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HUMAN INTELLIGENCE INCREASE:

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40 Vearscentury radicals were a bit too optimistic;they dl tended to think that there would be nohindrance to perpetual progress once mon-archy had been replaced by democracy andthe Pope had been prevented from int€rferingwith sciantific enquiry. Things were not quitethat simple, and most of the Utopian thoughtof the l9th century-including that of KarlMarx, whose passionate desire for justioecombined with his intolerant authoritarian-ism unleashed the Communist movement-was based on attempts to produce "lnstant

Progress" by giving the State the power to, asit were, torcu anerybody to be happy. Thishasn't worked very well.

In the l8lh, however, two brothers whohappened to be the grandsons of one Amer-ican president and the great-grandsons of an-other, namely Brooks and Henry Adams, be-gan to seethe laws of social changeabit moreclearly. They proposed what Henry called t heLow of Acelemtion. This alleged law, whichis not quite accurate, claims that change is notcaused by politics or revolutions, which areonly symptoms; change, the Adamses said, iscaused by economic-technological faEorswithin soci*y itself. And, guessing wildly,Henry Adams proposed that change occursat a rate which is the inverse square of time.

Spcifically, Henry assumed a X),flXbrcarintervd from thedawn of HomoErctus(an-thropology was just bginning thcn) to theScientific Rcvolution of Galileo, Bacon, etc.circa l6m. Hc assumed furthcr that the ncrtjump had bccn complacd circa lm, with

qusntum theory, thediscoveryof radium, theWriSht Brothers, etc. Now, 3fl) is the squareroot of 90,ffi, rc Henry Adams assumq[lencxt jump would be ompleted in.myears-that is, in rougNy 22ll yars, oraround June 192.

Things are not (or were not).moving quitethat fast.

But, while Hcnry was indulSing in wildmathematics, brothcr Brooks had hit onsomching ev€n mone intcrcstiltg..He notedthat the accumulation of capital-that is, thecentcr of mnomic power in the world-hadbccn moving steadily westward for severalthousand yean. It had morrcd, he noted,from Babylon to Gre, from Greece toRome and thenc to R€naissancc Itdian city-states, upward but still westwardto Gerrnanyand then ErUland, and was hovcring when hewrotc betw€cn lpndon and New York. Hepr€dictd that it would shift to New York,which has indced happcttcd.

Qs it about to rebound castward suddenly,due to the erncrgitry Arab oil*tatc? We willsoe rcas)ns to doubt that as we prooeed.)

In l9lE, a military aryinccr, Major C.H.Dowlas, who oridantly had not read Brooksand Hcnry Adams but sounds as if he had,canicd thcir kind of thinkfury a *cp further.Thc major factor in socid changp, Douglassaid, was the izczerzeat otmistion, whichsatcsacrituml hsitage.

Thc incremcnt of association simply meansthat whcn you'vc got mor€ poplc orSnnizedtogpthcr, you can accomplish more work;

By ROBERT ANTON WILSONb can expoct more changes inhuman life during the next 40years than occuned in the previ-ous 4,ffi years.

This is a perfectly safe, non-Utopian pre-diction because of a littleunderstood factorin human life which I call the I'function. I'stands for several things simultaneous-ly-Intelligence Intensification and Informa-tion lncrease, for instance. I'can also meanego'-that is, the mutation and dilation ofour self-images as we are continually trans-formed by the techno-social forces thathave been mutating us for the past severalmilenniums.

Before discussing the accelerated meta-morphoses of the next 40 years, let us reviewbriefly how the I'function has been progr€s-sively discovered.

Just before the American and French revo-lutions of 1776 ilnd l7EE, several philoso-phers began to propose that there was no limitto "progress"-that there was nothing inhuman fife that couldn't be changed and im-proved indefinitely. Condorcet, the mathe-matician, this idea most pointedlyof a[, daring to sprz-k of " the i4linile pedr-tqbility of mankind." Such ideas played alarge role in unleashing both of the revolu-tions mentioned, and the Mexican revolutionof 1810, and a great deal of su@uentradicalism.

Ofcourse, Condorcet and the other lEth

FUTURE L|FE r2l, Saplemb€r'l 980

R. Buckminster Fullerdefined the 12 function as

srynery -the kind ofreactionwhere l+ldoesnot equal 2,but 2 + .Forinstance, put a man and a

wonran in bed and youmight get, in nine months,

tlree people, not two.Fuller realized that the

highest form of synergywas mind imelf, which is,

as he sy$, inherentlyl f

selt- augmenung.

something Adarn Smith had already noticedn1776. But Douglas sawthis moredynamic-ally than Smith had. The incrernent of associ-ation increases from generation to genera-tion, he noted, because of culturd hoitage-the passing-on of knowledge, gimmicks, de-vicc, tools, ideas, etc.

Obviously, a tribal sociey could not buildthe Parthenon, wan if an architect of geniuswere bom among thenr. The increment of as-sociation and the cultural heritage were notthcre. Similarly, a Renaissance city-state,even with L,eonardo da Vinci in charge, couldnot put Neil Amstrons on the Moon. Fromtrajectories like thcc, Douglas calculatedthat the movement of capital, noted byBrooks Adams, followod the movement ofideas-of brlth hord and solt technology.And, sinoe our stockpile of ideas is increasingfrom gancration to gen€ration, change is in-decd accelerating, although not quite accord-ing to Hcnry Adams' invers€ square "law."

Douglas also noted that capital itself wasincreasing-a radical idea at the time, anddisputed by both socialists and Free Marketeconomists. We now know that Douglas wasright, and economists of all schools agrec thatcapital is increasing at around two p€rcent peryear (which means that world capital doublesabout wery 25 years.)

A few yean after Douglas, in l92l, CountAlfred Korzybski, another engineer, delinedthe I'function in his own way, callingit timebinding. Time-binding is the mechanism ofthe cultural heritage, Korzybski says, and it isbascd on our capacity to g€n€rate more and

more inclusive kinds of symbolism. As we ad-vanced, he says, we nroved from gnrnts andhowls, like other primatc, to articulatehuman speoch, to written language, to mathand graphs and calendars, to scientific laws;and now to computer simulations and elec-tronic world-wide information s'6terns. Ateach ste?, we learn more about how to modelthe universc, and how to predict what willwork and what will fail.

The timc-binding furrction, Korrybski cal-culated, operated rougNy like a geometricalprogression:

2 4 8 1 6 3 2 6 / 'This seems to be a much closer approxima-

tion of thetruth than HcnryAdams's inverse-square gu€sstinate. Dr. O.R. Bontrager hascollected scores of graphs of the rate ofchange in various fields of technology, andthey all approximate to the graph of Korarb-ski's simple geometrical progression.

Although this is not as shockirry, at fintsight, as Adarns'guess, it is equdly stadingwhen you look at it for a while. For instance,continuing the 24E scries five more stepe be.yond the sixth term, 64, where we left off, wefind ourselves suddcnly x T)4; and goingfive steps further, at 63,536. . .

We now know that some things are movingwen faster. For instance, J. R. Platt of Mch-igan State University has calculated thatspeed of ravel increased l,flXlfold sincc lSand speed of ommunication l0,ffi,flD.fold.One mm flew the Atlantic in l!I28, but2m,m,m men, wom€n and children flewthe Atlantic in ItE, 50 years later.

In l!I2E, when that lone man, CharlesLindberg, was flying the Atlantic in his crudebi-plane, engineerdesigncr R. BuckminsterFuller, who had r€ad Korzybski, defined theI'function as synergy. Synetgy is the kind ofreaction where I + I does not equal 2, but2 + . For instance, put a man and a woman inbed and you might get, in nine months, threepeople, not two. Add molyManum to st€eland you get an slloy tougha than either orboth. Bring Arabian mathernatics to Europe,mix it with the empirical knowledge of thecraftsmen, and you gBt Galileo and the sci-ance of phpics.

Fuller realized that the highest form ofsyn-ergy was mind itself, which is, as he sap, in-herently self-augmenting. That is, you can'tput two ideas together without a third ideaemerging, almost as in our sexual exampleabove. Fuller agrees with Douglas: capital in-creas€s, because ideas are always increasing.The world is moving toward largerand largercoherently organized systems, each capableof doing more, synergetically, than earlier,less organized systems.

ln 1914, Nobel physicist Erwin Schridin-ger added the next block to the definition ofI', in a book calld What Is Life?Schrddingernoted that werything in the universe, ucept&/e, follows the Second L,aw of Thermody-namics in moving steadily toward maximumentropy (which for our purpos€s we qlndefine loosely as chaos or incoherence.) Life,however, moves in the opposite direction:toward higher orgnization, greater'coher-ence, negotive entropy.

In the next few years, almost simultaneous-ly, Claud Shannon of Bell Laboratories andNorbert Weiner of M.I.T. realized that theinformation in a message could be mathemat-ically expressed as negative entropy. Thewhole science of cybernetics comes out of thisdiscovery, but that is not our topic here.What is interesting to us, in terms of I', is thatthe momentum of life toward greater coher-ence is, as Shannon and Weiner noted, vastlyaccelerated as life's techniques of informa-tion-processing improve. In short, the move-ment from grunts to language, to math, tocomputers, is a movement toward Informa-tion Intensification and against entropy, amovement toward coherent order andagainst random decay.

As Bucky Fuller was quick to point out, thedevelopment of Information Theory byShannon and Weiner enables us to see thehuman mind as the greatest synergy-machine, the greatest tool for doing-more-withJess, in this part of the universe.

Fuller points out that knowledge can onlyincrease (orcept for tragedies like brain dam-age in an individual or totalitarianism in asoci*y). As our communication skills and in-formation processing improve, human knowl-edge as a whole accelerates synergetically.Therefore, both hard and soft technology ac-celerate-ideas and tools both change faster,faster, faster. And capital accumulatesaccordingly.

The wer-provocative Dr. Timothy Learygtves us a final set of models to understandthe law of acceleration. ln The IntelligenceAgents, ln9, I-ary claims the east-to-westmovement, s€en as a migration of capital byBrooks Adams, is really a movement ofgenes. The Earth turns west-to-east; the hard-ier, more innovative genes, he claims, goagainst this and move east-to-west. The shiftof power from Babylon to New York notedby Brook Adams is still continuing, Learyavers; the pioneer genes are piling up on theWest Coast, and getting ready to blast offforspace.

This oddly parallels the theory of sociolo-gist Carl Oglesby that there is a cowboy-ver-sus-yankee war in our nrling class. The cow-boys are still looking for a new frontier,Oglesby saln; the Yankees have turned con-servative. Control of our economy is split be-tween theold NewYork capitalistsand thein-novative Western cowboy-capitalists. Thelatter group, of course, are the ones who areheavily investing in the space industry.

There is clear relevance between all thesenotions, and they all contribute to our under-standing of socio-economic change. TheAdams€s on migration and acccleration,Douglas on increment-of-association, Kor-zybski on "time-binding," Fuller on synergy,Schriidinger on life as an anti+ntropic pro-cess, Shannon and Weiner on infofmation asnegative entropy, and Leary on neuro-genet-ics, all illustrate part of what we mean by In-formation Increase. That Intelligence Inten-sification (a term borrowed from Leary) ispart of the worldround 4,@year informa-tion explosion should alsobe clear. Our hunt-ing-gathering ancestors did not need the vari-

20 FUTURE LlFEt2l. S€otember 1980

ety of kindsand stylesof intelligence that theGreeks of Plato's age needed. More intelli-gence, of different flavors and functions,were necessary for the transformationsknown to us as the Renaissance, the Indus-trial Revolution, the rise of representationalgovernment. New types of intelligence are be-ing produced to cope with the computer revo-lution and the burst into sPace.

The other aspect of l'-the continuousmutation of the ego-is more subtle. Tribalpeople only know themselves and definethemselves as units within the tribe, just asthey only know the universe as a few miles, ora few hundred miles, with a sky over it.Urbanization and civilization created adomesticated human ego, more selfdirec-tion, and a quality of alienation or onomieresultant from the loss ofthe tribd bond (ex-tended family). The Renaissance created themodern individual, questing, impatient,monstrously "selfish" by the standards oftraditional societies, seeking personal and im-personal goals unthinkable earlier in evolu-tion. In this century, and especially since1945, a new ego, a new social selfdefinition,is emerging, amid the usual chaos and anxietythat attend any major transformation.

We are less like our grandparents than theywere like the first food-gathering hominids.Every time you turn on the TV, you partici-pate in a miracle that is transforming youmore than you know. It do€sn't matterwhat's on the tube; as Mcluhan sid, themedium b the musoge-to a great extentanyway. The very fact that the tube can bringyou live pictures from the other side of theplanet causes you to know yourself in a dif-ferent way than any previous generation. Youintuitively have a different sense of who youare, where you are, what you are and whyyouare.

This neurological shockwave, which hasbeen risigg and accelerating for 4,ffi years, isnot going to stop or decelerate in the next 40.

Life will continue to be l-opening in everysens€.

Thecomputer revolution will mutate us farmore than TV. and much faster. Here's anexample of time-scale: when I entered highschool, in l9{i, there were virtually no TVs inprivate homes in the U.S.; by the time I fin-ished high school in 1950 almost everybodyhad a TV. All the sigrrs are that home com-puters are going to sweep the country in thenext four yerus the way TV did in my highschool days.

The computer is a seductive beast. Every-body-even people who think they hate tech-nology-gets hooked after a few hours of sit-ting at the console and playrng around withthis marvelous toy. Children seem to turn onto it even faster, and jump quicker from sim-ple to sophisticated programming. Thus, theproliferation of home computers in the 1980sis going to be a trernendous quantum jump inall dimensions of I'-intelligence intensifica-tion, information increase and a new sense ofwho and what we are.

You can't play with computers for longwithout beginning to sense that intelligence isthe capocity to r*eive, integrate and trsnsmit

signals, You begin to see your own nervousslntem as a marvelous computer in itself, andyou want to expand and accelerate its work-ings. You want it to receivemore signals, in-tegrate then|, into better simulations ormodels of the world, tronsmit them moreefficiently. Intelligence Increase begins toseem as hedonic as the quest for conscious-expansion in the'60s.

You begin to understand Mcluhan'spriradoxical claim that the medium is themessage. The ideas in this article<peciallythe Schrit'ingcr-Fuller concept of evolutionas a strude for better information and lessentropy-begin to make scnse intuitively andsensorily. Your nenous system is opandingby interfacing with the @mputer, which inturn will more and more be interfacing withother computef,s on Earth and in space.

Meanwhile, of course, noneof ourprescnt"probl€fl$" are going to go away overnight.Third World liberation, Black libcration,Women's liberation, etc. will continue to de-mand attention and solution. Terrorism willbe with us for a while yet-as long as there arepeople in the world who think that a smallgroup of white males in the Westem worldhavetoo much power and use and abusethatpouar without empathy for the needs andaspirations of others.

There is no need to build doomsday sce-narios about this worldwide struggle to de-centralize wealth and power. The first axiomof the I'hlpothesis is that if a problenr exists'a solution must also exist. The evolutionaryfunction of problems is not to lead us tothrow up our hands and cry out that the spe-cies is doomed, but to provoke us to think ofsolutions.

Sometime in the next l5 yean, betwcnl9E0 rnd 195, the ftrst longevity pi[s wi[ beappeadng. This is only a guess, of course-the time faclor cannot be estimated, really-but there are more scientists working on lifeexteruion today than there were working onatomic energy in the 193(h, before Einsteinwrote his famous letter to President Roosc-velt about German research in nuclear weaponry. As soon as any country gets a suonghint that some other country might have ananti-aging formula, or might be close, suchresearch will spurt atread dramatically.

(Some of the longwity pills currently usedby faddists<pecially Vitamin E, mega-doses of Vitamin C, and RNA-mayalreadybe some slight h€lp in extending lifespan' al-though the evidence is not conclusive yet.)

S€r,erd researchers have already reportedextemion of lifespan in expcrimentalanimals.

There have becn se\,€ral articles on thissubject in popular magazinc lately, and araslr of books zuch as holongevity (Roscn-feld), Tlp Life Extercion Rewlution(Kentl'The Immortal$ (Hanington); The Immor'tality Frctor (Segerbcrg), etc. Th€ avant-garde lO percent of the population is dreadylooking forward to the conquest of aging andthe eventual conqu€st of death. When thisnrcssage reaches 30percent ofthe population'both govemmcnt and private industry can beorpected to invest in thisresearchmuch more

Anti-aging drugs andlife-extensiontechniques wil l soondeliver us from thecurse of death, andwithin the next 40 yearswe will all be re-orientedto l iving centuries, notdecades, and topursuing the scientif icquest for actualimmortality. We have toexpect such quantumleaps every decadenow.

than at present. Assuming that the ltrstbreakthrough, however crude, will occur be-tweennowand lD5 isrearcnable. Evenif thefrst life otteruion drug or{y increases life-span l0 or 15 perccnt the psychological im-pact witt be immense. Expectations will rise,and research will accelerate wen faster.

Far-out sociologist F.M. Esfandiary maynot be excessive in claiming, "lf you can sur-vive the nort 20years, you will probably neverdie."

The fue of Space, of @urse, has alreadYbegun. Over lfi) men and women have beeninto space; our TV brings us satellite photoso,ery night on the weather forecasts, and hasbrought us pictures of Mars and Jupiter. Ashome computers linked up with satellites inspace become more cornmon, the sqtse willgrow in all of us that we are participating inthe SpaceAge wan if we are staying at home.But the longwity revolution will certainly in-crease the "population problem" in every-body's awareness, so that miSration intospace will s€em more and more nocessary.

Since we already have communication sat-ellites in plenty, the solar powa satellitesurged by California's allegdly "flakey"

Crovernor Brown cannot be far away. Afterall, ground-lwel solar power collectors canonly tap the sun's encrgy half a day at best'and not at all on cloudy, rainy or overcastdays. Yet a solar satellite can collecl enagy Ahoun a day, every day of the year. Even withanti-tech bias in some circles these days, anidea like that cannot be long ignored.

Dr. Barry Commoner, one of the leading

a l

FUTURE LlFEr21, S€otemb€r 198O

We are les like ourgandparents than th.y

were like the first food,gathering hominids.

Every time you tum onthe TV, you participate

in a miracle that isransforming you morethan you know. This

neurologlcal shock wave,which has been rising

and accelerating for4,000 yea$, is not going

to stop or decelerate inthe next 40.

cxpcrts on ecology, pointed out at the 1960meeting of the Amcrican Association for theAdvancement of Science that, ev€n beforesomc'kind of coological disastcr hits the plan-et, we will be in serious conomic trouble, i/we continue to basc our economy chiefly onnon-renewableresources such as oil and mal.It is a simple fact of oconomics that as a re-souroe grows scarcer, its price go€s up.(Lookd at your garcline bill lately?) If en-agyis not to becomesomething onlytherichcan afford, Dr. Commonff sls, we musts,tritchto renewuble resources pretty damndquick.

Solar power is the most abundantly avail-able ofall renewable resources, and satellitesare the best way to tap a lot of it.

But such solar satellites are just the firststep in our expansion into extra-terrestrialeconomy.

Engineer G. Harry Stine has calculatedthat there are l0'@ technical processes thatcan be performed cheaper or more efficientlyin space than on the surface of a planet. Thisis an example of doing-more-with-less thatmight make wen Bucky Fuller blink, but it issimple physics, based on the zero-gravity con-ditions and high-grade vacuum available inspae.

Incaseanybodydoesn't know, l0,oomeansl0 with a hundred zeroes after it. This is quitea large number (says he with English under-statement) and makes the Industrial Revolu-tion look like a tempest in a teapot by com-parison. It seerns to mean that, as industrymoves into space, the rate of capital increase

will accelerate much faster than the two per-cent per year that has prevailed since the latel9th century. In fact, it indicates that we areabout to experience the greatest quantumjump in energy, resources and wealth sincehistory began.

The word "we" in the above sentence is, ofcourse, ambiguous. In grressing how muchthe Great Economic Boom of space industri-alization means to the human race generally,rather than just to the multinational corpora-tions, keep in mind: (a) The Third Worldliberation movements and other poorpeople's crusades are nol going to go away(b)Even under our present system ofmonopolycapitalism, living standards have steadilyrisen for the majority. (Ihat is, contrary toMarx, capitalism has not meant that the richalways get richer and the poor always getpoorer; rather, the rich continue to get richer,but fewer and fewer are poor in the l9th cen-tury sense. Our unemployed poor, onWelfare, are far more comfortable andhealthier than the working poor in Marx'sday.) (c) As the information-intelligencerevolution continues , the deprived will findbetter, more rational ways to press their de-mand for a fair share of the pie. That is, it iseasy to ignore, or refuse concessions to, aband of crazy tenorists; it is not easy to ignorea group of people as well organized asAmerican labor today.

Bucky Fuller and Werner Erhard havepicked 195 as a taryet date for the abolitionof starvation worldwide. This may soundhopelessly Utopian now-but that is only be-c{lus€ we are so accustomed to stupidity andnarrow grd in high places. Making everyallowance for that factor of human cussed-ness, it seems reasonable to say that the Ful-ler-Erhard goal must be achieved in the4Gyear span this article is considering. Andthere is no reason why we shouldn't aim for1995; as any karate teacher will tell you, suc-cess depends on aiming at more than youthink you can achieve.

And here's where the much-malignedHuman Potential Movement comes into thepicture. This was not invented in the I 970s, asshallow critics believe, but in the 1950s. Itemerged from the interpersonal emphasis ofpsychologists like Harry Stack Sullivan, whorealized that a "sick" person is just one partof a "sick" situation; and from the risingpopularity of group therapy, replacing theold individual therapy; and especially fromDr. Abraham Maslow's discovery that healthypeople are more interesting than sickpeople-i.e. that health is what psychologistsreally ought.to study.

Frzud studied the neurotic, and tried to re-store them to normalcy, without a very clearidea of what normalcy was. Maslow studiedthe conspicuously healthy-the persons hecalled "self-actualizing individuals"-andfound they were as far from the norm as thementally ill are. Due to Maslow, psycholo-gists began to realize that the normal state israther dull and stupid. Emphasis shifted fromtreating the ill to "make them normal" intotreating both the ill and the normal to makethem self-actualizing, i.e. to show thern how

to achieve their full potential.Although there are now several branches

or schools of the Human Potential move-ment, with several varieties of jargon and"psychobabble," the best surnmary of whatthe whole Consciousness Revolution is allabout is, I think, that given by Dr. Leary inthe previously mentiord Intelligence Agents.

As Leary states the case, there are eightvarieties of consciousness-intelligence whichwe all potentially possess and which we can alldevelop to a higher general level than thepresent norm. These are:

Bio-survival intelligence. Using your bodyto avoid danger efficiently, as any intelligentanimal does. We only learn this kind of con-sciousness ifour majorinterest is sports ofthemore violent sort, like footbdl. We can alllearn more through martial arts such as kungfu, karate, akido etc.

Emotional intelligence. Using the emo-tional circuits in your brain to understandother people's emotions, "where they'recoming from," and how to relate to themwhen they seem irrational. In our society,only women seem to be trained in this kind ofconsciousness, and men are generally clumsyas oafs. Women's Liberation and the grow-ing influence of Human Potential has madethe qvont third of the male population moreor less aware of this, and the attempt tobecome more "sensitive" to others has atleast begun. We can only expect it to increase(and the sooner the better).

kmontic intelligence. The ability to usewords and other symbols without committinggross errors of judgement. This is the onlytype of intelligence which our schools even al-tempt to t@ch,and since we live in a deluge ofwords, symbols and other signals-and sincethe computer revolution is upon us-we allneed to learn how to receive, integrate andtransmit symbols more efficiently.

bcio-sexual intelligence. The capacity torelate to others without being exploitative andwithout being an exploiter. Our society tradi-tionally treats sex as a special case, but it isreally part of the whole social consciousnessgame. The rules are the same, in sex or inother relations between people: treat theother person as you want to be treated. Atpresent, few have that degree of maturity,and most are either bullies or masochists. Agrcat deal of therapy, group or otherwise,merely consists of teaching people a mod-icum of socio-sexual consciousness, so theycan cease to be bullies or masochists.

Neurosomotic intelligence. The ability tostay "high," to look and feel like a happy,healthy young adult all your life. This issomewhat "spookier" than the previouskinds of consciousness, but only because it isstill statistically rare. When somebody elsetransmits this to you, it called "Christian Sci-ence" or "faith-healing," etc. Maslow foundthat his self-actualizing people do it for them-selves, without a gu$. However arcane itmay seem at present, this type of intelligenceis increasing because weed has made tempor-ary flashes of it familiar to about a third of thepopulation, because biofeedback is showingus how to control it scientifically, and because

FUTURE LlFEt2l, S€ptember 1 980

the Human Potential movement, and suchexotic imports as Zen and yoga, are making itaccessible to more people every year.

Metoprogramming intelligence. Thecapacity of the brain to become aware of itsown programming, and to rewire itself formore pleasurable, more efficient, more suc-cessful programs. This is the goal of all themore advanced forms of psychotherapy andthe Eastern mystic traditions. It means turn-ing all your mechanical reflexes into volun-ury choices-ceasing to be a robot and devel-oping your full Human Potential-and it isstill exceedingly unconrmon. The wholeAquarian philosophy, of course, is based onthe hope that this transformation of human-ity from Mechanical Reactions to CreativeActions can be accelerated by the growingsynthesis of Eastern and Western psychol-ogtes, by new discoveries in the neuro-sci-ences, and by the fact that the acceleratedchanges we are going through demand that'our brains themselves accelerate and change.

Leary adds two further kinds of intelli-gence, which are so infrequent in our societyat present that to tdk of them at all sounds"mystical." These are neurogeietic intelli-gence-the capacity to intuitively grasp,through direct brain-DNA feedback, theEyolutionary script, the meaning of I', andone's own role in the entire drama of I'emoging out of the primordial slime tohigher and higher levels of coherence; andneuro-qtomic intelligence, which has to dowith the weird stuff that some scientists don'teven admit edsts, such as ESP and psychokinesis.

I think it safe to predict that, within the4Gyear span of this article, we will have muchmore precise scientific knowledge about howto increase aI eight of these levels of con-sciousnes. In short, I think we can expect aquantum jump in human functioning, togreater intellectual efficiency, greater emo-tional sensitivity and stability, and more self-awareress, selfdirection and zest-for-living.

Now let us look brieflyat some of the otherchanges and breakthroughs that can be ex-pected in the next 40 years.

Human cloning will be Wssible. (One sen-sational book, rejectd by most scientists,claims that it has already occuned.) Some ofthe implications of this are so staggering thatthey make the wildest science fiction seemtame. One can imagine a dictator cloning awhole army of killer-zombies from some low-IQ high-muscle prototype, or some eccentricSultan cloning a harem of Sophia [.orens,etc. Dozens of similarly bizarre fantasies willbe possible, and one can only accept cloningif onebeliwes that I'is reallygoingtoinoeasealso.

More significantly, cloning will completeour sexual reorientation. Contraception hasbroken the sex = pregnancy "law" by makingsex without reproduction possible; cloningwill change our attitudes further by makingreproduction without sex possible. A wholenew definition of humanity, sexuality andsociatity will emerge, which we can only dirnlyforesee.

Citia in spacemust inevitably follow space

factories. That is, neither male nor femaleengineers can be expected to put in long stintsout there without the heterosexual majoritydemanding the usual companionship and,eventually, the traditional family structure.Since desigrrs for space cities have existedsince 1968, and have been improved severaltimes already, real space cities are inevitablein our 4Gyear forecast.

People living in space will be as differentfrom Tenans as the hrst settlers of the U.S.were from traditional Europeans. They willbe the pioneer, maverick types-those who,if we trust Brooks Adams and Leary, havebeen moving westward for the last severalyears, dragging the rest of humanity in theirwake, as they endlessly produce new ideas,new tools, new capital and higher levels ofin-formation processing. Since there is nowhereleft for them to go on Earth, they will beleadi-ng the migration into space.

Or consider the following Utopian visions:-Drugs to permanently in'crease intelligence;-Artificial sight for the blind;-A cure for cancer.

Does it seem visionary to predict thes€within the next 40 years? A poll of scientistsconducted by Mccraw-Hill in 19/7 foundthat the majority of informed researchers be-lieve we will have all three within the next 20yeo,s.

In fact, since these predictions were madein 19|,7, we have already seen the development of one type of very limited' very expen-sive artificial sight for the blind, in laboratoryprototype only; and it has been discoveredthat one known drug, lecithin, can raise intel-ligence to a limited degree.

One psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Newport, haspredicted that, within 15 years, psychother-apists will be mainly diagnosticians. That is,they will merely decide what is wrong with agiven patient and then prescribe the rightchemicals to restore the brain to equilibrium.This was perhaps uttered with some whim-sy-but Freud himself predicted that suchchemotherapy would make hiswork obsoletesomeday.

Dr. Nathan Kline has claimed that, byAD, we will have such specific chemicalbrain-change agents as: drugs to increase ordecrease mothering behavior, drugs to im-prove memory or to remove specific mem-ories, dru8s to prolong or shorten childhoodor any other stage of life, etc.

It is hardly visionary, then, to project that'within our 40.year purview, we will all be ableto prognm our nervous systems to add, sub-tract or multiply any behavior we wish toalter.

we have traditionally been limitedand tor-mentd by three factors which theology calls"the world, the flesh and the devil." As theFrench philosopher Bernal pointed out, inmodern terms, the world means the limitedresources ofthis planet, over which we havebeen fighting for the past scveral thousandyears. Space migration means that we are nolonger hemmed in by this limitation. We aremoving from the closed systan of Terra to theop€n system of extraterrestrial expansion.

The flesh. to Bernd, meant the brwity of

I think it safe to Predictthat, within the 4O-Yearspan of this article, wewill have much moreprecise scientif icknowledge about how toincrease all levels of con-sciousness. I think wecan expect a quantumjump in human function-ing, to greater intellectualefficiency, greater emo-tional sensitivity, moreself-awareness andzest-for-living.

human life-thegrim factthat formostof us,senility, the other diseases of age, and deathitself come upon us before we have begun tofigure out what life is all about. Anti-agingdrugs and other life+xtension techniques willsoon deliver us from that curse, and withinthe next 40 years we will all be re-oriented toliving centuries, not decades, and to pursuingthe scientific quest for actual immortality.

The devil, ofcourse, merely represents ourown inner irrationality. All that we have saidabout intelligence increase and consciousnessexpansion indicates that we are on the thresh-old of major victories against the most per-nicious of the three traps that have previouslyconstrained us.

That is, the world represents limits in spacewhlch we are outgrowing, the flesh representslimits in life-time which we are also outgrow-ing, and the devil repres€nts limits in our ownconsciousness which we can also outgrow'We are evolving into an entirely new relation-ship to space, time and mind. The law of ac-celeration. increment of associAtion' synergy'etc. are all aspects of the single fact that in-telligence has been increasing more rapidlysince life began. At first, major changes cameonly in billions of years, then in millions, thenin thousands. After the scientific revolutioncirca l6m, we began to get used to rapidjumps every c€ntury. Some of us are nowgrowing accustomed to rapid quantum leapsto higher coherence every generation.

We have to exp€ct such leaps every decadenow, to understand what the next 40 yearswill really be like. E

FUTURE LlFEa2l, Soptember 19€02t