126 - Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution

Program Notes

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

[NOTE: The following quotes are from a conversation held in September 1991.]

Terence McKenna: “But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge.”

Terence McKenna: “The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic.”

Terence McKenna: “Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television.”

Terence McKenna: “As a global society, possessing DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting wooly mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded.”

Terence McKenna: “Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs.”

Terence McKenna: “High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society.”

Ralph Abraham (in 1991): “Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema.”

Terence McKenna: “So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.”

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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Well, I’m finally getting this week’s podcast out at midweek, which is always my target, but not one that I hit very regularly, at least not lately.

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But here we are, nonetheless, and today we’re going to hear the last of the trilogues for a bit.

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In fact, I’ve got a little surprise for you next week,

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and I’ll tell you about that after we hear today’s program.

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But first, I want to thank John S. and Terry L.,

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both of whom sent generous donations to the salon recently.

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So thank you, John and Terry.

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I appreciate your support in helping to keep these podcasts going.

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And for today’s podcast, we’re going to hear the recording of a private conversation Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake had back in September of 1991.

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Their topic that day was psychedelics and the computer revolution.

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And we begin with Ralph Abraham introducing the topic.

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But as you listen, try to keep in mind that this conversation was held in 1991.

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And a lot has taken place since then, particularly in the arrival of the Internet

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and significantly faster and more powerful personal computers than were available back then.

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So let’s join Ralph now.

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back then. So let’s join Ralph now.

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Well, our talks frequently range over different periods of history. We love to extract peculiar details from the historical record and speculate on their relationship to major movements in cultural history.

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So today we get to do this with modern history,

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with cultural history in our own lifetime,

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for our subject is psychedelics and the computer evolution.

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psychedelics and the computer evolution.

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There have been several articles in the journals recently,

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and newspapers speculating on connections between the onset of the psychedelic period and discoveries in the computer revolution.

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But it only came to my attention very recently

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through an article in GQ. For this article I was interviewed on the subject, my usual

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subject of complex dynamical models for history, for social, economic, political systems and their potential for aiding our jumpstart on the future.

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When the interview finally appeared in the magazine, however,

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it wasn’t about that at all.

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It was a speculation on psychedelics and the computer revolution.

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in the computer evolution.

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And this article somehow had evolved, I think,

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from my connection with Mondo 2000.

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So this is a magazine that we all know.

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We know the editors.

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We met them here, in fact, at Esalen.

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And this magazine had evolved through stages with different names,

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High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, Mondo 2000,

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as if we are working on high frontiers, we are hacking reality,

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we are creating the future, and we are aimed at Mondo 2000.

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And as a matter of fact, we do. Our trilogues

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are very much in this spirit. And the magazine apparently owes its existence to a market

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of fans of psychedelics who work in the computer revolution. But the idea of the causal connection

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between psychedelics and the computer revolution,

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this was new.

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The article in GQ begins with an excellent quote from Timothy Leary,

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who says,

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there are various natural resources in the world.

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Creativity is one of them.

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And understanding this, the Japanese will go to Borneo to collect teak

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and go to California to collect creativity.

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So this is the conjecture we can consider this morning.

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And to begin with, to see about the plausibility of the causal role,

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let’s look at the comparative chronologies of these two developments.

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All happened in our lifetimes and largely here in California.

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So this is the location if we are going to find a connection

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and we can dig it up in the wreckage in the basement of the local church and so on

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so the computer revolution began in World War two or a complete beginning

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anywhere but what we call the computer revolution began in World War two among

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people who probably did not take psychedelics. In fact, the psychedelic revolution started later.

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To begin with, the early computers were war machines.

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One was called the Norton bomb site,

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then there’s the Enigma machine, and so on.

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I was in grade school at that time.

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Then the psychedelic revolution, let’s say, started in the middle

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60s. What’s going on in the computer revolution in the middle 60s? We had the beginnings of

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a field now called scientific computation. At first, computers weren’t used for scientific

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computation, except as special purpose analog computers like the Norton bomb site, all designed around a single mathematical problem.

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General-purpose scientific computation required first the invention of floating-point numbers by Wilkinson in 1961.

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conjunction in these two chronologies between

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let’s say the first

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popular usage of marijuana

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and

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the arrival of LSD

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on university campuses and so on

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not to say

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that Wilkinson was an acid head

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but this is, anyway, looking for causal

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links we have to pay attention to the comparative

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chronologies. Then, just a couple of years later, when LSD hit the college campuses,

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computer graphics began its major growth from seeds planted in Salt Lake City with Evans and Sutherland and so on. And the usage of

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computer graphic hardware required software that was developed later by

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various people whose names are not well known. And whether they used psychedelics

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or not we couldn’t say, but certainly a lot of their friends did

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because that was the cultural, historical milieu of the time.

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A later development in the 1970s,

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then psychedelic mushrooms became popular on university campuses,

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and at this time there was a major change

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in the direction of the computer revolution

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in the shift of emphasis from mainframe computers

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to personal computers.

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Of course, this was a corporate decision in IBM,

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as the historians see it,

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but actually it was the Macintosh that more penetrated homes and became the

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first successful personal computer, and that was because of the Macintosh operating system,

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which was stolen from Smalltalk, one of the many very creative projects at Xerox PARC,

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the Palo Alto Research Center, in the 1970s. There also we found other innovations in computer graphic

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software such as the first paint program and the PostScript method of doing typographics.

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More recently in the 80s we had the decline of hardcore psychedelics at the onset of the, what do you call it, empathogens, like ecstasy. virtual reality and other software developments which would replace the ordinary reality with

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an alternative reality, if not psychedelic, at least equally distant from ordinary reality. So there’s a parallel, a chronology, and this suggests some conjectures, only chronological conjectures, not necessarily making much sense, such as a causal relation between LSD and the first computer graphic software.

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between the popularity of psychedelic mushrooms and the personal computer revolution,

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or at least its empowerment, the GUI,

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the graphical user interface, such as small talk.

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Also at that time, there was, at least in university campuses,

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a massive growth in interest by children in computer games.

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The first ones were in the Dungeons & Dragons category,

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which is still popular, circulating computer networks worldwide.

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More and more and more developments of sophisticated computer games

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like Dungeons & Dragons, Adventure, and so on,

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where you go down a little corridor, you come to,

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you can choose between this door or lifting that rock,

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and then you drop vertically.

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And it’s a computer graphic.

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Alternate reality is the substance of the game.

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And a lot of important evolution in computer software concepts took place in the milieu of these computer games.

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Also, the source code was available on the large networks,

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so children could learn computer programming and modify the games. Also, the source code was available on the large networks, so children

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could learn computer programming and modify the games. And so the evolution, I mean, the

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cultural history and the evolution of this game, Mew Mew, were co-evolutionary processes.

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And finally, a causal relationship between ecstasy and the

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emphasis on virtual reality, which is

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now being developed with great

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enthusiasm by governments for

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purposes of driving tanks, weapons

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systems, and making

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love, operating business, telecommuting,

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and so on,

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could be viewed as

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a quantum

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leap in the interconnectivity between the machine and the human user.

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So here are just some possibilities for causal relation between psychedelics and creativity in the computer industry.

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and I think just to fasten on one possible

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nucleus of all this is

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Xerox PARC, this place

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where some of the very

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important software concepts

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developed and it’s in

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it’s in Palo Alto

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centrally located in the

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Silicon Valley and in the midst

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of the central marketplace of the psychedelic culture.

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What do you think?

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Well, I mean, I gather that the causal connection between all this is the idea that both the evolution of the computer

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and the evolution or rediscovery and assimilation of psychedelic drugs

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has to do with consciousness expansion.

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I mean, in one case, we’re expanding memory, retrieval speed,

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machine-human interfacing.

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In the other frontier, the pharmacological frontier,

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we’re expanding our exploration of our own wetware

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and that probably the end result of this

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is to see these two superficially distinct fields

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as actually two facets of a single set of concerns that are

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migrating toward each other. I mean, I suspect, I assume that the drugs of the future will be much

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more like computers, and the computers of the future will be much more like drugs and that in fact the values and the areas that each

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seeks to maximize are similar to the areas of concern of the other the final goal of reductionist

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pharmacology if it’s able to make good on its belief that the basis of thought is ultimately molecular should be the

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designing of a drug which causes you to whistle the first eight bars of Dixie and nothing else.

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Similarly, the goal of computers, given the nanotechnological thrust the human interfacing thrust and so forth and so on

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is a computer that you can run its programs only by placing it under your tongue so that you know

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these two concerns one the concern of a kind of magical shamanistic emotion based we could almost say feminine psychology

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the drugs is a countervailing force to the uh material uh engineering hardwired, scientific, straight engineering approach.

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But in fact, it seems that the Ouroboros is taking its tail in its mouth,

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and these two concerns are seen to be simply different approaches

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to the completion of the same program of knowledge.

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Well, that’s very nice.

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It’s a little less than I wanted.

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This is a kind of a theory of convergent evolution or something.

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See, I’m thinking of the machines have evolved in a certain way.

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They could have evolved some other way.

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Why did they do this way?

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Because the interest of people making the innovations.

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Now, if those are people who specifically

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are having visual hallucinations on a regular basis,

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then it’s possible that they would be more inclined

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to have a GUI, a graphical user interface,

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icons on the screen.

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I mean, we have all these books.

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There’s hardly an illustration in them.

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We have an encyclopedia, a dictionary.

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Here’s the definition of the word tree.

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There’s no picture of a tree there.

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Now we look at the Macintosh or at Smalltalk or the Sun operating system.

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Here are icons all over the place.

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Every concept is represented by a picture.

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There’s very few words in sight.

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Could that be because the people making the creation

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are strongly influenced by an alternate

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reality in their own life, and therefore

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computers are evolving

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in a direction that is quite

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orthogonal from the

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preceding

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direction and vector

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of cultural history?

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Well, print had a series

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of sensory biases

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and intellectual biases built into it

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that print culture was always extraordinarily naive about.

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I mean, because of print,

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we have the concept of interchangeable parts,

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which gives permission for the concept of democracy. That’s an interchangeable parts, which gives permission for the concept of democracy.

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That’s an interchangeable parts theory.

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The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic.

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Because of print, we have the glorification of Cartesian logic

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and the emphasis on the here and now aspects of reality

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I mean I think that what’s happening now

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was very presciently anticipated

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by Marshall McLuhan

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who felt that the electronic media

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would return us to an eye-oriented culture

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and that the biases

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that have shaped the Western mind since the adoption

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of the phonetic alphabet, essentially, and that were then tremendously intensified by movable type,

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is all being exploded. The Gutenberg galaxy of cultural effects is being left far behind as we move out into a space that we could call

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psychedelic, visual,

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cybernetic,

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or all three.

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One approach

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would be to say, yes,

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we had the repression

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of fantasy thanks to the

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medium dominating the

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technology of the Gutenberg press and so

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on for a time.

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And then we had a liberation through the revival of visual representations thanks to electronic

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innovations in the medium world.

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For example, television and the main influence behind the graphical explosion in the computer revolution is not psychedelic visual

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hallucinations at all but just the rise of popularity of television in the american home

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well it’s all of a piece i mean television yes i mean television is certainly uh has a tremendous

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influence on the mass mind but on the creative cutting edge of the civilization,

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it’s psychedelics.

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Television influences culture,

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but if you watch television,

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it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television,

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the styles of cutting and rapid-fire imagery

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and macro-physical and micro-physical perspective shift

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and all of these things one could lay at the feet of psychedelics.

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Now, what an orthodox cultural historian would claim is

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it’s not psychedelics, it’s surrealism.

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Surrealism is always dragged in here as the godfather of modern

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advertising but in fact the concern of surrealism is nothing less than the pictorial representation

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of the contents of the unconscious as described by freud and jung so what it in a way, what we’re talking about here is not

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so much the culture-shaping

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power of psychedelics

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or television

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or surrealism, but

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of the emergence as a

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cultural artifact of the unconscious

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itself, which was

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being suppressed by this

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linear print

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head style of thinking.

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So visual representations, for example,

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have been relegated to the unconscious through the restrictions of the media.

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Well, they’ve always been the medium by which the…

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They are released from the unconscious

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and enter as if all people had suddenly become surrealist artists.

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The databases of the unconscious are visually dedicated databases.

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They’re not print databases.

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And now they are being liberated into consciousness.

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Really, I mean, as a global society possessing DNA sequencers

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and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and

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so on we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind that’s something that may or may not have

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some appropriateness if you’re hunting woolly mastodons and that sort of thing but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded.

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And apparently this is being eliminated.

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Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward outing the unconscious.

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Outing the unconscious.

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And this is computers are a wonderful tool for this as are psychedelic drugs.

00:21:52 ►

Yes.

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And so they are in cooperation in a crash program to out the unconscious.

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In other words, to increase the strength of the coupling and the effect of resonance between ourselves and conscious purpose in our society on the one hand and the cultural morphogenetic field on the other hand.

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The species mind is being made explicit by entering into the visual awareness of individuals.

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And through

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these means, when connection

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between the

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group mind

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and the business

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practice and so on is amplified,

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then we get

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commercial manifestation of

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creativity, of products

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like the personal computer.

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Well, but in a sense, I think that’s simply that the culture is building on the foundation already in place.

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Money, as understood by moderns, is almost entirely a print-created phenomenon.

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Before the invention of the printing press, money was something that you hid

00:23:05 ►

under your mattress. Now money is this completely abstract medium that is moved around by electronic

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banking transfer and investment capitalism and this sort of thing. And it has become, like the concept of the citizen, a way to uniformize all the complex spectrum of phenomena down to a single variable, money.

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And so the world of print is the world based on money.

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Now, the computer is very able to insinuate itself into that environment and build on it,

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but that isn’t, I think, the natural milieu of the computer.

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The natural milieu of the computer is information, which is very different from money.

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Money is a downloading of complexity into a kind of medium of exquisite simplicity.

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Information is an exploding of the apparent here and now

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into a much more multidimensional domain that is, therefore,

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it can only be grokked intuitively, It can only be grokked through feeling.

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So the abandonment of money

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and the substitution of information

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as a medium of exchange

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is having a feminizing, psychedelicizing

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and visually enhancing effect

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on the values and direction that society is going.

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And this is all happening without planning.

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I think this is just built in.

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These are the hidden agendas of the technologies

00:24:51 ►

that we imagine we can manipulate and appropriate

00:24:55 ►

without being reinfected by the hidden effects that they carry.

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But, of course, this is not true at all.

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We are completely now infected by these hidden assumptions. effects that they carry but of course this is not true at all we are

00:25:05 ►

completely now infected by these hidden assumptions what do you make of this Rup?

00:25:15 ►

well I like the idea of the re-emergence of the unconscious and it reminds me of the presumed of the prototypic image of the

00:25:28 ►

realisation

00:25:32 ►

of archetypal

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images in some kind of

00:25:36 ►

shared space

00:25:36 ►

is the cave art of the

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Paleolithic where

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you go deep into a cave and there

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by the flickering light of candles,

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after a scary initiatory journey, accompanied by chanting and so on, you see these images

00:25:51 ►

of animals and so on. A vision actually somehow made concrete within a shared space through

00:26:00 ►

a flickering light in the darkness. Well, I understand that of the Native Americans who went into this kind of thing,

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the Chumash were particularly well known for their polychrome cave paintings.

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They occupied the area now known as Hollywood.

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Well, the flickering light, the polychrome cave paintings, of course,

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give one an early version of the cinema.

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And the cinema, where you go into a darkened space and then, by flickering light,

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see incredible fantasies and patterns unfolding on the wall, is in some sense the precursor of television.

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Television is like the cinema writ small and brought into every home.

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And certainly in countries where television is introduced for the first time, like India,

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the principle used people make of it nowadays is videos of films.

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You can have all these films at home.

00:26:57 ►

So it’s like a miniaturised cinema.

00:27:00 ►

So I think if we’re looking at the history of this sort of revival of the collective visual imagination, the cinema is the precursor we have to look at rather than television.

00:27:09 ►

And of course, California again plays a crucial role in this revolution. psychedelics as another form of darkened space and flickering images and visual content.

00:27:30 ►

And the computer graphic revolution, which in a sense is like a transformed television or cinema

00:27:38 ►

to be able to represent more abstract kinds of imagery or pattern of the kind that may appear in psychedelic vision.

00:27:51 ►

These seem to be related kinds of phenomena.

00:27:56 ►

So, if we see this as some kind of reawakening of the

00:28:01 ►

visual imagination and the representation of the unconscious

00:28:05 ►

phenomena, the prototype for all of which

00:28:07 ►

is of course the world of dreams

00:28:09 ►

which occur in darkness

00:28:11 ►

in sleep, indoors

00:28:14 ►

usually

00:28:14 ►

and in a flickering

00:28:17 ►

and

00:28:18 ►

incomprehensible way

00:28:21 ►

the real roots is the world of dreams

00:28:23 ►

and its actualisation or externalisation

00:28:26 ►

through cave art and then through

00:28:27 ►

this variety of other transforms.

00:28:29 ►

You know, fairy tales told around campfires

00:28:32 ►

again the flickering light associated

00:28:33 ►

with the play of the imagination

00:28:36 ►

and of imagery conjured up in that case

00:28:38 ►

by words. But then the

00:28:40 ►

visual representation of all these

00:28:42 ►

things shows indeed some kind of

00:28:44 ►

connection.

00:28:50 ►

So I think you’re right that we can see this as part of a larger process of reawakening of the collective imagination.

00:28:55 ►

It’s part of an archaic revival.

00:28:57 ►

The print thing is very artificial, and we live completely within it.

00:29:03 ►

The verbal thing is very artificial.

00:29:06 ►

Well, I don’t see that so clearly.

00:29:08 ►

I mean, the print thing is a technological artifact

00:29:11 ►

less than 500 years old,

00:29:13 ►

and yet dominating the sensory ratios and psychologies

00:29:17 ►

of virtually every person on Earth.

00:29:19 ►

It’s just a matter of scale.

00:29:19 ►

We have a million years of consciousness,

00:29:24 ►

and then we have only 50 or 100,000 years of speech.

00:29:28 ►

Speech is a newcomer on the scene.

00:29:29 ►

The morphic field barely recognizes words.

00:29:36 ►

But words are still an incredibly deeply established creed

00:29:40 ►

compared with written words or print.

00:29:42 ►

Yes.

00:29:43 ►

And if you look at non-literate cultures,

00:29:46 ►

then, of course, the oral tradition is very important,

00:29:48 ►

but I suppose also there’s a much higher developed visual imagination.

00:29:52 ►

When you go to a Hindu temple or a Gothic cathedral,

00:29:56 ►

primarily designed to be appreciated by non-literate people,

00:30:00 ►

then you see a riot of psychedelic-type imagery,

00:30:04 ►

demons and snakes wriggling everywhere in Hindu temples,

00:30:08 ►

psychedelic stained glass windows and Gothic cathedrals,

00:30:11 ►

amazing vegetational forms and structures and shapes.

00:30:15 ►

But it isn’t a clearly, it isn’t a smooth, unbroken development.

00:30:20 ►

It’s that even between manuscript culture and print, there is an enormous leap that takes place.

00:30:29 ►

Because the psychology of manuscript culture is that you must look in order to understand.

00:30:37 ►

That’s the essence of manuscript.

00:30:39 ►

Because no font is ever repeated.

00:30:44 ►

No writing matters.

00:30:45 ►

No E looks like every other E.

00:30:48 ►

So you must look at manuscript.

00:30:51 ►

Reading of print is a very different psychological function

00:30:56 ►

because in the first few minutes of reading any text,

00:31:00 ►

you assimilate the font.

00:31:03 ►

From then on, you don’t look at E’s and F’s and L’s, you

00:31:09 ►

automatically assimilate them. It’s always the same. There’s no decipherment

00:31:14 ►

of the visual surface in the act of reading print in the way that there is

00:31:20 ►

reading manuscript. This is what McLuhan is talking about, this linear, uniform,

00:31:27 ►

high-speed thing which sets up democracy and modern science and reproducible data and all

00:31:34 ►

these things that we take for granted or that we fail to examine deeply are an aspect not only of the linearity of print, that’s been pretty well talked to death,

00:31:47 ►

but the uniformity of print

00:31:49 ►

and the curious way in which you don’t have to actually look at it

00:31:54 ►

sets us up for psychological blind spots

00:31:58 ►

that have closed us off to the reality of the visual world.

00:32:01 ►

It’s kind of a compression.

00:32:04 ►

Narrowing.

00:32:05 ►

Informational content of medium.

00:32:09 ►

But then since cinema, video, computers and computer graphics,

00:32:14 ►

there’s now going an expansion is in progress,

00:32:18 ►

which may expand well beyond any richness of media that history has seen before.

00:32:26 ►

Generally speaking, yes.

00:32:28 ►

The only caveat is that for the people who give their lives to this stuff,

00:32:34 ►

cinema is in no way seen as a precursor of television.

00:32:40 ►

Cinema is related to photography

00:32:43 ►

and related to the reconstruction of ordinary visual space.

00:32:49 ►

Television is a pixelated medium, very much like manuscript and not at all like photography,

00:32:58 ►

because with photography the eye is not asked to work.

00:33:04 ►

The eye beholds a photograph.

00:33:07 ►

The eye decodes the television screen.

00:33:11 ►

The fragmentation of the image makes it into an entirely different medium.

00:33:16 ►

Well, it’s a matter of degree.

00:33:19 ►

As with high-definition television, the resolution of video is increasing due to the

00:33:26 ►

over usage of silver

00:33:28 ►

and

00:33:29 ►

organic pigment and so on

00:33:32 ►

the resolution of film is decreasing

00:33:34 ►

sometimes they’ll meet

00:33:36 ►

computer graphics has the potential

00:33:38 ►

of resolution on the level

00:33:40 ►

of cinema

00:33:42 ►

so let’s think of a sequence

00:33:44 ►

then of manuscript printed book cinema okay we’ll

00:33:49 ►

skip television then we’ll think of computer graphics well television is related to the

00:33:55 ►

psychedelic interactive cinema not as interactive video i think that’s appropriate see if these

00:34:02 ►

people are actually right in their analysis of the effects of these media,

00:34:07 ►

then high-definition television is not television at all

00:34:12 ►

and will not have the same effect that television has been having.

00:34:16 ►

In fact, high-definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point, on the ropes, linear uniformitarians, because

00:34:26 ►

it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography, and it’s not going to have to

00:34:32 ►

be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense

00:34:39 ►

ratios and assumptions operating within the society.

00:34:43 ►

Video is doomed, not because of a resolution limitation,

00:34:48 ►

but because it’s not interactive.

00:34:50 ►

An interactive computer graphic game

00:34:53 ►

where you can watch the soap opera,

00:34:57 ►

but also play with it, change the script, and so on,

00:35:01 ►

is bound to be much more interesting

00:35:03 ►

just because of interaction than video or cinema.

00:35:07 ►

More like a dream, in fact.

00:35:08 ►

More like a dream, in fact.

00:35:10 ►

One of the things they’ve discovered that’s very frustrating to the engineers of virtual reality

00:35:18 ►

is they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting fast enough computers

00:35:26 ►

so that when you turn your head

00:35:28 ►

the scene is reconstructed

00:35:31 ►

in the way that normal space is.

00:35:34 ►

But what’s fascinating is they discover

00:35:36 ►

in virtual reality

00:35:38 ►

people rarely turn their head.

00:35:41 ►

People know that they are in a television-created space,

00:35:46 ►

and they immediately lock into their long ingrained habits of watching television,

00:35:51 ►

and people sit with the iPhones on like this.

00:35:56 ►

It’s temporary.

00:35:57 ►

Because they don’t understand that if they’re not watching TV,

00:36:01 ►

you have to tell them, your head keep turning your head

00:36:05 ►

stop sitting still you do not have to stare at this you say oh that’s right I

00:36:12 ►

don’t have to stare at it that’s temporary because video and cinema are on their

00:36:16 ►

way out I think the future of cinema is that all the films ever made will be

00:36:20 ►

digitized and stored in a gigantic library where in the context

00:36:25 ►

of a computer graphic VR parlor game, you can call up at will images from very, here’s

00:36:32 ►

Cleopatra, Salome or something and put them on the walls around you. So interactivity

00:36:39 ►

is the primary, I mean, this is the area where the computer revolution

00:36:45 ►

and psychedelics are in convergent evolution.

00:36:48 ►

They are coming together in the interactivity,

00:36:52 ►

but the extent to which the computer medium could be shared by a large number of people

00:36:58 ►

gives an idea of a further advance in the evolution beyond what was accomplished by hippies in the 1960s

00:37:09 ►

with psychedelics. Larger groups spread over space and time

00:37:13 ►

can come into

00:37:17 ►

morbid resonance with the same image.

00:37:21 ►

But this takes us to another

00:37:23 ►

key point in the whole thing

00:37:25 ►

which is that if in relation to mathematics

00:37:28 ►

since mathematics represents a particular realm of imagination

00:37:33 ►

for many mathematicians a particular realm of visual imagination

00:37:36 ►

this is Ralph’s chosen field of course

00:37:42 ►

that the normal way of communicating mathematical ideas

00:37:46 ►

is through a kind of symbolic structure

00:37:48 ►

as unrelated to the visions, as musical notation,

00:37:51 ►

as to the sounds you hear in Mozart’s symphony.

00:37:54 ►

And the secret which good mathematicians seem to have inherited

00:37:59 ►

or picked up almost by accident

00:38:01 ►

is that these symbols relate to what Francis Galton called mathematical

00:38:06 ►

landscapes, an inner imaginary space which creative mathematicians have. They see forms.

00:38:12 ►

He described how great mathematicians of his acquaintance reluctantly admitted, when he

00:38:17 ►

questioned them closely, to seeing landscapes with little balls rolling down and shapes

00:38:22 ►

changing before their very eye. This was how they did their mathematics.

00:38:27 ►

They then later translated and expressed it through symbols.

00:38:30 ►

Other mathematicians with this gift could somehow pick it up

00:38:34 ►

by a kind of resonance, the symbols acting as some medium that helped tune them to it.

00:38:39 ►

And this is actually how at least many branches of mathematics have been carried out.

00:38:45 ►

It’s still true today that good mathematicians have mathematical landscapes and mathematical imaginations.

00:38:52 ►

But this is a secret kept from most of us while studying mathematics in school or even university,

00:38:59 ►

where these symbols seem quite impenetrable.

00:39:02 ►

The manipulations you do with them seem quite arbitrary.

00:39:04 ►

these symbols seem quite impenetrable, the manipulations you do with them seem quite arbitrary. And it seems to me that one of Ralph’s points is that the computer graphics

00:39:12 ►

revolution now makes these rather abstract mathematical systems previously only visualisable

00:39:18 ►

by mathematics, and even then to a limited extent by mathematicians, like fractals and so on,

00:39:26 ►

immediately accessible to everybody.

00:39:28 ►

So suddenly these abstract mathematical concepts

00:39:32 ►

or mathematical spaces

00:39:33 ►

now become common cultural artefacts.

00:39:36 ►

You now have fractal sweatshirts

00:39:38 ►

and fractal imagery on printed fabrics and so on.

00:39:43 ►

So through computer graphics, there’s this opening up

00:39:46 ►

or democratising of the mathematical imagination.

00:39:49 ►

And I imagine that when mathematicians take psychedelics

00:39:56 ►

that their already developed mathematical landscape

00:40:01 ►

undergoes an expansion, intensification, or some other interesting

00:40:06 ►

development, since mathematicians have this peculiar and unusual kind of visual imagination

00:40:12 ►

to start with. Is that the case?

00:40:15 ►

Yes, I think that we could put this in the category of outing the unconscious that for peculiar reasons evolutionary mistakes

00:40:30 ►

mathematics had actually gotten relegated to the unconscious you see

00:40:36 ►

and it does have to do with printed books I’m sure when mathematicians speak

00:40:41 ►

to each other they wave their hands to draw pictures one line at a time on the board or with their hands in space,

00:40:48 ►

and they speak simultaneously and in coordination, coordinated like dance is to music, the picture and words.

00:40:59 ►

So it requires the cooperation, the coordination of multiple modes of representation in order

00:41:05 ►

to communicate a mathematical idea from one trained mathematician to another.

00:41:10 ►

So when you see colloquium talks, which are public performances of mathematical creativity

00:41:18 ►

in the act, performed live to an audience of people trying to understand, then you always see these visual

00:41:25 ►

dynapics, I call them,

00:41:28 ►

moving pictures with lyrics that are coordinated,

00:41:33 ►

done in a very artful way,

00:41:35 ►

using the room as, like,

00:41:37 ►

the memory palace of Giordano Bruno and so on.

00:41:42 ►

Here’s a space, this corner, and this is where this goes,

00:41:46 ►

and everything is coordinated with space.

00:41:49 ►

The dance of the performer, the waving of the hands,

00:41:52 ►

the going on the blackboard, and the singing of the words

00:41:54 ►

succeeds by telepathic miracle in communicating the idea.

00:42:01 ►

Then you have books, textbooks for teachers to use in schools

00:42:05 ►

who aren’t trained on this level or something

00:42:06 ►

so you send the book to the publisher

00:42:08 ►

with the drawings in the margin

00:42:10 ►

the publisher writes back

00:42:12 ►

we can only have 100 line drawings

00:42:15 ►

in this book, that’s the limit

00:42:17 ►

for financial reasons

00:42:18 ►

so then you get a book which

00:42:20 ►

fails in the communication

00:42:23 ►

of the idea, even to a trained mathematician.

00:42:25 ►

And out of this tradition comes this heavy reliance on symbols, which, for a person already

00:42:31 ►

trained in the mathematical dance hall, actually do reawake.

00:42:40 ►

They blow up the entire image.

00:42:42 ►

They recall it from practice, you know, in the memory field, a little icon.

00:42:48 ►

That’s fine, but for somebody to learn mathematics from scratch in this way, it’s impossible.

00:42:54 ►

So after this limitation on books, the transition from manuscripts to printed books,

00:43:01 ►

it was at that time that mathematics became arcane, was relegated to the unconscious.

00:43:08 ►

Along comes computer graphics. Suddenly, mathematics becomes visible. Suddenly, we have visual

00:43:15 ►

mathematics, visible mathematics, for the first time in a long while on a public scale

00:43:20 ►

on T-shirts and so on, as Rupert said. So I think that it’s true that mathematics is one key area

00:43:29 ►

which is saved from oblivion by the computer revolution,

00:43:35 ►

making visual mathematics possible

00:43:38 ►

and part of the daily experience of anyone with a personal computer.

00:43:43 ►

Well, don’t you think it’s just part of a larger program

00:43:46 ►

of language generally becoming visible

00:43:49 ►

through the medium of the computer?

00:43:51 ►

That what’s happening is that language is about

00:43:54 ►

to conquer the visual dimension,

00:43:58 ►

and the mathematical shock troops

00:44:00 ►

have somehow gone over the top first,

00:44:03 ►

but ordinary language can hardly be far behind.

00:44:07 ►

Yes, the current, I don’t know,

00:44:10 ►

the hot frontier of the computer revolution today is multimedia.

00:44:14 ►

That means you’ll have a CD,

00:44:16 ►

and when you double-click on the icon,

00:44:18 ►

you get songs, dancings, moving colored pictures, dramas,

00:44:25 ►

a coordinated multimedia display created by expert,

00:44:31 ►

best understanders of the subject,

00:44:33 ►

let’s say how to repair a car or how this tree grew from a seed

00:44:38 ►

and the morphogenetic field, the geometry of the soul,

00:44:41 ►

wherever you double-click, you’re going to get this multimedia show which is actually interactive.

00:44:46 ►

So you see that again, go back, slow down.

00:44:49 ►

Well, it’s the species mind, and nothing is happening

00:44:54 ►

except that what was previously wetware and driven by intuition

00:44:59 ►

is being made explicit as hardware and driven by a machine interface.

00:45:04 ►

being made explicit as hardware and driven by a machine interface.

00:45:10 ►

We’re downloading or uploading the unconscious into a cultural artifact,

00:45:17 ►

and it’s gaining presence in the domain of culture through this process. There are children’s books, since I was reading to Cosmo yesterday,

00:45:22 ►

and there’s this book, which has got pictures, they’re interactive,

00:45:27 ►

you can open the door, look inside, you see the crocodile,

00:45:31 ►

you close it, then you open this box, there’s a snake in there,

00:45:34 ►

close it, you open the clock, there’s a bird in there,

00:45:37 ►

and these are children’s books from which children actually gain their initiation

00:45:43 ►

to a certain level of initiation

00:45:45 ►

of, yes, of awareness of the environment and so on, the language, the cognitive strategies

00:45:53 ►

for understanding all this.

00:45:54 ►

These books are much more successful, sophisticated, and rich than the books which are used to

00:46:00 ►

teach mathematics to advanced engineering students in universities.

00:46:04 ►

They’re like crude DMT hallucinations.

00:46:07 ►

Yes.

00:46:09 ►

So the best of the books are children’s books.

00:46:13 ►

And the computer revolution is now advancing to a point

00:46:17 ►

where they’re sort of getting to the level of children’s books

00:46:21 ►

as far as richness of medium is concerned, but there’s

00:46:25 ►

a long way to go

00:46:27 ►

before they can approach

00:46:29 ►

I mean, they’ll never get there

00:46:31 ►

the richness of experience of a

00:46:33 ►

psychedelic trip, either alone in a dark room

00:46:35 ►

or with a group of people

00:46:37 ►

exploring a flower

00:46:38 ►

a long way to go

00:46:40 ►

well

00:46:43 ►

coming back to the connection between psychedelics

00:46:46 ►

and the computer revolution,

00:46:48 ►

there are several ways

00:46:49 ►

one might look at it. One is,

00:46:51 ►

well, first the sociological fact,

00:46:54 ►

as revealed both on

00:46:56 ►

the basis of anecdotal stories and

00:46:57 ►

on the survey carried out by the San Francisco

00:47:00 ►

Examiner. Out of

00:47:01 ►

118 people questioned at the

00:47:04 ►

recent Computer Graphics Convention in

00:47:06 ►

Nevada, 118 said that they had taken psychedelics. There was 100% psychedelic usage among leading

00:47:15 ►

figures in this field. Now, there’s a sense in which other branches of the computer world

00:47:20 ►

are part of the linear language-based print-type type thing the word processor, the commonest use

00:47:25 ►

of the computer in everyday life

00:47:27 ►

is an updated version

00:47:29 ►

of the typewriter and so on, it’s not

00:47:31 ►

something that breaks radically with this

00:47:33 ►

tradition, it’s in fact the colonising

00:47:36 ►

of the visual space, the sort of television

00:47:38 ►

type visual space by

00:47:39 ►

the printed word in a more

00:47:42 ►

humanistic form

00:47:43 ►

00:47:44 ►

in that

00:47:48 ►

area, people who

00:47:50 ►

develop new

00:47:51 ►

word processing things or spreadsheets,

00:47:55 ►

the suggestion

00:47:56 ►

is that psychedelic usage is quite

00:47:58 ►

low, perhaps maybe a little

00:48:00 ►

higher than the rest of the population, but

00:48:01 ►

computer graphics is the area where there’s

00:48:04 ►

exceptionally high incidence, in fact maximum incidence incidence of psychedelic use. Now,

00:48:10 ►

I wonder whether it’s because people who take psychedelics then want to find a career where

00:48:18 ►

somehow this incredible visual revelation can be followed through in some kind of technology

00:48:23 ►

and shared with others, a bit like some people who have amazing experiences with drugs

00:48:28 ►

then try and find ways of doing it through meditation

00:48:30 ►

or ways they can teach it to others without the drugs.

00:48:35 ►

Is that one of the reasons?

00:48:36 ►

Is it that people with visual imaginations are particularly drawn or influenced

00:48:42 ►

or amazed by psychedelics? and they’re the kind of people

00:48:48 ►

who go into computer graphics anyway. What kind of causal link do we have here? Is it

00:48:54 ►

that when actually thinking about some realisation of some programme that the psychedelics can

00:49:02 ►

actually help the creative process as a kind of ongoing usage during this kind of creative process.

00:49:09 ►

What do you think, Ralph?

00:49:10 ►

Well, I think in the creation of a new program,

00:49:14 ►

let us say the first spreadsheet, the first text editor or something,

00:49:21 ►

there are all kinds of concepts that have to be invented from scratch.

00:49:25 ►

Just about the geometry of the space of information,

00:49:30 ►

the view, the filter, what information will be stored where,

00:49:33 ►

what’s important, how to retrieve it, how to display it on the screen.

00:49:37 ►

All of this, an enormous amount of creativity is required

00:49:41 ►

because we’re constructing a new space using tools that have never been touched before.

00:49:46 ►

So I think that

00:49:47 ►

all of these

00:49:48 ►

creations

00:49:50 ►

and even the

00:49:53 ►

aspect of computer revolution totally

00:49:55 ►

dominated by print,

00:49:57 ►

that these have been enormously

00:49:59 ►

aided by visual

00:50:01 ►

imagination,

00:50:04 ►

by visual skills, by visual skills,

00:50:05 ►

by cognitive strategies involving geometric spaces and motion within them.

00:50:14 ►

So there could be expected incidents of psychedelic usage among pioneers in those fields as well.

00:50:26 ►

But when it comes to computer graphics,

00:50:28 ►

I do think that all of these different possibilities you listed operate in parallel.

00:50:35 ►

I know from personal experience with my students

00:50:39 ►

that among the most interesting students attracted to study computer graphics are those with psychedelic and other unusual experiences like traveling and foreign cultures.

00:50:53 ►

And they are looking for jobs where they can just feel more comfortable and have a chance for success and maintain their integrity, and they’ve chosen the computer graphic industry

00:51:05 ►

because it’s more congenial, more compatible, and what they’re doing is of value.

00:51:12 ►

Simultaneously, it’s probable that they are trained to succeed better in it than other

00:51:20 ►

people who would be better off as engineers creating new hybrid devices like high-density memory or something, faster processors and the like,

00:51:29 ►

which is a very linear engineering drawing-oriented kind of thing.

00:51:36 ►

So I think all of these things are true.

00:51:39 ►

There is a sort of a resonance between psychedelic experience and computer graphics, and I don’t know which

00:51:49 ►

causes the other. You see, it could be that while working on a computer graphic program,

00:51:55 ►

you see the same picture over and over again, and finally you get a kind of boredom sets

00:51:59 ►

in, where you don’t feel like, it’s like we can’t sit at the typewriter sometimes because we don’t want to stare at the page anymore and print on the computer monitor does get really boring and

00:52:12 ►

pictures do also and it may be that people who don’t have psychedelic recreation are not able

00:52:20 ►

to continue in the job you see after a year or two they have to retire, whereas others have more longevity

00:52:25 ►

in that kind of work. I don’t know

00:52:28 ►

and I don’t know how we can

00:52:29 ►

find out.

00:52:33 ►

Well,

00:52:33 ►

I mean, one,

00:52:35 ►

finding out is more than

00:52:37 ►

a matter of curiosity, because

00:52:39 ►

as the

00:52:40 ►

ABC

00:52:43 ►

television network implied when they contacted you about this,

00:52:47 ►

this has enormous implications.

00:52:51 ►

If the US leads the world in computer graphics,

00:52:55 ►

and if the principal competitor is Japan,

00:52:58 ►

if the Japanese corporations haven’t yet got programmers working in them

00:53:03 ►

who are onto psychedelics,

00:53:06 ►

then there are two possible consequences. One, the revelation of psychedelic usage in the U.S. computer

00:53:11 ►

fraternity will allow the drug enforcement agencies in the United States to try and clean

00:53:17 ►

up Silicon Valley to the possible detriment of loss of world lead in this important aspect of US high technology.

00:53:26 ►

Second, the Fujitsu Corporation and others in Japan

00:53:30 ►

may send their employees on crash courses in psychedelics,

00:53:35 ►

in which case they may well be getting in touch pretty soon with you and Terence

00:53:40 ►

to hire you as consultants for this process

00:53:42 ►

to try and unleash more creativity in Japan,

00:53:46 ►

assuming that psychedelics haven’t hit Japanese computer,

00:53:50 ►

corporate computer culture very much yet?

00:53:53 ►

Well, it’s likely that rather than suppress psychedelics in the United States,

00:53:57 ►

they will simply have to accept them

00:54:00 ►

or accept second-rate status in one of the few fields

00:54:04 ►

where we still hold some advantage.

00:54:07 ►

Well, that’s a possibility.

00:54:09 ►

I’m not sure if we even still hold an advantage as far as the creative edge is concerned.

00:54:16 ►

In most of the large software companies such as Borland, Microsoft, Santa Cruz Operations, and so on,

00:54:24 ►

I’m pretty sure that they do have drug testing.

00:54:28 ►

They have it at ABC News and so many other…

00:54:31 ►

To make sure that their programmers are taking sufficient psychedelics

00:54:36 ►

to stay on the cutting edge.

00:54:38 ►

Well, they’ll not.

00:54:39 ►

Oh, no?

00:54:44 ►

Come, come now, you’re slacking off here

00:54:47 ►

no but they’re not that rational here as i think they may be in japan the hysteria against drug

00:54:56 ►

usage in this country is not a rational program and probably will continue even though it means that the United States has lost its place

00:55:08 ►

as a primary industrial nation.

00:55:12 ►

Well, in Japan, where the large corporations

00:55:18 ►

have very enlightened leadership, it seems,

00:55:20 ►

with very clear goals and so on,

00:55:22 ►

they may very well study the data coming in from the grassroots science groups all over the world

00:55:28 ►

and decide that they need to encourage certain teams working on the frontier of the computer revolution there,

00:55:37 ►

where they are very keen to lead the world,

00:55:40 ►

encourage these teams to begin experiments with psychedelics and monitor the results carefully in a controlled way.

00:55:47 ►

I think that’s very likely,

00:55:49 ►

and I have always anticipated a shift of leadership

00:55:53 ►

in the intellectual, scientific, and technical things

00:55:56 ►

away from the United States

00:55:57 ►

as the wave of European immigrants that came during World War II die out.

00:56:03 ►

The American educational system has no way to replace them.

00:56:07 ►

It’s a very poor educational system.

00:56:10 ►

So I think we’ve already seen this,

00:56:13 ►

that the leadership in technical innovation has moved away from the United States,

00:56:19 ►

even in terms of computer software, computer graphics, and so on.

00:56:23 ►

Europe and Japan are on the rise,

00:56:26 ►

and the United States is in decline.

00:56:29 ►

So the conclusion is that civilization

00:56:32 ►

which welcomes psychedelics

00:56:34 ►

is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.

00:56:39 ►

Yes, that’s the conclusion.

00:56:45 ►

There you have it.

00:56:50 ►

I think we need to go a little further.

00:56:53 ►

Go for it.

00:57:01 ►

Well, one thing that I still haven’t heard from you is,

00:57:08 ►

since I don’t have a mathematical landscape having never been told about such things

00:57:11 ►

when I was studying mathematics

00:57:12 ►

having found the manipulation of these symbols

00:57:14 ►

quite meaningless and unsatisfying

00:57:17 ►

having never been able to find out

00:57:19 ►

why you did these things

00:57:20 ►

and therefore having abandoned mathematics

00:57:23 ►

like millions of others in despair or just

00:57:28 ►

out of boredom or lack of engagement. I’m curious to know from Ralph’s experience, firstly

00:57:36 ►

when he’s doing mathematical creative work, how the visual imagination works, how this mathematical landscape works,

00:57:46 ►

what your particular landscapes are like.

00:57:48 ►

And secondly, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, back over seven years ago,

00:57:57 ►

did you find yourself in the presence of amazing, technically astonishing visions

00:58:04 ►

which were nothing much to do

00:58:06 ►

with your usual mathematical landscapes

00:58:08 ►

or could you start from your

00:58:10 ►

habitual

00:58:11 ►

and well known areas of

00:58:14 ►

mathematical landscape and then almost

00:58:16 ►

consciously and interactively develop

00:58:18 ►

them in new ways and form a kind

00:58:20 ►

of continuity between those

00:58:22 ►

and the visions produced by

00:58:24 ►

substances such as

00:58:25 ►

DMT and ISD?

00:58:27 ►

Yes.

00:58:28 ►

Well, you know, between mathematics and physics there’s a big difference, and there’s a certain

00:58:34 ►

personality of a person that would choose to be a physicist and a kind of an opposite

00:58:38 ►

type of person that would want to be a mathematician.

00:58:41 ►

Likewise, within mathematics there are completely different continents,

00:58:45 ►

as it were, in the mathematical universe. And the usual map of this universe by historians

00:58:55 ►

of mathematics has three continents. They are algebra, thus the oldest one, and geometry

00:59:02 ►

and topology that comes later, about the same time or maybe a little earlier

00:59:07 ►

and then very recently a new one

00:59:08 ►

which is analysis, dynamics and so on.

00:59:14 ►

These three continents in the mathematical universe

00:59:17 ►

have totally different cognitive styles

00:59:19 ►

and algebra, I’m not active in algebra

00:59:27 ►

and I haven’t been to that many

00:59:30 ►

talks by algebraists

00:59:31 ►

I think that they make

00:59:33 ►

they have pictures

00:59:36 ►

that are more like tables

00:59:37 ►

not tables of data but

00:59:38 ►

classifications of things or something

00:59:41 ►

and they use

00:59:42 ►

visual representations that you don’t find in the

00:59:46 ►

book, or they’re not delightfully rich visual representations that are very direct representations

00:59:56 ►

of what they’re studying. They’re like auxiliary things. The geometry, of course, course is extrapolation of ordinary experience in space and time

01:00:09 ►

in space anyway let’s say

01:00:12 ►

so there are figures of triangles, spheres, torii and so on

01:00:18 ►

these cannot be really grokked in any way without visual representation.

01:00:27 ►

Mathematicians, geometers learn tricks for visualizing higher dimensions. That’s one of the main

01:00:31 ►

things. You could say the mathematical skills,

01:00:35 ►

the geometrical skills for our culture has evolved little by little

01:00:39 ►

primarily through the development of cognitive

01:00:43 ►

tricks based on visual representations of higher dimensions.

01:00:48 ►

Higher dimensions, well, three dimensions is represented in two by perspective.

01:00:52 ►

That’s some kind of trick.

01:00:53 ►

And there was a day in the 14th century when this trick was discovered by somebody

01:00:58 ►

and communicated to somebody else and became a major innovation in the history of painting.

01:01:04 ►

and became a major innovation in the history of painting.

01:01:09 ►

The third continent in the mathematical universe of analysis and dynamics,

01:01:12 ►

it has some kind of history from classical Greek times

01:01:18 ►

through the Middle Ages and so on,

01:01:20 ►

but primarily it’s associated with a recent beginning

01:01:23 ►

with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on.

01:01:28 ►

This is geometry with motion.

01:01:30 ►

So the visual strategies necessary to think and work in this area of galaxy is geometry with motion.

01:01:43 ►

is a geometry with motion,

01:01:47 ►

so it’s a more complex visual cognitive strategy than had ever been attempted before.

01:01:50 ►

Of course, it’s relating to dance,

01:01:53 ►

to running through the woods,

01:01:54 ►

to catching a ball, and so on.

01:01:56 ►

There’s dynamics in human experience,

01:01:58 ►

and every child is a dynamicist

01:02:00 ►

in learning to master the functions of the body, locomotion, and so on.

01:02:09 ►

So that’s the background.

01:02:13 ►

And I had worked in geometry topology and in analysis,

01:02:17 ►

or in a kind of analysis, classical analysis,

01:02:19 ►

which has symbolic representations of very great complexity and magnitude.

01:02:26 ►

For example,

01:02:27 ►

there are books where there’s a formula F equals on page one, and it goes on

01:02:30 ►

for over 300 pages of a single formula.

01:02:33 ►

To understand

01:02:34 ►

what it says, you have to assemble all these

01:02:36 ►

pages in your head and be able to scan it

01:02:38 ►

like this, like Ricci’s

01:02:40 ►

Memory Palace.

01:02:42 ►

And there are people who are trained to do that.

01:02:44 ►

The slightest comma out of place and so on.

01:02:46 ►

That’s another kind of visual trick

01:02:48 ►

which is indirect, like the Algebraeus.

01:02:52 ►

And then…

01:02:59 ►

Yes, by the time I started

01:03:01 ►

using psychedelics,

01:03:08 ►

I had already passed through this development and had published papers on dynamics,

01:03:13 ►

I mean geometry and motion in very high dimensions,

01:03:15 ►

which required an actual visualization of four, six, or eight dimensions

01:03:20 ►

down to the level of being able to remove the carburetor,

01:03:26 ►

replace something inside, and put it back on.

01:03:29 ►

So then what happened to me with psychedelic visualizations is that I saw, and first of

01:03:37 ►

all, I saw the visual reality that’s revealed in that way from the perspective of a kind of a trained observer

01:03:46 ►

of higher dimensions. So I could recognize

01:03:48 ►

a lot of phenomena.

01:03:50 ►

I could remember them, put them, take them out,

01:03:53 ►

combine them in

01:03:54 ►

new forms, and so on.

01:03:56 ►

Just because of this training, I guess I

01:03:58 ►

specialized in the enjoyment

01:04:00 ►

of the physical realms

01:04:02 ►

revealed. And also

01:04:04 ►

what I perceived did seem to be

01:04:07 ►

elaboration of an extension

01:04:12 ►

of the maximum visual capability I ever had before

01:04:17 ►

was then, even with marijuana, I would say,

01:04:21 ►

the first smoke was extended enormously.

01:04:25 ►

Although when I first smoked marijuana, I would say the first smoke was extended enormously. Although when I first smoked marijuana

01:04:27 ►

I didn’t have an extensive visual

01:04:29 ►

hallucination, still what I did observe

01:04:32 ►

details of a relationship

01:04:34 ►

between two people, for example,

01:04:36 ►

I then imaged these

01:04:37 ►

in a way using visual

01:04:40 ►

representative tricks

01:04:41 ►

which were beyond those that I’d used

01:04:43 ►

before. So the resonance, the connection,

01:04:46 ►

you know how it is, that you can rove over.

01:04:48 ►

The connection between

01:04:50 ►

mathematical visualization

01:04:51 ►

extended and the perception

01:04:54 ►

of ordinary reality.

01:04:56 ►

This was, you know,

01:04:57 ►

fused in a very interesting fashion.

01:05:00 ►

I can tell this story,

01:05:02 ►

I guess, that I hadn’t

01:05:04 ►

really made this connection before.

01:05:07 ►

The one that I mentioned in invention is a counterexample of a conjecture of Smale in 1966, I think,

01:05:20 ►

called the Omega Stability Conjecture.

01:05:23 ►

And here’s what happened.

01:05:26 ►

I was introduced to marijuana by some students at Princeton

01:05:29 ►

where I was teaching mathematics.

01:05:31 ►

I had gone to the dormitories,

01:05:34 ►

which is where they sat smoking,

01:05:36 ►

and smoked a joint.

01:05:37 ►

Then I had to walk home.

01:05:39 ►

While walking home,

01:05:41 ►

maybe this was in the summer,

01:05:42 ►

or anyway I remember it was warm.

01:05:44 ►

Probably it was spring,

01:05:45 ►

the spring of 1966, the path between the dormitory and my home, which was on the campus, passed

01:05:52 ►

Eno Hall, where my office was, on the first floor and close to the path. And in passing

01:05:59 ►

it, I heard that the telephone was ringing. So being a compulsive good boy,

01:06:06 ►

I ran and took my key, opened the door, and picked up the phone.

01:06:10 ►

It was Steve Smale calling from Berkeley.

01:06:13 ►

He said, I have this new idea about omicron stability,

01:06:16 ►

and I wanted to check it out with you and see if you think it’s plausible or not.

01:06:19 ►

He told me the omicron stability conjecture.

01:06:22 ►

I’d never heard anything like it before,

01:06:24 ►

that these sets, the omega limit sets,

01:06:27 ►

if they have hyperbolic structure and then perturbations and so on.

01:06:31 ►

Oh, that’s very interesting, Steve.

01:06:33 ►

I said this wrong.

01:06:34 ►

Instantly, that flashed in my mind, the picture,

01:06:37 ►

which I described to him on the telephone.

01:06:38 ►

I was stoned.

01:06:39 ►

This is maybe one of the first examples of stoned mathematics

01:06:42 ►

and is still one of my best rememberedremembered publications, I would say.

01:06:47 ►

Oh, no, Steve, that’s wrong,

01:06:48 ►

because if you had in four dimensions the following configuration

01:06:51 ►

with the two dimensions out here and the one dimension in there

01:06:54 ►

with the intersection that’s transversal and so on,

01:06:56 ►

I described this picture in four dimensions.

01:06:58 ►

Well, he has, maybe it’s in six dimensions.

01:07:01 ►

I can’t remember right now.

01:07:02 ►

But it’s something that there’s hardly anyone in the world could visualize unless they

01:07:06 ►

were, I’m like, here’s the guy who could do it.

01:07:08 ►

Steve Smale. My God, you’re right.

01:07:10 ►

He said, oh shit.

01:07:11 ►

So then, that was it.

01:07:14 ►

A short telephone call. I went on home.

01:07:16 ►

I went to bed. And in the subsequent

01:07:18 ►

two, three days, we talked on the telephone

01:07:20 ►

a couple of times and we wrote a joint

01:07:21 ►

paper which was published in

01:07:23 ►

1968 in the plenary volume of this global analysis conference,

01:07:30 ►

which was really the climax of 1960s mathematics.

01:07:35 ►

Let me ask you a question, Ralph.

01:07:37 ►

Do you think that the psychedelics propel you

01:07:41 ►

into the realm of mathematical truth in the ordinary sense that that’s imagined,

01:07:49 ►

or that all we can ever perceive is the workings of our own minds.

01:07:54 ►

And so the mathematical landscape is the neurological landscape, and that the structure of the brain defines the limit set of possible mathematical

01:08:08 ►

objects. This goes to the question of whether mathematics is species-bound, specialized,

01:08:17 ►

localized human activity, or whether it’s discovering God’s truth in the universe.

01:08:25 ►

Well, this may be one of those unanswerable questions.

01:08:28 ►

You could ask the same question about ordinary reality.

01:08:31 ►

I mean, here it is.

01:08:33 ►

Is this a neurological construct with a history of other neurological constructs,

01:08:39 ►

or is there actual grass there, and here’s a tree, and that’s a bird?

01:08:42 ►

Well, what do you think?

01:08:43 ►

So what I think is that the ordinary reality is really there and is there even if all everyone in our species should become

01:08:51 ►

extinct and we’re all dead and a lot of these things die and so they’re still i think ordinary

01:08:57 ►

reality is really ordinary and really real and i think the same about the mathematical landscape

01:09:02 ►

that it’s been there, it’s evolving,

01:09:05 ►

it’s there with or without us,

01:09:06 ►

and as we travel there,

01:09:08 ►

we have these Cristofaro Colombo and Vasco da Gama

01:09:14 ►

and so on of the mathematical landscape.

01:09:16 ►

They go out there,

01:09:18 ►

they find the footprints of some other explorer,

01:09:20 ►

they follow them,

01:09:21 ►

they find where that person turned around and came back,

01:09:23 ►

they camp out, they pitch their tent there, they hang out for a while, they go a little further

01:09:27 ►

out and come back, they write a report, they send it back.

01:09:30 ►

These different reports are integrated into our cultural map of this other actual reality,

01:09:36 ►

which is much richer than this one, and much more complex and hard to grok.

01:09:41 ►

So we haven’t really got much of it yet.

01:09:44 ►

It’s

01:09:45 ►

vast. And for me, one of the

01:09:48 ►

most exciting aspects of psychedelic

01:09:50 ►

traveling has been to go

01:09:52 ►

miles farther.

01:09:54 ►

Where no man has gone

01:09:55 ►

before. Well, do you think

01:09:57 ►

then that a hypothetical civilization

01:10:00 ►

of extraterrestrials

01:10:01 ►

on the other side of the galaxy

01:10:03 ►

doing mathematics

01:10:05 ►

will discover and describe the same objects that you and your colleagues discover and describe?

01:10:13 ►

It would be a fantastic coincidence if there’s this enormous landscape and they travel a lot

01:10:19 ►

and then we travel a lot, there might not be any intersection at all.

01:10:23 ►

There could be planets where there wasn’t mathematics,

01:10:25 ►

which had the same reality and so on,

01:10:28 ►

and yet there was no overlap.

01:10:30 ►

But since, you know, one, two, three,

01:10:32 ►

I mean, numbers, there’s some things that are so natural

01:10:35 ►

to be early discoveries in the mathematical landscape

01:10:38 ►

that I would think that there would be an overlap

01:10:42 ►

between the mathematics of this planet

01:10:44 ►

and the mathematics of any other.

01:10:46 ►

So if we were to then encounter this extraterrestrial civilization,

01:10:51 ►

any mathematical discoveries that it had made,

01:10:55 ►

if we could get in communication with them,

01:10:58 ►

would be rationally apprehendable to us.

01:11:01 ►

We wouldn’t just say, well, that’s a Zell construct,

01:11:08 ►

to us, we wouldn’t just say, well, that’s a Zell construct, and we humans don’t, we can’t grok the Zell construct.

01:11:10 ►

Our brains are organized differently.

01:11:13 ►

Well, it might take a while.

01:11:14 ►

It might take a few generations.

01:11:16 ►

I think that our exploration of the mathematical landscape has been slow, and maybe slow of

01:11:23 ►

necessity. There is this idea that the discovery

01:11:26 ►

of a mathematical structure requires a certain neural net connectivity development, and that

01:11:38 ►

there is a co-development, co-evolution between mathematical discovery and the connectivity, actually.

01:11:46 ►

The structures

01:11:47 ►

within the mind mimicking,

01:11:49 ►

empowering the representation of structures

01:11:52 ►

that are discovered in the mathematical landscape.

01:11:54 ►

So they could

01:11:55 ►

come to us with a mathematical

01:11:57 ►

structure that we could not

01:11:59 ►

dock, although in principle

01:12:01 ►

it was explainable. The development of the

01:12:03 ►

language, the development of the capabilities to understand it might take several

01:12:08 ►

generations just as we now see ourselves our children and so on struggling to

01:12:13 ►

understand the shapes in the reality of the computer evolution so you’re more it

01:12:20 ►

would be fair to call you as a mathematical Platonist rather than a mathematical relativist.

01:12:26 ►

Yes.

01:12:28 ►

In our previous conversations on this topic, we are to be denied.

01:12:32 ►

Yes, I was going to point that.

01:12:35 ►

And to have insisted on the ploy usually adopted by mathematicians on the defensive

01:12:40 ►

that these are merely provisional models produced by the human mind

01:12:44 ►

that we use as long as they suit

01:12:46 ►

us and we drop when they

01:12:47 ►

are not so. And if

01:12:49 ►

there’s any objective existence

01:12:51 ►

at all, this is an evolving structure

01:12:54 ►

rather than an eternally fixed

01:12:55 ►

platonic one that somehow

01:12:57 ►

is co-evolving along

01:12:59 ►

with our imaginations.

01:13:01 ►

This is the position I’ve heard you adopt.

01:13:03 ►

Yes, so this is a little confused. I’m a Platonist. I accept your idea of the evolution

01:13:13 ►

and the role of creativity in the mathematical landscape, and that this creativity is interactive

01:13:22 ►

with human activities on the mathematical frontier.

01:13:26 ►

So I accept that. This is kind of a modified Platonism.

01:13:30 ►

About the relativity of the models, we have to distinguish between mathematical structures,

01:13:36 ►

mathematical objects, such as chaotic attractors and so on. On the one hand, a model built out of them for something in a laboratory

01:13:47 ►

situation or ordinary reality. On the other hand, I’ve said that scientists, especially physical

01:13:54 ►

scientists, tend to identify the model with the target system. They have Maxwell’s equations for

01:14:01 ►

the electromagnetic field with the E and the B and so on, and then they think that the E and the B are actually physically existing fields. And I reject that.

01:14:13 ►

But the E and the B and their relationship as expressed in the formula is an important

01:14:17 ►

kind of mathematical object which has its own real existence in the mathematical landscape.

01:14:24 ►

And the modeling function is applied mathematics,

01:14:27 ►

is the thesis, is the way in which mathematics can serve us

01:14:31 ►

as a cognitive strategy for understanding the world around us,

01:14:36 ►

that it is possible to take these mathematical objects,

01:14:39 ►

to use them as tinker toys,

01:14:41 ►

to put them together into a model,

01:14:43 ►

which in some way is something like the experience of our culture of laboratory our test to our ozone layer

01:14:53 ►

or whatever and through this relationship between one particular

01:14:57 ►

carefully constructed mathematical model and experimental scientific observation of nature around us

01:15:09 ►

to gain understanding and to see relationships in a clearer way.

01:15:17 ►

But the models are not real in the sense they’re identified with ordinary reality,

01:15:22 ►

but the models are real in the sense that they are actual existing objects constructed in the sense they’re identified with ordinary reality, but the mungs are real, in the sense that they are actual existing objects

01:15:27 ►

constructed in the mathematical landscape.

01:15:31 ►

Well, their nature and their kind of reality

01:15:33 ►

would be of the nature of field structures, I should imagine,

01:15:37 ►

since I think of the mind as being a system of fields,

01:15:40 ►

fields being spatio-temporal pattern regions.

01:15:41 ►

fields, fields being spatio-temporal pattern

01:15:43 ►

regions.

01:15:45 ►

So if our minds

01:15:47 ►

are basically made up of mental

01:15:49 ►

fields, the mathematical landscapes

01:15:51 ►

have as their underlying substrate

01:15:53 ►

a mental field. That would be the kind of

01:15:55 ►

basis of a mathematical landscape

01:15:57 ►

or of its objective existence.

01:15:59 ►

I’d go further and think of them as

01:16:01 ►

morphic fields transmissible by

01:16:03 ►

morphic resonance.

01:16:06 ►

Then, since our view of the nature of the so-called external world or the physical world

01:16:14 ►

is also one which science reveals to us is made up of organizing fields,

01:16:19 ►

modeling fields by means of fields would indeed be rather a good way of going about it,

01:16:25 ►

because the models would have the same kind of quality as the things being modelled.

01:16:30 ►

Namely, there’d be field structures, in other words, structures of extended interrelationship or patterns in space-time.

01:16:37 ►

Yes, space-time mathematics has been defined recently in the monthly notices of the American Mathematical Society as

01:16:45 ►

the study of patterns

01:16:47 ►

in space and time.

01:16:50 ►

Interesting. So then the field

01:16:52 ►

and indeed since fields

01:16:53 ►

the principal metaphor from which fields

01:16:55 ►

are derived as agricultural fields

01:16:57 ►

which are structures in landscapes

01:16:59 ►

then the very metaphor

01:17:02 ►

of the mathematical landscape or in

01:17:03 ►

Waddington’s terms, the epigenetic landscape,

01:17:06 ►

relates us automatically again to this whole field concept.

01:17:10 ►

Yes.

01:17:10 ►

Mathematical objects, so-called, I guess, are created in this field.

01:17:15 ►

And so then psychedelics would enable

01:17:19 ►

the exploration of different regions of this field,

01:17:25 ►

these fields to be explored.

01:17:28 ►

Just the metaphor of exploring would be quite appropriate.

01:17:31 ►

I mean, if we’re exploring the countryside,

01:17:33 ►

then we go through fields and ecosystems and things

01:17:36 ►

which can also be thought of as fields.

01:17:38 ►

So there’s an exploration process.

01:17:40 ►

Yes, it seems to be an amplifier for resonance,

01:17:45 ►

something like putting helium in a violin.

01:17:49 ►

Well, Whitehead defined understanding

01:17:52 ►

as the apperception of patterns as such,

01:17:56 ►

and that means then that what you’re saying,

01:18:00 ►

that mathematics is understanding.

01:18:04 ►

If mathematics is the study of patterns

01:18:07 ►

and understanding is the apperception of patterns as such,

01:18:11 ►

then mathematics and understanding

01:18:14 ►

are suddenly seen to be two names

01:18:18 ►

for the same program of mental activity.

01:18:23 ►

That’s one way I guess you could say that.

01:18:26 ►

Then of course that’s Whitehead

01:18:28 ►

who would see understanding

01:18:30 ►

as primarily a mathematical function.

01:18:32 ►

Who was both a Platonist and a mathematician.

01:18:35 ►

The word apperception I think comes from Leibniz

01:18:38 ►

during his period when he was writing in French.

01:18:42 ►

And so we have to think of him also proposing monads

01:18:47 ►

as fundamental units of the intellectual medium.

01:18:55 ►

…patterns, atomic creodes,

01:18:58 ►

from which to construct more complicated space-time patterns

01:19:02 ►

suitable for modeling everything.

01:19:06 ►

Yes, monads are the atoms of the mathematical universe.

01:19:10 ►

So we’ve arrived here from psychedelics and the computer revolution

01:19:14 ►

to psychedelics as amplifiers in the monadological method of understanding.

01:19:24 ►

That by showing us pattern as such.

01:19:27 ►

And computer graphics is it not…

01:19:30 ►

Makes it explicit.

01:19:31 ►

…a tool for doing monadology,

01:19:35 ►

where we have this CD full of fundamental modads,

01:19:38 ►

which can then be combined in a kind of virtual reality,

01:19:41 ►

which is then the model for a certain real experience,

01:19:45 ►

or perhaps it is the real experience, depending on…

01:19:50 ►

Well, it makes the pattern explicit.

01:19:53 ►

It still has the same kind of reductive capacity as the photograph.

01:19:59 ►

Well, but not, for instance, in virtual reality.

01:20:03 ►

I mean, they’re talking about virtual realities

01:20:06 ►

where you will go into Seahorse Valley of the Mantelbrot set

01:20:11 ►

and camp there for several weeks exploring around.

01:20:16 ►

In 3D with goggles.

01:20:17 ►

Yes.

01:20:18 ►

Still, if mathematical imaginations exist in higher dimensions,

01:20:23 ►

still bringing it down.

01:20:26 ►

But usually it’s 2D.

01:20:27 ►

I mean, these fractal pictures, chaotic, attractive…

01:20:29 ►

In 3D, we are really trying to visualize something in much higher dimensions.

01:20:34 ►

So these are attempts to represent something

01:20:38 ►

which is experienced in a higher dimension and communication.

01:20:41 ►

It’s said that the human EEG has a dimension around six and a half.

01:20:46 ►

So probably this isn’t exactly

01:20:48 ►

right, but

01:20:48 ►

it is believed that if dimension

01:20:52 ►

is too high, you can’t understand. If it’s too

01:20:53 ►

low, you can’t represent anything.

01:20:56 ►

Let’s just imagine that

01:20:58 ►

a lot of natural phenomenon

01:20:59 ►

are basically six, seven, or eight dimensional.

01:21:02 ►

Then certainly

01:21:04 ►

whether it’s 2D or 3D

01:21:05 ►

where we’re representing them,

01:21:06 ►

it doesn’t matter much.

01:21:07 ►

You’re hardly at the front door

01:21:10 ►

of understanding what’s going on.

01:21:12 ►

But then what about…

01:21:15 ►

Well, there’s one point just to follow up

01:21:17 ►

this other thing of the mathematics and understanding.

01:21:20 ►

There’s this whole range of possible fields

01:21:22 ►

or field structures

01:21:23 ►

that can be explored through mathematics.

01:21:26 ►

But, of course, the realm

01:21:28 ►

of mathematics is perhaps vastly

01:21:30 ►

greater than the realm of physical

01:21:31 ►

reality we encounter.

01:21:33 ►

So, there are

01:21:36 ►

far more mathematical structures around

01:21:37 ►

than there are things that we can

01:21:39 ►

map them onto, and we find ones which

01:21:41 ►

correspond more or less. To something that we

01:21:44 ►

can recognize.

01:21:47 ►

Yes, but a lot don’t correspond to anything we know about,

01:21:48 ►

at least on this planet.

01:21:52 ►

However, then aesthetics comes in here.

01:21:56 ►

Beauty itself becomes a criteria for the selection of mathematical objects,

01:21:58 ►

and in fact this has been historically true.

01:22:03 ►

Yes.

01:22:05 ►

But then there’s a further point, which is that just as mathematicians communicate with

01:22:10 ►

each other through a kind of resonance, where they can transfer the picture, the intuition,

01:22:15 ►

the gestalt, from one to the other by means of symbols, dances, halting phrases, somehow

01:22:22 ►

it can just be transferred.

01:22:27 ►

halting phrases, somehow it can just be transferred. Has anyone ever tried doing this in a psychedelic

01:22:38 ►

state? Say you had a room of mathematicians and they were taking a substance like ayahuasca,

01:22:44 ►

which produces on the one hand a kind of empathetic group mind, and on the other hand the visionary state.

01:22:49 ►

Would it be possible greatly to enhance this possibility of communication that happens in the colloquium room by means of this dance?

01:22:52 ►

Has that ever been, in your experience, tried?

01:22:56 ►

Well, I think as far as I can remember,

01:23:02 ►

in my group’s psychedelic experiences,

01:23:05 ►

there was never another major mathematician.

01:23:11 ►

But still, any person, to some extent, is a mathematician

01:23:15 ►

and has these modes of perception and uses them as cognitive strategies and so on.

01:23:21 ►

I found that the ability to evoke these images in someone else

01:23:27 ►

through just saying something and waving your hands

01:23:30 ►

is enormously enhanced in the shared psychedelic atmosphere.

01:23:35 ►

It is.

01:23:36 ►

Amazingly, resonance is definitely amplified,

01:23:40 ►

and therefore you can have success in communication

01:23:42 ►

that you have never dreamed,

01:23:44 ►

which is kind of a spoiler, really.

01:23:46 ►

A gesture, like the guru in the jungle, you know,

01:23:50 ►

some little signs, and the person really has the whole idea,

01:23:53 ►

and then they respond, and the communication is very rapid,

01:23:56 ►

and even without, just in some telepathic way,

01:24:00 ►

there is an apparent resonance, a merging of minds, as it were. You can even visualize

01:24:08 ►

these minds like floating up to the ceiling and somehow docking with each other and then

01:24:14 ►

becoming one thing. And I have in this way created what appears to be what you could

01:24:20 ►

describe as telepathic union with a person in such a two- or three-person psychedelic trip.

01:24:28 ►

I remember one with Kenny and Ellis,

01:24:31 ►

where the three souls merged,

01:24:34 ►

and a telepathic bond was connected,

01:24:37 ►

which was never broken.

01:24:38 ►

It didn’t end with the psychedelic trip.

01:24:41 ►

I think that we took various things

01:24:43 ►

and were stoned together for three days after this we

01:24:47 ►

always knew when something was happening with the other one we could call up and say what’s going on

01:24:51 ►

well it sounds to me like group ayahuasca taking among research mathematicians is a tremendous

01:24:57 ►

frontier for grassroots science yes and exactly

01:25:01 ►

you’re listening to the psychedelic, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:25:13 ►

Well, since I’m not a mathematician, I’m afraid that that’s one grassroots science project that I won’t be participating in.

01:25:21 ►

But something Ralph said about high-definition television got me thinking about a grassroots

01:25:26 ►

science project that I could do. I was intrigued by what Ralph said about the ways in which the

01:25:32 ►

deeper pixelation of high-definition television had the potential of changing our cognitive

01:25:38 ►

processing. So I did a little experiment to test his idea. And thanks to some friends, I now have access to a big screen, high definition television to use for my experiment.

01:25:50 ►

And now in the past, the programs that I watched in high def were mainly those spectacular nature shows

01:25:56 ►

that included a lot of aerial views and other sites that are pretty far from our everyday reality.

01:26:03 ►

But I didn’t think that they were the best way to check out Ralph’s hypothesis.

01:26:07 ►

So instead I selected a program that was about as everyday boring as life can often be,

01:26:13 ►

namely a golf tournament, which is about as exciting as watching the grass grow.

01:26:19 ►

But it can be an immersive experience if you look at it that way.

01:26:23 ►

Now, here in our area, some of the stations broadcast in both standard format and in high def.

01:26:30 ►

So I watched for about a half an hour in the standard format and then switched to high definition.

01:26:36 ►

Of course, it’s an instantaneous sensation of wow when the high definition kicks in.

01:26:43 ►

But this time it was a smaller wow because

01:26:46 ►

there was no spectacular scenery flying by just a bunch of guys strolling around

01:26:51 ►

a big lawn and hitting tiny white balls around but in high def something else

01:26:57 ►

seemed to be going on I still can’t say what it is but it was more than just a

01:27:01 ►

better picture that captured my attention. In some mysterious way, the shift to a higher number of pixels on the screen

01:27:09 ►

actually somehow pulled me into that scene in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.

01:27:15 ►

Of course, I was paying attention to the experience in a more focused way

01:27:19 ►

because I was thinking about what Ralph had said,

01:27:22 ►

and perhaps I just let my fanciful imagination run away with me.

01:27:26 ►

But it got me to thinking that maybe some of our fellow salonners who are looking for a graduate thesis topic

01:27:32 ►

might want to look into this phenomena to see if there’s actually something physical that happens to a person’s brain

01:27:38 ►

who is watching a television program in high def.

01:27:42 ►

And here’s where I’m going with this.

01:27:44 ►

For at least a decade now,

01:27:46 ►

there have been various teams working on the technical problem of delivering a psychedelic

01:27:51 ►

experience via digital technology, the mysterious digital drugs that you hear about from time to

01:27:57 ►

time. Now, word on the street is that some of these attempts have been very successful in

01:28:03 ►

tricking the brain into thinking it’s on LSD or a similar hallucinogen.

01:28:08 ►

But all of the projects I’ve heard about involve using some cumbersome and expensive headgear,

01:28:14 ►

which is always going to be a difficult thing to sell.

01:28:18 ►

But if most households eventually have a high-definition television,

01:28:22 ►

and if some of our great young visionary artists

01:28:25 ►

transport their work into the world of online gaming,

01:28:29 ►

particularly the online multiple-player games

01:28:31 ►

that are acted out in high def,

01:28:34 ►

well, the age of digital drugs may well be upon us.

01:28:38 ►

So, how about it, you game designers and university researchers?

01:28:43 ►

Let’s get busy and see how long it takes

01:28:45 ►

before the screwheads in Washington discover

01:28:47 ►

that now they also have to start a war against digital drugs

01:28:51 ►

if they want to continue fighting the evolution of human consciousness

01:28:55 ►

that’s already taking place in the psychedelic community.

01:28:59 ►

And contrary to what Star Trek fans like to think,

01:29:02 ►

it isn’t space that’s the final frontier.

01:29:05 ►

It’s cyberspace, or more specifically, cyberdelic space.

01:29:10 ►

At least that’s my current fantasy.

01:29:12 ►

So if anyone has the opportunity and time to investigate the effects of high-def TV on the brain

01:29:19 ►

and wants to share their findings, I’d love to hear about it.

01:29:23 ►

Another thing I’m wondering is,

01:29:25 ►

where do you come down on the question that Rupert raised

01:29:28 ►

about halfway into their trilogue,

01:29:31 ►

when he wondered whether, in the field of computer graphics,

01:29:34 ►

and today that, of course, would definitely include everyone in the gaming world,

01:29:39 ►

are those people working in that field

01:29:41 ►

because of their psychedelic experiences that drew them into it,

01:29:51 ►

or did computer graphics and gaming grow out of the psychedelic community i guess that’s sort of a modern day chicken and egg problem but uh there is no doubt in my mind based on my own personal

01:29:57 ►

experience that the computer industry at least in regards to the personal computer and internet developers,

01:30:08 ►

well, that part of the industry is awash in psychedelics.

01:30:14 ►

It’s a widely known fact, yet it’s very seldom discussed in the mainstream media.

01:30:18 ►

Several books that do touch on this fact of life, however,

01:30:21 ►

are Technosis by Eric Davis,

01:30:24 ►

What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff, and Counterculture Through the Ages

01:30:27 ►

by R.U. Sirius.

01:30:29 ►

And there are a few others that I’ll also add to the program notes for this podcast

01:30:33 ►

if I can remember it.

01:30:35 ►

And if I forget to add those links, well, hopefully one of our fellow salonners will

01:30:40 ►

do it for me in the comments section, like our friend Lewis did for Podcast 115.

01:30:46 ►

Thanks, Lewis. I appreciate your help.

01:30:49 ►

Also, I was taken by what Ralph said about the students with backgrounds involving psychedelics and or travel

01:30:56 ►

who seemed to be more drawn to working in the computer graphics field

01:31:00 ►

because that field also provided a better sense of personal integrity that

01:31:05 ►

some other professions didn’t seem to have and now that over a decade has

01:31:11 ►

passed since Ralph made that statement I find that his observation is even more

01:31:16 ►

accurate today than it was back in 1991 and to me the fascinating aspect of this

01:31:22 ►

migration of some of our best minds to the world of

01:31:25 ►

computer graphics is that that world now encompasses the game development industry. And if you

01:31:31 ►

know much about that tech, you know that it is the true leading edge of computing and

01:31:37 ►

the true leading edge of social evolution on this planet, at least in my humble opinion.

01:31:42 ►

And what do I base this on, you ask? Well, mainly on having

01:31:46 ►

met hundreds of people, both young and old, who are both psychedelic and are computer developers

01:31:52 ►

of one kind or another. At least from where I stand, these people have some of the sharpest

01:31:57 ►

and most well-rounded minds I’ve ever encountered. Now that I’ve said that that I wonder if something can be both

01:32:06 ►

well-rounded and sharp at the same time

01:32:08 ►

well, I think you know what I mean

01:32:11 ►

and you probably know some people like that yourself

01:32:14 ►

in fact, maybe you are one

01:32:16 ►

why else would you be listening to

01:32:18 ►

podcast lectures about psychedelics

01:32:20 ►

so I guess I’m preaching to the choir here

01:32:23 ►

by the way, one of the magazines that

01:32:26 ►

Ralph spoke about at the beginning of this plialogue was Mondo 2000, which for me was my

01:32:32 ►

main source of information about the psychedelic community during the dark ages when I was living

01:32:37 ►

in the swamps of Florida and working for a corporate beast. And in fact, I still have all

01:32:43 ►

but the first two issues.

01:32:48 ►

I really should get rid of them, but I can’t find it in my heart to throw them out.

01:32:54 ►

It was a really great magazine and was where I first learned about a guy named Terrence McKenna.

01:33:05 ►

Now, the reason I’m mentioning this right now is that the man behind Mondo 2000 and many other highly creative ventures was none other than Are You Serious?

01:33:08 ►

whose podcast you really should check out sometime and you can find a link to it on our matrixmasters.com slash podcast page.

01:33:15 ►

In the future I’m going to try to get these podcasts back down to a one hour format

01:33:19 ►

but I’ve still got a couple things left to say before I go today

01:33:23 ►

and I do appreciate you sticking with us for these longer programs,

01:33:27 ►

so I’ll try to be brief here.

01:33:29 ►

But I want to be sure to point you to the MySpace page of Plativark.

01:33:33 ►

That’s P-L-A-D-A-V-A-R-K,

01:33:37 ►

whose music fits in the trip-hop trance psychedelic genre

01:33:42 ►

and uses a few sound bites from the salon on several tracks.

01:33:47 ►

During the past couple of years,

01:33:49 ►

several other groups have also honored the salon

01:33:51 ►

by using soundbites from various programs,

01:33:54 ►

and I really enjoy listening to them.

01:33:56 ►

So thanks to all of you musicians

01:33:58 ►

who are including soundbites from the salon in your work,

01:34:01 ►

and please feel free to use any clips you want from these podcasts.

01:34:05 ►

It’s truly an honor to be included in your art.

01:34:10 ►

Now, almost every week I receive a comment or two about how much you appreciate the mind of Terrence McKenna,

01:34:16 ►

and since I’ve been playing so many of Terrence’s talks, I guess I don’t say much anymore about the brilliance of his thought.

01:34:23 ►

I guess I don’t say much anymore about the brilliance of his thought.

01:34:30 ►

But I recently received an email from Zachary M., who is a longtime salon regular,

01:34:35 ►

and I want to read part of what he had to say because I think it expresses what a lot of us are thinking.

01:34:39 ►

Here’s what Zachary has to say about Terrence.

01:34:43 ►

Terrence McKenna is somehow a timeless commentator.

01:34:47 ►

I don’t know what it is, but this guy just doesn’t seem to get old, but young.

01:34:52 ►

Every time you play one of his things, I’m just shocked at how old the talk is,

01:34:57 ►

and yet how not only presently affirming, but futuristically pointing.

01:35:01 ►

The guy really seems to have become an immortal that does not age whatsoever.

01:35:03 ►

It’s something in his voice.

01:35:06 ►

It’s something in his consciousness that allows that to happen.

01:35:10 ►

It’s not so much what he says as how he says it that is so powerful.

01:35:15 ►

Perhaps his magical bard-like powers have broken the bounds of time’s borders and escaped into the dream beyond the eschaton.

01:35:19 ►

When you play another’s talks from earlier times, it seems and feels very old.

01:35:23 ►

But McKenna’s talk seems new. Not only new, but cutting edge.

01:35:28 ►

Well, I’m in total agreement with you, Zachary. At least for now, it looks

01:35:32 ►

like Terrence is headed for that posthumous glory that he laughed about

01:35:36 ►

back in 99. But maybe that transcendental object at the end

01:35:40 ►

of time is actually the spirit of Terrence McKenna laughing at the

01:35:44 ►

cosmic giggle.

01:35:45 ►

Now that would be a nice surprise, don’t you think?

01:35:49 ►

And the last thing I want to bring up here is an interesting message I received from

01:35:54 ►

Joel G. And here’s part of what he had to say.

01:35:58 ►

Hi Lorenzo, I started listening to the Psychedelic Salon podcast a few weeks ago and I’m hooked.

01:36:04 ►

I started listening to the Psychedelic Salon podcast a few weeks ago, and I’m hooked.

01:36:09 ►

In one of the podcasts, I heard the topic of Hopi prophecy briefly discussed,

01:36:14 ►

so I thought I’d tell you about a strange bit of coincidence I stumbled upon back in 2001.

01:36:16 ►

Here’s a little background.

01:36:21 ►

The Hopi consider four mountain peaks in their geographic area as sacred.

01:36:26 ►

One of these is the San Francisco Peaks, just a few miles northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona. The Hopi believe that spirits or supernatural beings

01:36:32 ►

called Kachinas live on the San Francisco Peaks. The Kachinas are responsible for bringing

01:36:37 ►

good weather and bountiful crops, among other things. Here’s the coincidence. I’m an avid

01:36:43 ►

mushroom hunter, and in 2000, I had just relocated

01:36:47 ►

from Washington State to Arizona. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of mushroom hunting

01:36:53 ►

in Arizona due to the arid climate. In August of 2001, quite by accident, I discovered a mushroom

01:37:00 ►

species new to science on the SF Peaks, home of the Kachina spirits. You guessed

01:37:06 ►

it, the mushroom is psychoactive, containing psilocybin. This is the first known psychoactive

01:37:11 ►

mushroom native to Arizona. It has a habitat unlike any other psilocybin mushroom that

01:37:17 ►

I know of, Aspen Forest at about 9,000 feet. The majority of these types of mushrooms,

01:37:23 ►

which I assume he’s

01:37:25 ►

meaning psilocybin, are associated with areas of human disturbance such as

01:37:30 ►

landscaped areas and fields with livestock. So to find a species in a

01:37:35 ►

relatively undisturbed aspen forest is quite rare. As far as we know it only

01:37:40 ►

occurs on the San Francisco peaks and sightings are usually few and far

01:37:45 ►

between. I’m in no way suggesting that the Hopi knew of this mushroom, but I think the

01:37:51 ►

Kachina mythology and the discovery of this new species is a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.

01:37:58 ►

Hope all is well with you, and keep up the great work, Lorenzo. Kind regards, Joel.

01:38:03 ►

Well, Joel, thank you not only for the kind words, but also for that fascinating information.

01:38:09 ►

Stories like that really get my imagination going,

01:38:12 ►

and maybe that will be true for some of our fellow slaughters

01:38:15 ►

who might be able to shed some more light on what you so rightly call a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.

01:38:24 ►

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of today’s program,

01:38:27 ►

I’ve got something a little different for you next week.

01:38:30 ►

As so many of our fellow salonners have pointed out to me,

01:38:34 ►

I’ve now done over 120 podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon,

01:38:38 ►

and yet there hasn’t been a single one that has a talk by a fellow by the name of Dr. Timothy Leary.

01:38:44 ►

I think I’ve mentioned this

01:38:46 ►

before, but that isn’t just an oversight on my part. Due to my close friendship with Myron

01:38:52 ►

Soleroff and Gary Fisher, both of whom who had very close working relationships with Dr. Leary

01:38:58 ►

in the 60s, well, I have a highly negative opinion of Tim Leary, and in deference to my two friends, I haven’t done anything to add to the Leary legend.

01:39:10 ►

But the fates have decided that my stand can no longer be tolerated.

01:39:15 ►

At least that’s the way I read the fact that a data drive arrived in my mailbox last week that had almost 100 gigabytes of audio and video recordings of the good Dr. Leary.

01:39:26 ►

And so it seems that I can no longer ignore this part of modern psychedelic history.

01:39:32 ►

Heck, even Ralph Abraham quoted him in today’s trialogue,

01:39:35 ►

so I guess that should be a sign for me to loosen up a bit.

01:39:40 ►

I’m not going to promise how much of this Leary archive I’ll be playing here in the salon,

01:39:51 ►

but for next week I thought it would be interesting to hear the talk that Tim Leary gave at Cooper Union in 1965,

01:39:56 ►

which for some reason I seem to remember as having been of some consequence at the time.

01:40:01 ►

I haven’t listened to it yet myself, but we can do that together next week and see how well his lectures stand up to the high quality of the McKenna material we’ve been listening to for the past couple of years here in the salon.

01:40:11 ►

It should provide an interesting comparison, don’t you think?

01:40:14 ►

At least I hope it’s going to be an interesting talk, and if it isn’t, I’ll come up with something else for next week.

01:40:20 ►

But as of right now, my plan is to begin trickling a little Tim Leary into the mix just to keep things interesting.

01:40:28 ►

And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:40:38 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org. Thank you. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

126 - Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution

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Program Notes

Previous Episode

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Similar Episodes

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