Humans On The Loop 23 - "Our Psychedelic Future" at the Australian Psychedelic Society
We’re switching it up this week to present my recent talk on psychedelic futurism at the first weekly meeting of the Australian Psychedelic Society (Fitzroy Beer Garden, Melbourne, Victoria).
The Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The Irish have a toast: “May you be alive at the end of the world” I’m more Irish than Chinese, and I know this because even though we’re living through total chaos these days, that means unprecedented opportunity for wonder, creativity, discovery, and growth.
- How to enjoy life in an age of mass extinction and the imminent transformation of the human species through genetic engineering
- CRISPR and evolution “in real time,” within the lifespan of “individual” organisms
- The self as a multitude of distinct neural “motifs” and how each of us is a village (or a bouquet)
- Living through “a trans-technological, trans-nature” renaissance
- The sharing economy, nonmonogamy, global citizenship, access vs. ownership as symptoms of a global transition to more freely exchanged modular selfhood
- How each of us is basically the sexually mature larval form of our ancestors and how staying “childlike” has empowered us with special powers as a species
- The future of work as a world in which there are as many different kinds of work as there are people
- The spiritual and philosophical implications of “teledildonics”
- What replaces “privacy” in an age of universal coveillance and mutual accountability
- Why we shouldn’t judge the world and lives of our software based digital human descendants
- Tim Leary’s “Just Say Know” as a better approach to technologies (since all technologies are psychoactive, and so tech and drugs should merit similar approaches)
Memorable Quotes:
“To the extent that we recognize that who we believe ourselves to be is a story our brain is creating instinctively and automatically, we can be more conscious about that, and we can inhabit different self-concepts as it suits us.”
“What we’re learning about the origins of life is that it wasn’t like suddenly the cell occurred, with a membrane already on it, and credit card debt, and alimony payments. This happened in stages. And the first stage, what we believe the first life form to be…was a soup of self-reproducing molecules that didn’t really have clear self-other division. And even now, bacteria are very promiscuous and free about the exchange of their own genetic information with one another.”
“When everyone has a 3D printer at home, you’re not going to go to a dealer. You’re going to print your own drugs.”
“Each of us is the still point at the intersection of colliding infinities.”
“It’s not so much that we’re coming to ‘The End of Jobs’…it’s that we’re coming to a world in which everybody’s jobs is basically unique to them.
“What is a human being? A human being is a pattern that occurs within a field of organization. You’re never the same stuff from moment to moment. Even the same atoms are blinking in and out of virtual particle states. So what are you more fundamentally than a pile of soup and bones? You are the pattern of information that exists within this electromagnetic field. And then…as Gregory Bateson said, information is ‘the difference that makes a difference.’ Information doesn’t exist unless it’s observed. Unless it’s understood. Information and consciousness are two perspectives on the same thing. So to recognize ourselves as, more fundamentally, fields of information, is to recognize ourselves as more fundamentally a nonduality of material and immaterial.”
“The story that we tell about ourselves is something that can be tweaked, hacked, reprogrammed, assumed, dropped. These identities end up becoming more like costumes that we are are able to remove and wear as appropriate.”
“This is part of the anxiety of modern existence: that as we become more and more transparent to one another, as we become more connected, we’re becoming more vulnerable, and our definitions of security have to change accordingly.”
“A good idea is better shared.”
EPISODE ART BY ADAM SCOTT MILLER: http://adamscottmiller.com/
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