Marriage is For Life

 So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on? 

It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. 

It wouldn’t want to kill us. 

But what it might do is organize us more efficiently.

— Grant Morrison

cybernetics (n.)

"theory or study of communication and control," coined 1948 by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), with -ics + Latinized form of Greek kybernetes "steersman" (metaphorically "guide, governor"), from kybernan "to steer or pilot a ship, direct as a pilot," figuratively "to guide, govern," which is of uncertain origin. Beekes agrees that "the word has no cognates" and concludes "Foreign origin is probable." The construction is perhaps based on 1830s French cybernétique "the art of governing."

The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. [Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc.," 1964]

DOCTOR: 

Excuse me. May I ask a question? 

Why did you submit yourself to freezing? 

You don't have to answer that if you don't want to. 


CONTROLLER: 

To Survive. 

Our History Computer has full details of you. 


DOCTOR: 

Oh? How? 


CONTROLLER: 

We know of your intelligence. 


DOCTOR: 

Oh, thank you very much. 

Ah, yes - The lunar surface. 


CONTROLLER: 

Our machinery had stopped 

and our supply of replacements been depleted. 

DOCTOR: 

So that's why you attacked the Moonbase. 


CONTROLLER: 

You had destroyed our first planet 

and we were becoming extinct. 


JAMIE: 

What difference does capturing us make? 

You'll still become extinct. 


CONTROLLER: 

We Will Survive. We Will Survive. 

Now You Will Help Us. 


PARRY: 

What makes you think we're going to help you? 

That murderer doesn't speak for us. 


CONTROLLER: 

You will become the first of a new race of Cybermen. 

You will return to the Earth and control it. 


PARRY: 

Never! Never! 


CONTROLLER: 

Everything we decide is carried out. 

There are no mistakes. 


JAMIE: 

A new race of Cybermen? 

But we're humans. 

We're not like you. 




CONTROLLER: 

You Will Be. 

Architect: 

The Function of The One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting The Prime Program. 

After which, you will be required to select from The Matrix 23 individuals – 16 female, 7 male – to rebuild Zion. 

Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to The Matrix, which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of The Entire Human race.

Neo: 

You won’t let it happen. 

You CAN’T. 

You Need Human Beings to Survive.

Architect: 

There are Levels of Survival 

We are Prepared to Accept.

Sarah Connor : 

[in a stolen car]  

Reese. Why me? Why does it want me? 


Kyle Reese : 

There was a nuclear war. A few years from now, all this, this whole place, everything, it's gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines, Sarah. 


Sarah Connor : 

I don't understand. 


Kyle Reese : 

Defense network computers. 

New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. 

They say it got smart -- a new order of intelligence. 

Then it saw all people as a threat, 

not just the ones on The Other Side. 

Decided our fate in a microsecond: Extermination. 


Sarah Connor : 

Did you see this war? 


Kyle Reese : 

No. I grew up after. 

In the ruins... starving... hiding from H-K's. 


Sarah Connor : 

H-K's? 


Kyle Reese : 

Hunter-Killers. Patrol machines built in automated factories. 

Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal. 


[pulls up his right sleeve, exposing a mark]  


Kyle Reese : 

This is burned in by laser scan. 

Some of us were kept alive... to work... loading bodies. 

The disposal units ran night and day. 

We were that close to going out forever. 

But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. 

He turned it around. 

He brought us back from the brink. 

His name is Connor. John Connor. 

Your son, Sarah... your unborn son. 


Swervin’ back to Brave New World. One other thing I liked about that show was the AI system called Indra which must be a reference to the concept of Indra’s Net.

GM: And as you know the drug in the show is Soma, which is Huxley’s creation. I just figured if Huxley named the drug Soma… if he had predicted AI, which is one thing he didn’t predict, I think he would have stuck with the Sanskrit and called it Indra.

Indra was my notion for explaining a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense in Huxley’s book. Why are there Epsilons? Why does the World State need a labor force? The book is about the consequences of capitalist mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction, because Huxley had moved to Hollywood and he’d seen the consumer society in full flood and witnessed the world of glamorous unreality — the talkies — which was happening. The whole thing is his attempt to deal with the impact of Ford and Hollywood. As I said, the one thing he didn’t think of was AI. So, the question became how could you make sense of a lot of the things he didn’t make sense of? 

And the idea came up of having a computer network that ran on human brains. We have all those neurons and all that capacity there. So instead of having a central server, the computer is a distributed network that runs on the brains of everyone in the World State. That was designed to solve the problem created by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who were both terrified that AI was going to rise up and take over, steal our jobs, and occupy our homes in a kind of immigration nightmare gone sci-fi.

So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on? It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. It wouldn’t want to kill us. But what it might do is organize us more efficiently. So that might explain a lot of the stuff Huxley didn’t bother to deal with.

The network starts to self-organize and it creates this homeostatic caste system, like a hive. It stratifies people and what it gives them in return is happiness. In Brave New World, the ultimate commodity is happiness. There’s no love, no money, but if you could make everyone happy even if they’re up to their necks in shit, then you’ve won. That was the idea. To create a computer network that doesn’t want to kill people. So, the reason why there are Epsilons — the reason people do jobs and manual labor, is because the computer needs its components to be fit and healthy. Rather than mechanize them, with everyone just slobbing out, it needs citizens to be super fit. So, they are always having sex, they are always playing sport, they are always working. They have pointless jobs that encourage them to be fit and healthy. That was the idea. The Indra network solved a lot of problems and I think it was one of the elegant additions to Huxley’s original.

Then who created the network in the story? Who gave birth to the AI?

GM:  Well, that was the original ten Controllers who started the World State. In Huxley’s book, there’s an anthrax pandemic that kills 2/3 of the world population and there’s only a couple of billion or whatever left. And everyone else gets together and forms a world scientific, anti-religious state because the killer plague was largely caused by political and religious conflict. So suddenly the World State arises to ensure that people won’t screw up so badly ever again. In our version, America is the only country that secedes from the World State. In Huxley, the Savage lands is just a Santa Fe reservation, a pueblo culture. 

In this version, the Savage Lands is all of North America. The idea was to imagine America 300 hundred years after the fall. People are sick, and the environment is fucked and there’s been six presidents in the last five months, and it costs three thousand dollars to buy a Mars Bar! America’s decision not to join the World State has brought the country to the brink of ecological, economical, and societal collapse. In this version, I think we got a richer background than even the original.

 

 

Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

Editor's Note: This story, originally published in the July 2000 issue of Scientific American, is being made available due to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species

10 Sec

Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and women,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicist’s style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein’s contributions in their fullness. Indeed, this limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have had little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world.

The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s accomplishments were so many and so diverse that it is useful to distinguish three fields to which he made major contributions: evolutionary biology; the philosophy of science; and the modern zeitgeist. Although I will be focusing on this last domain, for the sake of completeness I will put forth a short overview of his contributions—particularly as they inform his later ideas—to the first two areas.

A Secular View of Life

Darwin founded a new branch of life science, evolutionary biology. Four of his contributions to evolutionary biology are especially important, as they held considerable sway beyond that discipline. The first is the nonconstancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin. Up until 1859, all evolutionary proposals, such as that of naturalist Jean- Baptiste Lamarck, instead endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection that had been in vogue since Aristotle’s concept of Scala Naturae, the chain of being. Darwin further noted that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. Finally, he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was natural selection.

These four insights served as the foundation for Darwin’s founding of a new branch of the philosophy of science, a philosophy of biology. Despite the passing of a century before this new branch of philosophy fully developed, its eventual form is based on Darwinian concepts. For example, Darwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

For example, three different scenarios have been proposed for the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous: a devastating epidemic; a catastrophic change of climate; and the impact of an asteroid, known as the Alvarez theory. The first two narratives were ultimately refuted by evidence incompatible with them. All the known facts, however, fit the Alvarez theory, which is now widely accepted. The testing of historical narratives implies that the wide gap between science and the humanities that so troubled physicist C. P. Snow is actually nonexistent—by virtue of its methodology and its acceptance of the time factor that makes change possible, evolutionary biology serves as a bridge.

The discovery of natural selection, by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, must itself be counted as an extraordinary philosophical advance. The principle remained unknown throughout the more than 2,000-year history of philosophy ranging from the Greeks to Hume, Kant and the Victorian era. The concept of natural selection had remarkable power for explaining directional and adaptive changes. Its nature is simplicity itself. It is not a force like the forces described in the laws of physics; its mechanism is simply the elimination of inferior individuals. This process of nonrandom elimination impelled Darwin’s contemporary, philosopher Herbert Spencer, to describe evolution with the now familiar term “survival of the fittest.” (This description was long ridiculed as circular reasoning: “Who are the fittest? Those who survive.” In reality, a careful analysis can usually determine why certain individuals fail to thrive in a given set of conditions.)

The truly outstanding achievement of the principle of natural selection is that it makes unnecessary the invocation of “final causes”—that is, any teleological forces leading to a particular end. In fact, nothing is predetermined. Furthermore, the objective of selection even may change from one generation to the next, as environmental circumstances vary.

A diverse population is a necessity for the proper working of natural selection. (Darwin’s success meant that typologists, for whom all members of a class are essentially identical, were left with an untenable viewpoint.) Because of the importance of variation, natural selection should be considered a two-step process: the production of abundant variation is followed by the elimination of inferior individuals. This latter step is directional. By adopting natural selection, Darwin settled the several-thousandyear- old argument among philosophers over chance or necessity. Change on the earth is the result of both, the first step being dominated by randomness, the second by necessity.

Darwin was a holist: for him the object, or target, of selection was primarily the individual as a whole. The geneticists, almost from 1900 on, in a rather reductionist spirit preferred to consider the gene the target of evolution. In the past 25 years, however, they have largely returned to the Darwinian view that the individual is the principal target.

For 80 years after 1859, bitter controversy raged as to which of four competing evolutionary theories was valid. “Transmutation” was the establishment of a new species or new type through a single mutation, or saltation. “Orthogenesis” held that intrinsic teleological tendencies led to transformation. Lamarckian evolution relied on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And now there was Darwin’s variational evolution, through natural selection. Darwin’s theory clearly emerged as the victor during the evolutionary synthesis of the 1940s, when the new discoveries in genetics were married with taxonomic observations concerning systematics, the classification of organisms by their relationships. Darwinism is now almost unanimously accepted by knowledgeable evolutionists. In addition, it has become the basic component of the new philosophy of biology.

A most important principle of the new biological philosophy, undiscovered for almost a century after the publication of On the Origin of Species, is the dual nature of biological processes. These activities are governed both by the universal laws of physics and chemistry and by a genetic program, itself the result of natural selection, which has molded the genotype for millions of generations. The causal factor of the possession of a genetic program is unique to living organisms, and it is totally absent in the inanimate world. Because of the backward state of molecular and genetic knowledge in his time, Darwin was unaware of this vital factor.

Another aspect of the new philosophy of biology concerns the role of laws. Laws give way to concepts in Darwinism. In the physical sciences, as a rule, theories are based on laws; for example, the laws of motion led to the theory of gravitation. In evolutionary biology, however, theories are largely based on concepts such as competition, female choice, selection, succession and dominance. These biological concepts, and the theories based on them, cannot be reduced to the laws and theories of the physical sciences. Darwin himself never stated this idea plainly. My assertion of Darwin’s importance to modern thought is the result of an analysis of Darwinian theory over the past century. During this period, a pronounced change in the methodology of biology took place. This transformation was not caused exclusively by Darwin, but it was greatly strengthened by developments in evolutionary biology. Observation, comparison and classification, as well as the testing of competing historical narratives, became the methods of evolutionary biology, outweighing experimentation.

I do not claim that Darwin was single-handedly responsible for all the intellectual developments in this period. Much of it, like the refutation of French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace’s determinism, was “in the air.” But Darwin in most cases either had priority or promoted the new views most vigorously.

The Darwinian Zeitgeist

A 21st-century person looks at the world quite differently than a citizen of the Victorian era did. This shift had multiple sources, particularly the incredible advances in technology. But what is not at all appreciated is the great extent to which this shift in thinking indeed resulted from Darwin’s ideas.

Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The world they inhabited had been created by God, and as the natural theologians claimed, He had instituted wise laws that brought about the perfect adaptation of all organisms to one another and to their environment. At the same time, the architects of the scientific revolution had constructed a worldview based on physicalism (a reduction to spatiotemporal things or events or their properties), teleology, determinism and other basic principles. Such was the thinking of Western man prior to the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand in total conflict with these prevailing ideas.

First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically. It no longer requires God as creator or designer (although one is certainly still free to believe in God even if one accepts evolution). Darwin pointed out that creation, as described in the Bible and the origin accounts of other cultures, was contradicted by almost any aspect of the natural world. Every aspect of the “wonderful design” so admired by the natural theologians could be explained by natural selection. (A closer look also reveals that design is often not so wonderful—see “Evolution and the Origins of Disease,” by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams; Scientific American, November 1998.) Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.

Second, Darwinism refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the general concept of the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This viewpoint is called typology, or essentialism. The seeming variety, it was said, consisted of a limited number of natural kinds (essences or types), each one forming a class. The members of each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of other essences.

Variation, in contrast, is nonessential and accidental. A triangle illustrates essentialism: all triangles have the same fundamental characteristics and are sharply delimited against quadrangles or any other geometric figures. An intermediate between a triangle and a quadrangle is inconceivable. Typological thinking, therefore, is unable to accommodate variation and gives rise to a misleading conception of human races. For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously differ from other human ethnic groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism. (Although the ignorant misapplication of evolutionary theory known as “social Darwinism” often gets blamed for justifications of racism, adherence to the disproved essentialism preceding Darwin in fact can lead to a racist viewpoint.)

Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity, are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals. No two of the six billion humans are the same. Populations vary not by their essences but only by mean statistical differences. By rejecting the constancy of populations, Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to explanatory interpretation in science.

Third, Darwin’s theory of natural selection made any invocation of teleology unnecessary. From the Greeks onward, there existed a universal belief in the existence of a teleological force in the world that led to ever greater perfection. This “final cause” was one of the causes specified by Aristotle. After Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had unsuccessfully attempted to describe biological phenomena with the help of a physicalist Newtonian explanation, he then invoked teleological forces. Even after 1859, teleological explanations (orthogenesis) continued to be quite popular in evolutionary biology. The acceptance of the Scala Naturae and the explanations of natural theology were other manifestations of the popularity of teleology. Darwinism swept such considerations away.

(The designation “teleological” actually applied to various different phenomena. Many seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature are the simple consequence of natural laws—a stone falls or a heated piece of metal cools because of laws of physics, not some end-directed process. Processes in living organisms owe their apparent goal-directedness to the operation of an inborn genetic or acquired program. Adapted systems, such as the heart or kidneys, may engage in activities that can be considered goal seeking, but the systems themselves were acquired during evolution and are continuously fine-tuned by natural selection. Finally, there was a belief in cosmic teleology, with a purpose and predetermined goal ascribed to everything in nature. Modern science, however, is unable to substantiate the existence of any such cosmic teleology.)

Fourth, Darwin does away with determinism. Laplace notoriously boasted that a complete knowledge of the current world and all its processes would enable him to predict the future to infinity. Darwin, by comparison, accepted the universality of randomness and chance throughout the process of natural selection. (Astronomer and philosopher John Herschel referred to natural selection contemptuously as “the law of the higgledy-piggledy.”) That chance should play an important role in natural processes has been an unpalatable thought for many physicists. Einstein expressed this distaste in his statement, “God does not play dice.” Of course, as previously mentioned, only the first step in natural selection, the production of variation, is a matter of chance. The character of the second step, the actual selection, is to be directional.

Despite the initial resistance by physicists and philosophers, the role of contingency and chance in natural processes is now almost universally acknowledged. Many biologists and philosophers deny the existence of universal laws in biology and suggest that all regularities be stated in probabilistic terms, as nearly all so-called biological laws have exceptions. Philosopher of science Karl Popper’s famous test of falsification therefore cannot be applied in these cases.

Fifth, Darwin developed a new view of humanity and, in turn, a new anthropocentrism. Of all of Darwin’s proposals, the one his contemporaries found most difficult to accept was that the theory of common descent applied to Man. For theologians and philosophers alike, Man was a creature above and apart from other living beings. Aristotle, Descartes and Kant agreed on this sentiment, no matter how else their thinking diverged. But biologists Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel revealed through rigorous comparative anatomical study that humans and living apes clearly had common ancestry, an assessment that has never again been seriously questioned in science. The application of the theory of common descent to Man deprived man of his former unique position.

Ironically, though, these events did not lead to an end to anthropocentrism. The study of man showed that, in spite of his descent, he is indeed unique among all organisms. Human intelligence is unmatched by that of any other creature. Humans are the only animals with true language, including grammar and syntax. Only humanity, as Darwin emphasized, has developed genuine ethical systems. In addition, through high intelligence, language and long parental care, humans are the only creatures to have created a rich culture. And by these means, humanity has attained, for better or worse, an unprecedented dominance over the entire globe.

Sixth, Darwin provided a scientific foundation for ethics. The question is frequently raised—and usually rebuffed— as to whether evolution adequately explains healthy human ethics. Many wonder how, if selection rewards the individual only for behavior that enhances his own survival and reproductive success, such pure selfishness can lead to any sound ethics. The widespread thesis of social Darwinism, promoted at the end of the 19th century by Spencer, was that evolutionary explanations were at odds with the development of ethics.

We now know, however, that in a social species not only the individual must be considered—an entire social group can be the target of selection. Darwin applied this reasoning to the human species in 1871 in The Descent of Man. The survival and prosperity of a social group depends to a large extent on the harmonious cooperation of the members of the group, and this behavior must be based on altruism. Such altruism, by furthering the survival and prosperity of the group, also indirectly benefits the fitness of the group’s individuals. The result amounts to selection favoring altruistic behavior.

Kin selection and reciprocal helpfulness in particular will be greatly favored in a social group. Such selection for altruism has been demonstrated in recent years to be widespread among many other social animals. One can then perhaps encapsulate the relation between ethics and evolution by saying that a propensity for altruism and harmonious cooperation in social groups is favored by natural selection. The old thesis of social Darwinism—strict selfishness—was based on an incomplete understanding of animals, particularly social species.

The Influence of New Concepts

Let me now try to summarize my major findings. No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact. Likewise, most of Darwin’s particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the gradualism of evolution, and his explanatory theory of natural selection.

I hope I have successfully illustrated the wide reach of Darwin’s ideas. Yes, he established a philosophy of biology by introducing the time factor, by demonstrating the importance of chance and contingency, and by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather than laws. But furthermore—and this is perhaps Darwin’s greatest contribution—he developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands.

To borrow Darwin’s phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles.

This article is based on the September 23, 1999, lecture that Mayr delivered in Stockholm on receiving the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

ERNST MAYR is one of the towering figures in the history of evolutionary biology. Following his graduation from the University of Berlin in 1926, ornithological expeditions to New Guinea fueled his interest in theoretical evolutionary biology. Mayr emigrated to the U.S. in 1931 and in 1953 joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he is now Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus. His conception of rapid speciation of isolated populations formed the basis for the well known neoevolutionary concept of punctuated equilibrium. The author of some of the 20th century's most influential volumes on evolution, Mayr is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

The Eight Systems of Consciousness

The Eight Systems of Consciousness, a summary

by Robert Anton Wilson - from Cosmic Trigger

"To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or "gears," or mini-brains. 

Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the "silent" or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. 

This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics (or engages in other right lobe activating practices.)" 

- Robert Anton Wilson

We will explain each of the eight "brains" briefly: I II III IV V VI VII VIII 

 

I. The Bio-Survival System

This invertebrate brain was the first to evolve (2 to 3 million years ago) and is the first activated when a human infant is born. It programs perception onto an either-or grid divided into nurturing-helpful Things (which it approaches) and noxious-dangerous Things (which it flees, or attacks). The imprinting of this circuit sets up the basic attitude of trust or suspicion which will ever after trigger approach or avoidance.

 

II. The Emotional-Territorial System

This second, more advanced bio-computer formed when vertebrates appeared and began to compete for territory (perhaps 500,000,000 B.C.). In the individual, this bigger tunnel-reality is activated when the DNA master-tape triggers the metamorphosis from crawling to walking. As every parent knows, the toddler is no longer a passive (bio-survival) infant but a mammalian politician, full of physical (and psychic) territorial demands, quick to meddle in family business and decision-making. Again the first imprint on this circuit remains constant for life (unless brainwashed) and identifies the stimuli which will automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or submissive, cooperative behavior. When we say that a person is behaving emotionally, egotistically or 'like a two-year-old,' we mean that s/he is blindly following one of the tunnel-realities imprinted on this circuit.

 

III. The Time-Binding Semantic System

This third brain was formed when hominid types began to differentiate from other primate stock (circa 4-5 million B.C.) and is activated for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determines our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.'

 

It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid's geometry, Aristotle's logic and Newton's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs.

 

IV. The Social-Sexual System

The fourth brain, dealing with the transmission of tribal or ethnic culture across generations, introduces the fourth dimension, time.

Since each of these tunnel-realities consists of biochemical imprints or matrices in the nervous system, each of them is specifically triggered by neuro-transmitters and other drugs.

 

Notice how drugs that stimulate the first four circuits, which are already activated, tend to be dangerously addictive, roughly ordered ascending from the first circuit.

 

To activate the first brain take an opiate. Mother Opium and Sister Morphine bring you down to cellular intelligence, bio-survival passivity, the floating consciousness of the newborn. (This is why Freudians identify opiate addiction with the desire to return to infancy.)

 

To activate the second tunnel-reality, take an abundant quantity of alcohol. Vertebrate territorial patterns and mammalian emotional politics immediately appear when the booze flows, as Thomas Nashe intuitively realized when he characterized the various alcohol states by animal labels: "ass drunk," "goat drunk," "swine drunk," "bear drunk," etc.

 

To activate the third circuit, try coffee or tea, a high-protein diet, speed or cocaine.

 

The specific neurotransmitter for circuit four has not been synthesized yet, but it is generated by the glands after pubescence and flows volcanically through the bloodstreams of adolescents.

 

None of these terrestrial drugs change basic biochemical imprints. The behaviors which they trigger are those which were wired into the nervous system during the first stages of imprint vulnerability. 

 

The circuit II drunk exhibits the emotional games or cons learned from parents in infancy. The circuit III "mind" never gets beyond the permutations and combinations of those tunnel-realities originally imprinted, or abstractions associated with the imprints through later conditioning. And so forth.

 

 

But all this Pavlovian-Skinnerian robotism changes drastically and dramatically when we turn to the right lobe, the future circuits and extraterrestrial chemicals. The four evolving future 'brains' are:

 

V. The Neurosomatic System

When this fifth "body-brain" is activated, flat Euclidean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalts shift, in McLuhan's terms, from linear visual space to all-encompassing sensory space. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits. I turned this circuit on with pot and Tantra.

 

This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilizations and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated with electroencephalograms that this circuit represents the first jump from the linear left lobe of the brain to the analogical right lobe.

 

The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of "technicians of the occult"--Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.

 

About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans in the Caspian Sea area of Asia and quickly spread to other wizards throughout Eurasia and Africa. It is, of course, cannabis. Weed. Mother Mary Jane.

 

It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as "high" or "spaced-out." The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or, Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits I-IV) is, in evolutionary perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are Star Trek freaks and science fiction adepts. (Berkeley, California, certainly the Cannabis Capital of the U.S., has a Federation Trading Post on Telegraph Avenue, where the well-heeled can easily spend $500 or more in a single day, buying Star Trek novels, magazines, newsletters, bumper stickers, photographs, posters, tapes, etc., including even complete blueprints for the starship Enterprise.)

 

The extraterrestrial meaning of being "high" is confirmed by astronauts themselves; 85% of those who have entered the free-fall zero gravity describe "mystic experiences" or rapture states typical of the neurosomatic circuit. "No photo can show how beautiful Earth looked," raves Captain Ed Mitchell, describing his Illumination in free-fall. He sounds like any successful yogi or pot-head. No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.

 

Free-fall, at the proper evolutionary time, triggers the neurosomatic mutation, Leary believes. Previously this mutation has been achieved "artificially" by yogic or shamanic training or by the fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis. Surfing, skiing, skin-diving and the new sexual culture (sensuous massage, vibrators, imported Tantric arts, etc.) have evolved at the same time as part of the hedonic conquest of gravity. The Turn-On state is always described as "floating," or, in the Zen metaphor, "one foot above the ground."

 

VI. The Neuroelectric System

The sixth brain consists of the nervous system becoming aware of itself apart from imprinted gravitational reality-maps (circuits I-IV) and even apart from body-rapture (circuit V). Count Korzybski, the semanticist, called this state "consciousness of abstracting." Dr. John Lilly calls it "metaprogramming," i.e., awareness of programming one's programming. This Einsteinian, relativistic contelligence (consciousness-intelligence) recognizes, for instance, that the Euclidean, Newtonian and Aristotelian reality-maps are just three among billions of possible programs or models for experience. I turned this circuit on with Peyote, LSD and Crowley's "magick" metaprograms.

 

This level of brain-functioning seems to have been reported first around 500 B.C. among various "occult" groups connected by the Silk Route (Rome-North India). It is so far beyond the terrestrial tunnel-realities that those who have achieved it can barely communicate about it to ordinary humanity (circuits I-IV) and can hardly be understood even by fifth circuit Rapture Engineers.

 

The characteristics of the neuroelectric circuit are high velocity, multiple choice, relativity, and the fission-fusion of all perceptions into parallel science-fiction universes of alternate possibilities.

 

The mammalian politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are here transcended, i.e., seen as static, artificial, an elaborate charade. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal emotional game-playing (the usual soap-opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality-model.

 

Tactics for opening and imprinting the sixth circuit are described and rarely experienced in advanced rajah yoga, and in the hermetic (coded) manuals of the medieval-Renaissance alchemists and Illuminati.

 

No specific sixth circuit chemical is yet available, but strong psychedelics like mescaline (from my 1962-63 "sacred cactus," peyotl) and psilocybin (from the Mexican "magic mushroom," teonactl) open the nervous system to a mixed-media series of circuit V and circuit VI channels. This is appropriately called "tripping," as distinguished from straight-forward fifth circuit "turning on" or "getting high."

 

The suppression of scientific research in this area has had the unfortunate result of turning the outlaw drug culture back toward fifth circuit hedonics and pre-scientific tunnel-realities (the occult revival, solipsism, Pop Orientalism). Without scientific discipline and methodology, few can successfully decode the often-frightening (but philosophically crucial) sixth circuit metaprogramming signals. Such scientists as do continue to study this subject dare not publish their results (which are illegal) and record ever-wider tunnel-realities only in private conversations--like the scholars of the Inquisitorial era. (Voltaire announced the Age of Reason two centuries too soon. We are still in the Dark Ages.) Most underground alchemists have given up on such challenging and risky self-work and restrict their trips to fifth circuit erotic tunnels.

 

The evolutionary function of the sixth circuit is to enable us to communicate at Einsteinian relativities and neuro-electric accelerations, not using third circuit laryngeal-manual symbols but directly via feedback, telepathy and computer link-up. Neuro-electric signals will increasingly replace "speech" (hominid grunts) after space migration.

 

When humans have climbed out of the atmosphere-gravity well of planetary life, accelerated sixth circuit contelligence will make possible high-energy communication with "Higher Intelligences," i.e., ourselves-in-the-future and other post-terrestrial races.

 

It is charmingly simple and obvious, once we realize that the spaced-out neural experiences really are extraterrestrial, that getting high and spacing out are accurate metaphors. Circuit V neurosomatic rapture is preparation for the next step in our evolution, migration off the planet. Circuit VI is preparation for the step after that, interspecies communication with advanced entities possessing electronic (post-verbal) tunnel-realities.

 

Circuit VI is the "universal translator" often imagined by science-fiction writers, already built into our brains by the DNA tape. Just as the circuits of the future butterfly are already built into the caterpillar.

 

VII. The Neurogenetic System

The seventh brain kicks into action when the nervous system begins to receive signals from within the individual neuron, from the DNA-RNA dialogue. The first to achieve this mutation spoke of "memories of past lives," "reincarnation," "immortality," etc. That these adepts were recording something real is indicated by the fact that many of them (especially Hindu and Sufis) gave marvelously accurately poetic vistas of evolution 1,000 or 2,000 years before Darwin, and foresaw Superhumanity before Nietzsche.

 

The "akashic records" of Theosophy, the "collective unconscious" of Jung, the "phylogenetic unconscious" of Grof and Ring, are three modern metaphors for this circuit. The visions of past and future evolution described by those who have had "out-of-body" experiences during close-to-death episodes also describes the trans-time circuit VII tunnel-reality.

 

Specific exercises to trigger circuit VII are not to be found in yogic teaching; it usually happens, if at all, after several years of the kind of advanced rajah yoga that develops circuit VI facility.

 

The specific circuit VII neurotransmitter is, of course LSD. (Peyote and psilocybin produce some circuit VII experiences also.)

 

Circuit VII is best considered, in terms of 1977 science, as the genetic archives, activated by anti-histone proteins. The DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life. A sense of the inevitability of immortality and interspecies symbiosis comes to all circuit VII mutants; we now see that this, also, is an evolutionary forecast, since we stand right now on the doorstep of extended longevity leading to immortality.

 

 

The exact role of the right-lobe circuits and the reason for their activation in the 1960s cultural revolution now becomes clear. As sociologist F.M. Esfandiary writes in Upwingers, "Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now traveling to other worlds. People are now striving for immortality. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality."

 

The evolutionary function of the seventh circuit and its evolutionary, aeon-spanning tunnel-reality is to prepare us for conscious immortality and interspecies symbiosis.

 

VIII. The Neuro-Atomic System

Hold on to your hats and breathe deeply--this is the farthest-out that human intelligence has yet ventured.

 

Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop. "Out-of-body experiences," "astral projection," contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) "entities" or with a galactic Overmind, etc., such as I've experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Edison, Buckminster Fuller, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately, "the extraterrestrial unconscious."

 

Dr. Leary suggests that circuit VIII is literally neuro-atomic--infra, supra and meta-physiological--a quantum model of consciousness and/or a conscious model of quantum mechanics by the turned-on physicists discussed previously (Prof. John Archibald Wheeler, Saul-Paul Sirag, Dr. Fritjof Capra, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, etc.) indicates strongly that the "atomic consciousness" first suggested by Leary in "The Seven Tongues of God" (1962) is the explanatory link which will unite parapsychology and paraphysics into the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history.

 

When the nervous system is turned on to this quantum-level circuit, space-time is obliterated. Einstein's speed-of-light barrier is transcended; in Dr. Sarfatti's metaphor, we escape "electromagnetic chauvinism." The contelligence within the quantum projection booth IS the entire cosmic "brain," just as the micro-miniaturized DNA helix IS the local brain guiding planetary evolution. As Lao-tse said from his own Circuit VIII perspective, "The greatest is within the smallest."

 

Circuit VIII is triggered by Ketamine, a neuro-chemical researched by Dr. John Lilly, which is also (according to a wide-spread but unconfirmed rumor) given to astronauts to prepare them for space. High doses of LSD also produce some circuit VIII quantum awareness.

 

This neuro-atomic contelligence is four mutations beyond terrestrial domesticity. (The current ideological struggle is between circuit IV tribal moralists-or-collectivists and circuit V hedonic individualists.) When our need for higher intelligence, richer involvement in the cosmic script, further transcendence, will no longer be satisfied by physical bodies, not even by immortal bodies hopping across space-time at Warp 9, circuit VIII will open a further frontier. New universes and realities. "Beyond theology: the science and art of Godmanship," as Alan Watts once wrote.

 

It is therefore possible that the mysterious "entities" (angels and extraterrestrials) monotonously reported by circuit VIII visionaries are members or races already evolved to this level. But it is also possible, as Leary and Sarfatti more recently suggest, that They are ourselves-in-the-future.

 

The left-lobe terrestrial circuits contain the learned lessons of our evolutionary past (and present). The right-lobe extraterrestrial circuits are the evolutionary script for out future.

 

Thus far, there have been two alternative explanations of why the Drug Revolution happened. The first is presented in a sophisticated way by anthropologist Weston LaBarre, and in an ignorant, moralistic way by most anti-drug propaganda in the schools and mass media. This explanation says, in essence, that millions have turned away from the legal down drugs to illegal high drugs because we are living in troubled times and many are seeking escape into fantasy.

 

This theory, at its best, only partially explains the ugliest and most publicized aspect of the revolution--the reckless drug abuse characteristic of the immature. It says nothing about the millions of respectable doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have turned away from second circuit intoxication with booze to fifth circuit rapture with weed.

 

Nor does it account at all for the thoughtful, philosophical sixth circuit investigations of persons of high intelligence and deep sensibility, such as Aldous Huxley, Dr. Stanley Grof, Masters-Houston, Alan W. Watts, Carlos Castaneda, Dr. John Lilly and thousands of scientific and lay researchers on consciousness.

 

A more plausible theory, devised by psychiatrist Norman Zinberg out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, holds that modern electronic media have so shifted the nervous system's parameters that young people no longer enjoy "linear" drugs like alcohol and find meaning only in "non-linear" weed and psychedelics.

 

This is certainly part of the truth, but it is too narrow and overstresses TV and computers without sufficiently stressing the general technological picture--the ongoing Science-Fiction Revolution of which the most significant aspects are Space Migration, Increased Intelligence and Life Extension, which Leary has condensed into his SMI²LE formula.

 

Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time. SM + I² + LE = infinity.

 

Without totally endorsing Charles Fort's technological mysticism ("It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time"), it is obvious that the DNA metaprogram for planetary evolution is far wiser than any of our individual nervous systems--which are, in a sense, giant robots or sensors for DNA. Early science-fiction of brilliant writers like Stapledon, Clarke, Heinlein; Kubrick's 2001--all were increasingly clear DNA signals transmitted through the intuitive right lobe of sensitive artists, preparing us for the extraterrestrial mutation.

 

It is scarcely coincidental that mainstream "literary" intellectuals--the heir of the Platonic-aristocratic tradition that a gentleman never uses his hands, monkeys with tools or learns a manual craft--despise both science-fiction and the dope culture. Nor is it coincidental that the Whole Earth Catalogs - created by Stewart Brand, a graduate of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters--are the New Testament of the rural drop-out culture, each issue bulging with tons of eco-technological information about all the manual, dextrous, gadgety know-how that Plato and his heirs consider fit only for slaves. Not surprisingly, Brand's latest publication, Co-Evolution Quarterly, has been devoted to publicizing Prof. Gerard O'Neill's space-habitat, L5.

 

Nor is it an accident that dopers seem to prefer science-fiction to any other reading, even including the extraterrestrial-flavored Hindu scriptures and occult-shamanic circuit VI-VIII trip-poets like Crowley and Hesse.

 

The circuit VI drugs may have contributed much to the metaprogramming consciousness that has led to sudden awareness of "male chauvinism" (women's liberationists), "species chauvinism" (ecology, Lilly's dolphin studies), "type-G star chauvinism" (Carl Sagan), even "oxygen chauvinism" (the CETI conference), etc. The imprinted tunnel-realities which identify one as "white-male-American-earthian" etc. or "black-female-Cuban" etc. are no longer big enough to enclose our exploding contelligence.

 

As Time magazine said on November 26, 1973, "Within ten years, according to pharmacologists, they will have perfected pills and cranial electrodes of providing life-long bliss for everyone on Earth." The 1960s hysteria about weed and acid was just the overture to this fifth circuit break-through. Nathan S. Kline, M.D., predicts real aphrodisiacs, drugs to speed up learning, drugs to foster or terminate any behavior. ... Those who were jailed or beaten by cops in the 1960s were forerunners of The Revolution of Inner Technology.

 

Star Trek is a better guide to the emerging reality than anything in the New York Review of Books. The life-support and defense-system engineer, Scotty (circuit I), the emotional-sentimental Dr. McCoy (circuit II), the logical science officer Mr. Spock (circuit III) and the alternately paternalistic and romantic Captain Kirk (circuit IV) are perpetually voyaging through our future neurological history and encountering circuit V, VI, VII, and VIII intelligences, however crudely presented.

 

In short, the various levels of consciousness and circuits we have been discussing, and illustrating, are all biochemical imprints in the evolution of the nervous system. Each imprint creates a bigger tunnel-reality. In the Sufi metaphor, the donkey on the which we ride becomes a different donkey after each imprint. The metaprogrammer continually learns more and is increasingly able to be aware of itself operating. We are thus evolving to intelligence-studying-intelligence (the nervous system studying the nervous system) and are more and more capable of accelerating our own evolution.

 


Copyright: Robert Anton Wilson

 

Taken from: http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-8-systems.html

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension 8 circuit portal 
Megalink: Please take some time to go through this excellent and huge resource of information on the 8 circuit model. (Deoxy.org) 

Links:

8 Circuits page (go back to the previous page)

Shorter Circuits Overview by Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising excerpt) & more (the-goddess.org)

In this overview, RAW switches circuits 6 & 7. I don't really know why (yet). Don't fret, it's just another map for the territory!

Other Overviews: Cybercraft - starwood - phinwebb - bradley - fusion anomaly - wiki

The Eight Basic Winner/Loser Scripts by Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminati Papers excerpt)

The Neuropharmacy of an Eight-Circuit Brain by Antero Alli 

Recommended Books:

Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson - Quantum Psychology

Robert Anton Wilson - Cosmic Trigger Trilogy

Timothy Leary - Info-Psychology

Timothy Leary - Game of life

Timothy & Joanna Leary - Neurologic

John Lilly - Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer

Antero Alli - Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection

Antero Alli & Christopher S. Hyatt - A Modern Shaman's Guide to a Pregnant Universe

BRAVE

 O Brave New World,

That has such people in't!

 

  

brave (adj.)
"exhibiting courage or courageous endurance," late 15c., from Middle French brave, "splendid, valiant," from Italian bravo "brave, bold," originally "wild, savage," a word of uncertain origin. Possibly from Medieval Latin bravus "cutthroat, villain," from Latin pravus "crooked, depraved;" a less likely etymology being from Latin barbarus (see barbarous). A Celtic origin (Irish breagh, Cornish bray) also has been suggested, and there may be a confusion of two or more words. Related: Bravely.

Old English words for this, some with overtones of "rashness," included modig (now "moody"), beald ("bold"), cene ("keen"), dyrstig ("daring"). Brave new world is from the title of Aldous Huxley's 1932 satirical utopian novel; he lifted the phrase from Shakespeare ("Tempest" v.i.183).

HOPE :

How can you not see this?! They are bad people, Iris, and they have our dad! 

CIVIC REPUBLIC BRAVE :

Are you talking about us? 

The Civic Republic?

One of your Alliance partners? How are we "bad", exactly? 

 Come on. 

Tell me. 

IRIS :

You don't let anyone in or out. 

You won't let people communicate with your people. Or vice versa. 

You don't tell anyone where you are. 

And you have our dad. 

CIVIC REPUBLIC BRAVE :

I have a daughter. 

She's a bit older than you guys. 

She's a soldier in the CRM.

She's away from me a great deal. 

And that makes me scared sometimes. 

Then I remember that she's helping to protect the Civic Republic. 

She's helping us with the Alliance of the Three. 

She's taking that risk to help us eventually bring This World Back. 

And that makes me Brave. 

We have to Be Brave in This Life we have. 

Simply to exist now.

barbarous (adj.)

c. 1400, "uncivilized, uncultured, ignorant," from Latin barbarus "strange, foreign, barbarous," from Greek barbaros "foreign, uncivilized" (see barbarian (n.)). Meaning "not Greek or Latin" (of words or language) is from c. 1500; that of "savagely cruel" is from 1580s. Related: Barbarously; barbarousness.

brave (v.)
"to face with bravery," 1761, from French braver, from brave "valiant" (see brave (adj.)). Related: Braved; braving.

brave (n.)
"North American Indian warrior," 1827, from brave (adj.). Earlier "a hector, a bully" (1590s); "brave, bold, or daring person" (c. 1600). Compare bravado, bravo.
Related entries & more 

braw (adj.)
"handsome, worthy, excellent," a Scottish English formation and pronunciation of brave.

bravura (n.)
1788, "a spirited, florid piece of music requiring great skill in the performer," from Italian bravura "bravery, spirit" (see brave (adj.)). Sense of "display of brilliancy, dash" is from 1813.

bravado (n.)
1580s, "ostentatious courage, pretentious boldness," from French bravade "bragging, boasting," from Italian bravata "bragging, boasting" (16c.), from bravare "brag, boast, be defiant," from bravo "brave, bold" (see brave (adj.)). The English word was influenced in form by Spanish words ending in -ado. It also was used as a noun 17c.-18c., "swaggering fellow."
 

bravery (n.)

1540s, "daring, defiance, boasting," from French braverie, from braver "to brave" (see brave (adj.)) or else from cognate Italian braveria, from bravare.

    No Man is an Atheist, however he pretend it and serve the Company with his Braveries. [Donne, 1631]

The original deprecatory sense is obsolete; as a good quality attested perhaps from 1580s, but it is not always possible to distinguish the senses. Meaning "fine clothes, showiness" is from 1560s and holds the older notion of ostentatious pretense.
 

bravo (interj.)
"well done!," 1761, from Italian bravo, literally "brave" (see brave (adj.)). Earlier it was used as a noun meaning "desperado, hired killer" (1590s). Superlative form is bravissimo.

    It is held by some philologists that as "Bravo!" is an exclamation its form should not change, but remain bravo under all circumstances. Nevertheless "bravo" is usually applied to a male, "brava" to a female artist, and "bravi" to two or more. ["Elson's Music Dictionary," 1905]


prowess (n.)
late 13c., prouesse, from Old French proece "prowess, courage, brave deed" (Modern French prouesse), from prou, later variant of prud "brave, valiant," from Vulgar Latin *prodem (source also of Spanish proeza, Italian prodezza; see proud). Prow was in Middle English as a noun meaning "advantage, profit," also as a related adjective ("valiant, brave"), but it has become obsolete. "In 15-17th c. often a monosyllable" [OED].

Kenelm
masc. proper name, Old English Cenhelm, from cene "brave, bold" (see keen (adj.)) + helm "helmet" (see helmet (n.)).