Program Notes

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:14 Ralph Abraham: Takes issue with McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s interpretation of chaotic attractors… . To a mathematician, the word ‘attractor’ does not necessarily imply attraction.

07:23 Rupert Sheldrake:
“But Newtonian physics and the triumph of the mechanistic system, in my opinion, only works because what it was seeking to deny was introduced into it by a kind of subterfuge and pretended that this was a mechanical principle whereas it was something else.”

09:37 Ralph:
“The idea of two dimensional time could aid us here.” … The problem with the teleological approach is that the cause is in the future.

10:54 Ralph:
“The more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself.” … “The determinant of evolution [in the case being discussed] is the free will in the moment as the collective action of the citizens in the present.”

13:24 Rupert:
… discuses the concept of morphic attractors as a way of dealing with the fact that somehow, in the present, the person, etc. is subject to the influence of a potential future state that hasn’t yet come into being. “But that future state is what directs and guides and attracts the development of the present system.”

14:26 Terence McKenna:
“Well, this is all very interesting.” … “The modeling task, ne plus ultra, is history. This is where you’re no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues.” … “I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the 20th century is because of the absence of belief in an attractor.”

20:31 Terence:
“Our cultural phase transition that we are going through, vis a vie machines, may signify that we are not, as I have always thought, very close to the maximized state of novelty, but that we’re out there somewhere in the middle of that wave … "

22:41 Rupert:
“I think there’s a very big difference between spoken language and written language.”

25:16 Ralph:
“Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing, but mathematics probably preceded language as well.” … “We could reach a point where we had models that were decent in some sense to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships.”

33:06 Terence:
“[Ralph] do you still cling to the mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy?”

34:16 Terence: “And in a way that’s what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing. We’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s such a good idea that it will act as an attractor, and the world will move toward that form.”

Previous Episode

062 - Creativity and Chaos (Part 1)

Next Episode

064 - Confessions of a Dope Dealer

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:20

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

00:00:26

Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. Well, just as promised,

00:00:32

today we’re going to hear the continuation of the previous podcast in which Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake were discussing creativity and chaos. And this is from the first series

00:00:38

of trialogues they held, along with Terrence McKenna, at Esalen in September of 1989.

00:00:47

There’s one little hitch here, I guess,

00:00:52

and that is that the first 12 minutes of the tape had a really bad hum in it.

00:00:56

I guess there was some sort of a problem with the line connection from the board,

00:01:00

but it magically cleared up about 12 minutes or so into the recording. And I did my best to remove that annoying hum since it was really pretty loud.

00:01:07

But unfortunately, taking it out sort of distorted their voices just a little bit.

00:01:11

But it’s only for the first few minutes and it’s not nearly as bad as listening to that hum.

00:01:17

So let’s not delay any longer. When we left them in our last program, Rupert Sheldrake was

00:01:23

just beginning to describe his understanding

00:01:25

that mathematical attractors pulled from the front, as he put it.

00:01:30

And so we’ll pick up with Rupert concluding his thoughts about chaotic attractors,

00:01:35

and he’ll be immediately followed by Ralph Abraham expressing his surprise

00:01:40

with both Rupert’s and Terence McKenna’s take on attractors, which he didn’t quite buy into.

00:01:47

But the fact is how everyone tries to get out of it,

00:01:50

they do seem to be dealing with a new conception of putting

00:01:54

rather than pushing something that’s more Aristotelian than mechanistic.

00:01:59

Something that involves putting for an offensive of the cosmological reasons that we get from what Terence and I were discussing this morning,

00:02:07

you’re an adapter for the entire cosmic evolutionary process.

00:02:13

Well, I have to admit that when I heard this morning

00:02:17

from both of you, my god-in-law,

00:02:20

I was astonished at this interpretation and opinion.

00:02:24

And I can’t say it’s wrong, but I can say that it’s different.

00:02:29

I’m sure it’s different from the way that any mathematician has thought about the tractors in dynamical systems before.

00:02:38

I don’t think, I think it’s a narrow-trailer interpretation.

00:02:42

I mean, here we have the track, and here we have the train going down the track.

00:02:46

Now, we know that the train is going to keep on going down the track,

00:02:49

and it’s going to be back to the next station in seven minutes.

00:02:52

This is the station along the train.

00:02:55

So, the numerical system, like what we think of the numerical system,

00:03:00

is the rule, which is the track.

00:03:04

When the train is a certain place, it’s on the track, and where is it going to go next? It’s which is the track. When the train is in a certain place, it’s on the track.

00:03:07

Where is it going to go next?

00:03:08

It’s going down the track.

00:03:10

The rule is the train will be on the track.

00:03:12

Some trains are going to jump the track.

00:03:15

But basically the rule is the track where the train now is.

00:03:20

And as a matter of fact, it leads on to where the train is going to be next.

00:03:28

And then the rules apply again. I mean, we have a game that we’re playing here. The courted

00:03:33

rule, if you consent to play, and that is the rules of the game are that when you’re

00:03:38

at this spot, you go this way. When you’re at this spot, you go this way. Now, these rules, the rules of the game, the running rules,

00:03:49

comprise the agreement.

00:03:51

That’s the dynamical system.

00:03:54

Now, if there’s a nomadic somewhere,

00:03:56

maybe there is indeed, but we imagine that

00:03:59

then you just turn the crank on the axiomatic system

00:04:02

and it says eventually you’ll get to the destination,

00:04:06

the station, which might not be a point,

00:04:08

it might be a certain track,

00:04:10

or it might be a tangled up hidden track,

00:04:13

which is a chaotic approach here.

00:04:14

That doesn’t mean that the attractor is pulling the train.

00:04:20

So to think of the attractor as pulling the train,

00:04:24

I think is suggested by the word attractor,

00:04:28

which never, ever, when we thought of this word in the early 1960s,

00:04:33

did we ever think that it would be interpreted in this way.

00:04:35

But now I can see the obvious interpretation that anyone would make when they read this word.

00:04:41

It means nothing else.

00:04:43

I’ve had some of this.

00:04:44

And the second problem was confronted by the

00:04:47

Saraitic Museum of the Great,

00:04:49

where he chose the word attraction,

00:04:51

the gravitational attraction.

00:04:54

As Voltaire said in 1738

00:04:56

when he visited London,

00:04:58

this was years after, 30, 40 years

00:05:00

after Newton, 50 years after

00:05:02

Newton developed these ideas, they were still

00:05:04

not accepted in France.

00:05:06

And Voltaire said the principal reason

00:05:08

the French academicians scorned

00:05:10

Newton’s ideas was that he

00:05:12

used the word attraction. Voltaire

00:05:14

said if he used a different word, his ideas

00:05:16

would have been readily accepted

00:05:17

because the word attraction, which

00:05:19

to the French then, as it still does for us

00:05:22

today, has connotations of

00:05:23

sexual attraction,

00:05:29

that is, steeped in sort of animistic and subjective associations,

00:05:31

seem to them perfectly absurd.

00:05:33

The idea that the earth could be attracting a stone in a way that was had anything to do with the way that an attractive woman

00:05:37

could be attracting a man,

00:05:38

seem to them absurdly animistic.

00:05:41

And Newton was, you know,

00:05:43

Walter Nelson if he tells in a different way

00:05:45

his theories

00:05:46

that had been adopted

00:05:46

30 years earlier in France.

00:05:49

Now, the law of tennessee

00:05:49

had been wrong,

00:05:50

but the fact is

00:05:51

that he was not

00:05:52

accepted in France.

00:05:53

Newton was over getting

00:05:54

the notion of

00:05:55

gravitational attraction

00:05:56

because of his

00:05:57

animistic associations.

00:05:59

Now,

00:06:00

it was a difficulty

00:06:01

for people,

00:06:02

but the fact is

00:06:03

that Newton,

00:06:07

by substituting gravitationalitation with attraction managed to build a mechanistic cosmology

00:06:11

that replaced an animistic cosmology

00:06:13

by introducing animistic principles by subterfuge

00:06:17

in Aristotle’s view of the world

00:06:20

stones fell because they were attracted to the earth

00:06:23

they were attracted to their proper place They were attracted to their proper place.

00:06:25

They were attracted to the view of going home.

00:06:27

It was a kind of attractive process.

00:06:29

Newtonian physics said, well, then, no, it’s completely wrong to think of nature working on attractions.

00:06:35

Stones fall because of attraction.

00:06:41

Well, then, you say, well, wait a minute.

00:06:44

Isn’t that rather a funny word to use?

00:06:46

Listen to the name, don’t forget about the any sort of animistic association, this is a totally technical term.

00:06:52

So we’ve been through this particular thing before.

00:06:54

We have, yes.

00:06:56

So what’s happened is that in the evolution of science since the agnostic revolution,

00:07:01

attraction has been winged into the game again, again and it’s in vain to choose the name

00:07:05

and that’s what they’re saying

00:07:10

the name has such an inherent

00:07:11

appeal and plausibility

00:07:13

it seems to correspond to the way we had to screen

00:07:15

they never remember that summons isn’t meant to be

00:07:18

like that and sort of pretend that actually

00:07:19

it’s just a coincidence, you go to call it

00:07:21

something else, the new John F.

00:07:23

Felix and the triumph of the mechanistic

00:07:25

system, in my opinion,

00:07:27

because whatever seeking to deny

00:07:30

was introduced into it

00:07:31

by a kind of subterfuge

00:07:33

and pretended that this was

00:07:35

a mechanical principle whereas it was something

00:07:37

else. I suspect

00:07:39

that the same is true of your

00:07:41

dynamical attractors and yourself.

00:07:45

Even if you take the example of the train,

00:07:48

the station and putting the train,

00:07:50

in a sense what’s motivating the train

00:07:52

is the purpose of the people getting to New York or Los Angeles or London,

00:07:57

unless human beings were purposed and had destinations they wanted to get to,

00:08:01

unless they were in counties and had schedules

00:08:03

and planned the way they ran the trains in accordance with what we thought supply and demand was.

00:08:09

That train wouldn’t be running.

00:08:11

There’s essentially no distinction.

00:08:12

The station is an attractor.

00:08:14

If I want to go by train to London, I get on the train that’s going to London because

00:08:20

in fact it’s my purpose to go to London.

00:08:23

The idea that the train can be modelled as if it’s an attractor, but actually it’s my purpose to go to London. I don’t think the train can be modelled as attractive,

00:08:26

but actually it’s just a thing,

00:08:27

just a dynamical system running along rails

00:08:29

that happens to end up…

00:08:30

If you observe enough trains on the London Railroad,

00:08:33

you see lots of them going to London,

00:08:35

so you put in a model of London’s in the tractor,

00:08:37

but it’s got nothing to do with attraction.

00:08:39

That’s in a sense a subterfuge

00:08:41

because it has not a great deal to do with attraction.

00:08:43

People were… I mean, they were in particular, there were a few people travelling from…

00:08:49

Well, they can’t just place them down because they say there’s no demand.

00:08:56

So, I think you see that there is this implication.

00:09:01

I think Ian, you’ll show us an example that’s really there.

00:09:05

Well, I think it’s a first example, it’s really that. Well, I think it’s a good analogy with Newton’s attraction.

00:09:09

And there are, with his theory, or equally in general relatively,

00:09:14

some unresolved difficult problems about action at a distance.

00:09:19

Action at a distance in space.

00:09:21

And I think that we have the same thing here.

00:09:26

But it’s a question of action at a distance in space. And I think that we have the same thing here, but it’s a question of action and a

00:09:27

distance in time.

00:09:29

And

00:09:30

there are two different times that

00:09:33

are being confused.

00:09:35

The idea of two-dimensional

00:09:37

time that a couple of people have already

00:09:39

suggested could

00:09:41

aid us here.

00:09:43

The train moves down

00:09:46

the track and arrives at the station and that’s the attractor but he’s not

00:09:50

actually pulling the train. So there is

00:09:54

an action at a given instant before the train arrives

00:09:58

at the station, the arrival at the station is due in the future.

00:10:02

The problem with thinking of the station pulling the train

00:10:06

is that the cause is then in the future.

00:10:12

That’s the problem with this geological approach.

00:10:17

However, we can argue that the station pulls the train

00:10:20

because the people who are going there apply it to a different kind of time.

00:10:23

And that’s the time on the scale of the evolution of the train system.

00:10:30

People used to get off the train there and there was no station.

00:10:33

They asked the conductor for it to stop, and after many people did,

00:10:36

and then they built a station there and so on.

00:10:38

So I think the more interesting thing, rather than a dynamical model,

00:10:43

I think the more interesting thing rather than a dynamical model,

00:10:53

when a tractor and so on has the exerting influence of the past to approach the future, the more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself,

00:10:58

in which the train system with its greatest distribution of stations,

00:11:02

even the location of towns the size of London

00:11:05

as opposed to the size of Brighton and so on.

00:11:08

Although this is evolving

00:11:09

slowly in the course of another

00:11:12

kind of time, a time in

00:11:13

centuries.

00:11:15

And now we have this pattern

00:11:18

is coming forth

00:11:19

on

00:11:21

a trajectory in another space

00:11:24

which is also going to the tractor,

00:11:26

which is the final configuration, the city plan, the location of cities,

00:11:31

the network of train tracks and so on.

00:11:35

But the evolution of that is also going toward a tractor.

00:11:38

But is it being pulled by the tractor?

00:11:41

So I think it’s not because the people are

00:11:45

exerting their will by getting

00:11:47

on and off the train wherever they want.

00:11:50

That’s the real cause, as it were,

00:11:52

the determinant of evolution

00:11:54

is the free will of the moment.

00:11:56

It’s the collective action

00:11:57

of the citizens of the present.

00:12:01

That’s one more

00:12:02

thing I’d say before we

00:12:03

turn to this

00:12:04

opinion.

00:12:09

There’s a sense in which we face this problem in our own psychology,

00:12:12

and we’re sensing with our own motivations.

00:12:16

You see, motivations in the ordinary psychological sense are not pushing from behind,

00:12:20

but pulling from ahead, and in courts of law,

00:12:23

seeking to establish the cause of what

00:12:25

happened. Motivation

00:12:27

is very important. It sounds so

00:12:29

willfully like they’re saying

00:12:31

but if so what was their motive?

00:12:34

The motive isn’t what

00:12:35

if they did it in order to

00:12:38

kill them, in order to inherit knowledge

00:12:39

that they would inherit through their will.

00:12:42

There’s a sense in which a future state

00:12:43

or an imaginary future state is not pulling them. There’s a sense in which a future state or any matter of future state is not pulling them.

00:12:46

And there’s a sense in which

00:12:47

by our own integration we have

00:12:49

desires and goals, we have

00:12:51

purposes and aims, even if

00:12:53

just like coming to Essendon this weekend

00:12:55

all of us have the intention of getting here

00:12:57

and the intention

00:12:59

preceding our coming here.

00:13:01

And there’s a sense in which the goal of being

00:13:03

here at Essendon this weekend drew

00:13:05

our behaviour towards it.

00:13:07

And that goal was in the future.

00:13:09

So we face the same problem

00:13:11

in dealing with our own psychological

00:13:13

motivations, which we know most about.

00:13:16

We know more about our own motivations

00:13:17

than about the functioning of the constant nature.

00:13:20

And I would have thought exactly

00:13:21

the same problems arose.

00:13:24

And the concept of morphic effectors and morphic resonance theory

00:13:28

and in Aristotle’s notion of the soul, the concept of the infinity,

00:13:32

is trying to deal with this fact that somehow in the present,

00:13:36

the system, the person, the developing animal, the developing plant,

00:13:42

in the present is subject to the influence of a potential future state

00:13:46

that hasn’t yet come into being.

00:13:48

And that future state is what directs and guides and attracts

00:13:52

the development of the present system.

00:13:55

Now, is that future state existing in the present

00:13:59

in some other dimension or direction of time?

00:14:02

Or is it actually out there in the future

00:14:04

and pulling from tomorrow or the day after direction of time? Or is it actually out there in the future and going

00:14:05

from tomorrow or the day after tomorrow through time? I mean, these may be just different

00:14:10

ways of trying to imagine how this is where we’ve arrived at the imagination.

00:14:15

Exactly, it was a terrible story.

00:14:16

I don’t know.

00:14:32

Paul, very interesting. I had a lot to say about the earlier part, but I’ll work backward through it.

00:14:38

I think Whitehead had a phrase called appetition for completion,

00:14:48

which I take to be what this attractor notion is seeking to concretize. If we didn’t use the word attractor, if we tried to be true to the notion that the thing was being pushed from behind the process,

00:14:58

then we would have to use a word like the propeller or the motivator.

00:15:03

like the propeller or the motivator.

00:15:07

And in these cases, I think intuitively,

00:15:11

or perhaps it’s just the habit of my own thinking,

00:15:14

these seem to be inelegant terms.

00:15:18

They seem to immediately raise questions of operational detail that attract or doesn’t.

00:15:24

We know how things are attracted

00:15:26

to something. They simply

00:15:28

move toward them. But if something

00:15:30

is propelled toward

00:15:32

something, if something is motivated

00:15:34

toward something,

00:15:36

then we have to visualize an engine

00:15:38

strapped

00:15:40

to it that is moving it

00:15:42

toward an end

00:15:44

state which it somehow is able to magically

00:15:48

find, where if you view the attractor as the bottom of an energy well, well then anything

00:15:56

put into the energy well will make its way to the attractor, because the attractor is the least energetic state.

00:16:05

And so the whole system tends to move in that direction.

00:16:11

The idea that the cause is in the future makes hash of the notion of causality.

00:16:20

And so this is, I think, on the part of science,

00:16:23

something that they’re very concerned to eliminate, because the backwash from that assumption will make the practice of science much more difficult.

00:16:48

Ralph and his colleagues have been modeling for many years now plant growth, dripping faucets, coupled oscillators like groups of cuckoo clocks hung on the wall and this sort of thing. The

00:16:57

modeling task, Ni plus Ultra, is history. This is where you’re no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group

00:17:08

of students or colleagues but where you actually are saying our models our methods are powerful

00:17:15

enough that now we will take on the real world not even the real world of biology but the real

00:17:22

world of the felt experience of being embedded in human

00:17:27

institutions well when you look at history I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the

00:17:34

20th century is because of the absence of belief in an attractor this is the hideous legacy of existentialism and all the philosophies constellated around it, that there is no attractor, there is no appetition for completion. Everything is referent to the past up through the present and no further.

00:18:03

up through the present and no further.

00:18:07

So that’s what I think about the last part of the thing.

00:18:11

What interested me more and has appealed more to my own kinkiness because it caused me to think something I had never thought before,

00:18:16

even though on one level Rupert was taking liberties with my material.

00:18:32

was taking liberties with my material about complexity and truly I saw perhaps because I heard it from his lips rather than my own I saw a dimension which I had never seen before which which is my tendency is always to carry any principle to the ultimate extrapolation.

00:18:48

And if in fact the increase of complexity in the life of the universe

00:18:54

is directly related to falling temperatures in the universe,

00:18:58

then it seems to me it’s reasonable to suppose that the most complex states in the projective history of the universe

00:19:07

will occur at very low temperatures.

00:19:11

Well, isn’t it interesting then that phenomena like superconductivity and stuff like that

00:19:20

has to do with low temperatures?

00:19:24

And superconductivity is fascinating to cybernetic engineers

00:19:28

because it’s a way to preserve information from decay.

00:19:34

You see, if you put information into a superconducting circuit

00:19:39

operating around absolute zero,

00:19:41

it will be impossible to disrupt that circuit without destroying it.

00:19:47

And people like Erwin Schrodinger, as early as the mid-30s, suggested that since life

00:19:56

seeks to stabilize itself against mutation, the obvious principle to be brought in to

00:20:03

aid in that task would be something very much like superconductivity.

00:20:09

Well, I don’t want to belabor the point in my little space of time,

00:20:13

but in fact the way in which charge transfer and things like that occur in DNA

00:20:18

suggests that nature may have incorporated this principle into its mechanics. What this says to us in the present that is particularly poignant, I think,

00:20:30

is that our cultural phase transition that we are going through vis-à-vis machines

00:20:37

may signify that we are not, as I have always thought,

00:20:43

very close to the maximized state of novelty,

00:20:47

but that we’re somewhere out in the middle of that wave that goes from the beginning to the end,

00:20:53

and that what the cultural transition that we are doing is about unloading all novelty so far achieved into a much colder and stabler regime,

00:21:11

the cold and stable regime of silicon crystals and arsenic-doped chips and this sort of thing.

00:21:19

And this is a fairly appalling idea, because I think we all have a horror of being replaced by machines.

00:21:29

But on the other hand, prokaryotes were replaced by eukaryotes.

00:21:35

And there have been several of these replacement scenarios in the history of life.

00:22:06

scenarios in the history of life. So I think it’s interesting that you make this point about cooling and complexity. It seems to me to imply that in my own theory, the zeroal of time really describes is the fluctuation of the career of heat over the life of the universe.

00:22:12

And that in domains of high heat, information is degraded and novelty is lost.

00:22:19

And there is a kind of recidivist tendency.

00:22:30

And there is a kind of recidivist tendency, and when temperatures fall, order reasserts itself and stabilizes.

00:22:39

Well, I think that the storage in low temperatures is interesting, because I think one of the things, when Ralph said that mathematics is like language as a modeling system,

00:22:45

I think there’s a very big difference between spoken language and written language when you get written language

00:22:47

the first ones we know about are written on rocks

00:22:50

the ultimate low temperature crystalline storage system

00:22:53

the ten commandments as given to Moses

00:22:57

were written on tablets of stone

00:22:59

this is this kind of permanent storage system

00:23:03

and putting things in silicon crystals is a more sophisticated way,

00:23:07

but this is essentially a low-temperature storage method.

00:23:10

You couldn’t do it, you couldn’t write on water or in the wind.

00:23:18

So I think that the written language creates the illusion for us of an independent world.

00:23:26

I myself think the notion of platonic forms and this transcendent eternal world

00:23:33

couldn’t have arisen until written language had arisen,

00:23:35

because written language produced the model.

00:23:38

And by what I think of as a kind of idolatry,

00:23:41

these man-made symbols and structures, languages and mathematics,

00:23:46

when written down,

00:23:51

can be imagined to endure forever in some kind of other realm, as if there’s some kind of celestial rock or celestial stone or celestial crystal in which they endure forever.

00:23:56

But the reality of language as it’s existed for a far longer period of its history and

00:24:01

as it exists right now here as we talk to each other is in spoken language and spoken language is a process that happens in

00:24:08

time and the memory involved in spoken language which comes when stories are

00:24:14

retold like the bards and and the transmission in oral cultures there is

00:24:19

no written record so the spoken record the story organically develops as time goes on and

00:24:26

there’s nobody around say well look you’ve got the story wrong because in

00:24:28

the book it’s written like this the thing organically evolves and so I think

00:24:33

a model of language is a kind of model of reality an oral tradition has this

00:24:38

constantly evolving and conserved and yet conserved model as soon as you’ve

00:24:44

got a written one as soon as you’ve got a written one, as soon as you’ve got written records, or written mathematical formulae, you get

00:24:49

the impression, an imaginary realm of sort of eternal forms, by just sort of projecting

00:24:55

the notion of things written down. Anyway, that was just what I wanted to say in response

00:25:02

to what you said. And I think that’s one way in which we get this, or we could easily get.

00:25:08

I’m not saying for sure the mathematically platonic or Pythagorean realm is an illusion,

00:25:12

but it would be easy to see how such an illusion could be produced.

00:25:16

Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing,

00:25:24

but mathematics probably preceded language as well.

00:25:28

Certainly mathematics preceded writing.

00:25:30

And in mathematics we have, for example, a circle, a line.

00:25:36

I mean, these are, for Plato, the ideal ideals.

00:25:41

ideal ideals.

00:25:46

So we need writing on stone to think of a line or a circle or a triangle

00:25:50

as being eternal form.

00:25:57

And the evolution of this kind of mathematics preceding writing

00:26:02

was probably done by drawing in sand.

00:26:06

And writing evolved by drawing in sand,

00:26:08

and only later you had drawing on stone.

00:26:11

So I think, I mean, it’s just possible

00:26:14

that the idea of eternal forms, laws, and so on

00:26:18

emerged before writing on stone,

00:26:22

and that writing on stone was just, as a matter of fact,

00:26:24

a concretization of those.

00:26:26

It just suggests a migration in evolution

00:26:29

from the immaterial to the material,

00:26:32

from the abstract to the concrete.

00:26:34

I mean, it’s the opposite of what a lot of people think.

00:26:40

Your theories are the theories of chaos.

00:26:44

Using this gentleman’s terminology here,

00:26:46

is this a model?

00:26:48

How does it relate to,

00:26:50

is it a model for the chaos in society,

00:26:54

in our world today?

00:26:56

And what does it tell you about that?

00:27:00

Yeah, I used to answer when I went on the airplane

00:27:04

and the person in the next seat would

00:27:06

say, what do you do?

00:27:08

I said, oh, well, I’m a math professor.

00:27:10

I do research in mathematics.

00:27:11

And then they always say, that’s my worst subject.

00:27:15

And the conversation would end.

00:27:18

So I soon learned to pretend that it was something else.

00:27:22

Well, I write books.

00:27:23

Oh, yeah?

00:27:24

What kind of books? Well, textbooks. Well, that would was something else. Well, I write books. Oh yeah? What kind of books?

00:27:26

Well, textbooks. Well, that would end the conversation.

00:27:30

Once, as a kind of accident,

00:27:32

I said, well, I study chaos theory.

00:27:34

And the person immediately said,

00:27:36

now that’s a subject I know a lot about.

00:27:41

That was many years ago,

00:27:42

but I rejected that.

00:27:44

And so at that point, I would have answered to your question, no.

00:27:48

I didn’t think there was very much relationship

00:27:51

between mathematical models with chaotic behavior on the one hand

00:27:58

and the chaos in life, what people are talking about

00:28:01

when they say that’s something I know a lot about.

00:28:03

They’re talking about a problem in their relationship we’re in the middle of the

00:28:06

argument with their mate or something so but my attitude has changed over the

00:28:12

years and more and more I’ve been trying to make models in the social sciences in

00:28:18

general and now I have for example a project in psychoanalysis to model, working with a group of psychoanalysts to model the therapeutic situation.

00:28:29

And their idea was, I mean, in the experience of their practice of psychoanalysis,

00:28:37

they had the feeling that the patient would present, that’s a technical jargon I gather of that field, would present chaotically.

00:28:49

That the presentation would become more chaotic and that was to them a clue that

00:28:54

the trigger was approaching for an episode or something. So they came to me

00:28:59

saying could you model this, could we have data where we could sort of meter the extent of chaos, like my parameter

00:29:05

GN in the ocean.

00:29:09

And

00:29:09

that was a few years ago, and so it’s

00:29:12

progressed, and now I’m working on, I call it

00:29:13

aerodynamics, E-R-O,

00:29:16

models for

00:29:17

the love relationship,

00:29:19

and for the synergy of,

00:29:22

in society, social synergy in a group

00:29:24

of nations, for example,

00:29:25

what does lead to war and what leads to cooperation,

00:29:28

how do you resolve conflict and so on.

00:29:31

So I do feel that it is, I won’t say possible,

00:29:34

it’s conceivable in course of time,

00:29:37

given its adequate evolution of the modeling art

00:29:40

of this hermeneutical circle

00:29:43

the gentleman has described so well in the context

00:29:45

of the ships and the models for the ships that we could reach a point where we had models that

00:29:50

were decent in some sense to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships

00:29:55

a group of people like two three a group this size a group group of nations, a world of nations, the evolution of society,

00:30:05

and Terence’s dream, a model for history itself. This is kind of, it’s thinkable. It’s not

00:30:13

unthinkable. We’re not at a point where we can meter the chaos in the room and say they’re about to break for dinner. Isn’t what you’ve done today and yesterday sort of evidence of that with the thing

00:30:30

that she’s done with this comic and so forth?

00:30:34

It is presuming that we’re all somehow

00:30:37

going to get together through this

00:30:38

and in some way make it better for us

00:30:40

to communicate and be in the room

00:30:42

through this particular instrument yes any relationships

00:30:49

when I know the relationships working with people a lot about energy and the energy that gets or

00:30:56

doesn’t get focused with the two or three or get a group of eight or whatever. It’s a lot of working with pan-anthropology.

00:31:07

Well, I’m delighted to hear this optimism because I had recently, a month or two or three ago,

00:31:11

given a talk here to a group of social scientists

00:31:14

about the possibilities of mathematical modeling.

00:31:17

And their response was really angry and hostile.

00:31:21

The very idea of a mathematical anthropology

00:31:23

or a mathematical sociology, they thought

00:31:26

was really offensive.

00:31:27

People had a different kind of investment

00:31:29

in that situation.

00:31:31

You would get different kinds of

00:31:33

It reminds me of

00:31:34

when the gastropy theory

00:31:37

had come out

00:31:38

and people were looking at using

00:31:41

politics, especially

00:31:43

revolutionary politics.

00:31:46

That there are certain political and social changes which occur peacefully and in an incremental manner,

00:31:54

but those same changes will occur catastrophically if, for example, the economy is in trouble.

00:32:02

So they were attempting to use catastrophe theory

00:32:06

to model politics.

00:32:09

They weren’t able to get enough data, I think,

00:32:11

to make a practical model.

00:32:13

Actually, that’s a good case

00:32:15

because it was very promising.

00:32:17

It’s still very promising,

00:32:18

but it suffered a kind of sociological

00:32:22

or historical accident

00:32:23

where a wave of popular hostility

00:32:28

built up over catastrophe theory

00:32:30

in a series of newspaper articles

00:32:31

and within the mathematical community.

00:32:34

And it killed it.

00:32:36

It killed a very promising strategy

00:32:38

of model building for the social sciences.

00:32:42

Anyway, it was very limited.

00:32:44

It was a temporary stage on the way

00:32:46

to what we are doing now with these systems.

00:32:50

And I don’t know if it will save the world or anything,

00:32:53

but I can tell you it’s a lot of fun.

00:32:57

Ralph, in line with the question about sociology,

00:33:01

I haven’t asked you this question for a couple of years.

00:33:03

I ask it every couple of years.

00:33:06

Do you still cling to the mathematical proof

00:33:09

of the impossibility of monogamy?

00:33:17

I don’t remember your asking that two years ago, Terrence.

00:33:22

Nor ever before.

00:33:26

Do you remember making the statement?

00:33:30

Not only I don’t remember, but I say I proclaim to you all it’s impossible I ever made it

00:33:36

such a statement, because as I’ve just explained to Rupert, I don’t believe in the resonance

00:33:43

between the models and the actuality of ordinary life.

00:33:47

I think that it evolves our understanding to play with models.

00:33:53

Well, they do have a certain practical value, but I don’t consider that the interesting part.

00:33:58

So if I had a mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy in a certain model universe

00:34:06

of model relationship in level three.

00:34:09

I might have spoken about that,

00:34:11

and you made what Gregory Basin called a category error

00:34:14

and thought I was talking about human relationship,

00:34:18

but you know I never actually speak about human relationship.

00:34:20

I wish you told me this.

00:34:22

Seriously? human relationship. I wish you told me this, seriously..

00:34:26

.

00:34:27

.

00:34:28

.

00:34:29

.

00:34:30

.

00:34:31

.

00:34:32

.

00:34:33

.

00:34:34

.

00:34:35

.

00:34:36

.

00:34:37

.

00:34:38

.

00:34:39

.

00:34:40

.

00:34:41

.

00:34:42

.

00:34:43

.

00:34:44

… notion of the role of modeling I find very simple to the discussion especially where it’s tied in

00:34:49

with the feedback to clean the the abstracting and the concretizing blends them together so

00:34:58

your model is sailing model out and it keeps changing itself and tied to the this notion of the attractor

00:35:11

if you model an attractor does your model have attractive properties does it

00:35:19

begin to become a concrete or attractive entity?

00:35:27

We’ll have to ask Terence about this

00:35:29

since he’s been using this word extensively today,

00:35:33

appetition,

00:35:34

and I don’t know exactly what it means.

00:35:38

Terence, are models attractive?

00:35:40

I mean, are they habit-forming?

00:35:43

Is modeling a habit?

00:35:44

I think so. I think if a model is a good model it

00:35:49

will it will attract it will begin to attract it will begin to pull energy toward itself it’s

00:36:00

almost like the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy and in a way that’s what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing where we’re

00:36:11

trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s such a good idea

00:36:17

that it will act as an attractor and the world will move yes good to name for a

00:36:24

future with a future.

00:36:25

Yes.

00:36:27

Well, maybe it’s an appropriate time just to make mention

00:36:29

of this area of mythology and ritual,

00:36:34

that here we have a kind of model

00:36:36

which has been thought to be crucial for the evolution of a society.

00:36:41

And it could be that certain models are attractive in that realm for example the

00:36:46

Trinity or one God I think that it’s possible I mean there’s an alternative

00:36:57

possibility and that the models aren’t attractive exactly but you have

00:37:01

springing up thousands of new societies around the planet every few years,

00:37:07

and some of them will survive.

00:37:09

They’re like mutations in the social sphere,

00:37:13

and some will survive for a while and others not.

00:37:17

And some may have a really huge history, like 3,000 or 5,000 years,

00:37:22

or our civilization.

00:37:24

How old is this one?

00:37:26

It starts with the Renaissance

00:37:27

or in the time of Christ.

00:37:30

Say in the Renaissance,

00:37:32

this particular model

00:37:35

where it’s a very complicated pantheon

00:37:37

of gods and goddesses.

00:37:41

I think it could be natural selection

00:37:44

of societies

00:37:45

that have adopted a certain model

00:37:48

and made it a habit, whether attractive or not.

00:37:51

And then the longevity is not because the model is attractive,

00:37:55

but because it has a certain evolutionary advantage

00:37:58

or advantage in whatever is the selection mechanism.

00:38:02

Or it could be that certain models, like the Trinity,

00:38:05

are intrinsically attractive,

00:38:07

and that’s why there are so many societies

00:38:09

with Trinity as their model,

00:38:13

which had a long lifetime.

00:38:15

One example, just to follow up,

00:38:17

where does it make it over?

00:38:19

Where does the model cross over

00:38:21

when Frankenstein’s monster

00:38:23

gets citizenship papers? How does the model

00:38:30

stay not part of the real world? You see what I’m saying or trying to get at here? That

00:38:37

the model becomes it.

00:38:39

The model is just a plan.

00:38:43

But the model takes on a kind of

00:38:45

social reality doesn’t it in a

00:38:47

religious system like Islam

00:38:49

for example the model

00:38:51

of God which Islam

00:38:53

has this strongly

00:38:55

emphasized monotheism

00:38:57

actually takes on a social reality

00:39:00

it’s reflected if you have one

00:39:01

God then

00:39:02

the earth is sacred but then you have the idea there should be one

00:39:06

sacred place on earth so you have all pilgrimage

00:39:08

to Mecca, all mosques pointing

00:39:10

to Mecca, you have one God

00:39:12

mirrored in this one central

00:39:14

so you have a model actually becoming

00:39:16

social reality, this is a common thing

00:39:19

but there’s one

00:39:20

let me just conclude one

00:39:22

further thought on this line

00:39:24

I think that the history of religions is one of the things Let me just conclude one further thought on this line.

00:39:29

I think that the history of religions is one of the things that it tells us, is that all temples, images, diagrams, all the paraphernalia of religion, ritual forms,

00:39:42

in some sense have a modelling function.

00:39:44

Some of them may be symbols that participate with the reality they’re describing.

00:39:49

And one of the constant dynamics in the history of at least Western religions

00:39:55

is the way in which the models are taken to be the reality by people.

00:39:59

It’s a recurrent danger of models.

00:40:01

And in the Judeo-Christian tradition it’s called idolatry.

00:40:03

recurrent danger of models and in the Judeo-Christian tradition it’s called idolatry. It’s that the model of reality, the image of the God is taken to be the

00:40:09

God itself. And I myself think that one of the problems of the mechanistic

00:40:15

worldview is that the mathematical models of classical physics were taken

00:40:19

by many people to be the actual reality governing the world. So the idea was

00:40:24

there was this mathematical mind governing and this became the god of

00:40:27

the materialist or the atheist this kind of the mathematical models the images of

00:40:33

reality became the ultimate reality for them

00:40:38

a possible interesting example of a religious poetic myth becoming a powerful attractor. Between the 11th

00:40:48

and the 13th century in Western Europe, there was a very important paradigm shift took place,

00:40:53

namely the recognition of the importance of the Fenomen Principle. And this affected life in every

00:41:02

way. One of the ways to do this is to see the shift in the style of architecture, say, between the Romanesque construction that was used in the older portions of the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel and, say, the Cathedral of the Char.

00:41:27

Now, Mont Saint-Michel was built for the glorification of Saint Michael, who was the most powerful of all the angels, and one who threw Satan out of heaven.

00:41:31

A very masculine thing. It’s a masculine building. Very little decoration. Thick walls. Very little

00:41:37

small windows. Solidly built. A masculine style of architecture. If you go to Chartres, you see the apotheosis of

00:41:47

the feminine style of architecture. This act, I think, is in the sense of what you’re calling

00:41:54

an attractor, because between the 11th and the 13th century, beginning around the beginning

00:42:00

of the 12th century, hundreds of these Gothic cathedrals were built in Europe.

00:42:06

All for the adoration of the Blessed Virgin.

00:42:09

Hundreds of them at an enormous expense.

00:42:13

An enormous effort.

00:42:15

Remember, this was a poor time.

00:42:18

And Europe put an enormous amount of their effort into doing this.

00:42:22

And I can only see this as the attractive power of a myth

00:42:26

created around it.

00:42:27

Yeah, is it?

00:42:30

Well, it must be something like that.

00:42:33

I mean, it must be something to do

00:42:36

with the feminine aspect of creativity.

00:42:40

You see, one of the things that Ralph and I

00:42:42

were thinking about earlier today,

00:42:44

we were having a conversation after lunch,

00:42:48

that we find both masculine and feminine creative principles in mythology,

00:42:54

and both masculine and feminine creative principles come in trinities quite frequently,

00:42:59

the triple goddess, but then in the Christian world, the male trinity.

00:43:07

goddess but then in the Christian world the male trinity and Ralph was saying well maybe there would be since there seems to be this possibility of looking at it either way there must have been

00:43:12

somewhere in which the two threes formed a six and the two creative trinities interlaced and then I

00:43:20

declared to us that the the star of David is just such a diagram

00:43:25

two interpenetrating triangles

00:43:27

well any six fold structure

00:43:32

anyway this takes us into

00:43:35

another realm of archetypes

00:43:38

it’s six o’clock and maybe it’s time now to stop

00:43:41

because after supper

00:43:43

we come to Terence and Ralph on chaos and imagination.

00:43:52

At eight o’clock.

00:43:53

Eight o’clock.

00:43:59

And that’s where we’ll pick up with the next trialogue, which will be the podcast after next.

00:44:05

Because, as most of you already know,

00:44:08

I’m trying to put out three programs

00:44:10

each week, at least for a little

00:44:11

while. My plan is to

00:44:14

put out two trialogues each

00:44:15

week with an alternative program

00:44:17

in between the trialogues.

00:44:19

Once I get this first series podcast,

00:44:22

I’ll let you know what I decide about

00:44:23

how soon the next series will come out,

00:44:25

because maybe you’ll be ready for a break from the trial loggers by then.

00:44:30

In any event, I’ve got an embarrassment of riches in new program material right now,

00:44:36

so it looks like we’re going to have some interesting times together in the year ahead.

00:44:41

Getting back to today’s program, about 22 minutes or so into their conversation,

00:44:47

you probably noticed Rupert talked about the difference between written and spoken language,

00:44:53

particularly in respect to the permanence of the written word. I’m wondering if the

00:44:59

internet and podcasting are going to change his thinking about the spoken word not being

00:45:04

very permanent.

00:45:06

Who would have thought on that lovely September day at Esalen in 1989

00:45:10

that over 15 years later, so many more thousands of us would be able to hear this wonderful conversation.

00:45:18

So here’s a question for you.

00:45:20

In terms of the way Rupert and Terrence are talking about attractors,

00:45:24

in terms of the way Rupert and Terrence are talking about attractors.

00:45:28

What kind of attractor or series of attractors do you think it was that prompted someone to record those conversations

00:45:32

and then give them to Ralph and eventually draw them into being podcast here?

00:45:37

So I’ll let you have a toke or two on your own

00:45:40

and come to your own conclusions on that one.

00:45:43

And speaking of having a toke or two, it was only a couple of podcasts ago when I mentioned

00:45:50

that when KMO interviewed me for his podcast on the Sea Realm, he told me about another

00:45:56

program that can be found at www.dopecast.co.uk.

00:46:03

And now that I’ve heard several programs,

00:46:06

I have to say that it’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard so far.

00:46:11

The host of the Dopecast goes by the handle Dope Fiend,

00:46:15

and being one myself, I can honestly say I’ve never met a Dope Fiend that I didn’t like.

00:46:22

And after KMO told me about this program,

00:46:25

I checked their website and downloaded a couple of podcasts by the dope theme

00:46:29

as well as a couple of other podcasts from what they’re calling the Cannabis Podcast Network,

00:46:35

all of which is hosted at dopecast.co.uk.

00:46:40

Now let me give full disclosure here.

00:46:43

The thing is that ever since losing my MP3 player, I’ve only listened to short segments of these podcasts

00:46:49

because it’s just not very convenient to be tethered to a computer,

00:46:53

particularly once you’ve enjoyed the freedom of a mobile MP3 player.

00:46:59

Anyway, I sent Dope Fiend an email and told him I liked his program, at least the parts of it I’d heard.

00:47:04

I sent Dope Fiend an email and told him I liked his program, at least the parts of it I’d heard.

00:47:12

And now, to make a long story very short, out of the blue this weekend I get a package in the mail,

00:47:15

and lo and behold, it’s actually from the Dope Fiend.

00:47:20

You know, it was Christmas. It was just like Burning Man does Christmas, I guess, because just out of the blue, someone I don’t even know sends me a really cool iRiver MP3 player

00:47:26

with a built-in mic that looks like it’s going to work perfectly at Burning Man

00:47:30

and other road trips that I make to interview people.

00:47:34

So when I tell you how much I like the podcast from these guys,

00:47:38

I don’t want you to think it’s because of this wonderful gesture

00:47:41

or because he very kindly mentions the psychedelic salon from time to time.

00:47:46

I just really, really enjoy these programs and my bet is that most of you will too.

00:47:53

You know, from some of your email, I know that many of you are feeling like you’re out on the

00:47:57

end of the line, particularly if you don’t have any nearby friends to share a joint or to trip with.

00:48:05

And I know how you feel because that’s sort of been my situation lately.

00:48:09

Most of my friends from the tribe are now physically far away,

00:48:13

and so I sometimes get a little lonely myself.

00:48:16

And yesterday I got to hear some of Dope Fiend’s programs on my new MP3 player,

00:48:22

and did I ever have a ball?

00:48:27

You just have to hear these guys for yourself and you know just have a toker too and listen to the dope fiend max freak out the toker and some of

00:48:34

their other friends and fellow podcasters like queer ninja whose music podcast is also really

00:48:39

quite brilliant and then there’s xandor’s Girl Reports that I now don’t want to miss.

00:48:49

All in all, I just guarantee that you’ll feel a lot more connected to the tribe just by listening to these interesting and entertaining programs.

00:48:53

And don’t miss the Sea Realm either.

00:48:54

KMO is doing some really good work out there.

00:48:57

And now I’m looking forward to working my way backwards

00:49:00

through their entire year of podcasting.

00:49:04

All of these guys are having a real party that we can all join in on, at least in my humble opinion. Thank you. me, particularly since I’m making some changes to the site as well. But once it’s finished, I think you’ll like some of the things like the secure IM chat

00:49:49

feature that we’re going to eventually be able to use.

00:49:52

So thanks for putting up with the super long podcast page for now.

00:49:56

You know, I feel your pain as the saying goes.

00:50:00

And before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license.

00:50:12

And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the podcast page at the Psychedelic Salon, where you can find that, of course, at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.

00:50:24

You can find that, of course, at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.

00:50:30

And if you still have questions, you can send them in an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

00:50:36

And I want to thank Jock Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayuk,

00:50:39

for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon. And thanks again, Ralph Abraham, both for participating in the trilogues

00:50:44

and for letting Bruce Dahmer and me digitize your tapes of these sessions

00:50:48

and put them online for our friends here in the psychedelic salon to enjoy.

00:50:54

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

00:50:59

Be well, my friends. French.