Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Occam’s Razor is fine in the formation of physical theory, but it doesn’t take us far in understanding human motivation.”
“What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for is that reality is not reality. There may be no reality, but certainly this is not it. This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned, hallucination that we are all participating in.”
“Reality, whatever it is, is temporary and yields to non-existence.”
“Thought can’t go where the roads of language have not been built.”
“Culture is a kind of environment that we have learned how to interpose between ourselves and whatever is really out there.”
“I just don’t think that a monkey species had the wherewithal to evade the mechanisms of control and constraint that guide and direct everything on the planet. There is a purpose to history.”
“What is to be done? You can’t begin to answer that question until you have some notion of what reality is.”
“But all it takes [when two people are sitting together in silence] is somebody breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us.”
“I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what’s really going on.”
“Reality is a naive concept and should probably be abandoned as quickly as possible.”
“What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally-sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination of some sort.”
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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.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And before we get started, I’ve got one quick announcement for our friends who made donations during our pledge drive.
00:00:33 ►
As I gradually get a personal email out to all of our donors,
00:00:39 ►
I’ve discovered that Hotmail is bouncing all email from our MatrixMasters.com server.
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Eventually, I’ll get another mail address, email address, and resend those thatounced. But if you’re using Hotmail or some other Microsoft-owned email address,
00:00:49 ►
maybe you could ask them to take us off their blacklist.
00:00:52 ►
I can’t understand why we’re on their bad side, but…
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Maybe it was because back when I was a public spokesperson for Verizon many years ago,
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I was quoted in the trade press as saying that the Windows operating system was the biggest computer virus ever created.
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I don’t think they ever forgave me for that.
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And one other announcement, which is really more of a report now that I think about it,
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but for those of our fellow Saloners who have been asking about two of our elders,
00:01:22 ►
well, I’ve been told that the annual Easter Open House hosted by Anne and Sasha Shulgin was a great success again this year.
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And I understand that Sasha, very graciously, greeted guests for almost six hours, and for
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much of that time, our dear friend Nick Sand was also at his side.
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So it was another great gathering of the clan at the Shulgin’s again this year.
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So it was another great gathering of the Klan at the Schulzens again this year.
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Now, after my little screw-up last week, I thought that I should play it safe with another Terrence McKenna podcast before I catch the train for Tucson.
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As I’ve mentioned, I’m on my way to the Arizona Wild Wild West Festival that is being held this coming weekend.
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And that’s the weekend of April 25th through the 27th of 2014 for you time travelers who are just now joining us.
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And the talk that I’ve selected today is one that I hadn’t heard before.
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And I’m really looking forward to listening to it once again with you right now.
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Usually I only come up with a couple of quotes from each talk,
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but today the talk we’re about to listen to in a moment, I got over 10 of them.
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And considering the fact that this talk took place in August of 1991, well, I think that
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you’re going to be surprised at how relative it is yet today.
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And here’s a spoiler alert.
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Before 30 seconds of his talk has passed, you’ll hear Terrence McKenna say,
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and I quote,
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if you can put on a glove and some iPhones,
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end quote.
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That’s right.
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Terrence McKenna was talking about iPhones already in August of 1991,
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which was over 15 years
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before Apple finally got around
00:03:01 ►
to naming their new toy.
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Conferences on virtual reality.
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And, you know, on one level you have the gung-ho technocrats
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who just see this as the greatest form of entertainment ever.
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But it does raise certain fairly profound questions.
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I mean, if you can put on a glove and some iPhones and go into a synthetic world, let’s say a lavishly onto a pine dotted plane with a fountain in the
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center of it. And then by going to that fountain and walking through it, emerge back in the kitchen
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of the mansion. You know, where does reality begin and end? And how can we at this moment satisfy ourselves that we are not
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in some kind of solid state matrix
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of some sort
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how can we satisfy ourselves
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that this is not itself a simulacrum
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and the answer is you can’t
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we only assume it isn’t
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because that’s called Occam’s razor
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you all know what Occam’s Razor. You all know
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what Occam’s Razor is, right?
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It’s the idea that hypotheses
00:04:29 ►
should not be multiplied without
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necessity.
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The simple way of saying that is
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the simplest idea
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should always be preferred.
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But notice
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that this will
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lead you into deep error in most human situations.
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If you prefer the simplest explanation for what’s going on, you’ll never understand what’s going on.
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I mean, you see two people and they’re falling in love.
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If you assume they’re falling in love because they like each other,
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you’re probably missing the fact that one just inherited $10 million
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and the other is a rat.
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And, you know, one was abused as a child
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and the other is able to manipulate people all over the map.
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So Occam’s razor is fine in the formulation of physical theory,
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but it doesn’t take us far in understanding human motivation.
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What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for
00:05:31 ►
is that reality is not reality.
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There may be no reality,
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but certainly this is not it.
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This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned hallucination
00:05:48 ►
that we are all participating in.
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And whatever it is, it yields ultimately to non-entity.
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I mean, our realities are sustained by our being.
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And from looking at what happens to other people,
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we know that eventually you get laid into the cold, cold ground.
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And then what is your reality worth?
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So reality, whatever it is, is temporary and yields to non-existence.
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That seems to be the primary ground of being.
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Yeah, over here.
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Well, just in putting out something that’s a question to be explored as the week goes on,
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I mean, I’ve had that experience of, you know, quote-unquote reality
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being this very subjective thing.
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My question is, even if it’s not real, how could we use that
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fact to create a reality that’s more enjoyable? When it occurred to me was, you talked about
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these Amazon, Amazonian tribes and how, you know, what’s happening on Wall Street isn’t real there. Yet, you know, at some point,
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that whole seemingly infinite forest
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could be cut out from under them
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because of what’s happening on Wall Street.
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So I’m interested in how looking at
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this sense of reality not being real,
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how that all plays out with one reality intruding on another.
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Well, I think that what it points us toward,
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and this is where modern philosophy in large measure has gone,
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is realizing the primacy of language.
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has gone, is realizing that the primacy of language, that it’s up until fairly recently, people have accepted the idea that you’re born into the world and that’s the world. And then
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you make the best of it. It’s the hand you’ve been dealt. But what they didn’t understand was
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that this is a card game where you never have to show your hand. So you can claim to be holding eight aces.
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You can claim any damn thing you want.
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Reality is made out of language.
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Some people understand this and use it to bully the rest of us.
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I mean, we think, you know, you have to show your cards
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and they know that you just claim to have aces and eights
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and everybody gets out of your way.
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So as a culture, what we have to do is,
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and I’m definitely not big on this whole French thing,
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but nevertheless, there is something to be said
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for this deconstructionist method.
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We have to get down to the bedrock of reality, which appears to be words, means,
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and ideas, and then build back up from that. We can otherwise, what we get is the momentum
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of past error. We think of the people in the past as tremendously naive relative to ourselves,
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but it’s their intellectual world that we’re living in
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because they thought up all this stuff.
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And then we are acting out the consequences of it.
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How can we take control of the reality-creating machinery
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and then direct it in a way we want to go.
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No culture on earth has ever done this,
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or even conceived of the idea, so far as I can tell.
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There’s a lot of fun poked at feminism
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for its preference for words like chairperson and stuff like that.
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And these examples seem somewhat trivial.
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But in fact, the effort to reconstruct the language is very genuine
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because thought can’t go where the roads of language have not been built.
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So you decide where you want to go and then you build a linguistic path there. This whole thing
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with the psychedelic experience, the way cultures lose touch with it is by not being able to say
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anything about it, you know. And then it eventually gets so unsayable that if you start babbling about
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it, they throw a net over you and say,
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oh, well, he became schizophrenic,
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they had serious delusions, had to be locked up,
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didn’t understand that the universe is, you know,
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a half sphere on the back of a turtle being carried by a dwarf
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or whatever the sanctioned cultural reality is.
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dwarf or whatever the sanctioned cultural reality is. So our political dilemma and our cultural dilemma is a linguistic dilemma and we need to take hold of language and build it consciously.
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Now so far the only people who have understood this very thoroughly have been bad people,
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this very thoroughly have been bad people,
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fascists and other people with some hideous agenda that they wanted to displace the ordinary haphazard way
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of doing cultural business with.
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But it is not intrinsically compromised.
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It’s simply that the sly among us figured this out ahead of all the rest of us,
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but we can learn from them and can begin to sanction realities that never existed before.
00:11:36 ►
I mean, you’ve probably all heard me talk about memes and how what the reason I teach, the reason I write, the reason we all get together is because we’re trying to launch new memes.
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You all know what a meme is, right?
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A meme is the smallest unit.
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This is how I define it.
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Somebody told me recently, you define it wrong.
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It’s all right.
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My definition is better.
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My definition is better.
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A meme is the smallest unit of an idea in the same way that a gene
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is the smallest unit of organismic existence.
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So the meme of Marxism
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is made up of sub-memes of class struggle
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and return of the means of production
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to the workers and so forth and so on
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these are Marxist memes
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I don’t understand why
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you’re kind of getting under the point that
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it’s language based
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why can’t this meme be visual
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well I define
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language so broadly
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that it can be visual
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I mean what it is
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it’s the signifier for
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cognitive activity. And I don’t want to get off into this kind of linguistic vocabulary about
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this stuff. But language means dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, song. It means cognitive activity.
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I mean, this is the glory of our species.
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This is what we do so much better than whoever’s in second place.
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I mean, I guess the gorillas and the dolphins are a mile and a half behind
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doing whatever they’re doing.
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But I just don’t buy the notion that there
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is any other species on this planet
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with the possible exception of
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mushrooms that is involved
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in this language making
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enterprise in quite
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the way we are
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and it’s how we escaped
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the
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iron constraints of
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organic existence.
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We, culture is a kind of environment
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that we have learned how to interpose
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between ourselves and whatever is really out there.
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And we don’t know what it was
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because we invented culture 50,000 years ago
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and nobody’s seen anything else since.
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But there was something there that was so frightening and so alarming to us
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that we invented culture as a membrane that we would place between ourselves and it.
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And then there have been other membranes invented since.
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Urbanization.
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Let’s all crowd into cities and jabber to each other.
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That will hold it even more at bay.
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And so forth and so on. I mean, we really
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behave as though we fear something
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tremendously toxic
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or something which has
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a dissolving force over our being that lies beyond the frontier
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of language. And this relates to the ego. The ego is this cultural invention that we have created.
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People don’t need egos. I mean, you need one in this culture because everybody else has one, and so you have to use
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yours to navigate through it. But it’s not a necessary concomitant to being human. We could
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operate without them, but somehow we became traumatized by the experience of raw, unlanguaged nature, and we created this strategy.
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And it’s no different than, you know,
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I mean, some creatures create nests underground,
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and some creatures coat themselves in toxic slime.
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We also did that, by the way,
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because there’s something that has to be held back and suppressed
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that’s very alarming.
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It seems to me that you’re, you know, on one point you’re saying that, you know, we’re way ahead of the dolphins because we’ve created this linguistic-based, you know, thing.
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And on the other hand, I see it as, you know, but you’ve also just said that we’ve created this linguistic-based hallucination that’s isolated us from a perceptual-based, you know,
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I hesitate to use the word reality, but whatever you want to call it.
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And so why is this culture an improvement?
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Well, I’m not saying it’s an improvement.
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It’s an experiment of some sort. No other creature ever took this particular tack.
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Now, evolution seems to have its own set of values.
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What evolution is seeking to maximize
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is expression of the individual genome.
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In other words, there are two ways that a species can be successful.
00:16:42 ►
It can either evolve into an unoccupied niche of some sort
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that it then can tenaciously take hold of,
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or it evolves strategies for generalizing its existence
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so that it can occupy all sorts of niches.
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And this is what we’ve done.
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And when you look at the two possibilities,
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And this is what we’ve done. And when you look at the two possibilities, you see that creatures which follow the maximized adaptation to a single niche strategy usually become blocked. example. Evolutionarily, we could say that they are tremendously successful, but all
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they do is persist. They haven’t modified or changed themselves in 150 million years.
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By your definition, if there’s more cockroach genes out there than human genes, they’re
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more successful than us.
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Well, not my definition, but the definition of biology. And cockroaches are always held up
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as this tremendously successful
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evolutionary adaptation.
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We have set out on a different course,
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and it’s a course of continual redefinition.
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We can retool our culture very quickly.
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We have thrown away the mechanisms of genetic change
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and natural selection through modification of mutation,
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which was very, very slow and apparently a random walk.
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It didn’t have any kind of telos.
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But cultures can actually set up goals and move
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toward them. Even, I mean, the even very large and unlikely goals. I mean, like the Third Reich,
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their decision that it would be a good idea to eliminate Jews from Central Europe. I mean, this is a crazy idea. It would never happen.
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Nothing like that would ever happen in a situation of organic evolution. But in a situation of
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cultural evolution, the idea becomes the guiding image for the society, and then outrageous things are done and the consequences of that are played out i would
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like to think that uh that the that we have not escaped from the yoke the controlling yoke of
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nature in other words we aren’t off on some demonic tear where we are just like evil incarnate,
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but that actually nature requires a species such as ourselves
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to basically to harness energy.
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We are on a higher level doing what the mitochondria did
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in the abiotic oceans of the earth a billion years ago.
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We’re energy storage and release mechanisms,
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sanctioned by nature for some purpose,
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which will be visible somewhere downstream in the flow of time,
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but which is opaque to us.
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For us, history seems a kind of a nightmare,
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but it must, I think, have a happy ending
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or it would never have been allowed to happen in the first place.
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I just don’t think that a monkey species
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had the wherewithal to evade
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the mechanisms of control and constraint
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that guide and direct everything on the planet.
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There is a purpose to history, and I don’t want to go into it tonight,
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but as many of you know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this,
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trying to figure out something good about the human race,
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to figure out something good about the human race,
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something that can be said of us that will redeem the sins that we have visited upon the planet.
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And it isn’t easy,
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but some of our best people are working on it.
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You know what I mean?
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Yeah?
00:21:04 ►
If, in fact, part of what we are is the unveilment of the world or nature as you’re referring to now.
00:21:11 ►
Well, maybe what’s going on is that nature…
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You see, we as individuals can remember the past and model the future.
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But it may be that nature operates in an entirely different way.
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This harks back to our discussion of Platonism.
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Nature may have a kind of viewpoint in eternity.
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Nature may actually see what needs to be done
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and can plan on a scale of a million
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or a hundred million years
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so that
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well, this is slightly a field
00:21:52 ►
but it keeps coming up
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so it’s worth talking about
00:21:55 ►
every body in the solar system
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all of the inner planets
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all of their moons
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all of the solid bodies that orbit around
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the gas giants in the outer solar system, every piece of rock in the entire solar system has just
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been hammered to pieces by asteroid and planetesimal infall. And we prefer not to think about this.
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infall. And we prefer not to think about this. As recently as last January, what’s called an Apollo asteroid crossed within a half lunar distance of the Earth. This is hair-raisingly
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close. And there’s this crater out in Arizona. It’s only 50,000 years old. Whatever came down
00:22:48 ►
there was only about 30 feet across. And everything within 800 miles died instantly when that thing
00:22:56 ►
came down. There’s a scar on the Canadian shield larger than the crater Copernicus on the moon. Now this crater is over a billion and a
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half years old. The point being the universe may be a fantastically chaotic and dangerous place.
00:23:18 ►
And so our cheerful model of what biology is about is that, you know, we have, we’ve evolved over a billion and a half years
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and we have a billion years more and there’s no hurry and it’s all fine and man has thousands
00:23:34 ►
of years to work out the problems of civilization and so forth and so on. But it may actually be that nature senses some kind of danger and that a
00:23:47 ►
species like ourselves is a response to this danger. Our most astonishing feat as a species
00:23:55 ►
to date, besides language, I think, is that we can, though we are made of mush, we can summon to the deserts of this planet
00:24:07 ►
the light which burns at the center of the stars themselves.
00:24:12 ►
Not bad for anthropoid apes.
00:24:16 ►
I mean, granted, as soon as we do this,
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we then plot and scheme on how to bring it down
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on the heads of our enemies.
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That’s not our noblest trait.
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But the fact that we could go into matter
00:24:28 ►
and wrest a secret like atomic fusion from it
00:24:33 ►
and then carry that out is astonishing.
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And it may be that history,
00:24:40 ►
which lasts in the technical phase 25,000 years, something like that.
00:24:46 ►
I mean, if you go back just 15,000 years, it’s a pretty bare-wires scene.
00:24:52 ►
So the whole thing is a wink of an eye, you know,
00:24:56 ►
a geological instant from somebody getting the idea
00:25:00 ►
that you could flake flint off a core to the idea that you could send a starship to zeta
00:25:09 ►
retic and you know
00:25:26 ►
it would be the final irony
00:25:27 ►
if we spent a huge
00:25:30 ►
amount of time hammering on
00:25:32 ►
each other to get rid of nuclear
00:25:34 ►
weapons and stop
00:25:36 ►
cutting the rainforests and stuff
00:25:38 ►
like that and then
00:25:40 ►
one of these planetesimals
00:25:42 ►
contacted the earth and we all died
00:25:44 ►
instantly this thing that passed
00:25:46 ►
by at a half lunar distance in january it was not detected until five days later had it actually
00:25:54 ►
impacted the earth you would never have known what hit you this thing which killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago it raised a tidal
00:26:06 ►
wave 5 miles high
00:26:08 ►
that moved out from the
00:26:10 ►
impact point at 5 times
00:26:12 ►
the speed of sound
00:26:13 ►
can you picture a tidal wave
00:26:15 ►
5 miles high moving at Mach
00:26:18 ►
5? I mean we’re talking
00:26:20 ►
major
00:26:21 ►
smush here
00:26:23 ►
and
00:26:24 ►
yeah right talking major smush here. And the evidence is there that this happens,
00:26:31 ►
that these things are not rare,
00:26:33 ►
that it will happen again.
00:26:35 ►
I mean, if you take a long enough time span,
00:26:38 ►
they say it’s a certainty.
00:26:40 ►
Take it to the bank.
00:26:41 ►
But still the earth survived.
00:26:43 ►
So when you say, do you mean…
00:26:45 ►
Well, it survived.
00:26:46 ►
This thing which killed the dinosaurs,
00:26:49 ►
nothing larger than a chicken walked away from it.
00:26:52 ►
On this planet, nothing larger than a chicken.
00:26:56 ►
Okay, so that’s the bad news.
00:26:58 ►
The good news is the flowering plants
00:27:01 ►
evolved in the wake of that catastrophe.
00:27:05 ►
The mammals got their purchase.
00:27:07 ►
They were egg-stealing weasels up till that point.
00:27:11 ►
And then this opened up an opportunity for them to rush in and exfoliate all kinds of different forms.
00:27:20 ►
The earth has faced outrageous crises in its history.
00:27:24 ►
The earth has faced outrageous crises in its history.
00:27:34 ►
At a very distant point in the history of the earth, anaerobic life dominated the earth. And then it began to produce oxygen as a toxic byproduct.
00:27:39 ►
Oxygen was as toxic to the early life forms on earth as plutonium is to us.
00:27:46 ►
And yet, strategies were evolved,
00:27:50 ►
and this huge problem was gone around,
00:27:53 ►
and we then are the result of this.
00:27:55 ►
So, yes, there is no moral, there is finally no moral judgment.
00:28:01 ►
There’s just, you know, shit happens.
00:28:03 ►
That seems to be the rule,
00:28:29 ►
and then you can think it’s good or bad or indifferent. But that’s not the human point of view. The human point of view is that we have something very precious here that we want to conserve, that we want to carry through any conceivable catastrophe. And so technology may be a strategy for this. This is why it’s very important for us to think about reality on different levels.
00:28:36 ►
I started out by talking about philosophical reality,
00:28:40 ►
something for elderly people to discuss in book-lined parlors.
00:28:46 ►
But there’s also stuff like,
00:28:47 ►
what is the reality of our circumstance in this star swarm, in this galaxy?
00:28:54 ►
Are we safe or are we imperiled?
00:28:57 ►
What should we be doing?
00:28:59 ►
Is it okay?
00:29:01 ►
Should we be worrying about saving the rainforests?
00:29:04 ►
Or is that preposterous in the light of what we’re facing?
00:29:09 ►
And how can we know?
00:29:11 ►
What is to be done?
00:29:13 ►
The Tolstoyan question.
00:29:16 ►
What is to be done?
00:29:18 ►
You can’t begin to answer that question until you have some notion of what reality is. And at this stage, in trying
00:29:28 ►
to understand what reality is, all processes seem to me to be deconstructive. We need to take apart
00:29:35 ►
our languages, our cultural assumptions, the geological history of this planet, the biological history, the astrophysical nature, the structures in which we’re embedded in. We need to awaken to our true circumstance, the dreams that culture gives us, that we should be good Nazis or good Buddhists or Goodwitoto. These are just illusions that are temporary delusions
00:30:10 ►
which make possible the business of culture.
00:30:14 ►
But something now is happening that is different.
00:30:18 ►
We are becoming a global civilization.
00:30:22 ►
Power is being given into our hands that is truly power on a cosmic scale.
00:30:29 ►
I mean, what difference did it make when bronze-tipped spears were the heaviest thing
00:30:34 ►
anybody could bring to bear on any problem? But once you can blow the earth apart, like putting
00:30:40 ►
a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple, then you actually become actors on a cosmic scale.
00:30:50 ►
And this is the situation in which we find ourselves.
00:30:53 ►
This is why there’s a certain urgency, I think,
00:30:57 ►
because I totally disagree with people who think that human history can be seen wandering aimlessly
00:31:09 ►
into the millennia of the future
00:31:11 ►
with faster spacecraft
00:31:14 ►
and better packaged foods
00:31:18 ►
and more effective forms
00:31:21 ►
of psychotherapy and so forth
00:31:23 ►
this seems to me preposterous. Obviously,
00:31:27 ►
human history is some kind
00:31:28 ►
of self-limiting process that
00:31:30 ►
is seeking to maximize something.
00:31:33 ►
And if you look
00:31:34 ►
over what we’ve been doing,
00:31:36 ►
it seems like what we’re trying to maximize
00:31:38 ►
is an ability to release energy.
00:31:41 ►
Well, there may be more
00:31:42 ►
exotic ways to release energy
00:31:44 ►
than thermonuclear fusion,
00:31:47 ►
but thermonuclear fusion is a huge leap in the order of magnitude of the kind of energy
00:31:56 ►
that you can release. I mean, before nuclear fusion, the biggest explosion, the biggest
00:32:02 ►
release of energy that anybody could create was some kind of conventional bomb of some sort, which didn’t amount to zip except in the place where it happened to be dropped.
00:32:15 ►
Nuclear weapons are a whole other thing. all our religious fantasies about the end of the world, that was harmless enough stuff
00:32:26 ►
when all we could do is split each other’s heads open.
00:32:31 ►
Well, okay, so that’s perhaps enough
00:32:33 ►
about the point of view of straight science
00:32:35 ►
because I doubt there are very many people in this room
00:32:38 ►
who actually practice that kind of science.
00:32:42 ►
A point that should be made about reality
00:32:47 ►
that comes slightly closer to the experience of each of us
00:32:51 ►
is for society to work for reality
00:32:56 ►
always in quotes
00:32:58 ►
to work
00:32:59 ►
we have to assume that we are sharing the same reality.
00:33:06 ►
And there are different levels on which this assumption operates.
00:33:10 ►
For instance, many of you have heard me talk about the slippery vicissitudes of language.
00:33:19 ►
That in fact, we are communicating, we are most in agreement
00:33:26 ►
when we are silent with each other
00:33:29 ►
because then our assumptions
00:33:31 ►
about how we’re in agreement
00:33:33 ►
are able to fully unfurl themselves
00:33:36 ►
but all it takes
00:33:37 ►
is somebody breaking that silence
00:33:41 ►
and stating the contents of their mind
00:33:44 ►
for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us.
00:33:50 ►
Because it turns out, you know, I think it’s one way, you think it’s another.
00:33:55 ►
I believe we’re doing X, you think we’re doing Y.
00:33:59 ►
I think we’re serving so-and-so and you think we’re serving somebody else.
00:34:02 ►
think we’re serving so-and-so and you think we’re serving somebody else.
00:34:04 ►
And this is why,
00:34:05 ►
you know, I think
00:34:07 ►
great relationships are built
00:34:10 ►
in silence
00:34:11 ►
because then nobody ever
00:34:13 ►
finds out what’s really going on.
00:34:16 ►
Did you want to say something?
00:34:17 ►
Yeah, when you’re talking about
00:34:19 ►
science, are you talking about science
00:34:21 ►
the kind of science where
00:34:23 ►
in order for it to be science,
00:34:25 ►
you have to repeat, in a certain situation it has to be repeated and you have to get
00:34:30 ►
the same response, so that that proves out to be a truth?
00:34:35 ►
Yeah, I mean, that’s a good definition of science.
00:34:38 ►
So that when you’re talking about reality in the moment, that that never proves out true because if you’re in
00:34:47 ►
that artistic moment then you never get a repetition you’re getting a
00:34:52 ►
synchronicity where your reality is in tune with with a flow that that the
00:35:04 ►
words I use is like miraculous.
00:35:07 ►
People start showing up when I need them to chop-chop,
00:35:10 ►
and it’s when I let go of my ego and my need for a specific thing
00:35:14 ►
that that flow starts to happen.
00:35:17 ►
And in a scientific world, you need the same thing repeated several times
00:35:22 ►
in order to get it to be a truth.
00:35:24 ►
That’s right. I mean, a good definition of science,
00:35:27 ►
not one that any scientist would be comfortable with.
00:35:30 ►
I mean, they think they’re doing God’s work or something.
00:35:34 ►
But the fact of the matter is, what science is,
00:35:38 ►
is the study of those phenomena so crude
00:35:42 ►
that a return to initial conditions will cause the phenomenon to repeat
00:35:51 ►
itself. Well, if you think about your own life, there’s nothing like that in your own life.
00:35:57 ►
Love affairs, careers, disappointments,
00:36:05 ►
nothing that we experience as human beings has that quality.
00:36:10 ►
So this is the problem with science,
00:36:12 ►
is that in the pursuit of explanation,
00:36:18 ►
it has cut itself off absolutely from making sense of anything in our own lives.
00:36:23 ►
from making sense of anything in our own lives.
00:36:30 ►
That’s why efforts by science to move into the domains of our own lives have not been happy.
00:36:32 ►
Sciences like psychology and sociology are pseudosciences,
00:36:38 ►
as far as I’m concerned,
00:36:40 ►
because the objects they seek to explicate,
00:36:50 ►
because the objects they seek to explicate, personalities in one case and human group interaction in another,
00:37:01 ►
are not scientific phenomena because they don’t fall under the rubric of restoration of initial conditions allows the same situation to unfold.
00:37:05 ►
But I want to point out,
00:37:06 ►
go further than this.
00:37:07 ►
Well, first of all,
00:37:09 ►
let me say one more thing about that.
00:37:10 ►
Maybe what you just said is not quite true
00:37:11 ►
because if you were able to
00:37:13 ►
provide the whole set
00:37:16 ►
of same initial conditions,
00:37:18 ►
which is impossible to provide,
00:37:20 ►
but if you were able to provide
00:37:21 ►
exactly the same circumstances,
00:37:23 ►
there is a chance that that may happen.
00:37:25 ►
The problem is that you are not able to understand what all the initial conditions are.
00:37:30 ►
No, I think that since the invention of the probability calculus, that’s not even believed anymore.
00:37:38 ►
In other words, the idea used to be that if you think of the universal history as a film,
00:37:46 ►
that if you ran it back to the beginning and then hit the start button again,
00:37:51 ►
everything will happen exactly like it happened before,
00:37:55 ►
and I will be born in poor but humble circumstances in a Colorado mining town.
00:38:02 ►
But I think now the understanding is
00:38:06 ►
that only generally would the same things happen,
00:38:10 ►
and that even in orthodox science,
00:38:13 ►
probability allows for slight deviation.
00:38:18 ►
So it isn’t an absolute determinism.
00:38:20 ►
Well, I don’t believe that,
00:38:22 ►
because my feeling is that what we are just saying is that we
00:38:27 ►
don’t understand what’s happening, and the probability is just saying, more or less,
00:38:31 ►
I guess that it’s going to be around there. I just have some idea of what’s happening.
00:38:35 ►
But it’s saying, I’m not understanding the process really well, and therefore I can guide
00:38:41 ►
you approximately where you’re going.
00:38:42 ►
So do you think that if we could return to the initial conditions of the Big Bang
00:38:47 ►
and have it happen again, that five billion years later
00:38:52 ►
I would be sitting here with the same amount of change in my pocket as I have right now?
00:38:57 ►
I don’t believe that we could do that.
00:39:00 ►
Well, you brought it up.
00:39:03 ►
We could go back to the big bang
00:39:05 ►
and be back there
00:39:06 ►
but what I’m saying is that
00:39:07 ►
the fact that you’re saying that
00:39:09 ►
if you go back to the same initial conditions
00:39:11 ►
then it’s going to replace itself
00:39:13 ►
that statement is not true
00:39:14 ►
it’s not true either
00:39:15 ►
well see the problem is
00:39:17 ►
there’s only one set of initial conditions
00:39:20 ►
that are truly initial
00:39:21 ►
which is the big bang
00:39:23 ►
all other sets of initial conditions are embedded in some larger surround
00:39:30 ►
where everything has changed.
00:39:33 ►
I mean, for instance, if we say, you know,
00:39:37 ►
well, we can never restore initial conditions.
00:39:41 ►
The planets have moved.
00:39:43 ►
The stars are older.
00:39:47 ►
How can we restore the initial conditions? The planets have moved. The stars are older. How can we restore the initial conditions? Everything only happens once and then it never repeats itself.
00:39:57 ►
But I’m plowing toward this thing. But I want to say one more thing
00:40:05 ►
I’ll subvert myself
00:40:08 ►
that is, in order to do its work
00:40:11 ►
science had to, and this happened with Descartes
00:40:14 ►
it had to take the things that are most dear to us
00:40:18 ►
colors, taste
00:40:20 ►
feeling
00:40:22 ►
tactility
00:40:24 ►
and it defined those things as what it calls taste, feeling, tactility,
00:40:25 ►
and it defined those things as what it calls secondary qualities.
00:40:31 ►
Basically, this is a way of saying they’re not important.
00:40:34 ►
None of that is important.
00:40:37 ►
And what is important are primary qualities,
00:40:40 ►
spin, velocity, angular momentum, charge.
00:40:47 ►
Strangely enough, things none of us have a very intuitive grasp of,
00:40:51 ►
nor do we ever encounter these things in any naked form.
00:40:57 ►
They’re always embedded in matter.
00:41:00 ►
So science, in order to do its work,
00:41:03 ►
basically had to define the universe of feeling, emotionality, and immediacy as somehow peripheral, derivative, epiphenomenal, unimportant. or consciously. We are the victims of this kind of denigration
00:41:25 ►
of what we intuitively feel to be important,
00:41:30 ►
which is immediate experience.
00:41:33 ►
And immediate experience is not an object
00:41:37 ►
for scientific inquiry.
00:41:39 ►
Never has been, never will be.
00:41:41 ►
I mean, these pseudosciences fiddle with it a little bit,
00:41:44 ►
but the first thing they do when they study, for instance, human behavior,
00:41:49 ►
is they don’t study, they take it, they set up an experimental situation,
00:41:55 ►
which is not like any human behavior you’ve ever dealt with before,
00:41:59 ►
like either looking at screens and pushing buttons,
00:42:03 ►
or receiving electric shocks if you get right answers and stuff like that.
00:42:07 ►
I mean, how many times do we find ourselves in a situation
00:42:10 ►
where if we get a right answer, we avoid an electric shock?
00:42:14 ►
I mean, it’s absurd.
00:42:16 ►
However, then, there is a further distancing from reality that takes place
00:42:24 ►
that is not to be laid at the feet of science,
00:42:28 ►
although to discuss it we have to use scientific terminology. And that is, it goes like this.
00:42:34 ►
We all assume that if we are, I just stated how what a great thing silence was for building shared assumptions.
00:42:46 ►
So if we are all silent
00:42:49 ►
and we look around us in this room,
00:42:52 ►
we do tend to make the assumption
00:42:55 ►
that we all see the same thing,
00:42:59 ►
that we are all sharing the experience of the room.
00:43:03 ►
But when you analyze perception,
00:43:06 ►
you discover a very weird thing about perception.
00:43:10 ►
For instance, let’s take the primary sense in human beings,
00:43:14 ►
which is sight.
00:43:16 ►
We trust our eyes.
00:43:17 ►
We believe that our eyes tell us something about immediate reality.
00:43:25 ►
However, if you analyze what sight is, what seeing is,
00:43:30 ►
it’s that light reflected off surfaces pours into a sensory organ
00:43:36 ►
and then is transduced through a series of neurological transforms
00:43:41 ►
into an interiorized model of the immediate surround.
00:43:48 ►
The problem with this is that the light which enters my eyes is entirely mine.
00:43:57 ►
You don’t get any of it.
00:43:59 ►
And the light which enters your eyes is entirely yours.
00:44:03 ►
Not a single photon is ever shared by two people.
00:44:08 ►
If it’s my photon, it can’t be yours.
00:44:11 ►
Because photons can only be in a very discreetly defined area of space.
00:44:18 ►
In this case, in my retina.
00:44:20 ►
So everything I’m seeing is entirely opaque to you, hidden, occult, and everything you’re seeing is entirely opaque and hidden to me. We are truly prisoners of our unique perception.
00:44:39 ►
So, it’s a miracle that we can build models where we get any sort of shared consensus out of it at all.
00:44:46 ►
Terence, may I say something?
00:44:48 ►
Sure.
00:44:49 ►
You’re driving the tape editor mad.
00:44:51 ►
You can turn this around,
00:44:53 ►
because the twin photon experiment
00:44:55 ►
shows, in fact, that there’s no way
00:44:58 ►
that a photon can be considered as an individual object.
00:45:02 ►
I mean, what the experiment demonstrates
00:45:04 ►
is that every photon fills the entire universe.
00:45:09 ►
Well, it demonstrates it by the fiat of a fishy formula,
00:45:13 ►
don’t you think?
00:45:14 ►
No, I think it’s…
00:45:16 ►
Well, why not?
00:45:19 ►
How do you explain the interference pattern?
00:45:22 ►
Well, I think that explaining it,
00:45:24 ►
it’s not really explainable
00:45:26 ►
in the sense of if you mean
00:45:27 ►
how do you reduce it to a linear logic,
00:45:30 ►
you don’t.
00:45:32 ►
It’s pretty mysterious.
00:45:34 ►
Well, it does come out of a linear.
00:45:36 ►
I mean, it ends up you have to assume
00:45:38 ►
that the photon goes through both slips
00:45:40 ►
and you get the interference pattern
00:45:41 ►
as a linear superposition of the…
00:45:44 ►
So it is, in a sense, linear.
00:45:47 ►
But what I would argue is,
00:45:50 ►
since a photon is not a little particle,
00:45:54 ►
it’s something else.
00:45:56 ►
I mean, at least one of its properties is that it fills the entire universe
00:45:59 ►
and can interfere.
00:46:00 ►
One could understand that we’re all receiving, in fact, the same photon.
00:46:07 ►
Every photon that goes in my eye goes in everybody else’s well but when you say it fills the entire universe
00:46:10 ►
it fills some parts of the universe much more than others
00:46:15 ►
that’s the probability
00:46:17 ►
yes and that’s what gives it its particulate nature
00:46:20 ►
is that it tends
00:46:22 ►
it is technically everywhere
00:46:24 ►
but it’s is technically everywhere but
00:46:25 ►
it’s
00:46:28 ►
only technically everywhere
00:46:29 ►
in any practical sense
00:46:31 ►
whenever we carry out a measurement
00:46:34 ►
on it and seeing is a kind
00:46:36 ►
of collapse of this quantum
00:46:37 ►
vector then it appears to be
00:46:40 ►
particulate
00:46:41 ►
that’s absolutely right we’ve only ever observed
00:46:43 ►
photons but the effects we observe
00:46:46 ►
like the interference pattern
00:46:48 ►
is not particulate
00:46:49 ►
you can’t explain it
00:46:50 ►
that’s right
00:46:51 ►
so even though that photon that goes through your eyes
00:46:54 ►
mostly goes through yours
00:46:55 ►
and only a little bit goes through mine
00:46:57 ►
you can’t ignore the bit that goes through mine
00:46:59 ►
because there are lots and lots of examples
00:47:01 ►
but don’t you think that the experiments
00:47:04 ►
which prove this kind of
00:47:06 ►
thing are
00:47:07 ►
depend on
00:47:10 ►
such a vast
00:47:12 ►
chain of assumptions
00:47:14 ►
that the experiment
00:47:16 ►
itself becomes
00:47:18 ►
highly questionable
00:47:20 ►
I mean first of all
00:47:22 ►
the first assumption that’s made
00:47:24 ►
that is absolutely outside the realm of proof
00:47:26 ►
is that mathematics has something to say about reality.
00:47:31 ►
And we could actually have spent the entire evening on this,
00:47:34 ►
except that it probably would clear the room
00:47:36 ►
of all but the most hardcore.
00:47:39 ►
But no one has ever shown
00:47:42 ►
why operations
00:47:45 ►
with numbers
00:47:47 ►
which are after all entities
00:47:49 ►
only met with in the confines
00:47:52 ►
of the minds of anthropoid
00:47:53 ►
apes should somehow
00:47:55 ►
have this overwhelming
00:47:58 ►
relationship
00:47:59 ►
to reality
00:48:01 ►
what is the relationship of mathematics
00:48:03 ►
to what we call reality? The fact is, nobody
00:48:07 ►
knows. It’s a deep mystery. Well, then when you talk about experiments, the assumptions,
00:48:13 ►
the hidden assumptions behind any experimentalist approach are usually so great that once made explicit, the experimental method is seen to be simply the servant of a formal theory
00:48:29 ►
and can’t be seen to serve truth at all.
00:48:33 ►
Do you agree with that?
00:48:34 ►
Yeah, I do.
00:48:36 ►
I mean, that’s what you end up facing,
00:48:38 ►
is the fact that it’s our concepts that are creating the reality.
00:48:41 ►
And so even the assumption that there’s a surface out there that’s reflecting a light,
00:48:46 ►
it’s not an assumption that a physicist would make.
00:48:48 ►
Because if we made that assumption, we couldn’t get anywhere.
00:48:51 ►
I mean, it just doesn’t work.
00:48:53 ►
That’s right.
00:48:54 ►
I think the purpose of this evening is to show
00:48:58 ►
that reality is a naive concept
00:49:01 ►
and should probably be abandoned as quickly as possible
00:49:06 ►
well reality from this
00:49:11 ►
when I hear this reality from a standpoint of physical explanations
00:49:16 ►
which always, which seem like red herrings in some way
00:49:20 ►
to me is that if there’s
00:49:23 ►
speaking from sort of what would be a more spiritual viewpoint,
00:49:28 ►
that sort of the physical plane and things matter and everything falls out from more
00:49:36 ►
archetypical or something that has a less or more spiritual meaning, which I don’t have
00:49:44 ►
so much a reality problem with.
00:49:47 ►
That seems more real to you,
00:49:51 ►
this invisible dimension of eternal objects
00:49:56 ►
that are casting a lower dimensional shadow
00:49:58 ►
into the stream of time
00:50:00 ►
and giving rise to appearances.
00:50:04 ►
Yeah, that’s what you mean, isn’t it? I took the words right out of the… time and giving rise to appearances well I think this is
00:50:12 ►
why Greek philosophy was able
00:50:14 ►
to do business so successfully
00:50:16 ►
is that this seems
00:50:18 ►
intuitively true to most
00:50:20 ►
people it’s sort of like
00:50:22 ►
campfire philosophy
00:50:23 ►
if you just sit down and try to figure it out,
00:50:28 ►
there’s something in the human mind. I mean, I suppose it’s self-referential if we call it
00:50:34 ►
archetypes, but there’s something in the human mind that causes us to gravitate toward this
00:50:39 ►
Platonic point of view. The problem is it’s very naive, and the naivete of Platonism has never
00:50:47 ►
seemed to erode its success. I mean it’s been converting sophomores for 3,000
00:50:53 ►
years almost but in a way the great victory of modern thinking and I’m
00:51:00 ►
amazed to hear myself say this because I’m a Platonist through and through but you have to be a modified Platonist
00:51:07 ►
or you will end up running up against impossible problems with it
00:51:12 ►
for instance, you know
00:51:13 ►
if these archetypes are eternal
00:51:17 ►
well then what was their
00:51:19 ►
if the archetype of the human love affair
00:51:23 ►
is eternal
00:51:24 ►
then are we asked to believe that the archetype of the human love affair is eternal,
00:51:29 ►
then are we asked to believe that the archetype of the human love affair existed before the Big Bang?
00:51:32 ►
Did the law of gene segregation exist before the Big Bang?
00:51:38 ►
This is what Rupert’s always at such pains to talk about.
00:51:41 ►
Natural laws.
00:51:43 ►
I mean, what is the status of these natural laws before the
00:51:48 ►
appearance of the universe? Is there a kind of hyperspace of eternity? And then why are these
00:51:54 ►
natural laws as they are? It seems much more economical and intuitively less problem-fraught
00:52:05 ►
to assume that the so-called laws of nature
00:52:09 ►
are actually habits of nature
00:52:12 ►
that are changing through time as the universe evolves and changes.
00:52:17 ►
And, I mean, I don’t think it makes any sense
00:52:19 ►
to talk about the law of gene segregation
00:52:21 ►
before there was organic life.
00:52:26 ►
I mean, how could there be a law of gene segregation before there was organic life I mean how could there be a law of gene segregation
00:52:28 ►
I mean it just gets too
00:52:30 ►
too
00:52:32 ►
patched together
00:52:34 ►
as a theory
00:52:36 ►
don’t you think
00:52:37 ►
I think that you’re introducing
00:52:42 ►
those are loaded
00:52:43 ►
problems that you’re to talk about the Big Bang as itself, you know, in a whole time and etc.
00:52:55 ►
Well, what do you think the status of these archetypes is? Do they require a universe or are they there whether there is a universe of space, time, and matter?
00:53:07 ►
I don’t know.
00:53:08 ►
It seems that that’s only a problem if you’re thinking of time
00:53:11 ►
in a normal type of progression,
00:53:14 ►
in normal types of causal relationships.
00:53:17 ►
So it seems that’s to refute the idea of an eternal archetype
00:53:22 ►
because of, well, do they exist before this?
00:53:26 ►
So you want to substitute a Boolean logic here.
00:53:32 ►
Well, we could say, for instance,
00:53:34 ►
we could invert the causality of the universe
00:53:37 ►
and say that the platonic objects exist at the end of time
00:53:43 ►
and that they cast their influence backwards through time.
00:53:47 ►
And we could even define an archetype as that class of objects
00:53:52 ►
whose casuistry runs counter to the ordinary arrow of time.
00:53:58 ►
I never thought of that before.
00:54:00 ►
It’s probably fraught with epistemic peril,
00:54:03 ►
but somebody might want to work out the consequences
00:54:08 ►
of that it’s the idea you see that is now very hot in in chaos theory that that there is an
00:54:16 ►
attractor rather than an impeller that it isn’t that there was a big bang and everything is moving out from the big bang and physics is the unraveling of the consequences of this initial improbability.
00:54:31 ►
It’s rather the idea that there is a telos of some sort, a purpose,
00:54:36 ►
that is drawing phenomena into some kind of concrescence that occurs
00:54:42 ►
not at the beginning of the causal process but at its end and I tend
00:54:48 ►
to lean toward that but not in so hard a fashion that I would want to locate the archetypes at the
00:54:56 ►
end of history I think you know I think Platonism is a naive view of reality and that it’s something we pass through
00:55:07 ►
in our intellectual process of maturation
00:55:11 ►
and that you always want to maintain
00:55:14 ►
the idea of the archetype,
00:55:16 ►
but it has to be severely modified
00:55:18 ►
to meet some of the problems
00:55:20 ►
that have been discovered
00:55:22 ►
in the last couple of thousand years
00:55:25 ►
of doing that kind of philosophy.
00:55:30 ►
Sure, go ahead.
00:55:31 ►
Is it based on altered states that I’ve been in
00:55:35 ►
where returning to a more ordinary state,
00:55:39 ►
I have the sense clearly that everything,
00:55:41 ►
all this material, all the events,
00:55:44 ►
and everything is a fallout from some drama that I’m a part of.
00:55:49 ►
All my ideas, I mean all my, including, you know, whatever I might construct about time and the whole thing.
00:55:59 ►
And so then I’m left with that sort of quandary about no matter what I construct
00:56:05 ►
and what experiments might do about our physicists,
00:56:08 ►
it’s all to just confirm this other drama that’s happening.
00:56:14 ►
It happens an infinite number of times and with infinite variations, etc.
00:56:20 ►
Sort of the point that I would like to make is the point you’re making, that reality is, if explored at all, if stressed, if pushed, it breaks apart.
00:56:37 ►
The concept isn’t viable.
00:56:39 ►
The first thing to realize is where is it writ large that anthropoid apes should be able to reach the
00:56:47 ►
bedrock of reality? Why should we imagine that beings like ourselves are somehow divinely charged
00:56:55 ►
with the opportunity to perceive the truth of the matter? This is what modern philosophy has come to
00:57:02 ►
understand. This is why Wittgenstein could come up with the notion of what he called true enough.
00:57:11 ►
That’s a much more reasonable approach to things.
00:57:15 ►
I mean, after all, we’re monkeys.
00:57:18 ►
And so what we need is models that are true enough
00:57:22 ►
and leave God alone in his or her heaven
00:57:26 ►
and just work with the things
00:57:28 ►
that are rationally apprehendable to us.
00:57:32 ►
You mention altered states
00:57:35 ►
and I think if it weren’t for altered states
00:57:38 ►
our epistemic naivete would be much greater
00:57:42 ►
because we could all just fall into
00:57:43 ►
the culturally sanctioned
00:57:45 ►
hallucination that this is in fact reality. But we all know from experiencing altered states
00:57:53 ►
that this is just some kind of agreed upon socially sanctioned construct that when you lean against it with drugs or philosophy or insight,
00:58:07 ►
it breaks up under the pressure of that.
00:58:11 ►
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned
00:58:17 ►
and linguistically reinforced hallucination of some sort.
00:58:22 ►
And we can go outside of that hallucination
00:58:26 ►
either by using drugs
00:58:29 ►
or physical practices like yoga
00:58:32 ►
or simply by going outside of our reality.
00:58:36 ►
I mean, when you go to an Amazon tribe,
00:58:39 ►
all these things that you think are so important,
00:58:43 ►
you know, how the giants are doing or what’s happening on
00:58:47 ►
Wall Street or how the Democrats are getting their act together. Nobody knows what in the world
00:58:54 ►
you’re talking about. It is literally not real. And what’s real is, you know, how the fish are
00:59:01 ►
spawning in the river and honey production that year.
00:59:05 ►
They have their own culturally sanctioned hallucination.
00:59:10 ►
Well, then when you take psychedelic drugs,
00:59:13 ►
you seem to dissolve the software of neurological processing.
00:59:22 ►
And language is that software
00:59:25 ►
that has been created to handle
00:59:27 ►
certain kinds of cultural modalities.
00:59:29 ►
Well, then you, like, penetrate beyond the screen,
00:59:34 ►
if we think, if you want to use a computer metaphor,
00:59:36 ►
and instead you discover there’s assembly language
00:59:40 ►
in the machine, and it’s deep in the machine,
00:59:44 ►
and is rarely encountered except by
00:59:47 ►
hackers i mean that’s what you’re doing when you’re taking psychedelic drugs is you’re
00:59:52 ►
opening the cabinet you’re going into the machinery all those areas where it says the
00:59:59 ►
warranty will be voided if you remove this plate.
01:00:05 ►
Those are the plates that you’re unscrewing
01:00:08 ►
and poking inside of,
01:00:10 ►
voiding the warranty on your model of reality.
01:00:16 ►
And we don’t know to what degree this can go on.
01:00:21 ►
I recently was approached by the publishers Underwood Miller,
01:00:27 ►
and they asked me,
01:00:29 ►
some of you may know the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
01:00:34 ►
He came in the last five years of his life
01:00:37 ►
to believe that he was, in a sense,
01:00:41 ►
trapped inside one of his own novels.
01:00:44 ►
And he was the master of the parallel
01:00:48 ►
universe novel he worked this theme so many ways i mean he was brilliant at it and he underwent a
01:00:55 ►
series of experiences that we can’t really judge i mean it’s too facile to call it a psychotic break. And he spent the last 10 years of his life trying to understand what was happening to himself.
01:01:11 ►
And he reached the conclusion that the year AD 70 was followed immediately by the year 1948.
01:01:24 ►
was followed immediately by the year 1948 and that the intervening couple of thousand years
01:01:30 ►
were like a textual interpolation by a demo urge
01:01:34 ►
and that none of that ever happened
01:01:37 ►
that we are actually living in the last years of the Roman Empire
01:01:42 ►
that we are living in patristic time. And he saw superimposed over
01:01:48 ►
ordinary reality, another reality which he was fully engaged in, living in. He was a person in
01:01:56 ►
this place and this time. Well, is that a serious delusion or a breaking through?
01:02:06 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:09 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:15 ►
Are you a figment of my imagination or am I one of yours?
01:02:19 ►
Which is a line from a movie that I once liked.
01:02:22 ►
Or, as the Bard McKenna just asked,
01:02:25 ►
are we all seriously deluded about the true nature of reality?
01:02:30 ►
Not small questions at all, are they?
01:02:33 ►
So, was Terrence getting spacey enough for you this time?
01:02:37 ►
I guess that I shouldn’t still be surprised when I hear him say something
01:02:40 ►
that not only I hadn’t heard him talk about before,
01:02:43 ►
but when he comes up with things that I hadn’t even thought of before, well, it really blows me away.
01:02:49 ►
This time it was the thought that perhaps archetypes are created by the flow of time
01:02:54 ►
and are reflected back on us.
01:02:57 ►
Maybe he didn’t say it exactly like that, but that’s how I’m now thinking about it.
01:03:01 ►
What if, like Rupert Sheldrake proposes, and natural laws are actually
01:03:06 ►
more like habits, then what if archetypes are also a sort of a reflecting kind of habit?
01:03:12 ►
It’s fun to think about anyway, don’t you think? Now, I don’t want to get all woo-woo on you here,
01:03:19 ►
but the story of Terence McKenna’s concern about the possibility of an asteroid impact on Earth has not yet come to a completion.
01:03:27 ►
The story is still unfolding.
01:03:30 ►
I can’t remember if I played it here in one of the podcasts, but one night when I was staying at Bruce Dahmer’s house,
01:03:36 ►
back when we were digitizing all of Ralph Abraham’s recordings of the trilogues,
01:03:41 ►
we got to talking about the last night that Bruce and Terrence spent together
01:03:45 ►
at Terrence’s house in Hawaii. It was late at night and Bruce and Terrence were just kind of
01:03:50 ►
kicking back and talking about a wide range of things when Terrence asked Bruce about this
01:03:55 ►
problem of an asteroid impact. So for a couple of hours, the two of them kicked the idea around,
01:04:01 ►
mainly with Bruce doing most of the talking since he was already involved with NASA and the space program.
01:04:08 ►
And what Bruce told me is that although he’d been thinking about the project for some time,
01:04:13 ►
this was actually the first time he discussed his ideas about how to capture an asteroid,
01:04:18 ►
and the first time he talked about it with anybody else.
01:04:21 ►
Now let’s fast forward a few years to 2007, and we find Bruce now deep into his work with NASA,
01:04:29 ►
and he and Rob Landis of NASA’s Johnson Space Center authored a proposal titled
01:04:35 ►
Human Crewed Mission to a Near-Earth Orbit, or Bootprints on Asteroids. Now I won’t bore you
01:04:43 ►
with the details, but if you’ve been paying attention to the news releases about the U.S. space program,
01:04:48 ►
you know that capturing asteroids has become a hot topic.
01:04:52 ►
And as progress is made, I’ll be sure that you are among the very first to know,
01:04:56 ►
but one of the more exciting concepts being explored is to capture an asteroid,
01:05:02 ►
move it into moon orbit, and then mine it for precious
01:05:05 ►
metals. But the really big payoff is that projects like that will also develop the technology
01:05:12 ►
required to push large objects that threaten the Earth out of the way and prevent future
01:05:17 ►
calamities, such as the one that took out the dinosaurs. In fact, developing that kind
01:05:22 ►
of technology may even be the main reason that Mother Earth continues to put up with us goofy humans.
01:05:29 ►
Gaia may forgive a lot of the messes us humans have made if we can actually keep space rocks from smashing into her.
01:05:35 ►
But even if that’s just poetic fancy, the technological achievement would be very significant.
01:05:43 ►
Now in closing for today, I’d like to go back to something that Terence said
01:05:46 ►
about six minutes into his talk.
01:05:49 ►
He asked the question,
01:05:51 ►
how can we take control of the reality-creating machinery?
01:05:55 ►
I think that this is probably more than a casual question,
01:05:59 ►
and maybe it can only be answered on an individual level,
01:06:03 ►
not on the level of entire civilizations.
01:06:06 ►
But yet, at their heart, what are civilizations but oceans of individuals?
01:06:12 ►
And how pacific an ocean can be when all of its drops of water
01:06:16 ►
have created a peaceful reality for themselves and for the drops closest to them?
01:06:22 ►
And whether consciously or not, at this very moment you are creating your own reality.
01:06:28 ►
May it flow gently for you.
01:06:30 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:06:34 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.