[Music] We're going to talk about the evolutionary mind this morning. It's the topic of our book that's just coming out at the moment. And it prepares the way for thinking about the change in consciousness at the millennium. Obviously what happens at the millennium is something to do with our minds. It's not as if the laws of nature are all going to change at the year 2000. It's a mental event, a social event, a cultural event. And we're going to start this morning by talking about the evolutionary context for it. Our book called The Evolutionary Mind comes at a time when there's a tremendous amount of interest in evolutionary psychology. Psychologists in the last five to ten years have discovered Darwin. And I keep meeting psychologists who speak to me with that sort of enthusiasm and bright-eyed quality of the new convert. They've seen the light, they've discovered Darwin. And I wonder why, as a biologist, they haven't discovered Darwin a long time ago. Darwin, after all, opened up the field of evolutionary psychology with his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and the Animals. And there was a lot of speculation at the end of the 19th century about the evolution of consciousness. However, academic psychology this century has got involved in behaviourism, rats in cages pushing levers, and now cognitive psychology, computer models of neural processes, none of which has left much space for evolutionary theorising. So they've come rather late to this evolutionary speculation. There's been permission given to biologists to speculate about evolution of the mind in this way by the analysis of selfish genes. They feel if they're talking about selfish genes, it's somehow scientific, and it's given everyone permission. This kind of discussion is epitomised in Steven Pinker's recent book How the Mind Works. And it's based on the idea that human behaviour is determined by genes, there's a gene for everything, and they then work out in theoretical terms what these genes would lead us to expect, the selfish behaviour of the genes. Unfortunately, their conclusions are not terribly surprising or deep. And at the end of a lecture he gave recently in London, which was met with considerable scepticism, somebody said, "Well, now just give us one most important clear idea you've been able to deduce from your selfish gene theory." And he said that after lengthy calculations, they'd found that because females have only one or two eggs at a time, which are a rare and precious resource that needs conserving, whereas males produce millions of sperm, they deduced, after a lot of working out, that women would tend to seek high-status males and want to stay with them, whereas men would tend to be promiscuous, to spread selfish genes more freely. There was an air of disappointment in the lecture hall. And somebody was heard to say, "Is that all?" Anyway, the fact that this rather closed world of selfish gene speculation is going on has given other people within the scientific world permission to think more widely about evolution. Most evolutionary theories are purely speculative, since we don't really know what happened in the past. Many of them are just-so stories, rather like Kipling's accounts of how the leopard got its spots, and so on. But there have been, in this modern explosion of speculation about our evolutionary past, there are several rather interesting ideas that have come up, and I just wanted to bring up two or three of these this morning, because although there's no shortage of speculations about what happened in the human past in the books of Terence McKenna, there are several new ideas which might amplify these ideas about conscious evolution. The first ideas that I want to talk about are put forward in a book by Stephen Mithen, M-I-T-H-E-N, called "The Prehistory of the Mind." He's a British archaeologist, but in this book he's brought together a wealth of evidence from the fossil record, from archaeology, from the study of primate behavior, and from the study of child psychology, to put together a very interesting discussion of what happened to human minds during the three and a half million years of human evolution before recorded history began. The first upright walking hominids are now believed to have emerged in Africa over three and a half million years ago, Australopithecus. These were upright walking tool-using, they used simple stone tools, precursors of ourselves. Human history, three and a half million years of it, went on before we have the records from the great civilizations. The domestication of animals, the agricultural revolution, occurred 10,000 years ago. The first civilizations about 5,000 years ago, maybe 7,000 years ago. Industrialization, 200 or 300 years ago. But for the vast majority of human history, people were living in quite a different way. And it seems to me a very reasonable supposition that a great deal of our psychology, a great deal of the working of our minds has been shaped by this enormously long period, about which we know so little. What Meygen points out is that these, although we don't know what they thought about and how they worked, these early human beings, these early hominids, must have had several different kinds of intelligence. They must have had a social intelligence, they were social beings, they lived in social groups. And we know from studies of chimpanzees and other social primates, that there are very subtle interactions within the group, there are dominance interactions, there are cooperative interactions, and to get it right requires a kind of intelligence about how other members of the group are going to react, what's appropriate behavior, and so on. All social animals must involve some kind of social intelligence. And we can reasonably assume that our ancestors, our hominid ancestors, had a social intelligence to enable them to live together and work together in social groups. They had a technical intelligence that enabled them to make stone tools, maybe other technical devices or technical things, maybe fibers and string, which haven't left traces in the archaeological record. They must have had a natural historical intelligence, because if you're living as a hunter-gatherer, as they did, then unless you know what to hunt and how to hunt it, what the habits of the animals are that you're hunting, unless you know what to gather, where to gather it, what things are good to eat, what things are good as herbs, you don't get very far. And this requires an enormously detailed knowledge of natural history. Not just human beings, chimpanzees have to have this and many other creatures. So this must have been part of their mental makeup. And then at some stage they began to talk, and they must have had a linguistic intelligence. We don't know when language began. Some people put it 50,000 years ago, some people put it much longer ago, but really nobody knows. Language leaves no fossil traces. But something very strange happened. About 100,000 years ago, our ancestors achieved brain sizes roughly the same as ours today. So for 100,000 years, human beings have had brains of the current capacity. Yet for 100,000 years, they were not writing programs and building computers and thinking up Einstein's equations and so on. Something else was going on with those brains, and we haven't a clue what it was. Brain size, the development of current brain size, is not the reason that there's been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years. And it wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was the beginnings of art, paintings in caves and that kind of thing. What happened? Why did art and civilization only begin tens of thousands of years after the brain had reached its present capacity? And what enabled these different kinds of intelligence to give rise to the agricultural revolution, modern humanity and so on? Well, the hypothesis that Meithen puts forward is that about 50,000 years ago, some crucial transition occurred whereby these previously separate intelligences somehow came together, cross-fertilized each other, and produced the beginnings of characteristically human mentality. The connection of social and technical intelligence meant that people started using technical skills for making things like jewelry, ornaments, grave goods. The mixing of technical and natural historical intelligence led to a great improvement in hunting technologies, in weapons, in axe heads and spear heads and arrow heads and so on. The merging of social and natural historical intelligence led to a whole kind of mythic understanding of the animal and the natural world, which we find in all cultures around the world today. And combining these with linguistic intelligence, there was a whole burst of human development, of mental development. He compares this to a cathedral. A Romanesque and Norman cathedral has side chapels almost sealed off from each other with no interaction, whereas the great Gothic cathedrals sort of open up and all these different things can mix together. Somehow, he thinks, this transition 50,000 years ago was associated with the origin of religion and seems to have been based on a sense of human connection, not just with the earth but with the heavens. When I asked Meithen how he understood this to have happened, especially given his chosen metaphor of the cathedral, I said, "Do you think there really was a breakthrough from some extraterrestrial intelligence into the human realm at that stage, since all your evidence points to it?" And he said, "Of course not. That's impossible." [laughter] So I said, "How do you know it's impossible, since everybody all around the world, according to your own evidence, seems to have undergone this transition? It seems to have shaped human mentality as we know it." He said, "Oh, yes." He said, "Well, the very fact everyone believes it shows that this is an incredibly persistent illusion." [laughter] And I said, "But how do you know it's an illusion?" He said, "Because it's so persistent." [laughter] And I said, "Surely you can have things that are true that are persistent, too." He admitted in the end it was just a matter of opinion. But everything he said points towards some breakthrough to another realm of consciousness around 50,000 years ago, and something that happened with human groups all around the earth. And I think this is the first time I've seen a convincing building up of evidence from somebody who's coming from a very hard-nosed position that gives us some clue as to a major shift in consciousness that happened, and it involved some connection with a higher dimension. Now, some people will like to interpret that in terms of visits of spaceships, chariots of the gods, and so forth. I think that there are many other ways of thinking about it, and I can guess that Terence will be able to suggest at least one. [laughter] [laughter] But before we go, there's one other speculation about the past I want to mention, which I found particularly interesting out of this year's crop of books on the subject, which is Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Blood Rites. She's an American writer based in New York, and in her book Blood Rites completely changed around my idea of human prehistory. What she shows very convincingly is that our image of man, the hunter, striding forth onto the African savannah about three million years ago, is in fact pretty implausible. Human beings were small, they couldn't run very fast, they weren't particularly strong, their tools were extremely primitive. It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the hunter, but man the hunt head. In fact, most bone remains of early hominids show the marks and scratches and tooth marks of large cats on them. Human beings were on the African savannah with lots of game, but also with lots of big predators, and they were extremely vulnerable. And a great deal of modern human mentality, she argues, was shaped by millions of years of being preyed on by large predators. It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history, it was man the hunt head. She shows, very interestingly, that this sheds light on many religious traditions, because in many religious traditions there's the idea of the victim, the sacrificial victim. If you're a collective, a herd of wildebeest or baboons in a group out in the desert, and a predator approaches, the predators usually attack isolated members of the group, the old, the young, or sometimes the young males who are defending the group on the periphery. Those are the ones that get killed first. And when they've killed one of them, they start eating it, and very often the rest of the group then relax, and they often stand around and watch the predator eating the prey, because once they've got one victim, they're not hungry anymore, they're not interested in the rest, so one dies for the sake of the rest. This is a simple fact of predation. And she shows that this pattern, the idea of a sacrificial victim that dies for the sake of the rest, is deeply embedded in our consciousness as an archetypal pattern based in this biological fact of predation and the fact that we were preyed upon. She also shows that most of the early visions of gods and goddesses were in the form of carnivores. Even Jehovah is a carnivore. The story of Cain and Abel, where Cain is a farmer and offers the fruit of the earth to God as a sacrifice, and Abel is a herder and offers a sheep. God prefers the sacrifice of Abel. He prefers meat to vegetarian diet, and that's why Cain kills Abel. He's jealous. So this carnivorous quality of the gods is associated with images of the gods in association with predatory animals. She then goes on to show that whole nations identify with predators as a kind of justification for war-making, where the whole nation becomes like a predator. The symbol of England and many other countries is the lion, of America, of the United States the eagle, and so on. All around the world you find these predatory animals as national emblems. Well, I think her insights are particularly interesting, and because of this long history, it shows so much of our mythology, religious structure and fears are related to this long period of being preyed on. She shows the fantasies, the nightmares of young children in modern cities like New York, until they're about five years old, and not about child molesters and realistic fears, or at least the fears their parents have, they're about being eaten by monsters and wild animals. This is what most children's nightmares are about. And this would go back to a long period of history. So here we have two ideas, Mithon's ideas and Barbara Ehrenreich's ideas, about early human history, which would give memories. I would think of them as memories in the collective memory through morphic resonance. Jung would call them collective archetypes in the collective unconscious. Things which are built into our past, our memory, that have shaped the way our minds are today, of which we're largely unaware, because our normal study of history begins with the civilisations of the Near East, with Egypt, with Greece, Rome, and so forth, and leaves out the previous three and a half million years of human history which have really done so much to shape our evolutionary nature, and therefore condition the way we respond to each other today and in the future. I think that our evolutionary history is rooted in the past, but I've been reading on my journey here this novel, On the Edge, just published in England last week by Edward St. Aubin. It's set in California. The crucial scenes occur in Ethelyn. And here's a conversation going on in the hot tubs on page 130. "According to Terence McKenna," said Flavia, "who happens to be a genius instead of an arrogant British jerk, [laughter] history is rooted in the future." That's her. [laughter] Can I jump in? [laughter] Well, first of all, let's just assume that I've responded to this with the usual rap about diet, mushrooms, so forth and so on, that if you know anything about my work, you have heard ad nauseam ad infinitum. So just go past that and say-- and remind you, Rup and I have not really had a good conversation for 20 months, but I guess arranging ourselves according to the demands of the morphogenetic field, we're sort of thinking along the same creodes, because in my trying to understand at greater levels this moment of transition 50,000 years ago or this moment of breakthrough, what exactly were the elements and how did it happen, I've sort of come very close to this area that Rupert's indicating this morning, because I can't help but notice that a successful predator must think like prey, that there is this peculiar intellectual symbiosis that goes on between the predator and the prey, and hunting cats taught carnivores, I think, internalize the behaviors of their prey. Well, at the very dawn of the emergence of the evolutionary emergence of mind, the central human figure in that equation is the shaman, and the shaman at the high paleolithic stage is essentially a kind of sanctioned psychotic, in other words, able to move into states of mind so extreme that their immediate social efficacy is arguable, and to condense that into common English, what I mean is the shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back, and so in a weird way at this fractal boundary where human consciousness emerges, the first human consciousness was not human at all. It was a human ability to model effectively the thinking processes of other predators. With mathematical models. With mathematical models and precision, yes. And so, yes, what we're talking about when we're talking about hunting is we're talking about strategic thinking, and strategic thinking always involves bifurcating trees of choice. If we go to the waterhole at dawn, perhaps we can make a kill. If we take food and leave the women and children and go in this direction several days, perhaps we will make a kill, perhaps not. Perhaps by abandoning the women and the children, we will undercut our gene pool and return to catastrophe. Strategic thinking. What strategic thinking requires is the ability to contemplate possibilities not immediately present. In other words, there's a kind of time-binding function here. I'm really not so much posing a question to Rupert as adumbrating what he said. This is where it all comes together in this very complicated relationship between fear, expectation, strategizing, and the imagination. The two areas where I'm sure we spent a great deal of time studying these bifurcating trees of possibility were in the food gathering and hunting domain, and then in the sexual domain, which today we call erotic fantasy. But in the high paleolithic, erotic fantasy was rather closely welded to where your genes went and how your biological propagation processes proceeded. The key, whether you believe it was through the stimulation of psilocybin or through the aping of the behavior of other top predators that we aspired to compete with, whatever the causal mechanism, the domain in which the change was born and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us is the domain of the imagination. This is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since. And as this discussion today proceeds to look more into the future, I think we will see that as the imagination has been our past and the cradle of our humanness, so it also is the domain in which our trans-human metamorphosis will occur. Something like that. As far as I can see, this is dancing around an intellectual black hole or something. Here we have the question is posed, as I gather, of Stephen Mythun, that in the evolution of consciousness or culture, I'm not sure which, that there was a bifurcation 50,000 years ago which is of interest to us because we're in one now. And the question is what was it caused by? And then Rupert proposed that you would, of course, answer the psilocybin mushroom on the plains of Africa. But you didn't mention it. But this need not only was a constant throughout the 3.5 million years evolution of hominids, but also in pongids, apes, and swarming bees, schooling fish, and so on. This is more or less no news here. What was it then that happened 50,000 years ago if anything happened? So I know that this will not be a favorite hypothesis in this audience, but it's one that has to be counted. Do you ask for, are there any other, what did he suggest actually, Stephen Mythun? He doesn't give a very clear explanation as to why this might have happened. Well, he's a youngish man, I suppose. [laughter] Who probably has not read the great books of his predecessors such as, let's say, for example, Alexander Marchak, who led a great group of, a combined group of two species, a neurophysiologist and archaeologist, in the distant past to propose that a miracle that occurred like the beginning of Cro-Magnon 50,000 years ago had to do with a structural change in neurophysiology. This presents the view, if you want to look at it that way, God as a brain surgeon, also known as the hole in the head, where the connection between the hemispheres was improved in the Corpus Callosum, and this physiological evolution provided an evolutionary advantage in the hunting and so on. And as an evolution theorist, you would have to say, well, if there was divine brain surgery, then it could have been in response to a leading element in the evolution of some morphogenetic field. Now, thinking of this as a chicken and egg kind of thing, okay, is like the physiological change, there was a physiological change, was there not? Did Stephen Mytham mention that? Well, you can't from skulls, all you've got is skulls. Oh, you can, no, no, you can. That's the whole point, that these skulls have been examined microscopically by Alexander Marchak, and the changes in the skull, morphological changes, sharply divide that particular event, including the enlargement of the frontal lobes, which was considered because of Broca's brain to be the physiological foundation for the development of speech. Whereas we would say, probably, I'm guessing we would agree that the enlarged brain, Broca's brain evolved because, as we had already started speaking and had the need for more vocabulary, the things favored the larger vocabulary in terms of hunting, gathering, escaping large carnivores and so on. Anyway, there's a dichotomy of two different views about this bifurcation, the divine intervention one and the physiological DNA random mutation natural selection one. Isn't that it? And in this dichotomy, we see you opposed because Terence believes that eating psilocybin mushrooms is a purely material explanation, right, requires no recourse to a divine intervention in the field. Angels, dreams, you use the word imagination. But he's not suggesting a literal divine intervention, he's just speaking metaphorically. My then speaking metaphorically, I think I'm speaking literally. Because I think, you see, one of the things we have to explain is that religion or some sense of a beyond the human realm of consciousness is found in every human culture today, in some sense, in some way or another, a world of spirits, a world of angels, of gods. But to explain the universal distribution of this as part of traditional human thinking requires at some stage in the past there have been to an awareness of this other realm of consciousness. Now, this is not incompatible with psilocybin or any other drug hypothesis because those might have kick-started this connection with another realm of consciousness. But if we assume that today, all over the world, shamanic cultures and all other cultures have the sense of other levels and other kinds of conscious entities beyond the human level, some in animal forms and some in forms way beyond that, we have to assume that at some stage in the past there was a linking with these other realms of consciousness, whatever they are, not just metaphors, not just archetypes in the collective mind, but forms of consciousness that might well, I think, actually are out there. Well, in trying to think conservatively about the possibility of a non-human local intelligence, it seems to me that in a way nature herself presents as an intelligence, that the understanding of nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity that to deny them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind, that for anyone not burdened by that prejudice, it's self-evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding. It's interesting that really all it seems we can agree upon here is that the time frame is roughly 50,000 years. Well, so a whole bunch of things are triangulating on that moment. One could say, as I've argued, that it was the eating of psilocybin mushrooms. You could make a more general statement and say that was a subset of the consequence of an omnivorous diet. But if I may, where exactly were these mushrooms a hundred thousand years ago? Well, the way I think about it is there was an incremental involvement that had punctuated breakthroughs in it. In other words, the slow meeting of mind, mushroom, social complexity, acoustical abilities linked to neurophysiological states didn't just smoothly proceed, it all came together, but then at a certain point it gelled. And this is this 50,000-year point where social understanding, technology, linguistic repertoires, depth of diet, you know... Well, you're clinging to this material stuff. I think we can... it's about time that we... Well, there will be a material component, even if you believe angels descended from on high. Well, I suppose that... OK, you have the software that draws the novelty wave. You're a novelty theorist. We might appeal to novelty theory as an explanatory strategy here, a cognitive strategy in dealing with the bifurcation 50,000 years ago. If you run the program back for a hundred thousand years, do you or do you not find a kink there in the novelty wave in 50,000 BC? No, it's not based on data, only extrapolation, but is there or isn't there... Well, I think there were a series of breakthroughs. For instance, 120,000 years ago, the modern Homo sapiens sapien form appeared... In other words, no. In short, no, there's no... Both and, I think. The invention of writing 9,000 years ago was an enormous breakthrough. But all of these things proceed out of the further integration, complexification of the nervous system in connection with the function of the imagination. I can't even believe this, that you're presenting yourself as a conventional materialist evolutionary theorist. The Galactarians who built the mushroom in Kenya. This is your pal, your favorite... You see, with the mushroom theory, you can always just say they encountered the mushroom and then it proceeded from there. But you can go one step back and say who placed the mushroom in their path. No, I'd give you a hand there. I'd give you a hand there. And that was the preceding civilization of Lemorians who... What's wrong with Lemorians? They died out at that point because they had poisoned the environment with toxic chemicals and created global climate warming, which resulted in a drying of the desert, the Sahara Desert, from which sprung forth a bloom of psychedelic mushrooms that had been hiding under the surface previously because it was too wet. That's why... The loud hum I hear is William of Ockham spinning in his grave. I see. You think that DNA and the expression of genes is a simpler explanation than a divine intervention at the level of the novelty wave. I think that the DNA is divine. Ah. But William of Ockham... Ah, escape from his trap. Rupert, what you as a middleman should... I think... You see, I can't quite get your position because the new hard-nosed skeptic that you're revealing to us here and other places... You see, it doesn't seem to fit too well with Terence McKenna on non-human entities, machine elves, etc. I mean, the idea of other kinds of consciousness, other forms of entity that are not just inside our brains and appearing in relation to deranged states of mind, pharmacologically induced. The idea that they're out there seems to me an essential part of most of what I've heard you say over many years. Well, I'm sort of getting into what I intend to say later, but I think the key thing is not to concentrate on materialist versus non-materialist explanations, but to realize that the new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information. And information is expressed in the DNA, it's expressed epigenetically in culture. What's happening is that information was running itself on a primate platform, but evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being, which we call language. And we think it's ours, and we think we control it. This isn't what's happening. It's running itself, it's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving toward its own conclusions. Now I've just shot my talk. And it's so early in the morning. Well, this is this damn drug I'm drinking. It makes you give it all away too soon. I think, I mean, the discussion so far has been remarkably earthbound. And if we assume that information is not confined to this planet, if we, to put it in your information terminology, if we assume that consciousness is not limited to the earth, if we assume that there are not only conscious beings on other planets, but also that other elements of the universe, like stars, suns, galaxies, may have minds or consciousness, which I do assume, then it becomes very likely that at some stage a consciousness on earth could link somehow with those higher forms of consciousness. Who knows how? Maybe by something like interplanetary telepathy, something of that kind. So if there's some link of human consciousness with other forms of consciousness in the universe, then when that contact was established, there would be a big transition. That it could have been propelled or kicked off by drugs, it could have been kicked off by some mutation that led to more nervous interconnections. But when it happens, this connection with other forms of consciousness would transform human nature. Yes. And it would fit with the facts, because there's a belief in the... You see, now we're off the planet at last. Can I remind you, Terence, of a quotation from the front pages of your first book, speculating that mushroom spores are intergalactic travellers, that they have a hard case impervious to ultraviolet rays that enables them to float on the galactic wind from planetary system to planetary system, bringing us, as Rupert suggests, linguistic communications from other life forms, including immaterial life forms, that they've been in conversation with in the past. I think that this is an approximate summary of your preface. But notice how materialist and space- and time-bound that hypothesis is. I could agree with everything Rupert said. I think now our intellectual toolkit has been enriched by the virtual confirmation of the idea that there is a Bell-type non-local aspect to the universe. So I do think we're in contact with all intelligence in the universe through the Bell non-local connection. But that means that it has no historicity, this connection. It has always been there, complete and entire. So why there is a sense of progressing toward it or it erupting through into normal Earth-bound affairs is not because someone in the Andromeda galaxy makes a decision, "Now we will reveal ourselves to the Earthlings." It's that the antenna system and the nervous system of the Earthlings evolved through a point where suddenly this became self-evident. Well, now we're coming to the question for the first time in the enlarged context in which we have not only all space but all time informing us. And here I may remind you of Father Bede's letter, which is quoted in the last chapter of our new book, where he challenges us to consider the mystical element, which he describes as more or less in the language of David Bohm's implicate order, that all time and all space somehow exist as an interconnected ball of intelligence, which is informed. Let's just assume such a thing. Nevertheless, the science of our colleagues is more or less a true story of evolution, that there was a change, that language did come upon us in a certain moment, that before that moment we didn't speak, afterwards we did, and so the question arises, and I think this is in my interpretation the question we started with here, how could it be that with or without a divine intervention that there is this more or less linear progress in human intelligence, culture, capability, tool-using, and exponential population growth that is correlated without any causal implication with the descent of the novelty wave? Why do we have this peculiar artifact, this is an observational fact, that there is this increase in complexity in civilization apparently looking for a spectacular transformation, which we are associating with the word millennium now. What's going on? Well, novelty theory would just say the universe is a complexity-conserving engine. Whatever complexity it achieves by any means, it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity. If you don't like novelty theory... Because the morphogenetic field never forgets. It forgets a little, but it can be set back, but it can never be set back to zero, and it always, once it gets out of the ditch, it heads back in the same direction. It has a vector field preference. And then you mentioned David Bohm. His idea of emergent properties seems to achieve the same end without a telos of novelty theory. He simply says when you complexify a system, new properties will emerge suddenly and unexpectedly that couldn't have been predicted. If you put emergence theory with novelty theory, you see that the universe could not but proceed along the line of complexification of morphogenetic expression, density of connectivity, and all the things that retard entropy and give rise to, in fact, the complex non-entropic, ordered, apparently teleologically informed cosmos that we're in. Well, now we see them, but what you've described is... Why do you laugh? It was one of those verbs was a bit extraordinary. Okay. That there is then revealed a kind of evolutionary theory as a cosmological hypothesis. This is a theological position, basically, that there is a timeless, implicate order, and there is life on planet Earth and in the rest of the universe which evolves according to this theoretical rule. By an increase of complexity, when something is revealed, there's a development. It's not forgotten. It builds upon that. And this mystical unit, well, knowing all, is not telling all, but revealing gradually because just that's the law of life as we know it. In three-dimensional space and time. With Rupert and I, really, from my point of view, the only difference between the morphogenetic field that he has enthusiastically proposed and the ideas of novelty theory is for Rupert it's pushed from the past. For me it's pulled from the future. Well, that's what Teddy was saying in this book. Well, but what you get in the end of the day is the same thing. It's just a matter of preference and how much of orthodoxy you want to grind against. The phobia against telos is an artifact of 19th century deism and doesn't go very deep. You described the complexification of the universe as self-evident, and I believe it is self-evident. And the failure of science to address this is what makes it so frustrating and imprecise so late in the game. But the trouble with the emergence view you've been putting forward is that it's still very earthbound. You see, there's obviously been a major emergence of complexity in human culture. There's also been a huge emergence of complexity in the Amazon jungle and the Malayan rainforest, arguably far greater than anything we've achieved through technology, and millions of species of beetles, insects, plants and so forth. But it seems to me that long before all these things happened on earth, we've got the possibility of much higher levels of consciousness outside the earth. And as you know, I'm a devotee of the idea of the sun as conscious, and the stars. If you take the materialist view that consciousness interfaces with the brain through complex electromagnetic patterns of activity, then those on the sun, which we're learning more and more about every day, have unbelievably complex chaotic patterns, resonant patterns of acoustic waves going through the sun, polar reversals every 11 years, resonant patterns of electromagnetic waves. My thinking about this was much influenced by a science fiction novel by Fred Hoyle, published in the 50s, called The Black Cloud, where Fred Hoyle shows that to imagine intelligence necessarily grounded either in copper wires and computers or in nerve cells and brains is a limitation of this. You could have an intelligence system working through a plasma, an electrically charged cloud, and indeed, I think, through something like the sun. So if the sun is in fact conscious, if stars have a kind of consciousness, then of course it raises questions, well, what do they think about, what do they do with this consciousness? But it's very likely that the kind of consciousness they have would be at a vastly higher level than our own. So when we're talking about the emergence of higher consciousness in human beings, it's not as if for the first time in the universe some higher level of consciousness emerges. It could be that for the first time in the history of the solar system, our minds somehow contact the sort of intelligence, much greater intelligence that exists out there. And because I think it's possible to think of the stars and the sun as conscious, and then galaxies as conscious, you don't need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind. There's plenty of lower level minds than the divine mind that could be out there. And of course traditional views of spirits and angels tell us that there are many, many, many innumerable levels of intelligence beyond our own, within the galaxy, many associated with the stars. So we don't necessarily have to have the idea it's all happened and emerged on earth through a complexification. We can have the thing we reach a point where there's like a spark passes between a terrestrial consciousness, a human one, with more interconnected halves of the brain, people in the first throes of mind-boggling mushroom trip, etc. But somehow, whatever happens, there's this like a spark, a connection established. And it seems to me that this hypothesis has the great advantage of actually accounting for what's believed all around the world, namely that there is some connection between human intelligence and that of the sky. Because in terms of imagination, you see, predators and... We, human beings, were both predators and prey, but so are lots of other animals. And presumably any hunting animal has to have the imagination and the ability to identify with the prey. In fact, Rene Tom, years ago, produced a mathematical model of predator and prey, where there has to be a kind of internalization of the prey in the predator's mind in order to get the right strategy. This is not specifically human, and it's not enough as a basis of the imagination. I think this connection with realms beyond the human would give such an enlarged scope for imagination that to take literally what so many people around the world say in their myths seems to me the simplest hypothesis. Well, I'm more friendly to this idea of non-biologically based forms of consciousness than I was the last time we talked, because of this fact I mentioned, that I now think wherever there is a sufficiently complex informational environment, the functions of life, self-replication, etc., etc., mutation, adaptation, can go on. But obviously most of the intelligence in the universe would be utterly incomprehensible to us because it is so different. So we're transducing virtually the entire hologram of possible intelligence in the universe, but the reason our fantasies of angels and aliens give us hominids with binocular vision who use acoustical speech, in other words, creatures very similar to ourselves, is because we only can recognize what is familiar in this universal information field. So we sail right past the star mind, the galaxy mind, to communicate with a race of winged hominids around Zanabal Ganubi Prime simply because they are enough like us that we can grok our possibility of a relationship. It seems to me that this is just very begging the question in the traditional and cheap fashion, because... Oh, good, Ralph. I mean, I'm all in favor of celestial intelligence, and in fact I could even entertain a conversation with a Pleiadian, I don't mind. But the question, I mean, we started with the problem of evolution, the evolutionary mind is in fact the title of our book, and the question of the evolution, the progress, or even the origin of all these things is our ultimate question. Now, if our view is local to planet Earth, we can say, OK, we're being taught by bolts from the blue, and we have these meddling celestial intelligence that are reaching out, pretend to be Bell, and tell us Bell's theorem, give us mushrooms, pretend to be sent from the solar wind, or whatever. But where do they come from? The evolutionary problem, then, is just transferred onto another more remote place. Now, as I understand Rupert's idea of the morphogenetic field, is that these other places are also in evolution, and the whole system is in co-evolution, and that is an attempt, I think, one of the first ones in the history of intelligent discourse on this subject, the first attempt to get rid of the hypothesis of timeless truth. But if you get rid of that hypothesis, you have a whole bunch of weird problems, such as then you have to talk about the speed of propagation of novelty or morphogenetic fields, and then you're slammed to the wall because you have to either come up with a number, which you fit into a mathematical architecture, or you say that it's instantaneous, which returns you to this holistic, more metaphysical thing. If you don't believe that it's coming from the Bell space, then you have a whole bunch of these kinds of problems, which I think intuitively make it too complicated. Let it be instantaneous. I mean, I think the whole question of time is in fact behind this problem, that we have this idea about time, and then we're trying to talk about a timeless. So one way to eliminate this cognitive dissonance is to say, OK, there is no timeless, it's all in co-evolution, and we're a little bit behind the evolution of the Pleiadians, and then, well, where does that come from? We're stuck with the problem. So you, I think, you're talking of the attractor at the end of time is more or less the beyond time, is the intelligence that it informs, that nourishes the accumulation of complexity as we go along, apparently, in time. Well, I think the attractor is complete in and of itself in another dimension. The process of history and biological evolution is the growing complex enough to grow toward the thing and understand it. So is our process of growth then nourished or not nourished by some flow of something that comes from this attractor at the end of time in another dimension? It contributes the trajectory of our approach. It defines the domain in which we are moving toward it. We couldn't even talk this without chaos theory. No, chaos theory stands behind this very powerful. Well, I don't know, Ralph, people have been talking about this for a long time before chaos theory came along. But in such a muddled fashion. Compared with the sublime clarity of our present conclusion. So I don't quite see why chaos theory is an essential ingredient. Forget chaos theory. I'm interested in the possibility that in your deepest musings on this problem you have rather avoided Father Bede's challenge to grapple with infinity. And that in the idea of the co-evolution of morphogenetic fields begs the question of the existence of a timeless or eternal truth, pattern, guidance or something which is... Well... But are you... I don't know... I mean, Father Bede used the word mystical, but of course he was a priest. I don't think he meant the essentially incomprehensible. In other words, I don't think we're going to get to a place where we then say from here on it is mystery and rational apprehension fails. My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious. Well, I mean... No, I think... I don't agree with that. I must say... I thought you might not, sir. Well... Well, we'd soon be out of business if we're talking at the edge of the unthinkable, if we actually... everything suddenly becomes thinkable. Even in principle? I think that given the nature of the human mind evolved to deal with large predators, hunting on African plains, gathering herbs, etc., dealing with social problems, human relationships, etc., the idea that this evolution has equipped us with minds and language and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it's come from, where it's going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole, seems to me a rather improbable supposition. And I think that the point about mysticism, or what the Greek church calls apophatic, the apophatic, is that the ultimate in the end does lie beyond what we can think. Our thinking can only take us so far. And this isn't just because we haven't got enough professors of mathematics yet, or it's only a matter of bigger computers and so forth. There are grave limits on how far a very limited and evolutionary bound conceptual apparatus can take us. We'd never be able to embrace, as you yourself pointed out, the kind of mentality of the sun or a galaxy, because its concerns are so much greater and more remote than our own, let alone the universe as a whole. But in principle, some other form of organisation could. In other words, these things are not sealed from understanding. In principle, they are simply difficult for primate-based minds running limited software at low hertz rate to accommodate. Yes, but presumably the solar mind, if there is one, could have a pretty good intuitive understanding of the minds of other suns. If the sun has a mind, part of its activity, I think, would be concerned with the solar system, if we like the brain of the solar system. But part of its activity would be concerned with its peer group, namely other stars. And then part of their activity would be related to the mind or purpose or telos of the entire galaxy. And those kinds of concerns, you know, the kind of relationship problems that our sun may be having with other suns, or double star systems like that of Sirius, the kind of... Relationship problems. (Laughter) Those are rather beyond the scope of human psychotherapy, or indeed human thought. There may be so many things going on, as indeed there are, at levels we don't really understand very well the world of the goldfish or the ant. So, there are certain limitations which I don't think are just a temporary limitation on what we can conceive or imagine. Well then, until we run out of energy to conceive and imagine, are we conceiving of the solar mind, if it exists, as evolving or fixed? No, it must evolve. It must evolve perhaps on a different time scale, which is the time scale of relationship in their own community, which is the 15 billion year time frame since the Big Bang. Is that what you're thinking? We're coming to the crux of it here. I think the evolution of the solar mind would be related to what happens here, because we're part of the solar system. And I would assume that because all planets and everything that's happening within the solar system feeds back and influences the solar mind, that it would somehow... It's not just the mind of the sun, it's the mind of the solar system. It's been evolving since the birth of the Milky Way and the moment of the candle. That's right. What's going on here is part of its evolution. We're within it and contributing to it. So, the morphogenetic field then of all and everything had a birth moment with the Big Bang? Is that what you're thinking? Well, I'm assuming that if we take the Big Bang theory to be... If we assume there was a Big Bang, I know you're very sceptical about the Big Bang. It's only a story, it's a myth. But if we take this creation myth of modern science, then that must be the birth of the field of the whole system. Yes. And modern physics in the unified field theory, super-string theory, tries to explain how you start with a unified ten-dimensional field that then evolves the other fields of nature within it. So, we thought that's standard physics. I mean, it's not part of my particular view of things. No, but the consciousness of this all and everything... I mean, the solar minds contribute to the consciousness of the Milky Way, which is one galaxy, which then has the psychotherapist in its relationship with the nearby galaxy. Yes, in the galactic cluster, they come in series and groups. And actually, there's a synchrony of thought due to the fact that Bell's theorem connects them from the Big Bang and so on. But isn't all you're saying is that the universe is a modular hierarchy from atom through cells, societies? I'm challenging you to answer where the morphogenesis comes from that leads to a complexity in things like the birth of life, if it's simply the co-evolution of a physical system since the Big Bang. Novelty theory hasn't answered this question. It comes from the future. To the satisfaction of your mind and all smaller. Well, at least to the satisfaction of someone. But it doesn't explain either the origin of the novelty wave itself, nor does it... You see, there are many models, of course, of cosmic evolution. One of them is that because you have the cosmic expansion, that for some reason the primal explosion, Big Bang, throws everything apart, so it's all moving apart, that means things cool down. As they cool down, more form and order can appear, and it literally makes more space for things to happen in. The arrow of time, the arrow of evolutionary time and the driving engine of evolution is the cosmic expansion, which means nothing can ever be stable, can ever stay the same, because the whole cosmos is unstable. It's always expanding and cooling. And given that, through all sorts of phase transitions, as you cool a plasma down, as atoms appear, and then as gases condense to liquids and liquids to solids, the cooling process involves the appearance of more order, more form. When there was less before, there was very little, the moment of the Big Bang. So the cooling and expansion more or less force the appearance of more structure, pattern, order. And you could say that that gives scope for creativity all the time. There's always the scope for new things to happen. And it's a long-standing debate among evolutionary theorists as to whether this is following a pre-established plan or being drawn towards an already existing future goal, or following a pre-existing set of laws or rules, like the novelty wave, or whether it's all being made up as it goes along. And I'm much influenced in my thinking by Bergson, you know, Henri Bergson, in his book Creative Evolution. He very strongly defends the idea it's all being made up as it goes along. That doesn't mean to say that around the evolutionary process are not minds and imagination, but it makes the creative process of evolution more interesting rather than less, because it's not decided what's going to happen next. There are imaginations at many levels, including human imaginations at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what's happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up. But without the goal being fixed in advance. No, I have no problem with that. I don't see how, for instance, someone could hypothesise that all the laws came into existence simultaneous with the Big Bang. For example, did the laws of gene segregation come into being a billion years before biology existed anywhere in the universe? That seems naive and preposterous. Whitehead had this idea of what he called the Aboriginal God. What we call natural laws are simply habits of a very ingrained sort, and habits can change. And in more dynamic regimes, the mind, the society, habits can change overnight. So what is given is that there shall be ever greater complexity. What is not given is how this complexity shall arrange itself or what the final end state will be. It's a story that's being told as it unfolds. It's a game whose one of the rules of which is the rules can change. How are we doing here, time-wise? Good. Real good. Good, good. [laughter] Well, we're getting nowhere. In other words, this is the problem. There's the watch in the desert. It's a ticking by itself, or God put it there, we don't know. The question posed at the beginning, we actually haven't progressed at all in settling, although it looks like there's a kind of convergence in that-- Is this right? No, I have a feeling we've actually made some progress. But I always have that feeling. [laughter] Well, the attractor at the end of time, then, as I gather, has in it simple rules of a board game that says the complexity is going to increase and how it's evolving and things like DNA rules and stuff. We can make up as we please as we go along. Whatever natural selection approves of will then come to pass. Complexity will increase. That's the only rule. And so, in fact, you agree that time is slowing down. Well, time is slowing down as the events potentially contained within any given moment exponentially expand. In other words, we're sort of in a situation of a spaceship falling into a black hole. From the point of view of a distant observer, the spaceship falls into the black hole. There's a flash of hard radiation, and the story is over. From the point of view of the people on the spaceship, the relativistic stretching of the timeline means you fall forever, and you never reach the conclusion. So, in fact, the consummation of the universe may be only 14 years away, but there may be enough time between now and then to reiterate the life of this universe a trillion to the trillionth times. Time is not a tyranny. It's a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into. Ha-ha. I think we've ground to a halt. 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