🚀 go-pugleaf

Message-Id:   <49.2037@or.cl-hh.comlink.de>
------------------------------------------------- Hamburg, 20.01.93 09:33 ----

...und der zweite Teil

- snip -
	If you're looking for a prophet the scientific future, you could do
worse than mathematician Ralph Abraham, a shaggy middle-aged professor at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, who can use the word "grok" in casual
conversation and get away with it Abraham's revolutionary specialty, in which
he is an acknowledged leader, has come to be known as "chaos math" or
"dynamical systems theory." What people such as Abraham try to do is graph and
predict, with the help of computers, seemingly unpredictable events: global
climatic change the rise and fall of financial markets, even the social origins
of war. What makes this math revolutionary, of course, is that no one has
really mastered it yet, although aficionados believe it /can/ be mastered and
that the attempt is eminently worth making.
	The driving idea behind chaos math--that there is order in randomness
and randomness in order--sounds like one of those drug-induced epiphanies you
scrawl on a napkin at 3 A.M. and then throw away the next day.  Well, in a
rather literal sense, it is a drug-inspired notion, except that Ralph Abraham
kept the napkin and has been doodling on it ever since.
	"In the 1960s," he says, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely
creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know
this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community."
	Math and acid--not, one would think, a natural combination. It's like
hearing a champion marathon runner credit his success to chain-smoking Camels.
I'm confused. The image of a frying egg ("This is your brain on drugs") flashes
in my mind's eye.
	Abraham explains, "To be creative in mathematics, you have to start
from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate.
And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of
consciousness. What's going on now with dynamical systems theory is at least as
big a thing as the invention of the wheel."
	He glances at his desk, at the ubiquitous Macintosh sitting there, with
its blind gray screen. "Without this machine, of course," says Abraham, "what
we're doing now would not be possible. The computer extends our intellect,
which helps us create the future. It offers a door to perceiving complex
space-time realities."
	"The doors of perception"--the words ring a bell. The title of Aldous
Huxley's book on mescaline, taken from William Blake's epigram--"If the doors
of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite."  But what, according to Abraham, will all this infinite
portal-cleansing bring? Nothing less, he predicts, than global peace.
	"Social science, up until now, has not been very scientific. Now, with
computers and the new mathematics, we may be able to change that. Soon we may
be able to map and manipulate a certain set of parameters--social, cultural,
economic, geographical--that will help us to anticipate and mediate
international conflict. Loving on the largest possible scale will be enhanced
by the intellectual capability to understand the complexity of the systems in
which we live."
	Spoken like a true Macflower child.
				---------------
	They are sitting in a darkened Berkeley living room, talking about
virtual reality and smoking the milder, powdered form of ketamine. I'm with
them but not /with/ them, if you catch my drift. The ketamine is a bit way-out
for me, and the conversation too. Because I don't wish these folks legal
hassles, I won't say who they are, just that they know a lot about computers
(one man runs a thriving electronics research firm) and more than a thing or
two about drugs.
	Their speech, in case you're wondering, is perfectly coherent.
Alarmingly coherent, when you consider its content.
	"You know that telephone-company saying," someone pipes up from the
couch, "'Reach out and touch someone'? Well, soon, with the help of virtual
reality, you will be able to do that, literally. You'll wear a kind of bodysuit
with hundreds of little sensors and vibrators. You'll plug it into your
computer, your partner across the country will plug in too, and you'll be able
to feel each other up by moving around in the suits. There's a term for it
already, 'teledildonics.' The phenomenon of long distance sex."
	The beautiful young woman sitting beside him-she's a computer musician,
and we have just finished listening to her tape--takes a hit of ketamine, then
says, "Perfect. No diseases. No unwanted pregnancies."
	"Here's something else," says another young man. "It's very, very
possible that someday we will be able to transfer the contents of our brains
straight onto a microchip."
	"Why?" I ask. "Why would we want to do something like that?"
	"Come on," he says, "we do it already.  We do it all the time, whenever
we type our ideas into a computer. In the future we'll just do it faster, more
directly."
	I concede that, yes, it's a thought.  They're all thoughts.
Teledildonics, that's a thought too.
	And as the room fills up with thoughts--Utopian, strange, inspiring,
ridiculous--it strikes me that this is precisely what Americans are supposed to
do: think freely, then try to apply those thoughts, skeptics and solid citizens
be damned. Ford did it, Edison did it, Jobs and Wozniak did it, Ralph Abraham
is doing it now. It's what we're good at and, coincidentally, what some of our
international competitors--with their ancient social rule books and close-order
corporate calisthenic sessions--aren't so good at. In his recent book, /More
Like Us/, Japan expert James Fallows argued convincingly that instead of trying
to ape Japan's regimented industrial economy, the United States would do better
to unleash its individualistic potential. This may be another way of saying
that weirdness can be an export commodity.
	Timothy Leary, who has welcomed the computer revolutlon with his
characteristic cosmic enthusiasm, agrees. While Leary may be a prophet without
honor in his own country, the Japanese think otherwise, and he is much in
demand there as a lecturer and cultural consultant. "Japan is a tightly
structured hive society, and they know it," says Leary. "So just as they go to
the Middle East for oil and Australia for wood, they come to California for
creativity. They realize that creativity is a raw resource and that we have an
abundance of it here."
	Part of the recipe for that abundance, like it or not, is chemical.
When encountering some bizarre high-tech marvel, we often remark "Whoever made
that must have been on drugs." My reporting indicates that, more often than we
suspect, we're right. And how should we react to this ? I say: as tolerantly
and calmly as possible. A little brain damage, in the end, may be a small price
to pay for major brainstorms. And it's not as if we could stop these people
even if we wanted to. As ever, the pioneers will continue to pioneer, assuming
whatever risks they deem necessary. Judge them not by the trips they take but
by the gifts they carry back.
_______________________________________________________________________________

/Walter Kirn has written about Spike Lee and John Updike for GQ. He's working
in Montana on a new short story collection./

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Ottmar Roehrig

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