102 - Build Your Own Damn Boat

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

05:33 Terence begins with a discussion of “the felt presence of immediate experience.”

08:10 Terence McKenna: “The thing I like about the Zippy culture and the house, trance-dance, techno culture is that it’s about feeling. The combination of young people, drugs, a fairly sexually charged social environment, and syncopated music is just all designed to draw you into you and your friends and your scene, and your hood, and your place in the cosmos and not sell you out as a consumer to Hollywood, or Manhattan-manufactured forms of entertainment.”

10:01 Terence McKenna: “The culture is so capable of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, ‘Alan Ginsberg work kakis’. Did you see that!”

12:28 Terence McKenna: “What Rupert’s [Sheldrake] theory carries as an implication is what Prigogine now proclaims, which is, what we thought were eternal natural laws are simply something more like habits. Habits of Nature.”

26:49 Terence begins his discussion of paradigm shift.

28:57 Terence McKenna: “So, human freedom is the precondition for the assumption of man’s flaw, man’s fall. You know, what Thomas Aquinas called the felix culpa, the happy flaw.”

30:12 Terence McKenna: “A paradigm is a lens through which you see the world, and everything is transformed when you look through this lens.”

32:42 Terence McKenna: “If habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It’s more like a creature. It learns, It gains experience. As it matures it changes its strategy. As it expands its experience it gains new domains of emergent subtlety.”

36:36 Terence McKenna: “The dimension of human freedom is a precondition for guilt. Only the free can be guilty because only the free can be responsible for what they do.”

48:37 Terence McKenna: “What we call nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that what nature glories in is novelty.”

49:48 Terence McKenna: “Sometimes for ‘novelty’ I’ve used the phrase ‘density of connection.’ ”

1:01:13 Terence McKenna:“And when you think about it, if you really believe in eternal laws of nature then you have a philosophical mess on your hands.”

1:05:35 Terence McKenna: “Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism there is not consciousness.”

1:12:35 Terence begins a discussion about memes.

1:27:49 Terence McKenna: “We are very fortunate to live through an age of enormous reappraisal.”

1:30:17 Terence McKenna: “Humor is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. And in a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Because science believes that the world is truly there it is naive in its emphericism. Magic knows that the world is made of language. That the world is the construct of forceful imagination. And the people who don’t know this are walking around in the world of the people who do.”

1:31:27 Terence McKenna: “Do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors.”

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101 - Ayahuasca Adventure

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103 - Psychoactive Drugs Through Human History

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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, are you ready for some more Terrence McKenna?

00:00:29 ► §

I thought I’d treat us to another McKenna talk, one that I hadn’t heard before,

00:00:34 ► §

and hopefully it’ll be the first time for you, too.

00:00:37 ► §

The talk you’re about to hear actually was recorded by Paul Herbert,

00:00:41 ► §

who any of our salonners who visited Esalen in the 80s and 90s will probably remember.

00:00:47 ► §

According to our benefactor, who actually passed the tapes on to me,

00:00:52 ► §

and I quote when he’s talking about Paul, he says,

00:00:56 ► §

He started out his entheogen adventures as a postal employee in Santa Cruz, California,

00:01:02 ► §

before landing in the Esalen community.

00:01:02 ► §

as a postal employee in Santa Cruz, California,

00:01:04 ► §

before landing in the Esalen community.

00:01:11 ► §

Now, I hear that Paul could use the influx of a few positive vibes coming his way right now,

00:01:13 ► §

so I hope you’ll join me in sending Paul Herbert a big wave of love

00:01:18 ► §

and gratitude for all he has done throughout the years

00:01:21 ► §

in support of our community.

00:01:23 ► §

And I also want to thank Jay, the man I call our benefactor,

00:01:28 ► §

and who is the person who found me and then offered me the use of these tapes.

00:01:33 ► §

Now, I know this is going to be a long program

00:01:35 ► §

because the McKenna Talk runs over an hour and a half,

00:01:38 ► §

but I think it’s worth the time for me to give you an example

00:01:42 ► §

of how your life can sometimes make twists and turns

00:01:45 ► §

that ultimately take you in a completely unforeseen direction.

00:01:50 ► §

You know, back in the 80s, when I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer living in Dallas, Texas,

00:01:57 ► §

by far the last thing that I expected to be doing at this point in my life was hosting podcasts from the psychedelic

00:02:05 ► §

salon. At that point in time, I still hadn’t even tried cannabis. And while I was there in Dallas,

00:02:13 ► §

living such a screwed down life, well, there was Jay operating a Tai Chi school in Thailand.

00:02:21 ► §

Now, if you’ve been to one of the legendary full moon parties in Thailand, in the Gulf of Thailand, on the beach there on a little island, well, that’s where Jay had his Tai Chi school.

00:02:31 ► §

So just try to imagine back in the 80s, though, when there were no roads, no electricity, and only a couple boats a week.

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Well, that was the life Jay was living, while I had already traded my walk-on part in the war for a leading role in the cage, as they say.

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Now, fast forward 20 plus years.

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What are the odds, do you think, that these two paths will cross, and not only cross, but intersect in some very interesting ways?

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If you don’t know what I’m referring to, just go back to Podcast 100, where I talk about the significance of one of the tapes that Jay sent me.

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The significance to my life, and its connection to my life in Dallas at the time.

00:03:20 ► §

Synchronicities abound for all of us. Just pay attention, as the bar had often said.

00:03:32 ► §

Anyway, Jay was the messenger and custodian of these tapes, and I’m grateful to both Jay and Paul for their contributions towards preserving what many of us think of as very valuable information.

00:03:47 ► §

Now, to finally get on with the introduction to today’s program, we may be on a somewhat slippery slope here with what Terrence has to say about what he calls the felt presence of immediate experience.

00:03:53 ► §

That’s where this tape begins, and according to what I understand him to be saying,

00:03:59 ► §

just by passively listening to this tape, we are consuming someone else’s experience,

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namely the experience of those people who were in the room with Terrence when he did this workshop.

00:04:11 ► §

But just how does this concept work now that we’re in the wonderful world of podcasting?

00:04:13 ► §

You know, that’s what I’m wondering.

00:04:25 ► §

Is it possible for our collective listening of this talk by Terrence right now to turn an old tape actually into the felt presence of immediate experience, as he calls it.

00:04:31 ► §

I wonder if his message to the Zippies would still be don’t listen as well as don’t watch.

00:04:36 ► §

Well, I don’t have to answer those questions, but it’s fun to think about them as we join the ghost of Terence McKenna right now,

00:04:39 ► §

as he waxed eloquent about laws and freedom, habits and novelty at Esalen on the 29th of June in 1994.

00:04:51 ► §

And by the way, keep in mind that in 1994, the Internet was just a playground for geeks.

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It wasn’t the web we know today.

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It wasn’t anything even close to what we take for granted today about the Internet,

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which I think can explain Terrence’s almost childlike excitement about the word cyberspace

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appearing in the New York Times, which you’ll hear in this talk.

00:05:16 ► §

So let’s travel back in time to the summer of 1994, kind of try to picture where you

00:05:22 ► §

were in the summer of 94, and we’ll join a few of our friends in a workshop with Terrence McKenna.

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You finished up saying that the most important thing is the felt experience.

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The felt presence of immediate experience.

00:05:41 ► §

Right. of immediate experience. Right, and I’m wondering how you…

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To me, it seems that there’s a contradiction

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between that and the whole cyberspace thing,

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which is not felt experience.

00:05:52 ► §

Well, no, it’s immediate experience.

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What I mean is experience as product.

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In other words, if you’re interacting

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on an AOL conference, that’s your primary experience.

00:06:07 ► §

But if you’re watching TV, then you’re consuming packaged experience.

00:06:15 ► §

So what it means, the felt presence of immediate experience,

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is a kind of empowering of yourself as a producer rather than a consumer of experience.

00:06:27 ► §

I don’t know if I said it the other night, but one of the don’ts of zippyhood is don’t watch.

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In other words, don’t allow yourself to be cast in the role of spectator, of voyeuristic spectator. This is a phenomenon of, well, certainly the post-Renaissance,

00:06:53 ► §

the disembodied point of view that sees all and is somehow invasive,

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the third-person narrator.

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And through film and photography,

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this voyeurism has been empowered,

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and it’s actually a kind of technological fetish,

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or a fetish which technology has permitted.

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So I think watching, generally speaking, is a bad thing.

00:07:22 ► §

You want to participate and act.

00:07:26 ► §

So that’s the thing about the felt presence of immediate experience you know Morris

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Berman wrote a great book called coming to our senses if you’re interested in

00:07:36 ► §

these kinds of issues and very wonderful cultural analysis coming to our senses is a great book and it shows how

00:07:46 ► §

for complex reasons

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western civilization

00:07:50 ► §

has armored itself

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against feeling

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against body consciousness

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against sexuality

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against the excesses of birth

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and death and that

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the cost of this

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has been

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you know

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it’s great

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so the thing I like

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about the zippy culture

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and the house

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trance dance

00:08:17 ► §

techno culture

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is that it’s about feeling

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the combination of young people

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drugs

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a fairly sexually charged social

00:08:26 ► §

environment and syncopated music is just all designed to draw you into you and

00:08:33 ► §

your friends and your scene and your hood and your place in the cosmos and

00:08:39 ► §

not sell you out as a consumer to Hollywood or Manhattan manufactured forms of entertainment.

00:08:52 ► §

Part of, I guess, what comes out in these long rambling talks about the world

00:08:58 ► §

is that in the absence of a Marxist critique of capitalism,

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it doesn’t mean that capitalism is without flaw, God forbid.

00:09:08 ► §

It just means it now has no critics

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and you have to think about it from your own perspective

00:09:13 ► §

and what is it doing for you

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and does it serve, does it not serve.

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One of the hardest things with launching the Zippy meme that I talked about the other day

00:09:26 ► §

is to keep it out of the hands of the people for whom everything is fashion.

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This word, fashion, means two things.

00:09:37 ► §

Fast money and no political impact.

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It’s how everybody is disempowered

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by being turned

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into a fashion icon.

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You know, somebody flagellates themselves,

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pierces themselves,

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scarifies themselves, and the

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next thing they know they’re on the cover of

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Interview Magazine. That wasn’t

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the plan.

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The culture is so capable

00:10:03 ► §

of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and

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fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, Allen Ginsberg wore khakis. Did you see

00:10:18 ► §

that? I mean, this is the guy who wrote fiery attacks on mammon and said he’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness,

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dragging themselves hysterical naked through the Negro streets

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looking for an angry fix.

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From that to a khaki ad?

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So is Madison Avenue desperate?

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No, apparently American poetry is more desperate than Madison.

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Well, anyway, that’s enough free-form haranguing on that subject.

00:10:54 ► §

Anybody else about last week’s stuff?

00:10:58 ► §

Yeah, Fazine.

00:11:01 ► §

How is it that you say that it’s not good to watch,

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how is it that you say that it’s not good to watch,

00:11:09 ► §

but, I mean, where does that leave, like, reading a book or looking at a great painting or something like that?

00:11:12 ► §

I mean, when you’re reading a book,

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aren’t you just as engaged as you are when you’re watching TV

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and you sit there and you’re not doing anything?

00:11:19 ► §

Well, you know, if you were a purist, you could make that argument.

00:11:24 ► §

I think what you have to say about books is they’ve been writing them for about 2,000 years fairly seriously.

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So if you choose carefully, you’re likely to get a better book than if you choose your channel carefully.

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carefully.

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It’s just a higher… Books are

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in the nature of their

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being more structurally

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focused. What?

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What about just like a fixed image?

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Like a painting?

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Or, you know, sitting

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outside and staring at a tree for three

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hours?

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Isn’t there some

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experience that is simply um like you well

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staring at a tree that is the felt presence of immediate experience you know i mean that

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that’s like a working definition of meditation or something uh that’s real that’s you in a place in a time relating here’s the cyberspace story for the day

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this is today’s new york times um freedom of expression has always been the rule in the fast

00:12:38 ► §

growing global web of public and private computer networks known as cyberspace. Notice that it’s known as cyberspace.

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The newspaper of record is going with the lexicographical flow,

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and so it’s real now.

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It has the reality you can only achieve

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by appearing on the front page of the New York Times.

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But even as thousands of Americans each week

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join the several million who use

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computer networks to share ideas and chat

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with others, the companies that control the networks

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and sometimes individual users

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are beginning to play the role of

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censor.

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And it describes a

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guy in Norway who, when he

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received an ad from a

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Phoenix

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divorce attorney on the internet

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he designed something

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called a Killbot

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which was a program which

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automatically cancelled these people’s

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advertising worldwide

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and then

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there’s a long navel gazing

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discussion about what does this mean

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and you know are there

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laws and so forth and so on

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and what do the laws

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mean

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which brings me to what I

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sort of wanted to talk about

00:13:53 ► §

today

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I hope these things get

00:14:00 ► §

more interactive

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or that they seem interesting enough

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for you to participate.

00:14:07 ► §

Today’s talk arises for me out of things I thought about as a result of the other talk

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because for me the discussion the other day was basically about watching the soup churn

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and picking out various pieces of carrot, meat and potato

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and naming them and letting them drop back in the soup.

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What does this all come to?

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For years, for as long as I’ve been around Esalen,

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the cognoscenti have been awaiting what is called the PS, the paradigm shift, and it has been announced

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many times, you know, cited in the parking lot, seen in the baths, and yet it’s an incredibly

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elusive creature and never willing to really come out of the underbrush and be identified.

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And then there is the question, and what’s so great about it?

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Well, we won’t know that until we have it in our sights.

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But I think, let’s see, did I bring it with me?

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Did I have that much presence of mind?

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Yes, I did.

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I have that much presence of mind.

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Yes, I did.

00:15:33 ► §

Here is the issue of Brain Mind Bulletin on Pregosian’s grappling with the time paradox, as it’s called.

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What’s the date of that? The date is, it’s a special issue, May 1994.

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So this is a month old.

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So this is a month old.

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And the conclusion that’s coming out of his work is that nature is not governed by eternal laws,

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which is a very big piece of news in science because it has been the assumption really since the Greeks that there is a higher world of mathematical perfection and that somehow the world of

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physical appearance and substance is a shadow in Plato’s formulation, or a reflection of this higher, perfect, eternal world,

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which is mathematical in its foundation, and best conceived somewhat like the mind of God. And so then the task of science has been to elucidate

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these eternal, unchanging rules

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and to place nature in the context of this system of rules

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for purposes originally of philosophical contemplation

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and for the last thousand years or so for purposes of

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technological manipulation well a number

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of us over the past 15 years have been

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very restless with this idea it seems to

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be naive philosophically and it seems

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also not in in congruence

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with the observable facts of nature.

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Prigogine made his reputation

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by attacking the second law of thermodynamics,

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which was thought to be the most inviolate law in nature,

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the law that systems run down,

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and that order and energy is dissipated ultimately as heat,

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and that disorder is the destiny of all organized systems.

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Prigogine showed that this is not true.

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In classical chemical systems.

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He established what is called the principle of order through fluctuation,

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which is a situation where, for reasons not immediately apprehendable

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in classical chemical dynamics, a system will spontaneously mutate

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to a higher state of order.

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And we’re not talking biological or social systems,

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we’re talking just simple organic systems,

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chemical systems, I mean.

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Life is a very, very dramatic example of what Prakashen was talking about.

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We have genes in us that occur in flatworms,

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absolutely undifferentiated from their expression in the human body.

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Well, those genes are arguably 3.5 billion years old.

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Since the life of an ordinary star,

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not our star, which is a slow-burning and special kind of star,

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but ordinary stars have an order of existence of 600 million years.

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existence of 600 million years one-sixth the known rate of the persistence of life on this one piece of real estate so life is an is a phenomenon that violates

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the second law of thermodynamics on a planet wide scale with ease for 3.6

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billion years fascinating Fascinating.

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And social systems similarly perturb themselves into higher states of order.

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Gene, the ordinary mechanisms of Darwinian evolution,

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have to do with taking chaotic events,

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such as mutation, in other words,

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events which represent a degradation from an ideal state of order,

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and somehow using these stumbles, we could say, to become great leaps forward.

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A curious ability to, you know, take lemons and make lemonade.

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That seems to be what biology is doing there.

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Well, I know Prigogine only slightly and formally.

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My great intellectual comrade in arms is Rupert Sheldrake.

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And Rupert, this is his bailiwick as well,

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This is his bailiwick as well, because what he is saying, in a slightly different voice in the past is the way that they most tend to happen

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in the present and the future

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this is not a scientific idea at all

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it’s a very unscientific idea

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in its most extreme examples it appears And he, being a clear thinker,

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is willing to push the theory into the domain of the absurd examples. What do I mean by absurd

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examples? I mean that if you believe this concept, then teaching rats in Australia to run a certain kind of maze should make it easier for rats in England to run that same maze.

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Rats in England should run it faster once it’s run by rats in Australia.

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In other words, what he’s saying is the mere act of something happening

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sort of digs a ditch through

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the epistemic

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murk of causality

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this is what the biologist C.H. Waddington

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called a creode

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a creode is a developmental

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pathway

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and once you have one

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a process will

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tend to run

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in that pathway rather than on one side of it or on the other.

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And so what Rupert’s theory carries as an implication is what Pagodji now proclaims,

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which is that what we thought were eternal natural laws are simply something more like habits. Habits of nature. And that nature begins in a state of, in a highly undetermined state.

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set of possible creodes, that word which means

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developmental pathway, the set

00:23:05 ► §

of possible creodes radiating

00:23:07 ► §

out from the origin point

00:23:09 ► §

approaches some enormous

00:23:11 ► §

high number. But

00:23:13 ► §

things must

00:23:16 ► §

undergo the formality

00:23:17 ► §

of actually occurring.

00:23:20 ► §

Whitehead’s phrase.

00:23:21 ► §

Things must undergo the formality

00:23:24 ► §

of actually occurring.

00:23:25 ► §

So out of these many possible developmental creodes, a path will be chosen.

00:23:33 ► §

This is called now in physics a symmetry break.

00:23:37 ► §

And in theory, these symmetry breaks are not determined.

00:23:42 ► §

They could occur anywhere.

00:23:43 ► §

Now what I mean by that is a common one is,

00:23:47 ► §

and don’t hold me to the numbers,

00:23:49 ► §

but I believe the electron

00:23:51 ► §

is 1,860 times heavier than the proton.

00:23:56 ► §

No theory can account for this.

00:24:00 ► §

There is nothing apparently magical

00:24:03 ► §

about this being 1,800 so forth times heavier than the

00:24:08 ► §

proton. So it’s called a symmetry break. In the original mix of possibilities, the universe just

00:24:15 ► §

developed symmetry, as in tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye can frame thy fearful cemetery?

00:24:30 ► §

That kind of cemetery, or cemetery as we from the cattle towns of western Colorado say.

00:24:39 ► §

How does Darwin fit into this as far as the theories of evolution?

00:24:43 ► §

Are you basically implying an accidental chaotic dance is going on

00:24:48 ► §

in regards to how life is unfolding?

00:24:50 ► §

There is no rhythm, there is no reason,

00:24:52 ► §

there is no rhyme to the unfoldment of evolution

00:24:54 ► §

as we know it?

00:24:55 ► §

Well, certainly that was Darwin’s idea.

00:24:58 ► §

It’s not necessarily mine.

00:25:00 ► §

See, since the 19th century to the 20th century,

00:25:03 ► §

the word chaos

00:25:05 ► §

has actually changed

00:25:07 ► §

in the 19th century

00:25:09 ► §

chaos meant disorder

00:25:11 ► §

and

00:25:12 ► §

the gene, in a sense

00:25:15 ► §

you could almost say that Darwin

00:25:17 ► §

was the first chaos

00:25:19 ► §

theorist because they

00:25:21 ► §

discovered, the people

00:25:23 ► §

Darwin and his school,

00:25:25 ► §

that you could take two processes which are both random

00:25:31 ► §

and that by running these two random processes together,

00:25:36 ► §

you could attain striking examples of order and symmetry and beauty.

00:25:44 ► §

And to them, this proved that God is not necessary.

00:25:49 ► §

They said, look, no God,

00:25:51 ► §

nothing, no God up to the sleeve.

00:25:54 ► §

Just here is random mutation.

00:25:59 ► §

No mystery here.

00:26:00 ► §

Here is natural selection.

00:26:03 ► §

No mystery here.

00:26:04 ► §

I shuffle the deck together, and here I get peacocks, harlequin beetles, gray whales, and human beings, and no God necessary.

00:26:26 ► §

What they were obsessed by in the 19th century was the elimination of purpose, which goes to your question. They were totally against the idea that there is a plan, God’s plan,

00:26:33 ► §

because they were very concerned to continue the tradition of free will that they inherited from French rationalism,

00:26:43 ► §

and they felt they were holding the line against

00:26:46 ► §

the Church of England. In a way, this brings me to what I wanted to talk about today, which

00:26:53 ► §

was, I mean, there are many paths into this, but about the paradigm shift. And we’ve talked

00:27:02 ► §

now for a few minutes about natural law versus the idea that

00:27:07 ► §

the universe is some kind of evolving organism and I want to talk about two

00:27:16 ► §

opposed sets of terms the old paradigm and what it implied and how it worked, and the new paradigm and how it’s different and what it implies and how it works.

00:27:30 ► §

Because I think we’re getting close to pay dirt on this great change of consciousness thing

00:27:37 ► §

that everybody is waiting to have happen,

00:27:40 ► §

that enough data is accumulating, enough global web weaving is happening,

00:27:47 ► §

that we’re close to criticality on having the new paradigm emerge.

00:27:54 ► §

Perhaps Prigogine’s little announcement is the beginning of that.

00:27:59 ► §

But here are the terms. First of all, old paradigm.

00:28:07 ► §

Freedom and law.

00:28:11 ► §

This is what it’s about.

00:28:13 ► §

Freedom and law.

00:28:15 ► §

This great opposing and dichotomous set of concepts.

00:28:21 ► §

First, the laws of nature.

00:28:29 ► §

set of concepts. First, the laws of nature, eternal, platonic, suspended in some philosophical super space, beyond argument, beyond contradiction. And then, the mystery of freedom, that man is free and therefore responsible and therefore somehow bears a measure of guilt

00:28:53 ► §

for the historical predicament. So human freedom is the precondition for the assumption of

00:29:02 ► §

man’s flaw, man’s fall, you know, what Thomas Aquinas called the

00:29:07 ► §

Felix Culpa, the happy flaw. And these ideas of law and freedom have been worked out since the

00:29:18 ► §

late 17th century, when after the Cromwellian Revolution was disposed of and Newton published the Principia in England,

00:29:29 ► §

people like John Locke and Hume and Thomas Hobbes

00:29:33 ► §

began to work out the social implications of all this

00:29:38 ► §

while Newton and Leibniz and other people on the continent,

00:29:44 ► §

Leibniz and other people on the continent,

00:29:48 ► §

Fibonacci and so forth,

00:29:53 ► §

worked out the implications of the law part of it and created science as we know it, practice it, love it, hate it today.

00:30:03 ► §

Okay, now the new paradigm and the meaning, I guess we should talk for a minute

00:30:10 ► §

about what a paradigm is. A paradigm is a lens through which you see the world and everything

00:30:16 ► §

is transformed when you look through this lens. How your food, your religion, your sexuality, your science, your economics,

00:30:25 ► §

everything is transformed.

00:30:27 ► §

And for 500 years, let’s say,

00:30:30 ► §

we have looked at the world through the lens of freedom and law.

00:30:35 ► §

And our whole social dialogue has been,

00:30:38 ► §

how can we have as much freedom as possible and law?

00:30:43 ► §

And what is law? and what is freedom,

00:30:45 ► §

and this is what the dialogue has been about since the Renaissance.

00:30:54 ► §

Habit and novelty are the new, or what I would propose as the two concepts

00:31:04 ► §

that are rising out of a synthesis of 20th century experience

00:31:09 ► §

as the new defining terms of a universal paradigm.

00:31:19 ► §

And first I want to talk about habit

00:31:21 ► §

because I’ve already sort of anticipated that

00:31:24 ► §

by talking about Sheldrake and Pregosian.

00:31:26 ► §

Saying, you see, if you are, and believe me, it’s not easy for me to give up my Platonism.

00:31:34 ► §

I mean, I am to this day highly Platonic, but I don’t think we can just be Platonists.

00:31:40 ► §

I mean, there’s been some development since 530 BC.

00:31:46 ► §

Take a look at Alfred North Whitehead.

00:31:49 ► §

The problem is the eternality of the ideas

00:31:53 ► §

and their superordinary,

00:31:58 ► §

the superordinary ontos of their existence,

00:32:02 ► §

as a philosopher would say.

00:32:04 ► §

In other words, that they are nowhere to be found in what we call the world.

00:32:08 ► §

They are like with God, or with the square root of minus one, or something like that.

00:32:16 ► §

So habit, rather than law, has the curious effect of invigorating the universe and making it not something static like a piece of furniture.

00:32:30 ► §

Or as Newton imagined it, a divine clock, a machine built by God and then set going to the last tick of eternity.

00:32:42 ► §

But if habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism.

00:32:48 ► §

It’s more like a creature. It learns. It gains experience. As it matures, it changes its experience, it gains new domains of emergent subtlety.

00:33:09 ► §

And this is, in fact, what we see.

00:33:12 ► §

We see that the universe began as a plasma of free electrons,

00:33:17 ► §

and then there was a period of astrophysical condensation, stars and planets,

00:33:23 ► §

and then a period of nuclear chemistry ruled the universe as stars aggregated.

00:33:31 ► §

Is that not wrong?

00:33:33 ► §

Well, the point I’m making, see, is that it progressed from one phenomenon to another.

00:33:39 ► §

It didn’t remain static.

00:33:42 ► §

It didn’t remain static. Apparently, each episode of becoming,

00:33:48 ► §

rather than stabilizing itself like a machine would,

00:33:53 ► §

it actually becomes the foundation for some completely new phenomena.

00:33:57 ► §

And that’s what you call habit?

00:33:59 ► §

Well, as opposed to law.

00:34:02 ► §

See, I think law allows freedom,

00:34:06 ► §

because freedom means you go outside of law,

00:34:09 ► §

but law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly.

00:34:14 ► §

That’s a slightly different concept.

00:34:19 ► §

So if you take seriously this idea

00:34:23 ► §

that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit,

00:34:28 ► §

then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws.

00:34:36 ► §

What you’re inside is an organism.

00:34:39 ► §

And since you are an organism, there is suddenly an enormous dimension for empathy.

00:34:46 ► §

You can understand then, aha, I feel, I strive, I know hope and disappointment,

00:34:54 ► §

and I can therefore transfer these qualities to the dynamic of the world around me.

00:35:00 ► §

And this is very important.

00:35:03 ► §

Again, recall that what we’re talking about is why one paradigm replaces another.

00:35:07 ► §

This is very important for us as a species to get in contact with what we’ve done to the planet.

00:35:14 ► §

If the planet is a thing, you must relate to it the way you would relate, you know, to another person

00:35:26 ► §

or at least to a fine animal or something like that.

00:35:31 ► §

Can I ask the question, how would you suggest I would go from a law, looking through the

00:35:36 ► §

paradigm of law into the paradigm of habit and how I’m seeing and experiencing the world?

00:35:42 ► §

What would you suggest in my perceptual approach to the world around me?

00:35:48 ► §

Okay, well, that’s next.

00:35:50 ► §

And this is probably the most controversial part of all this.

00:35:55 ► §

It was very important when this habit,

00:35:59 ► §

I’m sorry, when this freedom and law dichotomy was set up,

00:36:03 ► §

every paradigm has a hidden or secret agenda.

00:36:07 ► §

And what lies behind this freedom and law thing is Christian ethics.

00:36:15 ► §

It’s very important in Christian ethics,

00:36:19 ► §

other than some fairly minor and screwball variants,

00:36:23 ► §

to maintain the idea of human freedom.

00:36:27 ► §

Because man cannot fall and be redeemed

00:36:30 ► §

without the dimension of human freedom.

00:36:35 ► §

And the dimension of human freedom is a precondition for guilt.

00:36:41 ► §

Only the free can be guilty,

00:36:46 ► §

because only the free are responsible for what they do.

00:36:50 ► §

You know, after all,

00:36:51 ► §

if the universe is a determinism,

00:36:53 ► §

then you do what you do

00:36:54 ► §

because you couldn’t do anything else.

00:36:56 ► §

And so to expect you to take responsibility for that

00:36:59 ► §

is a little weird.

00:37:00 ► §

So it was very important to establish

00:37:03 ► §

the idea of human freedom and

00:37:05 ► §

all our political systems are built on various adumbrations of this concept of

00:37:12 ► §

freedom habit and novelty is a little a shift slightly East on this issue

00:37:22 ► §

there’s a lot less freedom in the habit and novelty equation and there’s a lot less freedom in the

00:37:26 ► §

habit and novelty equation

00:37:28 ► §

and there’s a lot less

00:37:30 ► §

responsibility

00:37:31 ► §

and responsibility

00:37:34 ► §

you know, Weepo Yang

00:37:36 ► §

the 9th century Chinese

00:37:38 ► §

alchemist said worry

00:37:40 ► §

is preposterous

00:37:41 ► §

worry is

00:37:44 ► §

preposterous and thenorry is preposterous.

00:37:45 ► §

And then the exegesis explains that in order to worry,

00:37:51 ► §

you have to know what’s going on.

00:37:54 ► §

If you don’t know what’s going on, worry is an absurd.

00:37:57 ► §

I mean, it’s like someone who knows nothing about automobiles

00:38:00 ► §

worrying that their car may break down.

00:38:04 ► §

It’s immaterial.

00:38:06 ► §

So freedom is a very touchy subject,

00:38:14 ► §

and I offer this in an exploratory manner.

00:38:17 ► §

There are very respectable orthodox positions

00:38:22 ► §

which would tell you that the creation of the ideal of human freedom

00:38:27 ► §

and the way in which it has been enshrined and defended

00:38:30 ► §

in Western political institutions

00:38:32 ► §

is the crowning achievement of the civilization.

00:38:37 ► §

The problem is it has a curious relationship

00:38:41 ► §

to other important power concentrations, the community and the ego.

00:38:53 ► §

You know, where does freedom lie in that spectrum? When we say, if you are a Jeffersonian Democrat,

00:39:01 ► §

a materialist, a paid-up member of the Democratic Party,

00:39:05 ► §

and you say you are free, do you mean you are free to do whatever you want to do?

00:39:12 ► §

Or do you mean you are free to participate in the general will of the community?

00:39:21 ► §

This is not a closed issue.

00:39:23 ► §

Over the centuries

00:39:25 ► §

the answer to that question

00:39:27 ► §

has shifted

00:39:28 ► §

the 19th century

00:39:30 ► §

based on in America

00:39:33 ► §

based on the exposure to

00:39:34 ► §

frontier hardship

00:39:36 ► §

and that sort of thing

00:39:38 ► §

was much more

00:39:39 ► §

about the freedom of the community

00:39:43 ► §

to do what it wanted to do.

00:39:45 ► §

In the 20th century, consumerism and the disappearing of frontiers

00:39:54 ► §

and the rise of populations and the packing of populations very tightly

00:39:59 ► §

has tended, freedom has tended to mean the right to gratify the whims of the ego.

00:40:07 ► §

And this has led to a whole bunch of anti-communal attitudes and phenomena.

00:40:14 ► §

Class struggle, consumerism, manufacture of useless and soon-to-be obsolete objects,

00:40:26 ► §

people trapped in a rat race of media-propagated needs

00:40:33 ► §

and low salary and, you know, the rat race.

00:40:37 ► §

So the thing from the very beginning that has always puzzled me

00:40:44 ► §

when people talk about the future was

00:40:48 ► §

there’s a general agreement that it’s going to be more collective.

00:40:53 ► §

That, you know, we talk in terms of the Internet,

00:40:56 ► §

we talk in terms of boundary dissolution, community,

00:41:00 ► §

and yet the great metaphor for collectivism is now in ruins you know

00:41:07 ► §

Marxism I mean it’s finished and so there is no no countervailing force to

00:41:17 ► §

this freedom and law image at the moment but I think that when community coalesces around the felt need to express

00:41:29 ► §

community values, then the paradigm shift will be very close to happening. Now, when will that

00:41:37 ► §

happen? Things will have to get a lot worse, because you see, the paradox is that the people who can change the world

00:41:45 ► §

people like you and me

00:41:47 ► §

the upper 5% of the literate elites

00:41:51 ► §

of the industrial democracies

00:41:53 ► §

we’re the furthest away from the bad news

00:41:56 ► §

we’re getting three squares

00:41:58 ► §

and having a fine time

00:42:01 ► §

so somehow there has to be a sense of danger

00:42:06 ► §

or impending chaos.

00:42:09 ► §

And then we will, I hope,

00:42:12 ► §

organize ourselves to get out of it.

00:42:15 ► §

So are you saying the organism is reaching a point of

00:42:17 ► §

transformation that is very painful for many

00:42:21 ► §

and not so painful for few?

00:42:23 ► §

Or painful for all?

00:42:26 ► §

Well, I guess that leads to the subject of change.

00:42:29 ► §

You know, change is in and of itself neither painful nor pleasurable.

00:42:35 ► §

But, you know, the Bob Dylan song that says,

00:42:37 ► §

when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

00:42:41 ► §

Well, a lot of people have nothing and a few people have something.

00:42:47 ► §

lose well a lot of people have nothing and a few people have something and I think it wouldn’t hurt for everybody to lighten their ballast a little bit to to float higher so these ideas have a lot

00:42:57 ► §

of implications a paradigm touches everything and it begins very deeply but I think that

00:43:06 ► §

my

00:43:07 ► §

fractal mathematics

00:43:09 ► §

chaos theory, complexity

00:43:11 ► §

theory, my own stuff

00:43:13 ► §

with the time wave

00:43:15 ► §

all of this is going

00:43:17 ► §

to in a sense erase

00:43:19 ► §

much of the mystery about

00:43:22 ► §

the future

00:43:22 ► §

that the future is in a freedom and law system

00:43:28 ► §

necessarily unknowable

00:43:30 ► §

because if you knew the future

00:43:33 ► §

then this idea of freedom would fall under a shadow

00:43:36 ► §

but if you replace freedom with the idea of novelty

00:43:40 ► §

and see then that no matter how unique a situation is, it was somehow preceded, announced, anticipated by earlier situations,

00:43:54 ► §

then the anxiety that is built in to the freedom and law formulation disappears.

00:44:03 ► §

and law formulation disappears.

00:44:07 ► §

Because you see, with the acceptance of this idea of freedom comes the acceptance of an unknown future.

00:44:11 ► §

When, in fact, a great deal of the future can be triangulated and known,

00:44:17 ► §

even with old-style mathematical and cognitive techniques.

00:44:21 ► §

And when you toss in the new stuff,

00:44:21 ► §

and cognitive techniques.

00:44:23 ► §

And when you toss in the new stuff,

00:44:31 ► §

then we indeed have headlights on our vehicles, and it does throw a high beam into the future.

00:44:37 ► §

So…

00:44:37 ► §

Novelty, in fact, as well?

00:44:39 ► §

Well, novelty replaces freedom

00:44:42 ► §

in that freedom is this idea

00:44:44 ► §

that anything is possible and that you create it.

00:44:49 ► §

And novelty is the idea that sometimes interesting things are possible,

00:44:54 ► §

and you are more like the gifted recipient.

00:44:59 ► §

It embeds you more.

00:45:02 ► §

Freedom is a fairly alienating concept.

00:45:06 ► §

This is what modern existentialism understood.

00:45:09 ► §

You know, that woman, I can’t remember her name, Margaret Green, who wrote that book, Dreadful Freedom,

00:45:17 ► §

talks about how, you know, once you embrace freedom, a great deal of supportive structure fell away

00:45:26 ► §

which the existentialists embraced as a necessary confrontation

00:45:31 ► §

with man’s situation in the cosmos

00:45:36 ► §

but I think they were pessimistic

00:45:38 ► §

Sartre’s ultimate formulation of all this was he said nature is mute

00:45:44 ► §

well nature is mute.

00:45:49 ► §

Well, nature is not mute. That’s ridiculous.

00:45:53 ► §

How could somebody get so tweaked around as to hold that position?

00:45:56 ► §

I don’t believe it. Nature is not mute. Nature is the available statement for deconstruction on the nature of being.

00:46:06 ► §

I mean, if you, but if you don’t believe that,

00:46:09 ► §

then you’re an existentialist and you believe that human freedom

00:46:14 ► §

is the proper domain of becoming.

00:46:18 ► §

But this has not led to very happy.

00:46:21 ► §

I mean, I see that as a prologue to some kind of fascism.

00:46:26 ► §

You know, the Nietzschean super will is in there someplace.

00:46:34 ► §

But I think native peoples, aboriginals,

00:46:38 ► §

if you could explain these two things, freedom and law,

00:46:41 ► §

they’re not going to get freedom and law.

00:46:44 ► §

An Amazon tribe wouldn’t have a clue.

00:46:48 ► §

But if you talk about novelty and habit,

00:46:51 ► §

this they understand.

00:46:52 ► §

This is what life is to anybody who’s paying attention.

00:46:57 ► §

While freedom and law both are high-flown abstractions

00:47:01 ► §

that come out of a very special philosophical agenda

00:47:04 ► §

that by the

00:47:05 ► §

time Hume and Locke and John Stuart Mill got to it was 2,000 years old.

00:47:11 ► §

Most of the time novelty as a word and habit as a word is a put-off. I mean to think about

00:47:17 ► §

this, you know, I think in our culture for me has always been something that I’ve

00:47:22 ► §

moved away from. You mean that novelty sounds trivial

00:47:25 ► §

novelty has seemed superficial

00:47:28 ► §

and habit has seemed something

00:47:30 ► §

that I have no control over

00:47:32 ► §

something that I do over and over and over

00:47:33 ► §

in the sense

00:47:35 ► §

so it’s interesting that you’re using

00:47:38 ► §

law and freedom

00:47:40 ► §

in my life

00:47:41 ► §

everybody who ever had a physics

00:47:44 ► §

I mean a civics class

00:47:46 ► §

law and freedom.

00:47:48 ► §

So it’s interesting to have.

00:47:50 ► §

Well, I should explain

00:47:52 ► §

I mean, because since you bring it up

00:47:53 ► §

it may be in other people’s minds.

00:47:55 ► §

The reason I use the word novelty

00:47:57 ► §

is because I’m a

00:47:59 ► §

great fan of Alfred North Whitehead

00:48:02 ► §

who was probably

00:48:04 ► §

the last and greatest

00:48:05 ► §

of the Platonists

00:48:07 ► §

and he

00:48:09 ► §

has a theory which is put forth

00:48:11 ► §

in process and reality

00:48:13 ► §

which is his life’s work

00:48:16 ► §

magnum opus

00:48:17 ► §

in which novelty

00:48:19 ► §

is the word he wants to use

00:48:22 ► §

because he says

00:48:23 ► §

out of the background

00:48:25 ► §

of what has been

00:48:27 ► §

emerges

00:48:29 ► §

the unique

00:48:30 ► §

and he as I

00:48:34 ► §

feel felt

00:48:35 ► §

that

00:48:36 ► §

what we call nature is

00:48:39 ► §

a habit, a novelty

00:48:41 ► §

conserving engine

00:48:43 ► §

that what nature glories in

00:48:45 ► §

is novelty

00:48:46 ► §

the pattern on the butterfly’s

00:48:49 ► §

wing, the color of the

00:48:51 ► §

polyp, the molecular

00:48:53 ► §

species of the synapse

00:48:56 ► §

the chemical

00:48:57 ► §

dynamics at the heart of a star

00:49:00 ► §

that somehow

00:49:01 ► §

nature is

00:49:03 ► §

originally I called the counterpoise of novelty,

00:49:07 ► §

logically, I think, entropy,

00:49:10 ► §

which is a familiar concept in physics,

00:49:12 ► §

well understood mathematically.

00:49:14 ► §

But Rupert convinced me

00:49:17 ► §

that habit was a much more applicable idea.

00:49:24 ► §

And novelty is easy to understand

00:49:29 ► §

but hard to define.

00:49:31 ► §

It’s like the word complexity,

00:49:33 ► §

another word very easy to understand,

00:49:36 ► §

very hard to define.

00:49:37 ► §

I mean, whole conferences are held

00:49:39 ► §

on what is complexity,

00:49:41 ► §

and people leave in fury,

00:49:43 ► §

not speaking to each other.

00:49:45 ► §

But intuitively we grasp what this means.

00:49:48 ► §

Sometimes for novelty I’ve used the phrase density of connection

00:49:52 ► §

because I think that, you know, like the arborization of the nervous system

00:49:58 ► §

in the human brain or in the vascular system of a plant

00:50:01 ► §

that as many points as can be

00:50:06 ► §

made cotangential

00:50:08 ► §

to each other

00:50:09 ► §

defines the

00:50:10 ► §

complexity of a

00:50:12 ► §

system.

00:50:12 ► §

But it’s basically

00:50:14 ► §

and ultimately an

00:50:15 ► §

intuitive and

00:50:16 ► §

poetic concept

00:50:17 ► §

which is probably

00:50:18 ► §

as it should be.

00:50:24 ► §

The novelty of nature is embedded in the habit of nature.

00:50:31 ► §

Nature is almost all habit and a tiny, tiny cutting edge of novelty.

00:50:37 ► §

That’s right.

00:50:38 ► §

I relate that to the subatomic particle level.

00:50:42 ► §

In fact, that’s complete novelty. Anything can happen, except it is constrained by 12 habits,

00:50:48 ► §

the symmetry principles.

00:50:51 ► §

Yes, although I don’t know if we want to get off into this,

00:50:55 ► §

but since you’re here, Paul, it’s a good time.

00:50:58 ► §

Are you following all this stuff about how uncertainty is really taking a beating

00:51:04 ► §

and people are saying that it isn’t this mysterious property of nature,

00:51:09 ► §

it’s a mysterious property of Swedish quantum physicists,

00:51:12 ► §

and that David Bohm’s formulation of the quanta is a much more elegant formulation,

00:51:22 ► §

and gives you, eliminates the uncertainty domain at the cost

00:51:28 ► §

of introducing non-locality

00:51:30 ► §

which because of Bell’s

00:51:32 ► §

theorem they’re practically

00:51:33 ► §

ready to admit

00:51:34 ► §

so there is this sort of wild

00:51:38 ► §

horse movement

00:51:39 ► §

in quantum physics to

00:51:41 ► §

make it completely explicit

00:51:44 ► §

and predictable

00:51:45 ► §

and to get rid of all the woo-woo

00:51:47 ► §

that comes in with the Niels Bohr formulation.

00:51:53 ► §

I wasn’t thinking so much of the uncertainty principle,

00:51:55 ► §

but, for example, time can reverse.

00:51:58 ► §

There’s nothing at the subatomic particle level

00:52:00 ► §

that constrains time one way or the other, as far as I know.

00:52:06 ► §

And so lots of things can happen, and yet there are certain habits that have evolved with the universe which

00:52:10 ► §

we call the laws of physics or actually the symmetry principles.

00:52:14 ► §

Right.

00:52:15 ► §

And it seems to me that it would have to be that way. If that’s what’s happening at the

00:52:18 ► §

nature level, it’s reflecting something that’s happening in a deeper…

00:52:23 ► §

Well, you came in late,

00:52:25 ► §

but part of what we were talking about

00:52:26 ► §

was Prigogine and some of his new work.

00:52:29 ► §

And one of the things he casts doubt on

00:52:33 ► §

or is very skeptical of

00:52:35 ► §

is the irreversibility principle.

00:52:37 ► §

He says that…

00:52:39 ► §

Well, first of all, he says time is a process.

00:52:43 ► §

It’s not a concept.

00:52:44 ► §

And that there is an arrow, which is good news for my position,

00:52:50 ► §

because I’ve always felt that there was an arrow.

00:52:55 ► §

Is there order in the disorder?

00:52:56 ► §

I’m hearing you say order.

00:52:58 ► §

I’m hearing you say disorder.

00:52:59 ► §

Is there an order to the chaos and not to create it as predictable?

00:53:04 ► §

Chaos is the mother of order.

00:53:06 ► §

So it is a system, then.

00:53:08 ► §

It is, in a sense, its own law.

00:53:11 ► §

Well, yeah.

00:53:12 ► §

One of the things that I have down here to cover,

00:53:16 ► §

but we haven’t sort of stared near it, but that does it,

00:53:19 ► §

is if we go, I mean, for a scientist,

00:53:23 ► §

here’s the real difference between what freedom and law means and what novelty and habit means.

00:53:28 ► §

The way science has been done since Newton is through probability theory.

00:53:34 ► §

You get this with Cantor and these people.

00:53:37 ► §

Probability theory is a very, very necessary tool for science

00:53:45 ► §

but it may be a bogus assumption about nature

00:53:50 ► §

let’s think about probability theory for a moment

00:53:54 ► §

here’s how it works

00:53:56 ► §

you want to know how much electricity is flowing through a wire

00:54:01 ► §

you measure, you carry out a thousand measurements you add them together

00:54:07 ► §

you divide by a thousand

00:54:09 ► §

you now say this is how much electricity is flowing through the line

00:54:14 ► §

well but it’s entirely possible

00:54:16 ► §

that if you look back through the thousand measurements you made

00:54:20 ► §

not one will be the same as this average value, which

00:54:26 ► §

you’re now holding up and saying

00:54:27 ► §

is how much electricity is flowing

00:54:29 ► §

through the line. Not one of your measurements

00:54:32 ► §

confirms

00:54:33 ► §

your final conclusion.

00:54:36 ► §

But people say, well, but

00:54:37 ► §

you know, induction

00:54:39 ► §

and accumulation of sample

00:54:41 ► §

and averaging.

00:54:43 ► §

Averaging is what’s going on here at the center.

00:54:46 ► §

And the key to using averaging with intellectual effectiveness

00:54:52 ► §

is you’re making an assumption that’s very deep.

00:54:57 ► §

And the assumption you’re making is that time is invariant.

00:55:04 ► §

Well, that is simply an assumption.

00:55:08 ► §

It is the centrally untested assumption of science

00:55:13 ► §

over the past 500 years.

00:55:14 ► §

Now, let’s take something really important.

00:55:17 ► §

I’m making a review to say that this is the amount of electricity

00:55:20 ► §

that’s flowing through at this particular point in time.

00:55:23 ► §

Well, but The whole notion of

00:55:25 ► §

science is not that we attain

00:55:28 ► §

states of intellectual

00:55:30 ► §

consensus, but that we have

00:55:31 ► §

a true reflection of the

00:55:34 ► §

phenomenon. So then

00:55:35 ► §

here’s a case where this becomes

00:55:38 ► §

more important.

00:55:39 ► §

The speed of light.

00:55:41 ► §

The speed of light in

00:55:43 ► §

the general and special theory of relativity

00:55:47 ► §

is specified to be a constant.

00:55:51 ► §

So, since 1908, the speed of light has been measured

00:55:55 ► §

on this one planet with various devices.

00:56:02 ► §

Not once has any device ever gotten a value

00:56:07 ► §

exactly congruent with any other device.

00:56:11 ► §

Never.

00:56:13 ► §

Well, so then they rush forward,

00:56:15 ► §

you know, very flustered

00:56:17 ► §

that you would even mention this embarrassment.

00:56:20 ► §

And they say, well, you don’t understand.

00:56:22 ► §

It’s the limit of the instrumentality.

00:56:47 ► §

Well, but wait a minute. This is just a phrase some weasel lawyer scientist put together to explain why they weren’t getting the right value. per second of where it was yesterday. Or this measurement is only off by 20 meters per second,

00:56:49 ► §

one part in billions.

00:56:50 ► §

But the point is,

00:56:54 ► §

you’re not getting the same measurement that you got yesterday.

00:56:55 ► §

And so why are you saying

00:56:57 ► §

that the speed of light is constant?

00:57:00 ► §

Well, because the entire theory of relativity

00:57:03 ► §

falls to pieces

00:57:04 ► §

if you ever yield on that principle.

00:57:07 ► §

And so then a person who was trying to do what in science is called save the phenomenon would say, well, let’s plot the speed of light and see how much it’s varying.

00:57:22 ► §

speed of light and see how much it’s varying. Well now

00:57:24 ► §

if it is in fact

00:57:25 ► §

what is called the limit of the instrumentality

00:57:28 ► §

that is causing this problem

00:57:30 ► §

then do we all agree

00:57:31 ► §

that the values

00:57:34 ► §

should cluster

00:57:36 ► §

around a mean

00:57:38 ► §

in other words

00:57:39 ► §

this guy is 30 meters too fast

00:57:42 ► §

this guy in Australia he gets

00:57:44 ► §

30 meters too slow, this person is 70 meters too fast, this guy in Australia, he gets 30 meters too slow,

00:57:45 ► §

this person is 70 meters too fast, right?

00:57:47 ► §

The values would cluster.

00:57:49 ► §

Right.

00:57:49 ► §

But what do we actually see when we examine these variations in the speed of light?

00:57:56 ► §

We see that from 1908 until 1975, and I’ll explain why, 1975,

00:58:03 ► §

and I’ll explain why, 1975.

00:58:10 ► §

From 1908 to 1975, the speed of light has apparently slightly increased.

00:58:12 ► §

The values are not staying constant.

00:58:15 ► §

They’re drifting slightly upward.

00:58:20 ► §

Well, we are on one tiny planet in one very narrow slice of time,

00:58:26 ► §

and yet we, having measured the speed of light to be sliding slowly toward faster and faster, have created a physics based on the assumption that it’s a universal

00:58:31 ► §

constant and never changes.

00:58:33 ► §

Weird.

00:58:34 ► §

Completely in contravention to the stated methods of science.

00:58:39 ► §

Well, then what happens in 1972?

00:58:41 ► §

They hold a conference in Geneva, and everybody lays their cards out on the table and they say, look, this is just a pain, this whole business about the speed of light. From now on, the International Geophysical Union will define the speed of light.

00:59:03 ► §

and nobody should go and measure it don’t do that

00:59:05 ► §

if you want to know the speed of light

00:59:07 ► §

flip open your handbook of physical constants

00:59:10 ► §

and we, the International Physical Union

00:59:13 ► §

have decreed that this is the speed of light

00:59:17 ► §

weird!

00:59:19 ► §

and we could go on with similar examples

00:59:23 ► §

melting points

00:59:24 ► §

when a compound is created We could go on with similar examples. Melting points.

00:59:31 ► §

When a compound is created or isolated from nature that has never been created before,

00:59:35 ► §

one of the first things you do with it is you, as a physical chemist,

00:59:37 ► §

you determine its melting point.

00:59:43 ► §

This then goes into a handbook that’s published around the world of melting points. Well, the apparatus for doing melting point measurements

00:59:48 ► §

hasn’t changed greatly in a hundred years.

00:59:52 ► §

Melting points for certain compounds have fluctuated three degrees centigrade.

00:59:58 ► §

We’re not talking thousands of a degree here.

01:00:02 ► §

We’re talking about all over the map kind of stuff.

01:00:05 ► §

Rupert studied this.

01:00:07 ► §

Got a complete set of the 20th century’s published melting points.

01:00:12 ► §

What is chromium dioxide?

01:00:14 ► §

What did it melt at in 1934?

01:00:16 ► §

What did it melt at in 1958?

01:00:20 ► §

And looked at this.

01:00:21 ► §

Made charts showing many melting points rising with the measurements over time,

01:00:26 ► §

took it to the editors of the publishing house that is in charge of all this.

01:00:33 ► §

They were amazed. They hadn’t a clue.

01:00:37 ► §

It’s a complete bafflement.

01:00:41 ► §

Unless you believe, you know, that these things are wavering.

01:00:47 ► §

And that everything is less, you know, not subject to eternal laws.

01:00:52 ► §

It’s interesting that you said that speed of light is accelerating, that these are all going up.

01:00:57 ► §

I mean, everything seems to be increasing as does novelty in returns as we go towards this time.

01:01:04 ► §

Yeah, I mean mean it’s slight

01:01:06 ► §

it’s slight

01:01:07 ► §

but very

01:01:10 ► §

suggestive

01:01:11 ► §

and when you think

01:01:14 ► §

about it if you really believe

01:01:16 ► §

in eternal laws of nature

01:01:18 ► §

then you just have

01:01:19 ► §

a philosophical mess

01:01:22 ► §

on your hands

01:01:23 ► §

I mean eternal laws of nature.

01:01:26 ► §

The universe.

01:01:27 ► §

The contradiction in time.

01:01:28 ► §

Yeah, the universe is a finite thing.

01:01:30 ► §

It burst into existence X billion years ago.

01:01:34 ► §

Where are you going to say the laws of nature were

01:01:37 ► §

before the universe existed?

01:01:40 ► §

And don’t forget, we’re not only talking about laws of physics.

01:01:42 ► §

That’s one thing.

01:01:44 ► §

What about the laws of gene segregation?

01:01:48 ► §

Where were they before biology existed?

01:01:51 ► §

What kind of a question is that to even ask?

01:01:54 ► §

Clearly we’re in a sort of a loop here of ignorance.

01:01:59 ► §

It’s ignorance that generates questions that have no meaning.

01:02:02 ► §

that generates questions that have no meaning.

01:02:11 ► §

And so the universe is a thing where habit constrains,

01:02:15 ► §

but novelty overcomes that constraint.

01:02:19 ► §

And once overcome, new levels of novelty become incorporated into the old set of constraints.

01:02:24 ► §

I mean, like, for instance, take Manhattan.

01:02:28 ► §

Manhattan is an incredibly novel addition

01:02:32 ► §

to the geography of southern New York.

01:02:35 ► §

And yet, once in place, it has its rules.

01:02:40 ► §

You don’t break them.

01:02:41 ► §

If you break the rules,

01:02:43 ► §

you’ll be run over by a city bus

01:02:45 ► §

or mugged or something

01:02:46 ► §

so novelty establishes

01:02:49 ► §

new domains

01:02:51 ► §

of

01:02:52 ► §

constraint

01:02:54 ► §

and then out of that constraint

01:02:57 ► §

new novelty emerges

01:02:59 ► §

and this is a principle

01:03:01 ► §

which I believe

01:03:02 ► §

thanks to Prigogine and others,

01:03:07 ► §

reaches all the way across the domain of phenomena.

01:03:13 ► §

I mean, we’re not just simply talking about what goes on in biology.

01:03:16 ► §

We’re talking about what goes on in astrophysics, biology, cultural anthropology, sociology, these principles are universal.

01:03:32 ► §

And this is something new.

01:03:33 ► §

This is something new in the 20th century.

01:03:37 ► §

And it’s been a hard battle. I mean, you know, the theory of evolution is essentially a theory which is an effort to account for the large numbers of diverse plants and animals on the planet.

01:03:52 ► §

Darwin in his diaries referred to what he was doing as searching for a solution to the species problem.

01:04:01 ► §

It was not thought to have anything to do with sociology or geology.

01:04:07 ► §

But now I think we can see,

01:04:10 ► §

if we are willing to accept that the universe is an organism

01:04:15 ► §

rather than a machine,

01:04:18 ► §

which is what we inherit out of Descartes and Newton,

01:04:20 ► §

if we can see that the universe is an organism,

01:04:31 ► §

and Newton, if we can see that the universe is an organism, then we can see that it is evolving across all spectrums of phenomena.

01:04:41 ► §

I mean, stars evolve, societies evolve, personalities, communities, tectonic systems.

01:04:45 ► §

Everything seeks higher states of order this is the Purgosian principle

01:04:47 ► §

that systems actually seek

01:04:50 ► §

higher states of order

01:04:52 ► §

he and Manfred Eigen and that crowd

01:04:56 ► §

coined the phrase dissipative structure

01:04:59 ► §

dissipative structures

01:05:01 ► §

are these special situations

01:05:04 ► §

which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium.

01:05:12 ► §

That’s the technical way of saying it.

01:05:14 ► §

In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium.

01:05:26 ► §

And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all systems will reach equilibrium.

01:05:33 ► §

A cup of coffee left standing becomes a cold cup of coffee.

01:05:37 ► §

Everything seeks equilibrium.

01:05:39 ► §

But what Prigogine showed was that some systems don’t, and that they are incredibly tenacious.

01:05:47 ► §

Life being the most obvious example.

01:05:50 ► §

How does it do it?

01:05:51 ► §

How does life perform this trick of transferring order in the environment

01:06:05 ► §

into its energy cycle,

01:06:12 ► §

and then passing disorder out of the system.

01:06:16 ► §

This is what we call eating and excreting.

01:06:19 ► §

You take in very highly ordered proteins

01:06:24 ► §

with a lot of energy bound into carbohydrate

01:06:27 ► §

and protein, you extract energy from that and excrete out a much less differentiated,

01:06:37 ► §

much less energy intensive material. And by cycling energy through the form

01:06:46 ► §

the morphogenetic form of the

01:06:48 ► §

body maintains itself

01:06:50 ► §

it’s a kind of miracle

01:06:51 ► §

the form is like a ghost

01:06:54 ► §

in matter, the matter

01:06:56 ► §

flows through it

01:06:57 ► §

and the form

01:06:59 ► §

puts the matter through a series of

01:07:02 ► §

contortions that allow

01:07:04 ► §

the form to exist.

01:07:05 ► §

And as long as the form, the organismic form,

01:07:08 ► §

can obtain high-grade stuff,

01:07:12 ► §

which it can get energy out of,

01:07:14 ► §

it will maintain itself far from equilibrium.

01:07:17 ► §

And through the miracle of genetics and heredity,

01:07:21 ► §

this maintenance of a state far from equilibrium

01:07:24 ► §

has been going on on this planet for several billion years.

01:07:29 ► §

And of course, mind emerges out of this.

01:07:34 ► §

Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity.

01:07:39 ► §

Where, so far as we know, where there is not metabolism,

01:07:43 ► §

there is not consciousness.

01:07:42 ► §

so far as we know where there is not metabolism,

01:07:44 ► §

there is not consciousness.

01:07:46 ► §

Even computers,

01:07:51 ► §

they have to have a flow of electrons in their guts. When there’s no electrons flowing,

01:07:53 ► §

there’s no computation taking place.

01:07:56 ► §

Similarly for us,

01:07:58 ► §

when there is no flow of electrons,

01:08:01 ► §

no charge transfer,

01:08:02 ► §

then you’re dead.

01:08:04 ► §

And there’s no coming back

01:08:06 ► §

from that. But if you have

01:08:08 ► §

had children, look what’s

01:08:10 ► §

happened. Half of your information

01:08:12 ► §

has been kept

01:08:14 ► §

alive

01:08:16 ► §

in the non-equilibrium

01:08:18 ► §

thermodynamic state of the

01:08:20 ► §

dissipative structure, which is the

01:08:22 ► §

species you see.

01:08:25 ► §

Having experienced all states where my mind seemed very disconnected with my body,

01:08:30 ► §

it almost seemed as if there was an entity unto itself.

01:08:34 ► §

Well, some of our best people are working on this.

01:08:38 ► §

I don’t know how far they’ll get.

01:08:40 ► §

It’s a great question, isn’t it?

01:08:43 ► §

I mean, even separate from the brain.

01:08:44 ► §

I mean, the neurology of the brain is not the mind, as some argue.

01:08:50 ► §

Well, we talked about this the other day.

01:08:52 ► §

You know, is the brain the repository of consciousness,

01:08:56 ► §

or is it like a TV antenna?

01:09:00 ► §

Seeking consciousness in the brain may be like seeking little men in the radio.

01:09:04 ► §

Seeking consciousness in the brain may be like seeking little men in the radio.

01:09:11 ► §

And the problem of memory, where was it?

01:09:14 ► §

We had that whole discussion about memory,

01:09:17 ► §

and then in the New York Times there was a whole article about molecular theories of memory and what a big bust it was

01:09:22 ► §

and how they hadn’t really gotten anywhere

01:09:26 ► §

oh I know what it was

01:09:28 ► §

about it was about the silent areas

01:09:30 ► §

of the genome remember how we

01:09:32 ► §

talked about how only 5%

01:09:33 ► §

of the DNA transcripts protein

01:09:35 ► §

and the other 95%

01:09:37 ► §

is what’s called trash DNA

01:09:39 ► §

except that

01:09:41 ► §

it appears to be very necessary

01:09:43 ► §

and no one knows why

01:09:45 ► §

and then how this was a possible storage site for memory.

01:09:51 ► §

But I don’t know.

01:09:54 ► §

I mean, it may require technologies we can’t even imagine to correctly model memory.

01:10:03 ► §

They’re now talking about what are called terabyte storage modules

01:10:08 ► §

which would be crystals basically led read by the intersection of very very

01:10:18 ► §

fine laser beams that when they enter they could intersect at any of a very large number of points in this terabyte cube,

01:10:30 ► §

and each of these possible points is a zero or a one.

01:10:34 ► §

And so you have a very, very dense storage potential.

01:10:40 ► §

But, you know, we have a way to go.

01:10:42 ► §

There are 9 billion genes approximately in most higher mammals,

01:10:48 ► §

and you can get that easily on the head of a pin.

01:10:53 ► §

Easily on the head of a pin.

01:10:55 ► §

So nature as model for nanotechnological storage of information,

01:11:02 ► §

we still have a way to go with all of that.

01:11:08 ► §

Well, we can talk about this or not talk about it.

01:11:13 ► §

Anybody have anything they want to take off from on this?

01:11:17 ► §

It’s a big subject. It’s nebulous.

01:11:19 ► §

The paradigm changes everything, you see.

01:11:22 ► §

And the paradigms now come out of science. How we

01:11:25 ► §

view nature determines how we view ourselves, how we plan our societies and how we relate

01:11:33 ► §

to the past.

01:11:34 ► §

What you said about creos or things like habit creos, that kind of falling into this rut

01:11:42 ► §

and just continuing to channel along through it

01:11:46 ► §

is the process that we’ve been basically going through.

01:11:48 ► §

And as new ideas are spawned, new things, little pieces of novelty erupt along the path,

01:11:55 ► §

we kind of find new ways to jump out of our tracks and join in with other tracks

01:12:00 ► §

and perhaps create new habit patterns for others to form on.

01:12:04 ► §

And I’m fascinated by it.

01:12:07 ► §

I’m fascinated by the feeling of it, the energy I got from what you were saying,

01:12:11 ► §

and the sense that it’s really just a matter of continually zinging out new ideas

01:12:17 ► §

that’s going to change us or transition us, rather than what, like, children talk about.

01:12:21 ► §

Once you’ve gone the maze, once you’ve run the maze,

01:12:24 ► §

everybody else is going to run the maze

01:12:25 ► §

that much better.

01:12:26 ► §

So each idea that you spawn,

01:12:28 ► §

each idea that somebody spawns,

01:12:30 ► §

is actually helping to make it

01:12:31 ► §

so that it’s going to continue to happen.

01:12:35 ► §

Yeah, well, we’ve talked here,

01:12:36 ► §

not this year,

01:12:37 ► §

but last year,

01:12:38 ► §

about memes.

01:12:40 ► §

You know what memes are?

01:12:42 ► §

Memes are the smallest units of a concept

01:12:45 ► §

and they’re like genes

01:12:49 ► §

the word is deliberately constructed to rhyme with gene

01:12:53 ► §

and so when I say

01:12:55 ► §

every woman should consider having only one child

01:13:00 ► §

that’s a meme

01:13:01 ► §

and that meme goes out into society where it competes with the family values

01:13:08 ► §

meme, the gay lifestyle meme, the celibacy meme. They all compete like animals in an environment,

01:13:17 ► §

an environment of information. And then some win and some lose. You know, like the meme of the 18-child family is not doing too well these days.

01:13:31 ► §

Yet in 1800, the average American woman gave birth 13 times in her life.

01:13:37 ► §

The average American.

01:13:39 ► §

So memes come and go.

01:13:42 ► §

And they compete, sometimes fairly with each other, sometimes not.

01:13:46 ► §

I mean, a bad meme can gain ascendancy if you artificially enhance it by spending money.

01:13:55 ► §

You hire a publicist, and then they say a bad idea is a good idea,

01:13:59 ► §

and then the bad idea gains a certain coherency.

01:14:04 ► §

and then the bad idea gains a certain coherency.

01:14:10 ► §

So, yes, and under the influence of technological innovation and psychedelic drugs and cultural pluralism and all these things,

01:14:16 ► §

more and more memes are being generated and released.

01:14:22 ► §

You know, forms of, like, shamanism is a meme, the I Ching is a meme

01:14:26 ► §

yoga is a meme

01:14:27 ► §

Chinese herbal medicine

01:14:30 ► §

is another meme

01:14:31 ► §

and these things just furiously compete

01:14:34 ► §

and the ones

01:14:36 ► §

with the most

01:14:38 ► §

effective memes

01:14:39 ► §

whatever that means, always this mystery

01:14:42 ► §

the survival of the fittest

01:14:44 ► §

and whoever survives you call the fittest.

01:14:49 ► §

But it’s forcing mutation of these very rigid, linear, post-Renaissance structures

01:15:00 ► §

that have been put in place in Europe and derivative civilizations without ever being subjected to serious competition from other times and places.

01:15:13 ► §

So that’s part of what’s driving us forward into the future.

01:15:16 ► §

And the other thing is simply the availability of information,

01:15:20 ► §

that this is the age when all secrets were told, or they are being told.

01:15:26 ► §

I mean, you know, if you’re a standard user of the Internet,

01:15:33 ► §

you actually know more about what’s going on in the world

01:15:37 ► §

than probably the director of the Central Intelligence Agency 15 years ago.

01:15:43 ► §

You know, 15 years ago, that guy, he had the secret reports, the agents in the field,

01:15:49 ► §

what did they call them, the national projections on every country and so forth.

01:15:54 ► §

Well, now you have all that, and the democratization of information

01:16:00 ► §

is a very interesting phenomenon.

01:16:03 ► §

And it tends, I think, to replace freedom and law with novelty and habit.

01:16:10 ► §

One of the great things about the Internet is how difficult it is to regulate it.

01:16:15 ► §

How it’s almost beyond anticipation.

01:16:22 ► §

It’s as big as the human imagination.

01:16:25 ► §

So we’ve created a technology, unlike electricity,

01:16:27 ► §

which we can control,

01:16:28 ► §

that perhaps we cannot potentially control.

01:16:31 ► §

The Internet.

01:16:32 ► §

Well, I don’t think we’ve ever controlled a technology.

01:16:35 ► §

This is what McLuhan is all about.

01:16:37 ► §

He did and sold it, is what I mean.

01:16:39 ► §

Or educated us to, you know, be a part of that.

01:16:43 ► §

We recognize that we control it?

01:16:45 ► §

Well, like, but every technology carries utterly unpredictable consequences.

01:16:51 ► §

I mean, nobody dreamed, you know, that the automobile would create a sexual revolution

01:16:57 ► §

because it’s a rolling bedroom.

01:17:00 ► §

Nobody dreamed that the automobile would destroy the extended family,

01:17:07 ► §

that people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles.

01:17:10 ► §

The automobile created the suburb.

01:17:14 ► §

And, you know, McLuhan on print,

01:17:16 ► §

he says that the linear uniform qualities of print

01:17:20 ► §

created the very possibility of science,

01:17:24 ► §

of the idea of ordered

01:17:26 ► §

nature before

01:17:27 ► §

the printed book

01:17:29 ► §

nobody demanded that nature

01:17:32 ► §

be ordered

01:17:33 ► §

it was nice to be able to predict

01:17:35 ► §

the movement of the stars

01:17:37 ► §

but the idea that

01:17:39 ► §

the precision of

01:17:41 ► §

stellar movement could be extended

01:17:44 ► §

down to the oceans and the animal life.

01:17:49 ► §

That’s a post-Cartesian ideal for sure.

01:17:54 ► §

McLuhan said that the citizen is the creation of print.

01:17:59 ► §

The public is the creation of print.

01:18:02 ► §

There was no public in the Middle Ages.

01:18:04 ► §

You don’t have a public unless you have books or their derivatives.

01:18:09 ► §

The idea of audience, you know, these things that are so basic to us.

01:18:16 ► §

The idea of interchangeable parts in the manufacture of all kinds of objects, that’s from print.

01:18:28 ► §

So forth and so on.

01:18:34 ► §

Similarly, television had hidden impacts on sensory ratios.

01:18:41 ► §

McLuhan, strangely, his interpretation of television was that it restored us to a medieval sensory ratio. He said that print was an ear culture

01:18:48 ► §

and that television is an eye culture.

01:18:53 ► §

That he believed the TV screen

01:18:56 ► §

was more like a page of medieval manuscript

01:19:00 ► §

than either was like a printed book.

01:19:04 ► §

Because he said in the case of the TV screen and the medieval

01:19:07 ► §

Manuscript you must look

01:19:10 ► §

You must look in the case of the book you do not look you read and

01:19:16 ► §

Reading is a completely different function than looking and creates different ratios in the senses

01:19:24 ► §

You know the emergence of the laws of perspective in ratios in the senses. You know, the emergence

01:19:26 ► §

of the laws of perspective

01:19:27 ► §

in the late

01:19:29 ► §

in the 1460s

01:19:32 ► §

must have

01:19:34 ► §

burst over the consciousness

01:19:36 ► §

of European humanity

01:19:38 ► §

like a paradigm change.

01:19:40 ► §

When they first began doing

01:19:42 ► §

perspective, they

01:19:44 ► §

sold, manufactured for the art schools in Italy, these things called prospectographs that would project a recessional grid onto a canvas so people could learn how to do it absolutely unconsciously. I mean, for us, the laws of perspective are a fact of nature,

01:20:07 ► §

and yet they were discovered by an advanced group of thinkers

01:20:11 ► §

less than 500 years ago.

01:20:13 ► §

That’s odd.

01:20:15 ► §

What do you mean by…

01:20:17 ► §

I mean, you mean the laws of perspective,

01:20:20 ► §

like the things farthest away from you appear smaller?

01:20:23 ► §

Right, that was the breakthrough.

01:20:25 ► §

So he said, gee, I never noticed that quite before.

01:20:30 ► §

You’re right.

01:20:32 ► §

And, you know, someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon

01:20:37 ► §

in the development of the drawing styles of young children

01:20:41 ► §

and believes then that a child essentially, in the spirit of the old

01:20:48 ► §

saw that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the child develops through these cultural phases,

01:20:55 ► §

you know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened, I can’t remember the art historical term, but and then, lo and behold,

01:21:06 ► §

the perspective locks in

01:21:08 ► §

and the child can see.

01:21:14 ► §

Is that to say that kids who draw

01:21:17 ► §

in the pre, you know,

01:21:20 ► §

before they realize about perspective

01:21:23 ► §

are not seeing perspective.

01:21:26 ► §

That’s the assumption.

01:21:33 ► §

So let me see if I did my list.

01:21:38 ► §

I didn’t say transcending the calculus,

01:21:41 ► §

but it’s down here,

01:21:42 ► §

but I think we’ve flayed the history of mathematics enough.

01:21:47 ► §

Well, yeah.

01:21:47 ► §

It’s interesting how theology

01:21:49 ► §

is going to show up in all this mix

01:21:50 ► §

because you’ve mentioned

01:21:56 ► §

all these various disciplines,

01:21:58 ► §

ways of seeing.

01:22:00 ► §

And I’m curious

01:22:01 ► §

whether we’re going to start

01:22:02 ► §

to create a, you could say,

01:22:04 ► §

a paradigm

01:22:05 ► §

that is not theological so much,

01:22:08 ► §

but a way of seeing the world as…

01:22:11 ► §

using the word spiritual,

01:22:13 ► §

using that word and attempting to somehow see the world in that light

01:22:18 ► §

with this new way of seeing, this new way of…

01:22:24 ► §

I’m curious how that will translate itself.

01:22:27 ► §

The freedom and law bit,

01:22:31 ► §

the god of that universe is the blind watchmaker,

01:22:36 ► §

you know, who made the universe,

01:22:39 ► §

who set it going,

01:22:40 ► §

and who went to Idaho or something.

01:22:44 ► §

The god of the habit and novelty world is Gaian.

01:22:50 ► §

Everything is pictured organismically.

01:22:53 ► §

Everything is pictured as subsets, fractal subsets of other things.

01:23:01 ► §

And I think that that guy and god death

01:23:05 ► §

will empower feeling

01:23:08 ► §

that the blind watchmaker

01:23:10 ► §

doesn’t

01:23:11 ► §

the only hope in Christianity

01:23:13 ► §

and it’s a kind of a footnote

01:23:16 ► §

is that the blind watchmaker

01:23:18 ► §

will someday return

01:23:19 ► §

or send a representative

01:23:22 ► §

and then that’ll be good

01:23:24 ► §

but in the meantime you are just shit out of luck.

01:23:28 ► §

You have to sort it out on your own, you know.

01:23:33 ► §

The Guyon thing is more congruent with the way agricultural and aboriginal peoples

01:23:44 ► §

all over the world have always imaged nature.

01:23:48 ► §

It’s a curious thing, the Western commitment to abstraction.

01:23:55 ► §

It’s a unique cultural set.

01:23:59 ► §

You know, if you are at all familiar with the Maya civilization,

01:24:04 ► §

if you are at all familiar with the Maya civilization,

01:24:08 ► §

they achieved great things in mathematics and in technical understanding of city planning

01:24:12 ► §

and coordination of large-scale tasks and this sort of thing.

01:24:16 ► §

But they never left the woods in a certain sense.

01:24:21 ► §

Their buildings are adorned with floral ornament. They remain shamans through the high classic. They remain bound by huge public ritual and spectacle and this sort of thing. And Western civilization, this freedom thing, and then this God who went away and abandoned us

01:24:48 ► §

the blind watchmaker this all set us up for an entirely different kind of

01:24:52 ► §

cultural style and I don’t judge it I mean I think the accomplishments of

01:24:58 ► §

Western civilization stagger the mind but they are, it’s like a mad child. You know, the toys created by the mad child of Western civilization should clearly be turned over to mum for checkout and application, because left in the service of the childish worldview of Western civilization.

01:25:28 ► §

These things are just tools for polluting the environment,

01:25:32 ► §

decimating the cities of your enemies, so forth and so on.

01:25:36 ► §

So we’ve outgrown the technologies that have so well served us.

01:25:40 ► §

Yeah, I think it’s very clear that technology has become a demon,

01:26:06 ► §

Yeah, I think it’s very clear that technology has become a demon, that probably the moment is, you know, when the first atomic pile was lit. the human race in spite of the fact that it meant the end of fascism and all that on a scale of a hundred

01:26:07 ► §

a thousand years it meant the genie

01:26:10 ► §

was out of the bottle

01:26:11 ► §

never again would human beings

01:26:13 ► §

live without the power to wreck

01:26:16 ► §

the planet

01:26:16 ► §

well so that’s enough of that

01:26:21 ► §

anybody want to say anything or shall we

01:26:23 ► §

pack it in here today?

01:26:28 ► §

You can turn it any way you like,

01:26:30 ► §

but I think it’s interesting because there’s been a lot of talk over the years

01:26:35 ► §

about the new paradigm, and there have been small paradigms

01:26:39 ► §

which have claimed to be it,

01:26:41 ► §

and old wine in new bottles that’s claimed to be it and old wine in new bottles

01:26:45 ► §

that’s claimed to be it

01:26:47 ► §

but it’s

01:26:49 ► §

going to come from a

01:26:51 ► §

re-examination of

01:26:53 ► §

time and the whole

01:26:56 ► §

idea of

01:26:58 ► §

temporal invariance

01:26:59 ► §

and of mathematical modeling

01:27:01 ► §

of nature through

01:27:03 ► §

the technique’s derivative of the calculus.

01:27:06 ► §

It isn’t going to be that way anymore.

01:27:08 ► §

What these fractal and chaos theory

01:27:12 ► §

and complexity theory models represent

01:27:16 ► §

is the first steps beyond the objects of Greek mathematics

01:27:22 ► §

in 2,500 years.

01:27:24 ► §

I mean, you know, we’ve been using the perfect circle,

01:27:27 ► §

the perfect cube, the dodecahedron.

01:27:29 ► §

All of calculus is based on the ellipses

01:27:33 ► §

that can be sectioned from a cone.

01:27:37 ► §

And now suddenly, new, entirely new strides.

01:27:42 ► §

And it’s a huge revolution.

01:27:45 ► §

I mean, it’s very hard to get it all in focus,

01:27:47 ► §

what this all means.

01:27:49 ► §

We were very fortunate to live through

01:27:52 ► §

an age of enormous reappraisal.

01:27:59 ► §

All right, thank you.

01:28:00 ► §

Yeah, you want to say something?

01:28:04 ► §

Actually, I was sitting where David was sitting the other day,

01:28:07 ► §

and we talked a little bit afterwards.

01:28:08 ► §

I don’t know if he has a chance to talk.

01:28:10 ► §

David Gelman?

01:28:11 ► §

No, we haven’t talked.

01:28:12 ► §

Well, he brought up something about the shaman, the artist, the magician,

01:28:17 ► §

the sense of the other ways to accomplish some of the same goals

01:28:21 ► §

perhaps that science is going towards.

01:28:24 ► §

And obviously the roots seem to be converging more, I think, some of the same goals perhaps that science is going towards.

01:28:30 ► §

And obviously the roots seem to be converging more, I think, than diverging.

01:28:34 ► §

And I was just curious, at the time when he talked to you,

01:28:36 ► §

or asked the question, you sort of talked on it a little bit,

01:28:38 ► §

but it changed when we spoke afterwards.

01:28:40 ► §

He said, I wanted to talk more.

01:28:42 ► §

I was hoping we’d get back into the thing. About shamanism and art and magic? Yeah, the sense of what

01:28:45 ► §

I guess

01:28:47 ► §

the goals and the way they come

01:28:49 ► §

through. And I know you think on more than just the level

01:28:51 ► §

of science. Yeah,

01:28:53 ► §

I’m a critic of science. I mean, I

01:28:55 ► §

think it’s an interesting

01:28:58 ► §

artifact,

01:29:00 ► §

but it shouldn’t, you know,

01:29:01 ► §

it’s become a tyrant.

01:29:03 ► §

It’s become the arbiter of all truth.

01:29:06 ► §

And that’s ridiculous.

01:29:08 ► §

That’s absolutely ridiculous.

01:29:10 ► §

Most of what’s interesting doesn’t fall under the purvey of science.

01:29:15 ► §

Well, shamanism and the modern echo of it in the artist

01:29:22 ► §

is this awareness. It’s a humbler position

01:29:29 ► §

because what shamanism is saying is that ultimately art is the best you can do

01:29:36 ► §

and science is has a Faustian dynamic it dreams of a kind of ultimate resolution they’re even talking in here about

01:29:45 ► §

Leibniz said

01:29:48 ► §

in the least of substances

01:29:50 ► §

eyes as piercing as those of God

01:29:53 ► §

could read the whole course of the universe

01:29:55 ► §

that’s what science wants

01:29:58 ► §

eyes as piercing as those of God

01:30:01 ► §

in the meantime

01:30:03 ► §

the shaman acts to ameliorate our condition.

01:30:08 ► §

I mean, we are meat.

01:30:09 ► §

We are suspended between, you know,

01:30:12 ► §

that vagina and grave.

01:30:15 ► §

It’s all up for grabs.

01:30:18 ► §

Humor is an admission of ignorance.

01:30:21 ► §

Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge.

01:30:26 ► §

Magic, of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. Magic

01:30:26 ► §

and in a sense

01:30:29 ► §

to take it to a deeper level

01:30:31 ► §

magic is a deeper perception

01:30:34 ► §

than science

01:30:35 ► §

because science believes

01:30:37 ► §

that the world is truly there.

01:30:40 ► §

It is naive

01:30:41 ► §

in its empiricism.

01:30:46 ► §

Magic knows that the world is made of language

01:30:48 ► §

that the world is a construct

01:30:51 ► §

of forceful imagination

01:30:54 ► §

and the people who don’t know this

01:30:58 ► §

are walking around inside the realities

01:31:01 ► §

created by the people who do

01:31:03 ► §

Madison Avenue understands this.

01:31:06 ► §

Government propaganda agencies fully understand this.

01:31:11 ► §

And to the degree that you empower yourself,

01:31:14 ► §

you will become more and more a dweller

01:31:16 ► §

in linguistic constructs of your own making.

01:31:20 ► §

This is what I meant.

01:31:21 ► §

This is a good closure.

01:31:22 ► §

This is what I meant by do not watch, do not consume

01:31:26 ► §

in other words, do not lease other people’s linguistic structures

01:31:32 ► §

and live in them

01:31:33 ► §

build your own virtual worlds

01:31:37 ► §

build your own values and your own house of mirrors

01:31:41 ► §

and then you are on equal footing.

01:31:45 ► §

But if you are consuming the manufactured linguistic structures, Marxism, Freudianism,

01:31:52 ► §

Christianity, Keynesian economics, you name it, then you are to a degree giving up your

01:32:02 ► §

humanness, your uniqueness.

01:32:06 ► §

That’s, you know, and in Buddhist philosophy,

01:32:08 ► §

this is a value greatly to be conserved, human uniqueness.

01:32:14 ► §

And I don’t think any culture in history has been so at war with human uniqueness

01:32:20 ► §

because we have the technology to export so many so-called pat answers.

01:32:27 ► §

No matter what your problem is, there’s a book and a self-help group for you.

01:32:32 ► §

Well, that’s not, no, no, no, that isn’t it at all.

01:32:38 ► §

You know, build your own damn wagon.

01:32:44 ► §

All right.

01:32:46 ► §

Enough of this.

01:32:52 ► §

You know, after an hour and a half of Terrence McKenna,

01:32:56 ► §

there’s just not a lot left for me to say today.

01:33:00 ► §

Of course, that’s never stopped me before, so why should it today?

01:33:05 ► §

Well, hopefully I could be brief.

01:33:07 ► §

First of all, I’ve been spending a lot of time working out the details of this year’s Planque Norte experience on the playa at Burning Man.

01:33:16 ► §

And this year we’re going to do something a little different in that we’re going to scale way back down to our roots

01:33:22 ► §

and go back to our original idea of hosting conversations and not necessarily producing lectures.

01:33:28 ► §

Back in 2003, when we began the Planque Norte series, we used a much smaller and more intimate space.

01:33:37 ► §

And over time, though, our talks became so popular that by last year they were held in the largest structure on the playa and hosted several thousand people and had 39 speakers, 37 of whom actually showed up, and most of them even on time.

01:33:54 ► §

But by the time the man finally burned on Saturday night, I felt like that proverbial one-armed man at a wallpaper hanging contest.

01:34:02 ► §

I’m a man at a wallpaper hanging contest.

01:34:07 ► §

So this year I want to kick back a bit and not produce such a large-scale event,

01:34:10 ► §

mainly so I can have more time to play myself.

01:34:17 ► §

After all, it is the world’s greatest week-long party, at least from my limited perspective.

01:34:22 ► §

So stay tuned, as they say, and I’ll be telling you more about it in the weeks ahead.

01:34:28 ► §

And I guess this is a good time to point out that you actually can stay tuned,

01:34:33 ► §

as in stay subscribed, which you can do through any popular aggregator

01:34:39 ► §

like Google, Yahoo, and what most of our fellow slaughters use right now, iTunes.

01:34:44 ► §

There are a lot of ways to subscribe to these podcasts, and it’s free, of course,

01:34:45 ► §

and the advantage is that you’ll be notified every time I post a new program.

01:34:49 ► §

If you don’t want to subscribe through iTunes, just go to our main podcast page,

01:34:54 ► §

which is at www.matrixmasters.com slash podcast.

01:35:01 ► §

And in the left sidebar, you’ll find the logos for all kinds of different aggregators

01:35:05 ► §

that you can use to one-click subscribe.

01:35:09 ► §

Gosh, I really thought I could get some more email in

01:35:12 ► §

along with a few other things that I’ve been thinking about

01:35:15 ► §

but I’m just going to have to try and remember them for next week’s program

01:35:19 ► §

because I’ve already kept you far too long.

01:35:23 ► §

But I do need to mention that if I’ve been in the middle of an exchange of emails with you,

01:35:28 ► §

but you haven’t heard back from me for a bit,

01:35:30 ► §

well, that doesn’t mean that I’m mad or ignoring you or whatever.

01:35:34 ► §

It’s just that I’m kind of slow about keeping up with email.

01:35:38 ► §

In fact, I’ve had to begin treating it like the old snail mail

01:35:41 ► §

and not stress myself about responding.

01:35:45 ► §

You know, back in the old days before email,

01:35:47 ► §

I don’t remember being so stressed out about waiting a few weeks to respond to a letter.

01:35:52 ► §

Probably because they came so infrequently they never seemed urgent.

01:35:57 ► §

Anyway, please don’t give up on me and rest assured that I’m thinking about you.

01:36:02 ► §

And some people I do want to be sure to let know that I’m thinking about you. And some people I do want to be sure to let know that I’m thinking about are Mona F., R.J.C., Matthew K., Kevin G., Leo A., and especially Robert D.,

01:36:17 ► §

who, along with a dime short, have been our two most generous patrons over the last two years. And all of these kind people have really made a nice donation to help the salon keep on the airwaves, as they say.

01:36:32 ► §

So to you wonderful donors and to all of you who support these podcasts however you can,

01:36:37 ► §

whether it’s making an audio CD of your favorite program and giving it to a friend

01:36:42 ► §

or simply telling others about the Psychedelic Salon, well, thank you to all of you and thank you for being here with

01:36:51 ► §

us today.

01:36:51 ► §

Thanks for stopping by.

01:36:53 ► §

Well, before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic

01:36:58 ► §

Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 2.5

01:37:04 ► §

License.

01:37:05 ► §

If you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 2.5 License. And if you have any questions about that,

01:37:07 ► §

just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:37:11 ► §

which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.

01:37:17 ► §

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:37:21 ► §

just send them to Lorenzo at matrixmasters.com. And rest

01:37:26 ► §

assured I’ll read them and hopefully I’ll even respond when I get a chance. And thanks again,

01:37:32 ► §

Paul and Jay, for this recording. And thanks to Shatul Hayuk for the use of your music here in

01:37:38 ► §

the salon. And thank you, dear Terrence. We can’t wait to catch up with you again. And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:37:46 ► §

signing off from Cyberdelic

01:37:48 ► §

Space. Be well,

01:37:50 ► §

my friends. Thank you.