Greetings from Cyberdellic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well I just couldn't put this off any longer but I'm afraid
 I'm in need of another little hit of McKenna, Abraham and Sheldrake in one of
 their trilogues. But I don't want you to get worried now I'm not going to go into
 another one of those long series of nothing but trilogues. I just needed a
 little McKenna fix if you know what I mean. The conversation I'm going to play
 today was actually recorded on June 8th 1998 at Santa Cruz, California and in the
 box of cassette recordings of these trilogues that Ralph Abraham loaned to
 me for this project this trilogue was the most recent one. Actually there were
 three tapes with that date on them and they're each about an hour and a half
 long. So right now I'm going to play the first hour of the first tape and we'll
 get to the rest of that tape in another podcast later this week. But since
 today's program is so long I'm going to dispense with most of my usual chatter
 and join you in listening to Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert
 Sheldrake talk about skepticism and the Balkanization of epistemology.
 Well what I thought it would be interesting to discuss as part of our
 new series of trilogues because I think it's an issue that more and more people
 are becoming aware of is the whole question of skepticism and what I call
 the Balkanization of epistemology and what I mean by that is that somehow as
 a part of the agenda of political correctness it has become not entirely
 acceptable to criticize or demand substantial evidence or expect people
 when advancing their speculations to make what used to be called old-fashioned
 sense and I think this tolerance of unanchored thought and speculation is
 confusing the evolutionary progress of discourse but I'm also aware that if you
 draw the parameters too tight the baby goes out with the bathwater or you
 become a defender of scientism or some kind of orthodoxy. So in my own situation
 I've been trying to both understand what is strong and to be supported in
 science and what needs to be criticized and equally to look at the alternatives
 to science, the counterculture, the new age and to ask myself what is strong, what
 serves the evolution of discourse and what is in fact this type of unanchored
 thinking that I'm concerned about. So first let me talk a little bit about how
 I see science. If any one of us were to take what is called a scientific
 approach to many of the phenomena that interest us, psychic pets, the source of
 the content of the psychedelic experience etc etc, if we were to take a
 hard scientific view of these things, these phenomena which we know exist and
 which we find rich in implications would simply not be allowed as objects of
 discourse, they would be ruled out of order. So there's something wrong on one
 level with scientific what's called empirical empiricism, skepticism,
 positivism, it has different names. On the other hand if we go to the other end
 of the spectrum and are willing to admit the testimony of iridologists,
 cross-circle enthusiasts, victims of alien abduction, those who channel
 Atlantis, those who suspect undetected planets, those who believe vast alien
 arcologies dot the planes of Mars and so forth. - And pro bono, better get that in.
 - Yes, pro bono proctologists from other star systems making unscheduled house
 calls late at night in our homes. I mean both of you realize I'm sure that
 medical professionals regardless of their species or star system of origin
 do not make house calls anymore. So I see then this problem, science is too tight
 fisted, it misses much of what is interesting. To abandon the approach of
 science is to just be without rudder in an ocean of strident claims and
 counterclaims, many of which are preposterous and certainly not all of
 which can be true. So I have to think about this for a while. My approach was
 to say well science went from superstition to its present positivist
 position through a process of evolution, temporal unfoldment. So using a method
 I've advocated in other situations I conducted the following exercise. I said
 I will move backward through the epistemological history of science to
 the last sane moment science knew and then analyze what that consists of. And
 I'm not completed in this process but what I find is that a curious betrayal
 has occurred in science that with the rise of capitalism and industrialism
 science has actually become, has allowed assumptions to be made that betrayed
 its original intent. And what I mean by that is modern science relies on
 statistical analysis of data. You know measure ten times, add the values, divide
 by ten, this tells you how much rain is falling, how much voltage is flowing
 through a wire, something like that. This approach to phenomena mitigates against
 unusual phenomena. Inevitably. Because they are statistically
 insignificant. That's the phrase that is actually used. So we can talk about
 this in detail. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it but I think you see my
 implication that the method of statistical analysis, true, produces
 general formalizations of nature's mechanisms and wonderful products which
 can be sold and patented and so forth. But it's a coarse-grained view of nature
 and what it mitigates against seeing are the very things which feed the progress
 of science which is the unassimilated phenomena, the unusual data, the peculiar
 result of an experiment. So looking at that then I said well where are we in
 the history of science where this happened and how was it before and you
 may wish to correct me a hundred years either way but I'm very interested in
 sort of bringing back and re-appreciating William of Ockham who aside from the
 things I'm saying about him here which are very nice also had a notion not much
 appreciated of what he called unlimited progress and it comes very close to
 novelty theories, belief that the universe progresses unto merging,
 emerging with the nature of God. But the thing about Ockham that bears on all
 this is of course his famous razor which simply says, it's been
 interpreted in many ways, but hypotheses should not be multiplied without
 necessity or to put it more simply the simplest explanation of any phenomena
 should be preferred until found inadequate. Explanation should not be
 complexified beyond the demands of the problem against which it's being brought
 to bear. So what I'm feeling is if we abandon statistical analysis of
 nature and realize that probably the assumption of temporal invariance that
 that assumes about the underlying fields of nature is in fact a cheerful
 assumption untested and unprovable. So we should get rid in my hypothetical
 reformation of epistemological dialogue, we should get rid of statistical
 analysis, we should dial science back to the late medieval period of Ockham and
 we should do science that way and applying Ockham's razor we are quickly
 able to cut away the underbrush that these peripheral and alternative people
 have brought to the table. Some of its good things like hypnotism, acupuncture,
 nutrition therapy, rational approaches to telepathy, clairvoyance, none of this is
 what I have a problem with. I don't have a problem with people proposing new
 models of nature. What I have a problem with is unanchored eccentric revelations
 taking their place at the table. The channelings from the Pleiadians for
 example, the Sitchinite reconstruction of the ancient Near Eastern archaeology,
 the Arguellian distortion of the Mayan accomplishment. I find these things
 pernicious and easily dealt with if we use Ockham's razor. But when we go too
 far into statistical analysis of nature then we begin to cut away at our own
 beliefs and assumptions about nature. Yours Rupert of the morphogenetic field,
 mine of novelty theory and there must be some aspect of all this that would
 threaten you Ralph if extremely empiricist and positivist criteria were
 brought to bear. In other words we've all been called soft in our time but in fact
 I think our softness indicates a failure of science. Science has hoarded itself to
 the marketplace and to technology and interesting high-order phenomena like
 societies, economic crashes, complex system behavior is going to remain
 forever blurred in our understanding as long as we rely on statistical analysis.
 It's a tool that had its place but to hold on to it indefinitely is going to
 retard mathematics ability to give a deeper account of nature. A perfect
 example of this, and then I'll stop, would be the enshrinement of the so-called
 uncertainty principle in physics throughout the 20th century. The
 supposed great bridge between science and mysticism, well it turns out is just
 malarkey. There is no uncertainty principle. David Bohm's formulation of
 quantum physics gives perfect knowledge of velocity and position without
 ambiguity. It calls forth the notion of non-locality. That's why the
 Heisenberg formulation was preferred. But again non-locality accepted permits
 some of the things we're interested in. Telepathy, information from other worlds
 arriving via the morphogenetic field, and so forth and so on. So I haven't been
 maybe as rabble-rousing as you expected by naming in turn various heresies to be
 consigned to the flames, but I do think there are too many loose heads in our
 canoe and that no revolution of human thought that I'm aware of succeeded
 through fuzzy thinking. Well I've certainly got a lot to say about all
 that. Very interesting. I think that the first of all we have to see that
 there's a regional problem here that skepticism and and alchemism and so on
 carry different social balances in different parts of the world. You live in
 Hawaii and visit places like Maui quite frequently. Ralph lives right here in
 Santa Cruz, California where you only have to mention the name to anyone in
 England who knows California at all and they immediately say oh yeah where all
 the old hippies hang out. And it's the kind of it's a totally alternative place
 and as we've seen in our joint appearances in Santa Cruz there's a
 level of weirdness among some theories people have and the crank obsessions
 they follow which from outside the perspective of the West Coast most
 people would recognize as typically Californian. There's a kind of
 level of weirdness and cults and these I mean most of the phenomena you've
 named are phenomena of Hawaii and California. When you live in England
 things take on a rather different perspective. There's a general level of
 popular skepticism such as that the general tone of an English pub is one of
 sort of skepticism. - All the dark crop circles and Graham Hancock all homegrown
 British phenomena? - They are but every single one of them in any single pub
 where it's debated would always have skeptics in the discussion. You're
 never going to have a kind of thing where you have all believers except in
 small crank societies of true believers which exist. But the thing is the general
 cultural tone is one of skepticism and so the need for a great deal more of
 skepticism doesn't feel quite so urgent if you live in London as it does if you
 live in Hawaii or California. That's my first point. But secondly I think that the
 the the the scientistic skepticism you talk about is indeed a serious
 threat and I think that's done more than anything to drive science in this
 direction. It's a kind of dogmatic skepticism that rules out at any cost
 weird phenomena like telepathy and non-locality etc. And so to rule those
 out you have to say that a lot of phenomena don't really exist like
 telepathy and stuff and if non-locality happens it's just a
 peculiarity of the details of quantum theory. - Statistical anomalies get rid of all
 problems. - So you can you can take these points of view but the skeptical those
 kind of dogmatic skeptics who I find myself confronted with quite often the
 skeptical enquirer crowd who are on my case whenever they can be because they've
 classified me with the pro-brono proctologists from distant star systems.
 So the thing is I've had the experience of being put in that category by
 skeptics including the editor of Nature and the skeptics in Britain who regularly
 appear and good for a quote anytime by the press my old friend Professor Lewis
 Walpert at any moment and to any journalist several times a year will say
 can't take this kind of thing so seriously and then last year when he
 said but Professor Walpert don't you think you should keep an open mind about
 some of these things he says not so open that your brain drops out.
 So that kind of skeptic has done a great deal to force science into this narrow
 thinking mode it's forced the investigation of telepathy into more and
 more ridiculously detailed and unrealistic parapsychology lab
 experiments seeking to provide the statistical proof of regularities
 however I've what I've found is with the staring experiments and with the psychic
 pet experiments one can achieve results positive results which fit with all this
 normal statistical thing they're repeatable positive they meet all these
 statistical criteria they're not evenness and phenomena like human
 synchronicities these are regularities of nature so the old-style statistical
 approach can actually take as much further I think I'm using old-style
 statistical methods in my own research because I don't want to change both the
 content and the style at the same time you know I want to show that by the old
 methods these are valid criteria so if I have valid phenomena they actually
 happen and you can prove them in the old-style scientific way but I do agree
 that the the kind of discussion we have in science doesn't need to have all
 these things what I like most I think my most heroic example in the kind of thing
 I do is none other than the great late Charles Darwin and like most other
 biologists I greatly admire him but what I see in him and admire is different
 from what others admire I like his the way he draws on information from
 non-professionals plant breeders pigeon fanciers horse trainers and of course
 horse trainers cabbage breeders rose planters and specialists
 horticulturalists he draws on all these people's experience colonial explorers
 sailors who tell of feral pigs on the moat islands and how they've gone wild
 and so forth all this is what Darwin draws on and he discusses it in a
 common-sense way there's no statistical test chi-squared test five percent levels
 of probability it's wonderful science it draws on experience and treats it in
 the light of common sense using rules of evidence but without rigid statistical
 tests rigid methods and it's wonderful science he discovered a great deal he'd
 never heard of five percent levels of probability and yet it's great science
 so I think that the there is a possibility to return to a more
 common-sense approach and common sense of the British part type and probably of
 standard American kind too will often deal quite satisfactorily with the
 pro-brainy proctologists from outer space anyone who claimed that in the
 British pub would be this would be the butt of a great deal of humor within
 minutes and no pun intended
 yes well let me just say about that there is a political problem you're
 right though the British have this reputation in America for being the
 epitome of politeness actually in a British pub people are willing to blow
 the whistle on what they perceive as absurdity by jokes
 always with humor in the new age it is a utterly humorless and the reigning
 paradigm of political correctness demands that you treat all of these
 testimonies and bits of news with complete equanimity and it's thought to
 be rather out of sorts to suggest that anybody shouldn't be taken seriously the
 belief is that truth can't be known and so all there is is opinions so you know
 you speak from your knowledge of the calculus and world history and this
 person speaks from their latest transmission from fallen Atlantis and
 this is all placed on an equal footing and it's crazy-making and it also
 guarantees the trivialness of the entire enterprise I mean I just don't think any
 revolution in human history can be made by sloth heads well I think we in order
 to understand what you're saying I have to really try to figure out what a
 fluffhead is this is this is the crux I like your historical approach as we
 agree that science is rather in bad place now we look back find where it
 went wrong go back there start over again this is exactly what
 fundamentalists do say our ethics are grounds we're going to go back to the
 first speeches of Muhammad or something so William of Arkham I I feel
 uncomfortable with his idea of simplicity I mean the modern form is
 probably come all the rough measure of complexity which would be given a data
 set what is the length in bytes of the smallest computer program that can
 approximate the data set within epsilon or something like that and a problem
 with this technically speaking is that the last year's technology would give a
 come on the rough measure of this much this year technology would give a much
 smaller measure because we've learned a new trick of building models or it may
 only depend upon the computer language more or less that's used to build a
 model so in other words that there is no simple measuring stick of simplicity and
 given three explanations we're not sure what is the simplest one there's no
 mathematics that could really be applied it becomes a subjective judgment and
 therefore I think that this whole question where I think that you've
 suggested a one-dimensional scale of fluff head looks at the kind of fluff
 scale where down at this end we have what even Walpert thinks is okay and
 over at that end we have the the test that can be applied to pleiadians to see
 if they're real or not so in in this scale I think you've marked two points
 there's the point at which you think to the right of this is too fluffy into the
 left is okay and then there's another point where science agrees it's okay you
 see that you're really not like the channeling no but the telepathy okay but
 Walpert says the morphogenetic fields is not okay but DNA is okay so I'm thinking
 of these two points that you described as being on some linear and scale of
 fluffness and I'm thinking that this entire scale of fluffedness is not I
 mean you'd like to appeal to mathematics and to some kind of real science if
 there is a real science that the the community or the religion of science has
 gotten off the track of the real science and that there this is what bothers me
 and I wish that this were true but I have no faith in it that there is
 somewhere in the sky or in the deepest bowels of the earth a measuring stick
 where we could somehow measure the truth of something even if it's just a degree
 of truth as you know in chaos logic you don't have true and false you have a
 truth is a percentage between zero and a hundred percent and is only chaos logic
 would be a good alternative for you the truth of a proposition let's say a
 formal logic like Zeno's paradox is only a temporal assessment and is the input
 of the measuring stick of truth after which we get another measurement you
 see so now under what we know so far at 60% true now we assume that it's 60%
 true that's the input to another assessment when we find out it's 66%
 true that the input of another assessment then is 64% true hopefully
 this process of successive judgments which could be regarded as the history
 of science from the past through and on into the infinite future would converge
 on something but in chaotic logic it doesn't converge because certain kind of
 propositions which are circular in a way like Zeno's paradox they in circling
 around they have a chaotic attractor and so they're always giving different
 results never settles down it gives a dense set of estimates between zero and
 a hundred percent and from this perspective which is the successor of
 Aristotelian logic which served science up until the year 1985 or something
 you you can't have a clear measuring stick of truth and you can't have a
 clear scale of fluff and so the attempt to make something perfectly clear might
 be doomed to failure we understand it then is something psychological so I
 just want to give a I'm applying Ludwig Fleck here to you and Ludwig Fleck is
 the founder of the sociology of science where you sort of do Freudian analysis of
 the scientific community as is as a social as a flock of sheep as it were
 and with like in the 60s we were as parents very libertine with our children
 now we see those children have grown up my children are having children they're
 like much stricter and there's the idea that in successive generations people
 are more or less strict with their children and I think they're more or
 less strict about fluff also so that the fluff scale is actually a sociological
 aspect of a given culture civilization which fluctuates wildly in time and I
 think that this is just one of many theories for you personally and maybe we
 are also affected by this that as we age and then we are in contact with young
 people and then we are receiving input from them as far as the the
 morphogenetic sequence of a fluff scale is concerned that were affected by them
 and we were becoming a little more critical you see so then we become
 critical of ourselves in a way because a decade ago we were more open so our fluff
 scale is changing and therefore we have to rearrange all our social grid that
 some some people that were previously okay are not too fluffy for us and their
 brains have fallen out well let me say a couple of things about this first of all
 I think I agree with almost everything you say on the end of pointing out that
 it's truth is a very difficult thing to assess you didn't mention Kurt Gödel but
 certainly his proof that no formal system produces all true statements
 shows that even ordinary arithmetic is subject to debate and represents a kind
 of circularity so on one end I completely agree with you that truth is
 a very complicated concept and why shouldn't it be it's motivated thinkers
 since thinking began and where we as yet have no certain index for you mentioned
 that you thought my approach was one-dimensional and I agreed from your
 example but much of your criticism was was couched in the vocabulary of
 symbolic logic analytical deconstruction here's a way we might go
 at this agreeing that it's a messy problem let's agree that the solution
 may also be somewhat messy so for instance we perhaps need to talk about
 kinds of fluff I immediately identify two kinds of fluff one is
 unscientific speculation persistent throughout history and with the
 consistent provenance. What are you religion? Well mythology I wasn't going to attack
 religion I was thinking of more marginal ideas but religion is a good example I
 was going to suggest alchemy alchemy believes certain things about matter
 which science absolutely abhors and rejects the history of alchemy is far
 older than the history of science it has always been in existence its thinkers
 have always evolved and adumbrated their field of concerns so that's one kind of
 fluff fluff with punch because it has historical continuity but what are we to
 make of someone who brings to the idea a complete cosmological model generated in
 the past 10 years by themselves alone they never read Plato they know no
 mathematics they never read the Bible they never read Wittgenstein they just
 got it all in one download and it is on the face of it preposterous it's a faith
 that tells you that vegetables lose their auric fields unless peeled with
 wooden implements that major earth changes have already happened but are
 invisible to most people that there are only 100 real people alive on the planet
 anyway everyone else is a simulacrum from another dimension in other words
 preposterous on the face of it history lists idiosyncratic and utterly
 unanchored to any body of previous human thought sanctioned or unsanctioned so
 the question before us is how do we distinguish all these books from one
 that superficially might appear to be a match on the invisible landscape how do
 we make a division between the invisible landscape on the one hand and the rest
 on the other the invisible landscape the category of the invisible landscape is
 each in commentary there's a downgrading one right now they've been the eaching
 as a legitimate object of speculative discourse has been since pre-han time
 so let's say we accept a two-dimensional model for a fluff where there's deeper
 fluff like each in commentaries and more superficial fluff like the entire
 manifest universe is the circulation of a single electron let's use the
 Arantia book as an example so in this case or the pattern we were given last
 night as a spiral form to the basis of reality made as wire so I think that I'll give you a
 point here in that Ockham's razor is intuitively a good way to describe this
 new dimension the simpler and more complicated explanations for an effect
 which is a matter of fact not established
 so this is my worry about the anti-fluff posture that you now project in public
 and so on that's I'm sympathetic with a lot of things and we're worried greatly
 about the pattern and the problem with this strict parent approach to fluff is
 that some important discoveries may be shuttled aside as Wolfert shoves aside
 Rupert's idea of the morphogenetic field what is it that science hates hates
 besides Rupert a science hates homeopathy acupuncture or alternative
 medicine altogether science hates cold fusion when there's certain things say
 well you know too open-minded to even think about it too open-minded too much
 in conflict so a lot of things would have been missed you think of these
 paradigm shifts of the past of science for example the continental drift or
 the ice ages I can see you know this was a really terrific discovery of
 mountain climbing guides of the ice age that we don't take for granted rejected
 by science for 30 or 40 years and is one of the few successful example of a
 paradigm shift in science this scientific community so we've never even
 thought of it as a paradigm shift Oh see what a story I've operated in a great
 detail in my book yes guy arrows including a heroic picture of Agassiz
 himself he was taken into the mountains by these a mountain climbing guide said
 to look here at the Gerard mountains the limestone mountains what are these hunks
 of granite doing here they've been brought here from over there where we
 know where the granite is wonderful you mentioned 30 or 40 years Ralph I think
 one way of thinking about this problem is a some school of fluff should be
 given a certain amount of time to advance their agenda it's very very
 messy but if after 20 30 40 years they've gotten nowhere they should not
 lose their place in the discourse or move to the back of the room or
 something and I think this should be applied to science as well for example
 science has been beating its breasts since 1950 about how they were about to
 elucidate the mechanism of memory I think it's time to just pull the plug
 50 years to flail at this with every tool available and you have zilch to
 show for it similarly if the good the flying the people who believe aliens
 from other star systems are visiting this planet with great plans for mankind
 they've been running that rift since 1947 it's time for them to lower their
 voices and let other people have something to say maybe a century or two
 why are you so tight because if there is no progress there are other fields have
 created multiple revolutions in the same time scale progress is is very subtle so
 while looking for memory and grains in the brain they didn't find them but they
 did figure out how to do a certain kind of surgery so that if you have a you
 know a tumor or something they can do a really good job of helping you out so
 well I would challenge you to make a list of spin-off effects from the new
 age that have eased the suffering of mankind I mean there have been a few
 back scratchers and some nutritional supplements and a mantra or two but in
 terms of the money consumed the lives distorted the high bowl that we've all
 had to put up with I think okay if we were the National Science Foundation
 and we've been funding channelers for years hoping that they would find gold
 in South America I mean we might withdraw our funding at this point but
 we can't make it illegal somehow to channel no no what we have to legitimize
 is critical discussion so that when someone stands up and starts talking
 about the face on Mars people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs
 and just stand up and say malarkey mate and you know force people to experience
 a critical deconstruction of their ideas the face on Mars thing is an perfect
 example here in what 76 Voyager sends a low-resolution image might be a face all
 of these self-promoting so-called ex-NASA scientists I mean when I hear
 the phrase ex-NASA scientist in the new age I reach for my revolver so all of
 these ex-NASA scientists gather around proclaim this thing an alien artifact
 when the first Mars orbiter fails that orbital injection around Mars they
 scream conspiracy mankind isn't ready for the truth 18 months later the second
 Martian orbiter goes into orbit flawlessly NASA responding to the
 previous hullabaloo actually moves this site up in its photographic agenda
 photographs it exactly under the conditions these people say it must be
 photographed on it's clearly an eroded Mesa part of the Martian landscape no
 different from any other and immediately the face on Mars people
 scream that the data has been tampered with that all kinds of terrible things
 have been one guy sent me email saying well it is there isn't a face on Mars
 but there will be in the future and someone else wrote me and said well
 obviously the aliens wouldn't leave an artifact the face on Mars is cleverly
 disguised as an eroded Mesa well I agree but I'm not sure that it's good to rant
 against the face of Mars because there's no way by a William of Ockham or
 whatever that you could have ruled out the possibility that there was really a
 pocket watch on Mars and now in fact they do like there's life here in there
 there's water on the moon there's a pocket watch on Mars there's not a face
 on Mars but there's something that nobody suspected that was found by going
 there so my fear is that by drawing the line too tight that many discoveries
 will be missed they'll be missed and that a certain amount of open-mindedness
 is necessary to for novelty to come in and to nourish the evolution of the
 collective mind and I've got an answer to this a political answer because
 however much we choose to make criteria or define them we'd have no power
 whatever to enforce them unless we were on a funding committee of the National
 Science Foundation or the government or the British Medical Research Council or
 we were an editor of a prominent journal like Nature or Science and so forth
 under those conditions through controlling grants or through
 controlling editorial policies of major journals you really shape and influence
 the science community you are the ones that draw the line about what papers are
 published in Nature and people like Sir John Maddox who opposed my work declared
 in public in an editorial this work seemingly scientific by someone with
 seeming scientific credentials etc was actually outside the possible area of
 rational scientific discourse so there was a line drawn put on an index so
 there are people who do that but we're not in those positions nor are people in
 those positions very likely to listen to what we say so the realistic question is
 how in fact does all this work and and and how politically could the system be
 reformed here I rely on the book by a dissident Cambridge biochemist who wrote
 a book called the economic laws of scientific research and his name I
 forget but I remember it but anyway in this book he shows that if you look at
 the structure of scientific research funding you find that in the 19th
 century when there was a great deal of scientific creativity and originality
 in both Britain and America there was a great diversity of sources of funding
 there was very little public money in science practically none and it came from
 innovators companies that needed to do the science in order to make the
 chemicals and stuff no one was going to tell them or give them they had to do this
 engineering research a study of the Adam Smith study of the Industrial Revolution
 in Lancashire found that the improvements in spinning jennies and
 steam-driven machinery came not from experts not from mathematicians but it
 was mostly done by literate technicians who were improving the machines that
 they ran and understood from day to day the mechanics and this innovation was
 mechanic new technology came from old technology science had nothing to do
 with it he shows if you study the history of
 technology most of it most new technologies were in this way science
 was funded by a diversity of bodies and was quite diverse on the continent in
 Germany and France where they had centrally state-controlled policies in
 the 19th century the universities were funded by the state and there was a
 Ministry of Science and they had central institutes it was highly
 professionalized and institutionalized with professors with great power in
 Britain and America at that period there was actually no science in universities
 and now after the Second World War the biggest change happened after the Second
 World War when people like Vannevar Bush got the idea of a military industrial
 complex with big science huge government funding for defense research which
 linked in the universities to a huge government funded program of research
 and then with the National Science Foundation this model was extended to
 medicine but the primary one is the military research budget billions and
 billions of dollars driving research in laboratories Los Alamos Lawrence
 Livermore and so forth all around the United States and in the major contracts
 of universities then you have a centralized system of science funding
 through as we have it in Britain through research councils central government
 research councils which define spending for engineering research sociology
 research medical research who gets the grants and these are run by small
 committees of professors and experts you know people like Edward Teller were on
 these committees and they decide the science funding the structure of what's
 permitted and funded through the whole system system this imposes a kind of
 monopoly control a kind of uniformity of thought which is the enemy of deviant
 thinking that doesn't fit within that system however well or badly the lines
 are drawn you can't do anything that's not within the central the only answer
 to this he suggests because he's an Adam Smith father is not to follow Bacon's
 idea which is Francis Bacon's vision was central government government
 spending an academy of scientists state owned like a sort of state priesthood of
 scientists and then they think of new ideas which then go to the mechanics to
 turn into new technologies and science fuels this progress he shows that in
 fact technology fuels technology science hasn't got that much to do with it if
 you look at different science spending in different advanced countries pure
 science such as not that much to do with it but the pure science people have to
 do it on the centralized funding program in accordance with defense aims the war
 against cancer AIDS you know all the great agendas set by centralized science
 molecular biology and biotechnology now taking over the life sciences the only
 answer in practice is a free market answer whether you abolish or greatly
 reduce central government spending science is then paid for in accordance
 with enough lobby any interest group that's got enough lobbying power would
 fight for it there's a huge organic consuming community they'd lobby for
 money to be spent on organic farming research at the present it gets
 practically nothing because it's not part of the central agricultural
 research program geared towards Monsanto chemicals and so on so if you in fact
 this central monopolistic legacy of the Baconian heritage which is really what
 he was the Lord Chancellor of England it's an old-style monarchical church and
 state top-down hierarchical structure run by a small elite accountable to
 nobody whose these priorities if priorities were set by popular opinion
 pet research would be top of the biological agenda not the sequencing of
 more proteins the cloning of more sheep to help the biotechnology industry but
 instead pet research isn't even on the agenda so it's set by a small elite who
 bear no relation in their interest to the voters in a democracy who actually
 provide the money but on the other hand you would have them the astronomical
 budget would be entirely spent looking for UFOs no it wouldn't because if you
 had it you would give you'd have some kind of funding agency which would give
 matching grants to organizations if a new fair organization applies for a
 grant for you fair research you'd have a sort of advanced funding agency which
 could fund this kind of thing you'd have if you had a central funding agency it would be
 either have many more subdivisions or sub offices or would have a great deal
 more less hierarchical structure it would be done on a regional basis a
 state basis anything to allow for quirkiness and deviation and
 multiplicity of decision-making but all of these would be answerable if you got
 you a grant for your UFO project for five years you've got $50,000 a year for
 five years or something at the end of the five years you submit a report and
 this is published in scientific journals which are open to this kind of thing
 like the Journal of Scientific Exploration it will publish scientific
 papers on the face on Mars but anyone can write in and say why they think this
 isn't good enough evidence and the debates there in the journal and you can
 see both sides they do this they've done the face on Mars then the new evidence
 someone then publishes a new picture the new evidence of the face on Mars and the
 person who wrote the original can can write a reply but for most people a kind
 of new consensus would develop that there isn't much in it well one of the
 things I've noticed and talking to people about these problems is that
 pseudoscience is very difficult for most people to discern in other words if you
 dig into the face on Mars problem you'll find all kinds of articles with
 pretentious titles about information theory and higher dimensional
 reconstructions of the data so that before the spacecraft arrived we
 supposedly had terrain models of what it was going to see based on extrapolation
 of the early data and inevitably these people are all PhDs and they use these
 technical languages very adroitly so you know along with the idea that there
 should be some kind of historical continuity and I agree diversifying the
 hierarchical spending patterns would help the other thing is there needs to
 be some way of and this has never been done in science because I guess it was
 never necessary because the collegial atmosphere was self-policing but there
 should be a way of looking at the messenger and I'm not very keen on your
 messenger point because it leads to ad hominem arguments you see the classic
 thing you should avoid in proper rational discourse traditionally is ad
 hominem arguments attacking the messenger and not the message and ad
 hominem attacks where people who say things that you don't like they can be
 destroyed by smear campaigns like Randy trying to smear Geller or Geller
 hitting back by saying Randy's a pederast and a pedophile and a totally
 dishonest and disreputable character pervert and so on and this kind of ad
 hominem argument is all too common in practice when Randy attacks Geller on
 the ad hominem grounds look at the messenger a guy who was on to cheat
 music hall acts in Israel and stuff and then comes he's just a showman he hits
 back you see but that's where you get without hominem arguments you get Geller
 and Randy and Randy's supposed to be a rationalist well it's a problem I mean I
 would like to know these things about someone I was debating and but I agree
 with you it's not a valid point to bring forward but if for example you're
 dealing with the supposed guru but you know that he's done time for fraud
 embezzlement and auto theft I think that in a debate about his theology that
 would not be proper to bring forward but on the other hand you certainly would
 want to know that yes but it's a notice of venue you get the kind of the worst
 kind of prairie and proper popular press ad hominem attack where anyone in public
 life immediately they're going to find out if they've got mistresses or
 legitimate children and blaze the stuff all over the papers that means that
 people in public life politicians and so on the slightest sexual affair etc now
 becomes enormous I mean Clinton no one outside America can believe this
 fascination with whether or not there's no fascination 72% of the people would
 like to get on with it you see this is something could be driven by religious
 maniacs of the extent I think it's in the religious mania I think there's some
 kind of this kind of ad hominem business it's the stuff of popular TV the press
 etc etc there's too much of it in the modern world
 you don't see this capable I think I mean the monopolistic control of the
 financing of scientific research worldwide is bad and it's important so
 on nevertheless the National Science Foundation does rely on the judgment of
 these peer reviewers and group of experts and so on finally is their
 opinions that direct the flow of money and that would also be true if there
 was no central control and had every industry financing its own research
 actually is that you get more in the cat food industry there are two or three
 companies that are outstanding for their research on the dietary needs of cats
 and dogs and they do this research based on funds that are coming in from pet
 owners and so on this the 1950s model still exists to a degree and even in
 those companies there's a group of people who are deciding how to spend
 their money and maybe they're influenced by the criminal records of some of the
 researchers and so on but finally it's the opinion of any even a person in the
 street with a dollar to give to the March on times or something it's it's a
 question of opinion and that's where the big flack comes in the sociology of
 science these journals are important what you can publish what if that's why
 we don't like censorship people should at least be able to voice their theory
 about face on Mars or whatever the pattern and so on so it's I think very
 important who can publish and not publish in magazines like magical one
 and even if we aren't on committees of the National Science Foundation if we do
 speak and give opinions about these magazines and so on then we're affecting
 their editorial policies how do they decide whether to publish these articles
 or not the hope that there is some measuring stick of truth that you could
 be clear-headed like to use the late Aristotelian logic or something want to
 be clear-headed it's very hard to to distinguish we do not have a science as
 a matter of fact that allows us to distinguish one theory versus another
 Occam's razor or any other way we don't have finally we're going to use our
 intuition and we may take into account arguments ad hominem while doing so
 secretly of course and while saying the opposite we nevertheless consider the
 gender and and so on so I don't this is what's worried me about things like crop
 circles the pattern and so on I do not stand up and speak against them because
 I do not trust my own bias against them it could be true of the face on Mars
 could be discovered a channel can containing a quartz crystal watch could
 be found under the left paw of the Sphinx I mean I'm not sure that these
 claims are not true I think they're not very simple there's some things that
 aren't interesting I don't care if this face on Mars or not I do think the age
 of the chops pyramid is kind of an interesting question because the whole
 skeleton of history is a new little book called the chronology of ancient
 kingdoms amended to be getting the chronology of the Old Testament into the
 proper order and so on well I think we're all interested in these things the
 thing is not to be led astray by people who have for whatever reason a different
 notion of evidence a different notion of truth than we do well the medical
 profession I think that there you know it's based on good science and so on
 though I believe in vitamin C I don't believe in it but I have it you know I
 take vitamin C I took some today ten years ago my doctor the best doctor I
 have told me that vitamin C was hot wash it was just like morphogenetic
 fields to him now he believes in it what's happened it took a while to
 accumulate enough not evidence enough convergence of opinion enough consensus
 really that he could have faith in and along the people who are is it the
 question authority that's something that is making the conversation difficult and
 it has to do with I'm sorry to have to cut this off right here but we're
 already a little over the one hour time limit I try to impose on these podcasts
 and as I mentioned in the beginning of this program I'm going to keep my own
 comments to a minimum and get the rest of this trial log out to you in the next
 couple of days there are only about 30 minutes or so left in this conversation
 about skepticism but there are several comments from our fellow Saloners that I
 think are important and I don't want to just squeeze them in in a hurry here so
 I'll get to those comments and the rest of this trial log and I'll get them out
 in a separate podcast as soon as I can in the time I have left however I do
 want to thank our fellow Saloners Terry Corey Patricia and Adam all of whom sent
 in donation in the past couple of weeks it's incredibly wonderful of you all to
 do that and I want you to know that your gifts will reach a lot of people because
 they're going to be used 100% in support of these podcasts so many thousands of
 fellow Saloners the world over also thank you for your support of the
 psychedelic salon without you guys and the others who have sent in donations to
 help with equipment and hosting expenses I might have given up doing this a long
 time ago but the fact that so many of you feel so strongly about these
 podcasts that you send some of your hard-earned cash this way well it brings
 tears to my eyes to know that you care that much it really does and I'm also
 talking about all of you who have told your friends about these podcasts to you
 know each each week hundreds of new listeners join us it's quite amazing
 really to see how much interest there is in the area of consciousness expansion I
 don't know where we're going with these podcasts but I do know that it's a very
 enjoyable ride at least for me and so thank all of you for your kind words and
 support and in particular thank you again Terry Corey Patricia and Adam who
 are among the salon's staunchest supporters it's good to know you're here
 with us in cyber delic space and as always before I go I should mention that
 this and all the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under
 the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike 2.5 license
 if you have any questions about that you can click on the Creative Commons link
 at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find at matrix
 masters dot-com slash podcasts and if you still have any questions about that
 or anything else just send them to Renzo at matrix masters dot-com thanks again
 to my good friends Jacques Cordell and Wells who collectively go by the name
 Chateau Haya for letting us hear your music here in the salon and thanks again
 to Ralph Abraham not only for participating in these amazing
 conversations but who also provided the recordings for me to use in these
 podcasts and thank you again to Bruce Dahmer who not only made the
 arrangements for the use of Ralph's tapes but who also stayed up with me for
 several nights as we digitize them so hey thanks again Bruce and for now this
 is Lorenzo signing off from cyber delic space I'll be back with you soon but
 until then be well my friends


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