[00:00:00 - 00:00:07]	 Let me see here. Is there a flashlight? I have a page full of notes. I needn't be so...
[00:00:07 - 00:00:12]	 Is there anything here that wasn't touched on?
[00:00:12 - 00:00:25]	 Well, some notes about this planetary intelligence, thank you, June, and how all that works.
[00:00:27 - 00:00:32]	 One of the insights that... I've been reading different people this year, maybe you can tell,
[00:00:32 - 00:00:38]	 and one of the people I've been reading is Greg Egan, who I talked about last year, but now I've read more.
[00:00:38 - 00:00:45]	 Now I've read Diaspora, and the ones where he makes no effort whatsoever to explain it to you,
[00:00:45 - 00:00:47]	 unless you've already done your homework.
[00:00:47 - 00:00:58]	 And then Jonathan today, in his lecture, talked about DNA a little bit, and frame slippage, and all of that,
[00:00:58 - 00:01:00]	 and it reminded me of it.
[00:01:00 - 00:01:10]	 The thing that I'm coming to from my psychedelic experience, and my life experience, and the whole ball of wax,
[00:01:10 - 00:01:17]	 is I said for many, many years that the world is made of language.
[00:01:17 - 00:01:21]	 That was just sort of one of my bumper stickers.
[00:01:21 - 00:01:31]	 But I think that that carries some of the flavor of what I want to say there, but that there's more to it than that.
[00:01:31 - 00:01:42]	 It's that everything is code. Everything is code in the sense that hackers mean when they say they write code.
[00:01:42 - 00:01:49]	 When Sasha stands up and waves his arms and draws what he calls the dirty pictures,
[00:01:49 - 00:01:58]	 he initiates you into a code, a vocabulary with very defined rules and quick to learn,
[00:01:58 - 00:02:03]	 and then they're like tinker toys. Once you know the rules of the connectivity,
[00:02:03 - 00:02:07]	 then you can sit down like a child and begin to stick these things together and say,
[00:02:07 - 00:02:13]	 "Well, what would this be like, and what would this be like, and does God allow this, or does this break the rules?"
[00:02:13 - 00:02:23]	 And so forth. The DNA is like that. Human language is like that. Human body language is like that.
[00:02:23 - 00:02:32]	 Machines communicate like this. In fact, this is a bridge which connects us.
[00:02:32 - 00:02:44]	 This is the great overarching bridge which will connect us to the machines that they, like us, are commanded by language.
[00:02:44 - 00:02:57]	 And so this realization that everything is code and code moving on many levels is, I think, a further...
[00:02:57 - 00:03:05]	 It's more primary than the perception, for example, that things are made of space, time, matter, and energy.
[00:03:05 - 00:03:13]	 That's one level below code. The code codes for space, time, matter, and energy.
[00:03:13 - 00:03:20]	 It's much more like we're in a simulacrum, some kind of machine environment.
[00:03:20 - 00:03:28]	 And in fact, I like that idea because I've always sensed, and psychedelics have always intensified this intuition in me,
[00:03:28 - 00:03:39]	 that the universe is a puzzle. Life is a problem to be solved. It's a conundrum. It's not what it appears to be.
[00:03:39 - 00:03:55]	 There are doors. There are locks and keys. There are levels. And if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected.
[00:03:55 - 00:04:04]	 DMT is a perfect example of that. And of course, at the molecular level, it literalizes that metaphor.
[00:04:04 - 00:04:14]	 I mean, the DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous object introduced into the front door of the synaptic receptor.
[00:04:14 - 00:04:20]	 And then, you know, you can plunder the palace for five minutes.
[00:04:20 - 00:04:25]	 [laughter]
[00:04:25 - 00:04:35]	 Well, if the world is code, then it can be hacked.
[00:04:35 - 00:04:46]	 In other words, it needn't stand still in quite the same way that it stands still in your mind if you believe in something called the laws of physics.
[00:04:46 - 00:04:56]	 It permits magic because it says behind the laws of physics is a deeper level.
[00:04:56 - 00:05:04]	 And if you can reach that deeper level, you can make changes there.
[00:05:04 - 00:05:14]	 Now, this leads on to something that I wanted to say about an earlier theme, where I was talking about the legitimation of the community's intuitions.
[00:05:14 - 00:05:25]	 Something that we always kick around at these things, or I always bring it up in some form, is where do the hallucinations come from?
[00:05:25 - 00:05:38]	 We arrived late last night after a 24-hour trip from Hawaii that was just hell, or as much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict upon us.
[00:05:38 - 00:05:44]	 And we got stoned, and then we were laying there.
[00:05:44 - 00:05:52]	 And it always happens when you're cut off from cannabis for long periods like that.
[00:05:52 - 00:05:54]	 [laughter]
[00:05:54 - 00:06:01]	 You turn to it, it's ten times as strong, and the hallucinations were exquisite.
[00:06:01 - 00:06:07]	 And I've been looking at hallucinations now for 30-some years.
[00:06:07 - 00:06:14]	 And I looked at these last night, and I thought, if someone would ask me what were they like, what would I have to say?
[00:06:14 - 00:06:19]	 And I said, "Indescribable. Indescribable."
[00:06:19 - 00:06:25]	 And I looked and looked, and I could look to my heart's content, and they were indescribable.
[00:06:25 - 00:06:31]	 So we always come around to this question, where do the hallucinations come from?
[00:06:31 - 00:06:40]	 And I suppose the unconscious reductionists among us, and I don't mean that they're unconscious, I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism,
[00:06:40 - 00:06:55]	 probably assume that it's some kind of iteration thing, that bits and pieces of everything you've ever seen are rolling in some kind of neurological kaleidoscope that can run forever
[00:06:55 - 00:07:01]	 and just produce this endless download of drifting imagery.
[00:07:01 - 00:07:09]	 But there's a problem with that, because this stuff is too coherent, it means too much, it's too emotionally charged.
[00:07:09 - 00:07:27]	 Well, we have never really rallied as a group to try and locate in our combined opinions the one or several sources of these images.
[00:07:27 - 00:07:48]	 And I think that, and I talked a bit about this last year, but I think this is legitimate perception of thoughts, places, things, times, and objects
[00:07:48 - 00:08:00]	 that either have existed somewhere in the universe, or do exist, or have existed in the minds of beings somewhere, sometime in the universe.
[00:08:00 - 00:08:09]	 In other words, that we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like quantum connectivity.
[00:08:09 - 00:08:17]	 In other words, it's one thing to bask in the light of the overarching metaphor, which says everything is connected to everything else.
[00:08:17 - 00:08:23]	 It's quite another thing to say, and so then what are the consequences for me of this?
[00:08:23 - 00:08:37]	 And the answer seems to me to be that the imagination, the inside of our heads, really is the most vast frontier imaginable.
[00:08:37 - 00:08:49]	 And we must leave it for future generations, or maybe not generations, but future evolutionary biologists, to figure out why an animal nervous system
[00:08:49 - 00:09:04]	 would evolve a propensity for accessing bell non-local data, in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of things.
[00:09:04 - 00:09:12]	 There must be a reason, and in the same way that the problem of speciation posed a problem for 19th century biology,
[00:09:12 - 00:09:18]	 this can pose a problem to our thinking without it sinking our intellectual enterprise.
[00:09:18 - 00:09:26]	 It is for some more sophisticated future group of thinkers to understand why this is so.
[00:09:26 - 00:09:37]	 What we have to grapple with is that it is so, that it is so, that you have the Hubble telescope inside of you,
[00:09:37 - 00:09:50]	 you have inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurably distant from this point
[00:09:50 - 00:10:03]	 that is stated in numbers and units as meaningless. It's just elsewhere, the elsewhere of the absolute infinity of the plenum of imagination
[00:10:03 - 00:10:09]	 in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea.
[00:10:09 - 00:10:24]	 And of course the psychedelics are the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix that knits together this cosmic ecology,
[00:10:24 - 00:10:38]	 this system of living relationships. I am not impatient with the idea of extraterrestrial life or intelligence, just its pop regurgitation,
[00:10:38 - 00:10:52]	 but I think probably planets like the Earth are alive and conscious and they use the technologies that the species native to them evolve
[00:10:52 - 00:11:04]	 to cast images out into the larger universe, that the dialogue among cosmic minds is a dialogue among entire planetary ecosystems.
[00:11:04 - 00:11:10]	 It can't be trivialized into some take me to your leader scenario.
[00:11:10 - 00:11:19]	 Still less can it validate the unscheduled visit of pro bono proctologist from nearby stars.
[00:11:19 - 00:11:40]	 [laughter]