Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:25 Rupert Sheldrake describes how one could go about creating a “consumer’s report” for odd-ball theories.
06:23Terence McKenna:“Ninety-five percent of the scientists who have rejected astrology cannot cast a natal horoscope, and that the ability to actually cast a horoscope never seemed to be required of these high-toned scientific critics of astrology. It was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without understanding.”
07:26 Ralph Abraham: “Well, the hypothesis of causative formation, of course, favors deeper fluff… . The thing about astrology is that people say it works. An argument could be made that even though the Zodiacal reference frame that it is based on no longer has any basis in the sky that it works because people believe in it, and because it is in the N-field, and that because it’s deeper fluff, basically.”
08:27 Ralph: “I think it could be that scientific research, done according to the best principles, has a greater weight in impressing itself upon the morphogenic field.”
12:53 Rupert: “This internalization of the use of blind techniques has, in fact, gone farthest in parapsychology, where 85% of experiments are double blind in recent journals. In medicine and psychology where everyone pays lip service to blind techniques, in practice the number of blind papers, or double blind, is in the region of six to seven percent of all published papers in the top journals.”
17:09 Terence: “Well, speculation and skepticism begin to sound like novelty and habit. So maybe these things are just counter-flows in the intellectual life of the culture that redress each other. And though we do have certain long-running forms of fuzz, it does tend to correct itself over time.”
19:47 Rupert: “The fact is that in the mainstream of our culture skepticism reigns supreme.”
22:27 Terence:“New kinds of people are making their voices heard, people from outside the male patriarchal, usual membership in the club.”
25:34 Rupert: “In most walks of life skepticism is normal. We expect it in politics, courts of law, etc.”
27:30 Rupert: “[Science] is the only universal system which is not open to the normal processes of challenge from competing points of view, having to justify itself in terms of evidence.”
Also mentioned in this podcast
Cross-cultural Medical Ethnobotany by Nat Bletter
The Ayahuasca Monologues
with Jonathan Philips, Jamye Waxman, Bill Kennedy, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Nat Bletter
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
So, here we are back together again without a week in between.
00:00:29 ►
I have to admit that if it wasn’t for this new book I’m working on, I’d be putting out two or three podcasts each week.
00:00:36 ►
I’ve got, I guess, over a hundred hours of material that’s already been recorded and my list of people I plan on interviewing keeps growing each week.
00:00:50 ►
I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying that it’s nice to be back here with you again.
00:00:56 ►
Now, as promised in the last program, I’m going to play the remaining 30 minutes of a trialogue between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake that they held
00:01:02 ►
in Santa Cruz, California in June of 1998.
00:01:07 ►
And their topic, as you’ll recall, is skepticism and the balkanization of epistemology.
00:01:15 ►
And when we left our merry trial loggers in the last podcast, I think Terrence had just
00:01:20 ►
said something like, something is making the conversation difficult.
00:01:24 ►
And that’s where I had to cut it off. It just said something like, something is making the conversation difficult.
00:01:26 ►
And that’s where I had to cut it off.
00:01:34 ►
Well, as you’ll soon hear, it didn’t take them long to go on from difficult to uproarious laughter.
00:01:36 ►
So let’s listen.
00:01:45 ►
Question authority, that’s the question. Something that is making the conversation difficult,
00:01:49 ►
and it has to do with propositions such as vitamin C is good for you,
00:01:52 ►
may or may not be true,
00:01:55 ►
and people of good faith may differ,
00:01:58 ►
but when someone says
00:01:59 ►
people were cloned in vats 12,000 years ago
00:02:04 ►
and placed here by the denizens of an invisible 12th planet,
00:02:09 ►
that’s a different kind of proposition than that vitamin C is.
00:02:13 ►
I agree with you. I think you have a good point there.
00:02:16 ►
Yes, but I believe in this area of diversity and free market approach is fine.
00:02:22 ►
I think what I do to the people who have that belief
00:02:25 ►
is in so far as I had
00:02:28 ►
funds and had any research responsibilities
00:02:30 ►
and so on in that area
00:02:32 ►
I’d commission a review by somebody
00:02:34 ►
based in Santa Cruz
00:02:35 ►
whose first thing
00:02:38 ►
would be to leaf through the
00:02:39 ►
common ground catalogue
00:02:42 ►
and just look at what’s
00:02:44 ►
available of theories of where we came from there’s hundreds of them in ground catalogue and just look at what’s available of theories of where we came from
00:02:47 ►
there’s hundreds of them in that catalogue
00:02:49 ►
the index of advertisers runs over pages
00:02:52 ►
let’s start right there
00:02:54 ►
and then do a review article
00:02:55 ►
with all these different theories classified
00:02:58 ►
a kind of taxonomy of crank theories
00:03:00 ►
in a given field
00:03:01 ►
then you’d have a sort of summary at the end and you could have sort of audience ratings within this class of
00:03:08 ►
theories this is sort of a National Non-Science Foundation yes and it’s
00:03:14 ►
called speculation I was told well I think it’s a huge field and it’s in speculation have all books been created yet
00:03:26 ►
somehow
00:03:27 ►
take your work with angels
00:03:30 ►
for example
00:03:32 ►
I was shocked
00:03:38 ►
shocked
00:03:39 ►
now we’re getting personal
00:03:40 ►
yes well there you are you see I think a lot of my enterprises would fall
00:03:49 ►
foul if you had editorial control I think I’d rather quail at the thought of sending
00:03:55 ►
them to your editorial desk because I’m not sure your judgment would be so capricious
00:04:01 ►
I’d never know quite what mood you were in whether or not my work on angels
00:04:05 ►
would get me in prematur or not
00:04:08 ►
well the dust might be sent
00:04:09 ►
but unfortunately our press is
00:04:11 ►
it’s deeper fluff
00:04:13 ►
it’s deeper fluff
00:04:15 ►
perhaps more pernicious
00:04:16 ►
well Zechariah Sitchin
00:04:23 ►
at least made a claim for deeper fluff
00:04:26 ►
in his translation
00:04:27 ►
in his apparently
00:04:29 ►
learning, gaining the ability
00:04:32 ►
to translate the
00:04:35 ►
Shumerian cuneiform writings
00:04:37 ►
and give us fresh translations
00:04:40 ►
and interpretations of old texts
00:04:42 ►
and so on
00:04:42 ►
he was at least making a claim for deep fluff
00:04:44 ►
and you’re denying him that claim.
00:04:47 ►
So even there, it’s hard to locate a given exemplar
00:04:50 ►
in the two-dimensional scale of fluff that we’ve agreed.
00:04:53 ►
Well, but his cosmology calls for a 12th planet.
00:04:58 ►
Where is it?
00:05:00 ►
There’s a site on the Internet
00:05:02 ►
that claims that every 100 inch or more
00:05:06 ►
telescope on earth is under
00:05:08 ►
the control of a worldwide
00:05:10 ►
conspiracy
00:05:11 ►
that does not want you
00:05:14 ►
to know that this 12th planet
00:05:16 ►
is clearly visible
00:05:18 ►
now that’s where I
00:05:20 ►
blow the whistle
00:05:21 ►
you don’t need to do that, we just need to
00:05:24 ►
sophisticate, we need an existing mechanism to extend it.
00:05:27 ►
A consumer’s report on speculation books.
00:05:32 ►
And in this consumer’s report,
00:05:34 ►
it would be like consumer’s reports on washing machines and so on.
00:05:38 ►
You’d have this theory here,
00:05:39 ►
and then you’d have a series of columns that said,
00:05:42 ►
any improbable requirement.
00:05:44 ►
And then you’d have, requires 12th planet. In this column, there’d be a series of columns that said any improbable requirement and then you’d have requires 12th planet in this column
00:05:47 ►
and then it would say the next column evidence for special requirement
00:05:55 ►
and then some are smaller and then it would say none known and so on.
00:06:02 ►
I think that’s marvellous and you could do the Zetitic
00:06:05 ►
and Microsoft
00:06:07 ►
not with concentrate on the new age
00:06:10 ►
exclusively
00:06:11 ►
all of these institutions
00:06:13 ►
are extraordinarily improbable
00:06:15 ►
you know Paul Firearm in a wonderful
00:06:18 ►
essay in his book
00:06:19 ►
Against Method points out
00:06:21 ►
that 95% of
00:06:23 ►
the scientists who have rejected astrology
00:06:27 ►
cannot cast a natal horoscope and that the ability to actually cast a
00:06:33 ►
horoscope never seemed to be required of these high tone scientific critics of
00:06:39 ►
astrology it was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without
00:06:44 ►
understanding quite but you see this would be the same there has to be this it was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without understanding
00:06:46 ►
quite but you see this would be the same
00:06:48 ►
there has to be this dismissal level that we all operate
00:06:52 ►
where there are certain things we pay attention to and certain ones we don’t
00:06:56 ►
in my case you know I include UFO
00:06:59 ►
I don’t include UFOs I include telepathy and so forth
00:07:03 ►
when it gets to UFOs weird extraterrestrial chariots,
00:07:07 ►
conspiracy theories, the CIA, I turn off.
00:07:10 ►
I mean, there may be UFOs,
00:07:11 ►
but it’s not something I take any interest in, really.
00:07:16 ►
Although I meet many people who tell me I should.
00:07:18 ►
So I think we all have our own criteria here,
00:07:20 ►
and opinions vary, times change, and so on.
00:07:24 ►
Well, the hypothesis of causative
00:07:26 ►
formation of course favors deeper fluff deeper fluff for example astrology which
00:07:33 ►
I think is very interesting I think it’s quite valid to reject it on scientific
00:07:38 ►
grounds without being personally able to cast a horoscope anyway you can consult
00:07:42 ►
the world wide web and get a horoscope from any date and place.
00:07:46 ►
So the thing about astrology is
00:07:49 ►
people say it works,
00:07:51 ►
and an argument could be made
00:07:53 ►
that even though the zodiacal reference frame
00:07:58 ►
that it’s based on
00:07:59 ►
has no longer any basis in the sky,
00:08:01 ►
that it works because people believe in it,
00:08:03 ►
because it’s in the M field, because it’s deeper fluff basically homeopathy
00:08:09 ►
could be an example of a genetic field nothing but belief that very recent
00:08:18 ►
started very recently it must have built up this field very rapidly because for a
00:08:23 ►
short time they did extensive research
00:08:25 ►
and I think it could be that scientific research
00:08:27 ►
done according to the best principles
00:08:29 ►
has
00:08:31 ►
a greater weight
00:08:34 ►
in impressing itself
00:08:35 ►
on the morphogenetic field
00:08:37 ►
the racial memory
00:08:39 ►
this is actually a radical
00:08:41 ►
form of relativism
00:08:43 ►
because what you’re saying is,
00:08:45 ►
if enough people believed in the Urantia book,
00:08:48 ►
it would be true.
00:08:49 ►
Yes.
00:08:50 ►
No.
00:08:51 ►
Not.
00:08:52 ►
Not true.
00:08:53 ►
Work.
00:08:54 ►
It would work.
00:08:55 ►
Astrology works for people.
00:08:57 ►
Okay, alchemy no longer works
00:09:00 ►
because people stop believing in it.
00:09:02 ►
Probably the real truth is that
00:09:04 ►
astrology works for
00:09:05 ►
the people it works for and the people
00:09:07 ►
it doesn’t work for and never mention it
00:09:10 ►
and have moved on to something else.
00:09:12 ►
Well, there’s extensive research
00:09:14 ►
in astrology
00:09:16 ►
that passes all the
00:09:17 ►
tests of statistical
00:09:20 ►
significance and so on.
00:09:22 ►
Well, there’s some, but I mean
00:09:23 ►
the reason people believe in it in newspapers and magazines and astrologers and so on, there’s some but I mean the reason people believe in it in newspapers
00:09:26 ►
and magazines and
00:09:27 ►
astrologers and so on has nothing to do with that
00:09:29 ►
evidence, they use it as a background
00:09:31 ►
reinforcement
00:09:32 ►
I wouldn’t call that astrology
00:09:35 ►
no, well you see I think
00:09:37 ►
that you could apply this approach
00:09:40 ►
of this consumer
00:09:41 ►
type evaluation approach to different
00:09:44 ►
sciences too and you know my latest
00:09:47 ►
thing in the skeptical inquire what I’m trying to do is extend the skepticism to the sciences
00:09:53 ►
themselves and there’s very interesting paper in the current issue of the journal of the history
00:09:57 ►
of medicine on the history of double-blind double blind techniques were invented by Benjamin Franklin
00:10:07 ►
in Paris in about 1890
00:10:09 ►
and they were investigated
00:10:11 ►
Franklin was commissioned
00:10:14 ►
by the king
00:10:16 ►
Louis XVI
00:10:17 ►
to head up a royal commission
00:10:19 ►
to investigate the claims of
00:10:21 ►
Anton Mesmer
00:10:22 ►
and the whole of Paris was talking about Mesmerism the whole of Paris was talking about Mesmerism.
00:10:26 ►
The whole of Europe was talking about Mesmerism,
00:10:29 ►
animal magnetism, and so on.
00:10:31 ►
And Franklin and the members of the Royal Commission
00:10:34 ►
were firmly of the opinion that this was some kind of delusion,
00:10:39 ►
that people believed in this,
00:10:40 ►
but it might just be a product of their mind or their belief.
00:10:44 ►
And so in order to test this they
00:10:45 ►
developed blind methodologies
00:10:48 ►
where people didn’t know who’d been treated
00:10:50 ►
or who hadn’t
00:10:51 ►
and their blind methodologies actually involved
00:10:54 ►
blindfolds and that’s why they were called blind
00:10:56 ►
they blindfolded people and then
00:10:58 ►
they could still tell or detect
00:10:59 ►
the animal magnetism
00:11:01 ►
and often they couldn’t
00:11:03 ►
so the blind techniques were then
00:11:06 ►
later employed in the 19th century
00:11:08 ►
they then became the standard
00:11:10 ►
armamentarium of the skeptics
00:11:12 ►
against these marginal phenomena
00:11:14 ►
first applied to hypnotism and animal
00:11:15 ►
magnetism, mesmerism
00:11:18 ►
then they were implied
00:11:20 ►
in the 19th century they were
00:11:21 ►
applied against homeopathic
00:11:24 ►
claims, people said it’s all just suggestion it’s all just their belief In the 19th century, they were applied against homeopathic claims.
00:11:26 ►
People said it’s all just suggestion.
00:11:29 ►
It’s all just their belief.
00:11:32 ►
So to test that, already with this precedent,
00:11:34 ►
they used blind techniques.
00:11:38 ►
And some of them, I think, did turn out to be suggestion,
00:11:39 ►
but some were not. And the homeopaths took seriously this criticism.
00:11:43 ►
And they were the first group in the whole of scientific research
00:11:46 ►
to internalize blind techniques by running their own blind trials.
00:11:51 ►
They didn’t just have the skeptical attack, they internalized it.
00:11:54 ►
This kind of debate went on in the earlier parts of this century
00:11:57 ►
against a lot of medical cures and claims,
00:12:00 ►
some of them apparently respectable,
00:12:01 ►
the use of enzymes that would cure this or that.
00:12:08 ►
And some of these were totally phony how did you turn it?
00:12:09 ►
it wasn’t until after the second world war
00:12:11 ►
that the standard randomized double blind clinical trial
00:12:14 ►
became the norm in medical research
00:12:17 ►
and it didn’t really become widespread until the 50s or 60s
00:12:22 ►
so this is another case of blind techniques being internalised
00:12:26 ►
within psychology at the beginning
00:12:28 ►
of the century when they were studying
00:12:30 ►
phenomena of the mind
00:12:32 ►
known to be subject to distortion
00:12:34 ►
blind techniques were used in psychology
00:12:36 ►
they were used in parapsychology
00:12:38 ►
in the 1880s
00:12:39 ►
they had the same thing and they started
00:12:42 ►
using them. The result of my
00:12:44 ►
survey of blind techniques
00:12:46 ►
published in Journal of Scientific Exploration
00:12:49 ►
and summarised in the Skeptical Inquirer
00:12:52 ►
shows that this internalisation of the use of blind techniques
00:12:56 ►
has in fact gone furthest in past psychology.
00:12:58 ►
85% of published experiments are double blind in recent journals.
00:13:03 ►
In medicine and psychology,
00:13:05 ►
where everyone pays lip service to the idea of blind techniques,
00:13:09 ►
in practice, the number of blind papers, or double blind,
00:13:13 ►
is in the region of 6-7% of all published papers in the top journals.
00:13:18 ►
In British medical journals, it’s about 6%.
00:13:22 ►
In the American ones, it’s higher.
00:13:24 ►
I’ve just done a review of Annals
00:13:26 ►
of Internal Medicine, the New England Journal
00:13:28 ►
of Medicine and the
00:13:29 ►
American Journal of Medicine where the
00:13:32 ►
percentage of blind or double blind
00:13:33 ►
is close to 20%.
00:13:35 ►
But that still leaves 80%
00:13:38 ►
of the papers not blind.
00:13:39 ►
Now in biology the number of blind
00:13:42 ►
papers out of over 900
00:13:44 ►
reviewed is 0.7%.
00:13:46 ►
In the physical sciences, chemistry, physics, inorganic and organic chemistry and physics,
00:13:53 ►
the number of blind papers out of hundreds of papers reviewed is precisely 0%.
00:13:59 ►
We then interviewed top professors in leading departments of the physics, chemistry, biology, molecular biology department at Cambridge and Oxford and other universities.
00:14:11 ►
And there, most people in physics and chemistry departments neither use nor teach blind techniques.
00:14:17 ►
They’re just not used. They’re not known.
00:14:20 ►
In some physiology departments they do, in some they don’t.
00:14:23 ►
In psychology departments, of course, they do,
00:14:25 ►
in medical they teach them at least.
00:14:27 ►
But at the most of science is totally innocent
00:14:30 ►
of the idea of blind techniques,
00:14:32 ►
the idea of scientific objectivity.
00:14:35 ►
So biased, so unlevel is the scientific faith
00:14:39 ►
on which modern science rests,
00:14:41 ►
is that just because there are scientists in these areas,
00:14:43 ►
they believe that by putting on a white coat they become completely objective not
00:14:48 ►
subject to the biases that bias chemists that bias medical people patients
00:14:54 ►
ordinary people observers of phenomena where everybody is their objective true
00:15:00 ►
and so I think this is scientific investigation of this I suggest using
00:15:04 ►
check checking out
00:15:05 ►
flying techniques in the laboratory
00:15:07 ►
do you get different results in a physics experiment
00:15:09 ►
if you do it blind compared with doing it
00:15:11 ►
under open conditions, actually do it
00:15:13 ►
by experiment, does it happen
00:15:15 ►
that’s so biased has been
00:15:17 ►
this that there’s no scepticism being
00:15:19 ►
extended to normal science itself
00:15:21 ►
and in my consumer’s report on different
00:15:23 ►
sciences I’d have a column,
00:15:25 ►
Blind Awareness of Need for Blind Methodology,
00:15:29 ►
Use of Blind Methodology,
00:15:31 ►
Percentage of Papers Using Blind Methodology,
00:15:34 ►
and then Physics and Chemistry,
00:15:35 ►
the Awareness of the Possibility of Bias,
00:15:37 ►
would have to be practically zero.
00:15:39 ►
And probably in the new age as well,
00:15:42 ►
they both could profit from this.
00:15:43 ►
It would probably wipe out most of the things
00:15:46 ►
I’m objecting to
00:15:48 ►
well the popularity of the double blind
00:15:50 ►
methodology in parapsychology
00:15:52 ►
is obviously due to the
00:15:54 ►
difficulty of convincing people
00:15:56 ►
of the validity of the results
00:15:57 ►
and in other words under the
00:16:00 ►
special weight
00:16:02 ►
of skepticism
00:16:03 ►
that’s applied to the special weight of skepticism that’s applied to the special fringe of speculation.
00:16:09 ►
So somehow there’s a fundamental dialectic
00:16:12 ►
of the evolutionary mind
00:16:15 ►
that has to do with the balance and interplay
00:16:18 ►
between speculation and skepticism.
00:16:22 ►
These are the two forces at work,
00:16:23 ►
and we want them to both be healthy and
00:16:26 ►
freely interplay, and then if a new
00:16:28 ►
technique like double-blind experimental
00:16:30 ►
work comes up,
00:16:32 ►
then the
00:16:33 ►
interplay of these forces will
00:16:36 ►
guarantee that it’s used.
00:16:38 ►
Maybe, Terence, that your
00:16:40 ►
to summarize your case
00:16:42 ►
against the New
00:16:43 ►
Age fuzz
00:16:45 ►
is that there seems to be an area in the evolving mind
00:16:51 ►
where the speculation is not balanced
00:16:54 ►
by an appropriate amount of skepticism.
00:16:57 ►
You want to shine a flashlight of skeptical consideration
00:17:01 ►
onto that area of unbalanced fuzz.
00:17:05 ►
We’re interested in balanced fuzz here.
00:17:08 ►
Well, speculation and skepticism begin to sound like novelty and habit.
00:17:17 ►
So maybe these things are just counterflows in the intellectual life of the culture
00:17:23 ►
that redress each other.
00:17:26 ►
And though we do have certain long-running forms of fuzz,
00:17:31 ►
it does tend to correct itself over time.
00:17:36 ►
But we are seeing in the present historical moment
00:17:39 ►
an incredible fragmentation, syncretic theorizing,
00:17:49 ►
and a richness of ideological competition that is just perhaps slightly overripe,
00:17:54 ►
but due shortly to self-correct.
00:17:59 ►
Well, what I see is on the fringes
00:18:03 ►
a whole lot of small cults, like in California, all
00:18:06 ►
vying for space in Common Ground magazine, where you’ve got a huge competing market.
00:18:14 ►
What’s keeping all those in check is competition.
00:18:16 ►
I mean, if one cult does particularly well, it grows.
00:18:20 ►
Others fade away if they don’t get enough supporters.
00:18:23 ►
There’s a free market in these products,
00:18:26 ►
and there’s a great deal of competition,
00:18:30 ►
and people who believe in, what are they,
00:18:33 ►
a pro bono proctologist from distant star systems may not believe in some of the existence of the 12th planet,
00:18:37 ►
and are often, in fact, opposed to these other cults.
00:18:39 ►
So there’s no uniformity.
00:18:41 ►
There’s a free market, in fact, a rabble,
00:18:43 ►
a clamour of competing claims.
00:18:46 ►
That’s on the fringes.
00:18:48 ►
The main ground is occupied by a kind of Stalinist central control
00:18:54 ►
of all government funding and official silence,
00:18:57 ►
which excludes this stuff.
00:18:59 ►
I think that, as I suggested before,
00:19:01 ►
a real free market approach opening up,
00:19:07 ►
getting rid of this monopolistic control control which forces people out onto the margins
00:19:09 ►
would allow a more informed debate.
00:19:12 ►
And I think there’s plenty of scepticism around it.
00:19:14 ►
The fact that these crazy California and Hawaiian cults
00:19:18 ►
are not reported daily in the New York Times
00:19:20 ►
is because the people who run the New York Times are sceptical.
00:19:24 ►
And a lot of the gatekeepers of the major organs of our culture are extremely skeptical, and I would say in
00:19:29 ►
some cases excessively skeptical of these things. It’s not just the science community,
00:19:34 ►
it’s the kind of hard-nosed New York Times editor community too. And in Britain, most
00:19:38 ►
of our newspapers have that, not quite as hard-nosed, and they’re slightly better at,
00:19:43 ►
I think, allowing the unusual in
00:19:45 ►
but the fact is that
00:19:47 ►
in the mainstream of our culture
00:19:49 ►
scepticism reigns supreme
00:19:51 ►
and these things are
00:19:52 ►
actually forced to the geographical
00:19:55 ►
fringes like California
00:19:57 ►
and Hawaii
00:19:58 ►
and you happen to live in that ecosystem
00:20:01 ►
of competing cults etc
00:20:03 ►
I live more in the world where skepticism is the dominant paradigm.
00:20:08 ►
So there’s a kind of bloom of superficial fluff now
00:20:13 ►
is merely a symptom of the rigidity of this monopolistic control system.
00:20:19 ►
Well, I think it means that it’s forced into this kind of fringe loony community.
00:20:23 ►
If these things were able to compete in the open marketplace much more,
00:20:28 ►
I had ordinary scepticism, common sense.
00:20:30 ►
Common sense I take not just to be our own individual common sense,
00:20:34 ►
but a sense held in common.
00:20:36 ►
In other words, a kind of common, a consensus view
00:20:39 ►
of what makes sense and what doesn’t.
00:20:41 ►
And this changes with time.
00:20:42 ►
And it’s hard to document because common sense fluctuates
00:20:46 ►
with subgroups and subcultures with different common sense.
00:20:50 ►
But this is what’s actually the opinion that peer review committees
00:20:53 ►
are designed to constitute within that subculture.
00:20:57 ►
That’s the common sense.
00:20:59 ►
This is worth funding and that’s rubbish.
00:21:02 ►
So it’s the evolution of common sense,
00:21:04 ►
and I think that would be influenced by these
00:21:06 ►
players of habit which common sense
00:21:08 ►
is generally conservative
00:21:10 ►
and novelty
00:21:11 ►
and we’ve got that going on all the time
00:21:14 ►
and I don’t think that much of what
00:21:16 ►
we do or say about what ought or
00:21:18 ►
not to happen or propose criteria
00:21:20 ►
by which we have a fantasy
00:21:22 ►
of ourselves as editors
00:21:24 ►
I think we’ve got to wrap here on fluff honestly those criteria by which we have a fantasy of ourselves as editors of science fiction.
00:21:25 ►
I think we’ve got to wrap here on fluff, honestly.
00:21:29 ►
I think we’ve completed a more or less Fluckian model
00:21:31 ►
for a bloom of fluff at this time.
00:21:36 ►
I’m not sure there is a bloom of fluff,
00:21:38 ►
because there’s always been, like in Norman Cormes’ book on millenarianism,
00:21:43 ►
you read all these lunatic cults over centuries
00:21:47 ►
with Emperor Jones and people killing themselves
00:21:50 ►
and these gas people in Japan and so on.
00:21:55 ►
I don’t know if the fringe is larger now than before percentage-wise.
00:22:01 ►
I think the publishing industry would tell you that
00:22:05 ►
it’s an incredible
00:22:07 ►
bubble fluff
00:22:09 ►
at the moment
00:22:10 ►
a bubble in the popularity
00:22:13 ►
of fluff
00:22:14 ►
and that could have to do
00:22:17 ►
with the loss of public
00:22:19 ►
faith in science
00:22:21 ►
and public faith in traditional religion
00:22:23 ►
which is the other ingredient in the rise of class.
00:22:27 ►
Yes.
00:22:27 ►
New kinds of people are making their voices heard.
00:22:32 ►
People from outside the male patriarchal usual membership in the club,
00:22:42 ►
and so they bring different value systems
00:22:45 ►
and different notions of what constitutes truth and insight.
00:22:49 ►
People from outside Western cultures and, dare we say it,
00:22:57 ►
members.
00:22:59 ►
Members.
00:23:00 ►
I mean, it’s not for nothing that the word mysticism
00:23:04 ►
is occasionally paired with the word mysticism is occasionally
00:23:05 ►
paired with the word menopausal never heard of that yes but I think in the
00:23:14 ►
compete we’ve we’ve we’ve another five minutes as you like yeah we can always
00:23:19 ►
edit I think in
00:23:26 ►
I think that again the free competition is the end
00:23:28 ►
because you have these different products
00:23:30 ►
these different claims
00:23:32 ►
and it is actually in the end
00:23:34 ►
sorted out by market forces
00:23:36 ►
the new age has a big publishing thing
00:23:37 ►
traditionally with religions you had competition
00:23:40 ►
between different sects
00:23:42 ►
and if you have this thing you have
00:23:44 ►
mutual criticism it’s been
00:23:46 ►
impossible in Europe since the
00:23:48 ►
reformation to believe
00:23:49 ►
wholeheartedly the claims of the
00:23:52 ►
Pope without question because
00:23:53 ►
there’s a whole group of people whose entire
00:23:55 ►
institutional structure, the Protestants, is
00:23:57 ►
designed to question and reject them
00:23:59 ►
and in almost every issue
00:24:02 ►
of Christian doctrine
00:24:03 ►
there’s a sect that affirms and another that disputes it.
00:24:07 ►
So there’s a wide range of opinion,
00:24:09 ►
as there is in Hinduism, many schools of thought,
00:24:11 ►
Buddhism, different schools of thought.
00:24:13 ►
But I’m a little surprised,
00:24:15 ►
because you seem to be implying that here is yet another area
00:24:18 ►
where the solution to all problems
00:24:20 ►
is the practice of untrammeled capitalism
00:24:23 ►
and the unleashing of
00:24:26 ►
unrestrained market forces welcome to the new millennium well how different in
00:24:33 ►
England where other the Church of England’s an established Church but
00:24:37 ►
were Methodist Baptist congregations Presbyterians etc spiritualists
00:24:42 ►
Unitarians as in America, I mean we exported
00:24:45 ►
this diversity to the United States
00:24:48 ►
it was founded in the midst of this
00:24:50 ►
efflorescence of religious diversity
00:24:52 ►
in England after the Reformation
00:24:54 ►
the result of this was
00:24:56 ►
that they did compete, not through
00:24:57 ►
market forces in the normal sense
00:24:59 ►
but they’re competing for followers
00:25:01 ►
and if the Baptists grow at the expense of the
00:25:03 ►
Congregationalists they become more powerful
00:25:05 ►
but all of these have been based on a kind of competition
00:25:10 ►
different claims and a kind of scepticism
00:25:12 ►
because if it didn’t come from within that group or church or sect
00:25:16 ►
it would come from other ones about them
00:25:18 ►
and in politics you have this institutionalised
00:25:21 ►
if you have two or more parties
00:25:23 ►
their job is to be sceptical of the claims of the other
00:25:25 ►
in law courts we have the adversarial system
00:25:29 ►
where you have prosecution and defence
00:25:30 ►
whose job it is to be sceptical of the other
00:25:32 ►
in most walks of life scepticism is normal
00:25:35 ►
we expect it in politics, courts of law etc
00:25:39 ►
journalism
00:25:41 ►
journalists are more influenced by politicians and courts of law
00:25:44 ►
than they are by scientists or the new age
00:25:46 ►
and there the general rule is
00:25:48 ►
rules of evidence, here both sides
00:25:50 ►
of the argument, that’s the norm
00:25:52 ►
the human norm, it’s only in science
00:25:54 ►
that anyone can imagine that
00:25:55 ►
you could have a sort of total
00:25:58 ►
pyramid, a hierarchical
00:26:00 ►
system of truth, textbooks
00:26:02 ►
or in schools or teaching the same stuff
00:26:04 ►
the basic consensus view it’s like the church before the reformation. And I think that’s
00:26:09 ►
the problem, that because of that we then have a fringe of sects and cults, like you
00:26:14 ►
did around the edges, you know, this is the reformation model here, it’s quite a relevant
00:26:19 ►
one. I think since the reformation there’s greater diversity has meant that no absolute claim by any church
00:26:25 ►
is going to go unchallenged, even by other Christians.
00:26:29 ►
And so scepticism and hearing different sides of the argument
00:26:33 ►
have built into our social model about religion.
00:26:35 ►
We know there are different religions on offer,
00:26:38 ►
different brands of Christianity, in some sense in competition with each other.
00:26:42 ►
And this is a much healthier situation than just having a single one
00:26:46 ►
in science because there’s no
00:26:48 ►
way of these sects
00:26:50 ►
around the fringes ever achieving
00:26:52 ►
recognition even if they were remarkably
00:26:54 ►
successful, take years and years
00:26:56 ►
and years before they’d ever get an NSF
00:26:58 ►
grant, generations
00:26:59 ►
I come
00:27:02 ►
back to this idea of dissolving central
00:27:04 ►
control, in your line the problem would be bad because you’re I come back to this idea of dissolving central control
00:27:05 ►
in your line the problem
00:27:07 ►
would be bad because you’re speaking in terms of
00:27:09 ►
rejecting relativism
00:27:10 ►
in favour of some kind of absolutism
00:27:13 ►
which is the alternative
00:27:14 ►
I think it’s still based on a kind of
00:27:16 ►
bokeh model of some kind of central
00:27:18 ►
control of science and thought
00:27:20 ►
but the reality is that that
00:27:22 ►
situation doesn’t exist today
00:27:24 ►
it exists only in science
00:27:26 ►
it’s the only relic of that old world view
00:27:29 ►
it’s the only universal system
00:27:31 ►
which is not
00:27:33 ►
open to the normal processes
00:27:34 ►
of challenge from
00:27:36 ►
competing points of view
00:27:38 ►
having to justify itself
00:27:40 ►
in terms of evidence and so on
00:27:42 ►
this is almost the definition of science
00:27:44 ►
somehow that it’s to be an alternative to the diversity to justify itself in terms of evidence and so on. This is almost the definition of science somehow,
00:27:48 ►
that it’s to be an alternative to the diversity that has been experienced in world cultural history
00:27:52 ►
and the sphere of religion.
00:27:54 ►
Very early on, people knew that in every town
00:27:58 ►
they had different gods,
00:27:59 ►
and that was expected because there was no
00:28:03 ►
burden of the belief in monotheism,
00:28:08 ►
and therefore religion, as far as theogony is concerned,
00:28:14 ►
had multiplicity of gods and goddesses and principles and spirits and forces and angels and so on,
00:28:21 ►
and this multiplicity was acceptable,
00:28:24 ►
even though some people thought that gods were more powerful
00:28:26 ►
than the gods of other ones.
00:28:28 ►
They agree that we’ve got a lot of gods and probably there are other ones,
00:28:32 ►
and so everything fit together in a context of diversity.
00:28:36 ►
Well, early marketers brought the news
00:28:39 ►
that gods weren’t saying the same things in every place. They didn’t say the same things.
00:28:45 ►
And that launched skepticism.
00:28:47 ►
Some said it would happen in 2012 and others in 2013.
00:28:53 ►
But the fact is that science appealed to people who had lost faith in religion
00:28:58 ►
because there was, I think now pretty well dashed hope,
00:29:03 ►
that there could be a unique global planetary
00:29:07 ►
system of thought in which it’s established the truth of everything relative to other
00:29:15 ►
things. And that’s why it would be possible, many people would think it appropriate, that
00:29:22 ►
there’s a monopolistic control of the funding of scientific research
00:29:25 ►
because each thing is going to be supposedly
00:29:29 ►
to reinforce, validate, and confirm everything else
00:29:33 ►
because it’s the idea of scientific truth.
00:29:36 ►
Now, I think the idea of a free market in science
00:29:39 ►
would have to require giving up the idea
00:29:42 ►
that there is some kind of absolute scientific truth
00:29:45 ►
and that a given question would be settled either true or false
00:29:48 ►
according to this universal canon.
00:29:51 ►
And I don’t believe in this idea.
00:29:53 ►
I think that’s why the free market in scientific research would be good.
00:29:58 ►
However, I think that, Terence, your insistence on clear thinking represents a deep wish that there could be
00:30:08 ►
some more or less universal body of truth
00:30:12 ►
that we are expanding in the evolution of mind
00:30:15 ►
by testing new speculations for fuzz
00:30:22 ►
and saying eventually, after at least 30 or 40 years of research, there is or isn’t fuzz, and saying eventually after at least 30 or
00:30:26 ►
40 years of research, there
00:30:28 ►
is or isn’t fuzz. That is to say
00:30:30 ►
it’s consistent with
00:30:32 ►
a formal system of logic,
00:30:34 ►
a kind of mathematical Aristotelian
00:30:36 ►
system of
00:30:38 ►
truth that is consistent
00:30:40 ►
with the obvious provable
00:30:41 ►
theorem, it’s true or it’s false,
00:30:44 ►
and so on. and this is the I
00:30:46 ►
think the kind of thinking which is now outdated and I hope which is it’d be
00:30:51 ►
very nice if true but it’s simply not something that we can really expect in
00:30:57 ►
any reasonable amount of time there are there are inconsistencies and furthermore we’re used to
00:31:05 ►
accepting them
00:31:06 ►
so
00:31:08 ►
it could be
00:31:11 ►
that if science was
00:31:13 ►
liberalized in this way
00:31:14 ►
and was released from the yoke of
00:31:17 ►
Aristotelian logic
00:31:18 ►
and proof and statistical
00:31:20 ►
significance on the level of 100%
00:31:23 ►
then it would become very much like religion where you would have groups like Thank you. the evolution of the mind. In the dead end road of a logical system,
00:32:07 ►
belief in a consistency of a logical system is actually not consistent.
00:32:12 ►
Wow, how is that for a big question?
00:32:16 ►
Is the evolution of mind coming to a dead end?
00:32:20 ►
And if you’re still hanging on,
00:32:22 ►
wondering how the three of them answered that question,
00:32:24 ►
well, so am I.
00:32:26 ►
What happened after you heard Ralph pose that question is that none of them said a single word for 11 seconds.
00:32:33 ►
And then they sort of let out a collective sigh and decided to stop the tape.
00:32:38 ►
And if you were my age, you’d be able to remember the Saturday afternoon adventure movies that were continued from week to week,
00:32:46 ►
and at the end of one show,
00:32:48 ►
the hero would be swinging over a pit of crocodiles on a vine
00:32:51 ►
that breaks just before the screen goes black
00:32:54 ►
and a big to-be-continued sign appears
00:32:57 ►
to the collective groans of several hundred kids.
00:33:01 ►
Well, that’s how I felt when this discussion just ended.
00:33:08 ►
My hope is that they’ll pick up on that question at the beginning of the next tape, but we won’t know until I
00:33:12 ►
podcast it, and I’m not sure when that’s going to be.
00:33:15 ►
Right now I’m planning on getting a couple more of last year’s Palenque Norte
00:33:20 ►
talks from Burning Man podcast first, so until I
00:33:24 ►
get those talks out, I’ll be waiting in suspense with you.
00:33:29 ►
By the way, did you catch that part near the end where Rupert was talking about how skepticism works well in the marketplace of ideas in everyday life, but that in science it isn’t a balanced market because fringe ideas seldom have an opportunity to take root and
00:33:46 ►
grow and that has obviously been true in his own case and now you can find hundreds perhaps
00:33:53 ►
thousands of other instances where the scientific community as a whole rejects a radical new
00:33:59 ►
hypothesis right out of hand without any investigation at all. But fortunately, the Internet is changing the new ideas marketplace a bit,
00:34:09 ►
and so we now have public investigations of new technologies,
00:34:14 ►
things like Zero Point Energy that the Irish company Steron, I think their name is,
00:34:21 ►
has made available for public inspection by a widely diverse and quite large group of internationally recognized scientists.
00:34:29 ►
Without the power of the Internet to communicate directly with potential researchers and investors,
00:34:36 ►
a small company like that wouldn’t have a chance of creating a breakthrough of such magnitude.
00:34:41 ►
Let’s hope their tech stands up to the test that’s now being given. Now, I guess I’d like
00:34:47 ►
to go to the old email bag and pass along some information and ideas from some of our fellow
00:34:53 ►
salonners. And the first one is from a good friend, the Dope Fiend, whose podcast you can pick up at
00:35:00 ►
dopethiend.co.uk. In fact, Dope Theme is the founding father of the Cannabis Podcast Network,
00:35:08 ►
which is home to a wide range of programs that you might be interested in.
00:35:12 ►
In fact, just this morning I listened to KMO’s Psychonautica podcast for this week,
00:35:17 ►
where he played an interview he did with Matt Palomary,
00:35:21 ►
who you’ve heard here in the psychedelic salon a couple of times.
00:35:25 ►
It was a great interview, in my humble opinion.
00:35:27 ►
It doesn’t repeat anything from the interviews Mateo has done here in the Salon.
00:35:31 ►
And as always, good job, KMO. Keep those podcasts coming.
00:35:37 ►
Anyway, Dope Fiend writes,
00:35:40 ►
I wanted to comment on something your listener James said to you in an email at the end of episode 88, continuing the conversation on first-time psychedelics.
00:35:51 ►
While I agree that mushrooms, particularly the more friendly Mexican mushrooms, are probably a good starting point, I couldn’t disagree more on research chemicals.
00:36:01 ►
Firstly, James seems to think that research chems are legal.
00:36:06 ►
This is categorically not true. Research chems are chemicals which have not been granted any sort of legal status by the
00:36:12 ►
FDA. The only way they would be legal is if the researcher had a special license to study them.
00:36:18 ►
In fact, the law states that any chemical not approved by the FDA, even if you discovered it
00:36:23 ►
yourself five minutes ago, is illegal.
00:36:25 ►
What’s more, while mushrooms and other natural substances are known to have been used by people for hundreds of years,
00:36:32 ►
there is no real recorded history of use with many research chems,
00:36:36 ►
and so little knowledge of whether some people might have an adverse reaction to them.
00:36:41 ►
The exception may be those chems explored by the Shulgens, but even these are
00:36:45 ►
nowhere near as thoroughly tested and investigated as the natural psychedelics. As far as I see it,
00:36:52 ►
anyone taking untested chemicals is not only breaking the law, but far more importantly,
00:36:58 ►
is taking their life in their own hands. Therefore, I’d say they’re definitely not
00:37:03 ►
the best place to start one’s psychedelic experimentation.
00:37:06 ►
Good luck with everything, and I’ll see you in the salon.
00:37:10 ►
Dope Fiend.
00:37:11 ►
I want to thank Dope Fiend for clearing that up,
00:37:14 ►
and I have to admit that it was a failure on my part to not mention that at the time.
00:37:19 ►
Dope Fiend is correct in pointing out that this class of compounds, loosely called research chemicals,
00:37:45 ►
while they may not be listed on any of the DEA schedules, Thank you. The War on Drugs, because there are a lot of other places and podcasts that focus on that issue. But as Dope Pain pointed out, it really is important to have your facts straight about
00:37:49 ►
the legality of these substances. Basically, if a plant or chemical makes you feel good or opens
00:37:54 ►
your mind to cosmic awareness, well, it’s probably illegal unless protected by a powerful lobby in
00:38:01 ►
Washington. Even more important, as he points out, however, is the fact that while
00:38:06 ►
there have been thousands of years of human use of these psychoactive plants, most of these chemicals
00:38:11 ►
aren’t much older than a single human generation or so, which really isn’t much time to build up a
00:38:17 ►
safe morphogenic field around them. The bottom line here is that Dope Dean and I agree that,
00:38:23 ►
particularly for a first-time experience,
00:38:26 ►
research chemicals are not the best choice.
00:38:29 ►
Another email that I’d like to comment on is one that came from Marco, who joins us
00:38:34 ►
in the salon from his home in the UK.
00:38:37 ►
And after saying some very kind words about his enjoyment of these podcasts, he writes,
00:38:42 ►
it was Chateau Hayuk who pointed me to the website in the first place,
00:38:46 ►
so kudos to them for helping to spread the word.
00:38:49 ►
Well, Marco, that’s really nice of you to let me know how you found us,
00:38:53 ►
and I want to thank Jacques and the rest of Chateau Hayuk for making the connection.
00:38:58 ►
And Marco also attached a picture of some art he created,
00:39:02 ►
and I wrote back and asked if I could post it on our blog,
00:39:05 ►
because I think that many of our fellow saloners will
00:39:07 ►
resonate with it. And, of course,
00:39:10 ►
he said yes. Otherwise,
00:39:12 ►
I probably wouldn’t be
00:39:13 ►
telling you all this, would I?
00:39:15 ►
So, if you stop by the
00:39:17 ►
program notes for this podcast, you’ll see
00:39:19 ►
what I mean. And you can find
00:39:21 ►
our program notes page just by
00:39:23 ►
typing psychedelicsalon, all one word,
00:39:26 ►
psychedelicsalon.org
00:39:28 ►
in your browser’s address
00:39:29 ►
box, and that’ll get you there.
00:39:32 ►
So, thank you, Marco,
00:39:33 ►
for sharing your art with us.
00:39:36 ►
Another salonner turns out to be
00:39:37 ►
someone I heard interviewed on KMO’s
00:39:40 ►
Sea Realm podcast a few weeks ago,
00:39:43 ►
and that’s Nat
00:39:44 ►
Blutter. Nat is an ethnobotanist, and I’ll put up a link to his work on cross-cultural medical ethnobotany with the program notes for this podcast.
00:40:04 ►
questions on that same program notes blog that you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:40:10 ►
That way I can answer some of the more frequently asked questions in a place where they might reach others who are thinking about the same thing. And so this weekend I’ll add Nat’s comments about the
00:40:15 ►
fairy dream flower, and I’ve also got a few more questions about ayahuasca that I’ll try to answer
00:40:20 ►
in the notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which is the official name of the site.
00:40:26 ►
You’ll find it at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:40:29 ►
Now, getting back to the email Nat sent,
00:40:32 ►
it appears that an earlier email he sent didn’t get through my rat’s nest of spam filters,
00:40:37 ►
and I missed the fact that he was going to be speaking at the Ayahuasca Monologues lecture
00:40:42 ►
in New York City with Daniel Pinchbeck and others.
00:40:45 ►
But the good news is that it’s now available online.
00:40:49 ►
And I just checked the link that Nat sent,
00:40:52 ►
and it took me to a very interesting-looking list
00:40:54 ►
of a whole series of Ayahuasca monologues.
00:40:57 ►
And each one appears to be available in online video.
00:41:01 ►
So I’ll post that link with the program notes for this podcast,
00:41:04 ►
but I’d better warn
00:41:06 ►
you that this looks like one of those
00:41:07 ►
websites that’ll suck you in for a while.
00:41:10 ►
And as soon as I get this podcast
00:41:12 ►
posted, that’s where I’m heading.
00:41:13 ►
So, Matt, thanks for the information, and
00:41:16 ►
thanks for being here with us in the salon.
00:41:18 ►
Before I go, I
00:41:20 ►
want to once again thank our fellow
00:41:21 ►
saloners, Terry, Corey, Patricia,
00:41:24 ►
I think you go by the name Patty, actually,
00:41:26 ►
and Adam,
00:41:27 ►
all of whom sent in donations to the
00:41:30 ►
Psychedelic Salon in the past couple of weeks.
00:41:32 ►
I really appreciate it, you guys,
00:41:34 ►
and thanks for everything.
00:41:36 ►
Also, I want to mention
00:41:38 ►
that this and all of the podcasts
00:41:39 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are
00:41:41 ►
protected under the Creative Commons Attribution
00:41:44 ►
Non-Commercial ShareLike 2.5 License.
00:41:47 ►
And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.
00:41:54 ►
And for any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions that you might have,
00:41:57 ►
well, just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:42:03 ►
Thanks again to my friends at Chateau Hayouk
00:42:05 ►
for the use of your music here in the salon,
00:42:07 ►
and also a big thank you to you
00:42:09 ►
for being here with us again
00:42:11 ►
here in the psychedelic salon.
00:42:14 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo,
00:42:15 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:42:18 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.