Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
The session begins with a discussion about the nature of the Big Bang and its relation to philosophical concepts, specifically Kant’s notion of space as an a priori function of consciousness. Terence questions the traditional metaphor of the Big Bang as an explosion in empty space and suggests a more accurate understanding as the creation of time, space, and matter simultaneously. They argue that this event is highly improbable and that science’s request for belief in such an event is akin to asking for a miracle.The conversation then shifts to the notion of the universe as a process of novelty condensation and explores the idea that the universe might be much older than currently believed, possibly around 17.5 billion years. Terence critiques current cosmological theories and highlights issues such as the discovery of stars older than the universe. They suggest that the universe’s true age and nature might be significantly different from mainstream scientific consensus, emphasizing the chaotic and competitive nature of scientific research and the limitations of formal systems in generating all true statements within a system.Finally, Terence touches on the evolution of consciousness and language, challenging the idea that speech is a natural human ability. They propose that language, defined broadly as the coordination of details about the present to create a model of the world, predates speech and has deep roots in animal behavior. The discussion includes the role of psychedelics in early human development, particularly how psilocybin may have influenced social, sexual, and cognitive behaviors, leading to the emergence of complex consciousness and culture. The narrative underscores the impact of psychedelics on early human societies and their eventual decline, leading to the development of agriculture, hierarchy, and modern civilization.SUGGESTED READING: The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness (Free PDF copy)
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Transcript
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Three-dimensional transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Helpshounds.
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Greetings from cyberdallic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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And the recording from this Terrence McKenna workshop
00:00:25 ►
features a thought-provoking conversation
00:00:28 ►
that delves into the nature of consciousness itself
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and the origins of language
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and the intricacies of human cognition.
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The whole package is here this time.
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He begins by challenging conventional perceptions
00:00:41 ►
about the Big Bang,
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discussing its implications on our understanding
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of space, time, and matter. And he also critiques the improbable nature of scientific explanations
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and introduces the concept of novelty in the universe’s formation. He then goes on to
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explore the evolutionary development of language, suggesting that its origins lie not in speech,
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but in gestures,
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dance, and other forms of nonverbal communication.
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Terence then posits that early humans’ cognitive abilities were significantly influenced by
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psychedelic substances, in fact, magic mushrooms.
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This conversation also touches on the impact of agriculture, the emergence of hierarchy,
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and the transformative power of written language emergence of hierarchy, and the transformative
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power of written language in shaping human history and consciousness.
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So now let’s join Terrence and a few of his friends who are searching for answers about
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the so-called Big Bang.
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Nobody need feel constrained to behave themselves too much.
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But this is strong stuff.
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So it’s almost inconceivable that you would not have strong opinions.
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And I’m also willing to be steered far from these boggy lagoons
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if you have something compelling that you want to put into the mix.
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Yeah.
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I had something that I felt I had a little insight into the nature of the Big Bang, and I wanted
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to run it by you to make sure that this new understanding that I was getting the Big Bang was proper.
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And I wanted to see if there was a way to relate it to Kant’s notion of space as being
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a priori, the function of our consciousness primarily.
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And that was, in some reading, we were talking about the flaw of the, and now the metaphor
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of the Big Bang, because when you say the Big Bang, the image in your mind is empty space,
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and then suddenly out of nowhere for no reason at all, there’s an explosion that takes place.
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And that’s the usual way, that’s the way I was initially thinking of the Big Bang.
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But the way properly to think of, and I’m asking you if this is the way,
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is that it’s an explosion of space,
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that time, space, and matter were created in a single moment. And what this point of origin was enclosed in was, is ineffable.
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It wasn’t space.
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Space didn’t exist.
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And is that a more accurate notion
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of what the Big Bang hopes to…
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Well, the simple answer is,
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yes, that’s more how they want you to think of it.
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But it’s very hard to think of it.
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Because you can’t conceive of that.
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Well, I think the whole idea is up for review
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First of all
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Notice what it is
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What it asks you to believe
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It asks you to believe that for no reason at all
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The universe sprang from nothing
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In a single instant
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At one point
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Try and imagine Something more improper in a single instant at one point.
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Try and imagine something more improbable.
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They’ve beat you to it.
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That is the most improbable idea anyone could conceive of.
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I mean, try it.
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Try to think of something more improbable than that.
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It ain’t there.
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So essentially what science is saying with this notion is
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give us one free miracle,
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and everything will then roll without a hitch
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to the last syllable of recorded time.
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Isn’t DNA improbable? Improbable. But you can estimate the probability.
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Well, but you can estimate, and people do, the probabilities of DNA forming out of a simpler chemical environment.
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But how do you estimate the probability of an event which only occurred once?
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It must have been highly improbable, in fact, so highly improbable that the miracle is that it happened at all.
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so highly improbable that the miracle is that it happened at all.
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So I think that what we really need to consider,
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and… You were only created once.
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I was only created once.
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Well, Hans Moravik has an…
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Do you know who Hans Moravik is?
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He’s this guy at Carnegie Mellon University.
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He has an interesting take on that.
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He says, this universe is so
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improbable
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that the likelihood
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that this is actually
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the real thing
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is vanishingly small
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and this must be a recording
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of some time
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because how likely is it
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that you would find yourself in the
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one time the universe happened?
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So, I mean, you’ve got to talk to Hans about that.
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Where did this leave me?
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Let me see, let me see, let me see.
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Oh, but here’s an idea.
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I mean, here is my answer to this question, and I formulated this only recently.
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Since I believe that the universe is a process of the condensation of novelty, and I’m willing
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to grant that perhaps a large explosion occurred a long time ago in the past, then what we
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really have is a universe of infinite,
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with an infinite past,
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but a universe which only very recently became what we call material,
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that for eons, before the Big Bang,
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the universe was something so close to nothing that it didn’t register.
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You know, what general relativity says, I said the world was made of language.
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I just happened to be reading a paper, the Einstein Minkowski whoopty-do today.
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paper the Einstein Minkowski whoop-de-do today and what Einstein said was everything is a product of the curvature of space time there are no electrons there are no magnetic fields there these things are
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pop out they appear when you curve space time so essentially I
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visualize space time before the Big Bang as uncurved and for some reason a
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discontinuity appeared and and I guess my theory would go further than saying for some reason, not for some reason,
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but because the universe seeks novelty, a discontinuity appeared.
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And out of that flaw in perfect nothingness condensed the cascade of events that leads to this evening.
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My theory doesn’t put an upper limit on the age of the universe.
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It does have a dramatic novelty dissent about 17 billion years in the past.
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Current cosmology is just in chaos, no pun intended.
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These are deeply confused people.
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I don’t know if you’re following it,
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but we now have one group of people
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who say that they found stars older than the universe.
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Well, yes, serious problems down in the physics department,
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and somebody’s not going to survive the sorting out of this.
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I predict, I’m happy to go out on a limb, hell I live on a limb, that the universe will be found
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to be approximately 17.5 billion years old. That’s older than most people are saying now and the new, the hot blood
00:09:28 ►
in astrophysics is saying eight billion years. That’s preposterous. There’s something wrong
00:09:36 ►
because we can observe stars 12 billion years old. So, you know, they’ve got to sort it out.
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It’s good to pay attention to these things.
00:09:45 ►
You wouldn’t believe what a house of cards, the castle of knowledge, turns out to be when you get inside the gates.
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I mean, it’s just a bunch of competitive, party European characters publishing and hassling,
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and anything of any substance is totally unsecured You know Kurt Gödel in 1948 showed that enough people I mean I’m going overtime and raving here. I’ll leave it at this but one last thing
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Not too many people have assimilated what’s called girdle’s incommensurability theorem.
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What this says is that no formal system will generate all true statements within that system.
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What that means is that you can’t even trust arithmetic.
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Everything has now been shown to be an artifact of the human mind,
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and no more fallible or infallible than the three and a half pounds of neuron mush that produced it.
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This is an enormous piece of data to arrive on our plates,
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and most people, as I say, haven’t assimilated it.
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But what it means is finally, finally, finally,
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when all the debris is cleared away,
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all you have is intuition,
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aesthetics.
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The final appeal, Whitehead says, is to elegance of design and intuition.
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And that hands the whole thing back to the artist
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and opens a doorway into the imagination
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that means, you know, we stand on the brink of the first real moments of authentic being and authentic civilization.
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To be continued.
00:12:01 ►
As I say, these things to my mind are much more interesting and fun when the audience is into it and brings issues and questions to it.
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So before I launch into some meandering diatribe that could be interminable, if you have questions arising from last night, yes.
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I haven’t read any of your words since maybe it’s point in other places.
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I’m trying to follow the journey of your thought.
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When I gathered last night, you were saying that language is as a virus
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and that it limits the way that we can think and perceive the world.
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It limits our ability to change and to adapt.
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And you also said that nature seems to prefer more complex, more simple systems.
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Question number one is why do you choose to see the evolution of language as an evolution
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that isn’t a more complex than that’s favorite system. Excuse me, the last.
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Why do you choose to see
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the fact that languages
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have evolved and
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survive
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as being
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what sounds to me that
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if nature prefers more complex
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systems, why do you choose not to see the evolution of language as more complex systems, unless I misunderstood.
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I think you misunderstood me slightly in the sense that language does represent this complexification.
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The problem arises with the fact that we take the language too seriously.
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And actually, you anticipate what I was going to talk about this morning a little bit,
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and so maybe I’ll just get into that so you can see what I mean.
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I wrote a book called Food of the Gods
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in which the argument was unfolded
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that the evolution of consciousness
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has occurred too quickly
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to be accounted for
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by ordinary evolutionary mechanisms
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which are genetic mutation,
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natural selection the
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extraordinary expansion in human mental capacities has occurred in the last half
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million years and in terms of biology biological evolution that’s enough time to
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modify a spot on your wing or to slightly extend
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a tail feather or something like that. It is not sufficient time to account for the galaxy
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of effects that have been launched into the human world. And in that book, what I argued was that there is a hidden factor
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in our past history that somehow caused
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this enormous temporal compression to allow so much time
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to happen so quickly.
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And the factor, and I’m tearing through this now,
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because if you’re interested,
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they’ve got most of my books up at the bookstore, and Food of the Gods is a good one,
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if you haven’t read it. It’s certainly the most coherently argued of all the books.
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Leslie Meredith of Bantam made damn sure of that.
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But the idea basically there is that the reason we are such curious creatures,
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a hypersexual carnivorous ape possessing language,
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is because we underwent a very unusual set of circumstances and unfolding situations.
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And again, just very quickly, we, like many animal species, reached a climax of evolutionary adaptation in the rainforests of Africa.
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Arboreal, pack-hunting, insectivorous, gregarious animals,
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not greatly different from howler monkeys and troops of old-world monkeys that we’re
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familiar with, and insectivores and fruit eaters. but at a certain point the environment came under pressure
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in pressure induced by a very slowly unfolding cycle of planetary
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aridity. In other words, where there had been rainforest, there became grassland.
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And when an animal, any animal, is under nutritional pressure,
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in other words, when its food supply is threatened for any reason, it has two choices.
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It can become extinct or it can modify its diet. And animal behaviors, I spoke of habits last night, animal behaviors are so rigidly,
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genetically controlled that most animals cannot make that transition. They just die. A caterpillar
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deprived of its food plant, it can’t adapt. It dies. What happened to us is under this environmental pressure, we began to expand our diet, and we became omnivores. We added meat to our diet, small gain kills. And this was, a lot was going on in this period we were beginning to
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descend from the arboreal habitat forage around on the forest floor venture into
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the grasslands a couple of years ago there was a very supportive paper
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someone studying some kind of arboreal monkey and they discovered that the only
00:18:23 ►
time these monkeys would leave their arboreal monkey, and they discovered that the only time these monkeys would leave their
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arboreal habitat was to forage for food on the forest floor, and the only food they were coming
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down for was mushrooms. So with that kind of data in hand, with the knowledge that chimpanzees will dig with a sharpened stick to get at grass
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corms with the swollen roots of grasses which are often places where DMT sequesters
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it became possible to speculate that the hidden factor in early hominid emergence was the presence of large numbers
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of mutagenic chemicals in the newly expanded diet. The reason most animals are so restrictive
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in their dietary choices is because over hundreds of millions of years,
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nature has shown that this conservative attitude
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toward food is an excellent strategy
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for avoiding mutation,
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birth defects, outright lethal episodes,
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so forth and so on.
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So in other words, over long periods of time,
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those who were casual about what they ate were eliminated,
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and only the conservative diners remained.
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Well, then, when the environment came under pressure,
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dietary experimentation began,
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as I mentioned, the carnivorous thing,
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but also many other plants,
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and a good example of a plant
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that is on the edge of being a food plant,
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but that would have horrific consequences
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if you were unsophisticated in its use
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are some species of diasqueria, sweet potatoes.
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Sweet potatoes of a certain species are the source of all the
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steroids for birth control pills, and they are grown on huge plantations in Mexico, and this is a big
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cash crop in parts of Mexico. Well, imagine a hungry horde of foraging hominids who come upon a patch of dubious,
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chemically dubious sweet potatoes. It’s going to interrupt fertility, lactation, the health of fetuses.
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It just chaos descends on such a population.
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And, you know, when it all gets sorted out,
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they’re either considerably less adapted than they were before or more adapted.
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You don’t come through an episode like that without paying dues.
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So many foods were being tested,
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and different foods may have made different
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contributions through mutation and then selection the old method by which
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speciation occurs but also present in this environment were psilocybin
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containing fungi mushrooms coprophytic meaning dung-loving mushrooms and this was a grassland
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environment where cattle were evolving at the same time i’ve watched baboons in kenya forage over
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the savannah and what they’re interested in is old cow manure.
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They come up to it and they flip it over
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because they’re looking for beetle grubs.
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They know that it’s a potential vector
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for the fatty oils that occur in beetle grubs.
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So they’re very interested in this.
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In the Amazon, I’ve seen Stropharyicubensis,
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a psilocybin-containing mushroom,
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as large as this thing,
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growing in the pastures like this.
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In other words, not something you could easily overlook.
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So without doubt, foraging primates
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experimented with these things.
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And psilocybin has certain characteristics that make it a perfect trigger for the inculcation of consciousness into a species.
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And they are are first of all
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like many alkaloids
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it increases visual acuity
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small doses of psilocybin
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doses so small
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that you would not register them
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as an intoxication
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nevertheless
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you can see better
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you do better on standard eye tests.
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This work has been done.
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Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist
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to figure out that if there’s a plant in the environment
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of a hunting creature that gives better eyesight,
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that creature will increase its survival chances
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by accepting that plant into its diet.
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So there you have a very strong bifurcation. Those animals accepting psilocybin as a part of
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the diet would have greater hunting success, hence greater reproductive success.
00:24:02 ►
Hence the non-silocybin accepting members of the species
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would tend to outbreed fairly quickly.
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But there’s more to this story.
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At a slightly higher level,
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psilocybin causes arousal,
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which means it’s the state you feel when you’ve had a double cappuccino.
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Sleep is impossible.
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There’s restlessness, agitation, focusing on small activities in the environment.
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You’re stoned on speed, is what we’re talking about here.
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And sexual arousal.
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In a highly-sexed primate like the proto-hominids,
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this means sexual arousal, sexual endurance,
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sustained erection for the male.
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Notice that this is a second factor
00:25:01 ►
promoting the outbreeding of the non-silocybin using members of the group
00:25:07 ►
because those who are using psilocybin aren’t better fed because they’re better hunters
00:25:14 ►
and they’re having more sex successfully.
00:25:19 ►
So, okay, two factors tending then to eliminate non-silocybin using members of the group,
00:25:30 ►
but psilocybin, like all psychedelics, has this quality of dissolving pre-existing mental and behavioral pattern.
00:25:42 ►
So, and at high doses, meaning about five grams, it gives way to what we call the psychedelic
00:25:51 ►
experience, which though we are now 50,000 years further into it than those folks were
00:25:58 ►
back then, it’s as mysterious, frightening, possibly as socially controversial as it was then.
00:26:07 ►
And finally, and this is very special to psilocybin, and not well studied, but familiar
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to all high-density trippers, psilocybin causes glossolalia.
00:26:22 ►
It triggers language-like activity.
00:26:27 ►
It triggers long bursts of vocalization.
00:26:33 ►
That’s the only way you can put it.
00:26:35 ►
Disconnected from syntactical,
00:26:39 ►
or disconnected from the enterprise of meaning,
00:26:43 ►
as philosophers call it.
00:26:44 ►
In other words, at the height of these psilocybin
00:26:48 ►
Intoxications you are possessed from the point of view of an observer and shaman’s worldwide
00:26:57 ►
Have long experimented with Glossolalia and made it a part of their thing
00:27:03 ►
Well, so I argued that psilocybin had this important role
00:27:10 ►
in early prehistory and that in fact our legacy
00:27:14 ►
is the legacy of the children of these stoned monkeys
00:27:22 ►
and that the chaotic element that a psychedelic introduces into the mental structures of a population is an inevitable precondition for the overcoming of habit and the production of novelty.
00:27:39 ►
Novel social forms, novel forms of ceramic, body painting, toolmaking, so forth, and so on.
00:27:51 ►
I’ve said all that.
00:27:53 ►
Many of you have heard me say it.
00:27:55 ►
What this question brings up is I’m now involved in writing a second book on the same subject,
00:28:03 ►
going back and trying to work out some of the details.
00:28:08 ►
And the real problem with trying to understand language
00:28:14 ►
is trying to understand how you can discover it
00:28:18 ►
if you don’t already have it.
00:28:20 ►
There seems to be a kind of a paradox here.
00:28:23 ►
I mean, how can you decide what to say
00:28:26 ►
if you can’t decide what to say, you see?
00:28:32 ►
And it turns out you may imagine
00:28:35 ►
if you’re a non-specialist
00:28:37 ►
that this is all worked out
00:28:39 ►
and that great reputations have been built
00:28:42 ►
on fine theories rooted in certainty
00:28:46 ►
Not not
00:28:48 ►
It’s just a cat fight
00:28:50 ►
Nobody has a real clue as to what language is how it came to be
00:28:56 ►
So forth and so on
00:28:58 ►
What I’ve been pushed toward and this relates to your question
00:29:04 ►
Or at least I think it does because I started talking about this in response to your question.
00:29:11 ►
Well, you’re breaking the…
00:29:12 ►
This is your last remark included Chomsky in that grad and grammar?
00:29:17 ►
Yeah.
00:29:18 ►
But so here’s what I have come to conclude, and reluctantly I am pushed to take yet another
00:29:26 ►
hairbrained and radical position.
00:29:30 ►
And it’s this.
00:29:33 ►
When we say language, we use that word interchangeably with the concept speech.
00:29:41 ►
Language and speech to us are the same thing. But I don’t think that this was always the
00:29:49 ►
case. Language is something which goes very deep into animal organization. Language is the
00:30:04 ►
coordination of detail about the present at hand for the
00:30:09 ►
purposes of making a model of the world that you can inhabit. And I dare say dogs, cats, birds,
00:30:19 ►
reptiles all do this. And if, as Chomsky believes, there are what are called syntactical
00:30:28 ►
deep structures in the human brain, they didn’t just leap into existence 50,000 years ago,
00:30:34 ►
it comes up through the phylogenetic tree. And I got a boost in my ideas about this just three weeks ago.
00:30:48 ►
There was a fascinating article in science news about these people who are teaching infants’
00:30:56 ►
sign language months before they can speak.
00:31:02 ►
Months before they can speak.
00:31:04 ►
An infant can lie in a crib and in standard American sign language explain,
00:31:11 ►
I’m wet, please change me, pick me up, I want a bottle.
00:31:16 ►
And this is phenomenal and this is practical.
00:31:23 ►
This isn’t just happening in the lab. Soon here at
00:31:25 ►
Esselon, there will be courses
00:31:27 ►
for parents who want to communicate
00:31:29 ►
with their children
00:31:31 ►
in the first 18 months
00:31:33 ►
of life through sign language.
00:31:36 ►
Well, so
00:31:37 ►
that’s one clue.
00:31:39 ►
Then another clue is
00:31:41 ►
a few years ago I
00:31:43 ►
encountered an article about this choreographer in New York
00:31:49 ►
who had invented a way of writing dance so that even the most idiosyncratic dance,
00:32:03 ►
like a dance of Amazon Indians or a Merce Cunningham deal or something like that,
00:32:08 ►
there is a way to write it down so that a person who has studied this language of dance
00:32:16 ►
can look at it the same way a violinist can look at a musical script and then dance the dance.
00:32:24 ►
Well, what that tells you is that dance is under the control
00:32:29 ►
of syntactical structure as well.
00:32:33 ►
So is sign language, so is spoken language.
00:32:37 ►
So what all this leads to is the conclusion
00:32:43 ►
that we had language for a long, long time before we had speech.
00:32:53 ►
We gestured, we wiggled, we danced, we signed, we painted, we carved, and we communicated very, very well.
00:33:09 ►
It may seem as moderns that it would be difficult to communicate without language.
00:33:16 ►
But this has to do, and I’ll talk more about this, spoken language, I mean, speech.
00:33:22 ►
But this has to do with the fact that all forms of media expand to fill the universe.
00:33:30 ►
I’m sure you’ve heard morons say to each other,
00:33:34 ►
we don’t know what we did before we got cable TV.
00:33:41 ►
Well, what they’re saying is that this new form of media is so inviting and enticing
00:33:48 ►
that it just expands and fills the universe and you can’t tell what you did before so the bottom
00:33:55 ►
line here is speech is an invention it’s not something that we are genetically programmed to do it’s not an innate human ability
00:34:12 ►
it’s a skill it’s a technology it’s an invention was invented by one person at one place in one time just like everything else.
00:34:29 ►
That’s I mean maybe there’s simultaneously discovery, but you see what I mean.
00:34:35 ►
The evolution of consciousness
00:34:41 ►
is a slightly different issue and goes through different stages.
00:34:45 ►
But the invention of speech,
00:34:48 ►
and when I got into the academic literature on this,
00:34:51 ►
I was amazed to learn that the straight people,
00:34:56 ►
the dominant opinion among academics on this subject,
00:35:01 ►
is that language is no more than 35,000 years old.
00:35:06 ►
I’m always accused of either rushing the gun or something,
00:35:10 ►
but I was amazed.
00:35:12 ►
I mean, 35,000 years ago is yesterday.
00:35:17 ►
I mean, it’s yesterday.
00:35:19 ►
We were fully human 120,000 years ago.
00:35:24 ►
There were creatures called homo sapien sapien running around,
00:35:29 ►
and Homo sapien, the earlier form,
00:35:32 ►
reaches back half a million years.
00:35:35 ►
35,000 years for the discovery, invention, elaboration,
00:35:40 ►
however you want to put it, of language,
00:35:42 ►
spoken language, is amazing so the the stages of
00:35:48 ►
consciousness that led to that I think are worth thinking about and there’s an
00:35:54 ►
interestingly un-PC kink in this whole argument which is we place great we
00:36:04 ►
meaning some people nearby
00:36:07 ►
place a great emphasis on vegetarianism
00:36:13 ►
as a high form of consciousness but in looking at it evolutionarily
00:36:20 ►
an interesting picture emerges
00:36:23 ►
herbivores animals which you eat plants,
00:36:28 ►
have absolutely no interest in the world around them
00:36:34 ►
except as it is composed of herbage.
00:36:37 ►
You know, cattle are not particularly alert
00:36:42 ►
or far-seeing or any of these virtues
00:36:50 ►
verbiage as opposed to urbage the transition from urbage to verbiage to verbage
00:36:58 ►
and back again where you begin to begin to see a kind of mind at work, strangely enough,
00:37:12 ►
is in carnivores.
00:37:14 ►
Carnivorous animals have to, in a sense,
00:37:20 ►
think like their prey.
00:37:23 ►
This is interesting.
00:37:25 ►
A kind of transference of intent and understanding
00:37:29 ►
has to take place.
00:37:32 ►
The hunting cat must think like the monkey.
00:37:37 ►
The predator must think like the prey.
00:37:41 ►
And anyone who’s lived around
00:37:43 ►
raised a litter of kittens
00:37:46 ►
or anything like that
00:37:47 ►
knows that the joy of these
00:37:50 ►
carnivores
00:37:51 ►
is how attentive they are to the world,
00:37:55 ►
how they will play
00:37:56 ►
with things,
00:37:58 ►
and they watch
00:37:59 ►
and they plot in a simple way.
00:38:03 ►
And, you know,
00:38:04 ►
I recently had an occasion to see a couple of dogs in action,
00:38:11 ►
and they were typical yuppie house dogs of no great moment.
00:38:17 ►
But these people had a big backyard.
00:38:19 ►
Well, one night this baby fox came into the yard,
00:38:27 ►
and it hid under a low shed.
00:38:32 ►
The coordination between these two dogs,
00:38:35 ►
who had to that point been completely useless,
00:38:38 ►
was amazing.
00:38:39 ►
I mean, one went to one side, and one went to the other.
00:38:43 ►
They had the concept of group activity
00:38:46 ►
and coordination of strategy
00:38:49 ►
in order to get the fox.
00:38:53 ►
Very interesting.
00:38:54 ►
So carnivores, because they pay attention,
00:39:00 ►
I mean, that’s really what it is,
00:39:02 ►
they’re paying attention,
00:39:04 ►
evolved a very high level
00:39:07 ►
of consciousness
00:39:09 ►
in the moment,
00:39:12 ►
in the moment.
00:39:14 ►
And now we come to an interesting thing here.
00:39:19 ►
Worldwide, we have this phenomenon
00:39:21 ►
called shamanism,
00:39:23 ►
and it’s all mixed up with psychoactive plants and ecstatic flight and so forth.
00:39:32 ►
And in a sense, the shaman is a kind of superhuman person and an exemplar for the rest of society.
00:39:41 ►
rest of society.
00:39:49 ►
But especially in the psychedelic-based shamanism of the Amazon,
00:39:57 ►
which I maintain is closer to the ure type than mumbo-jumbo-jumbo shamanism,
00:40:01 ►
which you get other places, which I think is shamanism on its way to becoming priestcraft.
00:40:02 ►
But the interesting thing about this authentic drug-based shamanism all over the world
00:40:09 ►
is that there is emphasis on changing into an animal.
00:40:17 ►
Always a hunting carnivore, a big cat, jaguar shamanism.
00:40:24 ►
So interesting, the transition out of the dullness of herbivorous consciousness
00:40:35 ►
leads into the consciousness of the carnivore.
00:40:40 ►
The human beings observing this situation in a sense pick the highest
00:40:46 ►
point in the food chain
00:40:49 ►
the hunting cats
00:40:51 ►
and assimilate that consciousness
00:40:55 ►
the earliest human consciousness
00:40:58 ►
was not human at all
00:41:00 ►
the earliest human consciousness
00:41:03 ►
was the ability to think like a carnivore.
00:41:08 ►
Now, where it gets further, deeper, more interesting is when you bring into this the concept
00:41:18 ►
of psychedelic intoxication, not for purposes of visual clarity and hunting, not for purposes
00:41:30 ►
of sexual and social hanky-panky around the campfire, but higher doses where hunting is out
00:41:40 ►
of the question, sex is out of the question, and you’re simply nailed to the ground
00:41:47 ►
in a boundary-dissolving trance, let’s say.
00:41:55 ►
This then is about coordinating data that is not in the here and now.
00:42:02 ►
See, the hunting cat is entirely in the here and now. See, the hunting cat is entirely in the here and now.
00:42:07 ►
The psychedelically intoxicated person
00:42:12 ►
is entertaining strategies, objects, and scenarios
00:42:19 ►
that are not here and now.
00:42:23 ►
And interesting how these things keep feeding back into each other.
00:42:28 ►
The hypersexuality induced by the psilocybin,
00:42:36 ►
inevitably then induces the commonest form of human fantasy,
00:42:42 ►
which is erotic fantasy.
00:42:48 ►
And if you analyze erotic fantasy,
00:42:58 ►
or any fantasy, but erotic fantasy is driven from the hormonal level, it really consists of a string of what-ifs. What if? What if? What if? What if, What if I hit on this person? And what if they don’t kick me away and send me back to my borough? And then what will happen next? And then how will that be? And then what will happen? This sitting in silent darkness, entertaining this tree of branching possibilities is the basis for higher consciousness.
00:43:28 ►
And it may not be erotic.
00:43:30 ►
It could be a shaman thinking,
00:43:31 ►
what if we move the traps down toward the river,
00:43:37 ►
or what if we go back up to the higher altitudes early this year?
00:43:44 ►
But this ability to entertain possibilities
00:43:48 ►
is what starts us on the road to free will.
00:43:54 ►
Yeah.
00:43:54 ►
What is instinct?
00:43:56 ►
Well, I think instinct is sort of what this is
00:44:00 ►
pushing aside a little
00:44:03 ►
and trying to make space for itself.
00:44:06 ►
Instinct is action without contemplation of its alternatives.
00:44:14 ►
Instinct is not menu-driven.
00:44:17 ►
It’s a creode.
00:44:18 ►
It’s something you move through.
00:44:22 ►
So the contemplation of possibilities, the accentuation of sexuality, the
00:44:31 ►
dissolving of boundaries, and the increase in visual acuity, all these things
00:44:39 ►
produced the conditions for a very highly conscious society,
00:44:47 ►
a magical society,
00:44:49 ►
a society that was imaging the forces of nature
00:44:53 ►
as a great goddess
00:44:55 ►
and particularizing the power of that goddess
00:45:00 ►
in the cattle,
00:45:03 ►
which were the source of life, sustenance, meaning, and the mushroom,
00:45:09 ►
in an African environment that came into being sometime in the last 100,000 years,
00:45:15 ►
and lasted till about 15,000 years ago. And then, because the very forces which created it, the drying of the African continent,
00:45:29 ►
had proceeded further where there had been grassland, where there had been sparkling streams,
00:45:36 ►
where there had been vast herds of ungulate animals and endless supplies of mushrooms and
00:45:42 ►
ready game, so forth and so on there came desert and at
00:45:49 ►
that point in the stratigraphy of the Nile Valley at about 13 to 14,000 BP we see the
00:45:59 ►
first human habitation in the Nile Valley before that these river valleys were probably shunned
00:46:08 ►
as malaria-infested
00:46:10 ►
boglands and it was the great grasslands
00:46:13 ►
to the west.
00:46:16 ►
And interesting that in
00:46:17 ►
Egyptian mythology
00:46:21 ►
the after-death world is
00:46:24 ►
called the Western realm,
00:46:26 ►
almost as though there were a memory of a paradisiical time in a place to the West.
00:46:34 ►
And, of course, in the Garden of Eden’s story,
00:46:38 ►
which was put together by constipated Deuteronomists who were patriarchs,
00:46:49 ►
but they still could reach far enough back to remember.
00:46:51 ►
The story is very interesting.
00:46:54 ►
The woman eats of the fruit of the tree of life.
00:46:59 ►
Then Genesis says their eyes were opened,
00:47:02 ►
and they saw that they were naked,
00:47:06 ►
specific reference to clarity of vision, and they saw that they were naked, specific reference to clarity of vision,
00:47:10 ►
and they saw that they were naked, which was in fact the truth.
00:47:18 ►
So it’s hard to see why this realization was so unwelcome by the gardener.
00:47:26 ►
And then the story it goes through, its changes.
00:47:32 ►
And there’s a very interesting point in there where Yawa is walking in the garden,
00:47:36 ►
talking, let’s decently assume to himself,
00:47:39 ►
since it’s hard to know who else,
00:47:41 ►
but it’s a soliloquy.
00:47:43 ►
And he says, if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they will become as we are.
00:47:50 ►
Yes, as one of us.
00:47:53 ►
So the issue was not toxicity, the issue was not public health,
00:47:57 ►
the issue was hierarchy and knowledge.
00:48:02 ►
And then that story closes with the news
00:48:07 ►
that least we find our way back to Eden,
00:48:11 ►
an angel has been set at the Western Gate
00:48:15 ►
with an enormous flashing sword.
00:48:20 ►
This is nothing more than the drying of the equatorial sun of the Saharan grasslands.
00:48:30 ►
I mean, Eden disappeared. It’s guarded by aridity. It doesn’t exist anymore. And the fall took
00:48:37 ►
place. And what the fall meant was in short order agriculture, which means specialized roles for men and women.
00:48:50 ►
And the weird thing about agriculture is its technical success immediately creates surpluses.
00:48:59 ►
So then you can’t move around because you have all this grain that you’ve produced.
00:49:04 ►
So what do you do?
00:49:05 ►
You build a grain tower, a la the grain tower at Jericho, which is 14, you know, the oldest building
00:49:14 ►
in the world, the most advanced structure in the world 10,000 years ago. And it creates
00:49:23 ►
halves and have-nots. And it creates hierarchy. And so you get standing
00:49:30 ►
armies, kingship, sedentary populations which lead to urbanism, the concept of property, so forth
00:49:40 ►
and so on. And backbreaking labor is what agriculture brings, and that raises the possibility
00:49:49 ►
of slavery. And it’s probably reasonable to argue that the husbandry of animals and the husbandry
00:49:59 ►
of human beings blended into each other fairly smoothly. I mean, the first cities are breeding pens and
00:50:09 ►
holding areas for lesser human beings from the point of view of the people at the top of
00:50:17 ►
the hierarchy. Well, are then from there to here, it’s just a straight shot. Phonetic alphabets which further alienate
00:50:28 ►
and the elaboration of languages.
00:50:32 ►
And that’s the point I want to return to
00:50:34 ►
relative to your question.
00:50:40 ►
The elaboration of language is, it’s a trick.
00:50:45 ►
Someone realized that a certain sound could be assigned to a certain object
00:50:53 ►
and that that sound would then stand for that object.
00:51:01 ►
And it was, I’m sure, entirely arbitrary in consciousness, but of course it naturally
00:51:09 ►
flowed around and reflected these syntactical deep, these Chomsky and syntactical deep structures,
00:51:15 ►
which were already there to give meaning to hand signaling, body, English, winks, nods, and rolled eyes.
00:51:28 ►
But the invention of language interposes a reality between us and the ground of being,
00:51:38 ►
the reality of culture.
00:51:40 ►
And we’ve been living inside that bubble and elaborating it ever since.
00:51:47 ►
What is the minimum, I’m trying to get a grip on what you mean by the language,
00:51:52 ►
and I’m wondering what the minimum of that is, or maybe the first event is,
00:51:56 ►
that constitutes the presence of language.
00:51:58 ►
Is it as simple as making a discrimination in the world?
00:52:01 ►
Yeah, I think it’s something so simple that it would be traced back to a very simple
00:52:06 ►
life form at all. I mean, language is simply the internal algorithms that give you a coherent
00:52:15 ►
picture of the world and your place in it. It isn’t speech. You know, one of the interesting
00:52:23 ►
things about human beings is we’re the only animal that responds to rhythm.
00:52:31 ►
You can play good house music to monkeys till hell freezes over and they will not get the beat.
00:52:41 ►
They don’t get it.
00:52:45 ►
And rhythm shows that, to me,
00:52:49 ►
that our internal physiology
00:52:52 ►
and psychophysiology
00:52:54 ►
is precarious.
00:52:57 ►
There are many things like this
00:52:58 ►
about us that are precarious.
00:53:00 ►
For example, at other times we’ve,
00:53:03 ►
our sexuality,
00:53:09 ►
which in most animals, is one of the most rigidly genetically controlled areas of behavior. I mean, they do it the way they do it,
00:53:17 ►
because they can’t do it any other way. Very interesting that in humans, we have no preferred
00:53:24 ►
approach to this.
00:53:27 ►
We have monogamy, polyandry, we have group marriage, we have brothers who share wives.
00:53:35 ►
I’m speaking now worldwide, all kinds of cultures, all kinds of ways to handle what you would think would be,
00:53:43 ►
for the sake of evolution,
00:53:45 ►
a part of our behavior most rigidly under control.
00:53:50 ►
Let me follow through this, and then I’ll get to you.
00:53:52 ►
The proof of this, I think, is in these…
00:53:56 ►
We can look at two nearby species
00:53:59 ►
and see this precariousness in high relief.
00:54:04 ►
For example, the chimpanzees are monogamous, territorial,
00:54:11 ►
male dominance hierarchies are rigidly maintained,
00:54:16 ►
and female behavior is rigorously observed and controlled by males whenever possible.
00:54:25 ►
With a less than 1% difference in genetic constitution,
00:54:33 ►
the nearest species to the chimpanzee is the bonubo
00:54:38 ►
or the pygmy chimpanzee.
00:54:41 ►
Their sexual style is absolutely antithetical.
00:54:45 ►
Homosexuality, bisexuality,
00:54:50 ►
heterosexuality, group sexual activity,
00:54:54 ►
orgiastic sexual activity, on and on and on.
00:54:58 ►
They are in a continuous state
00:55:01 ►
of hypersexual activity.
00:55:04 ►
Two species, genetically for all practical purposes, the same species.
00:55:09 ►
Obviously, one emerged from the other.
00:55:11 ►
And with both having a genetic component only about 3% different from our own.
00:55:19 ►
And yet they present this wildly, and you cannot make chimpanzees behave like bonubos and vice versa.
00:55:30 ►
We’re able to freely control this very, very basic part of ourselves.
00:55:35 ►
And I think it’s because for a long, long time, longer than we’ve dared to imagine,
00:55:43 ►
longer than we’ve dared to imagine,
00:55:54 ►
sexuality has been a process partially under human control. I mean, one way of thinking about our political dilemmas
00:55:58 ►
and how did we get into this mess
00:56:00 ►
and what in the world is going on is just suppose this.
00:56:07 ►
Suppose that before psilocybin, our sexual behaviors were like chimpanzees, dominance hierarchies,
00:56:18 ►
control of women, anxiety about parental lineages and all this sort of thing.
00:56:26 ►
But it’s delicately balanced.
00:56:29 ►
Then comes a new factor in the diet.
00:56:35 ►
And it promotes basically greater sexual stamina,
00:56:38 ►
more interest in sex,
00:56:42 ►
dissolving of social boundaries,
00:56:46 ►
so forth and so on. And we like like, came to a bifurcation and switched, and our behavior became bonobo-like.
00:56:56 ►
And for a long time, like maybe 100,000 years. Like these
00:57:05 ►
hyperactive bonubo chimpanzees.
00:57:10 ►
And so
00:57:12 ►
orgiastic
00:57:14 ►
sexual rituals
00:57:15 ►
regulated by the moon
00:57:17 ►
integrated into intoxication,
00:57:20 ►
the children raised in common,
00:57:23 ►
very strong
00:57:24 ►
social glue if men can’t tell who their children are.
00:57:32 ►
You know, the women may know if they remember who they had sex with nine months ago, but the man can’t know.
00:57:39 ►
And so the loyalty is to the group, to our children.
00:57:44 ►
We must preserve our children.
00:57:47 ►
Very strong social cohesion comes out of that.
00:57:51 ►
And we lived like that during the period when we became human beings,
00:57:58 ►
meaning when we added language and dance and ritual and sacrifice and humor and poetry and all that good stuff.
00:58:10 ►
It was created by a kind within the context of a set of sexual behaviors that we haven’t
00:58:19 ►
comfortably practiced for 10,000 years.
00:58:23 ►
practiced for 10,000 years.
00:58:29 ►
Because the older sexual style was genetically programmed and only suppressed by the drug, if you will.
00:58:35 ►
Essentially, we inoculated ourselves into a more polymorphous
00:58:40 ►
sexual style through accepting mushrooms into our diet when we left that
00:58:47 ►
environment left Africa moved into the ancient Middle East over a period of a
00:58:53 ►
couple of millennia or maybe more the mushrooms got scarcer the orgies no longer
00:59:02 ►
happened at every new and full moon with all participating.
00:59:07 ►
They became great annual festivals, and then the mushrooms became rarer still,
00:59:15 ►
and then they became the prerogative of a priestly class, and then rarer still.
00:59:23 ►
And substitutes were frantically sought
00:59:26 ►
or maybe casually sought
00:59:28 ►
because they had a lot of time to do this.
00:59:32 ►
Well, the Sahara is not a good environment for psychedelics.
00:59:37 ►
We’re just fortunate that these ungulates are there with their dung.
00:59:42 ►
Probably the alternative psychedelic substance
00:59:45 ►
was fermented honey.
00:59:48 ►
Because all you have to do, basically,
00:59:50 ►
is mix water with honey and set it in the sun,
00:59:54 ►
and it will eventually turn into a crude alcohol.
00:59:59 ►
The problem there is,
01:00:00 ►
just as psilocybin promoted boundary dissolution and sexual stamina and so forth and so on,
01:00:08 ►
alcohol has a completely different set of affects on the organism. First of all, it promotes
01:00:18 ►
the misperception of one’s verbal facility. At the same time,
01:00:27 ►
in other words,
01:00:28 ►
you think you sound better than you do.
01:00:31 ►
At the same time,
01:00:33 ►
it lowers sensitivity
01:00:35 ►
to social queuing.
01:00:38 ►
So, you know, the fact
01:00:40 ►
that this woman has just belted you
01:00:42 ►
in the chops is taken
01:00:44 ►
not as a rejection but
01:00:47 ►
playfulness you know and so forth and so on I’m sure you know how many women have had
01:00:55 ►
their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse maybe in the in our
01:01:02 ►
time that’s a fading phenomenon,
01:01:05 ►
but I dare say there was probably a thousand years
01:01:08 ►
where nobody in Western Europe got laid
01:01:10 ►
unless they were juiced to the gills.
01:01:13 ►
And this is not a pleasant thing to contemplate.
01:01:18 ►
So the point of all this is
01:01:21 ►
our unique position here and now is the product of an incredibly unlikely
01:01:29 ►
series of events that we discovered a substance in the environment that didn’t cause
01:01:37 ►
birth defects or blindness or madness or paralysis but it did change our entire way of sexually and socially doing business.
01:01:49 ►
It promoted language-like activity, which led to the discovery of speech.
01:01:56 ►
We made all these changes, produced religion, produced art, produced theater, humor, etc., astronomy.
01:02:05 ►
And then the genie departed.
01:02:09 ►
The angel went away, and we were left standing somewhere
01:02:14 ►
in southern Israel with blood on our hands
01:02:18 ►
and 10,000 years of time staring us in the face,
01:02:21 ►
and we’ve been plodding across that abomination of desolation
01:02:28 ►
ever since. And then just to further screw with it, and then I’ll open it up, the Greeks come
01:02:36 ►
along, some considerable time later, with a phonetic alphabet, the most alienating alphabet ever invented.
01:02:47 ►
Because notice that a phonetic alphabet doesn’t stand for things in the world.
01:02:53 ►
It stands for sounds.
01:02:57 ►
Hieroglyphs, our picture writing is about the world.
01:03:02 ►
Phenetic writing is about the sounds of the speaking voice.
01:03:08 ►
And this further alienation from any input from the natural world
01:03:13 ►
permitted Greek science and Greek mathematics,
01:03:17 ►
which is what we have elaborated through the Renaissance and modern times,
01:03:22 ►
into the really crazy engine of cultural effects that we now call modern science and its technologies.
01:03:31 ►
Yes, you’re burning to say something.
01:03:34 ►
Well, we’re drifting a little bit from consciousness.
01:03:39 ►
And the question of consciousness and the significance of consciousness is something special to our speaking.
01:03:47 ►
Well, let me say, in my mind we’re not. In other words, what we’re talking about is how we could have achieved it,
01:03:56 ►
and then how we could have made such a mess with it after achieving it.
01:04:02 ►
Well, is it possible that consciousness is indeed a product of abstraction.
01:04:13 ►
In other words, if you can speak things, you can speak only as much as you can remember,
01:04:20 ►
but if you can write things, you then develop the capacity to speak volumes of very articulate
01:04:30 ►
and very complicated and specific things.
01:04:33 ►
And as a result of written language, you translate sounds, which any dog or cat would be
01:04:39 ►
able to communicate into a kind of encyclopedia because of written language, you then create a certain
01:04:48 ►
velocity of abstraction, which then catapults the species itself strictly by invention,
01:04:57 ►
not by any genetic issue at all, but strictly by the invention of the abstraction called
01:05:02 ►
language, you catapult them into an abstract level called itself.
01:05:09 ►
Yes, partly.
01:05:14 ►
Abstraction is what you encounter in the psychedelic experience.
01:05:19 ►
In other words, it’s abstract.
01:05:20 ►
Is it consciousness a form of abstraction?
01:05:23 ►
Not consciousness in the here and now.
01:05:26 ►
I mean, partly I agree with you, and maybe we don’t understand each other.
01:05:31 ►
What I hear you saying, and I agree, is that consciousness is a kind of conquest of dimensionality,
01:05:40 ►
of time.
01:05:42 ►
But I don’t agree with you that the major impact of writing
01:05:46 ►
was to vastly
01:05:48 ►
expand the database.
01:05:51 ►
What it was, was it allowed the database
01:05:54 ►
to be handed on without error.
01:05:58 ►
The people have studied
01:06:00 ►
before Yugoslavia turned into hell
01:06:03 ►
these Yugoslavian epic poets.
01:06:10 ►
There are people alive in the world today who can recite up to 100,000 lines of poetry without an error.
01:06:18 ►
prodigious feats of memory, just by memory.
01:06:24 ►
Memory is something we have, we’ve lost our memory, just by memory. Memory is something we have,
01:06:27 ►
we’ve lost our memory the same way we’ve lost our smell,
01:06:32 ►
basically because we’ve traded it in for technologies that stand in its stead.
01:06:39 ►
What writing allowed was for the database to expand beyond the knowledge of one of one generation
01:06:48 ►
or one group of people and it did accelerate this forward process into complexity and novelty
01:06:58 ►
and an alienation.
01:07:00 ►
But when you take the word and it says cat,
01:07:06 ►
and I look at it and I
01:07:08 ►
see the word cat and I think
01:07:10 ►
cat, then the abstraction
01:07:12 ►
of the word being cat,
01:07:14 ►
I get the same experience of cat from that word.
01:07:17 ►
That sense
01:07:18 ►
when I put my name Boyd here
01:07:20 ►
and I look at that, I have a name
01:07:22 ►
as an abstraction, that flip of
01:07:24 ►
abstraction has a way of causing me to look back at myself from my position
01:07:30 ►
of abstraction.
01:07:31 ►
But isn’t the word the same thing?
01:07:35 ►
I mean, why does the written word have a greater impact in that dimension than the spoken word?
01:07:43 ►
I think it’s really a fact of the context of abstraction.
01:07:46 ►
Well, you may be right.
01:07:49 ►
This guy, who was it who wrote this book called Coming to Our Senses?
01:07:55 ►
Morris Berman wrote, Coming to Our Senses.
01:07:58 ►
And there’s a really interesting chapter in there
01:08:00 ►
on the history of mirrors.
01:08:03 ►
And he says, you know, no society needs a mirror unless it has a sense of self.
01:08:10 ►
So how far back can we trace the existence of mirrors?
01:08:14 ►
And of course, he admits that you could see yourself in a reflecting pool and so forth.
01:08:19 ►
And mirrors are very old.
01:08:22 ►
I think the sense of self,
01:08:26 ►
some people want to argue that it’s Homeric.
01:08:30 ►
Julian James wrote a book
01:08:32 ►
called The Origin of Consciousness
01:08:34 ►
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
01:08:37 ►
and he said that up until the time of Homer,
01:08:42 ►
which is only 1,200 BC,
01:08:45 ►
people weren’t like us.
01:08:48 ►
What we call the ego,
01:08:51 ►
they called God.
01:08:53 ►
And they didn’t have egos
01:08:55 ►
except under extreme stress.
01:09:01 ►
Like when somebody is about to cut your head off and you’re one of those people
01:09:08 ►
an Achillean Greek you would hear a voice that would say get your ass out of there
01:09:17 ►
and you would think that this was the God directly communicating with you well you know
01:09:24 ►
it’s said familiarity breeds contempt.
01:09:28 ►
So eventually this thing which was God became me.
01:09:35 ►
And now I speak from that position.
01:09:38 ►
I tell myself, get your ass out of there.
01:09:42 ►
And this breaking apart of the components of consciousness
01:09:45 ►
into an I-Thou relationship
01:09:48 ►
is a product, according to him,
01:09:51 ►
of a slightly more,
01:09:54 ►
a slightly less sophisticated psychology
01:09:58 ►
than modern psychology.
01:10:01 ►
The fact that there are things
01:10:03 ►
around like multiple personality syndrome and this sort of thing,
01:10:08 ►
which most of us, let’s hope, have never experienced.
01:10:11 ►
But anyway, it’s statistically common enough that it tells you that identity,
01:10:17 ►
at least in some people, must be an incredibly fragile and unestablished concept.
01:10:27 ►
I think it still is.
01:10:29 ►
I think one of the things we,
01:10:31 ►
the reason we have a lot of trouble understanding the world
01:10:35 ►
is because we don’t understand how much we bring to it.
01:10:40 ►
If you really think the world is out there in 3D,
01:10:44 ►
it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that so many people are saying so much about it.
01:10:52 ►
We talked last night about the abductions.
01:10:56 ►
In a Newtonian world, we have to either decide, is this true or not true?
01:11:03 ►
Those are the only choices we have. In a slightly more sophisticated
01:11:07 ►
context, we could just decide, well, that’s the effect of a language virus, and it’s distorted
01:11:16 ►
their local reality, and those people believe that. But unless you’ve been infected with the
01:11:22 ►
virus, your reality will stay pretty much the same.
01:11:26 ►
But when I have enough language, enough, language, and I suggest that there’s a possibility of the phenomenon called enough.
01:11:34 ►
Given as a result of writing, as writing creates a kind of memory of the past experience,
01:11:42 ►
in the sense it extends itself so that
01:11:45 ►
we can develop really
01:11:48 ►
a consciousness of time
01:11:49 ►
and that becomes another form
01:11:51 ►
of abstraction.
01:11:53 ►
Yeah, developing a consciousness of
01:11:55 ►
time is very important.
01:11:58 ►
You’re right.
01:11:58 ►
We see ourselves in a story.
01:12:01 ►
And even if it’s not a qualitative
01:12:03 ►
difference, it could really be a quantitative difference
01:12:05 ►
in the sense that it would really facilitate rehearsal of being conscious of certain things,
01:12:11 ►
or of conscious of self-is thinker, of consciousness, or conscious of the ability for me to in some
01:12:17 ►
way mimic your imagination as expressed in language. I listen to you right now, I’ve got one
01:12:23 ►
shot at it. If I have access to writing or other writings,
01:12:27 ►
I have endless chances for iterations.
01:12:31 ►
See, I think I understand what you’re saying.
01:12:34 ►
And in a sense, with enough language
01:12:36 ►
and enough memory created by vocabulary,
01:12:39 ►
I can remember my history.
01:12:41 ►
I can reiterate my history
01:12:44 ►
and all of the things that have meaning to me suddenly become my history. I can reiterate my history and all of the things that have meaning to me
01:12:47 ►
suddenly become my story. Well, your story is your story, but it’s not your history in the sense
01:12:55 ►
that we remember very selectively. It’s an illusion to think that memory is a record of the past.
01:13:04 ►
Maybe not accurate, but I certainly accumulate my story.
01:13:08 ►
Well, this idea that we’re in a story is very interesting.
01:13:13 ►
One way to look not only at the human experience
01:13:17 ►
but at the entire evolution of life
01:13:21 ►
is to notice that biology and culture seem to be strategies for binding time.
01:13:30 ►
In other words, the lower animals live in the moment.
01:13:40 ►
Perhaps the higher predators can coordinate in a very limited time span a few seconds, some kind of strategy.
01:13:54 ►
Language and then speech are ways of coding data so that it doesn’t degrade into a dimension from which
01:14:06 ►
it can’t be recovered. In other words,
01:14:08 ►
once something is forgotten,
01:14:10 ►
it’s not going to happen again, and hence
01:14:12 ►
it’s lost. Well, then
01:14:14 ►
when you get
01:14:16 ►
to writing,
01:14:18 ►
that’s like a
01:14:20 ►
further increase in
01:14:22 ►
the efficiency of speech
01:14:24 ►
for the purposes of claiming time.
01:14:28 ►
And in fact, speech can only work from memory, but writing provides a text, which doesn’t change through time.
01:14:40 ►
So if you have a thousand-year-old book, it is saying what it said a thousand years ago.
01:14:46 ►
Well, then since the invention from the invention of writing, then printing is simply a way of spreading that ability
01:14:58 ►
from a very small group of people at the top of a social hierarchy throughout a society.
01:15:04 ►
And a print-based society
01:15:06 ►
in a sense
01:15:07 ►
that’s when you get a real
01:15:10 ►
sense of history
01:15:11 ►
there may have been
01:15:13 ►
people in Roman Greece
01:15:16 ►
who called themselves historians
01:15:18 ►
but until you have books
01:15:19 ►
you don’t really have the concept
01:15:22 ►
of history
01:15:23 ►
once you have books historical time comes into being.
01:15:28 ►
Once you have electronic databases and virtual realities
01:15:32 ►
and that sort of thing,
01:15:34 ►
you begin to coordinate,
01:15:39 ►
you almost begin to dream that time can be made to stop,
01:15:49 ►
that all time can be co-present and I was thinking last night after I got in bed actually I’ve been reading a book about time
01:15:54 ►
machines and I’ve been thinking about various schemes for travel through time
01:16:00 ►
and I thought what if you wrote a what if you had a very sophisticated program that would observe you, let’s say, for 500 days, what time you eat breakfast, what you eat for breakfast, how often you go to work, how often you have sex, what kinds of things you say to people,
01:16:25 ►
observe you for 500 days, I’ll bet that computer plugged into a virtual reality simulator
01:16:33 ►
could give you a picture of tomorrow that would stand your hair on end with its accuracy.
01:16:41 ►
Your tomorrow, because your tomorrow is quite a bit like your yesterdays especially if we start averaging
01:16:50 ►
so you can use the past and the duller a person you are the more effective this would work
01:16:58 ►
because the easier it would be to predict you know not tomorrow but where you’ll be next
01:17:04 ►
April I mean you could do this with me I know my future predict, you know, not tomorrow, but where you’ll be next April. I mean,
01:17:05 ►
you could do this with me. I know my future, and unless, you know, they drop a safe on me or something,
01:17:12 ►
I’ll be back here the second week of April to do this all over again, and a smart computer,
01:17:20 ►
you know, knowing the demographics you come from and your friends and the mailing list,
01:17:25 ►
it could probably come up with a 30% accurate prediction of who will attend
01:17:31 ►
and so forth and so on.
01:17:33 ►
And these are bullshit computers.
01:17:35 ►
Imagine if we had good ones how thoroughly you could triangulate and model the upcoming future.
01:17:42 ►
Well, but wait a minute, wait a minute.
01:17:43 ►
If we can do it for me,
01:17:46 ►
then we could do it for you.
01:17:48 ►
If we could do it for you and me…
01:17:50 ►
I mean, you can’t predict any emergent process that way.
01:17:56 ►
Unless you have an algorithm that inserts that.
01:17:59 ►
Well, that would…
01:18:00 ►
Then an emergent is an emerging.
01:18:02 ►
It’s just something that’s already embedded.
01:18:04 ►
Well, but I possess such an algorithm
01:18:07 ►
so I would argue you know that you can build in
01:18:10 ►
the unexpected you know one of the
01:18:12 ►
one of the
01:18:16 ►
one of the funniest books ever written about system
01:18:20 ►
theory is called planning on the unexpected
01:18:23 ►
but if we could do it for me and we agree But if we could do it for me,
01:18:27 ►
and we agree in principle we could do it for one person,
01:18:31 ►
then all you have to do is imagine eight levels of magnitude,
01:18:36 ►
better computer, and you could do it for everybody,
01:18:39 ►
and then combine the results and do it for the planet.
01:18:42 ►
I mean, this is essentially what forecasting is.
01:18:45 ►
They just try and…
01:18:47 ►
How much do you believe the weatherman?
01:18:50 ►
More and more.
01:18:51 ►
The weatherman is getting better.
01:18:54 ►
One of the interesting things…
01:18:56 ►
The weather’s gotten better.
01:18:57 ►
No, the weather isn’t getting better.
01:19:01 ►
One of the interesting…
01:19:02 ►
You know, people talk about how our machines are getting smarter and smarter and this and that
01:19:07 ►
well what i’ve noticed that’s quite a positive development i think is people are getting smarter and
01:19:16 ►
smarter mainly well not mainly i’m not i don’t want to say that but for one reason because the
01:19:23 ►
information available to them is better and better.
01:19:27 ►
It used to be that you had to, that the great fear in any creative person’s heart was that they would reinvent the wheel because they failed to read the journal of wheel reporting a certain issue,
01:19:47 ►
and then they spend their whole life doing something
01:19:50 ►
that somebody in Adelaide or Moscow is doing just as well or better.
01:19:55 ►
With the Internet, there is a kind of one-pointedness of information,
01:20:01 ►
and you should be able to avoid doing work that’s already been done,
01:20:07 ►
and you should be able to avoid other people’s mistakes.
01:20:10 ►
And in areas where this matters, in other words, where money is being spent,
01:20:16 ►
the coordination of detail is very high.
01:20:21 ►
Well, that by virtue of the internet,
01:20:28 ►
all the people who are working on,
01:20:30 ►
let’s say,
01:20:32 ►
some target-based drug design
01:20:35 ►
can be in communication daily
01:20:38 ►
all over the world.
01:20:39 ►
In other words, my colleague in Moscow
01:20:41 ►
or Santiago
01:20:42 ►
is no further away from me
01:20:45 ►
than my colleague one floor down
01:20:48 ►
in the building I’m working in
01:20:50 ►
and that’s very real in mathematics
01:20:53 ►
and nuclear physics and places like that
01:20:55 ►
and usually in a field however large
01:20:59 ►
and actually these fields aren’t large
01:21:02 ►
the top people know each other
01:21:04 ►
you know Ralph Abraham astonished me by saying recent And actually these fields aren’t large. The top people know each other.
01:21:19 ►
You know, Ralph Abraham astonished me by saying recently that he estimated that there were probably only about 3,000 full-time research mathematicians in the world.
01:21:23 ►
Theoretical, not applied mathematics, theoretical mathematicians.
01:21:25 ►
Well, that’s small enough.
01:21:27 ►
That’s like a small town in Iowa.
01:21:29 ►
They can all know each other.
01:21:33 ►
And of course, mathematics is tremendously ghettoized.
01:21:36 ►
The topologists don’t talk to the geometers.
01:21:41 ►
The algebrists don’t talk to the number theorists and so forth and so on. So in any given field where there’s intense focus
01:21:46 ►
on breakthrough or something,
01:21:48 ►
the number of people involved
01:21:49 ►
is probably under 100.
01:21:53 ►
And if those people
01:21:54 ►
stay in touch with each other
01:21:56 ►
and their graduate students
01:21:58 ►
and their research assistants
01:21:59 ►
are feeding the data to them,
01:22:02 ►
progress is happening.
01:22:04 ►
That’s why I say, we can see from here to the end
01:22:08 ►
right now. That’s why you can’t imagine a human future a thousand years out, because every single
01:22:15 ►
end of the world invention you can imagine, Starflight, human immortality, digitalized life,
01:22:23 ►
hypercomputers, on and on and on.
01:22:26 ►
We can see how to get from here to there in 15 years if the money is spent.
01:22:33 ►
Essentially, imagination no longer illuminates vast domains of future time.
01:22:42 ►
Everything we can possibly imagine is about to happen.
01:22:52 ►
Wow, now, that really blows me away.
01:22:55 ►
So back in 1995, Terrence McKenna says, and I quote,
01:22:59 ►
everything we can imagine is about to happen, end quote.
01:23:04 ►
Well, the about was much longer than he might have expected, but here it is.
01:23:10 ►
About is now.
01:23:12 ►
Of course, I still want to circle back to what Terrence said at the beginning of this conversation.
01:23:17 ►
Do you remember what he said about the Big Bang hypothesis?
01:23:20 ►
Quote, try to imagine something more improbable.
01:23:25 ►
End quote. Well, for me, it’s hard something more improbable. End quote.
01:23:26 ►
Well, for me, it’s hard to get past that question.
01:23:30 ►
And the truth is that, no, I simply can’t come up with a bigger thing to imagine than
01:23:35 ►
that this entire universe, for no reason we currently know about, simply burst into existence
01:23:41 ►
in a single instant.
01:23:43 ►
Well, that kind of sounds like a religious fantasy to me.
01:23:47 ►
Of course, Terrance stopped me again when he speculated that all time can be co-present.
01:23:54 ►
Now, think about that for a moment.
01:23:56 ►
To me, it sounds like a proposal to use Bell’s theorem for time as well as for space.
01:24:01 ►
But I’ve probably been reading too much science fiction lately.
01:24:06 ►
About 10 minutes ago, we heard Terrence speculate
01:24:08 ►
that if you had 500 days of VR recordings
01:24:12 ►
of every minute of your daily life,
01:24:14 ►
and I quote,
01:24:15 ►
it could give you a picture of tomorrow
01:24:17 ►
that would stand your hair on end with its accuracy, end quote.
01:24:23 ►
Now, isn’t that the way the LLMs like GPT-40 work?
01:24:27 ►
And remember, Terence gave this talk in 1995.
01:24:32 ►
Okay, that’s a much bigger stretch than it’s realistic.
01:24:35 ►
Maybe once we train a model with every recording and piece of writing that Terence McKenna produced,
01:24:41 ►
we can ask it about his possible preconceptions about AI.
01:24:47 ►
But even then, we’ve got to accept the fact that there simply is no way of actually knowing for sure what he would
01:24:52 ►
have had to say about our current state of, well, enthusiasm centered around artificial intelligence.
01:24:59 ►
It’s time to accept the fact that there are some questions we will never be able to find the
01:25:04 ►
answers for.
01:25:10 ►
So I’m going to give up speculating about what Terrence would say about our current state of affairs in this world.
01:25:16 ►
And let’s you and I now focus on what we think about how to move forward from here.
01:25:20 ►
It’s not going to be easy, but, well, at least it should be interesting.
01:25:25 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdallic Space.
01:25:27 ►
Namaste, my friends.