Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (15 page)

When I think about the future in that regard, which I do very rarely, I imagine the next hundred years will be crucial in determining what we have to bring ourselves back from. In other words, do we all go the road of India before realizing that there are unfortunate consequences of depleting your natural resources. In India you can go to these beautiful geological strata, four thousand feet up, the mountains and hills near Bombay for example. You see the complete deforestation of these areas, which leads to the alternate cycle of floods, where hundreds and thousands die in floods, and then tremendous periods of drought.

I remember coming back down from this place, going towards Bombay, and there are these Mangrove-like trees that send out roots from their lowest limbs, and goats were reaching up on their hind legs, and nibbling the growing tips of these roots, that far from the ground, and they weren't going to reach the ground, because there was always going to be enough goats to keep them from reaching the ground. So the trees weren't going to grow anymore, and it just seemed like ecological chaos. So anyway, when I think about the future at all, I imagine will we do away with the Brazilian forest? Will we do away with whole areas of the earth, and then face what it's like to have ten to twelve billion people on this planet? Or will things get under control before then?

DJB: Bob, do you think it's possible that the introduction of psyche-active plants into the food chain of early primates had any influence on our evolutionary development? Terence McKenna thinks that psilocybin mushrooms catalyzed the enlargement of the neocortex and the development of language. Roland Fisher has shown that low doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity.

ROBERT: I don't imagine it's had any, or much of an evolutionary effect.

RMN: Do you have a theory about why the brain size of Home sapiens increased so rapidly over such a short period of time?

ROBERT: I don't have any particular theory, no. It seems to me obvious that it must have been bound up primarily with language. Which is another great unique development in our own lineage. We know now of animal languages, and in primates we know that various species do use some sounds symbolically. But these are very, very rudimentary compared to our language. So, I think it must have gone hand in hand with language. I think reciprocal altruism was bound up in it, because I don't think you get selection for much language, unless you have a back and forth kind of relationship, where each benefits from the interaction. Even then I think of language initially as starting in families, and spreading among close relatives, and being beneficial that way.

RMN: What possibilities do you see for our future evolution, of humans or other species?

ROBERT: I haven't thought much about future evolution. Again, it's contingent in our own species' case with getting the population growth under control, and what form that's going to take- whether it's natural disasters and non-nuclear war, and that kind of thing, that's going to keep populations under control, or whether it's some kind of voluntary restraint, it's hard to guess. It's hard for me to visualize what system of reproductive competition will exist in the species, after we get the population growth under control.

DJB: How do you think consciousness evolved, and how do you see it evolving into the next century?

ROBERT: Well, I'm not sure what consciousness is. I think insects are conscious to a limited degree. I don't think they're highly conscious or acutely self conscious, but I think there's a little light turned on in insects that I've played with, and they're conscious of what's going on. How do you see it evolving in the future, Dave?

DJB: Well, I see brain capacity, and information processing abilities increasing, for one thing.

ROBERT: Increasing? So, that assumes now that bigger-brained people are leaving more surviving offspring?

DJB: Well, what I'm looking at is the overall 4.5 billion years of evolution, and brain capacity has increased, intelligence has increased.

ROBERT: Yeah. Right.

DJB: So, I see the pattern continuing on into the future.

ROBERT: But do you disagree with my statement? In other words, you see bigger-brained people leaving more surviving offspring.

DJB: Well, actually, I think I see exactly the opposite. I don't know about the size of people's brains, but I see those who are less educated reproducing more quickly than the more educated, unfortunately. I wonder why this is?

ROBERT: Well, you see this is the conflict between a teleological or orthogenetic view of evolution, and one that always insists that natural selection be behind it. You can't extrapolate from past patterns, unless you imagine there is some momentum, or force, carrying you through to the future. If you believe in evolution through natural selection, then you believe in the changes, which have been general, but not universal towards greater brain size. If you look at the vertebrates, there's been increase in brain size, in mammals over the last 150 million years, Been no increase in fish in 400 million years. No increase in amphibians, so far as I know. Increase in birds. Even in human lineage, I think there's no evidence of any increase in the last 100 thousand years. I'm not so sure about that statement. I know Cro-Magnon man was sort of a large-bodied form, but it had...

DJB: A larger cranium.

RMN: I heard that at some point they had brain capacities larger than we have now.

ROBERT: I've heard that too.

DJB: Why do you think consciousness evolved in the first place? How is it even adaptive?

ROBERT: Well, again, it depends on what we mean by consciousness.

DJB: Awareness, the opposite of being unconscious.

RMN: Or the ability to receive and transmit information.

ROBERT: Yeah, to me, it's just some kind of a heightened mental faculty, allowing heightened learning, and quicker responses to on-going events, which, however, is costly. I always use the analogy of an electric light being switched on, or not being switched on, partly because we're so visual, and our images of consciousness are so visual. And a light bulb is expensive, so we sleep, or we have periods of unconsciousness to rest what is a very expensive kind of ability.

DJB: Can you explain your theory of self-deception?

ROBERT: I tend to imagine that in social species, especially where there's been selection for deception, and spotting deception, then there's been selection for self-deception. This is a new kind of unconsciousness, where you systematically hide the truth from yourself. I tend to think that self-deception has been as important in human history as mental acuity itself is.

I'd rather have a leader that was minimally self-deceived, and not quite as quick with his brain, than someone who was quicker, but practiced a lot of self-deception. So when you talk about the future of consciousness, my mind goes around, and I think about self-deception, and how selection is operating with regard to that, and it's just so hard to speculate when we're talking about things on a time-scale of a few thousand years, at the least, to get some natural selection going that's going to show up with something.

While at the same time, we know that in the next couple of hundred years we're going to see radical changes, I think, in our environment, including our medical environment, including this bio-engineering business. Because bioengineering starts to get into conflict with natural selection if we start talking about changing our genome, the genome that's in our gonads. A small amount initially would create only a small effect, so we're going to go in, and we're going to get rid of my bad eye genes, and a few other bad genes. That's very minimal.

More extensive revision of yourself is like almost interfering with personal genetic reproduction, and I think those forces are going to be large and looming before regular old natural selection has had time to produce a human that's much different than ourselves. An issue that I cut myself off from has to do with social cost. Normalizing selection chops off the extremes all the time, and keeps the species close together.

Right now there's three percent mortality in our society between age zero and age twenty-five. That's very very small. Next to no variance can be generated by that small a selection. So then let's assume ninety-five percent of individuals couple up, or marry, and it isn't too far off from that right now. And let's assume everyone has two children, and let's assume you're supposed to have two, and you're not supposed to have any more than two, and if you lose one, you replace it.

Well, an intriguing argument that was published a few years back said after awhile the species will start coming apart, because you'll no longer have normalizing selection. So, in the extreme case, after fifty generations of this or something, your baby will require a certain kind of pills to keep it from having trembling spasms, and my baby will require that it keep it's left leg in warm water for a half an hour at night, and all of us will grow up with these environmental demands that are necessary to compliment what normally would just have been taken care of genetically.

So the social costs begin to go up, but right now we already have so many social costs from related biological things that don't have to do with natural selection. I'm thinking of matters like the elder generation and the result of medical advances. Now we have people who can live miserably between eighty and ninety, just dreadfully. I don't know if you all have been into any of these nursing homes. My wife worked in them and I used to pick her up. I couldn't take it. I'd wait outside. There were people screaming all night long. You know, they've been in there for six years screaming, and they'll be in there for five more screaming, and that's it. They're looking forward to death, because the screaming is all they're doing.

So, there is a case where suicide, I think, can be adaptive in several senses of the word. It certainly makes some sense if there was a dignified, good way to do it. I'd just say well, Dave is eighty-three now, and he's not taking care of himself, and he's going to have this farewell party, and we're going to say good-bye.

RMN: It'll be a happy occasion.

ROBERT: Yeah, something like that--a happy occasion. His relatives and friends gathered around.

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Faster than Faster than Light

with Nick Herbert

Nick Herbert holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Stanford University. He was senior scientist at Memorex, Santa Clara, and other Bay Area hardware companies specializing in magnetic, electrostatic, optical, and thermal methods of information processing and storage. He has taught science at all levels from graduate school to kindergarten including the development, with his wife Betsy, of a hands-on home-schooling science curriculum. Nick was the coordinator (along with Saul-Paul Sirag) of Esalen Institute's physics and consciousness program and has led many workshops on the quantum mechanics of everyday life. He is the author of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Faster Than Light (published in Japan under the title Time Machine Construction Manual), Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics, and he devised the shortest proof of Bell's interconnectedness theorem to date.

He has written on faster-than-light and quantum theory for such journals as the American Journal of Physics and New Scientist, and is Fringe Science columnist for Mondo 2000.

 
We interviewed Nick April 23, 1989, on a hill overlooking Santa Cruz, California. Nick spoke with us about the implications of Bell's Theorem, superluminal loopholes in physics, and the secret technologies behind time travel and contacting the dead, including step-by-step instructions on how to build your very own time machine. Nick is an ardent disciple of quantum theory's left-hand path, and his ability to humanize science and his imaginative speculations on time travel make him both fascinating and fun. He has a way of making even the most complex concepts of quantum physics easily understandable. He is very warm, has a contagious sense of humor, and has an uncanny talent for making the mundane seem mysterious.

DJB

DJB: What was it that originally inspired your interest in physics?

NICK: I started out in a Catholic prep school. I took religion and Latin there, and the idea was to become a Catholic priest. That was my goal, and somewhere through that I got derailed. I decided that wasn't the ultimate thing. I changed my mind, and decided science was probably the place where all the hot stuff was. The hottest part of science was physics, so I went to Ohio State and majored in physics. I think it's kind of a quest for what's the hottest thing going in this time I thought it was God, but now I think, at least for me, it's science.