531 - The Prisim Lecture

Program Notes §

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson

Date this lecture was recorded: February 1982

[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]

“The belief in certitude, I suspect, is a primate habit.”

“One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism results from watching what the government is doing… . because the government is the last place that important change is registered. And so if you’re looking at the government you’re looking at the past.”

“Certitude only belongs to those people who own just one encyclopedia.”

 

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530 - A Psychedelic Moment In History

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon.

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And first off, I’d like to thank the following fellow salonners.

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Kevin P., Leonard R., Christian S., Sarah V., Dennis H., James A., Thomas C., Brian L., and James L.

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And all of them have made donations to the salon this year, and their financial assistance is greatly appreciated.

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Thank you all very much.

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And for our program today, I’m going to play a talk by one of our favorite authors, lecturers, and intellectual lights,

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none other than Robert Anton Wilson.

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This is a recording that was made in February of 1982, and unfortunately,

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the sound quality of this recording isn’t quite up to today’s standards. And there were a few

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parts where someone in the audience spoke, but, well, it was too distorted for me to clean up.

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But I suspect that if you like Bob Wilson as much as I do, then, well, these are minor blemishes,

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particularly when you consider

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the fact that this talk was given 35 years ago this month. The lecture begins with Wilson putting

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labels on various U.S. presidents, and my guess is that you’ll want to extend these interesting

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presidential titles onward from 1982. For example, he calls LBJ the pacifist president

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because his escalation of the American War in Vietnam

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actually created a nation of pacifists.

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One can only imagine what word he would hang on

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the current resident of the White House.

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So let’s get on with it and listen to the one and only

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Robert Anton Wilson.

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I was standing outside a little while ago, and somebody came up to me and said,

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why do you think people come to hear you talk?

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Well, that’s a hell of a beginning.

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I found myself standing out there pondering, why do people come to hear me talk?

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I decided there’s nothing good on the toolbar on Fridays. standing out there pondering, why do people come to hear me talk?

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I decided there’s nothing good on the tube on Fridays.

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I’m very glad to be here in Santa Cruz,

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which is one of the intellectual capitals of the New West,

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maybe the New Alexandria.

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And I think we’re very fortunate to be living at the time we are and to have a president like Ronald Reagan.

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Well, yeah.

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Yeah, Reagan is the intelligent person’s president.

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First we had Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was the pacifist’s president.

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He, by getting us into the wrong war,

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in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and fighting it in the most abominable and disgusting way

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possible, turned most of the public into pacifists for the first time in American history.

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By 1968, 70 percent of the people in the Gallup poll were against the war. And so if there was a vast pacifist conspiracy working behind the scenes,

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obviously they must have been the ones who were responsible for Lyndon Johnson.

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It made pacifism more popular than ever.

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And then we had Richard Nixon, who was the anarchist’s president.

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Then we had Richard Nixon, who was the anarchist’s president.

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He, after five years of Nixon,

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practically everybody in the country had a view of the federal government,

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which is virtually indistinguishable from what you’ll find in hardcore anarchist literature,

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or in Machiavelli.

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And now we’ve got Ronald Reagan, who’s the intelligent person’s president.

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He is making stupidity de classe.

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Stupidity has never had a worse reputation.

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People used to regard the feeble-minded as specially touched by the gods.

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In Ireland, they believe the village idiot has had his mind stolen by the fairies

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and therefore he is a holy being in some sense.

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That’s Irish fairies, not San Francisco.

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I’m from San Francisco myself,

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but I’m not Chinese or gay.

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I don’t want to be misunderstood.

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I just happen to live there.

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The Reagan administration is really doing a great deal for intelligence

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by showing us all the evolutionary disadvantages of stupidity.

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And intelligence is really what I think evolution is all about.

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There are those who say evolution is the result of copying errors.

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That is strict neo-Darwinism,

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very popular in some circles.

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That’s the theory that if it weren’t for copying errors,

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we’d all still be amoebas.

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And some people believe it.

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There are some people who believe the earth is hollow.

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Has anybody here heard of Peter Beater?

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Nobody? You have?

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Ah.

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Some people think I invented Peter Beater.

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They imagine he’s a character in one of my novels.

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It may be his name that does that.

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Well, if you had a name like Peter

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Beater, you’d be weird

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too by the time you got through high school.

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Dr. Peter Beater

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puts out a conspiracy

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newsletter. I’m not putting

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you on. This is for real. He puts out a conspiracy newsletter. I’m not putting you on. This is for real.

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He puts out a conspiracy newsletter,

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and it’s even wilder than the other conspiracy newsletters that I subscribe to.

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He claims that the Russians have been infiltrating robots into the American government

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for over 15 years,

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and most of the people in Washington

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that we think are our representatives

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have all been murdered off.

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And these robots have been put there in their place.

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And he claims the attempted,

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so-called attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan

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was carried out because replacing the president

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is a much more delicate business for the KGB

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than replacing middle-ranked government officials.

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So they needed this big fake assassination attempt to cover up

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while they were getting rid of Reagan and putting the robot in his place.

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The question is, how could anybody tell the difference?

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Those of you familiar with computer theory know that’s the Turing machine problem.

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But Peter Beater really believes it.

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And then there’s Lyndon LaRoche.

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How many people here have heard of Lyndon LaRoche?

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Ah, he’s gotten further than Peter Beater.

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He believes that the International Marijuana Organization is headed by Queen Elizabeth II of England,

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in cooperation with a secret society called the Muslim Brotherhood,

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and of course MI5, British Intelligence.

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And he’s got a lot of followers.

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You run into them at airports all the time

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selling his book Dope Incorporated

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or his other book The Power of Reason

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which is his autobiography

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I’m not putting you on

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although some people put their hands up

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they’ve encountered Lyndon LaRoche and his followers

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his followers have buttons that say

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feed Jane Fonda to the whales.

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Ah, yeah.

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Yeah, they’re all for fusion and

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against solar power.

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And

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you all came through the hall out

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there to get into this room

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except for the three extraterrestrials

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I’ve spotted and teleported in

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I would like to try a little experiment

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at this point

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I would like you all to close your eyes

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what actually is going to happen

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is I’m going to run through the audience

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picking your pockets while you’re doing this

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but trust me

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believe it’s not a dirty trick like that.

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You don’t have to close your eyes if you don’t want to, but it helps.

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Try to visualize the hall outside that you came through in getting in here.

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Now try to pick out separate items in the hall.

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See how many separate items you can remember.

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What was hanging on the

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walls? What was on the floor?

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What else did you see?

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Four.

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Four?

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Four what?

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Ah, somebody saw four walls.

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Raymond Chandler said once that was very observant,

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if you noticed there were four walls in the room.

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He said that was very observant for a literary critic.

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Okay, how many people could remember ten things that they saw in the hall?

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How many could remember fifteen things?

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Let’s see, we got…

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How many people could remember 20 things?

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Is your hand up?

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Sitting on the table?

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You can remember 20 things.

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More than 20?

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Okay.

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Would you tell us the 20 things you saw out there?

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Okay.

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Okay.

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Wait, wait, wait.

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Now, that’s the longest list anybody could think of.

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Nobody could think of more than 15, except that lady there.

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She thought of 20, approximately.

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Now, those of you who had less items

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in your hall, how many of you

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had items that weren’t on her list?

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My God, it’s everybody.

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Now, I have done this

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experiment many times

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frequently with a blackboard

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and I will list

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I will take the champion in the class

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the one who has noticed the most things in the hall

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and list everything

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and when we get the list

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then I ask for people who have things they noticed

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that weren’t on the list

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and I start listing them

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with an audience this size

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and since this is only a two-hour lecture

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anyway, we’ll sort of abbreviate it, I think.

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The point has been made that

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virtually every hand in the room went up.

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I think it was every hand.

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Everybody had seen something that she hadn’t seen,

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even though she had seen more

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than anybody else.

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What conclusion can we

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draw from that?

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By Jove, Holmes, how do you do it?

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Well…

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We each perceive a different reality.

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Ah, yes, we each perceive a different reality.

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There weren’t any two people in the same hall.

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You were all seeing different halls.

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You were all creating, projecting, perceiving, conceiving,

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in some way constructing,

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glossing a hall in your heads.

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And each one of you created

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a slightly different hall.

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Now, it’s rather astonishing

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that we’re able to communicate it all

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under the circumstances

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since we’re all living

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in these separate reality tunnels.

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For instance,

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I could announce

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in an enthusiastic tone

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I love fish

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and some people

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in the group will immediately think

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of the big tanks of tropical

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fish that they have at home

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and think gee he has the same

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love for tropical fish that I have

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I wonder how many he’s collected

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whereas other people are thinking of going to the restaurant

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and they’re thinking yeah I like swordfish but I’ll settle for wonder how many he’s collected. Whereas other people are thinking of going to the restaurant and they’re thinking,

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yeah, I like swordfish,

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but I’ll settle for a sole

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if that’s what they’ve got.

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And the simple expression,

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I love fish,

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has had two diametrically opposite meanings

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for two different segments of the audience.

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And yet somehow we do manage to communicate.

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This miraculous faculty of language

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somehow does get ideas across,

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even though we are all living in separate realities.

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For instance,

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if I were to ask,

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as a matter of fact, I think I will,

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everybody be quiet for a minute

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and see how many different sounds you notice.

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Okay, let’s just take a quick survey of the room.

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Back there, somebody, what did you hear?

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What did you hear over there?

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What did you hear?

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A tape recorder. What did you hear? I heard a tape recorder. A tape recorder.

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What did you hear?

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I heard a car going by.

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Heard a car going by.

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What did you hear?

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I heard kind of the hum from the mothership up there about 40 miles away.

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Ah, yeah.

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Uh-huh.

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How many people heard the three more extraterrestrials teleporting into the room?

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What did you hear?

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Voices?

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Voices?

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What’s that?

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You were flying the ship.

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What’s that?

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You were flying the ship.

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It’s kind of curious, but with the sense of hearing,

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just as with the sense of sight,

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we all seem to be creating separate universes.

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Oh, yes.

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We could repeat the experiment just the way we did it the first time, and we’d get somebody who heard more sounds than anybody else in the room.

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And then when we asked how many people heard sounds that that person didn’t hear,

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every hand would go up again.

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It always works that way.

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We’re all abstracting in different ways.

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Nietzsche said the basic nature of reality is chaos.

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Some people thought the Discordians invented that philosophy,

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but it was actually Nietzsche.

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And out of this chaos, or Nietzsche also calls it the abyss,

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out of this chaos or this abysmal universe,

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we each pick out certain parts, and that becomes our reality tunnel.

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And when we get together with people and talk,

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we start forming a reality labyrinth in which our reality tunnel and their reality tunnel intersects.

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And when you get enough people together, like in a family,

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they create quite a complicated reality labyrinth.

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And then you move several families together, and you’ve got a band,

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and the reality labyrinth gets more complicated,

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and you get several bands organized, you have a tribe.

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And they got a reality labyrinth as complicated as the one that Theseus went into looking for the Minotaur.

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And something very strange happens if you take one of these tribes and introduce them to another tribe.

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Each tribe comes to the conclusion those people over there are crazy.

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They don’t know what the hell is going on.

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Their reality labyrinth is the weirdest thing.

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They’re all nuts.

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They believe strange things.

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Chaos.

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I think Nietzsche

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picked the word chaos

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because you can impose

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any form you want on it,

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but any form you impose on it

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is too small to cover all of it.

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And so there’s always more

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there that’s not inside your reality

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tunnel. If your reality tunnel was

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identical with the universe,

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or as Bucky Fuller says, universe,

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Bucky Fuller says

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universe instead of the universe

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because the comes from the Latin theos

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and means God. And so

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if you say the universe, you’re saying

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God, God, and that’s redundant.

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So he just says universe.

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Some people think

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despite this neurological relativism,

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the fact that we’re all existing

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in different neurological realities,

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different reality labyrinths

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and reality tunnels

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that we’ve created by ourselves or by talking to one another,

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we can somehow or other achieve certitude, despite all that.

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I’ve been writing a historical novel the last year, and one of the conclusions I came to is that

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certitude belongs only to those who only own one encyclopedia.

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that certitude belongs only to those who only own one encyclopedia.

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This is Wilson’s 23rd law.

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And all you’ve got to do is try to find out how old Mozart was when he wrote his first symphony to start with.

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If you look in one source, you’ll find out.

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If you look in five sources, you’ll be totally confused.

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This is parallel to Siegel’s law. A person

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with one watch knows what time it is. A person with two watches is never sure. And it’s the

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same if you look at two reference books or two encyclopedias. The belief in certitude, I think, I suspect, is a primate habit.

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I wrote a poem once called Quantum Physics as a Branch of Primate Psychology,

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which I hope has been widely read around these parts.

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And most people find it very hard to think of quantum physics as a branch of

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primate psychology.

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But it’s very easy to think of

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economics as a branch of primate

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psychology because in

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recent research they have trained chimpanzees

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to use tokens

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which are very similar to money

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and to compete for them.

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They’ve even seen hoarding behavior

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very similar to people putting things in bank vaults and so on.

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And it’s very obvious if you look at politics

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that that’s all standard primate territorial behavior.

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Tim Leary said once,

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the only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.

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Yeah, one thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism results from watching what the government is doing and not paying attention to the important

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things. People think the world is going to hell in a handbasket,

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and they have always thought that.

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Jonathan Swift thought that 200 years ago.

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Dante thought it 600 years ago.

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Juvenal thought it 2,000 years ago.

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However far back you go,

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you will find writers who were quite convinced

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the world was in a terrible mess and getting worse.

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That comes from looking at what the government is doing.

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Because the government is the last place that important changes register.

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And so if you’re looking at the government, you’re looking at the past.

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I mean this literally.

00:19:36 ► §

Government is made up of lawyers.

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And there were 250,000 lawyers working for the federal government two years ago

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when I saw a study.

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God knows how many are there now.

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But 250,000 lawyers in a year can create a very close analog to the abysmal chaos that Nietzsche was talking about.

00:19:58 ► §

This is the discordian law of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath.

00:20:04 ► §

law of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath.

00:20:10 ► §

And it’s really impossible for anybody in the United States today to find out whether they’re legal or not.

00:20:13 ► §

Well, yeah, the lawyers, there are citizens groups that evaluate politicians.

00:20:20 ► §

They send out rating sheets on them, not just the moral majority.

00:20:23 ► §

There are liberal groups that do this.

00:20:23 ► §

they send out rating sheets on them, not just the moral majority.

00:20:24 ► §

There are liberal groups that do this.

00:20:27 ► §

So the way they rate them is how many laws they enacted,

00:20:32 ► §

how many votes were they in the House or the Senate for.

00:20:36 ► §

If they weren’t there and didn’t vote on a new law, that gives them a low rating.

00:20:42 ► §

The idea is that passing more laws is somehow improving the quality of our lives,

00:20:48 ► §

like putting more paintings in a museum or hiring more musicians for the symphony.

00:20:50 ► §

But it doesn’t quite work that way because every time they add more laws,

00:20:53 ► §

250,000 lawyers working for the bureaucracy

00:20:56 ► §

and around 100 lawyers in the Senate

00:21:00 ► §

and over 400 lawyers in the House of Representatives,

00:21:04 ► §

the more these laws increase, and over 400 lawyers in the House of Representatives,

00:21:07 ► §

the more these laws increase,

00:21:14 ► §

the more restrictions there are on our ability to negotiate with each other,

00:21:15 ► §

do business with each other,

00:21:19 ► §

engage in social transactions with each other.

00:21:24 ► §

And if anybody in this room were to hire a lawyer to minutely go over your affairs to find out if you’re legal or not,

00:21:28 ► §

it would probably take several months,

00:21:30 ► §

and again, you would run into Siegel’s law,

00:21:33 ► §

because you’d only be sure if you only hired one lawyer.

00:21:36 ► §

If you hired two, you’d get two opposite opinions about how legal you are.

00:21:40 ► §

So nobody knows whether they’re a criminal anymore.

00:21:42 ► §

So nobody knows whether they’re a criminal anymore.

00:21:49 ► §

And it’s just as Lao Tzu said 2,500 years ago,

00:21:53 ► §

the more laws we create, the more criminals we manufacture.

00:21:55 ► §

That’s obviously true.

00:21:58 ► §

The more laws there are, the more things there are you can’t do,

00:22:00 ► §

so the more criminals there are.

00:22:05 ► §

Reagan is promising to get government off our backs, but the moral majority is trying to get it onto our fronts

00:22:08 ► §

and

00:22:09 ► §

you

00:22:12 ► §

it might be interesting someday to sit down

00:22:18 ► §

quietly, meditatively

00:22:20 ► §

and try to figure out how many laws you violated in your life

00:22:24 ► §

and how many years in prison they could pin on you

00:22:28 ► §

if they caught up on you and everything.

00:22:32 ► §

There are laws about what herbs you can smoke and what you can’t smoke.

00:22:37 ► §

There are laws about what you can do with your sexual partner

00:22:40 ► §

alone in the privacy of your bedroom.

00:22:43 ► §

There are laws about who you can hire and who

00:22:48 ► §

you can fire and who you can work for and who you can’t work for and where you can live and

00:22:52 ► §

where you can’t. And they keep working at it, creating more and more laws until eventually

00:22:58 ► §

we’re bound to reach the point that T.H. White satirized in the Book of Merlin in the anthill,

00:23:07 ► §

where everything not compulsory is forbidden.

00:23:12 ► §

And then the only thing left for the lawyers to do is to go on to the next stage,

00:23:15 ► §

where everything not forbidden is compulsory.

00:23:21 ► §

And still, this is normal primate behavior. It’s all territorial.

00:23:24 ► §

What it is is the wild primates mark their territories

00:23:28 ► §

with excretions, just like dogs. You’ve all seen dogs going around peeing on every tree they pass.

00:23:34 ► §

This is the way the dog marks his territory. The urine makes the topological outline which says,

00:23:40 ► §

this is my territory, and that’s why other dogs go around sniffing. They want to know whose territory it is.

00:23:45 ► §

And primates do the same.

00:23:48 ► §

Domesticated primates do it with ink excretions,

00:23:50 ► §

and they demark their territories that way.

00:23:55 ► §

Now, I seem to have wandered from the subject,

00:23:59 ► §

which was certitude,

00:24:00 ► §

but you’ve got to understand,

00:24:01 ► §

most people on this primitive planet, at this barbaric stage, early stage of the evolution of intelligence, believe they have certitude.

00:24:16 ► §

And that’s one of the main jobs in order to unleash an intelligence explosion which can cope with the changes we’re going through.

00:24:24 ► §

The first thing to do is make people realize they don’t have certitude.

00:24:28 ► §

Because if you’re certain about something, you don’t have to think about it anymore.

00:24:33 ► §

And the more things you’re certain about, the less thinking you have to do.

00:24:37 ► §

And the less thinking you do, the stupider you get.

00:24:39 ► §

And so opening up their vast areas of incertitude is the kindest thing I could do for all of you.

00:24:48 ► §

That’s what’s known in Zen Buddhism as grandmotherly kindness.

00:24:54 ► §

And that comes from a story about a monk

00:24:59 ► §

who kept going to the Roshi, the Zen master,

00:25:02 ► §

and asking him, what is the Buddha?

00:25:06 ► §

And every time he asked the Roshi, the Zen master, and asking him, what is the Buddha? And every time he asked the Roshi,

00:25:08 ► §

he hit him upside the head with the kichiku,

00:25:11 ► §

whatever you call that stick, kichiku.

00:25:15 ► §

And after a couple of years of this,

00:25:17 ► §

the monk was all black and blue all over.

00:25:20 ► §

But he still wanted to find out what the Buddha was,

00:25:21 ► §

and he’d go up to the Roshi every now and then and say, what is the Buddha?

00:25:22 ► §

And pow, he’d get it again.

00:25:24 ► §

And finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, so he left and up to the roshi every now and then and say, what is the Buddha? And pow, he’d get it again. And finally he couldn’t take it anymore,

00:25:26 ► §

so he left and went to another monastery,

00:25:29 ► §

and he got an interview with the roshi,

00:25:31 ► §

the head abbot, zen master,

00:25:34 ► §

and said he wanted admission there.

00:25:36 ► §

And the roshi said, why did you leave the last monastery?

00:25:39 ► §

So he told him what had happened.

00:25:41 ► §

And the roshi said, well, I’ll take you on,

00:25:43 ► §

but first go back and apologize to the other Roshi

00:25:47 ► §

because you didn’t show enough appreciation for his grandmotherly kindness.

00:25:52 ► §

And I always try to practice grandmotherly kindness

00:25:57 ► §

with the readers of my books, as some of you may know.

00:26:01 ► §

There are those who think they can be certain of something

00:26:05 ► §

even though nobody knows what the hell the hall is like.

00:26:07 ► §

We all created separate halls.

00:26:10 ► §

There is a belief that there is certainty in mathematics.

00:26:15 ► §

Certitude.

00:26:16 ► §

It’s very clumsy to confuse certainty with certitude,

00:26:20 ► §

but we all do it occasionally,

00:26:22 ► §

especially if people insist on giving you odd herbs just before you’re supposed to go on and give a talk.

00:26:30 ► §

Certainty is a quality of proposition.

00:26:33 ► §

Certitude is a quality of minds.

00:26:37 ► §

Some people think there is certitude in mathematics.

00:26:40 ► §

These are non-mathematicians.

00:26:42 ► §

These are non-mathematicians.

00:26:50 ► §

Mathematics believed up until the middle of the last century that we knew geometry.

00:26:54 ► §

We knew the geometry of the space in which we’re living.

00:27:00 ► §

Immanuel Kant, but maybe somebody can’t.

00:27:03 ► §

No, that’s a Groucho Marx type joke.

00:27:05 ► §

I shouldn’t do that. Immanuel Kant… I’m a Marxist-Leninist, Groucho and John.

00:27:12 ► §

Immanuel Kant believed the certainty of the propositions of Euclidean geometry

00:27:18 ► §

was so great that it showed that we can obtain truth intuitively

00:27:21 ► §

because there’s nowhere else they came from but intuition.

00:27:25 ► §

There’s no way of demonstrating them in the real world,

00:27:27 ► §

because in the real world you can’t find Euclidean circles,

00:27:30 ► §

Euclidean lines, you can’t even find Euclidean points.

00:27:35 ► §

And yet Euclid somehow, out of a marvelous artistic creative jump,

00:27:39 ► §

created this marvelous geometry, which was the geometry of the space.

00:27:44 ► §

And then the calamity occurred.

00:27:47 ► §

Gauss found another space and created another geometry.

00:27:52 ► §

And Riemann came along and perfected the Gaussian space.

00:27:56 ► §

And we suddenly had two geometries.

00:27:58 ► §

And nobody knew which was the real geometry of the real space anymore.

00:28:03 ► §

And a great pall of agnosticism crept over the mathematical

00:28:07 ► §

world. And there were optimists, as there always are. There were those who said, we’ll just keep

00:28:13 ► §

working on it, and one of the geometries will turn out to have a contradiction in it, and then

00:28:17 ► §

we’ll know that’s the false one. And that idea was given up after about 50 years, because while

00:28:23 ► §

they were trying to find the contradiction,

00:28:25 ► §

and it eluded them, a third geometry came along,

00:28:28 ► §

Labrachewskian geometry.

00:28:30 ► §

Now, nobody knows what the hell kind of space we live in.

00:28:34 ► §

We don’t know whether it’s Euclidean, Riemannian, or Labrachewskian,

00:28:37 ► §

or Hamiltonian, or Hilbert space.

00:28:41 ► §

And meanwhile, looming on the horizon

00:28:43 ► §

is the jocular figure of Bucky Fuller

00:28:45 ► §

with his synergetic geometry

00:28:48 ► §

which is entirely different than

00:28:50 ► §

any of the others and works so well

00:28:52 ► §

in

00:28:53 ► §

architecture and

00:28:55 ► §

in various branches of biology

00:28:57 ► §

that it is gaining in popularity

00:28:59 ► §

but nobody anymore

00:29:02 ► §

in mathematics claims

00:29:04 ► §

to know what’s the real geometry of the space.

00:29:08 ► §

Even worse, traumatic occurrences have been happening to the mathematicians

00:29:14 ► §

since the geometry collapsed.

00:29:16 ► §

Proof itself collapsed.

00:29:17 ► §

Nobody knows what proof is anymore.

00:29:20 ► §

This became obvious around the end of the last century,

00:29:42 ► §

This became obvious around the end of the last century, and Bertrand Russell, who once got fired from a college in New York because he was a man of low moral character, that’s because he wrote a book called Marriage and Morals in which he said, hardly anybody is monogamous, let’s stop pretending they are. He was a great mathematician

00:29:45 ► §

when he wasn’t being a man of low moral character

00:29:49 ► §

by uttering such sentiments.

00:29:52 ► §

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead,

00:29:54 ► §

another great mathematician,

00:29:55 ► §

rushed into the breach to define proof once and for all.

00:29:59 ► §

And they showed that all mathematical proofs

00:30:01 ► §

can be reduced to logical proofs.

00:30:03 ► §

And we know that logic is certain.

00:30:05 ► §

So now we know where mathematics comes from.

00:30:07 ► §

It’s just a deduction from logic, and there is a foundation under it,

00:30:10 ► §

and we’re not floating around in midair after all.

00:30:14 ► §

Then people started, other mathematicians went to work

00:30:17 ► §

on the Principia Mathematica, where Russell and White had demonstrated that,

00:30:22 ► §

and they found all sorts of flaws in it,

00:30:24 ► §

things that hadn’t been proven yet,

00:30:25 ► §

and further uncertainties grew up

00:30:28 ► §

until Brouwer came along and said,

00:30:31 ► §

actually, mathematics reduces to intuition.

00:30:35 ► §

And he developed a whole school of mathematics

00:30:37 ► §

in opposition to Russell and Whitehead.

00:30:39 ► §

So we had two schools,

00:30:40 ► §

the intuitionists and the logicians.

00:30:43 ► §

Meanwhile, other people working in both logic and mathematics

00:30:47 ► §

came to the astonishing realization

00:30:49 ► §

that the attempt to reduce mathematics to logic wasn’t working.

00:30:54 ► §

Meanwhile, the attempt to reduce logic to mathematics

00:30:58 ► §

was looking equally promising.

00:31:01 ► §

So maybe it wasn’t that mathematics was based on logic,

00:31:03 ► §

but it was that logic was based on mathematics, in which case we have what’s known as a

00:31:08 ► §

strange loop and you go around and around forever but you can that you

00:31:12 ► §

never know where you started or where you’re going to end and we’re back with

00:31:15 ► §

that abysmal chaos of Nietzsche’s that we were trying to get away from then the

00:31:28 ► §

Then the formalists came on the scene, led by David Hilbert,

00:31:36 ► §

and they demonstrated conclusively once and for all that mathematics was a matter of correct formalism,

00:31:39 ► §

just like a chess game, and they convinced one another,

00:31:42 ► §

and they couldn’t convince the rest of the mathematicians,

00:31:45 ► §

some of whom were still following Russell and Whitehead and saying,

00:31:48 ► §

by God, we will reduce it all to logic eventually,

00:31:53 ► §

and some of whom were following Brouwer and saying it all reduces to intuition.

00:31:57 ► §

And only a few followed Hilbert off into the formalist theory.

00:32:01 ► §

And this dispute went on for 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly the set theorists arrived on the scene and said, mathematics reduces to set theory.

00:32:08 ► §

So now we’ve got four theories

00:32:10 ► §

about what mathematics reduces to,

00:32:13 ► §

to logic, to intuition, to formalism,

00:32:16 ► §

or to set theory,

00:32:17 ► §

and mathematicians can’t agree among themselves

00:32:19 ► §

what it reduces to.

00:32:20 ► §

So we’ve got basically a half a dozen geometries

00:32:24 ► §

and four different ideas of what proof would be if we could find proof.

00:32:29 ► §

And mathematics is the agnostics heaven and the eternal burning pit of hell for those who are seeking certitude.

00:32:40 ► §

There is no certitude left anywhere in mathematics.

00:32:43 ► §

Meanwhile, the physicists plug along hopefully

00:32:45 ► §

even though they don’t know what mathematics is

00:32:48 ► §

and they’re using it all the time

00:32:49 ► §

they still think we can find out something about reality

00:32:52 ► §

with a capital R

00:32:54 ► §

as distinguished from the separate realities

00:32:56 ► §

that I demonstrated earlier in my experiment

00:32:58 ► §

that we’re all creating minute by minute as we go along

00:33:01 ► §

the physicists say

00:33:02 ► §

we will find the reality outside of these private

00:33:05 ► §

neurological reality tunnels,

00:33:07 ► §

the capital R reality.

00:33:09 ► §

And then they began to discover

00:33:12 ► §

very weird and creepy things

00:33:14 ► §

about that assumed reality out there.

00:33:17 ► §

And we got special relativity

00:33:20 ► §

and general relativity,

00:33:21 ► §

and it turned out

00:33:22 ► §

there are two interpretations

00:33:23 ► §

of general relativity, at least, and there are two interpretations of general relativity,

00:33:29 ► §

at least, and that Einstein endorsed both of them at different times.

00:33:34 ► §

This is, if anybody doubts this, look into The Voices of Time by J.T. Fraser,

00:33:40 ► §

in which he quotes statements of Einstein’s given at different times, in which he endorses the process view of Whitehead as the correct interpretation of general relativity,

00:33:46 ► §

and in another place,

00:33:48 ► §

he endorses the block universe of Minkowski

00:33:50 ► §

as the correct interpretation of relativity,

00:33:53 ► §

and those two things totally contradict each other.

00:33:55 ► §

So even Einstein wasn’t sure what relativity meant

00:33:58 ► §

when you took it off the mathematical level

00:34:00 ► §

and put it into the ordinary language.

00:34:03 ► §

But meanwhile, physics was growing remarkably

00:34:06 ► §

in the area of quantum theory, and we suddenly found we had two different types of physics.

00:34:11 ► §

We had the physics of relativity and the physics of quantum theory, and there’s no way to translate

00:34:15 ► §

from one to the other. So physicists use one part of the time and the other another part

00:34:20 ► §

of the time and hope that eventually they’ll get them together into some kind of unified

00:34:24 ► §

field theory. and that hope

00:34:25 ► §

is receding gradually as the hope

00:34:27 ► §

receded in the 19th century that we

00:34:29 ► §

would find the correct geometry of the

00:34:31 ► §

real space after all

00:34:33 ► §

what’s been happening in quantum theory

00:34:35 ► §

is that

00:34:38 ► §

confronted with

00:34:39 ► §

the fact that the mathematical

00:34:41 ► §

equations of Schrodinger

00:34:43 ► §

and Heisenberg and Dirac work

00:34:46 ► §

and have continued to work and are still working every day

00:34:50 ► §

and are the most useful equations around.

00:34:55 ► §

Physicists have been asking ever since the 20s,

00:34:57 ► §

what the hell do these equations mean

00:34:59 ► §

if we try to build a view of reality out of these equations. And the equations are so eldritch, as H.P. Lovecraft would say,

00:35:13 ► §

that a strange zoology, a strange bestiary of conflicting theories have arisen out of this.

00:35:22 ► §

There is the Copenhagen Interpretation,

00:35:27 ► §

which I like very much because it goes along with my general agnosticism.

00:35:31 ► §

The Copenhagen Interpretation was invented by Niels Bohr

00:35:34 ► §

and a couple of his friends at the Carlsberg Brewery.

00:35:38 ► §

That’s an in-joke.

00:35:39 ► §

He actually did live in the Carlsberg Brewery.

00:35:43 ► §

Well, he lived with the Carlsberg Brewery around him on the same grounds.

00:35:48 ► §

The Copenhagen interpretation says the equations don’t tell us what reality is.

00:35:53 ► §

They tell us how our minds work in trying to describe reality.

00:35:58 ► §

Bohr says that very explicitly.

00:36:02 ► §

It used to be believed that physics can tell us

00:36:06 ► §

about the universe

00:36:06 ► §

we now know that physics can only tell us

00:36:09 ► §

what we can say about the universe

00:36:12 ► §

direct quote Niels Bohr

00:36:14 ► §

that’s the Copenhagen interpretation

00:36:16 ► §

there are some physicists

00:36:17 ► §

quite a few who don’t like it

00:36:18 ► §

so they have tried to decide what the equations do mean

00:36:22 ► §

and out of this has come

00:36:23 ► §

the multiple universe

00:36:26 ► §

model, which holds that everything that can happen does happen. And the equations really

00:36:32 ► §

do say that. I mean, they really seem to say that if you look at them. This grew out of

00:36:37 ► §

the Schrödinger’s cat, the Duncan experiment, in which Erwin Schrodinger asked if you had a cat in a box

00:36:45 ► §

and a radioactive decay process which would eventually trigger the firing of a gun that

00:36:53 ► §

would shoot the cat and if theoretical physics is all it’s cracked up to be we don’t have to

00:36:59 ► §

open the box to see what happens we just solve the equations the equations involve the collapse of

00:37:06 ► §

the state vector and you find out that you can’t reduce the equations to less than two answers

00:37:11 ► §

so we’ve got one eigenstate as it’s called in which the cat is dead and another eigenstate

00:37:16 ► §

in which the cat is alive the result of taking this seriously is the ewg model named after

00:37:24 ► §

everett wheeler and Graham of Princeton,

00:37:26 ► §

which says that the universe does split every time two things can happen.

00:37:30 ► §

So there are millions and millions, as Carl Sagan would say,

00:37:33 ► §

millions and billions of universes all around us in which everything that can happen did happen.

00:37:41 ► §

And I’m not here tonight in one of them, because there are lots of things there, and several of them. As a matter of fact, there are millions of them and I’m not here tonight in one of them, because there are lots of things that I’m not here tonight.

00:37:45 ► §

As a matter of fact, there are millions of them where I’m not here tonight.

00:37:48 ► §

I just didn’t get here. All sorts of things could have stopped me.

00:37:51 ► §

And there are millions of universes in which John F. Kennedy didn’t go to Dallas

00:37:56 ► §

on November 22, 1962, and lived on to a ripe old age.

00:38:02 ► §

And there are millions of universes in which Kennedy didn’t go to Dallas

00:38:05 ► §

but slipped on a banana peel the next day and died anyway,

00:38:09 ► §

and all these universes are equally real.

00:38:12 ► §

And the exponents of this theory, exponents, proponents,

00:38:16 ► §

the proponents of this theory argue that this introduces

00:38:21 ► §

less metaphysical assumptions than any rival theory.

00:38:24 ► §

And they’re right.

00:38:26 ► §

If you try to list, if you go back to what’s known as Occam’s razor,

00:38:29 ► §

the fewest possible assumptions,

00:38:31 ► §

this doesn’t introduce any assumptions beyond what the equations seem to be saying.

00:38:36 ► §

However, it does seem mighty odd from the point of view of what’s called common sense,

00:38:40 ► §

and very few physicists can take it seriously.

00:38:43 ► §

And it’s rumored that they’re all acid heads anyway.

00:38:47 ► §

But be that as it may,

00:38:48 ► §

that’s one way out of the Copenhagen collapse into solipsism.

00:38:54 ► §

Because really, the Copenhagen interpretation

00:38:56 ► §

does come down to group solipsism.

00:38:58 ► §

The universe we know is the creation of our symbols.

00:39:05 ► §

And the multiple universe gets us out of that,

00:39:07 ► §

but since it doesn’t satisfy everybody,

00:39:09 ► §

David Bohm, once the star pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer,

00:39:14 ► §

Dr. Bohm has been developing the hidden variable theory,

00:39:18 ► §

which holds that there is a realm of hidden variables

00:39:20 ► §

that controls all quantum processes

00:39:23 ► §

and will get us out of all these puzzles,

00:39:25 ► §

and if we just look hard enough, we’ll find it.

00:39:28 ► §

Which reminds me of the law of fives in discordian theory.

00:39:32 ► §

That was promulgated by Ho Chi Zen,

00:39:36 ► §

a great discordian philosopher,

00:39:39 ► §

who subsequently went mad.

00:39:42 ► §

But Ho Chi Zen determined that

00:39:45 ► §

everything in the

00:39:45 ► §

universe is directly

00:39:46 ► §

related to the number

00:39:48 ► §

five or can be shown

00:39:49 ► §

to be directly related

00:39:50 ► §

to the number five if

00:39:51 ► §

we look hard enough.

00:39:53 ► §

And this is one of the

00:39:54 ► §

basic katmas of the

00:39:56 ► §

discordian religion.

00:39:57 ► §

Most religions have

00:39:58 ► §

dogmas, but discordianism

00:40:00 ► §

has katmas. And the

00:40:02 ► §

hidden variable theory

00:40:03 ► §

is very, I don’t mean

00:40:04 ► §

to be harsh on Dr. Bohm.

00:40:06 ► §

I like Dr. Bohm.

00:40:07 ► §

I love to read him.

00:40:08 ► §

He’s a beautiful writer and a fine philosopher.

00:40:10 ► §

I’m just being whimsical.

00:40:12 ► §

But the hidden variable theory is,

00:40:13 ► §

if we look hard enough,

00:40:14 ► §

we’ll find the hidden variables.

00:40:17 ► §

Evan Harris Walker has developed this

00:40:19 ► §

by showing that the hidden variables,

00:40:22 ► §

if they exist, must function non-locally.

00:40:26 ► §

And non-locally in physics means that they’re not diminished by space or time.

00:40:32 ► §

And we find ourselves, if we examine the non-local hidden variables and what they imply,

00:40:38 ► §

we find ourselves confronted directly with what all the mystics have been saying throughout history,

00:40:44 ► §

that all is one.

00:40:46 ► §

Or as Nick Herbert, a physicist who lives near here,

00:40:48 ► §

up in Boulder Creek,

00:40:51 ► §

as Nick Herbert puts it, here is there.

00:40:54 ► §

If the hidden variables function non-locally,

00:40:58 ► §

then there is no difference between anything.

00:41:02 ► §

Since everything was united at the Big Bang,

00:41:07 ► §

everything is still united. And even if there wasn’t a Big Bang, everything is still united because the hidden variables

00:41:11 ► §

function non-locally. Every son of a bitch you meet is Christ. I forget who wrote that,

00:41:18 ► §

some poet of the 1930s. That’s basically what the hidden variable theory comes down to I am Christ you are Christ what is the Buddha the one in the yard but the one

00:41:32 ► §

in the yard is a statue yes then what is the Buddha the one in the yard you can’t

00:41:37 ► §

separate anything from anything in the hidden variable theory all is one this

00:41:44 ► §

means that the whole universe we perceive,

00:41:46 ► §

those separate hallways you were all creating

00:41:49 ► §

as you came in here,

00:41:51 ► §

those things have nothing to do with reality at all.

00:41:53 ► §

They just show how the evolution

00:41:55 ► §

of a primate nervous system

00:41:57 ► §

into a semi-civilized state,

00:42:00 ► §

how this kind of nervous system

00:42:02 ► §

stacks incoming signals

00:42:04 ► §

into that kind of space.

00:42:06 ► §

The real reality, according to the hidden variable theory, is timeless and spaceless.

00:42:13 ► §

So anytime you perceive a separation in space or an interval in time, you are hallucinating.

00:42:22 ► §

And that’s just what the Buddha said. That’s what Plato said.

00:42:25 ► §

That’s what George Berkeley,

00:42:27 ► §

the Irish philosopher, said.

00:42:29 ► §

And many people are very happy

00:42:30 ► §

with the hidden variable theory.

00:42:32 ► §

These are people who have been mystics

00:42:33 ► §

for a long time

00:42:34 ► §

or who took certain popular chemicals

00:42:37 ► §

in the 60s.

00:42:39 ► §

And this all makes perfect sense to them.

00:42:41 ► §

But there are others who say,

00:42:43 ► §

my Christ, this isn’t physics,

00:42:48 ► §

it’s metaphysics and won’t have anything to do with it. So then they either got to go back to the multiple universe model in which everything that can happen to you

00:42:52 ► §

did happen to you, or you got to go back to Copenhagen and say, we don’t know anything

00:42:57 ► §

about reality. All we know about is what we’re saying to one another.

00:43:00 ► §

Or there was another path out, which is the super determinist position developed by Jeffrey Chu and Fritjof Capra.

00:43:09 ► §

And the super determinist position goes way beyond classical determinism because it has to assume non-local hidden variables, just like the Bohm theory.

00:43:19 ► §

But it lands us in a very peculiar place where I had no choice about coming here tonight. You had

00:43:28 ► §

no choice about being here. I have no choice about what I’m going to say next. You have

00:43:34 ► §

no choice about how you’re going to react to what I say next. And if you were to take a piece of prose, or poetry for that matter,

00:43:49 ► §

and cut it with a scissor up the middle, and then cut it the other way,

00:43:53 ► §

and then rearrange the pieces and copy down what comes out,

00:43:56 ► §

and do that with several pages and shuffle them up,

00:43:59 ► §

which is the way William Burroughs creates his books.

00:44:02 ► §

As some of you may know, it’s the cut-up method.

00:44:05 ► §

Actually, it was invented by the Dadaists back in 1914.

00:44:09 ► §

If you were to do that, you could only get one possible result,

00:44:13 ► §

because everything is not only determined, but super-determined.

00:44:18 ► §

And Fritjof Capra says this is total enlightenment when you understand this,

00:44:22 ► §

because you’ll never feel guilty about anything again. You’ll be as blissed out as any Buddha you’ve ever seen

00:44:27 ► §

sitting in any of those Chinese statues.

00:44:31 ► §

And so we are either living in a universe which we can’t know,

00:44:35 ► §

the Copenhagen view,

00:44:36 ► §

or anything that can happen does happen,

00:44:38 ► §

the multiple universe model.

00:44:40 ► §

Our reality has nothing to do with space and time,

00:44:42 ► §

and we’re hallucinating all the time,

00:44:44 ► §

except when we are

00:44:46 ► §

in this spaceless, timeless realm,

00:44:48 ► §

whether we got there by yoga,

00:44:50 ► §

drugs, or fasting, or whatever,

00:44:53 ► §

where everything is

00:44:53 ► §

so super determined that you have

00:44:56 ► §

no choice whatsoever about

00:44:58 ► §

which of these theories you’re going to prefer.

00:45:03 ► §

And

00:45:03 ► §

that is where physics

00:45:06 ► §

has gotten to in the last

00:45:07 ► §

but of course we can be certain

00:45:10 ► §

of some things

00:45:11 ► §

the San Francisco Chronicle never lies

00:45:14 ► §

well

00:45:15 ► §

the social sciences

00:45:20 ► §

meanwhile have been going

00:45:24 ► §

through a weird evolution of their own.

00:45:26 ► §

At the end of the last century, anthropologists started coming back

00:45:29 ► §

with reports about people who didn’t act like Victorian English men and women.

00:45:37 ► §

They found out that there were tribes in which…

00:45:43 ► §

tribes in which well in the Trobriand Island

00:45:47 ► §

is adolescents

00:45:49 ► §

not only are as sexually free

00:45:52 ► §

as in Santa Cruz

00:45:53 ► §

which was shocking news

00:45:56 ► §

to the Victorians

00:45:57 ► §

but they have their own separate huts

00:45:59 ► §

so that their parents

00:46:01 ► §

won’t interfere with them

00:46:03 ► §

as soon as you reach puberty you move into a separate hut and don’t interfere with them. As soon as you reach puberty, you move into a separate hut

00:46:06 ► §

and don’t live with your family anymore.

00:46:09 ► §

And they found tribes where headhunting was a sign of social accomplishment,

00:46:16 ► §

very much like and yet strangely unlike our society

00:46:20 ► §

where collecting money is a sign of accomplishment.

00:46:24 ► §

And then they found all these weird differences, and gradually the theory of cultural relativism

00:46:28 ► §

evolved, which holds that there are no constants in human behavior.

00:46:34 ► §

Once you create a society, people born into that society will go around acting as if it

00:46:39 ► §

makes sense, no matter how crazy it is from outside.

00:46:43 ► §

Of course, this had been noticed by people who traveled a lot

00:46:45 ► §

even before the, you know,

00:46:48 ► §

you go to Germany, you go to France,

00:46:50 ► §

you go to the South Seas, you go up

00:46:52 ► §

and see the Eskimos, you

00:46:53 ► §

wander around, you discover we’re not all living

00:46:55 ► §

in the same reality tunnel. There are all these

00:46:57 ► §

conflicting reality labyrinths,

00:46:59 ► §

and that’s how the theory of

00:47:01 ► §

cultural relativism grew up. But meanwhile,

00:47:09 ► §

in Vienna, there was Sigmund Freud.

00:47:15 ► §

And Freud was the fellow that if you said good morning to him,

00:47:17 ► §

he’d say, what did he mean by that?

00:47:20 ► §

Which is a very intelligent question. And Freud discovered that people’s beliefs

00:47:25 ► §

are frequently determined by unconscious emotional factors

00:47:29 ► §

that they don’t even know about

00:47:30 ► §

and Freud discovered that if you tell people

00:47:34 ► §

if you observe them very closely and clinically

00:47:38 ► §

as a psychiatrist has to

00:47:41 ► §

you will see the emotional forces

00:47:44 ► §

that are driving them to believe certain things.

00:47:47 ► §

And you then tell them calmly, slowly, quietly, in an unthreatening way, in as gentle a way as

00:47:54 ► §

possible, you have a strong emotional drive that is making you believe that. It has nothing to do

00:48:00 ► §

with logic or the facts at all. It’s just you have an emotional need for that belief.

00:48:07 ► §

They will get angry and start pounding on the table and tell you you’ve got a dirty mind

00:48:09 ► §

and stomp out of therapy.

00:48:11 ► §

And so it’s taken most of the 20th century

00:48:14 ► §

for therapists to find ways of breaking the shocking news

00:48:17 ► §

to their patients without driving them away.

00:48:21 ► §

And it has taken most of the 20th century

00:48:23 ► §

for people to realize that this isn’t just true

00:48:26 ► §

about those crazy people in therapy.

00:48:28 ► §

It’s true about the rest of us, too.

00:48:30 ► §

And so a little bit more of certitude has been taken away,

00:48:34 ► §

and we’re getting more and more to the position I spoke of,

00:48:37 ► §

where certitude belongs only to those

00:48:39 ► §

who own only one encyclopedia.

00:48:43 ► §

Meanwhile, the social sciences evolved further

00:48:47 ► §

and ethno-methodology came along.

00:48:50 ► §

Ethno-methodology was invented by Harold Garfinkel at UCLA

00:48:54 ► §

and some people think it was the major intellectual calamity of the 60s.

00:49:01 ► §

The widespread opinion throughout this society is that LSD was the major intellectual calamity of the 60s. The widespread opinion throughout this society is

00:49:06 ► §

that LSD was the major intellectual

00:49:08 ► §

calamity of the 60s.

00:49:10 ► §

But in social sciences

00:49:11 ► §

departments, when the candles gutter

00:49:13 ► §

low and there are no

00:49:15 ► §

outsiders peering over the transom,

00:49:18 ► §

they exchange the news

00:49:19 ► §

and whispers, it was that bastard

00:49:21 ► §

Garfinkel who did it.

00:49:24 ► §

Because,

00:49:25 ► §

well, for instance,

00:49:28 ► §

two of Garfinkel’s

00:49:30 ► §

best-known pupils are

00:49:31 ► §

Carlos Castaneda and

00:49:33 ► §

George Lucas.

00:49:35 ► §

And if you wonder

00:49:37 ► §

why the world is getting weirder all the time,

00:49:40 ► §

you don’t just trace it back by way of

00:49:42 ► §

Lucas or by way of Castaneda.

00:49:43 ► §

You’ve got to go back to the source, which was Garfinkel.

00:49:48 ► §

Garfinkel confronted the fundamental challenge of modern anthropology and sociology,

00:49:55 ► §

which is how the hell do we know what part of our experience isn’t created by the society around us?

00:50:01 ► §

How do we find out what is not programmed into us by the reality

00:50:05 ► §

labyrinth created by the conversations we exchange with people in the same

00:50:10 ► §

tribe? The distinction was put into words so that the social scientists thought

00:50:17 ► §

they could understand one another when they talked about it. And they decided

00:50:22 ► §

that the reality we create by talking to one another or by communicating

00:50:27 ► §

in deaf and dumb language or with semaphores or whatever, any reality tunnel or reality

00:50:34 ► §

labyrinth created socially is an emic reality, E-M-I-C. And aside from all that there is the etic reality E-T-I-C

00:50:46 ► §

and the etic reality is the thing that we don’t create

00:50:49 ► §

just by talking to one another

00:50:51 ► §

then the question is how do you find the etic reality

00:50:54 ► §

well you can go ask the physicists

00:50:57 ► §

we want to find out what part of our reality

00:51:01 ► §

isn’t created by the people we hang around with

00:51:04 ► §

and the physicists will tell you well actually What part of our reality isn’t created by the people we hang around with?

00:51:07 ► §

And the physicists will tell you,

00:51:12 ► §

well, actually, Niels Bohr says that physics itself is created by physicists talking to one another in the language they’ve invented,

00:51:16 ► §

which is known as wave mechanics.

00:51:19 ► §

And so we really can’t know anything about what’s going on out there.

00:51:24 ► §

To quote it once again, what Niels Bohr said,

00:51:27 ► §

it used to be thought that physics could tell us about the universe.

00:51:30 ► §

We now know physics can tell us what we can say about the universe.

00:51:34 ► §

So physics is part of the emic reality,

00:51:37 ► §

and we’re no closer to the etic reality.

00:51:39 ► §

But if we don’t give up, we can ask other physicists,

00:51:42 ► §

and they’ll tell us, oh yeah, there’s multiple universes out there.

00:51:46 ► §

All is one.

00:51:47 ► §

Buddha was right.

00:51:49 ► §

Or it’s all super determined and it’s determined that you were going to come here

00:51:52 ► §

and ask me this question and it was determined

00:51:53 ► §

that I was going to give you this answer and if you don’t

00:51:56 ► §

understand, they might hit you with a club like the Zen

00:51:58 ► §

Master because at that point, further

00:52:00 ► §

discussion is useless.

00:52:02 ► §

And

00:52:03 ► §

you might go ask the

00:52:06 ► §

mathematicians, but you’ll find they’ve got four

00:52:08 ► §

different definitions of proof, and none of them

00:52:10 ► §

agree what a real proof is anymore,

00:52:12 ► §

on top of which there’s Gödel’s proof,

00:52:14 ► §

which proves that all proofs are contingent

00:52:16 ► §

and make things even harder on

00:52:18 ► §

us.

00:52:18 ► §

If it’s a system big enough to include

00:52:22 ► §

number theory, which is a very simple

00:52:24 ► §

system indeed.

00:52:26 ► §

Yes.

00:52:28 ► §

That’s right.

00:52:30 ► §

And on top of the Goidel problem,

00:52:34 ► §

there is the scandal that was unleashed

00:52:38 ► §

when Garfinkel set his pupils to trying to find out what reality was.

00:52:43 ► §

He invented what are known as breaching experiments.

00:52:47 ► §

And breaching experiments consist of contradicting what people take for granted and seeing how they

00:52:52 ► §

act. And the idea was that in this way the students would discover what part of reality

00:52:57 ► §

is socially created and what part isn’t. And the upshot of this, according to some of Garfinkel’s

00:53:04 ► §

critics, were several nervous breakdowns

00:53:07 ► §

and a couple of murders and suicides

00:53:08 ► §

and some people think a worse scandal

00:53:13 ► §

than the LSD sessions at Harvard

00:53:15 ► §

some of Garfinkel’s students were sent home

00:53:19 ► §

when they were on vacation

00:53:20 ► §

and told to treat their parents like landlords

00:53:23 ► §

and pretend they were boarders

00:53:24 ► §

some of them were trained to observe on vacation and told to treat their parents like landlords and pretend they were boarders.

00:53:32 ► §

Some of them were trained to observe how people reacted if, while you’re talking to them,

00:53:37 ► §

if you don’t talk in a crazy or schizophrenic way or do anything else to convince them you’re schizophrenic, but nonetheless put your nose right next to theirs, how will they react

00:53:43 ► §

to that reaching of their assumption about how human beings

00:53:45 ► §

should interact? And Garfinkel

00:53:47 ► §

tried a lot of experiments like that

00:53:49 ► §

with the upshot that none of his students

00:53:51 ► §

were sure anymore what reality was.

00:53:54 ► §

And Carlos Castaneda wrote his

00:53:55 ► §

books, which have led to endless

00:53:57 ► §

controversy between those who say

00:53:59 ► §

Garfinkel was liberated,

00:54:01 ► §

Castaneda was liberated by

00:54:03 ► §

Garfinkel. He wasn’t trapped anymore in the emic reality of the social sciences.

00:54:10 ► §

He was able to open himself up and enter the emic reality of the sorcerer, Don Juan.

00:54:16 ► §

And he’s the first anthropologist to bring back real data

00:54:19 ► §

because all the others were so trapped in their own emic reality

00:54:23 ► §

that whatever they saw, they translated into the terms of their private culture,

00:54:27 ► §

of the social sciences and the universities where they worked.

00:54:31 ► §

Castaneda brought back the real thing.

00:54:34 ► §

And then there are the others saying, bullshit!

00:54:37 ► §

Castaneda is the biggest liar since the guy who created Peltdown, man.

00:54:41 ► §

And then there is Richard DeMille who says, now wait a minute.

00:54:46 ► §

Maybe Castaneda is conducting a breaching experiment. Maybe we’re trying to find out what happens when social

00:54:51 ► §

scientists have their basic axioms challenged. Maybe the whole thing is a breaching experiment

00:54:56 ► §

because it turns out there was another book that was used as a basic reference in a textbook on ethno-methodology

00:55:06 ► §

written by Garfinkel himself.

00:55:09 ► §

And it turned out that book was totally fictitious.

00:55:11 ► §

It was a book about the Brazilian Indians

00:55:13 ► §

and people who had actually been there

00:55:16 ► §

and studied the Brazilian Indians

00:55:17 ► §

couldn’t find anything accurate in the book at all.

00:55:20 ► §

And Garfinkel said it didn’t matter.

00:55:22 ► §

It was a bracketed report.

00:55:27 ► §

Which meant that it’s an equally valid report if you look at it a different way

00:55:29 ► §

it’s a report on the state of consciousness

00:55:31 ► §

of the person who decided to create such a thing

00:55:33 ► §

and at this point

00:55:38 ► §

we find that the mathematicians

00:55:41 ► §

give us four ideas of what proof would be

00:55:44 ► §

if we could find it the physicists give us four ideas of what proof would be if we could find it.

00:55:45 ► §

The physicists give us a variety of models, all of which contradict common sense,

00:55:51 ► §

all of which are intriguing, charming, amusing, but totally contradictory to common sense.

00:55:57 ► §

And the social scientists can’t find out whether we can find out anything

00:56:00 ► §

without being hopelessly warped in the process of communicating with others.

00:56:04 ► §

And you all know what happens if we try to find out without communicating with others.

00:56:09 ► §

We enter a separate reality. And that separate reality can be described as mental illness or

00:56:16 ► §

as illumination, depending on the emic reality of the person who was observing it from outside,

00:56:21 ► §

who had been meditating for a long time and wasn’t getting anywhere.

00:56:25 ► §

He wasn’t turning on, tuning in, or dropping out, or achieving supreme enlightenment.

00:56:31 ► §

He was just getting bored.

00:56:33 ► §

And he went to the Roshi and he said, I meditate and I meditate and I don’t get anywhere.

00:56:39 ► §

And the Roshi said, well, pick a different object for your meditation.

00:56:44 ► §

Meditate on an ox.

00:56:46 ► §

You’ve been meditating on the void and on enlightenment and on the Buddha and so on,

00:56:52 ► §

and that’s a little too much for you, so just meditate on an ox.

00:56:57 ► §

So the monk went to his cell and began meditating on the ox.

00:57:01 ► §

And after a couple of weeks, he stopped showing up for meals. And so the Roshi

00:57:07 ► §

waited, and what a few days go by, and the monk still wasn’t showing up for meals. He

00:57:11 ► §

was in there in his cell meditating on the ox. And finally the Roshi went to the cell

00:57:18 ► §

or chamber and yelled, come on out, I want to talk to you. And the monk said,

00:57:25 ► §

I can’t get out, my horns won’t fit through the door.

00:57:29 ► §

And at that moment he achieved illumination.

00:57:34 ► §

I can’t get out, my horns…

00:57:37 ► §

The monk.

00:57:41 ► §

I can’t get out, my horns won’t fit through the door.

00:57:45 ► §

According to ethno-methodology

00:57:47 ► §

and general semantics

00:57:49 ► §

and quite a few radical branches of social science,

00:57:51 ► §

that’s how all of our realities are created.

00:57:55 ► §

If Bell’s theorem in physics is true,

00:57:58 ► §

if the hidden variables exist,

00:58:00 ► §

the concept that we are physical hunks of matter existing in Euclidean space and moving at a constant rate from the past into the future has been created the way that ox was created.

00:58:17 ► §

The real reality is entirely outside such amic constructs.

00:58:25 ► §

And we can’t get out because our horns won’t fit through the door.

00:58:29 ► §

That is the realities that we believe in

00:58:32 ► §

have been imprinted on our nervous system

00:58:34 ► §

and conditioned and reinforced.

00:58:36 ► §

And everybody we talk to shares them.

00:58:39 ► §

Generally, if you run into somebody who doesn’t share your reality tunnel,

00:58:42 ► §

you try to get away from them as soon as possible

00:58:44 ► §

because they sound

00:58:46 ► §

weird.

00:58:47 ► §

The basic program

00:58:50 ► §

for increasing intelligence

00:58:51 ► §

is to try to have a serious

00:58:54 ► §

conversation in an unhostile

00:58:56 ► §

mode at least three

00:58:58 ► §

times a week with people who believe things

00:59:00 ► §

you regard as absolutely absurd.

00:59:03 ► §

It would be

00:59:04 ► §

very good if we could each, once a week,

00:59:07 ► §

sit down and have a basic rap about what the universe is,

00:59:12 ► §

or as Bucky Fuller would say, what the universe is,

00:59:15 ► §

and what we’re doing here and what we should be doing about it,

00:59:19 ► §

with a Japanese businessman who is running a very successful business,

00:59:24 ► §

making millions, and does Zen meditation every morning

00:59:28 ► §

before going to the office,

00:59:30 ► §

and with an Arabian sheik who thinks that women

00:59:35 ► §

whose faces aren’t covered with veils are terrible sinners,

00:59:39 ► §

and with a very intelligent, well-educated Russian bureaucrat

00:59:46 ► §

who knows that Marxism is the wave of the future

00:59:50 ► §

and that the capitalist system will collapse

00:59:52 ► §

of its own internal contradictions

00:59:54 ► §

without anybody pushing it if you wait long enough.

00:59:57 ► §

Or with a few other people

00:59:59 ► §

from outside your reality tunnel.

01:00:02 ► §

I noticed that an old friend of mine is here

01:00:05 ► §

who happens to belong to the Bay Area Cryonic Society.

01:00:08 ► §

There’s a cryonic society in London, too.

01:00:12 ► §

And there are others around the world.

01:00:15 ► §

Cryonic, the idea just appeared in 1964.

01:00:20 ► §

Now, a model of logic taught in all logic classes

01:00:23 ► §

is all men are mortal.

01:00:27 ► §

Right away we find an unquestioned assumption in there in the sexist vocabulary.

01:00:33 ► §

Trying to rephrase it and modernize it, all persons are mortal.

01:00:39 ► §

Second step, Socrates is a person.

01:00:42 ► §

Conclusion, Socrates is mortal.

01:00:41 ► §

step Socrates is a person.

01:00:44 ► §

Conclusion, Socrates is mortal.

01:00:47 ► §

That’s taught at the very beginning,

01:00:51 ► §

first day or at least sometime in the first week of any logic course.

01:00:52 ► §

That’s a valid syllogism

01:00:53 ► §

within the framework of Aristotelian logic.

01:00:58 ► §

The cryonics people have somehow escaped

01:01:01 ► §

from Aristotelian logic

01:01:03 ► §

and don’t accept that everybody is mortal.

01:01:07 ► §

They would reformulate the syllogism, that is the conservatives among them, would reformulate the syllogism, everybody has been mortal until now.

01:01:18 ► §

We are living here now, we may be mortal, or then again, maybe we aren’t, if the cryonic gamble works

01:01:26 ► §

out.

01:01:26 ► §

There was a poll taken by McGraw-Hill in 1975 of scientists on what they believed were the

01:01:33 ► §

most likely breakthroughs in the next 25 years, and high on the list was safe, efficient,

01:01:43 ► §

infallible cryonic preservation.

01:01:46 ► §

Nobody claims it exists yet.

01:01:50 ► §

People who have been put into cryonic suspension are gambling right now,

01:01:54 ► §

but within 25 years from 1975, which is around 18 years from now,

01:02:01 ► §

it won’t be a gamble anymore, if the majority of scientists in that poll are correct.

01:02:07 ► §

And so everybody who came here tonight with the opinion that you have to die,

01:02:14 ► §

if you thought that was a certitude, I’d just try to torpedo that one too.

01:02:20 ► §

There are some people who don’t think they have to die,

01:02:22 ► §

and they’re growing in numbers all over the world.

01:02:26 ► §

The idea started in 1964,

01:02:28 ► §

and there are more and more people who believe it,

01:02:31 ► §

and it’s becoming more and more practical.

01:02:34 ► §

And there is a report from an alternative reality tunnel,

01:02:37 ► §

which most people haven’t entered yet.

01:02:42 ► §

Most people haven’t thought at all about the potentials of life extension, but if you

01:02:51 ► §

were to put a thousand dollars in a bank, and virtually anybody could get their hands

01:02:59 ► §

on a thousand dollars if they were really determined. I don’t care how many economic

01:03:04 ► §

hassles you’re currently facing.

01:03:06 ► §

If you really put your mind to it, it might take several months,

01:03:10 ► §

it might take more than a year, but you could get $1,000 saved.

01:03:14 ► §

If you put $1,000 in a bank, a normal bank interest,

01:03:18 ► §

and if you’re not going to die in the next 70 years or the next 100 years

01:03:22 ► §

or the next 200 years, you’ll find out you’ll be a millionaire eventually,

01:03:27 ► §

just on normal bank interest.

01:03:29 ► §

Nobody has ever pursued that method of getting rich before

01:03:32 ► §

because it’s been impractical,

01:03:34 ► §

because nobody has lived that long before.

01:03:36 ► §

But in addition to the cryonics societies,

01:03:39 ► §

there are thousands of researchers all over the world

01:03:43 ► §

working on different approaches to life extension.

01:03:48 ► §

When I first got interested in this subject in the early 70s,

01:03:54 ► §

there were predictions like Arthur Clarke,

01:03:57 ► §

who’s a very far-out guy.

01:03:59 ► §

He wrote 2001, as most of you know, I’m sure.

01:04:03 ► §

Arthur Clarke said late in the 21st century,

01:04:07 ► §

science would achieve physical immortality.

01:04:12 ► §

By around, that was in the 60s,

01:04:14 ► §

by around 1970,

01:04:16 ► §

there were predictions popping up here and there

01:04:18 ► §

that it would come by the middle of the 21st century.

01:04:21 ► §

Later on, I began to read people like Bjorksten

01:04:24 ► §

who said it’ll be coming early in the 21st century. Later on, I began to read people like Bjorksten who said it’ll be coming early in

01:04:26 ► §

the 21st century. And then suddenly in the 70s, you find scientists in the field saying we’re

01:04:32 ► §

going to have it before the year 2000. And Clark has a law, Clark’s law, to predict when a breakthrough

01:04:39 ► §

is coming. Find out what all the bright young researchers think about when it’s coming.

01:04:44 ► §

find out what all the bright young researchers think about when it’s coming.

01:04:46 ► §

Get their estimate.

01:04:48 ► §

Then add 20 years on to that.

01:04:52 ► §

Because everything takes longer than the bright young researchers think.

01:04:56 ► §

Then you find out what the chairman of all the departments think.

01:04:59 ► §

Get the average of that and subtract 10 years from that.

01:05:03 ► §

Because the chairman of the department is usually old enough to be getting conservative.

01:05:07 ► §

And after you’ve added 20 years on to the bright young researcher’s estimate and taken 10 years off the chairman of the department,

01:05:10 ► §

you’re getting pretty close to where the breakthrough is probably really going to come.

01:05:14 ► §

Well, I’ve been talking, writing about life extension for quite a while,

01:05:19 ► §

but I got a tremendous shock last year when I picked up a book called

01:05:23 ► §

The Conquest of Death by Alvin Silverstein, who happens to be the chairman of the department.

01:05:29 ► §

He’s the chairman of the Department of Medical Research at State University of New York.

01:05:34 ► §

And he said the breakthrough is coming by the end of the 1980s.

01:05:41 ► §

The chairman of the department is saying if you can get through the 80s somehow,

01:05:45 ► §

in spite of Ronald Reagan and the massive armaments and all that,

01:05:49 ► §

there’s a good chance you’ll live indefinitely.

01:05:54 ► §

Immortality is a spooky subject because nobody really knows what it means.

01:05:58 ► §

Time has so many paradoxes in it.

01:06:01 ► §

But very likely, if you get through this decade, according to Silverstein,

01:06:06 ► §

you’ll live indefinitely as long as you want to.

01:06:10 ► §

That’s quite a, yes.

01:06:12 ► §

How does that relate to the population problem?

01:06:15 ► §

Well, there are those who are very mystically inclined,

01:06:21 ► §

and yet very practical too, like Dr. Timothy Leary,

01:06:26 ► §

who says that it can’t be a coincidence.

01:06:31 ► §

All of us paranoids talk that way.

01:06:34 ► §

It can’t be a coincidence that life extension technology

01:06:39 ► §

is arriving just at the point where space migration is becoming possible.

01:06:45 ► §

Leary feels it’s probably part of the DNA code

01:06:48 ► §

that no species will become smart enough

01:06:50 ► §

to extend its lifespan indefinitely

01:06:53 ► §

until that species has found a way to get off the cradle planet

01:06:57 ► §

and start expanding.

01:07:00 ► §

I don’t know if it’s that programmed into the DNA or not,

01:07:04 ► §

but it is a remarkable coincidence.

01:07:06 ► §

O’Neill and his cohorts have designed beautiful aesthetic space habitats

01:07:12 ► §

which are totally practical with the technology we have now.

01:07:15 ► §

We don’t need any new breakthroughs in technology to build them.

01:07:18 ► §

We could start right now.

01:07:20 ► §

We could have started in 1969 when O’Neill started designing these

01:07:25 ► §

before he even had a group of co-workers.

01:07:28 ► §

And we can start spreading out off of this planet.

01:07:32 ► §

But anyway, Bucky Fuller has been collecting statistics on populations since the early 30s,

01:07:41 ► §

which was a digression from his major work.

01:07:44 ► §

But he started studying the history of his own family

01:07:46 ► §

in Massachusetts because the Fullers have played a very prominent role

01:07:50 ► §

in Massachusetts for a long time

01:07:52 ► §

and tracing his family back he discovered

01:07:55 ► §

there were more children every generation the further back he went

01:07:58 ► §

and he began to notice the average number of children

01:08:01 ► §

in the Fuller family was less every generation

01:08:03 ► §

and he started

01:08:05 ► §

wondering about that and he managed to get the first United States census from

01:08:09 ► §

around 1800 and it turned out the average family then had I forget

01:08:15 ► §

somewhere between 10 and 20 children the average American family today has 1.5

01:08:22 ► §

children which goes to show where averages will get you. Nobody

01:08:26 ► §

knows where they keep the half. Fuller, in collecting statistics on this subject from

01:08:34 ► §

Malthus to the present, Malthus was the first one who said population was expanding so rapidly

01:08:39 ► §

that most of us had to starve. Fuller, in collecting statistics on this, finally worked out a graph which shows

01:08:46 ► §

the rate of reproduction

01:08:48 ► §

against the number of kilowatts

01:08:50 ► §

generated in a society.

01:08:53 ► §

And as the number of kilowatts goes up,

01:08:55 ► §

the number of children goes down.

01:08:57 ► §

That’s why American population

01:08:59 ► §

has been dropping.

01:09:00 ► §

I mean, the population growth

01:09:03 ► §

has been dropping,

01:09:04 ► §

the number of children per family, and it’s happening in all the advanced industrial nations.

01:09:08 ► §

It’s starting to happen in other nations as they industrialize.

01:09:12 ► §

And if you look at Fuller’s graph, it is quite obvious that as more and more power is generated, people, for some reason, decide that they don’t want large families anymore.

01:09:22 ► §

You don’t have to bribe them with radios

01:09:25 ► §

to have the men sterilized

01:09:26 ► §

like they were doing in India for a while.

01:09:28 ► §

People quite spontaneously decide

01:09:30 ► §

they want smaller families

01:09:31 ► §

as their general affluence increases.

01:09:34 ► §

Evidently, people had vast, huge families

01:09:37 ► §

in this part of the world

01:09:40 ► §

and are still doing it in the third world

01:09:43 ► §

because vast, large families

01:09:44 ► §

do have a certain advantage

01:09:46 ► §

in conditions of acute poverty and deprivation and near starvation.

01:09:51 ► §

You’ve got…

01:09:52 ► §

Most of them don’t survive,

01:09:55 ► §

so you over-reproduce for that reason

01:09:57 ► §

so that at least some of them will survive.

01:09:59 ► §

And you can put them to work on the farms and so on

01:10:02 ► §

since this is mostly in agricultural societies.

01:10:05 ► §

We have these large families.

01:10:06 ► §

And besides, people don’t have so many other interests as we have in advanced industrial

01:10:11 ► §

societies.

01:10:13 ► §

So I don’t think life extension is going to make the population problem any worse.

01:10:18 ► §

I think the population problem is leveling off for the reasons Fuller gave.

01:10:23 ► §

The population problem is leveling off for the reasons Fuller gave.

01:10:33 ► §

And with space opening up, if you generalize from the aviation industry to the aerospace industry,

01:10:39 ► §

in 1928, one person flew the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh.

01:10:43 ► §

In 1978, 200 million people flew the Atlantic. If space moves forward at the same rate,

01:10:47 ► §

by around 2010,

01:10:49 ► §

there will be 200 million people leaving this planet every year,

01:10:53 ► §

and the population problem, so-called,

01:10:56 ► §

will disappear like the War of the Roses

01:10:58 ► §

and other parts of history

01:11:00 ► §

that are no longer applicable to our situation.

01:11:04 ► §

Now, as Elizabeth announced, there will be a seminar tomorrow where we’ll go further

01:11:08 ► §

into these ideas, and I better warn you in advance, into some ideas even weirder.

01:11:15 ► §

So if your horns won’t fit through the door, maybe it would be wise to avoid the more sinister,

01:11:23 ► §

shocking, and eldritch revelations to come tomorrow.

01:11:26 ► §

I don’t know how many of you

01:11:28 ► §

here are prepared

01:11:29 ► §

to live forever. I would

01:11:32 ► §

imagine some of you had the idea

01:11:34 ► §

when you came in because you’ve encountered it

01:11:36 ► §

in my books or other books you’ve read,

01:11:38 ► §

but some of you never heard the idea before

01:11:40 ► §

tonight. It probably seems

01:11:41 ► §

as absolutely impossible as

01:11:44 ► §

the splitting of the atom seemed in 1904.

01:11:48 ► §

But what we will be talking about tomorrow

01:11:50 ► §

is the acceleration factor in human evolution

01:11:53 ► §

and how we can predict, reasonably as anything can be predicted,

01:12:00 ► §

that more changes are going to be happening in the next 20 years

01:12:04 ► §

than in all previous human history.

01:12:06 ► §

And now for the time we’ve got left tonight,

01:12:09 ► §

which is about how much?

01:12:10 ► §

What time is it?

01:12:12 ► §

9.52?

01:12:14 ► §

About half an hour if you want.

01:12:16 ► §

Maybe you can do some questions.

01:12:18 ► §

That’s what I was going to say.

01:12:20 ► §

It was supposed to break up at 10,

01:12:21 ► §

but since I don’t want to leave you stuck with only eight minutes for questions,

01:12:25 ► §

let’s let it go to around 10, 15.

01:12:28 ► §

So, now, after having gone through

01:12:32 ► §

the exquisite agony of suppressing your own thoughts

01:12:35 ► §

while I blabbed on up here,

01:12:37 ► §

you can now express anything that’s going through your head

01:12:40 ► §

as long as you follow the usual protocol

01:12:42 ► §

of the lecture room of pretending

01:12:44 ► §

to put it in the form of a question

01:12:45 ► §

to me. Yes?

01:12:48 ► §

The Earth is expanding.

01:12:51 ► §

There is no gravity.

01:12:52 ► §

Earth sucks.

01:12:56 ► §

The question is about

01:12:57 ► §

a book called Gravity, the Fourth Dimension,

01:13:00 ► §

which is a

01:13:01 ► §

rival theory to Einstein’s

01:13:04 ► §

general relativity.

01:13:06 ► §

And, yeah, I read it a long time ago,

01:13:08 ► §

and I thought, gee, what a great science fiction story.

01:13:15 ► §

For all I know, he’s right.

01:13:17 ► §

But general relativity seems more elegant to me,

01:13:22 ► §

so I’ll stick with general relativity for a while.

01:13:24 ► §

My horns

01:13:25 ► §

won’t get through that door. According to Bucky Fuller, there are four billion billionaires on

01:13:31 ► §

this planet right now. Most of us don’t know we are billionaires because our fortune has been

01:13:37 ► §

hidden from us by intricate systems of laws, zoning regulations, government rules, taxes, and so on.

01:13:48 ► §

But according to Fuller and his associates

01:13:51 ► §

at the World Game Computers in Philadelphia,

01:13:55 ► §

there is enough energy and resources known

01:13:59 ► §

to give everybody on this planet

01:14:00 ► §

the same standard of living as David Rockefeller

01:14:03 ► §

if we handle the technology intelligently.

01:14:08 ► §

The main reason this isn’t being done

01:14:10 ► §

is because we’re not handling the technology intelligently.

01:14:13 ► §

It’s been split up between 150 separate little pens,

01:14:19 ► §

each of which has an alpha male in charge

01:14:22 ► §

in the traditional primate pattern,

01:14:24 ► §

except for a few which have alpha females in charge.

01:14:28 ► §

And it’s very much like a ship with 150 captains all giving different orders,

01:14:33 ► §

and so the ship keeps going around in circles and we’re not getting anywhere.

01:14:37 ► §

But if we used our world-round technology intelligently,

01:14:40 ► §

we could all be living like David Rockefeller.

01:14:44 ► §

And this can only be done by following

01:14:46 ► §

Fuller’s principle of advantaging all without disadvantaging any. Because once you start trying

01:14:52 ► §

to advantage some by disadvantaging others, which is the traditional liberal or socialist approach,

01:14:58 ► §

first we rob the rich and give it to the poor, and then everything will be okay. The problem with

01:15:03 ► §

that is the rich always resent it, and they fight like hell, and they have the lawyers and the poor, and then everything will be okay. The problem with that is the rich always resent it,

01:15:05 ► §

and they fight like hell,

01:15:06 ► §

and they have the lawyers and the guns,

01:15:08 ► §

and they have all the power to fight like hell,

01:15:11 ► §

and if you do manage to kill most of them off in your country,

01:15:14 ► §

if you’ve decided that’s the only way to do it,

01:15:16 ► §

you immediately find a whole new class of counter-revolutionaries

01:15:19 ► §

who are people who have gotten pretty irritated

01:15:21 ► §

at you for going around acting like a bandit with a gun.

01:15:25 ► §

And so the police state goes on and on, and we don’t achieve utopia that way.

01:15:30 ► §

Because the idea of advantaging some by disadvantaging others is always resisted by the ones who are going to be disadvantaged.

01:15:37 ► §

And so Fuller proposes in a mathematical way,

01:15:41 ► §

the only system that will work is one that’s designed to advantage everybody without

01:15:47 ► §

disadvantaging anybody.

01:15:50 ► §

I think that’s enough on that subject for now. How would you apply that to Detroit this week?

01:15:56 ► §

What about that? I don’t know what happened to Detroit this week.

01:15:59 ► §

I’ve been busy working on a novel set in the Naples in the 18th century, and I haven’t been reading the newspapers.

01:16:05 ► §

I don’t mean just the streets,

01:16:07 ► §

but I mean the unemployment situation that’s developed there.

01:16:09 ► §

Oh, well, that’s just an example of the general lack of coordination

01:16:20 ► §

and intelligent planning in handling our technology.

01:16:24 ► §

Detroit, up until the mid-1930s, and intelligent planning in handling our technology.

01:16:29 ► §

Detroit, up until the mid-1930s,

01:16:32 ► §

there was tremendous competition to build a better car.

01:16:34 ► §

And then in the 1930s,

01:16:36 ► §

somebody discovered that you don’t make money,

01:16:38 ► §

you don’t make as much money that way as you make by building a car that looks better

01:16:41 ► §

and deceives people into thinking it’s better.

01:16:45 ► §

And so the whole emphasis went away from technology into styling and advertising and

01:16:49 ► §

Freudian analysis.

01:16:51 ► §

And they hired psychologists to teach the ad men how to write ads that would convince

01:16:56 ► §

people subliminally that the car would give them a better orgasm.

01:17:00 ► §

And Detroit is now suffering the effects of that.

01:17:03 ► §

and Detroit is now suffering the effects of that because that started in the 30s

01:17:06 ► §

and after nearly 50 years

01:17:08 ► §

it finally percolated through the heads

01:17:11 ► §

of the majority of automobile drivers

01:17:13 ► §

that all of this Freudian stuff in the advertisements

01:17:16 ► §

may tickle your fancy

01:17:18 ► §

and make you want to rush out and buy a Chevrolet

01:17:21 ► §

but when you come down to dollars and cents

01:17:23 ► §

you’re better off buying a Japanese car and so Detroit Chevrolet. But when you come down with the dollars and cents, you’re better off buying a Japanese car.

01:17:25 ► §

And so Detroit

01:17:26 ► §

has screwed itself.

01:17:28 ► §

It’s like,

01:17:29 ► §

I was thinking the other day,

01:17:33 ► §

what day is it?

01:17:35 ► §

I was trying to remember

01:17:35 ► §

what day it is.

01:17:37 ► §

And I suddenly remembered,

01:17:38 ► §

I suddenly remembered

01:17:39 ► §

today is Thursday.

01:17:40 ► §

And then this went

01:17:41 ► §

through my head.

01:17:42 ► §

Today is Thursday.

01:17:43 ► §

Today is Thursday.

01:17:45 ► §

What a day for chiclets, candy-coated chewing gum. I don’t know how many people here are

01:17:50 ► §

old enough to remember that, but that was on the radio 20 times a day or 200 times a

01:17:55 ► §

day all through the 1940s when I was a little kid. And they imprinted that on my neurons.

01:18:01 ► §

It’s still there. It can come out when I’m just thinking, what day is it? But I have never

01:18:05 ► §

chewed chiclets.

01:18:09 ► §

These mind control techniques

01:18:11 ► §

don’t work perfectly yet

01:18:12 ► §

or we’d all be zombies.

01:18:15 ► §

Yes.

01:18:17 ► §

Well, the novel

01:18:17 ► §

I’m finishing up right now

01:18:19 ► §

is set in Naples.

01:18:22 ► §

It’s rather hard for me

01:18:23 ► §

to say Naples at this point.

01:18:24 ► §

I’ve been in the novel so long,

01:18:26 ► §

I think Napoli automatically,

01:18:28 ► §

which is not quite what an Italian would think,

01:18:30 ► §

but it’s as close as I…

01:18:31 ► §

Napoli!

01:18:32 ► §

As close as I can get.

01:18:34 ► §

Napoli.

01:18:36 ► §

And it’s set between 1764 and 1770,

01:18:41 ► §

and it’s the first of a trilogy.

01:18:43 ► §

The next one takes us up through

01:18:44 ► §

the American and French

01:18:46 ► §

revolutions to around 1794. And the third volume in the trilogy will take us up to 1824.

01:18:55 ► §

And then after that, I think I’m going to write another one, which will fill in the space between

01:19:00 ► §

there and the point where masks of the Illuminati began in the 1890s.

01:19:05 ► §

And then the whole thing will fall into pattern,

01:19:07 ► §

a history from roughly the middle of the 18th century to the 1990s.

01:19:14 ► §

And by then I’ll be ready to write 2000 to climax the whole thing.

01:19:21 ► §

Well, that brings us back to Peter Beter again.

01:19:24 ► §

How do we know

01:19:25 ► §

Reagan isn’t a robot

01:19:27 ► §

how do we know that

01:19:29 ► §

Lyndon LaRoche isn’t right

01:19:30 ► §

and Queen Elizabeth is behind the whole

01:19:33 ► §

marijuana

01:19:33 ► §

according to LaRoche, Queen Elizabeth

01:19:36 ► §

personally sent Aldous Huxley

01:19:38 ► §

and Alan Watts over here to corrupt America

01:19:41 ► §

how do we know

01:19:43 ► §

we don’t know there’s no certitude anywhere here to corrupt America. How do we know?

01:19:46 ► §

We don’t know.

01:19:48 ► §

There’s no certitude anywhere.

01:19:51 ► §

We’re all like the blind men in the Sufi parable

01:19:52 ► §

feeling around the elephant.

01:19:54 ► §

I personally suspect

01:19:55 ► §

that it hasn’t been discovered yet,

01:19:58 ► §

but I couldn’t prove it.

01:20:00 ► §

During the Vietnam War,

01:20:02 ► §

the CIA was lying to Lyndon Johnson

01:20:04 ► §

as well as the rest of us.

01:20:05 ► §

So Lyndon Johnson, who was busy lying to us, was being lied to by the CIA,

01:20:10 ► §

so I don’t think anybody knew what was happening.

01:20:13 ► §

Well, I think what was said over here,

01:20:19 ► §

and I don’t believe in the super determinist theory any more than I believe in any other theory

01:20:26 ► §

but if you look at the history of science

01:20:28 ► §

you do find numerous cases of simultaneous discovery

01:20:32 ► §

and you will even find not just two people at the same time

01:20:36 ► §

like Darwin and Wallace coming up with natural selection

01:20:39 ► §

but you’ll find sometimes over a period of 25 years

01:20:42 ► §

several people discovered a thing

01:20:44 ► §

before it became generally recognized and accepted.

01:20:49 ► §

And also, I know a lot of the people involved in life extension research.

01:20:59 ► §

And believe me, the closer they get to it, the more they run around yelling at everybody,

01:21:08 ► §

we’re getting there, we’re getting there, and I just can’t see any way a lid could be clamped on it.

01:21:13 ► §

Besides, it’s happening in more than one country at the same time.

01:21:16 ► §

Research is going on everywhere.

01:21:17 ► §

The Russians have an official government-sponsored life extension research program,

01:21:27 ► §

which we haven’t got yet.

01:21:29 ► §

The only one in our government urging such a thing is Senator Cranston,

01:21:33 ► §

and he hasn’t got any support yet.

01:21:38 ► §

Yes, there was somebody with their hand up. Yes.

01:21:41 ► §

There are a variety of theories about what causes aging,

01:21:44 ► §

There are a variety of theories about what causes aging,

01:21:50 ► §

and there are various approaches to correcting it. That’s what the reality hinges on.

01:21:52 ► §

Well, in Pro-Longevity by Rosenfeld,

01:21:56 ► §

he points out that of all the theories of aging that are around right now that we know about,

01:22:02 ► §

of which there are quite a few, and I can’t remember most of them at this point.

01:22:06 ► §

Of all the theories of aging that are around, for every one of those theories,

01:22:09 ► §

there is somebody who thinks he’s very close to changing the variable so that we don’t have to age,

01:22:15 ► §

if that’s the thing that causes aging.

01:22:18 ► §

With genetic engineering moving along the way it is,

01:22:21 ► §

there’s hardly anything we can’t program in the foreseeable future.

01:22:29 ► §

How should we interact with each other uh do unto others as you would have them do unto you i think that’s the best

01:22:35 ► §

answer i’ve heard so far to that question

01:22:38 ► §

you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:46 ► §

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

01:22:51 ► §

My guess is that there are a lot of our fellow saloners

01:22:55 ► §

who haven’t yet read one of Bob Wilson’s enchanting books.

01:22:59 ► §

Just to give you a little of the flavor of his writing,

01:23:01 ► §

here are a few lines from his Principa Discordiant.

01:23:06 ► §

Quote,

01:23:06 ► §

I am chaos.

01:23:08 ► §

I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms.

01:23:13 ► §

I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy.

01:23:18 ► §

I am chaos.

01:23:20 ► §

I am alive and I tell you that you are free.

01:23:24 ► §

End quote.

01:23:25 ► §

Now, I realize that reading books isn’t done all that much anymore,

01:23:29 ► §

but, well, I do hope that you’ll give at least one of Bob Wilson’s great books a read,

01:23:34 ► §

because I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed.

01:23:37 ► §

And can you believe that the talk that we just listened to was recorded 35 years ago?

01:23:43 ► §

Parts of it sounded to me as if it had been just recorded last week.

01:23:48 ► §

For example, when he said, and I quote again,

01:23:51 ► §

One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism

01:23:56 ► §

results from watching what the government is doing.

01:24:00 ► §

Because the government is the last place that important change is registered.

01:24:04 ► §

And so if you’re looking at the government, you’re looking at the past.

01:24:08 ► §

End quote.

01:24:10 ► §

I hope that you are able to take that to heart,

01:24:13 ► §

and also to follow that old Latin proverb,

01:24:17 ► §

illegitimate non cabarendum,

01:24:19 ► §

which roughly translated means,

01:24:22 ► §

don’t let the bastards get you down.

01:24:24 ► §

which roughly translated means, don’t let the bastards get you down.

01:24:30 ► §

Now, I realize that most of our fellow salonners are considerably younger than I am,

01:24:32 ► §

at least in body, that is.

01:24:39 ► §

My mind remains quite infantile, it seems, but, well, my body gets a little creakier every day.

01:24:45 ► §

Often I receive emails from people who are lamenting the fact that they missed out on the 60s and, well, on much of the early days when psychedelics were just coming back into vogue.

01:24:51 ► §

But just because many of us were alive back then, it doesn’t mean that we were in the thick of things either.

01:24:57 ► §

Back in 1982, when today’s talk was recorded, I was still the president of a computer company in Texas,

01:25:04 ► §

and at the time I had

01:25:06 ► §

no idea who Robert Anton Wilson was. It was several years later before I learned about him and began

01:25:12 ► §

reading his books. So even though I was alive when Bob Wilson was at the top of his game, well, I

01:25:19 ► §

missed most of it. That got me to thinking about some of the other speakers that we’ve listened to here in the salon

01:25:25 ► §

And after doing some checking, I discovered that out of every ten podcasts here in the salon

01:25:31 ► §

Seven of them are by people who are no longer with us

01:25:35 ► §

Of course, my warped sense of humor recalled that back in the day, psychonauts were called heads

01:25:43 ► §

And so I thought that if we don’t do something about this,

01:25:46 ► §

well, the salon is soon going to be called the Deadhead Salon.

01:25:51 ► §

Get it?

01:25:52 ► §

Sorry about the pun, but I couldn’t resist.

01:25:55 ► §

Anyway, I’ve got some great news for us all.

01:25:58 ► §

Over the course of this year,

01:26:00 ► §

I expect to correct that lopsided balance

01:26:02 ► §

of presenting so many long-departed speakers.

01:26:06 ► §

And actually, I’ll be playing only a minor role in this,

01:26:08 ► §

but thanks to some of our fellow Saloners,

01:26:11 ► §

we’re going to begin hearing more and more stories from people who are in the psychedelic mix today.

01:26:17 ► §

Without a doubt, there are a lot of potential Bob Wilsons and Terrence McKinnons out in the world right now,

01:26:23 ► §

and the Symposia Group is going to help us find them.

01:26:27 ► §

I’ll be talking a lot more about this during the next few podcasts.

01:26:32 ► §

And before long, we’re going to be treated to what looks to be a regular weekly podcast

01:26:37 ► §

featuring some of the psychedelic stories that they’ve been and will be collecting during the rest of this year.

01:26:43 ► §

And if you’re interested in telling your own story to them, well, one of the best places to find them is going to be at the

01:26:49 ► §

upcoming MAPS conference, Psychedelic Science 2017, which is going to take place from April 19th

01:26:56 ► §

through the 24th in Oakland, California. As I said, I’ll be talking a lot more about Salon 2.0 in the

01:27:02 ► §

weeks ahead, but the headline is that I am really very excited about the potential of the work that the Symposia crew is doing,

01:27:10 ► §

and as we roll out these new podcasts, I think that you’re going to be as pleased as I am.

01:27:16 ► §

And don’t worry, I’ll still be doing my usual podcasts as well.

01:27:19 ► §

But as you know, I’ve not been too dependable lately about getting a new program out to you each week.

01:27:26 ► §

However, before long, you’re going to be able to expect at least one new podcast every week,

01:27:31 ► §

and oftentimes there’ll even be more than one.

01:27:35 ► §

So stay tuned, as the good folks in Radioland say.

01:27:39 ► §

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

01:27:44 ► §

Be well, my friends. Thank you.