New Realities recorded on November 10, 2015
Summary
In this episode of New Realities, host Alan Steinfeld interviews visionary thinker and author Howard Bloom about his book, ‘The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates.’ They discuss Bloom’s critique of fundamental scientific and philosophical assumptions, such as Aristotelian logic (A equals A) and entropy, and explore the concept of emergent properties. Bloom shares personal anecdotes that shaped his perspective as an outsider and argues for a new paradigm of scientific thinking that embraces complexity and emergence without relying on traditional religious or reductionist frameworks.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities, this is Alan Steinfeld and each week on this program I explore what I call a shifting paradigm in the consciousness of the planet, of humanity, and we are defining our world in different ways and tonight’s guest is very much at the forefront of a shifting paradigm.
Howard Bloom
Channel 4 Britain was lunatic enough to say that something to the effect of Howard Bloom is the next the Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton of the 21st century. And Gear Magazine was even wackier. It said Howard Bloom may just be the next Stephen Hawking, except he’s not just interested in science, he’s interested in the human spirit. And then of course there was Bonnie DeVarco who was the archivist for Buckminster Fuller, so she knew Buckminster and his work very well. And that was one of the startling comments because she said Howard Bloom is the Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the 21st century.
Alan Steinfeld
I guess that’s a great way to introduce yourself here on New Realities. When I say it, forget that I ever said it. It sounds egotistical as all hell. I’m here today with Howard Bloom, who besides writing some amazing books about the Lucifer Principle, the Global Brain was it? Right.
Howard Bloom
The Lucifer Principle, a scientific expedition into the forces of history, followed by, would you like the others? OK, followed by Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. And the Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism, soon to be joined, actually now joined within the last three weeks by The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates.
Alan Steinfeld
Just out now, that is Howard’s latest book. And The God Problem, when I heard you speak about other things and other shows, is I commented to you when I met you at a party, that it’s really not God that’s the problem, it’s our assumptions we make about the nature of creation.
Howard Bloom
Yes, you’ve got it exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
And so forget God. God’s not even in the question because that’s some hypothetical, would be what if. But what is in the question is how we cognize reality. That’s why I call the show New Realities. So you took five principles in this book and you broke it down. Five heresies. Five heresies. One, A does not equal A.
Howard Bloom
Yes, you’ve got it. OK, that’s the first one. Let’s start there. And the other four is 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Right. Number 3 is the second law of thermodynamics. The law of entropy. The law that all things fall apart. Is absolutely, totally and completely wrong.
Alan Steinfeld
I am with you on that. The fourth is…
Howard Bloom
The fourth is randomness is not as random as you think. This is not a 6 Monkeys at 6 Typewriters universe.
Alan Steinfeld
That would never happen.
Howard Bloom
Right. And number Alan did this to me brilliantly, I don’t know where the camera is, it’s here somewhere. It’s right there. OK. Alan did this to me brilliantly about two weeks ago when we met at a party. And he started reciting some of the key concepts for the book from the book, in a way that utterly astonished me. Plus he had seen beyond it beyond what’s in the book, to the book’s extra peripheral visions implications.
Alan Steinfeld
Well let’s hopefully we can get to that tonight. So the fifth principle was?
Howard Bloom
The fifth principle is information theory is not about information. And in fact it misses the mark.
Alan Steinfeld
Information theory is about…
Howard Bloom
Information theory is about, well we’ll go into that, that’s a complex construct.
Alan Steinfeld
OK. So what I get, we have these silly assumptions that have been passed down since Aristotle about the way the nature of the universe is.
Howard Bloom
OK, now let me stop you on assumptions. OK, because it’s a very important word. To understand these other things. OK. So, I put you in my position in this book. So Alan, let’s imagine this. You are 10 years old. You’re in a Godforsaken steel town that steel is about to evaporate from. Yeah, Buffalo, New York, OK.
Alan Steinfeld
I went to school in Buffalo. You really grew up in Buffalo? No wonder… I hated that place.
Howard Bloom
Yeah, OK. Gorgeous buildings but no people you can relate to. OK, so there you are stuck in Buffalo at the age of 10. No other kid wants to have anything to do with you when they’re throwing some sort of a party or they’re doing a they’ve erected a tent in somebody’s backyard. You are out. They post a sentry on their driveway to tell you you cannot even walk up the driveway. When they’re putting together a team for a baseball game and they see you coming, they literally pick up all their equipment and move to another location.
Alan Steinfeld
So you were like the geek before there were geeks.
Howard Bloom
The geek before, yes, before there were geeks. Although I think there have always been geeks. But at any rate, and one day you’re sitting in the, your big living room with these it’s all the curtains are always drawn. And they’re great big velvet curtains. The place, the room is dark. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
Alan Steinfeld
And it smells outside because of the steel is burning in Buffalo. Day and night.
Howard Bloom
Oh no, not where I was. Where I was across the street is a Frederick Law Olmsted park. And behind the house is a Frank Lloyd Wright house. So it’s a gorgeous location. A big Tudor yeah, big Tudor house not far from there. Yeah, exactly. So there you are and this book, you know you know the location of every book in the room. You’ve grown up with all of these books. And suddenly there’s a book in your hands and you don’t know where it came from. It has no location and you never see it again and when you grow up and look and Google book search you can’t find it. But the book tells you two of the most important things you’ve ever seen in your life. They basically it’s as if the author grabs you by the lapel and says, schmuck. I mean you’re Jewish so I can understand You’re Jewish if you’re me for a day. So at any rate…
Alan Steinfeld
And you’re doubly Jewish.
Howard Bloom
And the author says, schmuck. Listen to me. There are two basic rules of science. Rule number 1: The truth at any price including the price of your life. And it gives an example, Galileo, but it tells the story all wrong, thank God. It doesn’t tell you that Galileo’s buddy was the pope, and it doesn’t tell you that he was given a choice of being burned at the stake or saying no to all of his saying that everything he’d written was untrue and living under house arrest.
Alan Steinfeld
He did say that.
Howard Bloom
Yeah, he took the bargain. But it doesn’t tell you that. It tells you that Galileo would have been willing to go to the stake like Giordano Bruno in order to support his truth. And that’s what you need to hear, Alan. You need to hear a message of courage, not a message of cowardice. So rule number 1: the truth at any price including the price of your life. Rule number 2 of science: Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before. Look at things that you and everyone around you take for granted as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there. In other words, find your assumptions. Because it’s not just questioning we’ve all heard of questioning assumptions and that’s a difficult process. But you can’t question them until you find them.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but you know our cultural conditioning makes us immune to seeing we’re hypnotized by the culture to see just one level of reality. So we have to question the whole culture itself, we have to question the language we’re using that frames our reality into a very narrow view of what’s possible.
Howard Bloom
Exactly. Well, this book is designed, and if it achieves its purpose, then The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. This book is designed to take you out of the normal way of looking at things so you can see everything around you in a whole new light. So you can see the assumptions, and in the process of seeing the hidden assumptions, the very skillfully hidden assumptions, assumptions in some cases that have been with us for 2,300 years or more without questioning it makes you feel like an alien so you can see these things as if they’re strange and hypotheses, not absolutes.
Alan Steinfeld
Let’s go into that. Let’s go So if you say, start off, A does not equal A. Now let me see if I understand that. You have A here and then you have the equal and you have A here. Right. Your left hand is not your right hand. What’s here is not there. A cannot be A even though you’re calling it A, so we’re assuming that A is A when A here is not A there.
Howard Bloom
Right. And A is A equals A is vital to the process we call logic. I mean, I wondered, Alan, you know it took me until my 58th year or something like that to really dig into this. But I wondered, you know we talk about reason and logic all of the time, but we never step back and say, what are reason and logic? What are their basic assumptions? Are they really accurate? So I went back to the very roots of reason and I found them in Aristotle. And Aristotle was the guy who basically said A equals A period. And Ayn Rand has picked up that chant in the last 20 years, maybe 30. And she has made a basic it’s a creed that is recited by her people as if they are parrots, her followers. A equals A. If A equals A and if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals A. And Ayn Rand says that doubting that A equals A is the very root of everything that’s evil, foul, and wrong with this world. Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
Really? Well I would love to hear you debate Ayn Rand.
Howard Bloom
Well, she’s dead, it would be difficult, but it would be interesting. If you can get her on the show, I’ll come.
Alan Steinfeld
No, but so she and everyone before her as well said A equals A, this is the theory behind geometry.
Howard Bloom
It’s what Aristotle yes, it’s what’s behind geometry and Aristotle called it the principle of non-contradiction. That something cannot be true and not be true at the same time.
Alan Steinfeld
So because you were implanted at 10 years old with these two basic principles, the truth above everything and look at everything under your nose, you were able to kind of refurbish to be like a clean slate.
Howard Bloom
A radical re-perceiver. I was basically set up as a radical re-perceiver. Why? Because the kids wouldn’t let me up the driveway to participate in their games of doctor or house or whatever they were playing. And I was thrust to the periphery.
Alan Steinfeld
They did you they did you a favor.
Howard Bloom
Yes. But they may have sensed something in me that was off kilter to begin with. I mean, Alan, when I’m at a rock concert I like to get down in the middle of the audience to feel the whole experience, even though you know I have an all-access pass and can go absolutely anywhere. And I noticed one day, probably in a John Mellencamp or Prince concert, that when everybody was clapping and I was clapping too, when everybody was going like this, my hands automatically went like this. And when their hands were going like this, my hands automatically went like this. And it wasn’t a choice. Right. It wasn’t a choice at all. In fact it took real hard looking it means that talk about walking to a different drummer or marching to a different drummer, apparently my rhythms are the opposite in certain ways of other people’s rhythms, and that’s a tremendous advantage. It got me kicked out of every social group imaginable when I was a kid
Alan Steinfeld
But it also opens the doors to an original thinker. That’s why I’m so happy you’re on New Realities because you are like the original the Einstein, the Freud, the Karl Marx of our time.
Howard Bloom
Well, that’s the effort.
Alan Steinfeld
But anyway, because you’re a radical re-perceiver, you took nothing for granted.
Howard Bloom
That’s right.
Alan Steinfeld
And so let’s start here again with the God.
Howard Bloom
Right, well let me give you a little bit more on A equals A. Okay, when you think out one A, let’s imagine you think 1A out at 9:01 in the morning, at 9:00 in the morning and the next day at 9:01. Yeah, it’s A, right? A equals A. The fact is, in the minute between the thought of the first day and the thought of the second day, or typing the first day on your laptop and then typing the second day. The Earth has moved around its axis 17 miles. The planet has moved around the center of the sun 557 miles, and the sun, complete with solar system and you and me, has marched 864 miles around the core of the galaxy.
Alan Steinfeld
And every cell in your body has changed as well. So you are never you.
Howard Bloom
That’s right, you’re absolutely right.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s very like Heraclitus. You never step
Howard Bloom
Now here, Aristotle Einstein said that to think originally, you need to contend with somebody. I’m not giving you the exact quote, but that was his idea. You need a straw man. And Aristotle had a straw man. And his straw man had been dead for 90 years, but his name was Heraclitus.
Alan Steinfeld
Now Heraclitus was much more the wise sage than Aristotle.
Howard Bloom
But it’s very important. He said expect the unexpected because it’s difficult and hard to find. That one I live by as far as understanding New Realities. Right, but to set himself up. Look, put yourself in Aristotle’s shoes. Nobody’s ever heard of you. And you grew up in Stagira, which is a Godforsaken town that’s not the outside of on the outskirts of the Persian Empire, and it’s on the outskirts of the Greek Empire. It’s a city of barbarians. And you want to make it in the big time in Athens. There is a slot that’s been open ever since Thales. Thales established philosophy. And he began to establish the idea that each age has a great man, right? Now, to put himself on the stage of attention and contend for that position as a great man, Aristotle had to use every trick in the book. And one of those tricks is the name game. The more you associate yourself with people who are already of high stature, the greater your stature becomes. So if you take on the greatest philosopher of the last hundred years If you take on Heraclitus
Alan Steinfeld
But wasn’t Plato the straw man for Aristotle because they put those two in opposition wasn’t it Plato used Heraclitus as a straw man and he used Plato as a stepping stone. So he took part of Plato and but he set himself up and you use these guys to to buffer against and then Plato, he but weren’t his opinions or philosophies in opposition to Plato? He said everything is just kind of idyllic and Aristotle said, no, everything is concrete. Aren’t those two in opposition there?
Howard Bloom
Aristotle wouldn’t have seen it that way. Because Aristotle was building on the shoulders. You have to stand on the shoulders of somebody. So he took Platonic philosophy and said this Yes, and he restated it in his own words. And he restated it and credited it to Plato. But he gave, I mean it was Aristotle who called those ideal abstractions that Plato was talking about ideas. Okay. We talk about them as archetypes, but Plato didn’t talk about them as ideals.
Alan Steinfeld
Just a little side note, no one understood that Socrates was really a mystic. Right. When he would go into these demonic trances, he was communing with some higher level parts of his own consciousness.
Howard Bloom
Well, that could easily be, but I I have never studied Socrates. It’s hard because you got Socrates only through Plato, and how do you know what’s Plato’s or what’s Socrates’.
Alan Steinfeld
But the early Platonic dialogues are much more true to the Socratic way of being, I feel. Especially if you measure it against Aristophanes, who talks about Socrates in a very, like, you know, fun way. A very satirical way. But you can get an essence of what the Master Socrates was probably like: the humble being and the visionary.
Howard Bloom
Well, let’s go back to A and why A does not equal A. So you could say, Bloom, you idiot Just because you thought of one A at this one point, and you thought of the second A 17 miles away in terms of the Earth’s rotation, that doesn’t mean that A is different. What difference does it make? Well, context makes all the difference in the world. For example, William Shakespeare probably uses the letter A in his work somewhere close to 100 million times. And every A has a very different significance because of context. Let’s just take the two A’s in the word Shakespeare. Each one is pronounced differently. Shake versus spear. One you don’t even hear.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, but would you say that A here is re- it may not be equal, but it’s related.
Howard Bloom
Here’s the deal. Okay. The logic built on the premise that A equals A has taken us a long way. It is a very, very valuable tool. Consider it a screwdriver in the mental toolkit. But where has it taken us, let’s say? It’s gotten us algebra is all based on equations. That’s why it’s called equations. That little equal sign.
Alan Steinfeld
And what was the thing that it ran up against that it could no longer take us to?
Howard Bloom
Almost everything. Okay. Because our current way of thinking about things, Brian Greene, you know Brian Greene’s the theoretical physicist who has his own series Yeah, right. Two series on PBS and everything. And Brian Greene says if you could tell me the position of every particle in the cosmos, I would be able to explain the universe to you. Well What kind of bull is that? Here are a few of the things that A equals A
Alan Steinfeld
He just gave Brian Greene the finger if you weren’t looking.
Howard Bloom
Now he’s done a wonderful job with his career, and he’s a he’s a terrific explainer. And the things he explains are fascinating. So he should be given credit. But the fact is, he’s he’s in the very center of the tradition of two traditions. He’s in the very center of the tradition of Aristotle A equals A, Aristotelian logic. And he’s also one of those kids who would have been in the backyard when they sent the sentry down the driveway to say you’re not allowed here. He’s one of those guys. He’s like the good old boys. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So now it doesn’t allow us to talk about consciousness. Okay. It doesn’t allow us to talk about emotion. It doesn’t allow us to talk about social behavior. It doesn’t allow us to talk about emergent properties, and emergent properties are the big kahuna. Emergent properties are the thing that totally evading everybody in science right now.
Alan Steinfeld
Explain that.
Howard Bloom
Well, the idea of back at the in the 1700s. Okay. One guy discovered that if you put a bunch of things together, in one case it was scorching mercury, if you did weird things to a metal, you’d get a gas. And the gas had weird properties. And the gas, well he called, he called these things phlogiston and dephlogisticated air and stuff like that. Two guys discovered these two gases. One was oxygen and one was hydrogen. Right. Then it was discovered around 1790 that if you put some of the hydrogen well let’s do this with A equals A terms, and then we’ll go to heresy number two, 1 + 1 equals two, right? We all know that 1 + 1 equals two, we’ve been taught it ever since
Alan Steinfeld
And you’re saying 1 + 1 does not equal two.
Howard Bloom
Does not equal two. And here’s where emergent properties come in. Take one bell jar full of hydrogen and one bell jar full of oxygen. They’re both gases, right? A equals A. Yes. Gas equals gas. Yes. Put them together. What should you get? 1 + 1 equals two. So what should you get? Two gases. Twice as much gas. And you don’t. You get a liquid. Well, it depends. If you decide to light a match and put the match in, what should you get? Well, all you’re adding is heat to two gases. Garbage in, garbage out. A’s in, A’s out. You should just get a slight degree of warming in your two twice as much gas. You don’t. You get two emergent properties. One is a thing called an explosion. And the second is this really weird form of matter. It’s a form of matter. Now, what’s the difference between a gas and this chair? I can’t put my hand through this chair, right? But I can put my hand through a gas, I’m doing it right now. I can’t see through this chair arm. But I’m seeing through air right now.
Alan Steinfeld
So an in-between state. Is that really weird state, isn’t it?
Howard Bloom
Well, but so there’s hard stuff and there’s gas, right? Right. So we just put two gases in with a little bit of heat. Yeah. Right? We should have heated two gases. No. Whammo. Explosion. And this really weird stuff that’ll soak into your pants and make you very embarrassed if it soaks into the wrong spot, and you will, you know, hesitate to stand for half an hour while it dries out. It will soak into the rug, it will puddle on the It’s also the fabric of life itself. Yes. And it’s a very weird stuff. And and let’s go to heresy number four.
Alan Steinfeld
Wait wait, let me just absorb heresy number two. You’re saying obviously in practicality 1 + 1 does not equal 2. 1 + 1 equals something we can’t imagine.
Howard Bloom
Right. So an ad– But not all the time. But logic tells us that none of this should happen. Logic, Aristotelian logic tells us when you add two gases you should get a gas. Not a wobbly, wiggly stuff.
Alan Steinfeld
So are you saying the universe is actually not logical?
Howard Bloom
The universe is partially logical. Logic is It’s not Aristotelian logic. It’s not entirely Aristotelian logic. Aristotelian logic has allowed us to very successfully scratch at a bunch of surfaces. Very successfully. And here’s the how Aristot- how Aristotle broke it down. And this is where Brian Greene’s thinking comes from. Aristotle said that there are these things called elements. And if you break everything down to its elements and then you find and he coined a term. He used a metaphor. The dictates that Hammurabi gave you of how to lead your life. Those were called laws. Okay. So Aristotle said the task was first define the elements, then define the laws of those elements, which he called elementary laws. If you ever wonder where that phrase came from, it came directly from Aristotle, and we haven’t been questioning its sense. Okay. So there are elementary laws of the universe. Right. But what he said is once you understand the elementary laws, you understand everything. Well, that would mean that by understanding the two gases and their properties, you would understand all that comes from them when you combine them and put the match in. But you don’t. Not at all.
Alan Steinfeld
But he, those aren’t, but obviously he missed some basic elementary laws.
Howard Bloom
He missed the fact that there are emergent properties in this cosmos.
Alan Steinfeld
But he didn’t get to the core of the elementary laws behind elements. Obviously there are elements existing in many states that Aristotle was unaware of.
Howard Bloom
Well, you know, none of us have read the complete works of Aristotle. And even though I spent two years researching and reading Aristotle for this, I concentrated on his his metaphysics and I concentrated on his oh God, what is it called? I’m gonna have to memorize the name of this book. No, no, no, no. This is one with a really complicated name, but but in in the book that I can’t remember the name of that demonstrating that I’m not the Einstein, Darwin, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, we won’t tell anybody.
Howard Bloom
In this book there are two pages, two vital pages, in which Aristotle lays out the vocabulary of modern science. And the method of modern science. And Brian Greene when he is telling you about wonders on television and making statements about reductionism. Brian Greene doesn’t recognize the extent to which he’s taking things straight out of Aristotle. For example, Aristotle told you that metaphor is not science. It’s not really science. Metaphor is all that science is about. When scientists talk about a wave, that’s a metaphor. When they talk about a particle, that’s a metaphor. How can they say they don’t deal in metaphors?
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, I see. So that’s really what I want this show to be about. How can we think differently? How can we actually structure the nature of reality and see the world in a different way according to some of the fundamental laws you layout.
Howard Bloom
Right. Well one way is to re- read books like this. No no, but I’m serious, because every time you read a book you get into somebody else’s head. And being in somebody else’s head gives you helps give you a perspective. Now if you recognize from the beginning when you’re going to read a Jane Austen novel that one of the things you’re looking for is hidden assumptions. You’re not just looking you’re looking for Jane Austen’s hidden assumptions, those would be fascinating to find. But one of the reasons for looking for Jane Austen’s hidden assumptions is to find your own hidden assumptions. If you know that’s part of the journey, that’s part of the quest, that’s part of the adventure.
Alan Steinfeld
So what were the hidden assumptions that you discovered about yourself in writing this book?
Howard Bloom
Well, I discovered that I I am an outsider, I don’t know the reasons, I discovered, well, you know it’s not in this book. I discovered that I was born in 1943. That’s when America went into the war with Germany and Japan. Right. My father had just started a tiny little store in Buffalo, New York. And my father was suddenly yanked off to San Francisco, which in those days before jet planes was a four-day train ride day and night away. Not that the Navy was gonna let him take that train ride, only let him take it once. So I had no father. I grew up without a father. Okay. Now, my mother has to go run the store. That means she’s away from home 12 hours a day. 6 days a week.
Alan Steinfeld
You’re left with the books in this…
Howard Bloom
I’m left with no, not even that. I’m left with a cleaning woman. Now, why it didn’t occur to my mother to hire a babysitter. You know, babysitter in the task, I mean talk about assumptions, there’s an assumption hidden in these two different words, cleaning woman and babysitter. Babysitter job means you take care of the baby. Cleaning woman means you take care of the vacuum cleaner. Okay. So, so the cleaning women would lock me in a dark passage with a very cold wood floor and you register that when you’re 3 years old because you’re crawling on that cold wood floor, behind a baby gate. And you’re in the darkness and in the cold and that’s how I spent my first 3 years of life.
Alan Steinfeld
So what did that do for you?
Howard Bloom
Well it made me an outsider. Oh, I see.
Alan Steinfeld
And making you an outsider also made you think differently about reality.
Howard Bloom
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So let’s get back to the book.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, so I mean it’s okay, but I really want to learn from this conversation how to look at my own assumptions, how to look at the assumptions the culture gives me that thinks something is real or true or beautiful, and try to re-evaluate in terms of what I feel.
Howard Bloom
Right, well that’s a tricky one because that goes to Okay, so here I am in science all my life at the age of 10 I discover the first two rules of science. I go into microbiology and theoretical physics at the age of 10. And eventually decide to jump ship from science. And and spend I don’t realize it’s going to be 20 years, but to go off on my own voyage of the Beagle. And my voyage of Darwin’s Beagle. Yeah, my voyage of the Beagle doesn’t go to the Galapagos Islands. It goes to something strange and exotic that I know absolutely nothing about. It’s popular culture. So I start a commercial art studio, it becomes one of the two biggest commercial art studios in avant-garde art on the East Coast. Right. You started magazines, you PR company. Right, so I’m on the cover of Art Direction magazine, I’m then hired to edit a magazine. I don’t even ask what the magazine is about when I go for the interview. Turns out to be about rock and roll, which I’ve never really listened to. And I’m up for it because it sounds like an adventure. Because Alan, I’m looking there’s a vital step we’re skipping here, so again we’re gonna put you in my shoes. And you’re but you’re 12 years old. You’re about to have your bar mitzvah, and you suddenly read the arguments of Bertrand Russell and they make absolute sense, both to your mind…
Alan Steinfeld
What are the arguments against God?
Howard Bloom
Against God, it basically all comes down to the argument that if a complex thing needs something to design it, then who designed the designer of the complex thing? Okay. And, and so on and so forth an infinite recursion.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re saying if the universe is complex, it needs a God that’s complex, so who designed God? Yes, exactly. And so there’s no answer for that.
Howard Bloom
And there’s another argument. And that argument is that if there is a God, he’s one of the most death-hungry monsters you have ever seen in your life. Why? Cause he invented death. Did God really need to invent death? I mean, mass murder is going on all around you, and you’re growing up in the wake of World War II. And you’re growing up in the wake of the Holocaust. The Holocaust began the year you were born. And so you’re very aware right, because I’m putting you, because I’m putting you in my position. The Holocaust began that yeah okay, okay. So, at any rate, the point is that you grew up learning never to let a Holocaust go on. And there’s a God who’s created a universe of Holocausts. Every creature he’s ever given birth to has died. Even stars die, Alan. I mean that’s outrageous.
Alan Steinfeld
So so you, but maybe death is just a transition or not what it appears to be anyway.
Howard Bloom
Well because I’m very materialistic…
Alan Steinfeld
So where does that get So okay, that piece, then where does that get to your evaluation of that?
Howard Bloom
Well, here’s the deal. So, so you’re you’re 12 years old, you realize that you’re an atheist, a stone-cold atheist, there’s no question about it, it’s a matter of faith. It’s that basic. And your bar mitzvah is coming up and you don’t want to blow the presence. It’s the only party you’ve ever been invited to. So, so you keep it in your non-conscious for a while. You don’t admit it to yourself. Then, once you’ve written all the thank-you notes you can confess that you’re an atheist. And then…
Alan Steinfeld
But you are sort of mystic though, I have to say.
Howard Bloom
Yes, yes. But, but here’s the deal, here’s the real important moment. Your bar mitzvah is at the very end of June. Okay. That’s only two months away from September. What happens to Jews in September? The two highest holidays of the year. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So it’s a mere two months before your parents try to dress you in a suit, throw you in their blue Frazer, drive you down to Richmond Avenue where the synagogue is, and then you that’s as far as you’re going to go, Alan. You you hold on to the door frame of the car and they literally pull you by the ankles, thus threatening to shred your socks. And you suddenly realize something. The second rule of science, the rule by which you must live. Is look at things right under your noses if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there. Well your parents obviously have a powerful belief. Even though this is the only time of year they go to synagogue, they have a passionate belief in God. You can tell by the way they’re tugging on your ankles. Right. So you go into the synagogue and you look at every…
Alan Steinfeld
No, it isn’t. You getting to the synagogue, the point is that you all of a sudden all of the stuff you’ve read about anthropology, and by now you’ve been you’re in science for 27% of your life. So all the stuff you’ve read about anthropology shows you that people all over the world believe like your parents do in some sort of supernatural force, an equivalent to a God.
Alan Steinfeld
Some sort of fundamental assumption about an unreality that doesn’t make any sense at all.
Howard Bloom
Right. Well, and but this means that the thing right under your nose is not under your nose, it’s behind your nose. Because if there are no gods in the sky and there are no gods in the earth and there are no gods in the lighting system here, or in the plant behind us, well even in the plastic behind us. Okay. Then gods have got to be in here. And your job becomes find the gods inside of us.
Alan Steinfeld
Well that’s where I am in line with you because I do think we have some mystical, infinite force so believe Yeah. And that that animates us.
Howard Bloom
We have we have experiences of transcendence, we have experiences of awe, we have I mean, at the age of 16 I have my first out-of-body experience.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you explain that as an atheist?
Howard Bloom
Oh, that was easy. We worked that out in the…
Alan Steinfeld
It wasn’t just a phenomenon of the mind. I mean, you were out maybe consciousness really was not in the body. Is that I mean, that’s not your…
Howard Bloom
Well I don’t I don’t think so. Now, you might want to question that assumption.
Alan Steinfeld
But, but, yes, look, we we’re operating on the basis of assumptions and Valerius Geist, who’s one of the large one of the most important large mammal research specialists and wrote a landmark book called Life Strategies in 1978, and I worked this out, ’cause I had my But that’s another subset out-of-body experiences. Right.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Okay. Let’s get back to the book. Because I want to go back to the basic assumptions.
Howard Bloom
Right. But so your job, one of your jobs is to find the gods inside. Another one of your jobs is to figure out if there is no God, as you believe, how, I mean, if no God said let there be light, how did light come to be? If no God parted the heavens and the earth, where did the heavens and the earth come from? And no scientist that you know of is trying to answer that question.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. So what’s the, so let’s go back to these assumptions. Right. So okay, if there’s no, okay, let’s throw out the God principle. Right. And let’s start with fundamentals, observations of the of the of reality. Right. Right. Okay, so 1 + 1 does not equal 2, A does not equal A. Number 3 is…
Howard Bloom
Number 3 is, and this fits directly with everything you’ve just said. Number 3 is the second law of thermodynamics. One of the holiest laws in science. The law of entropy, the law that all things fall apart, that all things tend toward disorder, is so dead wrong, it’s ridiculous.
Alan Steinfeld
I am with you on that, and you know why I am with you? Because entropy only exists within a closed system.
Howard Bloom
Right. Obviously, the universe is an open system because something came from nothing. We are being fed this is my non-
Howard Bloom
But this is accepting the assumptions of entropy that there are closed and open systems.
Alan Steinfeld
Well there can’t be a closed system because everything seems to be connected to everything else. And we’re obviously here.
Howard Bloom
Yes. So where where’s the open, I mean where’s the closed system?
Alan Steinfeld
There is no closed system, so there is no entropy. I’m with you on that one.
Howard Bloom
Right. Okay. But remember the whole idea of entropy came out of a steam engine problem. And that was how to stop the leaks in a steam engine. So the universe was then compared to a steam engine. And and and but because science caught this plague from Aristotle of believing that metaphors are unscientific, it buries its metaphors. And when you bury your metaphors, you can’t question them as easily as you could when they’re out in the open. And it’s that steam engine metaphor that’s slightly out of date?
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Just slightly out of date. Because what happens when you put the two gases together? Did you get a chaos of disorder?
Howard Bloom
Right. So you got the opposite.
Alan Steinfeld
So we’re at the edge now of some major revolution in thought, in science, in consciousness, whatever you want to call it. What are the new principles that we can lay down for a new foundation of seeing the world?
Howard Bloom
Look, the form of a photon is a mystery. Now science is not regarding it as a mystery, well hey the second law of science is look at things right under your nose, look for the things that you and everybody around you take for granted. It is a mystery.
Alan Steinfeld
They don’t. That is obviously they’ve never seen it.
Howard Bloom
Right. So what does it do? It’s a recruitment strategy. It goes like this, right? And it goes like this 570 trillion times a second. That is a bloody survivalist instinct on the part of something. It knows where to stop.
Alan Steinfeld
The photon.
Howard Bloom
The photon. It knows where to stop at its amplitude. It knows where to stop down here at its minimum. Then it goes to an amplitude again.
Alan Steinfeld
Does it know or is that an emergent property of…
Howard Bloom
It’s both. It’s an emergent property. I wouldn’t say it knows. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t have a brain, it doesn’t have a consciousness, and yet it persists. And to say that persistence only belongs to humans when we have this thing that’s blipping, it’s doing this this…
Alan Steinfeld
Well, we are complex I mean, some people compare consciousness to a radio. As if, you know, you’re picking up consciousness through your brain, but it’s not being generated from the brain. Just like sound is picked up, but it’s not generated necessarily by the radio.
Howard Bloom
Well, sound is a recruitment strategy. Sound is another one of these waves.
Alan Steinfeld
So this recruitment strategy is is what? I’m trying to understand, what is that?
Howard Bloom
Well, that’s a good question. It’s I I when I finished writing this book and I was called on to do I think it was an an Andrew Stein and Ken Wilber event. It was a…
Alan Steinfeld
Andrew Cohen.
Howard Bloom
Yeah, Andrew Cohen. thanks. Right right right. And, I took material from this book and put it together as an essay on immaterial things, on the material power of immaterial things. There are forms that are able to sustain themselves. There are forms that have rigorous persistence. There are forms that maintain an identity. There are forms that are utterly promiscuous and grab one batch of matter and leave it behind almost instantly. Some like your identity and mine leave matter behind a little bit more slowly. But we still do that. And what the hell these are is the mystery. But you cannot solve a mystery until you establish what it is.
Alan Steinfeld
And you established principles whereby the world functions so you have a place to frame the mystery.
Howard Bloom
Right. And we and you’re throwing out all the old principles because they they are not true. Well I’m keeping them but I’m give- trying to give you new tools. I’m trying to show you their limitations. Okay. And you are. And you are. And I’m happy you are. Because A does not equal A. I know that for sure. And 1 + 1 does not equal two. And you definitely know Heresy number 3, that entropy is bunk.
Alan Steinfeld
I do. I do. I never I never agreed with that. And nor Number 4 would be?
Howard Bloom
Would be randomness is not as random as you think.
Alan Steinfeld
So what is randomness?
Howard Bloom
Well, again, take a look at that photon. It starts out at the very beginning of the universe 13.72 billion years ago, and it’s still trekking. It’s still doing its thing. Now if you multiply 540 trillion times 1 second times all the seconds between then and now, that’s how long this thing has been keeping it up. It is a very steady pattern. It is a very steady process. It is not at all random. It knows exactly where to stop on its amplitude, it knows exactly where its minimum is, and then it goes back and does exactly the same thing again. Is that a random universe? Okay, imagine you and I are sitting at a coffee table…
Alan Steinfeld
No, I don’t think the universe is random either.
Howard Bloom
Well, but when you’re in the areas that I’m in, one of my one of my, yeah, one of my areas is evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. You know, I founded the Group Selection Squad in evolutionary biology in 1995 and we legitimated a concept that’s very important called group selection that had been considered a curse and a a heresy up until then. And and when you’re working in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, you come up against absolute randomness and the six monkeys at six typewriters all the time. That is so ridiculous.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean meaning say that if you had enough typers and enough monkeys you would could reproduce the works of Shakespeare which seems totally illogical. Even if there were…
Howard Bloom
Yes, and and somebody actually tried the experiment in the last four years and they they didn’t even get words. I mean they got a lot of they got a lot of excrement on typewriter keys.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean so obviously they got a lot of excrement on typewriter keys.
Howard Bloom
But obviously the universe is not random. Right. But it’s also, according to you, not made from some great power that wants to keep it all together. So somewhere in between these polar…
Alan Steinfeld
Alan let’s take a look at the intelligent design hypothesis for just a second. Okay. Okay. What is it that a designer does? A designer first visualizes something. There are forty, roughly 40 visual centers in the brain. Vision is a very, very complex mechanism.
Howard Bloom
Oh, and you’re saying that’s not what the universe does. The universe does not visualize.
Alan Steinfeld
It doesn’t have to have 40 vision centers the way we do, it doesn’t have to come up with a picture of things and then apply that picture.
Howard Bloom
So how does the universe create, according to you?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I give okay, you’re back in my shoes, you poor baby. And you’re 19 years old. I’m glad I’m not 12 anymore. That was an awful time. And you’ve gotten yes that was an awful time. And you’ve you’ve not that 19 was any better, but you have gone off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. From Buffalo, New York. Yes. Read college. 1961. You opened your books Yeah. Your your parents yeah, your parents have packed you on a train and you spent three and a half days getting out there. And and it’s the first day of math class. Read now read has a couple of characteristics to be aware of. The median SATs in your class are higher than the median SATs at Harvard, Caltech, and MIT.
Howard Bloom
That’s why you went there, right?
Alan Steinfeld
I suppose so, I mean I was attracted by the idea of a very free form small school. A very progressive school.
Howard Bloom
Okay, here we are in Reed, 19 years old.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, right. Okay. You you’re you’re confused. It’s the first day of class you’re sitting there with 11 other students around a big conference table. And you’re waiting for the professor and you you smell her coming down the hallway before you see her. It’s not that she doesn’t take baths. It’s that in those days the reproductive technique when we didn’t have computer printers, was called mimeograph paper. It was a chemical process and it makes this very sweet, very pungent smell.
Howard Bloom
Oh, you know I like that. The blue paper, the blue ink on that. Yeah, exactly. That’s it. It made a great smell. It did an addictive odor.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. It was an addictive odor. So so you smell the mimeograph paper coming down the hallway. And she steps to the front of the table and she hands this pile of papers to the student on her right and tells him to pass it around. So we all get one of these pieces of paper. So you’ve got one too, Alan, you poor baby. And, and you look at this thing and it’s only half a sheet of paper. Uh huh. It’s it’s 165 words. Uh huh. It’s these five rules. Now they’re utterly incomprehensible. You don’t understand a word. But that’s all they are is 165 words and five rules. And your task for the rest of the year is every week, these are called Peano’s axioms. And again, simple rules equals axioms. And your job every week is to derive another corollary from these axioms. And by the end of the year, you’ve got everything you ever learned in grammar school about mathematics. You’ve got addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
Howard Bloom
Okay, so what are you telling me?
Alan Steinfeld
I’m telling you that eight textbooks’ worth of math, eight textbooks’ worth of math were implicit in 165 words. So that’s when you come up with something you call corollary generator theory. And your corollary generator theory is, maybe the universe started out with just a handful of simple rules. Three, four, five. And then, every Planck unit of time, does another homework assignment. Except there are 10 with 43 zeros after it Planck units of time in a second. That’s a lot of homework.
Howard Bloom
So you’re saying the universe perhaps is creating rules all the time?
Alan Steinfeld
No, the universe is extracting the possible from what’s implicit in those rules.
Howard Bloom
Well this is the heart of your argument. Now this is really what I want to go to. So okay, so what would be the first initial rules that you’re saying the universe…
Alan Steinfeld
Well I think they are these. I think they are attraction, repulsion, and a whole bunch of derivatives that will arise…
Howard Bloom
Some people just call that electromagnetism and gravity. Not to minimize.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, right. Right. Exactly. I mean okay back to the we’re gonna sit you at a coffee table you and me.
Howard Bloom
Am I still 19?
Alan Steinfeld
No, no, no, you’re now you. Oh I’m me. Okay. And yeah okay. And and we’re at a coffee table at the beginning of the universe and there never has been a universe and we’re sitting there and what one writer calls the potentia. Yeah right exactly. I have to go along with my literary conceit here.
Howard Bloom
Okay, I’ll go along with your…
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, okay. And and I’m a crusty old fart. And I don’t believe in anything. And and you are the young visionary, after all, you were born in the 1950s, I was born in the 1940s, makes sense. Okay. But there’s no universe, there’s nothing, we’re just sitting at a coffee table. OK. There’s absolutely nothing and and we’ve we’ve swilled down more hundreds of cups of coffee, possibly thousands of cups of coffee then I care to imagine the bill for.
Howard Bloom
You’re a poet, but I’d like you to get to the point. I mean, it’s great great poetry, great way to frame the story. Right. Well, I want you to I want you to see what happens. So so you say, you know I got this feeling over there, not that there is a there ’cause there’s no time and no space. But over there, I predict that a pinprick, how a smaller and a pinprick is going to erupt at any second now, and it’s going to go unfurling it’s going to unfurl a sheet at speeds beyond belief and I go, Alan, I know, this is lunatic. I mean, you know how many tens of thousands of cups of coffee have we consumed?
Alan Steinfeld
How does nothing come from something? I mean, all I’m saying is nothing. Right. And there never has been. All of a sudden there is something. All of a sudden there is a sheet of space and time and it’s unfurling at a rate that is utterly beyond belief. And then you make another one of your predictions…
Howard Bloom
How did I, how did I know that if I, I mean what…
Alan Steinfeld
Oh it’s just your crazy imagination. You’ve been like this since you were a kid. There’s no stopping you. I mean your parents weren’t able to control you, how the hell am I going to control you?
Howard Bloom
Okay. So that’s how That’s how something comes from nothing. Okay, so anyways…
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, right. This is this is why I take you to coffee all the time. So at any rate and and then you make another of your wacky predictions. Okay, I grant you that a pinprick smaller than a pinprick all of a sudden came from absolutely nowhere in nothing. Okay. And that it began unfurling a sheet of these two qualities that had that didn’t exist before called space and time. What the hell are they? With speed. What the hell is that? Or energy if you want to call the call the speed that. ‘Cause that’s what speed is. Okay. space, time and energy. Okay. And you say, any second now, you know the way a rain cloud precipitates in raindrops and hail? Uh huh. Any second now, that sheet of space and time is going to precipitate in things. And I go, Alan, Alan, listen to me, you know. We you, you know you’ve got one prediction right. Right? Don’t don’t get a swelled head about this Alan. Look at what we see before us, all it is is space, time, and energy. And you’re saying this is going to precipitate in things. Alan, there never have been things. There never will be things. That’s why we call it a nothing. Right? You got that? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay, and all of a sudden anticipating we’re about to get back to the six monkeys with six typewriters, so bear with me. All of a sudden from the nothingness precipitates the very first things. And they are quarks and leptons.
Howard Bloom
Okay, so you’re saying the emergent property of this thing that first unfolded was quarks and leptons. But the emergent property of nothing was this something.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, exactly. Yes, you’ve got it. Well, one one plus one well wait wait I’m losing it here. No no no. A equals A. You’re you’re telling me that this is going to precisely that space and time is going to precipitate in things. Okay. And I’m telling you A equals A. I’m telling you one plus one equals two, add space and time to space and time and all you get is space and time. Garbage in garbage out.
Howard Bloom
You say you don’t you get things. I say that. Yeah. You say we’re gonna get things. Now here’s where we get to the six monkeys with six typewriters. All of a sudden a blizzard of things. Roughly 10 with 88 zeros after it. 88 zeros roughly 10 with 88 zeros things come emerging from nothing. Now if this were a random universe, if this were a six monkey six typewriters universe, if this were the kind of universe that my friends in evolutionary biology are constantly referring to Then 10 with 88 zeros after it things, there’d be 10 with 88 zeros after it different kinds of things. Right. And they would have nothing to do with each other. Absolutely nothing to do with each other. They would have no way of connecting whatsoever. But that’s not what happens, Alan. What happens? The quarks come out for example in only 16 different forms. 16 different forms. Only 16 different forms.
Howard Bloom
That we know of though.
Alan Steinfeld
Well that we we we’re not even sure we know about quarks to tell you the truth. Everything we’re talking about right now is is courtesy of our current science.
Howard Bloom
Right, and that is so such a childish story. I mean it’s obviously, you can’t tell me a story based on a children’s story and expect to paint a picture of the world.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, I certainly can. And that’s what every physicist around is expecting, in fact they keep calling what they’re after a grand unified theory of everything.
Howard Bloom
Right, but you know what Samuel Butler called science? Yeah. Man’s ignorance of man’s ignorance.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, well of course, how do you tell an intelligent man by the number of things he knows he doesn’t know. In other words, a stupid man believes he knows everything. And the more intelligent an intelligent man gets, the more questions he’s befuddled by.
Howard Bloom
So I mean, but really it seems like you’ve, you’re, you have a sort of in-between, not nothing personal, an in-between theory of breaking down the old science that obviously isn’t true, but yet to conceptualize the new rules of a science that could explain a lot more than our science does.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m trying to get scientists to open their mind about even simple something as simple as a photon. Right. And even to, look it’s when you fail to see the mysteries that you become blind and ignorant.
Howard Bloom
Right. But by seeing the assumptions, they can formulate, our science and civilization can formulate a new direction of…
Alan Steinfeld
And I’m saying that we already have one in the computer. That is to say, once computers throw equations aside and once they begin dealing with things like fractals and John Conway’s Game of Life and Stephen Wolfram’s elaborations on John Conway’s Game of Life. Then all of a sudden we’re dealing with a reproducible medium that doesn’t need equations, but a reproducible medium in which emergent properties begin to spill forth. Then we can get…
Howard Bloom
And by observing the emergent properties, we can predict patterns of emergence.
Alan Steinfeld
We can get closer to predicting patterns of emergence. We can come for- the first step is always outline the mystery. The first step is build the corral, even if there are no ponies.
Howard Bloom
But you know what Terence McKenna says? He says it’s the increase in novelty that perpetuates the mystery.
Alan Steinfeld
And he’s absolutely right.
Howard Bloom
So novelty is unpredicted except you can predict novelty.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes. Well I’m I’m talking about science’s obligation to understand the and predict novelty. Until we can do everything, we’re not science. Look, the point of science once you throw it aside is to challenge God. What do I mean? The point of science is to become omnipotent. Right. The point of science is to become omniscient. So…
Howard Bloom
You’re much more of a mystic than you let on to because you…
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I’ve been called David Swindle at PJ Media says I’m a material mystic. And he’s damned right.
Howard Bloom
Yeah, I think you are. Because you’re looking at emergent properties, whatever they may be. Right. And, and you’re not being surprised by something out of left field, you’re actually welcoming it.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m inviting things from left field. I’m trying to get you to see that if you look at left field very carefully, you’ll see more astonishments out there than you ever imagined before.
Howard Bloom
So wait, the fifth assumption just to kind of wrap it up as far as you’re, the layout of the book is…
Alan Steinfeld
Well, information theory has been the big thing for the last 40 or 50 years. And IT, information technology is a trillion dollar industry. Okay, information theory is not about information. But what is it? What is it? What is it? Okay, here’s Claude Shannon in 1940 is hired by, Bell Telephone. And he’s hired by Bell Telephone. Remember, Bell Telephone has a history of hiring very smart people. Bell Telephone scientists have won more Nobel Prize, had won more Nobel Prize winners by the late 1960s than any other basic research facility funded by a private company. Okay. So when and they had a problem, they had 146 million miles of copper cable. Okay. Now to make money, they had to send messages over this copper cable. Okay. And they were running into the limits of the copper cable even with 146 million miles of the stuff. Okay. So they wanted to know how to pack more information into copper cable. And they hire a mathematician to figure it out. Now he’s not just any mathematician, he’s a mathematician who built his first telegraph system when he was a kid and who’s into juggling, which is transporting things from one hand to the other and getting them in order and stuff like that. And he comes up with a formula He comes up with a mathematical formula.
Howard Bloom
And the mathematical formula is almost identical to the mathematical formula that’s used for entropy. And Alan, what do I think of entropy?
Alan Steinfeld
You don’t like it at all. It’s…
Howard Bloom
No I don’t like it at all, exactly. But it’s almost exactly the same formula and as inaccurate as it is when applied to the entire universe. when it’s applied to just copper cable and trying to get an electrical signal down a copper cable. Oh, it works. It helps you…
Alan Steinfeld
It does work because because it’s a closed system, it’ll break down over longer distances.
Howard Bloom
Well, but it helps you it helps you figure out how to stop noise.
Alan Steinfeld
Wait, so you’re saying the signal that was being sent over this long distance was starting to decay, it wasn’t intact when it…
Howard Bloom
No, it’s not that it wasn’t intact, it’s that if I was able to get 15 signals down that cable, I wanted to know how to get 150 signals down that cable and increase my profits.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, so they figured this mathematician figured out…
Howard Bloom
How to compress he figured out a mathematics that allows for MP3s, that allows for sound compression.
Alan Steinfeld
And if you say that information theory is not about information it’s about what?
Howard Bloom
It means it’s only about a signal going down a copper cable. It’s not about anybody’s it’s not about anybody having an intention to send a message, and it’s not about anybody at the other end receiving and interpreting a message. So one day, it’s 1998 I think it was, and I have this friend, Eshel Ben-Jacob, and when Eshel came from Israel to visit me out in Brooklyn, I was sick in bed for 15 years, so I was stuck in my bed. And Eshel and his wife sat down at the foot of the bed and Eshel’s wife said do you have the latest copy of the Scientific American? Well I had everything spread out around me on the mattress including the latest copy of the Scientific American. And because I what I would do is automatically just turn to the table of contents to mark up the things that I wanted to read, I never saw the cover. She said okay, so I took it out from under my my left thigh, my right thigh, sorry, and and there it was open to the table of contents. She said look at the cover, I looked at the cover. It’s this absolutely gorgeous graphic. I couldn’t exactly tell what it was, but gorgeous. It’s Eshel’s work. Okay. Now because Eshel at the time was working on he he was the head of the condensed matter physics department at the University of Tel Aviv, he was the head of the Israel Institute Physics whatever it’s called, their National Institute of Physicists. And he was working in microbiology to see if this, this pattern was a bacterial colony. And it was a fractal pattern. And he wanted to know a very simple thing. Are these bacteria spreading out in fractal forms because of inanimate laws? The kind of laws that make fractals inside those stones you see at a lapidary shop that are cut…
Alan Steinfeld
Or are they organic laws.
Howard Bloom
Or are there laws, do inorganic laws govern life as well? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so what did he discover? What he discovered was that bacteria are, have a a collective intelligence. That they’re individual processors for all practical purposes that are networked in one of the biggest massive parallel process…
Alan Steinfeld
So they parallel process, they have independent intelligence and and collective intelligence.
Howard Bloom
Right. So, but that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is that one day um Eshel sends me a message and he says, if you can figure out the definition for information, then you will have solved the problem of the creativity of the cosmos. And it takes me two weeks because I’m very slow with some of these things. And then I come back to Eshel with a definition of information. And the definition of information is information is anything that an interpret can interpret.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know what I would say? Information, if you break it down, is in-formation. Patterns. It’s the ability to digest and recognize patterns in the environment, take them in and to re-cognize them.
Howard Bloom
Right. Well, you’re right. And and how do you know that something has recognized something else? If you’re sitting at a telephone and you’re listening to a voice, I can’t hear that voice necessarily, but I can see if you’re taking down notes. I can see if you get up from the
Alan Steinfeld
So what does it all have to do with information theory and your book about The God Problem?
Howard Bloom
Okay, information theory When Claude Shannon came up with this magic equation for squeezing stuff down a copper wire, squeezing messages. He wanted to call it entropy. Why did he want to call it entropy? Because it was almost exactly the same formula as the formula for entropy. Okay. And then he talked to a guy named Warren Weaver. And Warren Weaver was at the Rockefeller Foundation in charge of some sort of scientific program there. Okay. And Warren Weaver said no don’t call it that call it information. And then in the two articles that laid out information theory in two issues of the Bell Telephone, in-house magazine, Warren Weaver made a very crucial statement. He said don’t mistake our form of information for meaning. Our form of information is a special technical engineering sense of information. Well Warren, I got news for you. There is a word called information in the English language and information includes the stuff that you were just talking about and the stuff I was just talking about, a response and interpretation.
Alan Steinfeld
But what does that have to do with this new understanding, new way of understanding the world?
Howard Bloom
Well, let’s take a look at those first seconds of the universe, OK? You’re the madman and I’m the I’m the crotchety person right? So these things appear. And you say, these things are going to show a social rule book. These things are going to show sociality and they are going to show that they know who to get together with and who to separate from.
Alan Steinfeld
You mean a social relationship. From atoms to molecules, to elements, to people.
Howard Bloom
And I’m going to tell you that’s crazy. All these are are things. And you’re telling me that they have this anthropomorphic thing called relationships. You’re gonna tell me more. You’re going to tell me that they have this anthropomorphic thing called communication and meaning. That they actually interpret each other’s signals. This is crazy. And guess what? They do. Instantly. Two quarks that are sufficiently like each other flee from each other. That’s called repulsion. Right. Two quarks that are sufficiently different, gang up together and become fused permanently together.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Now let’s sum it all up. Because we’re almost out of time. We’ve talked for about an hour and a half or something like that. Let me see. So we have these assumptions about the world and we need to reevaluate. I mean you you broken down the old assumptions. The only thing you replace the old assumptions you have replaced it with is a hypothesis that there are emergent properties and we have yet to create the laws for emergent properties. But we can, we can see that by following our assumptions we’ve reached a dead end.
Howard Bloom
And that there is a new frontier opening. And the new frontier is being opened by computer simulation. And that new frontier will give us the tools to get beyond A equals A, it will give us the tools to get beyond 1 plus 1 equals 2, in fact it already is. It’s been doing that ever since Benoit Mandelbrot went to IBM in 1964 and began to use computers to make these incredible gaudy pictures emerge called fractals.
Alan Steinfeld
And so, so what is the new kind of paradigm? What are, where are we moving into as a new worldview based on new assumptions?
Howard Bloom
The new worldview is based on we’re at the lip of a new frontier. It’s your job to question your assumptions and see if you can see things from unique points of view. It’s your job to see the obvious. You know, the Babylonians made circles with compasses, and they used them as decorative objects, but they never uploaded the circle to the toolkit of the mind. They never made it a concept. It was only the Greeks that made it a concept. The Babylonians had no circles in their mind.
Alan Steinfeld
So what are we doing to making…
Howard Bloom
It’s your job, Alan, to look at the things right under your nose and figure out how you can make them new tool kits for the human mind to explore this vast new frontier of emergence.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. I think it’s the creative mind, the artist, the philosopher, the scientist, the Einsteins, the people who are willing to look at things and let go of the old paradigm.
Howard Bloom
But I gotta message for the audience and that is the Einsteins, the creators, the the fantastical wizards who come up with the new tools by seeing the obvious right under their nose, that’s you.
Alan Steinfeld
Also, this validates both Aristotle and what’s his name? Plato. No no no no. Heraclitus. Because both of them were right. It is very useful to look at A as A, it’s extremely useful.
Howard Bloom
Right. However, it’s extremely useful to know the entire time that A does not equal A. Why? Because the river is always changing.
Alan Steinfeld
The assumptions we make have created a world where we locked ourself into a box really.
Howard Bloom
Right. And and but we’re the ones who are capable of getting beyond the box.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. Tell people how to find you.
Howard Bloom
Okay, it’s HowardBloom.net. And that’s it. It’s HowardBloom.net.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you Howard for taking the time.
Howard Bloom
Oh well, it’s been great fun. I was amazed when you started spouting the stuff from this book.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know I think it’s so important that we throw out all our assumptions and start to build the world from scratch basically. This is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities and if you want to contact me contact me at newrealities at earthlink.net or check my website newrealities.com. Thank you for listening.