Plugging into ElfNet

"...we are separate entities with boundaries that collide...we are entities with boundaries that overlap."

with Francis Jeffrey

Francis Jeffrey is a pioneer and forecaster on the frontier interface between communication technologies and neuroscience. He is a consultant on ethical applications of science and technology co-founder of civic and environmental organizations, and CEO of Alive Systems Inc., which is devoted to the application of biological principles in computer software design.

Francis devised the "Linguini code, " an intercultural and human-computer communications "language. " He originated the concept of "communications co-pilot, " an electronic co-personality that works along with you while it learns to emulate and support your communication and computing activities. His magnum opus is a project-in-progress called ElfNet, an interactive network that will use telephones or interactive television to access global information resources in a personalized way, while building meaningful relationships and perfecting programs of action. A psychological theorist, his theory on the nature of consciousness in isolation was published in Woman & Ullman 's Handbook of States of Consciousness.

In 1973, after studying computational neurophysiology at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California, Francis began studies with John C. Lilly, M.D. (interviewed in our first volume) on sensory isolation and on human-dolphin communication research, studies which continued over the years. Recently Francis helped dolphins gain civil rights, at feast in Malibu. His concept was first enacted as public policy by the Malibu city council on January 7, 1992--apparently the first legal recognition in the human world of dolphins as individuals. In 1986 Francis co-founded, with Richard B. Robertson, the Great Whales Foundation, an organization that has called upon the international community to recognize whales as "living cultural resources " rather than consumables.

Francis is the author of the well-known biography John Lilly, So Far. His thinking has been provoked over the years by interactions with the twentieth century 's best and brightest innovators and nonconformist thinkers, including Timothy Leary, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (both of whom are in our first volume), Herbert Marcuse, Gregory Bateson, Lawrence Stark, M.D., Heniz von Foerster, Roland Fischer, and Ted Turner.

In interview mode, Francis demonstrates an extremely quick mind that is knowledgeable about an extraordinary scope of interests, free-associating surprising connections among conventional topics. Keenly perceptive of the hidden structure of ideas and systems, he possesses a special gift for making complex scientific concepts easy to understand in essential terms. He is also very unny, in an off-beat sort of way. Dark, piercing eyes dart amid birdlike features in a combination that seems to personify the archetype of the alchemist-wizard. I conducted this interview with Francis at his Malibu Beach home on June 29, 1994, at sunset. As we began, just off the deck, dolphins slid through the waves of the Pacific.

DJB

David What inspired your interest in computational neuroscience? How did you become interested in the interface between the computer and brain science?

Francis: I started reading Carl Jung as a teenager and found him fascinating. By the time I was about fifteen, I had read just about everything he wrote. But it seemed to really lack any explanatory power, so I started looking for something that would help to better explain the mind. After reading Jung, I thought, "Well sure, maybe the mind does this, but how and why does the mind do this?" It became apparent that this had something to do with the brain, and I began looking into that in college.

When I was in college studying psychology, computers were just coming online in a big way. So you had the first transition from these very elite mainframe institutions that everyone had to schedule their time on and share. They were originally installed with money from the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission to encourage research in physics, and virtually every university had one. Then minicomputers be-

came available, and we had laboratories that had some of the first minicomputers in them. So your lab actually had a computer, and it was obvious that the way to do experiments in psychology was to program them, because this was much more flexible than the old fashioned way of doing experiments.

I was fascinated with what cognitive science now calls the binding problem. What is it that holds a perception together as a unit? Behaviorism, which is the psychology that was widely being taught at that time, contributed absolutely nothing to this question. The stimulus-response perspective didn't give you a clue as to what made a perception. A more universal spin on the question would be "What is consciousness?" There is somebody who is having an experience, and that experience seems to hold together. You're not just little bits of a picture, like an insect eye, but there's a whole thing going on that you're involved in.

David That's the Big Mystery.

Francis: You can analyze it in different ways, and it's kind of like a quantum phenomenon. Depending on how you analyze it, what experiments you do, you conclude that perception is broken down into different units in different ways. Recently reputable academic scientists started saying that the binding problem--what holds a perception together--is something that they're going to start looking at. But that's just a way of getting the large question--"What creates a mind?"--in the door.

Well, there are a lot of ancient answers to that question from people who, without the benefit of any external technologies, just experimented on themselves. I think one of the best traditions of that would be The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. A contemporary roughly of Plate and Buddha, back more than 2,000 years ago, Patanjali is the legendary and perhaps actual author of The Yoga Sutras, which is a very concise presentation of the basic ideas of yoga. Of course, that is tied to all the Hindu philosophy, and on and on. But there's something very crisp and concise about The Yoga Sutras, and a lot of scientifically minded people, including John Lilly, have gotten way into it.

There are a lot of scientists, such as Deepak Chopra, who have benefited from association with this yoga tradition. Now, Patanjali said--among a great many other interesting things--that artificial minds can be created by ... how to translate it is difficult ... "egotism." Artificial minds can be created by the drive to selfhood. Okay, so I translate this as follows. "If you want to create an artificial mind"-which sounds very modern and technological, almost like artificial intelligence [AI], but he's talking about how a yogi can project his mind into form and clone himself--"what makes it possible is that there is a universal tendency to create coherent consciousness."

David To individuate?

Francis: To individuate, exactly. That's the basis of the phenomenon. So I applied this in my recent thinking, and this insight guides the communication-software development I'm currently into. What you need if you want to create an artificial mind--now in the modem technological sense--is you must somehow capture that drive toward individuation, toward consciousness. But it's not a matter of building up a bunch of rules on how some expert does things, which is how AI has turned out to be.

David How does your understanding of computer science give you insight into how the brain works?

Francis: It gives an insight in a negative sense, because computer science is a completely vapid subject. As far as I can tell, there isn't any. There are departments of computer science at universities, but is it science? It's like they're studying the history of the evolution of computers or something.

David Well, it's a systems approach to a certain type of technology.

Francis: That's the problem. You see, a system is like an artificial framework that you build, and then you try to fit stuff into it. To again use the quantum theory paradigm, you know what you observe depends on the kind of experiments and measurements you make. There's a certain complementarity there. You make certain measurements and observations, and you exclude others. So I think the hierarchical-systems approach is the

ultimate extension and reductio ad absurdum of that approach, because you end up with a created system that has no subject matter but its own constructs. It's like what Wittgenstein said, "Can it be that in mathematics what I am studying and seeking ... is to know that which makes it possible for me to create these things."

David So then, the study of computer science can also be the study of the brain's ability to model things in a way that creates powerful computational tools and digital technology. Francis: Well, in kind of a backdoor way. But that's just psychology. The tool building is "unconscious," driven by markets. I think you wanted to ask, "What de facto, in reality, is computer science?" It's actually just studying the latest generation of personal computers, the latest generation of software, and teaching people how to use them.

David Does the understanding of computers give you any insight at all into how the brain functions?

Francis: Well, experientially it gives you some insight into how your brain functions. You can go to two extremes. One of them allows you to see what happens to your brain when you interact with very sophisticated technology. Today we have very sensory computers--the hot buzzword is "multimedia interactive computers." Okay, so that's one area where you can look at it, and that's sort of what we were doing twenty to twenty-five years ago in experimental psychology--much simplified, because we didn't have the big power computers we have today.

We were using computers to throw complicated stuff at the human mind and nervous system, watching what the reaction was, and then using a computer to analyze it. But if you want to be very elegant and mathematical, you have to really go back to the original insights that led to the computer as we have it today. And there hasn't been much added on in the interim. With all the work done by all the artificial intelligence people and the so-called computer scientists, there really hasn't been a bit added to that origin. And now we're talking about forty to fifty years of "progress." So it kind of contributes to the observation--which I think some historian made--that the farther science progresses, the slower it goes, because it gets bigger and more bureaucratic. So you want to go back to people like John von Neuman, Alan Turing, Kirt Godel, Warren McCullock, and Waiter Pitts.

David How about vice-versa? Does the understanding of the brain give you any insight into computer science?

Francis: Well sure, because it sort of sets the outer limit on what humans can achieve. I mean, humans will be doing very well if they can translate a high percentage of what they find in their brain into some kind of external technology, and so far they've translated just a little bit of that.

David I'm curious as to how you envision the future evolution of technology in regard to how it's going to interface with the brain. Do you see specific types of technologies somewhere on the horizon that will interface directly with the brain?

Francis: Well, there's the good news and the bad news. Obviously there are these monitoring technologies, like SQUID, with all kinds of refinements of magnetic resonance or nuclear magnetic imaging. This allows us to start getting a very detailed view of what's going on in the brain. From the point of view of the brain, that's an output technology; from the point of view of a computer, it's an input of technology. So you can start having patterns from your brain going into the computer. The other side of it is that you can overwhelm the brain and the mind with the media technology, and of course we've already got that in a crude sort of way. Warfare and religion weren't invented in the twentieth century, they just became more efficient and industrialized. Now we've had television for a long time, and I think most of what it does is put a lot of noise into the brains of a lot of people, which causes a lot of confusion, although there are obviously certain benefits.

I watch CNN a lot because I get a lot of information that way. I find it has most of the information that's in the L.A. Times, only a day earlier, and just about as much depth. But it's loaded with commercial advertisements, and those are extremely irritating. So I think unless you're sitting there with a can of beer to kind of help you chill out, your impulse is to get up and turn those things off all the time. Maybe some people find them entertaining. But what's happening is you're jamming up the brains of millions and millions of people with messages that are pretty irrelevant to most of them most of the time, and are basically distorted or exploitive. So the danger and peril of this thing is that as you get more and more interactive and multimedia, you make a more compelling and more powerful medium that just basically surrounds people and drives them nuts--even more nuts than at present.

David Like interactive beer commercials.

Francis: Yeah, interactive beer commercials. You'll have the spigot right on your TV, and you'll go through this elaborate set of icons and menus, click somewhere, your already overdrawn bank account will be debited five dollars, and some beer will plop out. This is progress. (laughter)

David When you look at the history of technology and then project into the future, what new technologies do you think will have the greatest impact on the future evolution of humanity?

Francis: I think interactive technology is very big, and so is nanotechnology, which covers a span from drug technology to microfabrication techniques. This stuff has extremely profound implications. On the drug technology side, where you're doing things like peptididometics or orthomolecular chemistry, you have the ability to fabricate all the molecules that are found in the human body and all those that interact with it in specific ways. So there you have the solution to all the ancient dilemmas of medicine, aging and so forth.

David How do you think it will affect the evolution of consciousness?

Francis: I think it's going to create much more freedom, because the mind becomes decoupled from the usual deprivations of disease and aging. So there's a real capacity to create a new objectivity there, to create a consciousness that's less panicked and tied to immediate survival problems. Of course, again, there's the dark side, in which things can be exploited. Most science fiction is focused on giving warnings about the dark side of all these technological possibilities. For example, with nanotechnology you could create killer viruses or chemical biological agents that can transfer ideas to people, and you can thereby control them.

David More than the interactive beer commercials?

Francis: Yeah, I think so. But there's a real competition there. To go back to the other array, interactive technology, the point is to get as much real interactivity--which means stuff relevant to the individual--and as little exploitation as possible. The problem here, again, is like the paradox of CNN--it gives a lot of information at the expense of jamming up your mind with a lot of noise, because that's what pays the bills. So you have the same problem going here--the economic engine that drives the thing is commercial advertising.

David What's your personal technique for filtering signal from noise?

Francis: Well, obviously you focus on the things that are of the most interest to you, unless you've slumped into this kind of somnambulistic trance of addict television watchers, where everything goes in, probably. One thing you can say about the brain--or everything we' ve learned about it--is that it's driven by internal goals and expectations, and to some extent those are being shaped by external forces and interaction. But at any given moment, it's running on autopilot, and that automatically filters everything that's cominginto you. In some people it does so more or less efficiently.

So if you're a real needle-nose, a real information picker, then you have a very fine filter that turns up your inputs when the stuff that's potentially interesting comes along and turns it down when its not. But at the same time, that uninteresting stuff is work that's imposed on you, if you're to filter it out. I mean, you can't go to a movie today or rent a video tape without having fifteen minutes of advertisement at the beginning. It would be much better to have a system in which you can actually zoom in on and assign your energy to new information depending on its relevance to you.

And that is the promise of interactivity. Interactivity means, for instance, if you want to buy a car, you have a system that will answer the questions you're interested in rather than pitching various things to you. First of all, that assumes that you have some questions. So if you're already completely brain-dead, that's not going to be any help. But to say that the brain is run by its own priorities and expectations is also to say, if you take that to an extreme, that we're completely paranoid, or that we're capable of being completely paranoid, because a perception is largely projection, in the psychological sense of the word. So the questions is, to what extent is it

all just projection?

If it's complete, 100 percent projection, then you're having pure hallucinations, which you might have if you were in an isolation tank on ketamine or something, where you're completely turned out of the physical body and the physical world. Well, that mimics and extrapolates a state that all of us get into to various degrees, and that's the extreme side of the fact that the brain is run by its own priorities and expectations. So then you say, "Well maybe here is a hidden hazard of interactive technology. You can become so focused on a particular program that you lose touch with everything outside that, and it becomes a self-perpetuating and perhaps, eventually, a self-destructive pattern. There are obvious examples, such as various kinds of mental illness, various kinds of obsessions and drug addictions, that take on this character.

Historically you can see the same pattern in the rise and fall of great nations and empires. For example, take Hitler's Germany as an extreme case of paranoia, where you have a system that not only is completely wrapped up in and devoted to its own bizarre ideas, but physically harnesses the industry of an entire continent to realize them and try to spread itself.

If you have an interactive technology that does perfectly nothing but follow your expectations, projections, and interests, then you become information-tight, you don't interact with anything anymore, and you're in an increasingly descending and narrowing spiral of your own. I think you see this now in the mentality of people who spend too much time on their personal computers. It usually takes the form of some kind of game or some kind of obsessive conversation about a subject that's only interesting to a small in-group. It follows that maybe we need the journalists hawking ideas and new blips, but not the self-expanding tabloid kind.

David I'm curious about how your experience working with John Lilly and Timothy Leary influenced the development of your present belief system?

Francis: Leary is a great permissionary, a term located somewhere between missionary and permission. if a missionary is someone who's out to sell you some belief systems, a permissionary is somebody's who out to sell you on doing your own thing, to give you permission. So Leary was always an upper, an excitatory stimulant, and a kind of a machine-gun blast of new information. The man is compulsively collecting the most shocking, interesting new information and blasting it at others. So it was always a challenge being exposed to him, to open up to all these new ideas and see what you could do with them. He's kind of like a great firehose, where high-pressure ideas come spurting out at you. Very stimulating guy.

Lilly is a much more difficult case to describe. Perhaps he's almost more interesting as a specimen, and I guess that characterizes the role I ended up playing with respect to him. I wrote his biography, John Lilly, So Far, and that's really putting him under the microscope. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago, and he smiles a lot. He's like an example of how far somebody can go in the direction of being an extraterrestrial while living here. Very interesting. But he's also an extremely rigorous scientist, which J think people who don't know him well maybe wouldn't get, unless they went back and read some of his earlier work. So he has an enormous capacity for objectivity, for looking at things in an uncliched way, and for seeing the unobvious aspects of issues. He was, as part of his own development, maniacally committed to studying the question of consciousness and how it relates to perception, computers, and so on.

Lilly introduced me to the technology that he developed, the isolation tank, and also to cetaceans--dolphins and whales--to which I hadn't really had any prior exposure. The model operative there was that ET is already here on planet Earth. Here is this alien species that has a brain with a similar level of sensory capabilities and many other characteristics like our own. Some of them even have about the same size brain, so you have this interaction possibility with the "like-minded." Where I'm sitting right now, I literally have these guys living in the backyard.

In that ocean down there, the dolphins can't hear us on land, but they're actually hearing the whales, and together they're a global communication system. I told this to Ted Turner one night--I said that he had the second global news system. (laughter) He probably didn't like that too much, but he loves whales, so I don't think he minded. WNN, the Whale News Network, has been going on, apparently, for millions of years. It's only been in recent decades that humans have had things like transatlantic cables and global communication satellites. The whales have actually had this kind of system, through acoustic underwater communication, for millions of years.

David I'm curious about the work that you've done here in Malibu to help dolphins gain civil rights. Can you tell me how you became involved in this work and what goals you're trying to achieve?

Francis: About two years ago the Malibu city council passed a resolution that I wrote up. Walt Keller, a member of our new city council and a former mayor, urged me to do this. He was one of the founders of the city of Malibu. We were able to introduce the idea that Malibu is a shared human-dolphin environment. It's a beach community, and the dolphins figure very prominently in the lives of people here. You see them every day. Just right off this porch are dolphins and whales.

So that idea caught the collective imagination. CNN carried it. I remember doing interviews with German television networks, and even Time and Newsweek ran little articles about it. Because the implication is, if a community defines itself as no longer exclusively human--it's a human dolphin shared environment--then by implication you're making them at least honorary citizens. So then you start thinking, "Well, if the dolphins are honorary citizens, then this implies that they're individuals." I think anybody who's got any sense figures they're individuals anyway. But legally they're defined as commodities.

We have in the United States a Marine Mammal Protection Act, which is to protect the numbers of them. It's a resource conservation model. According to some biologist, if there are too few of a given species, then we start being extra careful to protect that species so it doesn't become extinct.

But they have no rights as individuals. In fact, just the opposite is true. Under current United States law, with a permit dolphins can be legally captured for various reasons, one of which is to put them on display in some kind of aquatic circus or something. Then they virtually become the property of the people who hold them. There's no provision for them to be liberated or eventually receive retirement pensions or anything like that, because there's no Screen Actor's Guild or Cetacean Performer's Union for dolphins. (laughter)

The law has worsened over the last couple months. Congress caved in to pressure from various businesses that exploit dolphins, and under the new law even the standards for making sure they're properly cared for are far more lax. They referred it to the Department of Agriculture, which administers the Animal Welfare Act. I should point out that under the Animal Welfare Act, certain mammals and birds are not defined as animals! How do you like that? The Department of Agriculture has "humane" standards, but they're pretty vapid, because they assume that the animal is being raised to be exploited or consumed in some way. That is like having "kind" ways of killing someone. The situation is a little better than that with captured cetaceans, who are considered theoretically to be held in some kind of public trust.

But when you come right down to it, they become the property of the captors. When Congress recently renewed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, they provided that the offspring of these captive dolphins actually become the property of the people who hold them. So essentially it reduced them to the status that breeding slaves had before the Civil War in this country. If you own dolphins, then their children become your slaves and property automatically. It's a pretty scurrilous situation, in my opinion. Of course, globally, the only real regulatory regime is the International Whaling Commission [IWC], which was also founded on a resource paradigm, and the original idea was to maintain enough stocks of the various species so you can continue to exploit them. When you talk about resource conservation, basically it's about conserving now so you can exploit in the future. That's the paradigm. This year Malibu made another significant--at least ideologically significant-contribution, calling on the International Whaling Commission to recognize whales as living cultural resources, as opposed to consumable resources. That actually does coincide with the legal rubric under which the IWC was established, which was to provide for the greatest sustainable use of the whale resource. So the position we're taking now is that the greatest sustainable use of the whale resource is not to treat them as potential food, but to treat them as a nonconsumable cultural resource. Because whales are part of a global communication society, and we're all in on that today. The problem is, in addition to killing them--which is equivalent to destroying nerve cells in the "global brain"--humans have put so much noise in the sea that whales' hearing range is now down to a few hundred miles, versus the thousands they could once talk across. The big question today is whether whales are potential customers for the phone companies. (laughter)

David So what's the next step in what you're trying to do?

Francis: Well, I'd like to see various localities, states--and eventually the United States and other national governments--extend individual legal recognition to dolphins and whales. I think the arguments for doing that are compelling, based on their neurological parity--some would say superiority-with humans. Everything we know about the richness of their social communication fabric supports this view.

David As a result of your experiences in the isolation tank, you developed an interesting model of consciousness, which was published several years ago in the Handbook of States of Consciousness. Can you briefly summarize the essence of your theory and what its implications are?

Francis: Remember the isolation tank is a method of de-emphasizing your physical existence and your physical position in the universe, as well as communication and all sorts of sensory inputs and outputs. Then, by contrast, it emphasizes whatever is left. A lot of people might think, "Well there's nothing left." But that's not the case. As I said, the human mind is primarily based on projection, and so once you get over the idea that you're not supposed to be experiencing anything because nothing's happening, that ability to project becomes free, and when it's not coupled to any sensory motor input/output, it is very close to the ability to imagine. So it's basically a creative idea. But what do you find then, and what kind of world develops under these conditions? Well, the physical world has a certain logic to it that has to do with the sensory motor system, and most of the ideas that circulate among humans have to do with that kind of activity in interaction with physical objects.

Of course, there are ideas that have to do with dreams and things that are a little different. But everyday, real-world ideas, whether they're just common sense or the most sophisticated science, have to do with properties of the physical world. And there you have mores that have to do with identifying bodies and objects. Basically, there's a concept of boundaries, and there's a logic and a whole mind-set that comes out of this. This is the logic of the physical world, where you say that it's A or it's B. If a certain area of space and time is included in phenomenon A, then it's probably not included in phenomenon B. Because these phenomena are defined by their boundaries, it belongs to one or the other, unless they're certain kinds of weird phenomena, like waves or something, where they're allowed to overlap and intersect.

So you get the idea that most of the time what you yourself are is defined by your boundaries. You have a pretty good idea that you're somebody in a particular body in a particular place. Now, when you go far enough into the isolation mind-set, that begins to break down, and you start to see that, if you are anything, you're probably patterns of communication, which are all tangled up with other patterns of communication in the outside world. So then you have a model of what you are that isn't based on boundaries anymore, but on loops that are tied in with other loops. It's an alternative to being this physical being. You have these overlapping entities that are defined by interacting loops of communication, and everything interpenetrates everything else. Well, you know, the Buddhists said that a long time ago. I called these patterns, "Bateson loops," after a communication theorist I once knew. The "spiritual" entities, defined by boundaries that overlap rather than by inside/outside distinctions that exclude one another, are called "Booles," after the nineteenth-century logician George Booles, who instigated Boolean algebra. So you might say, "Booles rush in ... "

David Tell me about Elfnet.

Francis: Elfnet is an idea that I've been pushing on everyone since about 1980, and it's based on a Santa's workshop paradigm. See, you have Santa and his elves, and all the elves are busy making toys for all the children. Imagine all the elves in some kind of benevolent organization at the North Pole. Now apply this to the information sphere. It's a collaborative model of information sharing. Everyone is contributing by providing information that might be useful to other people and taking out whatever information they can use that other people provided. This doesn't exclude that there could be some payoffs made for information within the system, but it has to be reasonable. The key thing is that the information is nonexploitive. That means the information you get is relevant to your own needs and interests. It's not someone trying to sell you something with irrational persuasion, which is what the whole commercial marketing system that dominates our media is about.

David So it would make information available to people in a more accessible format, and allow everybody to contribute and interact in a community-like way.

Francis: Yeah, that's right. It's a global community based on communication rather than physical presence and physical work. So, first of all, you don't want this to be chaos. Because right now you have chaos. This is the paradox. You can pick up a phone, and theoretically you can dial anyone in the world--I mean, if you know their number or even if you just start dialing numbers at random. I don't know, maybe you should try this as an experiment. Spend the entire day doing this and see what you come up with. But there's no guarantee that by following such a procedure, or even if you have some published directory of people that are supposed to be helpful resources of information, that you're going to find anyone who either has the answer to your question, or has the capacity and willingness to help you with whatever your problem is, or even wants to hear about it.

Henry David Thoreau said that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." So there's tremendous isolation and alienation, and most people live every day in this little doggy run of their habitual activities, where they're isolated from everything else that's going on. They' re mostly on the receiving end of information. So they get the news. Today we have an unparalleled ability to not only get news, but to see what's going on all over the place. 0. J. Simpson is running down the highway in his white Bronco, and everybody's there with him seeing it, but it's a big "so what?" as far as everybody else is concerned.

You ought to have a two-way system that somehow breaks down the wall of isolation, so you're not just the person who is receiving what somebody else considers to be news or information, which is basically what you are now. There's somebody out there calculating what you should consider to be news or information. It's being fed to you, unless you work very hard going through libraries and computer databases. You have to work extremely hard to get a little bit of information on your own. It's a very biased, commercial-marketing, advertising system. So we thought maybe there are better solutions then this. But most of the systems that exist are fairly intractable, hard to work with. So what do you do if you want information? Where do you go? You go to your various experts--a doctor or someone--and ask them.

When you do that, you find out that most of those people are really technicians. They're experts at performing certain procedures, and if you happen to be somebody who can benefit from the particular procedure they're running, then it might be good for you to see them. You could go to a library or do the electronic equivalent--go digging through this stuff--or you could participate in one of these bulletin boards or electronic mail systems, which are really pretty chaotic. Everyone's talking about the Internet, which is terrific. I use it all the time. But try to find anything on it. It's pretty intractable, even for experts, because it's really just an agreement to forward messages. So you're back to the same basic problem as the telephone call.

You find that the really organized systems of information are primarily commercial exploitation, or noncommercial exploitation, based on irrational persuasion. I'm not saying anything that isn't obvious. But in a sense, to focus on and harp on these issues is heretical, because we're supposed to be living in an age of "markets" and so forth. And because of the way things are, that implies constant exploitation, whether it's commercial exploitation, political exploitation, or religious exploitation. So how do you set up a system that's nonexploitive that gives you access to information? How do you do it technically? How do you give people access to this?

Things like CompuServe and so on, which are designed for this fragment of the population that is so-called "computer literate," are definitely growing. Your computer can log on with a modem to some network, and you can go in there and hunt for information or exchange messages. Those things are growing rapidly, but it's still a minority phenomenon, and it has some very serious limitations, as anyone who has tried to use it knows. So that medium is maturing now, but at the same time there are other media coming along, and they're eventually going to collide and converge. That would be the so-called interactive television, where you'll be online all the time. You just turn the thing on, and there you are. You're using the higher transfer rates and capacity of cable and fiber optic networks to allow a greater sensory richness of information. But still, the same basic problem is there. Even if you had that national information interstate right now, so that you could turn on your interactive television with the little remote control unit, you could only do what your son or daughter in the next room is doing right now with a PC on CompuServe.

See, you're still basically limited to what they do on CompuServe, but with a little more sensory richness. So you could see what these two things are converging into during the next few years. By the year 2000 they probably will have merged, and there won't be a lot of difference between using a utility like CompuServe and using an interactive television system. But there's really nothing new in any of that, because we've had these computer bulletin board systems and searchable libraries on a large scale for at least thirty years. What's changed is they've become a little bit easier to use, but just in a very minor way, by being sensorially richer.

David And Elfnet would do what to make the information more easily accessible to more people?

Francis: First of all, Elfnet starts with what everybody has right now. That's basically telephone communications. From the beginning, I thought it has to be something that is completely accessible through acoustic communication-the telephone. By using the telephone, you don't need anything that isn't in every home in America. Everyone knows how to use it, so the technological hurdle--both in terms of personal expertise and in terms of the burden of buying equipment--is very minimal. So what else do we have today? Well, we obviously have telephone and television, and the television is verging toward what the telephone is, in the sense of being a two-way interactive medium. So everything I say about the telephone today applies to interactive television in the future.

Once the paradigm is worked out, you just have to understand that it becomes a little bit sensorially richer to do this through an interactive television. You have visual images, and you can point at things with your finger or some remote control, which is a little easier than just being on the phone. But it's the same model--interactive two-way communication-and it applies universally.

The other aspect of this communication process is how the information is organized. I put this in the broader context of how the communication is organized, because information is thought to be some kind of substance, but it really isn't. Information is really a kind of accounting that's applied to communications. If you look at any respectable academic theory of information, you find that it ultimately comes down to that, that it's not the static representation of bits and bytes, or a checkerboard with checkers on and off. That's just the physical vehicle for it. The information is really a measure of communication. If you go back to the original mathematical theory of communication that engineers use, from around 1948, it said very explicitly what information is--a measure of communication, and communication is basically between minds, and it's about questions and answers. Questions and answers implies that there's a mind that has those questions and to whom the answers are relevant. In The Mind of the Dolphin, John Lilly said very succinctly, "Communication is between minds."

David So Elfnet is a way of linking up more minds.

Francis: Yeah. It's not really about the information, the data, or anything like that. It's about the communication patterns. So the paradigm is very different from that of an industry based on the idea that you have information, which is a commodity, a quantity that you're going to sell. CompuServe and similar services now will send you a CD-ROM that has half a gigabyte of images on it, and if you happen to have a computer that can log onto CompuServe and has a ROM reading capability, as some of them now do, you can plug this in, and you can get the same thing with more bells and whistles, much greater sensory richness. So instead of having a little Macintosh window-like icon you click on your screen, it'll give you a frog, a 747, or a door that opens up onto a magical kingdom. All that is embellishment, to the extent that it's entertaining. It's a crutch for people to interface and doesn't do anything for the basic issue, which is interaction, which-is about communication between minds. So this is where the paradigm takes off.

David Okay, so let's create a scenario. Let's say that I want to find out more about diabetes, and we have Elfnet set up. How would we go about doing that? I'd pick up the phone and dial into a central number--describe to me what would then happen.

Francis: First of all, we don't want to make you put in your whole life history every time you interact with this thing. Whether you're punching buttons on a touch-tone telephone, whether you're pointing and clicking, typing away furiously at a keyboard, or blabbing, there's an enormous burden of data input, which is a context. So what you want to have is an enduring context that is represented in this system, in which you own it as your private property. We're not talking about these credit bureaus that sell information about you for potential marketing and so forth. There's an enduring context in which you own an information action condominium. See, you own a condo in this information sphere, and that represents you. This has very interesting extensions that are related to what I was telling you earlier about the idea of giving dolphins and whales individual civil rights and legal status. Today there are five or six billion humans on this planet, but very few of them have very much in the way of individual standing or stature. Recognizing whales raises consciousness about recognizing ourselves.

As far as the economic systems that govern the planet are concerned, they're numbers. You're a statistic. For this reason it's very hard to protect even human rights. I try to protect dolphin rights, but I also support organizations like Amnesty International, which is one of the very best at trying to protect and define human rights. It's hard to get these government bureaucracies and multinational corporations to even accept standards of human rights that are being evolved by global supergovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations. It's very difficult. So if you can give every individual public access, I think that you're going a long way toward having a global society that, in a profound sense, recognizes each individual. That raises the possibility of caring for each individual in a specific way, and all that comes from the idea of having your personal, private information condo, your cellular-awareness domain, integrated into this kind of system.

So to return to your first question, about what sort of interaction there is, there are two poles to this interaction. One of them is that you can take charge, direct the interaction, and anything goes. You can be completely free of your whole interactive history. The other pole is that you can let it be based on what you've built up in the system already. You can let it make for you the associations that are most likely to connect you with the new information, as well as the enduring information that's most relevant to your concerns.

David You were working on something years ago called Computer Copilot. Is that related to this in any way?

Francis: It shares a common technology. There's a little revolutionary software technology at the heart of this, which I believe is a key to making it economical, at the present time, to do these sort of grandiose things I've described. This is another distinct application. The idea of a computer co-pilot, of course, relates to the idea that you have this personal entity. There's this enduring image of you, which is, again, your private property, your holding in this global communication condominium. And you could also have this entity completely under your own control. You could have this cellular presence on the Elfnet, the global brain, then you could have it interacting with your personal one that's completely under your own control, which you can expand using your own equipment and facilities. That was the idea of the Computer Go-pilot. It becomes an active thing, an agent that can do all kinds of work for you, because it represents you, your priorities, expectations, and so forth.

David Almost as though it becomes your unconscious.

Francis: Oh yeah, I guess you could say that, to the extent that your unconscious is this whole backload of priorities and expectations, things that go on in the background, automatic activities. You can maybe off-load or download much of your unconscious functioning to your personal computer, if it's set up this way. That project is in the background, to be developed as a product that I'm going to call Angel, because we thought it's not so much like your unconscious as like your guardian angel.

It's your electronic guardian and messenger, which is the idea of an angel, if you look at classical association It can help you manage your messaging, because as the world becomes more complicated, more communication-based, your load of messaging work becomes greater and greater, and, of course with Angel, you can handle this more efficiently. So what YOU can do, in the context of having this co-pilot or this agent, is you can organically automate a lot o these tasks that you have to perform, and you can achieve much greater efficiency. It gives you the ability to handle more and more information competently. You can integrate a lot of things you do now using communication devices and computers in a single model, and have it run all that stuff for you, rather than you having to master every new program that comes out. That's about it· So we're developing this now under the brand name trademark Angel.

There's a funny story to this. I filed this trademark protection about two years ago. As soon as it was published in the official gazette of the patent office, an objection was raised by--of all people--the Angels base-ball team. (laughter) So we had to negotiate a stipulated demarcation of rights with the team. That was the first real outside business negotiation of this enterprise, with this huge multibillion dollar corporation that manages the Angels baseball team. And little us with our far-out ideas.

In the Elfnet, the technology base is the same. In your own private communication condominium domain in Elfnet, you have a little mini co-pilot, or guardian angel. The difference is, in that context, that it's immersed in an associative network relationship with the guardian angels of all the other participants, which obviously could be millions or billions of people participating, constantly looking for those relevant connections that will contribute to all concerned. And obviously, you're allowed to limit this so you're not exposed to all the grasping tendrils in the entire world on every one of your vulnerabilities or aspirations.

But in the other model, this is like a software product that you have on – I don't want to call it a computer anymore--your personal high-tech communicator. It's much more selective, in the sense that you're not in the public commons and it's only in touch with those parties or information sources that you privately and specifically designated. But it's the same basic technology. You can see that a lot has happened since I started blabbing about this back in 1980, and much of this has become pretty mainstream, You have these so-called personal communicators, digital assistants, organizers, which are kind of a hodgepodge of badly fitting parts right now. They don't put the most obvious things in these, such as a telephone interface. So right now it's driven by some very conflicting market pressures, and hopefully the Angel will be available about the time that the hardware to run it on is mature.

David The idea behind Angel is basically about automating activities and functions. I'm curious about whether you think it's possible to create,through a computer network, an entity composed of synthetic consciousness, or a personality with an artificial mind?

Francis: I just jotted down a remark on this. I said, "We should not look for consciousness or awareness in an individual computer or program, but in a network including participants."

David Wait a minute! That's a way of skirting around the question! (laughter)

Francis: Well, no, it's not, not, not. No it's not. No it's not. Remember what I said about Patanjali's words, way back 2,500 years ago. He said artificial minds have this universal tendency to individuate, to create individual coherent centers of awareness. Contemporary scientific interest in this--the binding problem, "What makes a perception hang together? What makes it whole"--is very close to asking who or what is having that experience. This is really the basic issue in psychology, but it has been ducked for a long time because of a lack of boldness or techniques or theoretical tools, as well as this huge prejudice from nineteenth-century materialism that still hangs around. Behaviorism is a dead-end thing that doesn't get you anywhere scientifically, but it's been proven to be very useful for exploitation, whether you're training dolphins to do things for the Navy, or you're trying to train people by repetition to smoke Brand X cigarettes.

David Do you think that this tendency toward individuation is going to lead to silicon chips having coherent centers of awareness that can interact with us?

Francis: I don't know that they' d necessarily be silicon chips. See, again, there are two extreme poles to this. One of them is you say, "Well, this mind, this consciousness, is not really an individual property that is localized in a particular brain in a particular body. It's just somehow that it's concentrated there--it has something to do with it. Your consciousness is no more tied to your brain and body than the conversation is tied to the computer terminal, telephone, or fax machine it goes through. There's some association, but it's not dependent on a particular terminal device." So then I say, "Well, you should not look for consciousness in an individual computer program, no matter how it's constructed, no matter how clever the software. We should look for it in this network of relationships between communicational participants."

This ties in with your other question about this theory I published in 1986 that said essentially that, at a psychological or spiritual level, we are not separate entities with boundaries that collide; rather, we are entities with boundaries that overlap. And once you recognize that you're an entity with a boundary that overlaps, the first thing you realize is that you're both the inside and the outside of the boundary. The thing that distinguishes you is maybe the shape of the boundary, or something like that, but it's not even a question of inside versus outside. Second, when the boundaries of these different entities--which are not defined by physical-world logic but by this higher-dimensional logic--overlap, then the relationship is not so much a question of how much one of them encroaches into the other, because both of them own the inside and the outside.

Get yourself a couple loops of string, a red one and a blue one, and see what sort of interactive relationships you can work out with them by twisting them around on top of a white sheet of paper, and you'll get some idea what I'm talking about. But it's not so much how one encroaches on the other, because that is meaningless by this logic. Each boundary owns both its inside and it's outside. It's more a question of how those boundaries themselves interact, how they lie together or interrelate. Those might be relationships of common perception, common idea, which is the basis of communication. Then you ask, "Well the information itself seems to be drawing distinctions--yes, no, this, that, and so forth--so that in the information sphere, the boundaries that define your mind are all those binary kind of boundaries, where you are always on both sides of them. Wittgenstein demonstrated in the 1920s that logic is totally trivial, Godel that the mind is other than logical processes, and G. Spencer Brown that all the mindless consequences of mathematics can be defined by an extremely minimal system of symbols. But the mind is in the background of all this.

David Okay, so what you're describing is the process of thought, info

rmation transfer, and perception integration.

Francis: Yes. Now you want to get down to the psychophysical interface. See, that's the other pole of this. You're asking now, "What is it about the brain and the whole works such that you get consciousness and self consciousness, a sense of self, a sense of purpose, an extension in time and space beyond where you actually are, and apparently psychic communications with similarly constructed brains and minds?

David Right, that really odd sense of awareness that you're in the center of this immensely important drama.

Francis: Yeah, where does all that come from? There are some Gedenken [German, "to think with"] experiments, as the physicists used to call them, little scientific fantasies you could run and play with, which help you dissect this problem. One of my favorites is the theme of "Beam me up, Scotty," the Star Trek teleportation paradigm. That one actually goes back quite a ways. There are ancient spiritual ideas that relate to this, but if you stick to technology and science fiction, the first I pick up is in about 1948, in A. E. van Vogt's The World of Null A, which incidentally has a lot to do with the rejection of Aristotelian logic, the logic of the physical world, which my model is an alternative to. What he posits there is a character who has many bodies somehow. This person was originally some real person who had been cloned, or was maybe a total fabrication by someone else. There are many physical copies of him, and they're in chronic storage somewhere in orbit around another planet. So this person finds himself one day thinking he's going about his daily activities, and then some strange events intrude. He finds out that nobody else remembers him. Although he thinks he's going about his daily activities, before that day he didn't really exist, because all the people around him don't know who he is, and his story doesn't check out. He starts finding himself in a lot of trouble, and eventually he gets blown away. He's killed, and as soon as that happens, his consciousness transfers to another clone of himself, which is instantaneously activated and carries on with the story somewhere else.

The protagonist is left realizing he really doesn't know who he is or where he came from. Even though he has detailed memories going back to childhood, he realizes that they don't agree with anybody else's memories, and as far as he knows, they're completely some kind of fabrication that

was implanted in him. The next step is Star Trek, where you have this teleportation beam. Well, what's the premise of the teleportation idea in which you're being beamed up or down? In one location there's this device that is basically disintegrating and destroying your body.

David Breaking it into basic components, but keeping the original pattern somewhere.

Francis: Keeping the pattern, because it's not transporting the material. The material is being recycled, thrown out or we don't know what happens to the material. But all the information that is your body at that instant when you say, "Beam me up" is being recorded and transmitted like a television signal. So it's like a television or a fax machine except that it's in three dimensions and all very high resolution--it's operating at 10 -33 centimeters resolution. So the next thing you know, you're in the teleporter room of the starship Enterprise, and there you are in one piece again. It reconstitutes your body, getting the material from wherever in its storage, and it puts you back together. You have perhaps just a fleeting, or maybe not even any, break of awareness or consciousness

Various physicists have thought about this at the level of quantum theory and so on. They ask, "What would be an interface? What would be entailed?" and based on quantum theory, they usually conclude that you actually would have to destroy the original in order to make the copy exactly like it. In other words, you'd be disturbing it too much to preserve the original. So they say that you couldn't have the problem where you could still be stuck in location A while a copy of you is projected to location B and then there's two of you, one at each end of this communication link.

Of course, all this is conjectural, because no one really understands quantum theory that well anyway. But that seems to be a pretty credible position. So you don't have that dilemma because you'd actually have to physically destroy the original of you in order to make the copy in another location. Fine. What if you do that? You destroy the first copy, but you make two more copies at two different locations. Well, there doesn't seem to be anything theoretically wrong with doing that. So there's a problem. Then what's that like? Basically you've been cloned instantaneously by this process. So what happens? Are the two copies separate minds?

David Well, from that point in time on they're having different experiences, because they're not in the same space-time location .

Francis: Right. Sure. They're having different experiences. So at that point the two minds diverge, and they become two people. But is there some sympathy between them? Are they inherently in contact with one another, like in Aspec's experiments in the Bell's theorem paradigm. Are those particles correlated? This is a very big, complicated thing now. We're not talking about one photon. We're talking about the whole body and the entire personality. I don't see any reason you couldn't construct two identical brains. You might have to grow them from scratch to get everything right.

But are they going to be as one, in perfect sympathy or harmonious communication? At the moment that you've got two copies of your brain, are they perfectly attuned to one another? This would seem to be the case, because it seems that we're to some degree attuned to other brains that are quite a bit different from ours. I regard this as such a common phenomenon, experientially and empirically, that it's like nonsense to try to refute it, even though you probably don't have a scientific theory to explain it. But that is the ubiquitous reality of so-called psychic communication, which is such a common everyday occurrence for so many people.

David What do you mean when you say "psychic communication"?

Francis: For example, when you know what somebody else is thinking, or someone who is important to you has some trauma, and you immediately call up the person and say, "What happened?" Everyone has that experience. It happens all the time. This is sort of along some of the lines that Roger Penrose explores in his book. J think he's one of the most sensible theorists in this area right now. Your brain is full of quantum mechanical events, obviously. They're going on all the time. Because it's physical, it's made out of those events. This is what I call the epistemic theory of existence. It says that the very essence of existence is knowledge, or information. I think you can come to this conclusion by taking physics down to the quantum level, where you find that real existence becomes a mathematical proposition about things observing each other. So it's an epistemic process that creates an actuality, and that actuality is the basis of all the spatial geometries that we experience in the physical world, because it's the way that these atoms bind to- gether that creates the bonding angles and the Tinker-Toy sort of reality that builds our bodies and all this stuff around us.

David Perhaps consciousness is an inherent force in the universe, as basic as electromagnetism.

FRANCIS: I think that's closer to the ancient spiritual traditions, rather than this weird amalgam of scientific reductionism and materialism that leads to "strong" AI doctrine, which says that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon once you get a certain level of complexity, a brain of a certain size or a computer of a certain speed.

David Wasn't that the whole idea behind Marvin Minsky's book Society of Mind?

Francis: Not exactly. But he's-at least the last I heard--an exponent of strong AI, which I think is completely wrong. I think that's a hodgepodge that derives from the history of materialistic, reductionistic, behavioristic science in the last century or so. In contrast, I think what Penrose is hitting upon is that the same principle that creates mind or consciousness creates intelligence and creative imagination. He very directly ties them together, so consciousness and intelligence are intimately related to him, inseparable, tied to creative imagination. But the same thing that creates that, the same inherent property of the universe, is the one that accounts for the true principles behind the quantum mechanics of physical objects. So although he might not be saying this, he's really in the same camp as Patanjali, Maharishi, or the ancient spiritual traditions of the West, such as the Kabbala, where you find the same principles.

David Do you see the ancient spiritual traditions and modern science eventually coming to a point of reconciliation?

Francis: Well, sure. But again, there's constantly a tension here. It's being fought against by two things. The first is this whole society that's driven by the engine of commercial exploitation, based on irrational persuasion, misinformation, control of information, and the non-democratic use of information. The second thing, which is closely tied to that, is the industrialization and bureaucratization that is pervasive in the scientific establishment today. That's what fights it, and they're tied together, because they're both based on mass production, on output-only, one-way kinds of systems.

Obviously, the brain is quantum phenomena. The question is, are those quantum phenomena expressed only through a hierarchy of larger and larger structures? In your systems view, you have molecules, and the molecules make up things like receptors and cellular organelles, and those make up neurons, and the neurons interact with one another through electrical impulses and a whole alphabet of neurotransmitters, some of which are spike-like and instantaneous like an electrical signal, and some of which are graded and continuous. So this is very complex. The old model said you only look for the interactions among the aggregates--that is to say, you look at the interactions between neurons as if the neurons were computers or transistors or something with discrete logic. I say that's nonsense. I think that what makes this nervous-system tissue so remarkably efficient, compact, and powerful is the fact that it's using interactions at all the levels of scale that define its physical existence. From the quantum-particle level on up, all those levels are interacting.

You see, that's exactly what you don't have in a computer, because you've engineered that out. You've designed the computer so that a certain minimum number of electrons--it's in the millions now, and it's heading down into the thousands--forms of quantum of information. This transistor or this logic gate is in a charged or discharged state, but you don't want that individual electron to play any role in that distinction. So you design the device so it's not allowed to. Well, now they're heading toward technology where maybe one captivated electron could be the signal. That's starting to be interesting, but it's being constrained and manipulated in such a way as to force it to be a messenger, not a player.

David But isn't that exactly what the process of biological evolution has done? Hasn't it constrained the way our brains function such that it limits unpredictability?

Francis: I think on the input and output channels that's true, but I believe inside there's interaction at all levels of scale between the components of the brain, however you distinguish them. The brain works on its own principles, not only those in your philosophy, Horatio! So it means just as much to say that electron p-6 on atom 3423407 is talking to electron d4 on that atom over here as it does to say that neuron A is talking to neuron B. The human eye is sensitive to a single photon of light. That's amazing. There are neurons in the eye, rod and cone cells that are able to sense the incidence of a single quantum of light at the right frequency. Okay, that's a pure quantum event that's being sensed, and because of the way the neurons are hooked together, after that there's a certain amount of noise. So it turns out that the signal's not likely to get through unless there are, like, five or ten quanta impacting about the same time on adjacent cells.

Plants do the same thing. A green plant is an antenna. The chlorophyll molecule, of which there are zillions of copies in each leaf of a green plant, is a photon antenna. It picks up an individual photon, and it uses the energy of that individual photon to raise the energy of an electron. That way it can harvest the energy, and all of life on this planet--well, not all of it, now we know there are a few forms of bacteria that live in geysers and oil wells that operate on fermentation and so forth--but basically all the life on the surface of the planet is running on the energy that's collected by these individual quantum events, by individual photons hitting individual molecules of chlorophyll.

That there's a photon receptor in the eye means that the nervous system is capable of utilizing quantum events. But does it also emit quantum events? Why not? It certainly does. There are photons or quanta of all kinds of frequencies being emitted inside the brain. It can't help if it's throwing this stuff off. But don't assume it's throwing it away. So you have one part of the brain that's emitting this signal and another part receiving it. These things are very specifically tuned according to the theory that goes back to Einstein's photoelectric effect. A photon antenna is a resonator that can have its energy raised or lowered a certain quantal amount by absorbing a photon at the right wavelength. Well, that defines a communication channel. So if you have two electrons that have that same bandgap-say between state N and state M-then that defines the communication channel that can be traversed only by a photon of precisely that energy.

Well, obviously the brain is full of this stuff. It's hard to imagine engineering a better sensor for the energies of nature. In spite of all the thermodynamic arguments to the contrary, which I regard as archaic nineteenth century science, I think that this is going on all the time inside our brain. The brain is a photonic or a radio transceiver, which is communicating with itself over distance at the speed of light, in addition to everything else it's doing. And probably this phenomenon extends from one brain to another, in a much, much weaker way in relation to how in tune those brains are by virtue of their own structures.

Of course, everything I've just said could be disproven by a suitable experiment. There are other explanations you get by going in the Bell's theorem direction. If it's photonic or radio communication, then it's taking place at the speed of light. Well, maybe it's not, and there are paradoxical properties about this. Does your sympathetic communication with a significant other fall off with physical distance? Maybe it increases with d istance. Well, then you have to start looking for non-local phenomena, which are not signal transmissions by energy, so consequently they're not limited by the speed of light. But then causality, the order of "he thought, then she thought," is lost. As Penrose elucidated the phenomenon of quasi-crystallization, coordination over distance is indistinguishable from action backward in time. The vision causes the events that lead up to it. I take this as the paradigm of metaprogramming.

There's the quantum theory. There are also subquantum theories. "Is a quark a quantum?" for instance. It takes several quarks to make each of those elementary particles, which are the subject of classical quantum theories, so where does it go from there? A physicist I used to hang out with, David Finklestien, said that there's a certain level where you stop getting smaller and smaller parts. He said that at this level it's as if you take a watch and you smash it with a hammer, and instead of a bunch of watch parts flying all over the room, you get a bunch of watches. (laughter) See, that's again at the level where the logic of the physical world breaks down. It breaks down in the mind in isolation, and it breaks down at the quantum level, where you have the epistemic basis of existence, because the knowledge or communication process that creates physical existence doesn't follow the logic of the physical world. A thing isn't necessarily composed of parts that are smaller than itself; rather, it might be composed of parts that are larger than itself. Same thing in the mind. So it's gone full circle. A consciousness as big as yours might be responsible for a single dot at the end of this line.

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