We have some housekeeping business here.
 This morning is a session that lasts till noon.
 Mark and I work these things out very roughly.
 And he'll talk to you this morning about body and boundary,
 and then that will lead to discussion and so on.
 And that's it. Mark, there you have it.
 Good morning, everyone.
 Those of you who joined us for yoga,
 hopefully right now you're glowing at least a little bit inside.
 I actually found the amount of energy in the room,
 particularly when we were meditating at the end, to be outstanding.
 I do that meditation a lot, and I was almost blown over a couple of times
 by the amount of energy that was in the room.
 I'm going to spin a myth, a story,
 and it's a scientific story, maybe,
 and it has scientific verifiability.
 Verifiability? Maybe.
 Verisimility. Veracity.
 Veracity. Maybe.
 You can put it to the test by yourself.
 You can put it to the test in large populations.
 And it might be the foundation for an understanding of where we are right now.
 So I want to flash back to 1992.
 And I've gone to San Francisco,
 and I've turned my basement into a laboratory,
 and I'm building head-mounted displays
 with ocular components so poor that I can focus on almost any source now.
 And we're sticking our head into virtual worlds,
 and we're building very simple things.
 And we're just exploring, which is really all anyone is doing at this point in time.
 And at the same time, I'm starting to get this rising sense of ontological uncertainty
 about what the real is,
 that my psychedelic experience is starting to conflate with my experience
 about reality as it is in a non-psychedelic state.
 And I don't really think I know what's going on.
 Fortunately, serendipitously at this point in my life,
 Ian walks a bonafide mad scientist,
 and his name is Dr. David Warner.
 And David Warner at that time was at the Loma Linda Medical Research Center in Riverside.
 And these days he runs the Center for Really Neat Research.
 No kidding.
 At Syracuse University.
 Really neat. Center for Really Neat Research.
 At Syracuse University, in Dave's trip in particular,
 although he has a degree in philosophy and a degree in neuroscience,
 his trip used to take really cheap little electronic pieces
 and work them so that they can enable children who've had severe cerebral or neurological injuries.
 So say a child who had an accident coming out of the womb and has a break at their second vertebra,
 which means they can't even breathe with a respirator.
 Well, what kind of life can that child have?
 Well, that child, whom they got when she had barely been born,
 is now planning actually on becoming, I guess, a rocket scientist.
 Because she's been outfitted even in her wheelchair with very simple sensors that can read her eyes.
 And things like this that can enable her, and all of this used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
 But in fact there's so much technology, so much detritus lying around,
 that if you think about it creatively and you think about it from your heart,
 how can I help this person, you can slap things together in any particular order
 and come up with things that are completely amazing.
 And we don't normally think about it like that.
 We think about it like big science, like you have to really go to work and engineer the problem.
 We don't think of it as something you can simply hack together to enable a person to become whole,
 or at least to be able to effectively allow them to communicate with you in the outside world.
 Because that's what we're talking about is the spinal cord in that sense is our facility for communication.
 So when I say that the sun rises and sets on Dr. Dave, this is what I believe.
 And most of the people who have ever met him tend to think the same thing.
 He's a bona fide mad scientist. He'll never be rich.
 He might someday be famous for being a mad scientist.
 But he has an awful lot to say about why we do things.
 He started off his career as a Marine Corps drill instructor, so he can be very, very persuasive.
 And over the course of 1992 I got a horse doctor's dose of his persuasion.
 And so you can picture this evening in a sort of musty San Francisco basement in front of a great big chalkboard,
 and I got a spiel, which he at that time was calling perceptual cybernetics,
 which is something I'm still using as a word. It's a great big double word.
 He also calls it neurocosmology now.
 And it's to deal with the way that media or information in the universe interact with us.
 Now that said, what I'm presenting to you is a model. It's not God's honest truth.
 You can probably poke holes in it, but it's useful to understand certain things.
 So we're going to take the entire universe right now, and we're going to trisect it.
 And I'm going to say, "Okay, everything that's outside of me, the physical reality, objective or subjective,
 we're going to call that "phi." It's physical. You can think of it that way.
 Then we're going to take the universe of the interior, everything you're thinking or feeling,
 the things that you have to struggle to communicate because they're innate inside of you, but they don't always get out.
 We're going to call that "psi," for the psychic realm.
 And then we're going to take the body, the physical being, this thing that sits between,
 and that's the very important point here, and we're going to call that "phex."
 I think he has another name for it now which is slightly more romantic.
 Or we could go to the William Gibson term and call it "the meat," and we'll come back to that.
 And it's not important what's in island one or island two or island three.
 What's important is that there are boundaries between them.
 And I will give you two examples to illustrate these boundaries.
 Exhibit A, a remote control.
 Now note, it'll turn the VCR on and off.
 Did you see anything?
 No. It's infrared light coming out of here.
 You can't see infrared light. You can't parse the information.
 So this is information that's freely available in the physical world,
 but it's being stopped at the boundary to your body, that boundary between the physical and the body,
 because you aren't equipped.
 You don't have the sensors to actually be able to see it.
 So that's one layer. There's a very natural layer that's there
 that's actually separating us from the world at large.
 Second example.
 "Watashi wa Midori no Chisai no shito desu."
 I just said, "I'm a little green man," in Japanese.
 For those of you who can speak Japanese and can understand my decidedly poor pronunciation of it,
 you have an internal interface between your ears and the parts of your brain that process sound
 and your understanding, your higher functions.
 But if you don't, then that information is simply noise.
 It gets stopped at the interior boundary between the meat and your understanding.
 So we have at least two basic types of barriers to information.
 So that's the theory as Dave taught it to me.
 What I became aware of over the period of time that I continued to work in virtual reality,
 and in fact this became, I guess it sort of burst on me in a very clear sense
 after a psychedelic experience,
 that in fact what I was working on in virtual reality,
 what virtual reality, what interactive media, what media themselves are all about,
 are about retuning or changing the qualities of these interfaces that we innately possess,
 either by our physical or by our learned and acquired characteristics.
 So for example, you could go get a set of those cheapy Soviet infrared night vision goggles
 that are on the market now because the company's gone out of business,
 and you could see the information coming out of this.
 You can equip yourselves, you can augment yourselves in such a way that this becomes a visible reality.
 Or you could go take a short course in Japanese,
 and believe me, you wouldn't need to know much Japanese to understand what I said,
 and you could equip yourself internally with this interface.
 Now we normally call that interface learning.
 But in some sense what we're doing is we're equipping ourselves internally
 with a tool, with a mechanism, with an augmentation that allows us to understand it.
 So the goal, in some sense, with VR,
 and certainly Jaron Lanier, who's considered to be the father of virtual reality,
 evoked a word or a phrase which he said was "post-symbolic communication."
 I read that phrase, I don't get much information out of it except I get an intuition
 that this means that we can go directly from one mind, one Psi, to another Psi,
 without any intervening.
 But the job, the grand project of virtual reality, is to mediate away
 the functioning of the interface between the outside world and your body,
 and your body and the interior world.
 That said, if this is the direction, if that's the vector of our approach,
 the closer we get to it, the closer we get to a condition of more or less perfect fidelity
 between one psychic state and another transmitter and receiver.
 In the condition where that transmission is perfect or near perfect,
 I took a look at that and realized we already had a name for that state in English.
 And this is what frightened me, because the word for that state in English is a cyborg.
 If you think about, it's very interesting because science fiction,
 particularly pop science fiction, and in specific Star Trek,
 has been popularizing the notion of the Borg,
 where the individual has been sublimated to a collective will,
 which can forcibly insert its own norms, its own means, into a body,
 and thus make that body a slave agent.
 Let's go back and talk about boundaries.
 The boundaries of your body, the boundaries where you exist,
 both internal and external, are there for a reason.
 They keep you alive.
 The absence of boundary is not a condition that is normally associated with living systems.
 When you lose your boundaries, or when you bridge them,
 without thinking about what you're doing, you can die very quickly.
 So the boundaries that exist in us, to biology, to information,
 exist in order to preserve the integrity of yourself.
 So any attempt to move across those boundaries has to be considered very carefully,
 because the kinds of things that flow across those boundaries
 change the qualities of those boundaries.
 This is what I meant when I said last night that every word you hear,
 every bit of information that you encounter, changes you.
 But this is the human condition. That's the other side of the coin.
 The human condition, ever since the first woman uttered the first word,
 and sent something across the void,
 actually bridged the gap of perception from one mind into another mind,
 this has been going on.
 So there might have been some kind of a gap,
 but it's gone.
 So there might have been some point in the past
 where a human being was a self-contained unity,
 but that also might have been a pre-human state.
 It may be that the nature of what it means to be human
 is that we are in fact constantly in a state
 where that human gulf is being bridged,
 where other people are putting parts of themselves into you,
 and you are responding by putting parts of yourself into them.
 So we have to accept this as a condition of being alive,
 of being communicating beings in a culture.
 So there's this fundamental tension,
 because there's this drive to connect,
 and then there's this drive to be separate.
 So we have two sorts of outcomes
 that could happen from any possible flow like this.
 You could have, for instance, the rape of the Borg,
 or you could have the consummation of seduction,
 of the joining, of the merging,
 and these forces are constantly at odds.
 And every piece of media that we create,
 and as we get better and better at evoking a particular psychic state,
 we're getting further and further along that line,
 each one of these artifacts contains both the potential to rape
 or to dominate.
 And so this is why, to come back to it,
 it's important to work with heart,
 because when you work with heart,
 the drive or the innate desire within you
 is to consummate the relationship of communication
 and not use it as a vector for contamination and rape.
 Let's take, for example,
 and I want to use this as a general example,
 the cellular phone.
 I'm one of the few people I know in Los Angeles
 who still does not have a cellular phone.
 I don't know how it's happened, it's just happened.
 But I've seen something happen time and time again
 with all of my friends as they get the cell phones.
 The first thing you hear is, "Oh, well, I just need it for work,"
 or, "I just need it for a few calls."
 That's day one.
 By day 14, give or take,
 it's been thoroughly incorporated into their ontology.
 It's a form and a mechanism of communication
 that they have adapted to.
 It's a near form of telepathy.
 It's immediate, it's present, it's attached.
 It goes with you everywhere,
 and it's suddenly indispensable.
 Day one, you didn't need it at all.
 Day 14, you can't live without it.
 And so what we do is,
 as the information flows between our cells and the device,
 we adapt to the device,
 and the device is incorporated into our understanding of the world
 and how the world works.
 And you can say the same thing about the television,
 or the radio, or virtual reality.
 I'll stop there and come back.
 I like the idea about how we are almost like social insects,
 that we're generating the equivalent of informational pheromones,
 and that these means and linguistic structures that we generate
 are designed usually to impact other people's behavior,
 what pheromones do in insect societies.
 So, and I also was interested in what you said earlier
 about the interfaces between the boundaries.
 It seems to me that one of the things we're going to have to get used to
 is states of being that are very non-referential to meat,
 and that it's very hard to,
 that essentially what the body is, is a kind of metabolic knot in time.
 And so everything is perceived through the energetic unraveling of metabolism.
 It's what makes life possible.
 But on the other hand, you can build from that platform
 into areas that are not so clouded by the fact of an animal body.
 I think I, well, psychedelics, especially the high dose ones, seem to show this.
 So I'm imagining one of the things that we're going to have to get used to
 is points of view that are not human at all,
 but that will be ours to put up and take down as we want.
 There's the idea also of looking out at nature,
 making maybe what the program of consciousness is about
 is a re-infusing of all of nature with self-reflection,
 so that every eye that looks out at the world
 leads back to the global mind,
 whether cybernetically maintained or maintained in some other way.
 In other words, we're like causing nature, well, not causing,
 I mean, cause and effect is tricky here,
 but we are part of an emergent phenomenon of nature's self-awareness.
 Nature as information is somehow in an embryonic state,
 and human societies as purveyors and generators of information
 have become the medium of this dynamic,
 which infuses us as animals with the presence of, I don't know,
 spirit, the divine, an awareness of hyperspace, something like that.
 Everybody who's heard me more than once knows that I think of psychedelics
 as essentially boundary-dissolving agents, that that's what they do.
 Culture is the antithesis of this.
 Culture is a limited game, a limited piece of software
 run on a machine much more powerful than it is,
 and it defines behavior.
 Well, Mark is right.
 If you breach really deep boundaries, you die very quickly.
 If you insist on stepping into high vacuum
 or walking on the bottom of the lake without the benefit of scuba equipment,
 you quickly cease to be a functioning being.
 On the other hand, there's some kind of tension.
 Culture is a compromise.
 You know, Freud titled one of his books "Civilization and its Discontents,"
 meaning that civilization was a kind of fallen state
 that we had put upon us or took upon ourselves as an act of self-limiting.
 And in a way, you know, I keep having--
 I seem to gravitate toward these tunnel images
 when I think about virtual reality and psychedelics,
 because what I see them as is some kind of redemptive possibility
 that will make the historical experience make sense in the sense of
 it will somehow make history worth the trip.
 You know?
 I think one of the most horrifying visions in all of 20th century political dialogue
 is the discourse between the interrogator and Winston Smith in 1984,
 where the interrogator says to him, "Do you know what history is?"
 And he says, "No. What is history?"
 And he says, "History is a human boot smashing into a human face forever."
 Well, this is unacceptable.
 This is inconceivable.
 And the overcoming of it is by turning the tools that these pathological behaviors created
 out of science and positivism and so forth
 into actual elevators of human potential and intent.
 And the boundary issue is critical in a way.
 I think what's happening is we are becoming many species.
 You know, in H.G. Wells' time machine in the distant future,
 there were subterranean machine hive people,
 and then there were the free-spirited, witless surface people.
 It's a more serious fragmentation than that.
 Greg Egan in his science fiction says the real ethical challenge of the future
 is to preserve the very notion of a human species.
 You know, some of us may choose to leave the body entirely, if that is possible,
 and migrate into digital castles in the imagination
 that can exist in some kind of synthetic eternity of some sort.
 Other people might choose to be welded into machines that could approach the velocity of light
 and become, in a sense, immortal through downloading into robotic machinery.
 Other people for sure will try to return to the rainforest and sing their songs
 and sharpen their wooden implements with fire and all of this.
 Does that mean, then, that the idea of humanness is so linked to the body
 that it's now up for grabs or in question because of the possibilities that loom immediately ahead?
 I don't know. I agree with what Mark said last night,
 that the anchoring point has to be the body.
 It's a strategy we've talked about in other contexts,
 that when you don't know what's going on, when you lose your way,
 a very reasonable thing to do is to try to reason backward to the last sane moment you knew
 and then act from those principles.
 And, you know, history is, the whole of history is a fall away from authentic being
 in the felt presence of the moment.
 What virtual reality and the acceleration of technology does
 is the favor of essentially tipping the game, showing us what is happening.
 The kind of analysis of media and cultural artifacts that has been possible since 1950,
 McLuhan and so forth and so on, was literally, those thoughts were unthinkable before that
 because the reign of print-created linearity and positivistic understanding was so unquestioned
 that no one could lift their nose back from it to even inquire what it was.
 The whole last half of the 20th century is the dawning realization,
 the same personal journey that Mark made, we all made in some way,
 which was the realization that reality is not only not what it appears,
 but what it seems to be is something barely imaginable, Englishable, and discussable.
 That, you know, the cheerful assumptions of three-dimensional space
 and the virtue of hard work and chastity just, you know,
 it hasn't flung itself apart for you yet, it soon will.
 Before we leave one of the things you were just talking about, there's something that occurred to me,
 and I'm wondering when we talk about uploading and downloading from one form to another,
 and, you know, if we look at the body as a machine,
 are we not downloading information from those living items that we ingest into our body and digest,
 and we can, you know, if we're talking about DNA as information,
 well, we're taking that into our body, somehow we're processing it,
 whether it's nothing else but nutritional purposes, whatever,
 and when our body itself disincorporates and it goes into the ground,
 are we not then uploading back into the larger living system?
 Do we have the commonality of water, H2O, as a carrier system, you know?
 It just seems to me that a lot of times we see these science fiction scenarios
 as something separate from our existence that we know,
 and I think it's an existence that we know already.
 It's a similar type of process, reprocessing, that we're quite familiar with,
 we just don't remember it.
 Well, I think all of, you know, there's a view of nature that is certainly in the ascendant,
 that it is all chemically mediated information flows,
 that everything is essentially in communication with everything else,
 and that, in fact, when you step further back, it is just a seamless chemical mind.
 The distribution of DNA in the environment,
 the way acidity is regulated by breakup of leaf material,
 I recall memorizing when I was studying jungle ecosystems,
 the factoid that organic material born in rainwater in the Amazon
 flows on average no more than half a millimeter
 before being reabsorbed into an organic system.
 So, you know, there is not a lot of unused disk space.
 [laughter]
 Very rich in periphery.
 Yes, it's definitely maxing out.
 You know, one of my hopes for all of this is that nanotechnology will lead,
 and so will propagating the frontier of molecular biology,
 to the understanding that at the level where nature is computing,
 single atomic systems and molecular lattice work is what's utilized.
 If we are serious about perfecting our design process,
 then what we today think of as infrastructure
 should simply gently fade away as we learn how to piggyback
 and timeshare with the already extant submolecular computational machinery
 that binds the planet together anyway.
 I mean--
 There is many of us that have experienced that if you take an LSD-25,
 you can actually see this happening.
 Yeah, well, mycelial networks, you know,
 when you grow mushrooms and you see how it ramifies through the soil
 and you realize that these clamping junctions that it makes
 are very complicated chemical environments
 not dissimilar to what's going on in a synapse,
 and then you read that they find these mycelial mats on a scale of acres,
 and the age of the things can't even be calculated.
 Well, nature is very efficient.
 A system that works on one level efficiently
 will reoccur in other levels and in other applications,
 and I think part of the end of the pre-created linear Christian positivist dispensation,
 et cetera, et cetera, is the recognition that mind extends infinitely in all directions.
 It isn't all rationally apprehendable to the primate neural architecture,
 but the ocean thinks, the continents think, the solar system thinks, the sun thinks.
 Can we think what they think? Probably not.
 But then an infinite frontier of potential intellectual evolution opens up
 through the concept of an unlimited project of understanding.
 You know, Whitehead once pushed on the subject of understanding,
 said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such."
 That's all it is, pattern as such.
 Well, any given context, a room full of people, a coral reef, a planetary system,
 will display, if you observe it carefully enough, an infinite number of patterns as such.
 And as you discover one and then another and then another,
 you feel this "aha" experience which we associate with an epiphany of understanding,
 one of the coolest things that a human being can experience.
 So this is why what Mark said last night about virtual reality being a tool for seeing nature at different scales,
 is so, that gets my wheels turning, because I want to see planetary processes.
 I want to see the heat flow from the polar ice caps to the equator.
 I want to understand the salinity of the oceans.
 I want to grasp the speed at which volcanism is altering the sea floor and the atmosphere.
 Well, these are God, this is what God does.
 You know, it sits around and watches creation at the interesting scale.
 And it not only can be done, it is being done, and it will be done better and better.
 And, you know, there was the old cliché back at the dawn of the space age,
 as guys went into orbit for the first time and out to the moon,
 the epiphany of seeing the whole earth at once.
 And he said, "Well, we can't explain it to you, but when you see it, you know,
 a blue-green pea spinning in the darkness, you're never the same."
 Well, we all can see that, and much more.
 You can see to the mantle, you can pull out to the Oort cloud
 and see the entire solar system shrink down to a spinning dot.
 You can lose that in the vastness.
 And all of this stuff is not without consequence.
 The virtual reality in some people's mouths becomes almost a dismissive term.
 But that's because they're objectification freaks
 and don't understand that the power is in the information.
 You know, I mean, I feel that I've been on the surface of Titan,
 that I understand the lava fields of Io,
 that I've walked the valleys of Mars,
 because I've been to all those places informationally.
 But you prefer Hawaii.
 The air is better.
 You said that you feel as though you've been to these places
 through virtual reality demonstrations or through psychedelic experiences or both.
 Well, I haven't spent thousands of hours in virtual reality.
 I'm sure Mark has, but I consider the Internet a virtual reality.
 You know, every web page, every JPEG, every download,
 you're in some kind of multimedia information space.
 For instance, when I said I had walked the valleys of Mars,
 what I meant was there's one site that has what's called a self-scaling map of Mars.
 You go to this web page, you see the entirety of Mars,
 you set your cursor, you start clicking, and it just keeps opening,
 and it can go down to 30 meters anywhere on the planet.
 And you feel it.
 I mean, if you've ever flown from L.A. to Phoenix on an airliner,
 you get a better view of the Martian desert than you do of the Anza-Borrego desert
 when you make that air flight.
 I mean, if there were anthills down there, you could count them.
 I did see Madonna's face, but...
 I'll be issuing a coffee table book on that.
 I'm that too.
 Exactly.
 Because you want to talk for a while.
 So let's take some of the themes that Terrence was working with,
 particularly when it comes to inhuman points of view,
 and I want to talk about points of view for a little while.
 Because we have to start asking, as the media,
 as the information flow that we're embedded in,
 is in some ways just pulling us apart.
 The ego, as we experience it,
 and the ego sort of sits on top of awareness somewhere,
 and you can't touch it, you can't feel it, when you look for it, it's not there.
 But somehow there's a coherent unity that we believe that we experience,
 but it's being modified by these information flows.
 The interesting thing is that we assume, most of the time,
 that we have a coherent, consistent, regular ego,
 but it was probably never there.
 And let me illustrate.
 Let's say that you came to the session last night,
 and you heard about the yoga session,
 and you said, "Excellent! I'm going to be up, I'm going to be at the house,
 I'm going to be there at 7.30 in the morning."
 And you're firm about it, and you've made the decision,
 and you're going to do it, and you go to the hot tubs,
 and you sit in the hot tub for a while,
 and you maybe go and smoke some dope,
 and you go back to the hot tubs, and you relax,
 and all of a sudden it's 2 a.m., and the alarm goes off at 7.30,
 and the first thing you think is, "I'm not doing yoga."
 Now, this is an example.
 I'm quoting an example almost in total,
 as was given by George Gertschief to P.D. Ospensky
 when Ospensky was a student of his in the '20s,
 that, in fact, this "I" that we claim to have,
 this unity that we claim to be operating us at all times, isn't.
 It doesn't exist at all.
 There's a whole set of them,
 and they come and they go as they please.
 They can be based on whether you're just pepsick
 from the oatmeal you had for breakfast,
 or whether you're mellow because you've just finished a set of yoga,
 or if you're deeply in love and it's evoking certain things.
 So, in fact, what we're doing is we're always taking strands
 and pulling them together into some sort of unity,
 which is, for the moment, who you are.
 Well, this information flow that we're experiencing,
 particularly with respect to the Internet
 and with respect to virtual reality,
 appears to be amplifying and intensifying
 this drive to multiple personality.
 It appears to be making it more visible to us.
 And I'll give you a case in point.
 Sherry Turkle is a psychologist, child psychologist,
 developmental psychologist and researcher who until recently was at MIT.
 At MIT, I believe, in the Media Lab.
 And she'd done a lot of research on people who use,
 in spaces that are called either multi-user dimensions
 or multi-user dungeons or shorthand, MUDs.
 You enter into a MUD, and a MUD is generally a text-based virtual world.
 And to relate what you were talking about,
 I would think the Internet is just as much VR.
 We have different levels of fidelity on the experience.
 Is it a visual experience? Is it an aural experience?
 Is it a typed experience, a textual experience?
 It doesn't seem to matter because the virtual reality machinery
 we're always using at all times is up here.
 It's not something that's out there.
 We can maybe do better tricking ourselves from moment to moment
 if we have pretty pictures to look at.
 But really, that's just a form of hypnosis.
 So, we have people who are participating in these multi-user worlds,
 and part of what you do in this multi-user world
 is you create a character for yourself.
 And you live in that character while you're participating in that virtual world.
 And there are thousands of these MUDs and machines in colleges
 all across the country and at various research facilities,
 and people set them up in their homes, and they have themes.
 There's a Star Trek world, there's a Dune world,
 there's a world that I think is called Fuzzies,
 where the people run around and have sex with each other all the time.
 In very interesting configurations that are not necessarily associated with human biology.
 And so you find these characters, and your character developing out of this,
 and you might have a very specific form of a character.
 I might be Xena or a big warrior princess in one of these worlds.
 And when I'm interacting in this MUD,
 I'll take on all of the characteristics of this person.
 I'll functionally be this person.
 I'll draw the lines of my being together in a configuration that creates that person.
 So Turkle looked at this and said,
 "Okay, what's the fundamental difference between this
 and the individual who is diagnosed with a multiple personality disorder?"
 Which has now been rephrased, I think, in DSM-IV.
 Dissociative identity disorder.
 But we're familiar with the concept, right?
 People who have personalities that become dominant,
 but they have an entire sea of them.
 It's almost as if that normal sea that's in each of us,
 in these particular individuals, has been amplified to the point
 where the ego doesn't note the personalities coming and going,
 the personalities simply shove out, and they are the person.
 And then it submerges and another one comes out.
 Well, of course, there's a contextual difference,
 because at some level you know you're switching between your warrior princess self
 and your software engineer self at any moment in time.
 And you can make these contextual switches quickly.
 I can have one window on the screen, which is me typing into the MUD,
 and I can have another window, which is me typing a program.
 And if I'm really facile with the manipulation of my personality,
 I can go back and forth between these very quickly.
 I actually find that very difficult, because when I'm invested in a character,
 there's a lot of energy there, and so I don't want to make the transition too quickly.
 What we see, particularly in cyberpunk science fiction,
 is that this quality of disassociative identity is identified as a positive aspect.
 In William Gibson, repetitively you see the image of characters
 who are ridden by the loa of voodoo.
 That they literally disassociate themselves and become a god form.
 And the god speaks through them.
 So this is one set of identities that are being drawn up
 because of information that they're drawing through the net,
 which is producing a new personality in them.
 I think, and I want to assert for testing,
 that our children particularly are becoming facile at this.
 Because our children are growing up in this web of connectivity.
 A child who's six years old will never have known a world without the web,
 or without communications on a massive scale that can individuate
 particular parts of their personality in specific directions.
 One of my friends actually pointed out that this is all happening
 before their brains are fully formed,
 before their corpus callosum sort of shuts down their possibilities
 in a biochemical level for change.
 And that our children may in fact be very, very nimble
 at manipulating personalities, and they may not as they grow up
 see personality as the singular coherent ego,
 which is an artifact of probably sort of Renaissance Western culture
 when the artistic ego was born.
 And may in fact see themselves as an identity that is shifting
 from moment to moment and contextualized,
 and can really be highly individuated.
 And it can still be them.
 It's almost as if we're all coming out of the closet
 with different clothing on, and we can go back in
 and change the suit of clothing and come out.
 Now, that personality, those personalities can conflate
 not just in terms of game-playing or interesting forms like that,
 but one of the things that I believe will happen
 is that we'll be able to take, again, these inhuman points of view,
 so that it might be able to be possible to come up with a personality
 that can conflate its identity with the guy in Logos.
 Case in point, we haven't actually been up in a space shuttle
 to see the planet floating around.
 But I did see something pretty close in 1995.
 What I think of as the finest, the most seminal work of early virtual reality
 is a system that's known as T-Vision.
 And T-Vision is a supercomputer that uses a very large database
 to create a view of the planet as it is right now, and it's networked.
 So it's talking to weather satellites, it's talking to geographical data,
 and it's got an intense, huge, multi-gigabyte database of the Earth's surface.
 It runs on a supercomputer, and you sit with a beach-ball-sized trackball,
 and it isn't live, because we don't have the satellites in orbit for that yet,
 but we will.
 And the other data that's coming in, though, the geological data,
 the meteorological data, and so on and so forth, that is live.
 So what you're getting, at some level, is a static view of the planet
 as it was photographed at some point, the geological view,
 which is gathered from terrain data, and this meteorological view, which is live.
 And I saw this, and something inside me simply snapped.
 I said, "This was the vision that I'd had in 1990.
 This is the beginning of a type of thing that will be so commonplace
 that the globe that sits on every teacher's desk in every schoolroom in the world
 will be gone and replaced with this thing
 that will become conflated with our understanding of the planet."
 That, in fact, the planet is not this static ball that you can roll around
 that shows political divisions, because the first thing that goes away
 when you use a system like this is political division.
 There's no room for it in that model.
 What you see is the organic unity of the Gaian Logos.
 And as time goes on, the better this model gets,
 the more identified we become with it.
 Like the cell phone, it becomes a technology that we incorporate
 so that one of the personalities that we can identify with
 will be the personality that is identical to this Gaian entity.
 Don't you think it would be prudent to, instead of jumping directly to the Gaian Logos,
 rather to see the Gaian anus,
 if you're going to see the economic and resource flows?
 Oh, that's... I entirely... I didn't mean to say that you'd only have one view.
 The idea behind any system like this is that it can show you all the loops
 of human ecology and deep ecology,
 so that it's very possible to understand the correlations
 that take place between human effect on the planet and the result in the system.
 The idea behind it, in my eyes, is that if we can make these tangible,
 we can affect behavior.
 And in fact, that's probably the only way we can affect behavior.
 We might recycle because we've been told over and again it's the right thing to do.
 It's been ingrained in that level.
 But when it becomes a tangible entity, the behavior change happens of itself.
 Because it's part of you.
 It's become incorporated into your own understanding of how the world works.
 So I think that in fact this database, as I say as it grows,
 needs to become as deep as possible.
 And because people will argue about the content of that database,
 it needs to become as wide as possible.
 And the web is the beginning of that.
 Because you could have several different points of view.
 You could have the millenialist Christian point of view,
 which is to simply poison the planet because we're leaving anyway.
 And have that be one set of them,
 and we can sort of chart Amazonian deforestation.
 And say, "Oh, look, the number of days till the rapture,"
 "that's how much rainforest is left."
 Theoretically, you should be able to see anything you want to see
 to the exclusion of everything else.
 So if you wanted to see oil pipelines, electrical grids,
 the distribution of leukemia genes,
 the number of people bearing South African passports
 and where they were at any given moment,
 you should be able to...
 Essentially, it's a boil down of all the data.
 When I sort of recognized that ability
 and thought of it as a really great game idea,
 kind of a la Sim to Sim series,
 it's really Sim guy, but it would not be simulated, really.
 You could have every participant in the web
 utilizing all the resources on the whole planet
 to focus on any particular area they were interested in,
 healing them, and make certain suggestions
 to large corporations how to redistribute their resources.
 Right, in which case it starts to harness the power of the web.
 We really haven't talked about this as an intelligence amplifier,
 which it can, in theory, do,
 and that's one of the biggest parts of it.
 In fact, one of the reasons things do move faster now
 is because there's this common sort of...
 It's almost like a hummus of knowledge.
 It's this layer of knowledge that we can all refer to.
 It's not all true, but it is all in common.
 I want to say something about what you were talking about,
 multiple personality and all that.
 I hadn't quite thought of it that way.
 You know, one of the puzzles of the DMT flash
 is that there are these entities that seem weird,
 very strange and machine-like and alien,
 but that are also permeated by a kind of eerie familiarity,
 like you remember them from somewhere, or it's this thing.
 And it's occurred to me in trying to propagate
 all possible explanations of what these things might be,
 that they are...
 that, as Mark said, the self is not ruled by the ego.
 The self is actually a kind of elfin swarm of these...
 And this peculiar elf quality,
 which I've described as elf-machine-like
 and somehow based on language,
 is that these things are,
 and don't ask me to explain too deeply what this means,
 they are fractal refractions of one's own personality.
 I've mentioned at times the metaphor of
 if you hold up a mirror, you see yourself.
 But if you bring the mirror down sharply on a concrete surface
 so that it shatters,
 you don't see a shattered image of yourself.
 You see hundreds of perfect images of yourself,
 one in each shard, little ones, big ones.
 And in a sense, DMT is like some kind of an x-ray of the psyche
 revealing this fact
 concealed by the ego-based, print-created,
 subjectivist, positivist plot,
 the fact that you are not who you thought you were,
 that you are not an ego bound to a body,
 but that in fact that is some hideous convention
 that culture and phonetic alphabet
 and all these things have forced upon you.
 And so then, in thinking about this new kind of personality
 that's coming to be,
 or how will one live with this sense of fracturing and all that,
 you said it was almost as though everybody was coming out of the closet.
 The image that formed for me is
 it's like realizing and embracing the fact that you're an actor.
 I grapple with this all the time
 because when I'm brushing my teeth, I find myself humming,
 "There's no business like show business.
 There's no people like show people."
 And I've started out thinking that I was a philosopher.
 And the way I live in Hawaii is so entirely different
 from how I am on what I think of as the job
 that I have just had to accept that I'm this very strange person.
 And have peculiarly defined relationships
 with almost every single person that I deal with.
 And I have a feeling that the modern cult of celebrity
 and this fascination with vicariously living
 through the most recent spate of mass murders,
 presidential assistants, movie stars, and so on,
 is a kind of practice.
 Ordinary people are practicing to be actors,
 to have this same kind of--
 - To be extraordinary.
 - To be extraordinary, to be mutable.
 And it seems inevitable.
 It's modeled for us in the media so persuasively
 that we can't help but become characters.
 That's what's happening to us.
 We're becoming characters, many characters.
 - Now, is this a desirable thing?
 I mean, in donations.
 - Is it a positive thing?
 - Yeah, I mean, you have kids in Chicago who, you know--
 - Well, that's not a positive thing.
 Please don't frighten me.
 - There's some sort of violence somewhere,
 maybe from the evil movies.
 And murder this little girl for a bicycle,
 and two hours later be home watching cartoons
 and having popcorn.
 So is it a good thing to have the little kid persona
 and the murderer persona and all these things
 so we can come out and enact whatever we want to be?
 - There are-- - You answer, then I'll answer.
 - No, you answer, then I'll answer.
 There are, I think, in any situation
 where there's a disassociation like that,
 my own understanding is that there are attractors for behavior.
 And some of those attractors are pathological.
 And so if a personality coheres around those pathological attractors,
 you're going to get pathological behavior.
 It won't be consistent.
 That's why the kids can go home and watch TV afterward.
 Because they're really, I think, in some sense,
 disassociated from those parts of their being
 that produce that type of behavior.
 So what would be called for in a situation,
 if we're going to accept disassociation as a condition of modernity,
 then the idea would be to, in the reverse sense,
 build as many what I would call vivogenic attractors,
 present as many opportunities for cohesion around the personality
 in a positive logos.
 And, I mean, again, that brings us back to the body.
 If I can just ramble for one more minute.
 - No, keep going.
 - Which led me into the concept of techno-paganism,
 for lack of a better word, and that's a placeholder,
 which is a positive response to this type of fracture.
 That I can, through ritual practice, through magical practice,
 build areas in myself that allow for that positive cohering of the personality,
 which doesn't have to be any single one personality,
 but can be a range of god forms.
 Because paganism is a study of the archaic god forms,
 which can represent the archetypal elements of my psyche,
 so that I can bring them forth in a particular situation
 or toward a particular task.
 So that I could do Pan if I'm going to be in a sexual mode.
 I can do Hermes or Mercury if I'm going to be in either communication mode
 or I want to trick someone.
 I can do Cernunnos if I want to be the very primal male,
 or I can be the mother if I want to be very nurturing,
 so that all these primal god forms can act as loci for accretion
 of a personality around a particular point.
 And my magical practice has been much that for me,
 as a point of stability in there.
 I'd like to draw just back to Terence's inference that...
 or what I took for an inference that...
 Well, we were in the tub last night with Terry's kids,
 and I was grilling Terry's kids about this whole 2012,
 how much novelty can there be.
 And it seemed that at the point of maximum novelty,
 my suggestion was, well, that means essentially that
 it's one big Burning Man, no spectators,
 so that everybody in Utah is now putting out their own electronic CDs and stuff,
 and making their own videos.
 Somebody bounced that back to the web, of course.
 The web pages are like that.
 There's these grandmas in Utah,
 and there's these crazy, unbelievable expressions of creativity
 from your average person.
 So is that maybe what that level of novelty would be moving towards,
 as in the Truman Show, or waiting for Guffman, essentially?
 No, I think we're probably close to that now.
 What with the "See You, See Me"
 and people who sell the fact that they exist on the Internet
 through a 24-hour cam.
 MyFirstTime.com?
 Yes, exactly.
 But this issue that you raise,
 we are on one level carnivorous monkeys,
 and part of what people have to realize, I think,
 is that culture is not your friend.
 What techno-paganism means to me
 is arming yourself as a warrior
 to survive the onslaught of all the magic spells
 that are being flung around in your environment.
 And so, what Mark said about
 we keep coming back to this thing about
 every piece of information that comes through you affects you.
 We, certainly, Esalen is a place where very strongly now for many years
 the idea has been in place that there was such a thing as healing images,
 that people by imaging states of health
 or the shrinking of tumors and so forth
 could actually affect their own state of being.
 What hasn't been looked at with sufficient attention
 is the concomitant to that, which is
 if there are healing images, then there are polluting images, damaging images,
 images which make being a human being a more difficult proposition.
 And we have been very loath to examine this
 because we are very deeply committed as a culture
 to the idea of freedom of expression.
 But the doctrines of freedom of expression
 and universal education and so forth that we're so fond of
 were formulated before the rise of modern mass psychology,
 marketing theory, you know, the Joseph Goebbels contribution to the situation.
 And I think people are responsible for their mental health.
 To assume that you are born mentally healthy and will tend to stay that way
 is preposterous.
 All kinds of forces are trying to turn you into a compulsive, an obsessive,
 a sexual psychopath, a wannabe this, you know.
 Many forms of intellectual pollution abound.
 And people who endlessly imbibe mass media
 are at high risk for pathology.
 And when I hear about these things that go on,
 not particularly this one you mentioned,
 but the ones where kids go to schools and blow other kids away somewhere in the South,
 and then immediately what the media portrays is a week of church suppers and mass mourning
 where everyone asks, "How could this happen?"
 Well, church suppers are what drive people.
 [laughter]
 >> One of the things that I think is really important to remember,
 one of the kind of pathological edges of our-- cutting edges of our time,
 is that as we move into this era of connectivity
 and massive amounts of information at our fingertips,
 and the fact that these six-year-olds are going to grow up
 never knowing anything else but having that capability,
 the adults who are raising them do not come from that world.
 And how can you possibly imagine raising a child
 to live in a world that you've never even touched,
 that you will be nothing but a little footnote in?
 So it's a very, very dangerous time.
 Children who are six to ten years old today
 are going to live their lives in the 21st century,
 and they're going to have to pick their way into what the 21st century,
 the third millennium is like on their own.
 It's not going to be easy. It's not always going to be free.
 And it's tough. It's hard. It's really hard to own that.
 But that's-- I think, personally, I think that that's part of
 growing out of the human condition into God,
 of taking responsibility and saying,
 "We're going to move into something new, and it's going to be hard."
 Perhaps, though, what we can do to riff off of--
 and I think you're dead on when you say
 we have to arm ourselves against the magic spells.
 Perhaps what we can do is to try to give them
 a locus of at least one personality which has the filters.
 It's as if we need to develop an informational immune system,
 because the viruses are out there, and they will infect you.
 And it's as if we need that second-order unity,
 and we need to be able to try to develop it
 and teach it to our children at the same time they're acquiring language,
 which is the device by which they acquire viruses, at least right now,
 so that they have some protection.
 That we need to be the white blood cells and the T cells,
 or we need to give this to them,
 because otherwise they will find themselves overrun,
 particularly when they're young enough not to be able to discriminate.
 That's a beautiful vision, but how do we go from where we are now
 to coming into that awareness on the mass level?
 Well, I mean, on one level, all I hear Mark saying is,
 "We've lost touch with the ability to tell shit from Shinola."
 [laughter]
 Saying we must arm our children against the magic spells,
 to me that means we must teach them to avoid cult and hype
 and the non-sequitur and the over-financed glitzy image.
 And the way to do this is, you know, you start with--
 it's easy, like Occam's razor is a good place to start,
 and cost-benefit is another interesting filter, too.
 And who does this help is a good question to ask,
 and who does it hurt?
 The problem is that people have become very docile, narcoticized.
 I mean, we, you know, intellectuals seem to have the wild gene,
 and so we continue to hold meetings and bitch about it.
 Lots of people have just moved into daytime TV
 and Olestra and the rest of it, without a thought.
 But that being so, the "we" who must do that is the mass culture.
 So it's like, how does the "we" that you're referring to,
 of what we must do, come into being in effect?
 Okay. One thing that I believe is you attack magic with magic.
 And I mean, I think that's really the only effective level you can do it on.
 Now, one of my foundational assumptions, which we talked about last night,
 that in fact the magical description of reality is in fact
 conflating with the actual description of reality.
 So that in fact, magical training, I think, is going to be
 a cottage growth industry over the next 20 years.
 And I'm not being flippant to say that I actually do believe this,
 that in fact, in order to be able to understand how the language you use
 and the language other uses shapes your perception,
 and that's more than just really advertising, it's much deeper than that,
 is an important social skill.
 And that's the level where it enters culture.
 Can "we" do it? I think we have to do it in every one of the works that we create.
 The works that we create have to be conscious of it and have to accept it.
 It works enough, I can just go off on another little riff.
 Can I just jump in for one second? I want to say that the kids are alright.
 You know what I mean? They're brought up in much savvier media consumers
 than your parents, and then even people that are a little older.
 These kids have tremendous filters. They can tell shit from shining a flashlight.
 So are they growing up with the immune systems?
 Is this something that's maybe just happening now because of the environment?
 They are naturally attracted to quality stuff, to intelligent stuff.
 To the authentic.
 Yes, the authentic. Keeping it real is the buzzword.
 That's what they want to do.
 It might also be because they grew up constantly switching perspectives and forms.
 And that's the trick is to learn to be able to see it from the outside.
 As soon as you can see it from the outside, know it's happening, you can stop it.
 It's being stuck inside, and you don't see it.
 So these kids grew up changing perspectives all the time.
 They're more immune naturally.
 Yes, I don't think that kids are the problem.
 I think the problem is the momentum from the older generation
 that is still trying to hang on to the levers of the engineering and design process.
 And they don't know why they're hanging on because it doesn't serve them.
 The future is inevitable. You can postpone it a decade or two, but that's about it.
 Well, it's because they're risk-averse.
 They don't want to let go because they're afraid of us.
 They don't know it's there.
 And it's like hanging on to any losing position.
 Ultimately it's going to change, and they're going to have to let go.
 But in the meantime, they don't have to.
 You know, Max Planck said, "Physics proceeds funeral by funeral."
 There's a beautiful anti-spell to that notion,
 which I think probably has to be circulated in culture as a bit of a meme,
 which is, "It's not what you don't know that will hurt you.
 It's what you know that ain't so."
 That ain't so.
 And in some cases, we have to get over the fear of not knowing what the future is
 because what we know or what we think we know about the present ain't so.
 If you go back and look at various people's efforts to triangulate the future,
 the very best people got it wrong.
 I mean, if you look at the history of efforts in the 20th century to predict the future,
 probably the most successful was "Brave New World,"
 which in 1937 pictured a very realistic world based on genetic engineering
 that is still further out than anything we've arrived at and still could be realized.
 I mean, he understood the hellish marriage made by marketing, genetic engineering,
 the wish for social standardization.
 There's not barely a mention of computers in that or in 1984.
 Well, in 1984, the telescreen was a surveillance system.
 -Clarke got those right. -Yeah.
 Really, there's a gruff with chaos that's going on in between
 Raskolk's "Children of Chaos" sort of scenario,
 that those kids are perceiving a discontinuous reality through the media
 and that they're actually maybe quite more adept in thinking at deciphering
 or siphoning off what they need from it,
 so the... I'm sorry, I lost my thought.
 It's just from the last thing you said.
 Oh, well, I didn't mention chaos and can never recall the last thing I said.
 So you have my sympathy but not my help.
 No, I'm sorry, but it's really more about the visionaries and the "Brave New World"
 or what we got out of the influence of computer culture on science fiction,
 which was cyberpunk, which was still really steeped in chaos as its premise.
 I mean, really, what makes cyberpunk different than Clarke's foundationism
 or any of this sort of Star Trek approach is...
 -It's chaos. -The element of chaos, yeah.
 That it's a completely chaotic cyber universe.
 Right, and in part that's because of the incredible information flow
 that has really just made everything diffuse in some way and non-linear.
 And it's very multiplistic.
 It accepts that there are going to be all kinds of social ecosystems
 and people working different angles.
 The street finds its own use for things.
 So I want to ask a question which needs to be asked for two reasons.
 This multiplicity, which is both the present and probably in the future
 a more prominent condition, is this a frightening condition?
 Is it frightening when you look at it as an individual
 and you say, "This is happening to me or happening to my children,"
 and is it frightening when you consider everything as a whole?
 And the reason I ask this--
 and does it have a sort of demonic aspect to it
 in the sense of really sort of looking dark?
 The reason I ask this is because the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson
 has noted that repeatedly when there's a transition of age in civilizations
 that in fact the forms of the new civilization are always perceived as demonic
 by the civilization that's fading away in face of it.
 So when we look at this, I mean, I look at--
 and it's funny, just a brief little story.
 Last week after years of wearing glasses I finally got contacts again
 and I decided I didn't want to smoke when I was at Esalen Hall.
 I've been doing it a little bit, so I put a Derm patch on
 and I looked at myself in the mirror and said, "Damn, I've become a cyborg.
 I've become a character out of a Gibson novel."
 [laughter]
 And I look at this and the things that make me the most nervous about the future
 are the changing role of genetics, that genetics is--
 as we come to understand the code, as we come to see the pattern in the code,
 that our relationship to that code changes and that that code becomes very mutable
 and that scares the bejesus out of me.
 And I'm wondering as I sit here and I look at it,
 is that information flow works its way through the cell.
 Now, not because of nature, nature is God,
 but because of us and our will and our destiny, our teleology.
 That's frightening the daylights out of me and I'm looking at this and I'm saying,
 "Well, does that mean that this is then the future and I'm an artifact of the past?"
 Yeah, the cybernetic revolution is in all of our faces
 because we all surf the net and experience it daily as a growing and changing environment.
 This genetic thing goes on somewhat in the background,
 but if something happens to you, then you go to Stanford Medical Center
 and then you discover what they've been up to and what's on the menu for you.
 And we were discussing last week, they are now defining the human genome
 and they're defining the 200,000 or so SMP points where there is variability in the genome
 and that's where the hereditary diseases happen and so forth and so on.
 And it is within the reasonably short-term future,
 all these genes are going to be items for sale,
 pieces of nanomolecular machinery off the shelf that will make the difference
 between whether you die of leukemia, remain obese, become schizophrenic,
 experience liver failure, so forth and so on.
 And this will be simply in the pursuit of equilibrium, health and peace of mind.
 Once people begin to look at genes as drugs,
 the boundaries between self and world and identity and one's genetic heritage will be erased.
 I mean the very notion of a heritage and a coherent genealogical tree
 begins to make no sense if you're swapping out genes that you buy down at the A&P.
 Got to go. Got to hear. Absolutely.
 Molecular biology and molecular genetics and molecular pharmacology
 are really just different labels on the same door.
 All of these people are manipulating atomic systems, atom by atom, molecule by molecule,
 to tailor make lock and fit mechanisms that impact on biological systems first of all.
 I mean long before we grow a telephone from a long chain polymer,
 we will be selling human genes with no thought at all about it, I'm sure of that.
 You wanted to say?
 I was going to say that just a couple of steps past selling the genes,
 you get to the point where you have the nanomolecular assemblers
 where you can simply define, self-design, not just mentally,
 not just self-design your software, but your actual add-ons and diamonds to the meat.
 You know, someone wants some diamond wings.
 Right.
 And this is a, diamond wings may be a bit downstream,
 but all of this is arriving in the next 10 to 15 years.
 I mean this is well within reach.
 And it's always about cost-benefit curves.
 I mean almost anything can be done in genetics now
 if you're willing to spend tens of millions of dollars.
 But these, you know, recalling that the world's largest computers
 cost billions of dollars in 1950 and couldn't do what today's desktop does,
 you see that the distance in terms of compression cycles of research is very short.
 So is this preferable to the Bulworth solution for our genetic future,
 where we all fuck each other till we're the same color?
 That's happening.
 This genetic revolution that we're on the cusp of hasn't arrived yet.
 No, it's arriving. It will arrive gene by gene.
 If you're a diabetic, it's already arrived because you've been using human insulin for 15 years.
 Sure, but the things that we're talking about haven't really gotten here in full force,
 and that's probably a huge revolution unto itself.
 Between now and then, the fear of extinction, the fear of being part of what made this planet the way it is,
 according to Darwin, is part of what's driving us all.
 And it's probably part of what's driving this phenomenon you're describing.
 You mean of some huge catastrophe?
 Well, we're all here because we're lucky because we were the chosen sperm.
 We're all here because we didn't die along the way.
 It's a remarkable phenomenon that as many people live as they do.
 And when you look at all of this in combination with the way that consciousness is going,
 it suggests that there's something there.
 We all realize that on some very deep level.
 You mean that there's an attractor for the historical process in some sense?
 Yes.
 Yeah, I can feel it.
 And again, it seems to me that the common fabric is the understanding of pattern and the flow of information.
 That as the understanding of pattern and the flow of information passes through every one of these structures,
 as it passes through the structure of materials, we get nanotechnology.
 As it passes through the structures of knowledge, we get virtual reality.
 As it passes through the structure of the cell, we get genetic engineering.
 So there's a common river, in a sense, that's running through all of this.
 Yeah, I, in my most high-flown moments, think of us not as causing this,
 but that the laws of physics themselves are becoming more permissive.
 That the emergence of biology was a consequence of certain temperature and pressure
 and chemical regimens coming into existence that had never existed before.
 And then once those regimes were established, biology was an inevitable follow-through.
 And I think what we have established uniquely on this planet is a domain of epigenetic information flow.
 Information that is not coded into genes, but that is coded into much more ephemeral, culturally created language systems.
 And that this epigenetic language domain is somehow much more mutable than the genetic language domain.
 And so potential emergent properties come, appear in the epigenetic domain with greater speed and frequency.
 They also have a kind of autocatalytic or synergistic effect on each other.
 So the phonetic alphabet makes possible science, which makes possible a new industrialism,
 which feeds back through R&D into science.
 And you get the, and it's that information is more and more expressing its true nature
 and less and less dependent on the medium through which it flows,
 which was once geological processes, then genes, now once human languages,
 now computer languages being iterated at tremendous speed.
 And where this leads, we cannot say. But where it points, we can say. It points toward transcendence.
 [Unintelligible]
 But the important thing is that there is an asymptotic acceleration.
 It's not simply a ramp into novelty. It's an ascendant curve which has now become almost vertical.
 Yeah, Mark.
 It seems something that I've been thinking about for a number of years,
 which brings us back into boundaries from what we understand about the beginnings of life on Earth.
 It formed at the most important boundary that we know of on Earth at that time,
 which was the boundary between the land and the sea.
 Then in fact, the stasis of the land and the stasis of the oceans
 were both insufficient conditions for the creation of self-organizing systems.
 That in fact, the tidal pool represents the locus, the change, the dynamism,
 the fact that forces, perhaps self-replicating clays, we don't know,
 were constantly washed and then dried and then washed,
 forced these systems into some sort of self-organizing principles,
 which became the template for what we know of as life.
 And this has then been repeated because then we talk about the epigenetic transmission of information
 and this then, as we've talked about earlier in the session,
 is the boundary between one person and another person.
 Then in fact, it's the information when it crosses the boundary,
 to transverse the boundary, is to produce something different in both sides of that boundary.
 Yeah, I never thought of that before, but in a prebiotic planet,
 from the point of view of novelty theory,
 the most action happening on the planet would be the intertidal zone,
 because every 12 hours it's being inundated and dried, inundated and dried.
 I mean, it's not exactly a party.
 It reminds me of the joke in my town, there was so little to do that on Saturday night
 we used to go down to Ben Franklin's and watch the Muncrate freight.
 But when that's the only game in town, that's where you go.
 So the intertidal zone 800 million years ago was definitely where the action was on this planet,
 and today where the action is, is where all this science, money, human ingenuity, capitalistic frenzy,
 all comes together in just an orgy of epigenetic effects.
 Do you think the origin has any bearing on the outcome?
 For instance, does it make any difference whether it was intertidal zones and self-organizing systems,
 or whether it was panspermia coming from God knows where?
 Does that make any difference for the outcome?
 I wouldn't think so. I think probably all paths lead to Rome.
 I would bet you that even if panspermia is true,
 that the intertidal zone of the primitive Earth played a role in it,
 because that's where the energy and the free radicals and so forth would have been available.
 That's where they were on-carting the freight.
 Yeah, right.
 Isn't that just further barrier between the atmosphere and the space?
 Yeah, it's the three coming together.
 That's where the three are intersecting,
 with the biology and with the geology and with the terrestrial chemistry possible in the atmosphere
 and the hydrochemistry possible in the sea,
 and incipient meteorological contributions, incidental hard radiation from outer space,
 radioactive heat from the internal processes of the Earth, on and on and on.
 When you raise the number of inputting factors, you raise the possibility of an emergent phenomenon.
 Which makes the interesting points, and I'll come to you in just a second,
 which makes the interesting points, the liminal points, the points where the roads meet,
 those are always the places where the action is.
 And so if you look in the present culture, where are the roads meeting?
 Well, the net is, I mean, that's it. Everything points into it now.
 That's where all the roads are meeting.
 So it's now throwing out this profusion of novelty and of new forms,
 because it exists as an object specifically to do that.
 Yes, yes, although the current theory is that as things get faster and faster,
 the danger is not car crashes but parking accidents.
 Of course.
 You've mentioned a lot of acting with heart in, well, in all of our actions,
 and I'm in that, and that's what I'm saying.
 I wanted to ask, which of the theogens, organic, psychedelics,
 are best at opening the heart and stimulating the heart center?
 Well, somebody else might give a different answer, certainly,
 but I think ayahuasca, if I understand opening the heart to mean what I think it means,
 psilocybin blows your mind, and if you like insects driving spaceships
 and visions of galactarian hegemony and machines the size of Manitoba
 busy about their business, psilocybin is good.
 Ayahuasca sort of contextualizes you in the cosmos.
 You know, you feel yourself as a thing born to die, and I don't know,
 it's very moving.
 It's also literally moving in the sense that it turns your guts inside out
 and reduces you to, you recapture the primitive nematode antecedent
 by just discovering the real power of your gastrointestinal tract.
 So, MDMA, is there an organic substance?
 I suppose it's only organic, MDMA or other substances.
 I found that it was most interesting the first few times I did it,
 and then it sort of was a damped oscillation for me.
 But, you know, the greatest, anybody who's marketing a drug,
 doesn't market it as a love drug, just doesn't know anything about market.
 LSD was a love drug, marijuana has been a love drug, psilocybin, 2C-B.
 Crack is doing pretty well not being marketed.
 I'm sure there are enclaves of record.
 The nickname for crack on the street is love.
 Is that right?
 Yes, yes, absolutely.
 What can I say?
 And I think the truth is that all pharmacological, you know,
 that a very large family of alkaloidal and psychoactive agents
 stimulate arousal, CNS stimulation, which in primates means erection and hanky-panky.
 So, given that you've heard the hype and that the context supports the activity
 and that you're loaded, it would be no surprise if many people felt that erose was well served by psychedelics.
 My own feeling on this, and I don't have the extensive experience in ayahuasca,
 I've had an ayahuasca experience, but not the one that caused ego death.
 It was much more mild, it was very pleasant and very cleansing.
 But I have always associated psilocybin with being very heart-centered.
 When I was younger and needed years of therapy that I later got,
 I had a very, very hard time.
 I could take acid endlessly because it's a very intellectual sort of mind experience,
 but I'd always had a very hard time with mushrooms
 because mushrooms were pushing, in a sense, on my emotional center.


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