The Cosmic Giggle is an experimental documentary film that explores the human energy field's dynamic relationship with our environment. Naturally as human beings, we are connected to a vast network of fluid information inherent to the world around us. When we are children, we are open to this field through simple innocent observance, but because of our collective evolution towards a dominating and fixated worldview, this perception becomes veiled. This film reveals how this process takes place and provides keys for returning to a more primal and authentic experience of our reality.
How's that? Well. I can't see all of you, but it's a pleasure to be in Seattle this evening. You've made me feel real welcome. Thank you!
Our discussion this evening is "Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines" or "Shamans among the machines". I wanted to talk about this simply because these are two of my great loves, so I assume, being monogamous, they must be one love. So how to build intellectual bridges between these two concerns which seem so different?
As far as people and machines are concerned, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in his book General Systems Theory, he said: "People are not machines but in every opportunity where they're allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave." In other words, we tend to fall into the well of habit. Though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity, we too as creatures of physics and chemistry, of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious patterns. These repetitious patterns are the death of creativity. They diminish our humanness. They diminish our individuality, make each of us somehow like cogs in some larger system.
We associate this cog-like membership in larger soulless systems with the machines that we inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine, the age of the jet engine. Marshall McLuhan said: "We navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rear view mirror to tell them where they're going." It's not a very successful strategy for navigating into the future.
I made a number of notes on this matter of psychedelics and machines. To me, the connecting bridge - well, there're many - but the most obvious one is consciousness expansion. After all, psychedelics, before they were called entheogens, before they were called hallucinogens, before they were called psychedelics, they were simply called "consciousness expanding drugs". Good phenomenological description of what they do. Certainly, the technology of cybernetics is a consciousness expanding technology. It expands a different area of consciousness. They minds of machines and the minds of human beings are very different - so different that each party questions whether the other even has a mind.
In fact, what these are, are species of minds operating in very different domains. For instance, you can ask a five year old child to go into the bedroom to the third drawer of the dresser to select a pair of black socks and to bring them to mother. This is not a challenge for a five-year old child. To get a machine to do this is a hundred million dollars and a research team of forty or fifty technicians, code writers, working months. On the other hand, if you ask a person for the cubic root of 750344, much headscratching results.
A computer is utterly undaunted by that question. Computers are minds that work in the realm of computation. Human minds are minds that work in the realm of generalization, spacial coordination, understanding of natural language, so forth and so on.
Are these kinds of minds so different from each other (??? 6:06) so that there is no bridge to be crossed? I would submit not. In fact the bridge between the human mind and the machine mind is symbolic logic, mathematics. When we think clearly, we are intelligible to machines. People who write code know this: that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine, is to think clearly yourself. The machine has no patience for the half truth, the analogy, the semi-grasped association. For the machine, everything has to be clear. Everything must be defined.
So that's the commonality between minds and machines of the calculating species. What are the common bridges between psychedelics and these machines? Well, to my mind, this is an easier bridge to gap. Both computers and drugs are what I would call function-specific arrangements of matter, and as we develop nanotechnological abilities as we move into the next century, it will be more and more clear that the difference between drugs and machines is simply that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that.
Nanotechnology is a very hot buzzword at the moment, an unimaginable dream of building machines and small objects atom by atom, perhaps under the control of long-chain polymers running forms of preprogrammed software of some sort. It's all very razzmatazz, very state of the art, but in fact, pharmaceutical chemists have been working in the nanotechnological realm for over a hundred years. When you synthesize molecules out of simpler substrate specifically to have the conformational geometry that matches something going on in the synapse of a primate, a human or a monkey or something like that, you're working at this nanotechnological level.
Both the psychedelic and the new computational machines represent extensions of human function. This is really close to the now (? 9:05). It locks in with the concept of prosthetics. The drugs, the psychedelic substances, the shamanic plants, are forms of prostatic devices for extending the human mind, the human perceptual apparatus into hidden realms or inaccessible realms. Similarly the machines, by allowing us to model, calculate and simulate very complicated, multivariable processes, extend the power of the human mind into places it could never dream of going before.
Part of what seems to me very real about being a human being and inheriting 10,000 years of human history, is the complexity of the inheritance, and the growth of that complexity. A thousand years ago, an intelligent human being could actually dream of mastering the entire database of western civilization - read all the classic authors, read the Bible and your closing in on it around AD 1000. Now the notion of any single human being assimilating any even small portion of the database of this civilization, is inconceivable.
So machines which filter, which search, which are guided by human intent, that's part of the story. The other part of the story are boundary dissolving states of ecstasy in which all the factoids of the culture are thrown on for grabs, the deck is reshuffled, synchronicity rules, and out of that steps visionary understanding, breakthrough - integrated breakthrough under the aegis of psychedelic intoxicates.
So, prostheses for the human mind and with the advent of virtual realities of various sorts and that kind of thing, prostheses for the human body. I'm very keen on sort of the under the table effects of these things. In other words, I'm a full-going, full-heartcharging mcluhanist. And I really believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the world we've inherited, are strengths and weaknesses put there by print and by the spectrum of effects which McLuhan called The Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects spun off from print.
If you're not used to thinking in McLuhanist terms it may not seem immediately obvious to you that phenomenon as different as the modern notion of the democrating citizen, the modern notion of interchangeable parts on assembly line, the modern notion of conformity to canons of advertising, these are all spectrums of effect created by the linearity and the uniformity of print. It actually, in the late 15th century, reconstructed the medieval psyche into its proto-modern form, and we have lived within that print-constellated cultural hallucination for about 500 years until the advent of various forms of electronic media in the 20th century. McLuhan talked about radio, he talked about television. He didn't really live to see the internet.
The notion that keeps occurring to me as I watch all this, is that print was uniquely capable of creating and maintaining boundaries, more than any other form of media created, it was a boundary defining form of media. It proceeded linearly, it required literacy, which had implicit in it the notion of a very stable, advanced sort of educational system. Print was a creator and a definer of cultural boundaries, and the new electronic media are not and neither are the psychedelics.
This is why I proposed in a book of mine called The Archaic Revival, the idea that the values of the archaic, of the high-paleolithic values of community, ecstasy, relating to life through rhythm, dance, ritual, intoxication, that these values which seem so archaic are in fact destined to play a major role in the future as print fades. Print, just a convulsive 500 year episode in the western mind that opened that narrow window that permitted the rise of modern science, modern mathematical approaches to the analysis of nature, and then obliterated its own platform, it's own raison d'etre by allowing the growth, the appearance of the electronic technologies.
My sort of supposition about all of this - I'm not an apocalyptarian or a pessimist - I may be an apocalyptarian, I'm not a pessimist - I think this is all very good. Obviously, continuing to run western civilization on the operating system inherited from print produces various form of political and cultural schizophrenia, which allowed to to run unchecked would become fatal, would create cascades of chaos and political de-stabilization that would become uncontrollable.
Governments resist change. Governments cling to technologies and social formulae that are already tried and true. In that sense then, all governments are incredibly anti-progressive forces. Again the image from McLuhan of someone driving into the future using only the rear view mirror.
The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in this peculiar way to accentuate archaic values. Values which are counter to the print-constellated world. When you deconstruct what that means and look at the aboriginal or the paleolithic or the archaic world, you see that the central figure in that world is the shaman, male or female, the shaman. The shaman is like a designated traveller into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances and has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing.
We have no institution like this. We have advertising, we have rock 'n' roll stars, we have cults of celebrity. We have things which are shaman-like, but we have no real institution that permits human beings, in fact encourages human beings to go beyond their cultural values, to burst through into some trans-cultural super space, forage around out there and bring new memes back into the tribe. To some degree our artists do this, to some degree our scientists do it, but it's all hit and miss. It's all lilly nilly, and once achieved, it must be swept under the rug in the service of the myth of method, that somebody was following somebody else's work or somebody was applying a certain form of rational or logical analysis, and then that led to the breakthrough.
If you've read Thomas Paine's book on the structure of scientific revolution, you know, this is all lies and propaganda. The real story of science is that it's a series of revelations brilliantly defended by people whose careers depended on the brilliant defense of those revelations. One of the best-kept secrets of the birth of modern science, is that it was founded by an angel. That the young Rene Descartes was whoreing and soldiering his way across Europe as a 21-year old in the Hubsburg army, and one night in the town of Uolm in Southern Germany, he had a dream - strange that this would be the birthplace of Albert Einstein some 200 years later - but Descartes had a dream, and an angel appeared to him in the dream and the angel said: "The conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number." And he said: "I got it! Modern science! I'll go do it!" And he did, and that was the method for over 250 years of the conquest of nature, and it leads us to the Joseph's Injunction (? 20:21), The Mars Global Surveyor, long base interferometry that searches nearby stars for earth-like planets - it brings us the entire cornucopia of scientific effects but an angelic revelation disguised as a logical, philosophical breakthrough - this is what you're not told in the academy.
My point there is, human progress has always depended on the whispering of alien minds, confrontations with the other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chance held the winning hands. So the shaman, as paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social context, and in the present social context. The sky walker, the one who goes between, the one who passes outside of the tribe and then returns with memes, insights, cures, designs, glossolalia, technologies, and refertilizes the human family by this means. It's irrational, but it's how it actually happens, and it's how it's always happened and it may very well be the only way that it can happen. This cultivation of the irrational, this flirtation with the breakdown of boundaries.
So now, in our nuts and bolts technological progress, we have somehow created technologies which are very friendly to our social values in that these technologies can be bought, sold, licensed, upgraded - all things which we understand. But these technologies are acting on us in the same way that psychedelic drugs do, but more profoundly, more generally and more insidiously, because their effect is not understood, or if it is understood, it's not discussed.
So in a way we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase. All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future. Its music, its design, indeed the very people who will inhabit it appear to be the most switched-on, the most chance-taking, the most alive of the entire tribe. People who feel the beat, people who are not afraid to take chances, people for whom these technologies have always been very natural.
Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information transforming technologies. In fact, one of the strange things that is happening is: Every move we now make in relationship to the new technologies redefines them at the very boundaries where their own developmental impetus would lead them toward a kind of independence. In other words, we talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about the possibility of an AI coming into existence, but we do not really understand to what degree this is already true of our circumstance. In other words, how much of society is already homeostaticly regulated by machines that are ultimately under human control, but practically speaking, are almost never meddled with?
The world price of gold, the rate of the petroleum extraction, and other base-natural resources - how much of these things is on the high season, in the pipeline at any given moment? How much of electricity is flowing into a given electrical grid at any moment? The distribution and the billing of that electricity - all manufacturing and inventory processes are under machine control. So in other words, the larger flows of energy capital and ideas already have kind of autonomous life of their own that we encourage because it makes us money, it makes our lives smoother, it empowers us. It's a symbiotic relationship of empowerment.
Even in the matter of the design of these machines, once human engineers from a set of performance specs and they would design a chip to meek those specs, and the architecture would be put in place by human engineers - now a machine is told: "Here are the design specs. Design the architecture to satisfy the specs." And when that is done, the chip is manufactured, the actual design of the thing is in the hands of machines. So these machine are... You know, McLuhan once said of human beings, he said "We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next year's model." It appears that they're phasing us out of this ignominious role as well as well as any other roles.
Oh, let's see here. So, being an optimist, that's where I was, yes. How to make gold out of this situation? In other words, how to see this as a natural and positive unfolding of the planetary adventure? And for some of these ideas, I'm indebted to Michael (Manuel) De Landa who wrote a book called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. I highly recommend it. He didn't say what I'm about to say, I'll take credit and blame for it. But the book gave me the idea:
When you stand off and look at human beings and their technologies, it's very hard not to notice that from the very moment that we have the technology that can be distinguished from chimpanzees pushing grass stems down anthills or digging with sharpened bones or something like that - the minute you get past that, our technologies have always involved the materials of the earth. What agriculture itself is, is a different way of relating to the earth. Nomadism which preceded it, was a seasonal wandering, very lightly, over the earth. And at some point, the deep fertile soil of the river valleys that were encountered in these nomadic wanderings were recognized as potential sources of food if cultivated, if treated to a certain set of technological methods.
So that early technology is defined by a new relationship to the materials of the earth itself, and it's quickly followed because agriculture is so successful as a strategy for food production. It's quickly followed by city building and the establishment of secondary populations because you can't carry your surplus with you if your an agriculturist, so great is the physical volume of it. Cities - and at the very early establishment of these populations - in the Middle East you get first traces of metallurgy, the working of metals, the alloying of metals, the tinting of base metals with more precious metals.
This process of ever more finely refining and fabricating the materials of the earth proceeds in an unbroken series of processes and steps right up to the latest 500MHz chip, it proceeds right up to the modern computational machinery. I once heard someone say that plants were something that - that animals had been invented by plants to move them around, which from an evolutionary point of view you can see that this is a kind of truth, and many plants hitchhike around on animals, and no animals has been more prolific in the spreading of plants than the animal. We call it ecosystemic disruption, but what it really is is ecosystemic homogenization.
I live in Hawaii for example. 80 percent of the plants in Hawaii are now introduced species. Almost none of the plants that were pre-conquest on the Western coast of North America exist anymore. They have been supplanted by much tougher, more tightly evolved Mediterranean plants that have known the presence of grazing animals for millenia. So these flora are constantly being changed, human beings move plants around.
With that perspective then, it seems to me the earth's strategy for its own salvation is through machines and human beings are a kind of intermediary catalytic step in the rarefaction of the earth. The earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the earth itself is growing conscious.
You know, if you study embryology, you know that the final ramification, the final spread and thinning out of the nervous system happens very suddenly at the end of fetal development. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but in the last 10, 12 years or so a very profound change has crept over our household appliances - they've become telepathic.
So while we were arguing about the implications of the internet for e-commerce or what have you, all of these passive machines previously used for playing Pong and word processing, became subsets of a planetary node of information that has never turned off, that endlessly whispers to itself on the backchannels, that is endlessly monitoring and being inputted data from the human world. And we should know because upon attempt to the development of all this technology, chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the work of (??? 33:20) and Ralph Abraham and Stuart Kauffman - all these people who worked in complexity theory and perturbation of large scale dissipative structures, these people have secured that complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order.
This is counterintuitive if you're running physics 19th century style as your OS, but if you're actually keeping up with what's going on, there's nothing miraculous about this. All kinds of complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. What it really means is that we are in the process of birthing some kind of strange companion.
You know, Nietzsche, a hundred years ago, said "That strangest of all guests now stands at the door." He was speaking of nihilism, and certainly the 20th century sat down, had the party, drank the booze and went to bed with nihilism, but now a stranger guest stands at the door, and it is the AI. Denied as a possibility as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in books like Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do.
But if you've been paying attention you may have noticed those voices have grown strangely silent in the past five or six years. At this point nobody wants to say what computers can't do and hang their career on that. That would be extremely reckless at this point, I would think, because the fact is, we are ourselves elements acting and reacting in a system that we cannot understand. This seems natural to me because my observations as stated here this evening, rest on an assumption which science doesn't share, which I think is easily conveyed and you can confirm it from your own experience of light, and it is this: That the universe grows more complex as we approach the present. It was simpler a million years ago, it was simpler yet a billion years ago - as you go backward in time, the universe becomes more simple.
As you approach this golden moment, process, complexity is layered upon complexity, not only a planetary ecosystem, not only language using cultures, but language using cultures with high technology with supercomputers, the ability to sequence our own genome, on and on and on. That's self-evident. Equally self-evident is the fact that this process of complexification that informs all nature on all levels, is visibly, palpably, obviously accelerating. And I don't mean so that glaciers retreat 50% faster or volcanism is occurring in 12% greater rate than a million years ago. I mean viscerally accelerating so that now a human life is more than enough of a window to see the entire global system of relationships in transformation.
By this you could call me an extrapolationist. If I see a process which has been slowly accelerating for twelve billion years, it's hard for me to imagine any force which could step forward out of nowhere and wrench that process in a new direction. Rather I would assume that this process of exponential acceleration into what I call novelty, which you might call complexity, is a law of being and cannot be retarded or deflected.
But what does that mean, because now the human lifetime is more than enough time to see this process of rampant and spreading, virus-like complexity. What does it mean? It seems to presage the absolute annihilation of everything familiar, everything with roots in the past. And I believe that to be true, I think that the planet is like some kind of organism that is seeking morphogenetic transformation, and it's doing it through the expression of intelligence, and out of intelligence, technology.
Human beings are the agent of a new order of being. That's why, though it's obvious that we're higher mammals and some kind of primate and so forth and so on, you can look at us from another point of view, and see that we're more like archangels than primates. We have qualities and concerns and anxieties that animals don't share. We are materially suspended between two different orders of being and our technologies, our fetish, our religions and - my definition of technology is sufficiently broad that it includes even spoken language.
All of our technologies demand, push forward toward and make inevitable their own obsolescence, so were caught in an evolutionary cascade. You know, people say: "If the AI would break loose, what would it look like, what would it be? Where does humanity fit into the picture?" It's a little hard to imagine. The machines operating in 1000MHz confer automatic immortality on the mammalian nervous system if you can get it somehow uploaded, downloaded, cross loaded into machinery, because ten minutes becomes eternity in a machine like that.
So a kind of false or pseudo immortality opens up ahead of us, as a kind of payoff for our devotion to the program of machine evolution and machine intelligence. Now, some people say this is appalling and we should go back to the good old days, whatever the good old days were. To me, it's exhilarating, exciting, psychedelic, beautiful. It means that the human form, the human possibility is in the process of leaving history behind. History is some kind of an adaptation that lasts about, take a number, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years - no more than that. What is 20,000 years in the life of a biological species? We know that there were homo sapiens sapiens types 200,000 years ago.
So history is some kind of an episodic response to a certain set of culture dilemmas, and now it's ending. And print created a number of ideas which now have to be given up, ideas like the distinct nature, the distinct and unique nature of the individual, the necessary hierarchical structuring of society, all of these things are going to, if not have to be given up entirely, dramatically modified, because the illusion that the self has simple location, is now exposed. The self does not have simple location. This is why you are brother's keeper. That's why we all are responsible for each other. The idea that what happens in distant parts of the world makes no claim on my moral judgment or my moral understanding, is wrong. The wrong as revealed by quantum physics, as revealed by electronic experience is what Leibniz called a plenum. It's all one thing. It's all connected, it's all of a part.
So I also wanted to point out that I mentioned earlier this thing about prosthesis and how the machines are prosthetic devices extending human consciousness somewhat like psychedelics. That's the equation from a human point of view. But what is also equally true is that we are a prosthetic device for these machines. We are their eyes and ears in the world, we provide the code, we provide the constraints, we build the hardware. It is a relationship of mutual benefit.
It's not entirely clear that our contribution will always be creative in the sense that our primate hand will be on the tiller of existence as it has been, but certainly we are part of this equation of transformation that is making itself felt, and that distinction flesh and machinery, which is easily made now, will be less easy to make in the future as we migrate toward the nanotechnological domains, the methodologies of production become much more like the processes of biology.
For example, biology does all its miracles on this planet at temperatures below a 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Organic life requires no higher temperature to build great whales, redwood trees, swarms of locus, what have you. The high temperature, heavy metal technologies that we have become obsessed with, are extremely primitive and extremely toxic. That will all disappear as we model and genuflect in our manufacturing process before the methods and style of nature, which is to pull atomic species from the local environment, and then to assemble them, atom by atom by atom.
So this AI that coming into existence, is to my mind not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it really is it's a new confirmation of geometry as the collective self of humanity. And you know, I've always believed that while there are different models of what shamanism is - there's the Jungian model which is that the shaman is someone who goes to the collective unconscious and manipulates the archetypes and heals by that means. The model that I prefer is a mathematical model. The shaman is someone who simply, through extraordinary perturbation of consciousness, either through taking plant hallucinogens or manipulating diet or through flagellation and ordeal or by some means, perturbs consciousness to the point where the ordinary conformational geometries are blasted through, and then the shaman can see into the culturally forbidden zones of information.
If you think about shamanism for a moment, what do shamans do classically? They know where the game has gone, they are great weather prophets, they are very insightful in the matter of various small domestic hassles, like who stole the chicken, who slept with the chief's wife, this kind of thing, and they cure. They cure. Well, if you analyze these abilities, it's clear to me they all indicate, that they come from a common source, and the common source that they come from is higher dimensional perception in a mathematical sense, not a metaphorical sense, in the sense of 4D perception. If you could see in hyperspace, you could see where the game will be next week, you could see the weather a month from now, you would know who stole the chicken. And any good doctor will tell you that if you're building a reputation as physician, you must hone the intuitional ability to choose patients who won't die. It's a call. Any doctor will tell you this.
So this is what shamans are. They are 4D people. They are sanctioned members of the society who are allowed to put on the gloves, as it were, pull on the goggles, and look beyond the idols of the tribe, look beyond the myth. In a way, as culture breaks down in multiculturalism and the rise of the internet and a generation of people raised on hallucinogenic plants and substances, we all are asked to assimilate some portion of this shamanic potential to ourselves, and it's about not blocking what is obvious. Nothing comes unannounced, in this is the faith. Nothing comes unannounced, but idiots can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it, and this is not to mind woo-woo. It's actually based on the observations of how life works, whether it's counterintuitive to logical positivism and its fellow travellers or not.
Then I wanna leave you with just one last thought on all of this, which is, and this sort of arcs back to the question of the similarities between the machines and the plants, and it's a - I'm sure you've heard this, I've heard it. It has different levels of being said and being heard. It's that the world is actually made of language. It isn't made of electrons and fields of force and scaler vectors and all of that fancy stuff. The world is made of language. The word is primary, more primary than the speed of light, more primary than any of the physical constants that are assumed by science to be the bedrock of reality. Below that, surrounding and enclosing all those constructs of science, is language. The act of signifying.
You know, virtual reality is a very sexy new sort of concept as normally presented. Machine sustained immersive realities that trick your senses into believing you're in a world that you're in fact not in. But in fact, the entire enterprise of civilization has been about building these virtual realities. The first virtual realities were at Ur and Shanidar and (??? 51:52) and Jericho. Yes, stone and adobe is an intractable material compared to photons moving on a screen, but nevertheless the name of the game is the same, which is to cast an illusion between man and reality, to build a cultural truth in the stead of the natural truth of the animal body and the felt moment of immediate experience.
And this is where I want to tie it up, with this notion of the felt presence of immediate experience. This trancends the culture, the machines, the drugs, the history, the momentum of evolution. It's all you will ever know and all can ever know. It's the felt presence of immediate experience. Everything else arrives as rumor, litigant, advocant, supposition, possibility. The felt moment of immediate experience is actually the mind and the body aware of each other, and aware of the flow of time, and the establishment of being through metabolism.
And this, I think, is what the machines cannot assimilate. It will be for them a mystery as the nature of deities is a mystery for us. I have no doubt that before long there will be machines that will claim to be more intelligent than human beings, and who argue brilliantly their position, and it will become a matter of philosophical disputation whether they are or are not passing the Turing test and so forth and so on. But machines, I do not believe, can come to this felt moment of immediate experience. That is the contribution of the animal body to this evolutionary symbiosis which I believe will in the conquest of the universe by organized intelligence; that all this is prevalent.
I mean, we are fragile. This earth is fragile, a tiny slip anywhere along the line and we could end up a smear in the shale, no more than the trilobites or the (??? 54:43) or all the rest of those who came and went. But given the sufficient cultivation of the potential of our technology, we can actually reach toward a kind of immortality. Not human immortality, because that's a contradiction in terms, but immortality nevertheless, based on the possibility of machines and the transcendent ability of human beings to live and love and express themselves in the moment.
And the psychedelics bring that to just a white hot focus, and it's out of that white hot focus that the alchemical machinery of transformation will be forged, and it will not be like the things which have come from the industrial economy. They will not be profane machines. They will be spiritual machines, alchemical gold. The universal panacea that renaissance magic dared to dream at the end of the 16th century.
We are reaching out toward this mind child that will be born from the intellectual loins of our culture, and to my mind it's the most exciting and transformative thing that has ever happened on this planet, and the miracle is that we are present, not only to witness it, but to be part of it, and to be raised up in an epiphany that will redeem the horror of history as nothing else can or could, redeem the horror of history through a transformation of the human soul into a galaxy-roving vehicle via our machines and our drugs and the externalization of our souls.
Questions
"Are there questions?" "Yes!" "Yes, I can't see you but" "It's okay. Can you speak to how mercy and love gets built into these machines, because it seems like the machines are being built for commerce, and for the bottom line more than the expression of the human soul throughout the galaxy, I don't think think that - you know what I'm saying?" "I know what you're saying." "Where's the love in this?" "I think the love is a property of the system itself, in other words you're right. These bottom liners are not gonna be interested in building much love into this system.
However, the good news is that they're not in charge. In other words, what we have is a very complicated system, and certain design parameters appear to be - being maximized. There's an attempt to maximize them. But the thing that is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place. So for example, two things are charged against the internet. That it's disensouling, dehumanizing and yak yak yak, and that it promotes pornography, anonymous sexual shifting of identities and on and on and on. Well which is it? Is it this messy, sloppy autoerotic, erotic collectivist kind of thing, or is it disensouling, disempowering, cold, so forth and so on? I think the answer is: It's all and everything.
This question about the AI is very interesting to me, and if it's interesting to you, you should read Hans Moravec and Kurzweil and these people on this subject. The assumption is generally loose in that community that the complexification of the internet and the freestanding machines of certain types is eventually gonna lead to the outbreak of either consciousness or pseudo-consciousness of some sort in these large-scale systems. The question then becomes: Can a human mind envision what that is?
If you're interested, search words like "superintelligence" and see what the net kicks out. We can all imagine superintelligence. It's just somebody much smarter than we are. But obviously, all the engineering people agree, if you achieve an AI with superintelligence, then it will be intelligent to immediately design an intelligence which transcends it it. When you're talking of cycling at a 1000 megahertz, these processes can occur in a blink of an eye. Hans Moravec says about the rise of artificial intelligence: We may never know what hit us. I think, I mean I'm not that bright, but if I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull.
Many years ago, Ken Kesey had a theory and he said that the fastest any person react in the outside stimuli's 1/25th of a second, and popularized science, of course, (??? 1:01:04) AMA, they agreed upon that. So if we are going past any person reacting in the outside stimuli's 1/25th of a second, my question is: Can you time time travel? Can we like, if a person like Bruce Lee was able to (??? 1:01:24) reacted to an outside stimuli at 1/20th, and (??? 01:01:29) 21st, so if you're reacting to the outside world before it actually happens to you, everyone who's not reacting (??? 1:01:36), because you see, alcohol inhibits a person's (??? 1:01:40)
"Are you sure? First of all, there is this research - I'm not a neurophysiologist - but you've probably all heard this research that you actually make decisions before your conscious ego is aware that the decision has been made, that there's a slight time lag. So when you think you're making certain kinds of decisions, brainwave study shows it's already a done deal. But time is set by the cycle speed of the hardware you're running on. You know, the human body, we can argue about this cause it's different parts, but roughly runs at about a 100 hertz. Very slow. Well, if there is any meaning to the phrase "upload a human being into circuitry" - a lot of Greg Egan's fiction is based around the idea that you can copy yourself into a machine, you can turn yourself into software. But that when you enter the machine environment that's running at a thousand megahertz per second, you perceive that as vast amounts of time. In other words, all time is, is how much change you can pack into a second. If a second seems to last a thousand years, then ten seconds is ten thousand years.
One could imagine a technology just in a science fiction mood, where they would come to you in your hospital bed and say: "You have five minutes of life left. Would you like to die, or would you like the five minutes to be stretched to a 150,000 years by prosthetic and technical means? You're still going to die in five minutes, but you will be able to leave your elephants over the alps and write the plays of Shakespeare and conquer the new world and still have plenty of time on your hands. In other words, time is going to become a very plastic medium. Now that is a kind of time travel. Could there be time travel a la H.G. Wells where you climb onto the (??? 1:04:04) of the time machine and then day follows night light like the flapping of a great black wing until all emerges into a continuous greyness and then you find yourself confronting a (??? 1:04:20) in the year of one billion AD or something like that.
It's possible. I mean, time travel is completely out of left field ten years ago, in the last 18 months there have been hundreds of articles of time travel in Physical Review and other places. There are ever schemes for time travel that would work. they just require godlike technological abilities. In other words, if you could build a cylinder with the diameter of the planet Saturn that was 10 AU in length, and could spin it at 95% the speed of light, then it would wrap space-time around itself like toilet paper on the wall (? 1:05:10). And as you travelled up at the transverse dimension, you would find yourself travelling in time. Kurt Gödel showed this in 1949 and that paper has been lying around - well obviously, that's a tough way to do it. But it's a tough thing to do, right! His seven second delay. Yeah, well, they're working on that.
Somebody over here. Just a minute. This lady, then you. Speak!
"(What are?) The most important parts that are maintained in that (??? 1:05:55) virtual reality?"
You know, in William Gibson's fiction, the AI Wintermute I think it was called, was fascinated by human art, and it built collages in its spare time, and these collages began to turn up in various art galleries and exhibitions, and they had such an elan that someone in the plot follows it all to its source. I think human creativity is the thing that would be most interesting to the machines. In my darker fantasies, they just eliminate everybody who can't code C++ as being some kind of redundant mutation, and everybody who can code C++ is placed in Tahiti and sends their work down the pipeline to the machine world beyond.
I really think that we have a very, dare I say it, mechanistic view of what machines are. For example, say there were a superintelligent machine, and say it were your friend. If it were really superintelligent, then it ought to be able to just make your life heaven itself. In other words, without you giving it any input whatsoever, it should be able to arrange for you to find fifty dollar bills lying on the street, old friends encountering you, promotions coming your way, because the real thing that machines can do, I think, is manage complex processes.
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary - we are led by the least among us - and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
This is something - I don't really want to get off on this tear because it's a lecture in itself, but - culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes - what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture. Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important.
But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you.
[Audience question: "How do we fight back?"] How do we fight back. It's a question worth answering.
[Audience question: "Where is this planet as an organism going?"] Same question as how do we fight back. I think that, by creating art. Art. Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of Gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. By putting the art pedal to the metal, we really, I think, maximize our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.
This is what people were doing up until the invention of agriculture. I'm absolutely convinced that the absence of ceramic and textural material and so forth and so on, does not indicate the absence of subtle mind, poetically empowered minds, minds with an incredible sense of humor and irony, and community, and that it was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is: A person who dedicates himself to agriculture, who did in the paleolithic, can produce hundreds of times the amount of food they can consume. Why would anyone do that? Well, the answer is, because you can use it to play power games. You can trade it for wives or land or animals or something like that.
So, living in the moment, creating art, probably largely through poetry and body decoration and dance, gave way to toil and predatory social forms of behavior which we call commerce, capitalism, the market economy, so forth and so on. That's why the breakdown of the monolithic structures created by print is permitting a vast proliferation of the cottage industry mentality. The self-employed artist, the hacker who stays home and develops his or her software, people who dare to be independent and slip beyond the reach of these dinosaur-like mechanistic organizations. That's what it's all about. It's all about trying to negotiate a cultural standoff between you and your culture so that it will not put you in the can for the rest of your life, but you can put up with its stupidity, and you know, we have a very uncomfortable feat (? 13:25) on this issue, especially as people as you know, who are sophisticated about psychedelics. This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent to problem, and yet we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn't it perfectly clear that "business as usual" is a bullet through the head? That there is no "business as usual" for anybody who's interested in survival.
Over here, I promised this person, are you still interested?
"You talk about the psychedelics and their role (??? 1:14:29) as being the missing link between [inaudible]"
Oh, what a wonderful question. Yes. The question is, how to psychedelics pertain basically to the transition from higher primates to human animals. This is my (??? 1:14:46) because I have a theory to which I am grandly welcome, everyone tells me. But a theory of evolution, and I'll give it to you very briefly, it's simply this: The great embarrassment for evolutionary theory which can explain the tongue of the hummingbird, the structure of the orchid, the mating habits of the groundhog and the migration of the monarch butterfly. Nevertheless, the great embarrassment to evolutionary theory, is the human neocortex. Lumholtz, who was a pretty straight evolutionary biologist, described the evolution of the human neocortex as the most dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
Well, why is this an embarrassment? Because it's the organ that thought up the theory of evolution. So you know, can you say tautology? That's the problem right there. So, it is necessary in evolutionary theory to account for the dramatic emergence of the human neocortex in this very narrow window of time. Basically, in about two million years, they went from being higher primates, hominids, to being true humans, as truly human as you and I tonight. What the hell happened? What was the factor? The earth was already old. Many hundreds of higher animal forms had come and gone, and the fire of intelligence had never been kindled. So what happened?
I think that the answer lies in diet, generally, and in psychedelic chemistry in particular. I think that as the African continent grew drier, we were forced out of the ecological niche we had evolved into. We were (??? 1:16:55) dwelling primates, insectivores, complex signaling repertoire, evolutionary dead end. But when we came under nutritional pressure, we were flexible enough, this is the key to humanness at every stage of its development, our maddening flexibility. Other animal and plant species can't react. We can. Our flexibility. We began to experiment with a new kind of diet, and to leave the trees and explore the new environment of the grassland, and evolving concomitantly in the grassland were various forms of ungulate animals, double stomached animals whose manure is the ideal medium for mushrooms, coprophilic mushrooms, dung-loving mushrooms, many of whom produce psilocybin.
Well, I myself in Kenya, have seen baboons spreading out over a grassland and noticed that their behavior is, they flick over old cow pies. Why? Because there are beetlegrubs there. So they already had a behavioral vector for nutrition, for protein that would lead them to investigate the cow pies. In the amazon, after a couple of days of fog and rain, these psilocybin mushrooms, Stropharia Cubensis can be the size of dinner plates. In other words, you can't miss it if you're a foraging primate, you can't miss it. The taste is pleasant and psilocybin has unique characteristics, both as a hallucinogen and other properties that make it the obvious chemical trigger for higher processes, and I'll run through this quickly for you, but here it is:
In very low doses, doses where you wouldn't say you were stoned or loaded or anything like that, but just in doses you might obtain by nibbling as you foraged, it increases visual acuity. In other words, it's like a technological improvement on your vision. Chemical binoculars lying there in the grass. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if an animal is a carnivorous forager and theres a food which improves its vision, those that avail themselves of that food will have greater success in obtaining food and rearing their children to sexual maturity, which is the name of the game in evolution.
So step one: Small doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity and food getting success. Step two: Slightly larger doses of psilocybin in primates create what's called arousal. This is what you have after a double cappuccino in highly sexed animals like primates you get male erection. So what do you have here? You have a factor which increases what anthropologists without a trace of humor refer to as increased instances of successful copulation.
In other words, the animals eating the psilocybin are more sexually active, therefore more pregnancies are occurring, therefore more infants are being born, therefore there's a process which would tend to automatically outbreed the non-psilocybin using members of the population. Step two toward higher consciousness. Step three: You eat still more mushrooms. Now you're not foraging with sharpened (??? 1:20:53) nor are you horsing around with your opposed gender acquaintances. Instead you're nailed to the ground in hallucinogenic ecstasy, and one of the amazing things about psilocybin above, say, five or six grams dried material, is it causes glossolalia - spontaneous burts of language-like behavior under the obvious control of internal syntax. I believe syntax existed before spoken language, that syntax controls spatial behaviors and body languages and is not necessarily restricted to the production of vocal speech.
So there it is in a nutshell. We ate our way to higher consciousness. The mushroom made us better hunters, better survivors, among those in the population who used it, their sexual drive was increased, hence they outbred the more reluctant members of the tribe to get loaded, and finally, it created a kind neuroleptic seizure which led to downloading of these syntactically controlled vocalizations which became the raw material for the evolution of language and it's amazing to me that the straight people, the academics believe language is no more than 35,000 years old. That means it's as basic to human beings as the bicycle pump. It's something somebody invented 35,000 years ago. It's got nothing to do with primate evolution and the long march of the hominid and all that malarkey. No - it's just an ability, a use to which syntax can be put that previously had not been put, and before spoken language, things were very touchy-feely, and the wink and the nod carried you a great distance and gestural communication was very high.
That's why, and I should say this and then end, to me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid died brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. And technology developed and developed and mushrooms were in (??? 1:23:40) against faded (? 1:23:42), there was migrations, cultural change, but now, having split the atom, having sequenced our genom, having taken the temperature of Beetlegeuse and all the rest of it, we're now back where we started.
Like the shaman who makes the journey into the well of darkness and returns with the pearl (? 1:24:04) of immortality, you don't dwell in the well of darkness which was human history. You capture the essence of the thing, which is the godlike power of the shaman's myth, the technologist, the demon artificer, the worker of metals, the conjurer of spirits, and you carry that power back out of history, and it's in that dimension, outside of history, that you create true humanness and true community, and that's the adventure that we're in the act of undertaking. Thank you very very much.
Date: 11-25-12 Host: George Knapp Guests: Dennis J. McKenna, David Paulides
George Knapp welcomed ethno-pharmacologist Dennis McKenna, who has been studying plant hallucinogens for over forty years, and is convinced there are major therapeutic applications of psychedelics. They discussed the groundbreaking work McKenna did with his brother Terence, the great raconteur of wide-reaching philosophical ideas.
In the first hour, former lawman turned investigative journalist, David Paulides, detailed a potential breakthrough in Bigfoot DNA research.
Biography:
Dennis McKenna is an ethno-pharmacologist who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years. In 1975 he co-authored the book Invisible Landscape with his brother Terence McKenna. The book was based on their investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He also acted as co-star of his brother's book True Hallucinations, which further described their experiences while in the Amazon. He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, serves on the Advisory Board of the American Botanical Council, and has been a board member for Botanical Dimensions. In 2012, Dennis released The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!, a biography of his life's adventures with Terence.
Biography:
David Paulides, a former police investigator, has applied his skills to questioning Bigfoot witnesses. The results he has achieved in gaining access to witnesses and getting detailed information from them is both remarkable and intriguing.
Terence McKenna Art Bell Interview Coast to Coast AM 16th July 1999
A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment.Terence describes these experiences in his final Coast to Coast interview with Art Bell on July 16, 1999. He joined the ancestor spirits on April 3, 2000 at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, his daughter Klea and many friends, students and admirers.
"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears. " ~Terence McKenna
Sound Photosynthesis presents PSYCHEDELICS IN THE 1990'S - MAPS Conference Compilation. Historical. A gathering together to discuss the fate of psychedelics in the 1990's and their possible regulation or continued prohibition, are a group of speakers with divergent views and past experiences. Nevertheless, they share a deep commitment to the development of a constructive policy towards psychedelics. They graciously agreed to speak to help raise funds for psychedelic research, a field that has been at a standstill for a generation. Participants were: Timothy Leary, Alice Agar Wittine, Ram Dass, Rick Doblin, Mark Kleiman, Robert Zanger, Terence McKenna, Emerson Jackson, Ralph Matzner, Andrew Weil, Laura Huxley, Dennis McKenna, Jerome Beck, and Bruce Eisner. This is the closest you will get if you weren't there to begin with...if you were, this is better than your memories.
Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991
Sound Photosynthesis presents Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991. For the full length recording please contact us at www.sound.photosynthesis.com
THE STONED AGES explores the history of drugs. From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history.
THE STONED AGES explores the reasons we've used drugs through the ages to heal our bodies and minds, to connect with a higher power, to feel better, for recreation, to escape, for performance enhancement, and even to prolong our lives while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us?
Hosted by Dean Norris, THE STONED AGES will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse. How can drugs that are worshipped in one society be morally reprehensible and often illegal in another? And what causes some good drugs to go bad?
THE STONED AGES will interview the writers, historians, doctors, pharmaceutical reps, religious leaders, policy makers, FDA scientists, DEA representatives, and drug addicts who shape the often conflicting roles that drugs play in our lives today.
Drugs can kill and enslave, heal and provide hope, and alter our consciousness in deeply profound ways. THE STONED AGES will tell the story of how drugs have helped us become who we are.
Anthropologist Wade Davis is one of the world's great story tellers, with personal adventures to match. An Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, he specializes in hanging out with traditional peoples and exploring their religious practices.
He first came to public notice with his discovery of the reality of zombies in Haitian voodoo and the substance used to poison them---chronicled in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. He is the author of 13 books, including One River and Shadows in the Suns, and has hosted, written, and starred in numerous television specials, including "Earthguide," "Light at the Edge of the World," "Spirit of the Mask," and "Forests Forever." This talk is based on the prestigious Massey Lectures that Davis gave in Canada in 2009.
The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," declares Wade Davis, and then proves it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape.
The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis notes, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture.
The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concludes. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it.
Trialoguesare from a series of lively, far-reaching discussions between Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, that took place between 1989 and 1998, in America and England. These Mp3’s are generously hosted by Rupert on Sheldrake.org
These three-way conversations began in private after their first meeting in 1982. Encouraged by their similar fascinations and complimentary views, and inspired by the synergy of their ideas and styles and the input of differing areas of expertise, the three friends continued to meet and explore new areas of thought. Throughout their public trialogues, which began in 1989, they maintained the spontaneous, playful and intrepid spirit of their private talks, and were thrilled that these explorations inspired further discussions amongst their audiences. Their trialogues and friendship have been a source of great inspiration and stimulation for their own lives and work.
In their first set of public trialogues, held as a workshop at Esalen in 1989, they explored aspects of the world soul from the perspectives of chaos, creativity and imagination, and discussed many topics including: light and vision; the psilocybin mushroom; the unconscious; entities; the resacralization of the world; the reform of the educational system and the Apocalypse.
Their second series of trialogues examined evolution in all its forms, through new topics that included: grassroots science; psychedelics, computers and mathematics; psychic animals; the World Wide Web; celestial intelligences; the nature of time and the evolving mind.
Edited transcripts of many of their first series of trialogues are published in the book Trialogues at the Edge of the West (later published as Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness), and many of those from their second series can be found in The Evolutionary Mind.
Terence McKenna was an ethnopharmacologist, shamanologist, and author, known for his theories on plant hallucinogens and the novelty wave, and the bardic skill with which he conveyed his ideas. Sadly Terence died aged 53 on April 3, 2000.
Ralph Abraham, PhD, is a Professor of Mathematics, author, and pioneer in the fields of Chaos theory, computer graphics, visual mathematics and dynamical systems.
Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance.
1. Cast of Characters An introduction to the first series of public trialogues held at Esalen, California in 1989.
2. The Evolutionary Mind What could have been the cause for the breakthrough in the evolution of human consciousness around 50,000 years ago?
3.. Consciousness and Machines A discussion on the evolution of consciousness as it relates to machines. Symbolic logic, nanotechnology and the possibility of a synthetic super-intelligence.
4. History, Fractals and Change The fractal idea of history, and millenia as the plateaus of history. These bifurcation periods as opportunities to influence the creation of the future.
5. Creativity and the Imagination The crisis in science: collision between the permanent and evolutionary views of the nature of reality. A wide-ranging discussion in two parts.
6.Creativity and Chaos The chaos revolution, chaotic attractors and indeterminism in nature. A comprehensive discussion in two parts.
7. Chaos and the Imagination How can chaos theory and full access to the imagination aid us in our understanding of the world and in the creation of our future? A discussion in 2 parts.
8 Light and Vision How is our own vision related to light, and how is the perception of the world soul related to light? A discussion in 2 parts.
9 Entities Are disincarnate and non-human entities mental projections or non-physical, autonomous entities? How do they relate to the world soul and how can we interpret their messages? A discussion in 2 parts.
10 The Unconscious What is the nature of the unconscious, and how can we access its restorative powers? A discussion in 2 parts.
13 The Apocalypse This investigation into apocalyptic messages starts with the question of whether they are self-fulfilling prophecies or intuitions of instability. A discussion in 2 parts.
14 Grass Roots Science The trialoguers discuss the need for a new grassroots model of science. A discussion in 2 parts.
15 Saving the World The trialoguers address the problem of over-population and resource depletion. A discussion in 2 parts.
16. Gender Issues Exploring gender issues and ways to heal society. A discussion in 2 parts.
17. Cannabis The trialoguers discuss cannabis and its potential as a tool for cultural evolution. A discussion in 2 parts.
18. Crop Circles An in-depth investigation into the mystery of crop circles. A discussion in 2 parts.
34 Morphogenetic Family Fields An investigation into telepathic bonds within social groups and the nature of the fields that may underlie these connections (2 parts).
A. When the material presented therein triggers within the mind of the reader conceptualizations greater than those which can be expected as a consequence of logical deduction.
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1975) by Terence and Dennis McKenna is just such a book. When Terence sent me a review copy of this book some time ago, I was astounded, to put it mildly. The authors have shown how scientific knowledge in fields such as quantum physics, chemistry, genetics, and information theory interfaces with subjective metaphysical precepts manifested by the psychedelic experience. Science, they're telling us, has nearly reached the end of its rope by restricting its investigations to aspects of the physical world which can be repeatedly produced in controlled situations. Science has a difficult time getting an investigative handle on phenomena such as telepathy, UFO experiences, and similar paranormal phenomena, because these situations are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate from the laboratory bench.
Terence and his brother are also the authors of Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (1976), written under the pseudonyms O. T. Oss & O. N. Oeric. Terence has lectured extensively on hallucinogens and consciousness at the Esalen Institute, and is currently working on another book soon to be published. His brother is busy preparing a doctoral thesis on plant hallucinogens.
You could say Grower's Guide launched the starship and provided the initial acceleration. Now that we're so close to the hyperdimensional shock wave--as we transfer into the higher dimensions--the ontological linguistic transformation that Terence McKenna speaks of becomes necessary--indeed, the most obvious choice--for communication. There is quite a shock front to get the hyperdimensional shift to become probabilistically localized, but his discussion on time and the I Ching in The Invisible Landscape make the potentialities distinctly visible. Yet what I first noticed about Terence was not what he was saying, but how he was saying it. (Those of you who have heard him speak or heard his tapes will know what I'm talking about.) Terence, and his brother too, both have a peculiar way of enunciating every word with a lucidity unlike any other speaker I've heard. Perhaps he has access to a 7-element hyperdimensional communications processor or something. "Fascinating", as Spock would say. He's probably a skilled hypnotist besides...
Terence McKenna, author, lecturer, and shamanic explorer of the realm of psychedelic states, has been described by some as being "so far out, nobody knows what he's talking about", and by others as "the most innovative thinker our times". You be the judge.
The writings of the McKenna brothers are fascinating to me, not because I agree with everything they are saying (I don't), but because they are presenting ideas which are self-propagating. The Invisible Landscape triggered more questions in my mind than it answered; the impression is that the ideas presented are just the tip of the iceberg, a single needle on the redwood tree, one cell within the nervous system. In this sense, The Invisible Landscape is a book that's more than a book. I decided to talk to the author.
Psychozoic Press: Mr. McKenna, what's the most important shortcoming as you see it of science's approach to studying the world around us?
Terence McKenna: Science is interested in the kind of phenomena where, when you recreate the initial conditions, the same effect is always observed. And yet in life, you never experience the same sort of initial conditions; they're always different. Every set of processes that are really interesting has many end states. So you can think of science as a kind of large-grid description of the world. It only explains the simple phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. All the complex phenomena--consciousness, memory, culture--these things slip right through it.
PP: In the lecture you gave at the Esalen Institute on "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness", you talked about calling yourself an explorer. You referred to LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other hallucinogens as each being a distinct phenomenological universe. Would the physics of concrescence you're talking about in The Invisible Landscape be a sort of proto-science which seeks to integrate these various phenomenological universes?
TM: Concrescence is a philosophical term taken from Alfred North Whitehead. It means the growing together of something. And on the highest level, the growing together of everything. And in that sense, yes, these psychedelic drugs anticipate future states of human consciousness. The historical process is an exploration of these psychedelic states at the cultural level. You can actually say society is becoming more psychedelic; it means that society is becoming more and more reflective of the modalities of mind, and that process can be seen as an informational "growing together", a concrescence.
PP: Yes. When you stop to think about the way thinking has evolved in physics, you can see that it covers larger and larger domains in trying to describe the material aspects of three-dimensional matter.
TM: Well, science has outsmarted itself by pushing its analysis of the physical world to such a limit that it becomes recursive. You discover that you're no longer talking about velocity and momentum and charge and spin, you're talking about syntax and language and point-of-view and perspective and emphasis. The language of psychology almost emerges as a necessary consequence of examining matter at the very deepest level. This is symbolized by the ouroboric snake taking its tail in its mouth. Any analysis pursued deeply enough will lead back to the question of who analyzes, and this is what has happened in physics.
PP: Some of the labels they have come up with to name these different qualities reflect that, too: "charm", "color", and "beauty". The problems they have with labeling these things are kind of interesting in themselves.
TM: Well, they intuitively feel them to be primary qualities, so they want to label them with primary philosophical values. It's very platonic--almost Pythagorean.
PP: Yes, I was reading something not long ago about the "truth" quark--that's getting pretty fundamental.
TM: That's right, the search is on for the truth quark, now that naked beauty has been observed!
PP: You also spoke of "tuning" images so that the intent of meaning could be beheld in 3-D space--a technique of communication for which language is just a foreshadow. I understand what you're talking about, but it seems you're avoiding the term "telepathy".
TM: Telepathy I assume to be mind-to-mind transfer of thought, but with no ontological transformation of language. In other words, if you could hear what I'm thinking without me speaking, that would be telepathy. But I'm talking about something very different. It's actually an ontological transformation of the language so that language is no longer perceived with the ears, it's perceived with the eyes. When I speak, between you and me there comes into being the subject that I am discussing, and we can both look at it. And I turn it for you, and you behold, then, my intent, rather than hearing my intent.
When you hear my intent, what happens is I make small mouth noises, which have meanings assigned to them in the language called English. You have an English dictionary in your head. So my small mouth noises impinge on your brain, and you look in your English dictionary, and you figure out what I'm saying. Because we have a more-or-less common body of meaning. Although there can be misunderstanding if the subject is subtle.
I'm talking, though, about a kind of psychedelic language. You can almost think of it as an audio hologram, where sound is used to produce visual displays that are mutually beheld.
This idea, which sounds fairly outlandish, is actually very old. Philo Judaeus, an Alexandrian Jew of the second century, talked about the more perfect Logos, posing the question: "What would be the more perfect Logos?" And he said it would be a phenomenon that would move from being heard to being beheld without there being at any point a noticeable transition from one to the other.
And this would have just remained wild theological rambling, if it weren't for the fact psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens, especially DMT, make this possible. By singing and making linguistic vocalizations on these psychoactive compounds you can then produce a synesthetic glossolalia; you can control the contour of the hallucinogenic topology to such a degree that you can put meaning onto it. In other words, you are no longer the passive observer of an alien continuum; you are, in fact, through sound, imprinting onto this continuum intent and meanings. So it becomes a sculptable medium. And this is what mushroom shaman know. I think this is happening at higher doses than are usually taken in a recreational context in this society. But above five grams--if you weigh in the 140 pound range, and you take it in comfortable, dark, situations where you lie still in complete darkness with your eyes closed, no music, and you work with it--this becomes possible. The whole shamanic tradition that touches mescaline, as well, stresses the magic song--the song which is not willed, but comes through you. With ayahuasca in the Amazon, it's the same thing; the magic song is very much stressed.
So I think there is a potential technology--a fusing of language, psychoactive drugs, and thought--that could produce this ontologically different form of communication. In a sense, to return to your question, it is telepathy, But it's a whole different idea about what telepathy would be like, rather than being mind-to-mind transfer of spoken thought.
And I lecture about this. What I'm concerned to do professionally is to try and get people to redefine the psychedelic experience--at least the tryptamine-based psychedelic experience: psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca. It isn't the psychedelic model that we inherit from the '50s or the '60s: that you are opened to past emotional trauma, that you have deep insight into your personal existence, that you uncover traumatic material and resolve it. The Freudian and Jungian models of the psychedelic experience don't prepare you for the phenomenology of psilocybin at high doses; something else is going on. We're going to have to have a new model because it relates to all this linguistic stuff and the way in which language and the visual cortex are keyed and controlled. It hints at a new potential for an expression of humanness that is not technological, except in the mushroom as the product of technology.
And it's like language. The way in which language emerged must have been similar to this. In fact it's possible to suggest that man was formed by the interaction of curious higher primates with hallucinogenic plants. Because in experiments with monkeys where they had available DMT pipes--where the monkey could walk over and take a hit if he wanted to, but he didn't have to--certain monkeys would become literally fascinated by consciousness, by the phenomenon of watching themselves go through some kind of totally weird transformation.
That lays the basis. Once you are fascinated by a neurophysiological response, the more you trigger it, the more the credos are laid down for it to be more and more accessible. So you can just imagine these monkeys bootstrapping themselves toward Milton, Shakespeare, Bach, and Einstein, with these plant hallucinogens.
PP: So you're actually saying then that we're going through a second or higher phase of learning with these hallucinogens.
TM: Right. The cultural catalysis that is a product of hallucinogens is now entering a new phase. It's related to an ontological transformation of how we perceive and handle language. And I'm sure technology will have some role to play in this.
Information is what is loose on this planet. If you were to come in a flying saucer from another star system and observe the Earth, you would not have Linnaean bias of seeing everything in terms of competing species. What you would see is that there is a gene swarm on this planet; an immense gene swarm is furiously exchanging genes, but species are not being differentiated out of it. And that gene swarm represents an information swarm, because DNA is essentially a way of storing and transmitting and replicating information. That is what life is.
But then with culture and the advent of language, and then the further advent of alphabets and writing, information is taking on this more and more intense, rapidly replicating and self-reflecting ability. And when you get to the level of computers and technology, it's almost like consciousness is beginning to move out of the monkeys and into the excreted, reef-like, technoconcrescense that the monkeys produce. We are more like coral animals taking metal out of the earth, crimping it with ideas, and excreting it as machinery. I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said people are the genitals of technology. They exist to design next year's model and make it better. Information has this desire to self-reflect and replicate itself.
And of course, the psychedelics relate very closely to this. Because they are essentially information probes of some sort, reporting telemetric data coming in from nearby and not-so-nearby dimensions. But they are entirely interpretable as information, and in that sense probably susceptible to analysis by information theory.
PP: You've talked quite a bit too, about the UFO experience. I've read a few references to people who have had a perception of "galactic consciousness" with LSD. I've had that experience, too. But I notice you have made quite a point of differentiating the tryptamine hallucinogens from the others.
TM: Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "galactic consciousness". I can imagine that LSD gives you a vast and sympathetic perspective with nature on an astronomical scale. But what I'm talking about with these tryptamines is something a little different. It's the sense of the presence of an intellect of some sort--the sense that there are life forms, and forms of conscious organization, that really are alien and bizarre. But the problem is that they are not 30,000 light years away; they somehow, someway, interpenetrate the here-and-now.
This is a persistent claim of shamanism, and of true folkloric thinking worldwide. But it's a very alien idea to the last thousand years of Western thinking, where we have been definitely on the retreat from the idea that the universe is populated with teaming angels, demons, or anything else.
Again, the reason I link the UFO to psilocybin is because in the high-dose situation, or in the repeated high-dose situation in isolation, the psilocybin experience blends imperceptibly into what is called the "contact experience".
And nobody likes to hear this, because the UFO people are very jealous of their UFOs and absolutely convinced that they come from the stars and are made of metal and bear great hope for mankind. They think that any explanation which explains this in terms of human psychology or something like that is a reductionment. But actually, I don't think this is true. I think the UFO represents a sort of "shock wave" of concrescence; it precedes concrescence. It's a shadow of concrescence that haunts time and has always haunted time. It comes and goes, in and out of history. It is like a reflection of the end of history. It is the spiral lens-shaped topology left when everything flows together--when the temporal vectors collapse, you know, and we pass beyond description...
PP: The thing I was thinking of, just then, is that the attitude we hold toward these UFOs now probably is not much different than that which primitive men held about the moon and stars 10,000 years ago. They probably looked up in the sky and wondered what the silvery disk of white light was that moved across the sky at night.
TM: Yes, that's right. And you don't have to go back 10,000 years. A very interesting parallel to the relationship of the flying saucer to modern people is the relationship of the search for the philosopher's stone to the psychology of people in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Here it was rumored, you know, that certain people could produce a magical object that would give you long life, transmute substances into gold; it was just this mystical substance that would do everything, the universal panacea. Certain people claimed to have seen it or possessed it at one time, and wild and fantastic speculation was launched around this thing. Thus it served as a great impetus to the exploration of physical matter. And then, as more and more was discovered about physical matter, obsession with the philosopher's stone was slowly itself transformed into modern science. And I think the UFO obsession, if it develops correctly, will slowly change from an obsession with brotherly space people who will come and save us from ourselves into a much deeper appreciation of the hyperdimensional nature of consciousness, and the realization that all mind is Mind. There is only one Mind. Humanness is a name for a section of Mind that we exercise some control over. But information passes everywhere. There's an aphorism: Understanding passes everywhere.
PP: How about the UFO experience in relation to other types of light visions, like people seeing angels and saints and Virgin Marys? Ezekiel's UFO, are you familiar with that?
TM: Sure. That's all this business of "the other" presenting itself within the context of the historical situation. In other words, what happens is that you're somebody in some historical period and you're out in the wilderness. Something very strange begins to happen. The immediate symptoms of it are that the hair on the back of your neck stands up and your knees feel weak and you see a tremendous light descending from the sky. At that point your mind throws an enormous question out in the universe, which is: "WHAT'S HAPPENING?" And the answer comes back dependent on your historical situation. It is either without doubt, a manifestation of Krishna, or the Virgin Mary, or the flying saucer, or the philosopher's stone, or your personal guardian spirit--it depends entirely on who you are. You explain. The mind just goes into a tizzy of explanation. Whenever the mind is confronted with something it can't immediately dismiss, it falls into a frenzy of explanation, and that is what happens in that situation. And again, it has close parallels with these tryptamine hallucinogens. Because what happens when you smoke DMT, and what makes it so strange, is you immediately have these very complicated three- (at least, possibly four-) dimensional hallucinations by which you are surrounded. And you attempt immediately to pour language onto them. You say, "It's a . . . it's like a . . ." And it doesn't work. And the more that it doesn't work, the monkey inside you begins to go into some kind of shock. Because language is supposed to work.
PP: So that triggers the glossolalia-like phenomenon you were talking about in the Esalen lecture?1
TM: Well, in an effort to utter what the thing is, and seeing that English is hopeless, you are abandoned to your deeper intuition. And out of that comes the glossolalia, which then is actually able to "lock" that modality and affect it or "dance" with it. You wouldn't say "control" it, but you can then enter the flow and go through these changes with it.
I think that the great failing of psychedelic reportage and research is that the content of the experience is not stressed. They say "you have vivid hallucinations". But what the hell is a "vivid hallucination"?
I think people should be questioned very, very carefully. This is the interesting part. What it does to your heartbeat and whether your sweat increases and all that may be interesting to pharmacologists, but how many of us are pharmacologists? Most of us live in the real world, and what we want to know is what did it say to you about the real world, and the nature of reality, and how we should behave in the situation in which we find ourselves. That's what is most "obviously" important; and everybody's relationship to psychedelics is like that. They are into it for what it does for them--how it makes them understand being. But then when we rise to the level of scientific and psychological and clinical descriptions, all we hear about is heartbeat and whether the pupils are dilated, whether the reflexes were impaired.
PP: Is the psychedelic experience, then, going to be of paramount importance in the evolution of consciousness, or would these experiences be more appropriately regarded as accessory conveniences rather than essential elements? Just how important is the psychedelic experience?
TM: I think it's absolutely central. As I mentioned earlier, I think it not only causes us to become human beings, to emerge out of the primate substratum, but it is also driving us to move beyond being human beings. Speaking specifically of psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca, these are the hallucinogens which most closely resemble neurotransmitters. LSD does not occur in mammalian metabolism, [lysergic acid amide] only occurs in morning glories and ergot. Mescaline occurs in cacti, ketamine occurs in no organic situation. But DMT occurs endogenously in the brains of all mammals, including man. The β-carbolines occur endogenously in the brain of man. In fact, as you ascend the primate phylogeny, more and more occurs, so that man has the greatest concentration. N,N-dimethyltryptamine is very closely related to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine and is the major neurotransmitter that's driving the brain.
So I think it's possible even to suggest that to produce a state of mind roughly analogous to ayahuasca intoxication, all that's required is a one-gene mutation in the human genome. My hit on what these tryptamine hallucinogens are doing, is that they are literally anticipating future states of human evolution. This is the way the human mind is going to evolve. This is why, I think, there is such a persistent report that psilocybin hallucinations are science-fiction-like and seem to present these, you know, super-glossy, machine-like, highly polished surfaces that you can see into; I think that's an anticipation of cultural modalities. Like science fiction is an anticipation of the future, so is psilocybin. These things all come together. We are moving into the kinds of chemical brain states that will allow this kind of synesthesia--the visible glossolalia that I talked about. It could be a voluntary activity of normal metabolism.
PP: It seems odd, then, that the Eastern mystics haven't recognized this. Most of them are saying if there is any kind of drug involved, it's not a valid experience.
TM: Well, this is a special gripe of mine. I'm not impressed with priest craft. I think hierarchical religions are anti-progressive. This is why I have such respect for shamanism, since what it chiefly is, is very idiosyncratic. Shamanism is experimental psychology carried out by people who are not like us. It is not a religion in the sense of a set of dogmas; it's more like a set of maps that are given to you, and then you travel where you will.
I don't think that the yogic states approximate the tryptamine intoxication. In fact, part of what I'm trying to do with my career is point people to this and say look at this. This has been overlooked. Psilocybin, which is the most often contacted of these tryptamine hallucinogens, has--in the literature and the legal codes and all that--been treated as though it were like LSD. People say, "LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc.". But psilocybin is totally different from anything else. It has a phenomenology that we need to look at very, very carefully. It raises all kinds of questions in areas where we have never before been able to do anything. It allows you the repeated phenomena of "contacting an alien intelligence". We can do this with psilocybin in the laboratory with naive subjects. So that's big news for experimental psychology. Even if this "talking to aliens in the head" is only a psychosis, it's still big news that here is a compound that will repeatedly trigger it in a situation where you can study it.
Experimental psychology, pharmacology, linguistics, information theory, aesthetics, heuristics--all these disciplines would profit themselves by including the psychedelic experience in the province of things to be integrated.
PP: Yes, I think so. The concept of communication with an alien intelligence, which you brought out in the Esalen lecture, has been part of my own experience, too. And much more so with psilocybin than with any other type of hallucinogen.
TM: Yes. Well, because of the book we had written about growing the mushroom, we had access to name lists of people who had expressed interest in the book.2 We sent out many questionnaires about how people related to psilocybin. One of the questions was: "How much do you take?" Another was: "Do you hear voices?" We discovered that people who never took more than two or three grams (that's probably eighty-five percent of all people who take mushrooms) did not report voices. But the group using the high doses, seventy to eighty percent of those people checked that they heard voices, and some people felt inspired to write paragraphs about it.
PP: You spoke about getting in touch with the over soul through psychedelic drugs and leaving behind an era when man is "disciplined" by messiahs and saucers and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch. But wouldn't that make us as reliant on psychedelic drugs as we now are on technological materialism and hard science?
TM: No, because I assume that once you have contact with the over soul, ways will be found to access it without dependence on psychedelics. The idea of the over soul is another one of these metaphors to try and explain this "voice which integrates everything".
The reference to man being disciplined by saucers and messiahs is the idea that these religions, which arise from time to time and which halt all progress in any area except the exegesis of their own religious message, are like cultural governors. They occur because society becomes neurotically imbalanced. And in order to save it from itself, a kind of stasis is imposed in the form of some very autocratic, dogmatic religious faith which holds everything together for a thousand years or so while everybody catches their breath. Then it is eroded, and then progress in psychology and science and mathematics and other things begins again. But then the culturally neurotic situation arises again. And each time the intervention by the over soul is appropriate to the historical context.
For instance, the Hellenistic world, groaning under Roman imperialism, which was based on Greek philosophy, was totally ripe for a guy who rises from the dead after three days and preaches a certain gospel. And it's amazing, you know, where in a world where information moved no faster than a horse could gallop, Christianity exploded out of the Middle East. And the Roman authorities couldn't believe it. To them, it was just the wildest garbage! They were trained in Greek materialism and Euclidian mathematics and epicurean ethics. The idea that somebody could rise from the dead was utterly preposterous. Yet the servants were whispering and attending meetings, and the authorities dismissed it till it was too late.
Now, the flying saucer thing is very, very similar. No serious person gives it a moment's thought. It's just the stuff of the National Enquirer. Nevertheless, these polls keep coming out: thirty-seven percent of the American people believe flying saucers are real; eleven percent claim to have seen one. What's happening is that loyalty is being transferred from scientific institutions to the "space brothers". Not on the governing level of society, where everything is calm and controlled, but with the great masses who read the National Enquirer and say, "Well Ma dear, it seems tuh me th' space folk know a great deal more about it than prezydent Raygun!' That's dangerous talk. That means the official religion, which is science, is helpless in the face of this thing. They say, "It's something, but it's nothing." But they don't realize the important thing about the flying saucer is not, "What is it?" The important thing about it is, "What is it doing to human society?" What it's doing is throwing open the door to the legitimate belief in the irrational, and all kinds of other stuff.
It's changing, in other words, the social mass psychology. And that is something the government is usually the one to look after--our mass psychological images. Then here comes this other thing--out of the unconscious, I claim--to subvert the historical dreams of people who think they run things, and to instead send society in some other direction. It's like a metaphysical spanking. A mature society would not need messiahs or flying saucers to keep kicking it back into line. A mature society would just avoid being neurotic and things would develop without these lurches in one direction then another.
PP: I'm not sure if I'm going to agree with that completely, but...
TM: (laughter) If you don't, just walk out!
PP: Well, you talked along the same line about science betraying human destiny. The impression I have is not that science is betraying human destiny, but that science is dispensing its discoveries similar to the way the rain is sent on the unjust and the just. It seems that the political and economic communities have polluted science by applying that knowledge for localized and sometimes devious personal objectives. So all that comes down from science can go either way. Einstein wasn't thinking about Hiroshima, for example, when he worked out the equations of General Relativity.
TM: That's right. But on a larger scale, science has biases that have led us into the place we are: the fantastic concentration on understanding matter. What if, in the thirteenth century, they had become as obsessed with psychology as they become with matter; where would we be today?
PP: We'd probably be in our caves and huts meditating.
TM: Possibly. Or maybe that route would have taken us to the stars far sooner. What if shamanism had not been stomped on and pushed to the edge of the empire? What if instead we had pursued a route such as the Druids or the Incas or the Mayans? Because these were high civilizations; they attained levels of civilization comparable to where Europe was around 1200.
But we chose a certain path--a bias in favor of certain rules of evidence, certain ideas about what constituted claims on our cultural attention.
PP: I think that was necessary, though, to lay the foundations for more metaphysical developments later.
TM: Actually, I agree with you. What I often say in my public lectures is that civilization is the 10,000-year dash from the campfire to the starship. And it's a complete riot, and nobody knows till the last second whether it ends in complete catastrophe or in, you know, everybody being gathered into the Lord and setting off for the galactic center. And we won't know. It just becomes more and more frenzied and crazed. And in geological and biological terms it lasts only a micro-second. But if we who live seventy years have the fortune or misfortune to be born and die anywhere in that tiny 10,000-year span, it's a pretty crazy situation.
PP: You also talked about the primary and secondary qualities of matter such as mass, location, and velocity as opposed to color and texture, and then gave some discussion about these qualities being equivalently real, and pointed out that there's no justification for holding one set more real than the other.3 This brings us to the question: Is there any objective reality, or should we dispense with what is called objective reality?
TM: I think we should probably dispense with that notion. At bedrock, I don't believe the universe is made of quarks, or particles, or electromagnetic fields, or God's love, or anything like that. What I think it is made of is language. And where does language come from? It seems like it comes from inside our heads.
All these things--the Universe is this, it's that--these are just word nets. The Universe seems to be what you say it is. And to some degree, not what I say it is, or what you say it is; we are embedded in a cultural voice which says what it is. Then within that cultural voice we have our own small voice and we can "tinker" with the cultural definition of reality to some degree.
But over millennia, the cultural voice has changed its mind several times about what reality is. So I think we need, not a physics of what reality is, but a syntax, a grammar. We need to approach reality the way we would approach a work of literature, rather than the way we would approach a material system.
PP: So would you say language is rapidly becoming obsolete as a means of communication?
TM: It's self-transforming. Language begets meta-language, and so on. It's a bootstrapping effect.
PP: How does this sound: The probability that objective reality exists at all varies between zero and certainty as a function of the state of mind?
