What in the world is going on? What is going on? What does it mean to be incarnate in a human body at the end of the twentieth century in a squirrelly culture like this, trying to make sense of your heritage, your opportunities, the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Is it possible to have an overarching viewpoint that is not somehow canned, or cultish, or self-limited in its approach?
Novelty is complexity. It’s connectivity. It’s complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic states that sustain themselves far from equilibrium—that’s you as a body, that’s us as a society, that’s this planet as a living ecosystem. And the interesting thing about this novelty is: any given level of it which is achieved becomes the platform for further advance into novelty.
Everyone is running around saying, you know, “Recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your Irishness, your whateverishness.” And that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric breast-beating.
Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities. And people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things were real. And what is this? It’s a diminution of humanness. You’re choosing to limit yourself to a cultural reality—whether it’s the reality of being Witoto, or Orthodox Jewish, or whatever it is. It’s a smaller world than the simple hardware you were born into this universe with.
It’s almost as though God’s joke on us is to give us so much power and knowledge that we will either transcend ourselves or we will certainly destroy ourselves. Because the power and understanding being given to us is of godlike proportion.
I can feel the AI out there. I know it’s there. I know it’s growing. I know the planet is its embryo. I know the human community is its placenta. What will that kind of intelligence look like? We have no idea. We can imagine super-intelligence, but the first thing super-intelligence will do—in the first five seconds of its existence—it will design itself towards hyper-super-intelligence. And we have no notion of how it will see us. We have the cheerful guidance of Buddhist logic, which leaves us to hope that the super-intelligence will be bodhisattvic in intent. It damn sure better be, because otherwise we will be thoroughly hung out to dry!
Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for Physics by proving that chemical systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. So then, surely, must complex networks behave in the same laws. And we are building the most complex networks ever conceived by the mind of man, and we are making them ever more complex, and we are turning more and more of our cultural functioning over to machines that operate according to criteria but dimly perceived by their designers.
Someone once said plants invented animals to carry them around. Well, I think the Earth invented human beings to build machines, and those machines will be the consciousness of the Earth. Have you not noticed that these machines are made of the Earth? They are made of gold and silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the Earth, organized by primate fingers into more complex arrangements than the Earth could achieve through geological folding, glaciation, volcanism, and what have you. We do the fine-tuning, but the Earth is beginning to think.
If you want a talk about a revolution that went on while nobody was paying attention: you enter the 1990s, the home computer is something that you play Pong on and do word-processing on and it gathers dust in the den. Some time during the 1990s, while we were paying attention to Monica or George Bush or some damn thing, these machines went telepathic! They all talk to each other now! The machine on your desk is tickling a mind in London, a mind in Berlin, a mind in Bangladesh—machine minds! They talk to each other all the time.
We lost our connection to nature when we stopped taking psychedelics. And the reasons we stopped taking psychedelics are complicated and not entirely clear—largely climatological, I think, because I think human consciousness was born in an ambiance of mushroom-taking in a wet Sahara, and that when the Sahara went dry that is the Fall into history. You know, in the story of Genesis—I mean, just read it from that perspective! It’s a hassle over a plant! It’s a hassle over a plant! And what does this plant do? It opens your eyes. There is an incredible passage in Genesis where the owner of the garden is walking in the garden and mumbling to himself, and he says, “If they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will become as we are.” So this was not a public health issue, this was an issue of who will remain stupid and who will remain on top? It was that, if they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will see through this scam and they will become as we are. And so it is forbidden.