Jacque Fresco (1975) - Scientific Inquiry, Habits of Thought, Social and Moral Codes

Jacque Fresco - Classic Lectures 1973-1980 - Tape K216 (1975) Scientific Inquiry - Habits of Thought - Social & Moral Codes The first thing I'd like to declare is that there's no such thing as the scientific attitude, really. Scientific attitude means: the ability to inquire without a pre-established set, and no one has that. So, whenever you look at anything you have a set with which you look at the thing, which renders the attitude non-scientific. You can't have a scientific attitude if you have a set, and everyone has a set. In order to be scientific, it would mean [having] the widest possible range of inquiry. For example, if you found a radioactive material prior to the knowledge of its penetrating effects, you couldn't inquire into the damage of radioactive materials. I think many, many years ago some guy accidentally held his hand in front of an apparatus and got a shadow of his skeletal structure. He held his hand there and said "It doesn't hurt at all!" And years later dentists had their fingers begin to peel (they used to hold the X-rays in front of the mouth), because you can't inquire into something that you don't have enough information on. So, to have a scientific attitude, to inquire into the nature of things... For example, what is the nature of things? Well, the nature of some things are outside of your frame of reference. If you don't have knowledge of gamma rays or particular . . . Let's say that they use ultrasonic drills on teeth and that causes cavitation in the gum linings, it causes cells to rupture. But they didn't know that, and so years later, or months later, you have another effect. That's called a negative retroaction, you can't get to that until you do the first thing. It's like a lot of pills that people have been taking, and then five years later, or ten years later, you have another effect. So how can a person be scientific? What does scientific mean? Well it means, whatever the hell it means in the guy's mind who uses the word! So no one is scientific. Now, in order to do that, in order to generate an attitude, here's what we're talking about: degrees of appropriateness. [This] is what scientists are trying to talk about, degrees of appropriateness. And now we'll move from there. How do you set up degrees of appropriateness? By working on a special process, or project, which runs something like this, (I'm going to use old language because a new language would not illicit the appropriate response). The old language is: to try to imagine situations that are highly improbable and very strange and far out (I use the term science fiction). In other words (I mentioned in one of these sessions, I don't know how many of you were present), if you take two pictures [on] the old-time stereoscope you see pictures in 3D. But if you superimpose the plates: the right eye vision to the left side and the left eye vision to the right side, what happens? The face inverts itself. The eyes, instead of going in, they go out, and the nose goes in instead of out, you know? Every stereoscopy is reversed, and it's a very strange thing. If you looked at a tree for example, instead of the branches going out, they would go into themselves. If a guy was pointing at you, you'd see it like you shoved your hand into clay and made a negative image. A good basis for science fiction is reversed stereoscopy, especially if you looked at the structure of a tree inverted. It's hard to imagine those things. And so what you have to do is imagine, meaning, make up forces, fields, strange things, in your own head, as many things as you can, which is very difficult to do because our habits of thought are associatively established. But by crossing it, we're also in school [willing to learn]. We look like a lot of little balls rolling down a table as we go to school, and some of the little balls tend to roll off the table, meaning: [they] explore in special domains. Like if you see a child in the back yard with a lollypop stick smashing shit and spreading it out, we begin to 'interfere'. And anytime there's any probing... I mentioned in the restaurant tonight in [the] discussion how you can get to discuss sex on television and radio: by discussing things like, the planets. In other words, if I got on the air and began to talk about astronomy, and they say "What about the moons of Jupiter?'' and I say "I'd rather not talk about that," they'd say "Well, what do you mean?" I'd say "There may be children in the room." You see, how is it you talk about the nose, you talk about the ear, the eye but the balls, uh-uh! The pussy, not at all. How is it that we do that? Why don't you talk about the moons of Jupiter and not talk about a certain area? You know, you could have had a society that felt that Porter Crater was dirty, on the moon. And you put a barrier over there, a little silk, and tied it over, so nobody could see Porter Crater, see? And I also mentioned of a young lady driving into a gas station and her car isn't running right. The attendant mechanic looks at it and he says "It's the differential housing. Between the two wheels in the rear there's a ..." and she says "My God! How can you talk about that part of a car in public?" And so, 'the balls' of a car, or whatever you want to call it. And we have that kind of thing today. Just because your society started not talking about the earlobe there are certain areas, or movies, that are considered pornographic, which is really amazing. It depends on the culture. And that has to be invaded, you have to invade that area. You have to knock it out, not merely argue about the fact that we ought to talk about sex. But you ought to [be able to] talk about anything, anything at all; any kind of ideas must be talked about. And so, to the degree that we don't, we remain subject to cancer and all other kinds of social catastrophe, including war, jealousy, rage, crimes of passion, etc., because we don't talk about those things. So, not talking about them is committing a crime. We have to say that the people who don't talk about those things are the criminals, and make them feel ashamed, and criminal, for not talking about them; you are shocked when a person doesn't talk about infected balls on the air, you see? In other words, you have to reverse the role to almost embarrass the bigots. It's like you don't have a negro for coffee. It's the same sort of thing. Of course, you never have to throw an opinion on behavioral problems. And so you go on with that kind of thing and make it preposterous. Getting back to the stereoscope: you get an inverted image or you get a strange image. Now, because the stereoscope does that what would happen if you took the right hand image and the left hand image and reversed them, and turned one upside down? Well, sometimes you get a hand sticking out and a hand sticking in: both ways! And that gives you ground for science fiction. It opens up the possible areas of inquiry. But the habits of thought of the research institutions (who don't really do a lot of scientific research) but which does not exist! Scientific research: some guy mixing some shit together walks into the restaurant (he's a chemist) and he's eating, and he thinks: 'My God, they put a lot of sugar on everything!' And 'everything's so sweet!' And he was piddling around with some strange mixture, sucaryl or something like it, and he wasn't looking for it. He got a little bit of this powder on his finger, and everything tastes very sweet. But nobody sat down and invented it. And that's not science; they call that serendipity. You encounter something. And I mentioned also, to put a man on the moon you have to sit back and ask what the problems are. And then you design equipment to meet those problems, which is quite different than medical research. In medical research, they pour some shit on a cancer cell and watch, it turns green and nothing happens. They pour some additional shit on it and it goes into the sophistication of biochemistry. Biochemistry is a series of accidents, [in] which you mix things together and note that a lot of things don't work; then you write a book! And they put in all the things that worked. That's how a guy becomes a noted chemist. Because he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing nor does he know what he's looking for. And the idea is, it might be possible to build hypothetical structures, of a wide variety, and then attempting to account for events (in the hypothetical structures, that are far afield) ok? Alright now, I think I mentioned, in order to understand this well, when you take a magnifying glass and you put it on a block of ice (which I have mentioned, that this is always an interesting type thing) you can melt the center of the ice if you focus it on the center. It becomes fluid in the center, and the rest is cool all around. And I also mentioned this at other sessions, that the sun may not be a source of energy at all, as a hypothetical structure. Now, when you mention that to any physicist or scientist they say, you know "Who the hell are you?" Rather than say ''How do you mean that?'' that which is most interesting: If a person makes an odd statement like that, that would call for inquiry; then you drop the person if the inquiry doesn't make sense. Now, let's try that again: Here's a gigantic lens, and here's a point in space that that lens is focused on. And that point is radiating heat galore, because there are ten units of heat in each ray, and right here they're all focused. So if you lived out here and flew around, it'd be relatively cool, a little warmer here, but hotter as you went into that. And this isn't the source of energy; that is. The sun may be some focal point in space, let me call it 'Z beams', that come into a certain form of matter and re-radiate. Like, X-rays are representing cathode ray beam in a glass tube, hitting a hard plate of tungsten: Coming out of that is alpha, beta and gamma rays; there's nothing in this, no penetrating rays. That's called a secondary radiation; which the product is, after the cathode ray (which is not penetrating) hits a hard metal, then it becomes penetrating. Now, the sun may be no source of energy at all, it may be a focal point like this lens; anybody with difficulty there? Now, orthodox persons [may say] "My God, how can you propose that; everybody knows that the sun is a nuclear furnace." A nuclear furnace may not be a source of energy. But, we're so conventionalized in our habits of thought it's hard to break the pattern, which proves conditioning. Now, I never broke the pattern, either! I just ran into events that broke the pattern; I don't break patterns. And so, if you imagine things like that: which science fiction is good! It's good because you can go astray, you can write about a strange world that has strange values. But if you try to do it in Scientific American: just write an article on 'odd thoughts I've been having about the nature of nature', they wont print it. They wont print it because they want to know the orthodoxy of the structure of the person that wrote it. Rather than: 'Hey these are some interesting ideas. Let's call it pseudo-science and put it in under that heading'. But the real interesting thing about it is that sometimes the least suspecting system may be one of the major factors in the development of cancer. Not necessarily friction, not necessarily irritants, it could be a combination of body chemistry plus that, plus a number of other things. And I mentioned also, in the past that there may not be ultimately a cause for anything, there may be a whole lot of interacting variables that may generate cancer. Not a cause: a little fucking blue cell with a pink tip. You see: 'There it is, that's the cause of cancer'. Because they know that in some instances a cancerous growth remission will occur; it will get smaller and smaller and smaller, and they scratch their heads and that's the most fascinating thing! What is that, what went on there? That becomes a person you want to collect. Not all the samples of the tissue of the people died, but the remission people. These are the guys you call in. You make a loud noise on the drum it doesn't bother him at all, he sings, and he reads, and he does his homework. There's the guy you want to study. But the person who is uptight, they are studying that person. There is nothing to study there he solved the problem. But you want to get hold of situations that are far out. Now of course, metaphysics is a stimulus in this sense. The guy talks of sitting on a rug and flying around. So like i mentioned in other sessions, he sits with his legs folded, a turban, and maybe a bowl of fruit. But it doesn't tell you what he did when it rained on the rug, or if he had to take a leak, or a shit on the rug. Where your modern airliners have shit houses and cooking and television and everything else and this guy is kind of riding a lousy rug. And you know it gets dusty, and windy up there, and bird shit. But in an airliner its more than the rug. But the idea it was fascinating and far out idea, of course considered impossible at the time, which we surpassed. Sometimes in metaphysics they say "if only I can read a person's mind" or "I can read a person's mind". And then the person goes to work on trying to predict human behavior. The stimulus might be mind reading. The stimulus for an idea where a person says "I will that plant to grow" and the plant grows. "I will that plant not to grow" and he sits over the plant and he wills it not to grow. Now he holds the seeds in his hand and he WILLS that seed with anger not to grow. Certain acids are secreted in the skin which may inhibit the growth of that seed. Now he picks up another seed with dry hands and puts it in the ground and the one he "wills" to grow, grows. But the scientist, or the guy trained differently might check this, the secretion in the skin, and the effect on the seed. The metaphysician just walks off, and says how I'm willing seeds to grow. There is no research at all. And he says "I wish you a bad year". And he walks out of the house and he's hit by a Mack truck. People do that all the time, a thousand curses upon your soul. I'm sure some people get it occasionally. So what we have to do is try to find out, or try to get into the habit, of venturing outside of conventional frame of reference. Now, if you do that sexually, you're a pervert. In other words if I were to lick a cherry tree first and then make love my girlfriend would say, "oh my god, now what's the function of that?" And I say "what the hell is the function of sucking on a tit?" I don't get any cherry flavor. Sucking on a tit is just as preposterous as sucking on a cherry, except I've been conditioned to it. And I know that's preposterous. But because I've been conditioned to it doesn't make it right, or valid. That's what I'm trying to say. So whatever kind of behavior people engage in, related to whatever activity of the future, might be interesting, and certainly different, but it's very hard to say, "this is the way you do that, and this isn't the way you do it". That's why I mentioned at other sessions the handbook on sex is preposterous, because it's about that culture, and that subculture's views regarding sex. And if sex is conditioning, how can there be appropriateness? In other words, how can you talk about stimulating areas of the body, when if a frog crawled in your pussy, and moved around, you become repelled. You know what I mean.."my god how disgusting". You just don't sit back and say "alright, that's the stimulating area" and the frog hops around in there, and you say "gee terrific", if they don't look if it's a guy's finger or a frog. It's a series of sensations isn't it? But we're not that rational nor logical. Ok, now suppose I wanted some girl to get down on me, and I designed some piece of equipment that does that. And I'm sitting there, and he says "but it's not a girl", and I can't tell the difference. I would be in an institution. So the idea is, some structures always set down a procedure. And all of us look at that procedure, before we do a god damn thing... "now grab a hand full of tit, then stroke the hair, touch the left breast..." it's so fucking synthetic, you know what I mean? It is synthetic, like everything else is in the culture. I don't know what right or wrong, or, good or bad, is or anything of the kind. However, if I had such patterns as that, I certainly wouldn't go around announcing it, because what would happen is... society doesn't say "how interesting, a variable, new systems...". Instead, it says, "let me tell you about that guy.." But they don't tell you about what the guy said, they just tell you about the kind of deviation. Unfortunately, I'm straight and normal, Unfortunately, because I'm prejudice and bigoted. And when I think that there are patterns, that people will explore in the future. But they won't say, "this is right". They'll say, "hey, I tried something very interesting, and it worked for me". And then people try it, and they say, "Jeez it doesn't work for me", then they find a person it works for and it works for them. But the idea of writing a book.."no, no. yes, yes" ..thinking that your patterns are the only one. There was a time when the land owner of the village, and the people in it, would have to have sexual relations with the first girl who's going to get married in that village to try her out. And that was the normal thing. You brought your daughter to the chief and he screwed her and then you went off and she got married and the guy he got second chance, you see. Now, that was the normal procedure. It'd be shocking to go to bed with your wife, without having the chief of the village do it. Shocking for a lot of people. Now what about all our conventional habits of thought? Now what kind of a file system are you going to build? The conventional habits of thought lead us into this trap. And the trap is, that we think or react along the lines that we've been brought up in. And even if we try to listen to new values, it goes into the filing system, and it's sorted out, automatically, like this system here, where they have a channel here ...they have a bunch of balls that roll down of different sizes. And then they have a wheel here with different size holes in it, and as the balls come through one at a time, it seems that if you just want the larger balls, or the smallest ball, in the system filtered out, you have to design a special tracking channel, you ever see the thing that sorts quarters and dimes into the special slot? You can design equipment like that that sorts things out. Well the human brain has rigid holes, and as things come rolling in, it sorts them out in accordance with established order, not according to appropriateness. Not scientific. Now lets try...they use the word scientific, meaning in some instances... some people use the definition of science as, "the methodology of determining the next most probable". Who's determining the next most probable? Next most probable to what? Next most probable what? It's vague as metaphysics. The methodology of determining the next most probable might mean this. In your head, that a building, that would be acceptable in Washington for the capitol, might look like this. That may be the next most probable building for the capitol, but it's not the most probable building to execute the office of government. It's an inefficient structure for that. So, in trying to be scientific is almost senseless. What you can do, is seek out tools for inquiry. If you seek out tools for inquiry, it runs something like this. It runs in this manner. If a person is trying to get upstairs, and they hit the middle of the step, then they overstep on the corner, and slip back... and you comment, and you say, "Jesus Christ! You clumsy oaf, I mean, don't you know how to go up stairs?" That is what we call noise, pure noise, because there is no information. The person may have damaged vision, they may not see, their parallax may be off, they may see the steps distorted. You don't know anything about that. So our immediate comment is, "You're full of shit, you jerk, how you going to get up the steps that way". And if you associate with normal people, their language is like that constantly. "Lemme tell you what he did the other day..." What am I doing that for? If he did something inappropriate the other day, if you try to get a dollar bill in a coin machine in order to get a gum ball, I would say, he's learned in some other area, or else he looks at that gum ball machine differently than I do. Or there's what we call "less appropriate action", to get the gum ball out. Now the next thing is to inquire into the man and you find out that half his brain has been eaten away. And then you know. Or else his eyes are damaged, or else he's not of this culture. Comes from another culture but he's dressed to look like one of us. We don't do that. We come at people. We say "I don't like Bill. I like George. I don't know what it is. That's the way it is". George is a likable person. How can George be a likable person? You can only say that you like George. You can say that you like Al. And she says, "My God, I wouldn't dance with that guy, he steps on my toes all the time.", but it has nothing to do with anything. Any time you discuss people, you're wasting your time. Any time you discuss the conduct of people with a value, you're wasting your time. If you want to get along with people, don't discuss anything personal. If you say, "Do you want to go eat tonight?" You say, "What kind of food do you prefer?" He says, "Fish, the Lobster House." I say, "Well, I myself do not enjoy seafoods, I'll see you after the Lobster House, at the movie theater", or whichever place we agree to go. Now if he gets up and says, "Aahhh, you're a Goddamn kill joy, you never want to go where I want to go." Now, this is a question that came from values. It's like a Jap walking over, and Richard is speaking to him in English, and goes, "Jaba jaba jaba, why don't you say something that makes sense?" And that's what happens when we talk about human systems. Human systems are so far afield at their best, they are incorrect. Human systems that are ordered and right, are wrong. There's nothing that a human can say that makes any sense. It's always cultural reflection. It's a big fat mirror. You throw a pingpong ball at it, and it bounces off. You go to Africa, and a guy's name is Mombooza. There are ten million others. There is a guy named John, in this country and there are eight billion John's. And if you attempt to call the guy Z44, they're shocked. Like a million Bill's. And if you call a guy Z44, I told you, the man interested in music, art, poetry, whatever the hell it is. But Euripides Snead doesn't mean anything. Except in this sense. That if you take people, and say your father was a blacksmith, they call you Smith. Mr. Smith, it was simple for them. And when your son came he was Smithson. And that's what it's all about. You were Ms. Baker because you were married to a baker. I'd rather be Z44. People forgot that down the line. How can you hold hands and say "I love you Z44"? How can you say "I'm in love with Carolyn"? What's Carolyn? Who the hell knows what it is. It could be a fish from some particular island, years ago. We don't know where the word came from. If you go back in look up in a thesaurus, before that time, it may have been something else because dialects change. I'm sure many people are named bullshit. I'm sure. We've forgotten that. Are you familiar with the Irish fucking potatoes? You know what I mean, do you? They used to take a stick and push it in the ground to make a hole, then put the potato in. Called fucking, had nothing to do with sex. And then they pulled the stick out and they saw the hole, some association was made, then it became a bad word. Suppose I go around and I say "Ibba zibba". And he says "what does that mean?" "It means licking a gnat's asshole". Says "that's impossible, and a terrible thing". After I tell him what it means, then I can be arrested. If I say in Turkish on the air "fuck everybody in this community" I'm only going to get letters from the Turks. So the idea of a bad word is a word's been established as bad. Therefore, if there are no bad words and no good words there can't be any good or bad conduct. There can only be patterns of behavior that are less useful to a given task. If you wanted to draw and you turn the pencil upside down.... He says "you simple idiot, turn it around the other way". Instead of saying that you take the pencil, then go like that... and go like that...and you hand it to him and... Then you put him in an institution and go to work on him. But if he doesn't get it by this you don't need to say "you asshole, how do you expect a hard head person to write on a board like that.." All that's not necessary. And so most of your conversation's not necessary. The man invents the telephone; and somebody picks it up and calls somebody in the Philippines and says "how's your sister doing?" It's not a scientific invention nor is it social achievement by definition. Nothing is scientific. Because here you've got a bunch of chemists trying to lick cancer. And if they do lick the cancer then you might get a nuclear war which would wipe out everyone. The idea is that if this man is head of the department that wants to use nuclear weapons and he has cancer, if you treat him and he's well you may get nuclear war four years sooner. And the idea of treating anybody is senseless unless you know what kind of entity they are. There are a lot of people that want to do good. And their definition of good, is when a guy walks in a hospital like that, and he walks out like that. Then he goes around beating up Jews, Negroes, and Swedes. So we have no yardstick for good, or bad. Since there's no validity in being prejudice, since science has no attitudes; if you find out that the great majority of Negroes, due to their poverty and misery, steal and lie. and you keep your kids away from Negro kids that are brought up to that value system, you're doing the operant thing. But if you had a school where the kids were a batch of very high IQ... doctor, lawyer's sons... and here you got a bunch of coal miners who don't have a library, nothing else. And fifty of their kids go to school, your kids are exposed to a lower grade environment. So the ethics of putting people together may be constitutionally correct but it's socially damaging. Now I'm not talking about the validity of integrated school. I'm talking about this kind of thing. If you have a bunch of kids that have been given value systems that are difficult to live with then a school must be designed with the best in behavioral engineering to accelerate their associative systems. And that would be for everyone. But you don't mix people together. If he (John) is 17 years old, he has the value system of a 9 year old, he has the value system of a 63 year old person; well read. Putting them together is damaging. It's beneficial to this person, but this person becomes antagonistic, because he doesn't look forward to this person like, "My God, you have a fantastic set of ideas, you enhance my being". He doesn't say that. He gets mad at John, and trips him on the way out, because he doesn't have the tools. So in order to talk about science, science can't be concerned with integration. That's a value judgment has to do with morality, which has to do with nothing in particular. So the concepts of morality, in other words, if you were screwing your wife in front of an open window with the lights on, is the person that accused you of doing that a peeping tom? You say, "well, if you have the window shade up, why'd you have it up?" "Well you didn't have to look." What's a peeping tom? Suppose I said that anybody that looks at the state of Florida which is shaped like the devil's pecker, is a sin. And so.....and I put him in jail. Your social and moral codes are absurd. There's nothing, like I said before, no standards. Now a scientist, you get a journal of science. A journal of science would have in it pages which are anti-science which say things like this. These psychiatrist claim that "if you remove 4 feet of the intestines it will decrease mental disorders" they've been doing this for years in this country. There's no fat book on the errors and stupidity of medicine. You can't buy it. It exists. Thousands of interesting cases. Of the orgone therapy, you know that shit? They put you in a telephone booth and the orgone came in and.... and all kinds of nonsensical shit. You can write a book... some early doctors, they developed the forceps. But they wouldn't let it get out into medicine, they just kept it in their family. So that enhanced their family's ability to operate. They wouldn't let any other medics have it. And, is that scientific? If you want to earn a living. If your end goal is to make more money than anybody else; it's scientific. But he says, "Yeah, but you should give it to everybody". Then why doesn't NBC have a guy get up and say, "This is the best toothpaste in the world." Another guy, "You're full of shit, this is the better toothpaste." Another guy gets up and says, "no toothpaste is any good because we haven't found any evidence." Now, no broadcasting studio is scientific. No scientific conference is scientific. Scientific would mean, a wide range of inquiry. And so we don't have that yet. If anything were scientific, it wouldn't change. If this is a very advanced design, if you use that word. Advanced to what? A balloon? It's like designing a spoon called an economy spoon for fat people. It's got a small hole in it and when you pick up soup some of it leaks out. The whole idea...what a lot of science is about today. A lot of science is about nothing in particular. Preserving some aspects of this culture. Nobody seems to want to study the past, except people who are hung up in that area. The only thing you want to know about the past is roughly how we came to be what we are. Neither good nor bad. Roughly how primitive organisms evolved, or I wouldn't say evolved...changed. Evolved is hard to say because in the next ten years or so we'll know whether man is evolving or going downhill. We don't know what kind of society we're going to have, because when we get a mass trend of youngsters using drugs, and then a mass trend toward metaphysics, then a certain trend toward atheism, and logic, and functionalism. Now, functionalism is generated by scarcity. It's functional to take a big pot, and turn it into soup for a lot of people. If you don't have enough coal to make hundreds of fires, you put all the stuff in a large pot, and you can feed more people. So functionalism would be a product of scarcity. In other words, in order to feed people you've got to dehydrate food, instead of sending canned goods to India, you take all that stuff, dehydrate it, and put it in small packages. Then you can send a 9 year supply in a package, rather than lots of cans, and water, and all that sort of crap. Also, if you do send that to India, what are the consequences? Ultimately they'll breed, and spread, and then greater starvation will occur. Is it scientific to develop an airplane with no airport where it can land? What is scientific? Is it scientific to give your kid an education to become a lawyer, which to me is a socially offensive person, if you make your kid an evil structure... I'll give you an idea legally: I worked on some kind of inventions, and my patent attorney says, "Since the guy didn't follow through on the contract, don't divulge the nature of your invention, how it works, because then it falls to the public domain". And my lawyer says "if you don't divulge that we're gonna lose the case... Goddamn it, I'm going to step out.." So, the way that lawyers work, I have no idea, utterly senseless. But they have a book, and they work according to that book. A patent attorney has another book, and he works according to that. And if the judge is not familiar with the patent attorney's book, he doesn't know, and you fall in the wrong. So you're living in a society that is also... an attorney will say, "What i want to know is, did you say this on February 1st or not? Yes or no?" They don't call for shades of grey, possible other meanings. They're not interested in getting ideas across. Then they become criminally offensive. Well, you can't get up, and accuse a lawyer of being criminally offensive, because the judge has to sit down and say, "How do you mean that?" He's got a lot of other cases in line, he's got a big fat book. A, B, C, D. He operates according to that robotic procedure. Therefore, I'm trying to say that to be scientific is extremely difficult, but to be more appropriate, to a given end. Like I said, let me show you what scientific would mean by definition. I mentioned some years ago that Italians committed more crimes in New York City than anyone else, I'm talking about 35 years ago, and the mayor at the time wanted to ship all the Italians to New Jersey, because then he said there'd be very little crime in New York. He's right; it's scientific. But it's rough on Jersey. And it's rough on social change. It's not really....it's dealing with the problem in New York. Now, is the mayor of New York responsible for the problems of New York? Or responsible for the problems of America? Is he scientific then to ship all the Italians out? See? The whole idea of scientific becomes ridiculous, if you know what I'm talking about. Anybody have any difficulty there? Is it scientific then for a doctor, who's a member of the medical arts, sometimes calls them scientific. I understand that certain types of physical disorders can cost up to a thousand dollars a day. Do you know what the physical disorders are? Burns, right. Now, is that scientific? Take a guy that doesn't earn very much and tab him for 1000 dollars a day? For nine months? What do you mean by scientific? Is it scientific to work all your life and save up 20 thousand dollars...some people do..or 30. And then you get cancer in the last 3 months then you owe money? Used all your savings. What is scientific? How's a scientist scientific in the lab and then he goes out and he votes? He says "what can I do that was wrong?" He says "you behaved un-scientifically. You voted for a man 'cause you like him. You didn't study the qualifications of the person so you violated the scientific method", and you rip it up. He says, "You mean I can't practice in this town?" "That's right, you claim to be scientific. You didn't say 'I was a scientist in the field of glass technology. Other than that I'm an idiot.'" And this man is a scientist that deals with plastics, this man is an ophthalmologist and he deals with diseases of the eyeball... And he says, if he's not a scientist, he's scientific up to a point in a given area. So stop thinking about people being scientists. Some people are scientists, and they go to church. Some people are scientific in certain areas, and degenerative in other areas. They have habits of thought that are detrimental to their well being, and so nobody draws any of those lines. Remember when I said that if an eye surgeon is very fastidious, and he's working on re-suturing a delicate portion of the eye; micro-surgery, and he didn't like a tie that he made and he re-did it. And he did a beautiful job. Fastidious man. That's the kind of eye surgeon I want. He would be by standard definition a compulsive person. "Why does he have to take the stitch out, it's good enough". I want a compulsive person. Compulsive on watches, very delicate, gotta be just right, the gears have to move, just well. "AAhhhh, it's alright, it's adequate, let it go..." I want that kind of compulsive person when they do surgery on me. I want them to watch everything, I like that. There's certain areas we got no use for. And if I don't like you, you have habits, and I call you compulsive. He reads the Drama Weekly, he gets Variety, always Stage and Screen. Always in that. And you are a compulsive if you are always getting Camera Journal, the Photographic Journal, Book of Lenses. You're a fuckin' neurotic! Anybody that fits into any category that's socially acceptable; anybody that studies medicine has to be some kind of mental case. Because there's a lot of things in the world that are interesting. Not only medicine. Botany. Astronomy. Geology. How can you stop at medicine? How can a man stop at law. And so the scientific attitude does not exist. All that does exist, is degrees of appropriateness in different areas. OK, now we're talking about generating a scientific attitude. Try this as a sample and just see how difficult it is. Before you got here, Richard, I talked about superimposing stereoscopic pictures in the opposite direction, the right eye picture on the left. And what happens if the guy points the hand inverts itself like looking in a hollow arm with the point running the wrong way. A face goes in instead of out, it goes in like a mold. And that kind of idea, of an inverted person, like if a person walks into the background they get, they walk into the background in the stereoscopy, and the smaller guy is up front. It's is very interesting. It inverts itself. As the train goes down the track, it's getting smaller but coming forward, you know what I mean? If you ran a movie on reverse, now that's strange. And if you get into the habit of tossing ideas like that around that are strange and far out, it generates a wider set of values, regarding a wider arrangement of possibilities. Alright if we're going to have to toss our ideas around and examine human behavior.. it's very hard for an eskimo... I would say it's impossible..for an eskimo that doesn't read anything else or leave that igloo much except on his conventional hunts to sit down and imagine a new kind of world. When he goes like that; it's either gigantic igloos that don't leak, lots of polar bears 9 feet high. Or anything like that... but he cannot imagine titanium, you know what I mean? He can't imagine a heart pacer, the eskimo. A lot of people think that there are a lot of things in your head, that can be brought out if you concentrate. Nothing in your head can be brought out, that isn't put in. And therefore emptying a garbage can that has nothing in it gives nothing. And so, if you run the gamut of your thoughts, whatever that means, your collection of associative bits, or your set, you can only get out a combination of what's in, and a recombination of occurrences that happen in what they call thinking, when you tie together lots of events that are similar. Now the reason for cross-associative memory, a lot of people don't know why it occurs. They know that in robots, the robot will record something. The robot will see a tree, and record that. Then the robot will feel rain falling on it, and record that. And after it's recorded all of these things, what robots don't do is, "Hey you know that rain is not unlike a stream of water and not unlike a hose and not unlike a stone crashing through a barrel, there's a little bit of similarity in the patterns. And water is not unlike blood only it's clear." See robots don't do that. They don't cross-associate. Now this is what scientists have difficulty with. In computer design they can't understand what the process is in the brain that causes that cross association. Robots will always polish things, if you've got a robot that polishes things, and there's a war that wipes out the people of the earth it will go right on polishing things. You know what I mean? Whereas a robot... the Japanese... after the war is lost they still save things that have no more value because of their habits. Now if you're going to build a robot, that's going to do what you call creative thinking, original thinking, change itself, ask questions that it's never asked before, what has to be defined is the mechanisms of associative memory, just why it does that, or how it is that the brain does that. Does anybody want to venture a guess, Roughly, just a rough what you would call an imaginative guess, of why robots collect linear bits and don't cross associate? It is not programmed to cross associate. That's a very good tight description. Now what is, what type of program might induce cross-association? Just guess, any wild statement. Right, who said that? Similarities, very good, right. Right. OK, so here you have it. Here you have a thing and a child says "that's a cross" and if you do this, the child says "it looks like the letter T" or when you get closer says "no it's a cross". Then if you do this to a religious person, it might be a cross or an airplane is a hell of a lot like a cross. Now all things, are something like something else, which I said yesterday. I said there's nothing like the writers talk about... so hideous that it was beyond description. It's got to look like a frog or an alligator or an eel or something; or an octopus. But there's nothing beyond description. "He looked so strange, and so hideous that there are no words. His eyes were something, I'd rather not say." What were they? Were they like, uh, an infected asshole? Did they look like bird shit thrown against a fan? It's got to look like something. Nothing is beyond description, but writers make their money in running through vague areas, because people say it's good, it generates imagination, I can sit back and picture my own hideous creature, and that's stimulating. sometimes I read something, in the early days I used to read it and I'd become fascinated. Then I'd meet the author and I'd say "what do you mean?" and he'd go "I don't know". He was a dope, see. He just took words..hideous, strange, cities that were self-contained and.."what did they look like?" Then he'd draw the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. In other words there was no back up, it was just... they had a word Thesaurus..for city they had another word they stick'em in there, but the guy doesn't know what the hell he's writing about. And there's very few people that really know what the hell they're talking about. And so, since you have that problem in the world, you're bound to have problems with people. The whole idea of sitting down, solving problems with people is ridiculous. You can't work things out. There's nothing to work out. If you can work on physical referential things, you can make a glass that's harder, stronger, flexible, twistable. But you can't walk over to a person and say, "You are too rigid" and the person says, "Oh yeah? Want to fight?" You know, unless they come over to you and say, "What do you feel is inappropriate in my values, and set, and ideas?" Real genuine inquiry. But if they come over to you and say, "Do you really think that there's anything wrong with my personality?" they're telling you something else, you have to try to read that correctly. So what we are really interested in doing, is defining what kind of an organism man is, and other forms of life. And since patterns are filed in similar areas, what kind of instrument says, "What would this computer have to have to say that this is an airplane, and this is a cross and this is a modification of the letter T somewhere between a cross, 2% or 3% or 9%." What kind of quality would it have to have to be able to make the next decision? Alright use the word judgment. When is this thing here, when is this computer saying "that's an airplane, and that... is a bird" See? The computer has to be able to do what? What does a computer have to have? What kind of referent, give more detail. What? OK, it has to discriminate linear description of changes in a line. It has to follow the line of the system. It has to scan, zzzzzzz, when it comes into an unusual thing like that, does it classify that as a bird or does it look for a fanned area here? Then it looks for a fanned area. But in the early days the Germans build an airplane called the Taube that looked like this, it had a birds head on it and it had wings like this. Now a machine looking at a top view of a Taube, that type of airplane, it's going to then get closer and look for feathery-ness. And then if it looks for feathery-ness it's going to look for other characteristics, sound reflected from it. So for a machine to make what you'd call "appropriate decisions", it has to have many tools of inquiry. Because if I stuffed a dog and put it in my lab in the back, and it's right at the door, the minute you open the door the tape recording AAAHHHHHH, you know. Most people will not sit around and say, "Is it really a dog?" They usually move out. Now, what you have to do...is it really a dog? Meaning are there any other things other than the appearance? Suppose the head turned slightly and the mouth changed it's angle and there's a deep guttural sound and then a growl. That would be enough to cause most people to leave the area. Or spray something on it, see what I mean? But anyway, that would generate the behavior that I want. Now, a description of that. John says he ran away because there was a dog barking at him. And the truth is that John ran away. That's all. Whether there was a dog barking at him or not. He says, "God dammit, I tell you there was a dog barking" That's why the semanticist says "it seems to me there was a dog". You know was there or wasn't there a dog? You say to a lawyer "here, take this pen" and he grabs it and there's nothing there. He says "was there or wasn't there a pen?" Could have been a virtual image. But since science is so strange today, the things it can do. And if you create an event, lets say a holographic event of a sweet old lady crossing the street and hit by a Mack truck... holographic. And three witnesses claim that the old lady disappeared. What are the three witnesses claiming? When science becomes so sophisticated as to take the concept called validity and bend it, so that the person that seems to be a tele-tactile image, that coughs and gets some saliva on you, is not really there. What happens to science when the movies become three dimensional, olfactory and tele-tactile? What happens to description? I'm not talking about an illusion in your head where you're piping things in. Where you're generating the condition out there. The whole idea is when you turn to a person and say "what happened?", you always think they can tell you what happened. That's why the semanticist that says "it seems to me, as far as I know". Now you can't walk around through life and a girl says "do you really love me?" "Well it seems to me..." then she says "Well get lost, do you or don't you?" You live in a legal world, you know, ON or OFF, and there's nothing in between. So "yes I love many things about you". "All the things about me?" "Well No" "Um huuuum, just as I thought, you're not getting your food tonight". The whole Goddamn thing, is so preposterous in dealing with humans that the agency of psychiatry, the fact that it would be set up is preposterous. Because they must be set up in the context of a given civilization. Psychiatrists don't have an end goal; like overall social design to end their problem and phase themselves out. Like the guy that designed the tractors that plow the fields are people that try to phase out the guy and the mule. You know, and the bull. Try to phase it out. So the people that work hard on the future always work hard to phase themselves out. Now if a person says "what the hell are you working to phase yourself out for?" You're not trying to phase yourself out, you're trying to phase out a certain line of work that you do. All you want is the income, you don't want to work. But a lot of people get conditioned to enjoy the work because they get the income, and they work because they think they like to work. And if anybody likes to work it just means that you become victimized...brainwashed is the term. Pre-structured to behave in a certain way that society would gain, that is the society that you live in. Therefore, a smart person tries not to work at all. They try to do what they like to do. They try to get out of anything that is uncomfortable. In other words, if I ran the church I might condition the nuns to wipe my ass, because I don't like to wipe my ass. And that's what the nuns were for. In the early days the boys lived well. And they used to scrub the floors of the churches and sing hymns and you're the wife of christ and you march down there... free service. And you get a hell of a lot of free service, and a lot of people doing all kinds of things, they make the beds, and they don't create any havoc, they're quiet so you can read. They work out a system, They work out a system; the system is criminally insane, including the guys on top that work it out. So the whole idea of a society judging, and trying to evaluate, and place things together without an end goal is like a man building a bridge to nowhere. "Jeez you did a good job, put nine stainless steel screws in there, and all that" and the bridge doesn't go anywhere. Well what is this all about? What is this venture society all about? What is science all about since it doesn't have pre-stated goals? They're short term goals. You build a factory, put up a smoke stack, and then it starts belching shit into the rivers and all that and the plant was build by engineers. Or was it built by criminals? Ok. So much then for the scientific attitude and so much for trying to discuss things with human beings. The best thing you can do with people, is show them a new paper that's difficult to tear and say, "this has been developed and it's good for this or that purpose" But as far as talking about values and people you like or dislike, those are always troublesome subjects. Because the people you like I may not like. You may like the guy from India. You know what I mean? I may not like the guy, I don't know, see? So when you sit down and say, "Well you've got the wrong idea about that person" because your talking about a pre-set attitude. Now you tell me..this isn't true...that he hates anybody with an Indian dialect. Because if you had a bad experience with a person, with a negro accent. If a guy came over and he stabbed your mother and your wife and for 2 dollars you had in your purse, and then clobbered you and dislocated your shoulder and didn't bat an eye and ran off and the other negroes with him were laughing, you're going to have an attitude about negroes. Or Philipinos, or anybody, or a white man. And the judge says, or the humanist says "what's a human?" The humanist says you got to have a certain attitude. "These are people, they're human beings". But you notice that the humanist doesn't live that way himself, he can't afford it. Well the whole idea then about being a humanist is preposterous. Because what the humanist has to know, is that all people can be brought up to have genuine concern for all other people. Until that day it would be dangerous and erroneous. to rip the locks off your door and pick up any hitch-hiker. Because every time you pick up a hitch-hiker you might get your throat cut. So why take the chance? Says "well, not everybody's gonna hurt you.." Do you want to take that chance? There's a lot of sick people out there.. So a lot of people pass by hitch-hikers He never passes by a hitch hiker, he always picks them up, says "they're a human being on the road, wants to live". Now, when he picks them up and says "aaah, you're a human being, out on the road, you want to live", and they guy says "I'm a member of the American Nazi Party". "Get out of my car!" How do you know who you're picking up? I'm not suggesting that you do or don't pick up anybody. I'm just saying, that since you don't have any end goals, that there's no way to know what progress means. If you don't have something that you're headed for, it's pretty hard to set a value on something. Now if you say "well I just want to scan and learn many things and perhaps the end product of all that might be some direction", that's all right too; but, if you think in terms of getting wiser or becoming right or learning to make the correct decisions, you're offbeat. It's all that you're dealing with is degrees of appropriateness. Any questions about that? Ok, I'll just try to close or sum it up with something like this. If you land in a system that's different than that which you know, You can only measure that system with what you know. That's why we can never make a correct decision. When a guy lands on a planet he wants to know how hard the rock is. Hard in relation to what? His own head. Somebody had a foot that was 12 inches long and the whole system of scales was developed on that. So we talk about texture, and remember in closing I just want to say that, the thing that I've always said, if a flea lands on water he says it's hard and viscous and an elephant says it's soft. Very fluidy. And the flea says "no, it's a thick viscous substance that I and my family walk on and when I read your Bible about Jesus walking on water, I've never known a flea that couldn't". In other words, these people speak the truth. These things speak the truth and the truth is that there's no truth. There can be no truth. And the truth seeker has to be an idiot, because he wants to get down to the basics as though there were seven basic systems. Well, the human has six senses, y'know? Or he has four senses. He has a sense of touch, he has a sense of smell, a sense of sight. Then he has a topographical sense of the position of things in a room. He has a spatial sense in relation with various elevations. He has an inverted sense. He can also remember whether he had any hot coffee, an internal sense. Procrea-ceptive, extra-ceptive sense. He has a sense of the position of his fingers behind his back. when they are put in that position, and then say restructered, and then assumed again. They have thousands of variations of combinations. And the people that try to simplify things, there are the "seven basic laws of wisdom", you always see books like that. It makes me sick. When you think of the "three roads to cosmic consciousness". You know what I mean? And in that kind of cat shit, the basic things you look for in a particular thing; there can be some clues to finding some of the answers. But not the seven basic laws of wisdom. Whenever you see that shit scratch it. Alright. Yes? (audience:) You say for the scientific method to be purely scientific it can't have a rigid goal, is that what you said? (Jacque:) You can't be a human being and you can't have a set or a frame of reference. (Audience:) There's no such thing as a scientific method? (Jacque:) Right, exactly. A: But then you said though, J:There are degrees of appropriateness. A: ...about the bridge to nowhere? That we have to have a goal? What is...it seems contradictory. (Jacque:) Yes. If you have a goal. Something you want over here. Your behavior is moving generally toward that goal or some degree of deviation. The motivation is the goal. The deviation is the background that interferes with your direction of the goal; your economics... don't have enough money to get what you want, you know what I mean? Or you don't have the clothing to visit for an appointment that's important to you. A: This has nothing to do with the scientific method? J: Well what happens is.... scientific method is if you want people to produce, give them a goal. ??? I would say that the guy working in a lab real fastidious... they say "what are you working on" he says "I wish I knew". A: How can they work for cancer if they're not quite sure what they do? J: That's right, they don't know what they're working on. A: They should. But how can they? I thought you said... J: Another guy comes up to me and says "I'm interested in behavioral problems, I'm interested in studying human behavior". I always say "well, what do you mean by human behavior?" He says "well something about the will of a person, or how they feel about things." Well suppose they don't feel any way about things, suppose their feelings are generated by society? Suppose they're generated by... you drink a certain fluid and the tongue reacts, or you burn your... suppose your feelings are ACTED UPON rather than your own feelings. Suppose they're pre-structured. You know, like the Oriental behaves a certain way because he's instructed to do that. Now are you concerned about the range of behavior that can be inflicted on man? I use the term inflicted, or infected. The man can be infected to certain types of behavior; love, jealousy, whatever. He's infected by society. Contagious disease lands on you and you get the itch. People land on you, and you hate jews, negroes, swedes, or whatever. You get infected by values. But if you look for the source of infection, like the stupidity of medicine in an aspect, where they dissected Einstein's brain once, to see if they can find something special, like the neurons clad in stainless steel, running a straight path.. to see if there's a difference. Now, the stupid brain has just as many associations, as a well ordered brain, and they don't look crazy. The associative system of a disoriented person doesn't look like that. It's just as linear. A fascist hates jews, negroes, swedes in a beautiful linear fashion. And when you look at Einstein's brain they're not ordered and structured beautifully. Just like the pope's brain. It's just the quality of associations are different. So they'd always wanted to know whether an intelligent mind...what it's like. As though intelligence had a quality left behind in the cells. Now, let me say this, if somebody says to you "you just won this amount of money and you now have all these problems solved"... if you don't jump for joy, the person doesn't understand you. They've got people on television that jump for joy when they win a prize. But if you just said "I did?" and stuck out your hand and took the prize and walked off, the guy would be very disappointed, it would cause everybody to crack up. Or they may think you're a shill. But the whole idea of a certain type of behavior is expected of you. And we feel guilty and ashamed if we don't behave according to pattern. How come they succeeded then in making us cops over ourselves? We are POLICEMAN that go around arresting ourselves everyday. "I shouldn't have screwed around with his wife! I committed an evil thing!" and I'm arresting myself. And I'm weeping, and I'm confessing. But I enjoy doing it, see? The whole confusion of things is they made policeman of you! Ok, any questions?