Program Notes
Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake
All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994.
“I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!” –Ralph Abraham
“Notice that throughout history the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the blacks, they’ve taken their hits, but the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people [the Internet] utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.” –Terence McKenna
“Chaotic as the Web is, what it is is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of intelligentsia.” –Terence McKenna
“What it [the Internet] will be in the future will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives would actually go there.” –Ralph Abraham
“I think it’s [the Internet] built into the evolutionary morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos in that it could no more be stopped than mitocondria or societal organization.”–Terence McKenna
“I think it [the Internet] will supersede us. I don’t know how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete. It may shed the monkey meat.”–Terence McKenna
“The population explosion could end, let’s say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream.” –Ralph Abraham
“Nature is a world wide web. That was the first world wide web.” –Terence McKenna
Podcasts 19 (Part 1) & 20 (Part 2)
“The World Wide Web and the Millennium” a conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham (August 1998)
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171 - The Technology of Freedom
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, how’s this season coming along?
00:00:27 ►
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you’re keeping warm.
00:00:32 ►
But if you live down under, I already know how your summer is going.
00:00:35 ►
It’s going very hot, from what I hear.
00:00:39 ►
And since these podcasts reach fellow salonners in over 100 countries,
00:00:43 ►
and in almost every weather pattern on Earth, I guess I have to say to all of our fellow salonners in over 100 countries and in almost every weather pattern on earth.
00:00:46 ►
I guess I have to say to all of our fellow salonners, stay warm, stay cool, and I’m glad the weather is perfect where you are.
00:00:54 ►
I guess that should cover most bases, huh?
00:00:58 ►
Now let’s get on with today’s program.
00:01:01 ►
Two weeks ago, I played the first of two cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me.
00:01:07 ►
They were recordings of a private trialogue between him and Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
00:01:13 ►
And unless, like me, you are interested in history, particularly the history of the internet,
00:01:19 ►
you may not find today’s talk all to your liking because it took place 15 years ago and dealt with this
00:01:26 ►
newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. The recording was made at Terrence’s home on the
00:01:32 ►
big island of Hawaii, and at the time he still wasn’t connected to the internet there. However,
00:01:39 ►
it does sound like Terrence was very much up to speed on the potential of the net, and Ralph, as we
00:01:45 ►
all know, has been at the forefront of the evolution of the net since long before the
00:01:51 ►
web was invented. However, as you will hear, Rupert wasn’t all that convinced that people
00:01:56 ►
would actually contribute content to the web unless they were getting paid for it. Of course,
00:02:01 ►
today Rupert also provides a lot of free content on the web.
00:02:06 ►
What a difference a few years make, huh? And just so you know, I edited out a lot of the
00:02:13 ►
beginning of this recording because it was mainly Ralph Abraham describing to Rupert
00:02:18 ►
what the internet was. The date was sometime in 1994, which means that the World Wide Web was less than two years old at the time,
00:02:27 ►
although the Internet itself was around 25 years old by then.
00:02:32 ►
And Ralph’s description of and enthusiasm for the Web, when it was still in such a primitive state,
00:02:39 ►
marks him as one of its earliest prominent proponents.
00:02:43 ►
And I have to say that his foresight was truly amazing.
00:02:47 ►
When you hear Ralph winding up his introduction by saying that
00:02:50 ►
there are already tens of thousands of people creating webpages on the Internet,
00:02:55 ►
think about where we are today,
00:02:57 ►
with tens of millions of people pouring their creativity into the web
00:03:01 ►
every hour of every day of the year.
00:03:03 ►
So where were you back in 1994?
00:03:06 ►
Were you already connected to the net and up to speed with where Ralph already was at
00:03:11 ►
the time?
00:03:12 ►
Just keep in mind that the World Wide Web was less than two years old when this conversation
00:03:17 ►
was held, and most of us were, if we were connecting to it at all, we’re connecting
00:03:22 ►
to it through 1,500 baud modems.
00:03:25 ►
And that was the world that these three amigos were living in when they had this little conversation in Hawaii.
00:03:35 ►
And that means there are tens of thousands of people essentially devoting all of their waking hours for creative works for which there is no return except the joy of creativity.
00:03:47 ►
We have a region of absolutely unbridled, unrestricted creativity on a scale that boggles
00:03:53 ►
the mind, a scale never before seen.
00:03:56 ►
What are people doing?
00:03:57 ►
Why are they doing this?
00:03:58 ►
It’s all because I think that people involved in this field, as I feel,
00:04:10 ►
a unique window of opportunity for the creation of a new future.
00:04:19 ►
So that brings me to my particular focus for our conversation on the World Wide Web.
00:04:25 ►
This seems to me, and to other people who are careful observers of the scene,
00:04:30 ►
that the miracle for which we’ve been waiting,
00:04:35 ►
the Aquarian conspiracy, the descent of the superclient,
00:04:39 ►
the omega point and so on, is actually happening now.
00:04:44 ►
The Internet is the physical substrate, or the a-physical substrate, as it were, for
00:04:45 ►
the creation of a new future.
00:04:48 ►
And of all the people who have predicted this event in some detail in the past, the one
00:04:54 ►
that impressed me the most, understanding what’s actually happening now, is Teilhard de Chardin’s concept that he began publishing in 1924.
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We mostly didn’t start reading it until 1954 when his first book was published, Post-Humus,
00:05:16 ►
The Phenomenon of Man. There he described the World Wide Web without using these terms,
00:05:23 ►
without any reference to an electronic, a
00:05:25 ►
physical substrate, described in great detail what I think is happening in a metaphor.
00:05:30 ►
Now I would use the metaphor of the neural net. The neural net is kind of an abstraction of neurophysiology concepts,
00:05:46 ►
where the individual souls in the picture of Teilhard de Chardin
00:05:51 ►
are the nodes of a neural net,
00:05:54 ►
and they’re connected by links.
00:05:57 ►
And his vision of the omega point
00:06:00 ►
was a process taking up to 500 years
00:06:03 ►
in which the quality of the links between the
00:06:07 ►
individual nodes and the number of links between the individual nodes suddenly began to grow
00:06:15 ►
substantially in a kind of a paranormal phenomenon if not telepathy then intuition or just sensitivity, consideration, love,
00:06:26 ►
or something would amplify
00:06:28 ►
the strength of the connection
00:06:30 ►
between different minds,
00:06:32 ►
souls, and so on.
00:06:34 ►
And in this neural net
00:06:36 ►
analog picture would
00:06:38 ►
be created the
00:06:39 ►
super mind, the noosphere, and so on.
00:06:41 ►
This is the process that he called
00:06:43 ►
noogenesis.
00:06:46 ►
So I believe that
00:06:47 ►
the World Wide Web is, as a matter
00:06:49 ►
of fact, the noogenesis of
00:06:52 ►
the noosphere of the
00:06:54 ►
future. This is it.
00:06:56 ►
Now, what’s happening,
00:06:58 ►
what could happen, I mean, there’s a
00:06:59 ►
spectrum of possibilities.
00:07:01 ►
The cessation of this creative
00:07:04 ►
activity within the Internet, which is the
00:07:07 ►
self-organization of the dual reality, is not one of the possibilities for the future
00:07:12 ►
that I imagine. The creation of this thing is going forward. Everybody in the world will
00:07:18 ►
be connected to it. Anybody who has a television or a telephone, for example, will automatically be connected to this without them asking or doing anything.
00:07:28 ►
There it is.
00:07:30 ►
It may have a fee or may not have a fee.
00:07:33 ►
These are among the spectrum of possibilities for the future.
00:07:37 ►
So that’s an idea of what the World Wide Web is about
00:07:41 ►
and how I see it as an opportunity to amplify, create, trigger, participate in
00:07:49 ►
the spiritual revolution.
00:07:51 ►
All what we’ve talked about, the motivation for a lot of our books, writing, speaking,
00:07:54 ►
and so on.
00:07:55 ►
Suddenly, our opportunities in ordinary media pale in comparison with the opportunity presented us if we choose to take it
00:08:05 ►
on the internet in the form of
00:08:08 ►
this worldwide web
00:08:10 ►
on the citizenship level
00:08:11 ►
core.
00:08:14 ►
Well, it’s very interesting.
00:08:15 ►
I love hearing you talk about it
00:08:18 ►
because your
00:08:19 ►
enthusiasm
00:08:21 ►
is infectious.
00:08:24 ►
I mean, it’s the kind of ultimate
00:08:26 ►
technophilia that we’ve embraced here.
00:08:30 ►
I mean, God as computer.
00:08:33 ►
I agree completely.
00:08:36 ►
I think this is the compressence
00:08:39 ►
we’ve been waiting for.
00:08:40 ►
This is the outer shell of the omega point
00:08:44 ►
that history has been moving toward. The implications are mind-boggling and difficult to discern. Is this biology preparing to shed itself and decant into another dimension?
00:09:04 ►
itself and decamped into another dimension. Isn’t it interesting that it is ultimately wires, bolts,
00:09:11 ►
electrons, but its profits and its adherence
00:09:16 ►
reach for the language of theology
00:09:18 ►
to describe what is happening?
00:09:20 ►
This is nothing less than the manifestation of the incorporeal body of God in human society.
00:09:30 ►
It is the end of history as far as I can see. We’ve been talking since the 60s about boundary
00:09:37 ►
dissolution, interconnectivity, so forth and so on, assuming these things would arrive in pharmacological clothing.
00:09:47 ►
But it appears that this is a very powerful, practical competitor for that.
00:09:55 ►
It is disturbing, you put your finger on it, the absence of the feminine. I wonder if perhaps the first world wide web was 100% female and has
00:10:08 ►
existed for millennia and that in a sense what the engineering
00:10:12 ►
mentality is doing is simply hardwiring the
00:10:15 ►
information. Bringing the guys
00:10:19 ►
up to speed and introducing them to the reality
00:10:23 ►
of boundaryless communication,
00:10:26 ►
empathy, a sense of wholeness, completion, so forth and so on.
00:10:33 ►
So you think we should call it the second web?
00:10:36 ►
The men’s web.
00:10:36 ►
Sort of the dual of the second sex.
00:10:38 ►
Yes, women have always spun and moved in these webs,
00:10:43 ►
and now men, in the process of being feminized
00:10:47 ►
are learning this trick but implementing it in the way they know best which is through technique
00:10:54 ►
and i i just cannot see the edges of this i think you’re, that the thing we have heralded that seems so unlikely, that
00:11:06 ►
seemed in fact to require, and no pun is intended, a day of sex machina, the day of sex machina
00:11:14 ►
is now with us. And what’s wonderful is that it cuts down no forests, it creates no new slums, it is in fact invisible. And so the people who might,
00:11:29 ►
for various reasons, seek to slow it down, subvert it, manage it, are in fact unaware of it.
00:11:38 ►
They are perfectly in control of the land masses of the planet, its plutonium resources, its petroleum resources.
00:11:46 ►
They do not understand that these are not the key to the game.
00:11:51 ►
The key to the game is information and connectivity.
00:11:55 ►
And in that domain, this thing has to have a morphogenetic,
00:12:00 ►
it seems to have a morphogenetic impulse of its own.
00:12:10 ►
As a morphogenesis, I would be interested in what you have to think about it.
00:12:14 ►
And Rupert, as the proponent of the morphogenetic field,
00:12:18 ►
I wonder how this fits into your stream.
00:12:26 ►
Is it relevant, irrelevant, a shining example or metaphor of what you’re talking about? Or is it in fact a part of the processes that you’re interested in?
00:12:31 ►
Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. Because I find, I’m very sorry to say
00:12:45 ►
my sceptical
00:12:46 ►
impulses being activated
00:12:49 ►
because
00:12:50 ►
my own experience
00:12:53 ►
is that I already have access
00:12:55 ►
to vast amounts of information
00:12:57 ►
libraries, the whole of London’s
00:13:00 ►
libraries at my feet
00:13:01 ►
Cambridge University Library, incredible information
00:13:04 ►
through newspapers,
00:13:10 ►
mail, stacks of unread magazines, and so forth. I’m very aware of an incredible information overload. My problem is having time to read what’s already there. And the state that Ralph
00:13:17 ►
has described, people browsing idly through the net, you know, finding out amazing nuggets of information here and there,
00:13:26 ►
presupposes a vast amount of leisure, in which people, altruistic leisure, in which people
00:13:35 ►
are just connecting things up and being creative for its own sake, without hope of reward,
00:13:41 ►
and without need of recompense. And somehow I can’t get this picture into focus
00:13:49 ►
because it doesn’t correspond with the reality I know.
00:13:52 ►
It may be a failure of the visionary instincts.
00:13:56 ►
It may just be British cynicism surfacing.
00:14:02 ►
But I can’t quite see how this fits into the lives of people who have to make a living.
00:14:08 ►
I can see it as a leisure pursuit, a hobby, like hand radio.
00:14:14 ►
I can’t quite get this Neu-sphère, Terre de Chaudhoun, Deus et Commission, aspect of
00:14:23 ►
it. deus ex machina aspect of it? Well, in the past, if you sought information,
00:14:29 ►
you would seek only as far as you had to,
00:14:32 ►
and that was usually your local library.
00:14:35 ►
And the quality of your conclusions here
00:14:38 ►
would inevitably be infected with this kind of parochialism.
00:14:43 ►
For instance, in the old world,
00:14:45 ►
if you wanted a picture of the Mona Lisa,
00:14:48 ►
you would look up Leonardo da Vinci
00:14:51 ►
in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
00:14:53 ►
On the World Wide Web,
00:14:54 ►
if you want a picture of the Mona Lisa,
00:14:56 ►
you call up the camera in the gallery
00:15:00 ►
that is staring at the Mona Lisa.
00:15:03 ►
You don’t call up an image of the Mona Lisa,
00:15:06 ►
you call up the thing itself. I can’t imagine that, I mean, human beings are defined by
00:15:14 ►
localisms. What kind of world would it be if there were no localisms? In other words,
00:15:46 ►
In other words, if concepts like British, Somali, Chinese were utterly meaningless because everyone moved in the same cultural super space is that it does it by appealing to the lowest common denominator
00:15:47 ►
by forcing Bedouins in their
00:15:50 ►
huts to watch Dallas
00:15:52 ►
or something like that
00:15:53 ►
it seems to me the argument for this
00:15:56 ►
is that it preserves
00:15:58 ►
diversity
00:15:59 ►
it really celebrates all
00:16:02 ►
information without
00:16:03 ►
bias and It really celebrates all information without bias.
00:16:06 ►
And, Ralph neglected to mention, although I’m sure he’s aware,
00:16:12 ►
the original Internet was constructed by the American military
00:16:17 ►
as a system of communication specifically designed to survive a thermonuclear attack.
00:16:26 ►
Hence, it has been designed to be indestructible.
00:16:30 ►
There is no central control to bomb or blow up.
00:16:35 ►
Hence, the very people who created it find it impossible to control.
00:16:42 ►
So it’s a cultural…
00:16:44 ►
His great appeal is that it’s out of control.
00:16:47 ►
Yes.
00:16:48 ►
It’s totally out of control.
00:16:49 ►
It’s chaotic, friends, and we…
00:16:52 ►
We always wondered what would happen if you let creativity go in an infinite sphere of resources.
00:16:58 ►
What would happen? And here it is. Well, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not really comparable to traditional sources of information like books and magazines that comprise your familiar world. then it still fits very closely Teilhard Schindler’s description of Noah Genesis’ process,
00:17:30 ►
because the access to all that information has suddenly changed.
00:17:34 ►
Now, all those books in the British Museum are not really accessible.
00:17:38 ►
We know that we went there together, and we saw that we couldn’t actually request a book without getting a card,
00:17:44 ►
which is very difficult to get.
00:17:46 ►
I mean, access is severely restricted.
00:17:48 ►
There are, you know, six billion people in the world,
00:17:54 ►
and they just won’t fit through the door there.
00:17:57 ►
But on the Internet, people can have free access to all these materials.
00:18:01 ►
It’s true at the more popular sites at the moment.
00:18:04 ►
You have to wait in line up to a minute,
00:18:06 ►
sometimes even two minutes, to get the certain book.
00:18:10 ►
But just think that everything is the same,
00:18:12 ►
the same information exactly,
00:18:14 ►
but the access is amplified by factors of hundreds of thousands.
00:18:20 ►
That’s the strength of the link, the numbers of the links.
00:18:23 ►
That’s the most obvious thing that’s changing, is access.
00:18:27 ►
There are all these books on it.
00:18:29 ►
You see, a lot of books I want and information on are very obscure.
00:18:32 ►
They’re things I have to find in obscure libraries.
00:18:35 ►
And even if you go and look through their computerized index,
00:18:38 ►
you find it only goes back to 1960 or 1970 or something.
00:18:42 ►
The University of London, if I want to look at books prior to 1970,
00:18:46 ►
I have to go to some ancient card
00:18:47 ►
index. Now the idea that all
00:18:50 ►
those scientific journals, all those books
00:18:51 ►
that one person every three or four years
00:18:53 ►
looks at, are actually at some
00:18:55 ►
point going to take all the expense of entering
00:18:57 ►
all this information. No, no, no, they’re not.
00:19:00 ►
Unlikely. They’re not. It’ll be very
00:19:01 ►
limited information. However, at the
00:19:03 ►
rate that the books are being published now,
00:19:06 ►
almost every year, so many books are published
00:19:09 ►
that less is many books as were ever published before in the history of time.
00:19:13 ►
So obviously five to ten years from now,
00:19:15 ►
most books will be digitally available.
00:19:19 ►
They will.
00:19:20 ►
And robotically driven optical characters.
00:19:23 ►
But I’ll tell you one book that’s available now on the World Wide Web.
00:19:26 ►
Terrence, I don’t know if you know this, but the most obscure book in the world,
00:19:29 ►
the Voynich Manuscript, is available on the World Wide Web.
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The most obscure and rare manuscript in the world has been totally digitized
00:19:39 ►
and is full of pictures as well as text.
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The other thing I think it’s very hard to predict the impact of
00:19:45 ►
is no matter how obscure
00:19:50 ►
your field of interest
00:19:53 ►
or your self-definition,
00:19:56 ►
you can find the others.
00:20:00 ►
Third world handicapped lesbian mothers
00:20:02 ►
will all be able to communicate with each other.
00:20:07 ►
New communities.
00:20:08 ►
Ukrainian speaking morphogenesis under 30 with a history of ketamine abuse will be able to find and discuss this with each other.
00:20:19 ►
So some of the genetic processes run amok.
00:20:22 ►
Well, it seems fine if you know what you’re looking for, you see.
00:20:26 ►
But I think the point about the ordinary media and the way they work…
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When I read the Guardian newspaper in the morning,
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I’m particularly interested in certain kinds of things.
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There’s a whole lot of other things that I see that I wouldn’t normally look for.
00:20:40 ►
I would never dial up half these things.
00:20:42 ►
Well, the Guardian newspaper is on the worldwide web
00:20:46 ►
and furthermore it’s indexed now you read a book many of us start reading a book from the back we
00:20:52 ►
like to have a look at the index see if it’s a large one or a small one i see this book on island
00:20:57 ►
ecology it’s got 60 pages of indexed three columns i think this is a great book. Many books on the World Wide Web are indexed.
00:21:07 ►
Completely, every single word is in the index. That means it’s much easier to find what you’re
00:21:15 ►
looking for.
00:21:16 ►
Okay, well, let’s say that it has this amazing resource. The next question really
00:21:22 ►
is what kind of research projects or creativity do you want to do on it?
00:21:27 ►
I mean, I can think of several examples right now.
00:21:30 ►
I think the main areas that it would be useful for would be Terence’s chosen sphere, a sphere as a matter of fact.
00:21:37 ►
I mean, one thing I’m very interested in, you see, is the quality of time.
00:21:42 ►
I’m interested in the way the physical constants may fluctuate. And this is something
00:21:48 ►
Terence has interested me not, I have to say, primarily focused on the time wave itself,
00:21:55 ►
but on the general possibility that the time wave is an example of a quality of time phenomenon.
00:22:02 ►
a quality of time phenomenon.
00:22:05 ►
I’m interested in the empirical side of it.
00:22:09 ►
So I’d be interested in sunspot data,
00:22:10 ►
tide data,
00:22:13 ►
deviations from, you know,
00:22:17 ►
things from power companies and so on,
00:22:19 ►
rate of accident reports,
00:22:21 ►
you know, suicide rate statistics,
00:22:24 ►
all these things which could reflect changing qualities of time.
00:22:27 ►
I myself wouldn’t be able to do much with them
00:22:30 ►
because I wouldn’t have the mathematical means
00:22:32 ►
to do correlation analyses and all the things that you can do
00:22:35 ►
by comparing vast data sets.
00:22:38 ►
But that kind of research would be possible.
00:22:41 ►
And a new kind of time, quality of time research would be possible
00:22:46 ►
through the world right now. I can easily see that possibility. I can also see the number
00:22:52 ►
of people who are really interested in this might be very small. Not hundreds of thousands
00:22:57 ►
or millions, maybe a dozen or three.
00:22:59 ►
Especially in this kind of research.
00:23:01 ►
Yes. Well, one thing worth talking about is and it’s seems clear that this
00:23:07 ►
is a general quality of the late 20th century that opportunity creates and loses and that as some of us are moving off into accessing the central computers
00:23:26 ►
at Kiev State University and so forth.
00:23:29 ►
Some of us can’t read the ingredients in the cereal boxes.
00:23:35 ►
And a lot of people are going to fall through the web.
00:23:39 ►
But they’ve fallen through every web in history.
00:23:44 ►
And so then an issue emerges.
00:23:47 ►
Is this something being created for an elite?
00:23:50 ►
And what kind of an elite is it?
00:23:52 ►
It’s certainly not an elite of wealth.
00:23:55 ►
It’s an elite of intelligence.
00:23:59 ►
Now, notice that throughout history,
00:24:01 ►
the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the
00:24:08 ►
Blacks. They’ve taken their hits. But the most consistently oppressed group of people
00:24:14 ►
throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people, utterly force not be utterly incomprehensible to Dalits
00:24:26 ►
that is essentially
00:24:27 ►
the equivalent of the hydrogen
00:24:30 ►
bomb
00:24:31 ►
and if in fact
00:24:33 ►
consciousness expansion is to be
00:24:36 ►
our salvation
00:24:37 ►
then this must
00:24:40 ►
be, this is
00:24:41 ►
chaotic as the web is
00:24:44 ►
what it is, is it the controlled psychedelic experience
00:24:49 ►
spreading through the populace at the highest levels of the intelligentsia it’s more like a
00:24:56 ►
one-way psychedelic experience that after one hit of lsd or something your mind is altered permanently
00:25:06 ►
one hit of LSD or something, your mind is altered permanently. After you have
00:25:12 ►
browsed and gotten used to this phenomenon, it’s almost impossible to forget it.
00:25:15 ►
Or ever go back. Or ever go back.
00:25:23 ►
So since you can speak from experience, and I certainly can’t, what breakthroughs in your life have happened other than the vision of the world
00:25:26 ►
what it could be in the future
00:25:28 ►
the visionary side of it
00:25:29 ►
what actual benefits
00:25:32 ►
have you derived from it
00:25:33 ►
I think in
00:25:35 ►
our context
00:25:38 ►
of
00:25:38 ►
our common activities
00:25:42 ►
and so on
00:25:43 ►
I would say the most evident and significant aspect in my life,
00:25:53 ►
affected by the World Wide Web, is my motivation for authoring.
00:25:57 ►
I certainly am ready to give up writing books or intellectual activity
00:26:04 ►
other than sitting in a garden speaking, as we are right now.
00:26:07 ►
If the only result is publishing a book that’s read by 1,000 people
00:26:15 ►
or publishing an article that’s read by 100 people,
00:26:19 ►
this is an awful lot of work for no result, whatever,
00:26:24 ►
even though I love the process of making books.
00:26:28 ►
And there’s nothing more I want to do. I have a thousand ideas for writing. There’s just
00:26:32 ►
no reason to continue. Now, however, I see that I can freely self-publish all my creative
00:26:37 ►
energy and reach… My worldwide website has been cruised by probably a hundred thousand
00:26:46 ►
a hundred thousand people
00:26:48 ►
just in one year.
00:26:50 ►
And he sells advanced mathematical
00:26:52 ►
software. What if he were selling
00:26:53 ►
dildos?
00:26:56 ►
So the opportunity
00:26:57 ►
of reaching people, which people
00:27:00 ►
may be unaffected by what I
00:27:02 ►
write, and that’s okay, but
00:27:03 ►
at least there will be the possibility that that somehow motivates me to do more work.
00:27:07 ►
Furthermore, using electronic tools, preparing material to be published electronically,
00:27:12 ►
is very seamless, so I find I can go at a much greater rate.
00:27:17 ►
I’m planning to do about four volumes a year.
00:27:21 ►
I have a dozen ideas waiting as I always have,
00:27:26 ►
but for the first time, I anticipate
00:27:28 ►
completing them all shortly
00:27:29 ►
and making them available to people
00:27:31 ►
who will actually access them,
00:27:33 ►
discuss them, and do something similar
00:27:36 ►
in response. They’ll publish a book
00:27:37 ►
back.
00:27:39 ►
Heaven forbid. I mean, I have
00:27:41 ►
the dreadful prospect awaiting me when I
00:27:43 ►
return home next week from Hawaii of a stack of mail, several feet high, which I know will contain at least 20 bulky envelopes, which will contain exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about.
00:27:55 ►
People’s creative work in progress, theories of the universe, why Einstein went wrong, why evolution should be understood in a new way. I have a stack too.
00:28:05 ►
My set has insights on
00:28:08 ►
a great many things that I
00:28:09 ►
ought to be interested in.
00:28:12 ►
The idea of
00:28:13 ►
a torrent of this stuff pouring into
00:28:15 ►
my computer
00:28:16 ►
is enough to give me, you know,
00:28:20 ►
put me off totally because the amount
00:28:22 ►
of creativity around
00:28:23 ►
already is far too much in my opinion i
00:28:26 ►
don’t know that we need more you know but out of this ton this is a stack of 30 feet high of
00:28:32 ►
manuscripts you might find one valuable book but then all these cranes there’ll be one steve ruck
00:28:38 ►
i know but then one would be in the unenviable position of the editor of the magazine
00:28:42 ►
i mean i know we get a lot of this mail through the post,
00:28:46 ►
but, you know, talk to people like
00:28:48 ►
Noetic Sciences or New Age
00:28:49 ►
Magazine, and what comes into
00:28:51 ►
them, you know, in terms of unsolicited
00:28:54 ►
manuscripts, is enormous.
00:28:56 ►
And the editor has
00:28:57 ►
the unenviable task of looking
00:28:59 ►
through all this stuff and trying to decide which
00:29:01 ►
is just right. I’m grateful they do it,
00:29:04 ►
and that I don’t have to do it myself.
00:29:05 ►
On the World Wide Web, we each have to be our own editor.
00:29:08 ►
That’s a lengthy…
00:29:09 ►
No, people will publish whatever they please without restraint,
00:29:14 ►
and then people will browse whatever they please without restraint.
00:29:17 ►
And what we’re talking about is a thousand-fold increase
00:29:21 ►
of creativity all over the planet
00:29:22 ►
by people who’ve never had the opportunity before to create anything. They put a window into the World Wide Web in a public place
00:29:29 ►
in Los Angeles, and who crowded around it were gang members who felt that they had the
00:29:34 ►
opportunity to participate in society for the first time. This creativity can’t be bad.
00:29:41 ►
As an informational environment, what’s being said is you get
00:29:45 ►
much more interesting evolutionary
00:29:47 ►
situations out of
00:29:49 ►
species-dense
00:29:51 ►
environments than
00:29:53 ►
very sparse and inhabited
00:29:55 ►
environments. And I think what Ralph is saying
00:29:57 ►
is that the ideological
00:29:59 ►
environment is about to turn into
00:30:01 ►
the equivalent of an Amazonian
00:30:03 ►
rainforest, where it has been an Arctic tundra.
00:30:07 ►
Exactly.
00:30:10 ►
Well, yes, but it means that the amount of time
00:30:14 ►
somebody’s going to have to spend doing this editing function,
00:30:18 ►
I mean, when there’s a vast overload of information…
00:30:20 ►
Nobody has to edit anything because this is all…
00:30:23 ►
They have to select, though.
00:30:24 ►
Only the readers.
00:30:26 ►
Exactly, but it means each… I mean,
00:30:27 ►
I just…
00:30:29 ►
I just give thanks every day
00:30:32 ►
for the fact there are editors filtering
00:30:34 ►
out the vast amount of stuff from newspapers
00:30:36 ►
and magazines, so I don’t have to read
00:30:38 ►
all the stuff that’s submitted to them.
00:30:40 ►
And I’m sure sometimes they make mistakes
00:30:42 ►
and sometimes they have fascist
00:30:43 ►
inclinations and sometimes they’re…
00:30:46 ►
Well, you’ve been edited out over the years.
00:30:48 ►
I’ve been edited out a lot myself.
00:30:50 ►
I’m a victim of this process.
00:30:51 ►
But, you know, so have a lot of other people.
00:30:55 ►
I just don’t see how anyone could navigate
00:30:58 ►
through this total overload of creativity.
00:31:01 ►
Well, there are robots.
00:31:02 ►
The thing, Ralph, or I mean Rupert,
00:31:04 ►
you’ve been edited out a lot. If someone I mean, Rupert, you’ve been edited
00:31:05 ►
out a lot. If someone’s interested
00:31:08 ►
in Rupert Sheldrake,
00:31:10 ►
their only choice now
00:31:12 ►
is to approach you
00:31:13 ►
through
00:31:16 ►
your critics who have published
00:31:18 ►
widely. If they could simply
00:31:20 ►
enter the word Sheldrake
00:31:21 ►
and have your words
00:31:24 ►
before them, rather than
00:31:26 ►
the interpretation of your words
00:31:28 ►
by a hostile media,
00:31:30 ►
many people would come to you.
00:31:32 ►
They wouldn’t say, well,
00:31:34 ►
he must be a crank, or
00:31:36 ►
Nature magazine doesn’t approve,
00:31:38 ►
or so forth and so on.
00:31:40 ►
Well, they can right now just look
00:31:42 ►
at Sheldrake in books in print
00:31:44 ►
and order the book in a bookstore which isn’t already there.
00:31:47 ►
And if everyone can get…
00:31:48 ►
This is a trivial point compared with the elevated tone of our discourse so far,
00:31:52 ►
but if everybody could get copies of all our books free of charge on the World Wide Web,
00:31:57 ►
how are we going to pay for the grocery bills
00:32:00 ►
that will enable us to have enough metabolic energy to switch on well my publisher
00:32:09 ►
my publisher is petrified that i’ll put my book on the world wide web on the world wide web and
00:32:13 ►
of course his his his fear is justified because i am going to put it on the world wide web
00:32:20 ►
but here here is my idea about that that i’m trying to reassure my publisher with
00:32:22 ►
but here is my idea about that that I’m trying to reassure my publisher with
00:32:25 ►
if anyone goes into the bookstore
00:32:28 ►
and finds your book on the shelf
00:32:29 ►
they can stand there and read it on the hook
00:32:31 ►
and not buy it
00:32:32 ►
their only reason for buying it
00:32:34 ►
is they really want to buy it and take it home
00:32:36 ►
and it would be exactly the same on the world wide web
00:32:38 ►
because it’s very uncomfortable
00:32:40 ►
to sit in front of a terminal and read an entire book
00:32:42 ►
that’s just not the idea of the thing
00:32:44 ►
if you browse a book and you like it you’ll go to the bookstore and buy it. That’s what
00:32:49 ►
I think. Meanwhile, there’ll be many manuscripts which publishers and editors have rejected.
00:32:55 ►
Like some of your books were rejected and then they waited for a long time. Meanwhile, they could
00:32:59 ►
have been read by everybody on the World Wide Web who wouldn’t mind standing on the hook in the bookstore as it were if there was simply no alternative. So I think personally that my book sales,
00:33:10 ►
my royalty statements will be enhanced by putting entire books on the world wide web.
00:33:17 ►
There are these informatic robots going around indexing things. And this is a terrific relief of individual people.
00:33:27 ►
For example, in the past, I’ve had, I get stacks of mail
00:33:31 ►
where people are requesting the reprint of an article
00:33:35 ►
in some journal which is inaccessible to them.
00:33:38 ►
And I’ve usually responded by making a copy and sending it.
00:33:42 ►
In fact, I’ve been spending, over these past years,
00:33:44 ►
the average of $6,000 a year
00:33:46 ►
just copying materials and having them mailed out.
00:33:49 ►
That’s the cost of the secretary, the postage, and the copying.
00:33:53 ►
Now, all of that will be rendered unnecessary
00:33:56 ►
because people are not even going to write to me
00:33:58 ►
asking for the article because they know it’s on the World Wide Web.
00:34:01 ►
Well, some of them don’t already, but they soon will
00:34:03 ►
because I’m going to have business cards made that contain nothing but my name and
00:34:08 ►
my world wide web address.
00:34:12 ►
Yes, okay, but now, coming to your point about the noosphere and time to show that, I can’t
00:34:19 ►
quite get, again, how more information, more interactively will lead to this, since, as I understand,
00:34:26 ►
at least these are the more mystical aspects of human unity. They’re not things that are
00:34:31 ►
necessarily mediated by information transfer, either digital or, you know, text or audio.
00:34:39 ►
Well, now you’re disagreeing with Teilhard de Chardin, not with me. But I agree that there’s a terrific possibility that this opportunity I’m talking about turns out to be a big flop,
00:34:51 ►
maybe the biggest flop in history.
00:34:53 ►
I don’t think it will, but that’s one of the dangers.
00:34:57 ►
And that’s why our responsibility is to at least check it out, browse around there,
00:35:02 ►
and see if we think after that that there’s an opportunity or no,
00:35:06 ►
and if so, to give it some creative energy,
00:35:09 ►
because what it will be in the future
00:35:11 ►
will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives actually go there.
00:35:17 ►
Okay, well, I ought to be an instant convert,
00:35:20 ►
because what I’m in the process of doing through the Seven Experiments book
00:35:23 ►
is trying to launch a whole grassroots research project
00:35:26 ►
a resurgence of humanitarian grassroots research
00:35:29 ►
Perfect opportunity for you
00:35:30 ►
that involves going directly to people and around institutions
00:35:35 ►
and also people who are doing similar research things networking up with each other
00:35:41 ►
I only have this to say though, as I mentioned before, my experience so far with the internet,
00:35:47 ►
trying to find people who have telepathic cats, that it may when they’re telephoning
00:35:52 ►
a specific request, was that mostly what I got was junk comments about it from armchair
00:36:00 ►
skeptics. Two pieces of information that were relevant to people who fail to respond to a further inquiry.
00:36:06 ►
So I think most of the people who are the most active and interesting informants about their pets at the moment
00:36:14 ►
are people who would be the last to join the World Wide Web.
00:36:18 ►
They’re not computer nerds, they, people who like keeping dogs. Well, we’re talking here about a creative process that I imagine would be on the scale
00:36:29 ►
of three to five years before coming to fruition.
00:36:32 ►
And I can well imagine a website called Animal Magic, where a lot of the things that you
00:36:39 ►
would be paying your secretary to do will take place automatically.
00:36:42 ►
It’s called alt.pets and alt.cats
00:36:46 ►
and it already exists.
00:36:48 ►
Those exist.
00:36:49 ►
What is alt.pets?
00:36:51 ►
A huge conference
00:36:53 ►
on the internet.
00:36:56 ►
What about that?
00:36:58 ►
There are subgroups
00:37:00 ►
but it’s basically… It’s a news group.
00:37:01 ►
How this works is
00:37:03 ►
you write a letter and it’s posted there
00:37:08 ►
and everyone’s letters ever written
00:37:10 ►
are posted there in sequence.
00:37:12 ►
You can read them or not.
00:37:13 ►
You can scan them for keywords
00:37:14 ►
and only read the interesting ones.
00:37:18 ►
And you can ask for stories of telepathic cats.
00:37:21 ►
Well, that’s what happened.
00:37:23 ►
It was in the cat network. This question was asked about telepathic cats. Well, that’s what happened. It was in the cat network.
00:37:25 ►
This question was asked about telepathic cats.
00:37:28 ►
And it was much less successful
00:37:30 ►
than my peers through BBC radio
00:37:32 ►
programs, newspapers, magazines, etc.
00:37:35 ►
Well, the World Wide Web
00:37:36 ►
is a totally different structure
00:37:38 ►
than news groups.
00:37:39 ►
Because you can post things
00:37:42 ►
which elicit responses
00:37:43 ►
without doing any work.
00:37:46 ►
I mean, you have your articles and books and so on on the subject,
00:37:49 ►
the experiments that you’ve suggested,
00:37:51 ►
and the description of information that you would like to collect,
00:37:57 ►
and where to send it, which might not be you,
00:37:59 ►
and all of this is posted there.
00:38:01 ►
And people who browse by are not necessarily people who habitually respond
00:38:07 ►
to a particular news group this is sort of a much more horizontally diffuse structure but i’m
00:38:14 ►
surprised about that where you say you think it could be subverted or derailed i think it’s just
00:38:21 ►
built into the evolutionary and morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos
00:38:26 ►
and that it could no more be stopped than mitochondria or societal organization.
00:38:33 ►
There is some powerful faith.
00:38:37 ►
Yes, I agree to a point.
00:38:39 ►
I think that, as you said, the Internet began as a military network.
00:38:45 ►
And it depended on, well, first came the Unix operating system.
00:38:50 ►
This was made by the people working for the telephone company.
00:38:54 ►
I think that these different bits of creativity
00:38:57 ►
that finally we see assembled into the World Wide Web,
00:39:01 ►
something of tremendous importance,
00:39:04 ►
that each of these things was done in such a way,
00:39:07 ►
almost unconsciously by the people,
00:39:09 ►
with various elements that are inexplicable at the moment,
00:39:12 ►
that were the essential elements to make the next step possible.
00:39:15 ►
For example, Unix is multitasking.
00:39:18 ►
It automatically has network protocols built in.
00:39:21 ►
All these things were necessary.
00:39:22 ►
And I think that the creative people, for example, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the
00:39:26 ►
World Wide Web idea, all of these people were inspired by angels.
00:39:30 ►
That is to say that a divine mandate is somehow manifest consciously or unconsciously through
00:39:39 ►
them so that when they are doing their constructive, creative work with these hardware and software bits, they do that in such a way that eventually they can be plugged in and all this will work.
00:39:51 ►
So it does seem to be actually a divine architecture which is manifesting in this thing, just like
00:39:57 ►
in the orders of nature, in biological evolution.
00:40:02 ►
It’s so much like biological evolution, and it’s so appropriate that we should discuss it here in Hawaii,
00:40:07 ►
which has one of the more recent islands.
00:40:10 ►
And yet still you doubt the apotheosis of 2012.
00:40:15 ►
I’m not going to carry on about the battle of good and evil
00:40:21 ►
and the fallen angels and so on,
00:40:23 ►
but I do think it’s quite possible that something very, very disappointing
00:40:28 ►
will happen to this Internet in the future.
00:40:32 ►
For example, it’s recently under discussion
00:40:34 ►
whether every access should be charged as a long-distance call by the phone company.
00:40:39 ►
That right away would destroy the democracy that makes the real-world Web so exciting.
00:40:45 ►
I think if they made that decision,
00:40:47 ►
a parallel organization would offer an alternative service.
00:40:51 ►
There is alternate already.
00:40:53 ►
Alternate. There you see. It’s unstoppable.
00:40:55 ►
It’s unstoppable.
00:40:56 ►
It’s like DNA. Once it’s there, stand back.
00:41:03 ►
But I can see it leading to
00:41:05 ►
a great proliferation
00:41:07 ►
like speciation in the Amazon
00:41:09 ►
which you compared it with
00:41:10 ►
a vast number of species
00:41:12 ►
I mean already we have an incredible
00:41:15 ►
speciation of interest
00:41:16 ►
just going to any magazine store
00:41:18 ►
there’s tens of thousands of magazines
00:41:20 ►
on incredible specialist topics
00:41:22 ►
rabbit breeding, walking, flying,
00:41:26 ►
and yachting world.
00:41:28 ►
Of course it does, but the thing is that this Internet,
00:41:31 ►
which could lead to vast proliferation of special interest groups
00:41:35 ►
and speciation of subcultures and so on,
00:41:39 ►
it doesn’t have what Daya Deshonda had in his vision of the noosphere,
00:41:45 ►
which is not just thousands and thousands of little groups of special interest communicating worldwide,
00:41:52 ►
but some unifying principle of humanity.
00:41:55 ►
And that I don’t get.
00:41:56 ►
I can easily see how there could be groups discussing experiments with psychic dogs and cats.
00:42:02 ►
That’s why we’ve got to get busy and put some out there.
00:42:02 ►
with psychic dogs and cats. That’s why we’ve got to get busy and put some out there.
00:42:05 ►
Well, because the whole nature of it is based on endless proliferation
00:42:12 ►
or fragmentation or differentiation, which is actually one of the processes in evolution.
00:42:17 ►
It leads to millions of species of beetles in the Amazon.
00:42:21 ►
But what does that add up to?
00:42:24 ►
It’s one of the biggest and most puzzling
00:42:26 ►
problems for all theorists of evolution. What’s the reason for all this diversity? Why do
00:42:32 ►
we need, or why does evolution need this incredible diversity, since we like to think that the
00:42:38 ►
telepathists of cosmic evolution for billions of years as ourselves, heading towards this crucial point in 2012.
00:42:48 ►
And this seems to be, you know, there’s a human focus based in our thinking about evolution.
00:42:54 ►
The show that exhibited this humanistic bias very strongly,
00:42:58 ►
the narrow sphere was to do with some human process.
00:43:01 ►
Well, that rather leaves out all the millions of species of beetles.
00:43:05 ►
human process. Well, that rather leaves out all the millions of species of beetles. Now,
00:43:10 ►
here we have something that’s like a sort of vast speciation within the human world of information transfer made possible by this net. But where is any unifying principle
00:43:17 ►
that could be… And what the whole modern world seems to be based on is, you know, there’s
00:43:23 ►
two principles. One is global capitalism and unification of markets and that kind of thing. And the other is endless
00:43:30 ►
fragmentation of special interest groups and nationalist groups and that kind of thing.
00:43:35 ►
And it’s rather hard for me to see where the unifying pole would be in this, other than
00:43:41 ►
the technology that makes it possible, will be owned by rupes
00:43:47 ►
it dissolves national boundaries it dissolves class controls religious controls
00:43:54 ►
it creates a super organism it may not be that that’s not its purpose at all.
00:44:08 ►
It may be that it has an emergent
00:44:15 ►
telos of its own,
00:44:17 ►
and that asking what it’s for would be like a meatus
00:44:21 ►
asking what is evolution for.
00:44:27 ►
I think it will supersede this. I don’t know
00:44:34 ►
how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete.
00:44:38 ►
It may shed the monkey meat somewhere along the way. Here we diverge. I don’t think that at all. I think that the goal, in my own little view here,
00:44:46 ►
of what’s coming of all this,
00:44:48 ►
and this is why I said it’s possibly a huge flop,
00:44:52 ►
it’d be a huge disappointment
00:44:54 ►
if Rupert’s fantasy turned out to be the actual future
00:44:58 ►
of the computer revolution.
00:45:01 ►
What I see is the future is that somehow
00:45:06 ►
the exalted self-image
00:45:09 ►
of humanity will be corrected,
00:45:12 ►
that we will end up after a
00:45:15 ►
spiritual transformation in
00:45:17 ►
a better relationship with the biosphere
00:45:20 ►
so that we can have a future.
00:45:23 ►
And how to achieve that, it depends on somehow fantastic acceleration in the process of education
00:45:32 ►
so that people get information.
00:45:34 ►
I’m struggling to put on the World Wide Web as fast as possible ecological models that
00:45:40 ►
people can actually play in ecological games like SimCity,
00:45:51 ►
in which you see what happens if you cut down the Amazon jungle completely and so on,
00:45:56 ►
that this information becomes widely accessible in a form that doesn’t even require literacy.
00:46:03 ►
And the World Wide Web itself, I think, will become extinct in a very short time. This is a transitional phase in which a divine process is set in motion,
00:46:09 ►
giving us the necessary ingredients now missing in our system,
00:46:15 ►
which allow us to evolve to a species which can actually coexist
00:46:20 ►
sensitively with the environment.
00:46:24 ►
We’re not going to be
00:46:25 ►
downloaded into this virtual reality, I don’t think so. We’re going to end up
00:46:31 ►
without electricity and having a stable population. The population
00:46:38 ►
explosion could end, let’s say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream. Well… I don’t quite see how…
00:46:45 ►
By making people aware of the population explosion.
00:46:50 ►
And giving them information.
00:46:51 ►
Many people don’t know, don’t know anything.
00:46:54 ►
In many cultures, you can’t even ask,
00:46:56 ►
because to ask would be to draw attention to yourself
00:47:00 ►
and get great programming laid upon them.
00:47:07 ►
Yes, here it’s arriving in a brown wrapper.
00:47:15 ►
I can’t quite see how in the most impoverished villages of East Africa access to the World Wide Web is going to leap over primary education,
00:47:21 ►
literacy, and all these things which they don’t have.
00:47:24 ►
And you’ve got to be literate, you’ve got to speak English,
00:47:26 ►
you’ve got to have the access to this technology,
00:47:29 ►
you’ve got to be trained.
00:47:30 ►
I mean, I think this is always going to be…
00:47:32 ►
Well, but that’s all today.
00:47:33 ►
I mean, you should think of this, it’s on a parallel track
00:47:37 ►
with many other greatly innovative processes.
00:47:42 ►
For instance, nanotechnology.
00:47:45 ►
I mean, today, to access the web, you need a desk full of equipment.
00:47:50 ►
Tomorrow, something will be glued to your thumbnail.
00:47:55 ►
And I think we’re retreating from three-dimensional space, and that nanotechnological robots,
00:48:03 ►
such as we discussed the other night,
00:48:05 ►
are going to give us an incredible insight into how nature works.
00:48:11 ►
Nature is taking it all back,
00:48:13 ►
and all that will survive of the human world
00:48:17 ►
are those portions that are able to mirror nature sufficiently to survive the winnowing.
00:48:23 ►
And, you know, gasoline gasoline engines plutonium technologies
00:48:30 ►
these things will not survive the winnowing but nature is a world wide web that’s that was the
00:48:38 ►
first world wide web and in a sense what this is is a kind of integration i think you can think anything you
00:48:46 ►
want if you’re a hummingbird an ant a beetle but we build in 3d and this has set off an avalanche
00:48:58 ►
of problems for ourselves for the environment if we retract from three-dimensional space and move into this informational space,
00:49:08 ►
virtual space, cyber space, the planet heaves an enormous sigh of relief.
00:49:14 ►
The pressure is released.
00:49:15 ►
And we avoid distinction, extinction, this thing we find so precious. Our humanness can be preserved along with nature,
00:49:27 ►
but only at the expense of abandoning
00:49:30 ►
the mechanistic three-dimensional technologies
00:49:33 ►
that have carried us this far.
00:49:36 ►
And the World Wide Web begins to look like a mind.
00:49:39 ►
It begins to look like a virtual reality.
00:49:45 ►
I think it’s probably equivalent to animals leaving the sea.
00:49:50 ►
We are leaving 3D.
00:49:53 ►
Occasionally we leap into cyberspace,
00:49:56 ►
gulp the rich oxygen there of information for a few minutes,
00:50:00 ►
then turn off the computer and fall back.
00:50:03 ►
This may be the demonic journey of the future.
00:50:06 ►
So we have to collapse into the 2D of a TV screen in order to reach out.
00:50:12 ►
No, no, the 2D of the TV screen is simply a door, a gate, a window.
00:50:17 ►
It’s a window pane.
00:50:17 ►
You go through the window, and then you’re in this fantastic multidimensional space,
00:50:22 ►
which has all the dimensions of a DMT
00:50:25 ►
trip or something.
00:50:26 ►
It’s like astonishingly rich, and its feeling of reality is enormous.
00:50:32 ►
You can travel around, and although things are changing fast, you know where you are,
00:50:36 ►
you recognize certain mainstays, skeletal structures that don’t change.
00:50:40 ►
You learn your way around, traveling on this skeleton.
00:50:43 ►
And we will have a different relationship to memory.
00:50:46 ►
I mean, by the time you’re 25 years old,
00:50:48 ►
if you’ve been working on your virtual environment,
00:50:52 ►
which is a sense, your self, your unique self,
00:50:56 ►
experientially the thing will be the size of Manhattan.
00:51:01 ►
Yes.
00:51:01 ►
You know?
00:51:02 ►
Your hobbies, your trips, my private
00:51:05 ►
Manhattan, private fantasy.
00:51:07 ►
It will be vast, and every
00:51:09 ►
human being on Earth will have
00:51:11 ►
one of these, and it won’t require the
00:51:13 ►
cutting of a single tree, the extracting
00:51:16 ►
of a single drop of petroleum.
00:51:18 ►
Well, the trouble is
00:51:20 ►
I think there’s something lacking with this
00:51:21 ►
vision, and I think that’s probably the reason
00:51:23 ►
why 98% of the people on it are male nerds.
00:51:29 ►
Because there’s two points.
00:51:31 ►
Firstly, it would be great if what you say is true
00:51:35 ►
and it could mean that people could live in local communities.
00:51:38 ►
It seems to me the way forward is local economies.
00:51:42 ►
And most green theoreticians think that the only way forward
00:51:45 ►
is to localize economies, minimize travel,
00:51:49 ►
minimize movement, and so on,
00:51:52 ►
and to minimize our impact on the environment,
00:51:54 ►
have more food produced locally, and so forth.
00:51:57 ►
Local economies.
00:51:58 ►
That could be that this virtual space you’re talking about
00:52:01 ►
and this traveling around the world and these computers
00:52:03 ►
would remove people’s need to travel around so much and to have global access without going there.
00:52:11 ►
But the fact of the matter is that I find myself that I actually like coming in person
00:52:18 ►
to Hawaii and like being in person talking to you two, even though this involves expending
00:52:24 ►
vast amounts of aviation fuel.
00:52:26 ►
But this is your vacation.
00:52:27 ►
You don’t go out flying to New York to hassle our beloved agent.
00:52:34 ►
No, but the thing is that I think that this need
00:52:38 ►
for not just multidimensional virtual experience
00:52:42 ►
but actual experience of bodily being there, is very,
00:52:45 ►
very deep in human beings, and I can’t quite see how this is going to replace it.
00:52:50 ►
Not replace it, it may just decrease it slightly.
00:52:53 ►
Do you think so? I mean, is there any evidence that people on the World Wide Web actually
00:52:58 ►
spend more, spend less on travel, spend less on, you life of a person? No, no, no. This is not a matter of evidence, you see, because the thing is in the process
00:53:10 ►
of creation, but what it will become is what we dream it to be. We’re going to participate
00:53:15 ►
in its creation, if it has any potential whatsoever for good, which I think is potential. Not
00:53:21 ►
only is potential enormous, but we have nothing else which compares.
00:53:26 ►
In fact, one thing it does is illuminate how feeble are all other proposed solutions,
00:53:32 ►
because they are just theories involving nobody on the planet.
00:53:38 ►
So you have a theory, an interesting one, for limiting the population explosion.
00:53:44 ►
Terence has another
00:53:45 ►
theory. We’ve said these theories, we’ve put them in books that are read by a few people,
00:53:51 ►
and we’ve seen that we are totally impotent, in fact, in participating in the future, in
00:53:56 ►
the creation of the future, in whatever we think or do. Fly on the airplane or not is
00:54:02 ►
actually not going to influence the outcome whatsoever.
00:54:05 ►
But participation in the World Wide Web might,
00:54:08 ►
even if it’s only a long shot, a 1% chance,
00:54:11 ►
it dwarfs enormously any other chance that we’ve got.
00:54:15 ►
I’ll do a proof-of-concept experiment out here.
00:54:19 ►
I’m going to create a life that makes it unnecessary for me to leave this island,
00:54:24 ►
indeed practically unnecessary for me to leave this island, indeed practically
00:54:25 ►
unnecessary for me to leave this hill, and yet I am determined to, at the same time,
00:54:32 ►
continue to expand my influence, be read by more people, discussed by more people, and
00:54:39 ►
influence more people, because I will cease to speak to groups of 45 people in people’s living rooms,
00:54:47 ►
and I will begin to speak to hundreds of thousands of generally more intelligent people
00:54:53 ►
who are accessing me and my ideas through the net.
00:54:59 ►
Yes, so…
00:55:03 ►
Come back free of charge. Yes, I see you of charge, yes.
00:55:05 ►
I see you next year reduced to digging up barely edible roots in this forest.
00:55:16 ►
Gnawing at the bark of the tree.
00:55:21 ►
Well, it is possible to sell things on the web,
00:55:24 ►
and it is possible to ask for on the web, and it is possible to ask for donations
00:55:27 ►
on the web and so on.
00:55:28 ►
And these are the two principal ways we have bought groceries in the past so that we don’t
00:55:33 ►
have to dig tubers.
00:55:35 ►
And our request, I mean, writing grant proposals is a terrible bore.
00:55:41 ►
I’ve given it up completely.
00:55:43 ►
At the same time, I’d really
00:55:45 ►
like to receive a grant. I’m very low to waste a minute asking for one. So I think that the
00:55:54 ►
enhancement of my visibility on the World Wide Web, and if there is any merit whatsoever
00:55:59 ►
in what’s doing, and as is realized by people, I mean philanthropists, will be cruising the
00:56:06 ►
world wide web. Looking for
00:56:08 ►
opportunities to give them away. Absolutely.
00:56:10 ►
Looking for opportunities to get the most
00:56:12 ►
bang for the buck.
00:56:14 ►
Well I think it’s very important to
00:56:16 ►
plan the parameters but I think
00:56:18 ►
one should expect
00:56:20 ►
that it will exceed
00:56:22 ►
all plans
00:56:23 ►
and blueprints. I think it has… it’s part of the
00:56:27 ►
culture. It is culture and in that sense it has a life and a morphology of its own.
00:56:34 ►
No technology in human history has ever had the effects that its inventors
00:56:40 ►
supposed it would have and no technology in the history has ever affected
00:56:46 ►
so many people so quickly as this one does. Even if you don’t own a computer, you don’t realize
00:56:54 ►
the world is working better because your accountant is on the web, your broker is on the
00:57:01 ►
web, your doctor is on the web. You may not be, but your life is substantially improved by the existence of…
00:57:09 ►
Your agent is on the web auctioning your works.
00:57:14 ►
Yes, well all is going to be true, but for the thing to… and what human beings need is not just information. They need relationship, community, etc.
00:57:25 ►
All that will continue as usual.
00:57:28 ►
It won’t be diminished a bit by the addition of a new mode.
00:57:32 ►
Better to be on the web six hours a day than watching the damn television,
00:57:36 ►
which is what people do and call community these days.
00:57:41 ►
Well, I agree. Compare the television. This can’t be worse.
00:57:44 ►
I think half an hour a day on the web or half an hour three times a week on the web would very, very significantly enhance a lot of lives.
00:57:54 ►
Hmm.
00:57:56 ►
Like physical exercise.
00:57:59 ►
So, in terms of actual community, relationship, child rearing and stuff, somehow that’s all left in its present state.
00:58:07 ►
Absolutely.
00:58:08 ►
Which isn’t very satisfactory.
00:58:10 ►
Absolutely. There’ll be a subtle change, at best, in which people become more aware of other people.
00:58:17 ►
Far away.
00:58:19 ►
Yeah. That it becomes not so far away and we’re shrinking but I mean
00:58:27 ►
it won’t actually affect the problems
00:58:29 ►
to do with people’s marriages
00:58:31 ►
families, neighborhoods
00:58:32 ►
crime on the streets
00:58:34 ►
that kind of thing
00:58:35 ►
all that would be
00:58:38 ►
the same
00:58:39 ►
this is just a terrific increase
00:58:43 ►
in intelligence of the species, that’s all.
00:58:46 ►
But it’s much more restricted than the transformation you talked about in the first place, don’t you see?
00:58:52 ►
Because what really matters in terms of daily living?
00:58:56 ►
Well, if a spiritual transformation took place,
00:58:59 ►
then I think that some of the other problems might be ameliorated significantly, most especially crime.
00:59:07 ►
And anyway, Ralph talked about four levels on the Internet, or on the web.
00:59:13 ►
That’s today. Tomorrow is level five.
00:59:17 ►
At Seagraph, it was very clear to me that 3D imaging is what’s happening,
00:59:24 ►
and that the Internet is real estate.
00:59:27 ►
You walk into it,
00:59:29 ►
various forms of visual and head-mounted display problems
00:59:33 ►
are all being solved,
00:59:35 ►
and very soon, literally,
00:59:38 ►
the computer screen will be a doorway.
00:59:41 ►
Yes, the World Wide Web is headed for virtual reality.
00:59:43 ►
There’s no doubt about that.
00:59:45 ►
It’s already in construction.
00:59:47 ►
That. And then, you know, the difference between Newtonian space and cultural space would be seamless.
01:00:01 ►
Yes.
01:00:01 ►
Yes.
01:00:10 ►
I look forward to a day when people will live in an ecologically balanced Earth,
01:00:16 ►
a few hundred million healthy, well-fed, intelligent people who will be essentially at a very aboriginal level of cultural expression.
01:00:24 ►
But if you transpose yourself into the body of one of these
01:00:27 ►
people you will notice that when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space
01:00:34 ►
and those menus are the gateway to the cultural dimension which is not to be seen or touched
01:00:42 ►
anywhere it’s in the mind not not my mind, the collective mind.
01:00:47 ►
It’s what it is, is it’s the creation of a telepathic collectivity.
01:00:52 ►
I think it will be mainly dominated, at least for children,
01:00:55 ►
by things like Sonic Hedgehog and the banal fantasies of video game makers.
01:01:00 ►
Don’t you think that it will simply channel people into…
01:01:06 ►
Well, it’s not driven from the top down, the way all these other mediums are.
01:01:11 ►
You know, electrical power distributed from a station,
01:01:14 ►
radio sent from a central transmitter, TV, same deal.
01:01:19 ►
This is nowhere.
01:01:21 ►
The games for children will be made up by children.
01:01:24 ►
They won’t be sold by anybody
01:01:25 ►
because creativity becomes so easy.
01:01:28 ►
There’s already a third-grade classroom
01:01:30 ►
on the World Wide Web
01:01:31 ►
where the children are publishing their drawings.
01:01:36 ►
And children take to this stuff.
01:01:38 ►
They have no bias.
01:01:39 ►
They have no inertia toward print culture.
01:01:43 ►
They just take to the stuff.
01:01:46 ►
The wiring to jack into this thing
01:01:48 ►
has somehow been built in from the beginning.
01:01:52 ►
They’re so facile.
01:01:55 ►
They’re so good at it.
01:01:56 ►
Reading is actually a very peculiar,
01:02:01 ►
abstract activity
01:02:04 ►
that requires great training
01:02:05 ►
while being on the web
01:02:08 ►
any primate can do it
01:02:10 ►
once they’re shown the ropes
01:02:12 ►
well there
01:02:13 ►
so there you have it
01:02:15 ►
let’s turn it off
01:02:16 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon
01:02:22 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:29 ►
Back in 1994, I wouldn’t have agreed with Terence when he said that any primate can use the Internet.
01:02:37 ►
But today I’m in complete agreement.
01:02:40 ►
Shortly after turning three years old, one of my grandchildren began using the mouse on her parents’ computer.
01:02:47 ►
She’s four now and knows the difference between a PC mouse and a Mac mouse.
01:02:51 ►
Not only that, she’s been able to find her way around some very complex children’s sites quite easily.
01:02:58 ►
And I’ve noticed that many of her little friends are equally skilled in accessing the Internet at four years old.
01:03:03 ►
friends are equally skilled in accessing the Internet at four years old.
01:03:06 ►
It’s as Ralph, I think it was, said,
01:03:10 ►
we seem to actually have been pre-wired for this experience.
01:03:14 ►
Now, one thing I feel I should point out, though,
01:03:19 ►
is that Terrence was wrong when he said that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
01:03:24 ►
That’s an old urban myth that has been shut down numerous times.
01:03:29 ►
And if you want to know more about the early days of the Internet from its very beginning at BBN,
01:03:36 ►
then a good place to start is with the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, The Origins of the Internet,
01:03:39 ►
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
01:03:42 ►
It’s a really good read if you’re into geek stories,
01:03:50 ►
and I actually worked with and know a lot of the people mentioned in that book, so I can verify a lot of those stories.
01:03:56 ►
And one of those stories has to do with the urban myth that Terrence so blithely passed along.
01:04:04 ►
I’m also sure that you noticed how all three of them had the impression that the web was going to basically remain a guy thing.
01:04:08 ►
But from what I know, it didn’t work out that way.
01:04:12 ►
And today there are about the same number of women on the net as men.
01:04:15 ►
I could be wrong about that, but that’s what my impression is.
01:04:21 ►
And, of course, Terrence’s idea that it wouldn’t destroy the environment has kind of gone by the wayside.
01:04:23 ►
Now that we understand how much of the world’s electrical power
01:04:26 ►
is dedicated to keeping the Internet humming along day and night.
01:04:30 ►
But back in 94, I doubt if anyone was even close in their forecasts
01:04:35 ►
for where the net was going.
01:04:37 ►
Recently, John P. posted the following comment on OneMansBlog.com
01:04:42 ►
that points out how fast this technology has evolved in the past 15
01:04:46 ►
years. He said, at that time, people were using 14.4 baud modems to dial into an internet service
01:04:55 ►
provider and read pages on the web, and the number of sites was only in the hundreds or possibly
01:05:01 ►
thousands. Compare that to today. There are 160 million sites,
01:05:06 ►
and I visit them on my 10,000 baud modem cable connection, a 700 times increase. My house
01:05:14 ►
has more bandwidth than the backbone in 1994. I was also happy to hear that Ralph was talking
01:05:22 ►
about Teilhard de Chardin in relation to the Internet, and back
01:05:26 ►
in 1994 on top of it.
01:05:28 ►
I didn’t get it quite so
01:05:30 ►
early on. In fact, I didn’t
01:05:32 ►
publish my book, The Spirit of the Internet
01:05:34 ►
Speculations on the Evolution of Global
01:05:36 ►
Consciousness, until 2000.
01:05:38 ►
And in it, my main
01:05:40 ►
premise was the correlation between the
01:05:42 ►
way in which the Internet was evolving and
01:05:44 ►
how this was reflected in Teilhard’s work.
01:05:46 ►
So it was thrilling for me to hear this confirmation of my ideas coming from Ralph
01:05:51 ►
and coming so long before I picked it up myself.
01:05:54 ►
Which again leads me to think that I have yet to have my first original thought.
01:06:00 ►
I’m just really good at picking up on other people’s thoughts that are out in the noosphere,
01:06:04 ►
as Teilhard would have us believe.
01:06:07 ►
Now, if you would like to hear how Terrence’s and Ralph’s thoughts about the net evolved over the next five years after this conversation we just heard,
01:06:14 ►
you can hear their two-hour talk titled The World Wide Web and the Millennium, which I podcast three years ago as podcast numbers 19 and 20.
01:06:24 ►
And, of course, this was recorded in 1999, five years after the talk we just heard.
01:06:29 ►
And you can download both of those for free, of course, through iTunes or some other aggregator
01:06:34 ►
or directly from our website, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:06:39 ►
Now, I plan to read a couple of emails today.
01:06:44 ►
But a few days ago, I learned that my friend Fraser Clark died last week,
01:06:49 ►
and so I’m not feeling very talkative right now.
01:06:53 ►
When I first learned of his death, via Facebook actually, I thought it was a prank,
01:06:58 ►
and I still can’t believe it, but that’s the sad truth, I’m afraid.
01:07:03 ►
And Fraser’s death hit me on several levels, including the sobering thought that I was older than him.
01:07:11 ►
Now, by the time you hear this podcast, Fraser’s online wake and funeral will most likely be over.
01:07:17 ►
But you’ll be hearing more about him from me in the months ahead.
01:07:20 ►
I guess the main headline right now that I would write for Fraser is to say that he was Tim Leary, Terrence McKenna, and a dozen other of his peers all rolled into one.
01:07:31 ►
Fraser Clark, in my humble opinion, was a man of mythical proportions, and I’ll miss him greatly.
01:07:46 ►
So right now, I’m going to take a little break and go back and re-listen to my podcast, Number 45,
01:07:51 ►
which featured Fraser giving a lecture at Stanford University here in California.
01:07:56 ►
It’s titled, Rave Culture and the End of the World as We Know It.
01:08:02 ►
And it still remains one of my all-time favorite podcasts, even over most of Terrence’s talks. I’ll have more to say about Fraser
01:08:06 ►
Clark in future podcasts, where I’ll collect some more of his material for you to listen
01:08:11 ►
to. But right now, I’ve still got to absorb the fact that he’s moved on to his next big
01:08:17 ►
adventure. For many of us, Fraser was either a mentor, role model, teacher, wizard, sorcerer, or all of the above.
01:08:26 ►
There simply was no other like him, and we will all miss him dearly.
01:08:31 ►
I’m going to close now with a piece of music I played once before.
01:08:36 ►
It’s called Miss About You, and was written and performed by my friend Queer Ninja.
01:08:41 ►
Some of you know him from the Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast.
01:08:46 ►
And if I’m not mistaken,
01:08:47 ►
the vocals are by his friend Sharon.
01:08:50 ►
When I asked Ninja for permission to use it again,
01:08:53 ►
he said, of course.
01:08:54 ►
And he added,
01:08:56 ►
Fraser Clark was a fascinating person
01:08:58 ►
who tried his hardest to get the light and love to us all.
01:09:03 ►
And I might add, he succeeded magnificently.
01:09:06 ►
Without a doubt, there are literally millions of members of the psychedelic community
01:09:11 ►
who have benefited either directly or indirectly from the inspired genius of Fraser Clark.
01:09:17 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:09:23 ►
Sail on, dear Fraser. We’ll catch up with you when we can
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into the light of bare naked truth Sunlight in your hair
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The diamond smile you wave
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The secrets that you whisper to me
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that you whisper to me Oh, the love that’s in your eyes
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The peace that you enshrine
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The hope you weave in every world. The dreams you let me see
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The things you let me see.
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The things you’ll never need. The open doors you held for me.
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Oh, the empty vats that broke, the bitterness that choked, the rain that fell on the day you died. guitar solo This is Things I Miss About You
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Things I Miss About You
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This is Things I Miss About You
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Things I Miss About You you things that
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is about
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you