Hamlet's Halo -- a One-Act Play on Words

SCENE: Wittenberg. A chair before a desk in the office of R. Buckminster Fuller. The young Prince Hamlet confides in his professor.

BUCKY. Ignorant of the regenerative significance of synergy, man is vulnerable to de-generative feed-back consequences in his comprehensive determinations.

Universe is the comprehensive integral-aggregate system embracing all the separate integral-aggregate systems of all men's consciously apprehended and communicated experiences.

The total of experiences is integrally synergetic. Universe is the comprehensive a priori synergetic integral.

HAMLET. O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.

BUCKY. All experiences are finitely furnished with differentiated cognitions, recognitions and comprehensions.

Universe is finite because it is the sum total of finitely furnished experiences.

HAMLET.There are more things in heaven and earth, Professor,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

BUCKY. The word con-sider-ation comes from sidus, the Latin for star, the focal point of an as yet nondifferentiated concentration of events--ergo, con-sider-able, or con-stellar patterning, means an exploratory grouping of "stars" or complex idea entities that seem to man's limited tuneability to stand out together: Universe expanding through progressively differentiating considerations.

HAMLET. Indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

BUCKY.Generalized systematic conceptuality's omni-directional relationships are only angularly configured and are independent of size or dimension. No man has ever "seen" outside himself. His brain is a multi-frequency (four sensory ranges) scanning (TV) integrator, continually operating in co-ordination with a multitude of memory (kinescope taped) TV scanners.

Thinking is the self-disciplined process of preoccupied consideration of special-case sets of feed-back answers selected out of the multitude of high frequency alternating trans-ceiver brain traffic.

Thinking consists then of a self-disciplined deferment of conscious consideration of any incoming information traffic other than that which is lucidly relevant to the experience intuited quest for comprehension of the significance of the emergent pattern under immediate priority of consideration.

HAMLET. Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

BUCKY. Whereas all metaphysical phenomena were shuntingly disposed by the Einsteinian physicists into a then supposedly infinite universe's ephemeralization; it now comes as a surprise result of our finite-universe hypotheses that the metaphysical is as strictly definitive as the physical. And as the metaphysical embraces intellection, we may say that the nonsimultaneous all-knowledge (omniscience, or wisdom) gained by all men out of all-experience (universe) is comprehensive by a discreet margin of two to all-energy (omnipotence) whose measure omniscience took.

BUCKY.There is a question-asking possibility that omniscience may be transcendental in velocity to the definitive physical speed of energy omnipotence. The synergetic anticipatory capabilities of intellect (in respect to conceptual formulations of evolutionary transforming potentials of universe and the anticipatory stratagems evolved by intellect to test such hypotheses) imply the possibility of a velocity transcendence of omniscient functioning over omnipotence functioning which could mean an intellectually regenerated evolutionary extension of universe in generalized synergetical integrity. Intellect's comprehensive anticipatory objectivities indicates a speed of functioning transcendental to physical events. Intellect may be "creating" finitely extending and re-fining universe as it asks each next good question.

Exeunt.

Professor Fuller speaks from "Omnidirectional Halo" as published in No More Secondhand God and other writings
by R. Buckminster Fuller (1971)

Bucky Fuller's Requirements for a Dwelling Advantage

File under features no home should be without:

Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage

III. A. Provision of ready mechanical means, complementing or implementing, all development requirements of the individual's potential growth phenomena--allowing the facile, scientifically efficient, no-energy-or-time-loss--spontaneous development of self-disciplined education, by means of

1. Conning*, i.e., selectively stimulated awareness of the momentary interactions of universal progressions accomplished by means of facile reference to vital data on
• history
• news
• forecasts

calls for a conning facility combining book and periodical library, radio, television facilities, systematically arranged incoming reports on
1. current supply and demand conditions
2. current dynamic conditions -- weather -- earthquakes--latest scientific research findings
3. social dynamics-surfacing of commonweal problems of comprehensive readjustment to new potential and concomitant obsolescense factors
4. latest technical reference in
   • texts
   • movie documentation
   • television university (soon evoluting to increasing importance and reliability as the Autonomous Dwelling Facility becomes widely available) (52)

from No More Secondhand God and other writings
by R. Buckminster Fuller (1971)

While this list may well describe the home of the later 21st Century, it probably best describes a research center in the first decade of that century.

* Bucky takes his definition for conning from his days in the Naval War College, meaning to examine or study, but also to steer a ship. :dj

Time Consciousness and the Role of Dominant Myths

Having been a fan of both Brian Eno (see "Stars: the Consciousness of Cool," below) and Stewart Brand since the '70s, I was surprised to learn that the two had come together in the '90s, collaborating on the project described in Brand's book of the same name: The Clock of the Long Now.

Here we find Eno master of time as well as space. Brand credits Eno with coining "the long now," which, says Eno, extends "our concept of the present in both directions, making the present longer" (29). Then Brand and Eno take the long now into the realm of myth, for The Clock of the Long Now, with its associated 10,000-Year Library,

aims for the mythic depth to become, as Brian Eno puts it, "one of those system-level ideas which sets in motion all sorts of behavior without ever having to be referred to directly again. This is what dominant myths do: they make some sorts of behavior ring with recognition and familiarity and value and a sense of goodness, and thus lay deep templates for social cohesion about what would otherwise be very hard-to-discuss topics." (49)

Or as James P. Carse would say in Finite and Infinite Games:

• “We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.”
• “Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.”
• “Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.”

Just imagine what kind of civilization might arise from the myth of a long now...