115 - Bios and Logos

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Mark Pesce

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Mark Pesce.]

11:35: “The singularity is how Terence’s idea of the Eschaton is working its way now into popular cultures through scientists.”

16:42: “There are periods of time when your DNA isn’t doing anything at all, when it’s quiescent. And at that time, when it’s not interacting with the world around it, it can enter what physicists call superposition. When it’s not interacting it can enter a quantum state. That quantum state says that it can be in this universe, and this universe, and this universe, and this universe. Well, it can be in a lot of different universes. In fact, it can be in ten with five hundred zeros following it, possible universes.”

30:33: “The ability for you to react to your environment from your genetic code verses being able to react to your environment because you can communicate using language is probably at least ten million to one times faster. That means at the same time we acquired the ability to speak everything about us in terms of humanity, and human culture, and human thought, and human understanding suddenly went ten million times faster.”

47:22: [talking about nanotechnology] “The world we’re going to, the entire physical world, can now start to look a lot more like Legos that get snapped together at will. And if you think about the difference between building a castle out of sand and building a castle out of Legos, you’re starting to understand the difference that we’re about to be presented with in the material world. So at the atomic scale level of the material world is about to become linguistically pliable. This is an ability we have never had before.”

52:01: “It’s my belief, and I want you to prove me right, that the psychedelic community represents the authentic search for a middle path, because what’s happening in the psychedelic experience is that there’s a stretching of being. There’s a stretching of being that allows new forms of language and new ideas to enter. We all understand this intuitively because we come back from a psychedelic experience with some expanded sense of awareness, that we’ve been opened up to an understanding we didn’t have before.”

54:08: “You can argue about the specifics of when it’s going to happen, but what you can’t argue about is that there are three waves. We can take a look at the shape of these three waves and the fact that these three waves seem to be concrescening on a single point, and that this single point is where Homo sapiens is going to be left behind, and we’re going to see the emergence of a new species.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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So, how have you been this past week or so?

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I’m sorry that I’m so late in getting this podcast out,

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but to tell the truth, I just haven’t been able to muster the energy to get it finished before now.

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Hopefully you aren’t having a period of the Blas, too,

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and I should let you know that it may be about ten days before I get the next one posted due to a little trip I’m planning on taking.

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But not to worry, in a couple weeks we’ll be back on the regular weekly schedule.

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Also, in case you were one of the people affected last week when our site was down for a few hours,

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I’m very sorry for that, but hopefully we’ve fixed the problem and improved our service as well.

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What happened was that we had a little glitch when we shifted from a shared server to our own personal server.

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And for the geeks in the crowd, we’re now on a virtual private server based on the Linux vServer,

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which creates a virtual machine that protects our CPU and RAM resources from the other users on the same physical machine.

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It isn’t literally our own machine, but it’s an intermediate step before we have to make

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that jump.

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One advantage of this new server is that I now can increase CPU speed and memory on the

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fly as our audience grows, and we only get charged for the incremental increases as they’re

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made.

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I’d hoped to be able to use the minimum settings, but that turned out to be a fantasy on my part. So right now, in order to keep up with the growing number of simultaneous downloads of these podcasts,

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we’ve had to increase our monthly hosting fees by $40 a month.

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Now that’s the bad news.

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The good news is that almost at the same time I committed to this increase, we received

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donations from Victoria T. and from our old friend and regular monthly donor, a dime short.

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So thank you very much for your kind donations.

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I’ve taken them as a sign that I shouldn’t worry about going forward with these podcasts

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because people like you and all of the others who have donated to our cause over the past two years

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will fill the gaps that I can’t manage on my own.

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And I also want to offer my public apology to the wonderful people at DreamHost

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who have been letting us hog a shared server for much longer than any other web hosting company would have.

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In one of my past lives, I once worked in tech support,

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and I’m painfully aware of what jerks people can be when things break down.

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And as much as I hate to admit this, when our site went down during the transition last week,

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well, I became one of those jerks myself and peppered them with a slew of nasty messages.

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But they kept their cool and responded immediately and very professionally, unlike yours truly.

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And they even gave us a month’s credit for the inconvenience.

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So thanks a million, Dreamhost, and I promise to be more professional myself should we ever have another unavoidable problem.

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You guys are the best, and I really appreciate all you do to help keep the salon winging its way around the world.

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Now let’s get on with today’s program.

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I’ve been saving this talk until I could find the right time to play it,

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and it seems to me that following Terrence’s lecture in our last podcast, well, now is the right time.

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What we’re about to hear is a talk that Mark Pesci gave at the Mind

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States Conference in Jamaica that John Hanna produced in 2002, and it’s titled Bios and

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Logos. One of the things that I hope you’ll pick up on in this presentation is that Mark

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isn’t shy about disagreeing with opinions that he finds a flaw in, even if those opinions

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are coming from someone like Terrence McKenna.

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Actually, I felt quite good when I heard Mark talk about challenging Terrence

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because, well, he’d done the same with me,

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and so I felt that I was in good company after all.

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My point here is that I hope you, too,

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will not just accept everything you hear from our guests in the salon,

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or from me, for that matter.

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One of the main points about being a psychedelic thinker is that you think for yourself

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and not buy into ideas that don’t suit you.

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The last thing we need to be doing here is to try and create some new kind of dogma or something.

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You know, times change, people change, even reality itself is constantly changing.

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So let’s not get too set in our own mental ways if we can avoid it.

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And I know few people better suited to challenge one’s personal point of view than Mark Pesci.

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I might have mentioned this before, but when Mark and I first began exchanging ideas,

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we seemed to be pretty far apart in a few areas.

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And to be honest, six years ago, I didn’t think we’d ever see eye to eye on any of the

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major challenges that are facing our species and its continuing evolution.

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But when we got together at the 2006 Burning Man Festival, I was astounded to discover

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that Mark had finally come around to my way of thinking.

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At least that was how I saw it.

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From Mark’s perspective, it was probably the opposite. I had come around to my way of thinking. At least that was how I saw it. From Mark’s perspective,

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it was probably the opposite. I had come around to his way of thinking, and that may actually be

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closer to the truth. But the bottom line here is that we both are constantly taking in new

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information and using it to update our views of the world. And the result is that we seem to be

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heading to the same shore, even if our

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ships are following slightly different courses. So let’s sit back now and join my friend Mark

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Pesci as he discusses the concept of bios and logos, and see if we can use some of his

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very interesting ideas to build upon as we continue this interesting journey out to the

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far reaches of consciousness.

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continue this interesting journey out to the far reaches of consciousness.

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So I was first introduced to Mark Pesce at the All Chemical Arts Conference in Hawaii in 1999.

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And, you know, it’s just blown away.

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Here’s a guy who’s got so many totally fascinating ideas

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was working in so many

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interesting areas

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and I thought

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someday I will

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have him at one of my

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conferences

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and

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then I read his book

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The Playful World

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and I was just

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even more

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blown away

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and it’s

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such a good book

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I can’t

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over recommend it I think that you know just stop and buy it and read it and I gave it even more blood away. And it’s such a good book. I can’t over-recommend it.

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I think that, you know,

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just go out and buy it and read it.

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And I gave it to my mom,

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and she read it.

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Oh, I just love that book.

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It was so, so it’s even,

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you know, it’s not particularly,

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it’s very psychedelic,

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but it’s not about psychedelics.

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It doesn’t really mention drugs at all.

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And, you know,

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maybe Mark will tell you

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a little bit more about this book,

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but it’s, you know, it’s the kind of thing that you can give to your mom.

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So it’s in cross-generational interest in this book.

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So anyway, I’m babbling now and I’ll just let Mark take over doing that for me.

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My opening joke when the program was originally constructed, it was supposed to go Sasha and then me and then Alex Graham.

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I was going to make a joke that I feel like a plate spinner on Ed Sullivan between Elvis and the Beatles.

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And also, by the way, I changed, I picked this out of wardrobe about weeks ago.

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No, I am not a busboy.

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And I apologize for being absent

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out of the sessions

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over the last couple of hours. I always get very

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frenetic right before a talk because the ideas

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are always splitting around and then come together

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and I just sat down and started to bang things out.

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I’ve been banging them out for a month

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already, but they finally started to coalesce today.

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So, this

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is not going to be an information

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download. This is going to be a journey that we’re all going to go on together. I’m going to be an information download.

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This is going to be a journey that we’re all going to go on together.

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I’m going to tell you some stories.

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They’re sort of just those stories.

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They might be true, they might not be true, but they’re frames and we can start to use

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these frames to play with to understand my consuming desire, which is to understand where

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we are, how we got here, and where we’re going.

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And this was, as far as I could tell, the consuming desire of a man that I was very proud to call a friend,

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Terence McKenna, who has since passed away.

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And I became aware of his work many years before I really even knew who he was

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because I read a book called Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson.

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Wilson gives about three pages of his book

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over to this model of time and history

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that McKenna had written about in 1974

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in this book called The Invisible Landscape.

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And Terrence and I had started a conversation.

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We became friends in 1998

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with those stories I told you when we got things started.

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And the conversation was evolving

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around the ideas that were in his book

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and he had always wanted someone or some people to come along

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and try to at least challenge the ideas in this book.

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And we’ll get to what the ideas in this book are over the course of this talk.

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Has anyone read this book in this room?

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Okay, so several of you have and are familiar with it.

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What I want to talk about in the broadest possible sense

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is the idea of a resonant theory of history

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that there’s an idea that history

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isn’t just a sort of discontinuous set of events

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but that there’s an ebb and a flow to it

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and that right now

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for the foreseeable future

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there’s going to be a lot more flow to it than ebb

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and Tarnes talked about this in terms of something he called the time wave,

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which is, you can think of it almost as a sound that’s passing through time,

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a pitch, a whine, and that as that sound passes through things,

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they start to resonate with it, they start to change their form because of it.

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And it’s interesting because

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particularly in the psychedelic community

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we give a lot of credence

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to shamanic revelation

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people out in the Amazon can ingest ayahuasca

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and hear the plants talk to them

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and understand the past, the future, the present

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and we give less credence

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in our own community

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and in our own culture

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to the authenticity of that same experience.

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And part of what I want to do is start to question that directly, because I think that

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the revelation of the psychedelic experience is just as valid, not for someone who’s simply

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in the Amazon, although Terence was in the Amazon when he had this revelation, but he

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wasn’t situated in the Amazonian culture, but for us as people who are in modern Western

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culture and the revelations that we have, that they’re not just simply culture, but for us as people who are in modern Western culture and the revelations

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that we have, that they’re not just simply tricks, but that there’s an understanding

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that underlies them.

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In any case, I’ve been studying the time wave and his theory of the eschaton, the eschaton

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being a term meaning the end of history, for 20 years now since I originally encountered

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the ideas.

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And they are mostly referred to in a psychedelic framework.

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However, in 1993, a writer named Werner Wenge,

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who is best known as a science fiction writer,

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although he was also a professor of mathematics in San Diego,

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was invited to NASA to give a talk.

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And he gave a talk on something he called the singularity.

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The singularity is a word you’re going to be hearing a lot of

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if you haven’t heard it already.

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Has anyone already heard the word?

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So a number of people have already heard the word.

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The singularity is how Terence’s idea of the eschaton

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is working its way now into popular culture through scientists.

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And so scientists already talk about singularities because they talk about black holes,

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and black holes are singularities in physics

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where all the rules we think of as a physical world

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don’t apply anymore.

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And when we talk about the Big Bang,

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which is before any of the rules of the physical world apply.

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And so we already have existences of things

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that they call singularities.

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But now we’re starting to see the emergence of an idea

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that’s called the singularity of a force in history that we’re approaching.

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And reputable scientists are talking about this in reputable ways all the time now.

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So what I want to do is give you my own little take on what this idea is.

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And it’s a combination of what Terence’s ideas were at the time

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and what modern science is thinking about.

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Now, one of the ways that this idea

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has gotten into some sort of popularity,

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the idea of the singularity,

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is in a book that’s come out called

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The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil.

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Ray Kurzweil was one of the original pioneers

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of artificial intelligence.

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There’s a lot in this book that I think is pure bunk,

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but he’s very well respected,

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rightly or wrongly, in the scientific community.

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And one of the things that he says is that

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as computers get faster and smaller and faster and smaller,

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they get progressively more intelligent.

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And sometime in the next 30 years, computers

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are going to pass humans in their raw levels of intelligence, and at that point, everything

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becomes very unknowable, because at that point, there’s going to be a question about who’s

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doing what, who’s running the show, what’s really going on, and he calls that moment

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the singularity, and that’s one way that the idea of the singularity has approached modern science. And his argument is that at that point we may

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not be the dominant species on the planet. We may have produced, in a sense,

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our own intellectual heirs. Now I don’t, I do not buy that argument. If you want to talk

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to me offline I can give you a long recent explanation for why I don’t buy

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that argument. But the main reason is because we’ve been studying artificial intelligence for 50 years

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and we have not made computers one bit more intelligent in those 50 years. As it turns

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out, we’ve learned very little about artificial intelligence, but we’ve learned an awful lot

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about human intelligence. And the thing that we’ve learned about with human intelligence

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is that you need to grow it. The human intelligence emerges.

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with human intelligence is that you need to grow it. The human intelligence emerges.

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And so what I want to talk about then

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is three kinds of emergence.

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Emergence has become now my model

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for understanding how the world works,

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where we came from, where we are, and where we’re going.

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So I’m now going to talk about three different time scales.

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I’m going to talk about the creation and the emergence of life on Earth,

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which happened 4 billion years ago.

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The creation and emergence of the human species,

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which happened about 150,000 years ago.

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And the creation and emergence of technological civilization,

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which happened about 5,500 years ago.

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And what I want to do is show these as three waves.

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And these three waves fit inside of one another

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because they’re happening on different temporal scales.

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But they all seem to be approaching the same end point.

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So you can think of them as three arcs,

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each inside the other, all approaching the same point.

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One of the most influential books that I read,

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which helped me to get an understanding of how life came to be on Earth, was a book called Quantum Evolution, which was just published

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in America last year.

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It was published in Britain two years ago.

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And it was published by a biologist named John McFadden.

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John McFadden is not just some flake.

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He’s actually a serious molecular biologist.

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He understands the biology of tuberculosis better than any other single human being on a planet.

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And one of the things that he noticed when he was doing his research

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is that sometimes DNA does weird, unpredictable things.

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And he didn’t understand why.

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And he started to take a close look at this,

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and he realized that one of the things we’ve never looked at is that the quantum world,

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when we think of the quantum world as this world of sort of fuzziness

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where some things can happen and some things don’t happen, or maybe they both happen and

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don’t happen.

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It’s this world of physics that underlies everything, but it’s a very spooky, almost

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ghostly world.

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We looked at it for chemistry.

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We looked at it for physics.

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Well, what’s the next thing after physics and chemistry?

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It’s biology.

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We’re built out of chemicals.

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We’re built using the laws of physics.

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But no one had actually said we should take a look at the quantum laws

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and see if they apply to physical systems,

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if they apply to living systems.

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Well, he’s done that now,

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and they’ve actually started doing some tests,

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and he’s found some very interesting things

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and he’s made a proposal.

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Your DNA that’s in your cells

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is constantly interacting with the world around it.

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It’s constantly being turned into proteins

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that are being used to create your body.

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That’s what it is.

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The process of DNA is transcribed

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and it becomes protein, it becomes you.

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Well, there are periods of time

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when your DNA isn’t sitting and doing anything at all,

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when it’s quiescent.

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And at that time,

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when it’s not interacting with the world around it,

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it can enter what physicists call superposition.

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When it’s not interacting,

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it can enter a quantum state.

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That quantum state says that it can be in this universe,

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and this universe, and this universe, and this universe.

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Well, it can be in a lot of different universes.

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In fact, it can be in 10 with 500 zeros following it.

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Possible universes.

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When I gave a talk at MindStates, I actually said the number of zeros.

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It takes about two minutes to actually get through all the zeros.

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I’ll spare you that.

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So what does this mean?

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This means that in the original primal Earth,

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when there was just a sea of various chemicals rolling around,

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what happens is these chemicals aren’t interacting with the environment at large.

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They can go into superposition.

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What do they do when they’re in superposition?

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They can try A, B, C, D, so on and so forth until you get 10 to the 500,

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until they find a way to sort of carry on.

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Molecule A and molecule B

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might go into superposition

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and then find an interesting universe

00:17:50 ►

in which they interact

00:17:51 ►

and then what happens

00:17:52 ►

is because they interact

00:17:53 ►

they exit all of these universes

00:17:55 ►

and enter another one.

00:17:57 ►

And this is going on

00:17:58 ►

all the time all around you.

00:18:00 ►

Some of the molecules inside of you

00:18:03 ►

are in superposition right now.

00:18:05 ►

But what happens is if you take this back to when the Earth was very young,

00:18:09 ►

this provides now a possible model for explaining why something so improbable

00:18:14 ►

as the creation of life on Earth could actually happen.

00:18:17 ►

It’s because the natural world could exploit the fact that there are this multiverse of universes

00:18:23 ►

and could actually create all

00:18:26 ►

the lucky assets.

00:18:27 ►

Because when you get to 10 to the 500 possibilities, everything that’s really improbable is absolutely

00:18:33 ►

inevitable.

00:18:36 ►

So that book blew my mind because what it did is it laid a foundation for being able

00:18:40 ►

to explain the physical action that created life.

00:18:45 ►

All right.

00:18:45 ►

So that book was the first foundational text.

00:18:48 ►

The second book is a book that’s just come out

00:18:50 ►

called A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.

00:18:53 ►

Now, how many of you have heard of that one?

00:18:55 ►

All right.

00:18:56 ►

Stephen Wolfram is probably going to go down next to Newton.

00:19:01 ►

All right.

00:19:01 ►

There’s a big set of discussion going around right now

00:19:04 ►

about whether his book is good or if it’s bunk, and they’re probably going to be having that discussion for about the next hundred Newton. There’s a big discussion going around right now about whether his book is good or if it’s bunk,

00:19:06 ►

and they’re probably going to be having that discussion

00:19:08 ►

for about the next hundred years.

00:19:09 ►

The book’s been out six months,

00:19:11 ►

and most everyone I know is still working their way through it,

00:19:13 ►

still trying to figure out if what he’s saying is true.

00:19:17 ►

Here’s what he’s done in a nutshell.

00:19:20 ►

If you take the world of Newton,

00:19:21 ►

so the world of 17th century classical physics,

00:19:24 ►

everything, our formula, E equals MC squared, If you take the world of Newton, so the world of 17th century classical physics,

00:19:32 ►

everything, our formula, E equals MC squared, F equals MA, PV equals NRT.

00:19:33 ►

All right?

00:19:35 ►

They’re all formulas.

00:19:38 ►

Plus one thing in, you get another thing out.

00:19:42 ►

Well, that’s useful, and physics has a place for that to happen.

00:19:45 ►

But what Wolfram says is that there’s another kind of physics,

00:19:46 ►

a new kind of science.

00:19:51 ►

And it’s a science where you actually have to walk through a process from one end to another to get to the result.

00:19:54 ►

In other words, there’s no formula that gives you a rose.

00:19:58 ►

We know this. We’ve always known this.

00:20:00 ►

There’s no formula that gets you a rose.

00:20:02 ►

How do you get a rose?

00:20:03 ►

You have to grow it.

00:20:05 ►

And so what Wolfram does is he starts to explore the mathematics

00:20:09 ►

that give rise to the emergent forms of the world.

00:20:13 ►

And all living forms are emergent forms.

00:20:20 ►

So the difference between Newton and Wolfram

00:20:24 ►

is the difference between Newton and Wolfram is the difference between Newton and Darwin.

00:20:29 ►

Because you can’t explain Darwin with a formula.

00:20:33 ►

That’s why people still call it the theory of evolution.

00:20:36 ►

Because they haven’t found it reducible to a formula that’s repeatable.

00:20:40 ►

What Wolfram has done is provide a mathematical basis of understanding

00:20:45 ►

for how processes can happen through time

00:20:48 ►

to get from point A to point B.

00:20:53 ►

And the thing he says, and he calls this

00:20:55 ►

the law of computational equivalence,

00:21:02 ►

is that there’s no way to cheat getting from point A to point B with these systems with these processes in time

00:21:07 ►

There’s no formula you can use that will get you from point A to point B

00:21:11 ►

What you have to do is you have to walk all the steps

00:21:13 ►

You actually have to grow from point A to point B and you can’t know what point B is going to be in advance

00:21:20 ►

This is very important because what it does is it sets a limit on what we know

00:21:24 ►

But also provides a path for how we can come to know it. So what he’s now doing

00:21:31 ►

is he’s giving us the scientific and intellectual tools for us to come to an understanding of

00:21:36 ►

how the world emerges from these very simple interactions. And what I think we’re going

00:21:43 ►

to see is that over the next hundred years we’re going to

00:21:45 ►

start to apply this model.

00:21:47 ►

If you can think of the ultimate expression of Newtonian civilization as the bottom line,

00:21:54 ►

alright, that there’s this formula you can apply and you can finally come up with a number

00:21:58 ►

and you just apply the formula and you get the number, it’s not going to be the bottom

00:22:02 ►

line that we’re going to be looking at in this next level of understanding.

00:22:06 ►

It’s going to be the process that gets us there.

00:22:10 ►

Okay.

00:22:11 ►

What does this mean?

00:22:12 ►

I want to tie this now back in.

00:22:14 ►

Is that fairly clear?

00:22:16 ►

We all understand?

00:22:17 ►

What does this mean about the history of Earth?

00:22:19 ►

Because I set that way back off to four billion years ago.

00:22:21 ►

Well, we know that as soon as the Earth was cool enough,

00:22:26 ►

light formed.

00:22:28 ►

And the Earth wasn’t particularly cool when light formed.

00:22:30 ►

The average temperature on Earth when light formed was 160 degrees,

00:22:32 ►

which is considerably hotter than it is now.

00:22:34 ►

And the forms that emerged when the Earth was that warm

00:22:38 ►

could deal with Earth at that temperature.

00:22:42 ►

And what happened was that there were enough interactions going on,

00:22:45 ►

there was enough quantum evolution, quantum biology going on, that these

00:22:48 ►

forms could start to pop out of the multiverse, they could replicate, they

00:22:51 ►

could continue to exist. Once life popped out, all of a sudden it’s no longer a

00:23:01 ►

formula that’s evolving, but it’s the set of interactions between all these entities that are going on.

00:23:06 ►

So now we’ve moved from this quantum world

00:23:09 ►

to the world of Wolfram.

00:23:11 ►

So you have all these different entities

00:23:12 ►

that are interacting together,

00:23:14 ►

and you can’t predict the kind of interactions

00:23:16 ►

that these entities are going to have.

00:23:18 ►

You simply have to let them grow.

00:23:20 ►

So you have a couple of different kinds of interactions.

00:23:22 ►

Some entities eat other entities.

00:23:25 ►

So you have Hunter and Prick. Some entities convert sunlight into energy. They don’t have

00:23:29 ►

to eat. They just sort of hang out. Some entities incorporate other entities, and that’s another

00:23:34 ►

form. And each of you are part of that, because each of you and every one of your cells has

00:23:39 ►

something called a mitochondrion. And a mitochondrion is an organ that existed as a separate biological entity

00:23:45 ►

three billion years ago, but was

00:23:47 ►

brought into your cells and is now a part

00:23:50 ►

of each of your cells. So you are

00:23:52 ►

in fact a combination,

00:23:54 ►

a synthesis between two types of

00:23:56 ►

very old organisms.

00:24:00 ►

So the next four billion

00:24:02 ►

years that gets to us,

00:24:04 ►

you can think of as a continuous set of interactions between all of these organisms.

00:24:09 ►

And there’s no overall plan to these interactions, but because there are simple rules that are being repeated through time,

00:24:17 ►

they’re becoming, they’re creating more and more complex emergence of forms. And every interaction that every organism has

00:24:26 ►

with any other organism in the environment

00:24:28 ►

leaves an impression on the organism.

00:24:30 ►

There’s always some exchange,

00:24:32 ►

whether it’s positive or negative.

00:24:33 ►

There are no exchanges that are really neutral.

00:24:37 ►

When these exchanges are very important,

00:24:40 ►

when they threaten the life of the organism,

00:24:43 ►

the organism records the interaction.

00:24:47 ►

And the recording medium that’s been used

00:24:49 ►

for all of history for that interaction is DNA.

00:24:53 ►

DNA is a memory of the interactions

00:24:56 ►

that organisms have had with their environment through time.

00:25:00 ►

So it’s that record.

00:25:04 ►

And DNA, in space, is nothing but information.

00:25:07 ►

That’s what it is.

00:25:09 ►

And it’s a very slow form of information

00:25:11 ►

because it changes, it modifies very, very slowly.

00:25:15 ►

But every one of you, in almost every one of your cells,

00:25:18 ►

has a complete record of the last 4 billion years of life

00:25:23 ►

because every one of those interactions,

00:25:25 ►

when they become serious enough, have been brought

00:25:27 ►

into your genetic code.

00:25:30 ►

So that’s how we get from the dawn of life

00:25:33 ►

to the dawn of man.

00:25:36 ►

So now we’re gonna go 150,000 years ago,

00:25:40 ►

South Africa, to the place where they,

00:25:43 ►

as far as everyone can tell, homo sapiens

00:25:46 ►

emerged.

00:25:50 ►

Now, these people who existed

00:25:52 ►

150,000 years ago

00:25:54 ►

are genetically identical

00:25:56 ►

to everyone in this room.

00:25:59 ►

But we don’t call them modern

00:26:00 ►

men. They’re homo sapiens, but we don’t

00:26:02 ►

call them modern men, or at least anthropologists

00:26:04 ►

don’t call them modern men. There’s a reason for this. We don’t see what

00:26:10 ►

we would think of as human culture within them. Now, there’s been a bit of disagreement

00:26:15 ►

about when human culture began, and that disagreement has to do with how we define what human culture

00:26:22 ►

is. Prior to last year,

00:26:25 ►

we set the mark for the beginning of human culture

00:26:28 ►

at about 35,000 years ago.

00:26:30 ►

We found, this is because artifacts exist

00:26:33 ►

that we know were created by modern humans.

00:26:35 ►

Well, last year they found some artifacts

00:26:36 ►

that dated to about 77,000 years ago.

00:26:39 ►

And so all of a sudden,

00:26:41 ►

we doubled the length of time that modern humans exist.

00:26:44 ►

Well, what were these artifacts?

00:26:45 ►

Well, they were some wiggling lines that had been carved out upon a piece of rock.

00:26:50 ►

That’s it.

00:26:51 ►

But what does that mean?

00:26:55 ►

Let me go back to the people who preceded us, the Neanderthals.

00:26:59 ►

The Neanderthals existed from about somewhere between 400,000 to 300,000 years ago, and they existed co-existent with humans, and died out between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago.

00:27:12 ►

And the Neanderthals used artifacts, they used simple stone tools and things like this,

00:27:20 ►

but they didn’t have any sort of artifacts that evolved over their period of time.

00:27:25 ►

Their level of technical expertise

00:27:27 ►

never changed

00:27:29 ►

for the entire span of time they were on Earth.

00:27:33 ►

In other words, there was no internal

00:27:34 ►

cultural evolution in their artifacts.

00:27:37 ►

It was as if they started out at one point

00:27:39 ►

and they stayed.

00:27:40 ►

So they started out adapting

00:27:42 ►

and then they ended because they had failed at adapting.

00:27:46 ►

The thing that we find from the moment we see these first etchings on a piece of rock

00:27:52 ►

is we’ve now started to see that humans, modern humans, are starting to adapt their environment.

00:27:59 ►

And specifically, they’re starting to adapt their environment symbolically because etchings

00:28:04 ►

on a piece of stone are not a tool.

00:28:06 ►

It’s not something you can cut better with.

00:28:08 ►

It’s not something you can hunt an animal better with,

00:28:10 ►

or dig up a plant better with.

00:28:12 ►

It’s there because it signifies something.

00:28:15 ►

So now we’re starting to see the thing that actually makes us what we are,

00:28:19 ►

which is a linguistic consciousness.

00:28:22 ►

We are symbol manipulating, we are symbol using,

00:28:25 ►

and we place symbols all around us in the world.

00:28:32 ►

So, that means that these human beings

00:28:37 ►

that existed 75,000 years ago

00:28:39 ►

were linguistically capable.

00:28:41 ►

Now, it’s believed that the Neanderthals could talk,

00:28:45 ►

but let me quantify what I mean by talk.

00:28:47 ►

They could use very simple words and very simple phrases.

00:28:50 ►

If you think of a child when they’re about one year old,

00:28:53 ►

they can identify objects and perhaps identify actions,

00:28:57 ►

but they do not have the ability of a two-year-old.

00:28:59 ►

The two-year-old can take a limited number of words

00:29:03 ►

and then string them together in an arbitrary order

00:29:05 ►

to be able to produce meaning.

00:29:07 ►

That’s the difference between a Neanderthal

00:29:09 ►

and a human being as we understand it.

00:29:11 ►

All of a sudden we went from this very limited set

00:29:14 ►

of descriptors for the world

00:29:15 ►

to now a completely unbounded ability

00:29:19 ►

to be able to describe the world.

00:29:21 ►

That’s what we are.

00:29:23 ►

At the end of the day,

00:29:24 ►

we strip everything else away.

00:29:26 ►

We are the possessors

00:29:27 ►

of a linguistic ability

00:29:28 ►

which is infinitely extensible.

00:29:33 ►

Now, that’s a big deal.

00:29:36 ►

It’s such a big deal.

00:29:38 ►

There’s no other precedent.

00:29:39 ►

We haven’t been able

00:29:40 ►

to find this ability

00:29:40 ►

in any other species.

00:29:41 ►

We’ve been looking for it

00:29:42 ►

in the dolphins.

00:29:43 ►

We’ve been looking for it

00:29:43 ►

in the primates,

00:29:44 ►

so on and so forth. We haven’t found it in any other species. We’ve been looking for it in the dolphins. We’ve been looking for it in the primates, so on and so forth.

00:29:45 ►

We haven’t found it in any other species.

00:29:48 ►

It’s such a big deal that it ended up changing us

00:29:51 ►

in a very fundamental way,

00:29:53 ►

because for four billion years,

00:29:55 ►

we had simply been the product of the genetic code

00:29:59 ►

that had slowly been building up this historical process

00:30:02 ►

that had been added to bit by bit by bit by bit.

00:30:05 ►

And all of a sudden now,

00:30:06 ►

we’ve become symbolic manipulators.

00:30:09 ►

Well, when you free the ability

00:30:13 ►

to be able to manipulate the world

00:30:15 ►

from the biological substrate

00:30:17 ►

that it was located in before,

00:30:19 ►

it goes faster.

00:30:22 ►

How much faster?

00:30:23 ►

Well, Ray Kurzweil says that the difference between a computer’s ability to think

00:30:28 ►

and a neuron’s ability to think is about 10 million to one.

00:30:32 ►

The ability for you to react to your environment from your genetic code

00:30:37 ►

versus being able to react to your environment because you can communicate it by using language

00:30:42 ►

is probably at least 10 million to one times faster.

00:30:47 ►

So that means the same time that we acquired the ability to speak,

00:30:52 ►

everything about us in terms of humanity and human culture

00:30:56 ►

and human thought and human understanding

00:30:58 ►

suddenly went 10 million times faster.

00:31:04 ►

All right?

00:31:06 ►

That pops you into a completely different round.

00:31:10 ►

Because all of a sudden, we are not natural.

00:31:13 ►

There’s a second layer of things going on.

00:31:15 ►

There’s this biological layer of bios,

00:31:17 ►

which is what we’re made out of,

00:31:19 ►

but now there’s this linguistic nature, or logos,

00:31:22 ►

which is on top.

00:31:23 ►

And the biological nature hadn’t really been prepped for what was going to happen once

00:31:28 ►

things started going 10 million times faster.

00:31:32 ►

And that’s why human beings are, in a sense, such an oddity in the history of the world.

00:31:37 ►

It’s because not only are we this biological thing that emerged, but we’re now this linguistic

00:31:42 ►

thing that emerged, and this linguistic thing is, in some sense sense very much more powerful than the biological thing that’s containing it.

00:31:50 ►

And that means that the conception of the world, which had existed simply as things,

00:31:57 ►

the immediate sense that the animal has, and think of that as the animal consciousness,

00:32:02 ►

we’ve now stepped away from it because that linguistic capability

00:32:05 ►

has forced us away from it.

00:32:07 ►

And so everything you look at in this world,

00:32:10 ►

you don’t see it as it is.

00:32:12 ►

What you see it as

00:32:14 ►

is as you linguistically interpret it.

00:32:17 ►

This is what Terence McKenna once said

00:32:19 ►

when he said that the world is made of words.

00:32:23 ►

And if you know the right words,

00:32:24 ►

you can make of the world what you will.

00:32:28 ►

So,

00:32:29 ►

there’s been a lot of talk,

00:32:35 ►

particularly from the postmodern philosophers,

00:32:37 ►

and I read the postmodern philosophers,

00:32:39 ►

about the Disneyfication of the world,

00:32:41 ►

that the world, going to Times Square or something like this,

00:32:44 ►

has been turned into a giant

00:32:46 ►

media space where everything you see

00:32:48 ►

is now trying to sell you something

00:32:50 ►

or make you believe something or make you think

00:32:52 ►

something and so on and so forth.

00:32:54 ►

And they’re talking about this as if this

00:32:56 ►

is a relatively recent event.

00:32:58 ►

And what we have to remember

00:33:00 ►

is that this is not a recent event.

00:33:02 ►

For as long as there have been shaman and

00:33:04 ►

storytellers who have been telling

00:33:05 ►

us stories, linguistic tales

00:33:07 ►

about the way the world works,

00:33:09 ►

so for as long as we’ve been human beings,

00:33:11 ►

this process has been going on.

00:33:14 ►

That in fact, for all

00:33:16 ►

of human time,

00:33:17 ►

the world has always been linguistic

00:33:19 ►

and we’ve always been apprehending it

00:33:21 ►

through a linguistic interface.

00:33:25 ►

Now, that’s all well and good, but there’s something going on here.

00:33:30 ►

Our linguistic capability, because it’s not immediately part of our biology,

00:33:36 ►

it’s got a will of its own.

00:33:37 ►

The biology has a will to survive.

00:33:39 ►

It has a will to propagate it.

00:33:40 ►

It has a will to carry itself on.

00:33:42 ►

But the logos, our linguistic capability,

00:33:44 ►

it’s got a completely different

00:33:46 ►

set of prerogatives. And you know what?

00:33:48 ►

Ever since we’ve got

00:33:50 ►

the ability to speak, it’s been

00:33:51 ►

driving the vehicle. It’s not the body that’s

00:33:54 ►

been driving the vehicle. It’s been our linguistic

00:33:56 ►

ability that’s been driving the vehicle.

00:33:58 ►

The body has always been subordinate.

00:34:02 ►

And it’s been driving to its own end,

00:34:04 ►

to its own teleology, its own arc.

00:34:08 ►

We assume that we are the masters of the word, we are the masters of language, and in fact

00:34:12 ►

it’s precisely the opposite.

00:34:13 ►

The word is the master of us.

00:34:14 ►

And this is in some sense what Richard was talking about last night, because we have

00:34:20 ►

to be very careful about the way we are used by language because language is an instrument of control.

00:34:28 ►

Now, it started to pop up in scientific concepts

00:34:33 ►

because a few years ago, an evolutionary biologist called Richard Dawkins

00:34:37 ►

coined a word, the mean, which many of you are probably familiar with.

00:34:42 ►

And he thinks of it as the linguistic equivalent of the gene.

00:34:45 ►

Memes want to propagate like genes do.

00:34:47 ►

They want to go through and basically affect

00:34:50 ►

as many minds as possible and pass them through

00:34:52 ►

and so on and so forth.

00:34:56 ►

And so we got from the emergence of like four billion years ago

00:35:02 ►

DNA, which is the carrier for biology, and then from

00:35:06 ►

the emergence of our linguistic capability of 100,000 years ago, the mean, which moves

00:35:12 ►

10 million times faster than biology does, and because of that can always outwit and

00:35:18 ►

outrun biology in any situation.

00:35:22 ►

All right, so now let’s bring ourselves forward into modern culture

00:35:25 ►

technological culture

00:35:26 ►

if we’ve been driven by means

00:35:31 ►

for the last hundred thousand years we’ve been forced

00:35:33 ►

further and further away from the natural world

00:35:35 ►

and it’s not really as if we have

00:35:37 ►

any choice about our alienation

00:35:39 ►

from the natural world because the thing

00:35:41 ►

that makes us human is the thing that makes us alienated

00:35:43 ►

we can’t really have it both ways.

00:35:50 ►

The problem is, or the current situation is this.

00:35:55 ►

What’s happening is that we’re being hollowed out by our means.

00:36:00 ►

The things that we would associate with interiority,

00:36:03 ►

that we can have private thoughts and private feelings,

00:36:06 ►

they’re in conflict with the desire of means

00:36:09 ►

to be able to propagate and spread.

00:36:12 ►

Just do it.

00:36:14 ►

Enjoy Coke.

00:36:16 ►

All right?

00:36:18 ►

What is it?

00:36:18 ►

McDonald’s wants to make you smile.

00:36:20 ►

I can’t remember.

00:36:21 ►

All of this stuff is getting in there

00:36:23 ►

and is working at hollowing out

00:36:25 ►

what we would think of as the interior nature

00:36:27 ►

of the human being.

00:36:28 ►

Now, interiority was only recognized

00:36:31 ►

in the Enlightenment,

00:36:32 ►

and it was only recognized in the Enlightenment

00:36:34 ►

as it was really starting to disappear.

00:36:38 ►

And as this hollowing out gets more progressive

00:36:42 ►

and more progressive and more progressive,

00:36:44 ►

we’re going to start to see an era where what we would think of as the individual is existing

00:36:48 ►

sort of privately and apart from the collection of individuals and the collection of culture

00:36:53 ►

is going to disappear.

00:36:56 ►

And that could be perceived as being a very frightening thought.

00:37:00 ►

We’ll now talk about why it may or may not be.

00:37:05 ►

But what’s going on when people start bringing up terms like the singularity or the end of history

00:37:10 ►

is what’s happening is that we’re starting to understand now in a very profound way

00:37:16 ►

how much control the logos have, the words have, over what we are in our biology.

00:37:21 ►

How much they’re starting to dictate what we are in the world.

00:37:24 ►

Now the thing about the singularity,

00:37:26 ►

it’s almost silly.

00:37:28 ►

It came to me quite clearly a couple of months ago.

00:37:31 ►

The singularity that’s going on has no more meaning to it.

00:37:35 ►

It’s no more meaningful an event

00:37:36 ►

than what happens when you put a microphone too close to an amplifier.

00:37:42 ►

Okay?

00:37:42 ►

You get that line of feedback.

00:37:44 ►

But that line of feedback. But that line of feedback

00:37:46 ►

completely

00:37:48 ►

drowns out anything else

00:37:50 ►

that’s going on in the system.

00:37:52 ►

And so in essence, what’s happening

00:37:54 ►

is that as we’re improving our ability

00:37:56 ►

to communicate, that’s where we’re going next

00:37:57 ►

in our talk, we’re improving

00:37:59 ►

this ability to feedback to transmit

00:38:02 ►

the ideas of the locus.

00:38:05 ►

And the truth is we’re so far down that path

00:38:07 ►

that we only have a little bit more to go.

00:38:11 ►

Okay, so I’m going to bring this back to what Terence was talking about.

00:38:15 ►

We’ve now covered 4 billion years ago.

00:38:18 ►

We’ve now covered 150,000 years ago.

00:38:20 ►

We’ve covered a little bit of where we are now.

00:38:22 ►

I’m going to bring it back to the invisible landscape.

00:38:24 ►

Terence drew an awful lot

00:38:26 ►

of his work from the work of Alfred

00:38:27 ►

North Whitehead, Process and Reality

00:38:29 ►

being his big philosophical book, which

00:38:31 ►

I’ve read several pages of.

00:38:34 ►

It’s dense.

00:38:36 ►

I’ve been able to read other people

00:38:38 ►

writing about Whitehead, so I have

00:38:39 ►

some understanding of what he was talking about.

00:38:41 ►

But I did get a very important concept from it,

00:38:44 ►

which became a core concept in the playful world,

00:38:46 ►

which was the idea of concrescence.

00:38:49 ►

Concrescence is the idea that when you have

00:38:51 ►

different forces that come together,

00:38:54 ►

that is where novelty is produced.

00:38:57 ►

So you can have one type of force

00:38:58 ►

and another type of force,

00:38:59 ►

and where they intersect.

00:39:01 ►

Concrescence occurs.

00:39:03 ►

Novelty is created.

00:39:05 ►

Now, he took that idea,

00:39:07 ►

and Taurus took that idea and ran with it,

00:39:09 ►

and he said basically, since the beginning of time,

00:39:12 ►

there have been these different processes

00:39:14 ►

that have been happening,

00:39:15 ►

and that you could think of these processes

00:39:17 ►

as being ways that can be modeled,

00:39:19 ►

and that the intersection of these ways

00:39:22 ►

at any moment would give you some idea

00:39:24 ►

of the overall amount of novelty in the world at any particular point in time.

00:39:27 ►

There’s a model that I can give you that can help you understand this.

00:39:31 ►

Many of you know what an MP3 is, right?

00:39:33 ►

It’s a digital form for analog music.

00:39:36 ►

Well, how an MP3 actually works is it takes all the complexity of the sounds you’re hearing

00:39:41 ►

in a piece of music and breaks it down into individual descriptions of waves.

00:39:46 ►

And when those individual descriptions of waves

00:39:49 ►

are recombined, you get the music.

00:39:51 ►

And so essentially what Terence was saying

00:39:53 ►

is that underneath all this craziness

00:39:55 ►

that we think of as history are these series of waves.

00:39:59 ►

And the history is the way of putting them together

00:40:01 ►

to produce the music of time.

00:40:04 ►

And McKenna actually used the I Ching as a guide for all of this,

00:40:08 ►

and you can argue about whether that was true or not,

00:40:11 ►

because it provided for him a very interesting map for a time scale

00:40:14 ►

for showing how these waves are coming together.

00:40:21 ►

And at the end, he was able to produce the formulas.

00:40:23 ►

This formula would provide a way for you to know how much concrescence,

00:40:28 ►

how much novelty was occurring at any particular point in time.

00:40:32 ►

And he then ran this calculation, he ran this formula,

00:40:36 ►

and he took a look at history and said,

00:40:37 ►

okay, let me see if this is actually going on,

00:40:39 ►

where can I fit this formula, this output of this formula,

00:40:43 ►

this way of the history,

00:40:45 ►

so I can get some sense of where we are in the historic points right now. And he laid it out against his own understanding

00:40:51 ►

of history, and he came up with an end point of December 21st, 2012 as being the end, when

00:40:56 ►

novelty is maximized, when we all end up being transcended into something else. And he later

00:41:01 ►

on found out that was the end date of the mind calendar, which may or may not

00:41:05 ►

have any significance.

00:41:07 ►

But what I want to talk about

00:41:09 ►

is that even in the model

00:41:10 ►

that McKennick presented

00:41:11 ►

for arriving at an understanding

00:41:13 ►

of when novelty

00:41:14 ►

as a force in the universe

00:41:16 ►

would be maximized,

00:41:17 ►

whether or not the specifics

00:41:18 ►

of that model are true,

00:41:20 ►

what I want to do

00:41:21 ►

is provide a model

00:41:22 ►

that I think we can

00:41:23 ►

entirely base

00:41:24 ►

in a scientific understanding

00:41:25 ►

of biology

00:41:27 ►

and a scientific understanding of information

00:41:30 ►

to get to the same point.

00:41:32 ►

So we’ve been able to identify

00:41:33 ►

three progressive

00:41:35 ►

waves over the course of this talk.

00:41:37 ►

We’ve been able to define the emergence of life 4 billion

00:41:39 ►

years ago to where we are now.

00:41:41 ►

The emergence of a linguistic species

00:41:43 ►

100,000 years ago to now. The emergence of a linguistic species 100,000 years ago to

00:41:45 ►

now. The emergence of a technological species about 5,500 years ago to now.

00:41:52 ►

Now, let’s take a look at what happened 4 billion years ago. We got the medium of DNA

00:41:57 ►

as the information recording device for the world. We talked about that. That medium and

00:42:02 ►

the accumulation of that medium was very gradual but now it’s

00:42:05 ►

happened in the last 20 years is all of a sudden that medium which existed as an

00:42:10 ►

information transmission mechanism for biology has now become an information

00:42:15 ►

coding mechanism that is manipulable linguistically by us I want you to think

00:42:21 ►

about the human genome you don’t now think about the human genome. You don’t now think about the human genome

00:42:25 ►

as those twisting double helixes of DNA.

00:42:28 ►

Now you think of it as a long series of Gs, As, Cs, and Ts.

00:42:32 ►

You’ve all seen them, which are the codes.

00:42:35 ►

You talk about the film Gattaca.

00:42:37 ►

The title Gattaca comes from that code.

00:42:39 ►

So all of a sudden, we’ve made this transition

00:42:41 ►

from thinking about biology as a physical medium

00:42:44 ►

to now thinking about biology as a physical medium

00:42:45 ►

to now thinking about biology as a linguistic medium.

00:42:48 ►

So what we’ve done is we’ve now stopped that four million years into the space of linguistics,

00:42:54 ►

where we can manipulate it linguistically ten million times faster than we had before.

00:43:01 ►

Okay.

00:43:04 ►

Second,

00:43:07 ►

you have the emergence of linguistic species 100,000 years ago,

00:43:08 ►

and that was all well and good.

00:43:10 ►

And then what happened was that in 1840,

00:43:13 ►

the telegram was invented.

00:43:15 ►

And all of a sudden,

00:43:16 ►

the linguistic species can now start spreading

00:43:18 ►

its own information.

00:43:20 ►

You can do the math.

00:43:21 ►

It’s close enough, 10 million times fast.

00:43:23 ►

You can actually do the math,

00:43:24 ►

but the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light

00:43:26 ►

is about a million times, but whatever

00:43:28 ►

so it’s now possible to spread

00:43:30 ►

messages a million times faster

00:43:32 ►

and Marshall McLuhan

00:43:34 ►

who wrote about this back

00:43:36 ►

in the 1960s said it was essentially

00:43:38 ►

as if the entire human race

00:43:40 ►

had been converted to a single nervous system

00:43:42 ►

although a nervous system is actually much slower

00:43:44 ►

than the molecular kind of connection.

00:43:47 ►

But what had happened was because there was now so much information transfer, so much

00:43:50 ►

communication between the members of the species, they could functionally act as a single organism.

00:43:59 ►

So now the transmission of facts and ideas has become an instantaneous feature of life,

00:44:04 ►

culminated now in the Internet.

00:44:06 ►

And because of that, there’s a greater capability for ideas to meet, to interact, and produce

00:44:10 ►

progressives.

00:44:12 ►

And the history of the 20th century, with all of its wars and everything, could actually

00:44:16 ►

be more accurately characterized as a series of advancements in communication, where you

00:44:20 ►

start with the radio, and then go to the the television and then go to the internet one step

00:44:25 ►

after another.

00:44:27 ►

And an advancing, increasing capability.

00:44:30 ►

And every step along the way,

00:44:32 ►

the communication capability,

00:44:34 ►

it makes it easier

00:44:35 ►

and easier for messages,

00:44:38 ►

for memes to pass from person to person

00:44:40 ►

to person. Because what’s happening

00:44:41 ►

is that on top of everything that’s going on

00:44:43 ►

with us as biology, the secret

00:44:45 ►

history, the history we’re only starting to

00:44:47 ►

become aware of, is that the means

00:44:49 ►

are using us to make us better

00:44:51 ►

vehicles for transmitting means.

00:44:54 ►

That’s what’s really going on.

00:44:59 ►

So that’s

00:45:00 ►

the history of biology and the

00:45:03 ►

history of the human species in the modern frame.

00:45:06 ►

That’s where those waves are now starting to crash down into ground.

00:45:10 ►

Let’s take a look at the emergence of the technological species,

00:45:12 ►

which is more recent than the emergence of the human species.

00:45:15 ►

What happened was 5,500 years ago, language became a concrete artifact.

00:45:22 ►

What happened was that language got written down.

00:45:26 ►

The advent of writing,

00:45:27 ►

writing was really the first technology

00:45:29 ►

of significance to modern civilization.

00:45:32 ►

And it means that you could actually turn something

00:45:33 ►

that was linguistic and existed sort of in its ether,

00:45:36 ►

you could turn it into a physical object.

00:45:39 ►

And it’s interesting because they used to believe

00:45:41 ►

that writing emerged in Mesopotamia

00:45:43 ►

and then sort of traveled the world after this.

00:45:45 ►

And they’ve now since discovered that language emerged,

00:45:47 ►

pardon me, writing emerged simultaneously in Egypt and in Mesopotamia.

00:45:51 ►

They don’t know why.

00:45:52 ►

But they know that it emerged simultaneously in both places.

00:45:57 ►

And writing was the exteriorization.

00:45:59 ►

It was a concrete form of our drive to communicate.

00:46:02 ►

as a concrete form of our drive to communicate.

00:46:10 ►

So we’ve seen now how we’ve converted DNA from this very slow biological medium

00:46:12 ►

into this very fast form of codes.

00:46:15 ►

And we’ve taken the relatively slow form of communication

00:46:18 ►

via voice in terms of the instantaneous communication

00:46:21 ►

of telecommunication.

00:46:23 ►

And now what we’re going to see

00:46:24 ►

is an equivalent acceleration in technology.

00:46:27 ►

This is the third and final wave.

00:46:29 ►

I don’t know when it’s going to finish us off.

00:46:31 ►

Things may look like they’re going fast now.

00:46:33 ►

We think that the world’s going fast.

00:46:34 ►

Trust me, it’s absolutely nothing

00:46:35 ►

to what is just about to come.

00:46:38 ►

And it’s something that we have no precedent for.

00:46:40 ►

But what’s happening is that our technical ability

00:46:43 ►

is about to leap up and separate itself

00:46:47 ►

from the logos from our linguistic ability.

00:46:50 ►

What do I mean when I say this?

00:46:51 ►

There’s an emerging science known as nanotechnology, which is really exploding right now.

00:46:57 ►

And before very much time has passed by, it’s going to give us very fine-grained control

00:47:01 ►

over the material world.

00:47:02 ►

When Sasha was up here, he was talking about wanting the blackboard, where you could just snap bits of molecules on and off together.

00:47:08 ►

And this is precisely what nanotechnology is going to offer us right now,

00:47:11 ►

where nanochemists have to use very tried-and-true techniques

00:47:14 ►

and very mass techniques to do such and such a thing

00:47:17 ►

to add a radical or take a radical off.

00:47:19 ►

Whereas the world we’re going to, the entire physical world,

00:47:24 ►

can now start to look a lot more like Legos

00:47:26 ►

that get snapped together at will.

00:47:28 ►

And if you think about the difference

00:47:29 ►

between building a castle out of sand

00:47:30 ►

and building a castle out of Legos,

00:47:32 ►

you’re starting to understand the difference

00:47:34 ►

that we’re about to be presented with the material world.

00:47:37 ►

So the atomic scale level of the material world

00:47:40 ►

is about to become linguistically pliable.

00:47:44 ►

This is an ability we linguistically pliable.

00:47:45 ►

This is an ability we have never had before.

00:47:48 ►

Alright?

00:47:53 ►

So that means that in this world that we’re just starting to enter,

00:47:57 ►

anything that you see, whether it’s animate or inanimate,

00:48:02 ►

will have within itself the capacity to be entirely transformed by our linguistic

00:48:07 ►

capabilities.

00:48:08 ►

There’s now going to be a rapid transfer of information between the physical nature of

00:48:14 ►

the world and our linguistic nature.

00:48:16 ►

And that’s going to now produce another kind of world.

00:48:20 ►

And it’s very hard for us to conceptualize what a world like that looks like, although

00:48:24 ►

that was the point of writing The Playful World,

00:48:26 ►

because what I did for The Playful World was to write a book that talked about the scope of this revolution,

00:48:32 ►

but did it by talking about children’s toys,

00:48:34 ►

which are the least threatening objects adults have in the world, or kids for that matter.

00:48:38 ►

But you can use those toys to illustrate the broad scope of the transformations that are taking place.

00:48:44 ►

The one thing that I did not step away from, the broad scope of the transformations that are taking place.

00:48:45 ►

The one thing that I did not step away from, the one idea that I had that I did not step

00:48:51 ►

away from when I was writing this book, although I think that it’s a relatively disturbing

00:48:56 ►

concept for people who are not used to the idea, is that the only way we can conceptualize

00:49:03 ►

that kind of world is by identifying it with what we would conceive of as magic.

00:49:09 ►

It will be as if we have the ability to cast spells

00:49:13 ►

that actually change the quality of the material world.

00:49:16 ►

Let me quote Terence once again,

00:49:18 ►

and I want to thank Todd for this

00:49:19 ►

because I got this out of the talk that he made

00:49:22 ►

at the Alchemical Arts.

00:49:23 ►

He and I were very much having this conversation.

00:49:26 ►

He said, this downloading of language

00:49:28 ►

into objectified intentionality

00:49:30 ►

replaces the electrons that blindly run

00:49:33 ►

and replaces it instead with a magical,

00:49:36 ►

literally controlled phase space of some sort

00:49:39 ►

where wishes come true, curses work,

00:49:42 ►

fates unfold, and everything has the quality of drama,

00:49:45 ►

denying entropic mechanical existence.

00:49:49 ►

Now that isn’t to say we’re about to become omnipotent,

00:49:52 ►

because this is not what’s about to happen.

00:49:54 ►

But our abilities are about to become now

00:49:57 ►

so much broader than anything we’ve ever had to conceptualize.

00:50:03 ►

We have no language for it.

00:50:06 ►

We have none, which means that this is another indication

00:50:09 ►

that our linguistic capabilities are coming up

00:50:11 ►

against a wall, that there has to be some sort of shift,

00:50:14 ►

some sort of shift in our understanding for it.

00:50:18 ►

And the search to define that language

00:50:20 ►

is the grand project of our current civilization.

00:50:24 ►

We know that something new is approaching but there’s really… Let me step back for a second

00:50:31 ►

because when people encounter this idea and this idea is starting to suffuse the

00:50:35 ►

culture as a whole whether people know it consciously or unconsciously they’re

00:50:39 ►

starting to see the shape of this new world and if it fills them with horror

00:50:43 ►

and could very easily fill people with horror, what

00:50:45 ►

happens is they retreat into fundamentalism.

00:50:48 ►

They step away from this world.

00:50:49 ►

They insist that it is not happening, and step back into an earlier version of this

00:50:53 ►

world, which, by the way, is a linguistic construction.

00:50:56 ►

It doesn’t actually have any exterior reality.

00:50:58 ►

But it’s a safe place from which they can then curse the world.

00:51:01 ►

And we’ve seen, in just too much detail lately,

00:51:05 ►

what the price we pay for that stepping away is.

00:51:08 ►

There’s an alternative tendency

00:51:10 ►

with people who are too blindly optimistic

00:51:13 ►

about what the structure of that world is going to be.

00:51:15 ►

And they’re willing to accept

00:51:17 ►

any form that world is going to offer them.

00:51:21 ►

And that could be some sort of very weird communion

00:51:24 ►

with the machinic

00:51:25 ►

intelligences

00:51:26 ►

in which they

00:51:26 ►

sacrifice their own

00:51:28 ►

humanity in order

00:51:29 ►

to become incorporated

00:51:30 ►

as elements

00:51:30 ►

within this

00:51:31 ►

linguistic space

00:51:32 ►

and there are

00:51:34 ►

real dangers

00:51:34 ►

there too

00:51:35 ►

but there are

00:51:36 ►

people who are

00:51:36 ►

very pro that

00:51:37 ►

that say that

00:51:38 ►

this change is coming

00:51:39 ►

and I don’t care

00:51:40 ►

what form it takes

00:51:41 ►

and so you

00:51:42 ►

have in a sense

00:51:43 ►

to get Homeric about this,

00:51:46 ►

these are the still and true of this of the modern age.

00:51:48 ►

These are the points we have to sort of sail our way through

00:51:51 ►

in order to get to where we’re actually going

00:51:53 ►

once these three waves,

00:51:56 ►

in synchrony, in resonance,

00:51:57 ►

start to come down on shore.

00:52:00 ►

It’s my belief,

00:52:02 ►

and I want you to prove me right,

00:52:04 ►

that the psychedelic community represents the authentic search for a middle path.

00:52:09 ►

Because what’s happening in the psychedelic experience

00:52:12 ►

is that there’s a stretching of being.

00:52:13 ►

There’s a stretching of being that allows new forms of language and new ideas to enter.

00:52:18 ►

We all understand this intuitively,

00:52:20 ►

because we come back from the psychedelic experience

00:52:22 ►

with some expanded sense of awareness

00:52:24 ►

that we’ve then opened up to an understanding we didn’t have before.

00:52:28 ►

And so, psychedelic experience, and Terence really talked about this, psychedelic experience

00:52:33 ►

could be used as a force, as a mechanism to force the evolution of language.

00:52:37 ►

That we could actually harness the engines that are being offered by the psychedelic

00:52:41 ►

experience to be able to create new forms, and that those new forms would then help to shape the new world that we’re entering.

00:52:49 ►

And so we have the three waves.

00:52:51 ►

We have that biological wave that’s 4 billion years old.

00:52:53 ►

We have the linguistic wave that’s 100,000 years old.

00:52:55 ►

We have the technological wave that’s 5,500 years old.

00:52:58 ►

And they’re rapidly moving to this compressive point.

00:53:01 ►

And on the way, they’re producing a tsunami with so much novelty that it’s never been experienced

00:53:06 ►

before in the history of the planet.

00:53:10 ►

At the same time, we find ourselves

00:53:12 ►

within this increasingly narrow space

00:53:14 ►

where we’re really having to now start to

00:53:16 ►

fight a battle even to think thoughts within

00:53:17 ►

our own heads.

00:53:19 ►

And we’re being confined, not just

00:53:22 ►

linguistically, but we’re now starting to be

00:53:23 ►

confined biologically. Because now that we’ve converted biology to a code, it becomes linguistically, but we’re now starting to be confined biologically.

00:53:27 ►

Because now that we’ve converted biology to a code,

00:53:28 ►

it becomes linguistically manipulable.

00:53:30 ►

It becomes a tool for control.

00:53:34 ►

And technology is now also becoming a tool for control.

00:53:37 ►

So we have to be very cognizant of the fact that the escape that we’re looking for

00:53:39 ►

can’t be found just by relying on any of these older systems.

00:53:44 ►

And Terence actually was very promoting the concept of the forward escape.

00:53:48 ►

When you find yourself in a narrow passage,

00:53:49 ►

you simply hit the accelerator and start going as fast as you can.

00:53:53 ►

It’s a French concept.

00:53:55 ►

We can see now that there’s a birth coming,

00:53:58 ►

that there’s an emergence in the new form of being.

00:54:00 ►

You can argue about whether it would happen in 2012 or 2020 or 2015 or

00:54:06 ►

tomorrow afternoon.

00:54:07 ►

You can argue about the specifics of when it’s going to happen, but what you can’t argue

00:54:11 ►

about is that there are these three ways.

00:54:13 ►

We can take a look at the shape of these three ways and the fact that these three ways seem

00:54:16 ►

to be compressing on a single point, and that this single point is where Homo sapiens is

00:54:21 ►

going to be left behind, and we’re going to see the emergence of a new species.

00:54:22 ►

Homo sapiens is going to be left behind when we see the emergence of a new species.

00:54:25 ►

And I think of the psychedelic community

00:54:27 ►

as the people who are capable of taking stock

00:54:31 ►

of the entirety of the transformation.

00:54:33 ►

Because you’ve been thrust into spaces

00:54:35 ►

where you don’t have any words,

00:54:37 ►

and you’ve been forced to come back

00:54:38 ►

and create your own understandings.

00:54:40 ►

And because what will be permanently true

00:54:43 ►

for all of us in a few years

00:54:44 ►

has been occasionally temporarily true for us.

00:54:49 ►

And because we’ve been there, we don’t give in to amazement.

00:54:52 ►

We don’t give in to fear.

00:54:53 ►

We don’t give in to speed or pretty blinking lights.

00:54:55 ►

Talking to aliens, been there.

00:54:57 ►

The end of history, been there.

00:54:59 ►

And in fact, maybe all the bizarre trips we’ve ever had

00:55:02 ►

have been just what we need as humanity enters its last bizarre trip.

00:55:08 ►

Now, just a couple of months before he died, just on the beginning of the millennium,

00:55:14 ►

I went to visit Terence in Hawaii, and I had brought my copy of Invisible Landscape.

00:55:17 ►

He had it signed before then, and he signed it.

00:55:21 ►

And this is what he wrote.

00:55:22 ►

He said, properly understood, this book is a map to the stone as above so below.

00:55:27 ►

He was talking about the philosopher’s stone. And this philosopher’s stone has the capability of conversing base metals into gold.

00:55:34 ►

Now of course that’s an allegory. It means it can connect, create, take the base matter of consciousness and transmute it to a higher form of consciousness.

00:55:42 ►

And then he closed it with, as above, so below.

00:55:46 ►

And really… Pardon me?

00:55:48 ►

Thank you. I’m sorry.

00:55:52 ►

I was waxing LHA for a minute.

00:55:57 ►

He knew that this book was a metaphor,

00:56:00 ►

that it may or may not have been literally true.

00:56:04 ►

But what he closed it with was,

00:56:05 ►

as above, so below.

00:56:07 ►

But what he was really saying was,

00:56:09 ►

as inside, so without.

00:56:11 ►

That the things that you can find

00:56:13 ►

in the internal landscape,

00:56:15 ►

the invisible landscape,

00:56:16 ►

were the keys to be able to find

00:56:18 ►

how to get out,

00:56:19 ►

to work it out in the world.

00:56:25 ►

What he was saying was that the stuff within us,

00:56:28 ►

the stuff we experience,

00:56:31 ►

is the ultimate guide to that incredible journey

00:56:34 ►

that lies before us,

00:56:35 ►

because these waves are coming together

00:56:37 ►

and they’re crashing right on the shore of our souls.

00:56:41 ►

Thanks.

00:56:54 ►

How are we doing on time?

00:56:56 ►

We’re doing great

00:56:57 ►

on time.

00:56:57 ►

Do you have

00:56:57 ►

to take some

00:56:58 ►

questions?

00:56:58 ►

Yeah, of course.

00:56:59 ►

Okay.

00:57:00 ►

Yes.

00:57:01 ►

Okay, so

00:57:02 ►

part of your

00:57:03 ►

thoughts was

00:57:03 ►

about the idea of

00:57:06 ►

kind of nanotechnology

00:57:07 ►

and

00:57:08 ►

sort of

00:57:09 ►

I’m paraphrasing you

00:57:11 ►

but the

00:57:11 ►

our ability

00:57:13 ►

to become godlike

00:57:14 ►

perhaps

00:57:15 ►

with changing reality

00:57:17 ►

through this technology.

00:57:18 ►

Right.

00:57:19 ►

So that would lead me

00:57:20 ►

to think that

00:57:21 ►

we can do anything

00:57:22 ►

we want to do

00:57:22 ►

to some degree.

00:57:24 ►

Now another part of your thought was about about memes, being the linguistic sort of parallels with memes.

00:57:31 ►

And there’s memes that are running the show.

00:57:33 ►

Now, if the memes are running the show, and if I get to do anything we want to do, there seems to be a contradiction.

00:57:40 ►

Well, who’s the we that can do whatever we want to do? I mean, there’s not an essential contradiction

00:57:47 ►

because part of what we’re starting to understand

00:57:48 ►

is that that we, you know,

00:57:50 ►

when you say we can do whatever we want to do,

00:57:52 ►

the question is what is that we?

00:57:54 ►

Where is that we coming from?

00:57:56 ►

And what we’re starting to understand now

00:57:57 ►

is that we’re less we than we used to be.

00:58:00 ►

And the place that we’re going

00:58:02 ►

is going to force a real redefinition.

00:58:05 ►

And this problem of language

00:58:06 ►

becomes very slippery at this point.

00:58:08 ►

But there’s a process of the loss of interiority

00:58:13 ►

which is going on here.

00:58:14 ►

And there’s an upside and a downside to it.

00:58:16 ►

The downside is the thing that we think of

00:58:18 ►

as the individual is increasingly less vital.

00:58:22 ►

The upside is the thing that we think of

00:58:24 ►

as the community is increasingly more vital. So there is the thing that we think of as the community

00:58:25 ►

is increasingly more vital.

00:58:27 ►

So there’s a loss and a gain there.

00:58:29 ►

And so when you say, well, we can make of the world what we want,

00:58:32 ►

the question becomes now,

00:58:34 ►

are we entering a civilization or a culture or a form

00:58:38 ►

that that decision is being made by us collectively

00:58:42 ►

for the common good,

00:58:44 ►

or is it being made singly

00:58:47 ►

in order to produce domination and control?

00:58:49 ►

I think this is very much where Richard was coming from.

00:58:52 ►

My answer in a sense to surveillance society and to surveillance culture is that you can

00:58:58 ►

have as much surveillance as you want as long as everyone has access to it.

00:59:03 ►

It’s always the old question, who shall guard the guardians?

00:59:06 ►

And so if you step into a culture

00:59:08 ►

and say there’s going to be a top and a bottom in this culture

00:59:11 ►

and I’m going to try as hard as I can to be on the top,

00:59:14 ►

you’re accepting an entire mindset

00:59:15 ►

about what the products of that culture are going to be

00:59:17 ►

and you’ve already made your decision about who that we is.

00:59:21 ►

So with the sort of the meme idea

00:59:24 ►

that where does the concept of mean idea of that, where does

00:59:26 ►

the concept of free will get in?

00:59:28 ►

That’s a good question.

00:59:30 ►

And I’m not saying there isn’t

00:59:32 ►

such a thing as free will. What I’m saying

00:59:34 ►

is that it’s forcing us to take a very good

00:59:36 ►

look at this. I don’t think

00:59:38 ►

that there’s an ultimate answer

00:59:40 ►

to this. Part of what we think of as free

00:59:42 ►

will is, it emerges,

00:59:52 ►

emerges, literally emerges, from the raw complexity of the interactions that take place in our life.

00:59:58 ►

But I draw a lot of my own inspiration from the Sufis.

01:00:09 ►

And the Sufis make it quite clear that man does not live in free will, but he has to grow into a state of free will by practice. That most of your actions are mechanical and that there’s really you may feel you have free will but most of your actions are mechanical. I ascribe to

01:00:14 ►

that school that in fact free will is something that you earn by encountering the world and

01:00:18 ►

emerging into free will rather than something you just get.

01:00:22 ►

And that’s the… Robert had some rules

01:00:26 ►

that point in his book on meditation

01:00:28 ►

on the stuff about

01:00:29 ►

how to undo it yourself

01:00:31 ►

and the illusions of free will

01:00:33 ►

that we have it and we don’t have to do it.

01:00:36 ►

That’s part of our religions.

01:00:38 ►

And it’s a dangerous meme

01:00:39 ►

because it makes people complacent in the fact that

01:00:41 ►

they think they have free will, whereas most

01:00:43 ►

of the mystical schools will tell you,

01:00:45 ►

no, you don’t, but you can probably have it if you work hard at it.

01:00:51 ►

I mean, it’s a very contentious ground because particularly in the West,

01:00:54 ►

free will is regarded as an essential human right.

01:00:57 ►

It’s part of the foreign white human tradition.

01:01:00 ►

Yes?

01:01:01 ►

So who are the West’s writers?

01:01:01 ►

Yes?

01:01:02 ►

So who or what’s running the memes?

01:01:11 ►

Well, yeah, I mean, the memes are.

01:01:13 ►

Who or what is running the memes is the memes are. The memes are fundamentally looking to simply optimize their transmission

01:01:21 ►

from brain to brain to brain to brain.

01:01:23 ►

I will tell you that, this is a funny story,

01:01:26 ►

I came to this conclusion because I spent an evening

01:01:28 ►

in Switzerland smoking dope with the modern

01:01:31 ►

mother of meme theory, a woman by the name of Susan Blackwell,

01:01:35 ►

who, because she had chronic fatigue syndrome,

01:01:37 ►

decided she needed to start smoking pot.

01:01:39 ►

We spent a very nice stony evening in Lucerne

01:01:42 ►

talking about memes, and I started to understand

01:01:44 ►

over the course of my conversation with her,

01:01:46 ►

that really what she was talking about was that memes were starting to,

01:01:50 ►

they had been sort of in a constant struggle for optimization.

01:01:55 ►

And so when you talk about who’s running the show,

01:01:57 ►

well, the memes are, but the goal they have in mind,

01:01:59 ►

when you ask about biology, what’s running the show,

01:02:02 ►

well, an evolutionary biologist tells you that what’s running the show is the drive

01:02:05 ►

to pass your genes on to the next generation.

01:02:08 ►

And that, at a base level, is the only thing that’s going on.

01:02:11 ►

As far as ducks or guffies or whatever are concerned,

01:02:16 ►

that’s what’s going on.

01:02:17 ►

With memes, and it’s simplistic, it’s reductionistic,

01:02:21 ►

but it’s a model that you can use to understand.

01:02:23 ►

I’m not saying it’s the final model.

01:02:26 ►

The next level, you can say with the memes, what are the memes trying to do?

01:02:29 ►

They’re trying to get out there as widely as possible, but the way they’re doing that

01:02:32 ►

is by optimizing their ability to be transmitted.

01:02:37 ►

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake posits the concept of the morphogenetic field. for him, the morphogenetic field is intelligent.

01:02:48 ►

It is an intelligent field.

01:02:50 ►

And it is, in a sense,

01:02:52 ►

its goal is to self-propagate it in a way that the meme is.

01:02:56 ►

Would you draw a parallel between the morphogenetic field and the meme?

01:03:03 ►

And one of your literary post-biological discourses?

01:03:09 ►

Well, the interesting thing is that

01:03:12 ►

the morphogenic field in biology

01:03:15 ►

produces an easing of the way around biological systems

01:03:20 ►

to be able to reproduce behavior, right?

01:03:22 ►

And the same thing may or may not be true in me and mimetics.

01:03:26 ►

And actually, this brings up an important point

01:03:27 ►

that I wanted to ask on.

01:03:29 ►

One of the predictions of me, of morphogenetic theory,

01:03:32 ►

is that it’s much more difficult to synthesize something

01:03:34 ►

that’s never existed before than it is to synthesize

01:03:38 ►

something that already exists.

01:03:39 ►

This is a prediction.

01:03:40 ►

Have you noticed this in your own work?

01:03:43 ►

I’ve never thought of it.

01:03:44 ►

Okay, so it’s one of the predictions of Sheldrake’s work. Have you noticed this in your own work? No, I haven’t.

01:03:45 ►

Okay. So it’s one of the predictions that Sheldrake’s work.

01:03:49 ►

Could you define a meme for me to do that?

01:03:57 ►

A meme is the basic unit of linguistic capability that can be expressed and transmitted.

01:04:06 ►

All right?

01:04:07 ►

There’s a good joke.

01:04:10 ►

Memes don’t exist.

01:04:11 ►

Tell everyone you know.

01:04:13 ►

All right?

01:04:18 ►

Memes don’t exist.

01:04:19 ►

Tell everyone you know.

01:04:22 ►

All right.

01:04:23 ►

That gives you a sort of rough idea.

01:04:26 ►

All of the major religions are complexes of

01:04:32 ►

means that work together, but one of the

01:04:34 ►

means they all have in common is spread the word.

01:04:36 ►

Okay.

01:04:38 ►

One of the other means that most of them have in

01:04:40 ►

common is ours is the only true faith.

01:04:42 ►

Hinduism is the only religion that doesn’t.

01:04:44 ►

Right.

01:04:46 ►

Buddhism isn’t this thing

01:04:47 ►

you might have

01:04:47 ►

at all.

01:04:48 ►

All right.

01:04:50 ►

I didn’t hear

01:04:51 ►

that.

01:04:52 ►

I’m sorry.

01:04:53 ►

Hinduism is not

01:04:54 ►

the one true faith.

01:04:56 ►

Although,

01:04:57 ►

they are the

01:04:59 ►

one true faith

01:04:59 ►

with the exception

01:05:00 ►

of Buddhism

01:05:00 ►

which just doesn’t

01:05:01 ►

say anything

01:05:01 ►

about it.

01:05:02 ►

Yes.

01:05:03 ►

On that note,

01:05:04 ►

I’d up a challenge

01:05:06 ►

to psychedelic music

01:05:08 ►

that I’ve been talking about?

01:05:10 ►

Yeah, well, I don’t think I used to say church.

01:05:12 ►

Huh?

01:05:14 ►

I don’t think I used to say church.

01:05:16 ►

I don’t think I used to say church.

01:05:18 ►

Did I say church?

01:05:20 ►

I don’t think I said church.

01:05:22 ►

Did I say church?

01:05:24 ►

I could have been taken over by a church. Did I say church?

01:05:30 ►

I’d be really surprised if I used that kind of language.

01:05:34 ►

But forgive me if I did.

01:05:36 ►

I recant.

01:05:37 ►

I recant.

01:05:38 ►

I recant.

01:05:41 ►

No, I think I would have said community.

01:05:43 ►

You said emerge.

01:05:45 ►

Oh, emerge.

01:05:46 ►

Okay.

01:05:48 ►

Yes.

01:05:49 ►

I just wanted to, on the topic of community,

01:05:51 ►

I wanted to recommend a book that I found to be really, really, really good

01:05:55 ►

called The Neem Machine.

01:05:57 ►

That’s Susan Blackmore, what I was smoking dope with.

01:05:59 ►

Sure.

01:06:00 ►

And I also wanted to mention that it’s, you know,

01:06:03 ►

at least probable that she will be at the next MindState conference in Berkeley at the end of May of next year.

01:06:10 ►

Excellent.

01:06:11 ►

And she’s a firecracker.

01:06:13 ►

She is a firecracker.

01:06:14 ►

She’s another person who has blown me away as far as speaker and also an incredible mind.

01:06:22 ►

Yes.

01:06:20 ►

out of the line.

01:06:23 ►

Yes.

01:06:26 ►

You’re looking at the psychedelic community as a group

01:06:28 ►

who’s going to assist

01:06:29 ►

I’m looking at my notes to see if I

01:06:32 ►

transcribed it properly

01:06:34 ►

to assist

01:06:36 ►

in the new

01:06:38 ►

method of language

01:06:40 ►

slash communication

01:06:42 ►

in order to

01:06:49 ►

prepare language slash communication in order to prepare for what’s going to happen here in the next technology explosion

01:06:54 ►

in the next couple of years?

01:06:56 ►

Am I correct in what I said?

01:06:57 ►

Yeah, I don’t think.

01:06:58 ►

I mean, technology is one wave.

01:06:59 ►

There’s three different.

01:07:00 ►

There’s a linguistic wave.

01:07:01 ►

There’s a technological wave.

01:07:02 ►

And there’s a biological wave.

01:07:03 ►

And they’re going to collide and go off.

01:07:05 ►

I meant to say I spoke back.

01:07:07 ►

All right.

01:07:08 ►

Would nonverbal communication be one of those areas?

01:07:12 ►

It certainly looks like it does.

01:07:15 ►

That’s something that happens.

01:07:16 ►

Yeah.

01:07:18 ►

This is where words begin to fail.

01:07:21 ►

This is the problem.

01:07:22 ►

When you start talking about nonverbal communication, what can you say about nonverbal communication?

01:07:28 ►

It’s very hard.

01:07:29 ►

I think that we need to aggressively explore techniques for communication.

01:07:37 ►

It’s funny because John and I are both in the technological field, and in fact we do.

01:07:40 ►

My work as a programmer has almost always been around tools for communication,

01:07:45 ►

building technological edifices for communication.

01:07:48 ►

But there’s more than that.

01:07:51 ►

If you take a look at the work of someone like James Joyce, what did James Joyce do?

01:07:54 ►

He wrote a book.

01:07:56 ►

He said it’s been a good place that all of the world could be reconstructed from it,

01:08:00 ►

that he managed to sort of overload the language so thoroughly that you could,

01:08:04 ►

almost like an algorithm,

01:08:05 ►

almost like a program, grow the world from that book.

01:08:09 ►

I think that the very highest of art,

01:08:12 ►

I mean, at some level,

01:08:14 ►

the psychedelic experience is the art experience.

01:08:18 ►

The highest of art is the ability to be able to bring new things into language,

01:08:22 ►

whether or not they’re spoken,

01:08:24 ►

they exist as linguistic

01:08:26 ►

artifacts. I mean, I wish I could be more fluid linguistically about that. Terence is

01:08:34 ►

infinitely better at being able to talk about it than I am. But I think that that’s, in

01:08:39 ►

some sense, got to be the grand project. And we’ve not really, it was interesting because

01:08:44 ►

the All Chemical Arts Conference was, I think, the grand project. We’ve not really, it was interesting, because the All Chemical Arts Conference

01:08:46 ►

was, I think, the first time in modern history

01:08:48 ►

where we started to conceive of the idea

01:08:50 ►

of the psychedelic community as having a grand project.

01:08:54 ►

That there’s really something that we should be doing,

01:08:56 ►

and that we should start to think about it that way,

01:08:58 ►

and that we can take, not so much pride in it,

01:09:01 ►

but we can take sort of direction from it.

01:09:04 ►

And you want to be careful

01:09:06 ►

because you also don’t want that to become a meme

01:09:07 ►

that then drives out all the thought

01:09:09 ►

of all of this sort of thing.

01:09:10 ►

You fall into that trap again, too.

01:09:12 ►

But you can start to conceive of your actions,

01:09:16 ►

both individually and within a community,

01:09:17 ►

as being able to contribute something

01:09:19 ►

to the world that we’re all going to be creating.

01:09:25 ►

Yes?

01:09:26 ►

Is there some sort of value hierarchy

01:09:29 ►

that you see emerging from this?

01:09:33 ►

It seems to me like the speed and bandwidth

01:09:37 ►

is all in.

01:09:40 ►

I mean, that’s the thing.

01:09:41 ►

It’s not something you would basically play out

01:09:44 ►

of a collection or… Right. Yeah. When I was working on this talk,

01:09:55 ►

I gave an initial version

01:09:58 ►

to the LA Futurist Society

01:09:59 ►

three weeks ago

01:10:01 ►

in order to help clarify some of my ideas,

01:10:05 ►

they did not get the shotgun that you guys got.

01:10:09 ►

They got the pop gun.

01:10:12 ►

And one of the things that I said is

01:10:14 ►

we needed to be able to think about,

01:10:16 ►

we needed to be able to move to reflection

01:10:19 ►

over reflexive activity.

01:10:22 ►

We needed to be able to find

01:10:23 ►

or create the interior space for that.

01:10:26 ►

And it’s not clear.

01:10:28 ►

I cannot provide you any easy solution

01:10:31 ►

for how to provide interiority.

01:10:33 ►

Clearly spiritual practice, right?

01:10:35 ►

That is one of the goals of most spiritual practices

01:10:38 ►

is to provide a place for interiority.

01:10:40 ►

That is the aim of Zen practice.

01:10:43 ►

Right there. Stop the mind.

01:10:44 ►

Oh, look, interior space

01:10:46 ►

except you’re not supposed to think

01:10:48 ►

oh look, interior space

01:10:49 ►

because then you have to go back to the mind again

01:10:51 ►

so it’s

01:10:55 ►

it’s an odd thing

01:10:58 ►

because those are going to be constantly

01:11:00 ►

those forces are going to be constantly

01:11:02 ►

at war and the question is

01:11:04 ►

in the world when we finally get there

01:11:07 ►

is that constant interiority

01:11:09 ►

even going to be utterable?

01:11:11 ►

I don’t know

01:11:12 ►

I wish I had a nice good answer for that

01:11:15 ►

and I don’t have a clue

01:11:15 ►

Yes?

01:11:19 ►

I don’t mean to describe us

01:11:21 ►

as being virus

01:11:22 ►

and you saying

01:11:24 ►

falling into the crowd or being led by a meme?

01:11:28 ►

All this seems to just have memes as how various evil things.

01:11:34 ►

Can you give us a description of the way that the fans constantly try to get away from memes?

01:11:40 ►

Obviously they’re not entirely, but trust me, it takes a meme to fly a plane into a building.

01:11:50 ►

It also takes a meme to walk into a building on fire to save people.

01:11:59 ►

So those engines are both works.

01:12:02 ►

There are memes, good or bad, You’ve got to be so careful.

01:12:05 ►

There are means that can evoke the higher self

01:12:07 ►

and there are means that can evoke the shadow self.

01:12:11 ►

And so, I mean, again,

01:12:13 ►

this calls for then an adoption of the process philosophy

01:12:16 ►

and an adoption of the evaluated means.

01:12:18 ►

There’s no formula that says this means good, this means bad.

01:12:21 ►

How does this mean play itself out through time?

01:12:23 ►

How does it play itself in the body of someone

01:12:26 ►

who’s a carrier or the culture of someone who’s a carrier?

01:12:29 ►

This is, I think, gonna be,

01:12:30 ►

that’s the big thing about Wolfram.

01:12:31 ►

I’m really excited about Wolfram.

01:12:33 ►

He’s giving us a model that is,

01:12:36 ►

I mean, for 200 years after Newton,

01:12:38 ►

he conceived of everything as sort of clockwork,

01:12:41 ►

until relativity came along and kicked it in the butt.

01:12:43 ►

But the possible is that this is still do plenty of work, and that’s how they make cars. He’s going to now do the same thing

01:12:49 ►

to the physical world with respect to process. He’s given us that level of tool.

01:12:55 ►

Could a meme, is that M-E-A-M-E?

01:13:02 ►

M-E-M-E. Meme.

01:13:02 ►

Could it be? Is that M-E-A-M-E? M-E-M-E.

01:13:04 ►

Mimi.

01:13:05 ►

Would that be like a metaprogrammer

01:13:07 ►

in the 7th circuit,

01:13:09 ►

in the 8th circuit?

01:13:11 ►

It’s not the metaprogrammer,

01:13:14 ►

it’s the messages that are being carried

01:13:15 ►

by the metaprogrammer.

01:13:18 ►

So, Andrew?

01:13:20 ►

I wonder if that is just a single

01:13:22 ►

atmosphere, or is it

01:13:23 ►

as the rate of change increases, people become less and less able to cook, the faster the rate of progress is?

01:13:30 ►

Human states are not going through mental abuse.

01:13:32 ►

This is in fact what I was dealing with directly in the playful world.

01:13:37 ►

So the answer is no, because we’re not the generation who’s going to be the bearer of the children.

01:13:41 ►

And the children really only know a world of change, and so therefore they don’t encounter stress.

01:13:45 ►

So, the emergence of new and novel psychiatric

01:13:48 ►

disorders like ADHD, which I’ve never even

01:13:50 ►

visited before. ADHD is

01:13:52 ►

probably an adaptation rather than

01:13:54 ►

a disorder, although in severe

01:13:55 ►

cases it’s a disorder, and in mild cases

01:13:57 ►

it’s probably adaptation rather than a disorder.

01:14:00 ►

But it’s an addiction, I’ve never even visited before.

01:14:01 ►

No, I agree with you, but that’s what I’m saying. I think

01:14:03 ►

it may be adaptation.

01:14:06 ►

Alright, I mean, you can make a number of different arguments.

01:14:09 ►

The thing of it is that the ability to both focus around something

01:14:12 ►

for a long period of time,

01:14:14 ►

which is something that we think of as characteristic of consciousness,

01:14:17 ►

is, it may very well be a phantom of a particular style

01:14:21 ►

of linguistic discourse.

01:14:24 ►

I mean, it’s very funny, there’s a beautiful Simpsons episode of a particular style of linguistic discourse. All right?

01:14:25 ►

I mean, it’s very funny.

01:14:27 ►

There’s a beautiful Simpsons episode where Bart is diagnosed with ADHD

01:14:29 ►

and put on wonderful drugs, all right?

01:14:31 ►

And they’re saying he can’t concentrate.

01:14:32 ►

And Bart’s sitting here playing a video game

01:14:34 ►

with 36,000 things going on at the same time.

01:14:36 ►

And they’re making this point very subtly.

01:14:38 ►

It’s that ADHD is probably overdiagnosed.

01:14:42 ►

There are clearly people who cannot concentrate.

01:14:44 ►

And for them, it presents an insurmountable block.

01:14:46 ►

But there may be a broader set of children

01:14:48 ►

who in fact want to work in a discreetly small unit,

01:14:52 ►

but the culture hasn’t cut off the fact

01:14:54 ►

that they want to be able to do this yet.

01:14:57 ►

So it’s a very weird ground.

01:14:59 ►

You’re right, there’s a certain degree of mental illness there,

01:15:02 ►

because some people,

01:15:03 ►

maybe there’s something too far ahead of where we are now.

01:15:06 ►

But I think for a lot

01:15:08 ►

of children, the adaptation has simply

01:15:10 ►

focused them very differently.

01:15:11 ►

One of the conclusions that I make at the end

01:15:14 ►

of the playful world is that children

01:15:15 ►

are now creating a new language

01:15:17 ►

because of their interactions in this environment.

01:15:20 ►

And this language is not going to be

01:15:22 ►

something we’re going to be familiar with.

01:15:23 ►

And I’m now starting to get the sense that this language is more than to be something we’re going to be familiar with. And I’m now starting, it’s actually interesting to me, because I’m starting to get the sense

01:15:26 ►

that this language is more than just linguistic.

01:15:29 ►

It has to do with how their consciousness is focused.

01:15:31 ►

And so that we see this as a disease, where they just see this as a way of being able

01:15:36 ►

to be embodied in a world that is moving so very quickly.

01:15:41 ►

And so we’re treating them as if they were diseased, although they may or may not be.

01:15:46 ►

They may, in fact, be better able to cope in a faster world.

01:15:51 ►

It’s hard to know where to begin after listening to one of Mark’s presentations,

01:15:55 ►

and so I’ll just mention one thought that struck me

01:15:58 ►

when he was talking about our DNA having access to a large number of multiple universes.

01:16:04 ►

our DNA having access to a large number of multiple universes.

01:16:10 ►

And that is the quote of J.B.S. Haldane that Terence used in our previous podcast.

01:16:12 ►

And it goes something like,

01:16:15 ►

the universe may not only be stranger than we suppose,

01:16:18 ►

it may be stranger than we can suppose.

01:16:22 ►

And whenever I get a chance to listen to one of Mark’s talks, that quote really hits home with me.

01:16:25 ►

Early in this talk, we heard Mark mention Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines,

01:16:32 ►

which is a really interesting book, by the way.

01:16:35 ►

Subsequent to the talk we just heard, Kurzweil published another book titled,

01:16:40 ►

The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

01:16:44 ►

And it caused quite a stir when it first came out about a year ago.

01:16:49 ►

Well, just before it was published, Mark gave a presentation at one of our Planque Norte lectures at Burning Man,

01:16:55 ►

where he talked about Kurzweil and Werner Wenge, the man who first developed the concept of a technological singularity.

01:17:02 ►

And Mark told the story that at a recent meeting he had with Werner Wenge, The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:05 ►

The

01:17:18 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The

01:17:19 ►

The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The In the spring, my friend Matteo, who you know as Matt Palomary from previous podcasts,

01:17:29 ►

invited me to a dinner he was having with Werner Vinci, who was a friend of his.

01:17:34 ►

And while we were waiting for our meals to arrive, we were discussing, among other things,

01:17:40 ►

his ideas about a possible singularity, and of course, Ray Kurzweil’s new book came up.

01:17:45 ►

And during the conversation, I happened to mention Mark’s story about being called a gradualist.

01:17:48 ►

And without missing a beat, Vinji turned to me and said,

01:17:51 ►

Next to me, Kurzweil is also a gradualist.

01:17:56 ►

And for our fellow salonners who are into these things,

01:18:01 ►

well, that should really make the hair stand up on the back of your neck for sure.

01:18:07 ►

Personally, I’m in Mark’s camp on this and fervently hope that us gradualists are correct.

01:18:10 ►

But then, if Vingie is on target here,

01:18:13 ►

well, there’s really not very much any of us can do about it except sit back and enjoy the ride.

01:18:16 ►

Now, if you resonated with some of the ideas that Mark presented today,

01:18:21 ►

my suggestion is that you read some of the books he referenced.

01:18:24 ►

And I’ll try to remember to put links to them with the program notes for this

01:18:28 ►

page. And don’t think that you have to be a rocket scientist to handle them.

01:18:32 ►

Perhaps the most revolutionary book that Mark mentions is Stephen Wolfram’s A New

01:18:39 ►

Kind of Science. And I agree with Mark that Wolfram ranks right up there with

01:18:44 ►

Newton. Like thousands of others, I got a copy Mark that Wolfram ranks right up there with Newton. Like thousands

01:18:46 ►

of others, I got a copy of that book as soon as it was published and eagerly began reading.

01:18:52 ►

Initially, I was surprised at how accessible it was, and I still think that. But it still

01:18:58 ►

took me over three years to finish it, and today I doubt if I can explain what I read

01:19:03 ►

other than to have a grokking that he was really on to something

01:19:07 ►

that will be worth my time to dig into again and again and again

01:19:11 ►

until I kind of understand it.

01:19:14 ►

I guess you could say it’s a psychedelic science book.

01:19:17 ►

Well worth the time, if you’re so inclined.

01:19:20 ►

And before I forget it, if you go to markpesche.com,

01:19:23 ►

that’s M-A-R-K-P-E-S-C-E dot com,

01:19:27 ►

you’ll find many of Mark’s other presentations, both in audio and video formats,

01:19:33 ►

as well as links to his other websites and many of his fascinating essays.

01:19:38 ►

And I think you’ll be amazed at the wide range of topics he covers.

01:19:42 ►

Mark has some brain candy for almost any taste, so surf on over to

01:19:46 ►

markpesci.com and I’m sure you’ll be well rewarded for your time. Now before I get to a couple of

01:19:53 ►

other things I want to point you to, I want to give a shout out to our fellow salonners in Iceland,

01:19:59 ►

China, Norway, Japan, Sweden, Turkey, Singapore, Kuwait, and New Zealand,

01:20:05 ►

home of David M., who says,

01:20:07 ►

the psychedelic scene is alive and well down here in the form of music and the local homegrown.

01:20:13 ►

And he went on to invite me to stop by for a cup of coffee if I’m ever in the area.

01:20:18 ►

Well, thanks for the invite, David, and I promise to do just that should I ever find myself down your way.

01:20:24 ►

Now, why do I point out these particular countries just now, you ask?

01:20:28 ►

Well, right at this very moment, those are just a few of the countries

01:20:32 ►

that are showing up as having someone in the process of downloading one of our podcasts.

01:20:37 ►

While a lot of our fellow salonners live in North America and Europe,

01:20:41 ►

I want to point out the fact that the community of people who share our interests

01:20:45 ►

is worldwide.

01:20:47 ►

There is quite literally no corner of this planet where you can’t find a psychedelically

01:20:51 ►

oriented person.

01:20:53 ►

Find the others.

01:20:54 ►

That’s what Terrence McKenna’s mantra was.

01:20:57 ►

Now, I don’t know how to tell you to do this in your own neck of the woods, but what I

01:21:00 ►

can tell you is that the woods are full of people like you and me.

01:21:04 ►

So even if you’re lonely right now, have comfort in the fact that you are not alone.

01:21:10 ►

Each day I notice that more of our fellow salonners are stopping by our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog

01:21:16 ►

at psychedelicsalon.org where I post the program notes for these podcasts.

01:21:22 ►

And if you’ve been visiting that site for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve stopped using Google Ads on it

01:21:27 ►

because of my concern that there may be some tracking going on

01:21:31 ►

by their advertising programs.

01:21:33 ►

And I want to keep the site as anonymous and clean as possible.

01:21:36 ►

As I’ve said before, this is a listener-supported program,

01:21:40 ►

and even those little Google Ads now seem kind of intrusive to me.

01:21:45 ►

So I don’t want you to think that I’ve changed my mind about advertising on the site

01:21:49 ►

when in a few days you see links to two websites that are run by a couple of friends of mine.

01:21:55 ►

Just so you know, these are not commercial advertisements,

01:21:59 ►

but rather endorsements by me of these sites.

01:22:02 ►

I’m not receiving any financial compensation from either of them,

01:22:06 ►

although they’ve both been supporting

01:22:08 ►

the salon by spreading the word about these

01:22:10 ►

podcasts, and my guess is that

01:22:12 ►

quite a few of our fellow salonners

01:22:14 ►

found their way here through those sites.

01:22:16 ►

And for that, I am very appreciative.

01:22:19 ►

The sites that I’m

01:22:20 ►

linking to are Daniel Siebert’s

01:22:22 ►

SageWisdom.com

01:22:24 ►

and E-Rock X1’s Guy and Botanicals.

01:22:27 ►

Daniel, in my humble opinion, is the world’s leading expert on salvia divinorum,

01:22:33 ►

and you’ll remember him from our podcast number 81.

01:22:37 ►

EROC X1’s site covers a wider range of plants, herbs, and teas,

01:22:43 ►

including my favorite bedtime beverage,

01:22:45 ►

which he calls Hypnosis Tea Blend.

01:22:48 ►

And by the way, all of the products on both of these sites

01:22:52 ►

are perfectly legal, except for salvia,

01:22:54 ►

which now has been banned in a few countries

01:22:57 ►

and a few states in the U.S.

01:22:59 ►

As for the other items that you’ll find at Guyon Botanicals,

01:23:04 ►

Erock X1 says,

01:23:06 ►

I don’t buy from the mega distributors who exploit the natives and their ecosystem.

01:23:11 ►

I have a very tight network of honorable people who help me procure my botanicals from ethical sources,

01:23:17 ►

and I’m growing this network all of the time.

01:23:20 ►

So if you’re looking for plants and herbs that aren’t available in your local market,

01:23:25 ►

you might want to take a look at these sites when you get a chance.

01:23:28 ►

And speaking of sites to check out, thanks to Little Elf, E-Rock X1,

01:23:34 ►

and the comments from MySpacers, whose handles are Shaman’s Path, Vivian, Syrian Shaman,

01:23:41 ►

I think I said that right, C-I-A-R-A-N, Syrian Shaman I think I said that right C-I-A-R-A-N Syrian Shaman

01:23:45 ►

Cool name

01:23:46 ►

Vote Ron Paul

01:23:48 ►

PhiloSciben

01:23:49 ►

Nick

01:23:50 ►

Love

01:23:51 ►

Shroom

01:23:52 ►

Amethstar

01:23:54 ►

and God’s Food

01:23:55 ►

Well, we now have an active MySpace site.

01:23:59 ►

Now, I’m only beginning to get up to speed on MySpace myself

01:24:02 ►

and so I’m a real novice here

01:24:04 ►

but already we’ve

01:24:06 ►

got 125 friends, which seems quite spectacular to me. So if you’re also a MySpacer, well, I’d be

01:24:14 ►

more than happy to see you pop up in that friend column too. While I don’t have time to respond to

01:24:19 ►

each of you, I do surf over to your MySpace pages to get to know you a little better,

01:24:30 ►

and that’s been a real pleasure for me. Now, I don’t have time to go into all the postings that have already popped up and appeared on our MySpace page, but there’s one that I would

01:24:35 ►

like to point out right now, and that came from Shaman’s Path, who said, I’m excited

01:24:40 ►

to let you know that my new book, Sage Spirit, Salvia Divinorum and the Entheogenic Experience,

01:24:47 ►

and the accompanying music CD, Divinorum, are now available at martinball.net,

01:24:53 ►

that’s M-A-R-T-I-N-B-A-L-L dot net, and lulu.com, L-U-L-U dot com.

01:25:00 ►

And he included a little blurb about the book from Daniel Siebert, who says,

01:25:05 ►

This is a book that truly contains much sage wisdom.

01:25:10 ►

Dr. Ball regards salvia divinorum as a sacred herb and treats it with tremendous respect.

01:25:16 ►

He describes many of his personal experiences, shares meaningful insights,

01:25:21 ►

and provides helpful advice on using this herb as a tool for cultivating practical

01:25:25 ►

spirituality. Sage spirit should be read by all who seek to understand the nature of salvia

01:25:32 ►

divinorum, especially as it relates to human consciousness, personal growth, and spiritual

01:25:38 ►

development. And since I consider Daniel Siebert to be the leading expert on this subject, well, I can think of no higher praise.

01:25:47 ►

I know that a lot of our fellow slauners who also listen to Dope Fiend and Max Freecowd

01:25:53 ►

are really into salvia, and so you might want to get this book

01:25:56 ►

to further your understanding of this important plant.

01:26:00 ►

I seem to be going on here longer than usual,

01:26:03 ►

but so many of you have written to say that you don’t mind these sometime long comments by me.

01:26:09 ►

Well, I’m no longer worried about it.

01:26:11 ►

In fact, while I can’t remember your name, I can still see the face of one of our fellow salonners who rode all the way out to the back edge of Black Rock City last August just to encourage me to do a little more talking.

01:26:24 ►

So thanks for the encouragement,

01:26:26 ►

everyone. It’s very heartening indeed. There is one last item I’d like to cover today, and

01:26:31 ►

that’s the topic of the other podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis. Some of them you

01:26:37 ►

already know about, and some of them I haven’t mentioned before. To begin with, I highly recommend

01:26:43 ►

KMO’s Sea Realm podcast.

01:26:45 ►

It was KMO, by the way, who got me out of my own little cocoon

01:26:49 ►

and started me listening to a whole bunch of other programs.

01:26:53 ►

Thanks for that, KMO.

01:26:54 ►

You truly opened my ears to a whole new world of information and entertainment.

01:26:59 ►

And if you haven’t heard one of his interviews in the Sea Realm,

01:27:02 ►

well, you don’t know what you’re missing.

01:27:05 ►

Now, if you’re looking for something a little different, my friend Tom Barbalay does a couple podcasts that will take you on some really interesting mental adventures.

01:27:15 ►

For those of you who share my interest in the topic of artificial life, well, you may want to check out Tom’s Biota podcast where he interviews artificial life developers.

01:27:26 ►

And if you’re into second life, this might be a program you’ll really resonate with.

01:27:31 ►

And I’ll put links to all of these podcasts that I’m mentioning here under the links section in the right sidebar on our psychedelicsalon.org blog.

01:27:40 ►

The other podcast Tom does is called Ape Reality.

01:27:54 ►

The other podcast Tom does is called Ape Reality, and it’ll really blow you away if you happen to be a philosophical geek who wants to experiment with some truly amazing software called Noble Ape that Tom developed.

01:28:01 ►

And in this podcast, Tom discusses aspects of the development and philosophy of the artificial life community.

01:28:07 ►

Another podcast I’ve been meaning to mention for quite a while now is Dr. Dave’s very cleverly named Shrink Wrap Radio.

01:28:09 ►

Shrink Wrap is two words, by the way.

01:28:12 ►

Get it?

01:28:13 ►

Very clever, Dave.

01:28:15 ►

Since we’ve talked a lot about synchronicity here in the salon, maybe a good place to start

01:28:20 ►

with Dr. Dave’s show might be his episode number 75, which is titled, A New Theory of Synchronicity.

01:28:27 ►

And I guess I don’t even need to mention this,

01:28:29 ►

but both Tom and Dr. Dave are also fellow salonners.

01:28:33 ►

So they’re family, so to speak.

01:28:36 ►

And while I’ve probably talked about the programs on the Cannabis Podcast Network

01:28:41 ►

until you’re tired of hearing about them,

01:28:43 ►

I still want to mention them one more time, just to be sure that you don’t miss these

01:28:47 ►

wonderful podcasts, which all can be found at dopethean.co.uk.

01:28:53 ►

That’s D-O-P-E-F-I-E-N-D dot C-O dot U-K.

01:28:59 ►

You know, for pure joy and entertainment, there’s Lefty’s Lounge, where I stop by for a visit from time to time.

01:29:07 ►

And the all-new BB’s Bungalow, hosted from down under by the lovely Black Beauty.

01:29:12 ►

And, of course, the sounds of World Wide Weed, hosted by my dear friend, Queer Ninja.

01:29:17 ►

In addition to those three podcasts, the network is also home to what I consider to be the three most important information-oriented podcasts

01:29:26 ►

about our sacred medicines that you’ll find.

01:29:30 ►

There is the Grow Report, hosted by Xandor and Mrs. Xandor.

01:29:34 ►

And while it’s primarily aimed at the medical marijuana growing community,

01:29:38 ►

they also provide us with a lot of news and information that’s of interest to the psychedelic community at large.

01:29:45 ►

Next is Psychonautica, hosted by the one and only Max Prekout.

01:29:50 ►

There you’ll hear a world of information about psychedelic medicines, their uses, preparations,

01:29:55 ►

and safety tips, along with some pretty amazing stories and some great interviews.

01:30:01 ►

And in full disclosure here, I’ve been a guest on Psychonautica myself

01:30:05 ►

so I guess this is also a little self-promotion on my part

01:30:09 ►

and then there’s the cornerstone of the network

01:30:12 ►

and that’s the Dopecast hosted by Dopefiend

01:30:14 ►

and hey Dopefiend

01:30:16 ►

my hearty congratulations on your recent 100th podcast

01:30:20 ►

from the Dope Den somewhere in London

01:30:22 ►

I know what a tremendous effort it takes to produce

01:30:25 ►

that many podcasts, as I’m sure Dr. Dave does, who’s actually produced more podcasts than either

01:30:31 ►

one of us have. It’s an accomplishment that you can rightly be very proud of, and on behalf of

01:30:37 ►

all of our fellow salonners, we salute you. Now, I’d like to say one more thing about these last

01:30:42 ►

three podcasts, just to let you know how highly I value them.

01:30:46 ►

As you’ve heard me say on several occasions, one of the reasons I’m producing the Psychedelic Salon podcast is so that my grandchildren and their children will have access to this information once I’m no longer around.

01:30:58 ►

But my podcasts have mostly to do with the thinking that comes out of some of the experiences people have with psychoactive substances.

01:31:06 ►

However, when it comes to educating people about the details of using our sacred medicines,

01:31:12 ►

I’ve learned that information coming from family members and older people is often not paid much attention.

01:31:18 ►

And so I’ve been archiving the Grow Report, Psychonautica, and the Dopecast on CDs

01:31:23 ►

in the hope that one day my grandchildren will find them and listen to them closely.

01:31:28 ►

I’m not positive about this, but I think that at least Dope Fiend and Max Freakout

01:31:32 ►

are still under 30 years old, or at least not much older than that.

01:31:36 ►

And having come of age during the 60s, I clearly remember our mantra

01:31:41 ►

that you shouldn’t trust anyone over 30.

01:31:43 ►

And to a large extent, well,

01:31:45 ►

I still believe that. My point here is that I’m willing to trust the drug education of my

01:31:51 ►

grandchildren to these wonderful people. And I can’t think of a higher recommendation than that.

01:31:57 ►

Almost without exception, they give the same advice I would. So thank you all for doing what

01:32:02 ►

you do. While your efforts may not be rewarded financially,

01:32:05 ►

you’re certainly building some incredibly good karma.

01:32:09 ►

And I love you all.

01:32:11 ►

Well, that’s about it for today.

01:32:13 ►

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

01:32:18 ►

are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.

01:32:24 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:32:26 ►

just click the link on the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage

01:32:29 ►

that says Creative Commons,

01:32:31 ►

which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:32:35 ►

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints,

01:32:37 ►

or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:32:39 ►

well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:32:44 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:32:49 ►

Be well, my friends. Take it to the moon.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

115 - Bios and Logos

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Program Notes

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