Novelty Theory

Novelty Theory was an idea conceived and promoted by Terence McKenna from the late 1960s until his death in the year 2000. Novelty Theory is a form of eschatology. It has similarities with the apocalyptic world view of many modern Christianities.

McKenna claimed that his theory, while inspired by a revelation psychically-transmitted from an alien insect intelligence, while he was under the influence of hallucinogenic plant compounds, had a firm mathematical basis. Part end-times prophecy, part fractal mathematics, it was based on his interpretation of hidden numeric hierarchies in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. "Novelty" can be thought of as the creative force in the universe, dynamic change in opposition to static habituation. When graphed over time, a fractal wavefrom known as Timewave Zero or simply the Timewave results.

Contents

1 Precepts of Novelty Theory 2 Criticisms 3 Software history 4 External links

Precepts of Novelty Theory

Novelty Theory has a few basic tenets:

• That the Universe is a living system with a teleological attractor: complexity in material forms.
• That novelty and complexity increase over time, in a process equivalent to punctuated equilibrium in biology.
• That the human brain represents the pinnacle of complex organization archived by the known universe to date.
• That the fluctuations in novelty over time are self-similar at different scales. Thus the rise and fall of the Roman Empire might be resonant with the life of a family within a single generation, or with an individuals' day at work.
• That as the complexity and sophistication of human thought and culture increase, universal novelty approaches a Koch curve of infinite exponential growth.
• That in the time immediately prior to, and during this omega point of infinite novelty, anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.
• That the date of this historical endpoint is December 21, 2012, the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar. (A less common interpretation puts the end date of the Mayan calendar at December 23, 2012, but McKenna used the more common solstice date.)

This End of History was to be the final manifestation of The Eschaton, which McKenna characterized as a sort of strange attractor towards which the evolution of the universe developed.

His predictions for this transcendent event were wide ranging and varied, depending on his audience. At times he conjectured that it would be the moment at which the mass of humanity would, by means of some technology, become mentally conjoined in a great collective. At others he speculated that this was to be the moment in which time travel became a reality. Another was the birth of self-conscious artificial intelligence. Another was a global UFO visitation. Occasionally he even expressed doubt as to whether anything at all would happen. However, McKenna claimed that there was no contradiction between these scenarios, as they might all happen simultaneously.

Criticisms

There are several criticisms of Novelty Theory. Most contend that it is a sophistry based on a form of irrational scientism.

One criticism in this vein is that Novelty is not defined in natural units. Another is that the supporting, corroborative arguments are based on subjective historical analysis. McKenna was adept at this, and Rupert Sheldrake complained that the theory required his personality for its demonstration. Another criticism is that the historical end point was chosen arbitrarily.

When the user quits Fractal Time 7.1 (the last software package written to demonstrate the theory, see below), the program prints the following message before exiting:

Perhaps the real value of Novelty Theory, at the end of the technological
war-driven 20th Century, is that it is a parody. It is not a scientific
theory, nor is it a pseudo-scientific theory -- it is a parody of a
scientific theory. It basically mocks the pretensions of 20th Century
physical science. It purports to explain the nature of time and to
elucidate the inner workings of the temporal world, yet it is obviously
absurd, at least to a more than superficial examination. Novelty Theory
says to us: This is what any Cartesian-Newtonian scientific theory really
is -- basically absurd. And since it is absurd, we should not, and do not
have to, believe. This basically knocks the foundations out from under the
assumptions of modern Western society, built as it is on a faith in modern
physical science as being the authority as to the nature of the real world.
In this sense Terence McKenna's thought is both liberating and subversive.

This disclaimer was built into the program by its author, Peter Meyer. Terrence McKenna is not known to have ever issued such a statement. Indeed, in his published books, interviews, and recorded lectures McKenna consistently treats the theory as seriously as any of his other material.

There were also several mathematical criticisms, which led to subsequent minor revisions of the model (again, see below).

Software history

McKenna recruited Royce Kelley and Leon Taylor in 1974 to model the mathematical underpinnings of his theory. This was done in FORTRAN, on a CDC 6400 computer at UC Berkeley.

The first program for a personal computer was written in 1978 or 1979 by Peter Broadwell, an employee of Ralph Abraham. It was made for the Apple //e, and was the first to represent the data points as a graph. It was difficult to manipulate.

In the late 70's the German professor of mathematics and physics Klaus Scharff developed his own computer model based on the data sets in The Invisible Landscape, which he considered primitive. It was written in Pascal.

In 1985 Programmer Peter Meyer was asked by Mckenna to write a new version for the Apple //e. After finding the original work vague, and inspired by the recent publications of Mandelbrot, Meyer reinterpreted the waveform as a fractal. He completed this new version in Applesoft BASIC for the Apple //e in February 1987. It was the first piece of software to allow calculation of resonances.

In 1989 he wrote the first MS-DOS version in Munich. It was written in C, supported multiple screens, and was much faster. It was also in German.

In 1990 it was bought back by Meyer, rewritten to take advantage of the FPU, and published by his company Dolphin Software in 1991. In April 1991 a German version of the MS-DOS software was commissioned by Gaia Media in Switzerland. A new German language version, with various improvements in resonance rendering, was written and released in 1993.

In 1994 a newer English language version was written with even more improvements.

In 1996 Matthew Watkins (founder of The RetroPsychoKinesis Project (http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/)) published an objection which changed the underpinnings of the Novelty Theory, capturing the I Ching transform into a formula. A new DOS version was written by Meyer to incorporate this change in 1998. It was released as Fractal Time Version 6.72

Physicist John Sheliak further revised the theory, and version 7.1 was subsequently released by Meyer in 1999. It was served as shareware on Meyer's site, but is no longer. There are currently no licensed distributors.

External links

• Mckenna's explanation of the Timewave (http://www.levity.com/eschaton/waveexplain.html)
• The Watkins Objection (http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/autopsy.html)
• A Mathematical and Philosophical Re-Examination (http://www.levity.com/eschaton/sheliak/foreword.html) by John Sheliak
• Novelty & Concrescence  (http://www.levity.com/eschaton/novelty.html) – discussions of Novelty Theory in general terms
• The End Of The River (http://serendipity.nofadz.com/ft/gyrus/river.htm)
• Versions Fractal Time 7.1, Timewave Zero 5.2, and related software (http://www.asylum.org/~elfstone/timewave/TWZcomplete.zip) (2.92Mb download)