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Ephemeralization is a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1927, defined as humanity's accelerating progress towards the ability to do everything with nothing—psychokinesis, mind over matter.

The universe is dominated by gravity, which integrates the universe's particles into an ever more synergetic system, so that the particles' potential energies (rest masses) become progressively delocalized, which makes the particles ever more ghostlike, ephemeral.

The univetse's negative potential energy, also known as information, spirit or intuition, is a potential (irrotational) flow of the vacuum, engendered by the suction exerted by the universe's attractor—the most intuitive man. The flow passes through a universe-wide dendritic drainage system of wormholes, converging to the brain of the most intuitive man, where the speed of the flow is maximal, while the flow's potential energy is most negative (Bernoulli's principle). The enormous speed of the informational flow in the brain of the most intuitive man endows him with the ability to control the universe's past and thus turn the universe into a vortex of his self-creation.

For example, consider a cloud of 200 letters of a movable alphabet. Like marbles rolling towards the bottom of a bowl, the letters will bind themselves into a smaller quantity of greater‑quality words (because a word is more informative and thus has a more negative potential energy than its letters in a gaseous state). The outputted words will bind themselves into a single greater-quality sentence (because a sentence is more informative and thus has a more negative potential energy than its words in a gaseous state). The sentence acts as the attractor of the entire process, which is why the letters become bound not into random words but into the words specifically suited for the resultant sentence.

A single letter, when it is part of a sentence, conveys vastly more information than a multiletter word which is not part of a sentence. That is why ephemeralization is also known as "more-with-lessing".

Concept

Information is negative potential energy:

Szilard's explanation was accepted by the physics community, and information was accepted as a scientific concept, defined by its statistical‑mechanical properties as a kind of negative energy that introduced order into a system.

—Aspray, William. The Origins of John von Neumann's Theory of Automata In "Proceedings of the Summer Research Institute on the legacy of John von Neumann held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, May 29–June 4, 1988". American Mathematical Society, 1990, p. 291

• 200 letters synergized into 30 words have a more negative potential energy and a deeper potential well than 200 separate letters.
• 200 letters synergized into a single sentence have a more negative potential energy and a deeper potential well than 200 letters synergized into 30 words.

Like marbles rolling towards the narrow bottom of a funnel-shaped potential well, 200 letters spontaneously synergize themselves first into 30 words (so that the potential well becomes deeper), then into a single sentence (so that the potential well becomes still more deep):

By the same principle, the universe's atoms synergize themselves first into molecules, then into people. The most intuitive man is the attractor, puppeteer of the entire 13.8-billion-year-long process of his self-creation:

While falling into the universe's gravitational field, each atom of the universe expels its gravitational potential energy (rest mass) in the form of radiation and thus shrinks in size, becoming increasingly massless, ephemeral:

As we go forwards in time, material weight continually changes into radiation. Conversely, as we go backwards in time, the total material weight of the universe must continually increase.

—Jeans, James Hopwood. The Universe Around Us CUP, 1930, pp. 330–32

By losing their rest mass, the universe's atoms lose their resistance to the gravitational pull exerted by the mind of the universe's gravitational puppeteer—the most intuitive man—and thus become his ever more obedient puppets, which eventually endows him with the ability of psychokinesis.

Any self-gravitating system, converting its rest mass into energy, radiates away only a half of that energy but retains the other half. Therefore upon converting all of its rest mass into radiant energy, an atom will retain a half of that radiant energy circulating within itself and serving as a quasi rest mass. Those end-time atoms will formally have rest masses but essentially will be massless "radiant spirits".

During the last era of its existence, the universe will consist of such ephemeral, ghostlike atoms balancing on the verge of instantaneous disappearance.

The most intuitive man's life in the ephemeral, ghostlike universe, with only vestigial physical laws, can be called "dreaming awake at the edge of time". Eternal youth, any wishes instantaneously granted.

Origin of the concept

Fuller uses Washington Carver's assembly line (used by Henry Ford at his car factory), as an example of how ephemeralization can continuously lead to better products at lower cost with no upper bound on productivity. Fuller saw ephemeralization as an inevitable trend in human development. The progression was from "compression" to "tension" to "visual" to "abstract electrical" (i.e., nonsensorial radiation, such as radio waves, x rays, etc.).

Length measurement technologies in human development, for example, started with a compressive measure, such as a ruler. The compressive technique reached an upper limit with a rod. For longer measures, a tensive measure such as a string or rope was used. This reached an upper limit with sagging of the string. Next was a surveyor's telescope (visual). This reached an upper limit with curvature of the earth. Next was radio triangulation (abstract electrical). The technological progression is a continuing increase in length-measuring ability per pound of instrument, with no apparent upper limit according to Fuller.

Consequences to society

Francis Heylighen and Alvin Toffler have written that ephemeralization, though it may increase our power to solve physical problems, can make non-physical problems worse. According to Heylighen and Toffler, increasing system complexity and information overload make it difficult and stressful for the people who must control the ephemeralized systems. This might negate the advantages of ephemeralization.

The solution proposed by Heylighen is the integration of human intelligence, computer intelligence, and coordination mechanisms that direct an issue to the cognitive resource (document, person, or computer program) most fit to address it. This requires a distributed, self-organizing system, formed by all individuals, computers and the communication links that connect them. The self-organization can be achieved by algorithms. According to Heylighen, the effect is to superpose the contributions of many different human and computer agents into a collective map that may link the cognitive and physical resources relatively efficiently. The resulting information system could react relatively rapidly and adaptively to requests for guidance or changes in the situation.

In Heylighen's view, the system could frequently be fed with new information from its myriad human users and computer agents, which it would take into account to offer the human users a list of the best possible approaches to achieve tasks. Heylighen believes near-optimization could be achieved both at the level of the individual who makes the request, and at the level of society which attempts to minimize the conflicts between the desires of its different members and to aim at long term, global progress while as much as possible protecting individual liberty and privacy.

See also

• Accelerating change
• Accidental complexity
• Attention economy
• Collective intelligence
• Dematerialization (economics)
• Eco-economic decoupling
• Emergence
• Global brain
• Intelligence amplification
• Miniaturization
• Technological singularity

References

1. Dealey, James Quayle; Ward, Lester Frank. A Text-book of Sociology Macmillan, 1905, pp. 165, 168
2. R. Buckminster Fuller's Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game 1969 03 04
3. Fuller, Buckminster R. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth : Synergy 1969. "Synergy is of the essence. Only under the stresses of total social emergencies as thus far demonstrated by man do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge. Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his exclusive identity only with some sovereignized circumscribed geographical locality."
4. Seeds, Michael A.; Backman, Dana. Foundations of Astronomy Cengage Learning, 2012, p. 77. "Gravity rules. The moon orbiting Earth, matter falling into black holes, and the overall structure of the universe are dominated by gravity."
5. Fuller, Buckminster R. Synergetics Macmillan, 1975, §000.113. "Gravity is the inwardly cohering force acting integratively on all systems. Radiation is the outwardly disintegrating force acting divisively upon all systems."
6. ^ Mathews, Albert P. The Nature of Matter, Gravitation, and Light W. Wood and Company, 1927, p. 106. "The quantity factor of potential energy is space or volume which however is equivalent to mass."
7. The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Vol. XXXVI, Taylor & Francis, 1893, p. 24. "It is thus obvious that according to the ordinary conception we can assert no more than that the potential energy belongs to the system, that this conception therefore involves no localization of the energy in the system, and consequently no erroneous localization."
8. Cassidy, David C.; Holton, Gerald; Rutherford, F. James. Understanding Physics Springer, 2002, p. 239. "We must conclude that the potential energy belongs not to one body, but to the whole system of interacting bodies involved! This is evident in the fact that the potential energy gained is available to any one or to all of these interacting bodies."
9. Aspray, William. The Origins of John von Neumann's Theory of Automata In "Proceedings of the Summer Research Institute on the legacy of John von Neumann held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, May 29–June 4, 1988". American Mathematical Society, 1990, p. 291. "Szilard's explanation was accepted by the physics community, and information was accepted as a scientific concept, defined by its statistical-mechanical properties as a kind of negative energy that introduced order into a system."
10. Grey, Mary C. Introducing Feminist Images of God Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, p. 84. "The Spirit is the binding energy expressed by the word re-ligio/religion—a word that itself reflects the brokenness and fragmentation of the universe, that God is trying to heal."
11. Reichling, Mary Josephine. Images of Imagination: A Philosophical Study of Imagination in Music with Application to Music Education Indiana University, 1991, p. 133. "Intuition integrates the several parts to form a whole and does so spontaneously."
12. Ziegler, Franz. Mechanics of Solids and Fluids Springer, 1995, p. 167. "Force in such a potential field is a flux in the sense of a mechanical driving agent."
13. Volovik, G. E. The Universe in a Helium Droplet OUP, 2003, p. 60. "The non-viscous flow of the vacuum should be potential (irrotational)."
14. Sachs, Paul D. Dynamics of a Natural Soil System Edaphic Press, 1999, p. 56. "The negative energy force that moves water is called suction."
15. ^ Farrell, Barry. The View from the Year 2000 LIFE Magazine, 1971 02 26, p. 53. "The earth, to Fuller, is a ‘contracting phase’ of the universe, a low-pressure zone in the cosmos where energy is collected and stored. The sun’s radiation warms the oceans, and the oceans feed the earth. Fuller calls processes which conserve energy aspects of ‘synergy’, a word he relies on heavily in his discussions of the ‘more with less’ technologies that will accomplish the defeat of scarcity. <…> But the highest expression of synergy is man’s intuition, his ability to see comprehensive patterns in random events, which has led him from near helplessness to the point where he can now take control of his own evolution."
16. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can't get entangled without a wormhole: Physicist finds entanglement instantly gives rise to a wormhole ScienceDaily, 5 December 2013. "More fundamentally, the results suggest that gravity may, in fact, emerge from entanglement. What’s more, the geometry, or bending, of the universe as described by classical gravity, may be a consequence of entanglement, such as that between pairs of particles strung together by tunneling wormholes."
17. Benumof and Hagberg's Airway Management Elsevier, 2013, p. 596. «Bernoulli's principle, application of which is familiar to anesthesiologists in the functioning of the Venturi valve, states that when a fluid in a vessel passes through a constriction, dynamic energy (speed of flow) is increased, whereas static pressure (potential energy) exerted on the vessel side-wall is diminished.»
18. Skinner, Ray. Relativity for Scientists and Engineers Courier Corporation, 2014, p. 189. "A beam of negative energy that travels into the past can be generated by the acceleration of the source to high speeds. A beam of this sort could be used to send a signal into the past; if such signals were possible, we could determine the sense of the signal long before we decide upon the signal. This contradiction shows that we cannot use a negative-energy energy-momentum transfer mechanism to send signals. This does not mean that such energy-momentum transfers cannot occur; it means only that we cannot control those energy-momentum transfers to the extent that we can use them for signaling."
19. Cameron, A. G. W. Technical Note D-1682: The Collapse Phase of Early Solar Evolution NASA, January 1963, p. 5. "As the protostar contracts, half of the gravitational potential energy released will be stored as internal heat, and the remaining half will be radiated away from the surface."
20. Eddington, Arthur. The Expanding Universe CUP, 1933, pp. 90–92.

    "All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the "expanding universe" might also be called the theory of the "shrinking atom". <...>

    Let us then take the whole universe as our standard of constancy, and adopt the view of a cosmic being whose body is composed of intergalactic spaces and swells as they swell. Or rather we must now say it keeps the same size, for he will not admit that it is he who has changed. Watching us for a few thousand million years, he sees us shrinking; atoms, animals, planets, even the galaxies, all shrink alike; only the intergalactic spaces remain the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever‑decreasing orbit. It would be absurd to treat its changing revolution as a constant unit of time. The cosmic being will naturally relate his units of length and time so that the velocity of light remains constant. Our years will then decrease in geometrical progression in the cosmic scale of time. On that scale man's life is becoming briefer; his threescore years and ten are an ever‑decreasing allowance. Owing to the property of geometrical progressions an infinite number of our years will add up to a finite cosmic time; so that what we should call the end of eternity is an ordinary finite date in the cosmic calendar. But on that date the universe has expanded to infinity in our reckoning, and we have shrunk to nothing in the reckoning of the cosmic being.

    We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blurr of intense agitation. And then nothing.

21. ^ R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, Anchor Books, 1938, 1973, pp. 252–59
22. ^ Heylighen, Francis (2007). "Accelerating socio-technological evolution: from ephemeralization and stigmergy to the Global Brain" (PDF). In Modelski, George; Devezas, Tessaleno; Thompson, William (eds.). Globalization as evolutionary process: Modeling global change. Rethinking Globalizations. London: Routledge. pp. 284–335. ISBN 978-0-415-77361-4. ISBN 978-1-135-97764-1.
23. ^ Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990)
24. ^ Francis Heylighen, Tackling Complexity and Information Overload: intelligence amplification, attention economy and the global brain, draft paper, to be submitted to The Information Society, pages 20-44, 2002-04-12

• Technological change
• Buckminster Fuller