472 - The Timewave & The Watkins Objection

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.”

“In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.”

“I would argue that it’s almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you’re doing heroin you’re responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you’re mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?”

“If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.”

“My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.”

“I think of the mainland as Blade Runner Land.”

“Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.”

“I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.”

Hyperborea - Terence McKenna’s Website
Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination? by Matthew Watkins Introduction by Terence McKenna
2012 and the “Watkins Objection” to Terence McKenna’s “Timewave Theory” … by Matthew Watkins
Terence McKenna’s Reading List

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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And I hope that you find today’s talk by Terrence McKenna as interesting as I have.

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What I’m about to play for you is the next part of a workshop that he led at Esalen.

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And in my podcast 463, I played the first part of this workshop,

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and the next part you heard in my podcast number 469.

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I’m not sure which one of those it was in but you may recall that Terrence said that a week or so earlier he had been at an entheobotany

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conference in Palenque, Mexico and that it was during this time in Mexico that his major headaches

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first began to appear. And now today we’re going to learn about, well, something else that took place during

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this time in Mexico.

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I’m not saying that these two things are related, only coincidental, sort of amazingly coincidental

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in my opinion though.

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Normally I’d save my commentary for after we listen to today’s talk, but I’m going to

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change gears a bit today and have part of my say right now

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so that you can better grok what I happen to think

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is one of the more fascinating times for Terence,

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times to be conducting a workshop, that is,

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and talking about his time wave hypothesis.

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And please note that, well, at least in my opinion,

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Terence’s concept of a time wave is more of a hypothesis and not really a true theory.

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Anyway, it was at that Palenque conference where Terence had prearranged to meet a young man named Matthew Watkins.

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And they were going to explore ways in which Terence’s hypothesis could be used to deepen his ideas about large prime numbers, his being Watkins.

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deepen his ideas about large prime numbers, his being Watkins.

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And it was over the course of their conversations,

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sitting at the end of the Chan Ka Pool in Palenque,

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that Watkins pointed out a major flaw in Terence’s work on the time wave.

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I’m telling you this now, ahead of the talk, so that you know ahead of time that Watkins hadn’t traveled to meet Terence in order to expose a flaw in his theory,

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or hypothesis, whatever you want to call it.

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They were originally meeting about Watkins’ work with prime numbers.

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And as you’ll hear in this talk,

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Terence was actually kind of shaken with this revelation that had come forth,

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and he hadn’t quite yet come to terms with what could or should follow.

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And you’re going to hear him say,

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There is now on the table something called the Watkins objection, which is hideously

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difficult to understand, but if sustained, probably catastrophic for this theory.

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So what we are privileged to hear today is Terence McKenna perhaps at one of the most fragile moments

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in his professional life.

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He truly didn’t know at the time what his next move was going to be

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other than to return to his home in Hawaii

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and kind of regroup.

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Now the recording that I’m about to play

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begins with Terence wrapping up the morning session

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and talking about the fact that when a new drug comes along, we first have to learn how to use it.

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Then we pick up with the afternoon session, and he gets a question about the time wave write-off,

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making this, at least for me, one of Terrence’s most fascinating talks about the time wave,

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because it may be the only time that he publicly expressed

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some strong doubts about this hypothesis.

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The time wave section of this talk is only about 10 minutes long,

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and from there he does what he always does.

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He waxes eloquent with thoughts like, and I quote,

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this is one of my favorite quotes of Terence now,

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My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused and Tao is perceived as ego.

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Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

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End quote.

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Actually, I’ve never heard a better definition of what it means to become enlightened.

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So there’s much more here than just a time wave discussion.

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As you know, in the past I’ve stopped playing Terrence’s discussions about the time wave.

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And to be honest, I’ve taken quite a bit of criticism from his fans for that.

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The reason that I’m diverting back to it today, though, is that in the Terrence McKenna story, the time wave is a central plot line.

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the time wave is a central plot line.

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And as I said, this may be one of the few times where he publicly spoke so clearly about what actually turned out to be a fatal flaw in the hypothesis.

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And sometimes, you know, he called this the only original idea that he ever had.

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So there was a lot at stake here for Terrence.

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Now, when I come back after we listen to this talk,

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I’ll tell you what happened after Terrence returned to Hawaii

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to sort things out.

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But first, let’s begin with Terrence saying…

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Yeah, an interesting thing about drugs is

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often when a new drug is discovered,

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it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.

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For example, hashish in the 19th century

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was always eaten it was that was how you did it it was inconceivable and if you read the

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descriptions of those trips it was as psychedelic as anything i mean if you read fitzhugh ludlow

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or bayard taylor’s descriptions of hashish intoxication written in the 1850s, they are no less baroque and grandiose and psychedelic than Tim Leary’s descriptions in the 60s. this seems to be what had to happen to cannabis

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to change it into a social drug,

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a drug that you could play music on

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or be in a club on.

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Coca is an interesting one

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because coca, the leaf,

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is a very important part of the lives

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of the people who use it.

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Tim Plowman did research that showed that they were getting

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20 to

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15% of their nutritional

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base was coca.

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It’s a food.

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And in the high Andes

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where the temperature

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is very low, you

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can’t live without coca.

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It keeps you warm. If you go to cocaine,

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this is an addictive and fairly pernicious drug, but not nearly as addicting and pernicious

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if you take it all the way to freebase. Well, cocaine had been around for a hundred years

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before anybody turned it into freebase, and then, of course, it becomes crack cocaine.

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Now we’re seeing the same phenomenon with methadrine.

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You know, motorcycle gangs and people like that love crystal meth.

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But now they’re cooking it down to a freebase and producing this stuff called ice,

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which is a much more pernicious and dangerous drug and very

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hard on your heart. So cultures relate very differently to these things and it takes a

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while to figure out how to do them. In the 60s, if you didn’t take 500 micrograms of

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LSD, you weren’t a player. In the 90s, these little tabs and pieces of paper

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handed out in clubs

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have 50 to 70 micrograms.

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I talked to my son’s friends

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and they’re all excited about LSD

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and they have these little 50s

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and I say,

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well, why don’t you take 10 of them?

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You know,

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and have a 500 mic trip.

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They say,

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you must be nuts.

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Nobody would do that behind you.

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He’s had his hand up a long time.

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And I just wonder, taking the position so prominently that you do about psychedelics,

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are you not concerned about the government sort of cracking down on you to make an example of you?

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No, not really.

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I mean, we still have a constitution

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the last time I looked.

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And I think if they were going to shut me down,

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they should have done it years ago.

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To me, it’s a religious freedom issue.

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I don’t think these things are obligatory,

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that you must do them to be a complete human being.

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That’s preposterous.

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But it’s an option.

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And it’s part of freedom.

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I mean, governments are very uncomfortable with freedom. I mean, governments are very uncomfortable with freedom. If sex could be outlawed, they

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would outlaw it. Ecstasy in all forms makes them very nervous and unsettled.

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Right, because if we were all tripping, like the other cases in the U.S., I mean, surely Well, we have a funny way of thinking about drugs.

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I mean, for example, imagine if in 1948 a drug had been introduced into this country,

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so addictive, so powerful,

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that within a few years every single citizen

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was spending six hours a day loaded to the gills on this drug.

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Well, then everybody would say,

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we just went around the bend and blew out as a society. Well, but in 1948,

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television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness,

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warehoused lives, mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brain. It has a whole profile.

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Blood pools in your ass.

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Your eyes blaze over.

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Your brain states can be recognized

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as those of a television watcher.

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Your digestion goes to hell.

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Your eyes are shot.

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And we think nothing of this

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because we call it a technology not a drug we have very strong

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categorical imperatives operating here I would argue that it’s almost better to do heroin than

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to watch TV at least when you’re doing heroin you’re responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you’re

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mainlining TV, what is it but endless messages to fetishize products and to basically transfer

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your allegiance to various objects, which then can be sold to you. Yeah.

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How did you get a hold of Gerry Mander’s book,

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,

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which I was reading when I started Food of the Gods

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and then blissfully found it in your autobiography

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when I got to that section of the book that you had read it

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from your section on TV?

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Is it out of print now?

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It is out of print, yeah.

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I’ve always been interested in television

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from a McLuhanist point of view. I think a woman named Marie Wynn wrote a book called The Plug-in Drug, in she talks about the neurophysiological changes

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that accompany watching television

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and the dumbing down that occurs in the television environment.

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Well, we didn’t get as far as I hoped we would this morning,

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but we’re now on the edge of technology with this discussion.

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And we will proceed with all this at 4 o’clock this afternoon.

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Probably that was enough talk about strange drugs and states of mind this morning,

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unless somebody has some burning agenda.

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Pharmacotheon.

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Yeah, I was mentioning to somebody, right now in the bookstore here,

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there seems to be an excellent inventory

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of drug books.

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All of Ott’s stuff,

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including Ayahuasca analogs,

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all of my stuff,

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Stolarov’s book,

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Dale Pandell’s new book,

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the reprint of Ernst von Biedra’s book,

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a whole bunch of stuff

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there gathered in one

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place so if you’re looking for that

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stuff

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avail yourself of it, some of those things

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are somewhat hard to find

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he says your books are good

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thank you

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well that

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book

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that’s a good read

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there’s a book called

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Hallucinogens and Shamanism

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edited by Michael Harner

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that is a lot of different articles

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in one set of covers

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articles on ayahuasca

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on tabernacle

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I believe on peyote

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on solanaceous plants.

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It’s a good general intro, and that’s just one book, and it’s there, I noticed.

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Well, so if you have no issues, then it’s up to me.

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Is there anything anybody wants to talk about?

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Yes. Well, the argument for the time wave,

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the psychological argument,

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is that it’s an argument against anxiety

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of a certain unfocused sort

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because it makes a certain kind of generalized prediction

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about the future.

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It tells you where the improbable events are likely to cluster and

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where they are not likely to be encountered. It doesn’t say what will happen, but it tells you

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where to look for interesting and uninteresting events. As you live with it and you confirm for yourself that it works

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if you do

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then your confidence will grow

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has mine?

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well maybe I put it too gently last night

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there is now on the table

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something called the Watkins objection

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which is hideously difficult to understand, but if sustained, probably catastrophic for this theory.

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How do I feel about the Watkins objection?

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About the whole time wave thing at this point.

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Well, my…

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What the time wave thing at this point. Well, my… What the time wave thing is?

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The time wave…

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Actually, we’re sort of ahead of ourselves.

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It’s a theory I have about how things work

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that we will look at tonight in considerable detail.

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So what’s on the table right now

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is a discussion about this objection to it,

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that after 25 years of pleading for criticism,

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someone has come forward with a very complicated criticism

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which may or may not be devastating.

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And to decide whether it’s devastating or not,

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you have to know a lot about it,

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more than is to be expected of anybody here.

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In the next months, this will all be thrashed out at the website.

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In other words, I will write a defense.

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Watkins will restate the objection and the formulas that back it up.

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Ralph will weigh in.

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Broadwell will weigh in, who was the primary

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programmer. Peter Meyer will weigh in, who was the C++

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implementer. And we will all try and figure out

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whether this is shit or shinola that we have on our hands.

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Does that excite you? I mean, is that something that you look over to,

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that process? Well, I mean, is that something that you look over to, that process?

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Well, I wept at first for entirely personal reasons having to do with my alimocenary and financial situation.

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After I had absorbed it, I realized, no, no, it isn’t that it’s finished.

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absorbed it, I realized, no, no, it isn’t that it’s finished. It’s that this is the beginning of the real battle. That before, it’s just this, it was my conjecture, unopposed by anybody.

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And nobody has ever been able to make an objection that lasted longer than 30 seconds.

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Watkins put his finger on a very sensitive area where I myself have had doubts.

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And so now what I have to do is go back to Hawaii,

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and in my very slow and plodding way, in my non-mathematical way, I have to

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sit with the problem and sit with these four-dimensional objects and rotate them in my mind and try

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and sort through the mathematics, the epistemology, the ontology, the experimental method, the nature of falsification, etc., etc.,

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and decide where we are with this.

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So far, I’m the most alarmed person.

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Ralph said,

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you know, it’s just the Watkins objection,

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and then told a story about René Thom,

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who created a whole

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system of mathematics called

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catastrophe theory which then came

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to a screeching halt when

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another mathematician came forward

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with an objection

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which to the two of them were devastating

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but no two other people

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have really grokked

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what the point was

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exactly

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so this all has to be sorted out and it’s sort of what I dreamed of really grokked what the point was exactly.

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So this all has to be sorted out,

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and it’s sort of what I dreamed of.

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My assumption, my personal assumption about the time wave is that it will fail in 2012,

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and that then the rest of my life

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will be spent answering the not earth-shaking but epistemologically interesting to me question,

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why did it seem to work for so long?

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What was the nature of my psychology or the pattern itself or the context of the world that with all my

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epistemological antennae extended and

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all my razors sharpened I still went

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down the same primrose path as all these

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screwballs I deride all the time and

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that’s a very interesting question

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it has to do with the nature of truth

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and delusion and evidence and feedback

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and so forth and so on

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well so suppose then that the Watson objection

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is sustained and we all agree

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that he found this enormous hole

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well then the disconfirmation of the theory

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has arrived not in 2012, but in 96.

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Well, so then we can just move immediately on

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to this question which I anticipate,

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which is, why did it seem to work so long?

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I realize, and Watkins was at pains to point out to me, that a

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lot of people who don’t understand this theory take it very seriously. What they take seriously

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is the prediction that in 2012, at a certain day, at a certain time, this transformation will occur.

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12 at a certain day at a certain time this transformation will occur well it’s fine to take the prediction seriously but if you unless you understand the premises it’s no different

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from the guy who says the ocean is going to move to arizona and the guy who says the continents

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are going to reverse and the person who predicts the magnitude 8 quake on L.A.

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Predictions are never interesting in and of themselves.

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What’s interesting is the method.

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How did you, why do you think

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there will be a magnitude 8 quake in L.A.?

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If angels tell you this,

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I don’t care, you know.

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But if you tell me

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that by taking

00:21:27 ►

the circumference

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of the earth

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and the distance

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of the sun

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and the inverse

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square ratio

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of the weight

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of the planet

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and dividing

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by a polynomial

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of C

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then I’m interested

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you know

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method

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is still bullshit

00:21:41 ►

oh no

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it could easily

00:21:42 ►

be bullshit

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but there’s a way to find

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out. If angels

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tell you, what do we know

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from angels? The demons are of

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many kinds, you know, and some

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speak horseshit, so, yeah.

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When you contemplate, say you’re going to go back

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to Hawaii and contemplate all this,

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what role

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do psychedelics, do you think

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psychedelics play in that conversation for you?

00:22:06 ►

Oh, well, first I will…

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Can you question that goes with that?

00:22:09 ►

Sure.

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I mean, let me ask you an obvious question.

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Was it necessary for you to explore and be a test pilot

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in order to come up with the theory in the first place?

00:22:19 ►

I want to know the other end of his question.

00:22:21 ►

Well, the other end of his question is a 210-page book called True Hallucinations.

00:22:29 ►

Yeah, well, it tells you the sweat-on-the-brow tale of how this stuff got figured out.

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Yeah, no, first I’ll think about the problem,

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and then I’ll take psilocybin and think more about the problem it has

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to do with a very complicated mapping

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question having to do with whether or

00:22:53 ►

not a twist from positive to negative

00:22:58 ►

values at a certain point in the process

00:23:00 ►

is logically constrained or not that’s all I can tell you at this moment.

00:23:06 ►

Those of you who are hackers and have hacked the code,

00:23:11 ►

if you want to see me afterwards, I can say more about it,

00:23:13 ►

but there’s no reason to bore other people with it.

00:23:16 ►

But it’s a technical detail.

00:23:18 ►

The potential for a mistake is there.

00:23:23 ►

And I have always said, you know, that I would not go the route of

00:23:29 ►

the squirrels, that I could handle disconfirmation, that I’m more scientist than guru and pontificator.

00:23:39 ►

You see, the great thing about science is it’s the only human enterprise where you get points for proving you’re wrong.

00:23:48 ►

You know, that’s as good as proving you’re right.

00:23:51 ►

And you get as much respect from your colleagues.

00:23:55 ►

And it’s a strangely ass-backward way to move into knowledge,

00:24:00 ►

but it’s the only way anybody ever found whereby you can keep going indefinitely

00:24:05 ►

if you have other theories of knowledge

00:24:09 ►

inevitably turn into a dogma

00:24:11 ►

a closed system of axiomatic propositions

00:24:15 ►

that answer all objections

00:24:17 ►

so is the short answer

00:24:21 ►

that to some extent at least generally

00:24:23 ►

yes psychedelics play a role in the development of the theory?

00:24:26 ►

Yeah, absolutely.

00:24:27 ►

Do you intend to try to use psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, to go back?

00:24:33 ►

Yeah.

00:24:34 ►

Could you ask the mushroom just flat out, you know, here’s this objection.

00:24:39 ►

What’s the deal?

00:24:40 ►

What’s the deal?

00:24:41 ►

Yeah, of course.

00:24:50 ►

What can the mushroom do? Oh, yes. deal yeah of course oh yes no no Watkins Watkins is a worthy opponent Watkins is

00:24:57 ►

young I dared not ask how young a child, a savant of some sort.

00:25:09 ►

And he was not aggressive.

00:25:11 ►

He was gentle.

00:25:13 ►

He was respectful.

00:25:15 ►

We met because I had a theory of how we could use the time wave

00:25:21 ►

to explore extremely high prime numbers.

00:25:27 ►

So it was to explore a collaboration.

00:25:30 ►

But then we sat down there by the swimming pool with his yellow notepad, and he began to talk.

00:25:35 ►

And it became clear immediately that, you know,

00:25:40 ►

the thousands and thousands and thousands of people

00:25:44 ►

who had come before were as nothing

00:25:47 ►

compared to this one English guy.

00:25:54 ►

Has he published anything?

00:25:55 ►

Oh no, he has no fixed address.

00:25:57 ►

He’s a homeless person with a very sharp pencil.

00:26:03 ►

Did one happen here?

00:26:05 ►

No, no, it happened at Palenque.

00:26:09 ►

Will this upcoming discussion

00:26:11 ►

be available to other people to read?

00:26:14 ►

Oh yeah, it’ll be there.

00:26:16 ►

It’ll be under, there’s a page called Novelty.

00:26:20 ►

And if you go there, there are all kinds of exhibits,

00:26:22 ►

pro and con, the time wave.

00:26:24 ►

And now there will be something called the Watkins Objection.

00:26:29 ►

And possibly under the heading, Autopsy of a Mathematical Hallucination.

00:26:40 ►

It’s lots of fun, actually, all of this.

00:26:44 ►

You just can’t take yourself too seriously.

00:26:47 ►

It’s more fun for me, I think, than for my public,

00:26:50 ►

because my public tends toward mania and humorlessness

00:26:55 ►

in some percentage,

00:26:58 ►

which makes it all very scary then, I think.

00:27:02 ►

If you realize that we are inside some kind of literary construction.

00:27:08 ►

This is, actually, remember I mentioned last night about being in the baths and how it

00:27:13 ►

was like a Fellini movie crossed with a Disney cartoon? Well, I was thinking about that in

00:27:18 ►

bed last night and I said, well, there was a simpler way to say it. The simpler way is, it’s like a Vladimir Nabokov novel.

00:27:27 ►

Do you remember in Lolita,

00:27:29 ►

the movie as well as the novel,

00:27:32 ►

where they go to this motel

00:27:34 ►

for their first encounter,

00:27:36 ►

and the manager of the hotel

00:27:41 ►

is Mr. Harry Schwein,

00:27:44 ►

and he has a very pig-like face.

00:27:48 ►

And he’s introduced by Peter Sellers,

00:27:52 ►

the Humbert Humbert, the Claire Quilty figure

00:27:55 ►

brings him over and introduces him to Humbert Humbert

00:27:59 ►

and says, this is my very good friend, Mr. Harry Schwein.

00:28:03 ►

And the camera closes in and you see this pig-like

00:28:06 ►

face. Well, it was that level of spreading grotesqueness that clues you to the fact that

00:28:14 ►

this is good writing. This is good writing. This doesn’t just happen, this kind of stuff.

00:28:21 ►

This takes effort. Production values are high.

00:28:26 ►

And, you know, who you are in all of this

00:28:29 ►

is a question worth finding out.

00:28:32 ►

This sort of has to do with this thing I’ve been talking about

00:28:34 ►

for a few months about

00:28:36 ►

taking the conclusion that the world is made of language,

00:28:42 ►

which we’ve talked about for years,

00:28:44 ►

but realizing that what the implication of that is

00:28:47 ►

is that you can hack it.

00:28:50 ►

You can hack it in the sense of that you can hack code.

00:28:55 ►

This is a magical understanding.

00:28:57 ►

The world is not given.

00:28:58 ►

It’s not made out of physics.

00:29:00 ►

It’s not a Newtonian machine

00:29:02 ►

running according to partial differential equations. It’s not a Newtonian machine running according to partial differential equations.

00:29:06 ►

It’s a bunch of code and you can hack it and make it the way you want and rewrite the scripts

00:29:15 ►

and change the whole situation around. Yeah.

00:29:19 ►

If that’s true, and I was thinking about the last thing you did here, you said that what you realize on a high dose of GMT

00:29:27 ►

is that the world is magic top to bottom.

00:29:32 ►

If that’s true, then, and if you realize that

00:29:37 ►

under the influence of something like that,

00:29:38 ►

why aren’t we all just doing nothing but sitting here

00:29:41 ►

and visualizing world peace?

00:29:44 ►

Well, this is the question.

00:29:46 ►

If the world is the way we say it is,

00:29:48 ►

why isn’t it the way we want it to be?

00:29:51 ►

Right?

00:29:52 ►

I mean, what is this resistance?

00:29:53 ►

We are creating it, in fact.

00:29:56 ►

Is that what you mean?

00:29:57 ►

That it’s being managed,

00:29:58 ►

that we are projecting it out there and creating it?

00:30:01 ►

Yes, but it isn’t the ego that is doing this projecting. The ego is

00:30:06 ►

somewhat frustrated by the inherent apparent momentum of the situation. It’s not going.

00:30:13 ►

The ego has a different fantasy that is constantly being frustrated. My idea of enlightenment is when ego and

00:30:25 ►

Tao are fused and Tao is perceived as

00:30:32 ►

ego see then everything happens with

00:30:37 ►

complete appropriateness but until that

00:30:41 ►

fusion of Tao and ego takes place, then there’s always resistance.

00:30:49 ►

Psychedelics have a lot to do with this

00:30:51 ►

in the sense that we’ve said many times in these groups,

00:30:55 ►

you know, if you really want out,

00:30:58 ►

there’s nothing stopping you.

00:31:01 ►

The one thing about psychedelics is

00:31:04 ►

all these other spiritual disciplines, yoga, breathwork,

00:31:09 ►

this, that, and the other thing, you drive with the gas pedal to the floor. In this discipline,

00:31:17 ►

there’s a lot of emphasis on locating the brakes. We do not need to drive

00:31:27 ►

at full bore with our engine

00:31:30 ►

it’s all about throttling back

00:31:32 ►

gearing down, pace is everything

00:31:35 ►

if you truly have the appetite

00:31:38 ►

for the transcendental

00:31:40 ►

there’s nothing stopping you from becoming

00:31:43 ►

utterly incomprehensible

00:31:45 ►

to who you are now

00:31:47 ►

and to all of us

00:31:48 ►

you know if you

00:31:49 ►

move down

00:31:52 ►

a few miles down the beach

00:31:54 ►

and start taking psilocybin

00:31:56 ►

on a daily basis

00:31:58 ►

eventually you can become the monk

00:32:00 ►

of cold mountain and by eventually

00:32:02 ►

I mean in the next 30 days

00:32:05 ►

and you can move up onto the crags

00:32:09 ►

and dress in skins

00:32:12 ►

and people will say oh yes

00:32:14 ►

we see him occasionally

00:32:16 ►

woodcutters have run across

00:32:21 ►

signs of him in the woods

00:32:23 ►

I find that very freaky to contemplate have run across signs of him in the woods.

00:32:29 ►

I find that very freaky to contemplate because I know how little barrier there is

00:32:32 ►

between me and that.

00:32:34 ►

It’s just a step away.

00:32:36 ►

Like when I take mushrooms in the Amazon,

00:32:39 ►

the thing I have to fight every time I do it

00:32:43 ►

is this, it says walk

00:32:47 ►

into it walk

00:32:49 ►

into the jungle it is not

00:32:52 ►

what you think it is it is not

00:32:54 ►

unfriendly it is not

00:32:55 ►

dangerous go to it

00:32:58 ►

go now and you’re

00:33:00 ►

saying you know

00:33:00 ►

because you can

00:33:04 ►

you can sort of see a fantasy of integration, but you don’t

00:33:09 ►

know what would happen 12 hours out when you’re now 20 miles into the bush, no way back, and

00:33:17 ►

the psilocybin wears off, and night is falling, and the big cats begin the nightly hunt

00:33:25 ►

well, pardon me?

00:33:29 ►

yes, well, the hope is then

00:33:31 ►

that you would rise to the occasion

00:33:33 ►

but, you know, you’re way, way out there on a limb

00:33:37 ►

it may not be your occasion

00:33:40 ►

again

00:33:43 ►

the other end of the same question

00:33:45 ►

would be, how does one

00:33:47 ►

explore,

00:33:50 ►

resist going into that jungle

00:33:52 ►

and then when you come down

00:33:53 ►

in the psilocybin where it’s off, deal

00:33:56 ►

with business

00:33:57 ►

in the jungle that we have to deal with

00:34:00 ►

in an orderly fashion as you

00:34:02 ►

did before. How does one resist

00:34:03 ►

or throttle back to make as you did before, how does one resist or throttle back

00:34:05 ►

to make sure you don’t get incapable of coming back

00:34:10 ►

and attending the business

00:34:11 ►

so you can go back and explore some more?

00:34:13 ►

Well, I may not be the person to ask.

00:34:17 ►

I mean, I find myself very conflicted.

00:34:22 ►

18 months ago, 20 months ago, I moved to Hawaii, and of course it’s

00:34:28 ►

paradisical. The flip side of that is it’s insanely difficult to leave. I mean, this

00:34:36 ►

is not exactly hell on earth. I mean, you people all paid a lot of money to be here. But from where I’m coming from,

00:34:45 ►

you know, it’s level upon level of pressure

00:34:48 ►

and coldness and climatic shock.

00:34:52 ►

And I mean, I think of the mainland as Blade Runner land.

00:34:55 ►

It’s amphetamine land.

00:34:58 ►

It’s availability land.

00:34:59 ►

It’s strontium-90 land.

00:35:01 ►

It’s newt land.

00:35:03 ►

It’s, you know know just a horrific scene and i don’t know whether

00:35:09 ►

this is good or bad i’m getting to the place where i i could very easily never leave that hill

00:35:16 ►

and it’s not an abandonment of the world because i have the internet. I go everywhere. I see hundreds of people and exchange

00:35:28 ►

email with thousands of people. But the actual tumult of the thing seems crazy-making. And

00:35:37 ►

even my own wake seems crazy to me. I find it very hard to disentangle myself

00:35:46 ►

from this end-of-the-millennium,

00:35:49 ►

squirrely mentality that’s breaking loose

00:35:53 ►

where angels whisper on every street corner

00:35:56 ►

and half the people walking around have alien implants

00:36:00 ►

and the other people are channeling dead relatives.

00:36:04 ►

I call this the balkanization of epistemology.

00:36:10 ►

Everything is becoming Balkanized

00:36:16 ►

into various cults of meaning

00:36:18 ►

that have no communication with other cults of meaning.

00:36:23 ►

And so people retreat into closed communities of dogma and

00:36:28 ►

assumption and

00:36:30 ►

it’s it’s quite

00:36:32 ►

quite bizarre and

00:36:34 ►

Accelerating rapidly and the only thing I see mitigating that are psychedelics again

00:36:41 ►

Which dissolve boundaries, but I also see that the path that the psychedelics

00:36:47 ►

seem to be, the path by which the psychedelics are moving toward a kind of quasi-respectability

00:36:54 ►

is by making some kind of hellish marriage with organized religion and and that’s very dubious you know that will dumb

00:37:07 ►

it down and turn it into cults of personality and so forth and so on so it’s a very complicated

00:37:15 ►

situation what i try to convey to people is the only way to make sense of reality is to keep your mind clear.

00:37:26 ►

And to do that, you have to take drugs

00:37:28 ►

because social programming otherwise is so strong

00:37:33 ►

that you’re just walking around

00:37:34 ►

inside of some kind of Pavlovian nightmare

00:37:37 ►

that’s being handed down from Time Warner.

00:37:41 ►

So logical razors,

00:37:44 ►

a real emphasis on direct experience, and a fairly in-your-face

00:37:50 ►

show-me attitude, because in the spiritual marketplace all kinds of claims are being made.

00:38:00 ►

Do you find for yourself any reason to leave your hill

00:38:05 ►

other than perhaps the need to come out and earn a living?

00:38:09 ►

No, not really. Not really.

00:38:13 ►

So you could see yourself as a cyber monk of War Mountain?

00:38:18 ►

Well, I was billing myself as the zone ghost of cyberspace.

00:38:25 ►

That is the way to do it, I think.

00:38:29 ►

And I think more and more this is happening,

00:38:32 ►

that what I’ve discovered is a lifestyle,

00:38:35 ►

the way it feels is that we live there,

00:38:38 ►

we live in the future.

00:38:40 ►

We live in nature,

00:38:42 ►

a climaxed Pacific Island rainforest.

00:38:46 ►

We have a wireless connection to the internet

00:38:49 ►

that is run on superb machinery that is run by the sun.

00:38:56 ►

There are no wires in, no wires out.

00:39:02 ►

A four-wheel drive road so terrible that there’s no motivation to go by petrol-powered

00:39:09 ►

device to and from town, and the whole world is available through the internet.

00:39:16 ►

Most cities and office culture and suburbs, all these things are genuflections

00:39:25 ►

to the constraints of three-dimensional space

00:39:28 ►

on social styles.

00:39:32 ►

Most people have now,

00:39:34 ►

if they understand the internet,

00:39:36 ►

no reason to live where they’re presently living.

00:39:40 ►

And as soon as big corporations

00:39:42 ►

actually do the cost-benefit analysis,

00:39:45 ►

they’re going to buy everybody computers and tell them to stay home.

00:39:51 ►

And office culture will disappear.

00:39:55 ►

Corporations will become invisible, dispersed, dissipative structures,

00:40:00 ►

globally encompassing, locally focused where they need to be.

00:40:06 ►

People will be able to sell their skills in a global environment.

00:40:10 ►

The entire planet becomes a local telephone call.

00:40:14 ►

This is upon us.

00:40:16 ►

The speed with which the Internet is supplanting

00:40:24 ►

all other forms of information transfer and technology

00:40:28 ►

is really freaky, especially considering that if you’re not hip to what’s going on,

00:40:36 ►

nothing appears to have changed.

00:40:38 ►

You know, the world of 1996 looks pretty much like the world of 1993, except that in a hidden dimension,

00:40:48 ►

visible only through the screen,

00:40:50 ►

everything has changed.

00:40:53 ►

Everything has changed.

00:40:55 ►

And it’s steepening the social pyramid.

00:41:00 ►

It’s empowering political, social,

00:41:03 ►

sexual minorities and margins.

00:41:06 ►

It is dissolving boundaries,

00:41:11 ►

very much as a psychedelic drug dissolves boundaries.

00:41:15 ►

And I’ve said here, you know, in a way,

00:41:18 ►

drug design is the first and most successful to date branch of nanotechnology.

00:41:25 ►

I mean, when you design a drug,

00:41:27 ►

what you are designing is a tiny molecular machine

00:41:30 ►

designed to go into the environment of the nervous system

00:41:35 ►

and interact with the structures it finds there

00:41:38 ►

and produce a desired result.

00:41:43 ►

And, you know, atom by atom atom drugs are designed and built up the

00:41:48 ►

only difference between computers and drugs at this point is one is too large

00:41:52 ►

to swallow and we’re working on that oh well I think the moment before this communication becomes virtual and completely convincing is just a technological millisecond.

00:42:13 ►

I mean, by the turn of the century, the net will not look anything like it looks now. T1 and higher speed and everyone will be moving through

00:42:26 ►

extremely complex virtually designed

00:42:30 ►

environments so all this

00:42:32 ►

objection to the interface

00:42:34 ►

is just an engineering problem

00:42:38 ►

it’s on its way to solution as we speak

00:42:41 ►

right now the

00:42:43 ►

hardwired machinery, the performance limit of the hardware

00:42:52 ►

has never been tested. The software is not taking advantage of the hardware. The software is not as

00:43:00 ►

good as it should be. This is a human design problem. We’re not waiting for technological breakthroughs.

00:43:06 ►

We’re waiting for better code writers,

00:43:08 ►

more creative code.

00:43:10 ►

So eventually what we’re saying is

00:43:11 ►

at some point the technology will be able to

00:43:13 ►

fully and completely synthesize.

00:43:16 ►

Well, in a sense, you know,

00:43:18 ►

there’s this big whoop-de-doo about

00:43:20 ►

virtual reality and how radical

00:43:22 ►

a concept this is.

00:43:23 ►

The first virtual reality was Ur.

00:43:27 ►

I mean, once you move behind city walls and into language and begin to have social values

00:43:37 ►

and religious beliefs and classes and costuming and architecture, This is all virtual reality.

00:43:45 ►

It’s just being engineered in a very resistant media,

00:43:50 ►

like stone, for example,

00:43:52 ►

rather than building it out of light,

00:43:55 ►

as you do in a VR thing.

00:43:57 ►

But virtual realities are what we build.

00:44:00 ►

I mean, telling stories around the campfire

00:44:03 ►

20,000 years ago.

00:44:05 ►

What’s the concept?

00:44:07 ►

Close your eyes.

00:44:08 ►

Follow the voice into the three-dimensional modality of the storyteller’s world.

00:44:15 ►

What’s happening is that we, through technology and through slight sophistication of our epistemological tools,

00:44:27 ►

are noticing what we’re doing.

00:44:32 ►

We’ve discovered that media is not this completely transparent,

00:44:34 ►

neutral, friendly thing, but that in fact every form of media shapes culture,

00:44:38 ►

shapes social values, shapes the individual mind of the user.

00:44:43 ►

The psychedelic experience is so shocking to people.

00:44:48 ►

And that’s what it means to be straight.

00:44:52 ►

Not in the sense of sexually straight,

00:44:54 ►

but in the other meaning,

00:44:55 ►

in the sense of straight as opposed to freaky.

00:45:00 ►

I mean, straight people cannot handle the decompressed, fuzzy, limited, unlimited, boundaryless stuff of reality.

00:45:12 ►

I’m sure you’ve seen these bumper stickers that say, reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.

00:45:20 ►

Well, there’s something to this.

00:45:22 ►

Reality is a safe island in an ocean of much more ambiguous possibilities.

00:45:30 ►

But is reality safe when cyberspace and the Internet and television are wearing it?

00:45:39 ►

Who’s going to have control?

00:45:42 ►

Well, television is not…

00:45:44 ►

There will always be TV,

00:45:46 ►

just like there will always be airplane glue

00:45:48 ►

and, you know, scuzzy drugs.

00:45:52 ►

People have to make choices.

00:45:54 ►

Large numbers of people choose

00:45:57 ►

the larval, low-awareness feed of TV,

00:46:02 ►

but they also have no taste

00:46:11 ►

and have no ambitions and no expectation of the future.

00:46:17 ►

I mean, television is not an enormous intrusion into their existence. It sort of completes the flatness of it. The thing is to make other options available for those who want it. When I was growing up, I watched a lot of TV,

00:46:27 ►

because so did everybody else.

00:46:28 ►

There were no other options.

00:46:31 ►

Now, there are many, many options.

00:46:34 ►

And the most exciting thing is

00:46:38 ►

nobody need experience a sense of isolation.

00:46:43 ►

What I’m trying to say is, what about

00:46:46 ►

when everyone’s online?

00:46:49 ►

I don’t know if I, someone in the room must have the same fear. When everything’s online

00:46:54 ►

and the eye looks both ways into everybody’s domicile,

00:46:58 ►

wherever it is, in the rainforest or the middle of an urban development,

00:47:03 ►

how will that be different from 1984? How will we retain the freedom of an urban development. How will that be different from 1984?

00:47:06 ►

How will we retain the freedom of choice?

00:47:09 ►

How will we make sure that the Constitution’s in place?

00:47:13 ►

What will be our change?

00:47:14 ►

Well, in 1984, see, there’s a distinction here

00:47:17 ►

that’s important about media.

00:47:21 ►

We are only familiar with and have grown up

00:47:25 ►

all of us under the aegis

00:47:26 ►

of what is called mass media

00:47:28 ►

mass media means television

00:47:31 ►

newspapers, radio

00:47:33 ►

and what mass media is

00:47:35 ►

is one to many communication

00:47:38 ►

the editors of Time Magazine

00:47:42 ►

a team of 50 or so people at the top, communicate to millions of people.

00:47:47 ►

Similarly, network broadcast executives.

00:47:51 ►

The internet is different.

00:47:53 ►

It’s what’s called any-to-any communication, not one-to-many.

00:48:00 ►

And mass media has created, since the Renaissance, since the invention of print, the entire notion of what is called the public.

00:48:09 ►

We are so familiar with this idea, the public, I’m part of the public, you’re part of the public, we’re the public, that we don’t realize that before 1640 there was no such thing as the public.

00:48:25 ►

Before 1640, there was no such thing as the public.

00:48:28 ►

The public is created by mass media,

00:48:31 ►

and it will disappear with the disappearance of mass media. A way to understand this is to realize that the New York Times

00:48:38 ►

and the London Observer are as much tabloids as the trashiest and sleaziest

00:48:47 ►

of the alien abduction,

00:48:49 ►

Christ seen at the supermarket,

00:48:52 ►

Elvis at prayer kind of thing.

00:48:57 ►

Because, necessarily so,

00:49:00 ►

because the New York Times

00:49:02 ►

must be understood by millions of people. Anything which must be understood by millions of people. Anything which must be

00:49:07 ►

understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of

00:49:15 ►

fiction. This is hard for us to get used to because we say, well, the public or the public opinion is,

00:49:27 ►

and we have to have informed public opinion.

00:49:30 ►

We have never had informed public opinion.

00:49:32 ►

It’s a fiction.

00:49:34 ►

You know, P.T. Barnum said,

00:49:39 ►

nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American people.

00:49:42 ►

Truth. Truth. Yeah.

00:49:48 ►

It seems to me kind of like the discovery of the atom in the sense that there was tremendous potential for positive uses

00:49:53 ►

but just as much tremendous potential for destructive

00:49:58 ►

or counter-creative or counter-productive uses.

00:50:03 ►

And it seems to me like when you’ve got more and more people

00:50:06 ►

spending more and more time in front of a screen

00:50:08 ►

instead of more and more time out in nature

00:50:12 ►

or with other people,

00:50:16 ►

that while something may be gained,

00:50:17 ►

something very important may also be lost.

00:50:21 ►

And the downside may be that on the one hand you have more and more people physically

00:50:27 ►

isolated from other people, emotionally isolated from other people, and more and more people

00:50:33 ►

who become, their life, their internal experience becomes like being a big head, and what your

00:50:41 ►

body is there for is to carry your head around.

00:50:43 ►

head and what your body is there for is to carry your head around.

00:50:53 ►

Well, I feel the force of that, but on the other hand, throughout most of human existence,

00:50:56 ►

people have related to a very small group of people. We are the first generation in history to be totally comfortable with Shinjuku Station

00:51:04 ►

at rush hour or Grand Central Station

00:51:08 ►

at rush hour. I think probably relating to 40 or 50 people in a neighborhood is about all the

00:51:16 ►

emotional stretching anybody needs and the idea that you have to have vast numbers of face-to-face relationships with doorman, taxi drivers,

00:51:29 ►

people who serve you food, people who you serve food, and so forth and so on,

00:51:34 ►

it’s not really consistent with how people have lived their lives most of the time.

00:51:40 ►

I don’t like the artificiality of the technology, but I’m very confident that that’s a passing phase.

00:51:49 ►

Then what? Then you have people’s faces on the screen?

00:51:52 ►

It’s still another step removed from direct experience.

00:51:56 ►

Well, here’s what I imagine as a short-term engineering goal for 2006, let’s say.

00:52:05 ►

This would cost a trillion dollars,

00:52:08 ►

but you’d make 50 trillion dollars

00:52:11 ►

if you brought this to market in good shape.

00:52:15 ►

And this is not a nanotech fantasy.

00:52:18 ►

This is simply, this is within reach.

00:52:20 ►

Imagine an invention which looks like

00:52:24 ►

a pair of black contact lenses, but actually is

00:52:29 ►

implants which are put into the inside of your eyelids at some point in your life. Well then,

00:52:38 ►

when you close your eyes like this, these implants come down over your retina, and what you see are menus

00:52:48 ►

hanging in space. What you’re seeing is an interface into the net, the web, or the whatever

00:52:56 ►

it’s called, and by moving your eyes in certain ways, You can turn on switches and move through this interface.

00:53:06 ►

Virtually what has happened

00:53:08 ►

is that the entire cultural dynamism

00:53:11 ►

has become invisible.

00:53:14 ►

And you can be naked

00:53:16 ►

and live in a rainforest

00:53:17 ►

and dig for yams with a pointed stick if you want.

00:53:21 ►

And when you’ve got enough yams,

00:53:24 ►

you can close your eyes and visit

00:53:26 ►

the Vatican Library exhibit

00:53:28 ►

on Renaissance mathematics

00:53:30 ►

that is running at the

00:53:31 ►

Vatican Library website,

00:53:34 ►

or anything else

00:53:36 ►

in the vast gamut

00:53:38 ►

of sexual,

00:53:40 ►

intellectual,

00:53:42 ►

industrial,

00:53:44 ►

and so forth tools that are laid before you on the Internet.

00:53:48 ►

So that’s a reachable goal.

00:53:54 ►

Well, here’s what it does.

00:53:57 ►

See, my analysis is that what’s killing the world

00:54:01 ►

is not the Internet.

00:54:02 ►

What’s killing the world is addicting people

00:54:06 ►

to objects

00:54:08 ►

that we have to

00:54:10 ►

fabricate raw materials

00:54:12 ►

into these objects

00:54:13 ►

in order to supply people with these

00:54:16 ►

things. Mercedes

00:54:17 ►

and condos

00:54:20 ►

and VCRs and

00:54:21 ►

high fashion gowns and so forth

00:54:24 ►

and so on. If could, which would you rather have

00:54:28 ►

an 800 square foot

00:54:31 ►

$500,000 condominium

00:54:35 ►

in Malibu, which is real

00:54:37 ►

or the entire

00:54:41 ►

palace of Versailles with

00:54:43 ►

obedient staff on call 24 hours a day

00:54:47 ►

in virtual space.

00:54:49 ►

I think most people would go for Versailles.

00:54:52 ►

I think what we have to do is convince people

00:54:54 ►

that matter is tacky.

00:54:57 ►

And the way you convince people matter is tacky

00:55:01 ►

is by making the virtual world so beguiling that people think that

00:55:09 ►

the actual acquisition of objects is a manifestation of ill-breeding and bad taste.

00:55:18 ►

And that’s just a switch in cultural values, you know.

00:55:22 ►

A moment ago you said, and this is how I wanted to jump on,

00:55:25 ►

because I was kind of objecting a little bit like you were there

00:55:28 ►

about the loss of humanity, but I also heard you say,

00:55:31 ►

just briefly, is that all we need is 30, 40, 50 people.

00:55:35 ►

So I’m kind of curious, with all this technology,

00:55:38 ►

and for me, all the technology in the next thousand years

00:55:42 ►

will not replace the human spirit.

00:55:44 ►

You can’t send it under the lines.

00:55:45 ►

But besides that, you’re still advocating small communities,

00:55:49 ►

small, non-materialistic, small communities.

00:55:52 ►

So you still will have that.

00:55:55 ►

Yes, I think most people can make their living

00:55:57 ►

from local forms of agriculture.

00:56:01 ►

Tribalization.

00:56:02 ►

I mean, there are some things about population

00:56:04 ►

that have to be talked about too. But some of you know I’ve suggested this idea of one woman, one

00:56:10 ►

child, which is a very simple idea and which would collapse the world population by 50%

00:56:19 ►

in 30 years. And people say, well, but women wouldn’t voluntarily limit their reproductive activity.

00:56:28 ►

Well, maybe not in Bangladesh and Java, but where we really want people to hear this message is in

00:56:35 ►

Manhattan and Malibu, because the children of those women use 800 to 1, thousand times more resources than the children born to women in Bangladesh.

00:56:47 ►

Convince one woman on the Upper East Side of Manhattan not to have a child, it’s the equivalent

00:56:53 ►

of convincing a thousand people in Bangladesh not to have a child. If you could get 15% of the

00:57:01 ►

educated upper-class women of the industrial democracies to voluntarily have one

00:57:08 ►

child, within 10 or 15 years you would begin to see the indices fall back into the black

00:57:15 ►

on the resource extraction curve. So this is, my theory of politics is you can only get people to do things that are good for the community if they are also good for the individual.

00:57:32 ►

So if you like to have

00:57:46 ►

cradle-to-the-grave medical insurance?

00:57:52 ►

How would you like to have genuine status

00:57:55 ►

as a hero in the struggle to save the earth?

00:58:00 ►

And how would you like to have

00:58:02 ►

vastly increased leisure time

00:58:04 ►

and vastly increased

00:58:06 ►

disposable income? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Social esteem, more money, more time,

00:58:14 ►

less responsibility, and high status. So you persuade the individual then to act

00:58:22 ►

in a way which supports the goals of the community. And then

00:58:27 ►

beyond that, there are other issues. I mean, I would advocate a limiting of male birth.

00:58:33 ►

I think it’s crazy to try and feminize men. I think that’s so weird. And that if we as a collectivity feel that there is not enough femininity in our society, then we

00:58:50 ►

should have more women, not feminized men. And I would argue that the 50-50 ratio among

00:58:59 ►

the sexes is actually an artificially maintained ratio enforced by patriarchy, and that if resources and nurturing and care were equally distributed,

00:59:12 ►

there would be closer to a 75-25 ratio,

00:59:18 ►

or 70-30 ratio, men to women.

00:59:22 ►

A couple of these questions that were really touching upon

00:59:26 ►

perhaps a dehumanization relating to information transfer.

00:59:31 ►

I thought something important to add to that

00:59:35 ►

is a smaller number of relationships

00:59:37 ►

will become much, much richer.

00:59:42 ►

So, sure, we’ll be globally connected,

00:59:45 ►

but our community will,

00:59:48 ►

the depth and the levels of community

00:59:50 ►

will be so much beyond what there can be now.

00:59:54 ►

And I just look at it

00:59:56 ►

from the standpoint of food production.

00:59:58 ►

There’s already food being shipped around

01:00:01 ►

because of the petrochemical industry.

01:00:06 ►

Thousands of miles and refrigeration

01:00:07 ►

completely disconnected from

01:00:10 ►

01:00:12 ►

richness which comes from

01:00:14 ►

local resources and local

01:00:16 ►

community. And

01:00:17 ►

the reason why I believe people

01:00:19 ►

in Malibu or in

01:00:22 ►

Manhattan will

01:00:23 ►

be moving in these directions more

01:00:25 ►

is because it’s a higher quality of life,

01:00:29 ►

more mindful, more spiritual,

01:00:31 ►

and they can afford

01:00:34 ►

to live a simpler lifestyle.

01:00:38 ►

People who are in the midst of a machine,

01:00:40 ►

they don’t have the time to even think about it.

01:00:43 ►

Yes, what’s very disturbing about all of this,

01:00:46 ►

you’re right, some people are figuring it out.

01:00:49 ►

What’s disturbing is that since the collapse

01:00:51 ►

of the socialist critique of capitalism,

01:00:56 ►

capitalism is absolutely unrestrained and uncriticized

01:01:01 ►

and it is raising in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people in the third world

01:01:06 ►

a desire for a middle-class lifestyle that cannot possibly be delivered unless we cut every forest,

01:01:14 ►

dig every mine, and fabricate everything into consumer electronic goods.

01:01:20 ►

Exactly, and the problem with imagining some voluntary or other population control is

01:01:26 ►

it’s not going to happen until it’s economically driven, because right now our economy is based

01:01:31 ►

on expansion. And so all the dominators want that. They want expansion, more consumers,

01:01:37 ►

so they can make more products, so they can mine more minerals and add value.

01:01:42 ►

more minerals, and add value.

01:01:46 ►

Well, clearly, though, this can’t go on forever.

01:01:52 ►

There is a resource limit that has come into view. But are any of these people that are currently in charge of General Motors or Ford,

01:01:56 ►

are they really planning for that?

01:01:59 ►

Are they making allowances?

01:02:01 ►

Well, I think it’s happening already.

01:02:03 ►

It’s all a downside.

01:02:04 ►

I mean, who can buy cars?

01:02:05 ►

I mean, the market for cars is diminishing right here in this country.

01:02:09 ►

I think they’re going to come face-to-face with it by necessity.

01:02:13 ►

They’re getting rid of the people who they need to buy the cars right here in this economy.

01:02:18 ►

So I think it’s going to come on the roost.

01:02:20 ►

And the opportunities are shifting over away from products that

01:02:25 ►

are made out

01:02:26 ►

of matter to

01:02:27 ►

products that

01:02:27 ►

are made out

01:02:28 ►

of bits

01:02:29 ►

rapidly.

01:02:31 ►

And so the

01:02:32 ►

economic development

01:02:33 ►

energy is

01:02:34 ►

following that

01:02:34 ►

opportunity because

01:02:36 ►

they’re closing

01:02:36 ►

out where you

01:02:37 ►

have to cut the

01:02:38 ►

trees and dig

01:02:39 ►

them out.

01:02:40 ►

So now we’re

01:02:40 ►

making more and

01:02:41 ►

more products out

01:02:41 ►

of less and

01:02:42 ►

less matter.

01:02:44 ►

Well, that’s a good idea.

01:02:46 ►

Well, it’s great, and then the ultimate thing is let’s make everything out of cyberspace,

01:02:49 ►

and then we can all live there.

01:02:50 ►

And now we’re totally removed from the Earth.

01:02:54 ►

Now that’s the planet recovery because we’re not raping it anymore.

01:02:57 ►

We can have more time to spend in the dark.

01:02:59 ►

We can build cyberspace now.

01:03:01 ►

We can build forests and chop them down and sell them.

01:03:04 ►

You mean in cyberspace? Yes. can build forests and chop them down and sell them? You mean in cyberspace?

01:03:05 ►

Yes.

01:03:06 ►

We can go all in.

01:03:07 ►

Well, cyberspace

01:03:08 ►

doesn’t work quite like that.

01:03:11 ►

You know, somebody said

01:03:12 ►

in virtual reality

01:03:14 ►

the difference between

01:03:15 ►

a 10-story building

01:03:16 ►

and a 100-story building

01:03:18 ►

is 1-0.

01:03:21 ►

That’s how you make

01:03:22 ►

a 10-story building

01:03:23 ►

100 stories high, one zero

01:03:25 ►

it costs nothing, you build with light

01:03:29 ►

you build with numbers, there is no constraint

01:03:33 ►

we’re so used to resource constraint

01:03:36 ►

the constraints of gravity, the constraints of the tensile

01:03:40 ►

strengths of materials and all that

01:03:42 ►

imagine what we would build if we could build in the

01:03:46 ►

architectonic style of our own imagination. I think technology is not under the control

01:03:54 ►

of the people who are developing it. I mean, here’s an interesting thought. You could have

01:03:59 ►

a completely cyberspatial world and it could look like the Italian Renaissance. I think that the

01:04:07 ►

horse is going to make an enormous comeback. Once people don’t have to commute to cities,

01:04:13 ►

once people distribute themselves across the land, once people are involved in agriculture again,

01:04:20 ►

but you have to realize there are many, many technologies simultaneously evolving.

01:04:27 ►

There’s a whole angle on this that has nothing to do with cyberspace.

01:04:32 ►

It’s sort of the revolution one compartment over.

01:04:37 ►

And it’s called nanotechnology.

01:04:40 ►

Replicators for food, then fine. Food and water.

01:04:42 ►

Well, they’re working on it.

01:04:46 ►

Sure, sure.

01:04:48 ►

This is a design goal

01:04:50 ►

to essentially feed China

01:04:53 ►

on C4 floor sludge

01:04:55 ►

that is turned into basmati rice

01:04:57 ►

in matter compilers.

01:05:00 ►

People who don’t take drugs

01:05:03 ►

believe this is possible

01:05:05 ►

people like Eric Drexler

01:05:07 ►

and that crowd

01:05:09 ►

they see a world of nanosite machines

01:05:13 ►

machines smaller than the eye can see

01:05:16 ►

made of diamond that are transforming everything

01:05:19 ►

this is a near term

01:05:23 ►

engineering goal up the coast.

01:05:26 ►

What about these people?

01:05:28 ►

Well, I don’t accept the premise of the lowest common denominator.

01:05:33 ►

I think if you look at history, let’s say, on the scale of a thousand years,

01:05:38 ►

most people today live better than kings 300 years ago,

01:05:44 ►

far better than kings. In terms of technical progress,

01:05:50 ►

the PGP encryption that I run on my computer gives me better security than Stansfield Turner had

01:05:59 ►

when he ran the CIA. It is not true that the good things of life are not accruing to more and more people.

01:06:09 ►

Now, as the population grows, there are more and more people in some degree of misery,

01:06:18 ►

but even at that, the masses of India are better informed through their daily newspapers and their television than kings

01:06:26 ►

were 300 years ago. So what I see happening is an unleashing of information. It’s almost as though

01:06:35 ►

information is a kind of force, and we associate with it. We are the information-transducing ape.

01:06:46 ►

But after hundreds of thousands of years

01:06:49 ►

of transducing information into more and more complex forms,

01:06:53 ►

it has almost gotten out of us.

01:06:55 ►

It came down through our fingers and into the tools,

01:07:00 ►

and now our tools talk to us

01:07:02 ►

and seem to be getting smarter faster than we are.

01:07:06 ►

It’s almost as though information has a will of its own to complexify and advance itself,

01:07:14 ►

and it doesn’t care whether it uses DNA or human language or C++ to advance its agenda.

01:07:22 ►

to advance its agenda.

01:07:25 ►

The tools that we’re producing are essentially

01:07:26 ►

the hard wiring

01:07:29 ►

of our own unconscious.

01:07:31 ►

We are bringing into consciousness

01:07:34 ►

the parts of ourselves

01:07:35 ►

that previously were inaccessible.

01:07:39 ►

So it’s not simply, you know,

01:07:41 ►

the payrolls of the corporations

01:07:43 ►

and the stock fluctuations around the world, but it’s also the, you know, the payrolls of the corporations and the stock fluctuations around

01:07:45 ►

the world, but it’s also the complete database of the culture is now digitized and online.

01:07:53 ►

We are becoming, and McLuhan said this, he said, he said, human beings are the genitals

01:08:00 ►

of information technology. They exist only to produce

01:08:05 ►

a better model next year.

01:08:07 ►

In other words,

01:08:08 ►

we are like the genetic component

01:08:10 ►

of this epigenetic process.

01:08:13 ►

But to pretend that it’s alien from us

01:08:16 ►

is an argument to not speak English.

01:08:20 ►

You know, that’s a technology.

01:08:22 ►

That’s a way of information

01:08:24 ►

manipulation and retrieval

01:08:26 ►

that is anti-human

01:08:29 ►

and not natural

01:08:30 ►

and very recently

01:08:32 ►

invented

01:08:33 ►

there’s always a nostalgic

01:08:37 ►

looking back

01:08:38 ►

but

01:08:39 ►

you know, we’re clearly

01:08:42 ►

we’re never going to herd our cattle

01:08:44 ►

again across the undulating plains of a grassland you know, we’re clearly, we’re never going to herd our cattle again

01:08:45 ►

across the undulating plains of a grassland Africa.

01:08:50 ►

That party was cancelled long, long ago.

01:08:53 ►

And somehow information, self-reflection, cognitive process

01:09:01 ►

is synergizing itself to higher and higher levels and we can come along for the

01:09:08 ►

ride if we want and if we don’t want then it’s going on without us well i think that the real

01:09:18 ►

the real impact of the internet is art and that we have not yet begun

01:09:26 ►

to communicate with each other.

01:09:28 ►

We are so used to small mouth noises

01:09:31 ►

and text that we are,

01:09:34 ►

and we have the habits

01:09:36 ►

hammered into us by mass media,

01:09:38 ►

which are consumptive habits.

01:09:41 ►

We consume.

01:09:43 ►

You put somebody in front of a screen and they ask,

01:09:46 ►

can I play a game or what can I do? Well, the real answer is you can make something

01:09:52 ►

and communicate it. I just gave an interview and I was saying my vision of the net, what I want to

01:10:00 ►

do, I have a whole agenda not related to anything I’ve been up to. Years ago I used

01:10:07 ►

to paint, and I used to say all of life was a preparation for painting. And I haven’t

01:10:14 ►

actually painted since, I don’t know, 1970 or something. But I’m about to essentially paint again. And what I mean by that is, I, in response to your set of

01:10:28 ►

discomfort-ures, I’m troubled by the lack of the eroticization of the net. The net is not erotic

01:10:39 ►

enough. I mean, you can download pornography, but that’s not really my idea of what an erotic net would look like.

01:10:50 ►

And so take that and then couple it with this unique form of art that was invented in the 20th century, which is collage.

01:11:03 ►

invented in the 20th century, which is collage.

01:11:06 ►

You know, the Dadaists were the first people to rip up subway tickets and restaurant menus

01:11:10 ►

and newspapers and glue it all down.

01:11:13 ►

Collage is a unique 20th century form of art

01:11:16 ►

and it deconstructs culture

01:11:20 ►

and it has all kinds of adumbrations

01:11:23 ►

and echoes and resonances built into it.

01:11:27 ►

Hypertextualizing collage through image mapping

01:11:30 ►

to build vast, multileveled, hypercollage-like environments

01:11:38 ►

is something I want to do.

01:11:40 ►

And I want to use it to make the the net a much sexier place and I’m

01:11:47 ►

not interested in it as a commercial thing I’m interested in it as a

01:11:53 ►

communicative thing okay so that’s my one person’s agenda for the net well you

01:11:59 ►

might have a different take you should do your version everybody should

01:12:04 ►

understand you now have this

01:12:06 ►

little place where you can build and display your dreams, whatever they are, your private

01:12:13 ►

obsessions, your deepest fears. You can appear as pretentious or as honest or as direct or as

01:12:20 ►

elusive as you want, but there is this place now

01:12:25 ►

which is a window into your soul

01:12:27 ►

that you can put online.

01:12:30 ►

And my website will become more and more me

01:12:34 ►

until it will be more me than I am,

01:12:38 ►

because I will be a one-dimensional,

01:12:41 ►

real-time slice of a much deeper,

01:12:46 ►

online, cross-indexed hypertextual me

01:12:49 ►

and that will be the truer me

01:12:52 ►

and it lives forever in a sense

01:12:56 ►

they’re already confronting the issue

01:12:58 ►

of what to do with the websites of dead people

01:13:01 ►

and generally

01:13:03 ►

in many cases

01:13:06 ►

they’re just keeping them on

01:13:07 ►

01:13:09 ►

in a way I think what we should each do

01:13:12 ►

is it’s as though we’ve

01:13:14 ►

changed suddenly

01:13:15 ►

from slugs to snails

01:13:18 ►

and what I mean

01:13:20 ►

by that is now you can

01:13:22 ►

construct

01:13:24 ►

a physical artifact

01:13:26 ►

out of your genetic unfolding, out of the experience of your life,

01:13:31 ►

such that when you move on, it will stay around.

01:13:36 ►

And people can say, well, what did he know?

01:13:39 ►

Did he have it figured out?

01:13:40 ►

What did he say about how you handle an affair with the senator’s mistress?

01:13:46 ►

Did he know how to do that? And so forth and so on. And this becomes an enormous database for learning,

01:13:53 ►

for understanding, for feeling what it is to be human. And, you know, if there are parts of who

01:14:02 ►

you are that you are alienated from or that you think other people might judge harshly, then you can anonymize, you know, make it anonymous.

01:14:12 ►

Put yourself behind many levels of anonymity and then display whatever kink or peculiarity or crackpot idea or obsession you wish. So I think in a way the monkey body,

01:14:27 ►

while it’s been fine and is great for calisthenics

01:14:31 ►

and other activities,

01:14:32 ►

it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all

01:14:36 ►

of defining what it is to be human.

01:14:39 ►

What it is to be human is to have a human body

01:14:43 ►

and a human mind to have a human body and a human mind

01:14:45 ►

integrated inside a human culture with a human future.

01:14:51 ►

And if any of those things are absent, then the human is not fully there.

01:14:57 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:15:00 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:15:04 ►

I suspect that Terence’s closing thought just now isn’t,

01:15:08 ►

well, it’s not probably very politically correct in today’s atmosphere.

01:15:13 ►

But for a long time now, I’ve been thinking along similar lines,

01:15:16 ►

thinking about the fact that maybe being fully human isn’t automatic.

01:15:21 ►

You know, maybe we have to do things to make us what we consider to be human.

01:15:26 ►

Maybe this is easier to grok if instead of saying being human,

01:15:31 ►

maybe we should think of it as being civilized.

01:15:35 ►

Because I see a lot of human bodies walking around

01:15:37 ►

that don’t seem to be acting fully human from my perspective.

01:15:42 ►

But rather than continue with that discussion,

01:15:44 ►

I want to return

01:15:46 ►

to the earlier part of this talk in which Terence discussed his recent meeting with Matthew Watkins.

01:15:51 ►

As you just heard him say, he was going to return to Hawaii and think about what the Watkins

01:15:57 ►

objection meant, and how he and others would respond. Now, if this interests you as much as

01:16:04 ►

it does me, you maybe should go back to Terrence’s original website and read through some of the postings that followed this talk.

01:16:10 ►

Also, if you read an article from Reality Sandwich that I’ll talk about in a few minutes, you’ll learn that Terrence published his initial response to Watkins, but then quickly removed it from the site after Watkins had voiced his objections to it.

01:16:25 ►

Apparently, no copies of this original response exist.

01:16:29 ►

However, Watkins did eventually publish his autopsy for a mathematical hallucination.

01:16:34 ►

Great title.

01:16:36 ►

And Terence even wrote a one-paragraph kind of non-committal introduction to it.

01:16:41 ►

And that document still is available, and I’ll link to it in the program notes for today’s talk. Now, without getting into the nuts and bolts of the mathematics in that

01:16:50 ►

paper, I want to cut to the chase and read the conclusion that Watkins wrote. It reads, and I

01:16:56 ►

quote, the conclusion. So we see that the value of W, parent K K cannot be determined from the local geometry of

01:17:06 ►

the six-level object in a neighborhood

01:17:07 ►

of K. The, quote,

01:17:10 ►

collapse mechanism built into

01:17:11 ►

the formula is clearly K-dependent.

01:17:14 ►

Therefore, we see that not

01:17:16 ►

only is the inclusion of the

01:17:17 ►

half-twist failing to guarantee

01:17:20 ►

the preservation of some

01:17:21 ►

geometric property to which McKenna

01:17:24 ►

has referred,

01:17:29 ►

but the failure is precisely because of its inclusion.

01:17:34 ►

McKenna’s stated reason for this crucial step of the construction is unacceptable.

01:17:37 ►

As a mathematician who has met and talked with him,

01:17:40 ►

who is sympathetic with the majority of his other work,

01:17:42 ►

and who is only interested in spreading clarity,

01:17:48 ►

I must conclude that the time wave cannot be taken to be what McKenna claims it is.

01:17:56 ►

On a more positive note, I should add that I don’t find McKenna’s time wave exploit to be completely without value.

01:18:03 ►

It wouldn’t surprise me if a fractal map of temporal resonance was encoded into the King-Win sequence,

01:18:06 ►

just as it wouldn’t surprise me if something quite remarkable does occur on December 21, 2012. The world can be a very strange place,

01:18:12 ►

and we all have much to learn. McKenna’s hyper-imaginative speculation has fired the

01:18:19 ►

imagination of many. With this particular theory, and theory is in quotes here, with this particular theory, he has spread awareness of the I Ching and the Mayan calendar,

01:18:29 ►

both fascinating and poorly understood systems of ancient human thought.

01:18:34 ►

I should therefore end by suggesting that the remainder of his published thought

01:18:39 ►

should not be dismissed as a result of my findings, which are discussed here.

01:18:44 ►

End quote.

01:18:45 ►

Now, I have to admit that since I never took the time wave very seriously, I didn’t actually

01:18:51 ►

delve into the mathematics behind it.

01:18:53 ►

So, when I began reading more about it these past few days, I was really surprised to learn,

01:18:59 ►

for the first time, for me, about this so-called half-twist that Terence injected into his computations.

01:19:06 ►

And if you haven’t heard of the half-twist before, don’t feel bad.

01:19:10 ►

In an essay by Watkins for Reality Sandwich in 2010,

01:19:15 ►

an essay that everybody interested in the time wave owes it to her or himself to read,

01:19:21 ►

well, Watkins explains that he only learned about it from a footnote in the

01:19:25 ►

Time Wave Computer Program manual.

01:19:28 ►

Basically, what happened is that of the 384 so-called data points that Terence used to

01:19:35 ►

explain his hypothesis in, I think, excruciating detail in his book The Invisible Landscape,

01:19:41 ►

well, half of them got reversed somehow.

01:19:44 ►

As Watkins writes in his Reality Sandwich essay, and I quote,

01:19:49 ►

I challenged TM on this.

01:19:51 ►

He had, for no obvious reason, reversed half of the data points in his construction,

01:19:57 ►

and now it was being claimed that this is not well understood and awaits further research.

01:20:03 ►

I asked him why he did it in this case, and he simply claimed not to remember, end quote.

01:20:09 ►

So, in addition to Terence changing his initial end date after then learning about the Mayan calendar’s end date,

01:20:16 ►

it appears that Terence, or somebody else who was involved in helping him with the invisible landscape,

01:20:22 ►

simply reversed half of the 384 data points in order to make

01:20:26 ►

things fit better.

01:20:29 ►

So, what do we make of all this?

01:20:31 ►

Well, first of all, I agree with Matthew that we shouldn’t reject all of Terence’s thinking

01:20:36 ►

just because his ideas about the time wave are now kind of suspect.

01:20:41 ►

Although I didn’t buy into his 2012 Eschaton talk myself, well, in many other respects,

01:20:47 ►

Terrence McKenna has provided me with a significant number of ideas that have, well, they’ve led me to

01:20:53 ►

where I am today, and for that I am most grateful. But since Terrence himself made the time wave so

01:20:59 ►

central to his work, I’ve been trying to piece together a lesson, well at least for myself,

01:21:06 ►

that I can take away from all this. And for me, at least right now, that lesson is that no matter

01:21:12 ►

how excited I get about an idea of my own, I always need to keep the door open to the potential

01:21:18 ►

of having that idea obliterated by some new information. Terence’s reputation, in many ways,

01:21:25 ►

hung on this thin peg of a potential

01:21:28 ►

earth-shaking transformation

01:21:29 ►

that would take place sometime near the end of 2012.

01:21:33 ►

And as we just heard,

01:21:35 ►

in February of 1996,

01:21:38 ►

he was then prepared to even begin

01:21:40 ►

exploring his own psyche

01:21:42 ►

to see why it had misled him

01:21:44 ►

onto the path of seeming to preach

01:21:47 ►

about the end of the world or the eschaton as he envisioned it basically i think that it says as

01:21:52 ►

much about us followers of terence as it does about him you know deep down when life doesn’t

01:21:58 ►

seem to be working out the way we want it to locking on to some kind of a wild theory about

01:22:04 ►

a global change of some

01:22:05 ►

kind that’s going to take place is, well, probably a normal thing to do.

01:22:09 ►

In fact, just last week, there was a fundamentalist Christian preacher who, in 2011, had predicted

01:22:16 ►

the end of the world, and when it didn’t happen, he checked his computations and added another

01:22:21 ►

1,600 days.

01:22:23 ►

Unfortunately for this prediction, his new date came and went last week without the world ending.

01:22:28 ►

So what did he do?

01:22:29 ►

Well, he said that he’d have to go back to the Bible and find out where his calculations went wrong

01:22:34 ►

and make more adjustments.

01:22:36 ►

Now, I think that we should be honest with ourselves here

01:22:39 ►

before criticizing that screwball preacher for going back to the Bible for a reboot.

01:22:45 ►

After all, we just learned that Terrence, at least in my opinion,

01:22:49 ►

planned on doing something analogous by taking more psilocybin to reinvestigate his time wave hypothesis.

01:22:55 ►

And in my opinion, we always have to be on guard to not let some of the interesting ideas

01:23:01 ►

that we discover under the influence of psychedelics take hold of us before we have really fully examined them.

01:23:08 ►

You know, it seems that locking on to a crazy idea can sometimes be hazardous to your health.

01:23:13 ►

But I’ve probably said enough about this for now, so I’m going to let you take these thoughts on for yourself to sort out.

01:23:20 ►

And I’m sure that you’re going to come up with some things that I’m overlooking here.

01:23:25 ►

Probably some obvious things. My point here is to reiterate what Timothy Leary often said.

01:23:31 ►

Think for yourself and question authority. All authority. Maybe even the mushroom authority.

01:23:40 ►

Now, as much as I’m inclined to end my remarks right now, there still are a couple of other things from today’s talk that I’d like to point out.

01:23:48 ►

First of all, I had to smile when Terence was speaking about Fitzhugh Ludlow as well as if he was this ancient sage.

01:23:56 ►

Because first of all, if you’ve ever read Ludlow’s seminal work, The Hashish Eater, you’ll quickly realize that it’s mainly a series of tales about some trips that

01:24:05 ►

he took. Not physical trips, but well, there were some physical trips involved. But what’s more,

01:24:12 ►

he was only 21 years old when that book was published, which means that the ancient wisdom

01:24:17 ►

that flows from it came from the mind who, at the time that he wrote it, was younger than almost

01:24:22 ►

everybody here in the salon. So my point is not that the information is no good.

01:24:28 ►

In fact, it’s a really interesting book and really worth the time it takes to read.

01:24:32 ►

My point is that each and every one of us here in the salon

01:24:36 ►

is as qualified to write about and speculate about

01:24:40 ►

our experiences in consciousness exploration

01:24:42 ►

as was the now famous and revered Fitzhugh Ludlow. Thank you. Palenque to have their talks. And I remember that pool quite well. So if you go to psychedelicsalon.com, at the very top of the page, you’ll see a photo of

01:25:09 ►

the very spot at the end of the pool where we all met and talked during the Entheo Botany

01:25:14 ►

Conferences.

01:25:15 ►

And Matthew Watkins, as Pink Floyd says, I know you’re out there somewhere.

01:25:21 ►

In fact, I understand that Matthew sometimes makes speaking appearances

01:25:25 ►

at some of our community’s conferences. So, Matthew, I hope that you get to hear Terrence

01:25:30 ►

talking about you just a week or so after you first met with him in Palenque. And for what it’s

01:25:35 ►

worth, I think that he was joking when he called you a homeless guy with a sharp pencil. Because,

01:25:41 ►

hey, that’s been me and some of my best friends at one time or another as well

01:25:46 ►

it’s a pretty good group i think and speaking of good groups i’d originally planned on bringing

01:25:52 ►

you up to date about the recent activity on our new social media site which you can get to via

01:25:58 ►

psychedelicsalon.com but we’ve gone way too long today at at least I have. So for now, you can just go there and register for free as a lifetime charter member.

01:26:09 ►

That option is open the rest of this month.

01:26:11 ►

And then next week, I’ll tell you more about what’s beginning to take shape out there.

01:26:16 ►

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

01:26:20 ►

Be careful out there there my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

472 - The Timewave & The Watkins Objection

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