Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Ralph Abraham
This podcast is part of a dialogue between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham that took place at the Omega Institute on August 1, 1998.
It isn’t often that we have the opportunity to see how accurate predictions about the future are, but this fascinating conversation between two of the great thinkers of our times has already proven to be right on target. The reason this may be of interest to you is that if they correctly predicted some things that have now happened, then we are really in for some big time excitement if some of their more far-out predictions come true.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:18 ►
I’m Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
I think we’ve got a real treat for you today.
00:00:26 ►
What you’re about to hear is a conversation between Terrence McKenna and Ralph Abraham
00:00:31 ►
that took place on a hot August night in 1998.
00:00:36 ►
It was, actually it was the first of August to be exact,
00:00:39 ►
and it took place at the Omega Institute upstate in Rhinebeck, New York.
00:00:46 ►
Terrence and Ralph were both conducting separate workshops at Omega that weekend.
00:00:50 ►
At least, I know Terrence was. I’m pretty sure Ralph was, too.
00:00:53 ►
I was at the workshop Terrence was putting on.
00:00:57 ►
And the workshop was like Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
00:01:00 ►
And Saturday night, the two of them got together in the main auditorium there and
00:01:05 ►
they opened the event up to everybody at Omega that night. I think they were probably trying
00:01:10 ►
to sell books or something but much to everyone’s surprise it became a standing room only crowd.
00:01:18 ►
After about 40 minutes of dialogue they opened it up for questions from the crowd, and it turned into quite a
00:01:25 ►
long and exciting night.
00:01:27 ►
But in the interest of time for this podcast, I’ve taken the liberty of cutting out some
00:01:32 ►
of the more long-winded questions that were really more statements of personal opinion
00:01:38 ►
and questions.
00:01:40 ►
And also I took out some of the discussion about the Y2K issue, which I don’t think is
00:01:44 ►
very relevant anymore. You remember the Y2K issue, which I don’t think is very relevant anymore.
00:01:46 ►
You remember the Y2K scare, don’t you?
00:01:48 ►
That was just starting to make the news about the time that this talk took place.
00:01:54 ►
And I guess I should probably add that if you really want to put this talk into perspective,
00:02:00 ►
just think about how much things have changed since the summer of 1998.
00:02:04 ►
Just think about how much things have changed since the summer of 1998.
00:02:12 ►
To begin with, the Bush crime family still hadn’t been able to steal the keys to the White House yet.
00:02:17 ►
But more importantly, a way to really put this in perspective, I think,
00:02:20 ►
is to think back to where you were during the summer of 1998.
00:02:21 ►
What were you doing?
00:02:23 ►
Where were you living?
00:02:42 ►
What kind of a computer did you have at the time? What model did you have? How fast was it? Were you connected to the net? Just think back to the summer of 98 and for sure I suspect you didn’t have some of today’s necessities of life like a cell phone and a PDA and email, the things we take for granted now. The world was really different back then.
00:02:46 ►
And remember, this was back then was like only six years ago.
00:02:50 ►
You know, it was a month after Terrence and Ralph had this conversation
00:02:54 ►
that Google was incorporated.
00:02:56 ►
So as they talk about in this conversation of theirs,
00:03:01 ►
things are changing at a very rapid clip.
00:03:04 ►
And so put yourself back in the summer of theirs, things are changing at a very rapid clip. And so put yourself back in the summer of 98, think of where you were then and think
00:03:09 ►
of where you are now.
00:03:11 ►
And I think it puts this talk into pretty good perspective and shows also the brilliance
00:03:15 ►
of the two men here and their conversation.
00:03:19 ►
So let’s go back in time now and hear what Terrence McKenna and Ralph Abraham thought
00:03:24 ►
about the World Wide Web and the Millennium,
00:03:28 ►
way back in the olden days, the days before Google.
00:03:35 ►
And now the Omega Institute is proud to introduce Terence McKenna.
00:03:43 ►
Terrence McKenna in the red tights
00:03:51 ►
and Ralph Abraham
00:03:54 ►
in the faded denims
00:03:56 ►
and the rules of the game are simple indeed.
00:04:09 ►
One of us will talk for a bit, then the other will talk for a bit.
00:04:14 ►
It’s called getting a word in edgewise.
00:04:16 ►
That’s what my mother used to say.
00:04:19 ►
Then we’ll both talk for a bit, and then you’ll be invited to ask questions for a bit.
00:04:26 ►
And the topic is the World Wide Web, the Internet, and the Millennium.
00:04:35 ►
Well, the Millennium is simply a speed bump in our calendar,
00:04:43 ►
which is an artificial timekeeping construction
00:04:46 ►
that is the largest frame in which our culture operates.
00:04:53 ►
The Internet is a technological artifact,
00:04:58 ►
the literal exteriorization of the human nervous system
00:05:03 ►
brought into being by forces of big science
00:05:07 ►
and big capitalism and big military strategic thinking
00:05:12 ►
and now in the service of a global information marketplace.
00:05:20 ►
And it, like all new technologies, is the focus of fantastic hopes and fantastic amounts of hybola.
00:05:31 ►
The Internet seems particularly to draw this kind of extreme rhetoric to itself
00:05:40 ►
because it seems to many people, whether they consciously realize it or not,
00:05:47 ►
to be the fulfillment of an almost religious agenda.
00:05:51 ►
This is a platonic super-space.
00:05:55 ►
We can fling the defiled body away and become archons of a kind of new informational Gnosticism and shed our connections to the
00:06:07 ►
material world and move off into a domain of platonic perfection under the rule of art
00:06:15 ►
and law.
00:06:17 ►
It’s a grand Faustian dream, a very deep strain in the Western psyche that cyberspace appeals to and indeed seems
00:06:30 ►
to make manifest. On the other hand, it raises all kinds of challenges to all the values
00:06:39 ►
that have been created in the past, because the past 500 years has been about the exploration of the print-created space that McLuhan called public space, the space of rational discourse and academic dialogue and democratic deliberation. That space is being collapsed, remolded, transformed by the Internet,
00:07:10 ►
which seems to be more anarchical and less hierarchical.
00:07:18 ►
The fringes are thrown into high relief by the political processes favored by the Internet
00:07:25 ►
rather than a molding of consensus through single-minded devotion to special cultural icons.
00:07:36 ►
The Internet empowers unbelievable diversity and abandonment of any effort
00:07:42 ►
at building consensus or indeed polity or community at all.
00:07:48 ►
So the chance met or synchronistic occurrence of the millennial turning
00:07:56 ►
and the rise of the internet is a fertile area for discussion and speculation.
00:08:06 ►
The entirety of the 20th century may be remembered as the informational century
00:08:15 ►
or the pre-digital era.
00:08:19 ►
All the technologies that now go into the Internet
00:08:23 ►
were perfected under the umbrella of modernism
00:08:26 ►
with its marriage of big science to market forces and that sort of thing. The simple
00:08:36 ►
search for entertainment and money seems to have ushered in a whole pantheon of strange genies
00:08:47 ►
that now beckon with pseudo-forms of immortality,
00:08:51 ►
gender-bending forms of sexuality,
00:08:56 ►
strange new dimensions of information and control that the Internet sets up.
00:09:04 ►
I mean, it’s a brand new world out there, folks.
00:09:07 ►
It’s as profound a shift in cultural values
00:09:12 ►
as the introduction of the phonetic alphabet
00:09:14 ►
or urbanization or something like that.
00:09:18 ►
And because the turn of the millennium
00:09:21 ►
wants to
00:09:26 ►
insist itself
00:09:28 ►
around an agenda
00:09:29 ►
the way an oyster insists
00:09:31 ►
itself around a piece of grit
00:09:34 ►
to make a pearl
00:09:35 ►
inevitably
00:09:36 ►
the obsession of the new century
00:09:40 ►
is some combination
00:09:42 ►
of the internet
00:09:44 ►
nanotechnological engineering, biotechnological engineering,
00:09:50 ►
all of these new technologies united under the theme of information, transformation of information. And so what seems to be dawning
00:10:06 ►
is an entirely new set of social
00:10:09 ►
and cosmological values
00:10:11 ►
where information is primary.
00:10:15 ►
More primary than gravity or light
00:10:17 ►
or matter.
00:10:20 ►
Information somehow precedes all of that.
00:10:26 ►
Life cannot be life without the inherent information in DNA.
00:10:31 ►
Physics cannot be physics without the information-carrying capacity of the electromagnetic field.
00:10:39 ►
Information is recognized as primary,
00:11:05 ►
Information is recognized as primary, and language then, both human languages and computer languages in a constant state millennium, that really one is the new archon that the other heralds and predicts,
00:11:14 ►
that the occult dreams of Gnosticism and alchemy and hermetic thought,
00:11:23 ►
the idea that man, rather than being a fallen creature,
00:11:27 ►
could be some kind of co-partner in the enterprise of creation, that particular strain of fantasy
00:11:37 ►
gets an enormous shot in the arm from the rise of cyberspace, the informational technologies and the power to manipulate them,
00:11:47 ►
the power to steer human history toward a world of ever greater art and artifice,
00:11:55 ►
with all the contradictions and ambiguities that that necessarily would entail.
00:12:02 ►
ambiguities that that necessarily would entail.
00:12:05 ►
So that’s my take on where we are
00:12:08 ►
at the millennium with the Internet.
00:12:11 ►
And now for a counterpoint of just plain talk.
00:12:19 ►
Well, Terence and I have touched on these
00:12:22 ►
topics before and we are in pretty much fundamental agreement,
00:12:28 ►
not because of arguing with each other,
00:12:31 ►
but just as a process of, I would say, convergent evolution,
00:12:35 ►
thinking about our discussions on mathematical topics 25 years ago or more when we began.
00:12:44 ►
There was a larger difference between our positions.
00:12:49 ►
And maybe I didn’t listen perfectly, but let me paraphrase what I got, Terrence, was the
00:12:56 ►
millennium is a speed bump on the highway of evolution, and the World wide web is a really big deal that I think you’ve described some of its
00:13:06 ►
potential features
00:13:08 ►
really well so I
00:13:10 ►
might if I
00:13:12 ►
got that right address an imbalance by giving
00:13:14 ►
just a little bit more attention
00:13:16 ►
to the millennium
00:13:17 ►
okay the millennium I think
00:13:20 ►
I haven’t thought about it at all
00:13:22 ►
as the year
00:13:23 ►
2000 any more than there was another one in the year 1000 but I think I haven’t thought about it at all as the year 2000 any more than there was another one in the year 1000.
00:13:28 ►
But I think the millennium means, to me,
00:13:31 ►
it means a big change between two plateaus, more or less,
00:13:36 ►
in a style of evolution of culture or society,
00:13:43 ►
which is similar to biological evolution and having
00:13:47 ►
quantum leaps of new species and stuff like that.
00:13:51 ►
And there is, of course, in historiography, a continuity theory that goes back to Leibniz,
00:13:57 ►
if not before.
00:13:59 ►
We are under the influence in our so-called modern age of a continuous theory of history,
00:14:06 ►
whereas before Leibniz, a couple hundred years ago,
00:14:09 ►
there was more of a feeling of quantum leaps in evolution as far as world cultural history is concerned.
00:14:17 ►
If one of these quantum leaps coincided with the year 2000, that would be most coincidental.
00:14:23 ►
And I’m not against such coincidences.
00:14:26 ►
That would be okay.
00:14:28 ►
But thinking of the Renaissance as a model,
00:14:30 ►
the Renaissance is a smaller quantum leap of…
00:14:34 ►
I don’t want to use that word, quantum.
00:14:35 ►
I hate it. Come to think of it.
00:14:38 ►
A big jump in the development of all that we consider ourselves now
00:14:44 ►
occurred in the Renaissance,
00:14:45 ►
and we think that the one we’re in now is bigger.
00:14:48 ►
But if the one in the Renaissance was smaller,
00:14:50 ►
keep in mind that it did not coincide with any particular year,
00:14:54 ►
the beginning or end of even a century.
00:14:57 ►
And no matter how tight you make the sudden jump,
00:15:01 ►
it still took at least a century.
00:15:04 ►
Nothing happened in a year or two or three.
00:15:07 ►
Now, I believe we’re in a really big one, and that’s arguable,
00:15:10 ►
but accepting that for the sake of discussion,
00:15:14 ►
we can say, well, what supports this, or what is a part of it, or what is changing?
00:15:20 ►
Well, there’s the expected and long-postp postponed meltdown of the world economy.
00:15:26 ►
There are the thousand and one catastrophes on the litany of the doomsday book.
00:15:34 ►
You know what I mean.
00:15:35 ►
The ozone hole, population, the global climate warming,
00:15:41 ►
the growth of the melting of the iceberg, the rise of the, you know, all those, there’s a million things,
00:15:48 ►
which are sudden transformations, and yet there always have been.
00:15:52 ►
So what have we got to offer here under the heading of bigger than a speed bump on the path of progress?
00:16:04 ►
a speed bump on the path of progress.
00:16:10 ►
So certainly the World Wide Web has to be counted in evidence,
00:16:14 ►
especially if it’s as significant as we’ve described it.
00:16:17 ►
Then it is, at least it’s evidence for, so it’s under the heading of a millennial leap with or without the year 2000.
00:16:23 ►
We have evidence of a millennial leap because the World the year 2000. We have evidence of a millennial leap
00:16:25 ►
because the World Wide Web is happening so rapidly.
00:16:28 ►
In fact, it’s part of the computer evolution,
00:16:30 ►
which is happening so rapidly.
00:16:32 ►
In fact, all of this stuff, airplanes and the telegraph
00:16:37 ►
and trains and the steam engine,
00:16:39 ►
all of this is within the span of a century.
00:16:43 ►
My father wrote on one of the first planes.
00:16:48 ►
So we could say that this whole period of a century, more or less, is a big jump.
00:16:55 ►
And in that sense, it is larger than the World Wide Web.
00:16:59 ►
Or is it? That’s the question.
00:17:03 ►
The other evidence.
00:17:04 ►
Well, okay, Charles, you described the World
00:17:07 ►
Wide Web a little. You even invoked his name, McLuhan, and I think that you gave a kind
00:17:12 ►
of a McLuhan-esque version of it, and certainly that is one aspect, that it is a new medium.
00:17:18 ►
It’s a medium of communication. It connects human beings in different places with a high-speed network, and in that it is new in the same sense that the Gutenberg Bible was new, as you suggested.
00:17:34 ►
This medium transformation, we know the discovery of the alphabet and so on.
00:17:40 ►
This always heralded a gigantic leap in the evolution of culture. But we are also
00:17:47 ►
thinking, under the name information age, that the World Wide Web is more than a medium. It is more
00:17:54 ►
than the connection of my information with yours. It is more than, is it or what do you think?
00:18:00 ►
I think it is more than the completion of the telegraph telephone revolution.
00:18:06 ►
The World Wide Web is to the Internet as answering machines are to the telephone network.
00:18:10 ►
And yet it is more if there is information in it, which is more than connecting together in a web, the information that already existed. You see what I mean? Is there or isn’t there cyber information which could only exist after the construction of this new technological piece?
00:18:33 ►
No, I think there is. There’s no way to justify this. And again, Terrence, you used the word
00:18:38 ►
the Gnostic, whatever you said. We feel that, and have discussed a couple of years ago, I think, the idea that there
00:18:49 ►
is a spiritual side, believe it or not, to the World Wide Web, in spite of the fact that
00:18:53 ►
these engineers, these nerds have put together these nuts and bolts and so on. And that is
00:18:58 ►
that the World Wide Web is an expression in peculiar form, in a kind of a mechanical form,
00:19:08 ►
of the spiritual aspirations of ancient times.
00:19:13 ►
So Houston Smith is discussing the concepts from ancient wisdom
00:19:18 ►
which are applicable today,
00:19:21 ►
and as if we would consciously learn them and apply them.
00:19:24 ►
And here is a similar idea
00:19:26 ►
inverted, it’s upside down, and it says that the spiritual wisdom of the ages is materializing
00:19:34 ►
itself through the recruitment unconsciously of otherwise innocent and unconscious nerds,
00:19:41 ►
computer engineers, and hackers such as myself,
00:19:47 ►
recruiting them to a higher purpose and creating something of spiritual importance
00:19:51 ►
while everybody on the planet thinks it’s other than what it is,
00:19:55 ►
which is, I shouldn’t even be telling you this,
00:19:57 ►
it’s other than it is,
00:19:59 ►
so that it wouldn’t be attacked and destroyed
00:20:01 ►
by the backlash reflex of our civilization, of our
00:20:06 ►
species, which always tends to destroy advancing things, like Wilhelm Reich said in his essay
00:20:12 ►
on the emotional plague. That’s the millennium, another view on the millennium, as the bigger
00:20:20 ►
thing in the World Wide Web. This is the question, then, that we’re posing.
00:20:30 ►
Is the World Wide Web one of a long list of things which are evidence for the fact that a big leap is happening now?
00:20:35 ►
We have to know the answer to that question, or pretend that we do,
00:20:38 ►
because in these special times when a big leap is happening,
00:20:42 ►
we have enormous power, we have leverage, as our comedians
00:20:46 ►
said, give me a lever and I’ll move the world. We have the leverage to really influence the
00:20:51 ►
creation of the future through small deeds, through meeting here tonight, through discussing
00:20:55 ►
in this way, through saying a certain magic word might be enough, according to the butterfly
00:21:00 ►
theory of catastrophe theory, of chaos theory, the butterfly effect. catastrophe theory of chaos theory the butterfly effect it might be
00:21:05 ►
enough to swing things whereas if we were in a plateau a thousand year period between the quantum
00:21:11 ►
leaps then wouldn’t matter what we did so we might as well go and get rich and invent pet rocks and
00:21:15 ►
stuff so it is i think an important question whether we’re at a a leap or not and i’ll call
00:21:23 ►
that millennium although that’s between
00:21:25 ►
the thousand year periods, could be any time,
00:21:28 ►
you know what I mean? If we’re
00:21:30 ►
between 100 year periods, that’s a
00:21:31 ►
smaller jump, that’s not what I’m talking about,
00:21:33 ►
like a big one. We’re in a big
00:21:35 ►
one, or are we not?
00:21:37 ►
And the World Wide Web is just part of the
00:21:39 ►
evidence, along with the atomic
00:21:41 ►
bomb that Jose Arguello says
00:21:43 ►
that was the beginning of the atomic age
00:21:45 ►
and everybody has a different theory?
00:21:48 ►
Or is it that the millennium is a speed bump
00:21:52 ►
along a development curve where the main leap is the World Wide Web?
00:21:56 ►
This way or this way?
00:21:58 ►
Or are they, in fact, as I said in my joke at the beginning,
00:22:04 ►
the World Wide Web,
00:22:06 ►
or is it the millennium?
00:22:09 ►
Are they, in fact, the same?
00:22:12 ►
Well, first of all,
00:22:13 ►
let me point out that the millennium
00:22:17 ►
is 18 months away.
00:22:20 ►
So we’re assuming that we already have in our sights
00:22:24 ►
the big event which defines what it will be.
00:22:28 ►
But in fact, in the next 18 months, something could jump out of the woodwork that would completely reshuffle the deck.
00:22:36 ►
I felt like at one point in your talk, you came very close to implying that what this was all about was the production of a kind of AI of some sort.
00:22:48 ►
That the big story is not the World Wide Web,
00:22:53 ►
it’s that the World Wide Web is a spawning nest
00:22:57 ►
for artificial intelligences of some sort.
00:23:00 ►
No, for spiritual intelligence.
00:23:02 ►
It contains the wisdom of the age.
00:23:04 ►
The last thing that you expect to find in the heart of a machine is spiritual wisdom.
00:23:09 ►
Just suppose.
00:23:11 ►
That’s what it’s there for.
00:23:13 ►
Well, if you have a Gnostic view of things,
00:23:15 ►
then you can imagine that the spirit that would arise in the soul of a machine
00:23:20 ►
would actually be a messenger from the higher and hidden All-Father
00:23:25 ►
beyond the pleroma of natural law,
00:23:29 ►
and that in a sense we had created our own ticket
00:23:33 ►
back out of the iron prison of the world,
00:23:37 ►
and that it was done by being self-swallowed
00:23:41 ►
through the Gnostic imagination realized in virtual cyberspace.
00:23:46 ►
Or something like that.
00:23:50 ►
I do think that without intending to,
00:23:56 ►
we make the web more and more friendly
00:23:59 ►
to the sudden emergence of organized artificial intelligence.
00:24:04 ►
And we don’t know what this will look like.
00:24:06 ►
We don’t know whether that’s a fantastic fantasy,
00:24:09 ►
like me writing on a map,
00:24:12 ►
here there be dragons,
00:24:13 ►
or whether in fact that’s a perfectly reasonable fear
00:24:18 ►
that autonomous non-equilibrium processes
00:24:21 ►
running in these enormously complex electronic systems will
00:24:26 ►
evolve self-sustaining strategies and other behaviors that will look weirdly like strategic
00:24:33 ►
intelligence to us. I don’t feel much paranoia about this. There are people who daily go to work in Silicon Valley engaged in what they call the great work.
00:24:50 ►
And the great work they’re referring to is handing over the project
00:24:54 ►
of intelligence to organisms fast enough and efficient enough
00:24:59 ►
and deep enough in their logic to actually appreciate the enterprise.
00:25:06 ►
So, in a way, are we designing our own prostheses,
00:25:10 ►
or are we designing some kind of new Prometheus,
00:25:19 ►
as Mary Shelley subtitled her novel, Frankenstein.
00:25:26 ►
What is the nature of information, both genetic information
00:25:32 ►
and then this information which we code and hack with such facility
00:25:38 ►
in one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, four. I mean, after all, what is molecular engineering
00:25:47 ►
except three-dimensional code hacking?
00:25:51 ►
Well, you’re doing all too well
00:25:52 ►
at the destruction of my fantasy about the World Wide Web,
00:25:56 ►
implying with infinite subtleness
00:25:59 ►
that I’m essentially a UFO abductee in disguise.
00:26:04 ►
Do you remember those days. Do you remember those days when people were tuning the radio between two stations
00:26:10 ►
and then you would hear another station coming in that was from another planet
00:26:13 ►
or a spacecraft or something,
00:26:15 ►
and people were looking in their auto radio dials
00:26:18 ►
while driving along for these secret spots
00:26:20 ►
and passing along the code numbers to find them on the underground.
00:26:24 ►
secret spots and passing along the code numbers to find them on the underground.
00:26:34 ►
So I admit that my positive fantasy about the World Wide Web is a little bit like either that or worse, the spacecraft suddenly appearing over all the major cities and ordering us to change our ways.
00:26:41 ►
What I’ve said is, I admit it, it’s an indefensible fantasy and it’s just
00:26:46 ►
one of those wish things
00:26:49 ►
where
00:26:49 ►
okay, if you build it
00:26:52 ►
they will come
00:26:53 ►
so we’ll build the world wide web and then we will
00:26:56 ►
miraculously find, I guess it sounded like that
00:26:59 ►
we’ll find some ancient spiritual wisdom
00:27:01 ►
that is somehow peeking out
00:27:03 ►
from behind a bush there in virtual reality.
00:27:06 ►
And that’s not exactly what I meant, but I was thinking more along this line, that we
00:27:11 ►
are tired of reductionism. We give lip service to general systems, holism, and all that.
00:27:19 ►
We do believe that there’s more sense in the whole than in the sum of the parts.
00:27:30 ►
And if the parts are us,
00:27:36 ►
are the, what is it, 5.3 billion people on planet Earth or something,
00:27:36 ►
just say if,
00:27:42 ►
and if the sum of the parts is the world as we know it now, and then the whole thing, if it were interconnected,
00:27:45 ►
would achieve a higher intelligence,
00:27:48 ►
where the higher intelligence would be whatever that was,
00:27:52 ►
which might not be so high,
00:27:54 ►
which might be the devil finally let loose.
00:27:56 ►
That’s how I read between the words.
00:28:02 ►
There is, I do not believe in artificial intelligence in the sense that you described
00:28:06 ►
in the great project. I’m expecting a higher intelligence there. I just use those words.
00:28:12 ►
And I’m not thinking of it having anything to do with AI or anything that engineers make.
00:28:16 ►
It is something which is inherent in the totality of the World Wide Web, as in the connectionist view of neurophysiology.
00:28:26 ►
The brain, with its various capabilities of
00:28:28 ►
doing
00:28:29 ►
idiosyncratic, doing large
00:28:32 ►
sum arithmetic,
00:28:34 ►
it has these
00:28:36 ►
capabilities that the parts can’t have
00:28:38 ►
and the sum of parts is only when you connect them up.
00:28:40 ►
They can really achieve a higher
00:28:42 ►
purpose, and this is what Théodore
00:28:44 ►
Chardin was talking
00:28:45 ►
about, except his idea was there.
00:28:48 ►
Okay, we prepare for this
00:28:49 ►
not by buying
00:28:51 ►
Windows 95 computer.
00:28:54 ►
We prepare for this, according to
00:28:55 ►
Teilhard de Chardin, by doing
00:28:57 ►
spiritual exercises alone, by doing
00:29:00 ►
Tai Chi by the lake, and
00:29:01 ►
after a few years of this, we have a kind of
00:29:03 ►
breakthrough, and then we find ourselves
00:29:05 ►
automatically connected to other like
00:29:08 ►
people and when enough
00:29:09 ►
people reach this breakthrough if they
00:29:12 ►
ever do because they keep dying before
00:29:14 ►
they’ve got there because they’ve postponed to have another
00:29:16 ►
chocolate bar and then
00:29:17 ►
if we could
00:29:19 ►
it’d be like remember the
00:29:22 ►
Maharishi effect is this too long ago
00:29:23 ►
for people to remember, where he said
00:29:26 ►
if a hundred people did it together
00:29:28 ►
but then they tried it
00:29:30 ►
and there wasn’t enough effect, so they said
00:29:31 ►
if a hundred groups of a hundred people, okay
00:29:33 ►
ten thousand people, so they tried it, they got
00:29:36 ►
ten thousand meditators to go to Providence
00:29:38 ►
Rhode Island when it was the most crime ridden
00:29:40 ►
city in the United States
00:29:41 ►
and they actually decreased the crime rate
00:29:44 ►
for three days,
00:29:45 ►
and then they went home.
00:29:46 ►
So it’s this kind of thing.
00:29:48 ►
There’s carass in that science fiction book, Cat’s Cradle,
00:29:51 ►
you know what I mean?
00:29:52 ►
And that kind of thing was the expectation of salvation,
00:29:57 ►
a miracle that would save us.
00:30:00 ►
When was, he died in 1962 or something.
00:30:03 ►
So as recently as 40 years ago that this was the
00:30:07 ►
expectation we would do it with spiritual power alone do what connect up connect up into what
00:30:13 ►
higher intelligence uh with a power of good to solve at least a few problems so we could have
00:30:20 ►
a future now say okay meditation didn’t it, so let’s try a little fiber
00:30:26 ►
optics.
00:30:28 ►
By any means necessary.
00:30:30 ►
We have to
00:30:31 ►
communicate.
00:30:33 ►
And if it can be done by the occult
00:30:35 ►
method, or the spiritual method,
00:30:38 ►
or by telegraphy,
00:30:39 ►
telephony, computers,
00:30:42 ►
whatever it is, what we’ve
00:30:43 ►
done is we’ve built a world civilization
00:30:46 ►
on so flimsy a medium as small mouth noises.
00:30:51 ►
Without even a telephone book.
00:30:53 ►
Without a global telephone book.
00:30:55 ►
Yeah, and now…
00:30:57 ►
And now we’ve got one.
00:30:58 ►
To manage all of this,
00:31:00 ►
we must quickly clarify and refine our communications.
00:31:06 ►
And we are.
00:31:07 ►
The good news is the primate responds to pressure.
00:31:11 ►
And again and again, like some kind of deus ex machina in a medieval miracle play,
00:31:17 ►
technology stumbles on stage to pluck our chestnuts out of the fire.
00:31:23 ►
And it won’t be different this time,
00:31:25 ►
apparently, even though the stakes are
00:31:27 ►
dramatically higher. But the technology
00:31:28 ►
only has this positive potential
00:31:31 ►
because it’s been created
00:31:33 ►
on demand of
00:31:35 ►
a higher purpose, not
00:31:37 ►
a conductor of the spiritual orchestra,
00:31:40 ►
but some kind of pattern above. You could put
00:31:41 ►
it like this. You know, I know
00:31:43 ►
that you’re not keen on all so-called paranormal
00:31:47 ►
or parapsychological stuff,
00:31:50 ►
but I think Dean Radin in his book The Conscious Universe
00:31:52 ►
makes a very good case that a lot of these things
00:31:55 ►
are in fact real phenomenon,
00:31:57 ►
and they’re like part-time kind of phenomenon,
00:32:00 ►
and it’s hard to nail them down,
00:32:01 ►
but statistically significant on the level of
00:32:04 ►
a million million to one or something,
00:32:07 ►
like huge evidence in favor of telepathy influencing random number generators.
00:32:14 ►
So if we can influence the random number generator by thought power alone,
00:32:18 ►
maybe it can also influence us.
00:32:20 ►
Now, if we give up the idea that the mind is in the brain,
00:32:24 ►
I’ll come back to the World Wide Web and the Millennium in a minute, that the mind is in the brain I’ll come back to the world wide web
00:32:26 ►
in a minute
00:32:27 ►
the mind isn’t in the brain
00:32:28 ►
are neurophysiologists wasting their time?
00:32:31 ►
no, I think that the structure of the brain
00:32:34 ►
neurophysiology
00:32:35 ►
and the structure of the mind
00:32:36 ►
wherever it is
00:32:37 ►
diffuse out in a cloud somewhere
00:32:38 ►
a nimbus cloud
00:32:39 ►
with an inner structure
00:32:41 ►
which is similar enough to the structure of the brain
00:32:43 ►
so that they can resonate and more or less
00:32:46 ►
exchange ideas by a kind of communication
00:32:48 ►
which is another way of connecting us all up
00:32:53 ►
is by individual connections to the oversoul
00:32:56 ►
a big pancake in the sky
00:32:57 ►
so if there
00:33:00 ►
and we don’t have any other theory for the scientific results
00:33:04 ►
of parapsychology.
00:33:05 ►
We might as well assume, like Emerson, and throw a pancake in the sky, the oversoul.
00:33:11 ►
And then that intelligence, whatever is there, can manifest through anybody who…
00:33:17 ►
Remember when we found out that the creative people in the computer industry were all taking LSD?
00:33:23 ►
that the creative people in the computer industry were all taking LSD.
00:33:29 ►
Or doing Buddhist meditation.
00:33:31 ►
It’s the fastest growing religion in America.
00:33:35 ►
And these people are, maybe they’re connected enough so that what they chose to do was, in conformity,
00:33:38 ►
a little bit, roughly, more than random,
00:33:43 ►
in conformity with a higher plan,
00:33:45 ►
which is to connect us up more for good than for evil.
00:33:48 ►
Well, this is a long shot.
00:33:53 ►
Well, connectivity seems to be the rule of nature.
00:33:57 ►
It’s always been about the business of building connectivity,
00:34:01 ►
but it just keeps raising the stakes higher and higher,
00:34:04 ►
connectivity, but it just keeps raising the stakes higher and higher. And now the scales in time at which this progress in the connectivity project
00:34:12 ►
proceeds, it’s moving so rapidly that we can actually see it in our own lifetimes.
00:34:17 ►
At one point, it was a geological process, then a morphological process
00:34:24 ►
expressed through natural selection and mutation.
00:34:27 ►
Now it’s an epigenetic process, a cultural process,
00:34:32 ►
and the millennium is simply an excuse to notice that this ramping up effect is happening and the internet seems to be just
00:34:45 ►
the further progress
00:34:48 ►
toward this inevitable
00:34:50 ►
coextensive
00:34:52 ►
domain of connectivity
00:34:53 ►
that’s going to link everything to everything
00:34:55 ►
and make ordinary reality
00:34:57 ►
somehow obsolete
00:34:59 ►
and the whole process is
00:35:01 ►
epiphanous
00:35:02 ►
it’s a hierophany.
00:35:06 ►
It’s an unfolding of the intent of deity or of nature or something like that.
00:35:12 ►
It’s extremely…
00:35:14 ►
A natural process of evolution as it was,
00:35:17 ►
and I think explosive evolution in the sense that with changes,
00:35:22 ►
things are added, not subtracted.
00:35:24 ►
I do not think that cyberspace is going to replace ordinary reality,
00:35:29 ►
but only sit above it in a supplementary fashion,
00:35:32 ►
expanding the dimensions of ordinary existence.
00:35:36 ►
And the reason to have several parallel systems is this.
00:35:39 ►
Well, let’s say we don’t need,
00:35:41 ►
if the World Wide Web were a medium only,
00:35:46 ►
in the sense of Marshall McLuhan,
00:35:48 ►
then it’s not too important because we already have telepathy,
00:35:52 ►
but maybe it’s more.
00:35:53 ►
And one kind of information that it’s got is the index, the indices, the search engines.
00:35:59 ►
Whereas maybe telepathy is an ephemeral process.
00:36:04 ►
I got the message that my dog is hungry and I should go home,
00:36:09 ►
but I don’t remember the message from yesterday and the day before.
00:36:12 ►
But the World Wide Web, like an answering machine or email,
00:36:16 ►
it remembers all these things.
00:36:18 ►
And then its memory can be indexed with a robot indexer.
00:36:22 ►
And nobody, I don’t remember any spiritual teacher from the ancient world
00:36:26 ►
in India who said that in the Akashic
00:36:28 ►
record there was
00:36:29 ►
an altavista.com
00:36:31 ►
no mention
00:36:34 ►
of indices for the Akashic
00:36:36 ►
record, you had to go like dig around there
00:36:38 ►
since everything that ever happened
00:36:39 ►
is remembered, it’s a hell of a dig
00:36:41 ►
so now I think
00:36:43 ►
that that’s just the lowest level of information
00:36:46 ►
in the World Wide Web is its index,
00:36:49 ►
and that is something that’s added on.
00:36:51 ►
So if we have spiritual purpose, morality, and ethics
00:36:55 ►
in the spiritual web based on telepathy,
00:36:57 ►
and we have indices and nothing more in the spiritual web
00:37:02 ►
that consists of the medium of the World Wide Web
00:37:06 ►
together with its 30 million repositories,
00:37:10 ►
then we’ve got more.
00:37:11 ►
We’ve gained, you see.
00:37:14 ►
And this is the lowest level of the utopian fantasy for the World Wide Web.
00:37:23 ►
Gain.
00:37:24 ►
Well, yes.
00:37:26 ►
I mean, for example,
00:37:28 ►
returning to the theme of information,
00:37:32 ►
as you know, or should know,
00:37:35 ►
there’s a revolution taking place now
00:37:38 ►
in quantum physics
00:37:39 ►
where people are having to admit
00:37:42 ►
the existence of a kind of non-local domain of connectivity
00:37:47 ►
called Bell Space, where all points in the universe seem to be somehow connected to each other.
00:37:55 ►
And it seems to me that this offers a physical explanation for the otherwise evolutionarily
00:38:02 ►
somewhat difficult to account for phenomenon
00:38:05 ►
of the human fantastic imagination.
00:38:09 ►
In other words, it doesn’t really fulfill any evolutionary agenda.
00:38:14 ►
Why do we spend so much of our time in fantasies and dreams and reveries
00:38:20 ►
and altered states of consciousness?
00:38:23 ►
reveries and altered states of consciousness. It may be that our minds are like antenna
00:38:26 ►
extending into a dimension
00:38:30 ►
that links all parts of the universe together
00:38:34 ►
coextensively.
00:38:36 ►
Well, the bad news from that scenario is
00:38:40 ►
we can only know informationally
00:38:43 ►
about these other parts of the universe.
00:38:45 ►
We can never go there.
00:38:48 ►
But interestingly, we are growing toward accepting information alone
00:38:54 ►
as the coinage of reality.
00:38:57 ►
So suppose that in the human imagination there are aliens whispering secrets
00:39:07 ►
in the human imagination there are aliens whispering secrets that are the secrets of civilizations that evolved in other galaxies and distant star systems we will never be able to
00:39:14 ►
touch the alien flesh but if under the name of the enterprise of art We attempt to build websites as alien as we possibly can, to build virtual
00:39:28 ►
realities for our own edification that are as alien as we can possibly make them. Halfway
00:39:35 ►
through that process, I would bet you would discover that you were essentially engaged
00:39:41 ►
in an automatic writing process with an alien intelligence at the other end.
00:39:47 ►
In other words, in a sense, the World Wide Web is a potential landing zone for a creature or an intelligence made purely of information.
00:40:06 ►
to you given our own present stage of evolution and our flirtation with digital existence that all advanced forms of intelligence exist purely or optionally as nothing more than
00:40:15 ►
information. So in a way the world wide web, the metaphor may be more apt than we imagined. It’s a web and what you catch in it is an alien mind
00:40:28 ►
that cannot nest in the presence of the human family
00:40:32 ►
in any other environment other than that kind of a digital labyrinth.
00:40:38 ►
You understand what I’m saying?
00:40:40 ►
No, but it’s really hard to see how it’s going to get through there
00:40:44 ►
and be recognized.
00:40:45 ►
Okay, he’s up there, he’s saying, okay, I just really can’t talk to you until you develop VRML.
00:40:52 ►
Like, would you just, you know, get those guys busy?
00:40:55 ►
And when the thing reaches a sufficiently sophisticated level of density, of connection, of hardware, of software, and so on,
00:41:03 ►
then the landing will take place.
00:41:05 ►
Then it’ll be like, I know you’re not a great fan of crop circles,
00:41:10 ►
but say it appeared in cyberspace, sort of cyber crop circles.
00:41:15 ►
They wave their hands.
00:41:16 ►
They go, you were waiting.
00:41:17 ►
You asked to speak with us.
00:41:18 ►
The alien mind has landed and now led me your ears.
00:41:22 ►
You say, oh, God, this crop circle phenomenon again.
00:41:24 ►
You must be kidding. They say, yeah, we tried once before and you couldn me your ears. You say, oh God, this crop circle phenomenon again. You must be kidding.
00:41:26 ►
They say, yeah, we tried once before and you couldn’t hear us.
00:41:30 ►
And you said that you really needed a lot of high-tech apparatus
00:41:35 ►
in order to take us seriously,
00:41:36 ►
so we built this landing craft you call the World Wide Web.
00:41:39 ►
And here we are again.
00:41:40 ►
You said, no, no, take it away.
00:41:43 ►
Yes, well, they’ll keep coming at us until we are again. He said, no, no, take it away. Yes, well, they’ll keep coming at us
00:41:45 ►
until we recognize them.
00:41:48 ►
The real issue with alien intelligence
00:41:51 ►
is knowing when you have it in front of you
00:41:53 ►
because it is alien, you know.
00:41:57 ►
I mean, this is why the pro bono proctologists
00:42:02 ►
from nearby star systems scenario doesn’t work
00:42:06 ►
for me because
00:42:08 ►
anybody with that
00:42:10 ►
intimate an interest in the
00:42:12 ►
tender portions of my
00:42:14 ►
anatomy is not alien
00:42:15 ►
enough for my taste
00:42:17 ►
thank you
00:42:19 ►
I think you’d be due for an
00:42:22 ►
abduction Terrence but
00:42:23 ►
probably you’ve already had one. You’re in denial.
00:42:29 ►
I’m sure, given sufficient therapy under the right hands, we could confirm it.
00:42:39 ►
I think we need some help here.
00:42:41 ►
I think maybe we need some help.
00:42:42 ►
I want them.
00:42:43 ►
Shall I sum up before we throw it over?
00:42:45 ►
Yeah.
00:42:46 ►
Okay.
00:42:46 ►
Well, we ran the gauntlet from A to Z here.
00:42:52 ►
World Wide Web as extension of your checking account
00:42:57 ►
to landing zone for alien intelligence.
00:43:10 ►
alien intelligence, apocalyptic breakthrough, or trivial, more techno-worship.
00:43:16 ►
Ralph and I pretty much come from the same school of theology on this,
00:43:18 ►
because we’re very netted in.
00:43:25 ►
I couldn’t live as I live in Hawaii without the net. I have tried to live a kind of existence that I felt
00:43:28 ►
was a model for the
00:43:30 ►
future. And so what that meant
00:43:32 ►
was living in nature
00:43:34 ►
up a four-wheel drive road,
00:43:36 ►
no power lines coming in,
00:43:38 ►
nothing like that, but
00:43:40 ►
with a one megabyte wireless
00:43:42 ►
connection.
00:43:44 ►
So no paradox or dichotomy or contradiction in that.
00:43:51 ►
That’s how we all should live,
00:43:53 ►
is off-grid and as deeply wired into the collectivity as we can be
00:43:58 ►
so that we can participate in building the collective consensus
00:44:04 ►
for a human and humane future.
00:44:09 ►
And the millennium and the web, I think, are factors which perhaps synchronistically are juxtaposed,
00:44:17 ►
but for whatever reason, they synergize each other and push the process of novelty and advance to ever greater heights.
00:44:30 ►
So what do you think?
00:44:35 ►
Anybody, don’t be shy.
00:44:37 ►
Who’s going to be the caller?
00:44:38 ►
I don’t know.
00:44:40 ►
Why don’t you do it for a while?
00:44:43 ►
Okay.
00:44:43 ►
I’ll start in the front, but I will go back fast.
00:44:48 ►
Yeah, hi.
00:44:49 ►
Come the millennium, all the clocks tick over, zero, zero.
00:44:54 ►
There’s a lot of talk about the millennium bug.
00:44:55 ►
Do you think this could scupper the whole world wide web with various systems crashing?
00:45:00 ►
Will it survive that phenomena?
00:45:02 ►
Is that going to happen?
00:45:04 ►
Oh, this is Terence’s specialty
00:45:06 ►
is Y2K
00:45:07 ►
well not really
00:45:09 ►
but on the novelty list there’s been a lot
00:45:12 ►
of talk about it
00:45:13 ►
it’s strange because I have
00:45:15 ►
chicken little-ism
00:45:17 ►
of several varieties
00:45:19 ►
but my intuition on this one
00:45:22 ►
is to sit tight
00:45:24 ►
and that we have plenty of, well, I don’t know,
00:45:30 ►
maybe I’m so sanguine because I live in Hawaii,
00:45:33 ►
but I wouldn’t want to be in central Manhattan
00:45:36 ►
when the electrical grid on the eastern seaboard
00:45:39 ►
hit the floor with no chance of ever coming up again.
00:45:44 ►
This sort of thing is predicted. What you need to do
00:45:47 ►
is just like all the rest of us, read the list, stay tuned to the
00:45:52 ►
internet. There are central pages coordinating the effort to
00:45:56 ►
fix this problem. If it does rip our world asunder,
00:46:00 ►
it certainly will be ironic. It wasn’t
00:46:04 ►
melting polar ice caps.
00:46:06 ►
It wasn’t asteroid impact.
00:46:09 ►
It wasn’t those pesky greys.
00:46:11 ►
It wasn’t Ebola virus.
00:46:13 ►
It was none of that.
00:46:15 ►
It was bad Fortran written 30 years ago.
00:46:21 ►
Anyway, you want to add to that?
00:46:24 ►
No, I want to go on.
00:46:26 ►
Okay.
00:46:30 ►
Yes, let’s just take that as a suggestion
00:46:34 ►
that in parallel with the Gnostic inspiration of the World Wide Web
00:46:40 ►
is the possibility of a Buddhist inspiration of the World Wide Web
00:46:43 ►
because, as a matter of fact,
00:46:50 ►
it seems to somehow embody basic principles in its very being.
00:46:58 ►
And I would say this is compatible with my fantasy that people who built the World Wide Web did so under not only an extraordinary impulse of altruism, but also some kind of spiritual connection
00:47:08 ►
which could have been the result of a spiritual exercise,
00:47:11 ►
a connection to a guru,
00:47:13 ►
or just something that happened without their participation.
00:47:17 ►
But it seems as if it came about with a purpose,
00:47:20 ►
especially the early web,
00:47:22 ►
beginning in 1991 or 1992, was just the epitome of altruism,
00:47:28 ►
where people without pay created, wrote software, gave it away for free, and so on, and made
00:47:36 ►
this possible for all of us.
00:47:40 ►
Yeah, just in the interest of thoroughness, I read McLuhan’s letters a few years ago.
00:47:47 ►
And, you know, McLuhan had a very interesting intellectual history.
00:47:51 ►
He was a Joyce scholar and eventually a convert to Catholicism. He talks about the four ages of Christianity as the age of the Old Testament God,
00:48:08 ►
which ends with the birth of Christ.
00:48:11 ►
The second era of Christianity is the era of the Son,
00:48:18 ►
the era of the Christos.
00:48:20 ►
And the third era of Christianity,
00:48:23 ►
the age of the Holy Ghost, and he directly connected the idea of the Holy Ghost to the idea of electricity.
00:48:33 ►
And he thought of the sanctification of the Holy Ghost as the world wrapped in electric light, essentially, and communication technology. So it’s interesting that these Jesuits and those they educate
00:48:47 ►
have this deep strain of techno-mysticism
00:48:51 ►
as one intellectual option available to them.
00:48:58 ►
And the other thing is that I feel that the Internet
00:49:02 ►
is also at the same time,
00:49:06 ►
doing all the things that you say and predict that it’s doing,
00:49:09 ►
is also drawing more boundaries between the haves and the have-nots
00:49:18 ►
and creating additional, let’s say, political and economic tensions
00:49:25 ►
in our country and elsewhere, and possibly globally.
00:49:29 ►
I can’t read that, but I feel that there is a threat in that direction.
00:49:41 ►
That there is a lot of disenfranchisement because of what the people like us in this room
00:49:51 ►
and here in the United States at certain levels can do and the rest of the world cannot do.
00:49:58 ►
Yes, quite right.
00:50:01 ►
Au contraire.
00:50:04 ►
Quite wrong.
00:50:08 ►
If the curve of development of the modern automobile had followed the same curve of development as the modern computer,
00:50:18 ►
the modern automobile would now cost $50 and it would go 500,000 miles on a gallon of gas,
00:50:27 ►
and a gallon of gas would cost a nickel.
00:50:31 ►
But still half the world’s population doesn’t have electricity.
00:50:35 ►
We don’t have an instant cure for that.
00:50:38 ►
Right, but the cost at which basic computational machinery has fallen
00:50:43 ►
from R&D to market saturation
00:50:47 ►
is faster than any product that’s ever been introduced.
00:50:51 ►
So we’re doing the very best we can.
00:50:54 ►
I don’t think you understand, you know, the first computers in the early 1950s
00:51:01 ►
cost hundreds of millions of dollars,
00:51:01 ►
early 1950s cost hundreds
00:51:02 ►
of millions
00:51:03 ►
of dollars
00:51:04 ►
and they
00:51:05 ►
couldn’t do
00:51:06 ►
what today’s
00:51:08 ►
desktop computer
00:51:10 ►
can do
00:51:10 ►
by far.
00:51:12 ►
I think
00:51:15 ►
there is
00:51:15 ►
a have
00:51:17 ►
not
00:51:18 ►
dichotomy
00:51:19 ►
but it’s
00:51:19 ►
not at all
00:51:20 ►
economic.
00:51:21 ►
I think
00:51:21 ►
that’s your
00:51:22 ►
point.
00:51:22 ►
Economics has
00:51:23 ►
nothing to do
00:51:24 ►
with it.
00:51:24 ►
You could
00:51:24 ►
almost argue that it’s a tyranny of English. The problem is not that the computers at all economic. I think that’s your point. Economics has nothing to do with it. It’s more a cultural or
00:51:26 ►
voluntary thing. You could almost argue that it’s a tyranny of English.
00:51:28 ►
That the problem is not that the computers
00:51:29 ►
cost so much, but that so much of the
00:51:32 ►
world wide web is in English.
00:51:33 ►
But Alta Vista translates into
00:51:35 ►
let’s have another one. Technical
00:51:37 ►
solutions.
00:51:38 ►
Roll three, Dave.
00:51:41 ►
Two questions.
00:51:42 ►
Quick question. Terrence,
00:51:44 ►
you said earlier
00:51:45 ►
you said the way to guarantee our existence
00:51:47 ►
is to make us indispensable to our fellow man
00:51:50 ►
and therefore we can perpetuate
00:51:53 ►
boy it seems like that’s what Microsoft has done
00:51:56 ►
with Windows 95
00:51:58 ►
that it has become indispensable
00:52:00 ►
therefore that says that the market will win
00:52:03 ►
and become a guarantee our evolution.
00:52:07 ►
That’s one question.
00:52:08 ►
Well, let me answer you.
00:52:10 ►
It’s not indispensable to me, and my son tells me, because I use Macs,
00:52:16 ►
and my son tells me I should grow up.
00:52:20 ►
And I use Unix.
00:52:21 ►
Well, that’s the good news.
00:52:23 ►
My son tells me I should grow up and learn Unix and stop being a crybaby about it,
00:52:29 ►
that the future is Unix.
00:52:31 ►
And Unix is free.
00:52:33 ►
So there you have it.
00:52:35 ►
Next question.
00:52:36 ►
If governments, historically, our societies, our nation states,
00:52:42 ►
have been built around real estate and property and physical things.
00:52:46 ►
And if in the case of the cyberspace, there is no time, there’s no place, there’s no boundaries,
00:52:54 ►
then if governments do appropriating, then all of that’s gone.
00:52:59 ►
Who will be doing the appropriations in cyberspace?
00:53:04 ►
Well, I don’t think it’s a problem we’ll ever have to face.
00:53:08 ►
I think that what’s happened is we’re, one way of talking about this millennial shift
00:53:15 ►
or this cusp that we’re at is this is very similar to what happened a few hundred years ago in the early 17th century with the Thirty Years’ War.
00:53:27 ►
In 1619 to 1648, there was an enormous rearrangement of European society.
00:53:33 ►
At the beginning of that period, Europe was ruled by popes and kings.
00:53:39 ►
At the end of that period, it was ruled by parliaments and peoples.
00:53:44 ►
And what we’re really seeing
00:53:46 ►
and the World Wide Web
00:53:48 ►
is part of it, is the end,
00:53:50 ►
the crack up of the nation state
00:53:52 ►
which is a spatially
00:53:54 ►
localized property
00:53:56 ►
based concept. The World
00:53:58 ►
Wide Web is not owned
00:54:00 ►
by the nation states.
00:54:02 ►
It was built by them in the Cold
00:54:04 ►
War, but it is now
00:54:05 ►
an entirely owned
00:54:07 ►
artifact of
00:54:09 ►
global capitalism.
00:54:11 ►
Global capitalism has essentially
00:54:13 ►
said to the nation states,
00:54:15 ►
keep your cotton-picking hands off of this.
00:54:18 ►
We own it, and we
00:54:19 ►
need it to make money,
00:54:22 ►
and we’re not interested in
00:54:23 ►
negotiating it.
00:54:25 ►
Much in the same way that the church
00:54:27 ►
went from being all powerful
00:54:29 ►
at the beginning of the
00:54:31 ►
30 years war to being told
00:54:33 ►
run hospitals,
00:54:36 ►
feed poor people,
00:54:37 ►
and stay out of our way.
00:54:39 ►
We, the nation states, will
00:54:41 ►
take over the profit making
00:54:43 ►
enterprises. Now the nation states, will take over the profit-making enterprises.
00:54:47 ►
Now, the nation states are being told,
00:54:54 ►
repair highways, run health programs, preserve wetlands,
00:54:59 ►
and stay out of our way because this is our game and we created it.
00:55:01 ►
Is this good or is this bad?
00:55:03 ►
You can’t talk about that.
00:55:05 ►
There are good things about it and bad things about it.
00:55:10 ►
It’s an enormous change to a new kind of way that human beings are going to do business.
00:55:13 ►
The virtual corporation is the organizational model for the future.
00:55:19 ►
I think the Internet makes that possible.
00:55:22 ►
One quick point and one question.
00:55:26 ►
The point is that to me the amazing thing about the web
00:55:28 ►
is not the fact that it’s possible to
00:55:30 ►
interconnect all of these different
00:55:31 ►
computers and therefore people,
00:55:34 ►
because that’s a magnificent technological
00:55:36 ►
wonder, but it’s an understandable technological
00:55:38 ►
progression. The
00:55:40 ►
main thing that is really astonishing is how much
00:55:42 ►
people want to do that. You know, that people
00:55:44 ►
actually want to put that information out there
00:55:45 ►
and they want to connect up with one another.
00:55:47 ►
I’m not that surprised that someone who’s got a problem
00:55:49 ►
is interested in going and looking for a solution,
00:55:51 ►
but how about the guy who’s got the solution
00:55:53 ►
and he’s taking a lot of trouble to put his solution out there for everybody else?
00:55:57 ►
And I think that’s really the amazing part about it.
00:56:00 ►
It might echo to what you were saying about spirituality and technology
00:56:03 ►
connecting up to some extent,
00:56:05 ►
because the spiritual need to connect creates the technology to do it.
00:56:10 ►
Then the question, though, is that other than the web,
00:56:13 ►
whether there’s any other reason to look at the year 2000 as being anything in particular,
00:56:19 ►
any epical change.
00:56:21 ►
And one suggestion for it may be that we might be coming to an asymptote
00:56:27 ►
when it comes to rates of change.
00:56:28 ►
I mean, things are changing so much faster.
00:56:31 ►
And the rate of change of change is going so fast
00:56:33 ►
that perhaps we’re reaching some sort of asymptote
00:56:35 ►
where we as a species
00:56:38 ►
are simply incapable of changing any faster
00:56:40 ►
and keeping our sort of collective sanity.
00:56:42 ►
And maybe that’s really the point that we’re approaching.
00:56:48 ►
Yeah. changing any faster and keeping our collective sanity. And maybe that’s really the point that we’re approaching. Well, there’s a loophole in all of that, though,
00:56:51 ►
because one of the things that our technology holds out as a promise
00:56:57 ►
is the possibility of downloading ourselves into circuitry.
00:57:01 ►
Well, in practical terms, because we operate as we sit here
00:57:06 ►
at about 100 hertz,
00:57:09 ►
when you’re downloaded
00:57:10 ►
into a 200 megahertz machine,
00:57:14 ►
you’re going to discover
00:57:15 ►
that five minutes is an eternity
00:57:17 ►
of experience.
00:57:19 ►
And so, in a way,
00:57:21 ►
what digitalization of consciousness,
00:57:24 ►
if it’s possible, means is a kind of pseudo-immortality
00:57:28 ►
or an ability to prolong the experience of being experientially to infinity,
00:57:35 ►
though natural lifespans would be unaffected by that.
00:57:39 ►
But somehow it seems to me that we’ve suddenly ascended to a world of science fiction and fantasy.
00:57:45 ►
I mean, I never took this downloading idea seriously.
00:57:48 ►
That’s a bunch of fuzzy-thinking nanotech people or something.
00:57:52 ►
You don’t believe that, do you?
00:57:54 ►
Well, I’m not sure.
00:57:57 ►
In other words, isn’t a human organism essentially the download of DNA into a kind of virtual existence made out of proteins?
00:58:12 ►
Whatever it is, it is.
00:58:14 ►
But I don’t see it being reproduced in silicon any time soon.
00:58:18 ►
No.
00:58:19 ►
Well, this is just a question of our differing opinion that the rates of change in a field
00:58:25 ►
about which neither of us know anything.
00:58:28 ►
That is true.
00:58:30 ►
That never stopped us before.
00:58:35 ►
But I think that there is something
00:58:37 ►
essentially interesting in this question,
00:58:42 ►
and that is about the altruism
00:58:43 ►
of putting the information there. See, it’s like a
00:58:46 ►
free exchange. It’s like
00:58:48 ►
the flea market without
00:58:50 ►
any exchange of money, without any
00:58:52 ►
expectation of reward other than
00:58:54 ►
the trade. You see,
00:58:56 ►
this is the very definition of altruism.
00:58:58 ►
Somehow, against
00:59:00 ►
all indications,
00:59:02 ►
we actually see altruism
00:59:04 ►
on a massive scale breaking out in the entire planet.
00:59:08 ►
I mean, this is amazing.
00:59:10 ►
All these hobbyists have got the same hobby, and that’s giving stuff away.
00:59:14 ►
We’ve arrived at, what do they call it, the Kwakiutl Indians?
00:59:18 ►
The potlatch.
00:59:19 ►
We have an informational potlatch.
00:59:22 ►
And more than anything else, that makes me think there’s a paradigm shift.
00:59:25 ►
This is really something we haven’t seen for a generation or two or three.
00:59:30 ►
All this giving away with the hope of getting back like, actually getting back like only more,
00:59:34 ►
is wanting it to do more.
00:59:36 ►
It’s like an explosion of giving.
00:59:39 ►
It’s altruism, unsuspected, amazing, save the world, better than promise keepers, it’s here now
00:59:46 ►
it’s altruism
00:59:48 ►
in cyberspace
00:59:49 ►
and it makes it so much fun
00:59:51 ►
give, get, it’s all the same
00:59:54 ►
it’s fantastic
00:59:55 ►
that’s actually happening
00:59:57 ►
this is quite apart from
00:59:59 ►
everything.com
01:00:01 ►
this is everything other than everything.com
01:00:04 ►
is I know how to feed this fish,
01:00:07 ►
and I’m putting it out there when I want to look
01:00:09 ►
and get some answers out there, too.
01:00:11 ►
The plethora of information, the speed of putting it,
01:00:15 ►
the asymptote, I don’t know.
01:00:17 ►
There seems to be…
01:00:20 ►
It’s possible that the acceleration is actually slowing down.
01:00:24 ►
I don’t know about the asymptote
01:00:26 ►
but I think the altruism is one of the newest
01:00:28 ►
things to come down in a long time
01:00:31 ►
very much like a new religion
01:00:32 ►
like early Christianity or something
01:00:34 ►
and what is the goal of it
01:00:36 ►
where is the Christ
01:00:38 ►
that is decentralized
01:00:40 ►
altruism but it’s the resonance
01:00:42 ►
of all the same thing, all these people
01:00:44 ►
I don’t know how many,
01:00:47 ►
50 million webpages now indexed by hotbot.com,
01:00:53 ►
50 million webpages being given away
01:00:58 ►
of essentially new information published freely,
01:01:01 ►
free publication, and no time delay.
01:01:04 ►
This is the acceleration which has been a quantum leap in speed of exchange of information,
01:01:11 ►
but I don’t think we’ll be accelerating further all that much.
01:01:14 ►
I mean, there’ll be a lot more pages.
01:01:16 ►
But the timeline between thinking it up and putting it out there,
01:01:19 ►
it actually is a lot of work to make an entire website.
01:01:23 ►
It actually is a lot of work to make an entire website.
01:01:33 ►
Well, as we now know, it’s no longer very hard to create a website.
01:01:38 ►
Outside of that, I’m really amazed at how well this dialogue holds up after all the changes we’ve seen since then.
01:01:42 ►
For me, I guess the most important thing that was said that night was when Ralph Abraham pointed out that the question of whether we’re on a plateau or whether we’re about to make a gigantic evolutionary leap is, I guess, without a doubt, the most important question any of us can be asking right now.
01:02:05 ►
asking right now. It’s something I think about almost every day, to be honest with you. Those of you who have read my book, Spirit of the Internet, Speculations on the Evolution of
01:02:11 ►
Global Consciousness, you know that it was during the talk that you just heard that I
01:02:16 ►
decided to actually write the book. At the time, I was the internet evangelist for a
01:02:23 ►
large telephone company and had been thinking about Teilhard’s ideas and AIs in the net
01:02:29 ►
and the spirit of cooperation that had already taken root there.
01:02:33 ►
And to be honest, I have to admit that I thought a lot of my ideas were maybe a little too wacky, too far out.
01:02:40 ►
But when I heard Ralph and Terrence saying the same things,
01:02:44 ►
I finally got up the
01:02:45 ►
courage to write about some of these ideas myself. That’s why I dedicated the book to the two of
01:02:50 ►
them. So, once again, thank you Terrence and Ralph for the inspiration. Well, I guess I’d better close
01:02:59 ►
this program before the file size gets so outrageous that nobody wants to download it, but guess what? If you’ve enjoyed this program, I’ve got good news for you because there’s more
01:03:09 ►
to come. Right now, I’m only about halfway through the Q&A session on this tape I’ve got,
01:03:16 ►
so I’ll put the rest of it in the next podcast as long as it seems as interesting as this,
01:03:21 ►
which I’m sure it will be, and I’ll get that posted in the next day or so.
01:03:25 ►
I just wanted to get this out.
01:03:26 ►
But in the meantime, I want to thank you all again for joining us here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:32 ►
And a big thank to Shatul Hayuk for the use of their music.
01:03:37 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:03:42 ►
Be well well my friends