The Psychedelic Transhumanists
The original -- and much more colorful -- version of this article can be found at H+ Magazine. It is largely an attempt to subvert the materialism I see running rampant in the transhumanism community by reminding them how the last hundred years of philosophy stomps on that kind of nonsense. It is also a self-referential game, in which virtualization is discussed virtually... Enjoy!
Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism, genetic engineers another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind.
Some of these thinkers have been catalyzed by the psychedelic experience -- in a way, the most informative window into a world beyond the human that we have yet discovered. They understand the message of psychedelics and the message of technology to converge on the horizon of a deeper reading of reality that recognizes mind and matter as dimensions of the same truth -- a truth for which language has ill-prepared us.
The ranks of these "psychedelic transhumanists" include legendary rebels like Timothy Leary, wise fools like Terence McKenna, cultural commentators like Erik Davis and Mark Pesce, and avant-psychopharmacologists like David Pearce. Hailing from disparate knowledge domains, they nonetheless share hyperliterate and uniquely discerning intellect. As unusual as their arguments may be to anyone trained in more conventional models of reality, they nonetheless obey a rigorous scientific discipline in their own way, augmenting empirical knowledge with the established insights of 20th-century psychology and philosophy.
Their common vision shares much with the rest of the transhuman community, including an embrace of technology and science as both potent and inevitable; an evolutionary model of the universe and humanity; a sense of the human organism as something that can be tinkered with and expanded; a recognition of drugs as a technology that can dramatically reinvent identity; and a playful challenging of fixed boundaries. In many ways they demonstrate the seed of transhumanism in this moment by exemplifying self-revision and the reevaluation of assumptions as an open-ended and ongoing process. And along the way, they tatter the mechanistic control fantasies we have held onto in spite of our most sophisticated inquiries.
Among these visionaries, we find a general agreement on the emergence of emotional machines, but from a more non-dual perspective of the human as both emotional and machine-like, and a recognition of both inner and outer realities. They tend to critique philosophies that consider mind a mere epiphenomenon, or that fail to recognize the role of the speculator in speculation.
They see technology as ideas, and ideas as technology. They question our fanaticism for control in light of progress's runaway complexity, and remind us of the stubborn persistence of the unconscious, the body, and the other. They insistently remind us to see the evolution of humanity and beyond as much in terms of qualia as quanta, and paint the portrait of a future sensitive to psychological, spiritual, ethical, and biological concerns.
The distinctions between this vision and the more common idea of a technological singularity are easily distilled. In their own words, presented as a "virtual conversation" of transcripts and correspondences, here are the core messages of a transhumanist vision informed by the psychedelic experience...
Medium is message, and information is psychoactive.
Information is a more fundamental substrate of reality, an implicate order. "Pattern" replaces "matter."
Timothy Leary: I'm a great follower of a man named Marshall MacLuhan who wrote those wonderful books about communication. He said that if you want to change a culture, if you want to change yourself, if you want to change religion, then change the medium, the mode of communication. He said that Gutenberg created Protestantism where he had the mass-assembled book, where everybody can read. And now the new form of communication is electronic...
Terence McKenna: The realization that has flowered in the wake of the internet and the rise of cybernetics is that everything is made of information. Information is the primary datum of being. Concepts like time and space and energy are orders of magnitude removed from the present at hand when compared with a concept like information. Every iota, every bit of information that passes through us, changes us.
Mark Pesce: If you took a picture of this room in 1990 and you took a picture of it today, everything would look exactly the same and yet everything is completely different. Because in 1990 we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing seamlessly among all of us. And it's changed us. It's radically sped up the way we deal with information in society. And every bit of information that passes through you changes you. You cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of information. So the internet is acting as this enormous accelerator...
Erik Davis: Information came to be seen as an abstract, almost transcendental stuff that could "circulate unchanged among different material substrates." Once we begin to believe that information is more essential than material forms, we vacate the old cosmos defined by presence and absence, entering a world characterized by the binary feedback of pattern and randomness, signal and noise.
This accelerating knowledge leads to widespread acceptance of all reality as virtual...and that it has always been this way.
The transhuman age is simply making this inescapably obvious. Aldous Huxley's descriptive "far antipodes of the mind" (He used the phrase in a discussion of his mescaline experiences) and their real ecologies is the intellectual progenitor of The Matrix, and of a pragmatic relationship to the questions of ontology.
McKenna: The minute I understood the concept [of virtual reality] I knew...that this would be the next great thing. As a tool of art. As a tool for leading us beyond the notion that we are a hive society of advanced primates, because that's how we visually appear to the empirical point of view. That's an out-of-context description of what we are. It's like a schematic or an aerial map. What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes -- the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move. The purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality that are not artificial, but that are fields of data not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception.
I see virtual reality not as a way of escaping the notion of empirical reality, but as a way of re-portraying invisible levels of the given world that are very vital and important to us: how we see flows of energy, how we understand complex economies, how we understand the fractal hierarchies of nature.
What is already co-present with three-dimensional reality is being literalized....but being literalized in timescales that make the nature of the game apparent to all but the dullest among us. I mean after all, we have always lived in virtual realities, ever since we abandoned nomadism and defined a polis and a wilderness.
Davis: Media have long sought to create immersive spaces of fictional reality: Baroque cathedrals, 19th century panoramas, even, perhaps, the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux or Altamira. Today, the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with cognitive science and its understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we take for ordinary space-time.
Pesce: My first experience of virtual reality happened in 1990 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25. And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected I would find in this virtual world, wasn't an artificial Tron-like environment. It wasn't something that was entirely artificial. What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship. And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn't to escape into another dimension, but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can't always see, because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.
Where we're going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry. And we don't have any tools of mind. Western culture, which is based on this objective external reality -- it's not hard, it's all become very soft, and it's all flowing together. So we need to now start to find ways of describing what's going on. And so what we need to do -- I found in my own investigations -- is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically, that understand that perception shapes what you are, and you shape what you see. And that they're not separate areas, they're not separate domains, and you have to consider them as a whole.
My own explorations had led me to understand that in fact, in a world where anything you want is true, the only way to deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will. Dealing with your will is what magic has always, in all cultures, always been about. This is why the shaman doesn't go insane when the world just disappears -- they're ready for it. Because they understand that where they are isn't bound up in their idea of the world.
Prioritizing information over matter makes the issue of machine sapience irrelevant.
Consciousness of the other is an intractable mystery even between two people. It's a mystery we can sidestep, if we grant awareness by degree.
Davis: I think that we're going to find ourselves relating interpersonally with machines, whether or not they're actually alive or conscious in a way that scientists can debate about, we're going to be interacting with things that have those qualities.
That's going to change the way we're going to experience life and other people. I think we'll come to meet future artificial intelligences in the personae of animated characters, on a pop culture level. There's an element of animism in technology now that's going to increase -- in scientists exploring artificial life, kids interacting with intelligent dolls, in the relationship between ecology, technology and the environment -- it all comes down to a growing element of animism, throwing usback to being Palaeolithic man living in a world of animated nature.
Pesce: Each one of us grew up in a world where people and pets were invested with a certain internal reality that bricks and blocks obviously did not possess. This is not true for our children.
With Furby we have crossed a line in the sand, and there's no going back: the current generation of children, comfortable with the in-betweeness of Furby, have a growing expectation that the entire material world will become increasingly responsive to them as they learn to master it.
The emergence of "artificial" intelligence is a process of symbiosis, transcendence via inclusion, and the posthuman integrates the human, rather than dissociating from it.
Evolution proceeds by including prior forms in novel structures of higher complexity...likewise, the biological will likely be taken up into the embrace of intelligent machines. There is no precedent in evolutionary history for the "leaving behind" of evolutionary precursors. Bacteria and barter still exist, both independently and as elements of more complex organisms and economies.
Pesce: These are prosthetics, these machines, or perhaps, looking the other way around, we are theirs, but neither can really exist without the other. So this "rise of artificial intelligence" is a misapprehension. The rise of intelligence, however -- that seems historically inevitable.
Intelligence cannot be made. Intelligence can only be grown. And that means that in essence the machines are no different than ourselves. These are not our masters we're talking about. These are our children. And how can we not help but love our children? How could they not help but love us?
We can draw a line between ourselves and our machines no more easily than I can draw a line between myself and my eyeglasses.
Blind faith in technological progress as salvation is called into question, especially as regards the illusion of and desire for absolute control.
Psychedelic transhumanism acknowledges the stubborn reality of the body. Our visions of the future are themselves products of our extended phenotype and evolutionary psychology and thus do not merit wholesale acceptance. Absolute control is an illusion, the consequence of ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes by which life and mind come into being.
McKenna: Our technologies...are obviously lethal I would say, but they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving. William Butler saw this in the 19th Century, Teilhard De Chardin reached it in the forties and the fifties MacLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the fifties and the sixties.
Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded. Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control.
Attention becomes the limiting factor in an ecology of mind. And with finite attention and infinite possibility, the vast majority of whatever world in which we find ourselves will remain beyond our dominion.
New technology not only liberates new realms of expression, exploration, identity, and ethical depth but pushes the world ever-farther from our ability to control it. This is a simple property of complex systems, as much a fact of existence as anything else.
David Pearce: I think discontinuities in our normal state of consciousness lie ahead that exceed the gulf today between waking and dreaming consciousness. What can't even be discussed today because we lack the necessary "primitive terms" may well be the most important. What can the congenitally blind person say about the nature of visual experience? For the congenitally blind, more illuminating than intelligence-amplification is the gift of sight.
I think it's fair to say the transhumanist community is mostly interested in intelligence-amplification -- superintelligence rather than supersentience. I share an interest in cognitive enhancement, but in my opinion there is an important sense in which a congenitally blind person with an IQ of 220, or 920!, is just as ignorant as a congenitally blind person with an IQ of 120. I worry more about our ignorance in the latter sense than I do about our limited reasoning powers. Psychedelic drugs can briefly give us a tiny insight into how "blind" we normally are; but we soon lapse into ignorance again. Such is the state-dependence of memory. If I'd never tried psychedelics, then I fear I would be scornful of their significance because of the incoherence of most users' descriptions of their effects. But using the blindness analogy again, someone congenitally blind who is surgically guaranteed the gift of sight can take years before they can make sense of the visual world...at first they are overwhelmed and confused by visual stimuli.
We are linguistically unprepared to address the incredible diversity of perspectives that seem poised to bloom from increasing disparities in bodymind configurations and deepening strata of developmental levels within each of those continua. Claiming to know how these trends will ultimately manifest themselves in the world is what Leary called "caterpillar fantasies about what post-larval life will be like."
Given an imperfect knowledge of the future, we have to be careful that transhumanism does not lapse into merely commodifying the unknowable, playing to people's drive for immortality and pleasure as a meme in competition with the satisfaction of more immediate concerns. If transhumanism is understood as faith in our transcendental potential, then wisdom is a technology and real transhumanism starts now.
Davis: How do we live with creative intelligence and awakened senses in a groundless world beyond our control?
Behind the veneer of objective medicine, psychopharmacology is simply offering its ownresolutely philosophical answer to the eternal problem of human suffering: Use technology to control its symptoms. The posthuman self is a self on drugs -- SSRIs, hormones, brain boosters, neurotransmitters. We have entered an era that sanctions the psychoactive use of commercial chemicals, not just to cure disease or even to relieve suffering, but to reformat who we feel we are.
It's likely that people will become ever more comfortable with the notion that unpleasant (and unproductive) psychological states are simply bad code in the Darwinian bio-computer. And once you're comfortably ensconced inside that materialist cosmology, where meaning is secondary to mechanics, there is no particularly compelling reason (other than medical fallout) not to debug the mind with consumer molecules.
The paradox is that these mechanistic molecules can produce deeper, more authentic selves. People on SSRIs often describe themselves as finally feeling like normal people, like the person they were meant to be. This paradox...lies at the heart of the posthuman condition.
If one thing makes itself apparent from the psychedelic experience, it's that the more you know the more you don't know, and admitting this is a form of death. The acceleration of intelligence and extension of the individual lifespan means that life itself will increasingly come to resemble a constant re-imagining of self -- not the indefinite perpetuation that many of us desire, but an ongoing process of death and rebirth. And by its very nature, death is across the event horizon, an impenetrable unknown.
Davis: If I choose to automatically curb a basic dimension of my interior life with a targeted chemical, haven't I implicitly adopted a highly constricted model of what constitutes "the self"? Rather than embrace these new feelings of relief as the "real me," someone who modifies their everyday personality with pharmaceutical products must identify with the "I" that chooses to instrumentally control its states of mind.
Most advertising is aimed at the Controller, that portion of self that wants to expand its ability to manipulate the world in order to achieve its goals. Psychiatric drugs, though, add a crucial twist. When [pharmaceutical companies claim that their drugs] can "help you handle it," the "it" in question is, in the end, nothing other than a now-alienated portion of you.
That's OK if the goal of your life is simply to feel as good as possible for as long as possible. But happiness and freedom may ultimately depend less on maintaining particular states of mind than on cultivating the appropriate attitude toward whatever states of mind arise out of the elegant chaos of life. And it seems to me that control is not the attitude to hold in the long run.
Seeing the unconscious as persistent and progress as a dialectic leads to the ethical imperative of what can be generally understood as "heart"... a consequent sense of responsibility and a call for coherent and mature visioning of a future upon which we can collectively agree.
Ultimately, a transcendental future does not simply fall on us but is something we collaboratively construct in every moment.
Leary: A renaissance preaches a basic religion of humanism. The aim of individual life is to know yourself and treat each other as human beings...
Davis: Work like that at Princeton University, measuring fields of human consciousness -- for example when lots of people focus their attention on sporting events -- suggests that it might actually matter what we think about. Then you look at...how technology allows certain kinds of imagination such extraordinary power. I think we've lost the tools to navigate these worlds the old-fashioned way, we're almost rending the physical body, spending more and more time in that kind of etheric space, with no idea what we're doing, and the fact that this is going to have real world consequences is kind of obvious.
Of course the whole world has always been interconnected, and everyone depends on the world around them, but we tend to feel that we're outside of that, that we're individual subjects, that we have control over nature. So it's almost like a return of the repressed -- we want that back again, we need it back if we're going to deal with sociological and ecological problems.
Pesce: Even as we talk about this gnostic release, this uploading of the soul into some sort of silicon...there's this body that's behind, sort of bitching, saying "I am real. And I am the potential, I am the ground in which you work."
The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality. Where is the body in cyberspace? Where are you when your email is flashing across the net, when your agents are doing your bidding? Where are you, and how do you maintain your self?
Psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing. What we're going to see, and it's actually quite true that certain types of VR can produce the precisely same affect. There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason, or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason. So...I really want to work from the heart.
I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology, you have to work from the heart center. Because otherwise you'll create golems, you'll create Frankensteins, your creations will run away from you. That's the essence of the story of the golem -- that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life but without the light of knowledge or the heart. The heart of God.
I also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do. One of my biggest gripes about the internet is that it can't, as yet, contain the tenor of human emotion which is so important. If we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh, we've got a big problem. If it can't sing, we've got a big problem.
McKenna: And what we're talking about here is using technological prosthesis to extend and enrich humanness, to enrich communication, and it is, believe me, the want of good communication. If anything undoes us, this will be it: that our languages fail, that we misread each other's intent, that we could not understand each other.
So I'm seeing here almost a theosophical epiphany of language trying to bootstrap itself toward realms of platonic perfection, which as organic beings we experience as Love. Love, Beauty, Truth -- these are the vectors of human becoming. They always have been, they always will be, and the technologies that open these paths for us are no more and no less powerful than the human beings that wield them. So this is an enterprise of integrity and millenial implication, and what lies as the goal is true humanness, in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet, and with these strange children that we have brought into the world, our machines. That is the challenge at the end of history.
As we approach the event horizon, the only mature response is a humble participation in its unfolding mystery...which involves a deep scrutiny of our assumptions that the future will be the modified present, that the posthuman will be merely "humanity plus."
We think we make the future. But it is equally true that the future that makes us, to the degree that our thoughts of the future constitute our minds in this moment, and these minds constrain our experience both present and forthcoming. The fantastic power of language and information upon which the psychedelic transhumanists agree enthrones humble and compassionate intent as a crucial touchstone in our construction of a posthuman ecology of minds. The prevailing theme is that while we may not understand what we are, or are becoming, one thing is clear: We're all on this trip together.
- Bibliography -
Davis, Erik.
Leary,Timothy.
The Eightfold Model of Human Consciousness.
McKenna,Terence & Mark Pesce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l38faoCTyTE&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPrfDACDccw&feature=related
Pesce,Mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l38faoCTyTE&NR=1
Pearce, David.
Personal correspondence.
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/post-darwinian-ethics
http://www.hedweb.com/confile.htm
Michael Garfield is an evolutionary theorist who divides his time between writing, music, and visual art -- all of which can be found online at michaelgarfield.blogspot.com. He also moderates the Visionary Music Group at Evolver.net.
Image Credits: Leary - Courtesy of Philip H Bailey, McKenna - Courtesy of Erowid, Mark Pesce - Mark Pesce, Erik Davis - Andy Miah. Background photo by Paul Downey.
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Comments
Pre - Post - Sub - Neo - Trans
When will mankind simple realize human nature as already inherentlly "spiritual" ... that all such transitory "adverbs and adjectives" are nothing more than man himself lost to the eternal Tao of Now.
Actually all of the so called modernistic "mech-tech" infatuation is really only the flip side of Western man coming out of the dark ages.
Similar to the so-called sexual revolution being merely relative to the supression of previous times .. leading not to liberation but a planet full of STD's never before seen.
All planetary resouce depletion and/or destruction has come from such mech -tech bumbling humanism. Trying to attain the virtual at the expense of the actual
There are no indigenous cultures lacking in spirituality. Yet modern man has to convince himself of his own transitoriness via DNA Genes Machination ... all cent per cent to the degree of his necience only.
Like those who need money to make up for their inherent lack of satisfaction ... those whose passion for mechanistic technology will be forever in a similar vein.
Any/all authentic Mysticism was ... is .. and will forever be... free from such vanity. ... austere, ascetic and humble by it's very nature ... no sense of progress outside of the "always so" .. every transcendental tradition has shown us this and this alone.
To be fully human already includes all of the pre-post fruits of the "Tree of Knowlege" ...{Bibliical} .. humanistic nescience forever revealing nothing but the cycling of it's own duality ... maya ... mammon.
Adapting to Evolution
Michael,
I did read through the article, as I do most. here on RS
Terrace Mckenna had talked about Language, and not having the appropriate language for "where we could be / can go ...it was in this vain that I went off on my philosopical spree.
I do value these "visionaries, and value most of the RS points of interest, and platforms of approach. As a philosopher I just tend to see the underlying principles and offer direct insights intoi all of our so-called evolurionary folly.
Like your comment that our humanity and spirituality should/must learn to adapt to technology, when "karmically" it has been our lack of spirituality that has us dependant / interdependant ... on/with ... such deterministic technology to begin with
That in reality, neither so-called "evolution" or spiritual enhancement are linear, or forever forward moving.
As a bit of a lifelong mystic I don't do evolution as a concept period, ... as, at least for me, it has always gone against the grain of the cyclic nature of all reality.
From the perspective of organic spirituality this is the very misnomer.
The rise and falll of all mech-tech ideology and associated instrumentation will only be available to the awakened soul .. and the very Quantum views we are deveoloping are beginning to reveal this ... bit by bit ... but the "language" we are using just dosen't seem to fit.
It is all a crutch and has/is costing us spiritually. We talk about machination as if it were a godsend, but just like our financial institution ... it is a failing hope ultimately, based on desire more than necessity.
That it is here to be dealt with is one thing, But that we must embrace it and adapt ourselves to it is too off the psychedlic wall for me.
Just like the manifest hurricane wind{s} have a non-manifest / potential {eye} at the center, similar to the Eternal Tao being the hub of the wheel spokes, ones spirit sees all these so-called rise and falls as transitory.
When one reads some of these visionaries it is like they are caught up in the winds of change ... Mckenna for example has always been "all over the place" in his lectures. Leary also ... not wrong or bad ... but no yet fully grounded in their own center.
Not that there isn't some substantial "hit and miss" of certain principles that may lead to actual "revelation" ... mostly it is just the very struggle with "relativity itself" however ... and as we are finally coming full circle to "Quantum" view points in our progressive sciences ... well relativity and it's themes of linear evolution our themselves becoming obsolete. {the growing pains of developing quantum vocabulary.
So it is "just the language" I am uncomfortsable with ... and Terrance did seem to "envision" the need for such from his own perspective.
To give a practicle example from the Entheogenic perspective ... how we have developed synthetic extractuons isolating individual components of natural holistic and synergistic substances based on these mechanisting, deterministic and reductionistic sciences ...
I have never seen anyone who plays with these substances stay on the holistic path ... too much potency minus the synergy ... it is just a "quantum fact" that the mech-techies just don't get.
So by trying to further refine this process by going even more high tech with our processes, well it is just like in modern medical science .. the more we act out of sync with our organic and indigenous emnvironment the more high-tech "cures" so-called "evolve" to "fix the problem" {original misnomer} ... and everyone applauds
Like prostetics ... how many indigenous cultures exhibit the compromise of bodily limbs due to unatural living to where they "have to" develop such saving grace technology.
Is it really wonderful .. or really foolish We do not question our overall living/life style due to being caugfht up in the winds of change for change's sake, again loosing the perspective of "non relative soul or self ... or even the nature of consciousness itself as opposed to the machniations of the inertial mind.
Salvia Divinorum is a good present example. The more potent the extracts the more people loose true entheogenic perspectives, act out of whack and the powers that be regulte us away from our own abuse.
Yet if one simply chews the leaves in their wholistic form {cud} as the indigenous people do there is never this infatuation. DMT the same story. Cocaine the same story. {wearing 3d glasses at Avatar has actually frealed some people out of their seats literally}
Humunaity just cannot handle messing with mother nature ... cooperating yes ... manipluating no
It is our very superficial sense of linear evolution that has us thinking we wiill get there by going even further down this path and that we just haven't evolved enough yet ... maybe if we become "bionic" / n"cybernetic" that would do the trick
But just like protecthics it would only be to make uo for our oringinal mishap.
We rape the planet for minerals, and our evolutionaqry sciences are scoping out any planet in the solar system to "solve" this dilema by finding ways to extract from them to perpetuate our folly. {we are the Borg .. lol ... the fictional cybernetic race who feeds off of all other culture.
So it is not criticism that cometh from me ... but philosophical clarification as to the absolute nature of quantum flux ... no more transcendental to our humanity than lost to our perversion from our inherently quantum/spiritual nature.
There are definetly goods points mixed in with all this maya, at least from the perspectives of your article, and from each of those visonaries in their own rights ... but I can't help but offer a little phlosophy to help balance out our slowly progressing mech-tech to quantum views .. which still have a long way to go.
Just a caution to pace ourselves among the illusion of linear progress and remain true to the "zero point field state" / "eye of hurricane" ... "core of consciousness" that is already "self fulfilling" within in each of us. {spirit/soul}
The dark ages were truly scary and we are really in "reactionary form" trying to blaze too fast and far forward to escape this period of nescience ... the theory of evolution itself the very proof of such "uncontrolled folly " ... { Casteneda / Juan Matus -- "Controlled Folly"}
Just like every solstice is a chance to "reboot" and begin the cycle anew ... that this 2012 cycle end/beginning will have us truly begining from a new perspectie .. and not just the perpetuation of our own self disdaining inertia in relation to previous karma.
Unrevealed Science
Michael,
My original thought was in what is actually being inspired by such visionaries .. that we even come up with terms like post moderrnistic.. trans humanistic .. most of the people that quote Mckenna, like him, are all over the place ... above and beyond organic and indigenous life.
That we spend too much time telling ourselves who we are, the category of our relativity ...
Like Burning Man is more a mech-tech free for all, more than an indigenous pow-wow .. a rave and a craze more than a reflective meditation .. again, just an observation.
One judges a guru by their disciples ... again not really trying to be judgemental here, and will look deeper into the links you gave ... just can't help seeing that this whole inspired perspective may also be loosing karmic momentum as the ages cycle.
Falling victim to the same tricks of time that we are envisioning beyond ... as all persapective is subject to rise and fall
That our very generational sense of liberation, inspired by these visionaries, and others in relation to previous perspectives may also, itself become subject to it's own transcendence.
The prefix to science ... "sci"... is in the similar vain of "psy" {pcychology} and and "phy" {philosophy/physics} ... which refers to the inner knowing ability or potential, and not "what" is discovered outside of ones self through experimentation.
In Sanskrit, {the mother of all language} "Cit" tefers to the eternal state of knowing specifically distinct from "being" ... or "Sat"
Knowing of language ... or the language of knowing.
There are greater cycles of time revealed in the Ancient Vedic literatures, originating exclusively from the contemplation / enthgeogenic vision of the sages .... free from any external scientific method ...
There will never be a super computer that trumps this ... maybe one day confirm it in relation to our already lost nescience... yet the language itself used seems lost to it's organic zero point field .state of reference ... hence the endlesss speculation about where we are not already.
Hence my original premise of knowing itself being cyclic ... knowing is never acheived ... just revealed. as consciousness itself is constituted of Cit ... {eternal knowabilty}
This is why anyone can kearn the ABC's and appreciate Mozart
Appreciating what is shown ... not creating knowledge. The more mathematics and or instrumentation ... the more the original nescience. ... the very perpetuation of speculation.
So please do not continue to polarize me with your relativistic argumentsation as I am as much on your side {and visionaries} as I am transcendental to them.
The stronger the manifest hurricane winds ... the futher from the potrential core or eye ... the more mathematical computation ... the further from absolute zero we have gone ...as no matter how many nine's, {9, 99 999 }we have to again add a zero to realize tbe nature of "eternal knowability" ...
The more technoiogy ... the less inherent knowing .. again simply quantum fact ... non judgemental ... just the state of affairs from the quantum perspective ... an eternal frame for any "discovery" to but exist in relation to. {hence spiritual revelation as opposed to relativity}
Whether the bird, the wing ... the cells in the wing ... the whole flock of birds flying as an integrated unit
... there being absolutely no evolutionary conclusion that will ever acheive transcendence in relaton to perspective ... outside of internal vision or insight.
Like all of Einstein's math {in relation to theory of relativity} was merely secondary to his more organic/philosophical original vision of riding a light wave
The more technology we need the further from this core of knowing we are ... not judgemental .. just quantum fact.
Is there more "knowing" from "sophistry" ... one and one equals two .... {relativity} ... or in "philosophy" ... one and another and another ... only in relation to absolute zero. {quantum}
I guess my overall response was as much a general viewpoint into the nature of all the posts I read here in relation to someone like Mckenna
... what he actually inspires in people with the language that he used ...
As a philosopher, and not one of science .. I see the loss of the deeper inherent conteplative sense .. surendered to the dream of but endless sophistry that can only ever 'but solve it's own problems
Knowing is never achieved in other words ... your very concept of "future" itself is ultimately a misnomer from this more "mystic" perspective.
I apologize for not having a more sophisticated background outside of the purely philosophical, but as I mentioned before ... one and one will never equal two for me.
All of these futures ... no matter how phantasmagorical in their sophistication {super computers} can only but make up for inherent loss.
The difference betwee seeing "machine elves" and seeing organic lotus like unfolding of whole universal structures {pre and post mathematics} ... is really only relative to the "knowing" of the one having the "entheogenic moment."
From the perspectives of the Ancient Vedas "all" of the enlightened sages "saw" the same way ... it was not something that is not here now .. or has to be attained ... or clarified by "science" .... but already inherently known .. hence the "en" in entheogenic" {inherent} ... not specific to the visionary.
There was a very minute standard of time measurement from over 5000 years ago ... "the time it takes the sun to pass over an atom" ... which was realized from contemplation or entheo-vision alone .. without microscope or telescope .... countless other examples if one digs deep enough.
Those of us who need a new language are those of us lost to the old.
Each generation has to find truth anew unto themselves {quantum sociology} including larger persprctives of all of our so-called Western human progression.
Knowing will just never transcend mystery ....{spirit / zero pint field state of all potential}... my only real point of non-relavitistic contention.
... as all of the qualified passion of these visionaries, along with the rest of us .. well our very own quantum sciences, minus all of the speculation, have already reached the "omega" of the only difference between seer and seen .. wave and particle ... is never beyond it's own revelation {never objectively standardized}
Yet still there are those who want to go beyond this "quantum philosophical" ...one and another and another"... into the more mech-techie "relavitistic" time and space manipulations ... trying to create their own black holes .. particle smashing {end of progressive rainbow.
Most of the followers of Mckenna along with other mech-techies here on RS seem really into this type of "evolutionary speculation" {for lack of better term}
So it is not just my opinion but the actual result of such envisionization that realy seems to go against the grain of what can already be known about such potential ... before the manfest winds of progress again cycle around this original loss of inner contemplation ... or philosophical insight.
Too much language to say too little .. trying to know "about" what is already known within.
Way too many resources being used up in such vain
I am philosophically on the side of all who want to know ... but not on the side of anyone who wants only to know "about"
Consciousness itself already contains what one can be conscious "of" ... so other than this ... what is actually being "envisioned"
My commentary was never meant to be in opposition to your initial post ... nor argumentative ... but purely commentative, offering overall insights into the eternal nature of mysticism, {my real forte} as opposed to the "langusage" of our struggling relativity. {all of us}
I do have appreciation for these these visionaries and will look deeper into your offered links ...I just do not seem to see the need for relative comparisons of ideology itself ... the banging of heads in the name of intrigue ... who is to blame.
Any technology that "begs' our adaptation .. is determing the nature of our insights ... how is this quantumly free from inertia ... {this is what I personally ponder} ... again I apologize if my comments seemed to imply more and or polarize your original intent.
what is this i don't even
"The more technoiogy ... the less inherent knowing .. again simply quantum fact ... non judgemental ... just the state of affairs from the quantum perspective"
you didn't mean this literally, did you? because new technologies only reveal an unknowing that was already there (ie radio waves, frequency resonance, astronomy). with the technology, there is no more or less knowing. BUT when attention is brought to that unknowing through discovery and curiousity, we explore it and interepret it with our souls. this is a real benefit; the meditative nature of science. but not only is science a benefit/detriment, it is quite obviously a part of our human nature: the curiosity (whether with "good" or "bad"$$ intentions) that drives us ever forwards via technological innovation into the psychodelic eye of universe's capacity. though it is manifested through the means we have here in the western world, science and techno-progress is a universal idea that is manifesting itself in our time... love it or hate it.... it's exciting.
Present Example
Like having to use a Nuclear powered War Ship just to purify water {for the Haitians}
The more techno-nescience ... the more toys are invented to perform simple tasks.
When I was 18 years old I lived on "The Farm" in Summertown Tennessee, ... a large vegetarian farm community, inspiried and developed by original Haight Ashury Hippies ... "Visionary" Stephen Gaskins at the forefront of inspiration, although never really sole leader.
They had their own Gas pump, Red Cross Trailer, delivered their own babies via natural mid-wifery {100% sucess rate - 150 babies, when I had been there ... no drugs no prolems.
When ever buildings were being demolished, they would go and salvage so many things.
Their own soy /diary/flour mill, auto repair shop .. so much farming that when the Haitians were starving in the mid 70's huge truck loads of home-grown potatoes were sent. {their own expense}
When their were prolbems in Guatemala, they went down and helped reuild ... hands on .. nothing more.
How much "virtual" technology does it take to make up for "actual" help"
How much virtual, ideological visionary insight does it take to remain in Eden.
Inertial loss of vision
That you have to use it because it is already there, simply proves my point that such envisionation falls short of actual inspiration ... a so called solution that can only perpetuate it's own nescience.
You need to use it to the degree you lintially lost insight. Since all of our tax money has already been spent on such ncuclear folly, lets make a show of our prowess, and maybe earn a socio-politico "slap on the back" for such "evolutionary adaptation"
We will literally tell ourselves anything in relation to anything ... but actual revelation into even one thing is no where to be found
TRANS formation?
I love tim and terence and drugs and the burn, and I don't really use more teknowledgy than seems appropriate among my friends and family, and I am fascinated by the sheer music of the will coming through on this subject, thanks Micheal and Pippalayana!
On the subject of transhumanism, psychedelic shamanism and evolution, i want to share about my fifth grade science project. In fifth grade we raised silkworms. We fed them mulberry leaves, and wached the caterpillars eat and eat and eat, and we learned all about silk and china and marco polo and textiles, but mostly we learned about HOLOMETABOLISM,(Metamorphosis).
This aint no "theory" of evolution it is a creature turning into another creature right in front of your eyes.
I.7 billion cells are disrupted by the digestive juices in the gut, the brain is dissolved the skin the hair, the spine is dissoved, its all just SOUP. I have seen it. the only cells that are spared this destruction are the Original eight cells of the perenium, the "imaginal disc"
This is my wish for human transformation, that we are granted another dimension, after enduring what appears to be annailation only to become something we can not yet imagine..
This is not to say we should stop trying to imagine, imagination is the best part of compassion.
I love your article: inspiring & important!
I dont like the term ...
Brian Eno
It is more like the revelation of "before and after" all such mech-tech endeavor ... rather than "revrese snd retreat".
"Before and After Science" is a Quantum reality that any insightful being can realize ... nothing to reverse ... no where to retreat ...
just not relative to humanistic empirical scienctific method period
not pre-post sub neo trans anything ... spirit for spirits sake .. the mysticism at the core of all such folly
Kranzberg's Laws of Technology
I believe Kranzberg's Laws of Technology have a lot to contribute to this discussion, in particular these:
1. Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precidence in technology-policy decisions.
6. Technology is a very human activity, - and so is the history of technology.
Food for thought.
December 11, 2006 at 02:59
Prophetic announcement last night
I watched a prophetic announcement last night on TV. I’ve never read a book in my life (I only watch TV 16 hours a day). Nevertheless, I agree with everything Drew said because ‘they’ have shown it to me on my TV screen. Anyhow, I was watching a show last night; don’t remember which one ‘cause I have eight TV’s in my living room, all going at the same time on different channels. My attention was drawn to a Sears commercial, which was promoting a sale on every bed and bath item in all of their twenty six thousand stores. My interest was piqued because such a sale is always code for “listen to the following prophetic announcement!” What followed, you ask? I almost couldn’t believe my ears, and am at this very moment preparing myself and my loved ones…
“Hurry, because it all ends this Thursday!”All Seeing Eye
"The Threat of Infinity Must Be Contained."
I had to laugh when I read "The Threat of Infinity Must Be Contained." It is so ironic, lol.
Before I read it I have been exploring polar relations, and came to 'infinite' 'finite', and began wondering about this pair.
I realize that there is no such 'thing' as a 'finite' nor an 'infinite' as 'things'---things in their own right, but are really conceptualizations from a whole dynamic which in its essence is Mystery!
And I remembered this video I saw where this guy called Nassim shows this triangular finite shape, and contained within this finite shape is an infinite fractal pattern~ing...
;)))
fractals are not reality.
It's important not to confuse mathematics with REALITY. As math professor Steve Strogatz points out fractals are based on Platonic mathematics -- they are ideals NOT FOUND IN NATURE. And there happens to be an ecological crisis from Western science -- read Professor Alfred Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism" for example.
Here's Strogatz on fractals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxHRFZQtdSkAlso this comment
infinity in math and reality
But the real question is where does the measurement start and end -- this is the subject of math professor Joe Mazur's recent book "The Motion Paradox" wherein he reexamines Zeno in light of the latest science. Despite the usual patronizing dismissal of Zeno by the ultra-rational "scientists" those who really study the logic of Zeno realize that the paradox was never solved in science.
In fact in science it's called the "time-frequency uncertainty principle" as discovered by holograph inventor Dennis Gabor when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton. So in quantum physics this is known as "squeezed light" -- and it can be used to increase precision but it also demonstrates the inherent "smeared light" at the quantum level. Physicist Fritz-Albert Popp states how squeezed light creates the fundamental uncertainty for biophoton research -- so he never claims biophoton research can be used to "cure cancer" etc. since it's a case by case situation. The energy is always changing! And then Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is used by Penrose and Hameroff for their quantum brain model.
Science likes to fall back on the golden ratio since it's the most irrational of irrational numbers and as a continued fraction is just 1 plus 1 divided by 1 as an infinite fractal iteration. In fact the golden ratio -- also the basis for Freemasonry with its origin in ritual geometry mass human sacrifice altar construction (read math professor Abraham Seidenberg's essays in Folklore and Archive of science, etc.) -- anyway the deal is that the
fractal iteration of the "one" is still based on symmetry or "divide and average" mathematics using a closed form of infinity -- "contained" through sacred geometry. Kepler, for example, was against the closed form of the Golden Ratio. But in the time-frequency uncertainty principle reality is inherently unknowable as a symbol -- there is no symmetry -- no "one to one correspondence" between number and symbol or algebra and geometry.
In fact reality is inherently based on complementary opposites and can be logically inferred as the source of the I-thought or the source of the one -- this is why "one" was not a number in real Pythagorean harmonics and also in Taoist philosophy and the three gunas of India and in nonwestern music. There is then an alchemical energy transduction of the whole spectrum from sound to light -- even physics admits that there is no current model to explain sonoluminescence despite the fact that it is observed in ecology. The similar sonofusion is used for alchemical technology -- http://sonofusionjets.com
Consider the "Sonic Bloom" phenomenon discovered by Dan Carlson during his U of Minnesota research and now the basis for his farming business -- birds sing in ultrasound and this ionizes the stomata of plants so that nutrients in the dew solar cycle are absorbed through the plant leaves. Ecology is way too complex for science -- the equatorial forests -- the "brain" of the planet -- could never be modeled by any supercomputer -- despite the fact that a recent fractal study claimed that forests are fractals. Meanwhile Richard Dawkins promotes "synthetic ecology" based on Platonic Buckyfullyerenes so that asymmetrical nanosilica can be added to carbon-based molecules for artificial life. Sure it might be the "future" but it's not evolution in the sense of ecology. Ironically the silica for these nanobiomotor AI brain implants is from soy-based silica and then the brain of the planet -- the Amazon -- is being replaced by soy farms from the Freemasonic Cargill corporation. Michael Soule, a top conservation biologist, declared that all large mammals STOPPED evolving about 30 years ago.
Why are there no critiques of psychedelic transhumanism?