Trialogue 2 Psychedelic Computing - Psychedelic Computing

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Well, I'm finally getting this week's podcast out at midweek,

which is always my target, but not one that I hit very regularly.

At least not lately.

But here we are, nonetheless, and today we're going to hear the last of the trilogues for a bit.

In fact, I've got a little surprise for you next week,

and I'll tell you about that after we hear today's program.

But first, I want to thank John S. and Terry L.,

both of whom sent generous donations to the salon recently.

So thank you, John and Terry.

I appreciate your support in helping to keep these podcasts going.

And for today's podcast, we're going to hear the recording of a private conversation

Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake had back in September of 1991.

Their topic that day was Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution.

And we begin with Ralph Abraham introducing the topic.

But as you listen,

try to keep in mind that this conversation was held in 1991.

And a lot has taken place since then,

particularly in the arrival of the Internet

and significantly faster and more powerful personal computers

than were available back then.

So let's join Ralph now.

Well, our talks frequently range over different periods of history.

We love to extract peculiar details from the historical record

and speculate on their relationship to major movements in cultural history.

So today, we get to do this with modern history,

with cultural history in our own lifetime,

for our subject is Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution.

There have been several articles in the journals recently,

and newspapers speculating on connections

between the onset of the Psychedelic Period

and discoveries in the Computer Revolution.

But it only came to my attention very recently

through an article in GQ.

For this article, I was interviewed on the subject,

my usual subject,

of complex dynamical models

for history,

for social, economic, political systems,

and their potential for aiding our jump-start

on the future.

When the interview finally appeared in the magazine, however,

it wasn't about that at all.

It was a speculation

on psychedelics in the Computer Revolution.

And this article somehow had evolved, I think,

from my connection with Mondo 2000.

So this is a magazine that we all know.

We know the editors, we met them here, in fact, at Esalen.

And this magazine had evolved through stages

with different names,

High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, Mondo 2000.

As if we are working on High Frontiers,

we are hacking reality,

we are creating the future,

and we are aimed at Mondo 2000.

And as a matter of fact,

we do.

Our trilogues are very much in this spirit.

And the magazine apparently owes its existence

to a market

of fans of psychedelics

who work in the Computer Revolution.

But the idea of the causal connection

between psychedelics and the Computer Revolution,

and this was new.

The article in GQ begins

with an excellent quote

from Timothy Leary,

who says,

there are various natural resources

in the world.

Creativity is one of them.

And understanding this,

the Japanese will go to Borneo

to collect teak

and go to California

to collect creativity.

So this is the conjecture

we can consider this morning.

And to begin with,

to see about the plausibility

of the causal role,

let's look at the comparative chronologies

of these two developments.

All happened in our lifetimes

and largely here in California.

So this is the location

if we are going to find a connection

and we can dig it up

in the wreckage

in the basement

of the local church

and so on.

So the Computer Revolution

began in World War II.

Or you can put the beginning anywhere,

but what we call

the Computer Revolution

began in World War II

among people

who probably did not take psychedelics.

In fact,

the psychedelic revolution

started later.

To begin with,

the early computers

were war machines.

One was called

the Norton bomb site.

Then there's

the Enigma machine

and so on.

I was in grade school

at that time.

Then,

the psychedelic revolution,

let's say,

started in the middle 60s.

What's going on

in the Computer Revolution

in the middle 60s?

We had the beginnings

of a field

now called

scientific computation.

The first computers

weren't used

for scientific computation

except as

special-purpose

analog computers

like the Norton bomb site

all designed around

a single mathematical problem.

General-purpose

scientific computation

required first

the invention

of floating-point numbers

by Wilkinson

in 1961.

So,

there is

conjunction

in these two

chronologies

between,

let's say,

the first

popular usage

of marijuana

and

the arrival

of LSD

on university campuses

and so on.

Not to say

that Wilkinson

was an acid head,

but this is,

anyway,

looking for causal links,

we have to pay attention

to the comparative

chronologies.

Then,

just a couple

of years later

when LSD

hit the college campuses,

computer graphics

began

its major

growth

from seeds

planted

in Salt Lake City

with Evans

and Sutherland

and so on.

And

the usage

of computer

graphic hardware

required

software

that was developed

later

by various

people

whose names

are not well-known.

and

whether

they used

psychedelics

or not

we couldn't say,

but certainly

a lot of their

friends did

because that was

the cultural

historical milieu

of the time.

A later

development

in the 1970s

then

psychedelic mushrooms

became popular

on university campuses

and

at this time

there was

major change

in the direction

of the computer revolution

in the emphasis,

in the shift

of emphasis

from mainframe

computers

to personal

computers.

Of course

this was a

corporate decision

in IBM

as the historians

see it

but actually

it was

the Macintosh

that more

penetrated homes

and became

the first

successful

personal computer

and that was

because

of the Macintosh

operating system

which was

stolen from

Smalltalk

one of the many

very creative

projects

at Xerox Park

the Palo Alto

Research Center

in the 1970s

there also

we found

other

innovations

in computer

graphic software

such as

the first

paint program

and

the postscript

method

of doing

typographics

more recently

in the

80s

we had

the

decline

of

hardcore

psychedelics

of the onset

of the

what do you

call it

and pathogens

like ecstasy

and then

we find

a new

turn

in the

computer

graphic

revolution

toward

virtual reality

and

other

software

developments

which

would

replace

the

ordinary

reality

with

an

alternative

reality

if not

psychedelic

at least

equally

distant

from

ordinary

reality

so there's

a parallel

chronology

and

this

suggests

some

conjectures

only

chronological

conjectures

not necessarily

making much

sense

such as

a causal

relation

between

LSD

and the

first

computer

graphic

software

likewise

between

the popularity

of psychedelic

mushrooms

and

the

personal

computer

revolution

or at least

is

empowerment

the GUI

the graphical

user

interface

such a

small

talk

also

at that

time

there was

at least

in university

campuses

a massive

growth

in interest

by children

in computer

games

the first

ones

were in

the dungeon

and dragons

category

which is still

popular

circulating

computer

networks

worldwide

more and more

and more

developments

of sophisticated

computer games

like dungeons

and dragons

adventure

and so on

where you

go down

a little

corridor

you come

to you

you can

choose

between

this

door

or lifting

that

rock

and then

you go

out

vertically

and it's

a computer

graphic

alternate

reality

is the

substance

of the

game

and a lot

of

important

evolution

in computer

software

concepts

took place

in the

milieu

of these

computer

games

also

the source

code

was

available

on the

large

networks

so

children

could learn

computer

programming

and modify

the games

and so

the

evolution

I mean

the cultural

history

and

the evolution

of this

game

near you

were

co-evolutionary

processes

and finally

a causal

relationship

between

ecstasy

and the

emphasis

on virtual

reality

which is

now being

developed

with great

enthusiasm

by governments

for

purpose of

driving

tanks

weapon

systems

and making

love

operating

business

telecommuting

and so

on

could be

viewed

as

a

quantum

leap

in the

interconnectivity

between

the machine

and the

human

causal

relation

between

psychedelics

and creativity

in the

computer

industry

and I

think

just to

facet on

one

possible

nucleus

of all

this

is

Xerox

Park

is

a place

where

some of

the

very

important

software

concepts

developed

and it's

in

it's in

Palo Alto

centrally

located

in the

Silicon

Valley

and in

the midst

of

the

central

marketplace

of

the

psychedelic

culture

what do

you think

well

I mean

I gather

that the

causal

connection

between

all this

is the

idea

that

both

the

evolution

of

the

computer

and

the

evolution

or

rediscovery

and assimilation

of psychedelic

drugs

has to

do

with

consciousness

expansion

I mean

in one

case

we're

expanding

memory

retrieval

speed

machine

human

interfacing

in the

other

frontier

the

pharmacological

frontier

we're

expanding

our

exploration

of our

own

wetware

and that

probably

the end

result of

this

is to

see

these

two

superficially

distinct

fields

as

actually

two

facets

of a

single

set

of

concerns

that

are

migrating

toward

each

other

I mean

I

suspect

I

assume

that

the

drugs

of

the

future

will

be

much

more

like

computers

and

the

computers

of

the

future

will

be

much

more

like

drugs

and

that

in

fact

the

values

and

the

areas

that

each

seeks

to

maximize

are

similar

to

the

areas

of

concern

of

the

other

the

final

goal

of

reductionist

pharmacology

if it's

able to

make good

on its

belief

that

the

basis

of

thought

is

ultimately

molecular

should

be

the

designing

of a

drug

which

causes

you

to

bars

of

dixie

and

nothing

else

similarly

the

goal

of

computers

given

the

nanotechnological

thrust

the

human

interfacing

thrust

and so

forth

and so

on

is

a

computer

that

you

can

run

its

programs

only

by

placing

it

under

your

tongue

so

that

you

magical

shamanistic

emotion

based

we could

almost say

feminine

psychology

the drugs

is

a

countervailing

force

to

the

material

engineering

hardwired

scientific

straight

engineering

approach

but in

fact

it seems

that the

ouroboros

is taking

its tail

in its

mouth

and

these

two

concerns

are seen

to be

simply

different

approaches

to the

completion

of the

same

program

of

knowledge

well

that's

very

nice

it's

a

little

less

than

I

wanted

this

is

a

kind

of

theory

of

converging

evolution

or something

see

I'm

thinking

of

the

machines

had

evolved

in a

certain

way

they

could

have

evolved

some

other

way

why

would

they

do

this

way

because

the

interesting

people

making

the

innovations

now

if

those

are

people

who

specifically

are having

visual

hallucinations

on a

regular

more

inclined

to

have

a

GUI

a

graphical

user

interface

icons

on the

screen

I mean

we have

all these

books

there's

hardly

an

illustration

in them

we'll have

an encyclopedia

dictionary

here's the

definition of the

word tree

there's no

picture of a

tree there

now we

look at

the

Macintosh

or at

Smalltalk

or the

Sun

operating

system

here are

icons

all over

place

every

concept

is

represented

by a

picture

there's

very

few

words

in

sight

could

that

be

because

the

people

of creation

are strongly

influenced by

an alternate

reality in

their own

life

and therefore

computers

are evolving

in a

direction

that is

quite

orthogonal

from the

preceding

direction

and vector

of cultural

history

well

print

had a

series

of

sensory

biases

and

intellectual

biases

built

into it

that print

culture

was always

extraordinarily

naive

about

I mean

because of

print

we have

the

concept

of

interchangeable

parts

which

gives

permission

for the

concept

of

democracy

that's

an

interchangeable

parts

theory

the

citizen

is an

interchangeable

part

in the

body

politic

because

of

print

we

have

the

glorification

of

cartesian

logic

and

the

emphasis

on

the

here and

now

aspects

of

reality

I mean

I think

that

what's

happening

now

was

very

presciently

anticipated

by

Marshall

McLuhan

who felt

that the

electronic

media

would

return us

to

an

eye

oriented

culture

and

that

the

biases

that

have

shaped

the

western

mind

since

the

adoption

of

the

phonetic

alphabet

essentially

and

that

were

then

tremendously

intensified

by

movable

type

is

all

being

exploded

the

Gutenberg

galaxy

of

cultural

effects

is

being

left

far

behind

as

we

move

out

into

a

space

that

we

approach

would

be

to

say

yes

we

had

repression

of

fantasy

thanks

to

the

print

medium

dominating

the

technology

of

Gutenberg

press

and so

on

for a

time

and

then

we

had

a

liberation

through

the

revival

of

visual

representations

thanks

to

electronic

innovations

in the

medium

world

for

example

television

and

the

main

influence

behind

the

graphical

explosion

in

the

computer

revolution

is

not

psychedelic

visual

hallucinations

at all

but

just

the

rise

of

popularity

of

television

in

the

American

home

well

it's

all

of

a

piece

I

mean

television

yes

I

mean

television

is

certainly

has

a

influences

culture

but

if

you

watch

television

it's

psychedelics

that

shape

the

agenda

of

television

the

styles

of

cutting

and

rapid

fire

imagery

and

macro

physical

and

micro

physical

perspective

shift

and

all

of

these

things

one

could

lay

at

the

feet

of

psychedelics

now

what

an

orthodox

cultural

historian

would

claim

is

it's

not

psychedelics

it's

surrealism

is always

dragged

in here

as

the

godfather

of

modern

advertising

but

in fact

the

concern

of

surrealism

is

nothing

less

than

the

pictorial

representation

of the

contents

of

the

unconscious

as

described

by

Freud

and

Jung

so

what

it

in a

way

what

we're

talking

is

not

so

much

the

culture

shaping

power

of

psychedelics

or

television

or

surrealism

but

of

the

emergence

as a

cultural

artifact

of

the

unconscious

itself

which

was

being

suppressed

by

this

linear

print

head

style

of

psychedelics

they

are

released

from

the

unconscious

and

enter

as

if

all

people

had

suddenly

become

surrealist

artists

the

databases

of the

unconscious

are

visually

dedicated

databases

they're

not

print

databases

and

now

they

are

being

liberated

into

consciousness

really

I

mean

as

a

global

society

possessing

DNA

sequencers

and

thermonuclear

delivery

systems

and so

forth

and so

on

we

cannot

have

the

luxury

of an

unconscious

mind

that's

something

that may

or may

not

have

some

appropriateness

if you're

hunting

woolly

mastodons

and that

sort of

thing

but an

integrated

global

culture

cannot

have

the

luxury

of a

large

portion

of its

mind

inaccessible

to itself

and

somehow

occluded

and

apparently

this is

being

eliminated

technology

the evolution

of languages

and so

forth

have taken

a turn

toward

outing

the

unconscious

and

computers

are a

wonderful

tool

for this

as are

psychedelic

drugs

yes

and so

they are

in

cooperation

in

a

crash

program

to out

the

unconscious

in other

words

to increase

the

strength

of the

coupling

and the

effect of

resonance

between

ourselves

and conscious

purpose in

our society

on the one

hand

and the

cultural

morphogenetic

field

on the

other

hand

the species

mind

is being

made

explicit

by

entering

into

the

visual

awareness

of

individuals

and

through

these

means

when

connection

between

the

group

mind

and

the

business

practice

and so

on

is

amplified

then

we

get

commercial

manifestation

of creativity

of products

like

the

personal

computer

well

but in

a sense

I think

that's

simply

that the

culture

is building

on the

foundation

already

in place

money

as

understood

by

moderns

is almost

entirely

a print

created

phenomenon

before the

invention

of the

printing

press

money

was

something

that you

hid

under

your

mattress

now

money

is this

completely

abstract

medium

that is

moved

around

by

electronic

banking

transfer

and

investment

capitalism

and this

sort of

thing

and it

has

become

like

the concept

of

the

citizen

a

way

to

uniformize

all

the

complex

spectrum

of

phenomena

down

to

a

single

variable

money

and so

the world

of print

is

the world

based

on

money

now

the

computer

is very

able

to insinuate

itself

into that

environment

and build

on it

but that

isn't

I think

the

natural

milieu

of the

computer

is

information

which is

very

different

from

money

is

a

downloading

of

complexity

into

a

kind

of

medium

of

exquisite

simplicity

information

is

an

exploding

of

the

apparent

here

and

now

into

a

much

more

multidimensional

domain

that

is

therefore

it

can

only

be

grokked

intuitively

it

can

only

be

grokked

through

feeling

so

the

abandonment

of

money

and

the

substitution

of

information

as a

medium

of

exchange

is

having

a

feminizing

psychedelicizing

and

visually

enhancing

effect

on

the

values

and

direction

that

society

is

going

and

this

is

all

happening

without

planning

I

think

this

is

just

built

in

these

are

the

hidden

agendas

of the

technologies

that we

imagine

we can

manipulate

and

appropriate

without

being

reinfected

by the

hidden

effects

that they

carry

but of course

this is not

true at all

we are

completely

now

infected

by these

hidden

assumptions

what do

you make

of this

Rup

well

I like

the idea

of the

re-emergence

of the

unconscious

and

it

reminds

me

of the

presumably

the

prototypic

image

of the

realization

of

archetype

images

in some

kind

of

shared

space

is

the

cave

art

of the

paleolithic

where

you go

deep

into

a cave

and

there

by

the

flickering

light

of

and

so

on

you

see

these

images

of

animals

and

so

on

a

vision

actually

somehow

made

concrete

within

a

shared

space

through

a

flickering

light

in

the

darkness

well I

understand

that

of the

Native

Americans

who went

in for

this kind

of thing

the

Shumash

were

particularly

well

known

for

their

polychrome

cave

paintings

they

occupied

the

area

now

known

as

Hollywood

well

the

flickering

light

polychrome

cave

paintings

of course

give one

an early

version

of the

cinema

and

the

cinema

where you

go into

a darkened

space

and then

by flickering

light

see

incredible

fantasies

and patterns

unfolding

on the

wall

is in

some

sense

the

precursor

of

television

televisions

like

the

home

and

certainly

in

countries

where

television

is

introduced

for the

first

time

like

India

the

principal

use

people

make

of

it

is

nowadays

is

videos

of

films

so you

can have

all these

films

at

home

so

it's

like

a

miniaturized

cinema

so I

think

if we're

looking

at the

history

of this

sort

of

revival

of

the

collective

visual

imagination

the

cinema

is the

precursor

we have

to look

at

rather

than

television

and

of course

California

again

in this

revolution

well

the

cinema

television

psychedelics

as

another

form

of

darkened

space

and

flickering

images

and

visual

content

and

the

computer

graphic

revolution

which in a

sense

is like

a transformed

television

or the

cinema

to be

able to

represent

more

abstract

kinds

of

imagery

or

pattern

of the

kind

that may

appear

in

psychedelic

vision

these

seem to

be

related

kinds

of

phenomena

so

if we

see

this

as

all

as

some

kind

of

reawakening

of the

physical

imagination

and the

representation

of the

unconscious

phenomena

the

prototype

for all

of which

is

of course

the world

of dreams

which occur

in darkness

in sleep

indoors

usually

and

in a

flickering

and

incomprehensible

way

the real

roots

is the

world

of dreams

and then

its

actualization

or externalization

through

cave-arse

and then

through

these

variety

of

other

transforms

you know

fairy tales

told around

campfires

again

the flickering

light

associated

the

play

of

imagination

and imagery

conjured up

in that

case

by words

but then

the

visual

representation

of all

these

things

shows

indeed

some

kind

of

connection

so

I

think

you're

right

that we

can see

this

as

part

of

a

larger

process

of

reawakening

of a

collective

imagination

it's

part

of

an

archaic

revival

the

print

thing

is

very

artificial

well

I

don't

see

that

so

clearly

I

mean

the

print

thing

is

a

technological

artifact

less than

years old

and yet

dominating

the

sensory

ratios

and

psychologies

of

virtually

every

person

on

scale

we have

a million

years

of

consciousness

and then

we have

only

50 or

100,000

years

of

speech

is a

newcomer

on

the

words

but

words

are still

an

incredibly

deeply

established

creed

compared

with

written

words

or

print

yes

and

if

you

look

at

non-literate

cultures

then

of course

the

oral

tradition

is

very

important

but

I

suppose

also

there's

a

much

higher

developed

visual

imagination

when

you

go

to

a

Hindu

temple

or

a

gothic

cathedral

primarily

designed

to be

appreciated

by

non-literate

people

Then you see a riot of psychedelic type imagery, demons and snakes wriggling everywhere in Hindu

temples, psychedelic stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals, amazing vegetational forms and

structures and shapes. But it isn't a clearly, it isn't a smooth unbroken development, it's that

even between manuscript culture and print there is an enormous leap that takes place because the

psychology of manuscript culture is that you must look in order to understand. That's the essence of

manuscript because no font is ever repeated, no E looks like every other E, so you must look at

manuscript. Reading of print is a very different psychological function because in the first few

minutes of reading any text, you assimilate the font. From then on, you don't look at E's and F's and

L's, you automatically assimilate them. It's always the same. There's no decipherment of the visual

surface in the act of reading print in the way that there is reading manuscript. This is what

McLuhan is talking about of this linear uniform high speed thing which sets up democracy and modern science

and reproducible data and all these things that we take for granted or that we fail to examine deeply

are an aspect not only of the linearity of print, that's been pretty well talked to death, but the

uniformity of print and the curious way in which you don't have to actually look at it sets us up for

psychological blind spots that have closed us off to the reality of the visual world.

It was reflecting kind of a compression. Narrowing.

Informational content of medium, but then since cinema, video, computers and computer graphics,

there's now going and expansion is in progress which may expand well beyond any richness of media that

history has seen before. Generally speaking, yes, the only caveat is that for the people who give their

lives to this stuff, cinema is in no way seen as a precursor of television. Cinema is related to

photography and related to the reconstruction of ordinary visual space. Television is a pixelated

medium very much like manuscript and not at all like photography because with photography the eye is not

asked to work. The eye beholds a photograph. The eye decodes the television screen. The fragmentation

of the image makes it into an entirely different medium. Well, as a matter of degree, as with high definition television,

the resolution of video is increasing due to the over usage of silver and organic pigment and so on,

the resolution of film is decreasing. Sometimes they'll meet. Computer graphics has the potential of

resolution on the level of cinema. So let's think of a sequence then of manuscript printed book cinema.

Okay, we'll skip television. Then we'll think of computer graphics.

Well, television is related to the psychedelics. As interactive cinema, not as interactive video. I think that's appropriate.

Well, see, if these people are actually right in their analysis of the effects of these media, then high definition television

is not television at all and will not have the same effect that television has been having. In fact, high definition TV may

give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point, on the ropes, linear uniformitarians because it's going to be much more like cinema and photography.

And it's not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at. And this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within the society.

Video is doomed, not because of a resolution limitation, but because it's not interactive.

Video is doomed, not because of an interactive computer graphic game where you can watch the soap opera, but also play with it, change the script and so on. It's bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema.

More like a dream, in fact. More like a dream, in fact.

One of the things they've discovered that's very frustrating to the engineers of virtual reality is they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting fast enough computers so that when you turn your head, the scene is reconstructed in the way that normal space is.

But what's fascinating is they discover in virtual reality people rarely turn their head. People know that they are in a television created space and they immediately lock into their long ingrained habits of watching television and people sit with the iPhones on like this.

It's temporary.

Because they don't understand that if they're not watching TV and you have to tell them, turn your head, keep turning your head, stop sitting still. You do not have to stare at this.

You say, oh, that's right. I don't have to stare at it.

That's temporary because video and cinema are on their way out. I think the future of cinema is that all the films ever made will be digitized and stored in a gigantic library work.

In the context of computer graphic VR parlor game, you can call up at will images from very, here's Cleopatra Salome or something and put them on the walls around you.

So, well, interactivity is, is the primary, I mean, this is the area where the computer revolution and psychedelics are in convergent evolution.

They're coming together in the interactivity, but the extent to which the computer medium could be shared by large number of people gives an idea of a further advance in cultural evolution beyond what was accomplished by hippies in the 1960s with psychedelics.

But this takes us to another key point in the whole thing, which is that if, in relation to mathematics, since mathematics represents a particular realm of imagination, for many mathematicians a particular realm of visual imagination,

This is Ralph's chosen field, of course, but the normal way of communicating mathematical ideas is through a kind of symbolic structure as unrelated to the visions, as musical notation, as to the sounds you hear of the late-sight symphony.

And the secret which good mathematicians seem to have inherited or picked up almost by accident is that these symbols relate to what Francis Galton called mathematical landscapes, an inner imaginary space which creative mathematicians have.

They see forms. He described how great mathematicians of his acquaintance reluctantly admitted, when he questioned them closely, to seeing landscapes with little balls rolling down and shapes changing before their very eye.

This was how they did their mathematics. They then later translated and expressed it through symbols. Other mathematicians with this gift could somehow pick it up by a kind of resonance, the symbols acting as some medium that helped tune them to it.

And this is actually how at least many branches of mathematics have been carried out. It's still true today that good mathematicians have mathematical landscapes and mathematical imaginations, but this is a secret kept from most of us while studying mathematics in school or even university, where these symbols seem quite impenetrable, the manipulations you do with them seem quite arbitrary.

And it seems to me that one of Ralph's points is that the computer graphics revolution now makes these rather abstract mathematical systems previously only visualizable by mathematics and even then to a limited extent by mathematicians, like fractals and so on, immediately accessible to everybody.

So suddenly these abstract mathematical concepts or mathematical concepts or mathematical spaces now become common cultural artefacts.

You now have fractal sweatshirts and fractal imagery on printed fabrics and so on. So through computer graphics there is this opening up or democratizing of the mathematical imagination.

And I imagine that when mathematicians take psychedelics that their already developed mathematical landscape undergoes an expansion, intensification or some other interesting development, since mathematicians have this peculiar and unusual kind of visual imagination to start with. Is that the case?

Yes, I think that we could put this in the category of outing the unconscious, that for peculiar reasons, evolutionary mistakes, mathematics had actually gotten relegated to the unconscious, you see.

And it does have to do with printed books, and it does have to do with printed books, I'm sure.

When mathematicians speak to each other, they wave their hands to draw pictures one line at a time on the board or with their hands in space and they speak simultaneously and in coordination.

And then coordinated like dance is to music, to picture and words. So it requires the cooperation, the coordination of multiple modes of representation in order to communicate a mathematical idea from one trained mathematician to another.

So when you see colloquium talks, which are public performances of mathematical creativity in the act, performed live to an audience of people trying to understand, then you always see these visual dinapics, I call them, moving pictures with lyrics that are coordinated, done in a very artful way, using the room as like memory, memory palace.

And so on, here's a space, this corner, and this is where this goes, and everything is coordinated with space. The dance of the performer, the waving of the fans, the going on the blackboard, and the singing of the words succeeds by telepathic miracle in communicating the idea.

Then you have books, textbooks for teachers to use in schools who aren't trained on this level or something. So you send the book to the publisher, with the drawings in the margin, the publisher writes back, we can only have 100 line drawings in this book, that's the limit, for financial reasons.

So then you get a book, which fails in the communication of the idea, even to a trained mathematician. And out of this tradition comes this heavy reliance on symbols, which for a person already trained in the mathematical dance hall, actually do reawake, they blow up the entire image, they recall it from practice, you know, in the memory field, a little icon.

That's fine. But for somebody to learn mathematics from scratch in this way, it's impossible.

So after this limitation on books, the transition from manuscripts to printed books, it was at that time that mathematics became arcane, was relegated to the unconscious. Along comes computer graphics, suddenly mathematics becomes visible.

Suddenly we have visual mathematics, visible mathematics, for the first time in a long while, on a public scale, on t-shirts and so on, as rubrics said. So I think that is true, that mathematics is one key area, which is saved from oblivion by the computer revolution, making visual mathematics possible and part of the daily experience of anyone with a personal

computer.

Well, don't you think it's just part of a larger program of language generally becoming visible through the medium of the computer? That what's happening is that language is about to conquer the visual dimension and the mathematical shock troops have somehow gone over the top first, but ordinary language can hardly be far behind.

Yes. The current, I don't know, the hot frontier of computer revolution today is multimedia. That means you'll have a CD and when you double click on the icon, you get songs, dancings, moving colored pictures, dramas, you know, a coordinated multimedia display created by expert best understanders of the subject.

Let's say, let's say, how to repair a car or how this tree grew from a seed and the morphogenetic field, the geometry of the soul, wherever you double click, you're going to get this multimedia show, which is actually interactive.

Just so that we see that again, come back, slow down and so on.

Well, it's the species mind and it's nothing is happening except that what was previously wetware and driven by intuition is being made explicit as hardware and driven by a machine interface.

We're downloading or uploading the unconscious into a cultural artifact and it's gaining presence in the domain of culture through this process.

Well, there's children's books since I was reading to Cosmo yesterday and there's this book, which is, it's got pictures, they're interactive, you can open the door, look inside, you see the crocodile, you close it, then you open this box, there's a snake in there, close it, you open the clock, there's a bird in there.

And these children's books from which children actually gain their initiation to a certain level of initiation of, yes, of awareness of the environment and so on, the language, the cognitive strategies for understanding all this.

These books are much more successful, sophisticated and rich than the books which are used to teach mathematics to advanced engineering students in universities.

They're like crude DMT hallucinations.

Yes.

So the best of the books are children's books and the computer revolution is now advancing to a point where they're sort of getting to the level of children's books as far as richness of medium is concerned, but there's a long way to go before they can approach, I mean, they'll never get there.

The richness of a psychedelic trip either alone in a dark room or with a group of people exploring a flower.

A long way to go.

Well, coming back to the connection between psychedelics and the computer revolution, there are several ways one might look at it.

One is, well, first the sociological fact, as revealed both on the basis of anecdotal stories and on the survey carried out by the San Francisco Examiner.

Out of 118 people questioned at the recent computer graphics convention in Nevada, 118 said that they had taken psychedelics.

There was 100% psychedelic usage among leading figures in this field.

Now, there's a sense in which other branches of the computer world are part of the linear language based print type thing.

The word processor, the commonest use of the computer in everyday life, is an updated version of the typewriter and so on.

It's not something that breaks radically with this tradition.

It's in fact the colonizing of the visual space, the sort of television type visual space by the printed word in a more evanescent form.

So, in that area, people who develop new word processing things or spreadsheets, the suggestion is that psychedelic usage is quite low and perhaps maybe a little higher than the rest of the population.

But computer graphics is the area where there's this exceptionally high incidence, in fact maximum incidence of psychedelic use.

Now, I wonder whether it's because people who take psychedelics then want to find a career where somehow this incredible visual revelation can be followed through in some kind of technology and shared with others.

A bit like some people who have amazing experiences with drugs then try and find ways of doing it through meditation or ways they can teach it to others without the drugs.

Is that one of the reasons? Is that one of the reasons? Is it that people with visual imaginations are particularly drawn or influenced or amazed by psychedelics and they're the kind of people who go into computer graphics anyway?

What kind of causal link do we have here? Is it that when actually thinking about some realization of some program that the psychedelics can actually help the creative process as a kind of ongoing usage during this kind of creative process? What do you think, Ralph?

Well, I think in the creation of a new program, let us say, the first spreadsheet, the first text editor or something, there are all kinds of concepts that have to be invented from scratch.

Just about the sort of the geometry of the space of information, just about the sort of the geometry of the space of information, the view of the filter, what information will be stored where, what's important, how to retrieve it, how to display it on the screen.

All of this, an enormous amount of creativity is required because we're constructing a new space using tools that have never been touched before.

So I think that all of these dimensions and even in the aspect of computer revolution totally dominated by print, that these have been enormously aided by visual imagination, by visual skills, by cognitive strategies involving geometric spaces and motion within them.

So there could be expected incidents of psychedelic usage among pioneers in those fields as well.

But when it comes to computer graphics, I do think that all of these different possibilities you listed operate in parallel.

I know from personal experience with my students that there are among the most interesting students attracted to study computer graphics are those with psychedelic and other unusual experiences like traveling and foreign cultures.

And they are looking for jobs where they are looking for jobs where they can just feel more comfortable and have a chance for success and maintain their integrity.

And they've chosen the computer graphics industry because it's more convenient or compatible.

They feel that what they're doing is of value simultaneously.

It's probable that they are trained to succeed better in it than other people who would be better off as engineers creating new hybrid devices like high density memory or something, faster processors and the like, which is very linear engineering drawing oriented kind of thing.

So I think all of these things are sort of a resonance in psychedelic experience in computer graphics and I don't know which causes the other.

You see, it could be that while working on a computer graphic program, you see the same picture over and over again.

Finally, you get a kind of boredom sets in where you don't feel like it's like we can't sit at the typewriter sometimes because we don't want to stare at the page anymore.

And print on the computer monitor does get really boring and pictures do also.

And it may be that people who don't have psychedelic recreation are not able to continue in the jobs.

You see, after a year or two they have to retire whereas others have more longevity in that kind of work.

I don't know and I don't know how we can find out.

Well, I mean, finding out is more than a matter of curiosity because as the ABC television network implied when they contacted you about this,

this has enormous implications.

If the US leads the world in computer graphics and if the principal competitor is Japan,

if the Japanese corporations haven't yet got programmers working in them who are on to psychedelics,

then there are two possible consequences.

One, the revelation of psychedelic usage in US computer fraternity will allow the drug enforcement agencies in the United States

to try and clean up Silicon Valley to the possible detriment of the loss of world need in this important aspect of US high technology.

Second, the Fujitsu Corporation and others in Japan may send their employees on crash courses in psychedelics

in which case they may well be getting in touch pretty soon with you and Terence to hire you as consultants for this process

to try and unleash more creativity in Japan, assuming that the psychedelics haven't hit Japanese corporate computer culture very much yet.

Well, it's likely that rather than suppress psychedelics in the United States, they will simply have to accept them

or accept second-rate status in one of the few fields where we still hold some advantage.

Well, that's a possibility. I'm not sure if we even still hold an advantage as far as the creative edge is concerned.

In most of the large software companies such as Borland, Microsoft, Santa Cruz Operation and so on,

I'm pretty sure that they do have drug testing as they have at ABC News and so many other...

To make sure that their programmers are taking sufficient psychedelics to stay on the cutting edge.

Well, they'll not.

Oh, no?

Come, come now, you're slacking off peers.

No, but they're not that rational here as I think they may be in Japan.

The hysteria against drug usage in this country is not a rational program and probably will continue

even though it means that the United States has lost its place as a primary industrial nation.

Well, in Japan, where the large corporations have very enlightened leadership, it seems, with very clear goals and so on,

they may very well study the data coming in from the grassroots science groups all over the world

and decide that they need to encourage certain teams working on the frontier of the computer revolution there,

where they are very keen to lead the world, encourage these teams to begin experiments with psychedelics

and monitor the results carefully in a controlled way.

I think that's very likely.

And I have always anticipated a shift of leadership in the intellectual, scientific, and technical things away from the United States

as the wave of European immigrants that came during World War II die out.

The American educational system has no way to replace them.

It's a very poor educational system.

So I think we've already seen this, that the leadership in technical innovation has moved away from the United States,

even in terms of computer software, computer graphics, and so on.

Europe and Japan are on the rise and the United States is in decline.

So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.

Yes, that's the conclusion.

You have it.

I think we need to go a little further.

Go for it.

Well, one thing that I still haven't heard from Ralph is, since I don't have a mathematical landscape,

having never been told about such things when I was studying mathematics,

having found the manipulation of these symbols quite meaningless and unsatisfying,

having never been able to find out why you did these things,

and therefore having abandoned mathematics like millions of others in despair,

or just out of boredom or lack of engagement.

I'm curious to know, from Ralph's experience, firstly, when he's doing mathematical creative work,

how the visual imagination works, how this mathematical landscape works,

what your particular landscapes are like, and secondly, under the influence of psychedelic drugs,

what you're doing back over seven years ago, which, did you find yourself in the presence of amazing,

totally astonishing visions, which were nothing much to do with your usual mathematical landscapes,

or could you start from your habitual and well-known areas of mathematical landscape,

and then almost consciously and interactively develop them in new ways,

and form a kind of continuity between those and the visions produced by substances such as DMT and ISD?

Yes. Well, you know, between mathematics and physics there's a big difference,

and there's a certain personality of person that would choose to be a physicist,

and a kind of an opposite type of person that would want to be a mathematician.

Likewise, within mathematics there are completely different continents, as it were, in the mathematical universe,

and the usual map of this universe by historians of mathematics has three continents.

They are algebra, thus the oldest one, and geometry and topology that comes later,

or about the same time, it may be a little earlier, and then very recently a new one,

which is analysis, dynamics, and so on.

These three continents in the mathematical universe have totally different cognitive styles.

and algebra, I'm not active in algebra, and I haven't been to that many talks by algebraists,

and I think that they make, they have pictures that are more like tables,

not tables of data, but classifications of things or something,

and they use visual representations that you don't find in the book,

where they're not delightfully rich visual representations that are very direct representations of what they're studying,

they're like auxiliary things.

The geometry, of course, is an extrapolation of ordinary experience in space and time, in space anyway, let's say. So there are figures of triangles, spheres, a Tori, and so on. These cannot be really grokked in any way without visual representation.

Mathematicians, geometers, learn tricks for visualizing higher dimensions. That's one of the main things. You could say the mathematical skills, the geometrical skills for our culture has evolved little by little, primarily through the development of cognitive tricks based on visual representations of higher dimensions.

Higher dimensions, well, three dimensions is represented in two by perspective. That's some kind of trick.

And there was a day in the 14th century when this trick was discovered by somebody and communicated to somebody else and became a major innovation in the history of painting.

The third continent in the mathematical universe of analysis and dynamics, it has some kind of history from classical Greek times through the Middle Ages and so on, but primarily it's associated with a recent beginning with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on.

This is geometry with motion. So the visual strategies necessary to think and work in this area of color is geometry with motion.

So it's a more complex visual cognitive strategy than had ever been attempted before. Of course, it's relating to dance, to running through the woods, to catching a ball, and so on.

And there's dynamics in human experience, and every child is a dynamicist in learning to master the functions of the body, locomotion, and so on.

So that's the background. And I have worked in Geometry, Topology, and in analysis, or in kind of analysis, classical analysis, which has symbolic representations of very great complexity and magnitude.

For example, there are books where there are books where there's a formula F equals on page one, and it goes on for over 300 pages of a single formula.

To understand what it says, you have to assemble all these pages in your head and be able to scan it like this, like Ricci's Menrake Palace.

And there are people who are trained to do that, the slightest comma out of place, and so on.

That's another kind of visual trick, which is indirect, like the algebraists.

And then, yes, by the time I started using psychedelics, I had already passed through this development and had published papers on dynamics, I mean geometry and motion in very high dimensions,

which required an actual visualization of four, six, or eight dimensions, down to the level of being able to remove the carburetor, replace something inside, and put it back on that much.

So then what happened to me with psychedelic visualizations is that I saw, and first of all, I saw the visual reality that's revealed in that way from the perspective of a kind of a trained observer of higher dimensions.

So I could recognize a lot of phenomena. I could remember them, put them, take them out, combine them in new forms, and so are just because of this training.

I guess I specialized in the enjoyment of the physical realms revealed.

And also what I perceived did seem to be elaboration of an extension of the maximum visual capability I ever had before was then, even with marijuana, I would say, the first smoke was extended enormously.

Although when I first smoked marijuana, I didn't have an extensive visual hallucination, still what I did observe, details of the relationship between two people, for example,

I then imaged these in a way using visual representative tricks, which were beyond those that I'd used before.

So the resonance, the connection, you know how it is, that you can rove over, the connection between mathematical visualization extended and the perception of ordinary reality.

This was, you know, fused in a very interesting fashion.

I can tell this story, I guess, that I hadn't really made this connection before.

The one that I mentioned in invention is a counterexample of a conjecture of Smale in 1966, I think, called the Omega Stability Conjecture.

And here's what happened.

I was introduced to marijuana by some students at Princeton where I was teaching mathematics.

I had gone to the dormitories, which is where they sat smoking, and smoked a joint.

Then I had to walk home.

While walking home, maybe this was in the summer, anyway, I remember it was warm up, probably it was spring, the spring of 1966.

The path between the dormitory and my home, which was on the campus, passed, you know, where my office was on the first floor and close to the path.

And in passing it, I heard that the telephone was ringing.

So being a, you know, compulsive good boy, I ran and took my key, opened the door, and picked up the phone.

It was Steve Smale calling from Berkeley.

He said, I have this new idea about Omega Stability, and I wanted to check it out with you and see if you think it's plausible or not.

He told me the Omega Stability Conjecture.

I had never heard anything like it before, that these sets, the Omega Limit sets, if they have hyperbolic structure and then perturbations and so on.

I said, oh, that's very interesting, Steve.

I said it's wrong.

Instantly, they flashed in my mind the picture, which I described to him on the telephone.

I was stoned.

This is maybe one of the first examples of stoned mathematics, and it is still one of my best-remembered publications, I would say.

Oh, no, Steve, that's wrong, because if you had in four dimensions the following configuration with the two dimensions out here and the one dimension in there with the intersection that's transversal and so on.

I described this picture in four dimensions.

Well, he has, maybe it's in six dimensions, I can't remember right now, but it's something that there's hardly anyone in the world could visualize unless they were, I'm like, here's the guy who could do it.

Steve Smell, my God, you're right.

He said, oh, shit.

So then, that was it, a short telephone call.

I went on home, I went to bed, and in the subsequent two, three days, we talked on the telephone a couple of times, and we wrote a joint paper, which was published in 1968 in the plenary volume of this global analysis conference, which was really the climax of 1960s mathematics.

Let me ask you a question, Ralph.

Do you think that the psychedelics propel you into the realm of mathematical truth in the ordinary sense that that's imagined, or that all we can ever perceive is the workings of our own minds?

And so, the mathematical landscape is the neurological landscape, and that the structure of the brain defines the limit set of possible mathematical objects.

This goes to the question of whether mathematics is a species-bound, specialized, localized human activity, or whether it's discovering God's truth in the universe.

Well, this may be one of those unanswerable questions.

You could ask the same question about ordinary reality.

I mean, here it is, is this neurological construct with a history of other neurological constructs, or is there actual grass there, and here's a tree, and that's a bird?

Well, what do you think?

So, what I think is that the ordinary reality is really there, and is there even if everyone in our species should become extinct, and we're all dead, and a lot of these things die, and so they're still...

I think ordinary reality is really ordinary and really real, and I think the same about the mathematical landscape, that it's been there, it's evolving, it's there with or without us, and as we travel there, we have these Cristofaro Colombo and Vasco da Gama and so on of the mathematical landscape.

They go on out there, they find the footprints of some other explorer, they follow them, they find where that person turned around and came back, they camp out, they pitch their tent there, they hang out for a while, they go a little further out and come back, they write a report, they send it back.

These different reports are integrated into our cultural map of this other actual reality, which is much richer than this one, and much more complex and hard to grok, so we haven't really got much of it yet.

It's vast, and for me, one of the most exciting aspects of psychedelic traveling has been to go miles farther.

Where no man has gone before.

Well, do you think then that a hypothetical civilization of extraterrestrials on the other side of the galaxy doing mathematics will discover and describe the same objects that you and your colleagues discover and describe?

It would be a fantastic coincidence if there's this enormous landscape and they travel a lot, and then we travel a lot, there might not be any intersection at all.

There could be planets where there was a mathematics which had the same reality and so on, and yet there was no overlap.

But since, you know, one, two, three, I mean, numbers, there's some things that are so natural to be early discoveries in the mathematical landscape that I would think that there would be an overlap between the mathematics of this planet and the mathematics of any other.

So if we were to then encounter this extraterrestrial civilization, any mathematical discoveries that it had made, if we could get in communication with them, would be rationally apprehendable to us.

We wouldn't just say, well, that's a Zell construct, and we humans don't, we can't grok the Zell construct.

Our brains are organized differently.

Well, it might take a while, it might take a few generations.

I think that our exploration of the mathematical landscape has been slow, and maybe slow of necessity.

There is this idea that the discovery of a mathematical structure requires a certain neural net connectivity development,

and that there is a co-development, co-evolution, between mathematical discovery and the neural net connectivity, actually,

the structures within the mind mimicking, empowering the representation of structures that are discovered in the mathematical landscape.

So they could come to us with a mathematical structure that we could not grok, although in principle it was explainable.

The development of the language, the development of the capabilities to understand it might take several generations,

just as we now see ourselves, our children, and so on, struggling to understand the shapes in the reality of the computer evolution.

So you're more, it would be fair to call you as a mathematical Platonist rather than a mathematical relativist.

In our previous conversations on this topic, we have denied that we have insisted on the ploy, usually adopted by mathematicians on the defensive,

that these are merely provisional models produced by the human mind, that we use as long as they suit us,

and we drop when they are not so, and if there is any objective existence at all, this is an evolving structure,

rather than an eternally fixed platonic one, that somehow is co-evolving along with our imaginations.

This is the position I've had you adopt.

Yes, so this is a little confused.

I'm a Platonist, I accept your idea of the evolution and the role of creativity in the mathematical landscape,

and that this creativity is interactive with human activities on the mathematical frontier.

So I accept that.

This is kind of a modified Platonism.

About the relativity of the models, we have to distinguish between mathematical structures,

mathematical objects, such as chaotic attractors, and so on.

On the one hand, and a model built out of them for something in a laboratory situation or ordinary reality.

On the other hand, I've said that scientists, especially physical scientists, tend to identify the model with the target system.

They have Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field with the E and the B and so on,

and then they think that the E and the B are actually physically existing fields.

And I reject that.

But the E and the B and their relationship as expressed to the formula is an important kind of mathematical object,

which has its own real existence in the mathematical landscape.

And the modeling function is applied mathematics, is the thesis, is the way in which mathematics can serve us as a cognitive strategy for understanding the world around us.

That it is possible to take these mathematical objects, to use them as tinker toys, to put them together into a model,

which in some way is something like the experience of our culture, our laboratory, our test tube, our ozone layer, or whatever.

And through this relationship between one particular carefully constructed mathematical model and experimental scientific observation of nature around us,

to gain understanding and to see relationships in a clearer way.

But the models are not real in the sense they are identified with ordinary reality,

but the models are real in the sense that they are actual existing objects constructed in the mathematical landscape.

Well, their nature and their kind of reality would be of the nature of field structures, I should imagine,

since I think of the mind as being a system of fields, fields being spatio-temporal patterned regions.

So if our minds are basically made up of mental fields,

which the mathematical landscapes have as their underlying substrate in the mental field,

that would be the kind of basis of a mathematical landscape or of its objective existence.

Yes.

I'd go further and think of them as morphic fields transmissible by morphic resonance.

Then, since our view of the nature of the so-called external world or the physical world

is also one which science reveals to us is made up of organizing fields,

that modeling fields by means of fields would indeed be rather a good way of going about it,

because the models would have the same kind of quality as the things being modeled.

Namely, they'd be field structures, in other words,

structures of extended interrelationship or patterns in space-time.

Yes.

Space-time mathematics has been defined recently

in the monthly notices of the American Mathematical Society

as the study of patterns in space and time.

Interesting.

So then, the field, and indeed, since fields,

the principal metaphor from which fields are derived as agricultural fields,

which are structures in landscapes,

then the very metaphor of the mathematical landscape,

or in Boddington's terms, the epigenetic landscape,

relates us automatically against this whole field concept.

Yes.

Mathematical objects, so-called, I guess, are creoles in this field.

And so then, psychedelics would enable

the exploration of different regions of this field,

these fields, to be explored.

Just the metaphor of exploring would be quite appropriate.

I mean, if we're exploring the countryside,

then we go through fields and ecosystems and things

which can also be thought of as fields.

So there's an exploration process.

Yes.

It seems to be an amplifier for resonance,

something like putting helium in a violin.

Well, Whitehead defined understanding

as the apperception of patterns as such.

And that means then that what you're saying,

that mathematics is understanding.

If mathematics is the study of patterns

and understanding is the apperception of patterns as such,

then mathematics and understanding

are suddenly seen to be two names

for the same program of mental activity.

That's one way, I guess you could say that.

Then, of course, that's Whitehead,

who would see understanding as primarily a mathematical function.

Who was both a Platonist and a mathematician.

The word apperception, I think,

comes from Leibniz during his period

when he was writing in French.

And so we have to think of him also

proposing monads as fundamental units

of the intellectual medium.

Patterns, atomic creodes

from which to construct

more complicated space-time patterns

suitable for modeling everything.

Yes, monads are the atoms

of the mathematical universe.

So we've arrived here

from psychedelics in the computer revolution

to psychedelics as amplifiers

in the monadological method of understanding.

That by showing us pattern as such.

And computer graphics, is it not

makes it explicit.

a tool for doing monadology

where we have this CD full of fundamental modads

which can then be combined

in a kind of virtual reality

which is then the model for

a certain real experience

or perhaps it is the real experience

depending on...

Well, it makes the pattern explicit

rather than...

It still has the same kind

of reductive capacity

as the photograph.

Well, but not for instance

in virtual reality.

I mean, they're talking about

virtual realities

where you will go into

Seahorse Valley

of the Mantlebrot set

and camp there

for several weeks

exploring around.

In 3D with goggles.

Yes.

Still, it's...

If these...

If mathematical imaginations

exist in higher dimensions

it's still bringing it down.

I mean, but usually it's 2D.

I mean, these fractal pictures

are also...

In 3D, we are really trying

to visualize something

in much higher dimensions.

So, these are attempts

to represent something

which is experienced

in a higher dimension

and communication.

It's said that the human EEG

has a dimension

around 6 and a half.

So, probably this

isn't exactly right

but it is believed

that if dimension is too high

you can't understand.

If it's too low

you can't represent anything.

Let's just imagine

that a lot of natural phenomenon

are basically 6, 7 or 8 dimensional.

Then, certainly

whether it's 2D or 3D

where we're representing them

it doesn't matter much.

You're hardly, you know,

at the front door

of understanding

what's going on.

But then, what about

well, there's one point

just to follow up

this other thing

of the mathematics

and understanding.

There's this whole range

of possible fields

or field structures

that can be explored

through mathematics

but, of course,

the realm of mathematics

is perhaps vastly greater

than the realm

of physical reality

we encounter.

So, there are far more

mathematical structures

around than there are

ones that correspond to

and we find ones

which correspond more or less.

To something that

we can recognize.

Yes, but a lot

don't correspond to anything

we know about

at least on this planet.

However, then,

aesthetics comes in here.

Beauty itself

becomes a criteria

for the selection

of mathematical objects

and, in fact,

this has been historically true.

Yes.

But then,

there's a further point

which is that

just as mathematicians

communicate with each other

through a kind of resonance

where they can transfer

the picture,

the intuition,

the gestalt

from one to the other

by means of symbols,

dances,

halting phrases,

somehow it can just

be transferred.

Has anyone ever tried

doing this

in a psychedelic state?

Say you had a room

of mathematicians

and they were taking

a substance like

ayahuasca

which produces

on the one hand

a kind of empathetic

group mind

and on the other hand

the visionary state.

Would it be possible

greatly to enhance

this possibility

of communication

that happens

in the colloquium room

by means of this dance?

Has that ever been

in your experience tried?

Well,

I think

as far as I can remember

in my group

psychedelic experiences

there was never

another

major mathematician

but still

any person

to some extent

is a mathematician

and

has

these modes

of perception

and uses them

as cognitive strategies

and so on.

I found

that

the ability

to

evoke

these images

in someone else

through

just saying

something

and waiting

in your hands

is enormously

enhanced

in the shared

psychedelic atmosphere.

It is.

Amazingly,

resonance

is definitely

amplified

and therefore

you can have

success in communication

that you have

never dreamed

which is kind

of a spoiler

really.

A gesture

like the guru

in the jungle

you know

some little signs

and the person

really has the whole idea

and then they respond

and the communication

is very rapid

and even without

just in some

telepathic way

there is

an apparent

resonance

emerging

of minds

as it were.

You can even

visualize these minds

like floating up

to the ceiling

and somehow

docking

with each other

and then becoming

one thing

and I have in this way

created what

appears to be

what you could

describe as

telepathic union

with a person

in such

two or three

person

psychedelic

trip.

I remember

one with

Kenny and

Alice

where the

three

souls

merged

and the

telepathic bond

was connected

which was never

broken

it didn't end

with the

psychedelic trip

after

I think

that we took

various things

and were stoned

together

for three days

after this

we always knew

when something

was happening

with the other

one we could

call up and

say what's

going on

and so on.

Well it sounds

to me like

group ayahuasca

taking among

research mathematicians

is a tremendous

frontier for

grassroots science.

Yes, exactly.

You're listening

to the

Psychedelic Salon

where people

are changing

their lives

one thought

at a time.

Well, since

I'm not a

mathematician

I'm afraid

that that's one

grassroots science

project that I

won't be

participating in.

But something

Ralph said

about high

definition

television

got me

thinking about

a grassroots

science project

that I could

do.

I was intrigued

by what Ralph

said about

the ways

in which

the deeper

pixelation

of high

definition

television

had the

potential

of changing

our cognitive

processing.

So I did

a little experiment

to test

his idea

and thanks

to some

friends

I now have

access to

a big screen

high definition

television

to use for

my experiment.

Now in the past

the programs

that I watched

in high def

were mainly

those spectacular

nature shows

that included

a lot of aerial

views and other

sites that are

pretty far from

our everyday

reality.

But I didn't

think that they

were the best

way to check out

Ralph's hypothesis.

So instead I

selected a program

that was about

as everyday

boring as life

can often be.

Namely a golf

tournament which

is about as

exciting as

watching the grass

grow.

But it can be

an immersive

experience if

you look at

it that way.

Now here in

our area some

of the stations

broadcast in

both standard

format and

in high def.

So I watched

for about a

half an hour

in the standard

format and

then switched

to high definition.

Of course

it's an

instantaneous

sensation of

wow when

the high definition

kicks in.

But this time

it was a

smaller wow

all because

there was no

spectacular

scenery flying

by.

Just a bunch

of guys

strolling

around a

big lawn

and hitting

tiny white

balls around.

But in

high def

something else

seemed to be

going on.

I still

can't say

what it is

but it was

more than

just a

better picture

that captured

my attention.

In some

mysterious

way the

shift to

a higher

number of

pixels on

the screen

actually

somehow

pulled me

into that

scene in

a way

that I

hadn't

experienced

before.

Of course

I was

paying

attention

to the

experience

in a

more

focused

way

because

I

was

thinking

about

what

Ralph

had

said

and

perhaps

I

just

let

my

fanciful

imagination

run away

with me.

But it

got me

to thinking

that maybe

some of

our fellow

salonners

who are

looking

for a

graduate

thesis

topic

might

want

to look

into

this

phenomena

to

see

if

there's

actually

something

physical

that

happens

to

a

person's

brain

who

where I'm

going

with

this

for

at least

a decade

now

there

have

been

various

teams

working

on

the

technical

problem

of

delivering

a

psychedelic

experience

via

digital

technology

the

mysterious

digital

drugs

that you

hear

about

from

time

to

time

now

word

on

the

street

is

that

some

of

these

attempts

have

been

very

successful

in

tricking

the

brain

into

thinking

it's

on

LSD

or

and

expensive

headgear

which is

always

going to

be

a

difficult

thing

to

sell

but if

most

households

eventually

have a

high-definition

television

and if

some of

our

great

young

visionary

artists

transport

their work

into

the

world

of

online

gaming

particularly

the

online

multiple

player

games

that are

acted

out

high-def

well

the

age

of

digital

drugs

may

well

be

upon

let's

get

busy

and

see

how

long

it

takes

before

the

screw

heads

in

Washington

discover

that

now

they

also

have

to

start

a

war

against

digital

drugs

if

they

want

to

continue

fighting

the

evolution

of

human

consciousness

that's

already

taking

place

in

the

psychedelic

community

and

contrary

to

what

Star Trek

fans

like

so

if

anyone

has

the

opportunity

and

time

to

investigate

the

effects

of

high-def

TV

on the

brain

and

wants

to

share

their

findings

I'd

love

to

hear

about

it

another

thing

I'm

wondering

is

where

do

you

come

down

on

the

question

that

Rupert

raised

about

halfway

into

their

trilogue

when

he

wondered

whether

in

the

field

of

computer

graphics

and

today

that

of course

would

definitely

include

everyone

in the

gaming

world

are

those

people

working

in

that

field

because

of

their

psychedelic

experiences

that

drew

them

into

it

or

did

computer

graphics

and

gaming

grow

out

of

the

psychedelic

community

I guess

that's

sort

at least in regards to the personal computer and internet developers,

well, that part of the industry is awash in psychedelics.

It's a widely known fact, yet it's very seldom discussed in the mainstream media.

Several books that do touch on this fact of life, however, are Technosis by Eric Davis,

What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff, and Counterculture Through the Ages by R.U. Serious.

And there are a few others that I'll also add to the program notes for this podcast, if I can remember it.

And if I forget to add those links, well, hopefully one of our fellow salonners will do it for me in the comments section,

like our friend Lewis did for Podcast 115.

Thanks, Lewis. I appreciate your help.

Also, I was taken by what Ralph said about the students with backgrounds involving psychedelics and or travel

who seemed to be more drawn to working in the computer graphics field

because that field also provided a better sense of personal integrity

that some other professions didn't seem to have.

And now that over a decade has passed since Ralph made that statement,

I find that his observation is even more accurate today than it was back in 1991.

And to me, the fascinating aspect of this migration of some of our best minds to the world of computer graphics

is that that world now encompasses the game development industry.

And if you know much about that tech, you know that it is the true leading edge of computing

and the true leading edge of social evolution on this planet, at least in my humble opinion.

And what do I base this on, you ask?

Well, mainly on having met hundreds of people, both young and old,

who are both psychedelic and are computer developers of one kind or another.

At least from where I stand, these people have some of the sharpest and most well-rounded minds I've ever encountered.

Now that I've said that, I wonder if something can be both well-rounded and sharp at the same time.

Huh? Well, I think you know what I mean, and you probably know some people like that yourself.

In fact, maybe you are one.

Why else would you be listening to podcast lectures about psychedelics?

So I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.

By the way, one of the magazines that Ralph spoke about at the beginning of this dialogue was Mondo 2000,

which, for me, was my main source of information about the psychedelic community

during the dark ages when I was living in the swamps of Florida and working for a corporate beast.

And in fact, I still have all but the first two issues.

I really should get rid of them, but I can't find it in my heart to throw them out.

It was a really great magazine and was where I first learned about a guy named Terrence McKenna.

Now, the reason I'm mentioning this right now is that the man behind Mondo 2000

and many other highly creative ventures was none other than Are You Serious,

whose podcast you really should check out sometime.

And you can find a link to it on our matrixmasters.com slash podcast page.

In the future, I'm going to try to get these podcasts back down to a one-hour format,

but I've still got a couple things left to say before I go today.

And I do appreciate you sticking with us for these longer programs,

and so I'll try to be brief here.

But I want to be sure to point you to the MySpace page of PlataVark,

that's P-L-A-D-A-V-A-R-K,

whose music fits in the trip-hop, trance, psychedelic genre

and uses a few sound bites from the salon on several tracks.

During the past couple of years,

several other groups have also honored the salon by using sound bites from various programs,

and I really enjoy listening to them.

So thanks to all of you musicians who are including sound bites from the salon in your work,

and please feel free to use any clips you want from these podcasts.

It's truly an honor to be included in your art.

Now, almost every week I receive a comment or two

about how much you appreciate the mind of Terrence McKenna.

And since I've been playing so many of Terrence's talks,

I guess I don't say much anymore about the brilliance of his thought.

But I recently received an email from Zachary M.,

who is a longtime salon regular,

and I want to read part of what he had to say

because I think it expresses what a lot of us are thinking.

Here's what Zachary has to say about Terrence.

Terrence McKenna is somehow a timeless commentator.

I don't know what it is,

but this guy just doesn't seem to get old, but young.

Every time you play one of his things,

I'm just shocked at how old the talk is,

and yet how not only presently affirming,

but futuristically pointing.

The guy really seems to have become an immortal

that does not age whatsoever.

It's something in his voice.

It's something in his consciousness that allows that to happen.

It's not so much what he says

as how he says it that is so powerful.

Perhaps his magical bard-like powers

have broken the bounds of time's borders

and escaped into the dream beyond the eschaton.

When you play another's talks from earlier times,

it seems and feels very old.

But McKenna's talk seems new.

Not only new, but cutting edge.

Well, I'm in total agreement with you, Zachary.

At least for now, it looks like Terrence is

headed for that posthumous glory

that he laughed about back in 99.

But maybe that transcendental object at the end of time

is actually the spirit of Terrence McKenna

laughing at the cosmic giggle.

Now that would be a nice surprise, don't you think?

And the last thing I want to bring up here

is an interesting message I received from Joel G.

And here's part of what he had to say.

Hi, Lorenzo.

I started listening to the Psychedelic Salon podcast

a few weeks ago, and I'm hooked.

In one of the podcasts,

I heard the topic of Hopi prophecy briefly discussed.

So I thought I'd tell you about a strange bit of coincidence

I stumbled upon back in 2001.

Here's a little background.

The Hopi consider four mountain peaks

in their geographic area as sacred.

One of these is the San Francisco peaks,

just a few miles northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona.

The Hopi believe that spirits or supernatural beings

called kachinas live on the San Francisco peaks.

The kachinas are responsible for bringing good weather

and bountiful crops, among other things.

Here's the coincidence.

I'm an avid mushroom hunter,

and in 2000, I had just relocated

from Washington State to Arizona.

I wasn't expecting much in the way of mushroom hunting in Arizona

due to the arid climate.

In August of 2001, quite by accident,

I discovered a mushroom species new to science on the SF peaks,

home of the kachina spirits.

You guessed it.

The mushroom is psychoactive, containing psilocybin.

This is the first known psychoactive mushroom native to Arizona.

It has a habitat unlike any other psilocybin mushroom that I know of,

aspen forests at about 9,000 feet.

The majority of these types of mushrooms,

which I assume he's meaning psilocybin,

are associated with areas of human disturbance,

such as landscaped areas and fields with livestock.

So to find a species in a relatively undisturbed aspen forest is quite rare.

As far as we know, it only occurs on the San Francisco peaks,

and sightings are usually few and far between.

I'm in no way suggesting that the Hopi knew of this mushroom,

but I think the kachina mythology

and the discovery of this new species

is a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.

Hope all is well with you,

and keep up the great work, Lorenzo.

Kind regards, Joel.

Well, Joel, thank you not only for the kind words,

but also for that fascinating information.

Stories like that really get my imagination going,

and maybe that will be true for some of our fellow slaughters

who might be able to shed some more light

on what you so rightly call

a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of today's program,

I've got something a little different for you next week.

As so many of our fellow salonners have pointed out to me,

I've now done over 120 podcasts from the psychedelic salon,

and yet there hasn't been a single one

that has a talk by a fellow by the name of Dr. Timothy Leary.

I think I've mentioned this before,

but that isn't just an oversight on my part.

Due to my close friendship with Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher,

both of whom who had very close working relationships

with Dr. Leary in the 60s,

well, I have a highly negative opinion of Tim Leary,

and in deference to my two friends,

I haven't done anything to add to the Leary legend.

But the fates have decided that my stand can no longer be tolerated.

At least that's the way I read the fact

that a data drive arrived in my mailbox last week

that had almost 100 gigabytes of audio and video recordings

of the good Dr. Leary.

And so it seems that I can no longer ignore

this part of modern psychedelic history.

Heck, even Ralph Abraham quoted him in today's trialogue,

so I guess that should be a sign for me to loosen up a bit.

I'm not going to promise how much of this Leary archive

I'll be playing here in the salon,

but for next week I thought it would be interesting

to hear the talk that Tim Leary gave at Cooper Union in 1965,

which for some reason I seem to remember

as having been of some consequence at the time.

I haven't listened to it yet myself,

but we can do that together next week

and see how well his lectures stand up

to the high quality of the McKenna material

we've been listening to for the past couple of years

here in the salon.

It should provide an interesting comparison,

don't you think?

At least I hope it's going to be an interesting talk,

and if it isn't, I'll come up with something else for next week.

But as of right now,

my plan is to begin trickling a little Tim Leary

into the mix just to keep things interesting.

And before I go,

I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts

from the Psychedelic Salon

are protected under the Creative Commons

Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License.

And if you have any questions about that,

just click the Creative Commons link

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org

And that's also where you'll find the program notes

for these podcasts.

And for now, this is Lorenzo

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.