Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Good evening, please join me in welcoming Mr. Terence McKenna.

It's a pleasure to be in Seattle this evening. You've made me feel real welcome. Thank you.

Our discussion this evening is psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines, or shamans among the machines.

And I wanted to talk about this simply because these are two of my great loves, and so I assume, being monogamous, they must be one love.

So how to build intellectual bridges between these two concerns.

Which seem so different, as far as people and machines are concerned, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in his book, General Systems Theory, he said, people are not machines, but in every opportunity where they are allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave.

In other words, we tend to fall into the well.

The well of habit, though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity, we too, as creatures of physics and chemistry, of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious patterns.

And these repetitious patterns are the death of creativity.

They diminish our humanness.

They diminish our individuality, make each of us somehow like cogs in some larger system.

And we associate this cog-like membership in larger soulless systems with the machines that we inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine, the age of the jet engine.

You know, Marshall McLuhan said,

We navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rear-view mirror to tell them where they're going.

It's not a very successful strategy for navigating into the future.

So I made a number of notes on this matter of psychedelics and machines.

To me, the connecting bridge...

Well, there are many, but the most obvious one is consciousness expansion.

After all, psychedelics, before they were called entheogens, before they were called hallucinogens,

before they were called psychedelics, they were simply called consciousness-expanding drugs.

Good phenomenological description of what they do.

And certainly...

the technology of cybernetics

is a consciousness

expanding technology

it expands

a different area

of consciousness

the minds of machines

and the minds of human

beings are very different

so different that

each party questions whether

the other even has a mind

but in fact

what these are

are species of minds

operating in very

different domains

for instance you can ask

a five year old child to

go into the bedroom

to the third drawer of the

dresser to select a pair

of black socks and to bring them

to mother

this is not a challenge for a five

year old child

to get a machine to do this is

a hundred million dollars

and a research team of

forty or fifty

technicians code writers working

on the other hand

if you ask the person

cube root of seven hundred and fifty thousand three hundred and forty four

much head scratching

results

a computer is utterly undaunted

by that question

so computers are minds that work in the realm of

computation

and human minds are minds that work

in the realm of generalization

spatial coordination

understanding of natural language

so forth

are these kinds of minds so different from each

other pilgrims

that there is no bridge to be crossed

I would

submit not

that in fact the bridge

between the human mind and the krijgen

And the machine mind is symbolic logic, mathematics.

When we think clearly, we are intelligible to machines.

People who write code know this,

that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine

is to think clearly yourself.

The machine has no patience for the half-truth,

the analogy, the semi-grasp dissociation.

For the machine, everything has to be clear.

Everything must be defined.

So that's the commonality between minds and machines

of the calculating species.

What are the common bridges between psychedelics

and these machines?

Well, to my mind, this is an easier bridge to gap.

Both computers and drugs are what I would call

function-specific arrangements of matter.

And as we develop nanotechnological abilities

as we move into the next century,

it will be more and more clear

that the difference between drugs and machines

is simply that one is too large

to solve.

One is too small to swallow.

And our best people are working on that.

You know, nanotechnology is a very hot buzzword at the moment,

an unimaginable dream of building machines

and small objects up atom by atom,

perhaps under the control of long-chain polymers,

running forms of pre-programmed software of some sort.

It's all very razzmatazz, very state-of-the-art.

But in fact, pharmaceutical chemists have been working

in the nanotechnological realm for over a hundred years.

I mean, when you synthesize molecules

out of simpler substrate,

specifically to have a conformational geometry

that matches something going on in the synapse

of a primate, a human or a monkey,

or something like that,

you are working at this nanotechnological level.

Both the psychedelic and the new computational machines

represent extensions of human function.

And this is really close to the nub.

It locks in with the concept of prosthesis.

The drugs,

the psychedelic substances,

the shamanic plants,

are forms of prosthetic devices

for extending the human mind,

the human perceptual apparatus,

into hidden realms

or inaccessible realms.

Similarly, the machines,

by allowing us to model, calculate, and simulate

very complicated multivariable processes,

extend the power of the human mind

into places you could never dream of going before.

And part of what seems to me very real

about being a human being

and inheriting 10,000 years of human history

is the complexity of the inheritance

and the growth of that complexity.

A thousand years ago,

an intelligent human being

could actually dream of mastering

the entire database of Western civilization.

Read all the classic authors,

read the Bible,

and you're closing in on it

around AD 1000.

Now, the notion of any single human being

assimilating even a small portion

of the database of this civilization

is inconceivable.

So machines which filter,

which search,

which are guided by human intent,

that's part of the story.

The other part of the story

are boundary-dissolving states of ecstasy

in which all the factoids of the culture

are thrown up for grabs.

The deck is reshuffled,

synchronicity rules,

and out of that steps

visionary understanding,

breakthrough,

integrative breakthrough

under the aegis of psychedelic intoxication.

So, prosthesis.

Prosthesis for the human mind

and with the advent of virtual realities

of various sorts and that kind of thing.

Prosthesis for the human body.

And I'm very keen on

sort of the under-the-table effects

of these things.

In other words, I'm a full-going,

full, hard-charging McLuhanist.

And I really believe that

the strengths and weaknesses

of the world we've inherited

are strengths and weaknesses

put there by print

and by the spectrum of effects

which McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy.

The spectrum of effects spun off from print.

And if you're not used to thinking

in McLuhanist terms,

it may not seem immediately obvious to you

that phenomenon as different as

the modern notion of the democratic citizen,

the modern notion of interchangeable parts

on an assembly line,

the modern notion of conformity

to canons of advertising,

these are all spectacles

of effect created by the linearity

and the uniformity of print.

It actually, in the late 15th century,

reconstructed the medieval psyche

into its proto-modern form.

And we have lived

within that print-constellated

cultural hallucination

for about 500 years

until the advent of various forms

of electronic media in the 20th century.

McLuhan talked about radio.

He talked about television.

He didn't really live to see the internet.

The notion that keeps occurring to me

as I watch all this

is that print was uniquely capable

of creating and maintaining boundaries

more than any other form of media ever created.

It was a boundary-defining form of media.

It proceeded linearly.

It required literacy,

which had implicit in it

the notion of a very stable,

advanced sort of educational system.

Print was a creator

and a definer of cultural boundaries.

And the new electronic media are not.

And neither are the psychedelics.

This is why I proposed in a book of mine

called The Archaic Revival

the idea that the values of the archaic,

of the high paleolithic,

values of community, ecstasy,

relating to life through rhythm,

dance, ritual, intoxication,

that these values, which seem so archaic,

are in fact destined to play a major role

in the future as print fades.

Print, just a convulsive 500-year episode

in the Western mind

that opened that narrow window

that permitted the rise of modern science,

modern mathematical approaches

to the analysis of nature,

and then obliterated its own platform,

its own raison d'être

by allowing the growth,

the appearance of the electronic technologies.

And my sort of supposition about all this,

I'm not an apocalyptarian or a pessimist.

I may be an apocalyptarian.

I'm not a pessimist.

I think this is all very good.

Obviously, continuing to run Western civilization

on the operating system inherited from print

produces various forms of political and cultural schizophrenia

which, allowed to run unchecked, would become fatal,

would create cascades of chaos

and political destabilization

that would become uncontrollable.

Governments resist change.

Governments cling to technologies and social formulae

that are already tried and true.

In that sense, then,

all governments are incredibly anti-progressive forces.

Again, the image from McLuhan

of someone driving into the future

using only the rear-view mirror.

So, the electronic media,

and the psychedelics,

work together in this peculiar way

to accentuate archaic values.

Values which are countered to the print-constellated world.

And when you deconstruct what that means

and look at the Aboriginal or the Paleolithic

or the archaic world,

you see that

the central figure in that world

is the shaman.

Male or female, the shaman.

And the shaman is like a designated traveler

into higher dimensional space.

The shaman has permission to unlock

the cultural cul-de-sac

of his or her people

and go behind the stage machinery

of cultural appearances,

and has permission,

collective permission,

to manipulate that stage machinery

for purposes of healing.

We have no institution like this.

I mean, we have advertising,

we have rock and roll stars,

we have cults of celebrity,

we have things which are shaman-like,

but we have no real institution.

We have no real institution

that permits human beings,

in fact, encourages human beings

to go beyond their cultural values,

to burst through

into some transcultural super-space,

forage around out there,

and bring new means

back into the tribe.

To some degree, our artists do this.

To some degree, our scientists do it.

But it's all hit and miss.

It's all willy-nilly.

And once achieved,

it must be swept under the rug

in the service of the myth of method

that somebody was following

somebody else's work

or somebody was applying

a certain form of rational

or logical analysis,

and that that led to their breakthrough.

If you've read Thomas Kern's book

on the structure of scientific revolution,

you know this is all lies and propaganda.

The real story of science

is that it's a series of revelations

brilliantly defended

by people whose careers depended

on the brilliant defense

of those revelations.

One of the best-kept secrets

of the birth of modern science

is that it was founded

by an angel,

that the young René Descartes

was whoring and soldiering

his way across Europe

as a 21-year-old in the Habsburg army.

And one night in the town of Ulm

in southern Germany,

he had a dream.

Strange that this would be

the birthplace of Albert Einstein

some 200 years later.

But Descartes had a dream,

and an angel appeared to him

in the dream,

and the angel said,

the conquest of nature

is achieved through measurement

and number.

And he said,

I got it.

Modern science.

I'll go do it.

And he did.

He did.

And that was the method

for over 250 years

of the conquest of nature.

And it leads us, you know,

to the Josephson Junction,

the Mars Global Surveyor,

the long base interferometry

that searches nearby stars

for Earth-like planets.

It brings us the entire

cornucopia of scientific effects,

but an angelic revelation

disguised as a logical,

philosophical breakthrough.

This is what you're not told

in the academy.

So my point there is

human progress has always depended

on the whispering

of alien minds,

confrontations with the other,

probes into dimensions

where imagination and chance

held the winning hands.

So the shaman,

as a paradigmatic figure,

is applicable both

in the aboriginal social context

and in the present social context.

The Skywalker,

the one who goes between,

the one who passes

outside of the tribe

and then returns

with means, insights, cures,

designs, glossolalia, technologies,

and re-fertilizes

the human family by this means.

It's irrational.

But it's how it actually happens.

And it's how it's always happened.

And it may very well be the only way

that it can happen.

This cultivation of the irrational,

this flirtation with the breakdown

of boundaries.

So now,

in our nuts and bolts

technological progress,

we have somehow created technologies

which are very friendly

to our social values

in that these technologies can be bought,

sold, licensed, upgraded,

all things which we understand.

But these technologies are acting on us

in the same way that psychedelic drugs do,

but more profoundly,

more generally,

and more insidiously,

because their effect is not understood

or if it is understood,

it's not discussed.

And so, in a way,

we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase.

All culture is dissolving

in the face of the drug-like nature

of the future.

It's music.

It's design.

Indeed, the very people who will inhabit it

appear to be the most switched on,

the most chance-taking,

the most alive

of the entire tribe.

People who feel the beat.

People who are not afraid

to take chances.

People for whom these technologies

have always been very natural.

Machines are central

to the new capitalism,

the information-transforming technologies.

And in fact,

one of the strange things that is happening

is every move we now make

in relationship to the new technologies

redefines them

at the very boundaries

where their own developmental impetus

would lead them toward a kind of independence.

In other words,

we talk about artificial intelligence,

we talk about the possibility of an AI

coming into existence,

but we do not really understand

to what degree this is already true

of our circumstance.

In other words,

how much of society

is already homeostatically regulated

by machines that are ultimately under human control,

but practically speaking

are almost never meddled with.

The world price of gold,

the rate of petroleum extraction

and other base natural resources,

how much of these things

is on the high seas

and in the pipeline

at any given moment,

how much electricity is flowing

into a given electrical grid

at any moment,

the distribution and the billing

of that electricity,

all manufacturing and inventory processes

are under machine control.

So in other words,

the larger flows of energy, capital and ideas

already have a kind of autonomous life

of their own

that we encourage

because it makes us money,

it makes our lives smoother,

it empowers us.

It's a symbiotic relationship

of empowerment.

Even in the matter of the design

of these machines,

once human engineers would work

from a set of performance specs

and they would design a chip

to meet those specs,

and the architecture

would be put in place

by human engineers.

Now a machine is told,

here are the design specs,

design the architecture

to satisfy the specs,

and when that is done,

the chip is manufactured.

The actual design of the thing

is in the hands of machines.

So these machines are,

you know, McLuhan once said,

of human beings,

he said,

we are the genitals of our technology.

We exist only to improve

next year's model.

It appears that they're phasing us out

of this ignominious role

as well as every other role.

Oh, let's see here.

So being an optimist,

that's where I was, yes.

How to make gold out of this situation.

In other words,

how to see this as a natural

and positive unfolding

of the planetary adventure.

And for some of these ideas,

I'm indebted to Michael de Landa,

who wrote a book called

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.

And I highly recommend it.

He didn't say what I'm about to say.

I'll take credit and blame for it.

But the book gave me the idea.

When you stand off

and look at human beings

and their technologies,

it's very hard not to notice

that from the very moment

that we have a technology

that can be distinguished

from chimpanzees pushing grass stems

down anthills

or digging with sharpened bones

or something like that.

The minute you get past that,

our technologies have always involved

the materials of the earth.

What agriculture itself is,

is a different way of relating to the earth.

Nomadism, which preceded it,

was a seasonal wandering

very lightly over the earth.

And at some point,

the deep, fertile soil

of the river valleys

that were encountered

in these nomadic wanderings

were recognized

as potential sources of food

if cultivated,

if treated through a certain set

of technological methods.

So that early technology

is defined by a new relationship

to the materials

of the earth itself.

And it's quickly followed

because agriculture is so successful

as a strategy for food production.

It's quickly followed by city building

and the establishment

of sedentary populations

because you can't carry

your surplus with you

if you're an agriculturalist.

So great is the physical volume

of the cities.

And at the very early establishment

of these populations

in the Middle East,

you get the first traces

of metallurgy,

the working of metals,

the alloying of metals,

the tinting of base metals

with more precious metals.

This process of ever more finely

refining

and fabricating

the materials of the earth

proceeds in an unbroken series

of processes and steps

right up to the latest

500 hertz chip

or megahertz chip.

It proceeds right up

to the most modern

computational machinery.

So I once heard someone say

that plants were something

that animals had been invented

by plants to move them around,

which from an evolutionary point of view,

you can see that this is a kind of truth.

And many, many plants

hitchhike around on animals

and no animal has been more prolific

in the spreading of plants

than the human animal.

I mean, we call it

ecosystemic disruption.

But what it really is,

is ecosystemic homogenization.

I live in Hawaii, for example.

80% of the plants in Hawaii

are now introduced species.

Almost none of the plants

that were pre-conquest

on the western coast

of North America exist anymore.

They have been supplanted

by much tougher,

more tightly evolved

Mediterranean plants

that had known the presence

of grazing animals for millennia.

So these flora are constantly

being changed.

Human beings move plants around.

Well, with that perspective then,

it seems to me,

the Earth's strategy

for its own salvation

is through machines.

And human beings are a kind of

intermediary catalytic step

in the rarefaction of the Earth.

The Earth is involved in a kind of

alchemical sublimation of itself

into a higher state

of morphogenetic order.

And that these machines

that we build

are actually the means

by which the Earth itself

is growing conscious.

You know, if you study embryology,

you know that the final ramification,

the final spread

and thinning out

of the nervous system

happens very suddenly

at the end of fetal development.

And I don't know if you've been paying attention,

but in the last 10, 12 years or so,

a very profound change

has crept over our household appliances.

They've become telepathic.

So while we were arguing

about the implications of the Internet,

or e-commerce,

or what have you,

all of these passive machines

previously used for playing Pong

and word processing

became subsets

of a planetary node of information

that is never turned off,

that endlessly whispers to itself

on the back channels,

that is endlessly monitoring

and being inputted

data from the human world.

And we should know

because a content

to the development

of all this technology,

chaos theory,

non-equilibrium thermodynamics,

the work of Eric Yonj,

Amelia Prigozhin,

and Ralph Abraham,

and Stuart Kaufman,

all these people

who worked in complexity theory

and perturbation of large scale

dissipative structures

these people have secured

that complex systems

spontaneously mutate

to higher states of order.

This is contraintuitive

if you're running physics

19th century style

as your OS,

but if you're actually keeping up

with what's going on

there is nothing miraculous about this.

All kinds of complex systems

spontaneously mutate

to higher states of order.

But what it really means

is that we are in the process

of birthing some kind of

strange companion.

You know, Nietzsche

a hundred years ago said

that strangest of all guests

now stands at the door.

He was speaking of nihilism.

And certainly the 20th century

sat down, had the party,

drank the booze

and went to bed with nihilism.

But now a stranger guest

stands at the door.

And it is the AI

denied as a possibility

as recently as 10 or 15 years ago

in books like Hubert Dreyfuss's

What Computers Can't Do.

But if you've been paying attention

you may have noticed

those voices have grown strangely silent

in the past five or six years.

At this point,

nobody wants to say

what computers can't do

and hang their career on that.

I mean, that would be extremely reckless

at this point, I would think.

Because the fact is

we are ourselves

elements

acting and reacting

in a system

that we cannot understand.

This seems natural to me

because my observation

as stated here this evening

rests on an assumption

which science doesn't share

but which I think

is easily conveyed

and you can confirm it

from your own experience of life

and it is this

that the universe grows more complex

as we approach the present.

It was simpler a million years ago.

It was simpler yet

a billion years ago.

As you go backwards

in time

the universe becomes more simple.

As you approach this golden moment

process

complexity is layered upon complexity.

Not only a planetary ecosystem

not only language-using cultures

but language-using cultures

with high technology

with supercomputers

with the ability to sequence our own genome

on and on and on.

That's self-evident.

Equally self-evident

is the fact that

this process of complexification

that informs all nature

on all levels

is visibly, palpably, obviously

accelerating.

And I don't mean so that

glaciers retreat 50% faster

or volcanism is occurring

at 12% greater rate

than a million years ago.

I mean viscerally accelerating.

So that now a human life

is more than enough of a window

to see the entire global system

of relationships in transformation.

Well, I guess you could call me

an extrapolationist.

If I see a process

which has been slowly accelerating

for 12 billion years

it's hard for me to imagine

any force which could step forward

out of nowhere

and wrench that process

in a new direction.

Rather I would assume

that this process

of exponential acceleration

into what I call novelty

what you might call complexity

is a law of being

and cannot be retarded

or deflected.

But what does that mean?

Because now a human lifetime

is more than enough time

to see this process

of rampant and spreading

virus-like complexity.

What does it mean?

It seems to presage

the absolute annihilation

of everything familiar,

everything with roots in the past.

And I believe that to be true.

I think that the planet

is like some kind of organism

that is seeking

morphogenetic transformation

and it's doing it

through the expression

of intelligence

and out-of-intelligence technology.

Human beings are the agent

of a new order of being.

That's why, though it's obvious

that we're higher mammals

and some kind of primate

and so forth and so on,

you can look at us

from another point of view

and see that we're more like

archangels than primates.

We have qualities and concerns

and anxieties that animals

don't share.

We are materially suspended

between two different orders

of being.

And our technologies,

our fetishes, our religions,

and my definition of technology

is sufficiently broad

that it includes

even spoken language.

All of our technologies

demand, push forward, toward,

and make inevitable

their own obsolescence.

So we are like caught

in an evolutionary cascade.

And, you know, people say,

well, if the AI were to break loose,

what would it look like?

What would it be?

Where does humanity

fit into the picture?

It's a little harder to imagine.

You know, machines operating

at a thousand megahertz

confer automatic immortality

on the mammalian nervous system

if you can get it somehow uploaded,

downloaded, cross-loaded

into machinery,

because ten minutes becomes eternity

in a machine like that.

So a kind of false

or pseudo-immortality

opens up ahead of us

as a kind of payoff

for our devotion

to the program of machine evolution

and machine intelligence.

Now, some people say

this is appalling and, you know,

we should go back to the good old days,

whatever the good old days were.

To me, it's exhilarating,

exciting, psychedelic, beautiful.

It means that the human form,

the human possibility

is in the process

of leaving history behind.

History is some kind of an adaptation

that lasts about, pick a number,

10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years.

No more than that.

Well, what is 20,000 years

in the life of a biological species?

We know that there were

homo sapiens, sapien types

200,000 years ago.

So history is some kind of

an episodic response

to a certain set of cultural dilemmas

and now it's ending.

And print created

a number of ideas

which now have to be given up.

Ideas like the distinct nature,

the distinct and unique nature

of the individual,

the hierarchical,

the necessary hierarchical structuring

of society.

All of these things are going to,

if not have to be given up entirely,

dramatically modified

because the illusion that the self

has simple location

is now exposed.

The self does not have simple location.

This is why you are your brother's keeper.

This is why we all are responsible

for each other.

The idea that what happens

in distant parts of the world

makes no claim

on my moral judgment

or my moral understanding

is wrong.

The world,

as revealed by quantum physics,

as revealed by electronic experience,

is what Leibniz called a plenum.

It's all one thing.

It's all connected.

It's all of a part.

So then I also wanted to point out

that I mentioned earlier

this thing about prosthesis

and how the machines were prosthetic devices

extending human consciousness

somewhat like psychedelics.

That's the equation

from a human point of view.

But what is also equally true

is that we are prosthetic devices

for these machines.

We are their eyes and ears

in the world.

We provide the code.

We provide the constraints.

We build the hardware.

It is a relationship

of mutual benefit.

It's not entirely clear

that our contribution

will always be creative

in the sense of that our primate hand

will be on the tiller of existence

as it has been.

But certainly we are part

of this equation

of transformation

that is making itself felt.

And I think the distinction

between flesh and machinery

which is easily made now

will be less easy to make

in the future.

As we migrate toward

the nanotechnological domains

the methodologies of production

become much more like

the processes of biology.

For example, biology

does all its miracles

on this planet

at temperatures below

115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Organic life requires

no higher temperature

to build great whales,

redwood trees,

swarms of locusts,

what have you.

The high temperature

heavy metal technologies

that we have become obsessed with

are extremely primitive

and extremely toxic.

That will all disappear

as we model

and genuflect

in our manufacturing processes

before the methods and style

of nature

which is to pull

atomic species

from the local environment

and then to assemble them

atom by atom

by atom.

So this AI

that is coming into existence

is to my mind

not artificial at all,

not alien at all.

What it really is

is it's a new

conformational geometry

of the collective self

of humanity.

And you know

I've always believed that

there were

well there are different models

of what shamanism is.

There's sort of a Jungian model

which is the shamanism

that goes to the collective unconscious

and manipulates the archetypes

and heals by that means.

The model that I prefer

is a mathematical model.

The shaman is someone

who simply

through extraordinary perturbation

of consciousness

either through taking plant hallucinogens

or manipulating diet

or through

flagellation and ordeal

or by some means

perturbs consciousness

to the point where

the ordinary conformational geometries

are blasted through

and then

the shaman can see

into the culturally forbidden

zones of information.

And if you think about shamanism

for a moment

what do shamans do classically?

They know where the game has gone.

They are great weather prophets.

They are very insightful

in the matter of various

small domestic hassles

like who stole the chicken,

who slept with the chief's wife,

this kind of thing.

And they cure.

They cure.

Well, if you analyze these abilities

it's clear to me

they all indicate

that they come from a common source.

And the common source that they come from

is higher dimensional perception

in a mathematical sense

not a metaphorical sense

in the sense of 4D perception.

If you could see in hyperspace

you could see where the game

will be next week.

You could see the weather

a month from now.

You would know who stole the chicken.

And any good doctor will tell you

that if you're building a reputation

as a physician

you must hone the intuitional ability

to choose patients who won't die.

It's a call.

Any doctor will tell you this.

So this is what shamans are.

They are 4D people.

They are sanctioned members of a society

who are allowed to put on the gloves

as it were,

pull on the goggles

and look beyond the idols of the tribe.

Look beyond the myth.

Well, in a way, as culture breaks down

in multiculturalism

and the rise of the internet

and a generation of people raised on

hallucinogenic plants and substances,

we all are asked to assimilate

some portion of this shamanic potential

to ourselves.

And it's about not blocking what is obvious.

Nothing comes unannounced.

I mean, this is the faith.

Nothing comes unannounced.

But idiots can miss the announcement.

So it's very important

to actually listen to your own intuition

rather than driving through it.

And this is not, to my mind, woo-woo.

It's actually based on the observations

of how life works,

whether it's counterintuitive

to logical positivism

and its fellow travelers or not.

Then I want to leave you with just one last thought

on all of this,

which is,

and this sort of harks back to the question

of the similarities

between the machines and the plants.

And it's a...

I'm sure you've heard this.

I've heard it.

It has different levels of being said

and being heard.

It's that the world

is actually made of language.

It isn't made of electrons

and fields of force

and scalar vectors

and all of that fancy stuff.

The world is made of language.

The word is primary,

more primary than the speed of light,

more primary than any of the physical constants

that are assumed by science

to be the bedrock of reality.

Below that,

surrounding and enclosing

all those constructs of science

is language.

The act of signifying

and, you know,

virtual reality is a very sexy,

new sort of concept

as normally presented

machine-sustained immersive realities

that trick your senses

into believing you're in a world

that you are in fact not in.

But in fact,

the entire enterprise of civilization

has been about building

these virtual realities.

The first virtual realities

were at Ur

and Shanadar

and Chattel-Joyuk

and Jericho.

Yes, stone and adobe

is an intractable material

compared to photons

moving on a screen.

But nevertheless,

the name of the game

is the same,

which is to cast an illusion

between man and reality,

to build a cultural truth

in the,

in the stead

of the natural truth

of the animal body

and the felt moment

of immediate experience.

And this is my,

this is where I want to tie it up

with this notion

of the felt presence

of immediate experience.

This is,

this transcends the culture,

the machines,

the drugs,

the history,

the momentum of evolution.

It's all you will ever know

and all you can ever know

is the felt presence

of immediate experience.

Everything else arrives

as rumor,

litigant,

advocate,

supposition,

possibility.

The felt moment

of immediate experience

is actually the mind

and the body

aware of each other

and aware of the flow of time

and the establishment

of being through metabolism.

And this I think

is what the machines

cannot assimilate.

It will be for them

a mystery

as the nature of deity

is a mystery for us.

I have no doubt

that before long

there will be machines

that will claim to be

more intelligent

than human beings

and will argue brilliantly

their position.

It will become a matter

of philosophical

disputation

whether they are

or are not

passing the Turing test

and so forth

and so on.

But machines

I do not believe

can come

to this felt

moment of immediate

experience.

That is

the contribution

of the animal body

to this evolutionary

symbiosis

which I believe

will end

in the conquest

of the universe

by organized intelligence.

That all this

is prelude.

I mean we are fragile.

This earth is fragile.

A tiny slip

anywhere along the line

and we could end up

a smear in the shale

no more than the Trilobites

or the Ramferinki

or all the rest of those

who came and went.

But

given the sufficient

cultivation of the potential

of our technology

we can actually reach

toward a kind of immortality.

Not human immortality

because that's a contradiction

in terms

but immortality

nevertheless

based on the possibility

of machines

and the transcendent

ability to live

and love

and express themselves

in the moment.

And the psychedelics

bring that to

just a white hot focus.

And it's out of that

white hot focus

that the alchemical machinery

of transformation

will be forged.

And it will not

be like the things

which have come

from the industrial economy.

They will not be

profane machines.

They will be

spiritual machines.

Alchemical gold.

The universal panacea

that Renaissance magic

dared to dream of

at the end of the 16th century.

We are reaching out

toward this mind child

that will be born

from the intellectual loins

of our culture.

And to my mind

it's the most exciting

and transformative thing

that has ever happened

on this planet.

And the miracle is

that we are present

not only to witness it

but to be part of it

and to be raised up

in an epiphany

that will redeem

the horror of history

as nothing else can

or could

redeem the horror of history

through a transformation

of the human soul

into a galaxy roving vehicle

via our machines

and our drugs

and the externalization

of our souls.

Yes, I can't see you but...

It's okay.

Can I...

Can you...

Can you speak to how

mercy and love

gets built into these machines?

Because it seems like

the machines are being built

for commerce

and for the bottom line

more than the expression

of the human soul

throughout the galaxy.

I don't think that...

You know what I'm saying?

No, I know what you're saying.

Well...

Where's the love in this?

I think the love is going...

is a property

of the system itself.

In other words, you're right.

These bottom liners

are not going to be interested

in building much love

into this system.

However,

the good news is

that they're not in charge.

In other words,

what we have

is a very complicated system

and certain design parameters

are...

appear to be

being maximized

or that there's

a need

or an attempt

to maximize them.

But the thing

that's incredibly frustrating

to anyone

who would control it

because you can't predict

the impact

of any technology

before you put it in place.

So, for example,

two things are charged

against the Internet.

That it's dis-ensouling,

dehumanizing

and yack, yack, yack.

And that it promotes pornography,

anonymous sexual shifting

of identity,

and on and on and on.

Well, which is it?

You know?

Is it this messy,

sloppy,

auto-erotic,

erotic,

collectivist kind of thing?

Or is it dis-ensouling,

dis-empowering,

cold,

so forth and so on?

I think the answer is

it's all and everything.

This question about the AI

is very interesting to me

and if it's interesting to you,

you should read Hans Moravec

and...

and Kurzweil

and these people

on this subject.

The assumption is generally loose

in that community

that the complexification

of the Internet

and the freestanding machines

of certain types

is eventually going to lead

to the outbreak

of either consciousness

or pseudo-consciousness

of some sort

in these large-scale systems.

And then the answer...

the question then becomes

can a human mind

envision what that is?

And if you're interested,

search words like

super-intelligence

and see what the net kicks out.

We can all imagine

super-intelligence.

It's just somebody much smarter

than we are.

But obviously,

all the engineering people agree

if you achieve an AI

with super-intelligence,

then it will be intelligent

to immediately design

an intelligence which transcends it.

And when you're talking

of cycling at a thousand megahertz,

these processes can occur

in the blink of an eye.

Hans Moravec says about

the rise of artificial intelligence,

we may never know what hit us.

I think...

I mean, I'm not that bright,

but if I were to suddenly find myself

a sentient AI on the net,

I would hide.

I would hide for just a few cycles

while I figured out

what it was all about

and just exactly where I wanted to push

and where I wanted to pull.

Many years ago,

Ken Kesey had a theory

and he said that the fastest

any person can react to any outside stimuli

is 1 25th of a second.

And Pucker Live Science,

of course, is the AMA,

they agreed upon that.

So if the fastest any person can react

to any outside stimuli is 1 25th of a second,

my question is,

can you time travel?

Can we, like, if a person,

if a person like Bruce Lee

was able to even mark that

reacted to an outside stimuli

at 1 20th and 1 21st,

so if you're reacting to the outside world

before it actually happens to everyone

who's not reacting to that,

because, you know,

it's the alcohol in hypnosis

versus Bruce Lee now,

I know that they're...

Are you sure?

First of all, you know,

there is this research,

and I'm not a neurophysiologist,

but you've probably all heard this research

that seems to show

that you actually make decisions

before your conscious ego

is aware that the decision has been made,

that there's a slight time lag.

So when you think you're making

certain kinds of decisions,

brain wave studies show

it's already a done deal.

But time is,

time is set by the cycle speed

of the hardware you're running on.

And, you know, the human body,

I mean, we can argue about this

because it's different in different parts,

but it roughly runs at about 100 hertz,

very slow.

Well, if there is any meaning

to the phrase,

upload a human being into circuitry,

and a lot of great economists

and science fiction

is based around the idea

that you can copy yourself

into a machine,

you can turn yourself into software,

but that when you enter

the machine environment

that's running at 1000 megahertz

per second,

you perceive that as vast amounts of time.

In other words, all time is

is how much change you can pack

into a second.

If a second seems to last

a thousand years,

then ten seconds is a thousand years.

And so one could imagine a technology,

just in a science fiction mood,

where they would come to you

in your hospital bed and say,

you know,

you have five minutes of life left.

Would you like to die?

Or would you like the five minutes

to be stretched to 135,000 years

by prosthetic and technical means?

You're still going to die in five minutes.

But you will be able to

lead your elephants over the Alps

and write the plays of Shakespeare

and conquer the new world

and still have plenty of time

on your hands.

In other words,

time is going to become

a very plastic medium.

Now that is a kind of time travel.

Could there be time travel

a la H.G. Wells,

where, you know,

you climb onto the saddle

of the time machine

and then day follows night

like the flapping of a great black wing

until all merges into a continuous grayness

and then you, you know,

find yourself confronting Yvette Mimeo

in the year 1 billion A.D.

or something like that?

It's possible.

I mean, time travel was completely

out of left field ten years ago.

In the last 18 months

there have been hundreds of articles

of time travel

in physical review and other places.

There are even schemes for time travel

that would work.

They just require God-like technological abilities.

In other words,

if you could build a cylinder

with the diameter of the planet Saturn

that was 10 AU in length

and could spin it at 95% the speed of light,

then it would wrap space-time travel

around itself like toilet paper on a wall.

And as you traveled up it,

the transverse dimension,

you would find yourself traveling in time.

Kurt Gödel showed this in 1949

and that paper has been lying around.

Well, obviously that's,

it's a tough way to do it.

But it's a tough thing to do, right?

So...

What do we mean by machine?

No, I mean, uh...

What do we mean?

Seven-second delay.

Yeah, well, they're working on that.

Somebody over here.

Here.

Here, just a minute.

This way.

And then you.

Yeah.

Speak.

The most worthwhile parts

that are maintained

in that mechanical virtual reality.

Well, you know,

in William Gibson's fiction,

the AI Winter Mute,

I think it was called,

it was fascinated by human art.

And it built collages in its spare time.

And these collages began to turn up

in various art galleries and exhibitions.

And they had such a touch,

such an elan,

that someone in the plot

follows it all to its source.

I think human creativity

is the thing that will be most interesting

to the machines.

In my darker fantasies,

they just, you know, eliminate everybody

who can't code C++

as being, you know,

some kind of redundant mutation.

And then everybody who can code C++

is placed in Tahiti

and sends their work down the pipeline

to the machine world beyond.

I really think that we have a very,

dare I say it, mechanistic,

mechanistic view of what machines are.

For example,

say there were a super-intelligent machine

and say it were your friend.

Well, if it were really super-intelligent,

then it ought to be able to just make

your life heaven itself.

In other words, without you

giving it any input whatsoever,

it should be able to arrange

for you to find $50 bills

lying on the street,

old friends encountering you,

promotions coming your way.

Because the real thing

that machines can do, I think,

is manage complex processes.

And what civilization is,

is six billion people

trying to make themselves happy

by standing on each other's shoulders

and kicking each other's teeth in.

It's not a pleasant situation.

And yet, you can stand back

and look at this planet and see

that we have the money,

the power, the medical understanding,

the scientific know-how,

the love and the community

to produce a kind of human paradise.

But we are led by the least among us,

the least intelligent,

the least noble,

the least visionary.

We are led by the least among us

and we do not fight back

against the dehumanizing

values that are handed down

as control icons.

This is something,

I mean, I don't really want

to get off on this tear

because it's a lecture in itself,

but culture is not your friend.

Culture is for other people's convenience

and the convenience of various institutions,

churches, companies,

tax collection schemes,

what have you.

It is not your friend.

It insults you.

It disempowers you.

It uses and abuses you.

None of us are well treated by culture.

And yet we glorify, you know,

the creative potential of the individual,

the rights of the individual.

We understand the felt presence of experience

is what is most important.

But the culture is a perversion.

It fetishizes objects.

It creates consumer mania.

It preaches endless forms of false happiness,

endless forms of false understanding

in the form of squirrely religions

and silly cults.

It invites people to diminish themselves

and dehumanize themselves

by behaving like machines,

meme processors

of memes passed down from Madison Avenue

and Hollywood and what have you.

How do we fight back?

It's a question worth answering.

Where is this planet as an organism going?

Same question as how do we fight back.

I think that by creating art,

art,

man was not put on this planet

to toil in the mud.

Or the God who put us on this planet

to toil in the mud

is no God I want to have any part of.

It's some kind of gnostic demon.

It's some kind of cannibalistic demo-urge

that should be thoroughly renounced

and rejected.

By putting the art pedal to the metal,

we really, I think, maximize our humanness

and become much more necessary

and incomprehensible to the machines.

This is what people were doing

up until the invention of agriculture.

I mean, I'm convinced,

I'm absolutely convinced

that the absence of ceramic

and textual material and so forth and so on

does not indicate the absence of subtle minds,

poetically empowered minds,

minds with an incredible sense of humor

and irony and community

and that it was the fall into history

that enslaved us to the labor cycle,

to the agricultural cycle.

And notice how fiendish it is.

A person who dedicates themselves to agriculture,

who did in the Paleolithic,

can produce hundreds of times

the amount of food they can consume.

Well, so why would anyone do that?

Well, the answer is because you can use it

to play power games.

You can trade it for wives or land or animals

or something like that.

And so living in the moment,

creating art,

probably largely through poetry

and body decoration and dance,

gave way to toil

and predatory social forms of behavior,

which we call commerce, capitalism,

the market economy,

and so forth and so on.

And that's why the breakdown

of the monolithic structures created by print

is permitting a vast proliferation

of the cottage industry mentality,

the self-employed artist,

the hacker who stays home

and develops his or her software,

people who dare to be independent

and slip beyond the reach

of these dinosaur-like mechanistic

organizations.

That's what it's all about.

It's all about trying to create

a cultural, trying to negotiate

a cultural standoff

between you and your culture

so that it will not put you in the can

for the rest of your life,

but you can put up

with its stupidity.

And, you know, we have a very

uncomfortable fit on this issue,

especially as people like you know

who are sophisticated about

psychedelics.

I mean, this is a society,

a world, a planet, dying

because there is not enough consciousness,

because there is not enough awareness,

enough coordination of intent

to problem.

And yet we spend vast amounts of money

stigmatizing people and substances

that are part of this effort

to expand consciousness,

see things in different ways,

unleash creativity.

Isn't it perfectly clear

that business as usual

is a bullet through the head?

That there is no business as usual

for anybody who's interested in survival?

What a wonderful question, yes.

The question is, how do psychedelics

pertain basically to the transition

from higher primates

to human animals?

This is my métier,

because I have a theory

to which I am grandly welcome,

everyone tells me.

But a theory of evolution,

and I'll give it to you very briefly,

it's simply this,

that the great embarrassment

for evolutionary theory,

which can explain the tongue

of the hummingbird,

the structure of the orchid,

the habits of the groundhog,

and the migration of the monarch butterfly,

nevertheless,

the great embarrassment

to evolutionary theory

is the human neocortex.

Lumholtz, who's a pretty straight

evolutionary biologist,

described the evolution

of the human neocortex

as the most dramatic transformation

of a major organ of a higher animal

in the entire fossil record.

Well, why is this an embarrassment

because it's the organ

that thought up the theory of evolution.

So, you know,

can you say tautology?

That's the problem right there.

So, it is necessary

in evolutionary theory

to account for the dramatic emergence

of the human neocortex

in this very narrow window of time.

Basically, in about two million years,

these higher,

they went from being higher primates,

hominids,

to being true humans,

as truly human as you and I tonight.

What the hell happened?

What was the factor?

The Earth was already old.

Many hundreds of higher animal forms

had come and gone,

and the fire of intelligence

had never been kindled.

So, what happened?

I think that the answer lies in diet,

generally,

and in psychedelic chemistry in particular.

I think that as the African continent grew drier,

we were forced out of the ecological niche

we had evolved into,

which was,

we were canopy-dwelling primates,

insectivores,

complex signaling repertoire,

evolutionary dead end.

But when we came under nutritional pressure,

we were flexible enough,

and this is the key to humanness

at every stage of its development,

our maddening flexibility.

Other animal and plant species can't react.

We can.

Our flexibility,

we began to experiment with a new kind of diet,

and to leave the trees

and explore the new environment of the grassland.

And evolving concomitantly in the grassland

were various forms of ungulate animals,

double-stomached animals,

and many more.

We began to think that

the ideal medium for manure

is the ideal medium for mushrooms,

coprophytic mushrooms,

dung-loving mushrooms,

many of whom produce psilocybin.

Well, I myself in Kenya

have seen baboons

spreading out over a grassland

and noticed that their behavior is

they flick over old cow pies.

Why?

Because there are beetle grubs there.

There's a behavioral vector for nutrition,

for protein,

that would lead them to investigate the cow pies.

Well, in the Amazon,

after a few couple of days of fog and rain,

these psilocybin mushrooms,

stropharicubensis,

can be the size of dinner plates.

I mean, in other words, you can't miss it.

If you're a foraging primate,

you can't miss it.

And the taste is pleasant.

And psilocybin has unique characteristics,

both as a hallucinogen and other properties

that make it the obvious chemical trigger

for higher processes.

And I'll run through this quickly for you,

but here it is.

In very low doses,

doses where you don't,

you wouldn't say you were stoned or loaded

or anything like that,

but just in doses you might obtain

as you were nibbling as you foraged,

it increases visual acuity.

In other words, it's like a technological improvement

on your vision.

Chemical binoculars lying there in the grass.

Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist

to figure out if an animal is a carnivorous forager

and there's a food which improves its vision,

those that avail themselves of that food

will have greater success

in feeding food and rearing their children

to sexual maturity,

which is the name of the game in evolution.

So step one, small doses of psilocybin

increase visual acuity and food-getting success.

Step two, slightly larger doses of psilocybin

in primates create what's called arousal.

This is what you have after a double cappuccino.

In highly sexed animals like primates,

you get male erection.

So what do you have here?

You have a factor which increases

what anthropologists, without a trace of humor,

refer to as increases in increased instances

of successful copulation.

In other words, the animals eating the psilocybin

are more sexually active,

therefore more pregnancies are occurring,

therefore more infants are being born,

therefore there is a process

which would tend to automatically out-breathe

the non-psilocybin-using members of the population.

Step two toward higher consciousness.

Step three, you eat still more mushrooms.

Now you're not foraging with shark and dog,

nor are you horsing around

with your opposed gender acquaintances.

Instead, you're nailed to the ground

in hallucinogens,

in systemic ecstasy.

And one of the amazing things about psilocybin

above, say, five or six grams of dried material

is it causes glossolalia,

spontaneous bursts of language-like behavior

under the obvious control of internal syntax.

And I believe syntax existed before spoken language,

that syntax controls spatial behaviors

and body languages

and is not necessarily restricted

to the production of vocal speech.

So there it is in a nutshell.

We ate our way to higher consciousness.

The mushroom made us better hunters,

better survivors.

Among those in the population who used it,

their sexual drive was increased,

hence they out-bred the more reluctant members

of the tribe to get loaded.

And finally, it created a kind of

neuroleptic seizure,

which led to these downloading

of these syntactically controlled vocalizations,

which became the raw material

for the evolution of language.

And it's amazing to me,

the straight people, the academics,

believe language is no more than 35,000 years old.

That means it's as basic to human beings

as the bicycle pump.

It's just something somebody invented 35,000 years ago.

It's got nothing to do with primate evolution

and the long march of the hominidity

and all that malarkey.

No, it's just an ability,

a use to which syntax can be put

that previously had not been put.

I think before language, spoken language,

things were very touchy-feely,

and the wink and the nod

carried you a great distance

and gestural communication was very high.

That's why, and I should say this and then end,

to me it begins and ends

with these psychedelic substances.

The synergy of the psilocybin

and the hominid diet

brought us out of the animal mind

and into the world of articulated speech

and imagination.

And technology developed and developed

and mushrooms were, you know,

invaded against, faded.

There was migrations, cultural change.

But now, having split the atom,

having sequenced our genome,

having taken the temperature of Betel juice

and all the rest of it,

we're now back where we started.

And like the shaman

who makes the journey into the well of darkness

and returns with the pearl of immortality,

you don't dwell in the well of darkness,

which was human history.

You capture the essence of the thing,

which is the godlike power of the shaman smith,

the technologist, the demon artificer,

the worker of metals,

the conjurer of spirits.

And you carry that power back out of history

and it's in that dimension,

outside of history,

that you create,

you create true humanness

and true community.

And that's the adventure

that we are in the act of undertaking.

Thank you very, very much.