We don’t actually know what our predicament is. I mean, we are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence! What does it mean? What does it mean, first of all, to be a biological creature, to be as an animal? What is that? And then: what is it to be that, embedded, then, in a culture with histories and languages and aesthetic canons and literatures and scientific hypotheses about the cosmos, so forth and so on?
The world is entering into a phase of progressively more chaotic oscillation. This is not a consequence of what human beings have done, it’s part of the dynamics of the human-biological-geological matrix that represents the planet. Biology never stands still. It moved from the unicellular phase into the multicellular phase, it occupied all niches, it left the oceans, it occupied the land. It then entered into linguistic phase space: it entered into the domain of meaning, and there it erected conscious reflecting societies and individuals. Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
This is melting-together of technology, this globalization of culture, this creation of an electromagnetic sea of information—these are phenomena that only happen in the terminal moments of the planetary breakthrough. History itself is the shockwave of eschatology.
The universe is a novelty-conserving engine: it produces novelty and then it acts to hang on to it. And it uses that novelty to build the next level of novelty.
All of nature has halted its activity to turn and watch as Homo sapiens sapiens, the double-thinking monkey, takes the stage and begins to work with novelty on a scale like nothing that has ever been seen before. And this tool-building function—and I use the word “tool” in the broadest possible sense: language is a tool, social organization is a tool—that this is what we do. We build tools. And McLuhan very wisely observed: these tools are extensions of who we are. They are only distinct from us in our opinion, but in fact they represent extensions of our humanness.
My idea with psychedelics throughout my whole career with them was that they were—the purpose was to go out into mindspace and hunt ideas, and bring something back to show the folks around the campfire. Something that would astonish and amaze us all.
The key concept in communications is bandwidth. Bandwidth. The more bandwidth you have, the more detail, color, tone you can impart to your signal. Well, a very low bandwidth channel is the small mouth noise channel. I mean, this is about as primitive as it gets. Short of doing it in Morse code, doing it by voice, it’s amazing that we understand each other at all.
Language is such an odd phenomenon anyway in our species. I mean, notice that you have to have two people to do it, which raises a real question about how you get that coordinated the first time out. And it’s a behavior: it isn’t an organ; it isn’t like my arm, my nose. It’s a behavior. And a learned behavior. And yet, a behavior so much more complex than any other behavior you ever, ever learn. I mean, if the average person could walk like the average person could talk, they would be a prima ballerina of the Russian ballet. It’s very interesting that we have such facility for the linguistic enterprise. And how it evolves—it’s changing all the time. And, well, is it just changing in a kind of forward lateral direction, or is there some kind of vertical gain here? I mean, can we actually describe things better to each other than the ancient Greeks could describe things to each other? Can we say things which they couldn’t say? Or anything of consequence? And I maintain: yes. I maintain that culture—you know, freeways, international airports, so forth and so on—that’s just the trailing edge of evolving language.
You have to remember: we’re animals, we’re meat, we’re specks of replicating organic chemistry on the surface of a planet. If we can make a model of our environment that seems to us a sufficiently clear mirror, that is probably about as far as you can go. The idea that we can actually cognize the dynamic of being is… well, it’s a noble hope.
You can perform a kind of philosophical reduction and satisfy yourself that the self-and-world distinction is not primary, you know? That who looks through your eyes is the world.
We have millions of people who are warehoused in almost a larval state in their apartments, watching TV, paying for their medical plans, and glued to this mindless opera of cultural decay that is recited day after day in front of them. I mean, it’s horrible to imagine.
The Internet is the global brain; the cyberspatially connected, telepathic collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.
[The Internet] is where the cultural architecture is being put in place now. And it’s this invisible space which is where we should have been building all the time. So I think this is the doorway into the new dimension into which we’re going, and that these technologies (put in place for no reason other than to facilitate bank transfers and do incredibly mundane things) are turning out to be the seeds of our electromagnetic body in hyperspace.
Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher-dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we’re walking around in, you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet.
I don’t know if it’s just that we are neurologically set up—that there’s a button in us (the equivalent of a reset button) that just clears all the registers, and that’s why it’s wholly other. It’s wholly other because you just dumped your entire memory load off your disk and you’re now looking at a clean disk for the first time in your life, and you don’t have the faintest idea what it could possibly be. It’s something like that. Language fails. Anticipation fails.
We can’t feel the agony of each other. If we could feel what we were doing, we wouldn’t do it. You know? And yet, because each one of us identifies with our own body very strongly and checks no further, so the attitude is basically: “Well, I’m alright. And if you’re not… too bad.” And it’s a very abstract case to move people off of that.
Nature is speeding up. It always has been. And yet, you will never hear this discussed. The early life of the universe—there were no stars, no planets, there weren’t even complex elements. There was only helium and hydrogen. And, you know, talk about dull. It was dull! And over time, helium and hydrogen aggregated together and formed masses of such size that the temperatures at the center of those masses triggered fusion. And then, out cooked iron, sulfur, carbon, and the process of star formation began. The point being: the further back in time you go, the less events there are. And as I said last night: we are the inheritors of this process. If nature loves novelty, then nature loves us above all else in the cosmos, because there’s more novelty in our domain than anywhere else. And we work around the clock to elaborate novelty; human society is almost a pure novelty-production process.
One way of thinking of novelty (and Whitehead suggested this) is: density of connectedness. Well then, if you define novelty as density of connectedness, then you can predict what the ultimate novelty would be: the ultimate novelty is when every point is connected to every other point.
What is the purpose of language? I would submit to you that, in evolutionary terms, the purpose of language is to talk about the past. That the past ceases to be what it was when you have language, because you can pull it back: memory. Memory does something to time. It causes the past to remain in the present as a residuum. And as your memory storage technology advances from story-telling to writing to optical disks, the percentage of the past that you’re able to hold on to increases. And now, with virtual reality and all that, we dream of holding on to as much of the past as we want. So culture has become the servant of this conquest of dimensionality.
One way I think about concrescence and this enterprise that we’re involved in is: we are trying to make a tool. Not just any tool—we are trying to make the tool. Now, what is a tool? A tool is something that lets you do something. What, therefore, would be the ultimate tool? It would let you do anything.
If you have two H2O molecules—that’s water, but you don’t have wetness. Wetness doesn’t emerge until you have thousands of H2O molecules. And so the wetness of water is a property which only emerges when you have millions of these molecules together. And it does appear that complex neural nets have to be above 9 billion operating subunits. So, you know, it may be that—I mean, definitely, we are pushing toward criticality in any area of measurement. For example, if you look at the curve of energy release, or the population curve, or the curve of information production, or the curve of advancing velocity, you see that many of these curves will become asymptotic in the near future.
Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together, all its parts are becoming codependent. So, for instance, an earthquake which destroys central Tokyo would ruin the economy of Belgium, because the retraction of Japanese capital from world markets would set up reverberations that would be felt everywhere. The system is being slaved ever more tightly to various portions of itself. Crop failure in Russia causes strikes in Argentina, and so forth and so on. And this will accelerate. Well then, the task of management, somehow, is to bring this coalescing system through this transition period without the whole thing getting so much vibration built up into it that it falls apart. And so it’s very alarming to see barbarism uncontrolled in the world, to see people being pushed into boxcars on their way to extermination camps, and all this. This means that the global control systems are in danger of breaking down.
It’s the large-scale understanding and integration of human systems, and that’s the real challenge. I mean, it’s all very fine to take these mathematical models and describe the behavior of the dripping faucet—as was done very creatively—but the purpose of all this modeling is to eventually take control of our own relationships to each other, and to the world, and to the future, and to future generations.
I keep saying: de-emphasize anxiety, reassure people. You meet people who say, “I’m really scared. I’m scared about my job, I’m scared about my relationship. I’m scared, scared, scared.” The answer is: don’t worry! You don’t know enough to worry. That’s God’s truth. Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud! I mean, it’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
Our desire, you know, to string wires to talk to each other over distances, and send pictures, and be integrated—our faith that data is somehow important—is all part of this effort to mirror in our technology the Gaian mind.
McLuhan understood this very well: he believed that the worldwide rise of electrical networks could be correlated to the descent of the Holy Ghost. He thought we were living in the age of the Holy Spirit; that electricity is the Holy Spirit. And that’s abstract when you’re talking about telegraphs and that sort of thing, but when you’re talking about the Internet you realize, you know: we really are mental creatures.
The smart people know—the pharmacologists and the electronic, the nano-technological engineers—know that the difference between a drug and a computer is that you can swallow one and you can’t swallow the other one. And that’s the only difference, and they’re working to correct that problem. The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs. You know, they’ll be patches that you paste on your forehead or the back of your thumbnail.
As the Internet fades away (in terms of boxes and flickering screens) and becomes more and more transparent implants in your body, then your identification will be total with this global environment. And you will think of yourself as a person with two minds: the individual mind and the collective mind.
Something so extraordinary is happening on this planet. I mean, you know, for hundreds of millions of years biology flowed across the surface, and species advanced and retreated, and sensory organs were refined and redefined, and so forth and so on, but about 35,000–50,000 years ago, language broke loose. And language is the sheer will of information itself to transform itself. I mean, our medium is meat, but we are made of information, you know? And that information could be fed into a computer, crystallized into a virus. What we are is a long message that is being typed out in proteins by thousands of ribosomes coordinated over time. We are sort of like a phonograph record. And when you’re young, you know, certain enzyme systems, certain genes, are turned on. And then you pass into midlife, other genes are turned on, certain genes are turned off. It’s like a melody: theme and variation being brought back. The theme being enriched and worked. And then, finally, the whole thing builds to a crescendo, and then one by one the genes are turned off, and the audience tugs on its overcoats, and cabs are hailed, and people go home for the evening. But that’s what you are: you’re a story, a piece of code being run in the great computer of the world.
We can make things with language. We can coax ideas into matter and make engines, and dynamos, and transmitters, and oscillators, and all these things.
Even the most rational among us can hardly fail to notice that we have backed ourselves into one hell of a position. And how are we going to get through this, and maintain our human dignity? I mean, are we going to allow millions, billions of people to slip into starvation and disease? Are we going to practice triage on entire sectors of the planet? And withdraw resources so that the white industrial democracies can ride through the waves of chaos? I mean, it’s very important that we not only preserve the human genome, it’s important that we preserve human values through all of this. And I think realizing that we are caught in a process of metamorphosis and transformation not of our responsibility is the basis for the attitudes of confidence and anticipation that will be necessary, and that will allow us to be exemplars for the society.
Nothing lasts, you know? Not your friends, not your enemies. Nothing lasts. And we deny this. And yet, that’s the great psychedelic truth. And if you can face it in every moment and live it, you will have a very, very complete experience of existence. You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and be able to live in the light of its anticipation. And this, I believe, makes for a healthy life full of lots of laughs, and that’s basically what we’re striving for here. The best idea, the truest idea, will feel right.