Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
55 www.hplusmagazine.com The paradox is that these mechanistic molecules can produce deeper, more authentic selves. People on SSRIs often describe themselves as finally feeling like normal people, like the person they were meant to be. This paradox… lies at the heart of the posthuman condition. If one thing makes itself apparent from the psychedelic experience, it's that the more you know the more you don't know, and admitting this is a form of death. The acceleration of intelligence and extension of the individual lifespan means that life itself will increasingly come to resemble a constant re-imagining of self — not the indefinite perpetuation that many of us desire, but an ongoing process of death and rebirth. And by its very nature, death is across the event horizon, an impenetrable unknown. Davis: If I choose to automatically curb a basic dimension of my interior life with a targeted chemical, haven't I implicitly adopted a highly constricted model of what constitutes "the self"? Rather than embrace these new feelings of relief as the "real me," someone who modifies their everyday personality with pharmaceutical products must identify with the "I" that chooses to instrumentally control its states of mind. Most advertising is aimed at the Controller, that portion of self that wants to expand its ability to manipulate the world in order to achieve its goals. Psychiatric drugs, though, add a crucial twist. When [pharmaceutical companies claim that their drugs] can "help you handle it," the "it" in question is, in the end, nothing other than a now alienated portion of you. That's OK if the goal of your life is simply to feel as good as possible for as long as possible. But happiness and freedom may ultimately depend less on maintaining particular states of mind than on cultivating the appropriate attitude toward whatever states of mind arise out of the elegant chaos of life. And it seems to me that control is not the attitude to hold in the long run. > Seeing the unconscious as persistent and progress as a dialectic leads to the ethical imperative of what can be generally understood as "heart"… a consequent sense of responsibility and a call for coherent and mature visioning of a future upon which we can collectively agree. Ultimately, a transcendental future does not simply fall on us but is something we collaboratively construct in every moment. Leary: A renaissance preaches a basic religion of humanism. The aim of individual life is to know yourself and treat each other as human beings…. Davis: Work like that at Princeton University, measuring fields of human consciousness — for example when lots of people focus their attention on sporting events — suggests that it might actually matter what we think about. Then you look at… how technology allows certain kinds of imagination such extraordinary power. I think we've lost the tools to navigate these worlds the old-fashioned way, we're almost rending the physical body, spending more and more time in that kind of etheric space, with no idea what we're doing, and the fact that this is going to have real world consequences is kind of obvious. Of course the whole world has always been interconnected, and everyone depends on the world around them, but we tend to feel that we're outside of that, that we're individual subjects, that we have control over nature. So it's almost like a return of the repressed — we want that back again, we need it back if we're going to deal with sociological and ecological problems. Pesce: Even as we talk about this gnostic release, this uploading of the soul into some sort of silicon... there's this body that's behind, sort of bitching, saying "I am real. And I am the potential, I am the ground in which you work." The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality. Where is the body in cyberspace? Where are you when your email is flashing across the net, when your agents are doing your bidding? Where are you, and how do you maintain your self? Psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing. What we're going to see, and it's actually quite true, is that certain types of VR can produce the precisely same affect. There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason, or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason. So... I really want to work from the heart. I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology, you have to work from the heart center. Because otherwise you'll create golems, you'll create Frankensteins, your creations will run away from you. That's the essence of the story of the golem — that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life but without the light of knowledge or the heart. The heart of God. I also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do. One of my biggest gripes about the internet is that it can't, as yet, contain the tenor of human emotion which is so important. If we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh, we've got a big problem. If it can't sing, we've got a big problem. McKenna: And what we're talking about here is using technological prosthesis to extend and enrich humanness, to enrich communication, and it is, believe me, the want of good communication.