Michael Garfield and the host dissect mass extinctions, apocalyptic cults, and DMT entities, challenging the mind-matter duality through UFO encounters where beings described plasma-based life forms. They critique AI's role in replacing human creativity and surveillance capitalism while advocating for integral methodological pluralism to accommodate qualitative data like dreams. The discussion culminates in a vision of unified science that integrates higher-dimensional geometry with consciousness, suggesting that future survival depends on balancing technological efficiency with the conservation of mutual aid networks against inevitable singularity chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Subscribe And Say Thanks00:02:13
Hi everybody.
Just want to say huge thanks to all the new subscribers of the show on the last few episodes.
And if you're new to the show or if you've even watched a few episodes and you haven't yet subscribed, please hammer that subscribe button below the video.
It really helps us a lot.
And we've been getting a little bit of a nudge in the algorithm.
The high priests and priestesses at YouTube have been showing us some love thanks to you guys.
So if you're into paleontology, the future of AI, Or mass extinction events and even UFOs.
We get into all of that on this podcast.
This one was a wild ride.
So, without further ado, please enjoy this insanely fascinating conversation with Michael Garfield.
Dude, I've never seen anybody come so prepared like you just did.
What was that you just scooped into your mouth before we did this?
White vein, kratom.
White vein.
Yeah.
And plus, you got the kratom drink you got.
So you're like fully loaded on kratom.
I live dangerously.
How does that make you feel?
Like I don't need to drink as much coffee.
Really?
Yeah.
So I was telling Egan, when I drink a whole one of these things, I start to feel like really fed up.
I start to feel like slow and drowsy.
I have to drink like maybe three quarters of that to feel good.
Well, good.
I mean, to feel alert at least.
So you got a super high tolerance for kratom.
I feel like a.
My brain hasn't worked the right way since I was 16, and they used to serve bottomless coffee.
They probably still do at the International House of Pancakes.
And so, at 16, it was the only place we could go to stay up late in Kansas City.
And I drank like 27 cups of coffee or something in one night.
That's what happens when your teenagers are unsupervised.
Yeah.
You know, so since then, my biochemistry is just unusual.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Who knows?
Anyway, here we are.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming, dude.
Absolutely.
I'm excited to talk to you today.
You have a.
Weird Shit And Kratom Tolerance00:04:28
You're interested in some really weird shit.
Yeah.
Well, we live in weird times, right?
We live in strange, like weird in my friend and mentor, Eric Davis, Eric with a K, fantastic author and culture critic.
And he likes to say that we live in times of global weirding.
Yeah.
You know, that like global warming is just like a subcategory of this larger phenomenon that includes things like the breakdown of the boundary between the real and the virtual.
The way that our hyper-connected technological infrastructure has made it so that memes ripple through the population faster than ever.
We're kind of all on the inside of each other's heads all the time.
Weirding in that sort of classic British Isles W-Y-R-D sense means to twist.
The weirding of something is to twist the outside and the inside together in a way that is like the weaving of one's fate.
When he talks about global weirding, it's like, well, that's the phenomenon that my friends and I are all principally preoccupied with is what is digital technology?
What are psychedelics?
What are the – all of these different long-term trends doing in this moment that is dissolving the kind of more conventional categories of inside and outside,
of self and other, of being located in a simple address in space and time versus a more complex address like we live in now where it's like, well, where are we exactly?
Something that happens on the other side of the planet affects us.
in a way that it didn't before.
Yeah.
So yeah, I love that stuff.
Your title is paleontologist slash futurist.
What the f*** does that mean?
It means I started in paleontology and did that.
Like I did it semi-professionally for my teenage years.
I was going out to do dinosaur digs in Wyoming with Robert Bakker, who was, one of the principal paleontological consultants for the book and film Jurassic Park, and took me under his wing as a kid and engaged me in a kind of like Socratic learning for years and years.
And then right when I was about to get out of school at the University of Kansas and pursue paleontology as a doctoral student, I read a couple of papers on animal communication and the evolution of intelligence and language that got me interested in these like really, really big questions.
About the history of our planet and what evolution really means and all of this stuff.
These are questions that you can't really pursue easily through a study of the vertebrate paleontological record.
It's beautiful to be out in the badlands and digging up stuff that nobody's ever seen.
There's a kind of nature mysticism of a meditation on silence and wildness involved in that work that I fell in love with.
But then I fell in love with these other questions about.
the evolution of consciousness and then fell in love with the woman who's now my partner who was still had a couple years of school left to do.
So I got kind of stalled out, decided I didn't want to go to grad school and that I wanted to figure out where or I wanted to find a grad school where I could pursue this other stuff.
And there just wasn't a place for it because these kinds of questions in the biological sciences are only addressed through basically like complex systems science, which only until only very recently actually Were there any complex systems grad programs anywhere in the United States or anywhere?
And so there was nowhere to study it.
And everyone was like, don't do this.
You're, you know, you will become the bane of any organization that tries to take you on as a grad student because you're not supposed to be asking big cosmic questions.
You're supposed to be, you know, doing these little tiny things.
Mass Extinctions And Cosmic Questions00:15:52
Right.
You know, your grad advisor gives you some tiny piece of their thing.
Yeah.
It's all very siloed and sort of.
disciplinary fragmentation everywhere.
And so I was like, well, this is dumb.
Like I'm in love with these questions.
So I guess I just have to go pursue them on my own.
And then that leads a person into, you know, like out of thinking about deep time just merely in the past, starting to ask questions about the co-evolution of humans and technology and what we're becoming.
Right?
Like, what are we turning into?
And how is that related to major evolutionary transitions that have happened on the planet in the past, like the origin of cellular life or multicellularity or the atmosphere as a kind of artifact that's created through relationships between plants and animals and fungi?
And so, yeah, all these big questions go through the lens of paleontology, but come out on the other side as kind of practical inquiries into how do we navigate.
The transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere are going through right now.
What does it mean to be a person living through this stuff?
Yeah.
You know, those kinds of things.
So, yeah.
Do you ever go on any dinosaur digs anymore?
I haven't been on one in 20 years.
How many dinosaurs have you dug up?
Oh, that's hard to say because you don't always know that they're coming, the bones are from the same animal.
Oh, really?
Right.
So you don't always get like a perfectly shaped dinosaur, you just find random sporadic. bones.
No, that's gross Hollywood misrepresentation of the actual, you don't just get to sit there with a toothbrush and like, you know, just like in Jurassic Park, like they're just like, oh, hey, look, there's a whole thing here.
It's not like that at all.
It's like some sites are like that and they're very rare in the world.
Like the Gobi Desert Mongolian dinosaur quarries are kind of like that where, you know, the whole animal was buried in a sandstorm or whatever.
And so you just get this perfect skeleton that's coming out of the sand.
But then a lot of places like the Allosaur quarry that we dug up. in Wyoming was an Allosaurus nest that had been buried in a mudslide and then over years the gas from the rotting corpses.
What's an Allosaur?
Oh, it's like a kind of an ancestral relative.
It's not a direct ancestor, but it's kind of like a smaller Tyrannosaurus.
They were the ones that were hunting Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus and stuff in the late Jurassic.
They're really beautiful.
animals about 30 feet long.
They've got three big claws on each hand.
This site showed the behavior of allosaurs as family creatures with advanced parental caregiving.
You could see the way that the parents were bringing chunks of dinosaurs back to the nest and then letting their kids feed on them.
Bakker and his crew actually found the hip bone of an allosaurus that had been Had been fully penetrated by the spike on the tail of a stegosaurus.
And this animal should have died from its wound, but then was clearly nursed back to health because the wound had gotten septic and you could see an abscess in the bone.
But then the animal survived and did not starve to death and healed.
And the inference that you can draw from finding a fossil like that is that its brothers and sisters or its mate or whatever were bringing back food for this animal to eat while it nursed itself to recovery.
And so you have this like, you know, 144 million years ago, you have these really advanced.
Family behaviors that we've kind of taken for granted as something that only humans do or something that only mammals do.
And it turns out that dinosaurs loved each other and took care of each other and helped each other mend broken bones and stuff like this.
But yeah, but that site was totally scattered.
Nail quarry at Como Bluff was totally scattered because as the bones rotted in this mud, the The bones would turn, and so you would get stuff that was completely jumbled.
It was just like a total like Jackson Pollock chaos of bones that, you know, it was like very hard to tell, you know, who died first or what was laying on top of what.
And yeah, so, you know, sometimes you find sites like that where it's just, if something's buried in a real rapid, sudden flood deposit, it's just chaos.
And there's like rocks have been ripped up and deposited on, you know, I mean, you know, this, you know, this stuff is, I hear you talk about younger dryus impact stuff on the show.
And it's like, it's a similar kind of, you know, you're looking at the taphonomy and the stratigraphy.
What is the.
Did paleontologists talk about this?
Like, talk about how the impact affected the Earth and, like, if there were more than one?
I know it was like the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatan was the one that took out the dinosaurs removed.
Is it.
Do people think that there could have been more than one impact?
And where can you find the most dinosaur bones?
Oh, well, okay.
So the.
Sorry, that was like five questions.
Yeah.
So actually, I just saw, I can't remember the name of the paper, but.
Somebody just did some work.
Oh, it was Jim Kirkland, who is a fabulous American paleontologist who was involved in the discovery of a bunch of notable species.
But he just did a paper on an impact in, I think, Africa at the end of the Jurassic.
So it turns out that maybe these – like the Cretaceous period, which is like the heyday of dinosaurs, this longest stable period in recent Earth history.
Yeah.
Kirkland just did – Just shared this paper on apparently another meteor impact in South Africa that may have ended the Auroquang?
Yeah, the age of Brontosaurus and Stegosaurus.
So it may be that the whole age of dinosaurs was kind of.
I mean, the Permian extinction also had.
It was mostly about volcanic eruptions and.
What extinction?
The end Permian, which is right before the Triassic, which is the period that killed the.
The regime of terrestrial reptiles and the whole like ocean ecosystem that basically cleared the slate and made room for dinosaurs to take over.
And this, the end Permian extinction is the biggest in the history of the planet.
It's like 96% of all life on Earth.
Make that big again, Steve, that image.
That's not it.
That one.
So, where is that here?
That's not on this chart.
I mean, if you look, it's about 250.
Two million years ago, that there was a.
Okay, so we're only at this one, only goes to 150 million.
Actually, if you, there's a Netflix documentary, Life on Our Planet, that goes into some of the end Permian stuff in detail, that you get just like nothing.
Like there's almost nothing left over.
And we bounce back from that.
And that's just, it's funny because like there are, there's, they say five mass extinctions and we're living through the sixth, but that's based on a kind of what I, you know, like I consider kind of an arbitrary marker.
And there are, Actually, in the kind of recent fossil record, there are like 18 enormous extinctions, not like 18.
Yeah, there aren't, they're not all mass extinctions as far as like, you know, Pluto.
Like some people don't consider Pluto a planet, but you know, it's like that kind of a, you know, a boundary.
But there are a lot more major extinction episodes in the history of the planet than most people realize.
And, uh, and that only goes over the last few hundred million years.
And if you go back even further to even more.
You know, before the advent of multicellular, like complex life, then there were major dieouts like the great oxygenation event 2.2 billion years ago.
2.2 billion.
Yeah.
So, like, that's when cyanobacteria, like blue green algae, figured out how to photosynthesize.
And then over a couple hundred million years, flooded the atmosphere with oxygen.
And at the time, there were no oxygen friendly microbes on the whole surface of the planet.
And so it killed off most of life on the planet.
Back when there was only bacteria.
And so then, like, it's so funny because, you know, I was just hearing your conversation with the Snake Brothers and they were talking about, you know, like there's this thing of, you know, like disaster events and people hiding underground.
And like it's so, like, there is this constant theme in extinction events where that's what happened at the end Permian, that's what happened at the end Cretaceous, and that's what happened back at the Great Oxygenation Event was like there were these horror story moments where the, You know, like the planet is just being pummeled by acid rain, and like this, you know, plants aren't growing, and you get, yeah, you can see a ton of spikes on this, the Wikipedia.
Like you can see the mass extinctions stick out, but then there's like a whole sort of, there's a whole bunch of other stuff going on.
And some of these are possibly due to.
250, which one is that?
250 is the Permian.
Yeah, that's the big boy right there.
And what do you think that was?
You said that was volcanoes?
Yeah, there was like a methane bloom that made the atmosphere toxic and the whole planet was just on fire.
It was nasty.
But yeah, so the point is that the animals that survive through these kinds of events are burrowing animals.
And so even back in the great oxygenation event in the Precambrian, which isn't on this chart, you've got a.
Cambrian was 500 million years ago.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's that little.
Right at the beginning of this chart is the origin of complex multicellular life with like eyes and okay, you know, external carapaces, and you know, they were hunted like modern predator prey dynamics.
Okay, come out around this time.
You know, the world stops being just jellyfish and corals, but yeah, so there's this whole repeating motif in the history of life of things getting so bad that the only way that people or the only way that the life on the planet can survive is by either.
Adapting to poisonous atmospheric conditions or by burrowing underground and waiting it out.
And so, like, your own gut biome is basically the billionaire bunker dwellers of two billion years ago that decided they were going to wait it out underground.
And they're still down there waiting it out.
They're still like the anaerobic bacteria are no longer, they no longer conquer the surface of the planet, but they're inside all of the little places that they can still hack it out without being poisoned by oxygen.
Right.
What is the oldest.
Thing that you found in your digging?
I never dug older than the Triassic.
Oh, actually, no, that's not true.
Because for a while I grew up in Kansas City, and Kansas City is Ordovician.
So it's pre Mesozoic.
It's like, I think, like 350, 400 billion years ago.
Somebody's going to call me on this because this is not my area.
But this is when ancient relatives of starfish, the crinoids, were stalked.
They look like sea lilies or something.
They have a long kind of armored stalk, and then the sea star part of it is up in the water column filter feeding.
They're all over the Midwest.
You go to a road cut in the Midwest, and you can pull out these gorgeous crinoid specimens.
Those were all down by the Missouri River bluffs by my house.
That's probably the oldest thing.
The oldest thing that I actively dug in Wyoming was Triassic.
The Wyoming was part of a Triassic Seaway at the time.
And so you have ancient squid relatives called Bellum Knights that have these armored cones in the core of their body.
Like if you've got a parrot and it's eating cuttlefish bone, it's kind of like that, but it was cone shaped.
Yeah, there you go.
So these guys are all over certain parts of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain areas.
And they're really interesting, gorgeous.
There's these fossil deposits where it's just millions and millions of.
Squid butts, as Bakker used to say.
And yeah, you just walk around and they're everywhere.
It looks like spent bullet casings all over the ground.
That's wild, man.
So yeah, those are really cool.
Because you just think about the enormous schools of belemnites and other ancient cephalopods that must have inhabited these waters.
And it's bonkers.
Like they're just, I mean, the amount of biodiversity that has been the norm for our planet over most of its history.
is just beyond the conception of somebody living in the modern world.
You know, like even a hundred years ago in America, the skies were dark with flocks of birds, you know, on a regular basis.
And we've, you know, over the course of your life and mine, we've killed off something like half of the songbirds in North America and half the insects.
Right.
And it's just, it's just insane to think of like even the amount of biodiversity our parents grew up with is beyond our imagination.
And it's crazy to think that most likely all these extinction events were cosmic events, you know, coming from somewhere else.
They weren't self induced.
Like right now, we are probably the first civilization, maybe not, that actually has the capability and the wherewithal to nuke ourselves off the face of the earth.
Yeah.
Although, you know, like the, again, like the oxygenation event of 2.2 billion years ago was kind of an interesting conversation.
Counter example of that was like it looks more like industrial pollution now, you know, where it's like this was a successful by this was a product of successful manufacturing innovation, right?
Like turning air into sugar and then excreting oxygen as a industrial waste in that project.
And so, like, when we think about global warming now and the excretion of carbon dioxide through modern fuel burning and manufacturing processes.
It's really just sort of the opposite side of this larger cycle of manufacturing innovation.
Plastic Eating Microbes Evolve00:03:38
I used to host a show called Complexity Podcast where I talked with Olivia Judson, who is a fantastic British author who's done a lot of work on the history of life as a story of successive waves of innovations to discover new energy sources and kind of exploit them.
And says that, like, yeah, what we're going through right now is the discovery of fire.
But, you know, back in, you know, the Cambrian, it was the discovery of flesh.
It was like, you know, the modern predator prey dynamics come out of realizing that you don't have to sort of filter for your food in the water column or generate it yourself.
And then even before that.
Yeah, just eat each other.
It's so easy.
It's right there.
And then, you know, even before that, photosynthesis was this massive thing because up to that point, All life on the planet was chemosynthetic.
It was getting energy by breaking bonds and molecules, like life still does down around the sea vents.
And so now it's a whole thing, now we've come on to a different thing.
And I interviewed Ming Jin Lu for that same show, Complexity Episode 80, and he studies the evolution of modern plant fungi relationships and said that, like,
I think up to about 400 million years ago, trees, like early trees existed and so wood existed, but the mycorrhizal cohorts that live underground in the forest and eat dead trees, they did not exist.
And so a lot of the modern fossil fuel deposits are from an era of the planet where logs were being formed and falling.
And nothing was eating them, and the whole surface of the planet was covered in falling logs.
So, like, if you think about what we're going through right now and all of the industrial byproducts that we're creating and like the gyre of plastic in the South Pacific and all this stuff, but like life has already started to evolve plastic eating microbes that like we're already watching the biosphere adjust to this in the way that it has adjusted to similar endogenously created environmental disasters in the past.
So, it's not all cosmic.
It's like, Uh, it takes there's like a latency between us coming up with these major manufacturing and energy capture innovations, and then us figuring out how to close the material loops that are, you know, we like new kinds of trash are invented, and then life comes in and figures out how to eat the trash, right?
You know, and that happens over and over and over again.
And it, the difference with this one is, you know, can evolution adapt rapidly enough to adapt?
To making use of all of the new forms of trash that we're creating.
Because, like, the number of new chemical compounds that we're creating over the last century are exponentially greater than anything ever before.
So, in that way, it is different.
But it's not totally unlike, you know, coming up with photosynthesis.
And we look at the modern atmosphere now and we're like, oh, it's always been this way.
But it hasn't.
Collagen Supplements Boost Production00:02:54
Right, right.
You know, what we're looking at is.
A kind of uneasy piece that life figured out as a response to this, this, you know, potentially devastating innovation.
Yeah, it's interesting too, seeing, I'm sure you've seen the graph that Randall always shows of the atmosphere, the temperature in the atmosphere over like the last tens of thousands of years and the crazy variations and how it was like, I think it was during like the 1400s, it was like 10 degrees warmer than it is now.
And that's when all the major cathedrals were built.
That's when like the most.
Incredible art has been created in our modern history.
I generally love the study of natural history because it helps keep us kind of humble.
It helps us remember that all of the characteristics of contemporary life that we take for granted as static are mutable, that things have not always been this way and that things will not always be this way.
I interviewed Henry G. For future fossils podcast, I think episode 184.
And Henry is the senior editor at Nature Magazine or Nature Journal, right?
In the UK, he wrote a great book on the history of life and spends a little bit of time at the end of that book speculating.
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Apocalyptic Cults In The Future00:15:07
About the distant future, like after human civilization has crumbled and, you know, hundreds of millions of years into the future.
Olaf Stapledon, another British author from the 1930s, wrote a couple of really great books that are kind of canonical major inspiring works in 20th century science fiction called Last and First Men and Star Maker.
And both of them do this, like they look billions of years into the future.
You know, and that's like, I love that stuff.
I love, I love thinking about, you know, what, what comes, you know, if, if there was a time when plants and fungi were not locked together in symbiosis, and now we're seeing this, this kind of thing where like humans and machines are becoming kind of more and more symbiotic.
And then like, then what, you know, what's, you know, what's 100 million years from now look like?
What do these kind of people, what do those people speculate?
Oh, God.
I mean, that's just where you get to have fun.
Yeah.
You know, like you, you, I mean, this is the sort of epistemic challenge to think.
Epistemic.
Yeah.
Like, you define that?
Yeah.
So, like, so, like, you know, ontology is the study of, like, you know, what things are.
Methodology is the study of how, you know, like how you kind of know things.
And then epistemology is related to that, but it's, it's about, like, Belief and knowledge.
Yeah.
How do you come to things?
You know, who's asking?
How are they asking?
And so, you know, the, you know, when you hear people, I hear people online talk a lot about how we're in the midst of an epistemic crisis right now in human society because our information technologies.
There's too much information.
Right.
Yeah.
So we don't know how to make sense of them.
We don't know how to validate information anymore.
And like, I'll send you here, let me pull up a, I love citing this paper.
Or, this essay by my friend Jamie Stantonian here Apocalyptic Cults and the Early Modern Information Explosion.
Apocalyptic Cults.
Yeah.
So, he's talking about the printing press and the Thirty Years' War and how the decline.
Do you have it pulled up on your screen?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's right here.
You can switch to him, Steve.
Yeah, that the loss of authority, the legitimacy crisis that the printing press posed to the church.
was created a power vacuum into which flowed all of these different apocalyptic cults that were spreading their own versions of the Bible through self-printed pamphlets.
And so the moment where Munich ends up becoming a walled city full of end times apocalyptic fanatics and then goes into battle with the Catholic Church, and bishops send soldiers to reclaim Munich.
We're going through something like that right now where the amount of time that it's taking to generate new information.
I don't know if you've noticed, but most scientific papers now, people are just publishing stuff to archive.
And then it's there.
Archive.org being this sort of preprint server run by Cornell University, where all of the machine learning papers right now are going straight to archive before they make it through peer review.
And so people have access to all of this newly produced knowledge, but it's being generated faster than the process whereby.
Academic journals were created, you know, the process that like academic journals evolved in order to sort of vet things.
Who's producing all these papers?
I mean, a lot of them are university research, but there's private research, and then there's just people working in the garage.
And, you know, so like with COVID, here I'll pull up a.
And why are they publishing them direct to archive.com?
Well, archive.org, you know, ARXIV.
This is where, you know, it's.
The process of science has changed somewhat over the course of our lives to so that there's like this additional, not everybody does this, but a lot of people believe in open science as a way of saying, like, we're going to publish our work as a public good, as a service to public conversation.
And then, you know, it's going to go through the process of peer review still.
But like more work is being done than can possibly be peer reviewed.
And so, like, you get into these things.
I wrote this paper about this in 2020 about how do you, you know, how do you make sense of this stuff now?
Like, so, like, this was about COVID and how the problem that scientific institutions got into with the public during COVID was that, you know, people have been kind of trained to believe that science is this sort of, You know, fixed point like that.
That's there's an orthodoxy, yes.
And there, I mean, it's not just a free for all, it's not science is a broad term, yeah, right?
Like science, like, right, trust the science.
We're the scientists.
We are, you know, the people in the ivory tower who have studied this our whole lives and have the credentials to tell you what to do.
There's a sort of a mightier than thou sort of vibe.
Well, I mean, it really is like all science, you know, all knowledge, you know, you can kind of trace it around a circle of, you know, an observation that starts, From personal experience, and then is you know, you ask a friend to, you know, hey, like stand here and look at this and tell me what you see, and they see the same thing.
Then that intersubjective validation, you know, I thou validation, yeah, is more robust than just I saw a UFO or whatever.
And then, uh, but then like maybe the two of you grew up in the same house, right?
And so you're biased in the same way, you know, and so then, you know, science as most people understand it is this third person validation where you bring in somebody from a completely different set of experiences.
And they're going to, you know, you try to find, you stress test these claims as hard as you can, but there is no fundamental, there's no moment where you have, you know, like the replication crisis going on right now in psychology and in pharmacological medicine has a lot to do with the fact that the mechanical, like, you know, the action of different, you know,
psychoactive or, you know, different medical things have so much to do with expectation and the placebo effect and so on.
That you can run the experiments 20 years later and get different results because the culture has changed.
And so people's expectations have changed.
And like the way that there's a famous set of psychological experiments done by Daryl Bem called Feeling the Future.
Let's see.
So Daryl reversed the time series on all of these famous psychology experiments, I think nine famous psychology experiments.
And This piece is him basically saying, We took for granted that the past comes before the future.
But if you reverse the order of these experiments, you can see that people are like, you get results that are as statistically significant if you have them select something before they actually see the slide or whatever.
So he was saying, Look, according to your own standards, the field of psychology needs to admit that we are.
We have some sort of precognitive ability and people went insane over this paper and it was the result of an ongoing debate in psychology and clinical psychology or in experimental psychology about whether the discipline itself is flawed or whether we like, you know, like a lot of people claimed that he was burying negative results and a lot of people reproduced his work, but then denied that they had.
And it's just a, it's a complete mess in there.
And so like when, you know, this issue of It's not that science is broken.
It's that science itself continues to evolve and we get more and more nuanced about the way that we structure our experiments and the way that we validate, the way we understand the statistical support for a given phenomenon.
And then also, you know, Max Planck is famous for saying that science proceeds one death at a time or one funeral at a time because people get so stuck in their thinking that they deny The validity of anomalous evidence and they need to be replaced by younger researchers with fresh eyes.
And it's so corruptible as well.
I mean, everything is.
I mean, like, I don't want to single science out here because there is a problem generally.
I interviewed Tin Nguyen, a University of Utah philosopher, several years ago.
And let's see, where is this?
Oh, that's on Substack.
Yeah, Tin Nguyen and I had a really interesting conversation about expert identification and how basically, if you're not an expert in a field, then you can't actually validate what an expert is saying and the amount of time it takes to develop expertise. is always longer than the amount of time that you have to communicate something, like a complex idea.
And so it's not just climate scientists versus everyone else.
It's also geopolitical experts versus everyone else.
It's also plumbers versus everyone else.
It's like there are kind of an unspecified, kind of theoretically infinite number of things that you can be an expert in.
As knowledge becomes more and more developed, as our body of knowledge becomes more developed, then the amount of time it takes to learn some of these fields means that, like, there are more kinds of expertise.
It takes longer to acquire that expertise.
And so we're on the surface of this, like, growing volume of information that is, you know, with these major information technology revolutions like printing press or the internet.
We have to, we hit these periodic crises in being able to understand how to articulate the knowledge and like bring it together and like unify it.
And so Simon Dedeo, a Carnegie Mellon professor I interviewed years ago for complexity, talks about this.
Let me see if I can find this.
Oh, this is a fantastic talk he gave years ago.
Wait, not this one.
Super theories.
Dedeo Consilience.
He gave a talk.
Yeah, here we go.
Super Theories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism, looking over the history of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific journal, and running statistical analysis on this body of data that showed that every, let me see, every 150 years or so, we go through this wave where knowledge.
Let me see.
I think this is it.
Yeah, so you can see these spikes in the confidence of this is mutual information in bits is the linkage between different disciplines in science.
And so we go through these things where about 100 years we get more and more unified in our scientific understanding.
So like you can see where the study of electricity and the study of magnetism ends up.
Becoming the study of electromagnetics.
It's like it becomes one discipline.
And then there's a 50 year gap where suddenly that innovation in scientific thinking generates so much new insight that we lose the plot.
And so we're in one of these right now where the successes of the scientific endeavor have given us so much more to consider now that we don't know how to fit it all together.
And we're going to go through another couple of decades before it starts making sense again.
It's not a crisis in terms of what science is and it's not a crisis that's unique to the academy or to any other specific institution that deals with – it's not a crisis unique to journalism.
This is something that happens with every new institution and within 150 years, whatever institutions we come up with now to unify the knowledge produced by the internet will be in crisis again and we'll have to come up with some new system.
But science will persist.
Science will continue to evolve and become more and more effective and capable of making sense of things.
It just won't be science like most people think of it now.
Yeah.
It seems like there's got to be something else, like another way to, like everything can't just be weighed and measured in a lab, right?
Like this is one of the things I was talking to Annie Jacobson about a couple of weeks ago when she wrote this book called The Phenomena.
She was explaining that some of these precognitive ESP abilities that people have can't be duplicated and they can't be weighed and they can't be measured.
And there's this huge divide and there's this clash that goes on between the phenomena and the scientific method, right?
Because they just don't mix and you can't duplicate any of this stuff, but it's very much a real thing.
And this is something I was also talking to Jack Sarfati about a little bit.
Yeah.
He's like, these people, who was I asking him?
I think I was asking, I was asking about somebody who was coming in, uh, who was like skeptical about the whole UFO phenomenon.
Like, and Jack, you know, obviously he's got his opinions.
Yeah.
He's like, I'll fight him.
These people are idiots, Danny.
They're idiots.
Creativity Versus Artificial Intelligence00:15:17
I know this shit because I've seen it.
It exists.
Okay.
Just because you can't weigh it and put it in a beaker doesn't mean it's not real.
Totally.
Well, I mean, so, so my graduate advisor, I ended up going to grad school for a little bit and then dropping out because, uh, you know, life.
But the, um, My graduate advisor, Sean S. Bjorn Hargens, worked with the American integral philosopher Ken Wilbur on this, what he called integral methodological pluralism,
which is an attempt to take postmodern philosophy where we recognize that even our empirical investigations of the world are constrained by our language and that there is no way for us to know something with total absolute objectivity, you know, because like we all kind of live. in a virtual reality.
Yes.
You know, this kind of like our brain is generating this thing based on experience.
Everything.
You know, I talk about this all the time with people that I have in here who like to talk about everything.
And it's like, you haven't been to this part of the world and seen what's happened here.
You fucking read news articles and watch YouTube.
So do I.
I do the same fucking thing.
Like there's like, one of the things that really fucking frustrates me about some people is that people like to talk about things as if they are like absolute fucking fact and they know it.
And these people, their job is to know stuff, obviously, but all they do is they read stuff that other people write.
That those people got from somebody else or something else that they read or that they saw.
Yeah.
I mean, so that's the thing is that, like, as, you know, even the most rational person has to base some of their behavior in the world on expert claims made by other people that they can't directly validate.
Yes.
You know, and that this doesn't mean that it's an ontological free for all.
Like, it doesn't mean that, like, there isn't, you know, that we can't approach.
Truth, and that there aren't some people that see certain truths more clearly than other people.
And so, like, it's important to be clear about that.
But what it does mean is that we need to be more humble about what we, you know, like the things that we are taking for granted on the, you know, on the basis of belief because we don't have the time or the unlimited energy to sit there and scrutinize everything everyone ever tells us.
And so, you know, Hargins and Wilbur wrote this really cool piece for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science several years ago, Unifying this.
So, like I don't know, is this up on the yeah screen?
Yeah so, like here is, you can punch on it a little bit.
Yeah, let me.
Let me see a good example.
So this is uh, a piece that Sean, a chart that Sean worked on with Ken where, like you can see um, empirical science fits into one corner of this chart, where they're looking at the exteriors, the descriptions and behaviors of phenomena through the lens of singular entities.
You know, so this is like animal behaviorism or cognitive science.
But then you know uh, There are other ways, there are other schools of knowledge, like phenomenology, which is concerned with the interiority, the felt sense, the qualitative claims that can be made about your own internal personal experience.
And then you have different sort of ethnic studies, and the study of meaning and language are the cultural, sort of interior, plural dimensions of experience.
It's like what you and I agree a cat means, the word cat.
And so on.
And so you can take this framework.
And you can start to say that, for instance, Zen meditation as a technique does obey the scientific method in that they give you an injunction.
They give you a, like, sit on a mat for 20 years observing your breath.
And then you will have an experience that an expert in the field can tell you you've had this experience or they can tell that you're lying.
And that is peer review.
And that is, you know, like when, People like Terrence McKenna and Tim Leary compared taking psychedelics to looking through the microscope.
What they were saying was there is an experimental protocol, and if you follow this protocol, you end up with these results, and these results can be verified, but it's not quantitative in the way that a lot of people mistakenly kind of conflated with science, where they say, you know, like only science is only the concern about quantitative data.
We don't have a way to measure.
a dream, right?
Well, I mean, we're getting there.
Like there is, you know, for years I've been saying that I expect that one day I'm going to have a, you know, a kid and then the kid's going to be, you know, streaming their dreams on TikTok or whatever, you know, with a brain computer interface and you'll be, you'll be a dream influencer because you'll be able to like just like let other people subscribe to your feed.
And then just a couple months ago, this group found a way to use machine learning to translate The visual cortex activity into images, and so you're able to see what somebody else is dreaming.
What, yeah, this is a recent thing, but like I do what I can to stay on top of AI research, and this is a big deal.
That, like, who did this?
Uh, good question.
Uh, let's see, like, how do they produce the images?
Like, is it video still images, machine learning?
Yeah, no, they can let me you can pull.
Uh, let's see here.
Uh, deep dreaming is a problem.
Brain scan, well, deep dream is something else.
Hold on.
Oh, yeah.
AI recreates what people see by reading their brain scans.
What?
This is not the most recent research.
Holy shit.
But this is preliminary research to the stuff that I'm talking about here.
And so this year, this is a year ago.
It's way better now.
And so it's not going to be long before we can actually get into people's heads and do some really, really interesting work on, you know, like, for instance, you know, one of the things I've always been really curious about and I'm excited to see develop over the next year or so is having doing this for people that are on psychedelics, you know, and so like, you know, I have my friends Sarah Huntley and David J. Brown.
Have a book in edit right now with Inner Traditions on a field guide to DMT entities.
And they, you know, Sarah created illustrations of all of these different major types of things that people kind of frequently see when they're tripping.
And, you know, and so we're going to be able to get kind of to the point where, you know, one of my favorite pieces, let me see if I can pull this up.
One of my favorite essays of all time is Aldous Huxley's Introduction.
introduction to heaven and hell.
Let's see, painting while dancing.
Yeah, so let me just read you this quote because this is sort of the marching orders of my whole life.
He says, like the earth of 100 years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africa's, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.
In relation to the fauna of these regions, we are not yet zoologists.
We are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens.
The fact is unfortunate, but we have to accept it.
We have to make the best of it.
However lowly the work of the collector must be done before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory-making.
Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.
Nevertheless, they exist.
They are facts of observation, and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.
And it goes on.
But this, you know, this, this, my entire life, you know, after the four years I spent as a scientific illustrator at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, I've been thinking about The art that I make, in light of this kind of work, in light of going in.
My buddy Android Jones talks about this too about visionary art, which is the American kind of tradition that came out of fantastic realism in Europe, which came out of surrealism.
And so there's a direct lineage between Dali and Ernst Fuchs and H.R. Giger, who were.
Looking at dreams and visionary states, and then just painting what they saw.
And then by the time that comes over to the States through like Robert Venosa and Alex Gray, and kind of the modern forefathers and foremothers of visionary art.
I like the dinosaur with the flying saucer.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, that's.
Dude, let me get some art.
I need some prints.
Oh, I will.
I'll send you some prints.
Yeah.
But the.
That's what I'm saying.
So there's a whole tradition.
The tradition of artists that I grew up with are people that think about.
You know, going in with, you know, a dedication to having, you know, unusual or quote unquote non ordinary experiences and then treating it like a natural history illustrator and, you know, trying to record this stuff.
And so, like, my friends and I all paint this stuff, but then, like, it won't be long before, you know, just as, you know, generative AI has allowed non painters to paint, right?
It won't be that long before it allows people that have just really incredible, vivid dreams and trips and other things. to present fairly accurate representations of their own inner world that other people can compare to their own weird experiences and say, oh, there is something here.
We should dig on the X, see what stable features we can encode in scientific theory.
So, yeah.
There was an article that I don't know if it was a podcast I was listening to or if this was one of your essays that you wrote about how, like, the role reversal between creativity and AI, how we're like switching the roles, and like AI is sort of like turning us into blobs.
And this one, yes, I think it was this one that I read this morning.
And you know, that's it's something that one of the things that I've noticed recently is that, like, when it comes to the medium that which I publish this podcast is which is mostly YouTube, we get most of our audience on YouTube.
I noticed a lot of people on YouTube, and I know there's ad agencies doing this as well, but we've gotten so far off track that people are using ChatGPT and AI to literally tell them what kind of videos to make, giving them all the footage and all the frames for their videos, giving them the music, giving them the thumbnails, giving them the titles.
And I know ad agencies are even using the stuff to tell them where to put logos on commercials, how long commercials should be, how they should be narrated, and all this stuff.
And it's like AI is sucking all the creativity out of the human, not really out of the human mind.
It's like we don't need to do it anymore.
So it's like, let's just let AI do it.
It is weird.
So, yeah, this piece that you're talking about, improvising out of algorithmic isolation, was commissioned by a friend who wanted me to write about improv versus surveillance capitalism, right?
And that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about the attention economy and using stuff like gaze tracking software to tell how long somebody is looking at.
you know, at whatever.
And then they also have the zoom on Instagram.
If you know, if you zoom in on something, they'll like start giving you more of that person's shit.
Yeah, exactly.
So, so like all of this is, you know, the stuff that grew out of creating a, an ad revenue model for the web is, you know, it's so like I, I want to link that piece to two other pieces.
Let me see.
There's this piece I wrote a couple of years ago called the evolution of surveillance.
Talking about this in this way, talking about augmented reality and spatial computing and so on.
What do you mean when you say surveillance?
Are you talking specifically about the way ad agencies target people to target ads to them and stuff like that?
Well, it's about behaviorism generally, right?
The more cameras we have, the more keystroke logging we use, the more gaze tracking we use.
It's about trying to model behavior and then in order to either intervene and shape the way that people are behaving or in order to predict them such that you can sell them things more efficiently, etc.
And this is the point that I was making in this essay that this is not actually new, that all of these new sensory and behavior modeling innovations that we're making with digital technology.
Are an extension of this longer arms race between predators and prey that goes back at least to the evolution of the eye, where it's like suddenly you have this whole new dimension where you're not just sensing a prey animal or an organism along a kind of chemical gradient.
You can actually see something at a distance and watch it turn to avoid you, and then you can chase it.
Something like that is going on right now, where Cambridge Analytica knows your Facebook browsing behavior so well that it's able to predict.
You more effectively than your own spouse, you know, and like this kind of stuff.
And so, what's happening is that, um, in you know, in this piece on improvisation, this the evolution of these, um, these surveillance infrastructure, you know, the algorithms and the camera networks and all this stuff, yeah, uh, is modifying people's behavior in two different ways.
One is it's making people, uh, you know, like living inside of these systems.
You've got six different emoji reacts on Facebook.
You don't have a whole multidimensional spectrum of human emotional response.
You're limited to six sort of stock responses, or you can leave a comment.
So the more embedded we are in the machinery of civilization, the more it constrains our behavioral repertoire in certain ways, even as it creates more options for us in other ways.
And then the other thing is that all of these systems, evolution is itself a form of improvisation.
Humans As Modular Algorithms00:02:43
And evolution is this in the way that I've come to understand it through, you know, these like really like a fundamental study of evolution as a process includes more than just genetic evolution.
It includes, you know, the way that your brain wires neurons together as a way of encoding stable features in your own environment so that your behavioral response at the level of an individual has evolved to meet, you know, the environment at that time scale and not just at the time scale of genetic inheritance and so on.
The thing with these systems is that, yeah, they are, it's not simple.
I mean, it's not adequate to say that they're making us dumber, but neither is it adequate to say that they're making us smarter.
We are collectively smarter, but in certain ways individually dumber, but then are also capable of hyper-specializing and knowing things about the world.
to a far deeper extent than was possible.
There was no such thing as cognitive neuroscience 200 years ago.
And so at any rate, the machines become more and more lifelike as they evolve to model the behavior of living organisms, namely people.
And then we become in certain ways more mechanical.
But the place where those two trends meet on the horizon is that, you know, you've got Yuval Harari's, he gave a Google Tech Talk on the religions of Silicon Valley a few years ago,
the new religions of the 21st century talks at Google, February 2015, where he talked about how the, The revolution in computing has made it so that we no longer have a notion that humans are these sort of isolated, self determining, self authoring, rational actors, which is like the idea that dominated economics for most of the last hundred years.
Now, what we have is that the human is sort of a bundle of different unconscious algorithms that are all like modular and connected and nested inside of each other and that the human being is nested inside of a larger social order that is itself kind of an organism in its own right but that it's sort of like a turtles all the way down of unconscious algorithmic reactivity to each other.
PXG Drivers Are Game Changers00:02:42
So like, you know, like we, you know, the sort of Blade Runner conclusion that you come to is that humans are robots and robots are people.
And that's a contentious philosophical claim.
But the Buddha said as much, right?
A lot of the Eastern non-dual traditions are about how everything that we take for granted as the behavior of an organism that it's choosing what it does, if you inquire deeply enough into the nature of the mind, you realize that all of your choices are sort of mechanical responses to your conditioning.
Karma is like a an impossibly complex network of mutual causation.
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High Signal Moments In Science00:14:52
You know, and so like that's kind of where, you know, the tech world and, you know, revolutions in neuroscience and so on have taken us is like you're no longer, you know, to the extent that you're no longer an individual person now, right?
You're a city made of cells.
Some of those cells are human, some of them are not.
And, And there's a sense in which you at the cellular level, all of your cells are individuals.
They're just joined in this thing, and you are joined in this bigger thing that we call society, which is a kind of super organism.
And so, where we draw the lines around individuality depend on how far away we're standing from a given phenomenon.
And so, this notion, that's going back to this.
the stuff that Wilbur and S. Burn Hargens worked on.
Like that's, yeah.
So like there's a sense in which everything is individual and there's a sense in which it's plural or collective.
And so similarly, there's a sense in which free will, there's a stance you can look at where free will exists.
And if you move, then it looks like everything is just sort of blindly deterministically causing everything else.
And, you know, the question of like free will is a question about the philosophical stance that we want to take on emergence.
Like, is emergent behavior something that actually exists or does it just appear to exist because some, you know, like we see order in a new way if we stand and look at it at the behavior of the cosmos from a different perspective.
You know, so I take all of this stuff as like, you know, a lot of the stuff we can't know for sure.
because there are limits to our knowledge and the knowability of things.
And so it's like, well, we're probably better off assuming that it's both and that efforts to try and like pin down reality in one way or another, you know, saying like, oh, this is, you know, something is purely objective or purely subjective or choice does or does not exist.
These are methodological artifacts, you know, like are you a noun or are you a verb?
You know, which one, why does one have to be more true than the other?
Anyway, that's a rant.
Do you often take DMT?
No, not in.
I mean, you know, everybody's got their college years, but.
How many times have you done it?
Oh, God.
That's a good question.
Not in a while.
Is that.
Did you get into psychedelics after you were into all the paleontology stuff?
And did psychedelics sort of like catapult you into all this?
Definitely part of it.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the.
You know, the question of the evolution of intelligence and consciousness is hot on the heels of realizing that you, uh, you, that everything you thought you knew is up for grabs, right?
You know, and you're like, okay, well, what is the mind and where does it come from?
And, you know, how does language work?
Yeah.
And those are very, those are very undergraduate, uh, like, you know, you, yeah.
So, but, uh, You know, the older one gets, the cooler one's brain runs.
And the older one gets, the cooler one's brain runs?
Well, I just mean like you're earlier in life, your brain is a noisier object.
Yes.
You know, children are very like distracted and playful and creative.
And then as you get older, University of California, Berkeley child psychologist Allison Gopnik calls this the explore exploit tension, where it's like as you get older in life or as a system ages even, those systems become more conservative and more risk averse.
And then at some point, You can kind of go back.
Let's see where I put this.
I wrote a piece on this a while ago.
The future is noisy, talking about like there's a curve in life where as your senses start to fail you in old age, you become more childlike again.
You become more of a dreamer and more playful.
But yeah, there's so like the relationship diapers again.
Yeah, exactly.
The relationship between like.
You know, the notion that comes out of DMT research that the basically waking state is a kind of dream constrained by the wiring of the brain to its senses.
And so like the more signal you get from the outside world, the more your signal-to-noise ratio goes up.
And then as your senses develop or as they fail, that that ratio changes.
And so like different there are processes, like if you think about that kind of arc, there are moments in the process of the production of scientific knowledge that are high noise, and then there are moments that are high signal.
Like when you're collecting data, you want your noise to be as low as possible, but when you're trying to come up with a new hypothesis, you want to turn the noise up.
And so, again, this has to do with the way that, for instance, people that are like authors talk about you don't want to criticize.
Your first draft while you're writing it.
You want to save editing, which is a high signal to noise ratio process for later.
And then you want the original draft of your manuscript to be generated in a kind of sprint of noise production.
Right, right.
You know, so there's a really great paper.
There's an exchange of letters on the role of noise in innovation in complex systems.
Let's see.
Yeah, the role of noise in.
Collective intelligence, where famous psychologist Daniel Kahneman basically says, You know, noise is the enemy.
We're trying to get rid of noise.
And then his critics, led by David Krakauer and David Wolpert, say, Actually, if you eradicate noise from a system, you lose all creativity in the system.
You lose the ability for that system to adapt to surprise in its environment.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but there are definitely times in life where it's appropriate.
Perhaps, or it's more appropriate, you know, if you pursue trance and psychanotic adventure and lateral thinking and creative weirdness.
Yeah.
I think like the farther down the road we get in the advancement of technology, and, you know, if we ever hit the point of, I'm sure we will, but the point of like a singularity, we would maybe, maybe humanity will just want to escape this reality that we are in right now.
Like it's like the matrix, right?
Like we're unplugged right now and maybe, like a certain, a certain group of the human population, will just go like dive into psychedelics and just try to like DMTX themselves into that world for the rest of their lives and some people will join the machines.
Yeah, so you know our buddies Egan and Patrick, at NO Anotics.
You know I'm on the advisory board of this organization that wants to start doing extended state DMT work and other kinds of fundamental psychedelic research.
I'm really excited about this because I've always been more interested in asking fundamental scientific questions than in therapeutic research.
Obviously, we're in the middle of a mental health crisis.
It's very important that people have access to the best possible tools to maintain their mental health.
I know a lot of people who have benefited from a therapeutic encounter with psychedelics.
But when it comes to asking questions about the nature of reality and the greatest mysteries that science can ask, Then it seems obvious that we've left a huge bid on the table over the last several decades to use psychedelics as scientific instruments and to like ask questions that we can only ask in different states of consciousness and to, you know, to use these things in a different way.
I've been pursuing that line of questioning on the show for a while.
You need to talk to the people at the CIA.
They've been doing it for a long time.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, that's, you know, that's.
That's an interesting case, right?
Where the CIA is not constrained by the same sort of socioeconomic concerns that academic research is.
Moral concerns.
Right, right.
Exactly.
You've got like Bustamante on your show advocating for enhanced interrogation because it's practical, you know, it's how you get results.
And so, like, that's the thing military research has a lower barrier to.
It has more willingness to pursue something that might work.
Blue sky research.
Just try shit, whether it benefits us or not.
Right.
Whether we understand the mechanism for it or not.
Maybe it's useless knowledge.
Right.
Actually, and that's an interesting fact about the Cold War is that Russia took a very different approach to physics and psychology research behind the Iron Curtain and was not as bound as American academic research to try and understand how to try and pose a mechanism for stuff like telekinesis.
Before they would actually go ahead and look at it.
And so, like, one of the most interesting stories from American science over the last, you know, 50 years is the story of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab.
I talk about it in episode 186 of Future Fossils, a manifesto for weird science.
By the way, I love the name of your podcast.
Oh, thank you.
Future Fossils is such a sick name.
Thanks.
Yeah.
It's that paleontologist futurist.
It's that whole thing.
Yeah.
Take the whole span in at once.
But the Paralab, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Was funded by, I think it was Lockheed.
It was either Lockheed or McDonald's.
I'm going to catch myself on this.
But they, oh, yeah, here we go.
The full show notes are actually on Patreon.
But yeah, they got a grant from aerospace because they want, you know, aerospace wanted to know whether the brain as an electromagnetic phenomenon was influencing the sensitive electronics inside a fighter pilot cockpit.
And so.
The dean of Princeton Engineering got together with Aerospace and said, Well, okay, let's check this out, and spent 27 years pursuing research into subtle but statistically significant effects of human intention and emotion on both electronic and mechanical, ostensibly random systems.
So, like, you know, there's that you drop balls down into the pet, like a A matrix of pegs, and you can see the distribution as the balls fall to one side of it.
You get like a bell curve distribution, but they found that you could have people sit in front of one of those and will the balls to the right or the left, and that you could do the same thing with pseudo random electronic number generators.
And so, some people were better at this than other people, and that this is a skill that could be trained like that.
You can actually have a small but statistically significant.
The impact of willpower on the outcome of things like dice.
And they ran hundreds and hundreds of experiments with thousands of subjects over 27 years and ran meta statistical analyses on these results and found that basically, you know, they anticipated all of the criticism.
They were fiercely attacked even by, you know, other departments inside of Princeton Engineering.
And so they had to tighten it up.
And, you know, like people like Russell Targ and Dean Radin that work in parapsychology understand the enormous.
Pressure that they are under to be as rigorous as possible.
You see things like Larry Dossi's work on the healing power of prayer, where they've done triple blind research, where the people that are actually they did triple blind research on prayer and fertility, where the people that were receiving the prayer and the doctors in the fertility clinic none of them were aware that this was being done.
They know that they have to.
pole vault over a higher bar.
Often, a lot of the parapsychological research is cunning methodologically in ways that normal research doesn't have the responsibility to be.
Princeton Engineering found that they were like, look, in order for these results to be insignificant, we would have had to have buried something like hundreds of millions of negative results.
We would have had to hide more research than we ever had time to conduct.
By orders of magnitude.
And so, yeah, so there's like, but this is a case where they still don't know why it works, you know?
And so, or at least they don't.
Maybe the CIA people do.
That's interesting.
But they didn't lead with, well, we don't know how it works.
They led with, is there something here?
And if there is something here, at that point, we can start.
I mean, that's how science should work, right?
Is like, yeah, exactly.
Check the anomaly, and then you start to create hypotheses about what you're actually observing.
Well, when you have unlimited money to research shit that you don't know what the outcome is going to be, you can discover.
There's no end to what you can discover.
I just had a guy in here last week.
He's a professor of the history of religion.
He's from Texas, Jeff Kreipel.
Detecting Anomalies In Reality00:09:24
Yes.
You know him?
Yeah.
So Jeff Kreipel was the PhD advisor for Eric Davis.
Okay.
And he's, yeah, he's done, yeah, he's an interesting dude.
He was explaining to me how an aerospace gravitational propulsion engineer hit him up.
And asked him to meet at MIT and talk about religion and the history of Catholic nuns levitating.
Like, why, like, a JPL, a J, I think the guy was from JPL, like, a JPL aeronautics propulsion guy is interested in a professor of the history of religion.
Like, what a crazy combination.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, that's just like, like, those guys have no limit to what they can look into and what they can study and what they can research.
Like, who knows what the f they've figured out, you know?
I mean, I think one of the first episodes of yours I listened to was the interview you did with Diana Pashulka.
Mm hmm.
You know, and I love her and Kripel for this reason is that, you know, you get to a point where people know that you're sympathetic to weird.
And so they start like, you know, yeah, Kripel has that whole book.
What is it?
The Flip?
You know, it's like 70 different reputable physicists who would only speak to him under the condition of anonymity because they were in the closet about the fact that they no longer believe in materialism.
You know, they're idealists.
They believe that consciousness is primary and that matter is like an optical illusion of consciousness.
Yes.
And this is something that, you know, you go back to.
I just interviewed Neil Thies, who's an NYU pathologist who wrote a book about complexity science and non duality.
That's the next episode of Future Fossils.
And he talks about this about how, you know, a lot of physicists, even among the quantum physicists, Niels Bohr famously was one of these. these people that decided that the metaphysical implications of modern physics are that consciousness is primary.
And this is hugely debated still, right?
Like it's one of these things that, as Neil talks about in his work, is obvious to someone who has done a certain amount of phenomenological research into the nature of their own minds.
And it's completely unobvious to everyone else.
And so, you know, looping back around to this conversation about what science is.
You know, like, well, you know, you have these incredibly strongly convergent, robust agreements about the nature of consciousness coming from different schools of inquiry, you know, like Western Christian esotericism, you know, Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Kashmir Saivist Judaism, you know, Zen Buddhism, etc.
Like all of them are saying something similar enough that it sounds like it could be the same thing about, you know, the actual nature of reality.
But the amount of work it takes to get to verifying those claims is equivalent in terms of a time and energy investment and equivalent in terms of, you know, the need to be supported by a community of expert practitioners to something like making claims about the mathematical basis for wave-particle complementarity.
Like it's, it's like you're talking about, you're asking a lot of someone to be able to be both an advanced physicist and an advanced meditator, you know, and so there's like, you know, it.
Therein lies the tension between people that are claiming that matter is the basis of reality versus people that are claiming consciousness is the basis of reality.
Yeah, there's a lot of friction between those two.
Yeah, it's like, why not both?
Porque no los dos, you know?
Right, right.
I want to get back to what we were talking about with the people that were trying, you guys, like stuff like similar to what Andrew Gallimore was trying to do, like map the DMT world or like do the extended state psychedelic trips and figure out what that is.
Yeah.
What what have you found out about that, and what kind of stuff are you researching in regards to these studies?
Well, yeah.
So, you know, one of the big things I'm excited about working with neuroanatics is that, okay, so a few years ago I gave this presentation at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is a really fascinating kind of transdisciplinary congress of people working in all different fields of research, you know, machine learning, animal behavior, human cognition, evolutionary biology.
And then they have storytellers also.
It's not just scientists.
It's also, you know, authors and artists and philosophers.
And so my friends Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill, who are at IU Bloomington now, run this program every summer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
And it was during COVID, so we had to do this remotely.
But I got to participate a couple years ago and gave a I was part of a working group that was interested in questions about what they call agnostic biosignature detection, or like in astrobiology.
The notion that we're looking for life on the basis of a certain idea of what life is.
You know, that life is carbon based or that life requires water or like all of these things.
And they send radio signals.
Right.
They send, yeah, exactly.
Like, and all of you've had Gallimore on.
You've had Andrew Gallimore, you know, talking about the transcension hypothesis and like all of this interesting stuff about, well, in what way, you know, astrobiology is like the perfect, and origins of life, which is very related.
Our disciplines in science that stare right down into the barrel.
They're looking directly into the abyss of what it is that we think we know and how can we challenge those assumptions to dilate the aperture of our inquiry.
You can find the slideshow, Diverse Aliens.
These are my contributions to this larger presentation, this group presentation, on how.
Not only are there hard limits, like this fantastic 1999 paper that Lachman, Newman, and Moore wrote on the physical limits of communication, which says that any optimally encoded electromagnetic communication is mathematically provable as indistinguishable from blackbody radiation.
So, this means that if an alien civilization is smarter than us and wants to encrypt its radio communications, we will never know.
Because it will look to us like the noise, like it'll look like cosmic background radiation to us.
Right.
You know, and so there is, you know, there are all of these, again, like these are fundamental epistemic issues in life detection.
And so, you know, there are things about SETI, right, which are just kind of hilariously weird.
Like the fact that we are looking for, you know, it's been over 20 years, it's been 25 years since this paper came out.
And yet, you know, the dominant paradigm of, of, Biosignature detection is that we are looking for waves, like rays that are being passed from alien to alien.
And for whatever reason, we are systematically ignoring people like Chris Bledsoe, right?
Like the Bledsoe family who are saying, I don't think he's being ignored.
Well, I mean, no, I mean, a lot of people are paying attention, but it's interesting who's not paying attention.
A lot of interesting people are paying attention.
It's really interesting who is paying attention to that guy.
Tell me more.
I don't know if you watched the podcast or not, but he's like surrounded by spooks.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So, again, one of these questions of like, at the same time, NASA astrobiology, which is a fantastic group of scientists, is not paying attention to them.
You know, and why is that?
And again, maybe they are.
Well, there was a couple of people that are really deep, according to him, a couple of, at least one guy who was like very, very deep, lifelong into NASA is like, was like very, very interested in him and spent a lot of time with him.
The guy who likes to stay complete.
He was anonymous guy in his book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But Sophia wrote about him.
Yeah.
She calls him Tyler D. Right.
Jeff Krippel met this guy too.
Yeah.
But you know, it's interesting.
So like years ago, I painted at an event at the NASA Ames. Facility in California.
It was a big party held for Yuri's night, celebrating the first orbital human mission.
Afterwards, I talked a little bit to the NASA film crew that was on attachment to document this party being held in their aircraft hangar.
I was like, So you guys have seen some stuff, right?
They're like, Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, we have.
Psychedelics Question Ontological Status00:13:27
But you can't.
Write that stuff into a line item for an NSF grant, right?
Like that funding on that kind of stuff is coming from a different DARPA, a different arm, a different pocketbook.
And like I know a ton of people that work in astrobiology that are actually significantly more open minded about this stuff and where we could be looking than they are academically allowed to be.
Like Diana has talked about, you know, like that she has to maintain a kind of, you know, a performance of academic.
Like an ironic distance from her research when she's talking to other religious scholars, you know, that she can't talk about what she actually thinks is going on.
She can only talk about it through, you know, a kind of anthropological curiosity about other people's weird beliefs, you know?
And so, like, whatever, yeah, and a lot of people are constrained in this way.
But yeah, so the point is that, like, this stuff is, you know, if you're honest about the science, we know, for instance, that, uh, That around the age of five months, your brain starts screening out certain things that you're seeing.
Right.
And that, yeah.
So they.
Yeah.
This is what Gallimore was talking about, too.
Right, right.
It's a filter.
Your senses are filters.
Perceptual filters and masking.
And so there are things that you can do, like take psychedelics that overwhelm those processes.
So to put it in like a machine learning language, your brain.
Is running prediction algorithms that are overfit to training data and therefore fail at predicting out of sample data.
They fail at predicting stuff that is like, you know, like after a certain age, you can look straight at something that is unlike what you saw in the first year of your life and not even see it.
And so there are ways that we have learned to systematically hack around these filters.
And so, this is why the use of psychedelics as a scientific instrument strikes me as so important, and in particular, important to questions that are prosecuting the status, the ontological status of these weird things like mantises or whatever that keep showing up in people's trips.
So, again, there's.
And mantises show up in what kind of trips?
Oh, man.
My friend Stuart Davis, who we won't have time to go into my own.
Bevy of UFO experiences on this show, probably.
But, like, my buddy Stuart Davis, who's a member of that integral philosophy community in Colorado that I spent some time in and a fantastic singer songwriter, came out of the closet several years ago as a more or less lifelong experiencer or contactee and started a podcast called Aliens and Artists.
That the whole thing is archived now.
And you can go back and you can listen to my recount of various experiences that I've had and start with his, though, because his are really profound.
Like, he and his family had.
You know, and I maybe continue to have years and years of interaction like the Bledsoe's with these beings that were kind of bothering them every night at 3 a.m. would like show up outside their house.
And he jokes about how his wife got to the point where she was just like, I've got stuff to do in the morning.
I don't care.
I wish they would just leave us alone.
Like it ceased being interesting to his wife.
Like he and his daughter became annoying, found it really interesting because they were like, What is this?
And so Stuart and I joked that there's every married couple has one of each, you know, that like.
Like some of my earliest UFO experiences were with my wife, but she was just sort of like, I don't know what bin to file this under, and I have stuff to do.
And so, like, you know, it's funny, like society is kind of made of these two different groups, right?
You have the people that are very, very good at getting stuff done.
It goes back to that explore exploit trade off.
There are some people that are very efficient, very good at staying on a to do list, you know, and they run the world.
And then you have the artists and people who are brilliant, but they can't get funding, you know.
You have people that are highly creative because their brains are very noisy.
They're easily distracted, but they're paying more attention to the stuff in the periphery.
Right.
You know, and like the question is, how do you get these two people that have completely different heuristics?
They have different values for what qualifies as a worthy, you know, like is something worth pursuing or not.
And the lateral thinking weirdos are the ones that tend to make the observations that precipitate scientific revolutions.
But They, you know, they have a hard time.
Like, I am late every single month to file my invoice for contract work.
Cause it's just like, I just don't, you know, like you hear people like stories of like the Claude Shannon who invented information theory and how when he was at Bell Labs, he never, like, he forgot to cash his checks.
You know, they're just like so preoccupied with like, you know, chasing the ambulance.
I think it's good to have a spouse that is like different than you in that sense.
It keeps you balanced, keeps you from basically like, Losing your footing, right?
It keeps you from falling down the slippery slope.
Yes.
So, Nikki, I love it's healthy.
Thank you.
So, you, when did you start having these kinds of experiences?
My first UFO experiences were as a kid.
But then they really came, they became pronounced as an adult after I got out of college.
And it's interesting because, like, you know, there is a, there's a, there's a through line.
In the parapsychological research literature and in lore, in like, you know, going back hundreds of years, stories of poltergeists and other weird sort of haunting phenomena that concentrate in the homes of emotionally disturbed teenagers or people that are like at points in their life where things, where they're in an epistemic crisis.
They're in a crisis about like, what do I do with my life?
You know, who am I?
What is this?
There may be trauma involved.
Yes.
And it's these moments where the story has been disrupted.
What my, you know, Doug Rushkoff, another big inspiration of mine, calls it narrative collapse.
These moments, you know, like the Thirty Years' War or like what we're going through right now with disinformation and the post truth era, where, again, like it's like the internet is a psychedelic that is operating on all of human civilization at one time.
Like rather than, You take acid.
Actually, let me show you this.
Let's see, tech ethics as psychedelic parenting is the talk I gave a few years ago.
You're a very fast Googler.
Oh, thanks.
It's incredible.
So let's see.
Yeah, here's a slideshow.
Got it.
Where do I?
Oh, yeah.
So this is from that famous LSD functional connectivity study that was done in London, where this is, you know, the.
Graph on the left is your brain in an ordinary waking state, and the graph on the right is the functional connectivity between brain regions after eating psilocybin mushrooms.
And then you look at something like this, and this is the map of the World Wide Web taken a few years apart.
And you see the same kind of thing as our information architecture develops on the planet, it's doing something to human systems that looks like what psychedelics are doing to the brain.
And so, like, the fact that we live in a post truth era is akin, is like, at planet scale, what's going on in your own brain when you're tripping and you can't, you don't know how far something is.
Like you lose your, your footing your, you lose your, your reality story, and so yeah, so there's.
You know, this is really I. You know, I have always considered um, for reasons that include the fact that, like the evolution of computing technology, the evolution of biotechnology, the evolution of entertainment media and the evolution of psychedelics as a technology over the last 150 years are basically the same story.
You know, like Doug Engelbart, who was at ARPA and a principal player in the foundation of personal computing and the internet, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies LSD trials in 1955.
You know, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak both took acid famously as they were developing the Apple computer.
You know, you go back and, you know, Kerry Mullis, who Diana Pashulka has talked about, you know, like we have DNA lab techniques to produce DNA.
We have the polymerase chain reaction for which he won the Nobel Prize.
because he was a psychonaut.
And so there is this weird thing that this is another piece of my fondness.
The reason I tell you should fund neuroanotics is because it's arguable that most of the modern scientific world that we live in is owed to these experiences that people are having.
Like even Rene Descartes, what we think of as the paragon of rational secular thinking.
The Cartesian plane came from a fever dream that he had.
I think it was in the Prussian war.
I can't remember the exact war, but he was a foot soldier and he caught a fever and had this dream where an angel came to him and gave him the Cartesian plane and said, use this to conquer nature, basically.
And you've got Kekulé and the benzene ring and all of these famous scientific breakthrough aha moments.
Newton wrote more on astrology and alchemy than he did on calculus and.
Physics, you know, and so, like, there is this weird intertwinkling between our engagement with mysterious intelligences or kinds of,
you know, kinds of intelligence in nature, where our great ideas come from, and the development of, you know, the like thinking about biological processes as digital.
Or thinking about the digital computer and the brain as being kind of related phenomena, information theory as something about systems that compute.
And so, anyway, it's just funny to me that the internet being a psychedelic substance, and then people having these psychedelic experiences where they realize that computation can be embodied in analog carbon based.
Systems.
You know, it's all kind of connected.
Kerry Mullis, he's interesting.
Didn't, am I thinking about the same person?
Is Kerry Mullis the guy who had like the huge rift with Anthony Fauci?
I don't, oh God.
I think he, yeah, there was a whole thing, you know, in his later years watching him just basically shitting on Fauci, wait, like in the 90s or something.
Yeah, I think, you know, Kerry is one of these people that ended up saying some stuff that made him look kind of bad.
Later on, kind of the same way Michael Crichton became a climate change denier toward the end of his life and famously said some kind of really unfortunate stuff.
Wikipedia, I'm sure they have a very accurate depiction of Kerry Mullis, American biochemist, in recognition of his role in the invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique.
Yeah, polymerase.
Yeah.
Oh, that's what he won the Nobel Prize for.
He shared the 2000, or wow, 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith.
Awarded the Japan Prize in the same year, PCR became a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by the New York Times as highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into two epochs before the PCR and after the PCR.
Huh.
But yeah, he was an HIV, AIDS denier and all this stuff.
He was a denier.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, he expressed doubt that HIV was the cause of AIDS.
But like, no, so this is an interesting case.
Like, they call it Nobel disease, right?
You get recognized as being an expert in something.
Like, for instance, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, a brilliant astronomer who comes out and then says stuff about how, like, you know, philosophy is inferior to science without realizing that, like, all of scientific knowledge depends on philosophy.
UFOs And Ancient Seers00:04:41
And it's just like, dude, you're staying in your lane.
You know, I have no lane, so I'm an expert in nothing.
You have many lanes.
I have, you know, I have no lanes and infinite lanes.
I should not be, you know, I hope that I'm merely pointing people to authoritative sources.
And not professing to be one.
But this happens a lot.
People get asked, they become known as experts.
And it's because we have this really impoverished understanding of expertise that we think somebody's an expert.
So we can ask them anything and they're just smarter than I am.
And that's not the case.
Collective intelligence is fundamental.
But yeah, the UFO experiences.
What about them?
Your first one was when you were how old?
Nine or ten.
And what was it you saw?
I saw a, what, like an orb, a kind of metallic orb floating in the sky with an equatorial belt of like rainbow lights.
And there was the lights were kind of rotating around it.
And then I was in the backseat of a car and trying to get my parents' attention.
And by the time they turned around, it was gone.
Where were you?
Orlando.
Wow.
Two hours from here.
Yeah.
And then the most recent one I saw was.
Outside of San Marcos, Texas, and probably a human craft.
Like, if I'm gonna place a bet on something, it was about 20 feet wide, triangular object with green lights on each wingtip and flatter than it could be to keep a person inside of it.
But it was floating about 100 feet off the ground over a crowd of 300 people.
It was observed multiply by me and a bunch of my friends on the ground, and we watched it for about a minute and it floated upwind.
Over the crowd in the stage until it was over the tree line.
We couldn't see it anymore.
But it was like, it was the wind was clearly blowing in the opposite direction and it was going upwind at about the speed of the wind, maybe five miles an hour.
What do you think it is about people?
I think it's so funny that people that have UFO experiences have many of them.
I've never found anyone who's just like seen one UFO and it ended there.
Like they all have multiple experiences and a history of experiences from childhood on.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, that was a question that Stuart Davis pursued in his podcast, Aliens and Artists.
You know, he talked to.
Hundreds of observers.
And one of the patterns that they all had in common was that it was heritable.
You know, that there seemed to be some sort of thing where it's like, you know, my mom has seen them and her mom.
And like the story kind of changes over time.
You know, it's like 200 years ago, my parents were talking about fairies.
Right.
But it's this, you know, you look at the kind of coarse features of this thing and it's the same.
Over generations.
And so, yeah, again, it gets to this question about human cognition, right?
And like, you know, another thing that's heritable, I have some friends in common with Josh Shry, who's the host of the Emerald podcast, also out of Santa Fe.
And Josh just did a really spectacular two episode feature on seers through societies over time and how, you know, things like the Delphic Oracle.
Right in ancient Greece, or in the medicine people in various tribal groups across the planet, you know, that seers have been held through most cultures over time as having a special suite of cognitive faculties that make them usefully different as navigators of stuff that is not really well understood or known to everyone else.
And that, you know, in our Our effort to squelch and stamp out various pre modern superstitions in the modern era.
For instance, the pharmacological research is coming around to validating in its own way with its own methods a lot of the supposedly BS, witchcraft style, like herbal medicine.
A lot of these folk traditions were correct in.
Their understanding that certain kinds of herbs work for certain kinds of ailments.
AI Minds Like Alien Communication00:09:48
And we just drowned all those people or burned them.
And now we're coming back around to like, okay, wait a minute.
And I think something like that is happening right now with, let me give you an example here.
I love this paper that just came out this weekend.
This hallucination is inevitable, an innate limitation of large language models, where they basically say that this feature of language models, which is that, you know, they generative tools will produce stuff that's just really weird.
Like we can't iron out.
You know, like certain, you know, like if you prompt Chat GPT and then it gives you some sort of BS response, like, you know, they warn you, you got to fact check this stuff.
You can't just assume that GPT is telling you the truth.
Right.
You know, so, but it's like, it turns out that this, you know, this paper makes the case that something like that is, we're never going to completely get rid of hallucination in machine learning.
What is the Google one called again?
Gemini.
Gemini, yeah.
Us, Gemini, what you look like.
You'll look like a 600 pound black woman.
Yeah, there's all of that.
Yeah.
So, again, like, it's, you know, what has a given inference algorithm been trained on?
And that's so fing weird, man.
In that respect, you know, this notion that goes back to like, you know, Roland Fisher and all of these people in the middle of the 20th century that consciousness is basically sense constrained, you know, what we think of as the waking mind, not consciousness in the way that like the non dual traditions use it, which is.
Ontologically prior to mental activity.
But that mind is, you know, the waking life is sense constrained dreaming, it's sense constrained hallucination.
And so that's what they're saying with these language models is that, you know, so like what's interesting about this with respect to Josh Shry and Sears and so on is that, again, we want to combine low noise and high noise systems as complementary in our efforts to try and understand the world.
And so, you know, To the extent that somebody like Gregory Bateson said, you know, information is the difference that makes a difference.
It's like we're actually doing ourselves, like you were saying earlier about creativity, like the human creative process and machine learning, and how, like, if we go too far down this route of just eating and constantly regurgitating and then re eating these, you know, the generative media goes back into, you know, tuning the language models.
And then we end up further and further down the hole of our training biases.
Yeah.
You know, but at the same time, like, we can.
We can use language models the way that the ancient Greeks used the Delphic oracle, or the way that you can cast the I Ching or read the tarot or read tea leaves or whatever.
Again, it's about injecting randomness into a system so that you are knocking yourself out of the rut of being overfit on the reality model that you're using at any given time.
What excites me about A lot of the really savvy people that have been talking about AI for years, like Kevin Kelly, who I've had on the show three times, he's the founding editor of Wired Magazine and a brilliant technologist.
And he was saying, even as far back as the 90s, that trying to reproduce the human mind with AI is not interesting because we already have human minds.
And that what's actually really interesting is finding kinds of inference or kinds of intelligence that are.
Meaningfully distinct from our own.
That, like, we're like, you know, AI, we are making alien minds that can tell us something about us that we don't already know in the way that, like, learning to communicate with dolphins, for instance, is going to radically expand our view of the world.
And so, like, again, like, you know, when it comes to SETI, there's like three stances.
There's, you know, let's look out into space for life.
There's, let's look into our own phenomenal experience with psychedelics.
And then there's this other thing which is going on with groups like the Interspecies Internet.
Interspecies.io, which is like co founded by Vint Cerf and Peter Gabriel.
It's a fascinating project.
What is it about?
It's about using machine learning to create a translation layer between humans and non humans.
So, like learning to communicate with dolphins and apes and corvids and other kinds of creatures with AI so that you have, you know, like the dog's got the translation collar.
That stuff is like an inch away from us right now.
I was going to have Karen Bacher on the show.
Karen.
Uh, passed away last year tragically, but she was a brilliant eco acoustician.
What is the name of this?
Uh, interspecies.io.
Um, but yeah, Karen worked on the you know, using machine learning.
She wrote a book called The Sounds of Life about using machine learning to decode the communication of everything from like whales and turtles to coral.
It turns out like all kinds of life use sound to communicate that we didn't even realize until just a couple years ago.
Um, And so, yeah, there's this whole explosive field right now of ecoacoustics empowered by AI, so that, you know, like within a very short time, we're going to be talking to all kinds of non human animals.
And then we have an ethical question about whether we should, whether it's responsible for us to, like, there are issues of informed consent.
Like, should we really be giving, should we really be like, in the position to sell dolphins Instagram ads and stuff like that.
That seems like a really bad idea because they're like children, like they don't like, you know, should you really let your kids just watch YouTube without parental supervision?
No.
And anyway, so this is, you know, I just love the idea of like, oops, it turns out that, you know, we thought that AI was going to be good for like missile guidance and stuff like this.
The real feature of AI, the really interesting thing that it's going to turn out to be most useful for is helping us reconnect to This more sort of diverse relationship to mind and intelligence that makes our explorations of the cosmos inherently plural.
Like the last thing I think I had, I pulled up that I wanted to show you is this talk I gave a couple years ago about pluralism.
And it gets back to this, there's a ton of good links in here, a six minute talk on all of the different ways that people independently decided that pluralism. was the correct basis for asking deep questions about reality.
Again, there's a ton on the table right now.
What we stand to learn if we do manage to reliably open discourse with different forms of non-human intelligence, be they terrestrial organisms, be they machine intelligences, be they interdimensional ET type things or whatever.
Every new, I mean, there's like, I guess like the way to put it is like the term alien has not always meant the same thing, right?
Like there are people that call people crossing the border through Mexico aliens.
Alien just means beyond the horizon of my own sense of self, right?
It's an adjective that we apply to the things that are exotic to our own understanding of the world.
And so alien used to mean people living five miles away from you.
And maybe in another hundred years, alien will mean something that currently lies so far beyond the scope of our comprehension.
We will not consider the octopus to be an alien form of intelligence anymore, because we will have been brain linked to octopi through brain computer interfaces for a hundred years.
So it'll seem like your neighbor in the latent space of possible minds.
That's crazy to think about.
I mean, imagine, I mean, even if the work that the interspecies IO people are doing with using these models to decipher animal communication, I mean, imagine if we were able to somehow link the minds of people from different parts of the world, like different countries.
And like, I just think imagine how that would upset.
The balance of nations around the world, if it wasn't just like if you don't just have like these people at the very top of the pyramid communicating with each other, and then the people below are just sort of like are just passive, right?
If this thing becomes ubiquitous and people like you and me are able to tap into what people are thinking and communicate with, you know, people in other cultures that speak different fucking languages around the world, I wonder that how that would change.
Global Systems Hit A Wall00:15:23
The global balance and like how that would make, uh, when you think about you know superpowers and military might, like how that would make that obsolete, maybe in a way, because we're in the middle of it.
I mean, I so 189 at Future Fossils, I interviewed Parag Khanna, who's uh kind of a famous, a best selling futurist author.
Uh, I used to write for his blog at bigthink.com, and uh, he's spent a ton of time on this question, you know, this book.
That he and I discussed about a year ago, or maybe two years ago now.
Move.
Yeah, the forces uprooting us.
He's talking about how the increasingly interconnected global economy is dissolving national borders.
And a lot of what we see as this sort of counter force where people are like nationalism is having kind of a moment right now, but it's because.
The actual larger historical trend is in the other direction.
I'm not as unrepentant a globalist as Parag Khanna is because I also see the way that as boundaries collapse, things become more and more unstable and unpredictable.
It's not at all clear to me that we're moving into something that can be simply described as a kind of global system.
The internet, everyone's pulling out of social media.
because it's not safe anymore.
Like the way that there was a UC Santa Barbara study on fisheries, mass capture fishing a few years ago, showing that as we've gotten better and better at net trawling large schools of fish, schools of fish have evolved to be smaller because they avoid the attention of these fisheries because they're swimming in smaller groups.
It's a diminishing marginal return on fishing cost.
And so something like that is happening right now in the surveillance economy.
Where people are sick of being preyed upon in these enormous herds of willing flesh online and are pulling out, and the new social media experience is one that's much more campfire scale than global scale.
And so, as forces pull in other directions, opposite directions all the time.
But the point that Parag was making was that as things have become more and more globalized, Voluntary military participation has dropped profoundly.
That, like, people like voluntary young people no longer want to join the army because they no longer identify as national citizens on average as much as they used to.
They no longer have a fealty to, you know, the in a given country, they have on, you know, on average more of a fealty to being of a particular generation, yes, andor you know, identifying as global citizens.
My buddy Sam Barton, uh, who is a dear friend of mine, let's see, uh, what was that?
Sam Barton, Global Citizen.
He's working on a project, Global Citizens United, is a project he's working on with a few people to try and kind of advance this notion of global citizenship from the bottom up.
And so, yeah, I mean, there are these, you know, Parag talks about there being, you know, we have a moral imperative to open our borders more because.
Uh, you know, the demographic shifts in the population are making it so that we're going to run out of elder care.
You know, like Japan is already struggling, large parts of Europe are already struggling to, uh, with like replacement.
And so people are running out of, uh, you know, options for domestic labor and for the care of the elderly and this kind of thing.
And so we're going to have to, you know, like a society needs new blood in it.
And if we're, if our reproductive rates continue to drop because of the, the, systems dynamics of the demographic shift into urban living, then we're going to have to replace that not with children from a given country, but from, you know, immigrant movement.
That's a good point that this guy, I was listening to a podcast with John Mearsheimer and Lex Friedman had him on.
It was a guy's incredible.
He was talking about this, that specifically in regards to immigration from Mexico and South America and like how important it is like that.
And Also, I think from like Asian countries, that a huge chunk, I think more than ever, of young people are currently reproducing.
The people that reproduce the most that are immigrants from those countries that are keeping our, replenishing our population and keeping it from declining.
And if it wasn't for all that immigration, our population would be plummeting like at a way larger rate.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, Parag's observation is that we are actually, you know, like a lot of people think about this sort of hockey stick exponential curve, you know, but most systems, most complex systems have a negative feedback built into them somewhere where you actually get what they call a sigmoidal curve, which is like S shaped.
And you reach carrying capacity and then things check that.
So, like, it's not that we're going to, you know, like most people with a basis in ecology are less concerned.
About a system doing some sort of insane thing where it just.
I mean, this is a complicated topic, but the best perhaps introduction I can think of to this topic is the conversation I just had with physicist Jeffrey West and ecologist Manfred, evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubeekler.
And they look at this innovation, technological innovation, and they say basically.
Like we were talking about earlier about like innovating, like discovering new energy resources or new material resources for manufacturing, and that it creates a crisis, it exports some new kind of externality, some new kind of waste, or it exports, you know, in making a system more predictable and more controllable, you export chaos and disorder.
And then that chaos and disorder doesn't just disappear forever, it eventually comes back and bites you in the ass.
And so you can look at the history of technological innovation as a history of Constantly kicking this catastrophe a little further down the road, but that the crisis comes back even faster as the systems become more and more complex and unpredictable because they're generating more and more novelty.
And so, Wes talks about the finite time singularity, which is this moment that we can no longer adapt with new innovations at the pace of the new kinds of disorder that we have to understand, predict, control, manage.
And so, you know, at that point, The West is predicting something like the collapse of civilization.
But one of the things that we get into in this conversation is how it may be actually that we just kind of hit a wall and that things don't collapse, that they kind of just taper off.
And so Parag says the same kind of thing.
He's like, what were we thinking?
There are all of these checks and balances that come in, like people can't afford to have kids.
So, like, reproduction does not just continue to grow exponentially forever.
You get to a point where you can't afford a house and you can't afford having three kids.
And, like, that's the millennial experience, right?
Like, the millennial experience is we're actually starting to make choices where we're not just mindlessly pursuing an exponential growth curve anymore.
You know, the change.
What do you mean, mindlessly pursuing?
Well, like, you know, like, you know, the assumption that we're just going to keep.
Growing forever, like eventually a bacterial culture growing in a petri dish hits the wall of the dish.
Oh, okay.
You know, and so, like, this notion that comes from the Club of Rome limits to growth, like this famous paper in the 1970s, you know, talking about limits to growth.
It's like the assumption that that's going to, that that hitting a limit to growth or overshooting a limit to growth necessarily results in some sort of, you know, universal catastrophic collapse is not necessarily the case.
It's a question of the different scales at which all of these different things are unfolding, the different time scales at which they're unfolding.
So, I mean, I don't know.
I guess, I mean, we're kind of on a weird bender here.
But, like, you know, I think that the much like the collapse of unification in the sciences doesn't necessarily mean that we give up on the quest for consilience in our knowledge.
It doesn't mean that we, you know, like, the printing press comes out and then we go back to the stone age.
You know it's like, no, we hit a new we, we hit a new plateau and then it takes some time for us to figure out how to grow beyond that that plateau.
I don't know.
I mean, these are, these are very uh, these are very complex questions, but I don't think that we are um, I don't, I don't think that we are necessarily at uh, a point Where on one side of the curve, we all go up into space and live forever.
And on the other side, the only other possibility is that we end up bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age.
Like there's definitely a third thing in there.
Probably a few different things.
Yeah.
Back to your UFO stories.
What other kind of experiences?
Did you have any other kind of experiences other than seeing objects in the sky?
Did you have any like encounters with beings or anything?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
I mean, for sure.
Yeah.
But I mean, again, okay, like let me just. bracket this by saying that I believe in maintaining a kind of skeptical humility about all of the weird experiences that I've had.
I've had enough of them to find them interesting and worthy of serious pursuit, a genuine effort to try and understand something.
But I think that You know, anyone who believes that they know what's going on has failed, whether they believe on the side of, you know, this does not exist or on the side of like, this does exist and I know what's going on.
And in fact, one of the more interesting pieces of writing I've seen on this is, again, by my buddy Stuart Davis, who wrote a piece on the phenomenon as control system or developmental driver.
where he says, yeah, this piece.
Oh, hmm, advanced.
Well, so proceed.
You know, where he says, you know, is the UFO phenomenon and sort of all these related parapsychological phenomena maybe, like, does it maybe exist?
Gene.
This, where?
Oh, game is a song of his.
He loves exploring the shadow, the psychological shadow in his work.
But he writes this piece, where he basically asks, is the UFO a kind of deception that is malevolent?
Are we being controlled by an intelligence greater than our own that's preying on us in some way?
Or is it a call forward into a higher logical order?
Like is the fact that these things are so hard to define or that they seem so elusive or slippery that they escape Our attempts to nail them down into an easy kind of category.
Is this perhaps actually the feature?
Again, like, is this actually not a bug of what we're observing, but is this actually the point that we're being called to reconstitute our cosmology at a higher logical order that is not merely sort of a duality, a dualistic kind of thinking?
And the last thing I'd say on that before we go back to story time about my UFO experiences is that I talked about this with Sean, with Sean S. Bjorn Hargens, my graduate advisor on future fossils.
And we spend a lot of time.
You know, kind of he looks at how 200 different cultures and academic disciplines have investigated the UFO phenomenon and the conclusions that they've come to.
And one of the things that he basically says is that, you know, the through line on all of this stuff is that, you know, Jacques Vallee talks about this and many others, that the through line is that it seems to be, Carl Jung wrote about this.
If we can say anything about this phenomenon, it's that it interrogates.
The modern boundary between the mind and the rest of reality.
And that, you know, that there seems to be a sense in which the horizon of our understanding is on this sort of, you know, the psychophysical nature of things.
And so, you know, how do we, how can we, how can we do better science, you know, with a, you know, a kind of like interior SETI, you know, a no-anotic SETI?
How can we do science that helps us adapt?
The philosophy of science to a networked digital era?
Like, how can we update the philosophical underpinnings of scientific inquiry so that we can adequately deal with issues of mind matter complementarity or of the challenges in reproducibility for psychological experiments and so on?
And so, with all of that said, there is a sort of sense in which these experiences pollute or challenge or compromise.
Our attempts at objective material description.
Mantises And Separated Scientists00:02:14
And so, like, one of the things that I've decided I'm just not going to bother doing is to try and claim that any of my experiences should convince someone to believe in this stuff.
But, you know, with that said, like, I was in Peru in 2011 for ayahuasca ceremony, and in a really unusual situation where the 17 of us that went down together were all separated.
And led through our ayahuasca ceremonies as a kind of initiatic ordeal alone, like intentionally separated from one another rather than in a more kind of traditional circle, you know, ceremony setting.
And all 17 of us separated and out of contact with one another through ceremony all saw these weird sort of mantis like black chrome kind of aliens that appeared to us each individually.
And the next morning, we all came back and we were like, oh, you saw that too?
Like, what?
And in my case, these beings that, you know, kind of ran through the whole kind of classic gamut of behavior, including, you know, psychic surgery on you.
Like, you know, they're like opening up your energy body and operating on your subtle energy systems or whatever.
So I had that experience and I had the experience.
How old were you when you did that?
Mmm, 27.
Wait, yes, 27.
2000, yeah, 2011.
This was the week before the Fukushima reactor collapse.
We came back to civilization.
Like, we came out of the jungle and went to a hostel outside of Puerto Maldonado.
And the first thing we saw on TV was the coverage of the reactor meltdown.
And we were like, oh, because, like, the whole thing was like, you know, it's like you go through the experience, but then the work really starts when you get back.
Right, right.
And so, like, that was the joke on us.
We were like, oh, God.
Oh, God, right.
We live in the world, you know, now, and now, you know, where is the boundary?
You know, because cesium 137 is in your tuna.
Biological Forms As Divine Ideas00:09:53
But, like, you know, so there's that's another weird thing about this phenomenon, right?
Is the intense correlation between the UFO phenomenon and nuclear technology, you know?
And I know you've talked with a ton of people about this on the show and the intense curiosity that these unidentifiable craft appear to have about nuclear missile stations and so on.
But, like, so yeah, there's something really curious about that.
But, like, the beings that I saw in ceremony that, uh, that year were uh, trying to explain to me.
I mean again, like this is my, you know, this is the subjective experience I had of this was that they appeared to me out of nowhere and I was like, so how are you here?
You know what is this?
How are you showing up to me right now like, are you, you know?
And what they were saying was that um, that there are different substrates on which life can emerge or from which life can emerge, And that biochemistry, organic biochemistry is one of them, but organic biochemistry represents a specific stratum of temperature and pressure at which life can occur, and that life can occur at other pressures in other states of matter.
And that their form of life occurs in plasmas that are, you know, they're like ionized gases that are so hot and so electrically charged that organic.
Life cannot develop from them, but that they can generate basically like magnetic holograms, and that the kinds of interactions that are necessary for life can emerge out of the substrate of those holograms.
And so they're basically like, well, you actually have this too.
Like the living biological systems on the planet, as we conventionally understand them, all have this energetic component.
Which is, if you look at the work of like Irvin Laszlo or Rupert Sheldrake or some of these other people that have been trying to understand a new biology,
a lot of them puzzle into the relation of electromagnetism and quantum vacuum holograms and so on in these kind of more non-local and seemingly predictive biological dynamics.
The thing about they were saying is like, well, we have like a material body.
It's just that our material body is plasma and you have a plasma body, but that's not where evolution has tuned your attention or the has tuned your organization as the encapsulation or the incarnation of an inference, a model of its environment.
Like you live on a slow, cool planet.
And so the focal point for you as a living system is on this.
The material, the chemical substrate.
Whereas we are too hot for chemistry, but we are holograms made out of the magnetic interactions of heavy metals at the center of the galaxy.
We can appear to you through the nonlinear interactions of our subtle body and yours.
But we don't occupy time and space in the same way that you do because of the fact that our experience is centered on a different.
You know, the emergent interactions of a different phase of matter.
I was like, oh, okay, all right, cool.
You know, noted.
Yeah, noted.
Noted.
So, like, but they were basically like, look, there's nothing supernatural about this.
There's nothing, you know, this is not, this is the same physics that you have.
This is the same, you know, this is the same substrate for biology on a very general level.
But, But like you can't, like your eyeball would dissolve instantaneously if you tried to like actually physically co locate with us.
And, you know, the only way that we're able to appear to you is kind of like remotely through this spooky action at a distance or whatever.
Did it seem like they were far more advanced than we are technologically?
I mean, or what is technology?
More enlightened than we were.
Were they a superior being to us?
And can this communication happen?
Happen in the reversal role?
Like, can they somehow experience us in the same way you experience them?
I mean, so I.
I don't know if you had time to ask this question.
Yeah.
I wonder about, I mean, technology again, you know, I tend to think of things in a very, very general way where, you know, like one of my favorite papers is this piece, Multiple Paths to Multiple Life.
My friend Chris Kempis led.
A few years ago.
And there's a great, let me see if I can find this figure in this paper.
Oh, yeah, where they're talking about like we tend to think at layer one here, life as a space of material possibilities.
But then there's layer two, which is a space of physical constraints.
And then there's layer three, which is a space of optimization principles.
And so, you know, like this is a space where, you know, you have convergence on.
Certain, like, you know, like information theorists are going to argue that life could exist as like the blockchain might be alive or a national constitution might be alive or memes might be alive.
Memes, like, my again, Jacob Foster, the friend of mine who co leads the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute, gave a great presentation a couple years ago on death metal as a kind of parasitic organism that exists on the substrate of human brains.
He was just giving death metal as a joke example, but ideas are information patterns that propagate from one human brain or human mind to another.
And so there is a sense in which you can argue that something like a god in a more kind of modern information theoretical sense is a pattern of neural firing activity and behavioral activity that we see in.
Like entire groups of human beings, and in our relationship to each other through various technological media.
And so, you know, like Batman, this is something I talk about with Sean in that episode 150 of Future Fossils that like, you know, this is like Neil Gaiman and American Gods, you know, like this story about, you know, what are gods really?
Gods are ideas that people have and enact through their behavior.
So like Batman is like a thing.
Batman has a physical footprint of merchandise and, you know, the information of like Batman movies stored on Netflix servers and like this kind of stuff.
And so that's a thing.
That's a thing that exists in space and time, in the way that philosopher Timothy Morton, who's at Rice University with Jeff Kreipel, calls them hyperobjects.
You know, it's like it's so big that we can't really see it as a single thing.
Like climate change is a thing, but it's a hyperobject that we're embedded in.
And so we can only catch glimpses of it.
And like the UFO might be a hyperobject.
You know, it might be something that exists in some weird way, both kind of beyond us and inside of us, and that we're.
sitting here like scratching our silly monkey heads trying to make sense of it.
But that it's there.
It's there in the way that, you know, that Christianity is, you know, that like Christ, you know, historically, who knows, may have been a physical person, but Christ is definitely a real thing in that enough people believe in Christ and Christ influences their actual behavior in the world, you know?
And so like what is, What is an idea?
What is a technology?
What is life?
And are we basically ideas that are, are we like memes that, like 19th century natural history illustrator Ernst Heckel, who's like the legendary science illustrator of all time.
There's a great documentary about his work called Proteus, where he talks a lot about his study of biological form as a study of the ideas in the mind of God, as kind of like Platonic, like that physical, you know, like biological organisms and like the various forms that we see in nature throughout the tree of life are like ideas that God is having and that, you know, God's brain is like physical reality and so on.
And I think that's just a really elegant, beautiful system.
For the contemplation of transcendent weird notions.
Non Dual Awakening Experiences00:03:53
But I don't know how to answer your question about like, are they more or less advanced?
Because, you know, I mean, I don't know.
Have you, every time you experienced things like this, was it all under the influence of things like ayahuasca or psilocybin or things like that?
No, I definitely had sober.
But I mean, again, like, what is.
What is sobriety, right?
What is sobriety?
Because your brain.
It's a hyper object.
Well, like, you know, McKenna's talked about this, and so has, you know, Salvador Dali said, I don't do drugs, I am drugs.
You know, like the modern molecular biochemical approach to human cognition is that you are made out of psychoactive substances.
Yeah.
You know, so like what is sober?
Like you can't get away from, you know, being under the influence of something any more than.
Whether it's endogenous chemicals or endogenous chemicals, right?
Right.
So bags of chemicals walking around.
Right.
So you have never in a constant state.
Totally.
You just have, you know, one kind of intoxication that people take for granted as normal versus other kinds that are less normal and perhaps less socially interoperable, right?
Like, yeah, you know, you're, you're going to have trouble feeding yourself if you're Ramana Maharshi and you're in a kind of advanced meditative state all the time.
And, and so you don't have a perception of your ego.
Like, was that Jill Boltey Taylor who had my stroke of genius?
She had a, she had a, a, a, a hemis, a left hemispheric stroke.
She has a famous TED talk about it, like that she had a, kind of a non dual samadhi, you know, she had a moment of awakening where her boundary around herself dissolved and she didn't experience herself as separate from the cosmos.
But she also kept forgetting to call 911 because she was just like so like captivated by everything that she forgot that she had, she was in the middle of an emergency, you know?
So again, like there are, there's got to be some kind of utility to, Certain kinds of intoxication that allow us to meaning, you know, to see things differently.
But, you know, there's a reason that there are probably fewer artists per capita than there are bankers or whatever.
You know, like we, on average, we need to remember that, you know, we have to remember to eat.
Yeah.
It's similar to Jeff Kreipel wrote a book, Changed in a Flash.
I don't know if you heard of that one, but it's about this lady, Elizabeth Crone, I think her name was.
She got struck by lightning.
And then she basically recounts this whole experience of like after she got struck by lightning, she was going to church with her kids.
She went inside the church to get a doctor, and it was a what's it called?
It was a Jewish church.
So it was full of doctors.
Synagogue.
Yeah.
And they were all doctors and they all came and helped her.
And then she turned around to go back outside and she saw herself laying there on the floor, on the ground, like dead.
And then she followed some light into some other garden.
She explained she saw, and then she purposely didn't follow the light.
She was in this garden communicating with her dead grandfather for like two weeks straight.
And then she decided to go back into her previous body or previous space time.
And then she recounts all of this.
And then she had like all these precognitive abilities after this.
And she was able to predict things or like knew people were going to die the day before they died and all this crazy stuff.
And, you know, all these, I see just like such a pattern between some of these UFO experiences and these near death experiences.
And it makes me like curious to whether, you know, when it even comes to people like, Whitley Strieber or Chris Bledsoe, like all this stuff is just inside you.
Syntax And Precognitive Abilities00:02:49
Maybe not as it may not be external.
Well, it may just not be that, you know, inside you means what we think it means.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it's, you know, this room is inside you in some sense, you know, like again, like this is why I love the methodological pluralist approach to this stuff.
It's like, okay, in one sense of the word inside, this stuff is arising in your awareness.
And in another sense of the word inside, you're sitting in the room.
Where this is happening.
And those are two different ways.
We're using the same word, but they mean two very different things.
And so I think a lot of what we're dealing with right now is a demand for the evolution of our language.
In the same way that my interest in all of this stuff kind of arguably came out of reading a paper about where syntax comes from.
That's where it all started?
Yeah, the evolution of syntactic language.
This paper led by Martin Nowak.
Your recall of all these podcasts that you've recorded and all these papers that you've read is astounding.
Thanks.
Yeah, gobble nootropics, folks.
That's just a lot of fun.
Yeah, gobble crowd them.
Yeah.
So, this piece, Noak and Plotkin.
Oh, and Krakower worked on this one too, but he's got a couple on the evolution of language and of syntactic communication.
Oh, here we go.
Oh, look at that.
Henry G worked on this episode of this issue of Nature, my buddy Henry.
Anyway, so they talk about syntax and the sentence being.
Something that emerged out of a similar kind of catastrophic threshold in information production in early human society, like hominid society, where the complexity of society meant that we had suddenly exponentially more things to communicate to one another that mattered to the cohesion of our behavioral coordination.
Our language, which at the time was built on individual utterances, where like we didn't have sentences yet.
We had things like chair, you know, or like good, you know, and there was no real, you know, there was no way to articulate things into longer, more complex ideas.
The way a toddler communicates.
Right, right.
And then at some point, you get to a level of social complexity where you need to remember more words than you can.
Basically.
Higher Dimensional Reality Descriptions00:09:38
And so at that point, we go from a dynamic where you learn by adding new words to a dynamic where you come up with a handful of simple rules where those words can be combined to mean exponentially more things than you can actually remember.
And so this has implications to the origin of life because what we're talking about and what my friend Sarah Walker, who's a NASA-funded astrobiologist at ASU,
talks about that life is basically the life can be defined as the processes whereby systems generate a greater possibility space than the actual space of things that can happen.
So, like, you know, the notion that we are evolving into a deeper and deeper embrace of imagination and possibility is actually like fundamental to what it means to be alive and what it means to be intelligent.
You know when like, people talk about life as being uh, you know like, highly improbable.
You know like, the number of ways that you can put a mole.
You know molecules together to make something and only some of them will actually lead to a reproducing cell and you know vastly more of them won't.
And the question of like well, how is it that we did this?
The famous sort of critique of uh, you know that it's like a junkyard blowing, you know, a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a working 747.
It's like.
It's actually substantially worse than that.
But you have people like my buddy Bruce Dahmer, or like the quantum biologist John Joe McFadden at the University OF Surrey, who have interesting arguments for basically not only life being seemingly circumventing, enormous improbability,
but being inevitable because the grain of our cosmos is toward an expansion of what complex system scientist Stuart Kaufman calls the adjacent possible.
You keep coming to these crisis points in information management in both pre-biological, biological, and sort of trans or post-biological systems.
The solution is to invent a new syntax, a new order for articulating and recombining the parts that allow us to model the cosmos with adequate complexity in order to continue surviving in it.
We're at a point now in the history of the planet where subject verb object syntax is no longer adequate to describing the reality of our experience, such that we can say things like, I am in the room and the room is in me, and for it to make sense intuitively rather than it to sound like a nonsense statement.
I did a video on that.
Folks can find on my YouTube how to resolve a paradox.
And this is something that was communicated to me in a UFO experience, actually, in 2006, where they said, look, if you say you have a card, and on one side of the card, it says the statement on the opposite side of this card is false.
But then you turn the card around, and on the other side of the card, it says the same thing.
So they can't both be right, right?
Right?
Oh, no, but they can, because you can spin the card.
And so you can assign a relative truth value.
To these seemingly contradictory statements by adding a dimension, a dimension of time or a dimension of physical space, where those things can oscillate.
And that kind of oscillation is one of the core characteristics of a hyper object as defined by Timothy Morton.
So, like, reality is a hyper object, and we gain more and more accurately high, more and more adequately high dimensional understandings or models of reality by adding more dimensions and more perspectives to our understanding, which is exactly what we were talking about with, like, what is science?
Science is.
an open-ended process whereby more and more seemingly contradictory dimensions are unified at the level of our understanding and our world models.
That actually exceeds a third-person confirmation.
Really, I think the new form of science that we're going to stabilize at in the coming decades is a science that is comfortable with the complementarity of both quantitative and qualitative. evidence streams and has found some way to unify them in a higher logical order.
And so, yeah, so it gets, you know, all of the stuff we've been talking about today is like, how do we use systems of numbers and systems of experiences stereoscopically to train our scientific investigations on something that is fundamentally challenging to the idea of mind-matter duality?
Wild shit, dude.
Let's watch this video.
I mean, sure, it's kind of.
Yeah, this is just me doing a mural on the inside of my buddy's camper.
Oh, okay.
And you're just talking about this idea while you're doing your mural.
Yeah, I've got a ton of these time lapse videos online with me going on about one thing or another, philosophical ideas.
Oh, this was.
It's incredible.
So you said you got that idea in a UFO experience in 2006.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The second of four.
UFO experiences I had at Clinton Lake outside of the Lawrence, like where I went to school at the University of Kansas.
How did the idea come?
How did the idea get communicated to you?
Well, it said, like, imagine that, like, we're going to use a geometric analogy to present this to you.
They're like, okay, now imagine you have a question.
No, I mean, how is this coming to you?
Like, just showing up in my head while I was looking at this UFO.
Yeah, you're looking at something and this is just popping in.
These pictures are popping into your head or words?
Both.
And it was like, okay, so like, imagine you have a question and we're going to say that the question is, like, the formal logical presentation of this question is as a triangle.
The answer to the question is a tetrahedron.
You add another point that's off the plane at which you can't understand what you're being asked, and then you're able to observe the two dimensional plane from the third dimension.
And they're like, so the tetrahedron poses a question that can only be answered by a four dimensional extrapolation from that.
And so, like, all of our physics models are like low dimensional encodings of the actual complexity of reality.
And Our ability, like the ability of human beings to cognize a certain number of dimensions, is constrained by our evolutionary history, which required us to navigate space time at a certain level of complexity, right?
Like, you don't need to know that there are 11 dimensions because it doesn't matter to you, kind of, you know, it doesn't matter.
But maybe now it's starting to matter.
Maybe now we have an existential demand being made on us.
To understand things at a higher level of dimensionality because our actions are suddenly, you know, they have repercussions that extend into other dimensions, you know?
And so, like, there's a great book, Andrew Smith.
This is kind of like what, Steve, you remember what Billy Carson was showing us that video about crystals and the lady that was holding the 3D thing and it casts a shadow on the ground, like a 2D shape.
Yeah, that was it was a really good explanation as well.
There was a There's like ultra crystals or I forgot the name quasi crystals.
Quasi, yes.
Yeah, so Andrew Smith wrote Andrew P. Smith wrote a book about this called The Dimensions of Experience.
I want a book club with future fossils folks at some point Where he says basically like an ant actually doesn't even experience three spatial dimensions because they're so small It doesn't matter and they can like walk on walls and stuff.
So they really only experience X and Y Their experience of physical space is planar.
It's not cuboidal.
And humans have gotten to a point where we, you know, humans and birds, like for instance, birds actually have more advanced spatial cognition than humans do because they have to fly.
And so they're, you know, birds, especially birds that live in forests and other dense areas, have very advanced spatial.
Like that's why corvids, you know, crows and magpies and so on are so good at like picking locks and stuff is because they've they have to think in 3D in order to navigate.
And that's why humans, you know, we have really good stereoscopic vision and, you know, we can manipulate objects with our hands and so on because we were living in the trees for so long.
Corvids Think In Three Dimensions00:06:10
You know, we had to swing through, you know, a kind of dense, complicated three dimensional space.
And so, like, by the time we, you know, one of the things that years ago, the author of Xenolinguistics, which is like one of the best books on psychedelics and the evolution of language in the world, Diana Reed Slattery, When she was on Eric Davis' show Expanding Mind back in the day, she talked about how, like, all of human language is based on us living on the surface of a planet under one gravity, one Earth gravity.
And that language would look completely different if it had emerged in zero gravity.
Because, you know, you would think of things growing out rather than growing up.
You know, they would be growing out uniformly from a point in all, you know, in all directions rather than, you know, like the way that like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write in this metaphors we live by, they write about, you know, we have this relationship in our minds between more is up and then like, you know, a bigger pile of food is like better or like sitting upright means that you're kind of more.
You know, you're maybe a little happier than if you're kind of like slouched over.
So there's like these, there are very, very deep entailments between more is up and up is better that are in our language.
So when we talk about the stock market, we talk about it going up when it's performing well.
Right.
And we talk about it going down when it's not.
And like it's really counterintuitive to try and flip it around.
You know, one of the most interesting things about like data visualization and like the presentation of scientific knowledge is the way that we take these things as inherently objective, but they're actually.
Again, this is the postmodern or linguistic turn in philosophy.
It's like we're actually sitting on this incredibly deep substratum of embodied understanding that's coloring everything we take to be objective knowledge.
You know, so like, you know, like when people talk about getting the cold shoulder, it turns out that social rejection is registered in the brain the same place that like, you know, like you feel physical pain from social rejection and it feels cold and people report themselves as being colder when they're rejected.
And there's like a history between like you're a mammal, you slept in piles.
You know, you were like warmer when you were like accepted by your tribe or whatever.
So, like, our language is full of this stuff.
That's fast.
And so, again, like, where, you know, what's inside?
Did you say crows can pick locks?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
I mean, I did not know that.
Not every lock, right?
But like, yeah, there's fantastic crow, let's see, corvid.
Birds are crazy, man.
Lock picking.
And even like the homing pigeon, like we still haven't figured out how the homing pigeon.
Oh, it's so strange.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Oh, yeah.
Here we go.
Lock picking ravens.
What the fuck?
I mean, and they will work together.
So, how do they do this?
I mean, there are all kinds of experiments into this, into crow, raven, magpie cognition, but they'll work together.
Like, there are certain locks that you can only pick.
With two partners working on the same task.
And so they will figure it out together.
That's bizarre.
And what perception gives them the ability?
How did they evolve to be able to do this?
Do people speculate?
I mean, it's like intelligence is just the.
Basically, none of us are smarter than we have to be.
And none of us are dumber than we need to be.
You know, uh, it's a great quote.
That is a great quote.
I like that.
So, like, uh, I mean, there are statistical deviations, right?
Like, every once in a while, um, there's a fluke, and like, you know, evolution will cough out something that, you know, uh, Jack Sarfati, yeah, you get weird exceptions, but like, on average, it's, I mean, but that's because,
again, like, um, you know, evolution is itself a noisy process whereby, uh, Problems are solved, and the problem is the propagation of information through time and through space.
And so, like, you know, evolution as a process loves to maintain a diverse investment portfolio, you know.
And so, you get in any population, you know, you get a kind of reservoir of hedged bets, you know.
So, like, you know, like in a mature ecosystem, you will have.
Here's an episode of Complexity I did on this back in COVID where we were talking about mass extinctions being like a market crash.
And yeah, I don't host this show anymore, but it's still one of my favorite podcast episodes I've ever.
Why don't you host it anymore?
What happened?
Oh, I left SFI last year.
Oh, so this was a podcast.
This was somebody else's podcast.
Yeah, this is a show I did for them.
But I talk about this on the show on Future Fossils a lot also.
This one, let's see, was this the 163?
No, it was 161, where we talk about this like volatility, market volatility, and creativity and play and how.
Basically, the noisier a market is, the more it rewards sort of generalist strategies, where noisier investment strategies, because the market is noisier.
And so, if you specialize, you say, in a stable market, you can kind of rely on a conservative betting strategy.
But in an unstable market, and that's what gets back to this Hunter S. Thompson saying, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Technology As A Recombinant Space00:14:24
You know because like, suddenly you've been, you know, like you've been the weirdo for your whole life when things were normal and now they're not normal, you know.
And so like there's that, that classic trope in in, uh you know fiction where it's like aha the conspiracy theorist.
You know, now civilization has crumbled, and like you're the only guy that spent you know 150 000 hours watching you know how do you survive this kind of stuff?
And so suddenly everyone, you know begrudgingly, is like, all right let's, it's time to listen to tinfoil hat guy right, you know?
Um, But yeah, it's, it's, uh, it, there are times, there are definitely times, when it pays to be the, uh, the contrarian.
Yes.
You know, that's amazing, man.
So are you, you're doing your art, you do the podcast, and then you're also a musician.
Are you a solo musician or do you have like a band?
The album I'm releasing right now is a solo album, but it's an album about all of this stuff.
It's like, so you sing about it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's an album about my UFO encounters and the phenomenology of 5MEO DMT experience and what it's like to erode the boundaries of selfhood through our immersion in digital technologies and why we should be careful what we wish for when we start connecting our dreaming brains to 3D printers, because then you're going to just print out whatever you're dreaming about.
Is that really a great idea to smash the boundary between your dream life and physical reality?
Yeah, it's an album called The Age of Reunion, and I play like 20 instruments.
Really?
I recorded it all at home, so it's a sort of uneven production quality.
But it's coming out a new track every week until the end of April.
It's fun.
I've been working on it for 22 years.
It was time to get it out.
Really?
Yeah.
Are you still producing it like every day as we speak, or is this stuff that you've already done a long time ago?
You're just dripping it out now.
Yeah, I'm on to new stuff.
I've been, you know, all of this stuff was stuff that's like it's fun to research this stuff academically, but then it's also fun to inquire through a creative practice.
And, like, for me, you know, electroacoustic music and in particular taking an acoustic guitar and routing it through a bunch of effects pedals and sampling yourself and remixing yourself is kind of like a garage laboratory for studying cybernetics and evolutionary, you know, kind of processes.
Let's hear it.
What's it called?
Let's Steve pull it up.
That way he can pipe it through the mixer.
There's a look up transparent.
On the Age of Reunion on YouTube.
It's this one right here.
Let me see.
This is the latest single.
Where is it?
This one.
It's on my Linktree.
You got music videos?
Oh, yeah.
I did them all with AI.
They're fun.
Wow.
This stuff right here.
Did you see Kanye's new AI music video?
No.
Holy shit.
Is it amazing?
Is it full of swastikas?
No, it's not full of swastikas.
Thank God.
Oh, well, you got it pulled out.
I mean, yeah, but we can't hear it through the.
No, you can't hear it.
On my end.
You can't find it, Steve?
Steve's not as good as a googler as you are.
Uh i've oh, i'm not showing it to you.
There we go.
I think I found it.
Yeah yeah yeah, this is the one.
Yeah, so this is a song.
Oh, what you?
You send it, go up.
So if you buy it, you get this no no, no.
I was gonna say I am gonna, I am gonna print this album to vinyl at some point um, but I haven't done it yet because it costs a lot of money.
Yeah, I bet, but yeah, this is this is.
Uh, where is it?
Right there, right here.
There we go.
Yeah, you should max that full screen.
I love how you did it vertically for an iPhone.
Right, right.
I mean, it's an album about life online, so.
So what?
Whoa.
What AI software did you use to make this?
Oh, this is Kyber.
Kyber?
KAI, yeah.
And it's a video one?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, import your music and your lyrics and your prompts.
Oh shit.
So this is like, yeah, this is a video based on my, the actual sound and lyrical content.
Did you ask it to go vertical and not widescreen?
So I
imagine you imported your voice into this in the beginning.
It didn't sound exactly like this.
They just distorted it somehow?
I mean, this is like, I don't know, six-part harmony or something.
I was going for like an HR Giger meets Lisa Frank kind of vibe.
You know?
Yeah.
Like scary but pretty.
Because that's the nature of what we're living through right now.
Scary but pretty.
Dude, that's fucking crazy.
I had no idea that I didn't know about that AI software that could do this kind of stuff.
Oh, there's tons of it now.
I've got a lot of friends dabbling in this space.
What's the name of it again?
Kyber?
This one is Kyber, yeah.
I mean, you can do this with stable diffusion.
You can do this with I mean, you know, Adobe's working.
I'm working on consumer grade stuff for this.
I actually track state-of-the-art AI stuff now as part of my consulting, and it's moving very fast.
Beautiful and
terrifying at the same time.
I mean, that's the human condition.
That was incredible.
Thanks, man.
So all of your music videos, you use AI to make them?
Just recently.
I've got a ton of live stuff up on the YouTube as well.
Yeah, I mean, I like playing with whatever tools are available.
The weirdo on the edge of the village.
There's like a kind of responsibility to do this stuff to see what's possible to report back, you know.
So it's just part of that whole sort of overarching gesture of, you know, going to Australia and drawing the platypus, you know.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of Author and Punisher?
He does some really cool stuff.
Steve, pull up Author and Punisher on YouTube.
He, um, He doesn't use AI, but he's been doing this for a few years now where he takes like a warehouse where he has these like industrial machines and he synthesizes them into this like crazy electronic mix down.
It sounds like a metal industrial, like apex twin.
It's insane.
You find a Steve?
Yeah, watch this.
And his fucking videos are wild.
Square Pusher did some stuff like that with like a robot orchestra.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, this is what we're talking about in terms of like, you know, technology being a recombinant space where more and more of us are going to be making our own instruments, you know, inventing our own tools to suit whatever kind of creative language we feel.
You know, like one of my favorite artists is.
Is Onyx Ashanti, who invented a full body suit that's like his cybernetic music interface?
Whoa.
On YouTube?
Yeah, he's got a bunch of older stuff.
And then also, my friend Chagall in the Netherlands, she uses motion capture suits and stuff like this to do full body music control.
And so that seems like a pretty natural extension of creative activity as a kind of operatic.
You know, like a new syntax of interactions between the body and its built environment.
Yeah.
Some wild shit, man.
Yeah, that's what I.
Yeah, there's Onyx.
Yeah, totally.
So he's like covered in this 3D printed mech suit that he wears.
And I don't know how recent of a video you're going to find of his stuff, but he's very interested in this notion of like the evolution of language and, you know, like coming up with gestural.
Interfaces that this is very much like a straight out of a DMT thing.
Like, you when you see people in, you know, in a DMT induced state that are spontaneously gesturing and, you know, they're engaged in like glossolalia, you know, speaking in tongues type stuff.
You know, he's basically just coming up with like the cybernetic extension to turn that kind of induced improvised.
Full body gesture into something that's got like a machine translation layer in it so that other people can kind of groove on his groove.
You know, my friend the T-Fairy, who is also on the Noanotics Advisory Board, talks about this being, you know, she and I have had a lot of conversations about this being the, you know, the kind of the future of human language is something where, you know, we are, we're communicating through a kind of cybernetic translation envelope to one another, but everybody's got a different.
Layer, like the way that we're going to, we're starting to use augmented reality glasses for real time translation.
And so we're going to have, before long, why would we even have languages in the way that we think of them?
Right.
You would have your own language and the machine would just translate it into something that somebody else can understand.
Universal language.
Yeah.
Well, like the translation layer is universal.
But your language is yours.
It's like a speaker base of one, you know?
That's something that Peter Watts has written about in some of his sci fi and blindsight and echopraxia.
Or what about just like telepathic communication?
Like, when will we be able to, like, if we were able to stop using our vocal cords to talk and speak out sentences, like just thinking about things or communicating with imagery through people or like intention?
I mean, it's funny.
Let's not get too far ahead of it because, like, I already saw that joke of, like, in order to improve typing while using the Apple Vision Pro, we've created a fake iPhone keyboard that you see in AR that you can still sit there using your thumbs like you're actually holding a phone.
Adding Without Losing Crucial Things00:02:57
And it's like, you know, there are questions, right?
Like, there's what is it, Chesterton's fence, this principle of, like, don't pull up the fence until you know why the fence is there.
You know, like, there are certain things that, Like, it's actually probably a bad idea for us to get to the point where we're so reliant on technology that we none of us speak the same language.
Because as soon as that technology fails, you can't talk to each other.
Right.
You know, and so what persists into the new possibility spaces that we're creating, you know, what is actually strongly conserved in a new evolutionary regime is a really interesting question.
Like, for instance, We thought that we were going to be able to do away with the civil society, mutual aid networks, family groups, tribal affiliations, professional guilds, that somehow the state and the market and the economies of scale therein, the greater efficiency of organization at scale through states and markets was going to replace our need to raise your kids in a village.
That has sure not proven to be true.
Raising your kids in a nuclear family in the suburb is terrible.
You want an extended family around.
And so the question is, well, what do we think that we're getting ready to give up now?
And that's why I have conversations with Carl Hayden Smith, who's a brilliant psychedelic philosopher who's also involved in neonautics.
And Carl and I were talking about how, with all due respect to Andrew Gallimore, Andrew has this very sort of unrepentantly transhuman vision of our future.
And Carl and I are more on the side of hyperhuman.
It's not how we replace the human with technology.
It's how do we add something without losing something really crucial in the process.
Right.
But that's an open question.
Well, thank you, Michael, for doing this, man.
I really appreciate it.
Likewise, I love your show.
I love listening.
So thanks for having me on.
Tell people where they can follow your podcast, listen to your music, find your art, all that stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, the mother tree is just the link tree.
The link tree right now, Linktree, Michael Garfield.
But yeah, the Patreon, Substack are both feeds that the podcast is there, but so is a bunch of other stuff art and music and writing.
And I'm working on two books and I'm helping Noanotics figure out how to raise money for their.
Their research facility, and I'm working on some AI and tech ethics stuff I'll be sharing soon.
And, uh, yeah, I'd love to hear from you if you find this interesting.
This is a direct invitation to reach out to me.
So, yeah, cool man.
Thanks again for your time and for blowing my mind.