Program Notes
Guest speakers: Amanda Feilding and Mark Pesce
Amanda Feilding
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:30
“Britain is America’s greatest ally in all the dreadful things it is doing at the moment, the war on terror and the war on drugs. And without Britain America would feel isolated.”
07:12 Amanda discusses the new scale for drugs that is being proposed in the UK.
09:37 “Present drug policy simply doesn’t work, and indeed it is the policy which is causing most of the damages.”
10:45 “My particular interest is in separating the psychedelics and marijuana from the rest of the drugs.”
13:34 “We at the Beckley Foundation have decided to do some reports which will tell the truth. Because the United Nations report doesn’t tell the truth. It tells what the Americans want to hear.”
14:18 “At the last Beckley Foundation Seminar, which was held at the House of Lords in London, we had the top of drug policy of the United Nations and of the EU… . and the United Nations man agreed with me that the regulations on psychedelics should be altered.”
16:30 “At the moment it’s not illegal to do research on controlled substances, but no one does it because it’s not good for grant funding, or careers.”
19:52 Amanda begins her description of the brain imaging work that is being done with high-level meditation.
25:03 “In my opinion, to experience getting high means that you see a bit of you from higher up the mountain with a greatly enlarged area of simultaneous association of the neurons. So you get more far-reaching associations.”
Amanda’s Web site: The Beckley Foundation
Mark Pesce
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
28:34 Mark Pesce: Talks about the Eschaton, the impending end of everything. “Knowing your expiration date is a very big thing.” … but on what do you base your beliefs?
31:10 “Does the knowledge that there’s just a little bit more than six years left on the civilizational clock drive any individual that you have ever met anywhere? Have we seen anyone abandon their attachments and prepare themselves for this presumed, inevitable end?”
34:33 “What he [Terence McKenna] said [about 2012] was … take this and test it… . And I think his greatest disappointment was that so few people actually took that challenge.”
36:36 “I have had enough of this [focus on 2012 being the end of history].”
36:54“I have often equated the Eschaton with the idea of technological singularity.”
39:10 “What I would say is that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. There is only intelligence, whether it is vegetable, or animal, or mineral, all intelligence is one.”
41:16 “Wikipedia is the first identifiable artifact of the age of hyper-intelligence. It is the collective, and collective knowledge, of a billion human minds. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s just intelligence.”
Mark’s Web site: MarkPesce.com
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:25 ►
So, are you ready for a little something
00:00:28 ►
other than a trialogue?
00:00:31 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:00:34 ►
you know that I’ve just finished podcasting
00:00:36 ►
19 programs featuring trialogues
00:00:39 ►
that were held between Terrence McKenna,
00:00:41 ►
Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
00:00:44 ►
in 1989 and 1990 at the
00:00:46 ►
Esalen Institute. Now I’m finally going to get back to featuring a little wider variety of speakers
00:00:52 ►
before I return to the rest of the trilogues that were held in subsequent years.
00:00:57 ►
But before I introduce today’s program, I have some sad news to pass on. In case you missed it,
00:01:02 ►
I have some sad news to pass on.
00:01:04 ►
In case you missed it,
00:01:07 ►
Terrence McKenna’s entire library,
00:01:09 ►
along with all of his personal papers,
00:01:12 ►
were destroyed in a fire on the 7th of February.
00:01:16 ►
You can read Eric Davis’ account of what happened on our salon’s blog page,
00:01:18 ►
which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.net.
00:01:23 ►
That’s psychedelicsalon, all one word, dot net.
00:01:27 ►
But basically what happened was that Terrence’s estate
00:01:31 ►
had donated his library and papers to the Esalen Institute,
00:01:35 ►
which, of course, was the site of the trial logs that we just finished listening to.
00:01:40 ►
And as hard as it is for me to believe,
00:01:43 ►
Esalen stored all of this irreplaceable material in an old building that also housed a sandwich shop that caught on fire.
00:01:52 ►
Apparently Esalen didn’t lose its own archives because they were stored elsewhere.
00:01:57 ►
It was the McKenna collection that was lost.
00:02:00 ►
Sort of our tribe’s own little version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, I guess.
00:02:07 ►
I’ll reserve my comments about the administration of Esalen
00:02:10 ►
and let you come up with your own thoughts about the carelessness with which they treated Terrence’s papers.
00:02:16 ►
What a shame. What a terrible shame.
00:02:20 ►
I’m sorry to start out with such a bummer of an announcement,
00:02:23 ►
but I thought I’d better just get that out of the way and move on.
00:02:26 ►
Better to end on an upbeat note, don’t you think?
00:02:29 ►
And so, to get this program a little more upbeat, let’s get right to today’s guest speakers.
00:02:36 ►
The talks I’m going to play are from the Blanque Norte lectures at last year’s Burning Man Festival, and they are by Mark Pesci and Amanda Fielding.
00:02:46 ►
Mark and Amanda both spoke on Friday as part of a real star-studded bill.
00:02:52 ►
We began that afternoon with Dale Pendle talking about Horizon Anarchism,
00:02:57 ►
and you can hear that presentation in our podcast number 55.
00:03:02 ►
Amanda was next on the program and was followed by Mark. And then after Mark
00:03:06 ►
came the art panel with Alex and Allison Gray, Martina Hoffman, and Roberto Venosa. And their
00:03:12 ►
talks were podcasts number 51 and 52. Then came Eric Davis. His was podcast 49. And Daniel
00:03:20 ►
Pinchbeck, podcast 50. So you can see these are a little out of order,
00:03:25 ►
and I hadn’t planned on it being so long before podcasting Mark and Amanda’s talks,
00:03:30 ►
but I guess I just got a little carried away with all those trilogues
00:03:34 ►
and kind of forgot where I was with the Palenque Norte series.
00:03:38 ►
And I have to admit that it feels good now to hear some more of the talks from Burning Man again.
00:03:44 ►
I’m going to play these two talks in the order in which they were given,
00:03:47 ►
so we’ll begin with Amanda Fielding’s presentation and follow it with Mark’s.
00:03:52 ►
And I probably should mention that normally Amanda may be found giving talks in councils
00:03:57 ►
that are about as far removed from Burning Man as you can imagine.
00:04:02 ►
And I guess I have to admit that I maybe pressured her a little
00:04:05 ►
bit to give a talk at the burn, but my wife and I have been friends with Amanda and her
00:04:10 ►
brilliant husband Jamie for quite a long time, and I think she did this more as a favor to
00:04:16 ►
me than anything. But as you’ll hear in a minute, our tribe couldn’t have a better friend
00:04:21 ►
than Amanda. She’s devoted a significant portion of her life
00:04:25 ►
to lobbying and teaching government officials
00:04:27 ►
the truth about psychedelic medicines.
00:04:30 ►
And I’m happy to report that her work
00:04:32 ►
is finally taking hold in England
00:04:34 ►
and at the United Nations.
00:04:37 ►
In fact, both Ethan Nadelman and Sasha Shulgin
00:04:40 ►
referred to Amanda’s recent successes
00:04:42 ►
in their Planque Norte presentations the next day.
00:04:45 ►
So let’s join Amanda Fielding and the Big Tent in Theon Village
00:04:49 ►
during the 2006 Burning Man Festival
00:04:52 ►
and hear about her work with the Beckley Foundation,
00:04:56 ►
which is a charitable trust that promotes the investigation of consciousness
00:04:59 ►
and its modulation from a multidisciplinary perspective.
00:05:06 ►
Thank you very much.
00:05:09 ►
I founded and run an organization called the Beckley Foundation.
00:05:16 ►
Now, probably most of you hardly remember where England is,
00:05:20 ►
let alone have heard of the Beckley Foundation.
00:05:23 ►
So you might wonder what interest it is to
00:05:26 ►
you. But Britain is America’s greatest ally in all the dreadful things it’s doing at the
00:05:39 ►
moment, the war on terror and the war on drugs. And without Britain, America would feel rather isolated.
00:05:50 ►
Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has been called Bush’s poodle, or the chinkalist dummy, and
00:05:58 ►
he’s about to go. Now, the good news is that during this summer
00:06:06 ►
July and August
00:06:07 ►
the select committee
00:06:10 ►
of science and technology
00:06:12 ►
which is the body which advises
00:06:14 ►
the government what to do
00:06:16 ►
has
00:06:17 ►
sent out a paper
00:06:21 ►
saying
00:06:22 ►
that
00:06:23 ►
the current classification system for illegal drugs is not fit for purpose
00:06:32 ►
and should be replaced by a more scientifically based scale of harm.
00:06:38 ►
In light of the serious failings of the ABC classification system that has been identified,
00:06:46 ►
we urge the Home Secretary
00:06:48 ►
to honour his predecessor’s
00:06:49 ►
commitment to review the
00:06:51 ►
current system and do so
00:06:54 ►
without further delay.
00:06:57 ►
Now,
00:06:58 ►
the ABC system
00:06:59 ►
puts
00:07:00 ►
psilocybin mushrooms
00:07:03 ►
in Class A, in the same category as heroin and crack cocaine, as is LSD.
00:07:12 ►
And so the new scale will take into consideration, it will be classified on a scale of harms and benefits.
00:07:24 ►
on a scale of harms and benefits.
00:07:30 ►
And in this scale, it puts alcohol and tobacco high on the scale of harm,
00:07:36 ►
and cannabis relatively low, and LSD and ecstasy very low. This move originated at the Bechtle Foundation
00:07:48 ►
with the far-reaching talks I had with Professor Colin Blakemore,
00:07:53 ►
one of England’s most highly regarded scientists,
00:07:55 ►
currently head of the Medical Research Council,
00:07:58 ►
which gives out all the grant money.
00:08:02 ►
Now, I’ve been involved in the movement to integrate the enhancement of consciousness
00:08:07 ►
into the fabric of society since the mid-60s, and I came to the conclusion that the best
00:08:15 ►
way forward was to get those in high positions to see the wisdom of what we are saying, and so fight the cause for us.
00:08:28 ►
On the scientific advisory board of the Bechtle Foundation,
00:08:34 ►
I have most of the scientists who are in charge of advising the government,
00:08:38 ►
the advisory council of the misuse of drugs.
00:08:42 ►
By getting them on side, they do the work for one. By being a foundation,
00:08:49 ►
I’ve discovered that one stops being an individual with a slightly dubious past, and one becomes
00:09:00 ►
a very respectable body. and on two major occasions
00:09:05 ►
the British government
00:09:06 ►
has come to me
00:09:07 ►
in order for the
00:09:08 ►
Bechtle Foundation
00:09:09 ►
to review their
00:09:11 ►
papers on drug policy
00:09:17 ►
for the next 25 years.
00:09:20 ►
And I never speak myself
00:09:22 ►
but I speak through
00:09:24 ►
carefully spoken, carefully chosen experts
00:09:28 ►
who, after many conversations, come to have the similar attitude as myself,
00:09:36 ►
which is the present drug policy just simply doesn’t work.
00:09:41 ►
And indeed, it’s the policy which is causing most of the damages. So that
00:09:48 ►
is a little bit of hope that what England does now is a tipping point for the United
00:09:57 ►
States to do later. The Bechtle Foundation has over over the last five years, given a series of seminars which bring together the top scientists and policy makers from England, America, the United Nations, Europe.
00:10:21 ►
United Nations, Europe.
00:10:26 ►
And they’ve now got a very good reputation.
00:10:29 ►
You can see them if you’re interested on the website,
00:10:30 ►
00:10:33 ►
And we also produce a series of papers,
00:10:39 ►
reports like this,
00:10:40 ►
which are heavily written by the experts in the field.
00:10:44 ►
And my particular interest is in separating the psychedelics and marijuana from the rest of the drugs.
00:11:01 ►
Because in drug policy circuits, people treat with great boredom the psychedelics
00:11:09 ►
because they cause no crime and it’s just much easier to leave them in the most dangerous
00:11:14 ►
category and not to fiddle with them and not many people complain. So in the Beckley Foundation, I’ve got a lot of experts to write on global drug policy,
00:11:29 ►
and their views are taken very seriously around the world.
00:11:33 ►
And all the while, I put in information about the psychedelics and marijuana.
00:11:42 ►
And now we have started two other bodies. One international society for
00:11:52 ►
drug policy analysts, which consists of the most important drug policy analysts in the
00:11:58 ►
world, headed by Peter Reuter, chaired by Peter Reuter, who get together and they again
00:12:04 ►
have very little interest in marijuana and psychedelics
00:12:08 ►
so I would push them on that front.
00:12:10 ►
And then another body is the International Blood Policy Consortium
00:12:15 ►
which brings together over 40 countries
00:12:18 ►
and has a relatively big influence at meetings like the United Nations
00:12:25 ►
and the European Commission.
00:12:28 ►
We had one big
00:12:30 ►
success in, as you know,
00:12:32 ►
I’m sure, the United Nations
00:12:33 ►
is run by America, and America
00:12:36 ►
was trying to block
00:12:37 ►
any aid going to countries
00:12:39 ►
which teach harm reduction
00:12:42 ►
or
00:12:42 ►
safe sex
00:12:46 ►
on the grounds that it looks as though it encourages those activities.
00:12:53 ►
And the Berkeley Foundation started a movement with the European governments
00:12:57 ►
which indeed blocked that, and so America didn’t have its way
00:13:02 ►
and the United Nations got the idea and gave grants to those countries.
00:13:10 ►
Now, in 2008, the United Nations is going to have the review of the last ten years of drug policy
00:13:20 ►
and when they set the agenda for the next ten years.
00:13:25 ►
policy, and when they set the agenda for the next 10 years. And as I’m sure you all know,
00:13:35 ►
they spend multi-billions every year on eliminating drugs. And so we at the Bexley Foundation have decided to do some reports which will tell the truth, because the United Nations
00:13:41 ►
reports don’t tell the truth, they tell what the Americans want to hear so we’re doing
00:13:47 ►
one on
00:13:48 ►
I’m chairing the select committee
00:13:50 ►
of choosing the people to do one
00:13:52 ►
on the Cannabis Commission
00:13:54 ►
which will
00:13:55 ►
have the top scientists and policy experts
00:13:58 ►
on cannabis
00:14:00 ►
and
00:14:01 ►
I feel it might also be interesting
00:14:04 ►
but I haven’t got this funded yet to do one on psychedelics And I feel it might also be interesting, but I haven’t got this funded yet, to do one
00:14:06 ►
on psychedelics, because I feel the mood on psychedelics is beginning to change. At the
00:14:18 ►
last Beckley Foundation seminar, which was held at the House of Lords in London. We had the top of drug policy of the United Nations and of the EU.
00:14:30 ►
And Dave Nichols, who probably you know from America,
00:14:34 ►
gave a brilliant talk on psychedelics.
00:14:39 ►
And Bob Schuster, ex-director of NIDA,
00:14:43 ►
came out and said how much he valued psychedelics and marijuana in his own life.
00:14:49 ►
So this was quite a big surprise to these people.
00:14:54 ►
And the United Nations man, who was a very nice man, agreed with me that the regulation on psychedelics should be altered.
00:15:08 ►
So, basically, that’s the drug policy side of the Beckley Foundation.
00:15:15 ►
The other side is the scientific research side.
00:15:22 ►
Now, I’m not a scientist, and nor am I a politician
00:15:26 ►
I’m just a kind of
00:15:28 ►
amateur
00:15:30 ►
but I’ve found over the years
00:15:33 ►
I’ve managed to get into the brain imaging units
00:15:37 ►
which I’ve been working at
00:15:38 ►
because since psychedelics became illegal
00:15:41 ►
brain sciences
00:15:44 ►
and techniques of measuring what’s happening
00:15:48 ►
in the brain have expanded exponentially. And I keep feeling, if only I had a month
00:15:54 ►
or two in a brain imaging unit, and with the freedom to do what I wanted, with a technician
00:15:59 ►
or two who knew how to work the buttons, one could discover a whole range of fascinating new facts
00:16:06 ►
to do with consciousness and expanded and enhanced things.
00:16:12 ►
So I build up relationships with scientists I can work with
00:16:16 ►
and with brain imaging units where one can work
00:16:21 ►
and then with changing policies,
00:16:25 ►
one can actually get the research done,
00:16:29 ►
because at the moment it’s not illegal to do research on controlled substances,
00:16:33 ►
but no one does it because it’s not good for grant funding or careers or anything else.
00:16:42 ►
careers or anything else.
00:16:44 ►
So the Bechtel Foundation
00:16:45 ►
I instigate and get
00:16:48 ►
involved in scientific
00:16:49 ►
research and find the funding
00:16:52 ►
to do it.
00:16:53 ►
But at the moment it’s mainly
00:16:56 ►
pilot funding.
00:16:58 ►
And the
00:16:59 ►
research that we have
00:17:02 ►
on board at the moment
00:17:03 ►
the most exciting one, maybe, in the present company
00:17:09 ►
will be the first research with LSD and human subjects.
00:17:16 ►
And we have now got the first three permissions
00:17:20 ►
with two more rather minor ones to follow.
00:17:25 ►
And so we expect by the end of this
00:17:28 ►
year to be
00:17:29 ►
well on the way with that research
00:17:32 ►
and hopefully having
00:17:33 ►
got that, having opened the door
00:17:36 ►
to scientific research
00:17:37 ►
on humans, which after all is about the
00:17:39 ►
only way one can do scientific research on
00:17:41 ►
consciousness
00:17:42 ►
we will open the gates to the orchard
00:17:47 ►
where there’ll be immense ripe picking of fruit.
00:17:54 ►
And the other research I’m doing is on cannabis,
00:18:00 ►
what underlies, what neural correlates underlie the benefits of cannabis.
00:18:06 ►
All the research which has gone before is always on the harms of cannabis.
00:18:12 ►
So this will be what changes in blood supply,
00:18:18 ►
what changes in electrical and magnetic activity and and neurotransmitters,
00:18:26 ►
happen when people experience the benefits of cannabis.
00:18:30 ►
And doing this research is someone called Professor Dave Nutt,
00:18:35 ►
who is an internationally acclaimed expert on addiction, particularly.
00:18:43 ►
And he’s one of England’s leading scientists.
00:18:46 ►
And again, he chairs the advisory council
00:18:49 ►
of the misuse of drugs.
00:18:51 ►
So for years I’ve been saying to him,
00:18:53 ►
let’s do some OSD research
00:18:57 ►
because that’s trying out to be done.
00:19:00 ►
And there’ll be lots of rich findings.
00:19:03 ►
And he always says to me,
00:19:04 ►
slowly Amanda, slowly, slowly,
00:19:06 ►
let’s start with cannabis.
00:19:08 ►
But he’s already talking about the possibility
00:19:11 ►
of having a psychedelic,
00:19:13 ►
he’s got an opiate and alcohol department
00:19:20 ►
in his university,
00:19:22 ►
and he suggested having a triangle
00:19:23 ►
with psychedelics as a third point.
00:19:27 ►
So I hope within a year or two
00:19:28 ►
to have that going.
00:19:30 ►
But on the other hand,
00:19:32 ►
I don’t think really it matters where,
00:19:34 ►
so long as it’s a respectable university
00:19:38 ►
which has a good reputation.
00:19:43 ►
I’m open to use any university which has the equipment and the willingness
00:19:48 ►
to do the research.
00:19:52 ►
Another line of research that I’m doing, which is very, very fascinating, is high-level meditation.
00:20:03 ►
I was lucky enough to get a very high-level meditator,
00:20:07 ►
someone called Sister Jinti of the Brahma Kumaris Church,
00:20:11 ►
an Indian organization which is across the world.
00:20:16 ►
And she went into a mech machine,
00:20:21 ►
which is the kind of latest toy in the brain imaging world.
00:20:24 ►
It’s an enormous hair dryer filled with, I forget what,
00:20:28 ►
but it picks up things that the EEG cannot pick up
00:20:32 ►
and goes deeper into the brain.
00:20:34 ►
It’s very good at placing where stimulation comes from, magnetic changes.
00:20:41 ►
And with her, we had a paradigm of not meditating for 10 minutes, then meditating
00:20:50 ►
for 20 minutes, and then stop meditating for 10 minutes. And when she started meditating,
00:20:57 ►
several things happened which have never been seen before. One is her heartbeat went up from 60 to 90 beats per minute.
00:21:09 ►
She was sitting totally still.
00:21:12 ►
You can’t move at all in the machine or it upsets it.
00:21:15 ►
So that kind of shows the change in blood circulation,
00:21:18 ►
and blood circulation is one of my pet subjects
00:21:21 ►
as the underlying change of consciousness.
00:21:24 ►
pet subjects as the underlying change of consciousness.
00:21:30 ►
She then, I don’t know how much you know about the brain, but the visual and the motor sections,
00:21:36 ►
the motor somatic area of the brain,
00:21:39 ►
the electrical activity was desensitized.
00:21:43 ►
It was turned off
00:21:45 ►
and the high level
00:21:48 ►
activity, the gamma
00:21:49 ►
went vastly up
00:21:52 ►
I mean more so than anyone had ever
00:21:54 ►
seen before
00:21:55 ►
in the right
00:21:57 ►
cerebellum, which again is an area
00:22:00 ►
no one has ever identified before
00:22:02 ►
and during this phase
00:22:04 ►
she was having an identification
00:22:07 ►
with God and love and pure light. So it’s like a snapshot of the inside of the brain
00:22:16 ►
of a mystical experience, which is very, very fascinating. And what my aim is to do different types of meditation masters of meditation
00:22:26 ►
do a high level Buddhist meditator
00:22:29 ►
sadhu, various other forms of meditation
00:22:32 ►
and see the similarities and the differences
00:22:35 ►
and then also do it with psychedelics
00:22:40 ►
because as probably most of us know here
00:22:43 ►
there’s very strong tendency for the psychedelics
00:22:48 ►
to increase their mystical experience.
00:22:52 ►
And by doing brain images, we can see the neural correlates and see the similarities
00:22:59 ►
and the differences.
00:23:01 ►
And one could say, now what’s the point of seeing the neural correlates?
00:23:06 ►
And I think that’s a very great point, because I think if one can understand how these states
00:23:16 ►
of consciousness alter, it becomes much more difficult for governments to block it because everyone knows that
00:23:25 ►
the states
00:23:26 ►
achieved through prayer
00:23:29 ►
or meditation
00:23:30 ►
are kind of good for the
00:23:33 ►
society
00:23:34 ►
and if we can show that very similar states
00:23:37 ►
are achieved through
00:23:39 ►
the use of
00:23:41 ►
chemicals
00:23:43 ►
used in a certain way,
00:23:46 ►
it becomes very, very much more difficult to put them down.
00:23:52 ►
And also, if one can show that bliss and how the difference takes between bliss and horror, panic,
00:24:02 ►
all those negative things what is the
00:24:05 ►
blood situation, what is the
00:24:07 ►
neural situation
00:24:08 ►
and the
00:24:10 ►
neurotransmitters
00:24:12 ►
we learn
00:24:14 ►
in our know thyself
00:24:17 ►
instruction of life
00:24:20 ►
and we can use it more
00:24:22 ►
as a medicine to help people.
00:24:28 ►
And I don’t look upon psychiatric substances only as a medicine.
00:24:33 ►
I think they are also there for, as I’m sure you do, as the enhancement of one’s personal
00:24:40 ►
life.
00:24:41 ►
And although we, in the present climate need
00:24:46 ►
to talk of the medical
00:24:47 ►
benefits and also
00:24:49 ►
the spiritual benefits
00:24:52 ►
there’s also the benefits
00:24:54 ►
of
00:24:55 ►
being
00:24:57 ►
having all one’s senses
00:25:00 ►
deeper
00:25:01 ►
and in my opinion
00:25:03 ►
to experience getting high means that you see a bigger view
00:25:09 ►
from higher up the mountain with a greatly enlarged area of simultaneous association
00:25:17 ►
of the neurons.
00:25:18 ►
So you get more far reaching associations and I feel that is what our kind of poor, neurotic, mad species needs,
00:25:30 ►
more than anything else, is to get a better view of both themselves and the world situation.
00:25:39 ►
And I feel the tool is to expand consciousness,
00:25:42 ►
whether by dancing, meditation, or psychoactive substances.
00:25:48 ►
We have an added treat for you today that we had, I had somebody show up on the fly
00:25:54 ►
I didn’t expect to see here, and those of you who already know Mark Pesci know you’re
00:26:00 ►
in for a real treat, and Mark Pesci is going to do a short presentation for us here.
00:26:06 ►
I’ll say this, and I hope you’ll give his website address.
00:26:10 ►
His website has so much information, essays and sound, MP3s.
00:26:17 ►
You can spend days there.
00:26:18 ►
I have, and I guess the best way for me to introduce Mark is that I think he has probably one of the most brilliant minds
00:26:26 ►
I’ve had the privilege of encountering on this planet.
00:26:28 ►
So please help me welcome Mark Pesci.
00:26:35 ►
Hey, folks.
00:26:40 ►
This is probably the only time I will be able to give a lecture wearing a sarong.
00:26:47 ►
Don’t you love Burning Man?
00:26:49 ►
I’ve been spending my time, I would have been in here more,
00:26:52 ►
but we’ve been having a sort of alternate series of speakers over at the Oracle at Arrowhead,
00:26:56 ►
which is where I’ve been camped.
00:26:57 ►
Now, everyone in this room is an Arrowhead member, right?
00:27:04 ►
Everyone in this room is an Arrowhead member, right? Everyone in this room is an Arrowwood member, right?
00:27:10 ►
They need your money.
00:27:12 ►
They do God’s work, and you all know it,
00:27:14 ►
because how often do you go to that site?
00:27:17 ►
Oh my God, what did I just take?
00:27:18 ►
I’m going to go to Arrowwood to find out.
00:27:21 ►
Okay.
00:27:23 ►
Today’s talk is actually going to be on the topic of the future,
00:27:26 ►
because that’s the topic of Burning Man this year,
00:27:29 ►
the future, hope, and fear.
00:27:31 ►
So today’s talk is called The Future of All.
00:27:35 ►
Now, the future of all, at least as far as scientists envision it,
00:27:41 ►
is a gradually approaching senescence,
00:27:44 ►
a slow senility. Everything expands and cools
00:27:52 ►
like nitrous from a whippet until finally all has ceased in its movement. And that,
00:28:01 ►
of course, is perhaps a trillion years from now.
00:28:09 ►
So it’s probably more appropriate today, here at Palenque Norte,
00:28:13 ►
to talk about other sorts of futures,
00:28:18 ►
which are just as all-consuming, but perhaps somewhat more immediate.
00:28:19 ►
And there’s a word.
00:28:23 ►
It’s on nearly everyone’s lips.
00:28:26 ►
It’s most often left unvoiced and you know that word
00:28:28 ►
and if you know me you know damn well
00:28:30 ►
that I know that word too
00:28:32 ►
eschaton
00:28:34 ►
the impending end of everything
00:28:39 ►
I’m paying off, that’s my sound effects guy
00:28:41 ►
it’s become the fix-it star I’m paying off. That’s my sound effects guy.
00:28:47 ►
It’s become the fix-it star in this particular corner of culture
00:28:51 ►
that on 21 December 2012,
00:28:55 ►
the world comes to an end.
00:28:58 ►
Now, knowing your expiration date,
00:29:02 ►
that’s a very big thing.
00:29:04 ►
It’s a huge thing. It can be amazingly empowering,
00:29:08 ►
possibly. But this received knowledge, we must ask, did you receive it? Was it received by you personally? Or did you read it?
00:29:26 ►
Or did someone tell you?
00:29:28 ►
In other words, did it come in short via human communication?
00:29:34 ►
Because while we must trust communication,
00:29:38 ►
we must always distrust communication.
00:29:43 ►
Every word we hear
00:29:45 ►
is both truth and lie.
00:29:50 ►
And yet,
00:29:51 ►
so many are ready to believe.
00:29:54 ►
They’re ready to take that leap of faith.
00:29:56 ►
They’re ready to declare this sick,
00:29:59 ►
corrupt, shallow, unconscious mess
00:30:02 ►
that we politely call civilization,
00:30:06 ►
a failed experiment.
00:30:09 ►
And because we are ready to believe,
00:30:12 ►
we are ready to receive the word of the eschaton.
00:30:20 ►
We receive it uncritically,
00:30:23 ►
we receive it unthinkingly, we receive it uncritically. We receive it unthinkingly.
00:30:26 ►
We receive it unconsciously.
00:30:29 ►
And this idea drives a huge segment of the community.
00:30:35 ►
It’s become a day-fix-day.
00:30:37 ►
It’s become an organizing principle.
00:30:39 ►
Now, as some of you may know, if you’ve heard one of my talks over at Erewith,
00:30:45 ►
I have nothing against knowing your expiration date.
00:30:50 ►
It can be quite important.
00:30:51 ►
It can drive you to dedication.
00:30:54 ►
It can drive you to getting your shit in gear.
00:30:56 ►
It can drive you to self-work.
00:31:00 ►
But I need to ask you all, look in your hearts and look at your culture and tell me if you see this happening.
00:31:10 ►
Does the knowledge that there’s just a little bit more than six years left on the civilizational clock
00:31:15 ►
drive any individual that you have ever met anywhere?
00:31:21 ►
Have we seen anyone abandon their attachments
00:31:25 ►
and prepare themselves for this presumed inevitable end?
00:31:30 ►
You know the answer.
00:31:31 ►
I know the answer.
00:31:33 ►
That answer is no.
00:31:37 ►
Now, if you really believed it,
00:31:42 ►
things would be different.
00:31:43 ►
We have precedent for this.
00:31:46 ►
In this country,
00:31:47 ►
in the 1830s,
00:31:49 ►
a preacher by the name of Miller
00:31:51 ►
did a whole bunch of arithmetic
00:31:53 ►
and declared,
00:31:55 ►
lo and behold,
00:31:56 ►
I have calculated the date of the second coming,
00:32:00 ►
October 12, 1843.
00:32:03 ►
And he began to preach around America,
00:32:06 ►
and he gathered up a band of followers,
00:32:08 ►
and they were called the Millerites,
00:32:09 ►
and the Millerites prayed, and they worshipped,
00:32:11 ►
and they lived in a sort of primitive, apostolic communism,
00:32:15 ►
and shared the goods, and as the great day approached,
00:32:18 ►
they sold their goods off one by one,
00:32:20 ►
and the great day approached, and approached, and it passed.
00:32:25 ►
Ah, Miller said, I’m sorry, I’ve made a small mistake in my arithmetic.
00:32:30 ►
1844, I forgot that there’s no zero A.D.
00:32:35 ►
And so his followers rejoiced.
00:32:37 ►
He said, this time for sure.
00:32:40 ►
And they waited, and they prayed, and the blessed day approached and approached
00:32:46 ►
and it passed.
00:32:48 ►
And in American history, this is known by historians
00:32:51 ►
as the Great Disappointment.
00:32:58 ►
Now the Millerites had sold or given away
00:33:00 ►
everything they owned in preparation
00:33:01 ►
and now poor and disappointed, they went forth.
00:33:05 ►
And some of them became what we know today as the Seventh-day Adventists.
00:33:10 ►
Others became smaller products than sex.
00:33:13 ►
And so on.
00:33:14 ►
And this pattern repeats.
00:33:16 ►
In 1914, the Jehovah’s Witnesses preached the end of the world,
00:33:19 ►
which they saw coming at the beginning of the First World War.
00:33:23 ►
And then in Jonestown in 1978.
00:33:26 ►
And then Heaven’s Gate in 1996.
00:33:29 ►
It’s a recurring theme.
00:33:31 ►
The absence of an end forcing the hand of God.
00:33:38 ►
But actually, seriously, we have a lot less to worry about. If I saw anyone, anywhere, actually acting as though 2012 were some sort of inevitability, I would be worried.
00:33:55 ►
Instead, we carry on blindly, blandly, as though time stretched on indefinitely, without limit.
00:34:04 ►
I’m stretched on indefinitely without limit.
00:34:07 ►
And that’s in one sense very reassuring and in another quite depressing.
00:34:13 ►
Now, I am not John the Baptist.
00:34:17 ►
I am not declaring the coming of the end.
00:34:21 ►
Nor, should I make clear, did Terrence McKenna. He put his received wisdom
00:34:28 ►
out there, and he did not say, take and eat. What he said was, take this and test this.
00:34:36 ►
And I think his greatest disappointment was that so few people actually took that challenge up.
00:34:46 ►
Instead, his fans took up his story.
00:34:49 ►
They took it up hook, line, and sinker.
00:34:51 ►
They set their clocks and they waited, but they did nothing.
00:34:56 ►
And I think that that is this era’s great disappointment.
00:35:02 ►
Now, what would we do if we really believed in our hearts
00:35:07 ►
that the eschaton was so close to hand?
00:35:11 ►
That knowing would transform us.
00:35:15 ►
It would transform our actions into perfection.
00:35:18 ►
It would transform our vision into utter clarity.
00:35:22 ►
It would transform our hearts into perfect love, perfect trust, and perfect understanding.
00:35:29 ►
And I do not see this.
00:35:34 ►
And yet we hope.
00:35:37 ►
And if only because of my own association with McKenna,
00:35:42 ►
people often look to me for that confirmation
00:35:45 ►
that it is coming,
00:35:47 ►
that it is true,
00:35:49 ►
even when it’s not on the menu.
00:35:52 ►
Last year I gave a talk at MindStates.
00:35:54 ►
I talked for 45, 50 minutes
00:35:56 ►
about social networks,
00:35:58 ►
organizing principles,
00:35:59 ►
new forms of communication,
00:36:00 ►
BitTorrent,
00:36:00 ►
media distribution networks,
00:36:02 ►
and how this is all changing
00:36:03 ►
the way we communicate.
00:36:04 ►
And we opened the audience
00:36:05 ►
to questions
00:36:05 ►
and the first question
00:36:06 ►
was about the I Ching
00:36:07 ►
and the end of time.
00:36:10 ►
I hadn’t talked about that
00:36:12 ►
but because I’m associated
00:36:14 ►
with McKenna
00:36:15 ►
and because people want to believe
00:36:16 ►
in this impending end of everything
00:36:18 ►
despite any evidence
00:36:19 ►
they may or may not have
00:36:20 ►
of their own senses
00:36:21 ►
they basically completely ignored
00:36:23 ►
everything I’d said
00:36:24 ►
in the hour before
00:36:25 ►
that and just wanted to focus on this one idea of theirs.
00:36:29 ►
Now, I’m making a public statement here today at Palenque Norte.
00:36:33 ►
I have grown weary of this.
00:36:37 ►
I have had enough of this.
00:36:41 ►
And fortunately, I’ll have no more of this.
00:36:47 ►
For now, I will simply demur.
00:36:54 ►
Now, for my part, I have often equated the eschaton with the idea of technological singularity.
00:37:02 ►
That’s what I want to talk about now.
00:37:02 ►
of technological singularity.
00:37:04 ►
That’s what I want to talk about now.
00:37:06 ►
That’s a term that was coined by science fiction author Werner Wenschen
00:37:08 ►
in a lecture that he gave at NASA Ames
00:37:11 ►
back in 1993.
00:37:13 ►
I’m a friend of Werner’s,
00:37:15 ►
and he and I have talked about
00:37:16 ►
technological singularity at great length,
00:37:18 ►
philosophical terms.
00:37:19 ►
And I remember in one of our first conversations,
00:37:21 ►
he suddenly just sort of stiffened up and said,
00:37:23 ►
you are a gradualist!
00:37:25 ►
As if it were some sort of slam.
00:37:27 ►
Did you see how he just walked in and walked out?
00:37:32 ►
Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that this may be true.
00:37:36 ►
And I do admit that I hold to a certain sort of technological determinism.
00:37:42 ►
I do believe that we will ascend into something that at this moment
00:37:47 ►
is ineffable and unknowable
00:37:49 ►
and utterly different.
00:37:51 ►
But will this happen in a twinkling of an eye?
00:37:55 ►
I think maybe in retrospect
00:37:57 ►
it will look that way
00:37:59 ►
after we have recognized
00:38:01 ►
that the singularity has occurred.
00:38:05 ►
Now, a lot of people talk about the technological singularity
00:38:09 ►
as tied up into the idea of the rise of artificial intelligence.
00:38:13 ►
And if you read all of the signs as you were coming into campus all along,
00:38:17 ►
quote by Ray Kurzweil, whom I’ll come to a little bit later,
00:38:20 ►
he’s sort of the main proponent of this idea.
00:38:23 ►
I do not believe that there is such a thing as artificial intelligence.
00:38:29 ►
I don’t believe that there’s any sort of superhuman intelligence
00:38:32 ►
that will arise and overwhelm us all.
00:38:36 ►
It simply doesn’t work that way.
00:38:39 ►
We don’t have precedence in the natural world for that,
00:38:44 ►
or any historical or scientific
00:38:47 ►
record that it has ever happened. Instead, nature works by subsumption. When something
00:38:54 ►
new emerges, it subsumes the forms that came before it. The mitochondrion, which are in
00:39:00 ►
every cell in your body, are proof that this is the way that nature works.
00:39:08 ►
And so, what I would say is that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence.
00:39:14 ►
There is only intelligence.
00:39:16 ►
Whether it’s a vegetable, or animal, or mineral, all intelligence is one.
00:39:25 ►
So, back to Kurzweil.
00:39:27 ►
He’s perhaps the most visible proponent
00:39:29 ►
of technological singularity.
00:39:33 ►
And for years, through his books,
00:39:34 ►
he’s promoted the idea of another kind of eschaton
00:39:37 ►
where the machine intelligences
00:39:40 ►
multiply their capabilities so rapidly
00:39:43 ►
that they transcend all forms of human understanding.
00:39:47 ►
And he says that’s the singularity.
00:39:49 ►
And it seems to me that as interesting as that idea sounds
00:39:52 ►
and kind of rational as it sounds,
00:39:54 ►
it actually could only be possible
00:39:57 ►
if those machines were born in a universe entirely separate from us.
00:40:03 ►
But this is not that world.
00:40:06 ►
And we can draw a line
00:40:07 ►
between ourselves and our machines
00:40:09 ►
no more than I can draw a line
00:40:11 ►
between myself and my eyeglasses.
00:40:15 ►
Pretty blurry.
00:40:22 ►
These are prosthetics, these machines,
00:40:25 ►
or perhaps, looking the other way around, we are theirs.
00:40:28 ►
But neither can really exist without the other.
00:40:33 ►
So this rise of artificial intelligence, it’s a misapprehension.
00:40:38 ►
The rise of intelligence, however, that seems historically inevitable and so
00:40:51 ►
with a great deal of skepticism
00:40:53 ►
because I’ve known a lot about Kurzweil’s ideas
00:40:56 ►
I sat through a lecture by him at a conference in Pisa
00:40:59 ►
just a few months ago that we were both speaking at
00:41:01 ►
now when I spoke, I spoke about the rise of something that I’m calling hyper-intelligence. You all know what hyper-intelligence is, though
00:41:10 ►
you’ve never heard the word before because you’ve all used Wikipedia. Alright? Wikipedia
00:41:16 ►
is the first identifiable artifact of the age of hyper-intelligence. It is the collective and collected knowledge of a billion human
00:41:27 ►
minds. It’s not artificial intelligence, it’s just intelligence. And it’s a whole lot more
00:41:36 ►
of it than we’ve ever had before. So, that’s what I said. Thenweil spoke and I braced myself
00:41:45 ►
for a descent into bullshit
00:41:47 ►
into an exploration of ideas
00:41:51 ►
that I thought had no fundamental grounding
00:41:53 ►
in the reality of the world
00:41:54 ►
and to my shock and my surprise
00:41:57 ►
I found that Kurzweil had recanted
00:41:59 ►
now what do I mean by this?
00:42:06 ►
you see in Kurzweil’s new future,
00:42:09 ►
we design the intelligences using the only guide we have at hand,
00:42:15 ►
our human brains.
00:42:17 ►
We can now design and simulate some of the simpler neural structures
00:42:20 ►
that we have in our heads.
00:42:21 ►
For example, the cerebellum, the back of your head,
00:42:24 ►
which controls all of the coordination. There are only four kinds of nerve cells in
00:42:29 ►
the cerebellum. And when you’re born and grow, all your brain does, all your genes do, is
00:42:34 ►
just make lots and lots and lots of copies of those four kinds of cells. That’s all it
00:42:37 ►
does. It doesn’t do anything else. But once you’re born and you’re out there in the world,
00:42:41 ►
every movement you make, every interaction you have, causes those cells to connect together in different ways.
00:42:46 ►
And so you can start out with something that’s very simple and completely undifferentiated,
00:42:50 ►
and then end up with someone who can dance, who can balance, who can laugh, who can sing,
00:42:56 ►
because we grow into it through our interaction in the world.
00:42:59 ►
And now Kurzweil is saying, gee, this is what we’re going to be teaching the computers how to do.
00:43:04 ►
This is how we’re going to bootstrap the computers into intelligence.
00:43:08 ►
In other words, intelligence cannot be made.
00:43:13 ►
Intelligence can only be grown.
00:43:17 ►
And that means that, in essence, the machines are no different than ourselves.
00:43:22 ►
We spend our lives, in particular our lives as young children,
00:43:27 ►
emerging into intelligence.
00:43:29 ►
Now this is known technically as constructivism.
00:43:31 ►
It was a field pioneered by a Swiss child psychologist
00:43:34 ►
named Jean Piaget.
00:43:36 ►
And Jean Piaget realized that all children
00:43:39 ►
are absolutely perfect scientists.
00:43:41 ►
That they go out into the world
00:43:42 ►
armed with hypotheses about the world and how it works
00:43:46 ►
and they put these hypotheses to the
00:43:48 ►
test. And if they pass the test,
00:43:50 ►
they’re subsumed and other hypotheses
00:43:51 ►
are built upon them. And if they fail,
00:43:53 ►
the hypotheses are altered
00:43:55 ►
and then put to the test again.
00:43:58 ►
And this is what all children do all the
00:44:00 ►
time. And if we’re wise,
00:44:02 ►
this is what all grown-ups do all the
00:44:04 ►
time. And if we’re wise, this is what all grown-ups do all the time. So all our children
00:44:11 ►
do this all the time. And we’re teaching our machines to do it as well. So what does this
00:44:16 ►
mean? This means that these are not our masters we’re talking about. These are our children.
00:44:22 ►
Our masters we’re talking about.
00:44:24 ►
These are our children.
00:44:29 ►
And how could we not help but love our children?
00:44:33 ►
How could they not help but love us?
00:44:35 ►
Okay.
00:44:40 ►
Yes, we may be the weird, cranky, opinionated elderly relatives.
00:44:41 ►
Absolutely.
00:44:42 ►
To these new beings.
00:44:46 ►
But we will be beloved because we are the weird cranky unusual relatives
00:44:47 ►
and hopefully
00:44:49 ►
we will be respected
00:44:51 ►
for our wisdom
00:44:52 ►
because we’ve been around
00:44:53 ►
the block of it
00:44:54 ►
and we can teach them things
00:44:55 ►
that they do not know themselves
00:44:57 ►
that at least
00:44:58 ►
is the theory
00:44:59 ►
but unlike the other theories
00:45:02 ►
about technological singularity
00:45:03 ►
this is one that we can put to the test.
00:45:12 ►
And unlike the theories proposed,
00:45:17 ►
enthusiastically believed in without really any supporting evidence
00:45:21 ►
about a shuddering, stuttering, catastrophic drop off the
00:45:26 ►
cataracts of history,
00:45:27 ►
this at least has observational
00:45:30 ►
evidence to support it.
00:45:32 ►
That seems to me to be the way
00:45:33 ►
the world actually works.
00:45:37 ►
And that,
00:45:38 ►
I believe,
00:45:40 ►
is the future alone.
00:45:42 ►
Thank you.
00:45:47 ►
Thank you, Mark.
00:45:48 ►
It’s so kind of you to put that presentation together on such short notice.
00:45:57 ►
I want to thank Mark and Amanda again for giving those talks,
00:46:01 ►
and I’ll put links to their websites and a picture or two from their presentations on the program notes
00:46:06 ►
that go along with this podcast.
00:46:09 ►
Again, you can find the program notes for this podcast at www.plankinorte.org.
00:46:16 ►
And if you were in the audience that day,
00:46:18 ►
you’ll also remember seeing Ann and Sasha Shulgin sitting up front listening with you.
00:46:23 ►
It probably was hot and dusty that day, because that’s the way it always is on the playa,
00:46:28 ►
but I don’t really remember it being uncomfortable.
00:46:31 ►
I can just remember all the excitement in the air and the vibe in the tent.
00:46:36 ►
I guess you can probably tell that I’m already starting to get excited about going back to Burning Man again this year.
00:46:41 ►
And for those of us who are counting, as of today, there are only 199 days left until the man burns.
00:46:50 ►
Okay, now how do I segue out of here?
00:46:54 ►
Well, gosh, I’ve got several emails I want to talk about, including one from Michael,
00:47:00 ►
whose very generous donation is paying for the bandwidth to deliver this and all the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon this month.
00:47:07 ►
So thank you very much, Michael.
00:47:09 ►
And I do want to comment on something you said in your email, along with several other emails I also want to comment on,
00:47:17 ►
but I’m going to have to do it next program because, gosh, today’s just been one of those days that seem to come with a million interruptions.
00:47:29 ►
So if I’m going to have any hope at all of getting this podcast out yet today,
00:47:34 ►
I’d better cut it short for now and start doing all the back-end stuff needed to get this program online.
00:47:39 ►
I really do appreciate you taking the time to join us here in the salon today,
00:47:43 ►
and I look forward to being back here with you again next week.
00:47:46 ►
It’s really nice to know that you’re out there.
00:47:48 ►
And believe me, you’re not alone.
00:47:53 ►
There are a lot more of us on this path than even the most optimistic of us know.
00:47:57 ►
So thanks again, of course, to Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:47:59 ►
for letting us use your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:48:03 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:48:08 ►
Be well, my friends.