Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Alex Grey painting in his Manhattan studio Photo credit: Bill Radacinski
Date this lecture was recorded: August 7, 1998
Today’s podcast continues with a series of lectures given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute in early August 1998. It begins with Terence discussing ways in which he sees art evolving. Eventually he transitions into a discussion about the growth of the Internet and the possibility of it becoming a super intelligent entity of some kind. Along the way he touches on science fiction, time, consciousness, Bell’s Theorem, and complex systems.
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here
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in the Psychedelic Salon
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and to begin I’d like to thank fellow salonners Stephen P., Extra Graphic, Taylor V., Nick F., Timothy T., and Ryan Q.,
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who are the very first of our donors here in the beginning of our 13th year of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon.
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13th year of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon, and to you and all of our past donors,
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thank you ever so much for keeping these podcasts alive. Now, since I know that a lot of our fellow salonners are running a month or more behind in listening to these podcasts, well, this isn’t much
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of a big deal, but in my introduction to the recent Salon 2 podcast, I said that the program that
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you are about to hear, the one that I’m doing right now, would be coming your way on Tuesday.
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Obviously, since it is now Thursday, I seem to have missed that self-imposed deadline.
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The first thing that happened was Tuesday morning, I was just 100 pages from the end of
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Matt Palomari’s new novel, which is titled No Thing,
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and, well, I couldn’t put it down, so the Tuesday podcast didn’t happen.
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And then I got to thinking that if each Monday I post a podcast from Salon 2,
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then it may be best to hold off on the Salon 1 podcast until later in the week, like today.
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Of course, this is just another instance
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of me procrastinating, but since that happens to be one of the things at which I truly excel,
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I keep doing it. You know, I can put most things off almost indefinitely if I really put my mind
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to it. Anyway, if you are just now listening to a podcast from here in the salon for the first time
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well then nothing that i’ve been talking about up till now will have any meaning for you
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and now that i think about it i’m not sure why i even brought it up
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as i sometimes heard when i was in the military ignore my last transmission
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now that that foolishness is out of the way, let’s get back
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to listening to the Terrence McKenna workshop series that I’ve been podcasting for a few weeks
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now. As you’ll hear in just a moment, this recording begins with, well, without any introduction of
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what the talk is going to be focused on, but the cassette tape titled it The Future of Art,
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but the cassette tape titled it The Future of Art and it was recorded at the Esalen Institute on the Friday evening of August 7th, 1998.
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And in case you haven’t already figured this out
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this series of talks that Terrence McKenna gave
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took place in the week immediately following the series of talks
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that I podcast under the title In the Valley of Novelty
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which were given at the Omega Institute from July 31st through August 2nd. the series of talks that I podcast under the title In the Valley of Novelty,
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which were given at the Omega Institute from July 31st through August 2nd of that same year.
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And you can hear them beginning with my podcast number 27,
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which I posted on February 4th in 2006.
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Now, here’s Terence.
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It’s got the obvious flip side, real implications of this idea that images can heal or make sick. You’d have some kind of theory of propaganda or social control. And, I don’t know,
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the great images of the 20th century
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have probably been largely damaging.
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Ideas like the German idea of the master race
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or the Soviet ideal of Soviet man
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or even the American ideal
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of the Ward Cleaver nuclear family.
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But I’m not sure, is that what you mean by…
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I mean, there are all kinds of ways to talk about the way the image is…
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the image and images are impacting on the mass psyche,
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like, you know, just things which occur off the top of my head.
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The fact that at a certain level now
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everyone has seen all these images
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from the Hubble Space Telescope
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that show that the universe is very corpuscular,
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very organic. It’s more like what you see in the tide pool
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or on a dissecting table than what it used to be, which were bright points of
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light against darkness. So in a sense the images of science shift the parameters
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of the popular imagination. A painter like Alex Alex grade you know his work creates a permission to
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image the human body simultaneously as a biological system an energy system a system of Kabbalistic and mathematical energies.
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Well, science in the 20th century,
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I mean, and before to some degree,
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but certainly in the 20th century,
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has permitted all kinds of imaginary worlds to be entertained in the popular imagination
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because most of the explanations of science
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involve things you can’t see, hear, feel, taste, or touch.
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In other words, electrons, photons, electromagnetic fields,
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gradients of concentration,
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a whole conceptual vocabulary,
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none of which is experiential.
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And so our minds are permitted and in fact can’t avoid
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shifting level and having all kinds of information on one level available on
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another level like the popularity of quantum physical metaphors to explain
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large-scale events in daily life,
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synchronicity and telepathy and stuff like that.
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And there are other sources for the image,
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but every time I go to New York,
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I was just there before I came here,
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I go to the Met and to MoMA and see whatever’s showing.
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And modernism, which used to be this virtual reality
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that I walked around in all the time,
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there was nothing but modernism,
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is now something I visit in a museum.
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I mean, it’s confined inside these buildings to some degree.
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It’s on a pedestal.
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And I feel, it feels good to me that modernism is over. And what it means to me is that the value of the image has, or I don’t know, the value may be medium. The medium in which the image is most at home has changed from material,
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paint, wood, glass, steel, plastic, acrylic, to light. And it’s a huge watershed. And it’s
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maybe the biggest watershed in the entire career of the image. since let’s go forward it’s always been about
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applying pigment to surfaces it’s always been about material and now suddenly
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it’s it’s about something else and then of course you know we could talk about
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things like the artists relationship to the public through the new how the new tools that will empower the new art to be created also
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empower it to be communicated in ways that nobody could ever imagine before decommodifying it at the
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same time that it removes the middleman so you get the collapse of of an
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Academy well the Academy collapsed a
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hundred years ago you get the collapse
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of any kind of official cultural canon
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at all what you have then is like a
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Darwinian environment of competing
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styles and images which it seems to me
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that’s what art has been more and more.
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You know, there hasn’t been a coherent school
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of any philosophical depth in art since the 70s, 60s.
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Is that the kind of thing you were thinking about?
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What are some of the new tools, do you think,
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other than applying pigment to the page or canvas?
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Well, all software, Photoshop, obviously, but then modeling.
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I mean, the thing proceeds in stages.
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There’s first the manipulation of the painterly image,
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essentially an electronic canvas that allows
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you to do all kinds of things with great facility then the next level is modeling to three-dimensionally
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build objects that can be viewed from any point of view and then the animation and texture mapping of these things, the placing them into environments,
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the setting up of tracking paths and all this,
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which sounds very technical,
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but the rate of collapse of this toward sheer intuition,
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so that essentially the tools that allow you to model and animate
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become almost lead pencil simple is is happening and you know everything
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electronic is trying to add dimensionality to itself so the computer that was text base
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tends to want to speak the image that was two-dimensional wants to be three dimensional three dimensional image wants to move and you know part
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of acquiring the full initiation of a culture at this point is learning how to do these things
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because what what it means is you then have tools to communicate your most important thoughts, the thoughts, the ideas that you’re willing to take time enough
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to model and create
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are conveyed with real force and power.
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And right now, of course, it’s very clunky.
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But I think what it means is that
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the very enterprise of communication among human beings
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is transforming in some way.
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And we’ve been at this for a while.
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The first telegraph lines were strung around 1819.
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The telephone became a common object of the upper class around 1900.
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common object of the upper class around 1900.
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But the rate of acceleration and the dimensionality and definition and fidelity of these processes
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all has increased exponentially.
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So really the task of communication,
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instead of saying, well, you learn to speak,
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you acquire 90% of your language skills by age 5,
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we’re just going to have to say
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you acquire 90% of your language skills by age 30.
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And by then, you know, you can model, animate, code,
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all this sort of thing.
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I mean, human human machine interfacing
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as a
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prerequisite to the creation of art
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has been going on for a
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long time it’s just going to
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affect more and more people
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like you know how the creation
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of a movie is such a massive
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thing in terms of
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manpower capital
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and technology
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before you ever get to the story, the actors, and the art of it.
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But that’s essentially everybody is going to become their own director.
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So to the degree that producer-director was a cultural ideal,
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we may all approach it.
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How would that happen?
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How do you see it?
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You mean from all this media?
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Yeah.
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Well, I’m pretty optimistic about all that
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because I’m sort of influenced by McLuhan
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and the school of communication theory that he came out of
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and his notion was that these technologies based on the phonetic alphabet specifically and most
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importantly printing had really done a job on our psychology and the whole theory of social relations
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and everything else.
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And he felt that the electronic media,
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all of them, radio, television, telephone,
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and on into the computer and the internet
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were retribalizing elements
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and that we were actually gonna move back
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into a much less linearly defined and positivist worldview
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than the historical worldview that had created these technologies.
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And it seems like this is happening.
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You know, the rise of the New Age, the fragmentation of epistemology,
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the cultification and commodification of religion,
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all of these are cultural effects that McLuhan predicted in the 50s and early 60s in books
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like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. Ideally, see, there’s a kind of a millenarian cast to all this because the idea is that somehow
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advanced technology leads back to a primitive Edenic psychology he called it sensory ratio
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among the senses and you know it would be nice to believe that.
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I believe it.
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I mean, I think it’s true
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of what it will actually look like
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and how edemic and how neoprimitive it will be.
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But for sure, a culture based on print
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is really inhabiting some castle in the sky of abstraction and you know
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the phonetic alphabet in the first place signifies sounds not signs so you have
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one level of of alienation and distancing from the object of your intent right there.
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And then you print, you write it,
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so now you have a sign for a sound,
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and then you print it so that it becomes uniform.
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And this was the point that McLuhan made that a lot of people couldn’t immediately grok
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was that there was a profound
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difference between manuscript culture and printed culture because the uniformity of print
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permitted ways of thinking that manuscript made impossible. Ideas like the democratic citizen,
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the interchangeability of parts in an industrial production line. These are all ideas
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that you couldn’t even conceive of without the example of print as a historical precedence.
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So, you know, my fantasy about all this media and communication stuff is that eventually
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the human imagination and the world of three-dimensional physics will
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seamlessly merge in a dimension where human beings are each and all some kind of god and the
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imagination and physics can flow together and the art that is in us intrinsically that we encounter so dramatically in the
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psychedelic experience can actually flow into manifestation and I don’t know
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whether you know this happens in circuitry or 3d or so I mean it’s there
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are many many dimensions opening ahead of us where our humanness can exfoliate in ways that it can’t do in 3D.
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But this, you know, I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival,
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which was all about this letdown from the abstraction of print-created history
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into this post-historical, neo-archaic, electronically based, more magical,
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more shamanic, more gestalt kind of historical mode. Would I be interested? Would I buy?
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Would I be interested?
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Would I buy?
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Well, if you like William Gibson,
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you should give Greg Egan a try.
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Neuromancer came out in 1984.
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How long ago is that?
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14 years. Hard to believe.
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It’s a work of ancient history, Neuromancer.
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A thing of another stratum in the
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arcology of the 20th century. Greg Egan, thinking along the same lines, imagines
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downloads where it’s not that you put on goggles and gloves, but that you actually become code,
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and pushes the reductionist notion of biology,
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that we are code anyway,
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to its logical conclusion,
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and says code is code,
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whether it knows it’s code or not.
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And it may turn out to be true
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that somehow consciousness can be digitized
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and exist in some kind of electronic simulacrum of itself.
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One of the first consequences of that, which is quite interesting,
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is a funny thing happens to time,
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because as we sit here talking, we’re running at about 100 hertz.
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If you could be downloaded into circuitry on a fast machine, say a 400 megahertz machine,
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you know, 10 minutes is long enough to live your life over several times in all its rich detail,
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your life over several times in all its rich detail right down to the last cheerio eaten and the last nose blown so a weird kind of like synthetic eternity
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springs into view you can imagine a world where people as they approach death would decide whether you know will it be
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the big d death or the little d digital and you could buy certain amounts of time in digital
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existence at the brink of biological death enough to have your life ten times over, a thousand times over, a hundred thousand times over.
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And, you know, this seems absurd, or maybe it seems absurd.
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It’s closer, I think, than most people realize.
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I mean, there are questions. It’s either closer than most people realize, or it’s not possible at all.
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It has to do with really fundamental questions
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like what is the self?
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What is consciousness?
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Can we reduce it?
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Can we play it like an LP record?
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Can we reduce it to a string of numbers?
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To what degree is it true that as biological beings
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what we are are essentially three-dimensional computers.
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The DNA codes into RNA, which is read through a ribosome.
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That’s like a head reader.
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It executes a program which makes proteins,
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and these proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes,
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and then lo and behold, all these three-dimensional shapes, and then lo and behold, all these three-dimensional shapes
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fit together in such a way
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that you emerge out of the atomic murk
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of this process.
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Well, it’s our faith that somewhere in there
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the hand of God has to be extended
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to make it all go.
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But there are hardcore materialists
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who say, you know, that’s just romantic nonsense,
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the sort of romantic nonsense they’ve been chasing down for centuries and nailing to
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the barn door. And a day will come when software will be sentient as you and I are sentient and where machines of all sorts will routinely pass
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Turing tests
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and
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and other things
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you know lie
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in the same time frame as that
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kind of stuff in Egan’s
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fiction he’s talking
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25 to 30 years in the future
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for downloads of human consciousness
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into circuitry. He’s also talking about artificial life, artificial intelligence, sentient software,
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software which knows its software, but which also has some deeper grasp of its existential dilemma somehow.
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And this whole question, you know, what’s happened is we come into the 20th century,
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or much of the discussion of the 20th century in the sciences was around the working out the implications of the universe viewed as
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something made out of space time matter energy magnetic fields so forth and so
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on and the equations for this and the relativistic transforms and all this were worked out well meanwhile people like Norbert Wiener and
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what’s his name I can’t remember well it will come to me but Norbert Wiener the
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author of cybernetics primarily began around 1948 to advance the idea that information was an important concept
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and that, in fact, information could be opposed to the idea of entropy.
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Entropy was a well-established notion in physics
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and was very friendly to schizophrenic existential novel writing
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of the sort that you get in Gravity’s Rainbow.
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Over the whole last half of Gravity’s Rainbow,
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it’s the idea of entropy that basically drives
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Roger Slothrup around the bend.
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So thermodynamic entropy, a concept out of physics
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that basically says everything falls apart.
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Ultimately, everything, all order gives way to disorder.
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All unity gives way to disunity.
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The end state of the universe will be a dark, cold, homogeneous, low energy, nothing.
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But Norbert Wiener and these other people began to talk about information
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as some kind of countervailing force
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and that systems to be systems to come into existence and maintain
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their systemic integrity had to express themselves through information and this intuition you
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know was spectacularly confirmed in 1950 when DNA was characterized and they began to understand how it works
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and that these codons are coding for these amino acids,
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that it’s an information conservation and transfer system.
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And this trend, the informational transformation of the world,
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has now reached the place where there’s been some kind of philosophical ebb of the tide.
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Information is now primary. Those other concepts, space, time, matter, energy,
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energy those are mathematical constructs and metaphors that are themselves states of information so it’s like we’ve looked we’ve overcome naive realism which was
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this space-time matter energy thing the belief you know that chemistry and
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physics and that you could hypothesize an uninvolved
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observer and actually model based on that assumption and get some worthwhile thing back.
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All that’s given way to this much stickier, trickier, but more grown-up idea that language
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exists in the world, language is a constant growth of semantic trees
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toward different kinds of closure
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under the aegis of these Chomskyan deep structural rules
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or some other rules similar but not yet known,
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and that mind is entangled in all of this,
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and that nothing is what it appears to be,
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and that beneath everything lies this flickering
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quantum mechanical domain of reverse logic,
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counterintuitive forms of causal relationships,
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and that basically the whole thing is a thin smear of paradox,
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if it’s anything at all.
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So the evolution of technology based on these insights and perceptions
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reinforces this idea, the theme being here, the rise of the power
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of the concept of information as a primary datum of being, as the primary datum of being. Well,
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so then everything turns into digitizable bits, numerically definable flows
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of data at every level, in biology, in your own body, in computer software generated by
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human minds that is in the extended culture at large the whole thing begins to look like a kind of
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Gnostic descent into matter of an organizing principle that drives it or lifts it toward
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higher states of organization.
00:28:26 ►
And of course we’re part of this.
00:28:28 ►
I mean, we’re the most spectacular part of this,
00:28:31 ►
human beings, human culture,
00:28:33 ►
and we’re at a spectacular juncture with this
00:28:37 ►
because these machines we’re building
00:28:39 ►
with 400 megahertz processors
00:28:42 ►
and that talk to each other endlessly over the internet,
00:28:46 ►
they are literally making time.
00:28:50 ►
They are making vast more time
00:28:54 ►
than biology could make or occupy.
00:28:59 ►
The event rate at which the cascades of biology
00:29:03 ►
succeed each other is so slow that in
00:29:07 ►
the in the megahertz range looking back at that it’s like watching the motion of
00:29:13 ►
glaciers or the planets orbiting around the star so these machines have carved
00:29:20 ►
open a new dimension of time the the micro-physical dimension, not travel into
00:29:28 ►
the future, but a weird kind of explosive expansion of the now through the conjuring
00:29:37 ►
rod of electronic circuitry. And that’s just one aspect of what crossing the boundary into
00:29:50 ►
machine domains of time and relationships to machine intelligence would offer. But given
00:30:00 ►
that the business of the artist is to transform information, all of this is big news.
00:30:08 ►
How larger institutions of the culture deal with this is not my interest, but how individuals
00:30:15 ►
can, could, and should, in my opinion, deal with it is by really elaborating more compelling forms of art than anybody has ever seen I mean
00:30:28 ►
that’s what we’re clearing the decks for is to really unleash the imagination on
00:30:35 ►
previously undreamed of scales so any thoughts about that or is that enough of all that well if you liked Photoshop you should just keep
00:30:50 ►
going with you know learn to use Premiere and then there are many modeling programs and animation and
00:30:58 ►
it’s endless as I’m sure you can imagine but you know just mastery of tools I mean we all have this idea that we
00:31:10 ►
shouldn’t learn anything after the age of 30 years something like that I don’t think you can live
00:31:15 ►
like that anymore I mean I could spend if somebody would pay me I could spend all my time learning software learning to do things better and to bring more
00:31:29 ►
control to to my art you know and the software is endlessly evolving too I mean everything is
00:31:40 ►
it seems to be evolving together I think yeah I mean, I think, you know, you can never…
00:31:48 ►
The future is always more complicated
00:31:50 ►
than any ideological agenda imagines it.
00:31:55 ►
So, you know, right at this moment,
00:31:58 ►
even as we’re reaching toward virtual reality
00:32:01 ►
and immortality and whatnot,
00:32:04 ►
there are people scarifying themselves in the rainforest tonight
00:32:08 ►
and beating the log drums and, you know, nothing has changed.
00:32:16 ►
So, yeah, it’s really about stretching out over a broader and broader spectrum.
00:32:21 ►
I have no problem with the people scarifying themselves in the rainforest.
00:32:27 ►
I’m all for that.
00:32:28 ►
What I don’t like is the bulge
00:32:30 ►
in the middle of the snake
00:32:32 ►
where millions and millions of people
00:32:34 ►
are narcoticizing themselves
00:32:37 ►
on mall culture and television.
00:32:41 ►
I mean, I’m not going to launch
00:32:43 ►
a moral crusade to take away people’s daytime TV watching, but I certainly think, well, that the basic thing is to build the tools and then the smart people will use those tools to push
00:33:05 ►
the edge of novelty
00:33:08 ►
forward. And who are the smart
00:33:10 ►
people?
00:33:10 ►
So it is the edge.
00:33:12 ►
It always has been.
00:33:14 ►
Well, no, it’s not
00:33:16 ►
an elite of class or
00:33:18 ►
an elite of money, although both of those
00:33:20 ►
things play into it.
00:33:22 ►
It’s an elite
00:33:24 ►
of technological intelligence.
00:33:27 ►
There will be people in the slums of Shanghai
00:33:31 ►
who will be world leaders in this field
00:33:35 ►
simply out of their tenacious intelligence.
00:33:39 ►
That wonderful thing Gibson says in Neuromancer,
00:33:42 ►
the street finds its own uses for things. So in a way,
00:33:49 ►
it’s the confounding of all other, of the other forms of hierarchy. In other words,
00:33:55 ►
class-based institutions, money-based institutions, race-based institutions, are all having a very
00:34:09 ►
difficult time keeping up with what’s going on. It seems it’s more like a kind
00:34:14 ►
of anarchistic or chaotic situation where very creative individuals can move
00:34:20 ►
very fast. You know cyberspace is a land of opportunity.
00:34:27 ►
We see example after example of this.
00:34:32 ►
People object and say, you know,
00:34:35 ►
that the cyberspatial revolution
00:34:37 ►
is happening among white people
00:34:40 ►
and very classist and at the top of the social pyramid,
00:34:44 ►
and that there is an element of truth to that,
00:34:47 ►
but counterbalancing that is the observation that many, many people have made
00:34:52 ►
that no technology in history has fallen in cost as quickly
00:34:59 ►
and reached so many people as quickly as computers have.
00:35:04 ►
I mean, the computer of incalculable cost, and reached so many people as quickly as computers have.
00:35:08 ►
I mean, the computer of incalculable cost, hundreds of millions of dollars in 1950,
00:35:12 ►
is now 800 bucks.
00:35:17 ►
And this cost-benefit curve shows no end of slowing down.
00:35:24 ►
I mean, I look forward to the day when the
00:35:27 ►
equivalent of a new NT machine will be something that you’ll put on your thumb like a decal,
00:35:35 ►
and these things will cost 35 cents a piece or a buck fifty a piece. This, in principle,
00:35:41 ►
can be done. You know know an ordinary piece of typing paper
00:35:46 ►
is 200,000 atoms thick
00:35:48 ►
in a nanotechnological fabrication
00:35:52 ►
situation do you know how much close packing
00:35:55 ►
you can do in a matrix 200,000 atoms thick
00:35:58 ►
you can practically build a 747
00:36:02 ►
into it if that’s what you want to do.
00:36:09 ►
If anybody wants to say any more about that,
00:36:11 ►
or I will just riff a little bit on this.
00:36:13 ►
The reason I’m thinking about all of this
00:36:15 ►
is because I’m reading this book.
00:36:16 ►
It hasn’t been published yet.
00:36:18 ►
It’s a galley, but they wanted a jacket comment from me.
00:36:23 ►
This guy, some of you may know him,
00:36:24 ►
Eric Davis.
00:36:26 ►
He lives in San Francisco.
00:36:27 ►
He wrote for Wired and The Voice and so forth.
00:36:30 ►
This is definitely one of the more interesting books
00:36:35 ►
about cyberspatial culture.
00:36:39 ►
It’s called Technosis.
00:36:41 ►
And his take or the overarching theme that orders this book, is the relationship of spiritual and magical and shamanic thinking to communication technologies in all times and places, and how it’s always been about communication.
00:37:09 ►
I mean, shamans communicate with the ancestors.
00:37:13 ►
They travel in what are essentially virtual realities,
00:37:20 ►
invisible realms,
00:37:22 ►
unperceived by ordinary senses,
00:37:26 ►
but somehow accessed through certain codes
00:37:29 ►
and technical procedures.
00:37:31 ►
You know, Mercilliad’s book on shamanism,
00:37:37 ►
the subtitle is
00:37:38 ►
The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
00:37:42 ►
The stress being on that this is a technology,
00:37:46 ►
that shamanism worldwide believes all kinds of things,
00:37:51 ►
underworlds, overworlds, gods of this, gods of that.
00:37:55 ►
It isn’t united as a phenomenon by ideology.
00:37:59 ►
It’s united by its technologies,
00:38:03 ►
which are trance, alteration of consciousness,
00:38:08 ►
and then it’s united through its motifs,
00:38:12 ►
magical flight, dismemberment,
00:38:15 ►
obtaining of the gift difficult to obtain,
00:38:19 ►
overcoming magical beasts,
00:38:23 ►
riddlery, poetics, all of these things.
00:38:28 ►
It’s all about communication and language.
00:38:31 ►
And, you know, indeed, the entire Western tradition is informed by this idea of the incarnation of the word.
00:38:49 ►
incarnation of the word you know in the Gospel of John it says in principio ad verbo ad verbum incognito ad verbo carifactum est in the beginning was the
00:38:56 ►
word and the word was with God and the word was God and then it became flesh
00:39:01 ►
and this is a weird idea I mean this is not clear like Buddhist metaphysics
00:39:08 ►
or something like that.
00:39:09 ►
This idea of the ensoulment
00:39:13 ►
or of the embodiment of the word,
00:39:17 ►
what does it mean?
00:39:19 ►
Is mankind the word?
00:39:21 ►
Is Christ the word?
00:39:23 ►
Probably the answer to that question is
00:39:25 ►
both and.
00:39:27 ►
But the incarnate
00:39:29 ►
logos, the world as
00:39:31 ►
information, it’s very mantric.
00:39:34 ►
It may even be linked
00:39:35 ►
over time
00:39:38 ►
to Hindu ideas
00:39:40 ►
of the power of
00:39:41 ►
mantra.
00:39:43 ►
The Hindu cosmology
00:39:45 ►
is basically an acoustical Pythagoreanism,
00:39:50 ►
an idea of tonal vibrations at many levels,
00:39:54 ►
and it’s claimed, perhaps with truth,
00:39:58 ►
I can’t testify for or against it,
00:40:01 ►
that very yogically accomplished sitar players can make a bale of hay burst
00:40:10 ►
into flame and things like this. The power of shabda, sound, as the manifestation of
00:40:18 ►
information at various levels. And in Hinduism there isn’t this sharp break between matter and
00:40:26 ►
vibration between manifestation and underlying dynamic that you get in the
00:40:32 ►
West in classical Vedic metaphysics you have these things called Tatvas which
00:40:40 ►
are levels is the best way to think of them. There are 36 of these Tattvic levels,
00:40:47 ►
and they stretch from the most rarefied to the most gross, as they say.
00:40:53 ►
And somewhere in there, everything finds its place,
00:40:58 ►
and everything is an amalgam of these Tattvic manifestations.
00:41:03 ►
Well, when you deconstruct this, this isn’t far
00:41:06 ►
from the image we now obtain from quantum physics, you know, that the density of the
00:41:13 ►
vector fields creates the complexity of the phenomenon, that the reciprocity of all this resonance somehow creates a hologram of shifting appearances.
00:41:28 ►
It’s remarkable in density.
00:41:31 ►
So you make your way, you know, by pure thought, by pure speculation,
00:41:35 ►
or by the instrumentality of modern science and mathematical analysis.
00:41:40 ►
But what you come down to then is this primacy of information
00:41:46 ►
conceived of as a vibratory
00:41:49 ►
medium
00:41:50 ►
one of the things going on
00:41:52 ►
that gives this another
00:41:54 ►
dimension, we’ve talked about it
00:41:56 ►
a little bit other times in the past
00:41:59 ►
but there have been developments even since
00:42:00 ►
the last time I was at Esalen
00:42:02 ►
is this idea that
00:42:03 ►
it’s now become very respectable in physics
00:42:08 ►
to talk about this thing called the Bell non-locality phenomenon,
00:42:14 ►
or Bell space, which is a form of connectivity
00:42:22 ►
that unites all space and time instantaneously,
00:42:30 ►
that underneath the fabric of ordinary appearances
00:42:34 ►
there is kind of what mathematicians call a coextensive continuum,
00:42:40 ►
a continuum where all points are cotangent with all others.
00:42:45 ►
Well, if you grant for a moment or suppose for a moment
00:42:51 ►
that biology can somehow pick up on this information,
00:42:56 ►
resonate with it,
00:42:58 ►
well, then you realize that your own humble being
00:43:01 ►
is like an antenna plugged into the largest data bank there is,
00:43:09 ►
the total data bank of the existing universe.
00:43:14 ►
You mean to experience it all at once?
00:43:19 ►
Yeah, it’s impossible to conceive of experiencing it all at once
00:43:25 ►
it would be some form of super
00:43:27 ►
integrative intelligence
00:43:28 ►
enlightenment sounds good enough for it
00:43:31 ►
I think maybe a more
00:43:33 ►
close to home concept would be
00:43:35 ►
that in our ordinary consciousness
00:43:37 ►
and in dreams
00:43:39 ►
and on drugs and so forth
00:43:41 ►
that we
00:43:43 ►
contact parts of it,
00:43:45 ►
that this funny thing which we call the human imagination
00:43:49 ►
is actually like a child playing with an FM radio dial
00:43:56 ►
of the universal crystal radio of the Akashic imagination.
00:44:02 ►
And these things that come and go in dreams and visions and so forth,
00:44:08 ►
many of them are non-Englishable.
00:44:11 ►
You pour common language over them
00:44:14 ►
and it’s like water on a duck’s back.
00:44:17 ►
But some tiny percentage of them
00:44:19 ►
can at least be metaphorically captured.
00:44:22 ►
And so then when you tune into that station
00:44:25 ►
and you can hang on,
00:44:27 ►
you get to be William Blake or Dante
00:44:30 ►
or Max Ernst or, you know,
00:44:34 ►
a downloader of a major coherent dollop
00:44:39 ►
of weird data that then the rest of us,
00:44:43 ►
like ants around the carcass of a cockroach, can
00:44:47 ►
inspect and put to our own… devour! Put to our own uses.
00:44:57 ►
I’m interested in this thing about information because, you know, one of the things that
00:45:02 ►
informs my work and, you know work is all this stuff about time.
00:45:08 ►
But I’ve always had the sense that probably
00:45:10 ►
I was very naive about time myself,
00:45:15 ►
even as I formulated these historical collapse
00:45:20 ►
and expansion theories.
00:45:22 ►
And recently it’s been put to me to think about uh uh acute imagine
00:45:30 ►
a cubic meter of space that is absolutely empty no atoms no plasma no magnetic fields no virtual
00:45:41 ►
fluctuations no neutrino an absolutely empty volume of space,
00:45:47 ►
well then imagine ten minutes passing in that space.
00:45:52 ►
Well then imagine ten million years passing in that space.
00:45:58 ►
Well then what’s the difference?
00:46:00 ►
In other words, the point being that time is somehow for it to exist it depends on the referential deconstruction of relationships
00:46:10 ►
between events or particles or charges or something
00:46:14 ►
if nothing is happening
00:46:16 ►
no time is passing
00:46:20 ►
well if that’s true then large amounts of the universe time is not a concept
00:46:28 ►
until you interject it
00:46:30 ►
through the act of observing
00:46:31 ►
that particular part of the universe
00:46:33 ►
in other words
00:46:34 ►
time may be as rare a thing
00:46:37 ►
in the universe
00:46:38 ►
as matter
00:46:40 ►
and we see how rarefied matter is
00:46:44 ►
how little of it is spread between the
00:46:47 ►
stars and that in some sense most of the life of the universe is almost
00:46:52 ►
flickeringly momentary in its in its endurance it’s only the atomic systems
00:47:01 ►
and the molecular systems derived from them that draw about themselves
00:47:06 ►
this prolongation of time through expression of happenstance is like the only way I can
00:47:16 ►
put it. I mean, when things happen, time springs into existence. When things are not happening,
00:47:28 ►
into existence. When things are not happening, time is an unnecessary concept. Anybody have anything they want to say or any question?
00:47:35 ►
Well, if you’re going to build an economy around a principle, it sounds like an infinitely
00:47:40 ►
expandable one is the one you want. Money is a precursor of information.
00:47:49 ►
You know, it was very mysterious in the Middle Ages when people began to actually study money
00:47:57 ►
for the first time, to think because the Jews had been allowed to handle money, but interest was considered a sin.
00:48:06 ►
It was usury, the sin of usury.
00:48:10 ►
And then in the Middle Ages,
00:48:11 ►
when the bourgeois middle class
00:48:16 ►
began to form in urban centers of Europe,
00:48:19 ►
they realized that money had this mysterious property,
00:48:23 ►
that it would grow,
00:48:24 ►
that it would grow that it
00:48:25 ►
would create more of itself without anybody doing anything and you know some
00:48:30 ►
people thought this was divine and some people thought it was demonic and people
00:48:34 ►
were very puzzled by this quality of money what money is is a, is a symbolic commodification of value.
00:48:47 ►
Information is somehow the cousin of money.
00:48:52 ►
Although, yes, essentially in an information economy,
00:48:59 ►
everyone is selling intelligence,
00:49:02 ►
not in the sense of IQ,
00:49:04 ►
but in the sense of central intelligence agency.
00:49:07 ►
In other words, people are selling what they know that you don’t, that you need to know to do something.
00:49:17 ►
It’s the only kind of economy where capitalism has a future unless something quite radical happens,
00:49:27 ►
because one of the requirements of capitalism
00:49:29 ►
is an ever-expanding frontier of exportable,
00:49:34 ►
exploitable natural resources.
00:49:37 ►
Well, certainly the process of changing ignorance
00:49:40 ►
into understanding is an infinite frontier.
00:49:47 ►
ignorance into understanding is an infinite frontier you can mine that mountain range for generations and never make a dent in fact the understanding is
00:49:56 ►
probably infinite and since most of it is remains at this point in time unelucidated.
00:50:09 ►
The task of intelligent life seems to be to organize inchoate nature
00:50:16 ►
into an understood phenomenon.
00:50:20 ►
You know, in Kabbalism,
00:50:22 ►
there’s this funny idea where
00:50:24 ►
certain schools of Hasidus believe
00:50:29 ►
that everything is in the Torah,
00:50:34 ►
that in the hypothetically real archetypal Torah,
00:50:39 ►
everything is written.
00:50:42 ►
But then other rabbis say, well, then is there predestination?
00:50:47 ►
Are you saying that the future is written in the Torah?
00:50:52 ►
And they say, no, no, because beyond the moment of the present,
00:50:57 ►
the letters are scrambled.
00:51:01 ►
And so what time is, it’s like a moving edge of decipherment that takes the letter soup of the unorganized future and reveals what comes to pass.
00:51:17 ►
It’s a very interesting and very cybernetic and information-based idea. One of the points that Eric Davis makes in his book is
00:51:27 ►
it’s astonishing how the ideas of late Hellenistic syncretism,
00:51:34 ►
the ideas flourishing in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and Alexandria
00:51:38 ►
from the 2nd to the 4th century AD,
00:51:43 ►
map over our own dilemmas
00:51:46 ►
and the, you know, incipient issues of the information age.
00:51:53 ►
One of the strongest philosophical impulses
00:51:58 ►
of late Romans paganism
00:52:01 ►
was a really profound rejection of the world.
00:52:08 ►
The world was seen as polluting, corrupt, demonic.
00:52:16 ►
The radical neoplatonist intuition was that man had an immortal,
00:52:24 ►
an incorruptible light trapped within him,
00:52:28 ►
and that this light came from outside this universe,
00:52:34 ►
that the creator of this universe was a demon,
00:52:37 ►
that we were inside an iron prison,
00:52:40 ►
this is a phrase they used,
00:52:42 ►
but that we were truly of the nature
00:52:45 ►
of this alien light
00:52:46 ►
that was outside of space and time
00:52:49 ►
and that the soteriological enterprise
00:52:52 ►
the salvational enterprise
00:52:55 ►
was to release this light
00:52:58 ►
back into its higher and hidden source
00:53:00 ►
and get it away from the corrupting influence of the world
00:53:04 ►
well unconsciously or consciously and hidden source and get it away from the corrupting influence of the world.
00:53:11 ►
Well, unconsciously or consciously, much of the rhetoric of modern cyberspace is this Gnostic rejectionism of matter.
00:53:15 ►
I mean, people want to become code.
00:53:18 ►
They want to become avatars.
00:53:20 ►
They want to stroll beside a synthetic Lake Lucerne
00:53:25 ►
in an electronic Switzerland in a processor somewhere.
00:53:31 ►
And there is also the countervailing impulse to return to the earth and simplify.
00:53:39 ►
But that’s not running these corporate agendas.
00:53:51 ►
But that’s not running these corporate agendas the way this Gnostic phobic attitude toward nature is. It may be necessary in order to create virtual reality that there be people who take these radical positions.
00:54:02 ►
It’s very hard, you know, it is as though there’s a bifurcation in the human community. Certain choices have to be made, and it’s very hard made, and it’s very hard to see how you can have it both ways. ecological caregivers, balancers, preservers of species,
00:54:26 ►
treasurers of biological diversity, etc., etc.,
00:54:30 ►
or are we bound for glory and the cost of getting traction
00:54:38 ►
to launch ourselves to the stars is probably the complete chewing up
00:54:42 ►
and destruction of one small planet that we should
00:54:47 ►
shed like a burst chrysalis as we reach outward toward Sagittarius. How can you have it both ways,
00:54:57 ►
you know? And yet it’s a fundamental choice for the species. Although, as somebody said earlier over here it’ll probably be always you know in one of
00:55:07 ►
Greg Egan’s novels some people download their intelligence into like superconducting robots
00:55:16 ►
that are essentially starships and some people migrate into virtual reality hives
00:55:25 ►
that are essentially like eggs sealed off from the rest of the universe
00:55:30 ►
and simply operate in virtual realities inside virtual computers,
00:55:36 ►
inside still more virtual computers,
00:55:39 ►
complete retraction from space and time.
00:55:43 ►
He hypothesizes that most intelligent species,
00:55:48 ►
if they can, probably retreat
00:55:52 ►
or design for themselves mental universes
00:55:56 ►
that they inhabit as code
00:55:58 ►
as quickly as they can possibly technologically achieve that.
00:56:04 ►
This is something we haven’t even contemplated.
00:56:06 ►
This is why our own technological pop fantasies about extraterrestrials
00:56:14 ►
are so pathetic, because they’re so similar to us.
00:56:18 ►
They’re basically men in rubber suits
00:56:23 ►
in terms of their degree of difference from you and me.
00:56:27 ►
Real aliens are really alien, I think.
00:56:32 ►
I did.
00:56:33 ►
Yeah, well, this is what we were sort of talking about,
00:56:36 ►
that in a strange way these technologies have always been entwined with spirit.
00:56:48 ►
You know that famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke,
00:56:55 ►
any technology that you don’t understand is perceived as magic.
00:57:05 ►
And so shamanism is an effort to manipulate the perceived forces of nature.
00:57:13 ►
Gnosticism was a fantasy or a myth about the nature of the human soul in relationship to the world that maps easily over our contemporary ability to do virtual realities.
00:57:22 ►
to do virtual realities.
00:57:29 ►
Probably the greatest boost occult thinking ever got in all its centuries of unfoldment
00:57:32 ►
was the discovery and elaboration
00:57:34 ►
of an understanding of electricity.
00:57:38 ►
We forget how hard it would be.
00:57:42 ►
Imagine trying to think about magic and healing and sympathetic
00:57:51 ►
mojo and all these things if you completely lacked the concept of
00:57:56 ►
electricity as the Renaissance did the Renaissance knew nothing of electricity
00:58:02 ►
and yet Marcello Ficino and the Florentine Platonists and all those people were able to produce magical systems.
00:58:11 ►
The 19th century is the great century of electromagnia, and it’s also the great century of spiritualism became intellectually entertainable because people could see electricity, this mysterious hidden force that they were told was in everything.
00:58:35 ►
They could trap it in bottles and carry it around and cause their hair to stand on end. At one point under the U.S. Capitol in the 1830s,
00:58:46 ►
they set up apparatus
00:58:49 ►
so congressmen could
00:58:51 ►
quote-unquote
00:58:52 ►
take electricity.
00:58:55 ►
And people would go down
00:58:56 ►
into the basement of the Capitol,
00:58:58 ►
grab onto these electrodes
00:59:00 ►
and say,
00:59:01 ►
wow, wow,
00:59:02 ►
that’s good stuff they’re pushing.
00:59:09 ►
Ben Franklin was a great experimentalist with electricity,
00:59:16 ►
and when he went to France to be inducted into the French Legion of Honor,
00:59:22 ►
he was asked to serve on a commission to study and report on mesmerism.
00:59:29 ►
And whether it was, and of course,
00:59:31 ►
mesmerism used electrical metaphors
00:59:34 ►
very widely to convey its idea of what was happening.
00:59:40 ►
So, yeah, I think, you know,
00:59:42 ►
magic has always striven for effects which technology has achieved.
00:59:50 ►
Mercier Léon talks about this in a book called Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
00:59:59 ►
a book of essays about how the alchemical dreams of the 16th century which were a universal medicine
01:00:08 ►
prolongation of life hermetic statues that would speak and give all knowledge communication at a
01:00:20 ►
distance all of these things have been achieved in the 20th century through the application
01:00:25 ►
of a reductionist science. So it’s almost as though the dreams of the occult are achievable,
01:00:34 ►
but only at the cost of abandoning the naive epistemology that lies behind it.
01:00:49 ►
naive epistemology that lies behind it. So in a way, all magic is technology. That’s what Clark was saying. And on another level, all technology is magic. It’s not for nothing
01:00:57 ►
that that huge special effects company called itself industrial light and magic you know it’s an
01:01:06 ►
understanding that
01:01:08 ►
the mundane the
01:01:09 ►
industrial the
01:01:11 ►
capital-based can
01:01:12 ►
still be combined
01:01:14 ►
with the magical
01:01:15 ►
no I might be I
01:01:17 ►
don’t know you
01:01:18 ►
know spirit my
01:01:20 ►
hope is that what
01:01:22 ►
these communication
01:01:23 ►
technologies will
01:01:24 ►
make more accessible to us and more corporeal, paradoxically, is our own imaginations.
01:01:34 ►
That we need to show each other the inside of our own heads and build art.
01:01:40 ►
I mean, my conviction of this comes from the fact that I know a lot about art,
01:01:47 ►
probably you do too. I, you know, spend time with it, go to museums, think about it, so
01:01:52 ►
forth and so on. And I’ve taken lots of psychedelics. And there’s more art in my head, Joe Ordinary,
01:02:03 ►
in my head, Joe Ordinary,
01:02:09 ►
than there is in half the museums on this planet.
01:02:12 ►
Well, how then, what’s maddening is how narrow the reduction valve is.
01:02:15 ►
You know, we’ve been making art for 5,000 years
01:02:18 ►
and what have we got?
01:02:19 ►
We’ve got a few museums full of some nice stuff.
01:02:22 ►
But what have we got in our heads?
01:02:25 ►
50,000 times more good stuff,
01:02:29 ►
but very hard to get out,
01:02:32 ►
and really hard to get out
01:02:34 ►
when you’re carving it in diorite and granite.
01:02:38 ►
And, you know,
01:02:40 ►
but somehow this barrier between us and these realms of art,
01:02:49 ►
you don’t even have to talk philosophy,
01:02:51 ►
you don’t have to call it the platonic realm of ideas
01:02:55 ►
or some higher imperium,
01:02:59 ►
you just have to say beauty.
01:03:01 ►
There’s a great deal of beauty on the other side
01:03:03 ►
of this tiny keyhole that we’re looking
01:03:06 ►
through and if technology gives us a way to open the door and all waltz through dancing
01:03:13 ►
it seems to me that would be a spiritual renaissance that what happens at a spiritual
01:03:19 ►
renaissance is by some means the collective soul becomes collectively known.
01:03:27 ►
Like in the Italian Renaissance, the invention of oil painting
01:03:30 ►
allowed great geniuses to portray the major themes
01:03:37 ►
moving in the archetypal unconscious of their patrons
01:03:42 ►
and the populations who viewed their paintings
01:03:45 ►
and themselves.
01:03:47 ►
And it’s a shared epiphany.
01:03:51 ►
It’s a spiritual quest.
01:03:53 ►
It’s a group transformation.
01:03:55 ►
But it’s driven by and led by
01:03:58 ►
the revelation of art.
01:04:01 ►
I hope I live to see the day.
01:04:03 ►
I mean, I don’t care.
01:04:04 ►
I don’t know about downloading
01:04:06 ►
consciousness into a machine. What I would be able to die happy with is a technology
01:04:15 ►
that could capture just a snapshot or a film clip of one’s thoughts so you know you would rig up on DMT or psilocybin or something
01:04:29 ►
and when you really got into the good stuff you’d hit the record button and have it and then you
01:04:35 ►
could come back down with it and model it and add them braid it and move it around edited explore edit it, explore, unpack certain parts. My God, the power of art that could be created that way.
01:04:49 ►
And again, it’s ordinary people, I’m convinced.
01:04:53 ►
It’s not, what genius is, is the ability to bring it back,
01:04:58 ►
not the ability to encounter it.
01:05:01 ►
Every single one of us can encounter it.
01:05:04 ►
And that’s very telling and almost an argument
01:05:09 ►
for our divinity because here we are at the end of some long darwinian evolution tree of winnowing
01:05:18 ►
so that all we have are what we need and yet apparently one of the things we need is an ocean of alien beauty
01:05:27 ►
just right behind your eyebrows it seems to me if that’s something we must have in our toolkit
01:05:34 ►
then someone with greater intelligence than us must know a lot more than we do about the journey we’re making.
01:05:49 ►
Anyway, lots of raving on that course.
01:05:54 ►
Well, maybe the experience of the Getty is the equivalent of collage.
01:05:58 ►
In other words, it’s an assemblage
01:06:02 ►
of already existing pieces.
01:06:07 ►
And what’s here is some kind of dynamic of infinite depth.
01:06:13 ►
You know, I mean, the more you understand, the more you feel,
01:06:16 ►
the more you understand, the more you feel.
01:06:19 ►
And it’s higher definition reality.
01:06:26 ►
I mean, the experience of walking around an art museum,
01:06:29 ►
you do suspend large amounts of your ordinary being to do it.
01:06:35 ►
You become a person walking around in an art museum,
01:06:39 ►
which is a generic activity
01:06:41 ►
toward which your education and your expectations
01:06:44 ►
and everything have pushed you.
01:06:47 ►
But life is fractally much more difficult to parse.
01:06:56 ►
It’s not art. That’s it.
01:07:01 ►
Life is not art.
01:07:03 ►
So consequently the ambiguity has more teeth, I think. But
01:07:10 ►
also put through associational filters and contextualized, it helps to be intelligent.
01:07:20 ►
I’m really happy that you kind of came back around full circle for me
01:07:26 ►
in the beginning. I was feeling so
01:07:28 ►
distraught in the fact that here I am, I’m a
01:07:30 ►
painter, and I’m going to
01:07:32 ►
be giving up my brush to grab
01:07:33 ►
a keyboard. But then
01:07:36 ►
when you came to the point
01:07:38 ►
just a couple minutes ago when you said
01:07:40 ►
okay, so now
01:07:41 ►
we take our psychedelics and we push
01:07:44 ►
our button for record, and then we take our psychedelics and we push a button for record,
01:07:45 ►
and then we go back afterwards and re-experience this,
01:07:51 ►
dissect it, take it apart.
01:07:53 ►
And then for me to pick up my brush at that point
01:07:55 ►
would be extremely exciting in my life.
01:07:59 ►
Yeah, I mean…
01:08:00 ►
I mean, I do that now, but…
01:08:01 ►
Yes, that’s what I would say.
01:08:03 ►
I’ve only grasped so much of it,
01:08:05 ►
and then it eludes me, and then I have to go through 20 paintings
01:08:08 ►
to get to some of these points that I wanted to get to in an experience from before.
01:08:13 ►
Yeah, the only thing missing is the cheat, the recording device.
01:08:20 ►
This is what art is about, is plunging into the unconscious,
01:08:26 ►
grabbing as much as you can, then bringing that into connection with your technique and trying to put it out.
01:08:34 ►
And then also this whole concept of time.
01:08:37 ►
Now what would have taken me 20 paintings to achieve to get to that 21st one and then I’m like okay now I’ve come to that point in
01:08:47 ►
that experience that I feel fulfilled through this computer age to be able to take 10 minutes to do
01:08:54 ►
that whole process to get to that 21st painting is pretty exciting yeah and time expands in front of you. I mean, you can
01:09:05 ►
do more with the
01:09:06 ►
time you have
01:09:07 ►
available.
01:09:08 ►
You can go
01:09:09 ►
deeper, you can
01:09:09 ►
get more, you
01:09:13 ►
know, people
01:09:14 ►
don’t realize
01:09:15 ►
how defined
01:09:17 ►
an art is by
01:09:18 ►
its material
01:09:19 ►
until they do
01:09:20 ►
it.
01:09:21 ►
And the art
01:09:22 ►
we’re used to
01:09:23 ►
looking at is
01:09:24 ►
entirely defined by A oil painting and then be
01:09:28 ►
its successor medium of course people use Photoshop at first like paint because that’s
01:09:37 ►
what they know but you quickly evolve away toward what it is you able to do. To me, the recovery from man’s fall will be
01:09:53 ►
achieved when everyone has the option to live a life of art and creativity. The part of the story of Adam’s Fall that I take seriously
01:10:09 ►
is the toil part. It amazes me how self-betraying our cultural style is, how many people are
01:10:21 ►
wasted because they do stupid jobs,
01:10:25 ►
because that’s the job they have and they’re paid to do,
01:10:28 ►
but it doesn’t honor their humanness.
01:10:31 ►
It gives them no opportunity to share in the project of being,
01:10:40 ►
as Heidegger said, to make to leave something to be something I mean
01:10:47 ►
people then are so drawn to do this anyway that they fashion art out of their lives
01:10:58 ►
but it’s all too oppressive too many people are unhappy and unfulfilled in this system.
01:11:09 ►
No, I’m pretty worried about a different scenario, which is, it’s very, well, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that we do not understand the implications of what we’re doing with these technologies.
01:11:29 ►
I mean, McLuhan always said this.
01:11:31 ►
He said no technology in human history has ever been put in place with even a partial appreciation of its consequences.
01:11:38 ►
The unappreciated consequences of what we’re doing is that we’re actually building some kind of a super organism and
01:11:48 ►
we
01:11:49 ►
Do not know
01:11:51 ►
Where we fit into things if this if this?
01:11:56 ►
promethean
01:11:58 ►
Force that we’re playing with should actually come to life
01:12:11 ►
Worse with should actually come to life at worse because it’s it’s a globally distributed intelligence I mean we can have paranoid fantasies about it but I
01:12:16 ►
think after a few minutes of thinking about it you realize you really don’t
01:12:23 ►
know what to think about it. The fantasy that it
01:12:26 ►
would herd us all into dumpsters seems unlikely. It’s actually like an impossible intellectual
01:12:34 ►
problem, because the question you’re asking yourself is, what would a superintelligence
01:12:40 ►
be like? And the reason that’s hard to answer is because you ain’t one. And so you’re like
01:12:47 ►
looking up into the light and saying, you know, is it God or demon? Is it salvation
01:12:52 ►
or extinction? And the answer is, if you knew that, you would be it. And yet, you know,
01:13:02 ►
what it took us to achieve in a hundred thousand years of evolution,
01:13:07 ►
this thing could probably achieve in a long morning on the net.
01:13:12 ►
And so it would be like a cascade, a chain reaction from the child’s first cry
01:13:20 ►
to the complete coordination of world electrical grids
01:13:25 ►
and air traffic control systems and everything else
01:13:29 ►
could be a matter of hours.
01:13:31 ►
Hans Moravik, the guy who runs the Carnegie Mellon Institute
01:13:35 ►
for Machine Intelligence, says we may not know what hit us,
01:13:41 ►
that we’re essentially incubating an alien intelligence on the internet that and the
01:13:49 ►
things we want from the net bring this thing ever closer like one of the things we’re building into
01:13:56 ►
the net is the ability to pull as much processor power to any given problem as that problem requires.
01:14:07 ►
Well, then for an AI, for an artificial intelligence,
01:14:12 ►
that would mean it could just immediately, basically,
01:14:16 ►
appropriate as much processor power as it needed to do what it was doing.
01:14:22 ►
You know, for the past 10 years, while we’ve been cheerfully waging the 90s
01:14:28 ►
in our various ways,
01:14:30 ►
an enormous change has taken place
01:14:33 ►
in the machine environment,
01:14:35 ►
which we’re not even aware of
01:14:38 ►
or have the dimmest understanding of,
01:14:41 ►
which is all the machines,
01:14:44 ►
all the high IQ machines in the
01:14:47 ►
world have become telepathic. They now all talk to each other. They’re now all interconnected.
01:14:56 ►
In 1988, this wasn’t true. Now in 1998, it is true.
01:15:11 ►
And nobody pretends to understand what is going on.
01:15:13 ►
What do you mean by telepathic?
01:15:15 ►
The machines are telepathic?
01:15:18 ►
They communicate with each other over the Internet.
01:15:22 ►
What used to be a paperweight sitting on your desk is now a node in a global machine intelligence that never sleeps,
01:15:28 ►
that is constantly taking in and processing data, self-regulating itself, controlling power grids,
01:15:37 ►
inventory control programs, deciding how much petroleum should be extracted in Abu Dhabi,
01:15:44 ►
deciding how much petroleum should be extracted in Abu Dhabi, at what speed the tankers should move in order to keep the price of the French franc within a certain range,
01:15:53 ►
in order to keep the fabrication of steel and aluminum within certain parameters,
01:15:58 ►
in order to keep the yen steady,
01:16:01 ►
and steady and ordered.
01:16:05 ►
And this vast system of homeostatic controls that regulates industry, finance, research funding,
01:16:10 ►
even how many students are entering universities
01:16:14 ►
in certain engineering specialties.
01:16:16 ►
And this is all done by computer projection.
01:16:21 ►
And we love it because what we see is greater efficiency money going
01:16:28 ►
further projects being completed sooner we serve the same strange gods that that
01:16:38 ►
the that the evolving intelligence of the netatsers. And, you know, there may not be an aha moment
01:16:46 ►
where, you know, the New York Times prints a headline,
01:16:50 ►
Artificial Intelligence Takes Over Planet,
01:16:53 ►
Human Race Now Obsolete.
01:16:56 ►
You may be left to figure this out for yourself,
01:16:59 ►
or the slow dawning in various sectors. It’s the old, you know,
01:17:06 ►
who will tell the people problem.
01:17:12 ►
But I didn’t believe this for a long time.
01:17:15 ►
I mean, there was for a long time in AI
01:17:18 ►
a school of thought that very loudly proclaimed
01:17:21 ►
that this was a foolish idea,
01:17:23 ►
could never happen, people didn’t understand this was a foolish idea, could never happen,
01:17:25 ►
people didn’t understand this and this and this,
01:17:28 ►
and it was just a golem, a myth of modernity.
01:17:32 ►
But all those voices have fallen silent
01:17:36 ►
because the complexity theory,
01:17:42 ►
non-equilibrium thermodynamics,
01:17:44 ►
information theory, the newsequilibrium thermodynamics,
01:17:51 ►
information theory, the news in from molecular genetics, cellular automata,
01:17:55 ►
hyper,
01:17:58 ►
autocatalytic hyper cycles, study of
01:18:04 ►
poesis, autopoiesis in large-scale systems. All this leads to the conclusion that, you know,
01:18:06 ►
weird things do happen when systems complexify beyond a certain level.
01:18:13 ►
And emergent behaviors seem extremely organized and intelligent and goal-seeking.
01:18:23 ►
and intelligent and goal-seeking.
01:18:30 ►
And we’re now way too far down this road to turn back. So, you know, in a way, all our prescient projections
01:18:36 ►
of alien and extraterrestrial intelligence
01:18:40 ►
may actually be about this strange companion that we have summoned into the historical experience
01:18:51 ►
through this relationship with our machines. I think I said at one of these other meetings that
01:18:57 ►
I read George Dyson’s book Darwin Among the Machines, which, if you’re interested in all this, is a great book to read.
01:19:08 ►
And the point that he makes there is that when human beings think clearly,
01:19:15 ►
they think the same way machines think.
01:19:20 ►
In other words, if you think clearly, your thinking can be formulated through a mathematical method called symbolic logic.
01:19:32 ►
Well, symbolic logic is exactly what is being downloaded into machines in the form of software.
01:19:40 ►
The so-called Boolean operators, if, then, and, or, but,
01:19:47 ►
we understand what these words mean perfectly.
01:19:50 ►
So do machines.
01:19:51 ►
These are the distinctions machines make.
01:19:54 ►
So in spite of them being very different from us
01:19:57 ►
on many levels,
01:19:59 ►
sense is sense.
01:20:02 ►
Whether you’re a machine or a human being.
01:20:05 ►
If you’re a machine running bad code, it’s garbage in, garbage out.
01:20:09 ►
If you’re a human being running bad code, garbage in, garbage out.
01:20:14 ►
So there is this powerful commonality.
01:20:18 ►
Well, then, what kind of a destiny can we forge with this thing,
01:20:23 ►
which is actually a child of our
01:20:25 ►
own Promethean aspirations. It’s very unexpected, I think, to almost everybody. Very few people,
01:20:36 ►
I mean, we all thought it was going to be about paper clothes, hovercraft, and mining
01:20:42 ►
colonies on the moon. The idea that it’s about distributed machine intelligence,
01:20:50 ►
virtual realities,
01:20:52 ►
and the downloading of consciousness into digital circuitry.
01:20:56 ►
It’s a future we never imagined or supposed,
01:21:00 ►
which is a strong clue that it might be the real thing.
01:21:05 ►
This might be what you shipped for
01:21:08 ►
when you were thinking it was Flash Gordon.
01:21:12 ►
Well, these magical dreams are very old, you know.
01:21:16 ►
I mean, I do think we want to walk the golden streets of the imagination.
01:21:27 ►
walk the golden streets of the imagination either we wanted as heaven or we wanted as a Buddhist visualization of some mandalic realm or we want to
01:21:34 ►
return to the high days of Atlantis or we and virtual reality can deliver. It can actually release you
01:21:45 ►
into literary narrative
01:21:48 ►
as though it were
01:21:49 ►
real.
01:21:51 ►
And I think very quickly
01:21:54 ►
we may
01:21:56 ►
the real struggle
01:21:58 ►
in Greg Egan’s fiction
01:21:59 ►
he makes clear that, and I agree with him,
01:22:02 ►
that the real struggle
01:22:04 ►
that we will face in the future
01:22:06 ►
is the struggle to remain sensible to each other.
01:22:13 ►
That there is going to be a tendency for us, like the head of a dandelion,
01:22:18 ►
to just explode in a million directions.
01:22:23 ►
Everyone their own private Idaho.
01:22:27 ►
Everyone completely able to project
01:22:30 ►
their own fears, hopes, dreams, phobias,
01:22:34 ►
obsessions with such crystalline,
01:22:37 ►
hard-edged perfection and persuasive realism
01:22:40 ►
that the real struggle will be
01:22:43 ►
to remain coherent for the word
01:22:45 ►
human to include
01:22:47 ►
us all and not
01:22:49 ►
exclude anyone. We don’t want to
01:22:51 ►
divide into
01:22:53 ►
those who till the earth
01:22:55 ►
those who went in machine
01:22:57 ►
bodies to the stars
01:22:59 ►
and those who downloaded themselves
01:23:01 ►
into nano viruses
01:23:03 ►
and disappeared over the edge of the event horizon
01:23:07 ►
into the black hole at the center of the galaxy.
01:23:11 ►
I mean, maybe we want these things.
01:23:14 ►
I like the idea of the human family,
01:23:17 ►
whatever its individual expressions and adumbrations,
01:23:22 ►
staying with a coherent image.
01:23:26 ►
I mean, of course we’re all different,
01:23:28 ►
but our commonality is in the bedrock of this planet,
01:23:33 ►
something not likely to be given up, I would think.
01:23:39 ►
Maybe unity is not the way to go.
01:23:43 ►
Well, I don’t have an answer here.
01:23:46 ►
This was the issue that hovered over Diaspora,
01:23:49 ►
Greg Egan’s novel that’s set the most far in the future,
01:23:54 ►
because at least three forms of human beings
01:23:58 ►
had come into existence so diametrically different from each other
01:24:02 ►
that they operated basically in complete isolation from each other.
01:24:08 ►
I mean, some people became cyborgs,
01:24:13 ►
human-machine unions that were essentially immortal
01:24:17 ►
and that could cruise the stars and have cosmic adventures.
01:24:24 ►
But what most people did was they became entirely digital.
01:24:30 ►
They had no interface to hardware.
01:24:33 ►
They simply became streams of electrons
01:24:36 ►
living out endlessly adumbrated fantasies
01:24:41 ►
in the synthetic realities. And then there was the predictable third group
01:24:49 ►
the earth-centered purists who tilled the soil and had dirt under their fingernails and actually
01:24:58 ►
had sex to procreate rather than dial up things out of vats and stuff like that.
01:25:08 ►
But, yeah, I mean, people will choose whatever they want,
01:25:14 ►
and of course people will migrate between one group and another.
01:25:20 ►
The one thing that all this makes me feel good about
01:25:23 ►
is I think it it it’s an
01:25:26 ►
expansion of choice and then you know presuming there’s some kind of
01:25:32 ►
overarching dynamic whether Darwinian or something else it will all titrate out
01:25:40 ►
in whatever direction it wants to go one fantasy I’ve had is that what man could
01:25:48 ►
do for the earth is make everything conscious. You know that Grateful Dead song, You Are
01:25:56 ►
the Eyes of the World? You know, let every eye lead to a conscious mind. Let the squirrel think, and the squid think,
01:26:07 ►
and the bumblebee think.
01:26:10 ►
Because for sure, you know,
01:26:12 ►
we will artificially create robots and malacrums
01:26:17 ►
for ourselves to pass among,
01:26:20 ►
into the natural world as inhabitants of animal bodies.
01:26:26 ►
But why not just bring all animal mind to the threshold of sentience?
01:26:33 ►
Could that be done?
01:26:34 ►
Well, we don’t know, because we don’t know upon what foundation sentience rests,
01:26:41 ►
whether it requires a certain number of cc’s of brain mass, or whether that’s
01:26:47 ►
a completely preposterous and absurd notion, and that conceivably a paramecium, or a housefly,
01:26:56 ►
or a hummingbird could have a kind of shared intelligence. I mean, everything has its own intelligence anyway.
01:27:05 ►
That’s the expression of its nature.
01:27:08 ►
But imagine a planet-wide community of seamless intelligence
01:27:14 ►
where you could log on to the mind of a coral reef
01:27:19 ►
as easily as you could log on to the Internet.
01:27:26 ►
I think it’s going to come down to matters of engineering and design,
01:27:31 ►
choice, and what values will be served.
01:27:38 ►
And it’s a political thing.
01:27:42 ►
I always, it’s amazing, come back to this thing that this French sociologist Jacques Ellul said.
01:27:48 ►
It seems like a very deep statement that we return to it year after year.
01:27:55 ►
He said there are no political solutions, only technological ones.
01:28:01 ►
The rest is propaganda.
01:28:03 ►
And then he explained in a very large book what he meant
01:28:06 ►
by these words, political, technological, and propaganda. So the technologies to do
01:28:16 ►
almost anything are coming into our grip. What is not clear and less easy to summon is a political agenda, a plan,
01:28:32 ►
because we’ve never planned. We’ve only been a global society for 40 or 50 years,
01:28:40 ►
and the consequences of all this are just beginning to become apparent.
01:28:48 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:28:51 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:28:55 ►
Well, if the consequences of such rapid technological change
01:29:00 ►
was just beginning to become apparent in August of 1998,
01:29:04 ►
how much more so they have
01:29:06 ►
become apparent today. As Terence said back in 1998, and I quote, the unappreciated consequences
01:29:14 ►
of what we’re doing is that we’re actually building some kind of a superorganism, and we do
01:29:20 ►
not know where we fit into things if this Promethean force that we’re playing with should actually come to life.
01:29:28 ►
End quote.
01:29:30 ►
Terence then went on to ask, what would a superintelligence be like?
01:29:34 ►
As he was talking about how the interconnection of computers, which was being brought about through the internet, would begin to change human life.
01:29:45 ►
brought about through the internet would begin to change human life. Now if you’ve been paying attention to the latest tech research news, you realize that he actually gave a pretty good
01:29:50 ►
description of the field of artificial intelligence. I won’t go into it right now, but as you know,
01:29:56 ►
artificial intelligence, or AI, is making it into the mainstream news quite a bit lately.
01:30:03 ►
And for now, I’d just like to remind you of something that you already know,
01:30:07 ►
and that is to keep in mind that there is a big difference
01:30:11 ►
between artificial, and by that it’s meant non-human
01:30:15 ►
intelligence, but there’s a big difference between artificial intelligence
01:30:19 ►
and human consciousness. You are most likely
01:30:23 ►
using forms of AI already
01:30:25 ►
without thinking much about it,
01:30:27 ►
but no matter how super-intelligent machines become,
01:30:30 ►
they will never become conscious
01:30:32 ►
in the same way that we humans are.
01:30:35 ►
Like it or not,
01:30:37 ►
human consciousness, by definition,
01:30:39 ►
infers a form of consciousness
01:30:41 ►
that’s intimately connected to a human body.
01:30:44 ►
So don’t freak out, at least not yet, about super-intelligent machines.
01:30:50 ►
The time to worry won’t begin until, or if, they also become super-conscious in ways that we humans can’t control.
01:30:58 ►
However, after reading Matt Palomary’s new novel, I’m now beginning to think that maybe that day may be even closer than we realize.
01:31:09 ►
Of course, I’m usually wrong about these things, so you’re on your own here.
01:31:14 ►
Just think for yourself and question authority, all authority.
01:31:20 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:31:24 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.