Category Archives: Acceleritis

Acceleritis Theory Validated

Created March 14, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

In my 1976 book Mind Magic I postulated that the amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

And I theorized that this was the cause of a mental/emotional state I called Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). This is a state of consciousness in which questions are set aside, experiences are not assimilated, personal effectiveness is reduced, creativity is blocked, the awe and wonder of life is invisible, one subscribes to black vs. white thinking imposed by others, one has prerecorded responses used all the time, new learning and growth are stultified. One is coping but not mastering life. One is a conditioned robot.

In 2011, in this article, I started using the term “Acceleritis” to describe the condition of information overload acceleration over time.

Recently my wife Lalita gave me a birthday present of a new book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. In this book, the author documents social scientists’ work, essentially proving that my theory is correct. Both the author and the scientists whose work he cites add greatly to the picture, and I highly recommend reading this book for that reason, and because it also is a great read.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

Hari concludes that external forces have caused our inability to concentrate, rather than being caused by a lack of willpower on our part. He divides the book into chapters to review these external causes one by one. And he starts with the digital devices which are so obviously part of the problem. One citation is a 2016 study which found that we touch our phones an average of 2,617 times every 24 hours.

Interestingly, he also cites studies which use data from digital platforms to prove that acceleration is going on. For example, a 2019 paper in Nature Communications, “Accelerating Dynamics of Collective Attention”, studied the major digital platforms and found that over time, topics spiking in public interest last shorter and shorter times before wearing out. For example, trending hashtags in Twitter (now X) remained in the top 50 for 17.5 hours on average, but by 2016 that had dropped to 11.9 hours. Similar accelerations were found in Google and Reddit but not in Wikipedia. The appearance and disappearance of new phrases were analyzed across millions of books in Google Books published since 1880 and the pattern looked a lot like Twitter’s (now X).

(In a recent meeting I was asked if they should be worried because their ad recall scores appear to be dropping over a period of years. I explained that day-after TV ad recall scores averaged 26% when I first got into the business and were now 4%, so they shouldn’t take it personally.

I also mentioned that attention to ads and everything else has shortened dramatically during my tenure, and in our biggest media type today, digital, it is 1-2 seconds.

Since that meeting I’ve seen results of a neuro study where eye tracking showed that, out of hundreds of viewable social media ads, 90% of them got 1 second of attention or less – and this was in a laboratory forced viewing environment.)

Hari also interviewed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famous psychologist who coined the term Flow state, and had been an advisor to The Human Effectiveness Institute, and the author makes the connection between the state of distraction blocking Flow state, and advises slowing down, getting more sleep, staying off devices in much the way you’re used to reading in my posts here.

The amount of research covered in this book is impressive, and the writing is excellent. Where my own work is additive to this superb body of work lies in two main areas. (These may be addressed later in Hari’s book which I am not quite halfway through. I’ll let you know.)

One is the art and science of introspection. It’s important to spend as much time in Flow state and this is accomplished by first learning how to bring on the Observer state. Mind Magic and Powerful Mind are my two books on that subject. Powerful Mind was serialized in this blog last year and the book version will be out this year.

The other is our culture’s lack of an inspiring sense of mission for the vast majority of people. This is what causes the desire for distraction and the willingness to be led like sheep down any path that gives us a pleasant diversion from lives devoid of purpose and meaning. This is the source of the awful notion of killing time.

My recommendations as to how to develop an inspiring sense of mission are also included in the latter two books, and in my science-spirituality-synthesis nonfiction books A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” and You Are The Universe: Imagine That. The essence of my message: it is quite possible that we ourselves are part of a consciousness of such power that it earns the word “God”, and that if we watch for clues, we find we are being guided by events toward sharing our gifts with the world.

Because my view of reality is so different, I felt it would be necessary to also write fiction books which illustrate what I mean by getting into various characters’ heads. Hence Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, my series of four (so far) sci-fi/alternate history novels. In fact, Episode 1, The Great Being, was just published and became available on this site and Amazon yesterday.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

If you have questions, please feel free to have a conversation with my Soopra AI.

Love,

Powerful Mind Pt. 12

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Created May 26, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 11, click here.

You may have an investment in accepting some thoughts over others, such as thoughts that make you look smart to yourself. Just knowing that you can be biased goes a long way to seeing past any bias you may have lurking in your head.

Example: now that you have started reading this book, you are paying more attention to what goes on in your mind. Someone just said something to you and you notice that you have a flash of invisible anger and then go on with the conversation as though nothing happened. Later you have a free moment to look back and ask yourself “What was that?” It takes a little while but when you least expect it, when you are thinking of something else, it suddenly pops into your head that you have been secretly competing with a specific person, making him or her a rival, and what made you mad is that your rival scored a point. It was “secretly” because you never said to yourself “out loud in your mind” that you considered that person a rival. It was your own secret from yourself. You may know exactly what I’m talking about because this kind of thing has happened to you in the past. As a result of Powerful Mind, look forward to more of those exposés happening in the future as you peel away the layers of conditioning.

Don’t take anything to extremes. This key is not meant to turn you into Hamlet, never able to make a decision. You must in fact become more decisive, simply not hasty: think things through thoroughly and then take action. If you sense something is dragging on too long and you have needed to take action for some time, you really need to get away by yourself for however long it takes (within reason) to plan out what to do decisively.

Check your Perceptions

One form of hasty closure is perceptual: you actually “hallucinate” in mild ways all the time, seeing or hearing things that are subtly different from the reality that actually exists around you. You tend to see things that you expect to see, rather than what really happened. In this way your preconceived biases act themselves out in your physical senses.

You expect that someone will be sneering at you and you actually seem to see that sneer although this time the person is actually trying to be nice. Or the other way around, you expect them to be nice and don’t realize they are actually sneering at you.

The automated pre-conscious mind has searched your memory banks, found something similar and projected it, so that you literally see your prediction instead of seeing the current reality. Only by paying careful and patient attention can you override this hasty closure of the senses.

Unless you are patiently paying attention to everything that goes on around and inside of you, you will not notice your mind screening out things that are familiar, things you have seen before. This function of the mind is a type of hasty closure where the closure occurs in the pre-conscious state, even before you become aware of something.

To the robotical part of the mind, this makes sense, because it is conserving mental energy by making “invisible” those perceptions that it considers unimportant because that sort of thing has been seen before. At some point in the past, it was interesting but then closure was achieved on that content. The beautiful view out your window that you persistently ignore.

Most of the time it might even make sense that you save time by ignoring the familiar. But sometimes it means that you have lost the power to relish something beautiful just because your mind takes it for granted. Better that the whole you stays awake and aware of everything so the whole you can make your own decisions, rather than be run by automated functions of your pre-conscious mind.

Contemplation “Vacations”

I mention this strategy last because most people would say, “I don’t have time for this one.” Here the idea is to set aside some time for yourself, perhaps when there is nothing else to do — on a train, plane or bus when you have nothing you want or need to read, waiting in a doctor’s office, you can’t sleep for some reason, you’re getting a CAT scan or MRI and have to lay still for 25 minutes. Or when you are actually on vacation, or by yourself and no one is phoning you or texting you or otherwise distracting you.

Consider these times to be vacations from Acceleritis. There is no pressure. You can do anything you want. Instead of just letting your mind wander aimlessly, here’s something else you can do that is extremely useful and beneficial and pays back for the rest of your life. Contemplate who you are — who you really are. And what do you really know about what life is really all about.

Many eminent scientists have pointed out that everything science has learned since the beginning of time is a mere thimbleful relative to what there is in total to know. As the song goes, “how little we know, how much to discover” (Springer/Leigh). Actual knowing is very difficult. It requires the kind of proof demanded by science and by courts of law. Yet our minds want closure, it is built into our brains to want closure. We create fake closure just to have a sense of closure. This is hasty closure and it is self-defeating. It keeps us from objectively seeing and in the long run from getting closer to true knowing.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

Why Does the World Seem to Be Moving Away from Democracy?

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Created October 21, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my regular MediaVillage column the other day I advised the political parties to use imagery rather than just words in their midterm political ads. This was based on a finding that only 38% of Democrats and only about 20% of Republicans and Independents consider democracy to make it into the top two vote-deciding issues of the day. The greater concern is with money, meaning the declining portfolio values of investors and the cost of living going up. Voters clearly want those pain points to be made to go away by some form of governmental action. In the face of those felt pains on a daily basis, the idea of protecting democracy seems abstract and maybe even farfetched. My MediaVillage column implied showing, in ads, how life would be like if America became like Russia and China, people ratting each other out, getting conscripted and sent to war, not able to say what is really in their hearts and minds, and so on. This would be the way to get past abstractions and make the importance of democracy felt.

I was thinking of the great spot of the little girl smelling the flowers and then an A-bomb goes off behind her, which spot ended the presidential aspirations of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Images not words. I was picturing midterm political ads in the next couple of weeks with Americans having a loving dinner until political police kick in the door, 16-year-old girls in peaceful protests beaten to death, and so many other kinds of scenes like that which go on every day in most of the world, who live in authoritarian states rather than in democracies, ads showing those same sorts of things happening right here in America. That would be sure to cause a rise in the perceived importance of protecting our democracy in polls.

Americans are so sure of themselves however. We feel that it can “never happen here.” Which makes “protect our democracy” seem like mere political manipulation language, and we have all hardened ourselves against being manipulated.

I’m no longer so sure about the “It can’t ever happen here” thesis.

One of my former partners, a Chinese patriot in a long family line of Chinese patriots, told me sadly one day that he couldn’t stand to live in China because people were forced to rat each other out, so that you could never trust your neighbors to know anything beyond the superficial about you and your family’s doings. This was in 1983 when I visited China with him and found its ambiance very friendly, except for the airports and the soldiers inhibiting taking of some photographs. He said I didn’t know the half of it. Before he passed away he told me it’s much worse now.

Could it happen here, people ratting each other out to the government? Well, yes, in some States that are now attempting to pass or actually passing legislation paying bounties for reporting women seeking or having abortions, that’s a big step toward one of the many distressing things about living in an autocracy. One such law could move us a long way away from the kind of free-thinking freedom we’ve been used to for hundreds of years. And into the growing camp of countries who choose strong men to rule by force so as to allow individuals who play the game right to grow wealthy and powerful themselves, and the hell with everyone else.

Why is this happening now? Why didn’t it happen before? Newton’s Third Law: there is always an equal and opposite reaction. For more than a half century, civil rights, feminism, coming out of the closet, Hispanic immigration all made great strides in America, making it even better than it had always been. Then a line was crossed when Obama was elected. The shining moment. Not seen that way by everyone. Some white folks really disquieted. Pendulum starts to swing, metaphorically obeying Newton, we get Trump, Trump cozy with autocrats, acts like one, millions of Americans emulate him and let it all hang out.

Neil Postman said that television would eventually take us to a place where we all acted like we were on TV all the time. So did Aldous Huxley in his own way. We are here, living proof they were both right. Living as if in a dream world that pays very little attention to truth, facts, reality, where the average person plays back whatever they hear persuasively put, by people they are biased to believe in, in the expanded media, whether it’s backed by facts or not. Those of us lucky enough to go to college learned to think for ourselves but apparently many of us quickly forgot about that stuff under the endless media barrage. And Acceleritis. Let’s never forget that the human mind has limits and we are being pushed beyond those limits and have been for many decades by the media onslaught embedding our subconscious program of giving up trying to think for ourselves because it is all just too complex and everchanging. A great breeding ground for autocracy. Grand scale knuckling under to bullies.

That’s why it’s happening now, and why it’s already happening here. “It can never happen here” is obsolete. We are already about 40% of the way into autocracy. Fortunately, Millennials and Gen Z are thinking for themselves more than most of us. But we saw how 60s idealists were largely in finance by the 80s, so we can’t count on the purity of youth to save us. It’s an internal fight each of us has to win against our own tendencies toward autocracy, having bad feelings about some other people, unable to transcend that level of thinking and emerge into the daylight of solutions thinking, uniting rather than arguing. The essence of American democracy from the beginning. Rational discourse and civility, the genuine effort to find the win/win solution or get as close to it as possible. A uniquely American idea which echoes the importance placed upon balance by the eminent Greek philosophers.

When the question is asked in a poll after the kind of acerbic and heated media conversation that has been going on about democracy, the average person probably looks at this as a Democratic Party issue not as a really universal one. And answers accordingly, with the subconscious belief that “it can’t happen here”, that democracy is not the big issue of the day. Despite the first violent insurrection breaching the capitol in history. Insurrections are not democratic events, they are the signature of the start of most autocracies. Anyone who would use violence in those ways based on such skimpy evidence and self-delusional thinking would not hesitate to create laws to keep people from having abortions, from voting, for incentivizing tattling on others and taking vigilante actions, for gaming elections with districting, from stalling progress via filibustering, for arresting people on suspicion without habeas corpus, for allowing the state to cause individuals to disappear when considered desirable for the common good, for allowing people to be publicly humiliated in social media within purposely-impotent restrictions, for allowing legislators to goof off on the job for political gain ignoring the needs of the people, for allowing people to tell lies in the media with zero accountability… and all of the other tricks of the trade of the ever-dominant political form on the planet.

Here we are living it large and spoiled into thinking nothing can change that, all we need to do is pay less for gas and stabilize the stock market and go back to sleep. Too bad it isn’t that way, but it isn’t. Thousands of smart and calculating people have decided, long ago, to impose their will and take over control of the USA despite being a minority, and they have almost completed the operation. Millions of us have taken their word for things. Stuff happens in the world that Biden & co had no control over, yet the voters are told that that crew caused it all, and millions of people accept that without a second thought. They caused inflation, they caused the economy to go down, kick them out and put us in. Anyone running on that sort of ticket will not get my vote. I want to see solution plans, not irrelevant blame allocation. The best people in both parties can do a better job of forming their ideas and communicating them effectively, because right now the tailwind is going to people who are themselves internal autocrats, probably brought up by harsh parents, and who have the money, power, and will to win. That minority must not be allowed to take over the brightest hope of humanity. Elect Democrats or Republicans not based on their party but based on who they are and what solutions they are proposing. Are they putting down their competitors? Do they exude anger? Are they citing verifiable facts you can look up on Urban Legend and see are true, or are they telling what’s true to them?

The stakes are not just gas and stock prices. The stakes are slavery for ourselves and God knows how many generations of our progeny, if we stay asleep at the switch and let the strongest democracy ever to exist on Earth, backslide all the way centuries back into autocracy by simply voting the party and going back to whatever we were doing.

Please: Think. Feel. Vote.

Love to all,

Bill

Bringing Out Our True Selves

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Created August 12, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

This came through at 3am, I got out of bed and am writing it down.

Materialistic Accidentalism is a story we made up to explain reality to ourselves. In their heart of hearts, most of the people in the world today assume that the universe is an accident and that it is principally made up of matter. Most of the rest believe their religious explanation, and navigate through a wicked materialistic world as best they can, keeping to their articles of faith and training regarding the guard rails on their own behavior as best they can.

Let’s play a game. I’ll make up a story that is at least equally plausible as the latter two stories, Materialistic Accidentalism and religious creation explanations. Frankly, it will be more consistent with the latter, but that is not because of prejudgment or bias on my part, it just comes out that way as a result of logic. Here is my story:

Consciousness is a real thing in itself. Consciousness is the substrate, the primal content of the universe. Consciousness projects matter which pushes back when we push on it, which is really the processing of signals at the subatomic level of matter. Consciousness invented the brain to use the way we use our personal computers, to do the boring work for us.

The brain was our first personal computer.

War Reflects a Wrong Idea About Reality

The story that we each are separate is easy to believe because it sure feels that way. The sense of self is what consciousness is. It’s composed of coherent energy.

It’s conceivable that all of us together are cells in a single consciousness which has a richer, more multifaceted sense of self. Like the multifaceted eye of a fly on a higher level.

Not having, in our everyday state of consciousness, any awareness of such a connected reality of consciousness, we are alienated, we act selfishly, self-protectively, competitively, and sit in judgment of everyone else. In the end this leads to war and could lead to the entire destruction of the planet and everything on it. Looking at it from the perspective of our species, we are on our way to committing mass suicide, justified by lots of blather and by motivations which are dark humor if my story about who we are happens to turn out to be the real explanation. Like a man punching himself in the face. If we are in fact all one Being.

We are not here to accumulate land and absorb whole other countries, nor to rack up toys/material objects, praise and worship, fame, sex partners, power or money.

We are here to evolve as a consciousness. The road ahead, in my story, is that we will live again and again, and the long trend is upward to greater sanity and perceptual scope. Ultimately to being self-aware in the totality consciousness, the Original Self.

In the internal logic of my story/explanation of reality, competing against Accidental Materialism and the religious creation stories, the One Original Consciousness is what is creating each of our individual consciousnesses by populating us from within, looking out our eyes, as what we sense as OUR self. We are all avatars in the original video game.

What We Call the Subconscious Is Actually the Superconscious

In our present state of normal everyday consciousness, we are confused by such statements, since “sub” means “below” and “super” means “above”, it seems like a meaningless statement, an oxymoron. This linear black and white thinking is part of the limitation inherent in what we call normal consciousness.

What I’m saying is that what we call our subconscious is our real self, submerged in ego. The ego – a function of the brain, our personal inbuilt computer, the neural net built into our brains by our assimilated and unassimilated experiences – has taken over the castle of our mind. We now identify with the ego sub-sentience that is street-smart to, and resonant with, our ego dominated materialistic selfish Acceleritis-riddled culture, taking ego as our true self, when actually it is not. We have repressed our true self (what Freud called the id) and over-ridden it with the “out for number one” persona that takes over in early childhood.

Every now and then our real self tries to say something and that registers as a hunch. Or a dream, if we happen to be sleeping. Or, as flashes of true insight we get as we are lucky enough to slip into the Observer state or the Flow state. I’m positing that those higher state experiences are our true self, the self was born, breaking through the clouds.

Extra Motorific Competency

Another name for the Flow state might be Extra Motorific Competency, in terms of our ability to perform flawlessly in action. This is a takeoff of Extra Sensory Perception – ESP and EMC. Making the point that they are both aspects of the same thing: the arising of a more intelligent, competent, balanced and ethical part of ourselves, with unsuspected powers operating.

Both types of experiences – ESP and EMC – when we have them feel otherworldly, like nothing else we have ever experienced. They are Maslovian “peak experiences”. Numinous. What Freud called the “oceanic” feeling.

Observer state is a more subtle experience, that does not seem in any way “supernatural”. It is simply metacognition: being able to objectively consider one’s thoughts and feelings. The importance of the Observer state is that it is the doorway to Flow state. I’m reporting solely from my own experiences in saying that.

At 3am, half-asleep, when I started taking this down in scribbled notes I was experiencing it as taking dictation. This has been going on since I was a child. I hear whole sentences which excite me and I have to write them down so I don’t have to worry about not remembering it in the morning. I associate taking dictation in this way with inspiration in the classical sense used by Plato and metaphorized as the Muses. In modern slang it’s “channeling”. But channeling whom? Our true selves, what we now call our subconscious. Except that it is more powerful than what we call our conscious mind which – until we are in Observer state – is actually the ego, our internalized personal biocomputer.

These “magical” (that’s the way they feel) experiences of Flow state, ESP, taking dictation, are as real to me as everything else I experience, like inventing a new type of optimizer, or meeting my wife for the first time, or taking a vacation, or boiling eggs.

That is not scientific proof. But since it is real to me, and works to make me more effective in my life, I take my story as being the one I’m betting on. It’s pragmatic for me to do that because it works. When I ignore my hunches, or am cowed by being painted as “weird” by the imposing size of the ego culture, I do not perform at Flow state level.

I do expect that science will come around to validating my story. It might not happen in our current lifetimes. Science is on its way there as a result of relativity, quantum physics, and information theory. Consciousness is the “observer” in relativity. Consciousness “freezes probability waves” in quantum physics. Consciousness itself is information processing. Physicists and psychologists are divided between stories but tenure and security are tied to sticking with Materialistic Accidentalism until there is unassailable scientific proof of a different story. The ego culture is totalitarian in that way.

Coming back to religion. Above I wrote that my story competes with the religious creation stories. That was an oversimplification. My story could actually be the scientific explanation for their stories. For example, there can be little doubt that Jesus and Buddha experienced Flow state. My scifi novel The First Son is a fictionalized demonstration of how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and other religions could have come from Flow state inspiration and taking dictation. My story and the religious stories are unified in that book and in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, my newest scifi novel, set about thirty years in the future from today.

“God does not play dice with the universe.” –Einstein, denying Accidentalism

I set this nighttime dictation as a note in a bottle here to float out across the history of time… until it is found and considered by those whose minds are open to all possibilities not yet verified or disconfirmed by science.

Love to all,

Bill