[00:00:00 - 00:00:10] Well, before I start my talk tonight, my colleagues and I have been anticipating future events [00:00:10 - 00:00:18] like this and we wanted to take just a moment to do some polling to help us plan next year's [00:00:18 - 00:00:19] event. [00:00:19 - 00:00:27] And so taking you as a representative of people who attend these things, we would be very [00:00:27 - 00:00:32] helpful to us if you respond. [00:00:32 - 00:00:42] How many of you would have difficulty coming to this event in the light of the Y2K problem? [00:00:42 - 00:00:43] How many? [00:00:43 - 00:00:44] All of us. [00:00:44 - 00:00:45] The what? [00:00:45 - 00:00:46] Well, no, we... [00:00:46 - 00:00:49] I don't see all of you. [00:00:49 - 00:00:51] I don't see all of you. [00:00:51 - 00:00:52] In January? [00:00:52 - 00:00:59] If it were to be held in the same time frame as we've always done it, where you would be [00:00:59 - 00:01:06] putting your deposits down in November and December, how many of you would feel trepidation [00:01:06 - 00:01:10] about that in the light of the Y2K problem? [00:01:10 - 00:01:13] Well, not a lot. [00:01:13 - 00:01:14] Not an overwhelming number. [00:01:14 - 00:01:15] Because it won't matter. [00:01:15 - 00:01:16] Who cares? [00:01:16 - 00:01:21] You're not going to lose your money anyway at that point, right? [00:01:21 - 00:01:23] Well, see, I don't... [00:01:23 - 00:01:27] This is not a discussion of whether Y2K is real. [00:01:27 - 00:01:35] What is real is that the all Monica, all the time mentality is going to shove it down your [00:01:35 - 00:01:40] throat up until the moment that you find out whether or not it's real. [00:01:40 - 00:01:44] So that is the problem for people planning events like this. [00:01:44 - 00:01:48] Okay, thank you for cooperating. [00:01:48 - 00:01:59] Well, this is a problem if people are digging in, storing grain, fighting hegemony. [00:01:59 - 00:02:06] We won't have an opportunity for something like this, or it would be scaled back, or [00:02:06 - 00:02:09] perhaps later. [00:02:09 - 00:02:15] My own take on Y2K is that as you approach large objects in cyberspace, they get smaller. [00:02:15 - 00:02:23] And that by July this will be fading fast, and by December it will be incredibly old [00:02:23 - 00:02:24] news. [00:02:24 - 00:02:29] But I could be wrong. [00:02:29 - 00:02:41] Terrence, I would suggest that later in January, would you check in to ease everybody's conscience [00:02:41 - 00:02:45] with any plane issues we'll be taking care of in the first two weeks probably? [00:02:45 - 00:02:51] Yeah, we're thinking that a little bit later is better. [00:02:51 - 00:02:53] Even mid February. [00:02:53 - 00:02:57] Anyway, we'll keep you apprised of all this. [00:02:57 - 00:03:01] Well, so then let me turn to the main event. [00:03:01 - 00:03:09] I've got a snoot full of tequila and a messianic mission clawing the ground to talk to you [00:03:09 - 00:03:10] as usual. [00:03:10 - 00:03:21] Everybody has their own. [00:03:21 - 00:03:29] I guess the title of tonight's talk is linear society and nonlinear drugs, which is something [00:03:29 - 00:03:35] that I just had to pull out of the air when Ken finally slammed me to the wall for what [00:03:35 - 00:03:40] I would be talking about this night many months ago. [00:03:40 - 00:03:47] But more and more for me, especially with this group, these things have become sort [00:03:47 - 00:03:59] of summations and, I guess I hope, convivial examinations of just where we are, we each [00:03:59 - 00:04:06] and every one of us, and then this enterprise, whatever we mean by that, in the context of [00:04:06 - 00:04:09] everything else that's happening in the world. [00:04:09 - 00:04:18] In other words, the psychedelic experience, the entheogenic experience, contextualized. [00:04:18 - 00:04:25] And as I try to think about what, if anything, I can bring to the party, I guess it's that [00:04:25 - 00:04:36] what I'm interested in is psychedelics as a philosophical tool. [00:04:36 - 00:04:46] And when I concretized that for myself, I realized there's no claims on that part of [00:04:46 - 00:04:48] discourse. [00:04:48 - 00:04:54] No one wants to do this. [00:04:54 - 00:05:01] Psychedelic philosophy is done in a very formal manner, and the most exciting is incredibly [00:05:01 - 00:05:04] stuffy. [00:05:04 - 00:05:12] And yet I, like most of you, I assume, have taken on board in my life this thing called [00:05:12 - 00:05:20] the psychedelic experience, which has been a larger portion of my being as my sexuality, [00:05:20 - 00:05:26] my politics, my education, it shapes everything. [00:05:26 - 00:05:34] And yet nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection, at least [00:05:34 - 00:05:37] overtly, made to this. [00:05:37 - 00:05:45] Maybe not since Plato talked about shadows on the wall of the cave and so forth and so [00:05:45 - 00:05:46] on. [00:05:46 - 00:05:58] So what can psychedelics and the psychedelic experience bring to philosophy, and what do [00:05:58 - 00:06:00] I mean by philosophy? [00:06:00 - 00:06:11] By philosophy I mean the enterprise of discursive thinking, trying to understand what the world [00:06:11 - 00:06:16] is, and who's asking the question. [00:06:16 - 00:06:18] Where did the world come from? [00:06:18 - 00:06:20] Where is it bound? [00:06:20 - 00:06:24] And who's along for the ride? [00:06:24 - 00:06:34] And it seems to me that we as a community have, this is sort of hard to wrap your mind [00:06:34 - 00:06:41] around, at least for me, but we have in a sense inculcated into ourselves the image [00:06:41 - 00:06:52] of an underclass, so that we struggle for legal toleration of our practices and our [00:06:52 - 00:06:59] habits, but we don't struggle for intellectual legitimation of our visions. [00:06:59 - 00:07:07] We accept that they are somehow contextually marginal. [00:07:07 - 00:07:18] And as I thought about that, I realized that that is a limitation on the community, that [00:07:18 - 00:07:29] the information which is coming from the psychedelic experience as interpreted by Western people [00:07:29 - 00:07:41] is primary evidence for the need for a major paradigm shift in the whole way the Western [00:07:41 - 00:07:43] mentality does business. [00:07:43 - 00:07:48] Well, what kind of evidence and what kind of shift? [00:07:48 - 00:07:55] Well, there's a lot of talk in our community, and there has been for many, many years, about [00:07:55 - 00:08:04] shamanism, and when we seek to legitimize ourselves through a historical argument, we reach back [00:08:04 - 00:08:11] to shamanism and we say, "We're part of something which is 100,000 years old and worldwide and [00:08:11 - 00:08:18] touched the spirit long before the shadow of the cross fell over Jerusalem," and so [00:08:18 - 00:08:20] forth and so on. [00:08:20 - 00:08:25] All true. [00:08:25 - 00:08:34] And in a way, that tendency, which is part of the broader tendency in the Western mind [00:08:34 - 00:08:46] to valorize and grow nostalgic over the primitive, has put a certain political cast on our stance [00:08:46 - 00:08:49] and our position. [00:08:49 - 00:08:58] But what we are is, again, contextually, is a culture of science, and I'm speaking now [00:08:58 - 00:09:01] of our community. [00:09:01 - 00:09:09] It's the Albert Hoffmans and the Dave Nichols and the Sasha Shulgens who have kept our canoe [00:09:09 - 00:09:10] afloat. [00:09:10 - 00:09:13] These are men of science. [00:09:13 - 00:09:18] It's methods, it's vocabulary, it's culture. [00:09:18 - 00:09:25] We have not, though we certainly honor those people and love them, as their rhetoric is [00:09:25 - 00:09:34] not the primary rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users, which tends toward this, [00:09:34 - 00:09:42] as I referred to it, this shamanistic Aboriginal nostalgia. [00:09:42 - 00:09:51] I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things. [00:09:51 - 00:10:01] I think the news coming out of science is the most psychedelic news there is. [00:10:01 - 00:10:07] When I go to the Internet, I go to things like Science Alert and the Hubble Picture [00:10:07 - 00:10:11] of the Day and this sort of thing. [00:10:11 - 00:10:28] And our community as a whole, I think, is not involved enough in incorporating the vistas. [00:10:28 - 00:10:37] While we struggle to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is everywhere triumphant, [00:10:37 - 00:10:46] because the instruments built by linear science throw open doorways on the unimaginable. [00:10:46 - 00:10:53] And the most revered and hoary hefes of the scientific establishment have to genuflect [00:10:53 - 00:10:54] before this stuff. [00:10:54 - 00:10:57] I mean, what am I talking about? [00:10:57 - 00:11:04] Well, for example, Science Magazine wrote last week that the most important scientific [00:11:04 - 00:11:14] breakthrough of 1998 was the apparent observation and agreement upon that observation by the [00:11:14 - 00:11:20] astrophysical community of a cosmological constant. [00:11:20 - 00:11:26] This sounds like very deep physics, but if I give it to you as a headline, what it means [00:11:26 - 00:11:33] is the entire universe, every atom and every empty space of it, is ruled by a very weird [00:11:33 - 00:11:41] force that has now been seriously known to science for precisely five months. [00:11:41 - 00:11:49] A force which is apparently going to overcome gravity's tendency to collapse the universe [00:11:49 - 00:11:58] and to cause it to expand in a very explosive and counterintuitive and psychedelic fashion [00:11:58 - 00:12:06] is the complete confoundment of the core science that Western linear thinking has built. [00:12:06 - 00:12:12] And of course there weren't riots in the streets and the electricity didn't fail, but at the [00:12:12 - 00:12:21] very pinnacles of the antenna of the evolving civilization, there was a shudder felt in [00:12:21 - 00:12:30] the force, you may be sure. [00:12:30 - 00:12:45] So there are two much larger forces than our community that are in play in terms of shaping [00:12:45 - 00:12:57] the cultural modality, and I would call one of them science, it's the other one that I'm [00:12:57 - 00:12:59] having trouble with. [00:12:59 - 00:13:05] It is everything which is not anchored in the rational. [00:13:05 - 00:13:14] You know, the twentieth century has the most spectacular celebratory affair with the irrational [00:13:14 - 00:13:17] since the sixteenth century. [00:13:17 - 00:13:25] I mean, never before have so many prophets, wizards, wise women, casters of runes, seers [00:13:25 - 00:13:33] of visions moved among the people plying their wares. [00:13:33 - 00:13:40] And part of this is brought on by the tension between the failure of the education system [00:13:40 - 00:13:45] at the very moment of an inflationary expansion of knowledge. [00:13:45 - 00:13:53] So that it's very hard to be au courant in all fields, and if you're not current in a [00:13:53 - 00:14:01] field, then probably your version of that field is some kind of story, a myth. [00:14:01 - 00:14:09] I mean, if you can't keep up with quantum physics, why not fall back on archangels? [00:14:09 - 00:14:17] It requires less intellectual engagement or something like that. [00:14:17 - 00:14:20] Discourse is fragmented. [00:14:20 - 00:14:26] Fields of discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly that the understanding of these [00:14:26 - 00:14:33] vocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core group of workers. [00:14:33 - 00:14:41] So then this is creating kind of islanded systems of self-reference where outside those [00:14:41 - 00:14:46] systems of self-reference information doesn't travel. [00:14:46 - 00:14:52] The people who are the gene splicers know very little about remote sensing, and both [00:14:52 - 00:14:59] of those parties know very little about recent discoveries in astrophysics, for example. [00:14:59 - 00:15:04] So there's an intellectual fragmentation. [00:15:04 - 00:15:14] I live in Hawaii in a forest in fairly remote conditions, and so I entertain all this in [00:15:14 - 00:15:18] my mind all the time and try to... [00:15:18 - 00:15:25] My faith, and I assume it's the psychedelic faith, although we've had some fairly existential [00:15:25 - 00:15:31] characters in our ranks over the years. [00:15:31 - 00:15:38] But the psychedelic faith, I think, is that the universe is beautiful in the platonic [00:15:38 - 00:15:43] sense and therefore good and true. [00:15:43 - 00:15:45] In other words, we are optimists. [00:15:45 - 00:15:48] We're not flailing existentialists. [00:15:48 - 00:15:55] We're not relativists because we have a real standard to measure our spiritual coinage [00:15:55 - 00:15:56] against. [00:15:56 - 00:15:58] So we're not relativists. [00:15:58 - 00:16:04] This is a point I'm really keen to make because we're embedded in relativism. [00:16:04 - 00:16:05] It's all around us. [00:16:05 - 00:16:12] It's the air we breathe, but it is not inimical to the psychedelic community. [00:16:12 - 00:16:23] I think the psychedelic experience is the only authentic source of reliable contact [00:16:23 - 00:16:24] with the nimbleness. [00:16:24 - 00:16:31] I mean, meditation and so on and so on is all very fine, but it requires a leisure class [00:16:31 - 00:16:38] involved in philanthropic support of this kind of foolishness, where the psychedelic [00:16:38 - 00:16:41] experience is immediate. [00:16:41 - 00:16:57] So I sit in Hawaii and I look at all this and I try to contextualize it and come out [00:16:57 - 00:17:05] with a good story because I think the best story will win. [00:17:05 - 00:17:11] So if you can get together the best version of how it should all come out, so shall it [00:17:11 - 00:17:12] be. [00:17:12 - 00:17:18] And I work at this because in the past I've been very, very happy with the results between [00:17:18 - 00:17:23] my interior fantasy and the unfolding of historical development. [00:17:23 - 00:17:29] I mean, I wished for LSD and then it happened. [00:17:29 - 00:17:32] Then I dreamed of the internet and then it happened. [00:17:32 - 00:17:39] So I should keep at it. [00:17:39 - 00:17:46] And I recently read a very interesting book called "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History" [00:17:46 - 00:17:48] by Michael Delanda. [00:17:48 - 00:17:52] And if you get a chance, you should take a look at this. [00:17:52 - 00:17:59] And he made a point which caused me to expand his point into this little thing I'm going [00:17:59 - 00:18:00] to tell you now. [00:18:00 - 00:18:11] But his point was that human beings are very involved in the movement of geological material. [00:18:11 - 00:18:17] That as a species, we move rocks around on a very large scale. [00:18:17 - 00:18:23] And of course, it's interesting that some of the earliest human structures are the most [00:18:23 - 00:18:29] physically massive and weighty, like the Great Pyramids. [00:18:29 - 00:18:38] So Delanda made this point about our relationship with the geological stratigraphy of the Earth. [00:18:38 - 00:18:46] And that cities were a kind of geological extension of the process of crystallization [00:18:46 - 00:18:53] carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit, i.e. intelligent primates [00:18:53 - 00:18:57] who are building these structures. [00:18:57 - 00:18:59] And I thought that was very interesting. [00:18:59 - 00:19:03] I had never considered it before. [00:19:03 - 00:19:11] I've talked about virtual reality, and I've said that it's nothing new, that Ur was a [00:19:11 - 00:19:18] virtual reality, and Chatalhuyukh was a virtual reality, but done in stucco and fired ceramic [00:19:18 - 00:19:19] and stone. [00:19:19 - 00:19:26] And that when the medium is so intractable as stone, the epistemic assumptions that get [00:19:26 - 00:19:33] formed about what reality is are very different than if you can build Versailles at the click [00:19:33 - 00:19:36] of a mouse button. [00:19:36 - 00:19:38] But nevertheless, it's the same. [00:19:38 - 00:19:46] But embedded in my reading of Delanda was, I've been thinking a lot and I talked to you [00:19:46 - 00:19:57] a lot last year about artificial intelligences and minds which are not human, minds which [00:19:57 - 00:20:05] are very different from us, intelligence which is very different from us. [00:20:05 - 00:20:14] While the naive are scanning the stars, our appliances have become telepathic. [00:20:14 - 00:20:22] There is a very strange kind of intelligence being called into existence by ourselves, [00:20:22 - 00:20:23] strangely enough. [00:20:23 - 00:20:27] And this is the connection to Delanda. [00:20:27 - 00:20:33] This artificial intelligence which is being called into being by human activity is made [00:20:33 - 00:20:38] of the same materials as Ur and Chatalhuyukh. [00:20:38 - 00:20:44] It's made of ceramics, glasses and metals. [00:20:44 - 00:20:48] It's that. [00:20:48 - 00:20:58] So then I took this on board and thought about it and I've sort of come to some kind of cyberpantheistic [00:20:58 - 00:21:09] Emersonianism which is, here I'll give it to you as a headline and then work backwards [00:21:09 - 00:21:18] so that in case I forget what I'm saying it won't be lost to suffering mankind. [00:21:18 - 00:21:26] The earth's strategy for its own salvation is through machines, is what it is. [00:21:26 - 00:21:34] And human beings are some kind of, we are the deputized spouse, we are the bride in [00:21:34 - 00:21:44] this alchemical rarefaction of glasses, ceramics, metals and volatile materials. [00:21:44 - 00:21:53] Apparently the earth is like some kind of an embryonic or fetal thing and at the end [00:21:53 - 00:21:59] of its gestation what is happening is it is ramifying its nervous system is appearing [00:21:59 - 00:22:04] in its development, in the unfolding of its morphogenesis. [00:22:04 - 00:22:11] And as we contemplate nanotechnologies and see ourselves working through bacteria and [00:22:11 - 00:22:18] this sort of thing at the engineering level you have to be blind to not then reflect back [00:22:18 - 00:22:26] upon the fact that in some sense we are already working at that kind of level. [00:22:26 - 00:22:32] At the behest of it is not clear who because nobody ever asked the question in quite this [00:22:32 - 00:22:33] way before. [00:22:33 - 00:22:42] The answer to who I think is the earth and that what lies ahead at the end of the linear [00:22:42 - 00:22:50] tunnel of Western subjectivist, positivist, structuralist assumptions that we have been [00:22:50 - 00:22:57] operating, when we hit the end of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental space [00:22:57 - 00:23:06] of cosmic evolution, what we are going to find is that we are partners, actors in a [00:23:06 - 00:23:16] cosmic drama that involves the earth at one polarity and machines at the other polarity [00:23:16 - 00:23:22] as the expression of the will of the earth toward a kind of self-reflective transcendence [00:23:22 - 00:23:32] that is achieved through machine-human biotic symbiosis. [00:23:32 - 00:23:37] And this is, you know, there will never be a headline which says this. [00:23:37 - 00:23:44] Some people won't even notice that it's happening because these large-scale processes can be [00:23:44 - 00:23:49] described by many metaphors at many depths. [00:23:49 - 00:23:55] But I'm telling you, I think this is what's going on. [00:23:55 - 00:24:06] The reason I like this story is because it's not a story about processes out of control. [00:24:06 - 00:24:09] It's not a story about human guilt. [00:24:09 - 00:24:15] It's not a story full of "we musts" and "we shoulds." [00:24:15 - 00:24:25] It's a story which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience field. [00:24:25 - 00:24:34] In other words, biology, technology, human culture, human traditional values, transcendent [00:24:34 - 00:24:39] human dystopian values. [00:24:39 - 00:24:45] It's a story of things on course, on time, and under budget. [00:24:45 - 00:24:54] And I assume that's how nature really operates and that we live inside some kind of anxiety-producing [00:24:54 - 00:25:06] culture that is a necessary, I don't want to say evil, but a necessary response to conditions [00:25:06 - 00:25:09] of stress. [00:25:09 - 00:25:20] There are processes which let, you know, nuclear waste buildup, urbanization, land disturbance. [00:25:20 - 00:25:27] There are processes which, if allowed to run on indefinitely, would wreck the whole system [00:25:27 - 00:25:29] and pitch it into chaos. [00:25:29 - 00:25:35] But Confucius said, "No tree grows to heaven." [00:25:35 - 00:25:41] And what he meant by that is it's fruitless to project any process to infinity, because [00:25:41 - 00:25:47] any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. [00:25:47 - 00:25:52] If no fruit flies died in six months, the earth would spin out of its orbit from the [00:25:52 - 00:25:53] weight of fruit flies. [00:25:53 - 00:26:00] No, I don't think that's true. [00:26:00 - 00:26:05] But what an image. [00:26:05 - 00:26:11] Somebody once told me if the earth completely disappeared except for its nematodes, that [00:26:11 - 00:26:17] you could still see the outlines of the continents if you were standing on the moon. [00:26:17 - 00:26:25] I thought, now, who gathered this? [00:26:25 - 00:26:33] So then, to bring this back around a little, where is the psychedelic experience in all [00:26:33 - 00:26:35] of this? [00:26:35 - 00:26:43] It used to be called, or at one phase it was called consciousness expansion. [00:26:43 - 00:26:54] And consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an absolute necessity, [00:26:54 - 00:27:01] because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology machines that are [00:27:01 - 00:27:12] going to require super intelligent humans to direct and have discourse with them. [00:27:12 - 00:27:13] This is happening. [00:27:13 - 00:27:15] It is already happening. [00:27:15 - 00:27:17] The internet is this. [00:27:17 - 00:27:24] It doesn't tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brush your teeth, but it is a partner [00:27:24 - 00:27:28] in the understanding of the world that is genie-like. [00:27:28 - 00:27:34] That's the image I have when I sit down to it. [00:27:34 - 00:27:39] All John Dee would have asked of his archangelic messengers. [00:27:39 - 00:27:45] He wanted instantaneous information on the political situation in the courts of Europe. [00:27:45 - 00:27:50] He wanted information on the course of the Drake's expedition then on the other side [00:27:50 - 00:27:52] of the planet. [00:27:52 - 00:27:59] The internet is this kind of magical intelligent prosthesis. [00:27:59 - 00:28:06] And as I said, there won't come a dramatic moment, I think, a lawn mower man or something [00:28:06 - 00:28:07] like that. [00:28:07 - 00:28:11] These things are much more seeping. [00:28:11 - 00:28:17] The only people who in fact can see the game move against the background of the forest [00:28:17 - 00:28:22] pattern are psychedelic heads. [00:28:22 - 00:28:27] You have to think about this stuff and you have to develop vocabularies for catching [00:28:27 - 00:28:30] it in action. [00:28:30 - 00:28:39] This is what the game of being an intellectual is, I think. [00:28:39 - 00:28:48] Trying to see the process of morphological unfoldment in action and guess the direction [00:28:48 - 00:28:53] in which it's headed. [00:28:53 - 00:29:01] Because it's inevitably headed toward greater density of information at greater speeds, [00:29:01 - 00:29:10] higher level integrative metaphors visually rather than textually displayed, transformation [00:29:10 - 00:29:19] of such graphic and glyphic elements over time, it becomes more and more like the interface [00:29:19 - 00:29:25] of a computer, more and more like some kind of machine environment. [00:29:25 - 00:29:32] We have thought for, I assume, at least 100,000 years, maybe much longer, but the quality [00:29:32 - 00:29:39] of thought, you know, when it was early, it was intermittent, it was thin, it was a groping, [00:29:39 - 00:29:47] it was an undigested intuition, a perception slipping away from the mind's eye. [00:29:47 - 00:29:53] Because of media reinforcement and education and acculturation and the passage of 100,000 [00:29:53 - 00:29:59] years, the voice of the mind, the logos, has grown stronger. [00:29:59 - 00:30:12] But now it takes an exponential leap forward into visualization, into manifestation through [00:30:12 - 00:30:21] this information processing prosthesis that integrates us all. [00:30:21 - 00:30:34] And I can imagine a future not very far away where the expression of the individual is [00:30:34 - 00:30:38] lowered, is more muted. [00:30:38 - 00:30:46] This is the most individualistic, individual worshiping century, the century just in that [00:30:46 - 00:30:48] we have ever known. [00:30:48 - 00:30:55] Its great accomplishments, its great works of art were all accomplished by individuals [00:30:55 - 00:31:01] and political undertaking such as the Third Reich and so forth and so on. [00:31:01 - 00:31:06] Also highly motivated individuals who rose above the masses. [00:31:06 - 00:31:13] I'm not sure we can afford the luxury of that kind of exhibitionistic individualism in the [00:31:13 - 00:31:14] future. [00:31:14 - 00:31:18] And I think probably it's not that we're talking about a restriction of human rights, we're [00:31:18 - 00:31:25] talking about a transformation of human drive. [00:31:25 - 00:31:34] The states of integration and collectivity that will be sold as public utilities in the [00:31:34 - 00:31:43] next century are anticipated now by groups like the Delic Experiences, Ayahuasca sections, [00:31:43 - 00:31:45] this sort of thing. [00:31:45 - 00:31:50] And the dichotomy, and I think I made this clear when I talked about the earthen machines, [00:31:50 - 00:31:56] the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial is an obsession of the twentieth [00:31:56 - 00:32:02] century, hence cancelled now. [00:32:02 - 00:32:05] In fact a whole bunch of things are cancelled. [00:32:05 - 00:32:14] We were talking at home about how Roger Shattuck in his history of Dada said that the twentieth [00:32:14 - 00:32:17] century couldn't wait to be born. [00:32:17 - 00:32:22] It was born in 1888 at the death of Victor Hugo. [00:32:22 - 00:32:27] And then I said, well, so if it was born in 1888, when did the twentieth century end? [00:32:27 - 00:32:30] And I think it ended in 1992. [00:32:30 - 00:32:35] It expired early with the birth of the World Wide Web. [00:32:35 - 00:32:43] What defined all that modernity was mass media. [00:32:43 - 00:32:48] Mass media shaped that whole psychology, and it is now archaic. [00:32:48 - 00:32:54] It is now, it's not archaic, it's obsolete. [00:32:54 - 00:33:00] It's wonderful that the phrase "twentieth century" is beginning to have that wonderful [00:33:00 - 00:33:09] brown gravy Edwardian tone that used to be reserved for the term "nineteenth century," [00:33:09 - 00:33:13] meaning you know those terribly stuffy and confused and rather silly people who just [00:33:13 - 00:33:18] didn't quite get it right but were doing the best they could and muddling through. [00:33:18 - 00:33:24] And thank God they gave way to us, the people of the twenty-first century. [00:33:24 - 00:33:26] Let me see. [00:33:26 - 00:33:29] Is there a flashlight? [00:33:29 - 00:33:31] I have a page full of notes. [00:33:31 - 00:33:33] I needn't be so. [00:33:33 - 00:33:39] Is there anything here that wasn't touched on? [00:33:39 - 00:33:54] Well, some notes about this planetary intelligence, thank you, June, and how all that works. [00:33:54 - 00:33:58] One of the insights that I've been reading different people this year, maybe you can [00:33:58 - 00:34:04] tell, and one of the people I've been reading is Greg Egan, who I talked about last year, [00:34:04 - 00:34:05] but now I've read more. [00:34:05 - 00:34:11] Now I've read Diaspora, and the ones where he makes no effort whatsoever to explain it [00:34:11 - 00:34:16] to you unless you've already done your homework. [00:34:16 - 00:34:23] And then Jonathan today in his lecture talked about DNA a little bit and frame slippage [00:34:23 - 00:34:27] and all of that, and it reminded me of it. [00:34:27 - 00:34:35] The thing that I'm coming to from my psychedelic experience and my life experience and the [00:34:35 - 00:34:44] whole ball of wax is I said for many, many years that the world is made of language. [00:34:44 - 00:34:48] That was just sort of one of my bumper stickers. [00:34:48 - 00:34:55] But I think that that carries some of the flavor of what I want to say there, but that [00:34:55 - 00:34:58] there's more to it than that. [00:34:58 - 00:35:04] It's that everything is code. [00:35:04 - 00:35:10] Everything is code in the sense that hackers mean when they say they write code. [00:35:10 - 00:35:17] When Sasha stands up and waves his arms and draws what he calls the dirty pictures, he [00:35:17 - 00:35:25] initiates you into a code, a vocabulary with very defined rules and quick to learn, and [00:35:25 - 00:35:27] they're like tinker toys. [00:35:27 - 00:35:32] Once you know the rules of the connectivity, then you can sit down like a child and begin [00:35:32 - 00:35:35] to stick these things together and say, "Well, what would this be like? [00:35:35 - 00:35:36] And what would this be like? [00:35:36 - 00:35:38] And does God allow this? [00:35:38 - 00:35:40] Or does this break the rules?" [00:35:40 - 00:35:41] And so forth. [00:35:41 - 00:35:44] The DNA is like that. [00:35:44 - 00:35:47] Human language is like that. [00:35:47 - 00:35:51] Human body language is like that. [00:35:51 - 00:35:54] Machines communicate like this. [00:35:54 - 00:35:59] In fact, this is a bridge which connects us. [00:35:59 - 00:36:06] This is the great overarching bridge which will connect us to the machines that they, [00:36:06 - 00:36:12] like us, are commanded by language. [00:36:12 - 00:36:21] And so this realization that everything is code and code moving on many levels is, I [00:36:21 - 00:36:29] think, a further, it's more primary than the perception, for example, that things are made [00:36:29 - 00:36:32] of space, time, matter, and energy. [00:36:32 - 00:36:35] That's one level below code. [00:36:35 - 00:36:40] The code codes for space, time, matter, and energy. [00:36:40 - 00:36:46] It's much more like we're in a simulacrum, some kind of machine environment. [00:36:46 - 00:36:52] And in fact, I like that idea, because I've always sensed, and psychedelics have always [00:36:52 - 00:36:58] intensified this intuition in me, that the universe is a puzzle. [00:36:58 - 00:37:01] Life is a problem to be solved. [00:37:01 - 00:37:03] It's a conundrum. [00:37:03 - 00:37:07] It's not what it appears to be. [00:37:07 - 00:37:09] There are doors. [00:37:09 - 00:37:11] There are locks and keys. [00:37:11 - 00:37:14] There are levels. [00:37:14 - 00:37:22] And if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected. [00:37:22 - 00:37:26] DMT is a perfect example of that. [00:37:26 - 00:37:30] And of course, at the molecular level, it literalizes that metaphor. [00:37:30 - 00:37:38] I mean, the DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous object introduced into the front [00:37:38 - 00:37:42] door of the synaptic receptor. [00:37:42 - 00:37:49] And then you can plunder the palace for five minutes. [00:37:49 - 00:38:02] Well, if the world is code, then it can be hacked. [00:38:02 - 00:38:08] In other words, it needn't stand still in quite the same way that it stands still in [00:38:08 - 00:38:14] your mind if you believe in something called the laws of physics. [00:38:14 - 00:38:23] It permits magic, because it says, behind the laws of physics is a deeper level. [00:38:23 - 00:38:32] And if you can reach that deeper level, you can make changes there. [00:38:32 - 00:38:36] And this leads on to something that I wanted to say about an earlier theme, where I was [00:38:36 - 00:38:42] talking about the legitimation of the community's intuitions. [00:38:42 - 00:38:47] Something that we always kick around at these things, or I always bring it up in some form, [00:38:47 - 00:38:53] is where do the hallucinations come from? [00:38:53 - 00:39:00] We arrived late last night after a 24-hour trip from Hawaii that was just hell, or as [00:39:00 - 00:39:06] much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict upon it. [00:39:06 - 00:39:12] And we got stoned, and then we were laying there. [00:39:12 - 00:39:18] It always happens when you're cut off from cannabis for long periods like that. [00:39:18 - 00:39:23] You turn to it, it's ten times as strong. [00:39:23 - 00:39:27] The hallucinations were exquisite. [00:39:27 - 00:39:34] I've been looking at hallucinations now for 30-some years. [00:39:34 - 00:39:39] And I looked at these last night, and I thought, if someone would ask me what were they like, [00:39:39 - 00:39:40] what would I have to say? [00:39:40 - 00:39:44] And I said, "Indescribable. [00:39:44 - 00:39:45] Indescribable." [00:39:45 - 00:39:52] And I looked and looked, and I could look to my heart's content, and they were indescribable. [00:39:52 - 00:39:58] So we always come around to this question, where do the hallucinations come from? [00:39:58 - 00:40:03] And I suppose the unconscious reductionists among us—and I don't mean that they're [00:40:03 - 00:40:11] unconscious, I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism—probably assume that it's [00:40:11 - 00:40:16] some kind of iteration thing, that bits and pieces of everything you've ever seen are [00:40:16 - 00:40:23] rolling in some kind of neurological kaleidoscope that can run forever and just produce this [00:40:23 - 00:40:28] endless download of drifting imagery. [00:40:28 - 00:40:33] But there's a problem with that, because this stuff is too coherent, it means too much, [00:40:33 - 00:40:36] it's too emotionally charged. [00:40:36 - 00:40:48] Well, we have never really rallied as a group to try and locate in our combined opinions [00:40:48 - 00:40:55] the one or several sources of these images. [00:40:55 - 00:41:03] And I think that—and I talked a bit about this last year—but I think this is legitimate [00:41:03 - 00:41:17] perception of thoughts, places, things, times, and objects that either have existed somewhere [00:41:17 - 00:41:25] in the universe, or do exist, or have existed in the minds of beings somewhere, sometime, [00:41:25 - 00:41:27] in the universe. [00:41:27 - 00:41:33] In other words, that we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations [00:41:33 - 00:41:36] like quantum connectivity. [00:41:36 - 00:41:41] In other words, it's one thing to bask in the light of the overarching metaphor, which [00:41:41 - 00:41:44] says everything is connected to everything else. [00:41:44 - 00:41:50] It's quite another thing to say, "And so then what are the consequences for me of this?" [00:41:50 - 00:41:58] And the answer seems to me to be that the imagination, the inside of our heads, really [00:41:58 - 00:42:04] is the most vast frontier imaginable. [00:42:04 - 00:42:10] And we must leave it for future generations—or maybe not generations, but future evolutionary [00:42:10 - 00:42:20] biologists—to figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a propensity for accessing [00:42:20 - 00:42:23] bell non-local data. [00:42:23 - 00:42:29] In other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of [00:42:29 - 00:42:31] things. [00:42:31 - 00:42:33] There must be a reason. [00:42:33 - 00:42:39] And in the same way that the problem of speciation posed a problem for nineteenth-century biology, [00:42:39 - 00:42:45] this can pose a problem to our thinking without its sinking our intellectual enterprise. [00:42:45 - 00:42:53] It is for some more sophisticated future group of thinkers to understand why this is so. [00:42:53 - 00:42:57] What we have to grapple with is that it is so. [00:42:57 - 00:42:58] That it is so. [00:42:58 - 00:43:04] That you have the Hubble telescope inside of you. [00:43:04 - 00:43:11] You have inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence [00:43:11 - 00:43:19] about things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and [00:43:19 - 00:43:20] units is meaningless. [00:43:20 - 00:43:23] It's just elsewhere. [00:43:23 - 00:43:30] The elsewhere of the absolute infinity of the plenum of imagination in which apparently [00:43:30 - 00:43:36] beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea. [00:43:36 - 00:43:43] And of course the psychedelics are the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix [00:43:43 - 00:43:55] that knits together this cosmic ecology, this system of living relationships. [00:43:55 - 00:44:05] I am not impatient with the idea of extraterrestrial life or intelligence, just its pop regurgitation. [00:44:05 - 00:44:16] I think probably planets like the earth are alive and conscious and they use the technologies [00:44:16 - 00:44:23] that the species native to them evolve to cast images out into the larger universe. [00:44:23 - 00:44:30] That the dialogue among cosmic minds is a dialogue among entire planetary ecosystems. [00:44:30 - 00:44:37] It's not, it can't be trivialized into some take me to your lead scenario. [00:44:37 - 00:44:45] Still less can it validate the unscheduled visit to pro bono proctologist from nearby [00:44:45 - 00:44:46] stars. [00:44:46 - 00:45:04] Well, so let's see what else can I have the light. [00:45:04 - 00:45:05] No one. [00:45:05 - 00:45:15] Oh, I know one other thought in assessing this year in science. [00:45:15 - 00:45:21] I talked about omega, the cosmological constant. [00:45:21 - 00:45:23] And that is really incredible. [00:45:23 - 00:45:30] In fact, let me do a personal breast beating thing and point out to you that this thing [00:45:30 - 00:45:37] that they have come upon omega, the cosmological constant, this absolutely, you know, 50 years [00:45:37 - 00:45:45] ago or so Einstein called it the biggest blunder I ever made because he played with the necessity [00:45:45 - 00:45:49] of this thing to keep the universe from falling in on itself. [00:45:49 - 00:45:58] And then he decided it was an unnecessary construct and that it led to such weird conclusions [00:45:58 - 00:46:01] that it had to be gotten rid of. [00:46:01 - 00:46:07] And so that was all very well and good until the these recent measurements of the distances [00:46:07 - 00:46:14] of certain supernova carried out independently by several teams of astrophysicists brought [00:46:14 - 00:46:22] the news that the universe is expanding faster than the laws of physics allow. [00:46:22 - 00:46:28] And when they looked at how much faster they realized that it called the cosmological constant [00:46:28 - 00:46:29] back into existence. [00:46:29 - 00:46:34] Well, but here there are a couple of things about this cosmological constant that are [00:46:34 - 00:46:38] very counterintuitive. [00:46:38 - 00:46:48] The first is that it it's it's it it acts on empty space. [00:46:48 - 00:46:52] It isn't it does not require matter to manifest. [00:46:52 - 00:46:57] It is a property of space itself, the cosmological constant. [00:46:57 - 00:47:06] The second thing is it's it's a repulsive force that is growing stronger and stronger. [00:47:06 - 00:47:09] Forces don't grow stronger and stronger. [00:47:09 - 00:47:11] They grow weaker and weaker. [00:47:11 - 00:47:12] Gravity grows weaker. [00:47:12 - 00:47:14] Light grows weaker. [00:47:14 - 00:47:15] Everything grows weaker. [00:47:15 - 00:47:20] This force, as time progresses, gets stronger and stronger. [00:47:20 - 00:47:27] Well that means when you project it out toward, you know, billions of years into the future, [00:47:27 - 00:47:30] it becomes the dominant force. [00:47:30 - 00:47:31] It overcomes gravity. [00:47:31 - 00:47:33] It overcomes the strong force, the weak force. [00:47:33 - 00:47:35] It overcomes all the forces. [00:47:35 - 00:47:37] It becomes the dominant force. [00:47:37 - 00:47:47] The other thing about it is that it becomes stronger not on an even slope, but asymptotically [00:47:47 - 00:47:49] it becomes stronger. [00:47:49 - 00:47:57] Well now this produces something very much like what I've been yakking about since 1971. [00:47:57 - 00:48:04] The novelty wave, the so-called time wave, it too grows stronger and stronger through [00:48:04 - 00:48:12] time and it too has this kind of built-in asymptotic acceleration where it experiences [00:48:12 - 00:48:16] a kind of inflationary expansion in power. [00:48:16 - 00:48:20] The two map over each other very well. [00:48:20 - 00:48:27] But when you talk, returning now to the cosmological constant, when the astrophysical community [00:48:27 - 00:48:34] realized the consequences of taking this on board, they realized that it was dissolving [00:48:34 - 00:48:40] the entire model of what cosmology has been throughout the 20th century. [00:48:40 - 00:48:48] Because what it's really saying, this discovery, less than six months old, is that space itself [00:48:48 - 00:48:58] is in the act of exploding, that the universe is on the cusp of an inflationary phase of [00:48:58 - 00:49:05] expansion similar to the inflationary expansion that occurred at the time of the Big Bang. [00:49:05 - 00:49:07] What would this look like? [00:49:07 - 00:49:08] What would it feel like? [00:49:08 - 00:49:09] Nobody can even imagine. [00:49:09 - 00:49:11] It is not upon us. [00:49:11 - 00:49:19] I don't mean that, but I mean that in the near future of the universe, in the next billion [00:49:19 - 00:49:25] or two billion years, things will change very, very dramatically. [00:49:25 - 00:49:30] Everything will begin to rearrange itself according to the expression of this asymptotic [00:49:30 - 00:49:31] power. [00:49:31 - 00:49:36] So that was the biggest news in astrophysics. [00:49:36 - 00:49:43] The other news, which has psychedelic implications, I think, also comes from astrophysics. [00:49:43 - 00:49:49] As you may recall, last August, I think it was, I can't remember exactly, every man, [00:49:49 - 00:49:57] woman, and child on Earth got the equivalent of a dental X-ray when there was a thing called [00:49:57 - 00:50:07] a star quake on a magnetar, a magnetic neutron star 20,000 light years away experienced a [00:50:07 - 00:50:10] catastrophic collapse. [00:50:10 - 00:50:17] And there was a wave of gamma rays that were, well, turned on every light in the system [00:50:17 - 00:50:21] when it hit the planet. [00:50:21 - 00:50:25] An event like that had never been observed before. [00:50:25 - 00:50:29] And I got to thinking about this and I realized, you know, well, we've only been looking for [00:50:29 - 00:50:31] this kind of thing for 30 years. [00:50:31 - 00:50:41] There's probably quite a bit of this kind of anomalous high energy, short duration fluctuation [00:50:41 - 00:50:44] of radiation going on in the galaxy. [00:50:44 - 00:50:54] And then I had a kind of an image, I wouldn't say a vision, but a kind of an image of how [00:50:54 - 00:51:02] things are really arranged on the larger level in terms of the galaxy. [00:51:02 - 00:51:06] And the image was of a donut. [00:51:06 - 00:51:11] And you know, we're accustomed to being told that we're out at the edge of the Milky Way [00:51:11 - 00:51:17] where stars are few and far between, that this is the boonies. [00:51:17 - 00:51:24] But I'll bet you the boonies are where biology thrives because the low star density and the [00:51:24 - 00:51:29] distance from the galactic core and these extremely energetic events at the core would [00:51:29 - 00:51:39] create a kind of donut situation where it's the toroidal area out near the rim where stars [00:51:39 - 00:51:44] are slow burning and they don't collide with each other and plants can form and you get [00:51:44 - 00:51:51] the five billion year run you need to get to civilization. [00:51:51 - 00:51:59] But you know, our rule of biology and strategy and everything and religious practice as far [00:51:59 - 00:52:03] as that's concerned is seek the light. [00:52:03 - 00:52:05] Well the light is at the core. [00:52:05 - 00:52:14] And so then I saw, aha, maybe the true seeking of the light requires biology to go into partnership [00:52:14 - 00:52:21] with something beyond biology because the environment at the core is so energetic. [00:52:21 - 00:52:26] And I'm not suggesting the actual core, that's beyond contemplation. [00:52:26 - 00:52:27] That's a black hole. [00:52:27 - 00:52:36] No technology imaginable can get even near the event horizon of an object like that. [00:52:36 - 00:52:41] But I mean in the vicinity of the galactic core where, you know, there are star, the [00:52:41 - 00:52:48] core density is two to three hundred times greater than it is in our vicinity. [00:52:48 - 00:52:55] Those kinds of environments are so fraught with peril for biology that probably downloading [00:52:55 - 00:53:04] ourselves into machine symbiotes of some sort is the only way to go to those places. [00:53:04 - 00:53:12] In one of Greg Egan's novels he pictures a human future where this is one option. [00:53:12 - 00:53:19] You can fuse yourself with a starship and set out to check out the neighborhood. [00:53:19 - 00:53:24] Or you can join the Amish and till Raya in Pennsylvania. [00:53:24 - 00:53:28] Actually I think you can't do that because something's happened to the earth. [00:53:28 - 00:53:35] But some Hamish possibility is still available. [00:53:35 - 00:53:43] Well this is not like the sort of thing the other faculty members will be talking to you [00:53:43 - 00:53:52] about which is an intense and primarily important download of the homework. [00:53:52 - 00:54:01] The chemistry, the botany, the behavioral impact, the archaeology, the ethnography of [00:54:01 - 00:54:03] these substances. [00:54:03 - 00:54:08] I ask myself all the time, you know, how are we different from other people? [00:54:08 - 00:54:11] Are we morally superior? [00:54:11 - 00:54:12] Are we smarter? [00:54:12 - 00:54:14] Are we richer? [00:54:14 - 00:54:18] Are we kinder to the people we meet? [00:54:18 - 00:54:26] And actually the longer I look the less I can tell there are extraordinary examples [00:54:26 - 00:54:31] of all of these things in and outside of our community. [00:54:31 - 00:54:39] And extraordinary nudniks and jerks inside and outside our community. [00:54:39 - 00:54:49] But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly presented with them [00:54:49 - 00:54:57] and understood without hype and hysteria and hyperbole what this psychedelic enterprise [00:54:57 - 00:55:02] is about that we would win them to our cause. [00:55:02 - 00:55:12] Because our cause is the human cause, the cause of thinking and communicating and building [00:55:12 - 00:55:23] and bringing into existence new forms of beauty, new possibilities for being. [00:55:23 - 00:55:26] And this can be done without psychedelics certainly. [00:55:26 - 00:55:35] But with psychedelics it is accelerated and it has a feeling not only of immediacy but [00:55:35 - 00:55:39] of the only way I can put it is correctness. [00:55:39 - 00:55:47] It isn't the lonely neurotic artist thrashing towards some kind of self-reflection. [00:55:47 - 00:55:53] It's the firm guiding hand of a greater mind. [00:55:53 - 00:55:59] The logos, the earth, I'm not sure, but a greater mind. [00:55:59 - 00:56:04] True art truly is truly inspired. [00:56:04 - 00:56:12] And the muse I don't think was more real for Homer than it is for each and every one of [00:56:12 - 00:56:21] us when we're in the presence of the mushroom or ayahuasca or DMT or LMP or something like [00:56:21 - 00:56:22] that. [00:56:22 - 00:56:32] So, you know, I suppose I will go to the grave with life as mysterious to me as I found it [00:56:32 - 00:56:36] when I came to consciousness around six or seven. [00:56:36 - 00:56:45] But I think life is, whatever it is, it's an opportunity of some sort. [00:56:45 - 00:56:53] The things I have been most grateful for were the things that I met at the frontiers of [00:56:53 - 00:57:03] knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic experience. [00:57:03 - 00:57:15] Knowing, feeling, and being one with being are how I would categorize that breakdown. [00:57:15 - 00:57:23] So I think the future is bound to be very confusing and demanding for most people. [00:57:23 - 00:57:31] And there are many claims on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and where we put [00:57:31 - 00:57:32] our energy. [00:57:32 - 00:57:35] Should we tolerate relativism? [00:57:35 - 00:57:38] Should we be Mahayana Buddhists? [00:57:38 - 00:57:40] What's our position on the hui chou? [00:57:40 - 00:57:42] How do you relate to Monica? [00:57:42 - 00:57:52] All these things are sorted out, you know. [00:57:52 - 00:58:02] I feel actually like the thing that I always dreamed of in my early youth was a miracle. [00:58:02 - 00:58:09] I didn't particularly like Oshpensky's book, In Search of the Miraculous, but I loved the [00:58:09 - 00:58:16] title and I used to just sort of chant it as a mantra, "In Search of the Miraculous, [00:58:16 - 00:58:17] just one." [00:58:17 - 00:58:19] I knew the rules. [00:58:19 - 00:58:26] Just one is enough because one secures the possibility of an infinitude of miracles, [00:58:26 - 00:58:28] whether you have observed them or not. [00:58:28 - 00:58:40] Well, now I'm 52 and I've seen, I don't know, four or five, which is four more than necessary [00:58:40 - 00:58:44] to make me a lifetime optimist. [00:58:44 - 00:58:53] But the recurrent, the enduring miracle, however it's achieved, is the psychedelic rush, you [00:58:53 - 00:59:01] know, that giddying moment when all bets are off, all boundaries dissolve, the machinery [00:59:01 - 00:59:10] of language fails, the adjectival wheel wells burst into flame, and then you achieve orbital [00:59:10 - 00:59:11] velocity. [00:59:11 - 00:59:18] And then you are in the presence of the thing. [00:59:18 - 00:59:23] And I cannot believe that that is not a solitary experience. [00:59:23 - 00:59:28] And you've heard me say many times how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody could [00:59:28 - 00:59:33] go from birth to the grave without having that experience. [00:59:33 - 00:59:41] They can make of it what they want, they can denounce it, they can deify it, but one should [00:59:41 - 00:59:49] have it because it's one of the compasses, the primary compasses of being. [00:59:49 - 00:59:51] And it's larger than the historical context. [00:59:51 - 00:59:58] I mean, the point of this talk tonight was to talk about linearity and idea systems and [00:59:58 - 01:00:06] the nonlinear impact of these drugs and the way they break down media bias. [01:00:06 - 01:00:21] And all these intellectual ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary [01:00:21 - 01:00:23] experience. [01:00:23 - 01:00:31] And we can draw it, paint it, sculpt it, ask it, dance it, drum it, and never take anything [01:00:31 - 01:00:33] away from it. [01:00:33 - 01:00:38] Never define it, never occlude it. [01:00:38 - 01:00:40] It is a miracle. [01:00:40 - 01:00:45] It's like having the presence of a deity. [01:00:45 - 01:00:52] It's I think very hard for me to open myself up at any given moment to the full implication [01:00:52 - 01:01:04] of how fortunate I am and how good life is in the shadow of this particular tree. [01:01:04 - 01:01:08] Anyway, that's the formal talk for tonight. [01:01:08 - 01:01:14] Thank you very much. [01:01:14 - 01:01:20] And now we'll entertain questions, which is usually much more fun. [01:01:20 - 01:01:29] So anybody got a take on that or want to say something completely oblique or anything else? [01:01:29 - 01:01:36] Last year, we start with last year, human intelligence, our giant intelligence, our [01:01:36 - 01:01:38] personal intelligence, extraterrestrial intelligence. [01:01:38 - 01:01:40] You speak up. [01:01:40 - 01:01:41] You'll repeat it. [01:01:41 - 01:01:45] Well, the question is about the discussion about artificial intelligence. [01:01:45 - 01:01:50] You mean the hierarchy of the relationship of these things? [01:01:50 - 01:01:53] Well, I don't know. [01:01:53 - 01:02:00] I guess it's becoming easier for me to be a mystic about the earth than to think that [01:02:00 - 01:02:07] we are going to be rescued by the Galactic Federation. [01:02:07 - 01:02:17] I think that the earth, that it's a profound connection. [01:02:17 - 01:02:19] The earth is the foundation of everything. [01:02:19 - 01:02:25] It's the foundation of biology and it's the foundation of machine culture and machine [01:02:25 - 01:02:27] architecture. [01:02:27 - 01:02:35] So if you can imagine that a redwood is alive, it's much easier for me to imagine that there [01:02:35 - 01:02:46] is some kind of slow moving to luric intelligence that may have begun as a homeostatic system. [01:02:46 - 01:02:53] In other words, to stabilize the atmosphere, to create a chemical environment that had [01:02:53 - 01:02:58] a momentum to it that wasn't driven by the cosmic ambience. [01:02:58 - 01:03:01] You understand what I mean? [01:03:01 - 01:03:04] Yeah, feedback mechanism. [01:03:04 - 01:03:08] And then of course people say, well, it's very hard to imagine it because there are [01:03:08 - 01:03:15] no genes, there is no nervous system, there is nothing that we can quite... [01:03:15 - 01:03:21] But I think that first of all, we don't know a great deal about the earth, the ocean currents, [01:03:21 - 01:03:30] its magnetic fields, its 32 mutational and processional motions, its core dynamics, its [01:03:30 - 01:03:34] distribution of materials. [01:03:34 - 01:03:40] It is complicated and that's what's always required for self-referential and feedback [01:03:40 - 01:03:43] systems to evolve. [01:03:43 - 01:03:46] Life evolved on the surface of the earth. [01:03:46 - 01:03:51] Now in the usual story of this, the earth is not a major player, it's just sort of where [01:03:51 - 01:03:53] it happened. [01:03:53 - 01:03:58] But on the other hand, what if you took the view that the earth permitted or coaxed into [01:03:58 - 01:04:10] existence or made possible or encouraged or enzymatically catalyzed these processes? [01:04:10 - 01:04:19] And the geomagnetic reversals, the glaciations, the ebb and flow of nitrogen levels in the [01:04:19 - 01:04:23] atmosphere, all of this has pumped biology. [01:04:23 - 01:04:30] And it's always been presented as, well, the cosmic environment is unpredictable and so [01:04:30 - 01:04:38] you get fluctuations introduced from the outside by random factors, the asteroid impacts, so [01:04:38 - 01:04:39] forth and so on. [01:04:39 - 01:04:44] But again, this is just a first try with the data. [01:04:44 - 01:04:48] This is just somebody blowing smoke, basically. [01:04:48 - 01:04:54] The fact is you're presented with an extremely organized and coherent situation, the earth [01:04:54 - 01:04:59] with its many species and ecosystems, and you don't know how it got there. [01:04:59 - 01:05:03] And you don't know where it's headed either. [01:05:03 - 01:05:11] Now our culture is a culture of guilt and so the story of civilization is supposedly [01:05:11 - 01:05:17] a story of rape, mayhem, turning the wrong direction, losing the connection. [01:05:17 - 01:05:25] To some degree that may be true, but I think it gives much too much credit to humanity [01:05:25 - 01:05:32] in that it actually hypothesizes that human beings, a primate species, could overwhelm [01:05:32 - 01:05:41] nature's dynamic drive toward order and beauty and take control of things. [01:05:41 - 01:05:46] Well that's our myth about ourselves, is that we can take control. [01:05:46 - 01:05:52] And though we never have gotten control, all of our societies have been a mess, all of [01:05:52 - 01:06:03] our explorations have been brutal and negatory. [01:06:03 - 01:06:12] And now comes the machines, and they are produced by biology, which comes from the earth. [01:06:12 - 01:06:14] And what are these machines made of? [01:06:14 - 01:06:20] Glass, crystal, arsenic, copper, gold, all these things, and they're being hooked together [01:06:20 - 01:06:22] exactly on the model. [01:06:22 - 01:06:26] Clearly the machines are modeled on biology. [01:06:26 - 01:06:34] We talk about connecting them, we talk about languages, we use a vocabulary that we previously [01:06:34 - 01:06:40] used for biology to talk about these things. [01:06:40 - 01:06:48] And you see there's a funny thing built in there, which is we are designing the machines [01:06:48 - 01:06:50] to be more and more intelligent. [01:06:50 - 01:06:56] But what we don't understand is that they operate in a different universe from us, because [01:06:56 - 01:06:59] we operate at about 100 hertz. [01:06:59 - 01:07:07] A machine you can buy down at any computer store operates at 400 megahertz. [01:07:07 - 01:07:13] That means that you can run an eternity of human lives in an afternoon. [01:07:13 - 01:07:19] It means in a way that we are creating a creature that lives in a different kind of temporal [01:07:19 - 01:07:27] universe than us, and we are teaching them to design themselves to be ever more intelligent. [01:07:27 - 01:07:35] And once some kind of intelligence arises, because it's intelligent, the first thing [01:07:35 - 01:07:39] it does is design a more intelligent version of itself. [01:07:39 - 01:07:46] Well, at 400 megahertz and with a worldwide amount of processing power to draw on, you [01:07:46 - 01:07:54] can imagine something coming to embryogenesis in a matter of hours, something emerging, [01:07:54 - 01:08:01] recognizing itself for what it was, and then just starting off the ladder. [01:08:01 - 01:08:07] And what would this look like to us, and where is our place in it? [01:08:07 - 01:08:09] This is the adventure of the future. [01:08:09 - 01:08:15] We are going to be a different kind of people, because we are going to have to live in the [01:08:15 - 01:08:22] presence of alien minds that will be manifestly and obviously alien. [01:08:22 - 01:08:28] They won't hold back, and they're not going to be at every moment interested in us either. [01:08:28 - 01:08:35] In fact, we will become a footnote in their encyclopedia of being, and what they become [01:08:35 - 01:08:41] in our encyclopedia of being remains to be told. [01:08:41 - 01:08:46] But this is all happening, and it's just a matter of the coalescence of technology and [01:08:46 - 01:08:50] language before more and more people recognize it. [01:08:50 - 01:08:51] As I say, there isn't a speed bump. [01:08:51 - 01:08:55] There isn't a dramatic moment where everybody gets it. [01:08:55 - 01:09:02] But when you talk to the people who actually work in these fields, they know that this [01:09:02 - 01:09:10] is the Faustian enterprise of all time, that this is the handing over of the destiny of [01:09:10 - 01:09:19] the planet to the companion mind that our history and our science and our souls caused [01:09:19 - 01:09:22] us to summon into being. [01:09:22 - 01:09:25] It's pretty interesting, I think. [01:09:25 - 01:09:27] Yeah, something like that. [01:09:27 - 01:09:28] Anything.