Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (22 page)

RALPH: Well, I think that people who live in cities are not much in tune with animals. Actual communication with an animal is a rare experience for most of us. And some people are more sensitive to animals than others. They have a favorite pet, or they just really like animals. In my case, I grew up on the edge of town in Vermont, where they have, as it is said, two seasons: winter and July. Winter is very long, and a lot of times I was outside playing in the snow, usually alone. I used to go on long treks after school and on weekends on my skis, communing with animals and trying to figure out where they had been by the study of their tracks. And to this day 1 have a special love for animals, which is one of the reasons that I'm a vegetarian. I'm not only a vegetarian, but vegetarianism has a very great importance for me. It's a big thing, not just another habit.

Anyway, I like animals, and so I was very keen to swim with the dolphins. I had bought it, like most hippies, that dolphins are more intelligent than people. They had had the brilliance to flee to the sea a long time ago, and there they have lived in peace ever since, except for a few tuna fishermen. So I had a sort of double setup to have a good experience with these dolphins, and 1 had read a little bit about other people's experiences swimming with them. I knew that they have a very strong connection to the Orphic trinity of Chaos, Gaia and Eros. They're connected to Chaos most directly through the experience of hydro-dynamical turbulence, that is, white water.

Now white water is the most perfect chaotic thing we have: you hear it, you see it, you feel it--it's chaos personified. Dolphins know Chaos. They also know Gaia. They can find their way over great distances in the sea, their playground is thousands of miles across, they explore it all, they know their way around. They can sing and speak to each other over tremendous distances. Through their sonar communication apparatus they have a global sense which transcends our own. And then as far as Eros is concerned it's rumored that they're loose, they're sexy and they like to get it on in the water.

So that's the background. I went to John Lilly's place in Redwood City for a routine swim with Rosie and Joe and had a fantastic experience with them. They were very violently playful. I had communicated nothing, I was just there, and I wasn't adequately prepared for what they actually do. They like to take your hand into their mouth and press, but not too hard. You have to have some sort of faith that they're not going to bite you, because they have very strong jaws and sharp teeth. So I was kind of scared of this mouthing game. And then they had the flying body game. They would go down to the bottom of the tank, which was pretty deep, turn around, get ready and let go with their maximum acceleration and velocity, heading straight toward you, turning aside only at the last minute to brush gently against your side. It was kind of heavy; they were very heavy with me.

I was trying to figure out what to do. Should I grab on and go for a ride? I tried that; they slowed down and became more gentle. If I played with one, the other one appeared to be jealous, but it was all a game. There were a lot of interesting things, very much like playing with people, or at least children. But J was a little scared because I'm not that great a swimmer and they were very good swimmers. My faith had flaws that day, I suppose.

Then I decided to try a mental experiment. We know they're mental--they have memory and intelligence and language and so on. So I proposed an experiment in telepathy. I swam out of the tank into a little nook or cranny to regroup. I had this fantasy of lying still in the water, and they would both lie still as well, and one of them would face me in the water so that we were co-linear, head to head on a straight line, and then we would just exchange thought without any further ado. They were thrashing around in the water. So keeping this picture in my mind I swam out again, and they both became totally still, just as I had visualized.

I believe it was Rosie who got into position: on a line, still, head to head and so on. And then I thought, "Okay, let's exchange a thought." Boom! Loud and clear came a thought. She said, "Do you think it's nice in this tank? Would you like to live in this tank? It's too small; it's ugly; it's dirty. We want out!" So I said, "Wow, yeah, I can understand that; I'm certainly going to get out pretty soon and I wish you could too." Then we played a little bit more and I got out. I wrote in the log book about this experience just as I told you. Later there was a revolt of John Lilly's crew over the question of conditions in the tank.

DAVID: Have your experiences with psychedelics had any influence on your mathematical perspective and research?

RALPH: Yes. I guess my experiences with psychedelics influenced everything. When I described the impact of India and the cave on my mathematics I could have mentioned that. There was a period of six or seven years which included psychedelics, traveling in Europe sleeping in the street, my travels in India and the cave and so on. These were all part of the walkabout between my first mathematical period and all that has followed in the past fifteen years. This was my hippie period, this spectacular experience of the gylanic revival ( G.R. wave), -after Riane Eisler-of the sixties.

I think my emphasis on vibrations and resonance is one thing that changed after my walkabout. Another thing that changed, which had more to do with psychedelics than with India, was that I became more concerned with the application of mathematics to the important problems of the human world. I felt, and continue to feel, that this planet is really sick; there are serious problems that need to be faced, and if mathematics doesn't have anything to do with these problems then perhaps it isn't worth doing. One should do something else. So I thought vigorously after that period about something I had not even thought about before: the relationship of the research to the problems of the world. That became an obsession, I would say.

DAVID: Why do you think it is that the infinitely receding, geometrically organized visual patterns seen by people under the influence of psychedelics resemble computer generated fractal images so much?

RALPH: I don't know if they do, really. You know there's a theory of the geometric forms of psychedelic hallucinations based on mathematics by Jack Cowen and Bard Ermentrout. It has to do with patterns of biochemical activity in the visual cortex which is governed by a certain model having to do with neural nets. This model has geometric patterns in space-time, dynamical patterns, which are patterns that any structure of that kind would have. So these two mathematicians see psychedelic hallucinations as mathematical forms inherent in the structure of the physical brain. Now I'm not very convinced by that, but I think it's kind of an unassailable position. One cannot just argue it away on the basis of one's personal experience.

What I think about psychedelic visuals is not so different, except that I would not locate them in the physical brain. I think that we perceive, through some kind of resonance phenomenon, patterns from another sphere of existence, also governed by a certain mathematical structure that gives it the form that we see. I can't speak for everyone, but in my experience, this form moves. Now the historic pictures that they show us don't move. And the mathematicians of fractal geometry have made movies and they don't move right. So I think that the resemblance between fractals and visuals is very superficial.

I do have a general idea about the mathematics of these patterns. I call them space-time patterns, and they're fractal perhaps as space-time patterns. But the incredible symmetries, the perfect regularities, I think, are based on some other kind of mathematics. It is called Liegroup actions. And there are reasons why this kind of mathematical structure is associated with the brain. But even if you believed in the internal origin of these patterns in the physical brain and in the Liegroup action approach, some kind of mathematical source could be expected for these visions because they look so mathematical. They have regularity and perfection. How can an image of something perfect appear in the brain? It just doesn't make sense. So I suspect these visuals are actual perceptions.

RMN: Dynamical systems are arranged by organizing agents called attractors. Could you explain how these abstract entities function and how they can be used in understanding trends in biological, geographical and astronomical systems?

RALPH: Well, attractors are organizing centers in dynamical systems only in terms of long-term behavior. They're useful as models for processes only when your perspective happens to be that of long-term behavior. Short-term effects are not modeled by attractors but by a dynamical picture called a phase portrait. Its main features are the attractors, the basins and the separatrix which separates basins. Each attractor has a basin, and different basins are separated by the separatrix.

It is said that mathematicians study the separatrix and physicists study the attractors, but the overall picture has these complementary things that have to be understood. The separatrix gives more information about short-term behavior, while the attractors determine the long-term behavior. What is most amazing about them is that there aren't very many. And that's kind of surprising because there's so much variety in the world. I would have expected more variety in the mathematical models for the long-run dynamical behavior, but most of them look alike.

RMN: When an attractor disappears due to sudden catastrophic change, the system becomes structureless and experiences a term of "transient chaos" before another attractor is found. How have you applied this idea to cultural transformations?

RALPH: Well, that's actually a commonly expressed idea which might turn out to be unfounded. People--including me--want to use this aspect of dynamical systems theory called bifurcation theory to model bifurcations in history. History is a dynamical process and it has bifurcations. And here we have a mathematical theory of bifurcations, so let's try it. That makes sense. But the bifurcations that are known to the theory, as universal models of sudden change in a process, are not usually characterized by this transformation from one equilibrium stage to another through a period of transient chaos. That's very exceptional in the theory, and I don't know if natural systems show this characteristic either.

Let's say you could collect data about a civil war where you had maybe monarchy before and democracy afterwards, and the monarchy was very steady with institutions that you can depend upon, and so was the democracy, and in the middle you were constantly overrun by the troops of one side or the other, or by guerrillas. If this whole history were reduced to data and then you applied the rigorous criteria of dynamical systems theory to these data, and measured the degree to which it's chaotic, you might find that the monarchy had a chaotic attractor as the model for its data, in the democracy there is also a chaotic attractor of a completely different shape, and in between you don't have chaos at all; the transient is not transient chaos but is transient something else, or it's transient chaos but it's much less chaotic.

You know that heart physiology shows more chaos in the healthy heart and less chaos in the sick heart. I think it's dangerous to take the casual aspects and implications of these ideas of chaotic theory and start wildly trying to fit them into some preconceived perception of external reality. A better idea is to get some data and try to construct a model. There's no lack of numerical data about social and historical process. For example, the total weight of mail sent in mail bags from the American Embassy in Russia to Washington, D.C. is known for over a century. Political scientists have an enormous amount of data. I think the serious applications of mathematical modeling to the political and social process will proceed in the numerical realm. The result might not fit someone's preconception based on an intuitive understanding of these chaos concepts. So I don't know if social change is going to be characterized by chaos or not. I guess it might, according to some measures and observations, and might not, according to others.

DAVID: Do you see the process of evolution as following a chaotic attractor, and if so does that mean there is a hidden order, so to speak, to evolution? May what has appeared to evolutionary biologists as chance and randomness actually be a higher form or order?

RALPH: No. I think that the understanding of dynamical systems theory presented in popular books is extremely limited and a lot of physicists for example have studied attractors exclusively while as I said the mathematicians have been studying the separatrices. Attractors are very important in modeling physical processes in some circumstances, and that is very fine, but when you're speaking about evolution, if you want to make models for an evolutionary process, then probably the best modeling paraphernalia that mathematics has to offer you are the response diagrams of bifurcation theory. Bifurcations have to do with the ways in which attractors appear out of the blue, or disappear, and the way in which one kind of attractor or size of attractor changes into another.

These transformations appear in scientific data and in mathematical models in a much smaller variety of transformation types than you would suspect. And dynamical systems theory, at the moment, is trying to accumulate a complete encyclopedia of these transformation types called bifurcation events. Bifurcation events assembled in some kind of diagram would provide a dynamical model for an evolutionary process. Therefore, the actual attractors involved are almost of no interest. From the bifurcation point of view it doesn't matter if the process is static, periodic or chaotic. What's important is whether the attractor appears or disappears. And here there is plenty of room for chance and randomness.