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561 - Psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence

Jan 15, 2018, 50 min read

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Date this lecture was recorded: April 1999

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

“The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in a peculiar way to accentuate archaic values, values which are counter to the print constellated world.”

“The shaman is like a designated traveler into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances. And has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing.”

“All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future.”

“The Earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenetic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the Earth itself is growing conscious.”

“Human beings are the agents of a new order of being.”

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560 - McKenna’s Thoughts About Marshall McLuhan

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562 - What It’s Like To Be Loaded

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ►

And I’m really pleased to begin today’s podcast by thanking fellow salonner Bruce C.,

00:00:29 ►

who made a really nice donation to the salon last week to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

00:00:37 ►

So, Bruce, thanks a million. I really appreciate your help.

00:00:42 ►

Now, a couple of years ago, one of our fellow salonners asked me to mention

00:00:47 ►

any synchronicities that may take place in conjunction with one of my podcasts. And, well,

00:00:53 ►

today I’ve got one. Actually, for me, it’s a really big one. You see, I recently finished reading

00:00:59 ►

Uval Harari’s brilliant book, Homo Deus, and over the next few months, you’ll be hearing a lot more from

00:01:06 ►

me about that book. But here’s the headline. In 1962, I read Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomena of

00:01:13 ►

Man. But until I read Homo Deus, no other book has ever made as deep an impact on me as did

00:01:20 ►

Phenomena. But Harari’s book has taken all of my thinking about the noosphere and about

00:01:26 ►

what I wrote about in the spirit of the internet and what I spoke about in podcast number one from

00:01:31 ►

here in the salon. Essentially, all of my thinking over the past 50 years has been brought into focus

00:01:37 ►

by Homo Deus. Now, as I said, you’ll be hearing a lot more about that book in future podcasts,

00:01:44 ►

but here’s the

00:01:45 ►

synchronicity. I picked the Terrence McKenna talk that you’re about to listen to me with right now,

00:01:51 ►

I picked it out of a box of cassettes that, well, this one only had written on it Terrence’s name

00:01:56 ►

and a date, April 1999. I’m not sure where it was recorded, but that date means that this must have

00:02:02 ►

been one of the last talks that he gave before the major medical episode in May of 1999 that led to his death less than a year later.

00:02:12 ►

And as you listen to this, what I think is important to keep in mind here is that this

00:02:16 ►

talk was also given before he had any reason to believe that his life would soon be over.

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So my suggestion is to listen closely

00:02:25 ►

to how excited and positive he seems to be about the future.

00:02:29 ►

The future that you and I are living in at this very moment.

00:02:33 ►

Anyway, getting back to the synchronicity,

00:02:36 ►

and it’ll only become obvious to our fellow saunters

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who have already read Homo Deus,

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but once Terence gets into the meat of his talk

00:02:45 ►

and begins his rap on artificial intelligence and the internet,

00:02:49 ►

well, you’ll almost believe that Uwe Harari

00:02:51 ►

was channeling Terence McKenna when he wrote this book.

00:02:55 ►

Now that I think about it, I should have saved this story

00:02:58 ►

until after I finish talking about this great book in a future podcast,

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because until then you really won’t be able to grok

00:03:05 ►

how very much up-to-date that Terrence is in this talk

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that was given almost 20 years ago.

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It blew my mind the first time that I heard this rap,

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and so I should get out of the way right now

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and play it for you without any further ado.

00:03:22 ►

Our discussion this evening is

00:03:24 ►

Psychedelics in the

00:03:26 ►

age of intelligent machines.

00:03:29 ►

Or

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shamans among

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the machines.

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And I

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wanted to talk about this simply because

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these are two of my great loves

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and so I assume

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being monogamous, they must

00:03:44 ►

be one love.

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So how to build intellectual bridges between these two concerns, which seem so different?

00:03:55 ►

As far as people and machines are concerned, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in his book General Systems Theory,

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he said, people are not machines,

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but in every opportunity where they are allowed to behave like machines,

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they will so behave.

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In other words, we tend to fall into the well of habit,

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though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity,

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we too, as creatures of physics and chemistry of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious patterns and these repetitious patterns are the death

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of creativity

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they

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diminish our humaneness

00:04:52 ►

they diminish

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our individuality

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make each of us somehow

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like cogs in some

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larger system

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and we associate

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this cog-like membership in larger solar systems with the

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machines that we inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine, the age of the jet

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engine. You know, Marshall McLuhan said we navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rearview mirror

00:05:29 ►

to tell them where they’re going.

00:05:32 ►

It’s not a very successful strategy for navigating into the future.

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So I made a number of notes on this matter of psychedelics and machines.

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To me, the connecting bridge, well, there are many,

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but the most obvious one is consciousness expansion.

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After all, psychedelics, before they were called entheogens,

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before they were called hallucinogens, before they were called psychedelics,

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they were simply called consciousness-expanding drugs.

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Good phenomenological description of what they do.

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And certainly the technology of cybernetics is a consciousness-expanding technology.

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It expands a different area of consciousness.

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The minds of machines and the minds of human beings are very different,

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so different that each party questions whether the other even has a mind.

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But in fact, what these are are species of minds operating in very different domains.

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For instance, you can ask a five-year-old child to go into the bedroom

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to the third drawer of the dresser to select a pair of black socks

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and to bring them to mother, this is not a challenge for a five-year-old child.

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To get a machine to do this is $100 million and a research team of 40 or 50 technicians,

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code writers working months.

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On the other hand, if you ask a person for the cube root of 750,344,

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much head-scratching results.

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A computer is utterly undaunted by that question.

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So computers are minds that work in the realm of computation,

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and human minds are minds that work in the realm of generalization,

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spatial coordination, understanding of natural language,

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so forth and so on. Are these kinds of minds so different from each other, pilgrims,

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that there is no bridge to be crossed?

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I would submit not, that in fact the bridge between the human mind

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and the machine mind is symbolic logic, mathematics.

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When we think clearly, we are intelligible to machines.

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People who write code know this,

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that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine

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is to think clearly yourself.

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clear to a machine is to think clearly yourself. The machine has no patience for the half-truth,

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the analogy, the semi-grasp dissociation.

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For the machine, everything has to be clear.

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Everything must be defined.

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So that’s the commonality

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between minds and

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machines of the calculating

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species.

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What are the common bridges

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between psychedelics

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and these machines?

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Well, to my mind,

00:09:20 ►

this is an easier bridge

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to gap.

00:09:28 ►

Both computers and drugs are what I would call function-specific arrangements of matter.

00:09:32 ►

And as we develop nanotechnological abilities

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as we move into the next century,

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it will be more and more clear

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that the difference between drugs and machines

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is simply that one is too large

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to swallow.

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And our best people are working on that.

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You know, nanotechnology is a very hot buzzword at the moment, an unimaginable dream of building machines and small objects atom by atom, perhaps

00:10:09 ►

under the control of long-chain polymers, running forms of pre-programmed software of

00:10:16 ►

some sort.

00:10:17 ►

It’s all very razzmatazz, very state-of-the-art, but in fact, pharmaceutical chemists have

00:10:24 ►

been working in the nanotechnological

00:10:27 ►

realm for over a hundred years. I mean, when you synthesize molecules out of simpler substrate,

00:10:35 ►

specifically to have a conformational geometry that matches something going on in the synapse of a primate,

00:10:47 ►

a human or a monkey or something like that. You are working at this nanotechnological level.

00:10:55 ►

Both the psychedelic and the new computational machines

00:11:00 ►

represent extensions of human function.

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And this is really close to the nub.

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It locks in with the concept of prosthesis.

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The drugs, the psychedelic substances, the shamanic plants,

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are forms of prosthetic devices for extending the human mind,

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the human perceptual apparatus

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into hidden

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realms or

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inaccessible realms.

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Similarly, the

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machines, by allowing us

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to model, calculate

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and simulate very complicated

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multivariable processes

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extend the power of the human mind and simulate very complicated multivariable processes,

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extend the power of the human mind into places you could never dream of going before.

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And part of what seems to me very real

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about being a human being

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and inheriting 10,000 years of human history

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is the complexity of the inheritance

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and the growth of that complexity.

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A thousand years ago,

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an intelligent human being

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could actually dream of mastering

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the entire database of Western civilization,

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read all the classic authors,

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read the Bible,

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and you’re closing in on it

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around AD 1000. Now the notion of any single human being assimilating any, even a small

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portion of the database of this civilization is inconceivable. So machines which filter,

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which search,

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which are guided by human intent, that’s part

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of the story. The other part of

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the story are boundary

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dissolving states of ecstasy

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in which all the

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factoids of the culture are

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thrown up for grabs.

00:13:02 ►

The deck is reshuffled,

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synchronicity rules,

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and out of that steps visionary understanding,

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breakthrough, integrative breakthrough

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under the aegis of psychedelic intoxication.

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So, prosthesis.

00:13:21 ►

Prosthesis for the human mind

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and with the

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advent of virtual realities of

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various sorts and that kind of thing.

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Prosthesis for the

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human body.

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And I’m very

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keen on

00:13:36 ►

sort of the under the table

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effects of these

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things. In other words,

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I’m a full going,, full, hard-charging McLuhanist,

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and I really believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the world we’ve inherited

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are strengths and weaknesses put there by print and by the spectrum of effects which McLuhan called the Gutenberg

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galaxy. The spectrum of effects

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spun off from print

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and if you’re not

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used to thinking in McLuhanist terms

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it may not seem immediately

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obvious to you that

00:14:17 ►

phenomenon as different

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as the modern notion

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of the democratic citizen

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the modern notion of the democratic citizen,

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the modern notion of interchangeable parts on an assembly line,

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the modern notion of conformity to canons of advertising. These are all spectrums of effect created by the linearity

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and the uniformity of print.

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It actually, in the late 15th century,

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reconstructed the medieval psyche into its proto-modern form.

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And we have lived within that print-constellated cultural hallucination

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for about 500 years, until the advent of various forms of

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electronic media in the 20th century. McLuhan talked about radio, he talked about television,

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he didn’t really live to see the internet. The notion that keeps occurring to me as I watch all this is that print was uniquely capable of creating and maintaining boundaries.

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More than any other form of media ever created, it was a boundary-defining form of media. It proceeded linearly. It required

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literacy, which had implicit in it the notion of a very stable, advanced sort of educational

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system. Print was a creator and a definer of cultural boundaries. And the new electronic media are not,

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and neither are the psychedelics.

00:16:10 ►

This is why I proposed in a book of mine called The Archaic Revival

00:16:17 ►

the idea that the values of the archaic,

00:16:23 ►

of the high paleolithic,

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values of community, ecstasy, relating to life through rhythm, dance, ritual, intoxication, that these values, which seem so archaic,

00:16:40 ►

are in fact destined to play a major role in the future as print fades.

00:16:48 ►

Print, just a convulsive 500-year episode in the Western mind

00:16:54 ►

that opened that narrow window that permitted the rise of modern science,

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modern mathematical approaches to the analysis of nature,

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and then obliterated its own platform, its own resumptantra,

00:17:18 ►

by allowing the growth, the appearance of the electronic technologies.

00:17:24 ►

And my sort of supposition about all this I’m not

00:17:25 ►

an apocalyptarian or a pessimist

00:17:29 ►

I may be an apocalyptarian

00:17:31 ►

I’m not a pessimist

00:17:32 ►

I think

00:17:34 ►

this is all very good

00:17:36 ►

obviously

00:17:38 ►

continuing to run

00:17:40 ►

western civilization on the

00:17:42 ►

operating system inherited

00:17:44 ►

from print produces various forms of political and cultural schizophrenia, which allowed to run unchecked would become fatal, would create cascades of chaos and political destabilization that would become uncontrollable.

00:18:09 ►

destabilization that would become uncontrollable. Governments resist change. Governments cling to technologies and social formulae that are already tried and true. In that sense, then,

00:18:16 ►

all governments are incredibly anti-progressive forces. Again, the image from McLuhan of someone driving into the future

00:18:27 ►

using only the rear-view mirror.

00:18:32 ►

So the electronic media

00:18:36 ►

and the psychedelics

00:18:38 ►

work together in this peculiar way

00:18:41 ►

to accentuate archaic values,

00:18:47 ►

values which are counter to the print-constellated world.

00:18:53 ►

And when you deconstruct what that means

00:18:57 ►

and look at the aboriginal or the paleolithic or the archaic world, you see that the central figure in that world

00:19:08 ►

is the shaman, male or female, the shaman.

00:19:13 ►

And the shaman is like a designated traveler into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock

00:19:26 ►

the cultural cul-de-sac

00:19:28 ►

of his or her

00:19:30 ►

people and go

00:19:32 ►

behind the stage

00:19:33 ►

machinery of cultural

00:19:36 ►

appearances and

00:19:38 ►

has permission,

00:19:40 ►

collective permission, to manipulate

00:19:42 ►

that stage machinery

00:19:44 ►

for purposes of healing.

00:19:47 ►

We have no institution like this.

00:19:52 ►

We have advertising, we have rock and roll stars, we have cults of celebrity,

00:19:57 ►

we have things which are shaman-like,

00:20:00 ►

but we have no real institution that permits human beings, in fact encourages human beings, to go beyond their cultural values, to burst through into some transcultural super space, forage around out there, and bring new means back into the tribe.

00:20:27 ►

To some degree,

00:20:28 ►

our artists do this.

00:20:30 ►

To some degree,

00:20:32 ►

our scientists do it.

00:20:33 ►

But it’s all hit and miss.

00:20:36 ►

It’s all willy-nilly.

00:20:38 ►

And once achieved,

00:20:39 ►

it must be swept under the rug

00:20:41 ►

in the service of the myth of method

00:20:44 ►

that somebody was following somebody else’s work swept under the rug in the service of the myth of method,

00:20:48 ►

that somebody was following somebody else’s work,

00:20:54 ►

or somebody was applying a certain form of rational or logical analysis,

00:20:57 ►

and that that led to their breakthrough.

00:21:02 ►

If you’ve read Thomas Kuhn’s book on the structure of scientific revolution,

00:21:05 ►

you know this is all lies and propaganda.

00:21:12 ►

The real story of science is that it’s a series of revelations brilliantly defended by people whose careers depended

00:21:17 ►

on the brilliant defense of those revelations.

00:21:21 ►

One of the best-kept secrets of the birth of modern science

00:21:27 ►

is that it was founded by an angel,

00:21:31 ►

that the young René Descartes was whoring and soldiering

00:21:37 ►

his way across Europe as a 21-year-old in the Habsburg

00:21:41 ►

army.

00:21:42 ►

And one night in the town of Ulm in southern Germany, he had

00:21:47 ►

a dream.

00:21:48 ►

Strange that this would be the birthplace of Albert Einstein some 200 years later.

00:21:54 ►

But Descartes had a dream and an angel appeared to him in the dream and the angel said, the

00:22:01 ►

conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number and he

00:22:08 ►

said I got it modern science I’ll go do it and he did he did and that was the

00:22:17 ►

method for over 250 years of the conquest of nature and it leads us you

00:22:23 ►

know to the Josephson Junction,

00:22:25 ►

the Mars Global Surveyor,

00:22:27 ►

long base interferometry that searches nearby stars

00:22:31 ►

for Earth-like planets.

00:22:32 ►

It brings us the entire cornucopia of scientific effects,

00:22:39 ►

but an angelic revelation

00:22:42 ►

disguised as a logical philosophical breakthrough.

00:22:46 ►

This is what you’re not told in the academy.

00:22:50 ►

So my point there is human progress has always depended on the whispering of alien minds,

00:22:58 ►

confrontations with the other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chance held the winning hands.

00:23:12 ►

So the shaman, as a paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social context and in the present social context

00:23:25 ►

the skywalker

00:23:28 ►

the one who goes

00:23:30 ►

between the one

00:23:32 ►

who passes

00:23:34 ►

outside of the tribe

00:23:36 ►

and then returns

00:23:38 ►

with

00:23:39 ►

means, insights

00:23:42 ►

cures, designs

00:23:44 ►

glossolalia technologies means, insights, cures, designs,

00:23:47 ►

glossolalia, technologies,

00:23:54 ►

and re-fertilizes the human family by this means.

00:23:57 ►

It’s irrational, but it’s how it actually happens, and it’s how it’s always happened,

00:23:59 ►

and it may very well be the only way that it can happen.

00:24:04 ►

This cultivation of the irrational,

00:24:06 ►

this flirtation with the breakdown of boundaries.

00:24:12 ►

So now, in our nuts and bolts technological progress,

00:24:19 ►

we have somehow created technologies

00:24:23 ►

which are very friendly to our social values

00:24:27 ►

in that these technologies can be bought, sold, licensed, upgraded,

00:24:35 ►

all things which we understand.

00:24:38 ►

But these technologies are acting on us in the same way that psychedelic drugs do,

00:24:44 ►

are acting on us in the same way that psychedelic drugs do,

00:24:51 ►

but more profoundly, more generally, and more insidiously, because their effect is not understood, or if it is understood, it’s not discussed.

00:24:58 ►

And so in a way we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase. All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future.

00:25:12 ►

Its music, its design, indeed the very people who will inhabit it

00:25:18 ►

appear to be the most switched on, the most chance-taking,

00:25:25 ►

the most alive of the entire tribe,

00:25:29 ►

people who feel the beat,

00:25:32 ►

people who are not afraid to take chances,

00:25:35 ►

people from these technologies have always been very natural.

00:25:42 ►

Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information transforming

00:25:48 ►

technologies. And in fact, one of the strange things that is happening is every move we

00:25:55 ►

now make in relationship to the new technologies redefines them at the very boundaries where their own developmental impetus

00:26:07 ►

would lead them toward a kind of independence.

00:26:11 ►

In other words, we talk about artificial intelligence,

00:26:15 ►

we talk about the possibility of an AI coming into existence,

00:26:20 ►

but we do not really understand to what degree this is already true of our circumstance.

00:26:29 ►

In other words, how much of society is already homeostatically regulated

00:26:35 ►

by machines that are ultimately under human control,

00:26:40 ►

but practically speaking are almost never meddled with?

00:26:43 ►

but practically speaking are almost never meddled with.

00:26:52 ►

The world price of gold, the rate of petroleum extraction and other base natural resources,

00:26:58 ►

how much of these things is on the high seas and in the pipeline at any given moment,

00:27:03 ►

how much electricity is flowing into a given electrical grid at any moment,

00:27:07 ►

the distribution and the billing of that electricity, all manufacturing and inventory processes are under machine control.

00:27:13 ►

So in other words, the larger flows of energy, capital, and ideas

00:27:18 ►

already have a kind of autonomous life of their own

00:27:23 ►

that we encourage because it makes us money, it makes our lives

00:27:29 ►

smoother, it empowers us.

00:27:33 ►

It’s a symbiotic relationship of empowerment.

00:27:38 ►

Even in the matter of the design of these machines. Once, you know, human engineers would work

00:27:45 ►

from a set of performance specs,

00:27:48 ►

and they would design a chip to meet those specs,

00:27:51 ►

and the architecture would be put in place

00:27:55 ►

by human engineers.

00:27:57 ►

Now a machine is told,

00:27:59 ►

here are the design specs.

00:28:01 ►

Design the architecture to satisfy the specs, and when that is done,

00:28:08 ►

the chip is manufactured.

00:28:10 ►

The actual design of the thing is in the hands of machines.

00:28:14 ►

So these machines are, you know, McLuhan once said of human beings, he said, we are the

00:28:22 ►

genitals of our technology.

00:28:26 ►

We exist only to improve next

00:28:28 ►

year’s model.

00:28:30 ►

Well, it appears

00:28:32 ►

that they’re phasing us out

00:28:34 ►

of this ignominious role

00:28:36 ►

as well as every other role.

00:28:40 ►

Oh, let’s see here.

00:28:44 ►

So, being an optimist, that’s see here.

00:28:49 ►

So being an optimist, that’s where I was, yes.

00:28:55 ►

How to make gold out of this situation. In other words, how to see this as a natural and positive unfolding of the planetary adventure.

00:29:03 ►

unfolding of the planetary adventure.

00:29:10 ►

And for some of these ideas, I’m indebted to Michael DeLanda,

00:29:15 ►

who wrote a book called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.

00:29:17 ►

And I highly recommend it.

00:29:20 ►

He didn’t say what I’m about to say.

00:29:22 ►

I’ll take credit and blame for it.

00:29:24 ►

But the book gave me the idea.

00:29:30 ►

When you stand off and look at human beings and their technologies,

00:29:41 ►

it’s very hard not to notice that from the very moment that we have a technology that can be distinguished from chimpanzees pushing grass stems

00:29:47 ►

down anthills or digging with sharpened bones or something like that the minute

00:29:52 ►

you get past that we our technologies have always involved the materials of

00:30:00 ►

the earth what agriculture itself is is a different way of relating to the earth. What agriculture itself is,

00:30:06 ►

is a different way of relating to the earth.

00:30:10 ►

Nomadism, which preceded it,

00:30:13 ►

was a seasonal wandering

00:30:15 ►

very lightly over the earth.

00:30:19 ►

And at some point,

00:30:20 ►

the deep, fertile soil

00:30:23 ►

of the river valleys

00:30:24 ►

that were encountered in these nomadic wanderings

00:30:28 ►

were recognized as potential sources of food

00:30:32 ►

if cultivated, if treated through a certain set

00:30:38 ►

of technological methods.

00:30:41 ►

So that early technology is defined by a new relationship

00:30:46 ►

to the materials of

00:30:48 ►

the earth itself.

00:30:49 ►

And it’s quickly followed

00:30:51 ►

because agriculture

00:30:54 ►

is so

00:30:55 ►

successful as a strategy

00:30:58 ►

for food production.

00:31:00 ►

It’s quickly followed by

00:31:02 ►

city building and the

00:31:04 ►

establishment of sedentary populations,

00:31:07 ►

because you can’t carry your surplus with you if you’re an agriculturalist.

00:31:14 ►

So great is the physical volume of cities.

00:31:19 ►

And at the very early establishment of these populations in the Middle East, you get the first traces of metallurgy, the working of metals, the alloying and fabricating the materials of the earth

00:31:50 ►

proceeds in an unbroken series of processes and steps

00:31:55 ►

right up to the latest 500 hertz chip or megahertz chip.

00:32:01 ►

It proceeds right up to the most modern computational machinery.

00:32:06 ►

So I once heard someone say that plants were something that animals had been invented by

00:32:18 ►

plants to move them around, which from an evolutionary point of view, you can see that this is a kind of truth and many

00:32:30 ►

many plants hitchhike around on animals and no animal has been more prolific in the spreading

00:32:37 ►

of plants than the human animal i mean we call it ecosystemic disruption, but what it really is is ecosystemic homogenization.

00:32:48 ►

I live in Hawaii, for example.

00:32:51 ►

Eighty percent of the plants in Hawaii are now introduced species.

00:32:57 ►

Almost none of the plants that were pre-conquest on the western coast of North America exist anymore.

00:33:05 ►

They have been supplanted by much tougher, more tightly evolved Mediterranean plants

00:33:12 ►

that had known the presence of grazing animals for millennia.

00:33:16 ►

So these flora are constantly being changed.

00:33:19 ►

Human beings move plants around.

00:33:21 ►

Well, with that perspective then, it seems to me the Earth’s

00:33:27 ►

strategy for its own salvation is through machines. And human beings are a kind of intermediary

00:33:36 ►

catalytic step in the rarefaction of the Earth. The earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself

00:33:48 ►

into a higher state of morphogenetic order.

00:33:55 ►

And that these machines that we build

00:33:58 ►

are actually the means by which

00:34:02 ►

the earth itself is growing conscious.

00:34:05 ►

You know, if you study embryology,

00:34:08 ►

you know that the final ramification,

00:34:12 ►

the final spread and thinning out of the nervous system

00:34:17 ►

happens very suddenly at the end of fetal development.

00:34:23 ►

And I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention,

00:34:26 ►

but in the last 10, 12 years or so,

00:34:28 ►

a very profound change has crept over our household appliances.

00:34:34 ►

They’ve become telepathic.

00:34:37 ►

So while we were arguing about the implications of the Internet

00:34:41 ►

for e-commerce or what have you,

00:34:46 ►

all of these passive machines previously used for playing Pong

00:34:51 ►

and word processing became subsets of a planetary node of information

00:34:59 ►

that is never turned off, that endlessly whispers to itself

00:35:04 ►

on the back channels that is

00:35:06 ►

endlessly monitoring

00:35:08 ►

and being inputted

00:35:10 ►

data from the

00:35:12 ►

human world and

00:35:14 ►

we should

00:35:16 ►

know because concomitant

00:35:18 ►

to the development of all this technology

00:35:20 ►

chaos

00:35:22 ►

theory, non-equilibrium

00:35:24 ►

thermodynamics the work of Eric Jan, Shamilia

00:35:28 ►

Prokosian, and Ralph Abraham, and Stuart Kaufman, all these people who worked in complexity

00:35:34 ►

theory and perturbation of large-scale dissipative structures, these people have secured that complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order.

00:35:49 ►

This is counterintuitive if you’re running physics 19th century style as your OS,

00:35:58 ►

but if you’re actually keeping up with what’s going on, There is nothing miraculous about this. All kinds of complex

00:36:05 ►

systems spontaneously

00:36:07 ►

mutate to higher states

00:36:10 ►

of order. But what it really

00:36:12 ►

means is that

00:36:13 ►

we are in the process

00:36:18 ►

of birthing some kind of

00:36:20 ►

strange companion.

00:36:23 ►

You know, Nietzsche

00:36:23 ►

a hundred years ago said

00:36:25 ►

that strangest of all

00:36:27 ►

guests now stands

00:36:29 ►

at the door. He was

00:36:31 ►

speaking of nihilism.

00:36:34 ►

And certainly the 20th century

00:36:35 ►

sat down, had

00:36:37 ►

the party, drank the booze

00:36:40 ►

and went to bed with nihilism.

00:36:43 ►

But

00:36:44 ►

now a stranger guest stands at the door,

00:36:49 ►

and it is the AI,

00:36:52 ►

denied as a possibility as recently as 10 or 15 years ago

00:36:57 ►

in books like Hubert Dreyfuss’s What Computers Can’t Do.

00:37:02 ►

But if you’ve been paying attention,

00:37:03 ►

you may have noticed those voices have grown

00:37:06 ►

strangely silent in the past five or six years. At this point, nobody wants to say what computers

00:37:13 ►

can’t do and hang their career on that. That would be extremely reckless at this point, I would think. Because the fact is, we are ourselves

00:37:25 ►

elements

00:37:27 ►

acting and reacting

00:37:29 ►

in a system that we cannot

00:37:32 ►

understand.

00:37:34 ►

This seems

00:37:35 ►

natural to me because

00:37:37 ►

my

00:37:39 ►

observations, as

00:37:41 ►

stated here this evening,

00:37:44 ►

rest on an assumption which science doesn’t share,

00:37:48 ►

but which I think is easily conveyed,

00:37:52 ►

and you can confirm it from your own experience of life,

00:37:56 ►

and it is this, that the universe grows more complex

00:38:00 ►

as we approach the present.

00:38:03 ►

It was simpler a million years ago. It was simpler

00:38:06 ►

yet a billion years ago. As you go backward in time, the universe becomes more simple.

00:38:13 ►

As you approach this golden moment, process complexity is layered upon complexity. Not

00:38:22 ►

only a planetary ecosystem, not only language using cultures,

00:38:27 ►

but language using cultures with high technology,

00:38:30 ►

with supercomputers,

00:38:32 ►

with the ability to sequence our own genome,

00:38:35 ►

on and on and on.

00:38:36 ►

That’s self-evident.

00:38:38 ►

Equally self-evident is the fact that

00:38:41 ►

this process of complexification

00:38:44 ►

that informs all nature on all levels

00:38:47 ►

is visibly, palpably, obviously accelerating.

00:38:54 ►

And I don’t mean so that glaciers retreat 50% faster

00:38:59 ►

or volcanism is occurring at 12% greater rate

00:39:03 ►

than a million years ago.

00:39:05 ►

I mean viscerally accelerating,

00:39:09 ►

so that now a human life is more than enough of a window

00:39:14 ►

to see the entire global system of relationships in transformation.

00:39:22 ►

Well, I guess you could call me an extrapolationist.

00:39:26 ►

If I see a process which has been slowly accelerating

00:39:31 ►

for 12 billion years,

00:39:35 ►

it’s hard for me to imagine any force

00:39:38 ►

which could step forward out of nowhere

00:39:40 ►

and wrench that process in a new direction.

00:39:48 ►

Rather, I would assume that this process of exponential acceleration into what I call novelty, what you might call complexity,

00:39:55 ►

is a law of being and cannot be retarded or deflected. But what does that mean? Because now a human lifetime is more than enough time to see

00:40:09 ►

this process of rampant and spreading virus-like complexity. What does it mean? It seems to presage

00:40:18 ►

the absolute annihilation of everything familiar, everything with roots in the past.

00:40:28 ►

And I believe that to be true.

00:40:31 ►

I think that the planet is like some kind of organism that is seeking morphogenetic transformation, and it’s doing it through

00:40:46 ►

the expression of intelligence

00:40:49 ►

and out-of-intelligence technology.

00:40:53 ►

Human beings are the agent

00:40:55 ►

of a new order of being.

00:40:58 ►

That’s why, though it’s obvious

00:41:00 ►

that we’re higher mammals

00:41:02 ►

and some kind of primate

00:41:04 ►

and so forth and so on,

00:41:05 ►

you can look at us from another point of view and see that we’re more like archangels than primates.

00:41:12 ►

We have qualities and concerns and anxieties that animals don’t share.

00:41:18 ►

We are materially suspended between two different orders of being.

00:41:26 ►

And our technologies, our fetishes, our religions,

00:41:31 ►

and my definition of technology is sufficiently broad

00:41:35 ►

that it includes even spoken language.

00:41:38 ►

All of our technologies demand, push forward

00:41:45 ►

toward and make inevitable

00:41:47 ►

their own obsolescence.

00:41:51 ►

So we are like caught

00:41:52 ►

in an evolutionary cascade.

00:41:56 ►

And people say, well,

00:41:58 ►

if the AI were to break loose,

00:42:01 ►

what would it look like?

00:42:02 ►

What would it be?

00:42:04 ►

Where does humanity

00:42:06 ►

fit

00:42:07 ►

into the picture? It’s a little

00:42:09 ►

harder to imagine.

00:42:13 ►

Machines

00:42:13 ►

operating at a thousand

00:42:15 ►

megahertz confer

00:42:17 ►

automatic immortality

00:42:19 ►

on the mammalian

00:42:21 ►

nervous system if you can get it

00:42:23 ►

somehow uploaded, downloaded,

00:42:26 ►

cross-loaded into machinery,

00:42:29 ►

because ten minutes becomes eternity

00:42:31 ►

in a machine like that.

00:42:34 ►

So a kind of false or pseudo-immortality

00:42:41 ►

opens up ahead of us as a kind of payoff

00:42:44 ►

for our devotion to the program of machine evolution and machine intelligence.

00:42:54 ►

Now, some people say this is appalling and, you know, we should go back to the good old days,

00:43:02 ►

whatever the good old days were.

00:43:08 ►

go back to the good old days, whatever the good old days were, to me it’s exhilarating,

00:43:11 ►

exciting, psychedelic, beautiful. It means that the human form, the human possibility is in the process of leaving history behind.

00:43:29 ►

of leaving history behind. History is some kind of an adaptation that lasts about, pick a number,

00:43:38 ►

10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years. No more than that. What is 20,000 years in the life of a biological species? We know that there were Homo sapiens sapien types 200,000 years ago.

00:43:48 ►

So history is some kind of an episodic response to a certain set of cultural dilemmas.

00:43:56 ►

And now it’s ending.

00:43:59 ►

And print created a number of ideas which now have to be given up.

00:44:06 ►

Ideas like the distinct nature, the distinct and unique nature of the individual,

00:44:15 ►

the necessary hierarchical structuring of society.

00:44:28 ►

structuring of society. All of these things are going to, if not have to be given up entirely,

00:44:42 ►

dramatically modified because the illusion that the self has simple location is now exposed. The self does not have simple location.

00:44:46 ►

This is why you are your brother’s keeper.

00:44:49 ►

This is why we all are responsible for each other.

00:44:54 ►

The idea that what happens in distant parts of the world

00:44:59 ►

makes no claim on my moral judgment

00:45:02 ►

or my moral understanding is wrong. The world, as revealed by quantum

00:45:10 ►

physics, as revealed by electronic experience, is what Leibniz called a plenum. It’s all

00:45:17 ►

one thing. It’s all connected. It’s all of a part. So then I also wanted to point out that I mentioned earlier

00:45:28 ►

this thing about prosthesis and how the machines were prosthetic devices, extending human consciousness

00:45:36 ►

somewhat like psychedelics. That’s the equation from a human point of view. But what is also equally true is that we are prosthetic devices for these machines.

00:45:51 ►

We are their eyes and ears in the world.

00:45:55 ►

We provide the code.

00:45:57 ►

We provide the constraints.

00:45:59 ►

We build the hardware.

00:46:01 ►

It is a relationship of mutual benefit.

00:46:06 ►

It’s not entirely

00:46:07 ►

clear that our contribution will

00:46:10 ►

always be

00:46:11 ►

creative

00:46:13 ►

in the sense of that our

00:46:16 ►

primate hand

00:46:18 ►

will be on the tiller of existence

00:46:20 ►

as it has been.

00:46:22 ►

But certainly we are

00:46:24 ►

part of this equation of transformation that is making itself felt.

00:46:31 ►

And I think the distinction between flesh and machinery, which is easily made now,

00:46:39 ►

will be less easy to make in the future. As we migrate toward the nanotechnological domains, the

00:46:48 ►

methodologies of production become much more like the processes of biology. For example,

00:46:56 ►

biology does all its miracles on this planet at temperatures below 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:47:04 ►

planet at temperatures below 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:47:07 ►

Organic life requires no higher temperature to build great whales,

00:47:12 ►

redwood trees, swarms of locusts,

00:47:16 ►

what have you. The high temperature heavy metal

00:47:19 ►

technologies that we have become obsessed with are extremely

00:47:23 ►

primitive and extremely toxic

00:47:26 ►

that will all disappear as we model and genuflect in our manufacturing processes before the methods

00:47:38 ►

and style of nature which is to pull atomic species from the local environment and then to assemble them

00:47:49 ►

atom by atom by atom so this ai that is coming into existence is to my mind not artificial at all

00:48:12 ►

mind not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it really is, is it’s a new conformational geometry of the collective self of humanity. And, you know, I’ve always believed that there

00:48:22 ►

were, well, there are different models of what shamanism is.

00:48:27 ►

There’s sort of a Jungian model, which is the shaman is someone who goes to the collective unconscious

00:48:33 ►

and manipulates the archetypes and heals by that means.

00:48:39 ►

The model that I prefer is a mathematical model.

00:48:44 ►

The model that I prefer is a mathematical model. The shaman is someone who simply, through extraordinary perturbation of consciousness,

00:48:51 ►

either through taking plant hallucinogens or manipulating diet,

00:48:55 ►

or through deflagration and ordeal, or by some means,

00:49:11 ►

returns consciousness to the point where the ordinary conformational geometries are blasted through. And then the shaman can see into the culturally forbidden zones of information.

00:49:21 ►

And if you think about shamanism for a moment, what do shamans do classically?

00:49:26 ►

They know where the game has gone. They are great weather prophets. They are very

00:49:35 ►

insightful in the matter of various small domestic hassles like who stole the

00:49:41 ►

chicken, who slept with the chief’s wife, this kind of thing.

00:49:46 ►

And they cure. They cure.

00:49:49 ►

Well, if you analyze these abilities, it’s clear to me they all indicate that they come from a common source.

00:49:59 ►

And the common source that they come from is higher dimensional perception in a mathematical sense, not a

00:50:09 ►

metaphorical sense, in the sense of 4D perception.

00:50:13 ►

If you could see in hyperspace, you could see where the game will be next week.

00:50:20 ►

You could see the weather a month from now.

00:50:22 ►

You would know who stole the chicken.

00:50:22 ►

week. You could see the weather a month from now. You would know who stole

00:50:23 ►

the chicken. And

00:50:25 ►

any good doctor will tell

00:50:27 ►

you that if you’re building a reputation

00:50:30 ►

as a physician, you must

00:50:32 ►

hone the intuitional ability

00:50:34 ►

to choose patients who won’t

00:50:36 ►

die.

00:50:38 ►

It’s a call.

00:50:40 ►

Any doctor will

00:50:42 ►

tell you this. So this

00:50:44 ►

is what shamans are.

00:50:45 ►

They are 4D people.

00:50:48 ►

They are sanctioned members of the society

00:50:52 ►

who are allowed to put on the gloves, as it were,

00:50:56 ►

pull on the goggles,

00:50:58 ►

and look beyond the idols of the tribe,

00:51:02 ►

look beyond the myth.

00:51:04 ►

Well, in a way, as

00:51:05 ►

culture breaks down

00:51:07 ►

in multiculturalism

00:51:10 ►

and the rise of

00:51:12 ►

the internet and a generation

00:51:13 ►

of people raised on hallucinogenic

00:51:16 ►

plants and substances,

00:51:18 ►

we all are asked to

00:51:20 ►

assimilate

00:51:22 ►

some portion of this

00:51:23 ►

shamanic potential to ourselves.

00:51:27 ►

And it’s about not blocking what is obvious.

00:51:31 ►

Nothing comes unannounced.

00:51:33 ►

I mean, this is the faith.

00:51:35 ►

Nothing comes unannounced.

00:51:36 ►

But idiots can’t miss the announcement.

00:51:40 ►

So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition

00:51:46 ►

rather than driving through it.

00:51:49 ►

And this is not, in my mind, woo-woo.

00:51:52 ►

It’s actually based on the observations of how life works,

00:51:56 ►

whether it’s counterintuitive to logical positivism

00:52:01 ►

and its fellow travelers or not.

00:52:06 ►

Then I want to leave you with just one

00:52:08 ►

last thought on all

00:52:10 ►

of this, which is

00:52:12 ►

and this

00:52:14 ►

sort of harks back to the question of

00:52:16 ►

the similarities between the machines

00:52:19 ►

and the plants.

00:52:20 ►

And it’s a, I’m sure

00:52:22 ►

you’ve heard this, I’ve heard

00:52:24 ►

it, it has different levels

00:52:26 ►

of being said and being

00:52:28 ►

heard

00:52:29 ►

it’s that the world

00:52:32 ►

is actually made

00:52:34 ►

of language

00:52:35 ►

it isn’t made of electrons

00:52:38 ►

and fields of

00:52:40 ►

force and scalar vectors

00:52:42 ►

and all of that

00:52:44 ►

fancy stuff.

00:52:45 ►

The world is made of language.

00:52:48 ►

The word is primary, more primary than the speed of light, more primary than any of the

00:52:55 ►

physical constants that are assumed by science to be the bedrock of reality. Below that, surrounding and enclosing all those constructs of science

00:53:08 ►

is language, the act of signifying, and virtual reality is a very sexy, new sort of concept

00:53:20 ►

as normally presented, machine-sustained immersive realities

00:53:26 ►

that trick your senses into believing you’re in a world

00:53:30 ►

that you are in fact not in.

00:53:32 ►

But in fact, the entire enterprise of civilization

00:53:36 ►

has been about building these virtual realities.

00:53:40 ►

The first virtual realities were at Ur and Shanagar

00:53:44 ►

and Chattahoochee and Jericho.

00:53:48 ►

Yes, stone and adobe is an intractable material compared to photons moving on a screen.

00:53:56 ►

But nevertheless, the name of the game is the same,

00:54:00 ►

which is to cast an illusion between man and reality,

00:54:08 ►

to build a cultural truth in the stead of the natural truth of the animal body

00:54:19 ►

and the felt moment of immediate experience.

00:54:29 ►

And this is where I want to tie it up, with this notion of the felt presence of immediate experience.

00:54:35 ►

This transcends the culture, the machines, the drugs, the history,

00:54:43 ►

the momentum of evolution.

00:54:46 ►

It’s all you will ever know and all you can ever know

00:54:50 ►

is the felt presence of immediate experience.

00:54:54 ►

Everything else arrives as rumor, litigant, advocate, supposition, possibility.

00:55:03 ►

The felt moment of immediate experience is actually the mind and the body

00:55:09 ►

aware of each other and aware of the flow of time

00:55:15 ►

and the establishment of being through metabolism.

00:55:20 ►

And this, I think, is what the machines cannot assimilate.

00:55:24 ►

And this, I think, is what the machines cannot assimilate. It will be for them a mystery, as the nature of deity is a mystery for us.

00:55:31 ►

I have no doubt that before long there will be machines

00:55:36 ►

that will claim to be more intelligent than human beings

00:55:39 ►

and will argue brilliantly their position

00:55:42 ►

and will become a matter of philosophical disputation

00:55:46 ►

whether they are or are not passing the Turing test and so forth and so on.

00:55:52 ►

But machines, I do not believe, can come to this felt moment of immediate experience.

00:56:02 ►

That is the contribution of the animal body

00:56:06 ►

to this evolutionary symbiosis,

00:56:10 ►

which I believe will end in the conquest of the universe

00:56:14 ►

by organized intelligence.

00:56:17 ►

That all this is kralut.

00:56:21 ►

I mean, we are fragile.

00:56:22 ►

This earth is fragile.

00:56:24 ►

A tiny slit anywhere along the line and we could end up a smear in the shale, no more than the trilobites or the rampharenki or all the rest of our technology, we can

00:56:45 ►

actually reach toward

00:56:48 ►

a kind of immortality.

00:56:50 ►

Not human

00:56:51 ►

immortality, because that’s a contradiction

00:56:54 ►

in terms, but

00:56:55 ►

immortality nevertheless

00:56:58 ►

based on

00:56:59 ►

the possibility of machines

00:57:02 ►

and the transcendent

00:57:08 ►

ability of human beings to live and love and express themselves in the moment.

00:57:14 ►

And the psychedelics bring that to just a white-hot focus.

00:57:21 ►

And it’s out of that white hot focus that the alchemical machinery

00:57:25 ►

of transformation will be

00:57:28 ►

forged. And it will not

00:57:29 ►

be like the things which have come

00:57:31 ►

from the industrial economy. They will

00:57:34 ►

not be profane

00:57:35 ►

machines. They will be

00:57:38 ►

spiritual machines.

00:57:40 ►

Alchemical gold,

00:57:42 ►

the universal panacea

00:57:44 ►

that Renaissance magic dared to dream of at the end of the 16th century.

00:57:49 ►

We are reaching out toward this mind child that will be born from the intellectual ruins of our culture.

00:57:59 ►

And to my mind, it’s the most exciting and transformative thing that has ever happened on this planet.

00:58:06 ►

And the miracle is that we are present not only to witness it, but to be part of it

00:58:14 ►

and to be raised up in an epiphany that will redeem the horror of history

00:58:20 ►

as nothing else can or could redeem the horror of history as nothing else can or could redeem the horror of history through a transformation

00:58:28 ►

of the human soul into a galaxy roving vehicle via our machines and our drugs and the externalization

00:58:37 ►

of our souls.

00:58:51 ►

There couldn’t be more jokes.

00:58:57 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:59:00 ►

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

00:59:07 ►

Did you notice that although this talk was given six years after the one that I played in my last podcast, well, Terrence is still very much into Marshall McLuhan. Now, my main criticism of

00:59:15 ►

this talk is that at times it seemed to me that Terrence was kind of blurring the boundary between

00:59:20 ►

intelligence, as in artificial intelligence, and self-reflecting consciousness, as in human consciousness.

00:59:27 ►

As you know, there’s a big difference between intelligence and consciousness.

00:59:32 ►

Now, back when this talk was recorded, which was April of 1999,

00:59:36 ►

I think that probably most of us would have agreed with Terence’s take

00:59:40 ►

on how long it might take for an AI to reach a level equal to human thinking.

00:59:46 ►

Now keep in mind that we’re not talking here about a general artificial intelligence, but

00:59:51 ►

rather a very specific form of AI.

00:59:54 ►

Many specific different forms of AI, in fact.

00:59:57 ►

I’m sure that you’ve heard of the ancient Chinese game of Go.

01:00:02 ►

It’s considered to be the oldest continuously played board game that

01:00:06 ►

we humans still engage in. And according to Wikipedia, and I quote, despite its relatively

01:00:13 ►

simple rules, Go is very complex, even more so than chess. Compared to chess, Go has both a

01:00:21 ►

larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and on average, many more alternatives So back in the 1980s, coders began developing programs to play this very complex game.

01:00:39 ►

But it wasn’t until 2015 that the first AI Go player was able to beat one of the best human players in the world.

01:00:48 ►

Then just last year, AlphaGo beat the top human player in the world

01:00:53 ►

in three out of three matches.

01:00:55 ►

It had taken years of development,

01:00:58 ►

feeding millions of moves by hundreds of thousands of human players

01:01:01 ►

into its database for AlphaGo to be able to defeat the best human

01:01:06 ►

player in the world. Then something new happened. Google’s DeepMind AI was set the task of creating

01:01:14 ►

a new version of AlphaGo, but without using any human input. It created this new version using

01:01:21 ►

only the rules of Go and playing itself. In just three days time, this new version was created

01:01:28 ►

that has now defeated the earlier champion AI in 100 consecutive games.

01:01:36 ►

Now if you give this example just a little thought,

01:01:39 ►

I think that you’ll see how quickly this world could change

01:01:43 ►

once enough highly intelligent AIs get loose in the cloud.

01:01:47 ►

And yes, I know that this is a science fiction scenario.

01:01:51 ►

But you have to remember that when I was a kid,

01:01:55 ►

the wildest technological dream any of us had was

01:01:58 ►

that one day somebody would invent a two-way wrist radio

01:02:02 ►

like the one in the Dick Tracy comics.

01:02:06 ►

Don’t forget, the iPhone is barely 10 years old, so fasten your seat belt because I think that we’re about to move into the

01:02:12 ►

future even faster from here on out. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:02:21 ►

Be well, my friends.

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