A paradigm touches everything, and it begins very deeply, but I think that my—you know, fractal mathematics, chaos theory, complexity theory, my own stuff with the timewave—all of this is going to, in a sense, erase much of the mystery about the future. That the future is ( in a freedom and law system) necessarily unknowable, because if you knew... See more

It’s a curious thing, the Western commitment to abstraction. It’s a unique cultural set. You know, if you are at all familiar with the Maya civilization—they achieved great things in mathematics and in technical understanding of city planning and coordination of large-scale tasks, and this sort of thing. But they never left the woods in a certain... See more

Yeah. I’m a critic of science. I think it’s an interesting artifact, but it’s become a tyrant. It’s become the arbiter of all truth, and that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Most of what’s interesting doesn’t fall under the purvey of science.

Well, shamanism (and the modern echo of it in the artist) is this awareness. It’s a humbler... See more

The universe is a finite thing. It burst into existence X billion years ago. Where are you going to say the laws of nature were before the universe existed. And don’t forget: we’re not only talking about laws of physics. That’s one thing. What about the laws of gene segregation? Where were they before biology existed? What kind of a question is... See more

Things will have to get a lot worse. Because, you see, the paradox is that the people who can change the world—people like you and me, the upper 5% of the literate elites of the industrial democracies—we’re the furthest away from the bad news. You know, we’re getting three squares, and having a fine time. So somehow there has to be a sense of... See more

every technology carries utterly unpredictable consequences. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would create a sexual revolution because it’s a rolling bedroom. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would destroy the extended family, that people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles from [each other]. The automobile created the suburb. McLuhan, on... See more

You know, the theory of evolution is essentially a theory which is an effort to account for the large numbers of diverse plants and animals on the planet. Darwin, in his diaries, referred to what he was doing as searching for a solution to the species problem. It was not thought to have anything to do with sociology or geology, but now I think we... See more

Habit and novelty are the new—or what I would propose as the two concepts that are rising out of a synthesis of twentieth-century experience as the new defining terms of a universal paradigm

Let’s think about probability theory for a moment. Here’s how it works: you want to know how much electricity is flowing through a wire. You carry out a thousand measurements. You add them together. You divide by a thousand. You now say this is how much electricity is flowing through the line. Well, but it’s entirely possible that, if you look back... See more