|
Edited on Sun Oct-02-11 12:16 AM by drokhole
...it covers a broad range of topics (including his life), and this particular thread (information doubling) is told throughout the book with numerous callbacks, but I'll try to list the relevant bits: In 1974, statistician George Anderla estimated how much information humanity had accumulated between that African stone ax of 4,000,000 BC and the beginning of the Christian calendar in 1 AD when Rome was the biggest slave-state yet organize.
Naturally, 4,000,000 years worth of information gives you a rather large number. Anderla, however, took that as his basic unit, and then calculated how long it took to double that amount of binary units of information.
It only took 1500 years. By then power had shifted northward and mildly westward to the great Italian city-states ruled by bankers like the Medici.---- In 1550 AD, any educated person could potentially learn twice as much as the most erudite Roman of 1 AD, and something called 'the Renaissance' was challenging every dogma and orthodoxy of Europe. In China, the Confucian bureaucracy sought justice and fairness, as Confucius had taught them to do.
Within one breeding generation of the doubling of information - 17 years - in 1517 the first successful Protestant Revolution broke loose in Germany...
Only one breeding generation later, in 1534, the second successful Protestant Revolution occurred in England.
The Papacy felt itself losing control of the Western world and fought back; the Protestants refused to lie down and die, so one religious war followed another for over 200 years. In that 200 years, the avant minds of Europe increasingly turned away from the fanaticism of both the Catholic and Protestant reality-tunnels and moved, slowly and imperceptibly at first, toward 'humanism,' secularism and Objective Science.
It had taken around four million years to get from the first African stone ax to the Roman engineers and Roman law; but an even more total revolution had occurred by the time knowledge doubled again in 1500.--- By 1750, the information larder of humanity had doubled again.
The second doubling had taken only 250 years, during most of which Europe had been torn by crazy and fanatical religious wars.
By 1750 Julien de La Mettrie published the first book giving a completely mechanistic and materialistic account of human life and behavior...
Within one year, all this new information gave Benjamin Franklin the ideas he needed to embark on his electrical experiments, which led David Hume and many others to consider him 'the greatest scientist since Newton.'
Within 15 years, in 1765, James Watt in Scotland invented his steam engine and the Industrial Revolution began.
Watt had set a time-bomb under Patriarchy: The whole sun-king system which had held agricultural civilization together since the Bronze Age began to crumble. Industrialism demanded, and got, a major transformation of humanity, as radical as that which had occured when the sun-kings arose to conquer the 'partnership societies' (tribes) around them.
The American Revolution began in 1776. The French Revolution in 1789. The United Irish uprising in 1798. The first Mexican Revolution in 1810. The ideas of democracy and the free market began to win converts, and following in their wake were wilder 'heresies' like socialism, anarchism, feminism..."The information doubled again in 1900, then again in 1950 ( "American Empire replaces British Empire in prominence"), then in 1960 ( "we" collectively knew twice as much about the Universe as we had known in 1950..., demonstrations against segregation, first U.S. communications satellite in orbit, 200,000 new theorems were being published every year and no single mind could keep up with all this, world population reached 3 billion), again in 1967: Out of the American civil rights movement and the Third World struggles for liberation from imperialism, something completely new emerged - a worldwide Youth Revolution that nobody could define at the time and nobody has yet defined even today. It was a rebellion against war, and against racism, and against every Elite which greedily hugged its power - but it was also a new style of music, a change in drug habits (alcohol being rejected in favor of pot), a new awareness of ecology...
Bucky Fuller said that all the confusion, and sometimes feuding, movements that made up the Youth Revolution had one thing and only one thing in common. The participants were the first human generation that had been raised on television."Then, again in 1973 ( "Big Computers", cease-fire in Vietnam), and I lost the thread in my notes from there. Fair warning, I'm leaving out A LOT of material and events, but I hope this gives you enough of an idea. For more context, the quote from the OP is preceded by this: "During the brain workshop, I did my standard bit about how information has been accelerating in the past two thousand years, using the same statistics from French economist George Anderla used in this book. Somebody asked me if I thought that process might be a Mandelbrot fractal, as suggested by Terence McKenna. I said frankly that I wasn't sure, but I certainly agree with Terence that there are more wild and unpredictable changes directly ahead of us."Sorry if this is long-winded and wildly confusing, but it's hard to really summarize it (quite honestly, the whole "Cosmic Trigger Series" is worth a read). It, crudely, boils down to this: " By 1973...if you knew where to look, like somewhere in the Big Computers, you could find 128 times as much data as Jesus ever saw, 64 times as much as Leonardo had at his disposal, 32 facts for every one fact known in 1750, 16 for every one known in 1900, 8 for every one in 1950, 4 for 1960...and twice as much as we had in our inventory only six years earlier in 1967." Edit to add: This video may also help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q472Gf9Zd9k (Wilson appears around the :52 mark) And, here's a description of the Jumping Jesus PhenomenonAnd sorry it took so long, had to find what book it was from, then pour through the book. Anyway, here's a few of my other favorite quotes from the book: "All through my life, the U.S. has been at war more of the time than it has been at peace, and virtually all the wars are directed at colored peoples far, far away who pose absolutely no threat to our soil. The only threats most of them pose are that they are non-white, non-Christian and no longer willing to be governed by 'our' corporations.""Whenever the Establishment is annoyed, they send cops to beat the shit out of people.""On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.""We could follow traditional mammalian politics, in which one nation would try to dominate the others in order to access all 92 elements, which we now call a zero-sum-game. Or, we could choose a new synergistic path, a non-zero-sum-game, in which all Terrans cooperate to "advantage all without disadvantaging any." |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(759 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
