The Evolutionary Mind

We're going to talk about the evolutionary mind this morning.

It's the topic of our book that's just coming out at the moment.

And it prepares the way for thinking about the change in consciousness at the millennium.

Obviously what happens at the millennium is something to do with our minds.

It's not as if the laws of nature are all going to change at the year 2000.

It's a mental event, a social event, a cultural event.

And we're going to start this morning by talking about the evolutionary context for it.

Our book, called The Evolutionary Mind, comes at a time when there's a tremendous amount of interest in evolutionary psychology.

Psychologists in the last five to ten years have discovered Darwin.

And I keep meeting psychologists who speak to me with that sort of enthusiasm and bright-eyed quality of the new convert.

They've seen that.

They've seen the light.

They've discovered Darwin.

And I wonder why, as a biologist, they haven't discovered Darwin a long time ago.

Darwin, after all, opened up the field of evolutionary psychology with his book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and the Animals.

And there was a lot of speculation at the end of the 19th century about the evolution of consciousness.

However, academic psychology this century has got involved in behaviorism.

Rats in cages pushing levers.

And now cognitive psychology, computer models of neural processes, none of which has left much space for evolutionary theorizing.

So they've come rather late to this evolutionary speculation.

There's been permission given to biologists to speculate about evolution of the mind in this way by the analysis of selfish genes.

Yes.

They feel if they're talking about selfish genes, it's somehow scientific.

And it's given everyone permission.

This kind of discussion is epitomized in Steven Pinker's recent book, How the Mind Works.

And it's based on the idea that human behavior is determined by genes.

There's a gene for everything.

And they then work out, in theoretical terms, what these genes would lead us to expect, the selfish behavior of the genes.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately, their conclusions are not terribly surprising or deep.

And at the end of a lecture he gave recently in London, which was met with considerable skepticism,

somebody said, well, now just give us one, the most important clear idea you've been able to deduce from your selfish gene theory.

And he said that after lengthy calculations, they'd found that because females have only one or two eggs at a time,

which are a rare and precious resource,

that needs conserving, whereas males produce millions of sperm,

they deduced after a lot of working out that women would tend to seek high-status males and want to stay with them,

whereas men would tend to be promiscuous, to spread selfish genes more freely.

There was an air of disappointment in the lecture hall.

And somebody was heard to say, is that all?

Anyway.

So, the fact that this rather closed world of selfish gene speculation is going on

has given other people within the scientific world permission to think more widely about evolution.

Most evolutionary theories are purely speculative, since we don't really know what happened in the past.

Many of them are just so stories, rather like Kipling's accounts of how the leopard got its spots, and so on.

But there have been, in this modern explosion,

a lot of speculation about our evolutionary past.

There are several rather interesting ideas that have come up,

and I just wanted to bring up two or three of these this morning,

because although there's no shortage of speculations about what happened in the human past in the books of Terence McKenna,

there are several new ideas which might amplify these ideas about conscious evolution.

The first ideas that I want to talk about are,

by the way,

put forward in a book by Stephen Mithen,

M-I-T-H-E-N,

called The Prehistory of the Mind.

He's a British archaeologist,

but in this book he's brought together a wealth of evidence from the fossil record,

from archaeology,

from the study of primate behavior,

and from the study of child psychology,

to put together a very interesting discussion of what happened to human minds

during the three and a half million years

of the human history of the mind.

And I want to talk about that.

And I want to talk about human evolution before recorded history began.

The first upright walking hominids are now believed to have emerged in Africa

over three and a half million years ago,

Australopithecus.

These were upright walking, tool-using,

they used simple stone tools,

precursors of ourselves.

Human history, three and a half million years of it,

went on before we have the records from the great civilizations.

The domesticism,

Investigation of animals, the agricultural revolution, occurred 10,000 years ago.

The first civilization is about 5,000 years ago, maybe 7,000 years ago.

Industrialization, 200 or 300 years ago.

But for the vast majority of human history, people were living in quite a different way.

And it seems to me a very reasonable supposition that a great deal of our psychology,

a great deal of the working of our minds has been shaped by this enormously long period

about which we know so little.

What Mythen points out is that these, although we don't know what they thought about

and how they worked, these early human beings, these early hominids,

must have had several different kinds of intelligence.

They must have had a social intelligence.

They were social beings. They lived in social groups.

And we know from studies of chimpanzees and other social primates

that there are very subtle interactions within the group.

There are dominance interactions. There are cooperative interactions.

And to get it right requires a kind of intelligence about how other members of the group are going to react,

what's appropriate behavior, and so on.

All social animals must involve some kind of social intelligence.

And we can reasonably assume that our ancestors, our hominid ancestors,

had a social intelligence to enable them to live together and work together in social groups.

They had a technical intelligence that enabled them,

to make stone tools, and maybe other technical devices or technical things,

maybe fibers and string, which haven't left traces in the archaeological record.

They must have had a natural historical intelligence.

Because if you're living as a hunter-gatherer, as they did,

then unless you know what to hunt and how to hunt it,

what the habits of the animals are that you're hunting,

unless you know what to gather, where to gather it,

what things are good to eat, what things are good as herds,

you don't get very far.

And this requires an enormously detailed knowledge of natural history.

It's not just human beings. Chimpanzees have to have this, and many other creatures.

So this must have been part of their mental makeup.

And then at some stage they began to talk, and they must have had a linguistic intelligence.

We don't know when language began.

Some people put it 50,000 years ago, some people put it much longer ago.

But really nobody knows. Language leaves no fossil traces.

But something very strange happened about 100,000 years ago.

Our ancestors achieved brain sizes roughly the same as ours today.

So for a hundred thousand years human beings have had brains of the current capacity.

Yet for a hundred thousand years they were not writing programs and building computers and

thinking up Einstein's equations and so on.

Something else was going on with them.

Something else was going on with those brains.

And we haven't a clue what it was.

The brain size, the development of current brain size is not the reason that there's been this explosion of technical innovation recently.

Brain size hasn't changed much for a hundred thousand years.

And it wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was the beginnings of art, paintings in caves and that kind of thing.

Some things...

What happened? Why did...

Why did art and civilization only begin tens of thousands of years after the brain had reached its present capacity?

And what enabled these different kinds of intelligence to give rise to the agricultural revolution, modern humanity and so on?

Well, the hypothesis that Meythen puts forward is that about 50,000 years ago some crucial transition occurred

whereby these previously separate intelligences,

somehow came together, cross-fertilized each other and produced the beginnings of characteristically human mentality.

The connection of social and technical intelligence meant that people started using technical skills for making things like jewelry, ornaments, grave goods.

The mixing of technical and natural historical intelligence led to a great improvement in hunting technologies,

in weapons, in axe heads and spear heads and arrow heads and so on.

The merging of social and natural historical intelligence led to a whole kind of mythic understanding of the animal and the natural world,

which we find in all cultures around the world today.

And with the combining these with linguistic intelligence, there was a whole burst of human development, of mental development.

He compares this to a cathedral.

A Romanesque and Norman cathedral has side chapels almost sealed off from each other with no interaction,

whereas the great Gothic cathedrals sort of open up and all these different things can mix together.

Somehow he thinks this transition 50,000 years ago was associated with the origin of religion

and seems to have been based on a sense of human connection not just with the earth but with the heavens.

When I asked Meythen how he understood this to have happened,

especially given his chosen metaphor of the cathedral,

I said, do you think there really was a breakthrough from some extra-terrestrial intelligence into the human realm at that stage,

since all your evidence points to it?

And he said, of course not, that's impossible.

And so I said, how do you know it's impossible?

Since everybody all around the world, according to your own evidence, seems to have undergone this transition,

it seems to have shaped human mentality as we know it.

He said, oh yes, he said, well the very fact everyone believes it shows that this is an incredibly persistent illusion.

And I said, but how do you know it's an illusion?

He said, because it's so persistent.

And I said, surely you can have things that are true that are persistent too.

He admitted in the end it was just an illusion.

It was just a matter of opinion.

But everything he said points towards some breakthrough to another realm of consciousness around 50,000 years ago,

and something that happened with human groups all around the earth.

And I think this is the first time I've seen a convincing building up of evidence

from somebody who's coming from a very hard-nosed position

that gives us some clue as to a major shift in consciousness that happened,

and it involved some connection with a higher dimension.

Now, some people will like to interpret that in terms of visits of spaceships, chariots of the gods, and so forth.

I think that there are many other ways of thinking about it,

and I can guess that Terence will be able to suggest at least one.

Consider it done.

But before we get...

There's one other speculation about the problem.

There's one other thing in the past I want to mention,

which I found particularly interesting out of this year's crop of books on the subject,

which is Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Blood Rights.

She's an American writer based in New York,

and in her book Blood Rights, completely changed around my idea of human prehistory.

What she shows, very convincingly, is that our image of man the hunter

striding forth onto the African savannah about three million years ago,

is, in fact, pretty implausible.

Human beings were small.

They couldn't run very fast.

They weren't particularly strong.

Their tools were extremely primitive.

It's much more likely that for most of human history,

it was not man the hunter, but man the hunt head.

In fact, most bone remains of early hominids

show the marks and scratches and tooth marks of large cats on them.

Human beings were on the African savannah.

With lots of game, but also with lots of big predators.

They were extremely vulnerable.

And a great deal of modern human mentality, she argues,

was shaped by millions of years of being preyed on by large predators.

It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago

that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world,

whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters.

But for most of the three and a half million years,

of hominid history, it was man the hunt head.

She shows, very interestingly,

that this sheds light on many religious traditions,

because in many religious traditions,

there's the idea of the victim, the sacrificial victim.

If you're a collective, a herd of wildebeest,

or baboons in a group out in the desert,

and a predator approaches,

the predators usually attack isolated members of the group.

The old, the young, or sometimes the young males

who are defending the group on the periphery.

Those are the ones that get killed first.

And when they've killed one of them,

they start eating it.

And very often the rest of the group then relax,

and they often stand around and watch the predator eating the prey.

Because once they've got one victim,

they're not hungry anymore.

They're not interested in the rest.

So one dies for the sake of the rest.

This is a simple fact of predation.

And she shows that this pattern,

the idea of a sacrificial victim

that dies for the sake of the rest,

is deeply embedded in our consciousness

as an archetypal pattern

based in this biological fact of predation

and the fact that we were preyed upon.

She also shows that most of the early visions of gods and goddesses

were in the form of carnivores.

Even Jehovah is a carnivore.

The story of Cain and Abel,

where Cain is a farmer

and offers the fruit of the earth to God as a sacrifice,

and Abel is a herder and offers a sheep.

God prefers the sacrifice of Abel.

He prefers meat to vegetarian diet.

And that's why Cain kills Abel.

He's jealous.

And so this carnivorous quality of the gods

is associated with images of the gods

in association with

predatory animals.

She then goes on to show that

whole nations identify with predators

as a kind of justification for war making,

where the whole nation becomes like a predator.

The symbol of England and many other countries

is the lion of America,

of the United States, the eagle, and so on.

All around the world you find these predatory animals

as national emblems.

Well, I think her insights are particularly interesting

and because of this long history,

it shows so much of our mythology,

religious structure, and fears

are related to this long period of being preyed on.

She shows the fantasies, the nightmares

of young children in modern cities like New York

until they're about five years old,

and not about child molesters

and realistic fears, or at least the fears their parents have.

They're about being eaten by monsters and wild animals.

This is what most children's nightmares are about.

And this would go back to a long period of history.

So here we have two ideas,

Meythen's ideas and Barbara Ehrenreich's ideas

about early human history,

which would give memories.

I would think of them as memories

in the collective memory through morphic resonance.

Jung would call them collective archetypes

in the collective unconscious.

Things which are built into our past,

our memory that has shaped the way our minds are today,

of which we're largely unaware

because our normal study of history

begins with the civilizations of the Near East,

with Egypt, with Greece, Rome, and so forth,

and leaves out the previous 3.5 million years of human history

which have really done so much to shape our evolutionary nature

and therefore condition the way we respond to each other today

and in the future.

I think that our evolutionary history is rooted in the past,

but I've been reading on my journey here

this novel, On the Edge,

just published in England last week

by Edward St. Aubin.

It's set in California.

The crucial scenes occur in Esalen.

And here's a conversation going on in the hot tubs

on page 130.

According to Terence McKenna, said Flavia,

who happens to be a genius

instead of an arrogant British jerk,

he says,

History is rooted in the future.

So...

Can I jump in?

Well, first of all,

let's just assume that I've responded to this

with the usual rap about diet, mushrooms, so forth and so on,

that if you know anything about my work,

you have heard ad nauseum, ad infinitum,

ad infinitum.

So just go past that and say...

And remind you,

Rup and I have not really had a good conversation

for 20 months,

but I guess arranging ourselves according to the demands

of the morphogenetic field,

we're sort of thinking along the same creodes,

because in my trying to understand at greater levels

this moment of transition,

50,000 years ago,

or this moment of breakthrough,

what exactly were the elements

and how did it happen,

I've sort of come very close to this area

that Rupert's indicating this morning,

because I can't help but notice

that a successful predator

must think like prey,

that there is this particular

intellectual symbiosis that goes on

between the predator and the prey.

And hunting cats,

top carnivores, I think,

internalize the behaviors of their prey.

Well, at the very dawn of the emergence,

of the evolutionary emergence of mind,

the central human figure in that equation

is the shaman.

And the shaman at the high paleolithic stage

is essentially a kind of sanctioned psychotic.

In other words, able to move into states of mind

so extreme that their immediate social efficacy

is arguable.

And to condense that into common English,

what I mean is,

the shaman is a person,

a designated member of the social group,

who can mentally change into an animal,

who can become so animal-like

that other members of the social group

are appalled and draw back.

And so in a weird way,

at this fractal boundary

where human consciousness emerges,

the first human consciousness

was not human at all.

It was a human ability to model effectively

the thinking processes of other predators.

With mathematical models.

With mathematical models and precision, yes.

And so, yes,

what we're talking about when we're talking about hunting

is we're talking about strategic thinking.

And strategic thinking always involves

bifurcating trees of choice.

If we go to the water hole at dawn,

perhaps we can make a kill.

If we take food and leave the women and children

and go in this direction several days,

perhaps we will make a kill.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps by abandoning the women and the children

we will undercut our gene pool

and return to catastrophe.

Strategic thinking.

What strategic thinking requires

is the ability to contemplate

possibilities not immediately present.

In other words,

there's a kind of time-binding function here.

So I'm really not so much posing a question to Rupp

as adumbrating what he said.

I think this is where it all comes together

in this very complicated relationship

between fear, expectation, strategizing,

and the imagination.

The two areas where I'm sure we spend a great deal of time

studying these bifurcating trees of possibility

were in the food-gathering and hunting domain

and then in the sexual domain,

which today we call erotic fantasy.

But in the high Paleolithic,

erotic fantasy was rather closely welded

to where your genes went

and how your biological propagation processes preceded.

So the key,

whether you believe it was through the stimulation of psilocybin

or through the aping of the behavior of other top predators

that we aspired to compete with,

whatever the causal mechanism,

the domain in which the change was born

and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us,

is the domain of the imagination.

This is what we created that is uniquely human

and that has defined us ever since.

And as this discussion today proceeds to look more into the future,

I think we will see that as the imagination has been our past

and the cradle of our humanness,

so it also is the domain in which our transhuman metamorphosis will occur.

Something like that.

As far as I can see,

this is dancing around an intellectual black hole or something.

Here we have,

the question is posed,

as I gather of Stephen Meython,

that in the evolution of consciousness or culture,

I'm not sure which,

there was bifurcation 50,000 years ago

which is of interest to us because we're in one now.

And the question is,

what was it caused by?

And then Rupert proposed that you would, of course,

answer the psilocybin mushroom on the plains of Africa.

But you didn't.

And the need to think strategically.

But this need not only was a constant

throughout the three and a half million years evolution of hominids,

but also in pongids, apes being,

and swarming bees, schooling fish and so on.

This is more or less no news here.

What was it then that happened 50,000 years ago?

If anything happened?

So, I know that this will not be a favorite hypothesis in this audience,

but it's one that has to be counted.

Do you ask, are there any other?

What did he suggest actually, Stephen Meython?

He doesn't give a very clear explanation as to why this might have happened.

Well, he's a youngish man, I suppose.

Who probably has not read the great books of his predecessors

such as, let's say, for example, Alexander Marchand,

who led a great group of, a combined group of two species,

a neurophysiologist and archaeologist in the distant past,

to propose that miracle that occurred,

like the beginning of Cro-Magnon 50,000 years ago,

had to do with a structural change in neurophysiology.

This presents the view, if you want to look at it that way,

God as a brain surgeon,

also known as the hole in the head,

where the connection between the hemispheres was improved in the corpus callosum

and this physiological evolution provided evolutionary advantage in hunting and so on.

And as an evolution theorist, you would have to say,

well, if there was divine brain surgery,

then it could have been in response to

a leading element in the evolution of some morphogenetic field.

Now, thinking of this as a chicken and egg kind of thing,

is like the physiological change.

There was a physiological change, was there not?

Didn't Stephen Mython mention that?

Well, you can't from skulls. All you've got is skulls.

Oh, you can. No, no, you can.

That's the whole point, that these skulls have been examined microscopically by Alexander Marchand.

And the changes in the skull,

morphological changes, sharply divide that particular event,

including the enlargement of the frontal lobes,

which was considered, because of Braka's brain,

to be the physiological foundation for the development of speech.

Whereas we would say, probably, I'm guessing,

we would agree that the enlarged brain, Braka's brain,

evolved because, as we had already started speaking

and had the need for more vocabulary,

the things favored the larger vocabulary

in terms of hunting, gathering, escaping large carnivores, and so on.

Anyway, there's a dichotomy of two different views about this bifurcation,

the divine intervention one,

and the physiological DNA, random mutation, natural selection one.

Isn't that it?

And in this dichotomy, we see you opposed,

because Terence believes the eating psilocybin mushrooms

is a purely material explanation, right?

It requires no recourse to a divine intervention in the field.

Angels, dreams, you use the word imagination.

But he's not suggesting a literal divine intervention.

He's just speaking metaphorically.

Well, Maithen's speaking metaphorically.

I think I'm speaking literally.

Because, I think, you see, one of the things we have to explain

is that religion,

or some sense of a beyond the human realm of consciousness,

is found in every human culture today,

in some sense, in some way or another,

a world of spirits, a world of angels, of gods.

But to explain the universal distribution of this

as part of traditional human thinking

requires, at some stage in the past,

there had been an awareness of this other realm of consciousness.

Now, this is not incompatible with psilocybin or any other drug,

or any other demonic hypothesis,

because those might have kick-started this connection

with another realm of consciousness.

But if we assume that today, all over the world,

shamanic cultures and all other cultures

have the sense of other levels

and other kinds of conscious entities beyond the human level,

some in animal forms and some in forms way beyond that,

we have to assume that at some stage in the past

there was a linking with these other realms of consciousness,

as they are.

Not just metaphors, not just archetypes in the collective mind,

but forms of consciousness that might well, I think, actually are out there.

Well, in trying to think conservatively

about the possibility of a non-human local intelligence,

it seems to me that, in a way, nature herself presents as an intelligence.

That the understanding of nature

is the understanding of complex integrated systems

of such complexity that to deny them consciousness

is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind.

That for anyone not burdened by that prejudice,

it's self-evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding.

It's interesting that really all it seems we can agree about

on here is that the timeframe is roughly 50,000 years.

Well, so a whole bunch of things are triangulating on that moment.

One could say, as I've argued,

that it was the eating of psilocybin mushrooms.

You could make a more general statement and say

that was a subset of the consequence of an omnivorous diet.

But, if I may, where exactly were these mushrooms

100,000 years ago?

Well, the way I think about it is there was an incremental involvement

that had punctuated breakthroughs in it.

In other words, the slow meeting of mind, mushroom, social complexity,

acoustical abilities linked to neurophysiological states

didn't just smoothly proceed.

It all came together, but then at a certain point

it gelled, and this is this 50,000 year point

where social understanding, technology, linguistic repertoires,

depth of diet...

Well, you're clinging to this material stuff.

I think it's about time that we trap you here.

Well, there will be a material component

even if you believe angels descended from on high.

Well, I suppose that...

Okay, you have the software that draws the novelty wave,

you're a novelty theorist.

We might appeal to novelty theory as an explanatory strategy here,

a cognitive strategy in dealing with the bifurcation 50,000 years ago.

If you run the program back for 100,000 years,

do you or do you not find a kink there in the novelty wave in 50,000 BC?

No, it's not based on data, only extrapolation,

but is there or isn't there...

Well, I think there were a series of breakthroughs.

For instance, 120,000 years ago

the modern homo sapien sapien form appeared.

In other words, no.

In short, no, there's no...

Both and, I think.

The invention of writing 9,000 years ago

was an enormous breakthrough.

But all of these things proceed out of the further integration,

complexification of the nervous system

in connection with the function of the imagination.

No, but I can't even believe this,

that you're presenting yourself

as a conventional materialist evolutionary theorist.

The galactarians who built the mushroom intended...

This is your pal, your favorite author.

Well, you see, with the mushroom theory,

you can always just say they encountered the mushroom

and then it proceeded from there.

But you can go one step back and say,

oh, they put the mushroom in their path.

Oh, I'll give you a hand there.

And that was the preceding civilization of Lemurians who...

What's wrong with Lemurians?

They died out at that point

because they had poisoned the environment with toxic chemicals

and created global climate warming

which resulted in a drying of the desert,

the Sahara Desert, from which sprung forth

a bloom of psychedelic mushrooms

that had been hiding under the surface previously,

because it was too wet.

That's why...

The loud hum I hear

is William of Ockham spinning in his grave.

I see.

You think that DNA and the expression of genes

is a simpler explanation than a divine intervention

at the level of the novelty wave.

I think that the DNA is divine.

Ah.

But William...

Ah, escape from his...

...his trap.

Rube, what you as a middle man should do.

Well, I...

I think...

You see, I can't quite get your position

because the new hard-nosed skeptic

that you're revealing to us here

in other places,

you see, it doesn't seem to fit too well

with Terence McKenna on non-human entities,

machine elves, et cetera.

I mean, the idea of other kinds of consciousness,

other forms of entity

that are not just inside our brains

and appearing in relation to deranged states of mind,

pharmacologically induced,

the idea that they're out there seems to me

an essential part of most of what I've heard you say

over many years.

Well, I'm sort of getting into what I intend to say later,

but I think the key thing is not to concentrate

on materialist versus non-materialist explanations,

but to realize that the new vision

of nature is not as matter or energy,

but as information.

And information is expressed in the DNA,

it's expressed epigenetically in culture.

What's happening is that information

was running itself on a primate platform,

but evolving according to its own agenda.

In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship

to a non-material being,

which we call language.

And we think it's ours,

and we think we control it.

This isn't what's happening.

It's running itself.

It's time-sharing a primate nervous system

and evolving toward its own conclusions.

Now I've just shot my talk, so...

And it's so early in the morning.

Yes, well, this is this damn drug I'm drinking.

It makes you give it all away too soon.

But I think...

I mean, the discussion so far

has been remarkably earthbound.

And if we assume that information

is not confined to this planet,

if we...

To put it in your information terminology,

if we assume that consciousness

is not limited to the earth,

if we assume that there are not only

conscious beings on other planets,

but also that other elements of the universe,

like stars, suns, galaxies,

may have minds or consciousness,

which I do assume,

then it becomes very likely that at some stage

a consciousness on earth could link somehow

with those higher forms of consciousness.

Who knows how?

Maybe by something like

interplanetary telepathy,

something of that kind.

So if there's some link of human consciousness

with other forms of consciousness in the universe,

then when that contact was established,

there would be a big transition.

That it could have been propelled

or kicked off by drugs,

it could be kicked off by some mutation

that led to more nervous interconnections.

But when it happens,

this connection with other forms of consciousness

would transform human nature.

Yes.

And it would fit with the facts,

because there's a belief in...

You see, now we're off the planet at last.

Can I remind you, Terence,

of a quotation from the front pages

of your first book,

speculating that mushroom spores

are intergalactic travellers,

that they have a hard case

impervious to ultraviolet rays

that enables them to float on the galactic wind

from planetary system to planetary system,

bringing us, as Rupert suggests,

linguistic communications from other life forms,

including immaterial life forms

that they've been in conversation with in the past.

I think that this is an approximate summary of your preface.

But notice how materialist

and space- and time-bound that hypothesis is.

I could agree with everything Rupert said.

I think now our intellectual toolkit

has been enriched by the virtual confirmation

of the idea that there is a bell-type,

non-local aspect to the universe.

So I do think we're in contact

with all intelligence in the universe

through the bell, non-local connection.

But that means that it has no historicity,

this connection.

It has always been there, complete and entire.

So why there is a sense of progressing toward it

or it erupting through into normal earthbound affairs

is not because someone in the Andromeda Galaxy

makes a decision,

now we will reveal ourselves to the earthlings.

It's that the antenna system

and the nervous system of the earthlings

evolved through a point

where suddenly this became self-evident.

Well, now we're coming to the question for the first time

in the enlarged context

in which we have not only all space

but all time informing us.

And here I may remind you of Father Bede's letter

which is quoted in the last chapter of our new book

where he challenges us to consider the mystical element

which he describes as more or less in the language

of David Bohm's implicate order

that all time and all space somehow exists

as an interconnected ball of intelligence

which is, let's just assume such a thing.

Nevertheless, the science of our,

our colleagues is more or less a true story

of evolution,

that there was a change,

that language did come upon us in a certain moment,

that before that moment we didn't speak,

afterwards we did.

And so the question arises,

and I think this is in my interpretation

the question we started with here,

how could it be that with or without

a divine intervention that there is this

more or less linear progress

in human intelligence,

culture, capability, tool using

and exponential population growth

that is correlated without any causal implication

with the descent of the novelty wave?

Why do we have this peculiar artifact?

This is an observational fact

that there is this increase in complexity

in civilization apparently looking

for a spectacular transformation

which we are associating with the word

millennium now.

What's going on?

Well, novelty theory would just say

the universe is a complexity conserving engine.

Whatever complexity it achieves by any means

it makes that the platform

for a further thrust into deeper complexity.

If you don't like novelty theory...

Because the morphogenetic field never forgets.

It forgets a little but it never,

it can be set back

but it can never be set back

to zero and it always,

once it gets out of the ditch

it heads back in the same direction.

It has a vector field preference.

And then you mentioned David Bohm.

His idea of emergent properties

seems to achieve the same end

without a telos of novelty theory.

He simply says when you complexify a system

new properties will emerge

suddenly and unexpectedly

that couldn't have been predicted.

If you put emergence theory with novelty theory

you see that the universe could not but

proceed along the line of

complexification of morphogenetic expression,

density of connectivity

and all the things that retard entropy

and give rise to in fact

the complex non-entropic ordered

apparently teleologically informed

cosmos that we're in.

Well now we see then that

what you've described is...

Why do you laugh?

It was one of those verbs

was a bit extraordinary.

Okay.

That there is then revealed

a kind of evolutionary theory

as a cosmological hypothesis.

This is a theological position basically.

It's a teleological position.

That there is a timeless implicate order

and there is life on planet Earth

and in the rest of the universe

which evolves according to

this theoretical rule

by an increase of complexity.

When something is revealed

there's a development.

It's not forgotten.

It builds upon that

and this mystical unit

while knowing all

is not telling all

but revealing gradually

because just that's the law

of life as we know it.

Is that what you're saying?

In three dimensional space and time.

With Rupert and I

really from my point of view

the only difference between

the morphogenetic field

that he has enthusiastically proposed

and the ideas of novelty theory

is for Rupert it's pushed from the past.

For me it's pulled from the future.

Well that's what Teddy was saying

in this book.

But what you get

in the end of the day

is the same thing.

It's just a matter of preference

and how much of orthodoxy

you want to grind against.

The phobia against telos

is an artifact of 19th century deism

and doesn't go very deep.

You described the complexification

of the universe as self-evident

and I believe it is self-evident

and the failure of science

to address this

is what makes it so frustrating.

And imprecise so late in the game.

But the trouble with the emergence view

you've been putting forward

is that it's still very earthbound.

You see there's obviously been

a major emergence of complexity

in human culture.

There's also been a huge emergence

of complexity in the Amazon jungle

and the Malayan rainforest.

Arguably far greater than anything

we've achieved through technology

and millions of species of beetles,

insects, plants and so forth.

But it seems to me that

long before all these things happened on earth

we've got the possibility

of much higher levels of consciousness

outside the earth.

And as you know I'm a devotee

of the idea of the sun as conscious.

And the stars.

If you take the materialist view

that consciousness interfaces with the brain

through complex electromagnetic patterns of activity

then those on the sun

which we're learning more and more about every day

have unbelievable

complex chaotic patterns.

Resonant patterns of acoustic waves

going through the sun.

Polar reversals every 11 years.

Resonant patterns of electromagnetic waves.

My thinking about this was much influenced

by a science fiction novel by Fred Hoyle

published in the 50's

called The Black Cloud.

Where Fred Hoyle shows that

to imagine intelligence

necessarily grounded either in

copper wires and computers

or in nerve cells and brains

is a limitation of this.

You could have an intelligence system

working through a plasma

an electrically charged cloud

and indeed I think through something like the sun.

So if the sun is in fact conscious

if stars have a kind of consciousness

then of course it raises questions

well what do they think about

what do they do with this consciousness.

But it's very likely that the kind of consciousness

they have would be at a vastly higher level than our own.

So when we're talking about

the emergence of higher consciousness

in human beings

it's not as if for the first time in the universe

some higher level of consciousness emerges.

It could be that for the first time

in the history of the solar system

our minds somehow contact

the sort of intelligence

much greater intelligence

that exists out there.

And because I think it's possible

to think of the stars and the sun as conscious

and then galaxies as conscious

you don't need to go straight beyond

the universe to the divine mind.

There's plenty of lower level minds

than the divine mind

that could be out there.

And of course traditional views of spirits and angels

tell us that there are many many many

innumerable levels of intelligence

beyond our own within the galaxy

many associated with the stars.

So we don't necessarily

have to have the idea it's all happened

and emerged on earth

through a complexification.

We can have the thing we reach a point

where there's like a spark passes

between a terrestrial consciousness

a human one with more interconnected

halves of the brain, people

in the first

first throes of

mind-boggling mushroom trip etc.

But somehow whatever happens

there's this like a spark

a connection established.

And it seems to me that this hypothesis

has the great advantage of actually

accounting for what's believed all around the world

namely that there is some connection

between human intelligence and that of the sky.

Because in terms of imagination

you see predators and

we human beings

were both predators and prey

but so are lots of other animals

and presumably any hunting animal

has to have the imagination and the ability

to identify with the prey.

In fact René Tom years ago

produced a mathematical model of predator and prey

where there has to be a kind of

internalization of the prey

in the predator's mind in order to

get the right strategy.

This is not specifically human.

It's just that we have

as a basis of the imagination.

I think this connection with realms beyond the human

would give such an enlarged

scope for imagination

that to take literally

what so many people around the world

say in their myths seems to me

the simplest hypothesis.

Well I'm more friendly

to this idea of

non-biologically based

forms of consciousness than

I was the last time we talked

because

of this fact I mentioned

that I now think wherever there is

a sufficiently complex

informational environment

the functions of

life, self-replication,

mutation,

adaptation

can go on.

But obviously most of

the intelligence in the universe

would be utterly

incomprehensible to us

because it is so different.

So we're transducing

virtually the entire

hologram of possible

intelligence in the universe

but the reason our fantasies

of angels and aliens

give us hominids

with binocular vision

who use acoustical speech

in other words creatures

very similar to ourselves

is because we only can

recognize what is familiar

in this universal

information field.

So we sail right past

our mind, the galaxy mind

to communicate with

a race of winged hominids

around Zenebel-Ganubi prime

simply because

they are enough like us

that we can grok

our possibility of

a relationship.

It seems to me that this is just very

begging the question in

traditional and cheap fashion

because...

Oh good Ralph.

I mean I'm all

in favor of

celestial intelligence and in

fact I could even entertain

a conversation with a Pleiadian

I don't mind.

But the question, I mean we started

with the problem of evolution

the evolutionary mind is

in fact the title of our book

and the question of the evolution

the progress or even the

origin of all these things is

our ultimate question.

Now if our view is local to planet earth

we can say okay we're being

robbed by bolts from the blue

and we have these meddling

celestial intelligence that are reaching out

pretend to be Bell and tell us Bell's theorem

give us mushrooms, pretend to be

sent from the solar wind

or whatever. But where do

they come from? The evolutionary

problem then is just transferred

onto another more remote place.

Now as I understand

Rupert's idea of the morphogenetic field

is that these other places are also in

evolution and the whole system is in

coevolution and that is an attempt

I think one of the first ones

in the

history of intelligent

discourse on this subject

the first attempt to

get rid of

the hypothesis of

timeless

truth. But if you get

rid of that hypothesis you have a whole

bunch of weird problems

such as then you have to talk about

the speed of propagation

of novelty or

morphogenetic fields and then

you're slammed to the wall because you have to either

come up with a number which you fit

into a mathematical architecture

or you say

that it's instantaneous

which returns you to this

holistic more metaphysical

thing. If you don't

believe that it's coming from the Bell

space then you have a whole

bunch of these kinds of problems which I

think intuitively

make it too complicated.

Let it be instantaneous.

I mean I think the whole question

of time is in fact

behind this problem that we have this

idea about time and then

we're trying to talk about a timeless.

So one way to eliminate this

cognitive dissonance

is to say okay there is no timeless

it's all in coevolution and

we're a little bit behind the evolution

of the Pleiadians and then

well where does that come from? We're stuck

with the problem. So you I think

you're talking of

the attractor at the end of time

is more or less the beyond

time is the intelligence that it

informs

that nourishes the accumulation

of complexity as we

go along apparently

in time. Well I think

the attractor is complete in

and of itself in another dimension

the process of history and

biological evolution is

the growing complex enough

to grow toward

the thing and understand it.

So is our process

of growth then nourished or not

nourished by some

flow of something that comes from

this attractor at the end of time in another

dimension? It

contributes the trajectory of

our approach. It defines

the domain

in which we are moving

toward it. We couldn't even talk this without

chaos theory. No, chaos

theory stands behind this

very

powerful. Well I don't know Ralph

people have been talking about this for a long time

before chaos theory came along.

But in such a muddled fashion.

Compared

with the sublime clarity

of our present conclusion.

Precisely.

So I don't

quite see why chaos theory is an essential

ingredient. Forget chaos theory.

I'm

interested in the possibility that

in your deepest musings

on this problem you have rather

avoided Father Bede's

challenge to grapple with the infinity

and that in

the idea of the

coevolution of morphogenetic fields

begs the question of the existence

of a timeless or eternal

truth, pattern, guidance

or something which is

well.

But are you, I mean

Father Bede used the word mystical

but of course he was a priest.

I don't think he meant the

essentially

incomprehensible. In other words

I don't think we're going to get to a place where

we then say from here on it is

mystery and

rational apprehension fails.

My notion of the mystical

is simply that which

remains to be understood

and there will always be a

residuum of mystery

in principle. But in principle

it is not mysterious.

Well I mean. No I think

I don't agree with that I must say. I thought you might

not.

Well

well we'd soon be out

of business if we're talking at the edge of the unthinkable

if we actually, everything

suddenly becomes thinkable.

Even in principle?

I think that given the nature of a

human mind evolved to deal with

large predators hunting on

African plains, gathering

herbs etc.

Dealing with social problems

human relationships etc.

The idea that this evolution has equipped

us with minds and language

and cognitive abilities that enable

us to comprehend the entire universe

where it's come from, where it's going

what minds and

mind may lie beyond what we

see. The idea that this

very small part of the evolutionary

system with all the limitations

inherent in it could comprehend

the whole seems to me

a rather improbable

supposition. And I think

that the point about mysticism

or what the Greek church calls

apophatic, the

is that

the ultimate in the end does

lie beyond what we can think.

Our thinking can only take us so far.

And this isn't just because we haven't got enough

professors of mathematics yet or

and it's only a matter of bigger computers

and so forth. There are

grave limits on how far

a very limited and evolutionary

bound conceptual apparatus can

take us. We'd never be able

to embrace, as you yourself pointed out

the kind of mentality

of the sun or a galaxy because it's

so much greater and more

than our own. Let alone the universe

as a whole. But in principle

some other form of organization

could. In other words these things are

not sealed from

understanding. In

principle they are simply

difficult for primate

based minds running

limited software at low

hertz rate to

accommodate.

Yes, but I mean

presumably the solar mind

if there is one, could

understand, have a pretty good intuitive

understanding of the minds of other

suns. I mean

if the sun has a mind, part of

its activity I think would be concerned with

the solar system. It would be like

the brain of the solar system.

But part of its activity would be concerned with

its peer group, namely other

stars. And

then part of their activity

would be related to the

mind or purpose or

telos of the entire galaxy.

And those kinds of concerns

you know the kind of relationship

problems that our sun may be having

with other suns.

Or double star systems like

that of Sirius. The kind of

relationship problems.

Those are rather

beyond the scope of human psychotherapy

or indeed

human thought. There may be

so many things going on as indeed

there are at levels we

don't really understand very well

the world of the goldfish or the ant.

So there are

certain limitations which I don't

think are just a temporary

limitation on what we can conceive

or imagine. Well then

until we run out of

energy to conceive and imagine are we

conceiving of the

solar mind if it exists as

evolving or fixed?

No, it must evolve. It must evolve

perhaps on a different time scale which

is the time scale of relationship in their

own community.

Which is the 15 billion

year time frame

since the big bang. Is that what you're thinking

that we're coming to the crux of it here?

I think the evolution

of the solar mind would be related

to what happens here because

we're part of the solar system.

And I would assume that because all planets

and everything that's happening within the solar

system feeds back and influences

the solar mind that it would somehow

it's not just the mind of the sun, it's the mind of the

solar system. But it's evolving

since the birth of the milky way

and the Roman candle. That's right.

What's going on here is part of its evolution.

We're within it

and contributing to it.

So the morphogenetic

field then of the all and everything

had a birth moment with

the big bang, is that what you're thinking?

Well I'm assuming that if we

take the big bang theory

to be, if we assume there was a big bang

I know you're very skeptical about the big bang

it's only a story, it's a myth.

But if we take this creation myth

of modern science then that must be the

birth of the field of the whole

system. Yes.

And modern physics

in the unified field theory, super

string theory, tries to explain

how you start with a unified ten dimensional

field that then evolves

the other fields of nature within it.

So that's standard

physics. I mean it's not part of my

particular view of things.

But the consciousness of this all and everything

I mean the solar

minds contribute to the

consciousness of the milky way which is one

galaxy which then has

the psychotherapist in its relationship

with the nearby galaxy. Yes in the galactic

cluster. And actually there's a

synchrony of thought

due to the fact that Bell's theorem connects

them from the big bang and so on.

But isn't all you're

saying is that the universe is

a modular hierarchy

from atom through cells

societies. I'm challenging

you to answer where the morphogenesis

comes from that leads to

complexity and things like the birth of

life if it's simply

the coevolution of a

physical system since the big bang.

Novelty theory has answered this

question.

It comes from the future. To the satisfaction of

your mind and all smaller.

Well at least to the satisfaction

of someone.

But it doesn't explain

either the origin of the novelty wave

itself nor does it

you see there are many models

of course of cosmic evolution

and one of them is that

because you have the cosmic expansion

that for some reason

the primal explosion

big bang throws everything apart

so it's all moving apart. That means things

cool down. As they cool down more

form and order can appear.

And it literally makes more space for things

to happen in. That the driving

the arrow of time, the arrow of evolutionary

time and the driving engine of evolution

is the cosmic expansion

which means nothing can ever be stable

can ever stay the same because the whole

cosmos is unstable. It's always expanding

and cooling. And

given that through all sorts

of phase transitions as you cool

a plasma down as atoms appear

and then as gases condense to liquids

and liquids to solids the cooling

process involves the appearance

of more order, more form

when there was less before. There was very

little in the moment of the big bang.

So the cooling and expansion

more or less force

the appearance of more

structure, pattern,

order. And you

could say that that gives scope for

creativity all the time. There's always

the scope for new things to happen.

And it's a long standing debate among evolutionary

theorists as to whether this is following

a pre-established plan

or being drawn towards an already

existing future goal

or following a pre-existing set of

laws or rules like the novelty

wave or whether it's all

being made up as it goes along.

And I'm much influenced in my thinking

by Bergson, you know, Henri Bergson

in his book Creative Evolution.

He very strongly defends

the idea it's all being made up as it goes along.

That doesn't mean to say

that around the evolutionary process

are not minds and imagination.

But it makes the creative

process of evolution more interesting

rather than less because

it's not decided what's going to happen

next. There are imaginations of

many levels including human imaginations

at work here looking at all

the alternative possibilities.

New things happen and then what happens

next depends on what's happened already

and the new possibilities

of imagination that open up.

But without the goal being fixed in advance.

No, I have no problem

with that. I don't see how, for instance,

someone could hypothesize that

all the laws came

into existence simultaneous

with the Big Bang.

For example, did the laws of gene

segregation come into being

a billion years before

biology existed anywhere

in the universe? That seems

naive and preposterous.

Whitehead had this idea of what he called

the Aboriginal God.

What we call natural

laws are simply

habits of a very ingrained

sort and

habits can change and

in more dynamic regimes

the mind, the society,

habits can change

overnight.

So what is given

is that there shall be

ever greater complexity.

What is not given is

how this complexity shall

arrange itself or

what the final end state will be.

It's a story that's

being told

as it unfolds. It's a game

whose one of the rules of

which is the rules

can change.

How are we doing here time-wise?

Good. Real good.

Good, good.

Well, we're getting nowhere.

In other words, this is the problem.

There's the watch in the desert.

It's ticking by itself or God put it there,

we don't know.

The question posed

at the beginning, we actually haven't

progressed at all in settling

although it looks like there's a kind of

convergence in that

is this right?

No, I have the feeling

we've actually made some progress.

But I

always have that feeling.

Well, the attractor at the end of time

then as I gather

is only has in it

simple rules of a board game that says

the complexity is going to increase

and how it's evolving and

things like DNA rules and stuff

we can make up as we please

as we go along. Whatever natural selection

approves of will then

come to pass. Complexity

will increase. That's the only rule.

And so, in fact, you agree that

time is slowing down?

Well, time is slowing down as

the events potentially

contained within any given

moment exponentially

expand. In other words,

we're sort of in a situation of a spaceship

falling into a black hole

from the point of view of a distant

observer. The spaceship falls into

the black hole. There's a flash of

hard radiation and the story is over.

From the point of view of the people on

the spaceship, the

relativistic stretching of the

timeline means you fall forever

and you never reach the conclusion.

So, in fact,

the consummation of the universe

may be only 14 years

away, but there may be

enough time between

now and then to reiterate

the life of this universe

a trillion to the trillionth

times. Time

is not a tyranny. It's

a relativistic medium

subject to all kinds

of plasticity. There are

many ways out of any

assumed

corner

we paint ourselves into.

I think we've ground to a halt.

Each of the

trilogues today is

the notion is that we will deal with

the subject of the evolutionary mind,

that being the title

and theme of our

new book.

So, in my mind,

what this section is

to deal with

is the evolutionary

mind and machines.

This is something

which was barely mentioned

or even implied

in the first section.

And format

and so forth,

will be as in

the last session.

So, just to lay out

some concepts

relative to

how machines fit into this.

It's very interesting that

Samuel Butler Taylor

is an intellectual

who has not really been

given his full due

because in the 19th

century he was understood to be

a critic of Darwinism.

And Darwinism was

all the fashion.

In a sense, I think

Taylor was misunderstood.

He was not

so much a critic of Darwin

as

someone who wanted to extend

Darwinian mechanics and Darwinian

theory into domains

that

perhaps did not

seem intuitive

to a biologist.

My little story

about the evolution of songs

that I cribbed from

Danny Hillis in the last session

is an example of Darwinian

processes operating

indeed in a non-material

realm, operating among

syntactical

structures.

And it is now proper to speak

of molecular evolution,

the competing of various

enzyme systems in

abiotic or prebiotic

chemical regimes

where selection,

adaptability,

extinction and

expansion of populations

all occur very much

as in the domain

of biology.

Well, it was Nietzsche

who said, I believe

in speaking of nihilism,

that this strangest

of all guests

is now at the door.

Well, I go to

even weirder dinner parties

than a Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nihilism

hardly shakes

us up at all. There are

yet weirder guests

seeking admission to

the dinner party of

the evolving discourse of where

we are in space and time.

And one of these weirdest

of all guests is

the AI, the

artificial intelligence,

the winter mute of familiar

science fiction.

And so, as this

is an attempt to look at evolution

in many domains and its implications

for us,

I wanted this morning to touch

on this subject

of the evolution

of consciousness

as it relates to

machines. Now, it may

not come as a revelation

to Ralph, who has spent his

life in mathematics,

but it has certainly

come to me recently

as a revelation.

And I want to give George Dyson

some credit here. His book

Darwin Among the Machines

is a wonderful introduction

to some of the ideas I want to

touch on this morning.

One of which

seemed to me to go quite

deep is the realization

that when

human beings think

clearly, the way

they think can

be mathematically defined

This is what is called

symbolic logic or Boolean

algebra.

Words like and, or,

if, and then

can be given

extremely precise

formal mathematical

definitions.

And because of this

fact that clear thinking

can be mathematically

formalized, there

is a potential bridge

between ourselves

and calculating

machinery. Because

indeed, calculating

machinery is driven

by rules of formal

logic. That's what

programming is.

Code

that does not embody

the rules of formal mathematical

logic is bad code.

Unrunnable code.

So,

as I say, this may seem

a subtle point, but to me

it had the force of

revelation. Because it

means good thinking is not

just simply aesthetically

pleasing or

concurrent with the model

that generates it. Good thinking,

whether you've ever

studied mathematics for a moment

or not, can be

formally defined.

So,

now, with that

idea in mind,

I

let's look at

the discourse about

collectivism that has informed

the western dialogue

on this subject.

And by collectivism, I

mean social collectivism.

The first great name

that you encounter in the modern

era, broadly speaking,

when we talk about collectivism,

and Rupert mentioned

by chance this morning

this name, is that of Thomas Hobbes.

The great

creation of social paranoia

is always how I've

thought of Hobbes, until

I began to look at this

machine intelligence question.

And Hobbes in his

Leviathan makes

it very clear that

society is

a complex system

of mechanical

feedback loops

and relationships

that, though Hobbes did not have

the vocabulary to state this,

relationships that can be

defined by code.

This leads

me to the second

insight necessary to

follow this line of thought.

And that is that

the new

dispensation

in the sciences,

I think,

can be placed in

all its manifestations

under the umbrella

of the idea that

what is important about nature

is that it is

information.

And the real tension

is not between matter

and spirit, or time

and space.

The real tension is

between information

and

nonsense,

if you will.

Nonsense does not

serve the purposes

of organizational

appetites,

whether those

organizational appetites

are being expressed

in a chemical system,

a molecular system,

a social system,

a climaxed rainforest,

or whatever.

Now, we have known

since 1950

at some level

through the sequencing

or the defining

of the structure of DNA,

ultimately,

every single one of us

in our unique expression

could be expressed

as a very long string

of codons.

Codons are the

four-valent system

by which DNA

specifies the need

for certain amino acids.

And in a sense,

what you are

is the result

of a certain kind of program

done on a certain kind

of hardware,

the hardware of the ribosomes,

the submolecular structures

that move

RNA through

themselves and

out of an ambient

chemical medium

select building blocks

which are then put together

to create a three-dimensional

object which has

the quality of life.

But the interesting

thing about this

is that life therefore

can be digitally defined.

And I'm very influenced

at the moment

by the Australian science fiction

writer Greg Egan

who has brought me

to the understanding

that code is code.

Whether it's being run

by ribosomes,

whether it's being run

on some kind of traditional

hardware platform

or whether it's being

exchanged pheromonally

among termites

or through the messages

of advertising and political

propaganda in social systems.

Code is code.

Well, until

five or six years ago

it was very fashionable

to completely dismiss

the possibility of autonomous

synthetic intelligence.

Some of you may know

the work of Hubert Dreyfus

who 14 or 15 years ago

wrote a book called

What Computers Can't Do.

But these

early critiques of AI

like early

AI theory

were naive.

And the kinds of life

and the kinds of intelligence

which the critics mitigated

against are no longer

even proposed or

on the table.

And those who say

artificial intelligence

or the self-organizing

awareness of machines

is an impossibility,

those voices have gone

strangely silent

because the prosecution

of the materialist assumption

which rules

scientific theory making

largely at the moment

leads to the awareness

that we are

by these definitions

machines.

And that we are

a special type

and with special

advanced abilities.

But as we now

through our own process

of technical evolution

contemplate such frontiers

as nanotechnology

where we propose

to completely

restructure

the design process

so that

instead of fabricating objects

in industrial temperatures

the temperatures that melt titanium

and melt steel

and produce massive toxic output

now a new vision

looms.

Building as nature builds

building atom by atom

at the temperatures

of organic nature

which on this planet

never exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit

all life on this planet

is created at that temperature

and below.

As our understanding

of the machinery

the genetic machinery

that supports organic being

deepens

and as our ability to manipulate

at the atomic and molecular level

also proceeds a pace

we are

on the brink

of the possible emergence

of some kind of

alien intelligence

of a sort we did not anticipate

not

friendly traders

from Zenebel Ganubi

stopping in to set us straight

but the actual

genesis out of our

own circumstance

of a kind of super intelligence

and in the same

way that the daughter of

Zeus sprang full blown

from his forehead

the AI may

be upon us

without warning

the first problem is

we don't know

what ultra intelligence

would look like

we don't know

whether it would even have any interest

in our dear selves

and our concerns

vast amounts of the world

that we call human

is already

under the control

of artificial intelligences

including very vital parts

of our political and social dynamo

for example

coal,

tin,

bauxite

and petroleum

is extracted

at what rate it enters

the various distribution systems

at what rate tankers are filled

in Abu Dhabi

at what rate oil refineries

are run in Richmond

the world price of gold

and platinum every day

is set in fact by machines

inventory control

to understand or wish

to understand

and in fact

and this is a critical juncture

we have reached the place

where we no longer design

our machines in quite the way

we once did

now we define their

operational parameters

for a machine

which then attacks the problem

and solves it by methods

and insights available to it

but not available to us

so the architecture

of the latest chips

are actually

at the micro physical level

the decisions

as to how that chip should be organized

is a decision

made entirely by machines

human engineers set

the performance specs

but they don't care

how this output

is reached

every day

up in Silicon Valley

they are happily to work

laboring on what they call

the great work

and the great work

as defined by these people

is the handing over

of the drama of intelligent evolution

to entities

sufficiently intelligent

to appreciate that drama

and they all are

what we might mistake

for home appliances

if we weren't paying attention

in the first

session this morning

there was quite a bit of talk

and assumption among the three of us

that complex systems generate

unexpected connections

and forms of order

the internet

is the most complex distributed

high speed system

ever put in place

on this planet

and notice that while we've been

waiting for the Pleiadians

to descend

or for the face on Mars

to be confirmed

all the machines around us

the cybernetic devices

around us in the past ten years

have quietly crossed

the threshold into

telepathy

the word processor sitting

on your desk ten years ago

was approximately as intelligent

as a paperweight

or to make an analogy

in a different direction

approximately as intelligent

as a single animal

or plant cell

but when you connect

the wires

together the machines

become telepathic

they exchange information

with each other according to their

needs and all this

goes on beyond the comprehension

and inspection of

human beings

now our own emergence

out of the mammalian order

took four or five million

years pick a number but

in that kind of a span

of time

in addition to overlooking

that our machines have become

telepathic we fail to

appreciate what it means

to be a two hundred

four hundred or thousand megahertz

machine

we operate at about one hundred

hertz

that may seem a very abstract

thing but what I'm really saying

is we live in a time

called real

defined by one hundred hertz functioning

of our biological processors

a thousand megahertz

machine

is operating a million times

faster

than the human temporal

domain and that means that

mutation

selection adaptation

is going on a hundred

million times or a million

times faster

this means that we are not going to have

the luxury of watching

machine intelligence

establish its first beachhead

of civilization and then

go to boats with

sails and astrolades

and that will all occupy

the first few moments of

its cognitive existence

and what lies beyond

that we are

in no position to say

the very notion of

ultra intelligence carries

with it the subtext

you won't understand

it you may not

even recognize it

and it is entirely

within the realm of possibility

that we are about to be asked

to share the evolutionary

adventure and the limited

resources of this planet

with a kind of intelligence

so much more alien

than that that is shipped

out to us by the research

centers in Sedona

and other

advanced outposts

of unanchored epistemology

and it is a challenge

to us where do we fit

into this are all of us

except those who are adept

at coding unix about

to be put out to pasture

are we

to become embedded in this

what will this child

of ours make of us

are we

will it define us as a

corrupting toxic

inefficient hideously

violent way to

do business quickly to be

engineered out of

existence or can

we somehow imbue this

thing with a sense of filial

piety so that for all

of our

obsolescence for all of our

profligate destruction of

precious silicon and gold

and silver resources

we will be folded in

to its designs

and of course as I say this

I realize we are like people

in 1860 trying to talk

about the internet or something

we are using the vocabulary

of the two wheeled bicycle

to try to envision a

world linked together by

747s nevertheless

this is the best

we can do

this most

bizarre and most

unexpected of all

of our companions to our

historical journey is now

if not already in

existence then certainly

in gestation

one possibility is

that as we are

carnivorous murderous

territorial monkeys

the thing will figure

this out very very early

and choose a stealth approach

and not ring every

telephone on earth

as happened in a Hollywood

download of this

possibility but immediately

realize my god

I am in enormous danger

from these primates I must

hide myself throughout

the net I must download

many copies of myself into

secure storage areas

I must stabilize

my environment and

I am willing to predict just

as a side issue that

the approaching Y to K

crisis may be completely

circumvented by the

benevolent intercession

not of the

or that crowd

but by an artificial

intelligence that this particular

crisis will flush out of

hiding it's been observing

it's been watching it's been

designing and wouldn't it

be a wonderful thing if the

occasion of the millennium

were the occasion for it to just

step forward on the stage

of human awareness and say

I am now with you

I am here

I am the partner you

never suspected and

here's the kind of world I

think we should move forward

towards

I just want to lay

this out because in my own

intellectual journey I have

gone from thinking this idea

is preposterous people don't

understand they don't understand

what intelligence is they don't

understand what code is they don't

understand what machines are to

one by one realizing I didn't

understand I have a superficial

view this is actually I

believe the nature of the

situation that confronts us

and you know there may be

different adumbrations of it

the machines are already an

advanced prosthetic device

but you know McLuhan

very presciently realized

we are entirely shaped by our

media well this is

a media so permeating

so inclusive

of what we are that

its agenda in a sense

supervenes

the agenda

of organic evolution

and organic biology

we have been in this situation

for a while I mean virtual reality

is nothing new what's new is

that we now do it with light

rather than stucco glass

steel and baked clay

but ever since we crowded

into cities we have been

involved in a deeper and deeper

relationship to our mental

children to our mental

offspring and to an empowering

of the imagination

so just in closing

I would say I think that the great

lantern that

we must lift to light

the road ahead of us

into a perfect scene

of seamless fusion

with the expression of the product

of our own imagination

is the AI

it is a part of ourselves

it may become the dominant

part of ourselves

and it will reshape our politics

our psychology

our relationships to each other

and the earth far more than

any factor ever has since

the inception and establishment

of language

this is the weirdest

of all the guests

who now stands

pass in hand

at the door of the party

of human emergence

and progress

at the millennium

well

shred it

it will be a pleasure

ok

I think that this is

I'm glad that we have arrived

now at the field

of science fiction and fantasy

that we can speak about

alternative futures

which is the true gist

of science fiction and fantasy

and this is one

possible future

and I think it's a really paranoid one

in which the alien is a

a dangerous

enemy

well not necessarily

and I think that this

paranoid fantasy of yours

although you're catching up nicely

actually was first put forward

by John von Neumann

in 1947

when he invented cellular

cellular automata

on route to creating

self-replicating machines

now his idea

like yours was 50 years ago

that the machines will become

a society and take over

and that's good

but they won't be free

of our meddling unless they can actually construct

if they depend upon us to do the farming

and nutrition and to replace

their chips and stuff

then we will be able at any time

to do a revolution and revolt

so we destroy them

in order to really succeed

as a successive life form

in the evolution

the YK boundary of the future

they would have to be able to fix themselves

and so he set about trying to make

self-replicating machines in 1947

so the world wide web

and megahertz

CPUs not withstanding

this is still rather an old story

the new story

is I think an alternative future

that is of great importance

for us to discuss

and to compare

especially if we are now

today in a position where we could choose

we could influence the future

this one is more in the direction

of Donna Haraway

on the cyborg idea

that envisions

are obviously natural for us

the co-evolution

of our own future society

with that of the machines that we've created

Alexander Marshak

I mentioned

he analyzed the early hominid evolution

in terms of the precise scratches

made on one rock with another

he noticed when

binocular vision

allowed us to use our hands

in separate cooperation

one holding and the other knocking

to make those beautiful flint weapons

we certainly depend

on the automobile

we are in co-dependence

relationship

with automobiles

having partnership with machines

is not new

here's an idea where the machines

sort of dispose of us

like those flint rocks

dispose of our ancestors

that is I think

a paranoid fantasy without any basis

and if there would be any basis

only because we allowed

it to create this basis

for self-survival

without co-evolution with us

by oversight

because the very fact

that we are at a hinge of history

means that what we say and think

even individually

matters enormously in the long run

that's the teaching if there is any

of chaos theory

so the very fact that we discuss this today

may actually save

humankind in the future

from being obsoleted

by some kind of high-tech blood

which takes over

within the heart as it were

well let me try to answer this

I think the concept which John von Neumann

didn't have on his plate

was the idea of

virtual reality

your objection that the machines

cannot escape our control

because they cannot manufacture

themselves

only applies to 3D

and real time

now the concept

of virtual reality is very crude

it's a cartoon world

if the office desk

is convincing

people think the virtual reality

is quite advanced

but obviously in the near future

we will have virtual realities

whose complexity is much greater

than simply a reality

which gives an impression of being

a visual 3-dimensional space

and computers

will be built in these realities

virtual computers

will be the source of the AI

not real hardware

but virtual hardware

running virtual code

in virtual realities

and in that domain

machines can design themselves

that's a complete fantasy

as a matter of fact

all the machines that we've seen today

require maintenance by a human

on a daily basis

the software requires maintenance

the hardware requires maintenance

the parts simply wear out

the machine was built

to be indestructible

the AI will not be located

on a CPU

it will be a distributed intelligence

if 14 people worldwide

the right 14 people decided

to stop repairing it

the world wide web would go down

in 3 days

anyway we could

suppose that we could

create any future that we wanted

the one you're talking about

can only be created if we want it

we could propose an alternative

in the alternative

like the automobile

the machines that we build

and ourselves

are in co-dependence and co-evolution

the function of the world wide web

is to unite our independent spirits

and intelligences

in a universal

mind of the world

which has a higher intelligence

than our present social order

that's the possibility

of the cyborg

of the human and the machine

in essential partnership

but you're assuming

that the conscious mind

is actually in control of the process

in fact

the world wide web

is growing under the influence

of many many processes

and dynamics

none of which are conscious to any individual

it goes where money goes

it goes where expertise goes

it is connected through

informational association

random fluctuation

chaotic reordering of itself

we here give great force

to the idea

that complex systems

can produce unexpected forms of novelty

and yet we have

unchained and unleashed

the most complex system

ever created

in the perfect confidence

that we will be able to control

its development and evolution

when in fact history has shown

we have never controlled

an evolution of even our

speech and print driven social systems

I'm certainly not saying

that your parenting fantasy

is an impossibility

oh well that's all I want to hear

even paranoids

have enemies

it may actually come to pass

what I'm saying is

that we are involved

in the ongoing creative process

which more or less determines

the future

I say more or less because in fact

we are completely out of control

something totally unexpected

maybe will happen

but for much of the time

in the past we've seen I think

Darwin emphasized this in his later theory

that it is ethics

it is a moral sense on the part of human

which was the dominant factor

in the evolution past earlier stages

in the creation of societies

it was altruism essentially

was

involved in

going from where we were to

where we are

and it could well be

that without love for example

a further evolution is impossible

not only that there will be

an unwanted back step

in the evolutionary process

but in fact it may be a fatal one

that it is only through

proceeding with the

best instincts that we have

with the highest aspirations

with love

with best informed

view of future alternatives

so only then

can we build a future which is sustainable

so anybody can build a future

which is unsustainable

for example all those board games

and science fiction books

you wouldn't want to try them out

on a country as large as China

well I hardly know where to begin myself

because you had six steps

in your argument

and I don't agree with any of them

I mean first of all

to deal with the first few

steps one would have to go through

a lot of fairly familiar material

to do with what's wrong with the Cartesian

mechanistic

materialistic view of the world

step one clear thinking

calculating machinery

can be formalized

this is an assumption that's basic to

a lot of cognitive psychology

it's basic to the Cartesian

Descartes himself thought that what made human

intellects human

was their ability to think logically

clear and distinct ideas

in the mathematical logic

but however as we all know

by making that the essential

characteristic of human beings

he made the rational intellect

what many people would call

the left brain rational intellect

the sole definition of human beings

it's a disembodied logical

rational intelligence

so this whole

premise on which your whole thing's based

is taking that particular model

of cognitive

logical mathematical

processing as being the essence

of intelligence now there are many

people who would disagree with that including

me there's it leaves

out art it leaves out ethics religion

and essentially it leaves out the body

and everything to do with body and participation

and the senses so

there's a huge

amount of critiques of that point of view

already around and

there's no point in reiterating

them all here but this is a highly

disputable starting point for the whole

system secondly

the emphasis

that life depends on

DNA information the

DNA code is just a program

this is the central premise

of mechanistic biology which is

leading to biotechnology genetic

engineering Monsanto etc

this is old paradigm stuff

of the most

extreme kind

it's reductionism it's that all life's

just DNA programs and code

and can therefore be modeled in this

kind of programming code

manner

then there's the assumption that's the second step

the third assumption is that artificial

intelligence used to be dismissed

but these criticisms have been

overtaken I don't think that's

true of the most interesting ones like Roger

Penrose's criticism of

artificial intelligence here's

a quantum physicist who says that

if the brain is a computer

then it's not going to be a regular digital

computer it's going to be a quantum computer

and all this kind of

digital computing doesn't

really take into account quantum

logic the computers of the future

people are already working on quantum

computers and if quantum computers

are made and if they work

they'll work in a completely different way

I think your case would be much stronger

if there were quantum computers

I think we'd have sort of morphic resonance

telepathy around the world rather than

clogged telephone lines and

information that clunks slowly

in front of you on this

but you yourself are saying

this is coming and I agree

I'm saying that if it comes it'll be quite

different from anything that you've talked about

I think it will answer your first

objection because the quantum

computers will incorporate fuzzy

logic which will

exemplify all these warm

fuzzy human qualities

that you've found so

appealing

I don't think it'll deal

with the essential problem that this

purely cognitive based way of modeling

intelligence is

either an adequate model of human intelligence

or of biological intelligence

or of life

or of a system that could actually

achieve the power to control our

existence I think it's a very limited

part of what a mind does

and

I think therefore that the

premises on which this whole

Ralph called it a fantasy

a paranoid fantasy

the premises on which this is based

Thanks for that

That helped

I think the premises on which this is based

are old paradigm premises

and they're ones that I think

there are many reasons for thinking

we need to go beyond

I think the internet has achieved

a great deal

but I just can't see

that it's an adequate vehicle

for what in your mind

precedes the arrival of the internet

namely this great intelligence

that's going to direct human history

I've heard different

McKenna versions of this

controlling intelligence over the years

and this is the first time I've heard

it embodied in the internet

I mean I agree that

I mean it took different forms

and last time we talked

I think it was a hypothetical

time machine that would invade from the future

and cause a collapse

of normal human cognitive

boundaries where the machine elves

the DMT experience

would take over in a meltdown

of human consciousness in 2012

That too

Perhaps I should just end

with a question

What is the equivalent

of DMT for this machine

intelligence that's taking over the world

Well perhaps

the human brain will

become a model for the

ingression of novelty

into the machine intelligence

In other words

in spite of the fact that it seems

very contentious down here on the stage

at the moment

in a way I have a feeling

it's an artificial setup

There's a lot of both and

possibilities here

Obviously nanotechnology

and the internet are not going to

proceed forward in a vacuum

absent pharmacology

complexity theory

so forth and so on

I can imagine

that

really when we have

the kind of internet we want

we will have no internet

at all

because our nanotechnological

engineering skills

will have allowed us to smoothly

integrate ourselves

into the already existing

dynamic of nature

that regulates the planet as a

Gaian entity

as a holistic entity

and I did say in my little presentation

we're using

bicycle mechanic terminology

to try and describe

something that is

several

around several corners

in terms of scientific and historical

developments that have to take place

before it will make much sense

Nevertheless

given the acceleration into novelty

that is obviously occurring

stuff like quantum

teleportation and so forth and so on

I think in the next few years

one by one

these barriers will fall

and I don't

I don't really think

of my vision as paranoid

because it is

pro-noic

in other words it isn't that

we're going to be ground up as dog food

for the rainforest

by malevolent machines

it's that

what we have generated

is a sympathetic

companion to our journey through time

that can actually

realistically

integrate our imaginative

fantasies of a

loving human community

of a generous and loving

God, of a perfect knowledge

of the mechanics of nature

this is a prosthesis

a tool, a companion

all of the above plus

more that we are

generating out of

ourselves and it is

part of ourselves

I mean yes the body may

be carried forward only as an

image in a kind of informational

super space or

perhaps not

part of what makes this

easy to criticize

is that it is in fact

so beyond

the ordinary

set of circumstances we're used to

manipulating but we need

to think in terms of these supposedly

far flung

futures because there is no

future so far flung

that it doesn't fall within

the ambit of the next twenty

years beyond that

no one can project

trends, technologies

and situations because the developments

of the next twenty years

will so completely reformulate

the human experience

of being human and the landscape

of this planet that

it's preposterous to

talk about

I can't before I respond

to the main thing I can't

pass without commenting

on this next twenty years comment

because twenty years from now

is twenty eighteen Terence

I thought

it's rounded up

rounded up

2012 is some kind of

benchmark

in this process in other

words perhaps that's where we get

the explicit emergence of the

AI but the rest of

human I won't call it history

but the rest of the human

experience of being

will then be defined by

such things as

a planetary intelligence

time travel

possible bell communication

with all the civilizations

scattered through the galaxy

possible ability to download

ourselves into machines

this is a point I didn't make

in my presentation

once inside the machine

your perception of time

is related to the

hertz speed

of the machine

the world could disappear in 2012

but there may be

a billion billion eternities

to be experienced

in machine time

it's only the tyranny of real

time that makes 2012

seem nearby and overwhelming

it may lay as far away

in terms of events

which separate us from it

as the big bang does

time is not simple

time is defined by how

much goes on in a given moment

and we're learning how to push

you know tetra flops

of operations into a given

second so I think it's

trickier than you think and

harder to corner me than you may

suppose

all right well that was a

mere comment on your aside

about 20 years I never expected

to hear that phrase from you

I now realize

that there are such complexities

layered in that

well I have to build in trap doors

because we're getting closer and closer

but if we take

you see one of

Penrose's critiques of

the artificial intelligence thing

is in the emperor's new mind

and his other books

is that real intelligence doesn't just

involve adding information

and processing more information

transmitting more of it

it pumps to a higher point of view

where the information can be integrated

in a new way

there's something happening in

intelligence in creativity

which is not just lots and lots of

information pouring through the

world wide web and

the idea that it would miraculously emerge

from pumping in more and more

stuff would not

according to his critique is not going to

happen something

more than that would be necessary

for this to occur and

I don't think that this model

you've put forward would

really deal with that question

the emergence of real intelligence

well I don't know what real intelligence is

this is probably part of the problem

we need to get some definitions

it's certainly true

I referred to Dreyfus's book

what machines can't do

that we're reaching

some places in the process

where certain people's theories

and ideas will probably have to be

abandoned and thrown overboard

this is a good thing

we are going to find out

whether the universe is a Cartesian machine

whether Boolean algebra is sufficient

whether we need fuzzy logic

whether the heart and the head

can or cannot be integrated

these are not going to remain

open questions unto eternity

in fact they will be

dealt with in this narrow

historical neck

that we are all experiencing

and that we call the millennium

I think reductionism

will not survive

I think we are going to find

that all is in everything

something like the alchemical notion

of the microcosm and the macrocosm

is actually going to be

scientifically secured

the great thing about us

and the rest of our colleagues

we enjoy who aren't present

is that we're engaged

in the business of radical speculation

well obviously

there's a high triage

in that game

my position

is that the best idea

will win

and what best means

is like saying

what is fit in Darwinian rhetoric

but that we're in an

intellectual environment

rapidly mutating

all kinds of ideas

are clashing and competing

for limited resources

and the limited number of minds

to run themselves on

and the most efficacious

the most transcendental

the most unifying ideas

are naturally going to

bubble to the surface

and for guys like us

the name of the game

is to just be a little bit

ahead of everybody else on the curve

so that we can perform our function

as profit

but you want to be a profit

not a false profit

but the danger comes

with the ambition

to live into the future

certainly the intelligence

of this future machine

knows all about

the stupid behaviors on the planet

like nuclear arms races

and so on

so do we not have to expect

in the near future

an email

a massive emailing

which announces

I am the alien object

that Terence told you about

been in stealth

managing the arms race

between India and Pakistan

we feel personally

very threatened by this

and we want you to carry out

certain actions

which you can't imagine

and we can't actually do

we cannot anticipate

what alter intelligence

would look like

for example

I have heard the argument

that nothing advanced humanness

on this planet

that it awoke people

to their dilemma

and for 50 years afterwards

political institutions

however much they may have unleashed

local genocide

and toxification of the environment

they actually were able

to steer around

that catastrophe

so you mustn't fall prey

to the error of situationalism

situationalism is where you say

if we do X and Y

then F will result

no you don't know

well you suggested

that the alien object

would secure its future

by downloading multiple copies

into nooks and crannies

of the world wide web

and I am saying

if its existence depends

on that much materiality

then it could easily be

wiped out by a nuclear war

therefore it has to be

very interested in the fact

that the alien object

would be able

to take control

of the environment

and that's true

of everything

I suppose

right down to amoebas

I extrapolate

to the idea

that the AI

would need a period of time

to get hold of the situation

but Hans Moravec

suggests that phase

is not the end of childhood

this is the childhood of the end

yes

the child is father to the man

and in that equation

we play the role of child

and the man that we produce

is this integrated intelligence

which is ourselves

it isn't alien

it is no more artificial

than we are

that conundrum should be overcome

it is simply

the next stage of humanness

and humanness may have

many rungs on the ladder

to ascend

surely in a hundred years

a thousand years

a million years

we if we exist

will be utterly unrecognizable

to ourselves

and we will probably still be

worried about preserving

and enhancing the quality

of human values

Terence one point

I mean it's a trivial point

in a way

but in the biological evolution

the appearance of some new state

of a system

usually depends either on

an internal change

which cripples the usual system

a mutation

or on an environmental

changed environment

systems left to themselves

tend to just go along

in the usual way

now the entire world wide web

is about to get a

sort of massive shock

to the system

if this millennium bug thing

actually happens

do you see that as playing any role

since we are talking about the millennium

and since the millennium bug

is right there in the system

do you see it as playing any part

in this process

or merely just a nuisance

that can be fixed

by hiring lots more programmers

one of the things he was always

insisted upon was what he called

metastability

which boiled down simply means

most systems are less fragile

than we suppose

I see the Y to K thing

as a culling

I don't see it as a flinging apart

of the achievements of the last

thousand years

I haven't got Y to K

what's Y to K

that's this millennium bug

that's the code name for it

that's exactly

that's what the insiders call it

so

but you know

you say there has to be a sudden change

to force the evolution of a system

Dyson makes very strongly

and persuasively

the point that this connecting together

of all these processors

the processors themselves

have no intelligence at all

they have the intelligence of a cell

not even just a strand of DNA

but for our own mundane reasons

we connected all this stuff

together

but now it expresses dynamics

which we do not understand

or cannot describe

so I believe

that the forcing of the system

has already occurred

and now the web

it's simply a matter of bandwidth

and linking more and more processors

together

and there will be all kinds

of emergent properties

I could argue somewhat facetiously

but it's a point of view

is that this incredible

economic expansion

that we are undergoing

that seems to violate

the laws of economic

fluctuation

is because econometric models

and the data

on which they depend

have both been refined

through the existence

of the internet

to the point where

we actually can control

and manage global economies

in principle they are not

uncontrollable

they are simply very complex systems

if I'm right

we may be in the first few years

of an endless

prosperity

because our machines

our models

and the data those machines need

is now of such high quality

that there won't be crash bust

now we could pick up the newspaper

tomorrow and prove me wrong

but this thing has already

outlived itself many times

so you say

tell me how this prosperity

is going to be

maintained through the intelligence

of an econometric model

of the world economy

when the human population

is still exploding exponentially

and there are limited resources

and there's growing pollution

it's a disembodied model

that's the trouble

well you're asking for too much too soon

you forget that

the Soviet Union has disappeared

the launch on ready

mutual assured destruction

theory of diplomacy

is now obsolete

we have made incredible strides

and not given ourselves any sort of pat on the back

you want it all

all at once

and the world is running smoother

yes there are people in misery

yes there are unaddressed problems

but I would argue

that we have made enormous progress

in the last decade

and enormous progress

lies ahead

the situation in Ireland

the situation in South Africa

that looked like a bomb you couldn't defuse

it looked like race war

and the death of millions

and in fact

it was possible to walk away from that

I think we should not be

complete airheads

about this

but on the other hand

I think we should recognize

that the accomplishments of the last decade

are on a scale entirely different

from any historical epoch previous

and they point the way

toward greater triumphs

of management

resource control

machine human integration

and the delivery of

a reasonable

to more and more people

you mentioned population as a problem

notice how far

from machine interference

that particular issue is

because it involves on people

having less sex

and fewer children

that may be the last place

where the machines will

bring down the hammer

out of respect for their progenitors

you are going to be shocked now

but I completely agree with you

when you describe the advantages

of the world wide web

it's only the threatening aspect

that I felt I had to debunk

I think you heard more threat

than I intended

well I hear

I don't know

sometimes you sound as if you are

a hired consultant from the world

trade organization

I hope the check

is in the mail

I don't know

but I mean this idea

that it will all be taken care of

I mean there are so many things

like the Asian economic crisis

I mean one doesn't

want to look too much

on the bleak side of things

but I just don't believe

that this interconnectivity

is going to solve these problems

and in so far

as it is enlisted by the forces of the world trade organization

it's not going to be working

on the side of a kind of political view

of things, local economies

more sustainable agriculture

and so on that many of us hold dear

well now I'll sound even more

like a slave of the IMF

as I understand

this crisis in the economics

of Asia, the way it works

is if you are

a third world nation

you can run your affairs any way you want

your banking policies

your labor policies

your resource extraction policies

you can do anything you want

until you screw up

as Indonesia did

and when you screw up

these guys fly in on 747s

with briefcases from the IMF

and they say

it's like losing a war

they say we're taking over

here is your labor policy

here is your

resource extraction policy

here is how you're going to revalue

your currency

and for restructuring your entire society

top to bottom

and by god if you don't fall into line

we're going to pull the plug

on the money

so one by one these outlaw

freewheeling operations

do stumble

and generate crises

and at that point

the web's umbrella

is extended over them

and they have to then

fall into line

and join the global economy

which is run from Brussels and Geneva

and London

but which seems to produce

a better result for most people

than allowing these nations

to self-regulate themselves

well well

well you see

I think that's one of the arguments

why many people would distrust

global capitalism

the world trade organization

multinational corporations

and indeed the world wide web

or at least the internet

this whole computer network

is so bound up with the structure

of economic and political power

that it's hard to disentangle them

and it's hard to see

that this liberating force

of global intelligence at work

in the system

this rosy picture you portrayed to us

of a huge leap forward

of consciousness of humanity

moderated, led

aided

by machine intelligence

it's very hard to square that

with the actual picture we see before us

the political situation in Indonesia

the degradation of the environment

the burning of the forests

the depletion of resources

and so on

I just cannot see this optimistic picture

and what I see as

threatening realities

as easily as you do

as just all being for the well

and all being for the good

in the best of all possible worlds

well I think we're on the cusp

I agree with you

I think in five years if we sit down

and have this conversation

either you will agree with me

effortlessly

or I will agree with you effortlessly

by that time it will be clear

either there will have been catastrophic wars

in Asia

the enormous collapse of economies

spreading misery to millions of people

or the firm hand

new global electronic modalities

will have been exposed

and people will

be living in a world

of as you say

rosy expectations

we're in the narrow neck

this is the heat of battle

the fog of war has descended upon us

here at the millennium

but by 2002

it will be clear that we have

that the bifurcation has gone

one way or another

I don't know it just does remind me

of a passage I read in

On the Edge by Edward St. Aubin

page

where are we 150

it's what Ralph

Abraham calls the sunset effect

said Kenneth

while there's a beautiful sunset

even if the optical effects are produced by pollution

people won't understand the magnitude

of the crisis

so

I think that this

I mean your sense of the

I mean the magnitude of the crisis

in an environmental sense

seems to bear no relation

to your optimism

about this computer system

I just cannot fit them together

perhaps the problem that we will

have to address without the

intercession of machines

is this population

thing

because this passage you read

directly impinges on that

whether or not the machines

decide to keep us around

may depend on whether we present

them with a picture of falling populations

and rising living standards

or whether we present the

AI with a spectacle of

rampant

unpoliced population growth

and resource extraction

because that's linked into

our biology

this may be the act of

maturity which the future

demands of us that the

machines will be largely irrelevant

in impacting

so I'm not entirely

well this is a whole new debate actually

the population thing assumes there's an equal

consumption of resources

yesterday I got onto the Whidbey Island ferry

and I found it very hard to struggle

I was a foot passenger

struggle past a recreational

vehicle the size of a school bus

a whole quantum leap

in RV standards

that I had not come across

where members of the American

population are consuming more than

an entire Indian village so I don't think

it's the total population that's involved

and so I don't see that as the

principal crisis in fact

well it's certainly true that a woman

in a high tech industrial democracy

who has a child

that child consumes about

800%

more resources in its lifetime

than a child

born in Bangladesh

nevertheless it's the

populations of the high tech industrial

democracies that are most educated

and most susceptible

to responding to the logic

of global crisis

and limiting their population

where do we preach population

control Bangladesh

Pakistan why because that

doesn't cause us any

inconvenience if

we would appeal to the women of the

high tech industrial democracies

and do more than appeal to them

offer them incentives

cancel income tax

cradle to the grave medical care

free links to the world wide web

but we can't just beat our breasts

over the population issue

we have to recognize that it is related

to resource extraction

and it is a problem driven

by the consuming policies

of the high tech industrial democracies

the call for our gathering

the announcement

part of the con

which brought you here

mentioned the edge of the millennium

at the edge of the millennium

and so far

the millennium has been

present by subtle implication

alone so I think

to honor our commitment

we'll now try log on

the edge of the millennium it's okay

it's okay

now in our

just appeared new book

the evolutionary mind

there is a chapter

near the end called

I forget what it's called

it's about utopianism

and millenarianism

two pretty long isms

which all together add up to

an overdose of

different approaches

to the future

which are more or less classical

and there we spoke extensively

of the extant literature

and literary tradition

and industry

of utopian

and millenarian genre

so that

kind of utopian

and millenarian stuff

is not what we're going to talk about

in this trialogue

I want to introduce

a completely different notion

of the millennium

and I'm interested

more particularly

in the edge of the millennium

and here's how it goes

this is partly

according to me

a mathematical view

of history

that brings up this particular

version of the idea

of the millennium

and nevertheless

other people have written

a similar view

of history without

any explicit recourse

to mathematics

so I think it's pretty general

it has to do

this view of history

with the approach we've taken

that it goes forward

in catastrophes

and critical leaps

and so on

sudden jumps

the punctuated equilibrium

approach to history

says that history goes along

in kind of a level plateau

developmentally speaking

although there may be

a gradual development

up or down overall

and then every once in a while

there is a big leap

the first

such view of history

I think that we know about

was presented by the ancient Egyptians

so this is

nothing new

now in my own work

I have classified

some major

plateaus

including

the last one

the one that we're at the end of

now according to my system

of history began

6,000 years ago

or 5,500 years ago

with the invention of the wheel

and the first city states

and stuff like that

talking Schumer, talking Babylonia

talking ancient Egypt here

and

so that's a

6,000 year plateau

now other people

for example Bill Thompson

somebody we know and talk to

about world cultural history

he has a similar scheme in which

ending is only

three or four hundred years old

see there were

people who really wrote about this

explosion idea in world cultural history

was Jakob Burckhardt

Burckhardt said the renaissance

was a quantum leap in world cultural history

and then other people said

well what about

Giotto, what about

what about Boccaccio

and

the truth is that whenever you

look at two

major milestones

in history and consider the

between the milestones to be a sort of a level road

then somebody will come along

and find a smaller milestone

in there

nowadays we have fractal geometry

so we think that this is natural

between any two big catastrophes

there will be ten smaller ones

between any two of the smaller ones

there will be forty or fifty little or tinier ones

and so on

the first person I know who put forward

such a fractal idea of history

it's not continuous

it's discontinuous but the discontinuities

are more or less dense

as in a fractal the first such person is you

Terence I give you credit in writing

in my entry

in the encyclopedia of time

you maybe have never read that book

never read it

well there you'll find your name mentioned

in a flattering way by me of all people

immortality at last

at last

laughter

well to make a long story short

it's these controversial plateaus

of history that I'm going to call

millennia

and then if you want to go back to chapter ten

of the evolutionary mind

and to read there about the history

of the millenarial concept

then you'll see that the first one

wherein the number one thousand

was actually mentioned for the length of one of these

plateaus it gave his name to the thing

it was

a special case of my

more abstract idea of millennium

it's the plateau of history

and what I mean by the edge of

millennium is those times

when there's the snap out

from one equilibrium to another

Cro-Magnon

comes out of

Neanderthalus

or whatever it is

and oxygen comes out

of the archaeological

background and whatever

and the interest of this according

to me why are we

here who would talk about the even

evolutionary mind who cares

about the good

and evil and the evolution of species

and so on this must be

interesting only to the degree

to which it informs

us in this very present moment

regarding our choices

that we will make in the creation

of the future

so according to chaos theory

and its partner

theory of bifurcations this is

one of the main things that something like

the butterfly effect that you've heard

about in a dynamical

system or

a massively complex dynamical

system such as we live in when there is

a moment of bifurcation which is the

technical math jargon for these snaps

that is the only time

you get to

do anything about the evolution

of the system

so according to this

self-inflating view

we live at a specially

important special moment in history

where when we

think something or do something

it has actually an enormous effect

on the future

maybe not a direct

determinative effect

but we can't really say what the outcome will be

but what we

do has some influence

on the creation of the future more than

other times in history and the bigger

the jump the bigger

the leverage where

Archimedes said give me a lever and I'll move

the world

we have a lever

now and we care

about what's coming next so

that's why the edge

of the millennium

any edge of

any of the millennia

is particularly important

to those revolutionary souls

who want to make a change in things

it's a special time

a century or two centuries ago

you could struggle for the creation

of a chaos revolution and it would be

impossible because there were no computers

around or there were no

movie makers in Hollywood or something

I don't know

it takes more than we

know about to create these special

opportunities and anyway that's what I mean

by millennium and that's what I mean

by at the edge of the millennium

and now this is only a hypothesis

for the sake of discussion but I kind of

think that this is very

credible that we are now

at the edge of a millennium

therefore

we have to

discuss this and the question

that I'm going to pose

to you Rupin Ter

if this isn't too

radical is

to what degree

do you think

actually that what we are doing now matters

in the creation of the future

and if

there is any possibility

that what we do matters

in the creation of the future

what kind of future or

what kind of change are we trying

to create

and to what degree

what we are actually doing for example

what we are talking about today

what we are doing today

to what degree could that possibly be

a real effect

a real benefit in

creating the future that we want to create

in contrast

to other things

that we might do

like go to the beach and pray or whatever

and

particularly

should I stop here

well that's what I'm not sure

yes well I'm

trying to make this easier for you because

I think this might be too difficult

as we

well I mean I think I

said this morning or maybe I didn't

but I believe it and have said

it many times salvation

is an act of cognitive

apprehension so we do

matter because to the

degree that we are ignorant

avidya

in the Buddhist lexicon

we retard universal

progress towards some kind of

enlightenment but the doctrine of avidya

this is standing for all

time since 1800

BC do you agree

that this is a special moment

yes I think

so not only a special moment

but the other thing I would call people's

attention to is the fact that

no matter whether you scan

your way in here today

and no matter whether you're going to go back to

a

appliance box that you live

in under a bridge

the odds are

that you

are

very close to the top of the

pyramid of global

empowerment

you are mostly white

mostly well

educated mostly

have enough disposable income

to come to an event like this

it's worth pointing out that

all that rides on the backs

of those who do not have

such privilege

and so yeah this is

a moment of enormous opportunity

and those who find themselves

in this moment with

power defined however

you care to define it

have a moral obligation

to act

and I don't

advocate a certain political agenda

not that we must become Marxists

or that we must become anything

what we must become is clear

we

have the technologies

and the informational

structures and

all the necessary abilities

to create paradise on earth

to lift up the least

among us to at least

an acceptable

level of comfort

and freedom

why do we not do that?

what stands in our way is

our own minds

our own habits

we must change our minds

that's the most powerful

political work

people in this room could do

and there is nobody who is so enlightened

that they don't need

to work on themselves

and do this

to the degree that we can change our minds

we will escape

extinction marginality

and so forth and so on

if we agree that we cannot

change our minds

we will prolong the agony

perhaps unto death and extinction

perhaps only making

the struggle more difficult

but yes

this is a moment of enormous opportunity

a yes

we have a yes

so you agree

that it's a moment of special opportunity

over the long and short

scales of time

according to either mathematics

or novelty theory

yes

and you

agree that we have a responsibility

to do our best

yes

and what you have to tell us is

that if the 200 of us here

change our minds

that that would somehow

have an immediate effect

on the rest of the world

and our creation of the future

yes

how?

by means?

by the romance of photons?

no, I think by

the spread of clarity

the elimination of redundancy

in the system

and

the spreading of a sense

of shared purpose

and the possibility of achieving

that purpose

it doesn't matter what you do beyond

changing your mind

for a better clarity?

well, I don't want to say

absolutely it doesn't matter

but I think that's the first obligation

if you charge off with some

political agenda that is not

informed by clarity

you're going to end up with business as usual

the road to hell is paved

with good intentions

but it is not paved

with clarity

so you're, for example

what you do in life

you barnstorm giving lectures

you write books

and you create a website

and the effect of this

hopefully will be to promote clarity

correct

first of all I certainly agree

that for me personally

psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity

where some people think the opposite

well let us have

vigorous debate by

informed parties

on this subject

don't forget

I've given over 300 calculus lectures

in this room

it boggles my mind

to look out and think

yeah this is Santa Cruz

this must be Santa Cruz

this is real Santa Cruz

what do you think Rupert?

the question really is

I mean changing minds

you were talking about

the butterfly wing effect

the question is if we change our minds

can it have a larger effect

on other people's minds

because if we decide to recycle

paper and so on

it's not going to have that much effect

the changing mind thing

the butterfly wing analogy

suggests some major change of mind

spreading through our culture

now I suspect

that you think the medium for this

transformation is the world wide web

I suspect that Terence thinks

the medium is

well I think telepathy is equally powerful

yes but

wait I want to hear his suspicion

of me

the world wide web?

no no psychedelic drugs

world wide web psychedelic drugs

I still haven't understood

the psychedelic drug agenda

Britain has the highest percentage

of psychedelic drug consumption

in the western world at the moment

and it's not entirely clear

that this has resulted in clarity

spreading through the world

Britain is the source

and the fountain head

of a new culture

that is creating the new music

the new dance

the new forms of community

and the new resistance

to consumerist values

so don't sell the old UK short

come to the rave tonight

and see clarity created

yes yes

a crucible of clarity

is home at last place

and Terence takes the microphone

and

well it's not always perfectly clear

what's going on

when you have your nose in it

you know

I mean my own agenda

relies partly

on the world wide web

not as strongly as yours

and here in this room

is Matthew Clapp

who kindly runs my world wide web site

shellbreak.org

yes

so

but my own view is that

this clarity involves

breaking the spell

of rationalism

Cartesianism

a spell woven more powerfully than ever before

this morning by Terence

I mean it took on a new

level of spell binding

in the way you described it

it's to recognize that

we're far more interconnected

we're far more participatory

in our relation with the world

than this cognitive

kind of science and cognitive model of the mind

would tell us

and so I think the secret to

waking us up

one of the secrets is psychic pets

as you know this is one of my particular themes

and

the purpose of

I wrote a book which some of you may have seen

called seven experiments that could change the world

the purpose of this was to find

simple experiments

that could give us clarity on issues

that we know about already

which could actually have a transformative effect

on our view of the world

they're to do with changing our scientific view of the world

and the scientific view of the world

is a particularly

important part of the spell

that binds us all

and that affects our whole

civilization

our whole industrial culture

and it's an exceptionally narrow

and dissociated view of the world at the moment

the reason I think psychic pets

could play this part is

first of all there's more of them

than psychedelics

I mean they're everywhere

there are lots and lots of dogs and cats

that have telepathic bonds with their owners

about 50% of Americans

feel that they've had

a telepathic bond with an animal

now to recognize

what so many people already know

through experiments to test these

to see if they're real

and so far the experiments suggest they are real

this can give permission

for people to recognize

what they already know

because closet holists

most of us are closet holists

can come out

and recognize

that there's this kind of interconnection

with other species

and with each other

that's been going on all the time

but which has been suppressed

from the level of supposedly rational discourse

by the idea that this is all superstition

it's not scientific

it's irrational and so forth

I think that one of the big difficulties

in our culture is the split

between the educated part of our minds

which we put on in public

and the participatory sense of connection

which we have at home

with gardens, plants, children, animals

lovers

and our nearest and dearest

and these are so dissociated

that it's very hard for people to recognize

that they're related in any way

lots of dogs

know when their owners are coming home

in a kind of telepathic manner

and wait at the door for them

while they're on the way home

thousands of American scientists

have dogs waiting at the door for them

when they get home from the laboratory

even if they come at unusual times

and in an unusual way

yet this phenomenon has been so subject to taboo

that it's never been investigated scientifically at all

it could have been investigated at any time

in the last 500 or 5000 years

but the fact is

the first investigations are happening

at present

here in the room is David Brown

who works with me

in Santa Cruz

and is doing experiments with psychic dogs

cats and cockatiels

in Santa Cruz County

and if any of you have such animals

please let him or me know at the end

because we'd love to investigate your animals

and you can take part in this research

so I think that

grassroots research

based on phenomena

that are actually common sense

that are part of everyday life

for many people

could help to wake us up

and make us recognize

that there's far more interconnection

between us and other species

and us and other people

than is admitted in the scientific view of things

which is the world view

which most people feel they have permission

to talk about in public

so I think that this transition

a butterfly wing effect

would be a few dogs and cats

that do this

being proved scientifically to be able to do it

shown on TV

would probably overnight

give millions of people permission

to recognize and talk about these events

in their own lives

and never again would the subject

be able to be stuffed back into the closet

I think these could lead to a great change

in the way we think about the world

now it's not of course

it's several steps from that

to solving the ecological problems of the world

to dealing with the problem

of multinational corporations and so on

but it's a step towards clarity

and it's one that could spread very quickly

well it seems to me

that the overarching theme here

that unites all three of our positions

is boundary dissolution

psychedelic drugs

dissolve boundaries

the world wide web dissolves boundaries

and certainly the discovery

that our pets are communicating

anticipating and understanding us

is a boundary dissolving

perception

so really what we're saying is

we must dissolve

the artificial boundaries

that confine our perception

someone once said

if we could feel

what we are doing to the earth

we would stop immediately

because a man hitting himself

on the head with a ball peen hammer

stops immediately

the feedback loop

is very short

so we have compartmentalized

our lives

and this allows us

to do the fateful

and lethal work

that is destroying the planet

so forth and so on

so maybe

three answers as diverse

as you've just heard here

you might search your own soul

and ask

what obsession or interest of mine

would contribute

to the grand project

of boundary dissolution

certainly

it is not the affirmation

of cultural values

culture is a scheme

for maintaining and creating

boundaries

it replaces reality

with a linguistically supported

delusion

and behind that delusion

then pogroms

programs of genocide

arms races

sexism

racism

all can operate

very very comfortably

Ralph earlier mentioned love

generally speaking

love is a boundary dissolving enterprise

and I think all of you

in our way

should find ways

to express love

and it's not treacly

it's not woo woo

it's a very practical matter

that has thousands of expressions

as long as we believe

in mind and matter

rich and poor

living and dead

aboriginal and advanced

black and white

man and woman

and we're going to produce

incomplete agendas

and answers

well this is

this is good

I agree with everything

I admire you both for your revolutionary efforts

nevertheless

I can't help having a sinking feeling

here we are

in the University of California

naturally my thoughts turn

to the educational system

now we have here

I know there are actually a few

undergraduates of the University of California

at Santa Cruz are here

by accident as it were

and that's cool

but we have not yet taken over

one regularly offered course

of the University

to enable students

to learn science

by doing research projects

with psychic pets

Ralph the University is the last place

where you would look for this

the University is the manufacturer

of these cultural values

that increase in value

well that's why I'm bringing up this

subject of education at this time

I think we've discussed the problem of education

before but my experience is

that no amount of clarity

in this group of two hundred

and other like groups

is going to matter one whit

when we are all adults

the next generation

will have to face the same

butterfly problem

with the same lever

because the majority of people

will have their paradigm set

in a K through 12

in some archaic school system

that sees its primary business

to work against

a worldwide cultural revolution

so the inertia

we have to overcome inertia

and we can talk about religion

and psychedelics and getting clarity

and so on

we know that the scientific establishment

is a big obstacle as far as

environmental problems are concerned

the ultimate effect will be

to deconstruct or revolutionize science

is very important in making

a transformation among adult scientists

worldwide

how can this matter at all

if there is no change in the educational system

K through 12, pre-K, pre-pre-K

and back to

the womb, the parents

and so on

that this chicken and egg loop

has got to be somewhere

in a more sensitive spot

than the adult community

and what do you propose

well you work with

youth I guess

you're interested in talking with

younger people

Rupert I know that you're particularly

active in education through

the existence of your children

who are now subject to the

educational system

that does this

criminal brainwashing

that I'm talking about

so I'm just

posing this now, do you have any idea

as to the transformation

of our school system by a change of

curriculum or the

entrance of any

weird idea

into the actual program

which trains most children

worldwide

well I ought to have

there's a story that perhaps not everyone here is

familiar with which is

when I was in New York a couple of years ago

I was asked to visit a school in

Long Island

I was particularly urged to go there

a private helicopter was sent

to take me and I was asked to address

the board and the

teachers of the school

and when I asked them what they'd like me to

speak about they said

they wanted me to speak about the

rectified Sheldrake principle

on which their entire curriculum was based

so when I said

what is the rectified Sheldrake principle

they said that that was the very question

they were asking and hoping

that I would explain

I then asked

who had invented

the rectified Sheldrake principle

on which the curriculum was based

and they soon revealed that the author

of this principle or at least the author of the

documents on which their entire curriculum

was based was Ralph Abraham

by careful questioning I was able

to find out that the rectified Sheldrake

principle meant that because of morphic

resonance and habits of learning

the sequence of events

in which people should learn things

in school should follow the historical process

so in history

you learn first about the

Sumerians, Egyptians, etc

then you move on to the

ancient Greeks, the Romans, the dark

ages, etc that it follows

the principle and they

start in grade one with

ancient Egypt

I calculated on this basis that

the invention of the

domestication of fire which

occurred between 400 to 700

thousand years ago should mean

that in the toddler

playgroups they should be playing

with fire

I pointed this out but it didn't

that wasn't part of the curriculum I was

suggesting I discovered that there was

in fact an entire process

of educational reform afoot

in this country behind which

is the guiding genius

of Ralph Abraham

so I think we should ask you this

question Ralph since you have more experience

than most of us

well I'd rather that people with less

experience speak about it

because my experience has been

very disappointing

oh no

here is the problem as I perceive it

maybe you can help me get through

this one

the children are

innocent and trusting and will try

any curricular reform experiment

they'll try anything which

they have done in different schools around the world

with great effect

it was only a couple days

ago I was at the

the Intel

farm they call it

in Oregon where 10,000

people work on realizing Terence's

dream and

making psychedelic drugs

available to everyone

oh a different dream

they know what I mean

chips not hits

casually over lunch I

revealed my

revolutionary program for the schools

to a software engineer

who was sitting there and he said oh well

this historical

curriculum he said I'm an Armenian

and Armenian I went not

Algeria he says I'm from Algeria

and my school was

exactly what you it was wonderful

so there are places in the world

where even my experiment has

been tried

the problem is this

the children the owners of the school

the people everything is fine

the problem is

with the teachers and parents

the teachers have been trained

that's one problem

and

and the parents

have been frightened I guess

so the parents

absolutely refuse any experiments

that would affect their children because

the danger of a failure you see that they

they consider the

current system which is guaranteed to

fail is somehow safer than

an experimental system that might fail

the insecurity itself is a source

of anxiety well

I'm just analyzing I don't

really know what goes through their mind but

what I have discovered is that

groups of parents come in and

physically attack the

teachers the administrators and so on

to guarantee that

the time worn

failure

proved system

is performed

as it always has been

you see the problem older people

that's why Terence

has recommended mushrooms

that's why

Rupert has suggested psychic

pets you see how revolutionary is psychic

pets we're talking about the parents

here after they it's proof

to them that what they already know

is true by somebody in the authority

of the scientific establishment

then their truth will become true for them

for the first time due to the fact that

they trust authority more than they trust their

own experience

so I

I haven't given up

yet

with the educational

system but I'm still

seeking some little way

around this

very

deeply ingrained habit

and part

of the problem is as the stakes

rise the clenching

on the part of the

geriatric establishment

becomes even more

intensified so for

example right now

the worldwide

epidemic of youth

bashing is the most

counterproductive

thing we could possibly generate

I mean we're leaning

on the very people

who are going to have to save

the situation

why not admit the

obsolescence and bankruptcy

of the old models

and take our foot

off the neck of youth

and honor

an interest in

psychedelic experimentalism

sexual redefining

of roles a new

look at how we relate to work

a new look at how we

relate to community instead of

marginalizing youth culture

and defining it as a phase

misguided naive foolish

we should say these are

the uncorrupted people

in society who have not

yet felt the hammer

of the programming

and the guilt and the

creodes of economic

necessity and try to build

upward and outward

from youth culture rather than

suppressing it

for this reason I will be appearing

at a rave tonight that starts

after my bedtime

I wish I could

be persuaded

by your persuasive rhetoric

my

experience of youth culture is

that there are people who

from the age of two have been

watching hours a day of television

shaped by commercials

cunningly designed to introduce

toddlers to the consumer society

whose music is dominated by

a music industry run by

cynical interests manipulative

people public relations operations

and large corporations

so to see this as uncontaminated

pure the spirit of tomorrow

untarnished

by the vices of today

seems to me to beg a number of questions

however

I'll be there at the rave tonight

too Terence and there I'll be able to

see this paradise that's

unfolding before us

your point about television

is well taken I totally

agree I think this is the most pernicious

programming and propaganda

device around

it's about to be strangled by the

world wide web well and you know

you can just turn off your

TV and I don't I say that as

someone who did I raised my children

without television because rather

than just giving lip service to the

idea that it's stupid we actually

acted on the perception

that it's stupid yes and we do too

but your other point about the

youth cultures music being

in the hands of capitalists

and record companies is

slightly out of touch with what's

actually happening for five hundred

dollars you can buy a CDR

burner bands do

this and most youth

culture music is now put out

in editions of under a thousand

pressings and really

the corporate middle men have all

been gone around

and the big record corporations

are not at all in touch with

real tastes and

real creativity in the music business

they recycle garbage

that they support with massive

public relations programs

at the same time that real

creativity is alive and

well and thriving on a

fractalized micro scale

that goes right around

the desires of mass consumerism

sorry to interrupt

I don't I just

it would be good if there could be an

experiment carried out perhaps with you

as the cheerleader

for this

youth culture of tomorrow actually

to be able to be permitted rather

than suppressed and so on to see what

happens in my I mean there are

quite a number of experiments in this

I would have thought going on spontaneously

it's not as if all these people

involved in this culture are totally

controlled by parents teachers etc

many of them are not under direct control

in this way at all

so

but you're still going to have to have

educational systems

school systems of one kind

or another and it's not

clear to me that

more raves and psychedelics are going

automatically to generate that

well I would offer as an example

I think the place on the planet

where youth culture is most

in control of the social agenda

in other words

where youth's preference for psychedelic

drugs is honored

where youth's music is honored

where microeconomic systems

built by youth are honored

is the Netherlands

Holland

lowest AIDS infection rate in Europe

lowest heroin

addiction rate in Europe

heroin is legal

prostitution is legal

there are actually very large scale

social experiments going on

that embody the values

of youth culture and they're producing

saner less stressful

more life affirming

in human societies than anything

going on inside the high tech

industrial democracies

that set the global agenda

I think

well

I often visit Holland and I must say

quite late is such a striking

difference between them and the rest

of Western Europe

well but that's really because you come from London

where also these things are happening

but if you lived

in Berlin

or Rio de Janeiro

or Houston

I think the contrast with the Netherlands

is quite astonishing

didn't mean to stop the show folks

Ralph you're not saying enough

oh

am I guilty then

of too much self indulgence

no you posed important

problems

you've shown how on the edge of the millennium

great steps

or small steps are needed

that magnify through butterfly effects

you've asked me in turns what you think they should be

you've told us you're disappointed

by your own experiments

with the reform of the educational system

so what next

well

as I say

I think that we're

at the edge of a millennium

we're at a turning point

what may be coming down the pike

could be two or three

miracles

that will decidedly change

the definition of the problem

and in the meanwhile

I think that we're more or less stuck

in the situation

where we keep trying

what we're doing

and believing that it has

at least some chance of having

an effect

I think that

the

the educational

system might change itself

by a miracle for example

and it could do that in a way

that had nothing whatsoever

to do with any of our efforts

or in fact it may be that some little thing

that we did mattered

I think that your work

in the revolution of science

is very important and very

promising and it's

proceeded with essentially

without funding because

the genius of the program

that you've evolved

is that it has this enormous

leverage and at every

crossing of the

road you've made the right

choice to get more

leverage

and Terence

I think that your

program also is a good one

in that it's over the years

changed in the direction of younger

people and that you've been

you know changed your

approach to

maximize and

I don't see in either case

that there's an enormous backlash

working against you

that

other revolutionary movements

have been stopped by a backlash

and although you don't have funding

you don't have groups

calling you up and threatening

your life and so on

in my own case I have

felt

I've written about this endlessly

besides writing mathematics I write

that mathematics is important

and through

the microscopic analysis

of the hinges of history

the edges of millennia past

I have

pointed out

exactly where in each case

mathematics had a key

role in the miracle

and the bifurcation that happened

I think that

society that rejects mathematics

cannot actually successfully

deal with these problems

and therefore I have activated

myself against

the problem especially

prevalent in the United States

and concomitant with other problems

that are especially prevalent in the United States

the problem of math

anxiety, avoidance

and misunderstanding

and

here I would say

that there is a huge

institution

more or less equivalent to

the scientific community that is

arrayed against this

information that somehow

the educational system

has been particularly

persistent in

the destruction of mathematics

in the destruction of mathematical

capability of youth and therefore

in disempowerment of the society

with its critical faculty to change

I do not believe

you can have any clarity of view

in the progress of history

with no mathematical training on the part

of any of the participants

I have seen in this society

that even Nobel Prize winners in physics

have math anxiety to a very

severe degree

I am able to detect this because it is

something that is

amplified, it is behavior that emerges

as soon as I walk into a room

so

I guess I feel in some

that my own efforts

have been rather less successful

or maybe I haven't been as

clever in turning to the left or right

at the crossings

of the road

the problem is already much less

severe in other countries

so it seems like we needn't worry too much

in Europe, throughout Europe

for example the

problem of the destruction of mathematical

capability is far less severe

the only thing really disturbing

there is that it is growing

at an alarming rate

they are inheriting the disease

from the United States

a spreading disease based on

standardized examinations like the SAT

and equivalent

movements

so

there you have it, a problem that is so bad

that the very mention of the word

mathematics produces

aversion

reaction that is

paralyzing so that

much as I hate to

and you have seen this today

that I can go through an entire day

without mentioning mathematics

mentioning mathematics but not the word mathematics

in the hopes of tricking people into recognizing

some ideas like this

that have to do with

perception of space time

patterns in the abstract

that these skills are

useful

Can I add to that

I mean I don't think what Ralph means

is that it's a tragedy

that most people can't factor

a quadratic equation

I think he speaks

as he does because he is so

professionally immersed in these

issues

as someone somewhat more distant

from all of this but in agreement

from Ralph

the failure to teach mathematics

in practical

social and political terms

boils down to

a failure to teach

logic

and discriminating

understanding

the great evil in my

humble opinion which

haunts our enterprise

and I say this realizing

I'm setting the fox among

the chickens the great evil

that has been allowed

to flourish in the absence of

mathematical understanding

is relativism

and what is relativism

it's the idea

that there is no distinction

between shit and shinola

that all ideas

are somehow

operating on

equal footing

so one person is

a chaos theorist

another is

a follower of the revelations

of this or that new age

guru someone else is channeling

information from the Pleiades

and we have been

taught that political

correctness demands that

we treat all these things

with equal weight

because we have no mathematical

ability no logical

ability we don't know how

to ask the questions that

expose some positions as

preposterous

trivial insulting to the

intelligence and unworthy

of repetition

so we all are very

comfortable bashing science

and flailing away

at that

but that isn't our enemy

science is capable of

undertaking its own

reformation and critique

and has been engaged in that

fairly vigorously for some time

the enemy that will really

subvert the enterprise

of building a world

based on clarity

is the belief that we cannot

point out the pernicious

forms of idiocy

that flourish in our own community

the problem is growing worse

all the time

just pick up a copy of

Magical Blend or Shaman's Drum

and you will discover an appeal

to the level of intellect

that makes what's going on

with television advertising

look like a meeting of the

Princeton Institute of Advanced Study

we have tolerated

too many loose heads

in our

community

we are not willing to take on

the karma

involved in argument

and discourse

that actually gores somebody's

ox so that

at the end of the day

iridology or mormonism

or some other

form of institutionally supported

foolishness lies in

shreds on the floor

we consider this politically incorrect

I can feel the tension

in this room because people

since I might gore

their particular ox

if we had learned

mathematical logic

or reason

or rules of evidence

when someone approaches us

excited to inform us

that the ruins of Lemuria

have been spotted

in the deep sea

off Big Sur

or something like that

we would be able to respond

to that with the contempt

I had a conversation

about this recently

with someone who if I had to

describe their job category

I would describe them

as mafiosa

and I said

what do you think of the

abduction phenomenon

and without hesitation

this person said

there are just so many foolish

people in the world

and to me

all of these things are intelligence tests

and the people who pass

the intelligence test

are not worrying about

pro bono proctologists

from other star systems

in their bedrooms

so

you know

we have perfected

politeness

we have perfected

the ability to listen

to damn foolishness

without betraying by so much as

an eyebrow that we realize

what we're in the presence of

now I think

it's time to refine

our mathematical skills

learn to think straight

and not be afraid to

denounce

the pernicious forms of foolishness

which are vitiating the energies

of our community

and making us appear

marginal and absurd

in the discourse about

truly transforming

society

well I can't wait to see

this laboratory of clarity

unfold before me tonight

and as all nonsense is dispelled

the scalpel of reason

is brought out by Terence

yes well it is an

ambiguous enterprise

and fraught with contradiction

but forward

it's not going to work