994]
That is why 14 February 1946—the day of the unveiling of the first electronic general-purpose computer (ENIAC), regarded as the birth of the Information Age<ref>ENIAC: The Birth of the Information Age Popular Science, March 1996</ref><ref>The ENIAC Effect: Dawn of the Information Age ENIAC Museum</ref> —would be a much more apposite date for the beginning of timewave zero. Despite this obvious mistake, Terence McKenna's timing of the informational singularity is strikingly close to reality:
- In 2005, information was doubling every 36 months. [Source]
- In June 2008, information was doubling every 11 months. [Source]
- On 4 August 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: "Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003." [Source]
- By the end of 2010, information will be doubling every 11 hours. [Source]
Explanation
Both the universe's matter and the vacuum are undergoing an autocatalytic gravitational condensation, during which the more dense matter condenses increasingly faster that the less dense vacuum, so that from the perspective of matter, the vacuum appears to be expanding with an exponential acceleration. At that, the condensing matter radiates its entropy into the ambient vacuum.<ref>Beckenstein, Jacob D. ♦ Information in the Holographic Universe Scientific American, August 2003 ♦ "The entropy of a region uniformly filled with matter and radiation is truly proportional to its volume."</ref> The growth in the relative volume of the vacuum dilutes the entropy emitted by matter and thus makes the loss of entropy by matter irreversible.
The entire evolution of the star is toward a condition of greater order, or lower entropy. It is easy to see why. In a hydrogen star each nucleon can move willy-nilly along its own trajectory, but in an iron core groups of 56 nucleons are bound together and must move in lockstep. Initially the entropy per nucleon, expressed in units of Boltzmann's constant, is about 15; in the presupernova core it is less than 1. [Bethe, Hans A.; Brown, Gerald ♦ How a Supernova Explodes]
Evolution of matter
In Boltzmann's definition, entropy is a measure of the number of possible microscopic states (or microstates) of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, consistent with its macroscopic thermodynamic properties (or macrostate).<ref>Boltzmann's principle Wikipedia</ref> Virtual (spiritual) states are microstates; real (physical) states are macrostates. Thus the progressive decrease in matter's entropy leads to a situation in which ever-lesser spiritual efforts cause ever-bigger physical changes, which eventually allows of reality warping. By the end of 2012 AD, the entropy of the universe's matter decreases to a critical threshold, and it forms a Bose-Einstein condensate—the Eschaton.
Evolution of vacuum
The Planck constant—the energy barrier between the vacuum's virtual microstates and real macrostates—is a measure of the vacuum's entropy. By radiating its entropy into the ambient vacuum, the gravitationally condensing matter increases the vacuum's entropy—the Planck constant (ħ)—and thus raises the objective reduction threshold (E=ħ/t), making possible the existence of ever larger and intense wavefunctions—atoms, molecules, living cells, people. The progressive increase of the vacuum's objective reduction threshold culminates in the emergence of the Universal Wavefunction—the Eschaton.
Acceleration of time
Reaching every subsequent lower-entropy (i.e., having fewer internal degrees of freedom, more bound) macrostate requires making fewer interconnections (by converting the system's gravitational potential energy into the gravitational binding energy). Each successive macrostate is composed of ever larger chunks, so assembling it takes less time (just like assembling a house by joining prefabricated sections takes less time than building it brick-by-brick).
The result is that for a long time the network grows, but does not become fully connected. Instead it contains a large number of unconnected chunks, each containing a few nodes. Eventually, the addition of just one link triggers an instantaneous phase change and the network becomes fully connected." [Society's vital networks prone to 'explosive' changes ♦ New Scientist, 13 March 2009]
In the evolution of a massive star, the role of the "chunks, each containing a few nodes" is played by the ever-larger nuclei. When the size of the nuclei reaches a certain threshold, the star undergoes an instantaneous phase change into a neutron star, which can be conceived of as a single gigantic nucleus.
Each successive nuclear burning stage releases less energy than the previous stage, so the lifetime in each stage becomes progressively shorter. For a 20 MSun star:
- Main sequence lifetime ~ 10 million years
- Helium burning (3-α) ~ 1 million years
- Carbon burning ~ 300 years
- Oxygen burning ~ 2/3 year
- Silicon burning ~ 2 days<ref>Gene Smith's Astronomy Tutorial University of California, San Diego</ref>
- Iron core's collapse into an infinitely interconnected (Bose-condensed) neutron star ~ a few milliseconds<ref>Bethe, Hans A.; Brown, Gerald ♦ How a Supernova Explodes</ref>
See also
External Links
- Terence McKenna's website (as of 8 May 1999)
References
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