So the universe is a thing where habit constrains but novelty overcomes that constraint. And once overcome, new levels of novelty become incorporated into the old set of constraints. I mean, like, for instance, take Manhattan. Manhattan is an incredibly novel addition to the geography of southern New York. And yet, once in place, it has its rules.... 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

in a sense, you could almost say that Darwin was the first chaos theorist. Because they discovered—the people; Darwin and his school—that you could take two processes which are both random, and that by running these two random processes together you could attain striking examples of order and symmetry and beauty. And to them this proved that God is... 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

This is what I meant—this is a good closure—this is what I meant by “do not watch, do not consume.” In other words, do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds, build your own values, and your own house of mirrors. And then you are on equal footing. But if you are consuming the manufactured... See more

And the conclusion that’s coming out of his work is that nature is not governed by eternal laws. Which is a very big piece of news in science, because it has been the assumption (really, since the Greeks) that there is a higher world of mathematical perfection and that, somehow, the world of physical appearance and substance is a shadow in Plato’s... 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 whole notion of science is not that we attain states of intellectual consensus, but that we have a true reflection of the phenomena. So then here’s a case where this becomes more important: the speed of light. The speed of light in the general and special theory of relativity is specified to be a constant. So, since 1908, the speed of light has... See more