Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (18 page)

NICK: Ah, not really. I guess there are some things. Of course Jules Verne wrote about trips to the moon long before we went.

RMN: Maybe a lot of people become scientists, after reading science fiction.

DJB: I would just imagine that many scientists had read science fiction when they were young.

NICK: I certainly did. I read a lot of science fiction when I was young. I loved it. Still do. But I don't know about specific inventions coming from science fiction--where someone reads a science fiction book, and then goes out and works on that particular idea. I think the influence is more general. But this is one example where a specific science fiction story--Carl Sagan's
Contact
--influenced, at least in principal, a time machine. The other possibility for faster than light-travel, aside from using space warps, would be to somehow use this Bell connection. I don't think we can send anything concrete this way, but maybe information or mental influences could go between minds faster- than-light. But, unlike these three CalTech people, there's no demonstration of how one could do that. I spent about three or four years trying to use Bell's connection to send signals faster than light, using thought experiments and such, and every one of them has failed. It looks as though this Bell connection is something that nature uses to further her nefarious ends, but people can't use the Bell connection.

RMN: How would you test the results of a time travel experiment?

NICK: Wouldn't that be easy? If you wanted to send something back in time... Ah... I guess, you're right, it would have already happened, wouldn't it? Well, a lot of these time travel experiments depend on what your opinion of the past is. Is the past always the same, or is it changeable? Are there alternate universes? It's a good question. That really depends on your model of the past. If the past is not changeable, then you can't go back in time, or you already have, and you're the results of it. One of my best guesses is that the past is partially changeable--there are things there that are frozen, that you can't change, and there are other things that are up for grabs, that are still in the quantum potentia, and those things you could change. So, when you went back there you could have some funny restrictions on your activities, and basically you could only make changes that were consistent with what we already know to have happened here. We have this present. There's a lot that we know has happened. There's lots of things we didn't care about, and nobody knows whether they happened or not. Those things you could change. But you couldn't change something that some human being knew had happened already.

DJB: As long as it's an ambiguity, and hasn't become a actuality.

NICK: Yes, as long as it hasn't become an actuality you could change it.

DJB: Why do you think it is that time appears to flow in one direction only?

NICK: God, who knows? That's a good question. It's a psychological reason I think. Einstein said something about how the past and the future are illusions. Physics makes no distinction between past and future. The present doesn't have any special status in physics. In four-dimensional space-time, it's all just a huge block universe that's eternal. So, the fact that time seems to flow is a kind of illusion that our kind of existence gives rise to. It's an illusion of consciousness rather than anything in physics. It's funny that if we didn't know any better, if we just took the equations of physics as truth, we wouldn't even know about this flow of time, this illusion. The universe would seem to be a kind of eternal, ever-present process.

RMN: You have asked, "Why does nature need to deploy a faster than light subatomic reality to keep up merely light speed macroscopic appearances." Could you venture an answer to your own question?

NICK: That's the idea that, although Bell's theorem says of Reality that once some things are together they are always connected faster than light, Appearance is not. You don't ever see anything like this. Why does nature bother to go to so much trouble? Underground connecting everything, and yet above ground it's not connected. Why bother? Sounds a little bit like God, doesn't it? This omniscient entity lying behind the phenomena that keeps its kind of divine providence, so that nothing gets lost. I don't know. That's still a puzzle to me, why that is. I would not like to believe in an omniscient divine providence, because it seems such an easy solution.

I've been spoiled by learning about quantum physics. One of the things that philosophers try and do, is they guess what all the possibilities are for human thought. Try and second guess all thinkable things. Philosophers worry about different categories of mind, monism and dualism, and varieties of that, all the possible ways something could be. People have been doing that for a long time, but they never came up with something as weird as quantum theory. Physicists didn't like quantum theory at first either. We were forced into this strange way of thinking about the universe by the facts, into a way that had not been anticipated by the philosophers. Quantum theory is a strange mixture of waveness and particleness that no one had ever anticipated, and that we still do not completely comprehend.

DJB: Isn't it similar to what Eastern philosophies have to say about the world?

NICK: Oh, in some sense, but not in particulars. There's a vague similarity to Eastern philosophy, more than to Western philosophy, that's true. But this notion of probabilistic waves changing into actual particles has never been present in any Eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy talks about connectedness, everything being connected. It talks about the Tao, that's unspeakable, wholeness that envelops everything, and the flavor of that is like quantum theory. There's no doubt about that. More so than a mechanistic clock-work universe. But the details-no one ever anticipated that kind of universe. So, my guess is that, when we get a fuller picture of the world, it will be equally unguessable. It would not have been anticipated, and quantum mechanics was just a kindergarten lesson for how we're going to have to change our minds to make the next step.

DJB: It wouldn't be fun without surprises.

NICK: Well, yeah, not only surprises, but that all our guesses have got to be, and are always going to be, too timid. Nature is going to overwhelm us, and surprise us with the next step. Nothing we could imagine will be as amazing as what's actually there. So whenever someone comes up with a simple solution like there's a divine providence underneath it all, it's too simple. Try and imagine something more complex and marvelous than that, please.

DJB: Nick, one of my favorite ideas in your book Faster Than Light was the notion that time travel may only be possible into the future and back into the past, only so far as to the development of the first time machine. If we were to take a leap of faith, and imagine this scenario to actualize itself, how do you envision that monumental day to occur, when the first time machine is invented, and everyone from the far future comes back to visit the historic day?

NICK: Big party. Sure, that's what it would be like. It would be very crowded that particular day. From that point on, life would be very confusing, when all of space-time is open to our view.

DJB: What would that do to human consciousness? How would the progression of events occur? How could people keep track of things?

NICK: I don't know. I think it would be very confusing. Much more confusing than it is now. We'd ]earn to live with it, though. What it would be like, partly, is that time would just be another kind of space, if you can imagine that. We don't think that traveling back and forth in space is so strange. We have this prejudice that we shouldn't be able to do that in time. So if time becomes another kind of space, what are the consequences of that? I don't know. It's really hard to think about. I have to pass on that one. Another problem related to that is when you go faster than light, time and space, in the equations, they reverse. The roles of time and space reverse when you go faster than light. I don't know what that means. This reversal happens in the math but what would happen in the world? This same time/space reversal happens, by the way, in the vicinity of black holes.

RMN: What about time travel paradoxes? Like the case of being able to travel backwards through time to kill your grandmother. The parallel universe theory seems to resolve this, but what are your views on this?

NICK: Yes, the easiest way to resolve that would be to have a parallel universe, where you kill your grandmother, but she's not your grandmother, she's the grandmother of somebody else, who would have looked very much like you, who doesn't get born in that parallel universe. Another way of resolving that paradox, is this notion I mentioned before about there being fixed things and soft things in the past, and you can only change the soft things. So that things that are fixed like your grandmother's existence, you'd find that you couldn't change. My guess is that when you went back in time, it would be like in a dream, where there were certain things you could do. If you tried to do something that would change the past, you couldn't move that way. You could only make certain moves. It would be like being in molasses. In certain ways you'd find it very easy to move, and others you just couldn't do, because it would be that that had already been definitively done.

RMN: It had been filled up.

NICK: Yes, it would be filled up. That had already been done. So there are islands of reality in the past, but they float in a sea of possibility. As far as I know, that's original with me, that solution to time travel paradoxes. The place to look is in science fiction, for solutions to time travel paradoxes. There are a number of very original solutions to that.

DJB: What are some of the best ones?

NICK: Well, the most popular is with alternative universes. Science fiction's full of them. Another is that you can visit the past, but can't change it. You can only change the future through your time machine. You just become a disembodied viewpoint in the past, and you can't act at all. There's nothing you can do to change all that, it's like watching a movie. But if you go to the future, you can change the future. That's a pretty good one I think, but I wouldn't bet on it.

DJB: What do you think lies in the center of a black hole?

NICK: Well, there's supposed to be the dreaded singularity there, where space and time are infinitely warped. Talk about warped--everything is infinitely warped there, and nothing, not even light, escapes. All physics stops. Matter as we know it would be crushed to a mathematical point. It's bad news. The center of a black hole is a bad trip. Some physicists claim that quantum mechanics would intervene before that happens, but they haven't proved that. It looks as though everything is just crushed to this infinite density, including time itself. Time and space itself are just crushed out of existence. Physics ends at the center of a black hole. No one knows what goes on.

RMN: You say that quantum tantra could revolutionize human relations. What do you mean by this?

NICK: Well, it's related to us getting out of our little caves, and into the open ocean. I envision it as a way of exploiting and enjoying Bell's Theorem, of actually bringing the Bell connection into being. Bell's Theorem talks about this voodoo-like connection, and one of the preoccupation’s of voodoo is love charms--to make other people love you, and to break up a couple where you'd like to love one of the members of the pair. So, these making and breaking spells are what I envision quantum tantra to be--love charms that work because of physics. Some kind of thing you could do, object you could exchange, or medium you could plunge into, that would either connect you, correlate you, unconnect you, or anti-correlate you. There are Bell connections where you have opposite correlations. They make you unlike, rather than alike. There are these Bell correlations and Bell anti-correlations flickering in the world of particle physics. They eternally hold the world together, which is the basis of all chemical bonds. So one could imagine these occurring at the level of human beings. So, that's what I imagine quantum tantra to be, a way of exploiting the Bell connection on the human level, But I don't have the slightest idea how one would go about doing that. Just guesses.

DJB: Could you tell us about your plans for a "Pleasure Dome" project, and how do you see the future science of pleasure advancing? What new forms of pleasure do you foresee for our future?

NICK: Well, of course, some would find quantum tantra pleasurable--the union with another human being, at the quantum-mental level of existence--although others would find it horrible. So it would be both. The Pleasure Dome Project is an idea to use fundamental physics to increase pleasure for the pursuit of happiness--to put the pursuit of pleasure on a firm scientific basis, rather than in the amateur ways we've pursued it so far as individuals. Amplification and enhancement of the senses is probably the easiest way to do it. Find out how our senses work, and just increase that process.