Creativity, evolution of mind and the “vertigo of freedom”
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE
Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, bedeviling and hypnotic his ideas can be. As a professor of English and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University, he has taught courses in the history and rhetoric of the emerging technosciences – sustainability, space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary contexts from which they sprout. An explorer of the exciting and confusing rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational universe, he argues that in co-evolution with technology, we find ourselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as vital as it is unexplored.
In Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of The Noösphere, the transhumanist philosopher focuses on his favorite technology: the psychedelic, “ecodelic” plants and chemicals (read: drugs) that can help make us process more information and make us aware of the effect of language and music and nature on our consciousness, thereby offering us an awareness of our own ability to effect our own consciousness through our linguistic and creative choices. And that, from an evolutionary perspective, is simply sexy.
JASON: Your new book Darwin’s Pharmacy talks about the relationship between psychedelic plants and the accelerating evolution of the “noosphere”, which some define as the knowledge substrate of reality, the invisible, informational dimension of collective intelligence and human knowledge. Is this more or less accurate?
RICH: The book features a set of nested claims about the evolution of mind, psychedelics (or, as I prefer and propose, “ecodelics”), and the evolution of the noosphere, but all of the claims can be understood via two claims:
(1) Ecodelics have been an integral part of the human toolkit, so suppressing them is like suppressing music, jokes or other aspects of our humanity. (Here I am following Samorini, Siegel, and others)
and
(2) As integral parts of the human toolkit, ecodelics are best modeled as part of sexual selection – the competition for mates and the leaving of progeny. A careful look at Charles Darwin’s writings on sexual selection will show that sexual selection works through the management of attention – what we would now call “information technologies.” Think birdsong, bioluminescence ( the most widespread communication technology on the planet), poetry. The peacock is managing and focusing peahen attention with his feathers, so what we have called “mind” has been involved in evolution for a very long time. Mandrilles eat iboga before competing for mates.
I work with the notion of the noosphere drawn from V.I. Vernadsky, and propose that we define it as the collective effect of attention of ecosystems. Psychedelics seem to draw our attention to the whole. Ecodelics dwindle the broadcast of the ego – it is not very good at perceiving the whole, just as we can’t, unlike a butterfly, taste with our feet. With the ego dwindled, we can become aware of the noosphere – the message of the whole. This has particular importance as we grapple with the effects of human consciousness and its externalization in technology on the biosphere.
JASON: The Jesuit Priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the Noosphere very early on. A profile in WIRED Magazine article said, “Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness”.. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into “the living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts and experiences.” Teilhard wrote, “The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone.” He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing complexity consciousness among living organisms was the nervous system. The informational wiring of a being, he argued – whether of neurons or electronics – gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increases, evolution is led toward greater consciousness… thoughts?
RICH: Yes, he also called it this process of the evolution of consciousness “Omega Point”. The noosphere imagined here relied on a change in our relationship to consciousness as much to any technological change and was part of evolution’s epic quest for self awareness. Here Teilhard is in accord with Julian Huxley (Aldous’ brother, a biologist) and Carl Sagan when they observed that“we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine traces out this evolution of consciousness as well through the greek and Sanskrit traditions as well as Darwinism and (relatively) modern philosophy. All are describing evolution’s slow and dynamic quest towards understanding itself.
JASON: Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965, proposed that “just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas… how do you respond to this notion?
RICH: Yes, the irony here is that in in his amazing book Chance and Necessity, Monod was part of the rather vicious attacks on Teilhard. Teilhard was attacked by both the Church and mainstream science. Was he on to something? Nobody was more mainstream than Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, and he also talked about the “Three Worlds” of “objects”, “mental events” and the “products of the human mind”, with the last, ‘World Three’, corresponding roughly to the noosphere. One significant difference between my use of this map and Popper and others is that I do not limit the effects of attention to human attention. Flowering plants, for example, work on this level of the biosphere that involves insect attention and perception.
JASON: This ‘world of ideas’ sounds a lot like the Noosphere.. are these two guys saying the same thing here?
RICH: As I mentioned above, I think there are important differences in our use of this map, but all of these authors are pointing to the need to model an aspect of our ecosystems that involves what the plant scientists now call “signaling and behavior” as well as the collective effects of that signaling and behavior. I find that the noosphere is a good metaphor and mneumonic device for doing that and helps us think on a more planetary and informational scale.
Precisely because the noosphere is about differentials of attention, it matters how we model it.
JASON: James Gleick, author of The Information has said that ideas influence evolution:“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms […]Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry also arged that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit: Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains… to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet” What are your thoughts on this?
RICH: First, I like “idea sex” as a meme, and yet I think it is in some way redundant. I am working with Geoffrey Miller’s hypothesis (which was also, implicitly, Charles Darwin’s) that the human mind evolves as a courtship device. Thinking and story telling are like birdsong – they play a role in how we pair up. Darwin (as well as more contemporary researchers like Nottebohm) focused on the role of song in courtship and neurogenesis. Nottebohm observed juvenile finches singing their brains larger!
Gleick’s treatment of the evolution of ideas is strikingly resonant with Plato’s dramatization of the effect of writing to “get into the wrong hands” and drift. (See the Phaedrus). I honestly think we are still grappling with the fact that our minds are distributed across a network by technology, and have been in a feedback loop between our brains and technologies at least since the invention of writing. As each new “mutation” occurs in the history of evolution of information technology, the very character of our minds shifts. McCluhan’s Understanding Media is instructive here as well (he parsed it as the Global Village), and of course McLuhan was the bard who advised Leary on “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out” and very influential on Terence McKenna.
One difference between now and Plato’s time is the infoquake through which we are all living. This radical increase in quantity no doubt has qualitative effects – it changes what it feels like to think and remember. Plato was working through the effect of one new information technology – writing – whereas today we “upgrade” every six months or so…Teilhard observes the correlative of this evolutionary increase in information – and the sudden thresholds it crosses – in the evolution of complexity and nervous systems. The noosphere is a way of helping us deal with this “phase transition” of consciousness that may well be akin to the phase transition between liquid water and water vapor – a change in degree that effects a change in kind.
Darwin’s Pharmacy suggests that ecodelics were precisely such a mutation in information technology that increased sexually selective fitness through the capacity to process greater amounts of information, and that they are “extraordinarily sensitive to initial rhetorical traditions.” What this means is that because ecodelic experiences are so sensitive to the context in which we experience them, they can help make us aware of the effect of language and music etc on our consciousness, and thereby offer an awareness of our ability to effect our own consciousness through our linguistic and creative choices. This can be helpful when trying to browse the infoquake. Many other practices do so as well – meditation is the most well established practice for noticing the effects we can have on our own consciousness, and Sufi dervishes demonstrate this same outcome for dancing. I do the same on my bicycle, riding up a hill and chanting.
One problem I have with much of the discourse of “memes” is that it is often highly reductionistic – it often forgets that ideas have an ecology too, they must be “cultured.” Here I would argue that drawing on Lawrence Lessig’s work on the commons, the “brain” is a necessary but insufficient “spawning” ground for ideas that becomes actual. The commons is the spawning ground of ideas; brains are pretty obviously social as well as individual. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin notes that there is no such thing as “self replicating” molecules, since they always require a context to be replicated. This problem goes back at last to computer scientist John Von Neumann’s 1947 paper on Self reproducing automata.
I think Terence McKenna described the condition as “language is loose on planet three”, and its modern version probably occurs first in the work of writer William S. Burroughs, whose notion of the “word virus” predates the “meme” by at least a decade. Then again this notion of “ideas are real” goes back to cosmologies that begin with the priority of consciousness over matter, as in “In the beginning was the word, and the word was god, and the word was with god.” So even Burroughs could get a late pass for his idea.
JASON: Richard Dawkin’s definition of a meme is quite powerful: “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet, […] already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” [the replicator is] human culture; the vector of transmission is language, and the spawning ground is the brain.”
This notion that the “the vector of transmission is language” is very compelling.. It seems to suggest that just as in biological evolution the vector of transmission has been the DNA molecule, in the noosphere, the next stage up, it is LANGUAGE that has become a major player in the transfer of information towards achieving evolutionary change.. Kind of affects how you think about the phrase “words have power”. This insight reminds me of a quote that describes, in words, the subjective ecstasy that a mind feels when upon having a transcendent realization that feels as if it advances evolution:
“A universe of possibilities,
Grey infused by color,
The invisible revealed,
The mundane blown away
by awe”
Is this what you mean by ‘the ecstasy of language’?
RICH: Above, I noted that ecodelics can make us aware of the feedback loops between our creative choices – should I eat mushrooms in a box? – Should I eat them with a fox? – and our consciousness. In other words, they can make us aware of the tremendous freedom we have in creating our own experience. Leary called this “internal freedom.” Becoming aware of the practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these instances the “vertigo of freedom.” What to do? In ecodelic experience we can perceive the power of our maps. That moment in which we can learn to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility for it, is what I mean by the “ecstasy of language.”
I would point out, though, that for those words you quote to do their work, they have to be read. The language does not do it “on its own” but as a result of the highly focused attention of readers. This may seem trivial but it is often left out, with some serious consequences. And “reading” can mean “follow up with interpretation”. I cracked up when I googled those lines above and found them in a corporate blog about TED, for example. Who knew that neo-romantic poetry was the emerging interface of the global corporate noosphere?
JASON: Is this Anthropoligist Henry Munn’s “language as an ecstatic activity signification” in action? Is ecstatic utterance the universe talking to itself by encoding and transmitting information? Are we the conduits for the songs of the universe?
RICH: This notion of “ecstatic signification” comes out of Munn’s experiences with Mazatec curandera such as Maria Sabina in Oaxaco, Mexico. Maria Sabina is now recognized as a major poet. “Ecstasy” comes etymologically from the experience of “being beside ourselves.” The mathematician Brian Rotman has written extensively on this idea that we can experience “parallel” rather than “serial” reality. If we aren’t the conduit for the songs of the universe, then who is? I would add, of course, that so too are the Blue Whales, and the cardinals, and the grasshoppers. Mice sing courtship songs too, and Siegel observed a muskrat in mourning who ate Hawaian Woodrose seeds as a part of it Those seeds have LSA in them, a potent ecodelic. I know why the grieving mouse sings!
JASON: How do psychedelics and marijuana or other natural ecstatic states expand our communion with the dimension of the noosphere? Are these drugs like “modems” that plug us in?
RICH: We really need much more research to answer this question, but I think a more useful metaphor than “modems that plug us in” would be “knobs that allow us to turn down the self and tune in the Self.” Great chemists such as Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols have explored the “structure/function” relationship of psychedelic compounds, and found that you can’t reliably predict the effect of a compound from its form. You have to test it. So in the book I take the perspective of “first person science” – seeking answers from my own subjective experience as well as the first person reports of others. The 2006 Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin (Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance) shows pretty definitively that experiments from 1962 (The Good Friday Experiment) were correct to associate psychedelics with “mystic experience.” Within the vast history of mystical experience, a pattern seems to emerge: Perceiving and experiencing the immense power of processes external to our selves, we can experience what early researcher Walter Pahnke (among others) described as “ego death”:
“During the mystical experience when the experiencer has lost individuality and become part of a Reality Greater-than-self, paradoxically, something of the self remains to record the experience in memory. One of the greatest fears about human death is that personal individual existence and memory will be gone forever. Yet having passed through psychological ego death in the mystical experience, a person still preserves enough self-consciousness so that at least part of the individual memory is not lost. (Pahnke, p. 17) ”
If our experiences are highly tuneable by the language we use to describe them, we might rethink the phrase “ego death” as being rather easily misunderstood. I suppose that could be a virtue. Now what I call the “ecodelic experience” is less about “losing the self” than “tuning to the ecoysystem.” This is what Darwin was doing when, at the end of the Origin of Species, he “contemplated” the interconnection of all living things:
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us”
How did Darwin perceive this interconnection? He didn’t simply figure it out intellectually – he perceived it. And in order to perceive it, he had to experience something like the ecological contextualization of his own life. He perceived not only THAT he was interconnected with his ecosystem (itself veritably “made” of these interconnections”), but he perceived the SCALE of his being in relation to the scale of the ecosystem. Most of us feel this when we look up at a clear star filled sky at night if we are fortunate enough to find ourselves outside of the light pollution of urban areas.
The best model I know of for mapping that scalar difference between humans and their ecosystems happens to be the psychologist Roland Fischer’s model of what he called the “hallucination/perception continuum.” Fischer, who studied the effect of psilocybin (a compound of found in “magic mushrooms” and the compound tested in the aforementioned Good Friday experiment), described a continuum between hallucination and ordinary perception that is defined by the sensory/motor ratio – the ratio between the amount of sensory information we receive and our ability to act physically to respond to or verify it. When sensory input increases and there is no corresponding increasing in motor capacities, hallucination is the result. Note in this sense for Fischer the hallucination is a “real” perception of our breakdown in ordinary modeling tactics. This has interesting resonances with Kant’s theory of the sublime, and in ego death we may see the experience of this mismatch between our sensory input and our ability to organize it.Maybe that is why reality seems to be asymptotically approaching a psychedelic world view – consciousness shifts in response to the vast increase of information, changing in kind on the same scale as the psychedelic “turn on.”
Needless to say, more research is needed.
JASON: Buckminster Fuller described humans as “pattern integrities”, Ray Kurzweil says we are “patterns of information”. James Gleick’s new book, The Information, says that”information may be more primary than matter”.. what do you make of this? And if we indeed are complex patterns, how can we hack the limitations of biology and entropy to preserve our pattern integrity indefinitely?
RICH: First: It is important to remember that the history of the concept and tools of“information” is full of blindspots – we seem to be constantly tempted to underestimate the complexity of any given system needed to make any bit of information meaningful or useful. Caitlin, Kolmogorov Stephan Wolfram and John Von Neumann each came independently to the conclusion thatinformation is only meaningful when it is “run” – you can’t predict the outcome of even many trivial programs without running the program.So to say that “information may be more primary than matter” we have to remember that “information” does not mean “free from constraints.” Thermodynamics – including entropy – remains. Molecular and informatic reductionism – the view that you can best understand the nature of a biological system by cutting it up into the most significant bits, e.g. DNA – is a powerful model that enables us to do things with biological systems that we never could before. Artist Eduardo Kac collaborated with a French scientist to make a bioluminescent bunny. That’s new! But sometimes it is so powerful that we forget its limitations. The history of the human genome project illustrates this well. AND the human genome is incredibly interesting. It’s just not the immortality hack many thought it would be.
In this sense biology is not a limitation to be “transcended” (Kurzweil), but a medium of exploration whose constraints are interesting and sublime. On this scale of ecosystems, “death” is not a “limitation” but an attribute of a highly dynamic interactive system. Death is an attribute of life. Viewing biology as a “limitation” may not be the best way to become healthy and thriving beings.
Now, that said, looking at our characteristics as “patterns of information” can be immensely powerful, and I work with it at the level of consciousness as well as life. Thinking of ourselves as “dynamic patterns of multiply layered and interconnected self transforming information” is just as accurate of a description of human beings as “meaningless noisy monkeys who think they see god”, and is likely to have much better effects. A nice emphasis on this “pattern” rather than the bits that make it up can be found in Carl Sagan’s “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
JASON: Richard Dawkins declared in 1986 that “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions, […] If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” How would you explain the relationship between information technology and the reality of the physical world?
RICH: Again, information is indeed physical. We can treat a sequence of information as abstraction and take it out of its context – like a quotation or a jellyfish gene spliced into a rabbit to enable it to glow. We can compress information, dwindling the resources it takes to store or process it. But “Information, words, instructions” all require physical instantiation to even be “information, words, instructions.” Researcher Rolf Landauer showed back in the 1960s that even erasure is physical. So I actually think throbbing gels and oozes and slime mold and bacteria eating away at the garbage gyre are very important when we wish to “understand” life. I actually think Dawkins gets it wrong here – he is talking about “modeling” life, not “understanding” it. Erwin Schrodinger, the originator of the idea of the genetic code and therefore the beginning of the “informatic” tradition of biology that Dawkins speaks in here, knew this very well and insisted on the importance of first person experience for understanding.
So while I find these metaphors useful, that is exactly what they are: metaphors. There is a very long history to the attempt to model words and action together: Again, John 1:1 is closer to Dawkin’s position here than he may be comfortable with: “In the Beginning was the word, and the word was god, and the word was with god” is a way of working with this capacity of language to bring phenomena into being. It is really only because we habitually think of language as “mere words” that we continually forget that they are a manifestation of a physical system and that they have very actual effects not limited to the physics of their utterance – the words “I love you” can have an effect much greater than the amount of energy necessary to utter them. Our experiences are highly tuneable by the language we use to describe them.
JASON: Talk about the mycelial archetype. Author Paul Stamet compares the pattern of the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure…. what is the connection? what is the pattern that connects here?
RICH: First things first: Paul Stamets is a genius and we should listen to his world view carefully and learn from it. Along with Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, whose work I borrow from extensively in Darwin’s Pharmacy (as well as many others), Stamets is asking us to contemplate and act on the massive interconnection between all forms of life. This is a shift in worldview that is comparable to the Copernican shift from a geocentric cosmos – it is a shift toward interconnection and consciousness of interconnection. And I like how you weave in Gregory Bateson’s phrase “the pattern that connects” here, because Bateson (whose father, William Bateson, was one of the founders of modern genetics) continuously pointed toward the need to develop ways of perceiving the whole. The “mycelial archetype”, as you call it, is a reliable and rather exciting way to recall the whole: What we call “mushrooms” are really the fruiting bodies of an extensive network of cross connection.
That fuzz growing in an open can of tomato paste in your fridge – mycelium. So even opening our refrigerator – should we be lucky enough to have one, with food in it – can remind us that what we take to be reality is is an actuality only appearance – a sliver, albeit a significant one for our world, of the whole. That fuzz can remind us that (1) appearance and reality or not the same thing at all and (2) beyond appearance there is a massive interconnection in unity. This can help remind us who and what we really are.
With the word ‘archetype”, you of course invoke the psychologist Carl Jung who saw archetypes as templates for understanding, ways of organizing our story of the world. There are many archetypes – the Hero, the Mother, the Trickster, the sage. They are very powerful because they help stitch together what can seem to be a chaotic world – that is both their strength and their weakness. It is a weakness because most of the time we are operating within an archetype and we don’t even know it, and we don’t know therefore that we can change our archetype. By experimenting with a different archetype – imagining, for example, the world through the lens of a 2400 year old organism that is mostly invisible to a very short lived and recent species becoming aware of its creative responsibility in altering the planet – is incredibly powerful, and in Darwin’s Pharmacy I am trying to offer a way to experiment with the idea of plant planet as well as “mycelium” archetype. One powerful aspect of the treating the mycelium as our archetype as humanity is that it is “distributed” – it does not operate via a center of control but through cross connection “distributed” over a space. Anything we can do to remember both our individuation and our interconnection is timely – we experience the world as individuals, and our task is to discover our nature within the larger scale reality of our dense ecological interconnection. In the book I point to the Upanishad’s “Tat Tvam Asi” as a way of comprehending how we can both be totally individual and an aspect of the whole.
JASON: You’ve talked about the ecstasy of language and the role of rhetoric in shaping reality.. These notions echo some of Terence McKenna’s ideas about language… He calls language an”ecstatic activity of signification”… and says that for the “inspired one, it is almost as if existence is uttering itself through him”… Can you expand on this? How does language create reality??
RICH: It’s incredibly fun and insightful to echo Terence McKenna. He’s really in this shamanic bard tradition that goes all the back to Empedocles at least, and is distributed widely across the planet. He’s got a bit of Whitman in him with his affirmation of the erotic aspects of enlightenment. He was Emerson speaking to a Lyceum crowd remixed through rave culture. Leary and McKenna were resonating with the irish bard archetype. And Terrence was echoing Henry Munn, who was echoing Maria Sabina, whose chants and poetics can make her seem like Echo herself – a mythological story teller and poet (literally “sound”) who so transfixes Hera (Zeus’s wife) that Zeus can consort with nymphs. Everywhere we look there are allegories of sexual selection’s role in the evolution of poetic & shamanic language!
And Terrence embodies the spirit of eloquence, helping translate our new technological realities (e.g. virtual reality, a fractal view of nature, radical ecology) and the states of mind that were likely to accompany them. Merlin Donald writes of the effects of “external symbolic storage” on human culture – as a onetime student of McLuhan’s, Donald was following up on Plato’s insights I mentioned above that writing changes how we think, and therefore, who we are. Human culture is going through a fantastic “reality crisis” wherein we discover the creative role we play in nature.Our role in global climate change – not to mention our role in dwindling biodiversity – is the “shadow” side of our increasing awareness that humans have a radical creative responsibility for their individual and collective lives. And our lives are inseparable from the ecosystems with which we are enmeshed. THAT is reality. To the extent that we can gather and focus our attention on retuning our relation towards ecosystems in crisis, language can indeed shape reality. We’ll get the future we imagine, not necessarily the one we deserve.
JASON: Robert Anton Wilson spoke about “reality tunnels”…. These ‘constructs’ can limit our perspectives and perception of reality, they can trap us, belittle us, enslave us, make us miserable or set us free… How can we hack our reality tunnel? Is it possible to use rhetoric and/or psychedelics to “reprogram” our reality tunnel?
RICH: We do nothing but program and reprogram our reality tunnels! Seriously, the Japanese reactor crisis follows on the BP oil spill as a reminder that we are deeply interconnected on the level of infrastructure – technology is now planetary in scale, so what happens here effects somebody, sometimes Everybody, there. These infrastructures – our food sheds, our energy grid, our global media – run on networks, protocols, global standards, agreements: language, software, images, databases and their mycelial networks. The historian Michel Foucault called these “discourses”, but we need to connect these discourses to the nonhuman networks with which they are enmeshed, and globalization has been in part about connecting discourses to each other across the planet. Ebola ends up in Virginia, Starbucks in Hong Kong. This has been true for a long time, of course – Mutual Assured Destruction was planetary in scale and required a communication and control structure linking, for example, a Trident submarine under the arctic ice sheet – remember that? – to a putatively civilian political structure Eisenhower rightly warned us about: the military industrial complex. The moon missions illustrate this principle as well – we remember what was said as much as what else was done, and what was said, for a while, seem to induce a sense of truly radical and planetary possibility.
So if we think of words as a description of reality rather than part of the infrastructure of reality, we miss out on the way different linguistic patterns act as catalysts for different realities. I call these “rhetorical softwares”. In my first two books, before I really knew about Wilson’s work or had worked through Korzybski with any intensity, I called these “rhetorical softwares.”
Now the first layer of our reality tunnel is our implicit sense of self – this is the only empirical reality any of us experiences – what we subjectively experience. RAW was a brilliant analyst of the ways experience is shaped by the language we use to describe it. One of my favorite examples from his work is his observation that in English, “reality” is a noun, so we start to treat it as a “thing”, when in fact reality, this cosmos, is also quite well mapped as an action – a dynamic unfolding for 13.7 billion years. That is a pretty big mismatch between language and reality, and can give us a sense that reality is inert, dead, lifeless, “concrete”, and thus not subject to change. By experimenting with what Wilson, following scientist John Lilly, called “metaprograms”, we can change the maps that shape the reality we inhabit. Ecodelics seem to help induce a map of self that includes rather than excludes the scale of our ecosystemic interconnection, Pahnke’s Reality “Greater-than-self”. I should add that I am writing about this because this was something I consistently observed in m own experiences. When the book went to press, I learned that Arne Naess, the founder of Deep Ecology, was profoundly influenced by his experiences of LSD. Howard Odum, another ecologist, tried to help metaprogram us into a more dynamic and interconnected sense of ecology and thermodynamics with his language of “energese”.
JASON: The film Inception explored the notion that our inner world can be a vivid, experiential dimension, and that we can hack it, and change our reality… what do you make of this?
RICH: The whole contemplative tradition insists on this dynamic nature of consciousness. “Inner” and “outer” are models for aspects of reality – words that map the world only imperfectly. Our “inner world” – subjective experience – is all we ever experience, so if we change it obviously we will see a change in what we label “external” reality it is of course part of and not separable from. One of the maps we should experiment with, in my view, is this “inner” and “outer” one – this is why one of my aliases is “mobius.” A mobius strip helps makes clear that “inside” and “outside” are… labels. As you run your finger along a mobius strip, the “inside” becomes “outside” and the “outside” becomes “inside.”.
JASON: Can we give put inceptions out into the world?
RICH: We do nothing but! And, it is crucial to add, so too does the rest of our ecosystem. Bacteria engage in quorum sensing, begin to glow, and induce other bacteria to glow – this puts their inceptions into the world. Thanks to the work of scientists like Anthony Trewavas, we know that plants engage in signaling behavior between and across species and even kingdoms: orchids “throw” images of female wasps into the world, attracting male wasps, root cells map the best path through the soil. The whole blooming confusion of life is signaling, mapping and informing itself into the world. The etymology of “inception” is “to begin, take in hand” – our models and maps are like imagined handholds on a dynamic reality.
JASON: What is the relationship between psychedelics and information technology? How are ipods, computers and the internet related to LSD?
RICH: This book is part of a trilogy on the history of information in the life sciences. So, first: psychedelics and biology. It turns out that molecular biology and psychedelics were important contexts for each other. I first started noticing this when I found that many people who had taken LSD were talking about their experiences in the language of molecular biology – accessing their DNA and so forth. When I learned that psychedelic experience was very sensitive to“set and setting” – the mindset and context of their use – I wanted to find out how this language of molecular biology was effecting people’s experiences of the compounds. In other words, how did the language affect something supposedly caused by chemistry?
Tracking the language through thousands of pages, I found that both the discourse of psychedelics and molecular biology were part of the “informatic vision” that was restructuring the life sciences as well as the world, and found common patterns of language in the work of Timothy Leary (the Harvard psychologist) and Francis Crick (who won the Nobel prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for determining the structure of DNA in 1954), so in 2002 I published an article describing the common “language of information” spoken by Leary and Crick. I had no idea that Crick had apparently been using LSD when he was figuring out the structure of DNA. Yes, that blew my mind when it came out in 2004. I feel like I read that between the lines of Crick’s papers, which gave me confidence to write the rest of the book about the feedback between psychedelics and the world we inhabit.
The paper did hone in on the role that LSD played in the invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) – Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel prize for the invention of this method of making copies of a sequence of DNA, talked openly of the role that LSD played in the process of invention. Chapter 4 of the book looks to use of LSD in “creative problem solving” studies of the 1960s. These studies – hard to imagine now, 39 years into the War on Drugs, but we can Change the Archetype – suggest that used with care, psychedelics can be part of effective training in remembering how to discern the difference between words and things, maps and territories. In short, this research suggested that psychedelics were useful for seeing the limitations of words as well as their power, perhaps occasioned by the experience of the linguistic feedback loops between language and psychedelic experiences that themselves could never be satisfactorily described in language. I argue that Mullis had a different conception of information than mainstream molecular biology – a pragmatic concept steeped in what you can do with words rather than in what they mean. Mullis seems to have thought of information as “algorithms” – recipes of code, while the mainsteam view was thinking of it as implicitly semantically, as “words with meaning.”
Ipods, Internet, etc: Well, in some cases there are direct connections. Perhaps Bill Joy said it best when he said that there was a reason that LSD and Unix were both from Berkeley. What the Doormouse Said by John Markoff came out after I wrote my first paper on Mullis and I was working on the book, and it was really confirmation of a lot of what I seeing indicated by my conceptual model of what is going on, which is as follows:Sexual selection is a good way to model the evolution of information technology. It yields bioluminescence – the most common communication strategy on the planet – chirping insects, singing birds, Peacocks fanning their feathers, singing whales, speaking humans, and humans with internet access.These are all techniques of information production, transformation or evaluation.I am persuaded by Geoffrey Miller’s update of Charles Darwin’s argument that language and mind are sexually selected traits , selected not simply for survival or even the representation of fitness, but for their sexiness. Leary: “Intelligence is the greatest aphrodisiac.” I offer the hypothesis that psychedelics enter the human toolkit as “eloquence adjuncts” – tools and techniques for increasing the efficacy of language to seemingly create reality – different patterns of language ( and other attributes of set and setting) literally causes different experiences. The informatic revolution is about applying this ability to create reality with different “codes” to the machine interface. Perhaps this is one of the reason people like Mitch Kapor (a pioneer of computer spreadsheets), Stewart Brand (founder of a pre-internet computer commons known as the Well) and Bob Wallace (one of the original Microsoft seven and an early proponent of shareware), Mark Pesce were or are all psychonauts.
JASON: Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case has written about Techno-social wormholes.. the instant compression of time and space created every time we make a telephone call… What do you make of this compression of time and space made possible by the engineering “magic” of technology?
RICH: It’s funny the role that the telephone call plays as an example in the history of our attempts to model the effects of information technologies. William Gibson famously defined cyberspace as the place where a telephone call takes place. (Gibson’s coinage of the term “cyberspace” is a good example of an “inception”) Avital Ronell wrote about Nietzsche’s telephone call to the beyond and interprets the history of philosophy according to a “telephonic logic”. When I was a child my father once threw our telephone into the atlantic ocean – that was what he made of the magic of that technology, at least in one moment of anger. This was back in the day when Bell owned your phone and there was some explaining to do. This magic of compression has other effects – my dad got phone calls all day at work, so when was at home he wanted to turn it off. The only way he knew to turn it off was to rip it out of the wall – there was no modular plug, just a wire into the wall – and throw it into the ocean.
So there is more than compression going on here: Deleuze and Guattari, along with the computer scientist Pierre Levy after them, call it “deterritorialization”. The differences between “here” and “there” are being constantly renegotiated as our technologies of interaction develop.Globalization is the collective effect of these deterritorializations and reterritorializations at any given moment.
And the wormhole example is instructive: the forces that enable such collapse of space and time as the possibility of time travel would likely tear us to smithereens. The tensions and torsions of this deterritorialization at part of what is at play in the Wikileaks revolutions, this compression of time and space offers promise for distributed governance as well as turbulence. Time travel through wormholes, by the way, is another example of an inception – Carl Sagan was looking for a reasonable way to transport his fictional aliens in Contact, called Cal Tech physicist Skip Thorne for help, and Thorne came up with the idea.
JASON: The film Vanilla Sky explored the notion of a scientifically-induced “lucid dream” where we can live forever and our world is built out of our memories and “sculpted moment to moment and lived with the romantic abandon of a summer day or the feeling of a great movie or a pop song you always loved”. Can we sculpt ‘real’ reality as if it were a “lucid dream”?
RICH: Some traditions model reality as a lucid dream. The Diamond Sutra tells us that to be enlightened we must view reality as “a phantom, a dew drop, a bubble.” This does not mean, of course, that reality does not exist, only that appearance has no more persistence than a dream and that what we call “reality” is our map of reality. When we wake up, the dream that had been so compelling is seen to be what it was: a dream, nothing more or less. Dreams do not lack reality – they are real patterns of information. They just aren’t what we usually think they are. Ditto for “ordinary” reality. Lucid dreaming has been practiced by multiple traditions for a long time – we can no doubt learn new ways of doing so. In the meantime, by recognizing and acting according to the practice of looking beyond appearances, we can find perhaps a smidgeon more creative freedom to manifest our intentions in reality.
JASON: Paola Antonelli, design curator of MoMa, has written about Existenz Maximum, the ability of portable music devices like the ipod to create”customized realities”, imposing a soundtrack on the movie of our own life. This sounds empowering and godlike- can you expand on this notion? How is technology helping us design every aspect of both our external reality as well as our internal, psychological reality?
RICH: Well, the Upanishads and the Book of Luke both suggest that we “get our inner Creator on”, the former by suggesting that “Tat Tvam Asi” – there is an aspect of you that is connected to Everything, and the latter by recommending that we look not here or there for the Kingdom of God, but “within.” So if this sounds “god like”, it is part of a long and persistent tradition. I personally find the phrase “customized realities” redundant given the role of our always unique programs and metaprograms. So what we need to focus on his: to which aspect of ourselves do we wish to give this creative power? These customized realities could be enpowering and god like for corporations that own the material, or they could enpower our planetary aspect that unites all of us, and everything in between. It is, as always, the challenge of the magus and the artist to decide how we want to customize reality once we know that we can.
JASON: The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns”… Some advocates of psychedelic therapy have said that certain chemicals heighten our perception of patterns..They help! us “see more”. What exactly are they helping us understand?
RICH: Understanding! One of the interesting bits of knowledge that I found in my research was some evidence that psychonauts scored better on the Witkin Embedded Figure test, a putative measure of a human subject’s ability to “distinguish a simple geometrical figure embedded in a complex colored figure.” When we perceive the part within the whole, we can suddenly get context, understanding.
JASON SILVA: An article pointing to the use of psychedelics as catalysts for breakthrough innovation in silicon valley says that users …”employ these cognitive catalysts, de-condition their thinking periodically and come up with the really big connectivity ideas arrived at wholly outside the linear steps of argument. These are the gestalt-perceiving, asterism-forming “aha’s!” that connect the dots and light up the sky with a new archetypal pattern.”
This seems to echo what other intellectuals have been saying for ages. You referred toCannabis as “an assassin of referentiality, inducing a butterfly effect in thought. Cannabis induces a parataxis wherein sentences resonate together and summon coherence in the bardos between one statement and another.”
Baudelaire also wrote about cannabis as inducing an artificial paradise of thought:
“…It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft. […and eventually]… Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.”
Anthropologist Henry Munn wrote that:
“Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth… At times… the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for: a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, astonishing. […] For the inspired one, it is as if existence were uttering itself through him […]
Can you expand a bit on how certain ecodelics (as well as marijuana) can help us de-condition our thinking, have creative breakthroughs as well as intellectual catharsis? How is it that “intoxication” could, under certain conditions, actually improve our cognition and creativity and contribute to the collective intelligence of the species?
RICH: I would point, again, to Pahnke’s description of ego death. This is by definition an experience when our maps of the world are humbled. In the breakdown of our ordinary worldview – such as when a (now formerly) secular being such as myself finds himself feeling unmistakably sacred – we get a glimpse of reality without our usual filters. It is just not possible to use the old maps, so we get even an involuntary glimpse of reality. This is very close to the Buddhist practice of exhausting linguistic reference through chanting or Koans – suddenly we see the world through something besides our verbal mind. Ramana Maharshi says that in the silence of the ego we perceive reality – reality IS the breakdown of the ego. Aldous Huxley, who was an extraordinarily adroit and eloquent writer with knowledge of increasingly rare breadth and depth, pointed to a quote by William Blake when trying to sum up his experience: the doors of perception were cleansed. This is a humble act, if you think about it: Huxley, faced with the beauty and grandeur of his mescaline experience, offers the equivalent of ‘What he said!”. Huxley also said that psychedelics offered a respite from “the throttling embrace of the self”, suggesting that we see the world without the usual filters of our egoic self.
The breakdown of our worldview can be very distressing as well as liberating, of course, and this is why it is crucial now to think about the best conditions under which ecodelics (a category that includes cannabis) should be used by human beings. First of all, that context should not be criminalized – imagine the effect of that “programming”. Now that medical marijuana is thankfully being legally dispensed in states across the US and around the world, we should remember how important the context of use is: patients should think about the best possible and most healthful contexts and programming for the use of their medicine. And if you look carefully at the studies by pioneers such as Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman that you reference, as I do in the book, you will see that great care was taken to compose the best contexts for their studies. Subjects, for example, were told not to think about personal problems but to focus on their work at hand, and, astonishingly enough, it seems to have worked. These are very sensitive technologies and we really need much more research to explore their best use. This means more than studying their chemical function – it means studying the complex experiences human beings have with them. Step one has to be accepting that ecodelics are and always have been an integral part of human culture for some subset of the population.
JASON: What do you make of the stoned-ape hypothesis, proposed by Terrence McKenna, that self-reflective consciousness was kick-started by psychedelic chemicals?
RICH: Well, I like it very much as a catalyst for discussing the the co-evolution of mind. It seems to really freak people out that something in our diet – rather than in, say, our DNA – kick started consciousness, so that helps highlight our attachment to this idea that we are somehow separate from the ecosystem out of which we have only very recently evolved.Of course it resonates with anybody who has ever had a psychedelic experience precisely because of the sensitivity to rhetorical conditions I discuss above: we can observe the creative role that language plays in our experience, triggering an “aha” moment about the power of language. And in this instance we find ourselves becoming examples of precisely stoned primates having insights. The hypothesis, like my own (the ecodelic hypothesis) has the strength of being (somewhat) verifiable through first person experience. One of the things I want to do is collect examples of people coming up with this theory independently. The Beat poet Michael Corso had a routine focusing on morning glory seeds triggering human consciousness in the 1970s, for example, although he may have been remixing McKenna.
And there has been very strong work on animal use of psychedelics by researchers such as Samorini and Siegel, so it isn’t even controversial to suggest that ecodelic use is part of animal culture. Mandrilles have been observed using an ecodelic root, Iboga, in courtship. My argument is that the best model for ecodelic use in human culture is as “eloquence adjuncts” – they can have a very interesting and direct effect on our use of language, just as the bow and arrow has an effect on our ability to launch projectiles with precision and velocity. Think of how many of us use coffee spur the writing process. So Darwin’s, Pharmacy suggests ecodelics kickstart eloquence – the capacity to ‘speak out” and focus attention on the patterns within that speaking and generate new patterns. For a “symbolic species” that courts not only by butting heads (what Darwin called the “law of battle”) but through what Darwin called “charm” – birdsong, discourse, poetry – the use of ecodelics could very well be the difference between leaving progeny and not leaving progeny. Consciousness – the awareness of awareness – would be an emergent phenomenon that develops out of this intensive competition for eloquence. Tweet that! Obviously this is just a schematic model, with much more in the book. More research is needed!
JASON: Kevin Kelly refers to technological evolution as following the momentum begun at the big bang- he has stated:
“…there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way. The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense. If you take the amount of energy that flows through one gram per second in a galaxy, it is increased when it goes through a star, and it is actually increased in life…We don’t realize this. We think of the sun as being a hugely immense amount of energy. Yet the amount of energy running through a sunflower per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun. Actually, it’s so dense that when it’s multiplied out, the sunflower actually has a higher amount of energy flowing through it. “..Animals have even higher energy usage than the plant, and a jet engine has even higher than an animal. The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know. In fact, if it was to send it through any faster, it would melt or explode. It is so energy-dense that it is actually at the edge of explosion.”… can you comment on the implications of what he’s saying here?
RICH: I think maps of “continuity” are crucial and urgently needed. We can model the world as either “discrete” – made up of parts – or “continuous” – composing a whole – to powerful effect. Both are in this sense true. This is not “relativism” but a corollary of that creative freedom to choose our models that seems to be an attribute of consciousness. The mechanistic worldview extracts, separates and reconnects raw materials, labor and energy in ways that produce astonishing order as well as disorder (entropy). By mapping the world as discrete – such as the difference between one second and another – and uniform – to a clock, there is no difference between one second and another – we have transformed the planet. Consciousness informed by discrete maps of reality has been an actual geological force in a tiny sliver of time. In so doing, we have have transformed the biosphere. So you can see just how actual this relation between consciousness, its maps, and earthly reality is. This is why Vernadksy, a geophysicist, thought we needed a new term for the way consciousness functions as a geological force: noosphere.
These discrete maps of reality are so powerful that we forget that they are maps. Now if the world can be cut up into parts, it is only because it forms a unity. A Sufi author commented that the unity of the world was both the most obvious and obscure fact. It is obvious because our own lives and the world we inhabit can be seen to continue without any experienced interruption – neither the world nor our lives truly stops and starts. This unity can be obscure because in a literal sense we can’t perceive it with our senses – this unity can only be “perceived” by our minds. We are so effective as separate beings that we forget the whole for the part. The world is more than a collection of parts, and we can quote Carl Sagan: “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” Equally beautiful is what Sagan follows up with: “The cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff.”Perhaps this is why models such as Kelly’s feel so powerful: reminding ourselves that there is a continuity between the Big Bang and ourselves means we are an aspect of something unfathomably grand, beautiful, complex and unbroken. This is perhaps the “grandeur” Darwin was discussing. And when we experience that grandeur it can help us think and act in aways appropriate to a geological force.
I am not sure about the claims for energy that Kelly is making – I would have to see the context and the source of his data – but I do know that when it comes to thermodynamics, what he is saying rings true. We are dissipative structures far from equilibrium, meaning that we fulfill the laws of thermodynamics. Even though biological systems such as ourselves are incredibly orderly – and we export that order through our maps onto and into the world – we also yield more entropy than our absence. Living systems, according to an emerging paradigm of Stanley Salthe, Rob Swenson, the aforementioned Margulis and Sagan, Eric Schneider, James J. kay and others, maximize entropy, and the universe is seeking to dissipate ever greater amounts of entropy. Order is a way to dissipate yet more energy. We’re thermodynamic beings, so we are always on the prowl for new ways to dissipate energy as heat and create uncertainty (entropy), and consciousness helps us find ever new ways to do so. (In case you are wondering, Consciousness is the organized effort to model reality that yields ever increasing spirals of uncertainty in Deep Time. But you knew that.) It is perhaps in this sense that, again following Carl Sagan, “ We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” That is pretty great map of continuity.
What I don’t understand in Kelly’s work, and I need to look at with more attention, is the discontinuity he posits between biology and technology. In my view our maps have made us think of technology as different in kind from biology, but the global mycelial web of fungi suggests otherwise, and our current view of technology seems to intensify this sense of separation even as we get interconnected through technology. I prefer Noosphere to what Kelly calls the Technium because it reminds us of the ways we are biologically interconnected with our technosocial realities. Noosphere sprouts from biosphere.
JASON: There is this notion of increasing complexity… Yet in a universe where entropy destroys almost everything, here we are, the cutting edge of evolution, taking the reigns and accelerating this emergent complexity.. Kurzweil says that this makes us “very important”: “…It turns out that we are central, after all. Our ability to create models–virtual realities–in our brains, combined with ou modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.” What do you think?
RICH: Well, I think from my remarks already you can see that I agree with Kurzweil here and can only suggest that it is for this very reason that we must be very creative, careful and cunning with our models. Do we model the technologies that we are developing according to the effects they will have on the planetary whole? Only rarely, though this is what we are trying to do at the Penn State Center for Nanofutures, as are lots of people involved in Science, Technology and Society as well as engineering education. When we develop technologies – and that is the way psychedelics arrived in modern culture, as technologies – we must model their effects not only on the individuals who use them, but on the whole of our ecosystem and planetary society. If our technological models are based on the premise that this is a dead planet – and most of them very much are, one is called all kinds of names if you suggest otherwise – animist, vitalist, Gaian intelligence agent, names I wear with glee – then we will end up with a asymptotically dead planet. Consciousness will, of course, like the Terminator, “Be Back” should we perish, but let us hope that it learns to experiment better with its maps and learns to notice reality just a little bit more. I am actually an optimist on this front and think that a widespread “aha” moment is occurring where there is a collective recognition of the feedback loops that make up our technological & biological evolution.
Again, I don’t know why Kurzweil seems to think that technological evolution is discontinuous with biological evolution – technology is nested within the network of “wetwares” that make it work, and our wetwares are increasingly interconnected with our technological infrastructure, as the meltdowns in Japan demonstrate along with the dependence of many of us – we who are more bacterial than human by dry weight – upon a network of pharmaceuticals and electricity for continued life. The E. coli outbreak in Europe is another case in point – our biological reality is linked with the technological reality of supply chain management. Technological evolution is biological evolution enabled by the maps of reality forged by consciousness.
JASON: Andrew Leonard beautiful puts it like this: “…Computers, like psychedelic drugs, are tools for mind expansion, for revelation and for personal discovery. And to anyone who has experienced a drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect wirelessly to the Internet, and search for your dreams with Google: the power and the glory of the computing universe that exists now … does pulsate with a destabilizing, revelatory psychic power.” Can you comment on this?
RICH: Albert Hoffmann accidentally discovered the effects of LSD-25 in 1943 while preparing a batch of the compound at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. His account of the experience fits squarely within the contemplative mystic tradition even while Hoffmann worked in a modern technological context. Part of the impact of LSD in particular on our cultures was no doubt due to the fact that it came out of modern chemistry and its technological methods and contexts. Erik Davis talks about “techgnosis” – the continued effervescence of “magical” traditions through technology. Whereas technology for many promised the “disenchantment” of the world –the rationalization of this world of the contemplative spirit as everything became a Machine – here was mystical contemplative experience manifesting itself directly within what sociologist Max Weber called the “iron cage of modernity”, Gaia bubbling up through technological “Babylon.”
Now many contemplatives have sought to share their experiences through writing – pages and pages of it. As we interconnect through information technology, we perhaps have the opportunity to repeat this enchanted contemplative experience of radical interconnection on another scale, and through other means. Just say Yes to the Noosphere!
Jason Silva is a media personality and Fellow at the Hybrid Reality Instiute
