Program Notes
Guest speakers: Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer
Today we are taking a slightly different tack and heading into the cyber world of Artificial Life, which may sound like a contradiction or may sound like life in the hectic Western world these days. While this field may be controversial to old-line scientists, of late it has gained more traction and is proving to be the source of much new understanding about the way life has come to be. Our hosts for this conversation are Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer, two leaders in the field of AL and who are the cornerstones of Biota.org, the Web’s leading site for AL information. Surprisingly, their discussion quickly turns from things only true geeks can love to speculations about the work of Terence McKenna, psychedelics, and the possibility that all of us may be in the process of becoming machine elves.
Biota.org
Noble Ape.com
Damer.com
Evogrid.org
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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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Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And to get things started today, I first would like to thank some people who have either made a donation
00:00:30 ►
directly to the salon, or who paid for a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel,
00:00:36 ►
The Genesis Generation. All of which funds, by the way, are going to pay some of the expenses associated with these podcasts. And those fine souls are Mark C., Eric F., Chelsea S., Colin F.,
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and Colin, yes, I think I got your coded message in that clever number that you chose.
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Also, I’d like to thank David H., Cord M., Michael H., Grant O., Antique, I think that’s A-N-T-E-Q, I hope I’m saying that right,
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and also a nice donation from Jeremy S., so I can’t thank all of you enough for your support
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and for being an integral part of these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon, so thank you all ever so much.
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these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon, so thank you all ever so much.
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And two more people that I would like to thank today are Tom Barbalet and Bruce Dahmer,
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who happen to be the two people that we are about to hear from right now.
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As you already know from my mention in previous podcasts,
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Tom, among many other things, is the host of the biota.org podcast.
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That’s B-I-O-T-A dot org. And if you aren’t familiar with biota.org, well, it was created in 1996 to promote and assist in the engineering of
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artificial life. Now, to some of our fellow salonners, the phrase artificial life may
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signify life in a cubicle or on an assembly line or driving a delivery truck.
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And I agree that the lives of most of us are living and our neighbors are living are
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probably very artificial in many ways. But the artificial life that the folks over at
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Biota are talking about is something much more fundamental than that. In fact, in a companion
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interview to the one we’re about to hear, Bruce points than that. In fact, in a companion interview to the
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one we’re about to hear, Bruce points out that Tom actually coined the perfect acronym for the
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field of their investigation, and that is COOL, Computational Origins of Life. In other words,
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can something be created in a computer simulation that approaches something that biologists would be hard-pressed to not call life.
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But then again, I may have this all wrong, because the truth is that much of their work is, well,
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way beyond my level of understanding. The reason I’m telling you this is because during the first
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few minutes of the conversation we’re about to hear, there are a couple of things that they’re
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talking about that, well, they’re so geeky you may not think you’ll be able to follow the rest of the conversation.
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But my advice is to not give up listening because I think you’re going to really enjoy
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their discussion about how Terence McKenna and psychedelics and machine elves also fit
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into the thinking about this field of exploration.
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And interestingly, they even have differing opinions about some of Terrence’s ideas that
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may get you to thinking along some lines that you maybe passed by earlier.
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In a way, what we’re about to hear is a conversation that could have taken place between two characters
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in a science fiction story.
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Only these two characters are actually creating this edgy cyber world in their daily work.
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These two characters are actually creating this edgy cyber world in their daily work.
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So now let’s join Tom Barbalay and Bruce Dahmer as they kick around a few ideas about Terrence McKenna, psychedelics, alternate worlds, and artificial life.
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I’m a new voice to the salon, and I’ve been a frequent listener.
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My name is Tom Barbalay, and I have the pleasure of talking with Bruce Dahmer Who is no stranger to the salon at all? in fact some of my favorite photos of Bruce are of
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fans coming to him at Burning Man with his Avatar book and also the the salon has given me one of the
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I guess most intimate accounts of Bruce and it’s been a
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Privilege listening to a number of your talks that have appeared in the salon.
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Bruce and I have been recording conversations for about five years now.
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I think I probably have the title of the most recorded conversations of Bruce Damon
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in roughly, I guess, 100 hours or so in the Bioda podcast.
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We typically talk about strictly artificial life-related stuff.
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Also, the Bioda podcast has been mentioned by Lorenzo on a couple of occasions.
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life related stuff. Also, the Bioda podcast has been mentioned by Lorenzo on a couple of occasions.
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So it’s a pleasure to be on the salon today and have the chance to wrap with Bruce Daymer,
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associated with the kind of strange and eclectic legacy of Terence McKenna in the artificial life community. And it’s probably a good place, Bruce, to introduce what the artificial life community
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has been historically and where we both fit in the puzzle.
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Now, do you think that there’s something that you could start with?
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Well, I could probably give a bit of a summary.
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And one of the interesting things we should probably bring in, too, is recently I came into a collection of letters written to and from Terence McKenna around his Time Wave Zero project
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and the original Time Wave Zero software and manuals, which I’ve gotten running here
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because I have old machines that run old software in the computer museum.
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And somehow that all weaves into artificial life and machine novelty too, but that’s a fun new thing that’s come into the story
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as we’re unraveling McKenna.
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The artificial life community,
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we have slightly different views with regards to this,
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so I might start my kind of prehistory rap associated with the,
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I think the idea of artificial life predates the traditional discussion
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of computation and these kind of things.
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I mean, I read back into Plato’s work, artificial life predates the traditional discussion of computation and these kind of things.
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I mean, I read back into Plato’s work a number of the concepts of artificial life associated with what-if scenarios. And it’s interesting in terms of the early foundations of the definition of artificial life through Chris Langton,
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as life as it could be, because I think humans have been thinking about life as it could be well prior
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to computation.
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But maybe you can pick up the story from there.
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Well, you know, what’s interesting was at the beginning of research on my PhD on
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the EVOGRID or Evolution Grid project, I went to see Freeman Dyson at the Institute for
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Advanced Study in Princeton, which at the same time as I was
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meeting with Freeman, I trundled across the lawn and met with the archivists for the Institute,
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because the Institute was the home of the first one, one could argue, the first fully complete
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modern computer designed by John von Neumann under the protection of Robert Oppenheimer,
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who was then the director of the institute and under attack by the U.S. government.
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But von Neumann and his team made this beautiful machine called the Electronic Computer Project,
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which had internal registers that did not have patch cords on the outside.
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They convinced IBM to cut apart a punch card machine so they could get programs into this thing.
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And it was the machine everybody copied.
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And it became known as the von Neumann architecture,
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which we’re still with today, folks.
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But one of the interesting things is the third or so
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full-scale program written for this machine was an artificial life program
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by a fellow named Baruch Ellie who appeared at the Institute in the early
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in 1953 and by the summer of 53 he had what he thought of as numerical
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symbiote organisms running around in this
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five kilobit memory made up of vacuum tubes and and cathode ray tube storage
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he had these critters he would call them running around then think it was like a
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lot like Conway’s Game of Life from the 1960s or Chris Langton’s Cellular Automata from the 80s. This thing was running
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on this first computer in this summer of
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- So that’s fascinating because this
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fascination with creating whole ecosystems of life like
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entities and studying them and looking for signs of authentic evolution
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and genomes and looking for signs of, you know, authentic evolution and genomes and,
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you know, body plans and things like that has been a fascination of computer people ever since. The von Neumann point I just wanted to raise. Bruce and I have a series of divergent
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thoughts that will come up in our data as we both narrate this history. Can you give a definition of
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what a von Neumann machine is, Bruce, and we can move from there. Well, von Neumann, in a sense,
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some of von Neumann’s writings on this talk about this as the
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contingency architecture, and what they could get working was what they
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had in the late 40s, basically, which was
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they would load instructions, low-level machine language
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instructions would be all lined up in memory,
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and they may have come off of punch cards or a drum or something,
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and then they get put into registers, which are fast memory mechanisms,
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and then the machine goes at the instruction and goes and fetches the data from a short term
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or a big cache somewhere, does its little operations,
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and then puts everything neatly back in place and then goes to the next instruction.
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And it may be branching across this list of instructions or just going through them,
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but that’s the basic idea of the von Neumann-type machine,
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serial processing of these instructions as fast as you can do it.
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And that’s basically what we do today.
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There’s an element of certainty in the von Neumann machine,
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and that is critical in the localized idea of what a von Neumann machine is.
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But I think what fascinates me with modern computation,
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particularly if you look at a series of these things running in parallel,
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potentially accessing the same information, potentially networked, the boundaries associated
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with predictability disintegrate relatively rapidly. Even if you have, for example, two of
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these processes in a dual core or now, even dual core is now dated a quad core machine,
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and they’re accessing the same memory there are
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certain race conditions which means that basically they are all trying to access read or write or
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these kind of things of the memory space which eliminates some of the certainty now the interesting
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thing with regards to this idea of certainty is you then well ideally in most cases will program
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in the certainty and make sure that you don’t get into any of these race conditions.
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But there are some operations, particularly associated with network processing,
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where you do actually want to play into some of these elements of the race condition.
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So it’s interesting that you say that we are still dealing with von Neumann computing
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even to this day, because I would certainly argue against that.
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This is a non-trivial claim. It’s been very curious even raising this in the circles associated with the
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artificial life community because there is a kind of traditional community that still thinks of
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modern day computing as being very von Neumann but I certainly don’t consider modern day computing
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through the issues that I’ve described associated with parallel computing networks and these kind of things being von Neumann.
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Are you sympathetic to that, Bruce? Well, I think when we did
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the programming for the EvoGrid with little thousand atom volumes,
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the horrifying news is that
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in nature, nature’s running all thousand of those atoms
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at the same time,
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and they’re slamming against each other, and this is known as a dissipative system,
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in that stuff is trying to move around, and if it’s a hot area,
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the atoms are generally moving to a cooler area,
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or if there’s a denser area, then they’re moving.
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And reactions in the cell largely are happening because a large amount of matter is
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just slamming into the other matter in the cell and binding sites are found by this stochastic
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almost random walk process and that that’s how nature works whereas when we try to simulate
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nature the reason it takes so long is that we have to line up all those atom
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to atom interactions and even if we have scalar pipelines and even if we have
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everything like that we have to queue them up and simulate them to this
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bottleneck that we have you know we we don’t have a computer per atom and we
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don’t have a big computer that can control the whole volume.
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So we’re doing our best but we’re stuck in these bottlenecks.
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Otherwise it wouldn’t take hours or days or weeks to simulate these very, very small volumes
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like a folding of a protein may take weeks.
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Whereas in nature it’s happening in a few nanoseconds or less than a microsecond.
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So that’s all the bottleneck speaking there.
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And I guess this is again where you and I disagree
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because my view is that we just don’t have the correct model yet,
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that the computation is there and certainly the atomic computation is there
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associated with actually dividing this information into vastly parallelised computation.
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It’s just a matter of finding the correct model
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to take this information and optimise it for processing.
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But returning to the idea of what artificial life is
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in the context perhaps of Terence McKenna,
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there’ll be emergencies of McKenna through this discussion.
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In terms of the broad and written-down history of artificial life,
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it started with a fellow called Chris Langton, who basically gathered together a group of thinkers, similar thinkers, and formed a conference series, which is traditionally the way these things happen in academia.
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What happened through this conference series is that a series of books were written in parallel to this, some highly scientific, some philosophical, and also some popular.
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to this, some highly scientific, some philosophical, and also some popular.
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And what you saw through this was almost a grass fire of interest in the artificial life idea, probably in the late 80s and early 90s.
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And certainly, this is your and my story, and really the story of a number of folks
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in the biota community getting their hands on one of these, or many of these, artificial
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life-related texts and starting to think about life as it could be.
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And through this, there were probably in the order of maybe 100 or 200 folk that actually
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started creating relatively long-term simulations.
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And here we’re talking almost exclusively about computational simulation,
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although some of them were robotic simulations as well. So for example, Stephen Levy’s book Artificial Life perfectly captures that. The idea is that I guess you have, as I say, these simulators
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that created their own particular stakes in computational simulation. And Bruce’s original
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work in this with regards to the simulation of plants.
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Can you talk a little bit about that, Bruce?
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Yeah, the first project of biota.org was to, quote-unquote,
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grow plants from what are called Lindenmeyer systems
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and do it in the web through Java and VRML.
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This was way back folks. This was started in
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96 and we did a
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walk-up exhibit at the electric garden at SIGGRAPH in 97.
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It was perfectly timed and titled and people would extrude these plants and then put them on a virtual island. And that was the idea of using the procedural power of kind of encapsulated
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quote-unquote, genomic information to make a beautiful structure that everybody would recognize.
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And somewhere in the genes of real plants is something like a rewriting rule, something like an L system, because you can create simple L systems that will grow out the three-dimensional structure of a mustard plant,
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for example, with all the flowers in the right place and the right leaf shapes and everything.
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So somewhere in nature, there is code that does this.
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And that was our first project.
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And I guess in parallel to the formation of Biota,
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well, taking a step back, probably in the early 90s, I wrote antiviral software.
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And at the time, I was also writing a book called Field of Chaos, which I’ve recently published both in physical and electronic copies.
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And through that antiviral simulation, I developed a lot of extraneous code as well associated with creating landscapes and ideas, I guess, of early cognition and these kind
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of things.
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And gathering these ideas together, I created the Noble Ape simulation about actually the
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same time, Bruce, that you were doing the first biota project with L-system plants.
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And Noble Ape has continued on to this day.
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It’s something where various thinkers have come through and added their own little pepperings to it.
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But the fundamental idea behind Noble Ape was to create a rich organic environment through simulation,
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a rich biological simulation with plants, animals, birds, trees, insects, a wide variety of different things,
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and obviously the underlying landscape.
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And then also have these sentient ape-like creatures, the noble apes that
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wandered over the environment. And early on it was very primitive, it was black and white graphics,
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very simple visualisation. But from that I was able to gather together a wide variety of folk
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that had interests in the particular aspects of noble ape. And really I guess that’s been the
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legacy of noble ape going on, that it’s existed both in software philosophically and also with regards to these various
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intellectuals and others that have wandered through the simulation. In terms
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of BIOTA, how would you describe BIOTA to someone who might listen to the salon?
00:18:18 ►
Well BIOTA is actually a community center, an organization, and has been a conference, and now it is a podcast, thanks to incredible efforts here of Tom,
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to make a discussion happen around can we simulate nature in computers?
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Can we solve problems of emergence?
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simulate nature and computers can we solve problems of emergence can we create systems that complexity science can really use as an experimental laboratory can we what are the
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philosophical and ethical implications of of true artificial life should it ever emerge and biota
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has been that now since 1996 when it was founded.
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We had four conferences, and we’ve had, gosh, hundreds of podcasts at this point, Tom?
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Something like that.
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An embarrassingly large number, yes.
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Some from the old folks in the field from the time of Chris Langton and the Artificial Life Conference that Tom mentioned,
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and some also encouraging hobbyists, new people who
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are entering the field, basically connecting them quickly with the legacy and the history of the
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medium so they can really advance a lot more quickly and not reinvent the wheel that others
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have done before, and connect them with academic and industry business people who have the same
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fascination across these worlds.
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It is a fascinating idea that the hobbyist, and this is the non-academic fundamentally,
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someone who is just tinkering away at their particular simulation
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can actually have an impact on the academy as well, so to speak.
00:20:00 ►
And I think certainly what I found with developing Noble Ape early on
00:20:04 ►
was that I always felt a, I don’t know, a sense that I wasn’t actually doing anything that could contribute
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to a broader academic discussion and it was only from my experiences with doing academic publishing
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that I realised that having a project that has gone on for more than 15 years now as Noble Ape has,
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actually the reverse is true. The look at and think oh I wish
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you know I wish I could be doing this kind of thing for such a long period of
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time and I think the beauty of the artificial life hobbyist is that they
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are independent of funding sources so their passion and their enthusiasm and
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their drive associated with creating these very rich and interesting systems
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is independent of well their ability to you know have a day job and these kind of things.
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So it has longevity, an intellectual longevity as well as an actual longevity.
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But linking the psychedelic community and the artificial life community,
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based on the 15 years of Noble Ape,
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I was talking with Douglas Rushkoff a few months ago now,
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and he mentioned that he always saw the two communities very
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closely aligned, the artificial life community and the psychedelic community, because it
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related to both the familiarity and acceptance of alternative worlds, and a sense that what
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is presented to us as an immediate world need not be or should not be the way that it is.
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This is very much the life as it could be
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of langton and that gave me an interesting insight because there are you know there are
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ebbs and flows i mean certainly tom ray and yourself bruce and a few others in the community
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who of the artificial life community here also uh attend uh psychedelic conferences and it has
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always struck me that there are skill sets that are
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needed from both communities in order to operate.
00:21:49 ►
This echoes your thinking, I guess.
00:21:52 ►
Yeah, and one of the crossover points, which is very interesting, came when Terence and
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I sat down one evening at his house in Hawaii in February of 1999,
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and Terrence, as many of the listeners of this law know, of course, has this idea,
00:22:12 ►
and he talks about it, the universe is a novelty-conserving engine,
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you know, in Terrence’s voice here.
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So Terrence talks about certainly what is obvious to everybody,
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which is that complexity rolls forward and doesn’t reverse, so you get life. waking hours into a whole set of theories, sort of interlocking theories that ended up with the 2012,
00:22:47 ►
the concrescence of all of this in 2012, that somehow we were accelerating through this novelty time wave
00:22:55 ►
and we were going to reach almost like an infinite speed, almost like the inflationary model of the universe.
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I can comment about that a little but what what was interesting that evening in hawaii is
00:23:07 ►
i spent the better part of an hour with terence trying to describe to him how the internet actually
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worked and why it wasn’t a good environment for what he was talking about why the internet
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was too arid it was too thin and there was no one actually working on the
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problem of creating an AI that would somehow rear its head in cyberspace.
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The environment just wasn’t conducive for, it wasn’t even conducive for a simple artificial
00:23:41 ►
life form, let alone a full-blown AI, and that this was actually all pretty much in
00:23:46 ►
the realm of fantasy. Because Terence opened the discussion with, I don’t suppose you’re one of
00:23:53 ►
those people who believes that the AI will emerge and within 20 minutes will all be taken over.
00:24:02 ►
And I said, no, Terence, I do not. And let me explain why.
00:24:06 ►
And I really believe then and I believe to this day that Terrence
00:24:11 ►
and many other people are extremely naive.
00:24:14 ►
I mean, they see a virtual world with, you know,
00:24:18 ►
a screensaver with fish swimming on their screen,
00:24:22 ►
and they really misinterpret that.
00:24:25 ►
They think that that is something that one day will be alive.
00:24:28 ►
But it’s a chimera.
00:24:31 ►
It’s truly artificial.
00:24:33 ►
It’s truly limited.
00:24:34 ►
It’s like a shadow puppetry.
00:24:37 ►
There’s no depth to any of this.
00:24:40 ►
If you start to study molecular biology and how things actually work in the cell you realize that
00:24:48 ►
our computing systems are pathetic they’re they’re not even are one of the one of the things that
00:24:55 ►
happened to me and recently as i joined the astrobiology center at nasa aims as an associate
00:25:02 ►
and in a conversation down there i had with andrew pohoreal
00:25:06 ►
and andrew really said it well he’s a well-known nasa researcher has a lot of funded projects in
00:25:13 ►
astrobiology and origin of life and he said you know what what the people who are in the computer
00:25:18 ►
science side don’t understand is that the palette that they are working with to do emergent phenomena, self-assembly, whatever,
00:25:28 ►
is so limited in code compared to nature’s palette.
00:25:32 ►
And they think it’s the opposite.
00:25:34 ►
They think that they have many more widgets and tools.
00:25:39 ►
But I posit that nature’s tool set is much broader
00:25:52 ►
But I posit that nature’s tool set is much broader and that there is this divide between those who work in the computer simulation side and those who work in chemistry. It’s a divide that, in fact, we saw at Digital Burgess in 1997, where we climbed up to the Burgess Shale in Canada.
00:26:03 ►
The paleontologists who were there were detectives.
00:26:06 ►
They described themselves as detectives after the greatest crime in history,
00:26:11 ►
the emergence of complex life through the Cambrian explosion.
00:26:16 ►
Whereas the computer science types, they were world makers.
00:26:20 ►
They were little micro-gods or nano-gods,
00:26:23 ►
and they could create their own perfect little worlds and watch the things that are happening.
00:26:27 ►
But no chemist or no biochemist or no paleontologist would really take them seriously because they’re staring into the full Monty, the full complex, seething, biochemical, you know, billion-year history,
00:26:46 ►
and everything, you know, stuff coming out of the computer science labs
00:26:49 ►
looks interesting, but basically it’s not that useful
00:26:54 ►
for people who are dealing with the physical world.
00:26:57 ►
They would pat you on the head and say,
00:27:00 ►
very nice, maybe we could use this to figure out
00:27:04 ►
how trace fossils are made or something
00:27:06 ►
so you know just to conclude this long long rap uh i was really trying to reign terence in and in
00:27:14 ►
fact earlier that same earlier that year in 1998 at a trial log and you can hear this on the salon terence terence became more extreme over
00:27:26 ►
time and you know in the 80s he was talking about ufos and stuff and you know and then he kind of
00:27:32 ►
pulled back on that in the 90s he was talking about ais and as the internet grew and his as
00:27:38 ►
his man he got his mac connected to the internet and he started seeing things he really extrapolated way too far he was reading way too many sort of science fantasy books and at one
00:27:50 ►
point in the 1998 trial log which I think was at UC Santa Cruz he was
00:27:55 ►
talking about the AI rising and taking us all we were all disappear into its
00:28:01 ►
folds you know in 20 minutes and Rt, Ralph stopped him and said,
00:28:09 ►
Terrence, that is a paranoid delusion. There’s no basis for reality in that. And I’m just not
00:28:15 ►
going to stand for it. I’m not going to even comment. And Rupert did the same. And I had lunch
00:28:20 ►
with Ralph earlier this year. And I said, what about this? He said, yeah, well, Rupert and I tried to kind of put a boundary around Terrence
00:28:29 ►
and tried to keep him from going way out there.
00:28:32 ►
We were both opposed to this kind of thing.
00:28:35 ►
It just was nonsensical.
00:28:38 ►
It went too far, you know, in a sense, and this is my words,
00:28:41 ►
you know, it’s like the Ray Kurzweils of the world.
00:28:44 ►
You get a little discredited i mean there you are terence is sitting with one of the world’s great
00:28:49 ►
mathematicians and uh and another man steeped in science and they’re kind of looking at them
00:28:55 ►
rolling their eyes because this guy’s has gone too far and dennis mckenna you know terence’s brother
00:29:09 ►
And Dennis McKenna, Terence’s brother, also, back 15 years ago in interviews, used to comment in an interview with Peter Garman that Terence, his dear beloved brother, often made stuff
00:29:16 ►
up.
00:29:17 ►
If somebody, if he didn’t have an answer to something, he didn’t want to be seen to be
00:29:21 ►
up short-changed, so he would make stuff up, and he would get his facts wrong pretty frequently in the books and in the talks.
00:29:30 ►
And a lot of the ideas that Terrence had came through Dennis, and as Dennis said in that interview in 1993, you know, my brother never checked with me first.
00:29:42 ►
checked the fact, checked with me first.
00:29:49 ►
So, you know, in the service of exploring his psychedelic realms,
00:29:52 ►
Terence was making up quite a lot of stuff.
00:29:55 ►
He would derive and make up a lot of stuff,
00:29:59 ►
and he wouldn’t go back and read whether the stuff had any validity.
00:30:01 ►
But the stories were good.
00:30:09 ►
As Dennis said, my brother never let a fact get in the way of a compelling way to tell something or in other words, a story.
00:30:13 ►
So end of long wrap, but that’s kind of wrapping up a bit of what Terrance…
00:30:20 ►
Terrance was fascinated by artificial life.
00:30:23 ►
And in fact, the EvoGrid project in some ways is a novelty machine.
00:30:29 ►
It’s a novelty conserving engine.
00:30:31 ►
It’s one of the first to be built in technology and software with a serious goal and measurable results.
00:30:39 ►
So the EvoGrid itself, Terence would be, if he was here, he would be fascinated by it.
00:30:46 ►
And in fact, it might bring him a bit more down to earth,
00:30:49 ►
because it shows how hard true novelty is if you’re trying to simulate nature in a computer.
00:30:56 ►
Here, Bruce and I disagree.
00:30:58 ►
And folks listening in, I’ve listened to a lot of Bruce’s interviews,
00:31:02 ►
many that have appeared through the salon,
00:31:04 ►
and the trick with talking to Bruce is actually to leave little drops of crumbs
00:31:08 ►
at various points in his conversation so you can go back and touch on them.
00:31:13 ►
So starting with the origins of Noble Ape and McKenna,
00:31:16 ►
I’ve never met Terence McKenna, but certainly listening to the salon,
00:31:19 ►
there have been a number of points that Terence has made
00:31:21 ►
which have really captivated me in terms of the fact that
00:31:24 ►
at points in developing Noble Ape, I had experiences with what he’s describing maybe
00:31:30 ►
not necessarily connected with facts as Bruce has noted but certainly associated with primate
00:31:36 ►
psychology, primate evolution and the you know evolution of communities and these kind of things
00:31:43 ►
so certainly through listening to the salon and independently having developed nobel
00:31:47 ►
eight for 15 years there have been a number of links with what McKenna has
00:31:51 ►
said and also my own experiences developing nobel eight it’s relatively
00:31:56 ►
difficult to describe the kind of intimacy that one needs to have with a
00:31:59 ►
simulation over such a long period of time and particularly when you start
00:32:04 ►
looking at a simulation in terms
00:32:06 ►
of novelty and emergence. Now emergence here means that it’s something that surprises you but it also
00:32:13 ►
has a quality associated with how you can get the information from the simulation. Artificial life
00:32:19 ►
simulations are traditionally so complicated that it is impossible, basically, to get all the information from the simulation environment.
00:32:28 ►
So you have this kind of distancing
00:32:30 ►
of the kind of information that you can get from the simulation
00:32:33 ►
and you have to find different ways of interrogating the simulation
00:32:36 ►
to try and get some of this information out.
00:32:39 ►
So some of my favourite quotes of McKenna
00:32:41 ►
that resonated with Noble,
00:32:44 ►
I think it was a quote of
00:32:45 ►
one of his PhD supervisors where he said that if you looked at the world as a world made
00:32:51 ►
by angels it was very disappointing, but if you looked at it as a world made by monkeys
00:32:55 ►
then it was truly amazing. And I think this has been my experience with developing Noble
00:32:59 ►
Ape. So there’s this idea of the kind of paranoid monkeys coming down from the trees and with a hyper sense of both fear and also long-term desire kind of charting a path through an
00:33:11 ►
environment which is really the narrative associated with Noble Ape. So from doing
00:33:16 ►
these kind of simulations for long periods of time and looking at social evolution through
00:33:21 ►
the context of simulation I started to realise that there was a gross
00:33:26 ►
lack of both social science and also true card science data associated with things that
00:33:35 ►
traditionally had been outside the boundaries of science. And the thing that interested
00:33:38 ►
me doing artificial life simulation is that you could actually construct simulation environments that weren’t necessarily possible in the physical world or even in social science experiments.
00:33:50 ►
So the idea of the interrogability of the simulation and also the observability of the
00:33:56 ►
simulation led me to start looking at things in the outside world in terms of them being potentially simulations as well and the idea of
00:34:06 ►
information can exist both in deltas and in clouds rather than actual
00:34:12 ►
interrogatable points I think is a very interesting thing that came from this
00:34:15 ►
broader artificial life simulation that for example in deltas means that you
00:34:19 ►
can’t really stop something and find something at a particular instance
00:34:24 ►
because it exists in the flow
00:34:25 ►
and in the cloud that these ideas can exist in multiple points rather than a single point and
00:34:31 ►
traditional science doesn’t well physics has a means of interrogating deltas but in terms of
00:34:36 ►
actually understanding clouds it’s it’s more difficult in terms of the spreading of information
00:34:41 ►
so the need for a new kind of science
00:34:45 ►
has really come through the artificial life community
00:34:47 ►
being distilled in this idea of simulation science.
00:34:51 ►
But returning to McKenna,
00:34:55 ►
the concept of AI as Bruce described it,
00:34:59 ►
this notion that artificial intelligence
00:35:01 ►
will in some way resemble human intelligence
00:35:04 ►
or needs to resemble human intelligence,
00:35:06 ►
I think is one of the easy paradoxes to squash with artificial life
00:35:11 ►
because certainly what you find through artificial life simulation
00:35:14 ►
is that there is a continuum of intelligence.
00:35:18 ►
In fact, Roy Plotnick’s appearance on Biota,
00:35:21 ►
on the early Biotas associated with the Cambrian explosion,
00:35:24 ►
stated this best, this notion that intelligence really is on a continuum which starts with survival,
00:35:31 ►
that when the earliest organisms started kind of eking their way towards feeding grounds,
00:35:36 ►
they had a view of survival that emerged through into intelligence.
00:35:41 ►
And this notion of intelligence as being on not necessarily even
00:35:45 ►
a continuum potentially a multi-dimensional space and we are merely well maybe a small cloudy point
00:35:52 ►
but just one point in this environment so bruce and i differ very strongly associated with this
00:35:58 ►
idea of machine intelligence and what it will actually look like. So in the context of the singularity movement in particular,
00:36:05 ►
I’ve often described my own views as being post-singular
00:36:10 ►
in terms of this notion that what we have in computation
00:36:13 ►
is distinctly different than human intelligence,
00:36:15 ►
and in many ways it is vastly more powerful than human intelligence.
00:36:20 ►
And here I guess I’m more of a McKenna file than Bruce is in this regard.
00:36:25 ►
And I guess my view is things like the financial system, for example, or the legal system,
00:36:31 ►
or these amazing, in some regards, human-created, but vast numbers of humans that have created these environments,
00:36:38 ►
have created something which is distinctly larger than human intelligence
00:36:42 ►
and also has a far greater survivability,
00:36:46 ►
both temporal survivability, because obviously we all have finite lives that we live as humans,
00:36:51 ►
but also the ability for it to be self-maintaining and also enact terrible things against the
00:36:59 ►
humans, which I think in the case of the financial system currently is pretty well self-evident.
00:37:04 ►
which I think, in the case of the financial system currently, is pretty well self-evident.
00:37:09 ►
So I guess my view is post-McKenna in that light,
00:37:15 ►
and also reinforced by years of studying eclectic and diverse simulations, because the Nobel simulation isn’t just a single simulation,
00:37:19 ►
it’s a series of simulations that are layered progressively.
00:37:22 ►
And one of the curious things I found with McKenna was that he had an aversion to weather simulation, and the weather simulation has actually been
00:37:29 ►
one of the most interesting parts of Nobel APE in terms of the effects of communities and structures
00:37:34 ►
based on, well, simulated meteorological effects. But I guess that brings me up to where you were,
00:37:41 ►
Bruce, in terms of talking about AI in the context of human intelligence,
00:37:47 ►
which is the very narrow definition offered by the singularity, versus the context of
00:37:52 ►
intelligence as being something where we are only one potential exhibit in the cloud of
00:37:59 ►
potential intelligences, and where things like the internet and various other forms
00:38:03 ►
of machine intelligence are vastly more powerful, or I I don’t know I don’t like using the term vastly more intelligent but
00:38:10 ►
certainly can out survive us what’s what’s your view with regards to the kind of plot Nick
00:38:15 ►
definition of survival intelligence and how we relate to that well I think that you know I’ve
00:38:22 ►
talked about this on some other podcasts on the salon but
00:38:26 ►
I think that the we vest far too much in our technology if we if you really look at
00:38:34 ►
the internet as a whole even the banking system uh all this stuff is hand-built and hand-maintained by millions of people.
00:38:46 ►
I think apart from very, very good Unix and Linux servers,
00:38:51 ►
if you left these systems without somebody poking and prodding them,
00:38:55 ►
the whole system would go down, the whole Internet would go down pretty quickly.
00:38:58 ►
It’s almost as though in the 19th century,
00:39:04 ►
if people thought, well, the telegraph system is going to create a super mind or the steam engine rail system, you know, is bigger than we can comprehend.
00:39:15 ►
Therefore, you know, you’ll get Frankenstein coming out of the steam engine and electricity system.
00:39:22 ►
And in the 1930s, you had sort of that idea with radio and…
00:39:28 ►
Yeah, go ahead, Tom.
00:39:29 ►
How do you walk away from the financial system?
00:39:32 ►
How do you walk away from it?
00:39:34 ►
I mean, you describe these things as computational systems,
00:39:37 ►
but they’re not just computational systems.
00:39:40 ►
They exist in a philosophical realm
00:39:43 ►
which is completely independent from the physical nature of the system.
00:39:48 ►
So this is the thing that has interested me about Rushkoff’s more recent writing,
00:39:53 ►
is that the ability to move away from the financial system is not just stopping to maintain the computers that are running the financial system,
00:40:02 ►
because it exists as something that is greater than just the computers that are running the financial system because it exists as something that is greater than just the computers so how do you walk away as with the telegraph system but in
00:40:09 ►
the context of the financial system how do you walk away from the financial system in terms of
00:40:15 ►
its complete computerization well i think that what i’m trying to get to here is
00:40:28 ►
I think that what I’m trying to get to here is certainly the traders on the floor, the bankers, the policymakers,
00:40:34 ►
they’re constantly reacting to the dynamic that is rippling through the financial markets. And it’s very hard to predict what’s going to happen.
00:40:38 ►
People poke and prod it, and then a wave is set up, and currencies and, you know, all this stuff happens.
00:40:46 ►
But I think it’s not an intelligence.
00:40:49 ►
It’s just a great big hairball mess of stimulus response.
00:40:56 ►
It’s a huge finite state machine in a sense.
00:40:59 ►
And we built this huge finite state machine and it comes and bites us all the time.
00:41:04 ►
You know, a good model for this is International Space Station.
00:41:08 ►
You know, all good planning aside, I mean, 13 nations worked on that thing.
00:41:14 ►
You know, I worked on some modeling and simulation of it back in the mid-2000s.
00:41:21 ►
And there’s 100-plus type of connectors on it.
00:41:27 ►
And there’s, you know plus type of connectors on it and there’s you know hundreds of computers running it and so the crew that are up there find that there’s a dynamic to the thing you know
00:41:33 ►
if if for instance there’s a problem rotating the solar panels because there’s metal shavings
00:41:39 ►
somewhere it has this ripple effect that goes through the whole station and you have
00:41:44 ►
problems uh maintaining all kinds of equipment will go out if power levels drops somewhere it has this ripple effect that goes through the whole station and you have problems
00:41:45 ►
maintaining all kinds of equipment will go out if power levels drops so it’s just a huge complex
00:41:53 ►
dynamic that we’ve made when we were inventing agriculture we learned about that we learned about
00:41:59 ►
living in a complex dynamic system whether to flood the fields at a certain time
00:42:06 ►
complex dynamic system, whether to flood the fields at a certain time, the spreading of seed and not weed, how to keep ergot molds from getting to your grain supply.
00:42:16 ►
Human beings have been living in these complex systems for a long time.
00:42:21 ►
We’re just making them such that now you know we really can’t drive them
00:42:26 ►
we’re kind of we’re can’t work we’re victims of the of the system that we
00:42:31 ►
have made and maybe we’re doing this to the whole planet but I don’t think that
00:42:35 ►
there’s an AI or there’s a there’s anything that’s going to emerge other
00:42:40 ►
than just a huge amount of reacting and maintaining and fire drills.
00:42:46 ►
I don’t think that the system we’ve made is an autonomous, stand-alone AI of any sort.
00:42:53 ►
I guess my concern with your definitions is that you’re defining AI
00:42:58 ►
and you’re defining intelligence and you’re defining the human brain
00:43:02 ►
very much in terms of what these things aren’t.
00:43:04 ►
But the thing that I am in terms of what these things aren’t.
00:43:09 ►
But the thing that I am interested in is what these things are and how we can understand these things in the context of potentially ourselves with these things,
00:43:14 ►
but also in the context that if these things are destructive, if they are polluting,
00:43:20 ►
if they are doing things which are causing us very fundamental problems that I think probably through sheer democratic voting,
00:43:27 ►
a majority of the world’s population or a majority of even small towns
00:43:33 ►
would say they don’t want these systems in place,
00:43:37 ►
that they don’t like these systems,
00:43:38 ►
and these systems are ultimately creating control and influence
00:43:42 ►
which are completely independent of the problems that people face
00:43:45 ►
there is still no intellectual control there is no understanding there is no means of actually
00:43:50 ►
firstly disassembling these systems but secondly finding ways to extract yourself from the system
00:43:56 ►
which seem to be the only two possibilities and i guess my criticism of rushkov’s work and a lot of
00:44:02 ►
the theorists that are coming through the dissection of the financial
00:44:06 ►
system is that there is no meaningful way to remove oneself from this environment. I guess
00:44:11 ►
my discussion associated with being post-singular really motivates intellectuals into starting to
00:44:18 ►
analyze these systems and starting to grapple with what they are in some very meaningful sense in the
00:44:23 ►
context of where we are, rather than
00:44:25 ►
discussing abstract ideas of artificial intelligence that neither map onto, firstly,
00:44:30 ►
the financial system, or secondly, human intelligence. And it seems to be a strange
00:44:35 ►
kind of argument to say that these things aren’t artificial intelligence, and they’re not
00:44:39 ►
intelligence. And, you know, these things are something something they exist in some way they may
00:44:45 ►
appear to be through particular analytical methods just to be a kind of mess but they are a vastly
00:44:51 ►
controlling mess which seems to be greater than can be described by individuals they may be
00:44:56 ►
initially enacted by individuals but i think no one individual can intelligibly understand them
00:45:03 ►
which is a property which is really critical.
00:45:06 ►
I think not even large groups of individuals can understand them.
00:45:09 ►
So the whole notion of collective or single intelligence,
00:45:12 ►
human intelligence, being able to dissect these environments
00:45:15 ►
seems to be relatively flawed as well.
00:45:17 ►
I guess my concern is that I would like to see an emergence
00:45:20 ►
of intelligent folk who were able to start breaking apart these things in terms of what
00:45:27 ►
they actually are rather than using kind of negative terms against them because without that
00:45:33 ►
kind of understanding that kind of analysis we’ll never be able to extract ourselves from these
00:45:38 ►
things more importantly these things are evolving let’s use term, at such a fast rate that the previous theories,
00:45:47 ►
the previous means of explanation, and even the ones that are emerging through things like
00:45:51 ►
singularity are fundamentally flawed in terms of the analysis of things such as the financial
00:45:57 ►
system, for example. And I guess my interest is the maybe elements of McKenna that could offer
00:46:03 ►
some degree of insight into some of these things.
00:46:06 ►
So let’s turn the conversation in that direction.
00:46:09 ►
What do you think Terence could teach us
00:46:10 ►
about how we can actually analyse these things?
00:46:12 ►
You talked in terms of Terence kind of going far too fast
00:46:16 ►
and far too much in a particular direction
00:46:18 ►
without a connection to facts.
00:46:20 ►
But in terms of the inspirational nature of McKenna,
00:46:23 ►
which I guess is motivating both of us
00:46:25 ►
actually having this conversation, what elements of McKenna do you think may be useful in terms of
00:46:30 ►
understanding these kind of contemporary problems? I think that McKenna’s concept of infinite novelty
00:46:37 ►
in the time wave in 2012 should be really stripped out of any of this analysis.
00:46:45 ►
And to really just put aside, I did another talk about this on the salon
00:46:52 ►
where I really feel that McKenna’s own life was accelerating so quickly
00:46:56 ►
that he couldn’t imagine himself in 2012.
00:46:59 ►
And it was really a personal eschaton that he was going through.
00:47:03 ►
But beyond that, you know, he’s no longer with us and can’t comment.
00:47:08 ►
I think that what he would say is, you know, this is his take on it,
00:47:14 ►
was that the psychedelic state that you enter or that, you know, people do enter
00:47:20 ►
allows you to see astoundingly complex
00:47:25 ►
for you at that time
00:47:27 ►
realities, whether it be
00:47:29 ►
the elf machines or
00:47:30 ►
seething geometry or the entire
00:47:33 ►
planet from space
00:47:35 ►
etc.
00:47:36 ►
and that the human mind
00:47:38 ►
is actually quite capable
00:47:39 ►
in these
00:47:41 ►
elevated states
00:47:43 ►
of grokking,
00:47:46 ►
a massive amount of interlocking complexity.
00:47:50 ►
At the same time, and this is very important,
00:47:52 ►
this comes from Leary and all these people who tripped in the 60s,
00:47:59 ►
you see the game.
00:48:01 ►
You see the mundane reality when you land from the elevated state. You see the game that see the mundane reality when you when you land from the elevated state you see that
00:48:06 ►
the game that people play and you actually realize uh that people are operating on very very simple
00:48:15 ►
principles sort of a stimulus response kind of a principle of you know me and i want to get mine
00:48:21 ►
or i’m afraid of this and they they actually are almost most people, even in institutions,
00:48:29 ►
governments, financial service companies,
00:48:32 ►
they act almost in a kindergarten-like way, very, very simplistically.
00:48:37 ►
There’s a few devious ones amongst us who are creating the financial instruments
00:48:42 ►
and really gaming the system.
00:48:44 ►
But for the most part, the average member of the public,
00:48:48 ►
you can almost predict what they’re going to say at the next moment.
00:48:51 ►
You could almost predict what they’re thinking and where they’re going to go
00:48:55 ►
because they’re in this game, which is relatively simplistic.
00:49:00 ►
And so the psychedelic experience and the psychedelic reality reveals these games when you land you look around and say oh I’m in this game
00:49:11 ►
but it’s it’s a game that’s relatively cartoony and kindergarten II you know
00:49:15 ►
even up to the level of sitting in the Oval Office or the president you realize
00:49:20 ►
these guys are operating on poor information, they’re operating on these
00:49:25 ►
assumptions that there are very few sort of brilliant people in the room that seek to
00:49:31 ►
see the whole picture and really profoundly think about things.
00:49:35 ►
Very very few.
00:49:36 ►
They’re mostly just reacting.
00:49:39 ►
And some of them have a vision and some of them have a fundamental understanding but
00:49:42 ►
very few do.
00:49:44 ►
And within organizations, you know, government or military have a fundamental understanding but very few do and within organizations you know government or military whatever very very very few people are thinking
00:49:49 ►
outside of the box or coming up with new things so we’re kind of carried along in this flotation
00:49:56 ►
device so the psychedelic space allows you to see that and see that with that information the information that that people are
00:50:06 ►
operating on relatively simple needs and simple scenarios you realize that the
00:50:12 ►
system can collapse easily but it can also be changed relatively easily
00:50:19 ►
because it’s not very sophisticated you So perhaps that while Steve Jobs talks about doing a trip that he did
00:50:29 ►
in probably the 60s or early 70s and realizing he could make a whole new world,
00:50:34 ►
his mind was able and capable of creating and changing the world
00:50:39 ►
and making an entirely new world.
00:50:40 ►
And he founded Apple Computer based on that and has continued to do that so the people who
00:50:48 ►
have had their minds opened up to the greater reality
00:50:51 ►
that they see are the power sources
00:50:55 ►
they’re the people who can make the future
00:50:58 ►
and of course they see the game being played some people who
00:51:04 ►
are opened up to this reality go back into what Terrence would call the mundane reality through that doorway.
00:51:12 ►
And then they themselves, they get alienated.
00:51:16 ►
And they check out.
00:51:18 ►
They tune out.
00:51:20 ►
And it’s to their disadvantage because then they become financially disadvantaged and they become disempowered.
00:51:27 ►
So the trick is, and Terrence is one of the few people to ever make enough money to live on talking about, you know, mushrooms.
00:51:37 ►
Let’s face it, this is, as he himself said, this is no way to build a career.
00:51:48 ►
this is no way to build a career. So for the most of us, if we see these visions, and we come back,
00:51:55 ►
we have to integrate, you know, the famous integration phrase, but we can do powerful things in the world with this, these insights, and we can see the game for what it is.
00:52:01 ►
And we can not get panicked about what people say on TV and
00:52:06 ►
we can stay outside of the discussions of the panic of the day kind of
00:52:11 ►
discussions because it is it you just see it as a game so for example I think
00:52:18 ►
the psychedelic experience gives you a long view of history and Terence was
00:52:22 ►
very good at this Terence you know widely in history, not just alchemical history,
00:52:28 ►
but the history of technology, of arts.
00:52:31 ►
He was really there with it.
00:52:34 ►
And so in the mode of Terence, I would say,
00:52:38 ►
okay, we’re worried about the growing,
00:52:41 ►
seeming out-of-control complexity of the financial system.
00:52:47 ►
Well, roll your clock back to the 1870s railroads have spread across several continents and there is no control mechanism 1860s
00:52:56 ►
and 1870s so you get these head-on collisions of trains you get complete bedlam there are all these
00:53:02 ►
different railroad companies and they solved the
00:53:06 ►
problem they invented telegraphy and a whole system of coding and to keep these trains from
00:53:11 ►
from slamming into each other roll your clock to the 1920s when there were hundreds of telephone
00:53:17 ►
companies and this is before ma bell and others you know gobbled them up and created the Microsoft type of monopoly by the 1930s. So the 1900s
00:53:28 ►
to 1920s, complete bedlam in the
00:53:32 ►
system, trying to call between one town and the other
00:53:35 ►
when your phone company is only in your town.
00:53:40 ►
And they managed to, they moved a step up and by
00:53:43 ►
1929, 1930, they had direct dialing
00:53:48 ►
where you didn’t have to wait for somebody to call you back
00:53:51 ►
and connect the line.
00:53:53 ►
And we gradually mastered the complexity of a new medium
00:53:56 ►
that seemed to be out of control and never would it be solved.
00:54:02 ►
And so I think we’re doing this again.
00:54:04 ►
And we connected computers together with money,
00:54:07 ►
with trading, with news, and we’re in this boom of complexity, and there’s a joy in it,
00:54:14 ►
but there’s also a panic over it’s overwhelming us. But I think soon these systems will be
00:54:21 ►
subsumed again. They’ll just be part of the woodwork
00:54:30 ►
and they’ll just function. The engineers will figure it out, the regulators will figure it out, and then we’ll be into a new era of a new complex system on top of the old one.
00:54:35 ►
And we’ll think back 20 years in the future and say, why did we worry so much about such and such?
00:54:42 ►
You know, it was just, it was a problem that would get solved
00:54:45 ►
so an important point that you touched on which I guess is once I’ve done this
00:54:50 ►
relatively relatively nihilistic negative rap associated with our
00:54:54 ►
inability to understand modern technology the secret that we have is
00:55:00 ►
communication the ability and this is interesting in the psychedelic
00:55:03 ►
community because the find the others is inhibited by various legal aspects,
00:55:08 ►
but I think the, I mean, we are both students of computer history.
00:55:15 ►
We both love the rich narrative that computer history provides.
00:55:20 ►
You have a shrine set up in your backyard to this,
00:55:24 ►
and I maintain a
00:55:25 ►
lot of it in my head and my bookshelf but the idea of Steve Jobs is a good one
00:55:30 ►
because Steve Jobs didn’t create this stuff alone he was able to communicate
00:55:34 ►
with groups of individuals and actually get a swell of engineering talent to
00:55:39 ►
come through and devote their you know 16 hours a, 7 days a week to this dream as well.
00:55:45 ►
And I think the power that we still hold as humans versus machines
00:55:50 ►
is the ability to put ideas out there to communicate
00:55:53 ►
and to find ways of actually dissecting and solving these issues.
00:55:59 ►
And I guess the feedback that I would give associated with what you’ve described
00:56:03 ►
is that the communication
00:56:05 ►
and the ability to analyse these problems and then communicate means of describing them
00:56:10 ►
and solutions is the critical factor. And I think when you talk about the game and the
00:56:14 ►
elements of the relative simplicity, the game is still maintained by an environment which
00:56:21 ►
is very protective if you look at the financial system and particularly the way the financial system can work against individuals want
00:56:27 ►
to try and step outside of the financial system but I think the way that we can
00:56:31 ►
solve that is through a communication of ideas and utilizing the telephone
00:56:36 ►
metaphor in terms of actually utilizing these ideas and communicating them and
00:56:42 ►
getting together in groups and having discourse
00:56:45 ►
and actually creating something which is independent of the environments that we see.
00:56:49 ►
So I guess that’s my discussion to your solution point is that the communication part is the critical factor.
00:56:56 ►
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:56:58 ►
So, Bruce, I think this is we’ve kind of covered a number of points here.
00:57:02 ►
I’m not sure if you want to continue wrapping on various other artificial life points,
00:57:06 ►
but I think we’ve talked a little bit about machine novelty
00:57:09 ►
and hopefully instigated folks in the salon to start thinking about such things
00:57:15 ►
and also perhaps looking out to the biota community
00:57:17 ►
or looking at a variety of different directions.
00:57:20 ►
What are your concluding thoughts associated with this discussion?
00:57:23 ►
Well, I think that another thing to touch upon,
00:57:26 ►
I know salon listeners are waiting for this one, is the machine elves.
00:57:30 ►
You talk about Terence McKinney, you cannot not talk about machine elves.
00:57:35 ►
So Terence described the mushroom experience
00:57:40 ►
as being extremely high-tech and futuristic spaceships around distant worlds,
00:57:47 ►
these machine elves, et cetera.
00:57:49 ►
So for him, at least, the mushroom experience was super high-tech.
00:57:55 ►
So does that experience, you know, does it give us any insight
00:58:00 ►
into how technology is wrappering itself around each of us?
00:58:04 ►
Or are we all
00:58:05 ►
becoming machine elves hmm and so you know this is this would make a whole
00:58:11 ►
wrap in it in itself so if I can if I can just give an intro to that point my
00:58:16 ►
interpretation of that and this actually comes through a conversation that you
00:58:19 ►
have with Terence that was put out in the Biota podcast, was the idea that the machine elves exist as the simulated others,
00:58:30 ►
and certainly in terms of the Nobilates communicating.
00:58:33 ►
I’ve thought a lot about the machine elf communication as well in that light,
00:58:39 ►
the idea that when you have external entities that are fundamentally internal
00:58:43 ►
but represented as external entities,
00:58:48 ►
communicating in a way which seems to be unintelligible,
00:58:52 ►
it is ultimately a computational problem.
00:58:57 ►
And certainly my own views with regards to the appearance of the machine elves are analogous to looking at, well, firstly, the language of artificial life,
00:59:02 ►
the language of communication of these entities,
00:59:04 ►
which is a continuous topic in biota,
00:59:07 ►
but also an understanding that perhaps this is another form of language,
00:59:12 ►
ultimately, that we hold,
00:59:13 ►
that we can represent in perhaps a computational form,
00:59:16 ►
but the need for these entities to communicate in a way
00:59:21 ►
which is potentially unintelligible to us,
00:59:24 ►
but certainly is intelligible to these externalized entities.
00:59:28 ►
And I guess that’s been my view from a kind of artificial life perspective
00:59:32 ►
associated with the machine elves, very much embodied in my own machine apes
00:59:36 ►
and their existence externally.
00:59:40 ►
Does this gel with your own sense?
00:59:42 ►
Yeah, I think that certainly, you know, seeing these highly technological worlds that somehow come from somewhere that you cannot, you know, it’s the future.
00:59:55 ►
These worlds are stranger than we can suppose, to quote, you know, Whitehead, which is a quotation from Terence.
01:00:07 ►
know whitehead which is a quotation from terence i mean these these worlds are so fantastic and you think how could i have imagined them does this vision of technology come from outside of me
01:00:13 ►
so there’s that whole riff and rap about well this is a communication from some other world or for
01:00:21 ►
some other beings and we’re we can learn from it and we can build technology based upon it,
01:00:26 ►
and that’s a whole thing.
01:00:27 ►
So you could build the super ultra-nobly from something you saw
01:00:33 ►
while taking mushrooms, or maybe not.
01:00:38 ►
Scientists have reported that they have seen the structure
01:00:41 ►
of chemical compounds that they could never have otherwise seen.
01:00:47 ►
And this is certainly not in my experience, this is not something that I seek out.
01:00:54 ►
But the question is, can you use the psychedelic state as a tool to create wilder and woolier technologies for the earth
01:01:05 ►
or to understand the fuzz of technology
01:01:09 ►
that is enveloping the earth and see it,
01:01:11 ►
maybe to see the threat or to see the benefit
01:01:15 ►
to having this fuzz of technology all around us.
01:01:19 ►
Is this gonna clothe us and keep us warm
01:01:21 ►
and help us survive,
01:01:23 ►
or is this gonna suff suffocate us psychologically this
01:01:25 ►
technology it’s hard to say but perhaps the psychedelic state is the place to ask the question
01:01:32 ►
it’s always a pleasure chatting with you i’m looking forward to being on location with you
01:01:36 ►
in the near future and living in the bay area to enjoy many more of these discussions and certainly
01:01:42 ►
you’ve mentioned ralph abram but you have an intellectual community particularly of scientists
01:01:48 ►
that are also part of the psychedelic community that is very rich and I’m looking
01:01:52 ►
forward to having many future discussions with you and with them
01:01:55 ►
Thank you Tom and just another little plug for
01:02:00 ►
the 2012 events, you’ll be here by then so there will
01:02:04 ►
be events
01:02:05 ►
that have to do with the life of Terrence McKenna,
01:02:08 ►
but also these ideas will be held in the Bay Area.
01:02:12 ►
They’ll be held at Esalen Institute in June of 2012.
01:02:15 ►
There’s an event planned for the end of January
01:02:17 ►
in Los Angeles with Lorenzo and myself.
01:02:21 ►
And so all of these events are coming up,
01:02:24 ►
and we will be showing Terence’s TimeWave software
01:02:28 ►
and looking at some of his thoughts that have just come to light
01:02:32 ►
about it and just as we kind of unravel the man and
01:02:36 ►
see what will go beyond 2012. We put these things out in
01:02:40 ►
podcast form. I know your recent experience trying to hold a talk on
01:02:44 ►
Orcas Island, that was also my experience doing a talk at Stanford, that there was a general assumption that these things
01:02:49 ►
would appear in podcasts, so perhaps we didn’t get the same attendance that we would have gotten. But
01:02:54 ►
we need to find some way, and this goes out to Lorenzo as well, to actually understand that the
01:02:59 ►
physical attendance is probably also beneficial as well as just hearing the audio. And I think perhaps having Terence’s original software running
01:03:07 ►
is a good indication that folks may actually want to attend this thing physically
01:03:12 ►
as well as hear the audio after the fact.
01:03:14 ►
Yeah, we certainly need to sell tickets, folks.
01:03:17 ►
So we need to fill the rooms to make the energy happen and the excitement
01:03:22 ►
and the words will flow.
01:03:26 ►
Bruce, it’s always a pleasure.
01:03:28 ►
Thank you, Tom.
01:03:30 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:38 ►
So, what do you think about Bruce’s closing comment
01:03:41 ►
that maybe we’re all becoming machine elves ourselves.
01:03:46 ►
Now, if you’re new to the salon and aren’t familiar with Terrence McKenna’s thoughts,
01:03:51 ►
well, that probably doesn’t mean anything to you.
01:03:53 ►
But for me, I have to admit that it has now caused me to wonder
01:03:57 ►
if maybe when Terrence was seeing those machine elves,
01:04:00 ►
that maybe he was seeing the future once our tech completely encapsulates us.
01:04:06 ►
Maybe that’s what the future holds for us.
01:04:08 ►
We all become machine elves and have games with self-dribbling basketballs.
01:04:13 ►
And now I’ve probably driven away any new listeners with all of this nonsense, but getting
01:04:18 ►
back to the more serious take on the conversation we just heard, but my very elementary understanding of the research that’s going on
01:04:26 ►
in the field of artificial life has actually given me
01:04:30 ►
is a significantly greater understanding of just what a miracle of engineering
01:04:35 ►
and science our bodies actually are.
01:04:37 ►
And perhaps that may be the ultimate gift of this branch of science,
01:04:42 ►
which is that we, as a species, begin to more fully
01:04:46 ►
appreciate what a fantastic gift human life actually is, and maybe with that awakening,
01:04:53 ►
we all begin living lives that are more worthy of these incredible bodies that get us around
01:04:58 ►
and sometimes provide a lot of pleasure.
01:05:01 ►
I hope that some of our friends here in the salon pick up on this artificial life trail.
01:05:06 ►
It’s a really fascinating area of deep research,
01:05:10 ►
and it’s a field that amateurs can also take part in,
01:05:13 ►
because you don’t have to have a bunch of money
01:05:15 ►
to get started and participate.
01:05:17 ►
And if you’re interested,
01:05:19 ►
my suggestion for the best place to go
01:05:21 ►
would be to go to biota.org
01:05:24 ►
and subscribe to Tom’s podcast,
01:05:26 ►
where you’ll find close to a hundred programs that speak to all aspects of the field of study
01:05:31 ►
that we call artificial life. And you don’t have to just be a computer geek to join in. There are
01:05:37 ►
countless philosophical and ethical questions to be discussed in this field, not to mention all of the rich ground that new science fiction writers can take on.
01:05:47 ►
So check out biota.org on the website,
01:05:51 ►
where you can find not only information about the podcast,
01:05:54 ►
but papers, projects, and a list of key people in the field.
01:05:58 ►
It’s really a great place to get involved in this fascinating community
01:06:02 ►
if these kind of ideas interest you.
01:06:05 ►
Now, there are just two quick announcements before I go.
01:06:09 ►
First of all, if you can get to New York City
01:06:11 ►
for the weekend of October 14th through the 16th of 2011,
01:06:16 ►
you won’t want to miss the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics conference
01:06:21 ►
that’s being hosted by Judson Memorial Church
01:06:24 ►
in the heart of Greenwich Village.
01:06:26 ►
This is the fifth year
01:06:28 ►
of this important conference and
01:06:29 ►
they’re going to be featuring a lot of speakers
01:06:31 ►
including Steve Beyer who
01:06:33 ►
also hosts Spirit Plants
01:06:36 ►
Radio among many other ventures.
01:06:38 ►
Also, I think that Jim
01:06:39 ►
Fadiman is going to be there and we’re
01:06:41 ►
planning on having him as a guest here in the salon
01:06:43 ►
later this year when Matt Palomary interviews him for us. But if you want to find a few of the others in the New
01:06:50 ►
York City area in just a few weeks, this conference is the place to be. And my final announcement is
01:06:57 ►
twofold. A few days ago, one of our fellow salonners, Joe Matheny, and I finally connected
01:07:03 ►
and talked about a number of things.
01:07:05 ►
For one, he had me as a guest on his own podcast, which is called The G-Spot.
01:07:11 ►
And that should be easy to remember, but I’ll also put a link to his information along with the program notes for today’s podcast.
01:07:18 ►
Now, Joe has been around this scene for far longer than I have,
01:07:22 ►
although our paths have come dangerously close to crossing
01:07:25 ►
on several occasions. And yes, I am promoting a podcast on which I make an appearance, which
01:07:31 ►
I guess means I’m promoting myself. But the main thing I want to tell you about is that
01:07:36 ►
Joe is the copyright owner to several Robert Anton Wilson recordings, and he’s going to
01:07:42 ►
let me podcast them here in the salon for you.
01:07:50 ►
I’ll have more to say about Joe and his generosity in those podcasts that I do, but for all of you Bob Wilson fans, I want you to know that we’re in for some more brain candy from
01:07:55 ►
Raw in the very near future.
01:07:57 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast once again by
01:08:02 ►
reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:08:15 ►
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 get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:08:24 ►
on webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:08:28 ►
And if you’re interested in some of the stories that might have led you and me to where we’re sharing this moment together right now,
01:08:30 ►
well, you can read a few of them in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:08:35 ►
which is available in Kindle and other e-book formats,
01:08:38 ►
as well as a pay-what-you-can audio book read by me.
01:08:41 ►
And you can find out more about that at genesisgeneration.us.
01:08:47 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.