Terrence McKenna's writing

He had some crazy beliefs, but I think his writing is very interesting. He believed in a very unique and strange variant of the Singularity (which apparently he predicted would happen December 21, 2012 AD at 11:18 AM GMT). He was also really, really big on drugs and psyhedelics, and studying culture, society, etc. There is a craziness, but there is also a lot of interesting creativity and deep insight to his writings.

Any fans of this ideology out there have anything to say about this, or have any good quotes?

If you have a powerful enough language, you can take control of reality. This is what magical languages, like in the late Renaissance, were about. The only thing which comes close to that today is code for computers. Essentially, these are languages which, when executed, something happens. They are languages of efficacy. They carry, not meaning, but motivation to activity.

You know, in every scenario of alien contact there is a prop. It has different ways of appearing, but basically it's the landing zone. You have to build a landing zone, and every flying saucer cult worth its salt builds a landing zone. In a way, I think the new protean electronic Internet -- the purpose of the Net is to catch the alien mind. The alien mind is within us. It will be coded by human fingers, but it will be truly alien. Simply because it is downloaded through the human neural network, do not think that the invoking of this thing -- which is an artificial intelligence, a protean, non-human intelligence, a globally-distributed, self-learning, self-defining-teaching-integrating intelligence -- is not going to be alien. And yet it is going to come through us.

Sometimes meaning is a palpable thing: like liquid being poured through cracking ice, language moves ahead of its intent; it encloses its object and gives you almost a reverse casting of the thing intended. There are many ways for words to fits themselves over the contours of intentionality

excerpted from here and here, linked to from here.

Most of what he says is totally wrong.

Most of what he says is totally wrong.

How so? I would have thought it rather difficult to be so judgemental on things metaphysical.

Terrence was a god in the same way that Jimi Hendrix was a god, but not in the same way that Einstein was a god. I read True Hallucinations both before and after becoming a scientist. I took it for truth before and for beauty after. Appropriate for the title, I think.

I would like to see the immortalist community adopt the "Winter Solstice of 2012" meme in non-mystical fashion- say as the date by which all professed immortalists would go professional. I've always thought that rather than a date of prophecy, it should be a date of decision. Singularitarians could use it as a target date as well, either as their date of mass professionalization or as a target date for achieving strong AGI. Perhaps target date and date of prophecy could merge in self-fulfillment.

A little bit about Terrence McKenna from wiki:

I mentioned him yesterday here.

Terence McKenna grew up in a small, highly religious town in western Colorado. Unusually poor eyesight forced him to wear bifocals at an early age. This and his nonathletic nature made him an outcast, and he spent much of his childhood alone. He was introduced to the subject of geology by his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home. From this he developed a deeply artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.

McKenna was first informed of psychedelics by the writings of Aldous Huxley. His first direct experience with them came when he ate several packets of commercially produced morning glory seeds, an experience he claimed set the direction of his life.

After graduating from high school, McKenna enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco in The Summer Of Love before his classes began, and was introduced to cannabis and LSD by Barry Melton, who happened to be rooming in the apartment opposite his.

In 1969 Terence received a B.S. in Ecology and Conservation from the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived outgrowth of the Berkeley campus. He spent the years after his graduation teaching English in Japan, traveling through India and south Asia; smuggling hashish and collecting butterflies for biological supply companies.

Following the death of his mother in 1971 Terence, his brother Dennis, and three others traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing DMT. At La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he allowed himself to be the subject of a psychedelic experiment which he claimed put him in contact with The Logos: an informative, hallucinatory voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience. The revelations of this voice prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his Novelty Theory.

For most of the 1970s McKenna maintained a low profile, living in a nondescript suburban home, supporting his lifestyle with the royalties from the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide, and the cultivation and sale of psilocybin mushrooms. He said that he was frightened out of this line of work, and into public speaking by the harsh penalties the war on drugs exacted from his colleagues. He himself was once wanted by Interpol for drug trafficking.

McKenna was a contemporary and colleague of Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Riane Eisler and participated in joint workshops and symposiums with them. He was a personal friend of Tom Robbins, and influenced the thought of numerous scientists, writers, artists, and entertainers.

He became a fixture of popular counterculture in his later years. Timothy Leary once introduced him as “the real Tim Leary”. He contributed to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Zuvuya and Shpongle, and his speeches were sampled by many others. In 1993 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, which was documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes[1] (his lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD). He was a skilled orator, and admired by his fans for his eloquence. While some of his presentations included verbatim repetitions of earlier material, his gift for extemporaneous speech allowed him to weave them into seamless performances that varied audience to audience. His responses to novel questions were usually as sophisticated and subtle as his prepared speech.

In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on the subjects of virtual reality (which he saw as a way to artistically communicate the experience of psychedelics), 'techno-paganism,' artificial intelligence, evolution, extraterrestrials, ancestor-worship (or, as he put it, contacting 'dead people'), and aesthetic theory (art/visual experience as 'information,' hence the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics). He advised the taking of psychedelics in relatively-to-extremely large doses (asserting that those who had only sampled psychedelics in small doses failed to access their full potential), particularly alone, in a dark space, without music or other forms of external stimulation. Philosophically and religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gnostic Christianity, and James Joyce (calling Finnegans Wake the best literary representation of the psychedelic experience). He remained opposed to all forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening. He believed DMT was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience and spoke of the 'jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs' or 'self-transforming machine elves' that one encounters in that state. Although he avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of both monotheism and monogamy), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being 'trans-dimensional travel, literally,' enabling an individual to encounter what could be aliens, ghosts/ancestors, or spirits of the earth.

McKenna also co-founded Botanical Dimensions with Kathleen Harrison (his colleague and wife of 17 years), a non-profit ethnobotanical preserve on the Island of Hawaii, where he lived for many years before he died. Before moving to Hawaii permanently McKenna split his time between Hawaii and a town called Occidental, located in the redwood-studded hills of Sonoma County, California a town unique for its high concentration of artistic notables, including Tom Waits and Mickey Hart.

Terence died in 2000 of glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. He was 53 years old. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, and his daughter Klea.

[edit]
The "Stoned Ape" theory of human evolution
Perhaps the most intriguing of Terence McKenna's theories and observations is his explanation for the origin of the human mind and culture. McKenna theorizes that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open—following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.

Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The psilocybin -- which in small doses provides an increased visual acuity, in slightly larger doses a physical sexual arousal and in still larger doses full-on ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia -- gave evolutionary advantages including the rearing of off-spring to reproductive age amongst those tribes who partook of it. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many—McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, resulting in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

McKenna's theory has intuitive strength, but it is necessarily based on a great deal of supposition interpolating between the few fragmentary facts we know about hominid and early human history. In addition, because McKenna (who described himself as "an explorer, not a scientist") was also a proponent of much wilder suppositions, such as his "Timewave Zero" theory, his more reasonable theories are usually disregarded by the very scientists whose informed criticism is crucial for their development. A live recording of his "Stoned Ape" theory can be found on the CD Conversations on the Edge of Magic (recorded live at the Starwood Festival).

McKenna's interests were Ethnopharmacology and Shamanism. He traveled to parts of the world where psychedelic drugs are part of initiation rituals and such and took part. That takes some serious "balls." Yes, some of his ideas are a bit "out there" -- however, he does point out some very interesting points and backs them up pretty well, I'd say. I don't necessarily believe in timewave zero stuff 2012 or whatever. I do things "speeding up;" however. Also, I didn't quite see "self transforming elf machines from hyperspace" when I hallucinated (as a youth)...I saw some other stuff though...freaked the sh*t out of me; all I can say..

I remember when he said (I am paraphrasing here):

The doubling of the human brain size in one and a half million years is the biggest evolutionary jump of any higher organ of any higher animal in the entire fossil record.

If this is true, then we should question if diet might have played a role in this massive expansion of the brain.

When I was a junior in high school, my final term paper in an English class challenged some of the finer elements of McKenna's theory. I think my entire class knew his ideas by the end of the year.

I would suggest reading Food of the Gods to get a grasp of some of his ideas. That; or listen to him speaking. I can do an almost "perfect" impersonation of him speaking... [tung]

Watch this video of him speaking; he's a great speaker to watch:

Skip forward about 40 min if you want to see the dude get to the point.

http://video.google....e McKenna&hl=en

Edited by nootropikamil, 14 October 2006 - 03:50 AM.

Watch this video of him speaking; he's a great speaker to watch:

Ayn Rand is rolling in her grave.

This need for connection - connection to nature, to spirit, to some ephemeral universal oneness; this requirement to sacrifice the ego and the self to gain such connection; this fantastic shortcut through drug use: unfortunately, some singularitarians, transhumanists, and immortalists also invoke these ridiculous platitudes because, like religious people, they cannot embrace science and technology and a material, physical universe.

You want a reason to be environmentally minded? It is not some silly and bizarre connection to nature. We are already "natural" animals. How about the simple aesthetic appeal of nature unfolding through physical processes? How about an appreciation of a landscape untouched by the feet or hands of intelligent beings? How about the challenge of gaining more power over your tiny corner of the universe using less resources, or more resources used much more efficiently?

One more video like this and I too will enlist in the War on Drugs.

I can call myself, in good faith, a psychedelic shaman, a Christian, an anarcho-communist, a Discordian, and a sufi mystic libertarian.

I'm also a scientist, and I very much "embrace science and technology and a material, physical universe".

Anyone heard of Keats' concept of "Negative Capability"?

No, but that might explain why his name was writ on water. I have, however, heard of Carl Sagan's "skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder".

Perhaps "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in" my philosophy. Until science has mapped that boundary, I will skip the drugs.

I'm also a Pope in the Church of the Subgenius, HankConn... (and so are you.)

Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana (see wikipedia). Richard Leis is not. I like them both.

Dr. Sagan's book "Broca's Brain" (with a little help from Voltaire) made me an atheist around the time I hit puberty.

Quoting Sagan from an interview in which he was asked about his meeting with the Dalai Lama:

CS: Well, when I talk to religious leaders, one thing I always ask them is: What would you do if a fundamental tenet of your religion was definitively disproved by science? And, at least in the West, and especially among fundamentalist religions, the tendency is to say, "Science couldn't possibly," or, "My religion is an absolute truth, and if science gets different answers, too bad for science." The Dalai Lama's answer was: "If science found a serious error in Tibetan Buddhism, of course we would change Tibetan Buddhism." So I tried to push him on this issue. Suppose it was something basic? Suppose, for instance, it was reincarnation? And the Dalai Lama said to me, "If science can disprove reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would abandon reincarnation." And then he said, "But it's going to be mighty hard to disprove reincarnation."

Like the Dalai Lama, I'll abandon any crazy beliefs I have if science can find a serious error in them. We'll need to cure aging to have the time to work on that. Do hyperspace machine elves exist? I don't care just yet. The neural correlates of experiencing them undeniably exist (I can attest to this.) If I were a neurobiologist, I'd be actively interested in exploring that. My interest in neurobiology is one of my prime positive personal motivators to find a cure for aging. It might take eons to reverse engineer consciousness and the imagination, even for a singularity level intelligence.

Is the Dalai Lama a friend to science? It would appear so.

Hey, I love you all! Go immortalism!

I'm also a Pope in the Church of the Subgenius, HankConn... (and so are you.)

Well, that makes three of us.

It might take eons to reverse engineer consciousness and the imagination, even for a singularity level intelligence.

Sure, at our current level of technology, or a linear extrapolation of the progress thereof. If we constructed an entirely novel intelligence capable of bootstrapping itself to superintelligence by recursively optimizing its source code and hardware, this would make the undertaking drastically more productive over a very short time period.

Not that an AGI is even necessary to do the job within our lifetime; progress in bio and nano isn't linear- it's exponential.

Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana (see wikipedia). Richard Leis is not. I like them both.

I like you, too.

I tried marijuana once a few years ago. It left black tar all over my teeth and my throat burned for hours after. That was my first and last recreational drug use attempt other than alcohol, and one that has been branded in my brain ever since.

I advocate the legalization of all drugs for whatever use. It is not for me to tell anyone what to do, as long as they do not get in my way, threaten my person or continued existence, or introduce foul fumes in my breathing space. I do, however, find drug use for recreational or psychedelic use reprehensible. The friends and family I have known who use drugs and then try to justify their use because it makes them more philosophical or calm or grounded or connected or "it is just fun" are the same friends and family who rely on such crutches just to make it through life. They often have histories that have led to this need for crutches, and it hurts me to know they have been treated so horrifically by experience.

Is the Dalai Lama a friend to science? It would appear so.

The Dalai Lama is no friend to science. He flirts with science. He teases with science. When all is said and done, he leaves science at a comfortable distance. He is just like those who promulgate "The Forbidden Letters" and "alchemy" and the reaching of new insights through psychedelic drug use.

Fortunately, scientific and technological progress are relentless while silly ideas ebb and flow to inconsequentiality.

Here is the second part of that talk:

http://video.google....e McKenna&hl=en

You can extract some sense out of almost anything - even the most insane bizarre rambling. I find it odd to see people discussing mystical ideas and psychedelic drug use here of all places (where I thought the majority are very much rational minded individuals).

I particularily enjoyed his book "food of the gods" it has some interesting theories.

Also, I got ahold of his video "Alien Dream time" with stephen kent on digeridoo...

And why does this matter?  It matters because it chose that the way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past.  This is what the psychedelic experience means.  Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.  And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace.  Because what we need is a new myth.  What we need is a new true story that tells us where were going in the universe.  And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed.  And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. 

Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate experience.  And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience.  But thats what holds the community together.  And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body-- in the body-- there are Niagara of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.  I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience, like going to the grave without having sex.  It means that you never figured out what it was all about.  The mystery is in the body, and the way the body works itself into nature.

Its interesting to muse about, in the least.

One thing I've noticed, is that he is such a wordsmith with this ability to keep speaking on a subject and explaining away aspects of it so it seems like it makes sense. At the same time, he isn't overly critical of his initial conclusions, such as thinking that these dmt entities are actually external "robot machine elves", seeming to ignore the possibility that it might all be just in his in mind.

It might take eons to reverse engineer consciousness and the imagination, even for a singularity level intelligence.

You're greatly overestimating the complexity of the brain simply based on what it has created. Reverse engineering should take no longer than 2030, as Kurzweil has argued in detail.

Terence McKenna is a warm, smart, and funny guy, but his mind is filled with mystical garbage. The 'stoned ape' theory holds absolutely no water scientifically. It is impossible to communicate with dead people. Nothing will happen in 2012. Hallucinations seen under the influence of psychedelics signify nothing permanent or external but are interesting from a cogsci and philosophical viewpoint.

On the other hand, he's totally correct that psychedelics can open up your mind and make you look at reality in new ways. The War on Drugs is evil. The marijuana prohibition, especially, is insane.

Great comment from the video: "Though my conclusions may sound as flakey as anybody else's, it was hard for me to get this flakey!"

Briefly (I have class less than seven minutes):

One of my friends compared the discussion at this site to Christian fundamentalists arguing about the rapture. To quote him:

...the whole feel of that board is like reading christian fundamentalists argue about the rapture.  "Once the singularity hits we'll all be godlike beings with super brains!"  "Nanotech will save us all!"  "No, not nanotech, cryogenics..."  and it goes on. 

I thought that was pretty funny.

With respect to McKenna's theory about 2012 and Timewave zero ideas, etc; I think these are pretty easy to dismiss.

However, his theory that the doubling of the human brain size in less than two million years might have been influenced by elements of our diet are pretty well grounded in evolutionary biology through the fossil record. These types of mushrooms were definately around, and I imagine they provided some type of energy source...why wouldn't we eat them? And if we did, what are the implications?

Long-term genomic changes are caused by evolution (random mutation) and natural selection (selective death and reproduction). When it comes to diet and evolution, unless it makes a fitness difference, evolution doesn't care. Being under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms a few days out of the month is actually more likely to have made you more vulnerable to predators and the elements rather than less. So if anything, there was a selection pressure against mushroom eating, rather than in favor. There are far more poisonous mushroom varieties than psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Sure, edible mushrooms can be an energy source, but most mushrooms aren't psychedelic, and their consumption has the same importance to evolutionary trends as the consumption of grains with similar calories and nutrition.

What McKenna is arguing is also Lamarckian in implication. Like giraffes getting longer necks because of stretching and then having children with stretched necks. That's not how evolution works. If I eat mushrooms and become enlightened, it doesn't matter one iota to my genes, which stay the same. I can't pass it on through children.

For something to make an evolutionary difference, it also has to be panspecies. Otherwise the mutation simply gets blurred back into the main gene pool.

The increase in human brain size is explained perfectly adequately by mundane reasons such as the need to manage social complexity, evolutionary arms races, and the need to throw spears accurately. For more info, I recommend the compilation "The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution".

The truth is as follows: in our evolutionary history, a couple times a year or so, some percentage of humans may have eaten psychedelic mushrooms and tripped. This may have made them ever-so-slightly better or more open-minded people, and they might have passed the benefit of these experiences on in shamanistic rituals. However, the presence of psychedelic mushrooms on the African savannahs is sufficiently low and their effects sufficiently fitness-indifferent that they had no impact whatsoever on our evolutionary trajectory.

As for comparisons between 2012 and "Rapture of the Nerds" (boy, am I sick of that overused phrase), the similarity is only skin-deep. The potential of self-improving superintelligence is real, no matter how wild it sounds, and the characterization of 'novelty', Timewave Zero, and the rest, are all false, no matter how appealing they sound. Sure, the less you know, the more similar everything seems. If I knew nothing about powered flight, and it were suggested to me, I might say, "that's the same thing as angels".

Can you refute the argument that the doubling of the size of the human brain in two million years is the biggest evolutionary jump of any organ of any species in the entire fossil record?

That's McKenna's first premise that you need to fully embrace the rest of his "wild" theory.

Second, I'll ask, are you familiar with tryptamines? Are you aware that serotonin (a major brain neurotransmitter) is also a tryptamine? Do you find it at all strange that psilocybin is also a tryptamine? Ironically, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a compound found in the human brain in trace amounts and is very closely related to the tryptamines found in psilocybin containing mushrooms. Also, "By some scientific accounts, DMT can be found in elevated amounts during times of visual dreaming or after near-death experiences" (1).

Let's not get into DMT too much right now.

McKenna postulates in the video I linked to on the other page -- in which he is citing evolutionary biologists (and I trust he is not making this up) -- that a reason why species tend to have very specialized diets is because variation in diet can lead to higher rates of mutation. Do you refute this? If so, with what evidence? Because, if this is true, would allowing a tryptamine containing food source into our diet might have caused some mutation in the development of our brain?

[quote]Being under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms a few days out of the month is actually more likely to have made you more vulnerable to predators and the elements rather than less. So if anything, there was a selection pressure against mushroom eating, rather than in favor. There are far more poisonous mushroom varieties than psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Sure, edible mushrooms can be an energy source, but most mushrooms aren't psychedelic, and their consumption has the same importance to evolutionary trends as the consumption of grains with similar calories and nutrition.[/quote]

I don't think you were listening very closely to McKenna speak as it appears you missed much of what he said. Recall: McKenna hypothesized that there are three [3] different levels of intoxication induced by the mushroom. They are breifly summarized here (and in the video I linked to) ...and I'll quote:

[quote name='McKenna']Psilocybin-containing mushrooms

[O]n one level, at the lowest dose, psilocybin increases visual acuity, which means better success at hunting. Then, at the middle dose level, it creates this hypersexual activity. Then, at still higher doses it creates the full-blown psychedelic experience, about which we are as uninformed and as easily amazed as our remote ancestors were. So, it was a 3 step process. It was basically a chemical that had been allowed into the diet that boosted us toward boundary dissolution, language acquisition, sexuality without boundaries, and so on.[/quote]

He's not making this stuff up.

[quote name='http://herbarium.0-700.pl/biblioteka/Food%20of%20the%20Goods.pdf']Roland Fischer measured the ability of graduate students. given small amounts of psilocybin, to detect the moment when previously parallel lines became skewed.  He discovered that performance was actually improved.

When I discussed these finding with Fischer he smiled after explaining his conclusions, then summed up: .You see what is conclusively proven here is that under certain circumstances one is actually better informed concerning the real world if one has taken a drug than if one has not..  His facetious remark stuck with me, first as an academic anecdote, later as an effort on his part to communicate something profound.  What would be the consequences for evolutionary theory of admitting that some chemical habits confer adaptive advantage and thereby become deeply scripted in the behaviour and even genome of some individuals?.  Terence McKenna, .Food of the Gods..[/quote]

If our proto hominid ancestors found a drug that increased visual acuity and we included it into their diet, this would, without doubt, confer an adaptive advantage, as they would be better hunters. And there is probably some caloric value in these fungi...

At the second level of intoxication -- hyper sexual activity explained above -- this infers the species would be more highly sexed. I recall McKenna said "the name of the game in Darwinian evolution is successful copulation." Indeed. More sex should equal more offspring.

Re: my freind's comments about the discussions here re the singularity....

That was merely meant to highlight the irony in attacking McKenna's "theory" meanwhile entertaining wild speculations about exponential developments in computing as somehow more "realistic" than McKenna's ideas.

Regarding the singularity:

If current progress continues, it WILL happen at some point. But I wouldn't bet on it happening anywhere within the 21st century, certainly not as close as 2030. I also have to laugh whenever I hear people talking about using AI for the purposes of life extension. "we don't know how to cure aging, so we'll spend all our time trying to invent a computer more intelligent than us and let the computer figure it out rather than working directly on the problem ourselves".

Garenthnel: you shouldn't really laugh, as two of the founders of this very organization went on to devote the majority of their time to boosting AGI for life extension, and two of the most prolific immortalist-meme-promulgators, Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, see superintelligence playing a critical and necessary role in the implementation of radical life extension. There are hundreds of rational, mature, and non-wishful-thinking immortalists who agree. This partially boils down to how hard of a problem you think human-equivalent AI is. Interestingly enough, AI has already been 'solved' (by Marcus Hutter), albeit using infinite computing power... his design (AIXI) is provably viable. Were you aware of that? Over the years of reading I came across thousands of little bits and pieces that slowly converted me from being totally skeptical about AI's potential to being cautiously enthusiastic.

And regarding Adam's comments (interesting discussion btw):

Can you refute the argument that the doubling of the size of the human brain in two million years is the biggest evolutionary jump of any organ of any species in the entire fossil record?

Off the top of my head: no. But I would be pretty surprised if it were. There is a phenomenon called "island gigantism" whereby island-isolated species balloon to large sizes quickly. But anyway, size increase does not equal "evolutionary jump". The idea that it automatically does is another one of those psuedoscientific conceptions of evolution spun by guru tricksters with the nasty habit of praising science when it suits their needs and bashing it when it doesn't. (McKenna demonstrates this multiple times throughout the video.) Unless you specify a criterion for what 'evolutionary progress' means, you can't say that bigger brains are that much greater than anything else. Perhaps fish experienced a greater evolutionary jump when they started crawling on land, or bacteria did immediately after major extinctions.

Even if the claim is true, it could then just as easily have absolutely nothing to do with psilocybic mushrooms. There is an irritating trick that gurus can use to prosecute poorly-supported theories - mention a bunch of stuff that sounds closely related and is novel, while sidelining the causal link part, and afterwards people have a strong tendency to continue associating these things with one another. While I agree with the independent truth of some of McKenna's fact bites, I disagree with the flakey connections he draws between them. Here are some of his points:

1. psychedelics make you look at the world in a new way and help prevent you from being an uptight, uncreative square.
2. homonid evolution happened very rapidly.
3. psilocybic mushrooms were present on the grasslands of Africa during our evolutionary history.

It is easy to concede all the above points, while dismissing the connections, which were fabricated using wishful thinking and unbridled enthusiasm about psychedelic use. The way that McKenna couldn't stop talking about psychedelics for more than 10 minutes throughout his entire guru career gives you a clue that he likes to tie them into everything, whether they belong there or not. The hallmark of a good scientist/philosopher is the ability to isolate trains of thought from one another once in a while, instead of always letting everything run together indescriminately.

Second, I'll ask, are you familiar with tryptamines?

Yes, I read The Spirit Molecule in high school. I think that DMT is very fascinating and would like to try it, or at the very least, see some more trip accounts beyond the dozen or so that have been floating around on the web for more than a decade.

"By some scientific accounts, DMT can be found in elevated amounts during times of visual dreaming or after near-death experiences" .

By 'scientific accounts', this article means, 'some scientists have speculated'. This is waaay different than an experimental study. For example, a recent experimental study found that consumption of psilocybin mushrooms led to life-changing spiritual experiences. But there is no study that suggests that DMT levels in the brain are elevated during REM sleep.

And again, what does DMT being found in the brain have anything to do with psilocybin and human evolution? Are you suggesting that because DMT is found in the brain, it's plausible that we could have eaten psilocybin in the past and had it stick around in our brains permanently, in fact for so long that it integrated itself into our sperm and eggs and made sure to insert itself into our children's brains as well? This is a tricky case of things-that-sound-the-same-but-are-completely-different department.

McKenna postulates in the video I linked to on the other page -- in which he is citing evolutionary biologists (and I trust he is not making this up) -- that a reason why species tend to have very specialized diets is because variation in diet can lead to higher rates of mutation. Do you refute this? If so, with what evidence? Because, if this is true, would allowing a tryptamine containing food source into our diet might have caused some mutation in the development of our brain?

No, I think he is completely pulling this out of his ass. The reason why species have specialized diets is because when niche diets work, there is no selection pressure in favor of generalized diets. 99% of the time, a fairly narrow diet is just fine, though some flexibility is necessary during periods of drought, for example.

Because the potential for mutation is so old, natural selection has had billions of years to fine-tune the adaptations protecting against it, and they exist primarily on the molecular level, in the central machinery of the cell. For food consumption, the danger is not mutagens, but simple poisons. What McKenna said may make sense if you replace 'mutagens' with 'poisons'.

The tryptamine FAQ lists most of the few dozen plant, fungi, and animal species that contain tryptamines, many in trace amounts. I'm sure that analysis of the total edible flora and fauna in our evolutionary environment would find that only a negligible percentage contained tryptamines. Usually, they have to be consumed along with an MAO inhibitor or put through an extensive purification process to obtain a psychoactive dose. That is why we see lots of phalaris grass but very little DMT. Psilocybin mushrooms may be the only "ready to eat", non-life-threatening natural tryptamine source.

Even if there were tryptamines everywhere, they'd have to get us in the balls, not the brains. It doesn't matter if our brains are mutated beyond all recognition - unless it's reflected in the germline, nothing will be passed along. Unless our super-mushroom-enhanced brains help us beat the crap out of our enemies in a serious way, every day for thousands of generations, the Mushroom Effect is a drop in the pond of natural selection operating on the brain.

Many foods are mutagenic. Meats, in particular, are more metagenic than vegetables. The mutagenic effects and the experiential effects of consuming such food are completely separate. If I eat a mutagenic papaya, and that makes me happy, does that mean that it is mutating my DNA in the direction of me being a happier person? Not at all. If I eat a mutagenic mushroom, and that makes me enlightened, does that mean it's also mutating my DNA in the direction of being more enlightened? Absolutely not. The psychoactive component and the mutagenic component are two entirely different things.

Mutations are random. Not like in X-Men or TMNT. Most of the time, mutation leads to cancer and death. There is no such thing as 'purposeful mutation' in nature. Only variation and natural selection. If a mushroom mutagen led to the acceleration of homonid evolution by introducing a wider average degree of variation in the species, then a meat mutagen could do exactly the same thing.

I don't think you were listening very closely to McKenna speak as it appears you missed much of what he said. Recall: McKenna hypothesized that there are three different levels of intoxication induced by the mushroom.

Sorry, I responded to your message before I watched the whole 2-hr segment... I did this because I thought I was familiar with the bulk of McKenna's teachings, though I must have missed the three-levels-of-intoxication part.

For psychedelic mushrooms to have a non-negligible impact on the human species, they'd have to be available in quantity wherever we went. But the Psilocybe genus is not even found in Africa, but is in fact primarily an American genus! Psilocybe mushrooms closely resemble poisonous mushrooms, and even a .01% error rate in mushroom selection would wipe out any hypothetical fitness gains from better hunting or sexing.

About the hunting and sexing claims. At low doses, psilocybin can boost visual acuity a bit, sure. But our ancestors would rarely have had low doses. Being hungry hunter-gatherers, they would have been more likely to consume multiple grams of such mushrooms rather than the fourth-gram or eighth-gram doses necessary to obtain visual acuity benefits without actually tripping. This would put them significantly over the edge, into happy land.

I'm not sure if you've ever had a gram or more of mushrooms, but let me tell you, hunting would be the last thing on your mind. Laughing, yes, hallucinating, yes, staring at flowers, perhaps, but hunting, not a chance. That type of high-exertion, stamina-driven, high-concentration activity is the antithesis of the psychedelic mindset.

The sexual boost thing is a total load of hooey. Mushrooms are not an aphrodisiac. They are one among thousands of compounds wrongly claimed to be aphrodisiacs. Human males get horny when exposed to mating-worthy females, whether mushrooms are involved or not. Again, have you ever been on mushrooms? They are not an aphorodisiac, and millions of psychonauts would agree with me.

McKenna claims that mushrooms helped give us language. This should set off alarm bells immediately. How could mushrooms possibly take a pre-linguistic ape, and single-handedly construct the complex neural circuits within its brain necessary to process language, then somehow make sure that these were introduced as a germline-level enduring change in the genome rather than a temporary thing?

McKenna's scientific theories about homonid evolution are so full of holes, they're Swiss cheese. He's not really interested in science - and puts science down repeatedly in his talks. He only uses scientific sound bites when he thinks they work to his advantage. Personally, I think I'd find him more entertaining if he just said what he wants to say, and didn't try to back it up with bogus science.

That was merely meant to highlight the irony in attacking McKenna's "theory" meanwhile entertaining wild speculations about exponential developments in computing as somehow more "realistic" than McKenna's ideas.

No irony... these 'wild speculations' are radically more realistic than McKenna's ideas, and are increasingly being treated as such in scientific discourse, popular culture, and in intellectual circles. Kurzweil's Singularity book was one of the most popular science books this year. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of educated people take the creation of artificial intelligence through brain reverse engineering seriously. The main argument is on timescales.

Meanwhile, followers of psychedelic philosophers such as McKenna are extremely limited. You'll mainly find them in the trance scene (Schpongle) or metal (Mudvayne).

Kurzweil's ideas are amenable to rational, scientific discussion, while McKenna's are not. This is probably why the ideas of the former are so compelling to so many people.

MichaelAnissimov:

Nothing wrong with using AI to help cure aging or solve other difficult problems......... if you have an AI that can actually help. I see a lot of people looking towards AGI as something of a great saviour and focusing all their energy upon it when the same people could be working on the problem themselves and have solutions in a much shorter time period. AGI may have uses in the future if you wish to discuss things such as analysis of cryonics patients for revival or things such as uploading but right now we need to focus more on the pure biomedical research to get us to that time period. We already have the resources to make a big difference in this regard - simply curing cancer alone would give everyone a lot more time.

I too am enthusiastic about AI - I can see many many wonderful uses for it, but what I do not see is the singularity happening in my lifetime.

I've read Terrence McKenna and he was brilliant as a writer but not as a scientist. I bet I'd have loved him as a person and his theories were really interesting. I'm sure we could have conversed in the same language when pressure on my brain made me smell the colors of spoken language. Those states of mind are fascinating and compelling - maybe because we all spent time in them in the infancy period before speech reformed our way of thinking?

Magical thinking holds no valid place in science except as an object to be studied.

I've got a midterm coming up that I need to study for...I'm going to try to reply to Michael's comments by later tonight (dude, is this guy smart or what? I think he already has some AI ).

Okay, Mike, I needed to pop my second dose of Provigil and finish my daily workout to keep up with you (what kind of bionic brain do you have, bro?)...

Garenthnel: you shouldn't really laugh, as two of the founders of this very organization went on to devote the majority of their time to boosting AGI for life extension, and two of the most prolific immortalist-meme-promulgators, Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, see superintelligence playing a critical and necessary role in the implementation of radical life extension. There are hundreds of rational, mature, and non-wishful-thinking immortalists who agree. This partially boils down to how hard of a problem you think human-equivalent AI is. Interestingly enough, AI has already been 'solved' (by Marcus Hutter), albeit using infinite computing power... his design (AIXI) is provably viable. Were you aware of that? Over the years of reading I came across thousands of little bits and pieces that slowly converted me from being totally skeptical about AI's potential to being cautiously enthusiastic.

I am optimistic about the role artificial intelligence can play in the future with respect to aiding our species to solve problems that could otherwise take us Millenia to solve. However, at this time, we have no AGI. Our current technologies are all we can count on today to solve today's problems; and I don't think you would disagree. I think investing in future technologies is the best (and only!) way to develop them; obviously. No one thought man would walk the moon; it took a lot of vision and execution to get it done. I'm not an expert in computing, so you wouldn't want to ask me to develop any AI technologies...At this time we have effective narrow AI, but no real AGI. Dr. Goertzel and Bruce are working to develop Novamente, but even their current assessments require 6 years to be effective. I'm going to invest a bit into this project; not because I understand it really, but because I believe the logical construct makes sense.

There is a phenomenon called "island gigantism" whereby island-isolated species balloon to large sizes quickly. But anyway, size increase does not equal "evolutionary jump". The idea that it automatically does is another one of those psuedoscientific conceptions of evolution spun by guru tricksters with the nasty habit of praising science when it suits their needs and bashing it when it doesn't. (McKenna demonstrates this multiple times throughout the video.) Unless you specify a criterion for what 'evolutionary progress' means, you can't say that bigger brains are that much greater than anything else. Perhaps fish experienced a greater evolutionary jump when they started crawling on land, or bacteria did immediately after major extinctions.

Even if the claim is true, it could then just as easily have absolutely nothing to do with psilocybic mushrooms.

I think you are way too harsh on McKenna. He clearly states that his ideas aren't conclusively provable.

Now, much the fossil record is spotty, at best. However, it is particularly interesting that the brain size of hominid species doubled in such short order. We are discussing the very organ that came up with the theory of evolution itself! I think it's a valid topic for scientific inquiry; and I think McKenna offers a reasonable theory for what pressured our brain to grow so large so quickly. I don't see any other evolutionary biologists attempting to tackle this problem with any vigilance...

There is an irritating trick that gurus can use to prosecute poorly-supported theories - mention a bunch of stuff that sounds closely related and is novel, while sidelining the causal link part, and afterwards people have a strong tendency to continue associating these things with one another. While I agree with the independent truth of some of McKenna's fact bites, I disagree with the flakey connections he draws between them. Here are some of his points:

1. psychedelics make you look at the world in a new way and help prevent you from being an uptight, uncreative square.
2. homonid evolution happened very rapidly.
3. psilocybic mushrooms were present on the grasslands of Africa during our evolutionary history.

With respect to the first sentence, I could say the same about most of Kurzweil's theories on nanobots, AI, etc.

With respect to 1, 2, and 3...

1. That's not really what McKenna says. He says that the drug in psilocybin mushrooms can induces three different and distinct states (described in further detail above). ONE of these states induces boundary dissilution -- and to be honest, with all of the recent nuclear talk from North Korea, I think a 5 gram dose of psilocybin might be more effective to solve these problems than any political maneuvering.

2. Hominid evolution -- we descended from the trees to the grasslands. We were looking for new food sources, and there was the psilocybin mushroom. We included it into our diet and psilocybin and its metabolies may have induced morphological changes and mutations in the brain, possibly causing quicker growth. The development of some of our brain neurotransmitters may have been chemically modulated by the inclusion of psilocybin in our diets.

3. They were there for most of the time. And I'm pretty sure we would have experimented with them. Why wouldn't we? Humans LOVE drugs, I still know people who take "shrooms." If you have ever studied human behavior, we also have a tendency to religious activities. If a drug induced a religions experience, that would explain maybe some of these tendencies, couldn't it?

It is easy to concede all the above points, while dismissing the connections, which were fabricated using wishful thinking and unbridled enthusiasm about psychedelic use. The way that McKenna couldn't stop talking about psychedelics for more than 10 minutes throughout his entire guru career gives you a clue that he likes to tie them into everything, whether they belong there or not. The hallmark of a good scientist/philosopher is the ability to isolate trains of thought from one another once in a while, instead of always letting everything run together indescriminately.

Of course; it's easy to dismiss any points. However, in light of no opposiing theory of greater relevance, I must say that McKenna does a pretty good job of offering a possilbe explaination for the what might have caused the development of greatest marvel known to man: the human brain.

The hallmark of a great scientist/philospher is to develop ideas that are worthy of scientific debate. Recall the "SENS challenge:" "to demonstrate that SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), Aubrey de Grey's prescription for defeating aging, is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." Can you dismiss McKennas theories as "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate?" Would you call De Grey a good scientist/philosopher? Can you show me some examples of how he (or another scientist you admire) "[isolates] trains of thought from one another once in a while, instead of always letting everything run together indescriminately?" Please illustrate with an example.

Yes, I read The Spirit Molecule in high school. I think that DMT is very fascinating and would like to try it, or at the very least, see some more trip accounts beyond the dozen or so that have been floating around on the web for more than a decade.

Ah, [tung] , I'll tell you all about it at the next Transhumanism meeting we meet at. You're a really smart guy, and I admire you. Thank you for setting up that last meeting. I'd always wanted to meet Bruce, Dr. Goertzel, Dr. de Grey, and it was a lot of fun! My DMT experiences were life changing, is all I can say. Even though I didn't follow the lesson I was supposed to learn a couple of times, unfortunately.

By 'scientific accounts', this article means, 'some scientists have speculated'. This is waaay different than an experimental study. For example, a recent experimental study found that consumption of psilocybin mushrooms led to life-changing spiritual experiences. But there is no study that suggests that DMT levels in the brain are elevated during REM sleep.

And again, what does DMT being found in the brain have anything to do with psilocybin and human evolution? Are you suggesting that because DMT is found in the brain, it's plausible that we could have eaten psilocybin in the past and had it stick around in our brains permanently, in fact for so long that it integrated itself into our sperm and eggs and made sure to insert itself into our children's brains as well? This is a tricky case of things-that-sound-the-same-but-are-completely-different department.

Ah...I can't find the citation at this time, but humans have been monitored during dream states, and supposedly (yes, supposedly, a bad word for a scientist!) the level of DMT is correlated with REM sleep.

What is strange about DMT is that it exists in the brain, only lasts about 5 minutes. Your brain knows exactly what it is and how to metabolize it. That's why it lasts only five minutes!

Anwyays, that's a different topic.

No, I think he is completely pulling this out of his ass. The reason why species have specialized diets is because when niche diets work, there is no selection pressure in favor of generalized diets. 99% of the time, a fairly narrow diet is just fine, though some flexibility is necessary during periods of drought, for example.

Because the potential for mutation is so old, natural selection has had billions of years to fine-tune the adaptations protecting against it, and they exist primarily on the molecular level, in the central machinery of the cell. For food consumption, the danger is not mutagens, but simple poisons. What McKenna said may make sense if you replace 'mutagens' with 'poisons'.

McKenna is too smart to pull stuff like this "out of his ass" because it would make his whole pitch too easy to discredit;

A couple of snips:

Evolution is the fundamental underpinning concept of biology. It has shaped and continues to shape the diversity of life around us, from elephants to insects, fynbos to ostriches. It has also, of course, shaped human diversity. But what exactly is evolution? In a nutshell, evolution is change through time. This can be change over a very short time (for example the virus that causes AIDS has flourished in large part because of its ability to evolve very quickly), or over very long periods of time ('living fossils' like horseshoe crabs have changed very little over many millions of years).

Our own evolutionary history, since our ancestors diverged from those of the other primates, extends back around six million years. Evidence for this evolution comes in many forms. Of course, there are the fossils. We have a rich fossil heritage in Africa, much of which comes from South Africa, from very early human ancestors who lived in the Sterkfontein Valley around 3 to 2 million years ago, to modern people who looked essentially like us and inhabited the Cape 100,000 years ago. But fossils are not the only evidence.

Examples of human evolution are all around us, and we can learn a lot about the past by looking at things in the present. For example, traces of our evolution can be found in what we look like - in things like the shape of our skulls or the color of our skin. We can gain insight into evolution by examining our diet - what we can and cannot eat, as well as what we must eat.

Another example:

The Loss of Endogenous Ascorbate Production –
The Genetic Precondition For Human Evolution
About 40 million years ago the ancestor of man lost the ability to synthesize ascorbate endogenously. This was the result of the mutation of the gene encoding for the enzyme L-gulono-?-lactone oxidase, a key enzyme in the conversion of glucose to ascorbate. This genetic mutation left all descendants, including all human beings living today, dependent on sufficient exogenous ascorbate supply in the diet.

The precondition for this genetic mutation was a sufficient dietary supply of ascorbate. The precondition was met by the fact that at the time of the mutation our ancestors lived in the central regions of Africa and their diet consisted mainly of fruits and other nutrition rich in ascorbate and other vitamins. Nevertheless, as a result of this mutation the availability of ascorbate in the body of our ancestors dropped from between 10,000 to 20,000 milligrams synthesized endogenously every day, to several hundred milligrams taken up in the diet of the African habitat. More than 30 million years later this genetic defect was completely unmasked by environmental conditions triggering the evolution of man.

And these are just quick googlings.

The tryptamine FAQ lists most of the few dozen plant, fungi, and animal species that contain tryptamines, many in trace amounts. I'm sure that analysis of the total edible flora and fauna in our evolutionary environment would find that only a negligible percentage contained tryptamines. Usually, they have to be consumed along with an MAO inhibitor or put through an extensive purification process to obtain a psychoactive dose. That is why we see lots of phalaris grass but very little DMT. Psilocybin mushrooms may be the only "ready to eat", non-life-threatening natural tryptamine source.

Even if there were tryptamines everywhere, they'd have to get us in the balls, not the brains. It doesn't matter if our brains are mutated beyond all recognition - unless it's reflected in the germline, nothing will be passed along. Unless our super-mushroom-enhanced brains help us beat the crap out of our enemies in a serious way, every day for thousands of generations, the Mushroom Effect is a drop in the pond of natural selection operating on the brain.

Many foods are mutagenic. Meats, in particular, are more metagenic than vegetables. The mutagenic effects and the experiential effects of consuming such food are completely separate. If I eat a mutagenic papaya, and that makes me happy, does that mean that it is mutating my DNA in the direction of me being a happier person? Not at all. If I eat a mutagenic mushroom, and that makes me enlightened, does that mean it's also mutating my DNA in the direction of being more enlightened? Absolutely not. The psychoactive component and the mutagenic component are two entirely different things.

Mutations are random. Not like in X-Men or TMNT. Most of the time, mutation leads to cancer and death. There is no such thing as 'purposeful mutation' in nature. Only variation and natural selection. If a mushroom mutagen led to the acceleration of homonid evolution by introducing a wider average degree of variation in the species, then a meat mutagen could do exactly the same thing.

We don't know for sure what effect a particular food might have on the rate of mutation without experimentation. What you address are question marks, and they remain question marks. We don't have millions of years to conduct experiments to determine whether or not psilocybin induces a higher rate of mutation than Vitamin C.

For psychedelic mushrooms to have a non-negligible impact on the human species, they'd have to be available in quantity wherever we went. But the Psilocybe genus is not even found in Africa, but is in fact primarily an American genus! Psilocybe mushrooms closely resemble poisonous mushrooms, and even a .01% error rate in mushroom selection would wipe out any hypothetical fitness gains from better hunting or sexing.

About the hunting and sexing claims. At low doses, psilocybin can boost visual acuity a bit, sure. But our ancestors would rarely have had low doses. Being hungry hunter-gatherers, they would have been more likely to consume multiple grams of such mushrooms rather than the fourth-gram or eighth-gram doses necessary to obtain visual acuity benefits without actually tripping. This would put them significantly over the edge, into happy land.

I'm not sure if you've ever had a gram or more of mushrooms, but let me tell you, hunting would be the last thing on your mind. Laughing, yes, hallucinating, yes, staring at flowers, perhaps, but hunting, not a chance. That type of high-exertion, stamina-driven, high-concentration activity is the antithesis of the psychedelic mindset.

The sexual boost thing is a total load of hooey. Mushrooms are not an aphrodisiac. They are one among thousands of compounds wrongly claimed to be aphrodisiacs. Human males get horny when exposed to mating-worthy females, whether mushrooms are involved or not. Again, have you ever been on mushrooms? They are not an aphorodisiac, and millions of psychonauts would agree with me.

McKenna claims that mushrooms helped give us language. This should set off alarm bells immediately. How could mushrooms possibly take a pre-linguistic ape, and single-handedly construct the complex neural circuits within its brain necessary to process language, then somehow make sure that these were introduced as a germline-level enduring change in the genome rather than a temporary thing?

McKenna's scientific theories about homonid evolution are so full of holes, they're Swiss cheese. He's not really interested in science - and puts science down repeatedly in his talks. He only uses scientific sound bites when he thinks they work to his advantage. Personally, I think I'd find him more entertaining if he just said what he wants to say, and didn't try to back it up with bogus science.

Hypholoma cyanescens are only found in North Africa (classified now as Psilocybe mairei).

How do you know the behavior of our ancestors? The dose Dr. Fisher administerd to the graduate students was underneath a gram; a dose so low your mother or father could take it and be unaware of any significnant psychedelic effects.

I've consumed five grams of Psilocybin mushrooms before and I've experienced what I'd consdier boundary dissilusion effects. All in all, I've consumed Psilocybin mushrooms at least 10 different times. I was definatley interested in sexual activity. Psilocybin does arouse the CNS.

Also, you've missed out again on McKenna's theory. He suggests that the mushrooms were preserved in honey, which becomes mead; a crude sort of alchohol. The CNS arousal effects...in addition to the effects of alcohol...which, McKenna says are: 1) Alcohol decreases sensitivity to social cuing and 2) Increases verbal facility. McKenna hypothesizes that the combination of these two drugs induced orgiastic behavior, and I think that's a reasonable conclusion, based on my experience with these two compounds.

McKenna claims mushrooms might have contributed to our species development of language because Psilocybin caused boundary dissilution. In other words, it made our species willing to try new ways of communicaiton. Absent male dominance characterisitics, I think we all would communicate more effectively.

I wouldn't call McKenna's ideas "bogus" and attempt to promote technologies such as AI and expect to be taken seriously. Sorry, there's just no evidence that it works yet, so at this point, dude -- until there is evidence to suggest otherwise -- Kurzweil's ideas are a pipe dream -- just as you call Mckenna's ideas. If not more so, because you wish to propel these ideas into the future, and McKenna is trying to solve problems from the past.

No irony... these 'wild speculations' are radically more realistic than McKenna's ideas, and are increasingly being treated as such in scientific discourse, popular culture, and in intellectual circles. Kurzweil's Singularity book was one of the most popular science books this year. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of educated people take the creation of artificial intelligence through brain reverse engineering seriously. The main argument is on timescales.

Meanwhile, followers of psychedelic philosophers such as McKenna are extremely limited. You'll mainly find them in the trance scene (Schpongle) or metal (Mudvayne).

Kurzweil's ideas are amenable to rational, scientific discussion, while McKenna's are not. This is probably why the ideas of the former are so compelling to so many people.

Total irony and double standards.




[tung]

Hey, I should have included this news in this topic: Mushrooms' active ingredient expands the mind, study finds...

Adam,

Terence McKenna is a psychedelics guru and mystic. The majority of his ideas are highly unscientific or just plain wrong, in the same vein of realism as L. Ron Hubbard, Rael, or Alex Chiu. To say that evolutionary biologists have no explanations for human brain size increase over the past couple million years is just ludicrous. There are hundreds of books and probably tens of thousands of online papers discussing this very issue.

McKenna obviously believes strongly in his ideas, and saying that one's ideas "aren't conclusively provable" is just a cop-out to avoid being proven wrong. Interestingly enough, nothing is conclusively provable, because even a billion trials turning out one way doesn't preclude the possibility that an additional trial will give rise to a new outcome. Beliefs operate based on confidence percentages, not black-and-white yes-or-no.

You ignored my long explanation about how consuming psilocybic mushrooms could never give rise to psilocybin-like neurotransmitters, how boosting a mutation rate would be more likely to cause cancer than cause an entire species to mutate in a specific direction, and how even if mushrooms could enhance people that took them, there would be no mechanism for the mushroom to introduce germline changes to the species as a whole, or even any one individual.

The quick googlings you present later on are in agreement with my points, and I'll address them below. Evolution works in a very specific way, and it's important to understand how it works, so we can learn what is and isn't possible for it. McKenna's theory - that eating mushrooms can give rise to psilocybin-like neurotransmitters that cause us to permanently think in a way slightly analogous to being under the influence of mushrooms - is physically impossible. Evolution forbids it. I'll explain why below...

For the reasons I stated above, McKenna's ideas are not worthy of scientific debate. Aubrey's, on the other hand, are. If you were to poll a representative group of scientists on this question, I'm sure that 99%+ would agree that McKenna's ideas are so wrong as to not be even worthy of debate, whereas less than 25% would say the same about Aubrey's ideas. Aubrey's scientific journal is highly cited, whereas McKenna is hardly cited at all, being so explicitly unscientific.

A person who can think like an expert in more than one area is capable of compartamentalized thinking. McKenna tied everything back to psychedelics. If Aubrey constantly tried to tie everything back to SENS, he would be guilty of the charge I put to McKenna. But he doesn't.

Ah, tung.gif , I'll tell you all about it at the next Transhumanism meeting we meet at. You're a really smart guy, and I admire you. Thank you for setting up that last meeting. I'd always wanted to meet Bruce, Dr. Goertzel, Dr. de Grey, and it was a lot of fun! My DMT experiences were life changing, is all I can say. Even though I didn't follow the lesson I was supposed to learn a couple of times, unfortunately.

Thanks... you're the first person I've met personally that has done DMT.

Examples of human evolution are all around us, and we can learn a lot about the past by looking at things in the present. For example, traces of our evolution can be found in what we look like - in things like the shape of our skulls or the color of our skin. We can gain insight into evolution by examining our diet - what we can and cannot eat, as well as what we must eat.

About 40 million years ago the ancestor of man lost the ability to synthesize ascorbate endogenously. This was the result of the mutation of the gene encoding for the enzyme L-gulono-?-lactone oxidase, a key enzyme in the conversion of glucose to ascorbate. This genetic mutation left all descendants, including all human beings living today, dependent on sufficient exogenous ascorbate supply in the diet.

The precondition for this genetic mutation was a sufficient dietary supply of ascorbate. The precondition was met by the fact that at the time of the mutation our ancestors lived in the central regions of Africa and their diet consisted mainly of fruits and other nutrition rich in ascorbate and other vitamins. Nevertheless, as a result of this mutation the availability of ascorbate in the body of our ancestors dropped from between 10,000 to 20,000 milligrams synthesized endogenously every day, to several hundred milligrams taken up in the diet of the African habitat. More than 30 million years later this genetic defect was completely unmasked by environmental conditions triggering the evolution of man.

In these top case, the chain of cause and effect goes like this:

Nutritional reality of the surrounding environment ---> gives rise to ---> a powerful selection pressure ---> in the presence of ---> entirely random mutation ---> results in ---> physiological adaptations to better cope with the nutritional reality.

In the second case, the chain of cause and effect is similar but different:

Increasing ascorbate in food ---> leads to ---> endogeneous ascorbate production no longer being selected for ---> in the presence of random mutation and genetic drift ---> eventually causes ---> our capacity to produce endogeneous ascorbate to atrophy.

These are both entirely scientific. They're based on Darwinian population genetics, the experimentally confirmed model of evolution that everyone uses nowadays. The first chain is the casual explanation for our ability to digest certain poisons, smell foods before eating them, and maybe even build fires to soften up food and kill germs. They're food-driven physiological and cognitive adaptations.

The second chain is the causal explanation for increasing myopia (need for glasses) in our present society - because of agriculture, medicine, and all that other good stuff, there's no selection pressure in favor of perfect vision, therefore random genetic drift leads to worse vision overall, and the need for more glasses. Diseases of the motor cortex have the same cause - there is less need for a large motor cortex, so it genetically drifted into smallness, making it more susceptible to motor disorders.

Terence McKenna's causal chain goes like this:

humans start eating psilocybic mushrooms ---> which gives them a survival advantage ---> while accelerating their mutation rate ---> while preferentially directing those mutations to cause their genomes to code for brains that start manufacturing psilocyin-analogues ---> resulting in permanent boundary-disillusion, including sexual flexibility, and language ability.

It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't explain how eating mushrooms causes the evolutionary environment to start selecting for brains that produce mushroomlike neurotransmitters. There is a way I could artificially select for mushroomlike neurotransmitters - by executing brains without them before they can give rise to offspring. But this isn't natural. Even if mushroom consumption were beneficial, it would select for humans with a greater tendency to consume mushrooms, rather than humans with mushroomlike neurotransmitters.

Our ancestors only started creating mead about 10,000 years ago, while our evolutionary history is at least 10 times that length. So theories dependent on mead can't say much about the environment that created our species. All the same, even if they made it into mead, many would still have consumed several grams, and being on several grams gives zero advantage, both for hunting or reproducing. Sober males are just as horny as mushroomed males, more likely to win in a fight, and more likely to bring home food. There is no selection pressure in favor of people on multiple grams of mushrooms.

You're probably one of the only people in the transhumanist community who thinks that McKenna's ideas are just as scientific as Kurzweil's... Paul Hughes is the only person who comes to mind who might agree with you. All I can say is, more than 95%+ of people who have read books by both would say that Kurzweil's vision is vastly more scientific and probable than McKenna's.

Growing up in and around San Francisco, I can definitely say that psychedelics are very interesting and important from a psychological/developmental point of view... and a fruitful area for research. However, it's important to understand how information flows in the process of evolution and natural selection. After all, it built every living organism we see around us. What McKenna is suggesting is like a stream flowing uphill - it's physically impossible, even if all the conditions were right. It really isn't surprising, as it has taken evolutionary biologists decades to prosecute Darwinian population genetics within their own discipline, never mind to outsiders. When McKenna formulated his ideas, in the 70s and 80s, very few laypeople would have had the sort of understanding of population genetics necessary to invalidate this theory. But we have this theory today, and we might as well use it...

It just doesn't make sense.

Yeah I tried for a while to understand exactly what he was trying to express in his theory, and I think you are right in that the evolutionary changes he implies happened are the laundry list of common fallacies of evolution that you refuted above.

I feel a little intellectual quid pro quo is called for. Double standards are prevailing....

I'd like to draw attention to one of your comments from here.

Head only. Your body can be rebuilt based on your genetic information. Easy as pie.

American pie? Cherry pie? Or maybe apple pie?

Mind backing this with a little evidence, please? How exactly do you plan to rebuild my body based on my genetic information? I'd really like to know.

[wis]

Obviously you should back it up in the relevant topic.

I sure hope that comment is entirely sarcastic; when you make such comments it makes it VERY difficult to take your position against Mckenna's ideas even *sort of* seriously. I also find it difficult to debate with you when you don't have a single scientific reference in your post...I'd like to stick to the evidence as much as possible. I'd be fully willing to digress and analyse the fossil record and some further evidence I can cite to back McKenna's theories, but I would prefer not to do so if you choose to implement a different level of rigour to your own biases than others.

I am not McKenna and I don't hold to all of his theories. However, I personally think his ideas are far more realistic than your Kurzweil inspired fantasy cited above...

[glasses]

I am just as content to entertain wild speculations about exponential developments in computing or cryonics as I am to entertain wild speculations about the evolutionary cause for the human brain size doubling...I'd just like us both to use the same standards for evidence if we choose to engage in a rational, scientific debate...

By the way, I didn't read the whole post, I just read the first paragraph (or so) and noted there aren't any references to any primary or secondary sources. I just got back from the gym and am going to bed soon. I'll try to take a closer look at the rest of your comments later.

Take care.