The Timewave Was Wrong and Still Interesting

“December 21, 2012 came and went without incident. This does not end the conversation about what McKenna was trying to describe.”

The Timewave Zero prediction, that December 21, 2012 would be a singularity of maximum novelty, was falsified without drama. McKenna had acknowledged the prediction was falsifiable. It was.

What survived the falsification was not the specific prediction but the philosophical claim McKenna derived from the I Ching insight: that time has qualitative structure, that novelty is not uniformly distributed, that some moments are more generative than others.

This claim is not scientific in the sense of being falsifiable. But it is not obviously false. It is what the I Ching was always about: the claim that the moment you are in has characteristics, that some moments resemble other moments, that navigation of time requires attention to its qualitative features.

McKenna wrapped this philosophical observation in a mathematical apparatus that didn't support it and attached it to a specific date that was wrong. The philosophical observation survives. The mathematical apparatus is discarded.

The lesson is about the cost of overconfidence: if he had presented the underlying claim more modestly, it could be engaged more seriously. The overconfident presentation invited dismissal of both the wrong part and the interesting part together.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)