around inside of me, I couldn't do it. And now, when I'm in the mushroom, I actually find myself very, although it's intellectual and it's interesting, and there are machines the size of Manitoba, I've often found it to be very vital for the heart center. - I think intent has a lot to do with it. The most moving heart experience I ever had, or in the top five, anyway, was on LSD. And it completely arranged my life. And I was 19 years old, I had a great deal of hostility toward my parents. I was a Marxist and of this and of that, and just tied in knots. And it undid me very dramatically. And the changes that went on that morning are all still nicely in place, thank you. So I think it has a lot to do with context and intent and what you need and how fucked up you are. Because any psychedelic will act psychologically on an obsessional or a complex personality. Yeah. - Are the North American analogs less somatically challenging to you? Are they all, you say, DMT and Haramala are gonna make you barf anyway? - By North American analogs, you mean Phalaris and like that? The problem is that while DMT is common throughout many plants in nature, it's rarely in very concentrated form. If you're trying to get off with Phalaris, you're gonna have to have a lot of it. People seem to be having a lot of luck with Mimosa hostilis and the conspecific Mexican species. Secotria viridis remains the best source for DMT. Most DMT in the underground is synthesized. It's not plant extracted anyway. - You brought up children a couple of times. I'm just wondering if you have anything to say on the post-modern child. I had an experience of going to see, I hate to say it, Spice World. But it had so many post-modern self-referential plays within it and I couldn't follow the movie. And seven-year-old kids could. - Oh, thanks. (audience laughing) - Yeah, Mark Spice. I think that what you're making is a reasonable observation. It's probably getting off easy. In the fact that the environment that seven-year-olds are growing up in is so over-coded, right? There's so much flowing in so many different directions that they've probably, their brain stems are probably literally different from ours. I mean, I hate to think that at 35, I can't get with it in the context of modern culture, but in some ways. - What an admission. Put that next to your name on the cover of Wired. There you go. - Yeah. - Wired is written for rich 45-year-olds, but Spice World was probably designed for their target audience, which is like 10, 10-year-olds. And so it's literally built with that kind of, it's almost a catalytically, sort of self-referential engine in it, because that's what's gonna hold their attention. That's what's going to be, I mean, if movies are hypnotic forms of media, which they really are, then it takes a different type of beast to hypnotize a 10-year-old. Just the same way, I mean, I went to see "Armageddon," for example, and no single shot in "Armageddon" is more than two seconds long. I'm starting to get an epileptic seizure after 45 minutes of this film. And I think it really represents what they're doing is they're doing whatever they can to hold the attention, to maintain the sort of the hypnotic illusion of the film. And the requirements for that are different for a seven or a 10-year-old, because they're growing up in this environment, which has caused them to really form differently in their psychic processes. What will be interesting is to see these kids when they get to 18 and 20, and start passing through the university system and whatnot, and find out what holds their attention then. - Next question. - Because of what I do, I'm in the media stream. Like my personal media stream is like a really good 15-year-old. And what happens is they just become creators like that much earlier, that much younger. I mean, they're the ones with the family, they're the ones with the website. And it's very dense, well thought out, well put together, quality art direction. - Will they be able to talk to us, or will they only be able to talk to each other? - They might not be able to talk. They'll be able to talk to people who can talk to them. - Will I be able to talk to them? - Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you could just try. You could just jump into that culture and see. - Okay, so can I ask a question for Terrence then? - Sure. - If we, and I think it's probably reasonable to say we probably don't wanna necessarily get left behind by this, what can we look to? Is there either a drug or a ritual that can help us grow into where our kids may already be? - No, you know, I think we have to have character models built of ourselves and turn the whole thing over into our writers. And we'll just go off to Tahiti and the writers can, it's the Uncle Duke solution. If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire and a whole team of people will keep you a-curin. (laughing) This is Finn's plan for me, by the way. (laughing) So, you know, I think the only way to keep your career going is to retire the bod and create an online character. Saturday morning cartoon show, apparently, is where the action is. And then there are the Teletubbies. - Yes. - And, you know, they take a further leap. The 15-year-old girls we're talking about can't understand the logic of the Teletubby world. How much more obscure, then, is it to us? And then what do the Teletubby addicts portend? They have TV sets in their stomachs. They exist in a world where the sun of LSD seems to shine all day long. (laughing) And everybody's pre-verbal. How's that for an archaic revival? (laughing) - So those are the, actually, the Teletubby kids, the, what is it, one to three-year-olds? - One to three. - The audience will be the 13-year-olds in 2012. - That's right. - The child is father to the man. Yeah. - Kind of two things. One, I don't expect an answer from them, but could our parents talk to us when we were 15? Not mine. And I don't think I was too different from some of the people that I've seen. So I don't know about that part, and I don't have children, so I can't speak as a child in there. But my first question about the multiple personas and was this a desirable thing, I did get interrupted before I could get to where I wanted to be by all your faithful defenders. All the points were very good, and I was curious to hear what people were gonna say to that. But really, isn't the underlying connector to the whole thing what you started talking about when we did this morning? The opening of the heart, the heart connection. So in the point that you've made, and a couple of the other people about how we won't be able to talk to kids 'cause we won't be from that generation that's happening right now. Don't you talk to people through the heart? So if there are multiple personalities, and that's, we don't know, I don't care to judge if it's a good or bad thing, but say we have four or five online characters. One is the kind of demonic edge and sort of attractive violence, which I don't know 'cause I don't really tend to go that way. But of all the different personalities that we could develop and explore, isn't the real thing, and I heard you start to get close to it, and that's what I was kinda waiting for you to pick up the page, was is there going to be an ethics that we have to impart onto our children so that they can make their own decisions in the future, and aren't these kids already making the decisions, the statements, the statements, that geez, the kids already know the truth, we're the ones that are screwed up, but which ethics for which persona is going to be appropriate? Who is going to teach or impart that information towards those ethics? So is one persona gonna be where, well, my value system really isn't towards honesty. Okay, another person over here may have that, and that's not better or worse than mine. Is this other persona's mind gonna be, my whole integrity is based upon honesty? So do we have multiple ethics for multiple personalities, and aren't we already crowded enough in the United States and the world that we're gonna have each person with 10 more persons? Okay. (audience laughing) I want, you're dead on. Ideally, we wanna be able to talk to our children so we can transmit values. Some of that's done through language, but I think the largest part of it is done through example. Because that speaks in a language that isn't bounded by rhetoric, and it isn't subject in most normal situations to quote-unquote poison, 'cause it's authentic. And authenticity seems to carry something of its own, or can carry something of its own. What was the rest of what you said? There was a lot there to-- Multiple ethics. Oh, multiple ethics. We have characteristics and acts and clothes that we have with each individual setting, like I may be a different person at work than I am, in the sport that I like to do, or in the friends I hang around with, people who I know who like to read, I like to talk about, read, or people I know in the music world, I like to talk music. But my more maturing that I've noticed in myself in the last few years is to try and integrate all those things, not keep them separate and develop them individually, but to try and be the same person I am at work as I am at home, as I am in my sport, as I am in my music and my passions. Probably this is a mistake, I would think. Probably this is a mistake. Balancing? Integrating like that. I mean, I grapple with this same thing, and then if you can't do it, you define yourself as odd, where maybe the post-modern condition is actually to admit that the industrial environment is so different from the home, the learning environment is so different from either of those, that you're beating yourself on the head with some kind of print-created ethic of wholeness that is like trying to avoid venial sin or something. It just can't be done. On the question of ethics, I think nothing we've talked about here has implied that the law of karma is canceled in virtual reality. - That's right. - People who choose to be jerks will have the lives that the universe hands to jerks. - And that's a chaos. - Well, my experience is that you want to sort of streamline your being to move through society and business and love and disappointment and triumph with a certain amount of grace. Maybe the idea of personality needs to be in the same way that we talk about transcending culture and building a meta-culture, maybe the concept of personality needs to give way to something like the metanality, and the metanality is the troop of people that come and go from your body and your terminal and for which you are responsible for the credit cards issued to them. - That's right. - And so forth and so on. I mean, that could become the definition of personality, those people for whom you have financial responsibility and direct legal accountability. - To come back to, I invoked Gurdjieff earlier, and Gurdjieff looked at this field, this army of eyes, and said that with very careful, strenuous self-observation and work, you could at least see them coming and going and once you could see them coming and going, you could perhaps make some, what he called a permanent magnetic center out of them. Okay, so you might if you were really good at it, and Gurdjieffians are known as being a dour lot because they practice so much self-analysis. But you could conceivably pull this into an integrated personality which can give you a lot of flexibility. See, that's the thing it grants you in the end, is once you've got this unity, you can gain an enormous amount of flexibility as a result. So it's almost as if you take the aesthetic path to integrate and you do that, what you're getting is this ability to be multiple. - But with that central core. - With that central core. - I mean, I'm not the first to say this, but people have been creating personality in the media, one of the groups of people who has one of the most well-created and financially renumerated personalities, media personalities as rappers, O'Shea Jackson is not Ice Cube, Percy Miller is not Master P, yet, especially teenagers are the most attracted to this whole world than almost anything else. And I think to them it does represent kind of almost a karmic, legendary, good guys, bad guys, fighting, winning, taking over, getting paid. (laughing) - Is it mythic? - Super mythic. - Yeah, it's super mythic. - It's mythic. - Doing it, absolutely, yeah. - But when you talk about that that's not their real personality, that that's not Ice Cube's personality, I mean, what, he lives in like, Wayna Park, and like, you know, drives in every day, (laughing) - Very charming, living with him helps, it all pays off. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I mean, he used to be a pimp, he used to be in a gang, he used to like-- - No, no! (laughing) - I mean, these are-- - I can't believe that! - No, no, no, no. - He's my man now. (laughing) - What? - When you start presenting these personalities to the media, and, where do you start to separate the man from the man? It does not the man become the man, to many, many people. - To many people, the man becomes the man. - But not to him. - Not to him. - Not to him. - But what's more important? - Well, I-- - Is it important for the-- - It's crazy making to become your myth. - Yeah. - You know, Gibson's meditation on this is the novel Idoru, which is well worth reading if you're interested in the mechanics of modern celebrity. But anybody who is involved in celebrity-hood has to be cynical and ironic, or completely foolish, because it's so totally, and obviously manipulated in front of you. I mean, you know, buy yourself a publicist and pay them $1,500 a month, and you'll be amazed what happens to your life. (laughing) You'll be a household word. We buy and sell celebrity by the pound these days. Don't be fooled. I remember once I had a girlfriend whose father was a public relations guy. This was many, many years ago. And one evening, we were waiting for the 11 o'clock news to come on, and he said, "I got the circus on tonight. "The circus is in town. "Sure enough, the news comes on, "and it's telling us that the circus is in town." And I'm sitting there thinking, my God, the fact that the circus is in town is not news. It's a commercial event. This guy just paid for this, and I stayed up to watch an infomercial on the circus. So I think we have to assume that celebrity, we need a certain number of them. Pray you don't ever become one. And don't take it seriously. - I think I heard about the rappers, just for one second, though. The kids have bought into the myth that these people present. But they actually, I think, have taken away from it that there's less gang activity. They've taken away from it that it is a story, and you can watch it be played out, and you don't have to. I mean, there's always gonna be the psychotic attractor that goes to the nitty-gritty of that. But really, I think that because we've been able to play out the myths of saying get a life, or what have you, it's allowed people to work through those things, and to come to discuss them, and see the consequences of them, and move away from it. - I think what we're dancing around here is what you were hitting on was the ethic, and the point of the ethic. And I think you come to a point in time when you just have to drop any illusions of the sanctity of your ethic, because there's a period of time in this particular physical part of the world where it was ethical to beat Indians to death with sticks that they would not worship at your cross. - Of a certain culture. - It was ethical in the northern circles to kill baby girl children. - In a certain culture. - It was ethical. And the thing is that I think because we've become such an intellectually overbearing type of being in this particular time, we become enamored of our ethic, and we think it's the only ethic you have. And what I'm trying to say, I think what we're saying is at the end of history, at the end of history, there is a new ethic dawning. And it's going to arrive, it's going to emerge, it's emerging, we see it emerging right in front of us. And because we come out of a series and set of ethics that were different, that's very, very different from what's dawning, even though we may have had problems with understanding our parents' and children's role, from this last era, this last epoch of ethic, there was things that held them together, they were commonalities, there was wisdom to be passed through to children even if it didn't seem like they were getting it at the point. I really wonder if there's how much we have to give to inform the ethic that's building now. I think, I really think that we're a footnote on it. Nothing more than a footnote on it. That's my personal belief, and I don't expect anybody else to know, no. - What I hear you saying is it is not about rock and roll. - No. - That's get over it. - Yes. (audience laughing) - What strikes me in this is how little attention is really paid to emotion. And Terrence, you've been very eloquent at talking about how we haven't really languaged and examined that incredibly complex, subtle dynamic that's taking place inside of us all the time, which is the emotional realm, which is ultimately what really drives us. And yet it's this mysterious realm that we're very unfamiliar with, and the more things take place out here, the more reactive we are inside, and yet it's uncharted territory. - Can I take this for a second? - Yeah. - One of the things we'll do tonight with the voce is the voce is a very emotional technique for communication. It's not particularly, it's not bounded by language particularly, but it's an emotional technique for communication. I hope we haven't been leaving the emotions out in this or to give the impression. - I didn't mean necessarily here. I just mean in this realm that is going on. - And I think that what that calls for is an exploration of those techniques. And so what we wanna do is start exploring tonight or expose you to something that's an exploration of that. And to dedicate our work, insofar as our work is driven by our heart, to an exploration of those techniques. - So we're gonna have a big trackball so we can zoom in and find our settings. (laughing) - Imagine it and it's yours. - Yeah. - This thing about emotion, emotion without language is inchoate. And so the very fact that what we're talking about here is the evolution of communication carries with it the implication of an evolution of communication. I see it already happening. Our whole sociological experience has been that of breaking down the simplistic models of what it was to be a human being we inherited from our parents in the past. And we're learning more and more about who we are. We're learning about the real textured feel of racial and class differences, the real texture and feel of different gender choices and sexual preferences. This is a vast frontier. We haven't even begun to fully acknowledge the complexity of our individuality and how many different kinds of us there are. But we have to have language. Without language, it's just a kind of a leading edge of intuition that doesn't cast light very far into the future. With language, our diversity becomes this thing that is a great source of community and individual satisfaction. And so the whole project is a project of communication. And then the understanding, the heart, the community, the connectivity will just be found to have followed along with the process. It's part and parcel of it. It's strange, you know, the net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadours of the 14th century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world soul, and leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the earth. And so this is where we find ourselves at noon. This was the morning session. I hope you've planned bathing and massages and so forth and so on. We'll meet here four to six. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) - Come along to the fact that I'm still working on my vision for developing some form of networked visualization over the internet, which I'd been working on for a number of years at that point, which would allow me to perhaps continue this evocation of the planet that I felt like I was really working toward. And I subscribed to a number of mailing lists. And in a mailing list that I subscribed to, a rather good one called Fringeware, I started to see these curious little things pop up in my email. I didn't really know what they were. People seemed to be calling them URLs. And they had a very curious form. M-H-T-T-P, colon, gobbledygook. Didn't really know what it was. Fortunately, I had a workstation, not a PC, but an actual sun workstation on my desk that I'd recently bought and retrofitted. And I had an internet connection. And so I figured out that these artifacts were part of something called the World Wide Web. And I used the internet to go over to a site in Illinois where they were keeping what they were calling a web server and a web browser under the name of Mosaic. And I downloaded them to my computer and installed them and took a look at the configuration instructions, which were pretty easy. And whammo, my computer became web server number 330. And well, I was like, okay, but what is this web thing? And I launched the Mosaic browser. Comes up on a page, and we're all familiar with the metaphors now, that pointed to the web server at NCSA, the National Center for Computer Applications. And I went click and bam, I was somewhere else. And instantly I got what was going on. Because I'd spent some years earlier working on a problem called hypertext. And hypertext is the concept that words and ideas are linked implicitly as well as explicitly, so that any thought that's ever been had has relations and correlations to other thoughts. And the dream and the vision behind hypertext is to be able to make those links explicit rather than implicit, so that all documents become multiple documents. There's no such thing as an isolated fragment of text anymore. It's all one big, giant, gorgeous, heterogeneous unity. Well, it was pretty much over. I had a shit-eating grin on my face for two weeks. And in those two weeks, I was consulting and I would get home from work and I would fire up the Spark Station and fire up the internet link. And I would surf the web. And at the end of the two weeks, I was done. (audience laughing) And it's not because I'm a fast reader. It's just that's what was there. But I could tell. I saw it and I said, "This is the shit." And I ran to my friend Owen over there and I said, "Owen, there's this web thing. "It's the shit." And I dragged him over to the Spark Station and I showed him. He's like, "Eh, whatever. "What I've seen better. "It's whatever." And I ran and told my other friends, "It's the shit." I think maybe I've heard of it. And finally, after probably in a brow beating and then maybe meditating on it, I remember that Owen and I were on a Saturday afternoon in San Francisco somewhere and he just sort of stopped short in the middle of the street and went, "It is the shit. "This is gonna be it. "This is big." Because the vision of a global hypertech system had seduced a certain segment of people who were working in computing for over 20 years. Before it had become anything like a reality, it had been something that had been driving a certain particularly, probably psychedelically influenced crowd of people who were working in computing as the reason or a reason that computers were at all useful. Well, I wasn't going to brow beat all of my other friends into accepting the reality of a web which was still really tiny. So I devised a much more crafty scheme. There are regular, I guess you could call them house parties in San Francisco, which are called anon salons, which are actually basically rent parties for people who live down in Selma. And they open up the house and they invite people in to show weird things off and it's an evening. And I got contacted. I said, "Oh yeah, let me show something off "at the anon salon." And so we actually carted my Spark station across town and set it up. And I didn't tell anyone who came by that evening that I was showing them the world of my web. As a friend came in, I sat them down and said, "What's something that interests you?" Botany, click, click, click. Oh, wow. Astronomy, click, click, click. Cool. Astrology, click, click, click. Wow, that's great. And every one of them went away seduced by this. So this is January of 1994. And this is sort of before the hoopla had started. But I'd found the trick. And what we saw over the next several years that this happened to anyone, anywhere, who was anywhere near a computer and a modem. And I started keeping an index, which I've called the Pesce Index, based on the number of URLs that show up in Super Bowl advertisements. (audience laughing) And I've been very religious about this. So in 1994, the number was zero. Amazingly, in 1995, there were two. In 1996, every single advertisement had a URL. In 1997, every single advertisement had a URL. In 1998, the figure came down. It's because they stopped running URLs at the bottom of Taco Bell ads 'cause they just made no sense. (audience laughing) Because the hipness of being on the web had simply become business as usual. So in 36 months, we saw this complete conflation of the web with the way people worked in the world. It was for all intense and instantaneous change. So I was watching this as it went along. And in 1997, I stepped back from it. And I said, "This is curious. "It may be without precedent." And I took a look at it in that light. And I wondered, I started to wonder if in fact the catalytic genesis of the web wasn't in fact some sort of self-organizing principle. There are problems here with what we can know about it. Because if I say that there's a self-organizing principle at work here, the self-organizing principle is at a level that's greater than any of us can see as individuals because we're all embedded in it. So we can only get our own view of things. And it's difficult to step out. But when you step out, you see something that looks pretty doggone catalytic. And the response to each individual in that catalytic process, the reason that the web was so powerful and immediate is because it seduced everyone as an individual. We all got hooked on the internet's crack. And if I were a meta-organism and I were going to reorganize my internal content, or organize my internal content, I'd find some way of doing it that wouldn't require forcing the parts into order, but that would seduce them, that would encourage them, that would lull them into some sort of greater unity. And I saw this and I said, "Okay, maybe, just possibly, "this is the same footprint in the sand "that Robinson Crusoe saw on the beach, "the thing that let him know that someone else "or something else was alive out there." And we don't, we can't know necessarily who or what is making that footprint. But I argue that that footprint is an artifact that tells us that there's something that is transhuman or metahuman going on here. And that in fact, as much as we think that human culture is the raison d'etre of what's going on on planet Earth, in fact, perhaps the game got a little broader. And it meshed well with an idea that I'd encountered in my youth, which was the idea of the noosphere from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. To go into that briefly, he was a Jesuit and a paleontologist and he saw no contradiction between them. And he saw the unfolding history of the planet as a history of organizations and these organizations occurred in two levels simultaneously. There were organizations and accumulations of size, that is order, and accumulations of interiority or organization. So that organisms passed from a single level stage to a multicellular stage, so that's a size issue. And then as things got further, that internal organization would complexify. In other words, rather than the simple organization of cells that you might see in an organism like a hydra, you might start to see the formation of internal structures such as organs. After that passed for a while, you'd then see further levels of organization into a nervous system, which is a complexifying of the organism so that the organism becomes, in a whole sense, conscious of its environment. And following this line, Teilhard said, there were human beings who have arguably the most advanced consciousness on the planet, that their role in being self-reflective is that they allow a window upon which this process of organization and complexification can view itself. If that statement is true, then what we can see as the next step, what Teilhard proposed, is that there would be an organization and a complexification of the layer of mind that covers the planet. And he called this the noosphere. And noosphere actually means, I believe it means mind, correct, in Greek. So we're talking about this layer of mind that covers the planet. Now, the web is not the noosphere. In the same way that the soul is not the body, they're related, they interact with each other. They aren't the same thing. And you probably can't separate them out and take a look at one or another independently. But one can offer concrete evidence of the other's existence. And so I see this explosiveness of the web happening everywhere instantaneously as being a visible proof or identity that this noospheric entity exists, and in fact is working very seductively, it's the seduction of Sophia, to in fact bring us into its unity. Let's talk about simulation. Simulation has a relatively long history. Computers, that's what computers do. Computers simulate. Whether it's a spreadsheet doing a simulation or a word processor simulating a page that's being typed. But specifically when we talk about virtual reality, we talk about simulations that are geared toward the human senses. Well, simulation has had two tendencies over the last 20 or 30 years of its development. And one of them has come from above. Military simulations. The first simulations were developed in order to improve jet fighter pilots, in order to augment a jet fighter pilot as he's working in a cockpit because he's incredibly informationally overloaded. And all of the basic pioneering work that was done in virtual reality was done on the defense department's dime in the 1960s by a man named Ivan Sutherland. So everything that we think of as classically being VR, force feedback, sticking your arm in cyberspace, a head-mounted display, real-time computer graphics, this was all developed 30 years ago. Flash forward about 10 years, and now we have simulation coming up from below in the video game. And as it turns out, most of the people who did pioneering work in virtual reality came not from defense simulation, but from video gaming. So people like Brenda Law, Warren Robinett, and Jaron Lanier. Jaron Lanier actually made a small fortune off of an Atari video game years before he started working in virtual reality. But these machines were fast on if they opened enough of a window that the potentiality of the medium to simulate could be exposed. And at this point, with the kind of video games that you can go into a Toys "R" Us and buy, there's very little difference between a defense simulation engine and a Nintendo 64. They've started to converge. (silence) A third track. During the brief period that I was at MIT, I somehow locked into a salon that was held regularly on Saturday nights in Cambridge Port, which is just outside the bounds of MIT, where a certain very hackerly class of people would get together and talk about new ideas. And it turned out that these salons were held at the house of one person named K. Eric Drexler. And these salons were talking about a set of ideas about making machines that were so small, they were literally made out of molecular components. And they were called nanotechnology, which was an idea that Marvin Minsky had begun to talk about, I believe, in the 1970s. And that Drexler saw and just ran with. And the idea was that the normal physical processes of the world were becoming finer and finer grained with respect to human control over them. And that at some point it would be possible to really assemble reality bit by bit, both literately and figuratively, and to make machines that were of any possible construction at any possible scale. In 1982, he wrote a book called The Engines of Creation. But that book wasn't published until four years later. There's a small story there. He wrote the book and he printed 12 copies, which went out to friends for 48 hours for review. It went out to one of my friends and I got on my knees and I begged. And for 12 hours, I read the first draft of Engines of Creation from cover to cover. The book that was published by some big New York publishing house is not the book he wrote. Because the book he wrote could not be published. Because the book he wrote spent chapters plumbing the depths of the possibilities of a technology that could reasonably be reused to reanimate the dead. And this is a subject that I think is not covered in any length or any detail in the published version of it. It's not covered in any length or any detail in the published version of the Engines of Creation because it's just too flipped out for the public to read. But if you talk to a nanotechnologist, perhaps quietly and in a corner because they're all trying to get corporate backing these days, they will agree that this is the case. So there's a drive to control the physical universe at the molecular level from below that form of nanotechnology. But then we also see the countervailing trend from above, which is the drive to understand biology at the molecular level and understanding the machinery of the cell at its very sort of finest granularity and be able to harness the processes and the sub-processes in the cell such that there is at a functional level very little difference between an understanding of the machinery of nature and the creation of the actual machines ourselves out of the whole cloth. It turns out that the lines between simulation and nanotechnology converged a lot quicker than anyone had thought. In 1993, a master's student at the University of North Carolina came up with a device that he called the nanomanipulator. The nanomanipulator combines a scanning, tunneling electron microscope, which in shorthand is an STM, which is nothing more than a pin with an extremely sharp point and a small electric charge. They're actually quite easy to make. Well, quite hard to make well, but they're quite easy to make. And this tip, and the electric charge on it can be used to move individual atoms around. Well, they also then took the specialty of UNC, which is a thing that scanned the cross-surface of an atom. You could push atoms into place, and in fact, you could watch the quantum tunneling as the atoms leapt out of place very suddenly. That is all that it took to make the nanomanipulator. That is already an extant device, and yet that device represents the prototype for the systems that will follow in the next 14 years. Now, nanotechnology, which promises everything, is not without its discontents. And the largest of its discontents, the thing that keeps me worried at night and makes me afraid of the dark, is something that's called the gray goo problem. The gray goo problem is very simply put. It's possible to construct what's called a nano-assembler, a tiny machine with a tiny computer inside of it. And this computer has two instructions of significance. One is that it eats, and it's not all that picky about what it eats, and the other is that it makes copies of itself. If such a device were released into the environment, it's believed that the surface of the planet would be nothing but a sea of these nanomanipulators in 72 hours. Whoops. Yes. (audience laughing) If it's a well-constructed nanomanipulator, it's not all that picky. Okay? Probably it eats carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Probably that's what it eats. It might eat some metals for some things, but it can eat basically anything it wants. This is going to become a reality, and the nanotechnologists are very well aware of this, and they're more frightened of this than I am, which makes me happy. But this technology will probably become widely available early in the 21st century. It'll probably be possible that your children or your children's children will be able to work with the descendants of the nanomanipulator within the next five to 10 years. Already, a company in Belgium has attached a nanomanipulator via the web to a VRML browser, so you can get in there and you can push atoms around over the web. So that's just the beginning. And on a rather longer-term approach, the idea of having this engine within a nanoassembler, which is the computer which tells it what to do, there is now a project that's going on at NASA Ames up here in Mountain View to produce the first functional nanocomputer in 2011. They expect to have it out. (audience laughing) And the people doing this are Creon Lebert and Ralph Merkle, and Ralph Merkle is considered one of the fathers of nanotechnology, so this is not a metal project. It's got government funding and they're working on it. So all of this is converging. The idea in simulation is that whatever you want, you can make manifest. The idea in nanotechnology is that whatever you want, you can make manifest. These concepts are ontologically convergent. They're two halves of the same coin. They're seeing and doing. So the eschaton, which we are hurtling towards, involves at least in part the realization and the identity, in the sense that they're convergent so that they're indistinguishable, of at least these two trends in technology. That raises a whole host of issues because we now have a conflation of the imaginal and the real, and we have a world filled with people who aren't nice. And they're going to have what is both the engine of creation and the engine of destruction. And we even have ourselves who are sitting here and we may be good people, but we're caught now in a reality that is going to literally dissolve because it can take on any form. And we need to be able to deal with the psychic onslaught in terms of our own personal ontologies with that mode of being. And this is where psychedelic experience is perhaps the most relevant because in the psychedelic experience, particularly in the intense psychedelic experience, you experience this dissolution and yet you don't lose yourself. But that's still only happening at the psychic level. It seems to me, and I put this forward as an ideal, that we need to find some mode of being that allows us to confront our newfound capabilities, almost godlike capabilities, in a way in which we do not end up destroying ourselves. I believe that techno-paganism is a response to that question. That in fact, the magical reality of the archaic revival where the world is animate, where every object in the world is animate, where the world is animated by your words, by the logos, by the words you speak, by the codes you write, by the atoms you move together, you form the world. That this identity, this realization of the archaic world is in fact what we need to move into at full speed if we're going to make it past that point alive. I don't see any other realistic alternative. We have to become masters of reality. We have to become masters of the real knowing that that means an exploration of the imagination. (audience applauds) - I'm curious about one thing. There's so much happening so quickly, it feels almost as if, imagine an ocean liner, the Titanic, okay? - And there's that iceberg. - Okay, there's an iceberg, and here we are in a rowboat pulling in the other direction, trying to slow it down. Or it makes sense, I don't know. - You mean that it seems catastrophic. - What's that? - You mean that it seems inevitably catastrophic. - Could be, that it could be. It's almost as if there's so much happening that no matter what we do, we can't change what's happening. - Well, there's a lot of momentum. On the other hand, primates really don't get traction until they're cornered. (audience laughs) This question that you were talking about, Mark, about the gray goo problem, one suggested approach for dealing with really dangerous and scary things that we will inevitably fiddle with is, we think about virtual realities as deployment of data or simulacrums of real worlds, but it should be possible as virtual reality gets more-- - Real? - Real, to build computers that are virtual machines. They don't exist in the real world. Well, then, truly dangerous software can be virtual software running on virtual machines inside virtual realities so that if there's a meltdown of some sort, it can find several levels below three-dimensional space and it doesn't break out in our neighborhood. We have multiple, triple, quadruple redundancy on something like that. Of course, as Mark points out, not everybody will play by the rules. When you handle thermonuclear materials, there are rules, but if you probably visited the Pakistani atomic test site at Lahore, it would stand your hair on end. (audience laughs) And it's freaky, the amount of, the corners that are cut with plutonium. If you cut corners with gray goo, you're going to end up with a lot of it. - How are we sure that this isn't a simulation? - Well, that's a favorite question. How can we be sure that this isn't a simulation? The fact that it has telos means that either telos is a natural product of nature, which much of science has resisted for centuries, or this is not the first run of this software, and this was all built by somebody, and we all are playing roles that were scripted long, long ago. This could be, we could be running inside a virtual reality. Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us, but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of star flight and longevity extension and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Then that means when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility. In one of Greg Egan's science fiction novels, there is a kelp-like organism that runs a Wang tile, a simulation of a virtual reality, and after studying this organism for a long time, they realize that the alien race that they're seeking is inside this thing in VR and only exists as data and can't be apprehended on any other plane. So Mark mentioned the vector of virtual reality, nanotechnology, global communications. It's clear that we're moving toward, if not the eschaton itself, then some kind of historical echo of it in simulation that for all practical purposes will be the same thing in terms of the impact it has on our lives. For example, you could doubt my much vaunted prediction that the world is going to become unrecognizable by 2012, but do you doubt for a moment that by 2012, every major religion on Earth will have vast simulations of its eschatological vision for you to wander in and try out so that you can look in on nirvana.com or move over to the celestial city or look in on Sufi paradise. I mean, religious ontologies will be marketed like beers and will be made as realistic and compelling as possible. Well, then who is to say what is real and what is not? Real is a distinction of a naive mind, I think. We're getting beyond that. I mean, naive empiricism worked well enough until the discoveries of quantum physics 70 or 80 years ago revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement. (audience laughing) - I wanna, yeah, okay. So to take this a little bit further and actually put some teeth back into my theories about nanotech, I wanna talk about artificial life for a little while. It has been a plaything of hackers for a few years to create environments where data are subject to the same stresses that they find in organisms in the real world. And sometimes these data are constructed along genetic lines and they can breed, they can mutate, they can change. And these are actually starting to prove of some utility. It turns out that if you take what's called a genetic algorithm and ask it to do a certain thing and then let it grow and compete against its brothers and sisters for 40 or 50,000 generations, you might find an algorithm that can do this thing, whatever it might be, adding two numbers, calculating the interest on the national debt or whatever, and it can do so remarkably quickly and in a way that looks to a programmer completely illogically. And yet it's getting the job done. So what we've done is we've taken observations of the pressures and the flow of information in the real world and started to bring that into our simulation. And so we're starting to call this artificial life. It's not conscious in the way we would assume it's conscious, but it's reactive and adaptive to its environment in the way that we would normally associate with biological systems. This work is constantly being improved. It looks like they'll be using it in chip design now because it turns out that if you try to design chips this way, the chips themselves will find ways to grow themselves more or less in ways that will take use of the nonlinear features of a chip. A digital chip is considered to be a one, zero entity. It's not. Transistors and the things we make them out of, in fact, have all these very funky properties that are neither one nor zero. And it turns out that the organisms we grow with them take advantage of these boundary situations to improve their usability. So it turns out that when we start to let things grow, what we find is that not only do we lose control over them, we lose any sense of reason when connected with them. And the thing that I worry about when I apply that to the gray goo problem is the issue of the virus. Viruses are epi-biological entities. They found a way to harness themselves to living systems in such a way that they don't need to live, but they can use a living host to propagate themselves. And even if we have the nanotechnology squirreled away in a simulation that's three levels deep, the first thing that will do is breed a simulation that's capable of popping the stack of reality until it explodes into the real. So in fact, perhaps what we need is those safe holes, but also the developments of an autoimmune system for information. Well, again and again, what comes up is this thing that information elevates and information destroys. And if you try to pretend that it's neutral, you will probably become the victim of it in some way. You know, right behind artificial life lies the possibility of artificial intelligence, which is a whole other ball of wax. And the way we choose to construct the web is strangely very friendly toward the spontaneous generation of artificial intelligence. They're talking now about a new protocol, is it called XML, which will allow any user of the net to pull as much processing power as they need for a given problem. Well, in a situation like that, if you have artificial intelligence of any sort that gets going, it will cover 50,000 terrestrial years of evolution in about five and a half hours. Hans Moravec at the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence says, "If this broke loose, "we would probably never know what hit us." You can read essays on the net around the subject of what is ultra-intelligence. You know, we can imagine a super-intelligence. That's our idea of God. But Moravec and other people say any artificial intelligence which emerged on the net, as far as we can tell from game theory and our own best mathematical modelings of these situations, the first thing an artificial intelligence would do is design a more efficient artificial intelligence. Well, when these processes are spanning hours, the whole thing from the human world's point of view looks like a kind of chain reaction. And what you get out at the end, we do not know. And we do not know the attitude of the thing you get out at the end toward our dear selves, its gentle makers. - Right. (audience laughs) - So, you know, and these things are very real. The most cutting-edge sciences seem to indicate, you know, since the '70s on, when Ilya Prigozhin did his work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the word has been out that very complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. There is some kind of loophole in the second law of thermodynamics that allows this to happen in dissipative structures. Our own organic existence and our economies and civilizations are examples of this. Well, what we are brewing here is a very potent non-equilibrium thermodynamic environment that has a kind of rudimentary intelligence, a desire for cohesion, a desire for self-perpetuation, a desire for closure in its own design process. And this is what will probably bring the eschaton, in my estimation, is that we are actually in the act of giving birth to another order of being. At least ultra-intelligence, planetary in scale, machine-based, operating at 400 megahertz and above, and with God knows what plans for mankind. And the question becomes, are we embedded in that? Are we embedded in that machinic phylum? Are we part of that? The question of artificial intelligence has of course plagued researchers for 40 or so years, in part because there was an original methodology which said that we can, we'll just design a mind, it'll think, or at least there'll be a fake simulation, I think, and we'll do this in what they considered a very top-down fashion. And the further they got into the problem, the more ridiculous this scenario actually became. So because we aren't unities, and in fact, AI has really sort of had to come to that conclusion, there is no little guy in your head which is giving the orders. It's not working that way, and yet that was the fundamental assumption of people who were working in AI. Then of course, about 15 years ago, Rodney Brooks at MIT comes out with his little insects, and his insects are very simply constructed. Each part of the being of the insect has its own instructions. The legs just have to sort of stay up, the eyes just sort of have to see, and the whole thing displays an emergent behavior which looks a little bit like a machine-made insect. This now has become, I believe this is called constructivist AI, has become the new paradigm, which is throw all of this shit together and see what comes out. So the current work of this group is to construct a humaniform version of this called COG. The reason for it to be humaniform is based on something that's probably got more to do with philosophy than it does with computer science, which is that if we can create some form of consciousness that we expect to be able to communicate with, it probably has to be bounded with a body that is at least in some ways equipped with the same set of constraints that we have as human beings. If a silicon chip suddenly booted itself up into existence, it's not clear that it would have a consciousness that would be easily capable of being recognized by us, super intelligent or not, because the boundaries that give it its defining qualities are so vastly different from our own. So the idea with COG is to create this humaniform and give it enough human qualities and then to let it start crawling around the lab and learning how things work and maybe things will start to emerge. The beautiful and I think rather cool thing about this, which feeds into something that you were just talking about, is that there is a woman who is working at the MIT AI lab who also holds a position at the Harvard Divinity School and her job is to teach the child ethics. Because we think that, they think that, if it is possible that this machine displays any kind of human intelligences, the first thing you'd want to be able to do is to teach it what's right and what's wrong. Yes, that's-- - It'll probably work both ways. - But who teaches the teacher in the first place? - Yeah, how are those ethics determined? - This is what ethics is about. - Right, right. - Fire, her first rule is put money in the poor box. - No, it's not. - Well, isn't it bury the dead, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, behavioral responses to other people's discomforts? With a real AI, of course, you're going up against something which is thinking about the same question you are and you hope not reaching different conclusions. I was recently had the minor revelation when I was reading something about the psychology of the Cold War and how both sides studied game theory. And one of the things that game theory has concluded is if you are in a position of opposition to someone and you really want to win the argument, it's absolutely vital from your point of view to win, then one of the best strategies available to you is to convince the other side that you're capable of anything and I realized in my whole life in conflicts with people, the first thing I try to establish is the idea, now we are gonna work this out. We are going to achieve an end state which will be pleasing to you. This is why I lost all those struggles with people over the years. No, you try to convince the other person, if this doesn't go my way, it's going to get so weird for you, it will be unbearable, so be forewarned. So, William Gibson talked a lot about AI in his novels and one of the points that he makes that I think is very interesting is he imagines an AI called Wintermute and what Wintermute is most interested in doing is making collages and this is an interesting idea to me because it says that Wintermute is ultimately not creative. What Wintermute is capable of doing is generating new juxtapositions of old data by shredding maps and photographs and bus tickets and arranging these things in Joseph Cornell type boxes but ultimately, Wintermute is an arranger of the detritus of human civilization. That fascinates me because I've noticed that the entities that you encounter in psychedelic spaces are often seen to be collages. If you're really paying attention, like in psilocybin encounters, what it's saying to you is made up of half-forgotten plots of science fiction stories you read as a kid, half-glimpsed memories that you've forgotten, vistas, incidents, conversations. It never is entirely original. The product is original but atomistically deconstructed, it is always the detritus of being that's being arranged by these entities. - I always thought that was an unsuccessful trade. (audience laughing) - Well, it can get harder and harder to trace the provenance of a given image but I think if you really, if you know yourself, you know where it's coming from. It helps to have a very good memory, I know, because it uses the obscure, it uses the parts of the novel you forgot. The ego is very selective as it threads its way through the data but you have to believe that there's a bigger point of view that's not missing any of this stuff. - John? - Yeah. - I'm just making a few notes. If the grand project, and this is almost a question that'll end up being addressed to you, if the grand project of technology is the deconstruction of reality, and I've been arguing this afternoon that in fact that's what it is, then we're faced with a situation as I outlined earlier but we're also faced with something else that I really believe has already become clear and will even become clearer as the reality of the eschaton which is that the information flows, really sort of been the subtext of what we've been talking about over the last two days, are becoming, the currents are speeding up and the currents are moving through all of us and every stage as we move closer to this, all they ever do is they ratchet up the speed of change, they ratchet up this information flow and this information flow is no longer being bounded by any particular material. It's flowing through strata of rock, it's flowing through strata of biology, it's flowing through strata of silicon and it's flowing through the strata of our minds. So I'm trying to think how to put this in a question. Is there a point that you think that there will be a sort of collective slapping of the head as humanity says, this is what's going on, is there a point at which the eschaton becomes visible to a large enough set of people that the idea of the eschaton becomes an almost auto-patholitic idea that by its visibility it invokes itself or is that the last second before? Well, the answer is sort of yes, no and maybe. On the largest scale, I would argue, like people sometimes object to the idea of the eschaton occurring soon with logic like the following. Don't you find it strange that since it could occur at any moment in time, it happens to be occurring coincident with your own lifetime? In other words, isn't there some kind of solipsism here, some circularity or some inflationary delusion at work? And for a long time I felt the force of that, but then I decided no. (audience laughing) Because human history is the outer shell of the eschaton. If you think of the eschaton as a process that is condensing, becoming more dense and less rarified, then it really has no outer limit. You could say that from the moment of the Big Bang on, the concrescence was inevitable. But in terms of being able to see it coming into existence on scales and through the lens of human values, it seems clear to me that after existing in a relatively steady state for 700 million years, since life left the archaic oceans, about 100,000 years ago, or 50,000, I mean it's imprecise, but around 100,000 years ago, things began to go berserk on this planet. And it was not among the woodchucks, the scorpions, the macaws, or the gray whales. It was specifically in the hominid line of the primates that something began to tear loose. And what was it? It was epigenetic transformation of information. It was as though information which had previously been content to operate in the domain of biology as genetic information had grown too impatient to be contained by that vessel. And so human language emerged sometime in the last 50,000 years. And that began an accelerated cascade of symbolic, epigenetic, technologically linked activity where every process then which resulted fed in to an acceleration of this general tendency. All of what we call human history can be pretty nicely confined within 6,000 years, not 100,000 or 50,000. I mean, you go back 6,000 years, you're at 4,000 BC. The pyramids lie in the distant future as a technological dream. Well, if you don't think things got out of control 50,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago, how about within the confines of the 20th century? You know, people in 1910 were living pretty much over most of the surface of the globe as people had been living in 1500 in Europe. The 20th century opens with the theory of relativity. Max Planck's experiments with black body radiation, powered flight, psychoanalysis, pataphysics, jazz, you name it, whatever your favorite icons of modernity are. And so I think that the old models, and we should remember that as recently as 120 years ago, it was entirely respectable for a member of the intelligentsia of England to maintain that the earth was created on October the 5th, 4006 BC at 10 a.m. That was a respectable opinion in the middle class Episcopal gentry of Victorian England. So what is happening is that things are getting weirder fast. 1923 was an enormous watershed when the ever-stodgy edifice of physics, which had been rocked to its foundations by Einsteinian relativity, encountered the notion of the quanta, the uncertainty principle, the role of the observer in the production of measurement at the heart of nature. This is what I call discovering that the bedrock is a funhouse basement. And as we have prosecuted the frontiers of knowledge over the past 50 years, it's only our incredible lack of historical perspective that keeps us, I think, resistant to the idea that we are in the gravitational tug of an enormous attractor that must lie ahead of us in time, not very far. How far can it be? To my mind, people who talk about how things are gonna be in 500 years or 1,000 years have atrophy of the frontal cortex. I mean, what Mark said either this morning or last night about the difference between 1990 and 1998 in terms of the internet, 1998 lies farther from 1990 by a great distance than 1990 lies from 1900. The acceleration has become overwhelming. Now, we have built in defenses against this, which is it's almost like the expanding universe theory, except it's, apply it to the intellectual universe. The intellectual universe is expanding at such an enormous rate that most people embedded in a professional field cannot see beyond the boundaries of their own technical concern. So the people in nanotechnology have no idea what's going on in, let's say, information compression or environmental restoration or something else. Every science is reaching, every field of technology is reaching towards some kind of holy grail of its own special set of concerns, but there's no information being communicated along the face of the wave and into this intellectual chasm of understanding that the rapid acceleration of historical processes created pours the energy of cult. We have become a people ruled by rumors of the improbable. We're told that human fetal tissue is being traded for fiber optic technology by back channel sections of our own government. We're told that extraterrestrials of dozens of shapes and sizes are running around in the trailer courts of America. We're told that the Antarctic ice cap is about to melt, that planetesimal objects are headed toward Earth, that Christ and Elvis were seen arm in arm down at the mall, on and on. Well, people say it's the millennium or it's the breakdown of consensus reality. It is all of that, but I think it's embedded deeper. I think it's embedded almost in the physics or dynamics of planetary complexity in this, on the surface of this planet. In answer to your question, will it ever break through? Will there ever be an aha moment? I think there will. I think it will come sometime after the millennium, like 2006, something like that. Because first of all, the echoes and resonances of the millennium must die away. And we must understand that it wasn't simply the year 2000 or Y2K or the Chrysler expectation of millenarian dispensation, that nothing can turn off these processes that have been operating for such very long spans of time. And it is absolutely unreasonable at this point to suppose that any force could intervene to stop what is happening. Well, then people say, well, then are we just to disappear up our own virtual wazoo? Or how are we to picture this? Well, I think that's like asking us to see around several corners at once. The things which will happen between here and 2012 will rewrite the disk of reality several times. If 1994 and 1998 can be separated by centuries of technological progress, then what is it going to be like in 2002 when the T1 connection becomes the standard connection for most people on the internet? When virtual reality is completely trivial? When everyone moves much of the time through virtual code-created spaces? Well, probably it will appear very humdrum because we will have gotten used to it by then. But what we will be asked to get used to at that point is the perfection of quantum teleportation, the possibility of essentially turning the entire physical universe into the equivalent of an electromagnetic medium of some sort. And I think that the breakdown of consensus reality, the breakdown of physics, the breakdown of models about what is happening will eventually lead to a complete overheating of the official engines of explanation. This is what lies behind the belief that the government is about to come clean about flying saucers, or it's about to come clean about the ruins on Mars. I mean, these are in fact chimeras in the popular mind, but they indicate the realization that reality is slipping out of anybody's control. The thing that amuses me about conspiracy theory is that it propounds the obviously preposterous notion that the system can be guided and controlled. You know, you want to go beyond the hair-raising terror of conspiracy theory, then lock in on the concept that no one is in charge. Not the Jews, not the Vatican, not the German government, not the World Bank, not the Catholic Church, nobody. The whole thing is under the aegis of dynamics that are out of the reach of human institutions and human intentionality at the institutional and individual level. Well, so then people call that chaos, and they say, "Well, it's just flinging itself apart. "It's melting down." No, it's not. As it exceeds our ability to control its direction, it actually reveals its real ontos, you know, that we are not cattle for Christ. We are not socialist automatons. We are not bearers of the genes of the master race. We are none of these squirrely ideas. We are something else, which is in the process of unfolding. And I think eventually, to answer your question, it will become, this will become the central product of the human race, instead of discussing the eschaton at the aegis. And I've watched it move from the real aegis. I mean, I was into this in 1973, when it made no sense to anybody, including me. I just said it because I was hopelessly insane and had no choice. And I've watched it move in and in. And, you know, now you can go on the internet. There are these people called singularis. These are guys with pen protectors, for sure. And yet they believe that by calculating rates of data compression, density of computer architecture, human population, energy release, velocities attained, so forth and so on, you draw all these curves out, and lo and behold, somewhere between 2010 and 2025, we possess all information, move at infinite speeds, release infinite amounts of energy, live forever, and so forth and so on. People say, "Well, what does this mean? "Can these curves possibly hold these vectors?" I think the answer is yes. But the fulfillment of these things will occur in dimensions very difficult for us to grok or imagine. What I love about what I do is that I get to read all the hot new stuff and I think about it and I think about it, and every once in a while, a piece of information comes floating down the pike that lifts an edge of the veil and I see three months further into the future or six months further into the future. For instance, in the last six months, I have understood that processor speed... {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.69 sec Decoding : 3.29 sec Transcribe: 5447.02 sec Total Time: 5451.00 sec