The Future Does Not Compute

Awaking from the Primordial Dream

This is Chapter 20 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

The whole world reaches in man its own consciousness.

-Goethe

Carl Jung, gazing upon a timeless African landscape, found himself momentarily absorbed, dreamlike, into a world not yet fully awake:

From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world around me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being./1/

I imagine most of us have had some such experience, at least to the extent of finding ourselves lost in the hypnotic scene before us as in a reverie. We find ourselves enmeshed, or “caught up,” in the world. Our minds seep outward into our surroundings, so that we no longer stand apart from the tableau we contemplate. The psyche, having momentarily escaped the self's constraining will, lives outside ...