[Music]
 I can't imagine a domain of human endeavor that isn't impacted by the imagination.
 I mean, teasing the imagination apart from the talking monkey is not an easy thing to do.
 Imagining ourselves without imagination is itself a paradox.
 And yet, what is it? And why is it?
 If you take the view that biology does nothing in vain,
 and evolutionary economics are incredibly spare,
 then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do not exist?
 I mean, that's, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination.
 Some people might argue and say, "Well, for most people, the imagination is the coordination of mundane data."
 In other words, if I work this hard and if I have this much money, can I afford that car?
 To my mind, this is not putting great pressure on the human imagination.
 The human imagination, as I suppose it, is almost an extension of the visual faculty.
 Imagination is something that one beholds, something that takes—people speak of castles in the air or something like that.
 One idea that is worth entertaining, because it is entertaining, not necessarily because it's the truth,
 but is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present.
 In other words, it's very clear from an evolutionary point of view that our body and our sensory perceptors
 are organized in such a way as to protect us, to warn of danger,
 to give you the muscles to respond to that danger when it comes.
 The imagination doesn't seem to work quite like that.
 If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it's paranoia.
 In other words, if you believe every cop on the corner is looking at you, every chance heard comment is about you,
 the imagination is, in that situation, pathological.
 It is taking the raw data of experience and giving it a maladaptive spin.
 So then, where is the imagination appropriate?
 And it seems that it is most appropriate in the domain of human creativity,
 that, in fact, separating art from imagination is simply the exercise of separating cause from effect.
 Art, sculpture, poetry, painting, dance, is like the footprint of where the imagination has been.
 And you know, the abstract expressionists, Pollock particularly, always insisted that a painting, a Pollock,
 is not what the process is about. The process is about making a Pollock, being Pollock, the act of creation.
 What the rest of us are then left with is a husk, a tracing, something left behind which says,
 "Imagination was here. Imagination acted in this place, and this is what is left."
 A very interesting thing that's going on in physics at the moment is,
 and I don't want to spend too much time on this because it's slightly off subject, although it certainly is fascinating,
 the great bridge between art and science that was supposedly built in the 20th century hinged on this thing called the uncertainty principle.
 It was the idea that as you know more and more things about certain aspects of a system, an atomic system in this case,
 certain other parts of it lose focus and become less and less clear.
 For example, if you know velocity, you don't know position.
 As you hone in on exact position, velocity becomes smeared out.
 Probably more ink and more breath-beating has been shed over this aspect of modern physics than any other.
 Now, to the great embarrassment of all the people who held workshops and wrote books and pontificated on this matter,
 it appears that this is what it always looked like, fuzzy and confused thinking,
 and that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or rather the Heisenberg formulation of the quantum theory,
 is now not to be preferred.
 The preferred understanding now is the version of quantum theory formulated by David Bohm.
 The difference between these two theories mathematically is precisely zero.
 There is no difference, but they make different assumptions.
 And the reason originally the Heisenberg formulation was preferred
 was because it was felt that this uncertainty principle, which was a hard swallow,
 was not as hard to swallow as a piece of baggage which the Bohm theory carried embedded in it.
 And that piece of baggage was called non-locality.
 The two theories produced identical mathematical descriptions of nature,
 but one had this uncertainty principle in it.
 The other had built into it non-locality.
 Non-locality is the idea that any two particles that have been associated with each other in the past
 retain across space and time a kind of connectivity,
 such that if you change a physical aspect of one of these particles,
 the law of the conservation of parity will cause the other particle to also undergo a change
 at the exact same moment, even though they may by now be separated by millions of light years of space and time.
 This was thought to be so counterintuitive, so preposterous,
 that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was chosen as the lesser of two evils.
 But it turns out, over the past ten years, experiments have been done in the laboratory,
 not thought experiments, actual apparatus experiments,
 which secure that non-locality actually is real.
 There is, below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics,
 there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomena.
 It raises the possibility, then, that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception,
 not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception,
 and that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be.
 So I myself am up in the air about this, or as you get to know me better, you will see,
 I don't feel the need to believe or disbelieve, to proclaim this true or untrue,
 but it is useful at this stage for understanding our mental life.
 I've spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking about the origins of consciousness,
 and in one sense, asking the question, "What is the imagination?"
 is a different way of asking the same question, "What is the origin of consciousness?"
 And as some of you know, to distraction,
 I believe that psilocybin mushrooms played a role kick-starting human evolution.
 I don't want to repeat all that here. It's been taped many times.
 But what I want to point out is that we can see in nature, I think,
 the declension from the full-blown human imaginative capacity
 back into the organization of the animal mind.
 We can see the stages through which this must have unfolded.
 The interesting animal to look at in all of this for the moment are the top carnivores.
 This is not PC in a vague environment, but thought just has to lead you wherever it leads you.
 It's very clear to me that top carnivores coordinate data in the environment very judiciously.
 Cows have very little to say about grass,
 but cats, hunting cats, have a great deal to say about their diet
 because a top carnivore to be successful must, in a certain sense, think like its prey.
 And so at the very point of the emergence of these coordinated strategies held in the mind,
 there's a paradox.
 The earliest consciousness is consciousness which apes other consciousness.
 In other words, the top carnivore that is most successful
 is the carnivore that can think most like a weasel or a groundhog or a rabbit
 because this ability to think like the prey gives you a leg up on the prey.
 And if you've ever seen, not domestic cats,
 but small jungle hunting cats or jaguars or something like that
 in the sudden presence of a chicken 100 feet away or something,
 they fall into a fit of imagining because they can almost taste it.
 They probably can taste it.
 They fall into a strategic mode that is clearly an intense state of imagining,
 but it is triggered by the presence of the prey.
 What is interesting about human beings is we went one step beyond that.
 We, for reasons which don't need to concern us here,
 acquired the ability to strategically suppose,
 not in the presence of the stimulus,
 but in fact back in the back of the cave around the fire with our bellies full,
 telling tall tales.
 And it's interesting that the imagination is the land of what if,
 and what if is almost like a statement in a computer language.
 If is a Boolean operator, if you know what I mean.
 If breaks the flow of reality into two possibilities,
 if A or B or more.
 And this ability to contemplate worlds which are only in potentia
 is the basis of the imagination.
 And I would submit to you, since we all are sitting here in monkey bodies,
 that it's pretty clear that the stimulus for all this if thinking
 comes in two forms, food and sex.
 In other words, we think about what we are going to eat,
 we construct our behavior along an if tree.
 If I go to the water hole, if I take my sharpened arrows,
 if I lie in wait, if the gods favor me, I will bring down dinner.
 The sexual game is played the same way.
 If I approach the desirable female with the correct offerings,
 if her mood is correct, if my gifts are found pleasing,
 then some wonderful thing will follow from all of this.
 So animals, I don't think, think like this.
 They may think, but they don't think like this.
 It seems to be a unique human ability that probably has to do with,
 as I say, in our case there were many different factors.
 For example, we became the top carnivore on the planet,
 but who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore
 when there were saber-toothed cats walking around that weighed 1100 pounds.
 How were we able to insinuate ourselves into a more powerful position
 than these enormously powerful animals that we once shared the earth with
 and that in fact we hunted to extinction.
 It's our destiny and our fate to have removed the so-called megafauna from this planet.
 It is now generally agreed by paleontologists that the disappearance of the megafauna
 and the appearance of the human beings are linked in time.
 Well, we did this by imitating those carnivores,
 and imitation is an act of the imagination.
 We like in our story about ourselves to think of ourselves as bold hunters,
 but the evolutionary truth of the matter is probably that
 as the first wave of primate radiation into the grassland occurred,
 as the diet was in transition, we were scavengers of carrion.
 We were not noble hunters bringing down mighty animals.
 We followed along behind lions, lion kills.
 There's one school of evolutionary theory that believes this is why our olfactory senses are so diminished,
 because quite frankly we had our face in rotten meat for a million years.
 And if that doesn't dull your appetite for keen smells, nothing will.
 Least you despair, I'll tell you that there's a counter theory which says,
 "No, no, we lost our sense of smell when we stood upright because it lifted our face off the ground."
 In either case, there seems to be the idea that when you get away from the olfactory action,
 the energy to support the maintenance of that sense collapses.
 For whatever reason, we made our way to the brink of the imagination.
 In other words, I don't think we require a deus ex machina to take ourselves to the position of being top carnivore on the planet.
 We have a mean throwing arm.
 And you may notice no animal throws things the way we do.
 Other primates hurl excrement down on agonized explorers.
 But fortunately, not with great accuracy.
 And anyway, that particular material is rarely deadly anyway.
 But a human being, for example a big league baseball pitcher,
 can at 125 miles an hour put a baseball across a 17-inch plate over and over again.
 One theory of the origin of consciousness wants to say that throwing something is an interesting activity.
 Because though it may appear to be the same activity as digging grubs or scratching your ass or something like that,
 in fact, it requires coordination toward a future outcome that is highly mathematical.
 In other words, you may not think in numbers, but you must somehow sense the concept of trajectory, coordination of target and intent.
 And when you get all this up and running, according to some people,
 there's not enough brain power left over to write the Fifth Symphony and invent quantum physics and paint The Last Supper, if you like.
 This seems preposterous to me.
 I think that how the imagination got such a hold on us was that we accepted into our diet catalysts that we were unaware of
 and pushed our mental state around, specifically psychedelics of various sorts.
 And a reasonable working definition of psychedelics, what they do, whether you're for it or against it,
 whether you think it triggers paranoia or ataraxia, they are catalysts for the imagination.
 They catalysize thought. Thought becomes more baroque.
 It reaches deeper into reality for data. It sees forms of connectivity that previously escaped it.
 It makes assumptions, leaps of assumption, not always correct, but sometimes correct.
 So what it does is by, to some degree, transferring chaos into the mental world, it creates a much richer dynamic.
 And so thought processes become more complicated.
 And in a sense, then, language becomes the behavior which expresses the imagination.
 It can be expressed in a limited form through dance, through gesture, and of course it can be expressed very well through painting.
 If you've reached the stage where you have painting and are not chipping rock or drawing in blood in the sand or something like that,
 but if you have really a rich technology behind your artistic intent,
 but that rich technology would never have arisen without the intercession of language.
 And so these two things, which make us unique among nature's productions on this planet,
 imagination and language seem to be almost like the exterior and interior manifestation of the same thing, the same phenomenon.
 And what it is, is it's a facility with data, an ability to connect it in novel ways, for one's own entertainment and amusement, if nothing else.
 Storytelling is obviously this kind of activity where modules, a ghost, a princess, a lost kingdom, a disturbed father-son relationship,
 these modules are manipulated to entertain people.
 And you know, it's a cliché that there are only five stories.
 And I think Robert Graves in The White Goddess argued there's only one story.
 And we keep telling variants of this story over and over again.
 Well, what history then is, or what culture is, is the phenomenon that attends the rise and spread of the imagination in the human species.
 But because the imagination works on this what-if model, it always tends toward idealism.
 In other words, it is not simply a networked process.
 It's a networked process with a vector field.
 In other words, it's going somewhere.
 It's not just a random walk. It's headed somewhere.
 We idealize.
 If you're going to play the game what-if, most people who are psychologically healthy don't sit around entertaining dire possibilities.
 What if I get a terrible disease?
 What if I'm run over by a truck?
 No, people say, what if I make a lot of money?
 What if I meet somebody who gives me a lot of money?
 And it begins to tend toward idealism.
 And we are obviously ruled by ideals and ideas.
 We haven't found a good one yet, but we certainly have sacrificed a lot of blood and time in the process of discovering a whole bunch of bad ideas.
 And we haven't lost our faith in ideas.
 Even though human history is the record, not one idea has survived from the distant past in its original form.
 And some of the most persistent ideas, I would argue, are some of the most pernicious ideas.
 The idea of man's inherent flaw.
 That's an old, old idea, and how much suffering has existed because of it.
 But culture then is the record of the human imagination.
 Well, that's fine. That's of interest to anthropologists and somebody else who knows.
 What gives the whole thing a lot of bite is that more and more the imagination is where we spend our time.
 You know, there's a lot of talk these days about virtual reality.
 An immersive, state-of-the-art technology in which you put on goggles and special clothing or enter special environments.
 And then you are in artificial worlds created by computers.
 And this is thought to be very woo-woo and far out.
 But in fact, if you're paying attention, we've been living inside virtual realities for about 10,000 years.
 I mean, what is a city but a complete denial of nature?
 And say, no, no, not trees, mud holes, waterfalls, and all that.
 Straight lines, laid out roads, class hierarchies reflected in local geography.
 Meaning the rich people live here, surrounded by the not-so-rich people, all served by the poor people who are so glad they're not the outcast people.
 So, you know, urbanization is essentially the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho.
 And the growth of cities and the growth of the immediacy, I guess you would say, of the urban experience has been a constant of human evolution since urbanization began.
 Now, the only difference that the new technologies offer is we are going to do this with light, not mortar, brick, steel, aluminum, and titanium, which are incredibly intractable materials.
 I mean, it's amazing to me.
 We started with the toughest stuff, and of course it cost enormous amounts of human blood and treasure to work with such intractable materials.
 It's always been amazing to me that the largest buildings human beings ever built are, in a sense, the first buildings human beings ever built.
 Because the pyramids of Egypt are enormous, even by modern scale, and yet they were among the earliest buildings ever built.
 In virtual reality, the difference between a hundred-story building and a ten-story building is one-zero.
 That's all in a line of code.
 You specify 100 over 10, and you get a hundred-story building instead of a ten-story building.
 What this should tell us is that in the domain of light, the intractability of matter is overcome.
 And so we are on the brink of a time—we have arrived, we are at the time—where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent.
 And so we are going to find out who we are.
 We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will.
 Now, this is, I suppose, like a litmus test for paranoia.
 Is this going to be a nightmare of, you know, 24-hour-a-day sadomasochistic pornography?
 Or is it going to be—will we literally build heaven on earth?
 Knowing what I know about the human animal, I suspect it'll be both/and,
 because we're not going to get everybody marching in the same direction on this, and one person's hell is another person's heaven.
 But the imagination, which to this point has been a human faculty and the consolation of artists, is about to turn into real estate.
 You know, as real as any real estate there is.
 And in a way, I think the shamans who, for the past 50,000 years, have been—essentially, they leapt over the material phase of imagination engineering
 and went to nanotechnology 25,000, 30,000 years ago.
 By nanotechnology, I mean reliance on machines to achieve your goals, machines that are under one nanometer in size, smaller than a billionth of an inch.
 We don't think of drug molecules as machines, but in fact, they are machines.
 And they perform their work in the synapse like machines.
 So shamanism didn't use matter to build its realities.
 It was more sophisticated than that.
 It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind in the presence of unusual neurochemicals to produce unusual phenomena and unusual sensoria of experience.
 Now, what's happening is these two strains of development, the—let's call it the pharmacological, nanotechnological, low-tech, natural, shamanic path,
 and the high-tech, material-manipulating, macro-physical technologies are encountering each other and meeting in the domain of the modern computer.
 And this is fascinating.
 The world is becoming more and more defined by the imagination.
 And those of us who are involved in creating this, I think, have the feeling that it has a kind of built-in dynamic toward finality.
 In other words, this is not a process that can go on for hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of years.
 Because the human imagination is so endlessly self-transcending, whatever its most advanced creation of the moment is, it's in the process of obviating and denying it and seeking to go beyond it.
 And, you know, I think it was Plato—I'm not sure he said it first—but said, "If God does not exist, human beings will create God."
 Well, I think the truth is they're not even going to wait to find out.
 It's easier to cut to the technical solution and sort the whole thing out later.
 And if the God we make and the God we find are in conflict with each other, they'll just have to duke it out.
 Maybe they'll marduke it out. I'm not sure.
 Because, you know, there's a wonderful phrase in "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries," a book by Mersiliad, where he's talking about powered flight of all things, the Wright brothers.
 And he says, "Whatever we make of this as an engineering feat, it speaks volumes about the human psyche's desire to transcend itself infinitely."
 And so, you know, in a sense, the powered flight is a psychological breakthrough, because man flies.
 Well, then, spacecraft, we break beyond the embrace of gravity.
 And these technological breakthroughs are always presented in terms of overcoming some set of boundary constraints imposed by nature.
 And in virtual reality, all boundary constraints are overcome by nature, just as in the imagination.
 But the imagination metabolically sustained, in other words, you eat well, then you smoke a lot of hash, then you enter into an imaginative reality.
 But as metabolism ebbs and flows, as your food digests, as the drugs leave your system, this reality, whatever it is, falls to pieces and is washed away.
 But the reality, the virtual realities created in code are more enduring.
 They are, in fact, as enduring as the code makers.
 And so we're beginning to talk in terms of dreams which don't go away, worlds of the imagination which one can work on for months,
 and then lead one's critics through and collect their critiques and make the corrections and dot the i's and cross the t's,
 according to the way one's critics and friends think it should be done.
 And so what this means is somehow the imagination, always among the most private of domains,
 is like everything else under the impact of the new technologies, being redefined so that there is no private and public distinction anymore.
 So we are on the brink of losing, in a sense, a part of our individuality.
 We are going to be able to build hallucinations and then walk through them and discuss them and edit them and re-edit them.
 And to this point we've been doing psychology sort of like a blind man polishing a Cadillac in total darkness.
 If you keep excellent notes and don't lose your place, you form a kind of a notion of what a Cadillac must be.
 But what we're about to do is just turn on the fluorescent lighting and look at the thing.
 And I don't know what this will bring. I think it will redefine us.
 It will bring a great mystery to ourselves and to each other, but not in principle, only through limitations imposed by the physical body and limitations of technology.
 And so I think what our yearning for community, for collectivity, for telepathy, for universal human understanding,
 is in a sense going to be self-fulfilled by simply opening up the imagination, not as a private dimension, but as a public and shared dimension.
 And this will be, I think, incredibly enriching and surprising.
 We are going to find out what the human critter really is and what we are really capable of.
 And I'm not afraid of this at all because I think, well, basically I'm a Platonist, and Plato identified the good and the true and the beautiful as the same thing.
 But notice it's very hard to know what is good, and it's quite difficult, even more difficult, to know what is true.
 But it is intuitively understood what is beautiful.
 So beauty is the easy way in. Beauty leads to the good and the truth.
 And we are on the brink, I think, of taking a stride toward beauty that is the greatest stride in that direction since the emergence of language in the human species.
 And the emergence of language in the human species was the first shoe dropping in this enterprise.
 And the building of virtual realities that can be shared and critiqued and understood is the dropping of the second shoe.
 A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination.
 And when this is an accessible possibility to most people, I think a great deal of our inhumanity will simply fall away from us because it is not inherent.
 It is the product of misapprehension, misapprehension of each other's goals and intent and aesthetic.
 So I think that's about all I have to say about that tonight.
 I get spun into it and I can't stop. I don't know whether I'm talking to yourself or to you or to me.
 But this is some of what we'll talk about this weekend. This may be the longest single uninterrupted spiel you hear from me.
 As I said, these things are best driven when people inject their agenda into it.
 But these are the things I'm thinking about. History feels very risky to a lot of people.
 I think that it is risky, but it is because the stakes are so high. We really have an opportunity to transcend ourselves and to fulfill the human enterprise on this planet.
 And I'm so aware of the limitations of the people of the past, their agonies, their concerns.
 I mean, how many children died, were born stillborn? How many women died in childbirth?
 Nine times in the last five million years, the glaciers have ground south from the poles, pushing everything in their path.
 Those people didn't drop the ball. The amount of human suffering and agony that has gone into carrying us to this moment of privilege and opportunity is incalculable.
 And can only be redeemed if we bring this inherent human beauty into the world as spiritual food for ourselves and for the human community.
 Well, it's very interesting. I'm working on a book now. A lot of it is about the subject of language.
 It's a little hard to talk about it in English, because in English, the word "language" both means the general linguistic facility, and it also is heard as meaning speech.
 And as I looked into language and studied it, and studied what other people had said about it, there were some surprises.
 The first surprise is that the straight people in the field, what is taught in the academy, is that language is no more than 35,000 years old.
 This was astonishing to me. I just, for some reason, my own intellectual biases, assumed that the conservative academic position would be that spoken language is old, because it seems so basically a part of it.
 How can it have arrived 35,000 years ago? That makes it something as artificial as a bicycle pump or a transistor radio.
 Well, the problem here is that this word "language" is misheard in English.
 So, in writing this new book, I had to make a very clear distinction. Language is old. Honeybees do it. Dolphins do it.
 It's even possible, when you think of chemical communication, that flowers and ants do it.
 Nature is knit together by communication, which has rules, has syntax, and so is language, if you've ever stood in a rainforest or any species-dense environment.
 It's alive with signals, with sounds, with odors, that are carrying messages. These things are not just produced for aesthetic effect.
 They have intended hearers and so forth and so on.
 And language in human beings is old, because we know that we evolved from pack-hunting primates, socialized primates, that had, as we observe the behavior of primates alive in the world today, very complex repertoires of signals.
 Signals which mean "dive for cover, an eagle is cruising the area," or "here is food enough for a dozen of us," and so forth. Complex pack signaling.
 What happened, and it was the greatest technological leap we've ever made, and in some ways the cleanest and the most astonishing.
 It's almost like a resonance. Remember last night I mentioned how strange it was that the largest buildings people ever built were the first buildings they ever built?
 Well, the greatest technological revolution so far ever launched by human beings was in a sense this early one.
 I won't call it the first, because there was tool-making before that, there was fire before that.
 But somewhere in Africa, no less than 40,000 years ago, and this means a time when human beings who look like you and I, maybe a little pigmentation differential, but basically people exactly like you and I, had already radiated all over the planet.
 By 40,000 years ago, nobody argues that people weren't everywhere. Recent finds in Australia have pushed back the date of aboriginal penetration into Australia to 120,000 years.
 And that's not woo-woo, that's Wollongong University Department of Archaeology stuff. 120,000 years.
 People were all over the world. Well, did they communicate? They certainly did communicate.
 They communicated with dance, with gesture, and, leading back to your question, with music.
 They communicated in all kinds of ways. But we now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population, it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this.
 We saw this in America after World War II when a print literate society within a decade became a television society.
 We are seeing it now where in the space of five years the internet goes from being say what to indispensable for huge numbers of people.
 In the space of five years, someone in Africa probably loaded, experimenting with singing and chanting and sound, was lifted out of their plane.
 In other words, they actually had a breakthrough in the imagination. And they said how would it be if, this amazing word, the power of if, how would it be if we decided that a certain sound is associated with a certain thing.
 Let's play a little game. Every time I make this sound, you think of this thing. And let's make a little list. Let's take five sounds and assign them to five common things.
 Now I'll make the sound and you think the thing. Well, behind all this is the organizational architecture of the human organism which onto a game such as that will effortlessly lay what is called syntax.
 And Chomsky and others have shown that what is called the rules of transformational grammar or the deep structures of language are genetic.
 All languages in order to be intelligible have to obey these rules. The language which does not obey these rules is not a language, is not intelligible.
 And so through a breakthrough in imagination, a kind of stepping sideways from the by then old enterprise of entertaining each other with funny mouth noises, language was produced.
 And it was probably, I mean literally at a definable moment in space and time, a person, the mother or the father of all media discovered utterance.
 It was like an intellectual virus spreading through the population and moving as quickly as human beings could carry it because it was a superior form of media.
 And before communication had been, I imagine, highly slanted toward emotional states and time-bounded states.
 You know, you go up to somebody, you take hold of them, you look at them and they understand we're either going hunting or we're going to have sex and it will be spelled out in just the next little while.
 That kind of thing. And this kind of communication was a sufficiently viscous social glue to hold small hunting gathering groups together.
 As society complexifies and spreads out through space and time, it either loses its coherency or it evolves methods of communication to keep it in touch with itself.
 I am not a linguist. I read a lot of this linguistic literature without really understanding it.
 But I know that the people who give their lives to this believe that they can extrapolate the rules of spoken language of the Indo-European, of modern European languages to reason backward toward a language that was spoken 12 to 10,000 years ago called Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.
 And this was thought to be the great achievement of linguistics as of 15 or 20 years ago.
 Now a new generation of people have pushed it further back.
 There is a language called Norstratic that was spoken on the Anatolian Plateau and across southern Europe 15 to 25,000 years ago.
 And now people like Shavroshkin at Stanford and this was all done by Russians, by the way.
 The Russians hold the high ground in linguistics. It was the Russian insights that cracked the Mayan language too.
 But Shavroshkin and his people are now talking about a language called Old World. And Old World is the first language ever spoken on this planet by higher primates.
 Beyond Old World there is inarticulate silence. And Old World is a 35,000-year-old language.
 How can we know such things? You have to push into linguistic literature and you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
 But there are websites you can go to where people speak in Old World.
 And you can hear what it sounded like. And it sounds like a bunch of really primitive people.
 How do we know that we've really evolved with this language?
 Well, this is an interesting area. One of my sub-themes is novelty.
 And that supposedly reality becomes more novel as we approach the present.
 And this is certainly true of biology and many, many phenomena.
 But there is an important exception, so I'm told. I'm not yet entirely convinced of this, but convinced enough to pass it on.
 And that is, though this obviously contains a paradox, languages seem to be more complicated as you go back in time.
 Structurally and in number of words. So that, for instance, Old English is considerably richer in certain areas than Modern English.
 Now I say probably what's happening is that technical vocabularies are keeping the boat roughly at equilibrium.
 But for every widget word, a word describing some subset of our technology,
 if we're losing words that indicate emotional nuances or nuances of rapport and understanding, then the language is being impoverished.
 Most scholars of English believe that Shakespeare caught the wave.
 Shakespeare is not only a phenomenon of immense human genius focused in one person,
 but it's also a moment of incredible linguistic richness and opportunity that didn't exist 200 years before and didn't survive 200 years after.
 Rather than the personal aspect of the history.
 Well, but as I lay in the tubs at Esalen, a vast vocabulary of subtle gradients of interpersonal states of angst, longing, need, rejection, triumph and defeat are passed in front of me.
 And frankly, I'd rather read my manual on my hard disk sometimes.
 But I'm a tough nut to crack.
 But this does lead on to an aspect of all this that I wanted to talk about, which is languages.
 I mean, I'm sure you've heard it said it's a double edged sword because it liberates as it enslaves.
 All clarity is achieved by the sacrifice of true identity.
 You know, the world is actually a messy and difficult to articulate place.
 If you can make it all seem very simple and smooth running, then you're a con artist of some sort.
 Yeah.
 Yes. Well, one group of linguists suggests probably the big impulse producing language originally was the wish to lie.
 I said, if only I could deceive people more.
 And I always, you know, along this line, the wonderful thing which Winston Churchill said at the height of World War Two, he said, truth is so precious that she must always be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.
 That's an interesting point of view. The truth is not something you trot out and show everybody that you surround truth with lies so that only the discerning, you know, we we simple, straightforward, plain dealers don't think like that.
 But believe me, you get with an Amazonian shaman or someone like that. He is not operating under a strong moral obligation to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as quickly as he possibly can.
 No, it's all about, you know, leading you this way and then dropping you and watching you wiggle and then leading you another way.
 And eventually, because truth is guarded, this is in our society, the commodification of information has made it something that you want to deliver with maximum punch to its target audience as fast as possible and cash the check and get out.
 But that that is not traditionally how it's done.
 Well, it divides the seamlessness of reality into the articulated and the unarticulated.
 You know, Trumbull Stickney, who's not exactly a household name, was one of those poets who died in the trenches of World War One, the Golden Generation.
 And he wrote a poem called Meaning's Edge. And he said in that poem, I do not understand you.
 It is because I lean over your meaning's edge and feel the dizziness of the things that you have not said. And it's that the dizziness of things unsaid that always surrounds the enterprise of communication, especially spoken language.
 Now, to go back to this thing about the evolution of language and technology, and are we getting better or worse at it, communication, I discern at least if you look at the evolution of media the way we would look at the evolution of a species or a group of genera in an organic situation,
 a very pronounced preference for the visual.
 We, you know, from the simply the idea of colorful and rich speech, which was all we had for a long time, gives way in the early 19th century to photography.
 It's still, and it's black and white, but immediately the people who invent it can think of nothing but color and motion. And by 1900, they've got that under control.
 And then there's stuff like stereophonic sound and on and on.
 Clearly, we view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion.
 One of the things that seems to always come up in these things is the fact that so-called primitive or aboriginal or preliterate people using psychedelic plants that melt local cultural conditioning seem to access a place where language is much more a visual enterprise.
 Ayahuasca circles sing, but the singing is critiqued as though it were pictorial activity.
 In other words, after the shaman stops singing, you hear people saying, "I like the part with the orange spots, but I thought the olive drab magenta section was self-indulgent," or something like that.
 And you're thinking, "This is a critique of a song." No, the song is the sound, is the carrier.
 The acoustical wave is no longer in the foreground of the experience of appreciating the performance.
 It has become the carrier of something visible.
 And a lot of people think that somewhere in the human future lies telepathy, and it's usually imagined as "you hear what I think," a kind of extension of what we have.
 But I think it's more likely to develop along the lines of "you see what I mean."
 In other words, we add dimensionality to language, and we then can walk around in it.
 I touched on some of this last night, with the virtual reality, because virtual reality in the service of the ideals that I'm interested in would become a technology for showing each other the contents of our imagination with less ambiguity than we have ever had before.
 Yeah. Well, I suppose every technology has created more opportunity for deception.
 You can't have complex, illusionistic realities unless you work in pictorial space.
 Yes, I don't think these technologies will reform the human character.
 Also, I'm not sure -- subterfuge is a major part of art.
 It certainly is a major part of leisure dormain.
 Every sentence is essentially a conjuration, and the rabbit of meaning is pulled out of the hat of constructive syntax.
 So you cannot have truth unless you allow for the possibility of error.
 This is the point that illuminates why predestination is a waste of time.
 Predestination is the idea that the universe is a kind of film, and it's running, and it's all determined how it's going to come out, and there's nothing anybody or anything can do to affect it.
 God created it, and it's unfolding.
 Well, the thing that makes predestination theory worthless, in my estimation, is notice that if that's true, then you think what you think because you can't think anything else.
 And that puts the enterprise of seeking truth in a preposterous position.
 In order to seek truth, one must have the option of screwing up, and then it's the dichotomy between the screwing up and the finding truth that creates the sense of dynamic existential completion.
 Sound is the fourth dimension.
 Well, this is -- now you're at the cutting edge.
 I mean, yes, yes, and yes.
 Sound is the fourth dimension.
 Sound is a very effective way for transducing energy into the body.
 The body is virtually transparent to sound.
 The mushroom said to me once, apropos of absolutely nothing, it said, "What you call man, we call time.
 And time and metabolism, metabolism is permitted by time, and somehow time is caused by metabolism.
 And then sound is in there as an energy transducer.
 And yes, I think a future technology of sound probably will cure disease and set people right.
 All this business that goes on in shamanism with blowing on the body and projecting sound into the body, obviously some of it is misunderstood and marginal and showmanship.
 But at the core, sound is, I think, not yet been given its complete role in all of this.
 The fact that you can see sound under certain conditions.
 You know, there's a phenomenon called sonoluminescence that creates temperatures 20 times greater than the surface of the sun.
 This is done in a test tube by simply using acoustical waves and bubbling fluid to collapse and create extremely brief high-pressure states.
 So sonoluminescence, there's a website you can visit.
 Isn't there always?
 Yeah, yeah, Al.
 Are you saying that catalytics...
 Well, I guess what I'm sort of saying is that once you have the concept of nanotechnology, then you see that drugs and prosthesis or computers or tools are categorically migrating toward each other.
 You've probably heard me say, you know, the only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow.
 And our best people are working on that very problem.
 So, yeah, I think that from the middle of the 19th century on, without really much drugs to help them along, I mean, a little ether, a little hashish,
 poets and artists in Europe were obsessed with synesthesia.
 There's a wonderful New Yorker cartoon, maybe some of you saw it.
 A bunch of guys in suits are sitting around what is obviously a corporate boardroom.
 And in the background, there is a profit and loss chart, and it's clearly headed into hell.
 And the chairman of the board is saying to a small, smiling man sitting at the other end of the table, "You're right, Higgins.
 A deliberate disordering of the senses worked for Rambo, but would it work for us?"
 So this is a reference to a symbolist poet of the 19th century and the belief that we need to erase the boundaries between the senses and create a synesthesia, a hallucinogenic, a psychedelic, if you will, reality.
 I mean, the late 19th century, the pre-Raphaelites, the Jugendstil impulse, that was all like, you know, they could smell psychedelics in the air of the future.
 They couldn't quite get high, but they were definitely bird-dogging in the right direction.
 So, yeah, the trick, if we're going to design our own states of mind, is to make sure that we don't dump the baby out with the bathwater.
 We want the net to be as haunted as possible.
 We don't want to lose its atavistic connections back into the darker resources, recesses and resources of the unconscious.
 That's why Bill Gibson's novel Neuromancer is so prescient, because here it is, this super-technological fantasy, but at the center of the net, the gods of voodoo are reappearing.
 And I came to the realization, thinking about the Internet, you know, the other is within us.
 When the other finally, if it ever, comes into full manifestation, it won't come in mile-wide ships of titanium that position themselves over the secretariat building of the UN.
 It won't come like that.
 It will come out of human hands and human dreams.
 It will be fully other.
 I'm not copping out here.
 It will be fully other, but it can only be built through us.
 This addresses what I was beginning to get at last night when I talked about non-local information.
 The alien is real, but the alien is not here in the stupid sense.
 The alien can only manifest itself through us, but this probably means that given a sufficiently resilient technology, it can manifest completely through us.
 So, in a sense, the Internet is a kind of landing pad.
 There has always been in our fantasies of extraterrestrial contact the notion of the pad which has to be built for them.
 And people claim it's the Nazca Lines and all, you know.
 It's an archetype, the idea of the prepared space that awaits the arrival of the other.
 But now, because of the nature of the Internet, because you can't see who's coding, you can almost imagine that we're calling the thing forth.
 And I think it will probably appear as a website.
 And, you know, when it's sorted out, you'll realize, my God, http://zeta-reticuli.org is really coming from Zeta Reticuli, but through virtual, through non-local, Baumian space.
 It's totally separate in the sense that it is somewhere else in the universe and evolving completely along its own lines and not in any way under our control.
 But then you turn the coin over and the division between it and us is completely seamless because of the non-local nature of information.
 In other words, this is an incredibly empowering idea, if true.
 I mean, it will make a revolution in psychology that few people have yet even sensed coming.
 What we're talking about here is putting the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious first, expanding it to the size of the cosmos, and then showing with physics exactly how the trick is done.
 So we are not separate from any place.


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