Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
I was talking with Greg Keith about the pleasure dome project as we were walking down here along the San Lorenzo River, and noticed that there's a pleasure research facility here on the beach--the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Places like that offer clues to the nature of pleasure. What happens here at the Beach Boardwalk? People get scared out of their life in safe environments. So, this must partly be what pleasure is. To be scared, but to really be safe. To be frightened, but secure. So we have to look about for new ways of doing that-scaring the hell out of people, but making them secure at the same time. So there'll be some scary rides at The Pleasure Dome, I think, but ultimately safe.
RMN: Could you tell us a little bit about telesensation?
NICK: Oh, that's one of my favorites. Telesensation is the idea of achieving a new body image by building robots of various kinds, and linking with them-through radio or optics--and taking on their body image. Taking on the body image of a human robot, or a robot that's shaped like a fish, an eagle, or a bat, and just being that entity for awhile--taking on their trip, and sensing with their senses, with an ant or an eagle's sense.
RMN: It'd be great for ecology.
NICK: Great for ecology yes!
DJB: Are you familiar with Jaron Lanier's work, building Virtual Reality simulators at VPL Research up in Pale Alto?
NICK: Oh, no, I don't know about this. I've heard rumors of this kind of research, but I don't know anyone who's actually doing it. There have been some science fiction stories about telesensation, where it's used to develop or do work on the surface of planets like Jupiter. In one story I recall the man is actually in orbit around Jupiter, but he feels as though he's on the surface of Jupiter, in a gravity of 30 Gs, or something like that, and doing mining work.
DJB: The Japanese have actually already developed something like that.
NICK: Is that right?
DJB: Yeah, it's written up in Grant Fjermedal's
The Tomorrow Makers
. Grant talks about the out-of-body experience he had using one of these machines, while looking at his body from a convincing three-dimensional perspective outside of it.
NICK: Well, one of the things I wonder about is this--if consciousness really is separate from the body, how come there are cases of multiple personalities-where many personalities inhabit one body--but there's never the case of one personality inhabiting two bodies--where you look out of somebody else's eyes, or out of two people's eyes at the same time? If consciousness were really distinct from the body, you might think that would be at least a possibility.
DJB: Some people claim that, though.
NICK: They've looked out of other people's eyes?
DJB: Some people claim that they've formed a unification between their consciousness and that of another person.
RMN: Usually a couple.
NICK: Well, if I couldn't see something, but because I was in this state, then I could. If that actually happened, then I'd be impressed. I would think that quantum tantra would allow us to do this. That would be one of the tests of quantum tantra, the ability to watch TV facing away from it. Not a very impressive ability, is it? There might be other, more interesting things to do with this, than watching TV with your back to the television. You can do that with a mirror I guess, without the threat to your integrity.
RMN: The penultimate question. I hear you've been working with technology with which to contact the dead. Can you tell us about your ideas and experiences concerning this?
NICK: This is a notion that quantum processes are somehow connected with consciousness, that some quantum processes are unspoken for, and can be taken over by discarnate spirits. So what we do is, we get these quantum processes, and link them to communicating devices. Then we encourage spirits to inhabit the processes and speak to us through quantum mechanical mediums. If the dead can occupy brains, why can't they occupy these machines? So in the seventies we tried to make machines that discarnate spirits could inhabit. These involved radioactive sources connected with computers, and they were connected with typewriters or with speech synthesizers. So, when we turned the machine on, it would rapidly type pseudo-English, or make sounds which one observer said sounded like a Hungarian reading
Finnigan 's Wake
. I don't think our devices were complicated enough to be occupied by spirits.
RMN: Complicated enough?
NICK: Complicated. Like they were maybe the brain of an ant, something like that, or maybe even smaller.
RMN: It was just too basic.
NICK: Yes, it was just too basic a system. What we would want is a more complicated quantum system.
RMN: But you were getting something.
NICK: Oh, we got some funny prankish things that occurred. The most exciting thing happened at a Houdini seance, when we spent all day trying to get Houdini to come back from the dead through our typewriter. This was on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and it was in San Francisco. We had Houdini posters up on the walls. We held seances in the dark, joined hands, and lit candles, the typewriter chatting away all the time--a metaphase typewriter this was called. A couple of people dropped acid for the event. We went through the text and couldn't find any real printing, any real message, but the one thing that we did find that happened for sure, was right at the beginning--the typewriter jammed. it didn't print straight, so there were these lines of type going all over the place, and they made a little frame, a little oval, that wasn't typed in. There was one line in the oval, and it said, "In an infinite time." All with no spaces-"inaninfinitetime"-something like that. Now that message could be taken many ways. A million monkeys typing on a typewriter could type anything in an infinite time. An infinite time could be meaning to talk to us, a busy signal, that kind of thing. The ultimate busy signal.
In any case, it convinced me that the universe has a sense of humor. It's really about the funniest thing that could have been said in a few words. But nothing else seemed to occur that particular day. We had pounds of stuff to go through. Actually, this page was lost. Afterwards, we'd all saw it, but people had taken some of the pages for souvenirs, and I guess somebody got that one, and we never found out where that page ended up. So it's another one of those experiments that doesn't have any data. We don't have that sheet anymore. So it depends on the memory of all of us. Thomas Edison apparently worked on experiments to contact the dead, and there is a videotape about some of his exploits. I guess someone had a movie camera around, and had caught this for posterity. There's a videotape, it's something about collected weirdness, and it's just full of like Mondo Cane, or something like that. One of the scenes in this videotape, which I read about, was Edison, and his early model of something to talk to the dead with. But it never worked, he never got it to the point where it actually worked.
DJB: Edison would be a good person to try to contact probably, because he had an interest in it.
NICK: Well, there actually were some people who tried that. Yeah, Gilbert Wright, the inventor of Silly Putty, and some friends of his tried to build a machine to contact Edison. They claimed to get Edison through mediums, and Edison actually, through these trance mediums, gave them instructions for building a machine, through which he would try and talk. It involved batteries and radio-like devices, but Edison wasn't able to use that machine. It didn't work.
DJB: Could you tell us about any projects that you're presently working on?
NICK: Well, my next project is going to be a book on the mind called
Elemental Mind
. It's a book on a long-shot model of mind. All the smart money these days, for a model of consciousness, seems to be put on either of two models--a computer or a biological model. The computer model assumes that the mind is some kind of software in the hardware of the brain, some kind of exquisite software that involves a self-image--it's a self-image program, a little "I." I was talking to a friend of mine--his slogan is "We're the guys that put the I in IBM." You could have conscious computers that would have these little software programs, with self-awareness built into them.
RMN: Little egos.
NICK: Little egos, yes. That's one guess, that the mind is the software in the hardware of the brain. The other guess is that mind is somehow an emergent feature of certain complex biological systems--that it will arise whenever the biology gets complicated enough. Self-awareness is just an unsuspected evolutionary possibility of living meat. Elemental Mind explores the hypothesis that none of that is true. It's a long-shot--that mind is as fundamental to nature as light or electricity. It's all around in one form or another, and our minds are just specific examples of it, specific ways that the Universal Mind has manifested. So I'm looking for evidence for this sort of thing, and ways of making Elemental Mind more plausible. By the way, I tried to think of a word for the other kind of mind, and the best I could come up with is molecular mind. Molecular mind versus elemental mind. Molecular mind is where you put stuff together and make a mind, and elemental mind is where mind is already fundamental. So you don't have to make it, it's already there. All you have to do is have systems that will manifest it. So my latest project is to work on that, and make that make sense.
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Chaos and Erodynamics
with Ralph Abraham
Ralph Abraham is renowned for bringing a fresh perspective to mathematical thought. His study of dynamical systems as the building blocks of reality, has led him to extrapolate fundamental mathematical principles into his philosophical outlook . A professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1960. He taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia and Princeton before moving to Santa Cruz in I 96S and has held visiting positions in such various locations as Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, Florence and Siena.
He is the author of numerous mathematical books.
Linear and Multi-Linear Algebra
,
Foundations of Mechanics
was written with J.E. Marsden
and Transversal Mappings and Flows
with J.Robbin. He wrote
Manifolds,Tensor Analysis and Applications
with J.E. Marsden and T. Ratiu, and the highly successful four-volume
Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior
with C.D. Shaw. His latest book entitled,
Trialogues on the Edge of the West
is a group of discussions with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake on the relationship between science, philosophy and religion.
Traveling through Europe in his twenties, living in a cave in northern India and working as a professional gambler in Las Vegas were all experiences which helped to shape Ralph's philosophical outlook. He has been active on the research frontier of dynamics in mathematics since 1960, and in applications and experiments, since 1973. In 1975 he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz to explore the use of interactive computer graphics in teaching mathematics. He is the founding editor of
Eagle Mathematics and Applied Global Analysis
.
We talked with Ralph on March 4th 1989, in the cozy· living room of our dear and mutual friend Nina Graboi, who has often worked as his editor. We found him to be a soft-spoken, intensely thoughtful and down-to-earth character, with the gentle tone of a person who has become philosophically resigned to seeing further than others.
RMN
DAVID: Ralph, you're recognized as one of the leaders in the mathematical study of chaos. Can you tell us what it was that originally inspired your interest in mathematics and the mathematics of vibrations and dynamical systems?
RALPH: Well, I didn't get interested in dynamics and decide that's what I was going to study. It was just left foot, right foot, or some series of miracles. It happened like this.
I was an engineer and worked in a physics project, so I became a student of physics. Then one day a physics professor said in class that if you want to understand physics you have to study mathematics. So I changed to mathematics at that point. And I found a mentor, somebody who took care of me and helped me out, a wonderful man, Nate Coburn. I started studying what he was doing because he was my only contact in mathematics. One reason I responded to his program was that it had to do with general relativity. Einstein had been a household word when I was growing up. My father respected Einstein very much. It was said that only eight people in the world could understand Einstein. My teacher apparently could and was writing in that field.