Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
52 Fall 2009 Timothy Leary: I'm a great follower of a man named Marshall McLuhan who wrote those wonderful books about communication. He said that if you want to change a culture, if you want to change yourself, if you want to change religion, change the medium, the mode of communication. He said that Gutenberg created Protestantism where he had the mass-assembled book, where everybody can read. And now the new form of communication is electronic…. Terence McKenna: The realization that has flowered in the wake of the internet and the rise of cybernetics is that everything is made of information. Information is the primary datum of being. Concepts like time and space and energy are orders of magnitude removed from the present at hand when compared with a concept like information. Every iota, every bit of information that passes through us, changes us. Mark Pesce: If you took a picture of this room in 1990 and you took a picture of it today, everything would look exactly the same and yet everything is completely different. Because in 1990 we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing seamlessly among all of us. And it's changed us. It's radically sped up the way we deal with information in society. And every bit of information that passes through you changes you. You cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of information. So the internet is acting as this enormous accelerator…. Erik Davis: Information came to be seen as an abstract, almost transcendental stuff that could "circulate unchanged among different material substrates." Once we begin to believe that information is more essential than material forms, we vacate the old cosmos defined by presence and absence, entering a world characterized by the binary feedback of pattern and randomness, signal and noise. > This accelerating knowledge leads to widespread acceptance of all reality as virtual… and that it has always been this way. The transhuman age is simply making this inescapably obvious. Aldous Huxley's descriptive "far antipodes of the mind" (He used the phrase in a discussion of his mescaline experiences) and their real ecologies is the intellectual progenitor of The Matrix, and of a pragmatic relationship to the questions of ontology. McKenna: The minute I understood the concept [of virtual reality] I knew… that this would be the next great thing. As a tool of art. As a tool for leading us beyond the notion that we are a hive society of advanced primates, because that's how we visually appear to the empirical point of view. That's an out-of-context description of what we are. It's like a schematic or an aerial map. What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes — the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move. The purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality that are not artificial, but that are fields of data not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception. I see virtual reality not as a way of escaping the notion of empirical reality, but as a way of re-portraying invisible levels of the given world that are very vital and important to us: how we see flows of energy, how we understand complex economies, how we understand the fractal hierarchies of nature…. What is already co-present with three-dimensional reality is being literalized... but being literalized in timescales that make the nature of the game apparent to all but the dullest among us. I mean after all, we have always lived in virtual realities, ever since we abandoned nomadism and defined a polis and a wilderness. Davis: Media have long sought to create immersive spaces of fictional reality: Baroque cathedrals, 19th century panoramas, even, perhaps, the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux or Altamira. Today, the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with cognitive science and its understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we take for ordinary space-time. Pesce: My first experience of virtual reality happened in 1990 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25. And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected I would find in this virtual world, wasn't an artificial Tron-like environment. It wasn't something that was entirely artificial. What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship. And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn't to escape into another dimension, but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can't always see, because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us. Where we're going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry. And we don't have any tools of mind. Western culture, which is based on this objective external reality — it's not hard, it's all become very soft, and it's all flowing together. So we need to now start to find ways of describing what's going on. And so what we need to do — I found in my own investigations — is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically, that understand that perception shapes what you are, and you shape what you see. And that they're not separate areas, they're not separate domains, and you have to consider them as a whole.