[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Ralph: For the first time I've heard you describe this forthcoming event as a birth. This optimistic event is interpreted by you as an Eschaton.
This is a myth made real, like the Christmas tree, where the events of history are kind of pasted on. As the tree shapes to a point at the top,
you've drawn history around it, in an ascending spiral that ends at the point where they put the star. I think history can be wound on the form
of this myth in a lot of different ways. You start with an assumption that's very symmetric and identical to the scientific myth of the birth of
the universe.
This puts me in mind of the history of history, where the concept of time in different cultures suits different models, of which there are only a
few. There's the bang to bang model, which you share with Teilhard de Chardin. There's the infinite linear progress model, which is pretty
much discredited now by everyone. There's the reflection model, where a cycle is completed and then repeats from the beginning in a cycle of
epochs which may be never ending. There's the Kurt Godel2 model, in which time goes forward and encloses on itself by going around a
torus and coming back. Many ancient societies shared this model, where it was understood in a way that's similar to our theory of homing
pigeons, that every action we are doing today will be repeated again another day. These different models for history are essentially mythical
structures; that is, no scientific evidence can be given to distinguish one from other. They start on the basis of belief.
Now that we have archeology and cultural history, we
know there are different models of time, historically, and that they fit into certain patterns. By and large it's thought that they guide us through
the evolution of culture itself. In other words, if it's not true that tomorrow is already determined, then we just have to do a good job to follow
our dream today. If it's pos-sible that what we do, think, or say affects the future, then it's important which historical model we choose,
because the myth itself guides action, determines evolution, and influences to a degree the outcome. I don't see, though, even accepting the
Christmas tree model, why the point with the star should be a birth or a death, or anything other than a simple cultural transformation, more
or less presaged by a shockwave at the end of this epoch. Why couldn't it be just a simple social transformation like the Renaissance?
Terence: Because the planet can't bring forth the birth of new societies. We've come to the end of our road in birthing new models of
community. Wouldn't you agree that when we look back over the whole history of life as known to us, it appears to be some kind of strategy
for the conquest of dimensionality? The earliest forms of life were fixed slimes of some sort. Then you get very early motility, but no sense
organs, where organisms literally feel their way from one point of perception to another. Then comes sequestering of light-sensitive pigment
upon the outer membrane, and the notion of a gradient between here and there appears. Then for a long, long time there's the coordination of
backbones, skeletons, binocular vision and so forth. Then, with human beings some fundamental boundary is crossed, ending the conquest of
terrestrial space, and beginning the conquest of time, first through memory and strategic triangulation of data out of memory, and then the
invention of epigenetic coding, writing, and electronic databases. There's an ever more deep and thorough spreading out into time. In this
Eschatonic transition that I'm talking about, the deployed world of three-dimensional space shrinks to the point where all points are
cotangent. We literally enter hyperspace, and it's no longer a metaphorical hyperspace. What we're say-
ing is, this transition from one dimension of existence to another is the continuation of a universal program of self-extension and
transcendence that can be traced back to the earliest and most primitive kind of protoplasm.
Ralph: Isn't this a fancy way of saying we're running out of time?
Terence: Yes. Time is speeding up. There isn't much left. Someone said time is God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
My notion is that we are caught the transcendental attractor is a kind of black hole, and we've fallen into its basin of attraction. Now we're
circling ever faster, ever deeper, as we approach the singularity, called the Eschaton. All of this exceeds rational apprehendability. It lies
outside the framework of possible description. We're on a collision course with the unspeakable. Contrasted with other animal life, we've
been selected out for a very peculiar metamorphosis via information and the conquest of dimensions, to become something completely other;
a new ontological order of being.
Ralph: It's too early to tell. Everything has accelerated on one hand. The population explosion, the destruction of the biosphere, the
complexity and rate, the seriousness and irreversibility of all this is climaxing. Meanwhile, we have language, this 25,000, 60,000, or at most
100,000 year old artifact. We've developed such things as agriculture and the urban revolution. We have automobiles and airplanes and
computers hooking us up. We have all this increase in the complexity and fractal dimension of life, more or less to our benefit. We have, as it
were, a race between two processes, both of which are growing faster exponentially. We don't know for sure which one is growing more.
Furthermore, the possibility of a miracle can't be ruled out, due to the fact that we wouldn't even have gotten this far without a whole series of
them.
It's a subtle matter, the way in which the myth of Eschaton can interweave in this race between the two accelerating processes. What do vou
think, Rupe?
Rupert: I agree with you, this is a cultural pattern. The Judeo-Christian tradition takes further the tendencies already present in early
civilizations. There's movement towards some end time, envisioned in apocalyptic prophecy. The last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of
St. John the Divine, speaks of things not unlike those that Terence does. As Terence is well aware, the apocalyptic nature of his thinking is a
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]