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 ling... See more

And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember th... 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 dange... 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

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 s... See more

Dissipative structures are these special situations which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium. That’s the technical way of saying it. In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go, and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium. And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all s... See more

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

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

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 pos... See more