Accelerating Future

Terence McKenna - Preparing for the Singularity Saturday, Nov 7 2009 

singularity and videos Michael Anissimov 10:11 pm

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10 Responses to “Terence McKenna - Preparing for the Singularity”

1. Vladimir_Nesov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 6:05 am

   It’s a mystery-worshiping piece that extends a class of mysterious experiences to include author’s mysterious notion of singularity. This is a surface analogy that brings together things as unlike as, say, quantum mechanics and consciousness: since both are “mysterious”, they must have something in common, some underlying phlogiston! There is nothing cool about this malady of reason, it’s one of the things that brought about the madness that now threatens to rob humanity of the future.

2. Michael Anissimov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 9:56 am

   Well, I don’t see why things like this can’t be enjoyed with extremely large grains of salt. I don’t find the mysteriousness at all persuasive, and I do think that an ethnobotanical walk through the jungle is a cool thing. If we completely ignored everyone who isn’t rational all the time, we would have no data to fuel any rational inference. That’s also why I’ve done things like read Scientology literature. I’m interested in how people think.

3. Vladimir_Nesov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 10:41 am

   “I do think that an ethnobotanical walk through the jungle is a cool thing.”

   The video isn’t about the jungle. Although the jungle thing might be a positive aspect, it is pretty orthogonal to the central mystery-worshiping theme.

   “If we completely ignored everyone who isn’t rational all the time, we would have no data to fuel any rational inference.”

   You are overshooting, of course I’m not implying that. Irrationality may be fascinating, important, and adverse at the same time.

   “I’m interested in how people think.”

   On object level, the video is pretty evil, on meta level it may be an interesting topic for a discussion — I guess absence of this disclaimer is what irked me, like with Itmar Arel’s video. Also, the problems demonstrated by the video are hardly specific to the topic of singularity, and constitute an isolated anecdote.

4. James Sargeant Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 11:22 am

   “If we completely ignored everyone who isn’t rational all the time, we would have no data to fuel any rational inference”

   Totally agree. It’s worth having an open mind about these things. The kind of views that are expressed in this video may not correspond exactly to what’s become standard issue rhetoric about the singularity but that’s a good thing surely… because it opens up a bit of healthy debate.

5. Michael Anissimov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 11:31 am

   The video isn’t about the jungle. Although the jungle thing might be a positive aspect, it is pretty orthogonal to the central mystery-worshiping theme.

   Mystery worship is so ubiquitous, I think it’s really hard to have a rounded intellectual diet and stay away from it. Terence McKenna has a lot of interesting ideas, and approaches the concepts of AI, posthumanism, and the Singularity from a perspective that is quite novel in comparison to most transhumanists. Most people, even intellectuals, are thought followers rather than thought leaders, and I find Terence McKenna to have been a fascinating thought leader. I find him interesting partially to compare and contrast my own psychedelic experiences (which have always impacted my philosophy) with his.

   I think transhumanists should embrace psychedelics more, because if we can’t wholeheartedly support people introducing a little molecule or two into their brains so they can have novel mental experiences, then what makes us think we would support the right of someone to completely reengineer their own brain or body? The semi-taboo social connotations of psychedelics in some circles, even transhumanist ones, doesn’t make any sense to me, and posting this video is a way of poking at that.

   McKenna points out that modifying our brains with psychedelics is one of the best ways that we can experience something like a Singularity today, and I think that’s quite true. We spend all our lives within a certain sort of mental statespace, and psychedelics is one of the only available ways to break out of that. It can have quite a powerful effect on someone both viscerally and abstract-philosophically. I’m not really paying attention to the mystery-worship because the potentially beneficial aspects of psychedelics are my focus.

   On object level, the video is pretty evil, on meta level it may be an interesting topic for a discussion — I guess absence of this disclaimer is what irked me, like with Itmar Arel’s video. Also, the problems demonstrated by the video are hardly specific to the topic of singularity, and constitute an isolated anecdote.

   I don’t feel the need to post constant disclaimers about things because I often like to present outside content without getting in the way. People can and should make their own conclusions. Just because I post something doesn’t mean I agree with it wholeheartedly (in fact, I almost never do), and that should just be taken for granted. People shouldn’t need disclaimers to let them know that mystical thinking is often a wild goose chase. People shouldn’t need disclaimers to see that Itamar Arel’s claims seem quite overoptimistic, etc. If I made disclaimers over everything, I’d feel like I’m getting in the way of people seeing things with an open (albeit hopefully Bayesian) mind. Also, I don’t see why mentioning that psychedelics are the closest thing we have to real mental modification is necessarily evil. Maybe because I’ve been exposed to McKenna’s ideas thousands of times already, I know just what to tune out. Compared to the intellectually timid and conservative mainstream, I find McKenna’s ideas quite fascinating, even if they include mystery-worship.

   Perhaps one of the reasons for your negative reaction is that you didn’t know what to expect from the video, and were surprised that it wasn’t a useful analysis like I try to produce in my own essays on the Singularity. If so, then I’d argue you should have known what to expect. Everyone should be familiar with McKenna’s ideas because they provide a common jumping-off point for discussion on the Singularity in some circles. The more ideas, the more potential connections we have to facilitate conversations. (Which facilitates relationships, which facilitates allies…) Especially since McKenna was a thought leader who spoke about the Singularity, and there are so few of them in existence, I think we have an obligation to at least be familiar with his ideas. The time investment is quite small, and the more ways of looking at something one has at their disposal, the better equipped we are to engage in lateral thinking.

6. Osprey Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

   I took psychedelics in the 70s and follow technological singularity news, but I sure hadn’t associated them until now, lol. I do give McKenna credit for outside the box thinking. Interesting…

7. Vladimir_Nesov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm

   “McKenna points out that modifying our brains with psychedelics is one of the best ways that we can experience something like a Singularity today, and I think that’s quite true.”

   What does it even mean?

8. Vladimir_Nesov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm

   To amplify on that question: I don’t hold a negative moral position on taking psychedelics. My dislike was directed exactly at the belief that they give info about singularity — which I’m appalled to learn you turned out to have an affinity for (so that despite the talk of redundancy of disclaimers, here turned up a non-obvious assumption).

9. Michael Anissimov Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 5:37 pm

   What does it even mean?

   A successful Singularity would entail mental modification beyond the traditional Homo sapiens boundary (if desired). New senses, new sensory modalities, and novel types of cognitive information processing. Given that the brain is highly homeostatic, unusual things are often required to achieved true altered states — sensory deprivation, dreaming, or the introduction of psychoactives. Humans basically occupy a dot in cognitive statespace — altered states let us step slightly outside that dot, if only for a few hours. The result are entirely new mental experiences that would be impossible, even if principle, given the standard homeostatic state of mind (sobriety).

   In the future, if we survive, numerous choices will become available to make hardware-level edits to the human mind and brain. Now, we have a crude approximation of that in the form of psychoactive substances, especially psychedelics. Certain psychedelics give us a window into what cognitive enhancement or modification might be like. Because it’s easier to break things than make them work properly, psychedelics can help teach us that certain mental modifications would likely be counterproductive dead ends. It also points to other directions which might lead to beneficial cognitive modifications. The limited cognitive reprogramming possible with psychedelics may be considered a sneak preview of the more radical cognitive reprogramming that will one day become possible with brain-to-computer interfaces and uploading.

   Psychedelics have provided information that changed my appraisal of the probability of friendliness in an arbitrary human intelligence augmentee or upload. People who have never tried psychedelics before are more likely to overestimate the chances that we will locate and implement beneficial cognitive modifications on a path from Homo sapiens to a smarter form of intelligence. Because they’ve always been sober, they expect other points in cognitive statespace to be sober as well, unaware that their sanity and clarity of mind is only held precariously in place by homeostatic mechanisms that evolved painstakingly after quadrillions of failures.

   Psychedelics help people realize that the mind is a program, and they are not a ghost in the machine, but that the ghost is the program itself. In people with the right philosophical starting point, they help demonstrate mind-brain equivalency. A supernatural soul or ghost in the machine could not possibly be influenced so profoundly by the presence of a mere molecule in the brain, one would think, because in a dualist perspective the mind and brain are related, but ultimately independent things. Seeing firsthand that a mere molecule can have such an impact on the most intimate of mental processes might cause a dualist to reevaluate their stance.

   The more dots in the local cognitive statespace we personally experience, the easier it is to draw curves between the varying facets of human experience and formulate theories of mind that predict them all. Such exploration is also useful for developing theories of consciousness, one of the most fascinating unsolved problems in science and philosophy. For instance, are animals conscious? If so, they might have moral worth, and we ought to all become vegan. Experience with different types of consciousness helps inform us in these philosophical explorations. Pure intelligence alone, without sufficient data, might come to the wrong conclusions over and over again. Direct experience provides us with a quick shortcut to useful data without having to engage in dubious internal modeling and imagining without empirical verification.

   The sciences of consciousness and altered mental states are insufficiently explored, and traditionally considered uninteresting to hard-nosed scientists. That’s why we have philosophers like David Chalmers, who come along and demonstrate that real, useful philosophy on consciousness is both possible and very important. Traditional psychedelic communities are often poisoned by mystical thinking, but that doesn’t mean all investigations into altered states are mystical — it just means that the area is in more need of scientific study, and is a casualty of what Robin Hanson calls the “silly idea bias”. It’s not considered a legitimate area of study by most due to an anti-drug ideological complex that aims both to restrict personal cognitive freedom, and a global culture that traditionally gives religion (in particular, Christianity and Islam) sole dominion over the sublime. Psychedelics show that spirituality is not necessary to achieve interesting altered states in waking life.

   Above, I’ve listed several reasons why psychedelics are relevant and related to the Singularity, philosophy, theories of consciousness, and challenging the hegemons of traditional religion. There are many others.

10. Vladimir_Nesov Says:
    November 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm

    Thanks, I understand your position much better now. I disagree that psychedelics are either necessary, desirable or even valid source of knowledge about all the issues you’ve listed, but it may well be true that they are effective at driving home the points you’ve listed (which I’d see as a form of Dark Arts), given the particular background where that’s so, which may be prevalent enough.

    So, that’s the distinction I’m making: method of discovering knowledge vs. method of (self-)persuasion. To give an example scenario when that makes a difference for decision-making: if I know that I’ll start believing that animals are conscious if I explore that issue in the context of taking psychedelics, and I currently don’t believe it true that animals are conscious, and I don’t believe that I’ll start believing it there as a result of it being true, but rather as a blunt result of experience itself, then rationally I should avoid doing that in order to hold believes closer to reality.

    For the claim that this experience gives actual observations, I answer that all the crucial facts can be found in brain-damage and other neuroscience studies, and it’s much better epistemic hygiene to study loads of such indirectly-observed info than to take anecdotal and not deliberatively controlled or comprehended info from personal experience. It’s too easy to be confused about what personal experience means, take free will as a case in point, where physics and computer science that give conceptual insight, not philosophical brooding.

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