Shamans Among the Machines

to join me in welcoming Mr. Terrence McKenna.

How's that, all of you?

But it's a pleasure to be in Seattle this evening.

You've made me feel real welcome.

Thank you.

Before I get started,

I wanna thank some people who made this possible.

First of all, I wanna thank Bruce Pavitt

for his friendship and vision and patronage.

Like to thank Jared and Alex.

Like to thank HPX and On a Dime.

These are the people responsible for the visuals.

Like to thank John,

who's responsible for the ambient background,

if there is one.

And Dean Chamberlain, who took the amazing photographs

of Albert Hoffman, Tim Leary, and myself.

Other people, be sure and check out his photographs.

The guy is amazing.

Major talent.

Okay, so much for all of that.

I hope you all got the brochures

which were available this evening,

which indicate major events

in the psychedelic community to come.

One in Mexico that's become legendary over the years,

and one dedicated to psychedelic artists

that will occur in Hawaii this September.

So we look forward to this.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

And our visitors,

but also our audience,

that is a new experiment

in an effort to expand the dialogue on psychedelics

to bring artists out of the closet

and to force a confrontation

on the issue of the impact of psychedelics on creativity.

Having said all that,

our discussion this evening is psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines,

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 of habit though the glory of

our humanness is our spontaneity

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 other

unishar individuality make each of us unique Bonjour brother God has a foot it's so beautiful

us somehow like cogs in some larger system. And we associate this cog-like membership

in larger solar 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 rearview 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.

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 psychedelics, and the technology of the

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 five

50 technicians, code writers working months. On the other hand, if you ask a person for

the cube root of 750,344, 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 and so on. Are these kinds of minds so different from each other, pilgrims,

that there is no bridge to be crossed?

I would submit not. But in fact, the bridge between the human mind 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. People who write code know this, that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine is to think

clearly. 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-grasped association. 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 the human mind and the machine mind?

Think clearly yourself. The machine has no patience for the half-truth, the analogy, the semi-grasped association. 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 the human mind and the machine mind?

yourself. The machine has no patience for the half-truth, the analogy, the semi-grasped

association. 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 the two

things, between drugs and machines, is simply that one is too large to swallow. And our

best people are working on that. Technology is a very hot buzzword at the moment, an unimaginable

dream of building machines and small objects, atom by atom, perhaps under the control of

long-chain polymers, running forms of pre-programmed software.

Subtitles by the Amara.org community

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 human, it's 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 human mind to a birds-winged littlenut self, in

the sense that they could be那我們 our perception over the entire way of life. I

think that's the true meaning of that nub. And we can really just get ramped up and up.

But in the end, technology is not just a resource, it's anglishment of those birds and

insects that are able to politically access the mind through their actually today existing

escre Cisco. Because were х intensity processes, nonophatic processes, podem crying hacia

the power of the human mind into places it 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 A.D. 1000. Now the notion of any single human being assimilating

any, even a small portion of the database of this civilization is unthinkable.

It's 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 a visionary and a mastermind.

Understanding. Breakthrough. Integrated 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.

Um, sort of the under the table thing.

...

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 the

canons of advertising. These are all spectrums 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.

Thank you.

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 content.

It was a boundary-defining form of media. It preceded 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 Palaeolithic,

values of community, ecstasy, relating to life through rhythm, dance, ritual, intoxication,

etc, 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, as we

obliterated its own platform its own raison d'etre 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 rearview mirror

so

the 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 like this when we have advertising we have rock and roll stars

we have cults of celebrities we have things which our shot unlike but we have

no

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 did 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 led to their breakthrough.

If you're a researcher, if you're a curator, if you're a writer, if you're a writer, if you're a writer, if you're a writer,

If you've read Thomas Kuhn'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 a 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, 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...

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 from whom these technologies have always been very natural.

Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information-transforming technologies.

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.

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.

Well, 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 it.

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

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 consciously.

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 us

to itself on the back channels,

that is endlessly monitoring

and being inputted data

from the human world.

And we should know,

because concomitant to the development

of all this technology,

chaos theory,

non-equilibrium thermodynamics,

the work of Eric Yodge,

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 counterintuitive

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.

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 observations,

as stated here this evening,

rest 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 backward 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 accelerated

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 mercurially 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 A.I.

were to break loose,

what would it look like?

What would it be?

What does human,

what is,

where does humanity fit

into the picture?

It's a little hard 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.

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.

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 shaman is someone

who 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 deflagellation

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 the 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 Shanandar

and Chattahoochee 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 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

and 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 Kralud.

I mean, we are fragile.

This earth is fragile.

A tiny slit anywhere along the line

and we could end up

a smear in the shale

no more than the trilobites

or the ramphorans

or Frankie or all the rest of those

who came and lived.

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 of human beings

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.

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 ones

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.

There could have been more jokes.

What happens to a lawyer

when you give him Viagra?

He gets taller.

That's it for jokes.

Are there questions?

Yes.

Yes, I can't see you.

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,

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

appear to be being maximized

or that there's an attempt

to maximize them.

But the thing is

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-insolent,

dehumanizing,

and yak, yak, yak.

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-insolent,

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 Kurtzweil

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

superintelligence,

and see what the net kicks out.

We can all imagine

superintelligence.

It's just somebody

much smarter than we are.

But obviously,

all the engineering people agree,

if you achieve an AI

with superintelligence,

then it will be intelligent

to immediately design an intelligence

which transcends it.

And when you're talking

of cycling of 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.

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

10 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

godlike 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

around itself

like toilet paper on a roll.

And as you traveled up

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 a tough way to do it.

But it's a tough thing to do.

A 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.

Well, you know,

in William Gibson's fiction,

the A.I. 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 view

of what machines are.

For example,

so 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 collections,

election 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

swirly 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.

The 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.

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.

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.

That's why, you know,

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 lines

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?

Are you still interested?

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 mating 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?

Well, 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 space

and 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 went

and became 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,

whose 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.

So they already had 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,

strophariocubensis,

can be the size of dinner plates.

I mean, in other words,

you can't miss it

if you're 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

by 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,

but those that avail themselves of that food

will have greater success in obtaining 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-giving 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 born,

therefore there is a process

which would tend to automatically outbreed

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 meat,

nor are you horsing around

with your post-gender acquaintances.

Instead, you're nailed to the ground

in hallucinogenic 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 outbred 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 that 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.

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 true humanness

and true community.

And that's the adventure

that we are in the act of undertaking.

Thank you very, very much.