Present Future

so uh now i've lost my way here ah yes no no optimism so i sit in hawaii and i look at all

this and i try to contextualize it and and come out with a good story because i think the best

story will win so if you can if you can get together the best version of how it should

all come out so shall it be and i work at this because in the past i've been very very happy

with the results between my interior fantasy and the unfolding of historical developments

i mean i i wished for lsd and then it happened then i dreamed of the internet and then it

happened so i should keep at this uh and i i recently read a very interesting book called

a thousand years of nonlinear history by michael delanda and if you get a chance you should take

a look at this and he made the point which caused me to expand his point into this little thing i'm

going to tell you now but his point was that human beings are very involved in the movement of

geological material that as a species we move rocks around on a very large scale and of course it's

interesting that the early some of the earliest human structures are the most physically massive

and the way like the great pyramids um so delanda made this point about our relationship with the

the geograf geological stratigraphy of the earth and that cities were a kind of geological extension

of the process of crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit

i.e intelligent primates who are building these structures and uh i thought that was very

interesting i had never considered it before i'd all i've talked about virtual reality and i've said

that uh it's nothing new that ur was a virtual reality and chatol hiyuch was a virtual reality but done in stucco and fired ceramic and stone and that when the medium is so intractable as stone the epistemic assumptions that get formed about what reality is are very different than if you can build

at the click of a mouse button, but nevertheless it's the same. But embedded in my reading

of Delanda was I've been thinking a lot and I talked to you a lot last year about artificial

intelligences and minds which are not human, minds which are very different from us, intelligence

which is very different from us. While the naive are scanning the stars, our appliances have

become telepathic. There is a very strange kind of intelligence being called into existence

by ourselves, strangely enough, and this is the connection to Delanda, this artificial

intelligence which is being called into being by human activity, is made of the same materials

as Ur and Chatalyuk. It's made of ceramics, glasses, and metals. It's that, uh, so then I took

this on board and thought about it and I'm, I've sort of come to some kind of cyber pantheistic

Emersonianism, uh, which is, uh, here I'll give it to you as a headline and then work backwards

so that in case I forget what I'm saying, it won't be lost to suffering mankind.

The, the Earth's strategy for its own salvation is through machines, is what it is. And human

beings are some kind of, uh, we are the deputized spouse. We are the bride in this alchemical rarefaction

of glasses, ceramics, metals, and, uh, and volatile materials. Apparently, the Earth is like

some kind of an embryonic, uh, or fetal thing. And at the end of its gestation, what is happening

is it is ramifying its nervous system, is appearing in its developmental, in the unfolding of its

morphogenesis. And as we contemplate nanotechnologies and see ourselves working through bacteria and

this sort of thing at the engineering level, you have to be blind to not then reflect back

upon the fact that in some sense we are already working at that kind of level at the behest of

it is not clear who. Because nobody ever asked the question in quite this way before. The

answer to who, I think, is, is the Earth. And that what lies ahead at the end of the linear

tunnel of, of Western subjectivist, positivist, structuralist assumptions that we've been operating,

when we hit the end of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental space of cosmic evolution,

what we are going to find is that we are partners, actors, in a cosmic drama that involves the

Earth at one polarity and machines at the other polarity as the expression of the will of the

Earth toward a kind of self-reflective transcendence that is achieved through machine-human biotic

symbiosis. And that, and this is, you know, it won't, there will never be a headline which

says this. Some people won't even notice that it's happening because these large scale processes

can be described by many metaphors at many depths. But I'm telling you, I think this is what's

going on. The reason I like this story is because it's not a story about processes out of control.

It's not a story about human guilt. It's not a story full of we musts and we shoulds. It's a story

which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience field. In other words, biology, technology,

human culture, human traditional values, transcendent human extopian values. It's a story of things

on course on time and under budget. And I assume that's how nature really operates. And that we live inside

some kind of anxiety-producing culture that is a necessary, I don't want to say evil, but a necessary response

to conditions of stress. There are processes which let, you know, waste, nuclear waste buildup, urbanization,

land disturbance. There are processes which if allowed to run on indefinitely would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos.

But Confucius said no tree grows to heaven. And what he meant by that is it's fruitless to project any process to infinity

because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. If no fruit flies died in six months

the earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit flies. No, I don't think that's true.

But what an image.

Somebody once told me if the earth completely disappeared except for its nematodes that you could still see the outlines

of the continents if you were standing on the moon. I thought, now just, who gathered this back to all of you?

So then, to bring this back around a little, where is the psychedelic experience in all of this?

Well, it used to be called, or at one phase it was called, consciousness expansion. And consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an absolute necessity.

Because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology machines that are going to require super intelligent humans to direct and have discourse with them.

This is happening. It is already happening. I mean, the internet is this. I mean, it doesn't tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brush your teeth.

That's a half a second point.

I think it has to be the case in this.

I think it was one of the worst things like this.

What else do you think about it?

That's what I think about it.

It's a kind of a thing that I think about it.