Trialogues at the Edge of the Millenium

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 consciousness

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

was not 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 a permission given to

biologists to speculate about evolution of the mind in this way by the analysis of

selfish genes they feel if it's they're talking about selfish genes it's somehow scientific and

it's given everyone permission this is 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 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 irrelevant to their own genes they're not able to deduce from their own genes

that they have 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 had to say is that all

right anyway this 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

the explosion 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 it by put forward in a book by Stephen mythen 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 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 use 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 domestication of animals the agricultural Revolution occurred 10 000 years ago the first

civilizations about 5 000 years ago maybe 7 000 years ago industrialization two or three hundred

years ago but for the vast majority of human history people were living in quite a quite

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

so little what my then points out is that these although we don't know what they thought about

and how they worked for 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 what 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 if you know unless you know what to gather where to

gather it what things are good to eat what things are good as herbs 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 that really nobody knows language leaves no fossil traces but

something very strange happened about a hundred thousand 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 those brains and we haven't a clue what it was

that 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 art and civilization only begin

to develop in the early 20th century and not in the early 20th century and not in the early 20th century

and not in the early 20th century and not in the early 20th century and not in the early 20th century

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 my then 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 spearheads and

so on the merging of social and natural historical intelligence led to a whole kind of mythic

understanding of the animal in 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 cathedral

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

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

somehow he thinks this transition fifty thousand 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 my then

how do you know that we are connected to the heavens what if I asked you how do you know that

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.

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 a matter of opinion.

Yeah.

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 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 Rites.

She's an American writer based in New York,

and in her book Blood Rites, 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,

um,

is, in fact, pretty implausible.

Human beings were small, they were...

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.

Um, 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, of 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 world,

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.

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.

This is 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,

Meythin'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 three and a half 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 own

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's a genius.

History is rooted in the future.

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.

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 peculiar 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.

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 waterhole 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,

this 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 trans-human 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 Steven Meythen,

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

claims of Africa,

but you didn't.

And the need to think strategically.

But why this need

not only was a constant

throughout the three and a half million years

evolution of hominids,

but also in pongids,

apes,

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?

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, Steven Meythen?

He doesn't give a very clear explanation

as to why this might have happened.

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 Marshak,

who led a great group of

a combined group of two species

of neurophysiologists

and archaeologists

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 whole

in the head,

where the connection between

the hemispheres was improved

in the corpus callosum

and this physiological evolution

provided an evolutionary advantage

in hunting and so on.

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.

No, 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 Steven Meithen mention that?

Well, you can't from skulls,

all you've got are skulls.

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

That's the whole point,

that these skulls have been examined

microscopically by Alexander Marshak

and the changes in the skull,

morphological changes,

exactly 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,

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

or 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.

Mythen'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 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,

whatever they are. Not just metaphors,

not just archetypes in the collective mind,

but forms of consciousness that might

well, and I think actually are,

a part of that.

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 upon here

is that the timeframe is

roughly 50,000 years.

Well, so

a whole bunch of things are trying

to be 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...

We'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

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 sapiens 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 who placed

the mushroom in their path. Oh, I'll give you a hand there.

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

wouldn't like it. Ah, escape

from his

trap.

Rube, what you as a middle

man should do.

I think, you see, I can't quite

get your position because the new

hard-nosed skeptic that you're

revealing to us here and in other places.

You see, it doesn't seem to fit

too well with Terence

McKenna on non-human entities,

machine elves, etc.

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 conclusion.

Now I've just shot my

talk.

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 the...

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

travelers, 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 tool kit 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

earth bound 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 a

interconnected ball of intelligence

which is, let's just assume

such a thing, nevertheless

the science

of 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.

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.

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.

Well 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 unbelievably

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 50s called The Black

Cloud. Where Fred Hoyle

shows that to imagine

intelligence necessarily

grounded either in copper water

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

and 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

between two classes. 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

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. And it's not enough

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, etc.,

etc., 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 the star

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

sent by bolts from the blue and we

have these, you know, 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

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 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.

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 apophatic

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

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 concerned

to so much greater and more remote

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 if

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. Yes.

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

path 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 we thought 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 and 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

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

that work here. Looking at 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.

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.

Is this right?

No, I have the feeling we've actually made

it.

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 relative

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 some aspect

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

the 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,

you know, 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 Frederick 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,

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

Hobbes. The great

theoretician 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 information.

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 program being run

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 pheromonially

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.

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.

We are machines of 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

massive objects at

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

apace, 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, how much

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

has grown far too complex

for any human being

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 there are people who go

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 Palladians

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 200, 400

or 1000 megahertz

machine.

We operate at about 100

hertz.

That may seem a very abstract thing

but what I'm really saying is we live

in a time called

real. And it is defined

by 100 hertz functioning

of our biological processors.

A 1000

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 astrolabes

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

that 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 eunuchs 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 resource

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're like people in

1860 trying to talk about

the internet or something.

We're 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

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'm

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'm

willing to predict just

as a side issue that the

approaching Y to K,

this crisis may be completely

circumvented by the benevolent

intercession, not of the

Zenebel Ganubians 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.

So

I just want to lay

this out because in my own

intellectual journey I have gone

from thinking this idea

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 had 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 in

to a perfect 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 guests

who now stands

pass in hand at

the door of the party

of human emergence and

progress at the millennium.

Shred it.

It will be a pleasure.

I think that this is

I'm glad that we have

arrived now at the

field of science fiction and

fantasy and 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 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 themselves. 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

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 future, we could influence

the future. This one

is more in the direction of Donna

Haraway on the cyborg idea

that envisions which

is 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. And

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

or something. That is

I think it's 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 at the

within the heart as it were.

Well let me try to answer

this. I mean 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.

Most, you know

now the concept of virtual reality

is very crude. It's a cartoon

world if you were, 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

three 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. They're moving parts.

But the internet seems

as one machine was

built to be indestructible.

The AI will not be located

on a CPU.

It will be a distributed

intelligence. If fourteen people

worldwide, the right fourteen people

decided to stop

repairing it, the world wide web would go

down in three days.

I think you, I don't believe that. Anyway we

could, let's say, suppose that

we could create any future that we wanted

the one you're talking about can only be

created if we want it. Now I'm just trying

to 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

the development and evolution of even

our speech and print driven

social systems.

I'm certainly not saying that

your paranoid 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 there are evolutionary

steps which 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

of 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

essentially 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 is 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.

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

worldwide realm. But you yourself are saying

this is coming. Well

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.

No, I don't think it'll deal

with the essential problem

that this purely cognitive based

way of modelling 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. 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 etc. 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

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 20 years.

Beyond that, no one

can project trends,

technologies, and situations

because the developments of the next

20 years will so completely

reformulate the human

experience of being human

and the landscape of this planet

that its preposterous

universe to talk about.

Well, I can't,

before I respond to the main thing,

I can't but pass

without commenting on this next

20 years comment because

20 years from now is

2018, Terence.

I thought...

It's rounded up.

Not rounded down.

2012 is some kind of

benchmark in this

process. In other words,

perhaps that's where we get the

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,

tetraflops of operations

into a given second.

So I think it's trickier than

you think and harder to corner

me than you may suppose.

That was a mere comment on

your aside about 20 years.

I never expected to hear that

phrase from you, but 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 the...

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 involves

sort of jumps 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

and there's no way to tease them apart

except to live

into the future.

Certainly the intelligence

of this future machine

knows all about 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.

And let me give you an idea

about 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

ultra-intelligence would look like.

For example, I have heard the argument

that nothing advanced

humanness on this planet

like the use of nuclear weapons

against Japanese

cities because that was

so horrifying 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

what will happen. Well, you suggested

that the alien object would

secure its future by hiding,

by downloading multiple copies

into nooks and crannies of the

World Wide Web. And I'm 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 there are 20, 30 thousand

nuclear bombs still

moving around this planet.

I would hope so,

but that's only my opinion. In other words,

noticing that all

newborn creatures need

a sum period of time

to adjust to their environment

and get their legs, 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 might last

under a minute or two.

I see, so this 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,

you've probably got an answer for this.

And if not, you'll soon think of one.

But 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 and

internet 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're 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?

Well, I sort of came up

under the tutelage of Eric Jansch

and 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 you're

referring to. That's the code name for it.

Yes, 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 or maybe 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, crash-bust

cycles. Now I 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.

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 it will

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

bear heads about this. But I'm

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 and

tolerable life 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're going to be shocked now Terence 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 that the...

I think you heard more threat than I intended.

Well I hear, I don't know,

sometimes you sound as if you're

a hired consultant from the

World Trade Organization.

I hope the cheque is in the mail.

But I mean

this idea that it will all be taken

care of, I mean there's so many things

that, 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 insofar as it is

enlisted by the forces of the

World Trade Organization, multinational

companies and so on, it's not going

to be working on the side of a kind

of political view of things,

local economies, more so

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're 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's how you're going to

revalue your currency.

Here's our plan 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 free

wheeling 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 from

most people than allowing

these nations to self-regulate

themselves.

Well, well.

Well, you see,

I mean 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

difficult 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 a threatening

reality 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

think it's been 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 of these 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, 2003

it will be clear that

we have, that the bifurcation

has gone one way or

another.

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 the

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 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.

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

toward biological evolution

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 a 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 the plateau

now ending is only

300 or 400 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

Patatrio? What about Boccaccio?

And

the truth is that

whenever you look at two

major milestones

in history and consider that

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

10 smaller ones. Between any two

of the smaller ones there will be

40 or 50 little or tinier ones

and so on. The first

person I know who put forward

such a fractal idea of history

that 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

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 10

of the evolutionary mind

and read there about the history

of the millenarial concept

then you'll see that the first one

wherein the number 1000

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

plateau 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 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 bifurcation

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

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

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

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 of

vidya in the Buddhist

lexicon we retard

universal progress towards

some kind of enlightenment

but the doctrine of vidya

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 scanned your way

in here today and no matter whether

you are going to go back to

appliance box

that you live in

or a bridge

the odds are that you

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

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

because 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 and to the degree 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 we have a yes

a yes

so we

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

effect on the rest of the

world and our creation of the future

yes how

how would it

have this effect yes by

telepathic means

by the romance of

photons no I think by

the spread of clarity

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

laughter

so your

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

laughter

applause

don't forget

I've given over 300 calculus

lectures in this room

laughter

it boggles my mind to look out and think

well yeah this is Santa Cruz

it must be Santa Cruz

laughter

what do you think Rupert

laughter

the question really is I mean changing minds

we're talking

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

yet more newspaper 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

laughter

I suspect that Terence thinks the medium is

well I think telepathy is equally powerful

laughter

yes but um

wait I want to hear his suspicion

laughter

world wide web

yes I think

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

laughter

Britain is the source of

and the fountain head of the world wide

youth 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

come to the rave tonight and see

clarity created

yes yes

the crucible of clarity is home at last place

laughter

and Terence takes the microphone

laughter

well it's not always

perfectly clear what's going on

when you have your nose in it

laughter

I mean my own agenda

relies partly on the world wide web

not as strongly as yours

and I

here in this room is Matthew Clapp

who kindly runs my world wide website

um

jailbreak.org

laughter

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

um I mean it took on a new

level of spell binding

um 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

other themes

laughter

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

this 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

then all these 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 rational 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

I calculate that tens of 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, is based 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

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

to give a greater clarity about what's really

going on

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

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 perceptions

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

destroying community

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

genocide

arms races

sexism

racism

all can operate very very comfortably

Ralph earlier mentioned love

generally speaking

love is a boundary dissolving

enterprise

so I think each of us

the three of us

all of you

in our way

should find ways to express love

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

then we're inevitably going to carry on

a dualistic analysis of our dilemma

and we're going to produce

incomplete agendas and answers

applause

well this is

good I agree with everything

and 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 a group

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

well Ralph

the University is the last place

where you would look for this

the University is the manufacturer

of these cultural values

that imprison us

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

my experience is that no amount

of clarity in this group

of 200 and other like groups

is going to matter one whit

when we are all adults

you see

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

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

and so Rupert's work

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 touched somewhere

in a more sensitive

spot than the adult community

and what do you propose

well you work with youth

I guess you are interested

in talking with younger people

and Rupert I know

that you are particularly active in education

through the existence of

your children who are now subject

to the educational system

that

that does this criminal

brainwashing that I am talking about

so

I am 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 is 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 would 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

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

Aryans, 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 play groups

they should be playing with fire

and

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've 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

Algeria he said 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 okay 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 proved 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

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

bariatric 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 here 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

it's 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 culture's

music being in the hands of the

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've still

going to have to have educational systems

school systems

of one kind or another

and it's not clear to me that

you know 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 youths preference

for psychedelic drugs is honored

where youths music is honored

where microeconomics

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 society

than anything going on

inside the high tech industrial

democracies that are the

that set the global agenda

I think

well I often visit Holland

and I must say I haven't quite noticed

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

you've asked me and Terence

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

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

Terrence 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's 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'm able to detect this

because it's something that

is amplified

it's behavior that emerges

as soon as I walk into a room

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

it's 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's growing at

an alarming rate that it's becoming

they're 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's 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've seen this today

that I can go through an entire

day without mentioning mathematics

with mentioning mathematics

but not the word mathematics

in the hopes of tricking people

into recognizing that some ideas like this

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

shift and shinola

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

and this problem is going

growing worse all the time

I mean 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 sense 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

it deserves

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

shining

unannounced

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 the flick of 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

yes well it is

an ambiguous enterprise

and fraught with contradiction

but forward

ever forward