Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this talk, which was given in October of 1995, Terence McKenna talks about his concept of thinking about various cultures in the same vein as computer operating systems, complete with viruses. He says, “Your operating system determines what world you are living in.” -McKenna
He then goes on to equate a clash of cultures to a clash of operating systems. It sounds elementary, but it does seem to give me a better way to think about world affairs. Of course, I’m more of a geek than a historian. This metaphor may work for you as well.
Recommended ReadingThe Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemmaby Mustafa Suleyman (CEO of Microsoft AI, majority shareholder in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Helvet Jones.
00:00:14 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And guess what?
00:00:25 ►
I’ve come across a few more tapes of Terrence McKenna talks that I, well, I don’t think you’ve heard before.
00:00:32 ►
Well, once I came across these tapes and started listening to them,
00:00:35 ►
I discovered the sound quality was so poor that it probably is the reason they were never released to the public.
00:00:42 ►
But today, thanks to the open source audacity software,
00:00:46 ►
even an amateur like me can make it presentable.
00:00:49 ►
So here we are.
00:00:52 ►
Now, as we listen to what Terrence has to say,
00:00:55 ►
it may be more productive for you to reimagine what he saw
00:00:59 ►
as the major change to our world within the next 18 years,
00:01:03 ►
but instead listen to it in a new context.
00:01:06 ►
In 1995, Terrence McKenna was postulating that this change would come on December 22nd, 2012.
00:01:13 ►
And his reasons for this, at the time at least, seemed to be within the realm of possibility.
00:01:20 ►
Well, 12 years have passed since 2012, and I guess that it would be fair to say that in the 24 years since Terrence has died, there actually has been a significant change in the world.
00:01:32 ►
But what has taken place during those 24 years will be seen as unimportant in respect to what is being predicted about the current revolution in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.
00:01:44 ►
You’ve probably heard that old saying that says,
00:01:47 ►
if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
00:01:51 ►
So be warned.
00:01:54 ►
Lately, I’ve been spending the majority of my time using
00:01:58 ►
and also learning about artificial intelligence, AI.
00:02:02 ►
That’s my new hammer.
00:02:04 ►
And yes, I realize that most people think this whole AI thing is simply more hype coming out of Silicon Valley.
00:02:11 ►
Maybe so, but I think not.
00:02:14 ►
Fortunately, for an old guy like me, we aren’t going to have to wait another 18 years to find out.
00:02:20 ►
My sources tell me that revolutionary changes will be upon us in three to five years,
00:02:25 ►
so I should still be around for you to tell me that it was all much ado about nothing.
00:02:31 ►
Nonetheless, if you pretend that this talk was given last night
00:02:35 ►
and that Terence wasn’t speaking about 2012,
00:02:38 ►
instead pretend that he was talking about the coming tsunami being brought about
00:02:43 ►
by the combination of AI and synthetic biology.
00:02:46 ►
You may be surprised at how well it fits into today’s paradigm.
00:02:51 ►
So, now let’s listen to what Terrence was thinking back in October of 1995.
00:02:59 ►
Well, since there are a lot of people here who sort of know me, I’ll do a little bit of catch-up since anyway what you do with your life dictates what you think about it.
00:03:10 ►
So about 14 months ago, I moved to Hawaii, which I had had a relationship to for a long time, like 17 years or so.
00:03:21 ►
And it’s very interesting.
00:03:25 ►
I was thinking about talking to you about this tonight, and the metaphor that came to me
00:03:30 ►
was the difference between being here and being in Hawaii is sort of the difference
00:03:37 ►
between being in the first class bar of the Titanic and being in a lifeboat about
00:03:44 ►
half a mile away on that clear, exceptionally
00:03:51 ►
warm evening when the sea was so glassy that you could hear the band still playing
00:03:59 ►
on B-deck in the lifeboats, bobbing in the cold North Atlantic.
00:04:07 ►
And some people think that if the Titanic hadn’t sunk, World War II, World War I would
00:04:15 ►
never have happened because the people on that ship were people who, in sufficient positions
00:04:22 ►
of power to have had an impact on that
00:04:25 ►
Vanderbiltz and these sorts of people went to the bottom of the sea so I think
00:04:33 ►
that we’ve come to sort of a very interesting place in the culture the evolution of
00:04:43 ►
the culture something is a foot something is a foot the tone of the time is
00:04:50 ►
changing the the psychedelic revolution which people my age imagine to have been the first
00:05:01 ►
Trump of judgment was in fact not the first Trump of judgment. You can go back
00:05:09 ►
in time and you can find anticipations of this at least throughout the 20th century and the late
00:05:17 ►
19th century. Pataphysics, for example, which was a French art movement
00:05:26 ►
started by Alfred Jari and his friends.
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And, you know, in 1888, L’Entremant strolled
00:05:35 ►
the streets of Paris with a lobster on a leash.
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And Alfred Jari made casts of his erections
00:05:44 ►
and displayed them prominently in his apartment.
00:05:47 ►
I mean, these people were tweakers.
00:05:49 ►
There’s no question about it.
00:05:55 ►
I was reading today an 1888 article on hyperspace, in which it refers to it as that old hackneyed notion of hyperspace.
00:06:14 ►
The entire 20th century, besides being motivated by an impulse toward archaism, which I talked
00:06:23 ►
about in my book, the archaic revival, has also been
00:06:28 ►
infused with this sense of the imminence of another dimension of some sort.
00:06:39 ►
And I spend a lot of time thinking about questions like,
00:06:48 ►
why don’t we all make sense to each other?
00:06:52 ►
Why are there so many people running around who seem to me to be squirrely,
00:06:57 ►
even though to myself I objectively realize that my own ideas are open to this kind of judgment.
00:07:06 ►
And in short, what does it mean that the forward progress of reason
00:07:12 ►
and mathematical analysis and so forth,
00:07:18 ►
and Marxism and feminism and on and on,
00:07:21 ►
has turned unexpectedly into like an epistemological fire-free zone
00:07:28 ►
where there seems to be a great deal of difficulty in telling shit from Shinola.
00:07:37 ►
And why is that?
00:07:39 ►
What is happening at the end of the 20th century to fracture our understanding of reality and
00:07:49 ►
a metaphor that I’ve been thinking about for the last 30 seconds that I’d like to
00:07:59 ►
share with you is the idea that we’ve been extraordinarily naive about language, about what it is,
00:08:12 ►
and about how exactly it constructs the reality that we’re living in. I find it, I mean,
00:08:23 ►
the world, first of all, is made of language.
00:08:27 ►
That’s a point I’ve made many times over and over.
00:08:31 ►
And I’m not alone in that.
00:08:34 ►
Still, it comes as news to some people.
00:08:36 ►
The world is not made of atoms or quarks or any of these things,
00:08:42 ►
leptons, barions.
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It’s made of language.
00:08:48 ►
That’s how we experience.
00:08:50 ►
Anything beyond language is pure conjecture and the province of professional philosophers
00:08:57 ►
and they’re all in disarray over what it means anyhow.
00:09:02 ►
So that’s one thing.
00:09:03 ►
The world is made of language.
00:09:06 ►
But hopefully a lot of people I’m talking to are hackers or code people of some sort,
00:09:13 ►
so that this kind of metaphor will make some sense.
00:09:16 ►
We have known since 1950 that DNA is the central molecule which runs biology.
00:09:28 ►
And DNA, when deconstructed logically, is a kind of binary code,
00:09:35 ►
a code of nucleotides, four nucleotides of two types,
00:09:41 ►
and arranged in a linear fashion code for all of the proteins that compose life.
00:09:54 ►
So this kind of digital code when you turn to a computer is called assembly language.
00:10:04 ►
And it’s the most maddening kind of code to write,
00:10:07 ►
because in computers, it’s only zeros and ones.
00:10:11 ►
It’s not even incomprehensible commands like you get in Unix or something like that,
00:10:18 ►
if you don’t understand Unix.
00:10:19 ►
It’s simply zeros and ones,
00:10:22 ►
so you can imagine what a nitpicking task it is to program that stuff.
00:10:28 ►
All computers run like that.
00:10:30 ►
Well, then, and perhaps we can use the publicity budget of Microsoft
00:10:38 ►
to propel us to collective understanding here,
00:10:42 ►
since they spent several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars
00:10:46 ►
to publicize Windows 95 this past summer,
00:10:51 ►
most people, whether they want to or not,
00:10:54 ►
know now what an operating system is.
00:10:58 ►
Well, it’s occurred to me recently
00:11:01 ►
that cultures are like operating systems.
00:11:10 ►
And software, therefore, is analogous to cultural institutions like religions or political
00:11:20 ►
theories or theories of fashion or aesthetics, so forth and so on.
00:11:27 ►
So if we de-physicalize the universe and try to think of it in information theory terms
00:11:36 ►
and try to hack what is going on, suddenly it becomes much easier to understand
00:11:44 ►
the number of phenomena that are otherwise
00:11:46 ►
fairly elusive.
00:11:48 ►
For example, if you want to understand, let’s say, Tibetan Buddhism, the bad news for dilettance is
00:12:04 ►
you have to speak Tibetan.
00:12:07 ►
Tibetan is the operating system for the software called Mahayana Buddhism.
00:12:15 ►
In English, the only kind of Mahayana Buddhism you can run is called Mahayana Light.
00:12:26 ►
You see?
00:12:28 ►
Because English was not set up for that.
00:12:31 ►
Now, if you try to run Buddhism in a rare and obscure operating system, let’s say Wittoto,
00:12:40 ►
now it really is not parsing, and you’re running Buddhism light, light, light in Wittoto.
00:12:50 ►
So it turns out what operating system you have determines what world you’re living in.
00:13:00 ►
And the crisis that we’re experiencing as a culture is that we have a clash of operating systems,
00:13:10 ►
almost similar to the clash between 7.5 running on the Mac, Windows 95, and OS2.
00:13:20 ►
These are mutually exclusive domains of language that are very, very difficult to communicate across.
00:13:27 ►
And when you try to translate the software of one operating system, let’s say Amazonian shamanism, into English, it comes across very oddly.
00:13:45 ►
into English, it comes across very oddly.
00:13:48 ►
So you get a term like spirit helper.
00:13:52 ►
What does this exactly mean? It’s almost as though if you were to reverse engineer
00:13:55 ►
this metaphor and imagine that you were going
00:13:57 ►
to take quantum physics and translate it
00:14:00 ►
into the Wittoto operating system.
00:14:04 ►
And then you would try to explain in Wittoto to Wittoto what a quark is.
00:14:11 ►
The problem is almost insurmountable.
00:14:15 ►
And there are other problems, specifically that all complex systems,
00:14:22 ►
and this is something that Kurt Girdle secured,
00:14:26 ►
something else he secured that’s even more interesting that we’ll get to later,
00:14:31 ►
is the possibility of travel through time.
00:14:36 ►
But that’s another story.
00:14:38 ►
But what he secured in this domain is that all complex systems
00:14:42 ►
eventually generate viruses within them.
00:14:47 ►
And if you’re familiar with the computer metaphor of viruses, viruses are bits of extraneous
00:14:57 ►
code that are let loose inside an operating system and raise holy hell with it for one reason or another
00:15:05 ►
in the modern
00:15:09 ►
world memes
00:15:11 ►
operate
00:15:13 ►
like viruses
00:15:15 ►
and what I mean by a meme
00:15:18 ►
if you’re not familiar with that
00:15:20 ►
term a meme is the
00:15:22 ►
atomic unit of
00:15:24 ►
idea
00:15:24 ►
in other words if words, if organisms are made of genes,
00:15:31 ►
ideologies are made of memes. The Freudian meme is composed of the, the Freudian system is
00:15:39 ►
composed of the edible meme, the dream interpretation meme, so forth and so on.
00:15:48 ►
These memes compete in a kind of ideological ecosystem, trying to gain dominance.
00:15:59 ►
And essentially, this is what modern advertising is about,
00:16:03 ►
is trying to push memes into the competitive
00:16:08 ►
environment and have them triumph by stacking the deck in one way or another, through money,
00:16:15 ►
basically.
00:16:16 ►
Well, the reason all this seems to me important is because there is this alarming phenomenon going on of spread of these intellectual viruses.
00:16:36 ►
Seat in righteous rage, but there’s no way to do this but by example.
00:16:42 ►
Let’s take, for example, a recently developed mean,
00:16:47 ►
which is there are, we are told,
00:16:51 ►
large numbers of people who believe that they were awakened
00:16:55 ►
in the middle of the night by people or something
00:16:58 ►
from another star system who insisted on conducting
00:17:03 ►
a rectal examination and did tissue removal and so forth and so on.
00:17:09 ►
And these people reinforce this belief, meet in support groups, and ask the government to investigate
00:17:18 ►
their dilemma.
00:17:21 ►
Well, you know, I think we all are, have been brought up to be intellectually tolerant of peculiarity.
00:17:31 ►
Basically, most people’s attitude is you can think anything you want, and I think that’s true.
00:17:38 ►
But also we can think anything we want about what you think.
00:17:46 ►
And one of the things I think about that,
00:17:50 ►
I kept having, I have a revulsion to it.
00:17:55 ►
And somebody pointed out to me,
00:17:58 ►
or someone used the word leper,
00:18:01 ►
and it all clicked for me.
00:18:04 ►
And I realized these people who have this idea are infected by a kind of a
00:18:14 ►
virus which gives them a common mental a common view of the universe but it doesn’t make any sense
00:18:25 ►
unless you also are infected
00:18:28 ►
by the virus
00:18:30 ►
and there are all kinds of these viruses
00:18:33 ►
moving among us
00:18:36 ►
and so then the question becomes
00:18:39 ►
how do we purge
00:18:42 ►
how do we scrub our discs
00:18:44 ►
how do we purge our, how do we scrub our discs?
00:18:49 ►
How do we purge ourselves of these viruses?
00:18:58 ►
Well, you can attempt to inoculate yourself with a weakened form of the virus.
00:19:02 ►
This is the strategy of vaccination. So, for instance, in order to avoid joining a flying
00:19:05 ►
saucer coat you might consider Catholicism by inoculating yourself with this
00:19:15 ►
mean you would hope then to have sufficient antibody resistance to the more
00:19:21 ►
outlandish claims being put forth by this other group of people.
00:19:30 ►
But I maintain that these diseases of language, these brain viruses is what they are.
00:19:41 ►
We’re used to thinking of viruses as presenting physical symptoms,
00:19:46 ►
sweating, vomiting,
00:19:48 ►
whatever.
00:19:51 ►
But all viruses,
00:19:54 ►
in fact, all organisms
00:19:56 ►
which have a pathological
00:19:58 ►
part of their life cycle,
00:20:01 ►
evolution pushes them to evolve
00:20:03 ►
toward a benign state. a simple way of putting this is all parasites long to be symbiots
00:20:14 ►
because being a parasite is a terrible strategy because it kills the host that’s the definition of being a parasite kills the host host. Well, then you’re shit out of luck.
00:20:27 ►
So evolution pushes to modify the lethal nature of the relationship
00:20:37 ►
between the parasite and the host,
00:20:39 ►
and what you get then are viruses which have milder and milder physical presentation.
00:20:49 ►
Actually, what put me on to this was something which happened 30 years ago now, I guess, in Berkeley.
00:20:56 ►
I had a classmate who was a brilliant geneticist, studied under Joshua Letterberg at Stanford and all these people,
00:21:04 ►
and is now on the brink of the Nobel Prize and while we were all doing acid what he was doing was injecting himself with a special weakened flu that he had gained an affinity to and he said I don’t quite understand it, but it gives me ideas. And he created
00:21:31 ►
basically genetic demography. That’s what he’ll win the Nobel Prize for. And he created it out
00:21:37 ►
of these self-induced flus. And he had an elaborate model of how the flu molecule, the flu virus had a relationship to DNA and so forth and so on.
00:21:49 ►
Well, I’ve had 30 years to ponder it.
00:21:52 ►
And I now think it’s completely reasonable to suggest that most ideas are caused by viral infections of one sort or another.
00:22:04 ►
William Burroughs was on to this.
00:22:06 ►
He said, in language is a virus from outer space.
00:22:12 ►
You’ve got it down to a bumper sticker.
00:22:18 ►
Well, so now knowing that the name of the game
00:22:22 ►
is shifting the operating system
00:22:24 ►
and dumping the viruses off your disc, how do you do it? And the answer is the same answer as how you get rid of any virus. Medicine. You need medicine. medicine this is not
00:22:51 ►
this is not Stolachnaya
00:22:52 ►
in those of you
00:22:57 ►
so what medicine means
00:22:59 ►
in this case
00:23:01 ►
is psychedelics
00:23:04 ►
this property of psychedelics.
00:23:07 ►
This property of psychedelics that we have previously discussed ad nauseum
00:23:10 ►
called boundary dissolution
00:23:13 ►
is in fact, another way to think of it,
00:23:17 ►
is it is code erasure.
00:23:21 ►
And the reason people horrify their nearest and dearest by taking LSD and then
00:23:28 ►
leaving their job at the paper box factory or the dog food mill or whatever it is, is because
00:23:38 ►
the virus of capitalism, the virus of materialism, the virus of employee loyalty, all these viruses are
00:23:49 ►
purged away, the accumulations of the detritus of the ideological train wreck that we call
00:23:58 ►
Western civilization. And underneath all of that then is the pre-historical,
00:24:09 ►
and I maintain post-historical human being,
00:24:14 ►
waiting to be discovered, waiting to be coaxed out
00:24:21 ►
and integrated into human society
00:24:27 ►
well
00:24:28 ►
I mentioned this because
00:24:31 ►
though we only have
00:24:34 ►
18 years or so
00:24:35 ►
to the big surprise
00:24:37 ►
in that
00:24:40 ►
time the
00:24:41 ►
the meme wars are going to rise
00:24:44 ►
to an excruciating pitch and reality as we know it is as I say
00:24:50 ►
just dissolving under the spread of these ideological viruses of all sorts I mean beliefs
00:24:59 ►
we talked about this with the staff the other day. I maintain that belief is toxic.
00:25:09 ►
There are not good beliefs and bad beliefs.
00:25:12 ►
There are just bad beliefs.
00:25:15 ►
Because bad beliefs inhibit human freedom.
00:25:24 ►
A belief is a closed system.
00:25:28 ►
Yes, if you believe A is A,
00:25:31 ►
it’s impossible for you to believe A is B,
00:25:35 ►
and therefore you are less free.
00:25:38 ►
In other words, all truly bright people
00:25:43 ►
know that the essence of being in the world
00:25:47 ►
is to be able to simultaneously entertain two completely contradictory ideas at the same time.
00:25:56 ►
Who was it who said consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?
00:26:02 ►
Emerson.
00:26:04 ►
Good. We’re getting a better quality
00:26:06 ►
of people here.
00:26:07 ►
Usually.
00:26:12 ►
So
00:26:12 ►
it’s very important, I think,
00:26:20 ►
to deconstruct
00:26:21 ►
the situation we’re in
00:26:24 ►
using psychedelics and information theory metaphors
00:26:28 ►
in order to stay free because if you buy a bill of goods then you know the road to hell is paved
00:26:36 ►
with that the the paradox of the intellectual enterprise is that only open systems survive.
00:26:49 ►
And all orthodoxies are closed systems.
00:26:54 ►
So, for instance, you know,
00:26:56 ►
though tomorrow we may tromp all over science
00:26:59 ►
in our excitement to get somewhere,
00:27:02 ►
at the moment in the context of this discussion,
00:27:08 ►
science begins to look pretty good
00:27:11 ►
because the amazing thing about science,
00:27:14 ►
for all of its testosterone and its pretentiousness
00:27:18 ►
and the guilt of the physicist and yeah, nah, nah, nah,
00:27:22 ►
for all of that,
00:27:28 ►
the important thing about science and what makes it unique among human intellectual enterprises is that a scientist’s job is to
00:27:36 ►
prove that he’s raw that’s what science is about you don’t get that down at the
00:27:43 ►
ashram or up at the monastery
00:27:46 ►
or over here with the Nakhbandi or anybody else.
00:27:52 ►
The concept of science is that if you’re wrong and you prove it,
00:27:57 ►
it’s not only no disgrace.
00:28:00 ►
It’s glory.
00:28:01 ►
Your colleagues gather around you and say,
00:28:04 ►
good work!
00:28:06 ►
You crushed that hypothesis to smithereens.
00:28:10 ►
Now we can move on to another one.
00:28:13 ►
And by this extraordinary method, unique in the history of ideas,
00:28:19 ►
science has expanded and expanded its hold over the domain it’s sought to explicate, which is the
00:28:30 ►
world of space and time, matter, and energy. Now, there are really severe problems with
00:28:37 ►
science, with its method, with its assumptions, so forth and so on. We can talk about
00:28:42 ►
that later. But in this single quality, I think it’s very admirable.
00:28:49 ►
And I think that’s the way to live,
00:28:51 ►
to follow hypotheses without fear,
00:28:57 ►
but to subject them,
00:28:59 ►
to enormous scrutiny and pressure.
00:29:03 ►
The truth, you know, Winston Churchill said the truth is so precious
00:29:08 ►
that she must be accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard of lies.
00:29:14 ►
That may be true of military planning and that sort of thing.
00:29:19 ►
But I take a slightly different view.
00:29:21 ►
I think the truth is perfectly able
00:29:25 ►
to defend itself.
00:29:28 ►
You,
00:29:29 ►
the thinking monkey,
00:29:31 ►
are not going to overturn
00:29:33 ►
the canoe of truth
00:29:35 ►
no matter what you do.
00:29:37 ►
The only canoe that you can overturn,
00:29:40 ►
the only boat you can sink,
00:29:42 ►
is the boat of
00:29:44 ►
illusion, error,
00:29:46 ►
falsity, duplicity,
00:29:48 ►
baloning,
00:29:50 ►
in short.
00:29:51 ►
And so truth need not be guarded.
00:29:54 ►
Truth can be tested.
00:29:56 ►
Hard, hard, hard.
00:29:59 ►
So when you find
00:30:00 ►
orthodoxy or anybody
00:30:03 ►
defending something, trying to shield it from your eyes, saying,
00:30:08 ►
you know, it’s sacred or it’s secret or it’s something else.
00:30:13 ►
This has the smell of priestcraft and weaselhood about it and should be forthrightly denounced as such.
00:30:29 ►
Half the room grows tensely silent.
00:30:33 ►
Half the room yucks it up.
00:30:41 ►
Hey, listen, if Brother David can sit there grinning through this kind of thing, I think you can handle it.
00:30:49 ►
And we’re comrades in arms.
00:30:52 ►
In fact, we’ve been burying the bodies together down on the beach for decades.
00:31:00 ►
So this to me, I mean, these kinds of metaphors, this kind of thinking, it goes a long way toward explaining from my point of view why there is so much social tension over this psychedelic issue.
00:31:14 ►
Nobody who has informed themselves about this issue claims that great criminal fortunes are being made or that children are being turned into
00:31:27 ►
psilocybin runners in the ghetto or you know we know that all reasons all all stated reasons
00:31:38 ►
for suppressing psychedelics are in fact some kind of a lie. And then the more naive on our side,
00:31:47 ►
therefore assume that, well, shortly the sun of reason will climb to its zenith
00:31:54 ►
and all these things will be made legal.
00:31:58 ►
Not.
00:31:59 ►
Not.
00:32:01 ►
Because this phenomenon is a dagger poised at the heart of every social system that’s ever
00:32:11 ►
been put in place from the grain tower at Jericho to modern fascism in China. No social system
00:32:22 ►
is so confident of its first premises that it can tolerate this kind of questioning.
00:32:32 ►
But we don’t live for the greater glory of social theories and institutions.
00:32:39 ►
We live because we find ourselves, as Heidegger said, thrown into being.
00:32:46 ►
And we have to sort that out on an individual basis.
00:32:52 ►
And, you know, it’s just like when you’re a kid, your parents are God.
00:33:00 ►
Even if, amazingly, they smack you around, drink like fishes and they’re trash, they’re still God until you reach a certain point of objectivity, and then you say, you know, I’ve got to get out of here.
00:33:16 ►
Well, on another level, the cultures that we grow into, most people never question beyond.
00:33:26 ►
Or, you know, if you have a slight disequilibrium about the society you’re in,
00:33:34 ►
then you can become a political extremist of the right or left.
00:33:39 ►
And they provide right-wing and left-wing parties for you to join,
00:33:44 ►
to register your descent.
00:33:47 ►
And it’s like a bell curve.
00:33:49 ►
And as long as a lot of people arrange themselves in the middle, you’re perfectly free to arrange yourself wherever you want.
00:33:58 ►
But this is a kind of co-option.
00:34:02 ►
This is a kind of co-option.
00:34:12 ►
Any society can tolerate 5% in a state of dissent.
00:34:14 ►
Some societies don’t.
00:34:18 ►
I mean, some societies are driven by anal retentive bastards who, you know, go for 100%.
00:34:22 ►
But this is probably overkill.
00:34:24 ►
You don’t need that. Nevertheless,
00:34:29 ►
accepting the idea that only a small percentage of people can live free and the social order
00:34:38 ►
be maintained is unacceptable. Everyone should have the opportunity for freedom,
00:34:47 ►
complete freedom,
00:34:49 ►
no matter how much that may interfere
00:34:54 ►
with the plans of people
00:34:56 ►
who have allied themselves
00:34:58 ►
with these dehumanizing institutions.
00:35:04 ►
And so it seems to me it’s really,
00:35:11 ►
oh, I don’t know, synchronistically important or ironic
00:35:14 ►
or fitting or something like that,
00:35:17 ►
that at the end of history,
00:35:20 ►
at the end of the linear unfolding
00:35:24 ►
of Western alphabets and values and conceptual models,
00:35:32 ►
what we find staring back at us is the techniques and the dimensions of Paleolithic shamanism.
00:35:46 ►
I mean, this is really apparently where we are most comfortable.
00:35:53 ►
The deprogramming from the means of history
00:35:59 ►
is the path to a kind of reconnection with an authentic feeling of humanness.
00:36:09 ►
I mean, we are not going to ever return to herd our cattle in innocence
00:36:14 ►
across the plains of Africa.
00:36:17 ►
That option has been foreclosed.
00:36:21 ►
But like the child in a damaged or abusive relationship, we can go beyond our immediate
00:36:36 ►
past trauma into the past and anchor ourselves there. And we’re going to have to do this because the forces
00:36:46 ►
that we’ve set in motion are truly mind-boggling. I can see from here to anywhere in 18 years.
00:37:01 ►
In other words, the most visionary possibilities are not within reach, they’re here.
00:37:14 ►
What I mean by that is a worldwide electronic collectivity of information,
00:37:20 ►
instantaneously available to a very large percentage of the Earth’s people,
00:37:29 ►
pharmaceutical approaches to immortality,
00:37:36 ►
nanotechnological approaches to the dematerializing of our technologies
00:37:42 ►
so that they disappear into the background of our world,
00:37:46 ►
and we can appear to live as primitives and yet have all the appurtenances of our technology
00:37:55 ►
in a micromaneturized form, either through implants or something else.
00:38:01 ►
or something else.
00:38:06 ►
Psychedelic drugs,
00:38:12 ►
an infinite number of states of consciousness engineered through target-based drug design,
00:38:17 ►
eventually the digitalization of organic life.
00:38:23 ►
These are the things not of the next thousand years,
00:38:28 ►
but of the next 20 years.
00:38:31 ►
There are people at work on all of these things tonight.
00:38:35 ►
I mean, some of you may be those people, for all I know.
00:38:40 ►
I mean, I’m sure we have hackers.
00:38:41 ►
I don’t know how many nanotech people we have.
00:38:46 ►
But… I mean, I’m sure we have hackers. I don’t know how many nanotech people we have. But a very interesting phenomenon is happening,
00:38:53 ►
which is partly driven by the Internet and modern media.
00:38:58 ►
The amount of data available to a worker in any field has grown exponentially so that actually people,
00:39:10 ►
the combination of people in institutions appears to be getting radically smarter where focused
00:39:18 ►
problems are concerned. In other words, if you’re a solid-state physicist working in Stockholm on a certain
00:39:26 ►
problem, other labs in San Diego and Tokyo are no further away than your colleague’s lab down
00:39:34 ►
the hall. And all this information is being coordinated. And every field, you know, the high-speed
00:39:44 ►
deep space propulsion people, the nanotech people,
00:39:48 ►
the DNA code hackers, all of each field has a goal which it imagines it can maximize in five to
00:39:59 ►
10 years. But the level of focus needed to participate in one of these fields precludes
00:40:09 ►
knowing what’s going on in nearby related fields. So people have a sense of what is possible
00:40:19 ►
in their unique domain, but nobody has looked up from their workbench to look down the face of this
00:40:29 ►
rising tidal wave of integration of information to say, well, what does it mean when
00:40:36 ►
my perfect solution meets this perfect solution and this solution and this solution, and
00:40:44 ►
this solution, what solution and this solution
00:40:45 ►
what kind of world is it going to be and you know my my own supposition about this which we
00:40:56 ►
will talk more about unless you hog time is that a way of thinking about this is that a way of thinking about this
00:41:07 ►
is that novelty is increasing
00:41:11 ►
at a very, at a kind of asymptotic rate.
00:41:17 ►
Apparently, when it’s all said and done,
00:41:20 ►
what the universe really cares about
00:41:23 ►
is complexification, or interconnected interconnectedness or what I call
00:41:29 ►
novelty thermodynamically this is a tricky concept Norbert Wiener it’s been
00:41:34 ►
argued over but intuitively it’s pretty clear I mean you can tell the difference between
00:41:40 ►
novelty and habit or entropy and complexity.
00:41:47 ►
Well, if you look at the history of the universe,
00:41:51 ►
novelty has been increasing since the Big Bang.
00:41:55 ►
The early universe was very hot.
00:41:59 ►
Only free electrons could exist.
00:42:02 ►
It cooled.
00:42:04 ►
Then stable atomic systems emerged.
00:42:07 ►
That’s an emergent property.
00:42:09 ►
There weren’t atoms before that.
00:42:11 ►
It was an entirely new thing in the universe, atoms.
00:42:16 ►
Further cooling and condensation of these atoms into stars,
00:42:22 ►
where you get a new phenomenon, high pressure because of aggregation,
00:42:29 ►
and sufficient pressure to force nuclear fusion into existence, a new phenomenon which cooks out then metals like iron and elements like carbon.
00:42:43 ►
Carbon becomes the basis then
00:42:45 ►
for a new kind of chemistry.
00:42:48 ►
Primitive life emerges.
00:42:50 ►
Out of that comes the enclosed nucleus,
00:42:55 ►
the eukaryotic cell.
00:42:57 ►
Out of that comes cell colonies.
00:43:00 ►
Out of that comes simple organisms,
00:43:03 ►
out of that complex organisms, out of that complex organisms out of that culture out of that
00:43:08 ►
super culture now this is this is easy to understand and in fact pretty trivial stuff
00:43:15 ►
the big news is nobody’s ever elevated that phenomenon to a principle they say well you
00:43:24 ►
can’t talk about physics in the same breath
00:43:27 ►
with biology and history and contemporary evolution of culture.
00:43:33 ►
These are completely separate domains.
00:43:37 ►
No, only in the minds of printheads are these separate domains.
00:43:42 ►
They are self-evidently not separate domains. It’s that
00:43:48 ►
nature produces complexification, out of which nature produces still greater complexification,
00:43:56 ►
leading to ourselves, ultimately, and our civilization, and its runaway rush toward God Armageddon extinction
00:44:10 ►
whatever it is it’s rushing towards something and you know rational systems fail
00:44:18 ►
Marxism what was it it was like a Kleenex in a blast furnace. Religions endure. And they have the most
00:44:26 ►
squirly denoumas you’ve ever heard. I mean, you know all about it, the resurrection and the
00:44:33 ►
life. And so here we are in this secular society with reason in tatters and the shrill
00:44:44 ►
voices of the channelers and the inspired rising in a self-reinforcing
00:44:51 ►
threnedy to excruciating heights. So in this circumstance, to understand the world
00:45:00 ►
that lies between us and the Eschaton requires a radical switch in operating system,
00:45:10 ►
a radical deprogramming from all these strong and weak viruses that we’ve inherited from
00:45:18 ►
the past, yeah. Oh, Eschaton, sorry. Yes.
00:45:29 ►
It’s a word out of Greek used in theology. It means the last thing.
00:45:31 ►
The Eschaton is the last thing.
00:45:35 ►
And I think that it’s not far away.
00:45:40 ►
That it’s inconceivable.
00:45:42 ►
You have to have shot ketamine directly into your imagination
00:45:49 ►
in order to conceive of hundreds or thousands more years of human history.
00:45:57 ►
It just isn’t there.
00:46:00 ►
It’s crazy to talk about 100 years from now,
00:46:05 ►
because the process is already set in motion
00:46:08 ►
or self-limiting out at about 20 years,
00:46:12 ►
and you don’t have to be a psilocybin-inspired Irishman
00:46:17 ►
to come to this conclusion.
00:46:20 ►
One of the sites that I point to from my website
00:46:24 ►
is a group of people around Eric Drexler,
00:46:28 ►
the nanotechnologist who call themselves the singularists.
00:46:33 ►
And they say they’re rationalists, they’re engineers, for God’s sake.
00:46:38 ►
And they say, you know, propagate the energy release curve, the population curve,
00:46:47 ►
the food production curve, the energy release curve, the population curve, the food production curve,
00:46:52 ►
the data compression curve, and the physical acceleration curve. You draw these all out based simply on extending their previous behavior,
00:46:58 ►
no fancy assumptions involved,
00:47:02 ►
and you discover that all of these curves cross each other
00:47:05 ►
somewhere between 15 and 20 years from now.
00:47:08 ►
We reach infinite energy release, infinite speed, infinite data compression for all practical purposes,
00:47:19 ►
20 years out.
00:47:22 ►
So, you know, human history is written itself out of the picture. We are on the brink of moving into the domain of the imagination. It has been an attractor for millennia in the human mind. I mean, the arrow of process always settles down
00:47:48 ►
and points toward greater complexity.
00:47:51 ►
I mean, there may be eons of retraction,
00:47:56 ►
of accumulation of habit,
00:47:59 ►
of destruction, of achieved novelty.
00:48:03 ►
But always the process picks itself up
00:48:06 ►
and whatever is available,
00:48:09 ►
it builds on that and goes forward.
00:48:11 ►
And there have been some halacious speed bumps on the way.
00:48:18 ►
I mean, we love to congratulate ourselves
00:48:20 ►
on our ability to destroy the Earth.
00:48:22 ►
But 65 million years ago, a planetesimal object impacted on this planet, and nothing larger
00:48:33 ►
than a chicken walked away alive.
00:48:37 ►
That was a highly novel event.
00:48:41 ►
The fans of sustainability, had there been any, would have had a multiple heart attack.
00:48:49 ►
However, flowering plants and higher mammals would never have gained ascendancy over the
00:48:59 ►
biome. Had that event not occurred, had that event not occurred, mammals to this day would probably be at the level of egg-stealing shrews.
00:49:10 ►
Actually, I know some people who are eggs stealing shrews, but, you know, fortunately there’s few.
00:49:21 ►
So, you know, there is this give and take, this ebb and flow.
00:49:27 ►
But ultimately, over time, novelty is maximized and preserved.
00:49:33 ►
Science doesn’t say this.
00:49:35 ►
The reason it’s an important finding is because it changes our position
00:49:43 ►
in the cosmic drama.
00:49:46 ►
What science and 20th century existentialism
00:49:49 ►
and behavioral psychology
00:49:51 ►
and all these other lame brain
00:49:54 ►
ratomorphic empiric empiric trips tell us
00:49:58 ►
is that we are a cosmic accident,
00:50:02 ►
damn lucky to be here as spectators,
00:50:04 ►
and that we are in an ordinary solar system
00:50:08 ►
in a hideously humdrum galaxy and so forth and so on. And, you know, when you go to the grave,
00:50:15 ►
that’s it. That’s science. That’s its vision of man, man’s place in the cosmos, humanity’s place in the cosmos,
00:50:25 ►
humanity’s place in the cosmos.
00:50:28 ►
This idea, working from observation,
00:50:32 ►
the self-evident observation of the preservation
00:50:35 ►
of novelty, or we wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure.
00:50:40 ►
If the universe had anything at all against novelty,
00:50:43 ►
it could have eliminated our presence at any time in the past to history of the universe had anything at all against novelty, it could have eliminated our presence at any time in the past history of the universe.
00:50:52 ►
With this idea in place, suddenly we matter.
00:50:57 ►
We matter.
00:51:00 ►
Apparently, much of the universe has settled down into ruts of habit.
00:51:08 ►
I think of the laws of physics as extremely strong habits.
00:51:14 ►
I think of the laws of biology as slightly weaker, but still tremendously driven and predictable habit.
00:51:28 ►
But our position in things is that we still have freedom to act, freedom to create.
00:51:37 ►
This isn’t debatable. We see it all around us. It doesn’t mean we’re doing a good job. It just means we are doing it. And somehow
00:51:47 ►
what this has come down to, I think, is technology. Information seeks to generate itself, stabilize itself, perpetuate itself, and then transcend itself.
00:52:14 ►
And a very curious thing is going on right now, which is we are downloading our culture into a different kind of matrix.
00:52:25 ►
These things that we think of as machines
00:52:29 ►
are, as McLuhan so presently observed,
00:52:34 ►
simply the extensions of ourselves.
00:52:38 ►
The distinction is immaterial.
00:52:42 ►
We are, as a snail makes a shell,
00:52:47 ►
so we make cultures.
00:52:50 ►
But the snail always makes the same shell.
00:52:54 ►
We are constantly improving the design of the shell we make.
00:52:59 ►
And what we’re trying to do, as far as I can tell,
00:53:04 ►
is produce a tool of some sort.
00:53:09 ►
Media are the extensions of man.
00:53:12 ►
There are tools.
00:53:14 ►
You know, the whole story of the West begins with the idea,
00:53:19 ►
In Principio at Verba metverbukar of factumest,
00:53:24 ►
in the beginning is the word,
00:53:26 ►
and the word is made flesh.
00:53:29 ►
What does this mean?
00:53:32 ►
It means, I.M.H.O.
00:53:37 ►
It means that information is seeking to incarnate into matter in order to somehow attain a higher dimension
00:53:50 ►
than where it started, that somehow the path of information salvation leads through a descent
00:53:59 ►
never arise without a fall, it says, in Finnegan’s way.
00:54:06 ►
So the fall into matter, which is, you know, Adam and Eve and Lucifer,
00:54:12 ►
and, you know, we know how to beat that drum.
00:54:15 ►
The fall and redemption of ourselves is a fall into matter,
00:54:21 ►
and then somehow matter and spirit must be made must be con mingle and remember i said the essence of
00:54:31 ►
sanity as being able to hold a contradiction in your mind the contradiction that we must hold in our
00:54:38 ►
mind is the idea that spirit as spirit and matter as matter can somehow be the same thing.
00:54:50 ►
And this is what we’re being pulled toward.
00:54:54 ►
It’s a hyperdimensional attractor in time.
00:54:59 ►
And our technologies from Sumer on have been just reflections of this.
00:55:08 ►
You know, the airplane, the telegraph,
00:55:12 ►
LSD, longevity drugs,
00:55:15 ►
all of these things are attempting to
00:55:19 ►
simulate or mirror aspects of omniscience.
00:55:25 ►
Omniscience is what happens when you pass out of ordinary space time and into hyperspace.
00:55:33 ►
And the big error that we’ve made in our analysis of our situation as a civilization is the idea
00:55:44 ►
that process is pushed from the past into the future like dominoes.
00:55:51 ►
In other words, serial causality is not what’s going on.
00:55:58 ►
The reason science wedded itself to this doesn’t have to detain us here, but it’s 19th century and it’s shallow.
00:56:08 ►
What is actually happening is that we are under the influence of a kind of chaotic attractor
00:56:15 ►
that is pulling us tighter and tighter, a tightening gyre, as William Butler Yates said,
00:56:25 ►
a tightening gyre around a transformative principle
00:56:30 ►
that lies ahead of us in the future.
00:56:34 ►
Now, strangely enough,
00:56:35 ►
when you deconstruct St. Augustine and Teilhard de Chardin
00:56:40 ►
and Stuart Kaufman and other
00:56:46 ►
people, they’re all saying
00:56:48 ►
something like this.
00:56:50 ►
But what they’re not saying is
00:56:52 ►
that it’s a fauna.
00:56:54 ►
It’s a fauna.
00:56:56 ►
This isn’t pie in the sky.
00:56:59 ►
It now lies
00:57:00 ►
less than 18 years, 17 years, something
00:57:03 ►
like that in the future.
00:57:07 ►
And I think it’s easier to understand how such a thing could be possible.
00:57:12 ►
If you think that the world is made of matter,
00:57:15 ►
the only way you can understand a rap like this
00:57:18 ►
is to imagine that the end of the world will occur 18 years in the future.
00:57:23 ►
And God and his angels will come and three dimensions
00:57:26 ►
will roll up like a scroll and so forth and so on. That’s a rather large swallow even for a psychedelic
00:57:35 ►
imagination with this idea of operating systems, viruses and realities created by linguistic domains, it becomes more plausible.
00:57:53 ►
Because you see, what’s happening is that the culture is being left behind by the technology.
00:58:03 ►
You can’t assimilate this technology
00:58:08 ►
and be the guy in the Magritte painting
00:58:12 ►
with the rolled umbrella and the bowler hat.
00:58:15 ►
You just can’t be.
00:58:17 ►
The meek are going to inherit thater.
00:58:21 ►
But as we move into the future,
00:58:29 ►
we have to re-engineer ourselves.
00:58:31 ►
It’s almost like an aerodynamic problem.
00:58:41 ►
What we’re trying to do is take essentially a DC3 and turn it into an F-18 in-flight.
00:58:47 ►
Because if we don’t do this, the acceleration of the medium we’re moving through is going to tear the wings off and so the only way to do this I think is
00:58:53 ►
by just obviating the whole discussion about high technology the world isn’t
00:59:03 ►
interested in whether you like it or not.
00:59:06 ►
It’s here.
00:59:08 ►
And psychedelic drugs, same deal.
00:59:11 ►
They’re here.
00:59:13 ►
And the path to the possible human lies through the integration of these things.
00:59:22 ►
And if we don’t do it, somebody else will.
00:59:27 ►
Whatever satisfaction
00:59:29 ►
people get out of being Luddites,
00:59:33 ►
it is small potatoes
00:59:35 ►
compared to
00:59:37 ►
the positive input
00:59:39 ►
that comes to you
00:59:41 ►
if you accept change.
00:59:45 ►
That’s the bottom line.
00:59:47 ►
That’s the final true message of psychedelics.
00:59:52 ►
And it’s the message that the culture outside of psychedelics
00:59:58 ►
is so keen to deny with materialism.
01:00:03 ►
And everything from the calendar to theories of democracy,
01:00:10 ►
so forth and so on.
01:00:11 ►
I mean, the hardest lesson you will ever learn, I think, and psychedelics really rub your nose in this,
01:00:20 ►
is nothing lasts. Nothing lasts.
01:00:26 ►
You know, not your friends, not your enemies,
01:00:31 ►
not your fortune, not your children,
01:00:35 ►
not even you.
01:00:38 ►
Nothing lasts.
01:00:39 ►
Well, if you live your life in denial of that,
01:00:43 ►
then, you know, it’s essentially like being dragged,
01:00:46 ►
kicking, and screaming 60 years to the yawning grave.
01:00:51 ►
If you can accept this sentence of impermanence,
01:00:57 ►
if you can open up to it,
01:00:59 ►
and again, this key word, open, the open system survives.
01:01:06 ►
Then you discover what William Blake said, you know,
01:01:12 ►
infinity in a grain of sand.
01:01:14 ►
That’s the way to cheat the grim reaper.
01:01:19 ►
Strangely enough, the way you cheat the grim reaper
01:01:22 ►
is by living as fast as you can.
01:01:28 ►
And for sure, there are many souls among us who are doing their best to live as fast as they can.
01:01:35 ►
If that describes you, well, my only advice is to at least slow down on the curbs.
01:01:41 ►
Almost 30 years have now passed since Terence gave this talk, and we’re still here. Of course,
01:01:47 ►
Terence did go on to say that, and I quote, human history has written itself out of the picture.
01:01:53 ►
We are on the brink of moving into the domain of the imagination. And if you’ve listened to any of our
01:02:00 ►
recent live salons, you’ve heard me say that artificial intelligence is the exoskeleton of the
01:02:06 ►
imaginations. So, once again, it seems to me at least, that Terrence was onto something, but
01:02:11 ►
he was so far ahead of the curve that it wasn’t yet in sight. And I can hear some of our fellow
01:02:17 ►
saloners groaning right now, because, well, some of them have let me know that they think I’ve
01:02:22 ►
gone overboard with my enthusiasm about AI.
01:02:26 ►
So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
01:02:28 ►
But for sure, whatever big changes AI may bring,
01:02:32 ►
they aren’t 18 years in the future.
01:02:35 ►
They are here and now,
01:02:36 ►
which is why I keep trying to get you to pay attention to what’s going on in that field.
01:02:41 ►
You don’t have to be a geek to participate.
01:02:44 ►
In fact, you aren’t even
01:02:45 ►
going to have a chance to not participate. Okay, end of lecture. Almost. But first, here are three
01:02:54 ►
short sound bites from the talk that we just listened to. But the snail always makes the same
01:03:00 ►
shell. We are constantly improving the design
01:03:06 ►
of the shell we make.
01:03:08 ►
And what we’re trying to do,
01:03:10 ►
as far as I can tell,
01:03:12 ►
is produce a tool
01:03:13 ►
of some sort.
01:03:17 ►
It means
01:03:18 ►
that information
01:03:21 ►
is seeking to
01:03:23 ►
incarnate into matter in order to somehow attain a higher dimension than where it’s started.
01:03:33 ►
What is actually happening is that we are under the influence of a kind of chaotic attractor
01:03:40 ►
that is pulling us tighter and tighter a a tightening gyre, as William Butler Yeats said,
01:03:50 ►
a tightening gyre around a transformative principle that lies ahead of us in the future.
01:03:59 ►
Now, doesn’t that sound like Chat GPT and the other large language models?
01:04:05 ►
And did you know that they are all built on the basis of being transformer models?
01:04:10 ►
That sounds to me like the transformative principle Terence just mentioned.
01:04:16 ►
Okay, I’ll leave you to ponder that on your own.
01:04:19 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:04:23 ►
Namaste, my friends.