By the Late John Brockman Read Free Page A

in the operant circuits of the brain. The incoming signals are transmitted by both
     internal and external receptors. “Effect involves the total situation and not a single
     level of information movement.” 8 There are no single levels of information movement. The total situation is the neural
     situation, the process of the nervous system. This system is operational. “All that’s
     traceably happening is a shimmering array of pattern shifting occurring in a centerless,
     edgeless network. It’s measurable piecemeal: trivial. The whole is unmeasurable indeed
     except through effects.” 9 Information is the measure of effect, the measure of the ordering of the brain’s
     activity in the transactional present.

     
    Communications theory is the study of messages. In this system, the message is nonlinear.
     The communication, the message, is pattern, order, neural inhibition. The message
     is the change in neural activity. It can be considered as a program, and a “program
     is nothing else but a set of commands: “do this; do that . . .” which in other words
     means: “don’t do this; don’t do that . . .” 10 We are dealing with the transmission of neural pattern from “a brain and its outputs,
     through a specifiable set of processes to the external world, through a portion of
     that world with specifiable modes, media and artificial means to another body, another
     brain.” 11 We are dealing with a set of relationships which allows us to conceptualize the communication
     of neural experience. The difference between human experience and neural experience
     is the difference between illusion and reality, between choice and no choice.

     
    In talking about the state of consciousness, do not deal in there-and-then considerations
     of interpretation of the ordering and arrangement of the direct experience of the
     brain. The ordering and arrangement are a continual functional happening. The ordering
     and arrangement are all that is actually happening. Nothing else ever happens. The
     ordering and arrangement are to be measured in terms of information.

     
    The most significant, the most critical, inventions of man were not those ever considered
     to be inventions but those which appeared to be innate and natural. Man never understood
     to what degree all of nature was man-made. One such major and crucial invention was
     talking. Talking was probably man’s most important invention. It was, undoubtedly,
     considered to be innate and natural until a man, making a new observation, exclaimed,
     “We’re talking.” 12 At that point no one had ever heard of such a thing. Still, talking was an invention
     that changed the way the brain worked. Talking, a man-made invention, provided information
     modifying the operation of the brain without any awareness. There was no choice. For
     thousands of years man was molding himself in a certain manner, but the pattern was
     not invented until a man said, “We’re talking.”

     
    Man is dead. Credit his death to an invention. The invention was the grasping of a
     conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized.
     The invention was man-made. It was the recognition that reality was communicable.
     The process was the transmission of neural pattern. Such patterns are electrical not
     mental. The system of communication and control functioned without individual awareness
     or consent. The message in the system was not words, ideas, images, etc. The message
     was nonlinear: operant neural pattern. It became clear that “new concepts of communication
     and control involved a new interpretation of man, of man’s knowledge of the universe,
     and of society.” 13 Man is dead. “We’re talking.”

     
    The system can be comprehended only by killing off man. We are not destroying a phenomenon.
     We are replacing one system of abstraction with another system of abstraction. Man
     was nothing but a model, a technique. It is now