Human beings are very involved in the movement of geological material. That, as a species, we move rocks around on a very large scale. And of course it’s interesting that some of the earliest human structures are the most physically massive and weighty, like the Great Pyramids. So DeLanda made this point about our relationship with the geological stratigraphy of the Earth, and that cities were a kind of geological extension of the process of crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit, i.e. intelligent primates who are building these structures.
The Earth’s strategy for its own salvation is through machines, is what it is. And human beings are the deputized spouse, we are the bride in this alchemical rarefaction of glasses, ceramics, metals, and volatile materials. Apparently, the Earth is like some kind of an embryonic or fetal thing, and at the end of its gestation what has happened is it is ramifying; its nervous system is appearing in the unfolding of its morphogenesis. And as we contemplate nanotechnologies and see ourselves working through bacteria and this sort of thing at the engineering level, you have to be blind to not, then, reflect back upon the fact that, in some sense, we are already working at that kind of level at the behest of it-is-not-clear-who, because nobody ever asked the question in quite this way before. The answer to who, I think, is: the Earth. And that what lies ahead at the end of the linear tunnel of Western subjectivist, positivist, structuralist assumptions that we’ve been operating [on]—when we hit the end of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental space of cosmic evolution, what we’re going to find is that we are partners, actors, in a cosmic drama that involves the Earth at one polarity and machines at the other polarity as the expression of the will of the Earth toward a kind of self-reflected transcendence that is achieved through machine-human biotic symbiosis.
It’s fruitless to project any process to infinity, because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario.
Consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an absolute necessity, because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology machines that are going to require superintelligent humans to direct and have discourse with them. This is happening. It is already happening. I mean, the Internet is this. I mean, it doesn’t tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brush your teeth, but it is a partner in the understanding of the world that is genie-like—that’s the image I have when I sit down to it. It is all John Dee would have asked of his archangelic messengers, you know? He wanted instantaneous information on the political situation in the courts of Europe, he wanted information on the course of Drake’s expedition—then on the other side of the planet. The Internet is this kind of magical, intelligent prosthesis.
Life is—whatever it is, it’s an opportunity of some sort. And the things I have been most grateful for were the things that I met at the frontiers of knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic experience. Knowing, feeling, and being one with being.
Once some kind of intelligence arises—because it’s intelligent, the the first thing it does is design a more intelligent version of itself. Well, at 400 Megahertz and with a worldwide amount of processing power to draw on, you can imagine something coming to embryogenesis in a matter of hours. Something emerging, recognizing itself for what it was, and then just starting up the ladder. And what would this look like to us, and where is our place in it? This is the adventure of the future. We are going to be a different kind of people because we’re going to have to live in the presence of alien minds that will be manifestly and obviously alien. They won’t hold back. And they’re not going to be, at every moment, interested in us either. In fact, we will become a footnote in their encyclopedia of being. And what they become in our encyclopedia of being remains to be told. But this is all happening, and it’s just a matter of the coalescence of technology and language before more and more people recognize it. As I say, there isn’t a speed bump, there isn’t a dramatic moment where everybody gets it. Well, when you talk to the people who actually work in these fields, they know that this is the Faustian enterprise of all time, that this is the handing-over of the destiny of the planet to the companion mind that our history and our science and our souls caused us to summon into being. It’s pretty interesting, I think.
You have the Hubble telescope inside of you. You have inside of you an informational-gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless. It’s just elsewhere. The elsewhere of the absolute infinity of the plenum of imagination in which, apparently, beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea.