Quote:Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism, genetic engineers another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind.

Some of these thinkers have been catalyzed by the psychedelic experience -- in a way, the most informative window into a world beyond the human that we have yet discovered. They understand the message of psychedelics and the message of technology to converge on the horizon of a deeper reading of reality that recognizes mind and matter as dimensions of the same truth -- a truth for which language has ill-prepared us.

The ranks of these "psychedelic transhumanists" include legendary rebels like Timothy Leary, wise fools like Terence McKenna, cultural commentators like Erik Davis and Mark Pesce, and avant-psychopharmacologists like David Pearce. Hailing from disparate knowledge domains, they nonetheless share hyperliterate and uniquely discerning intellect. As unusual as their arguments may be to anyone trained in more conventional models of reality, they nonetheless obey a rigorous scientific discipline in their own way, augmenting empirical knowledge with the established insights of 20th-century psychology and philosophy.

Their common vision shares much with the rest of the transhuman community, including an embrace of technology and science as both potent and inevitable; an evolutionary model of the universe and humanity; a sense of the human organism as something that can be tinkered with and expanded; a recognition of drugs as a technology that can dramatically reinvent identity; and a playful challenging of fixed boundaries. In many ways they demonstrate the seed of transhumanism in this moment by exemplifying self-revision and the reevaluation of assumptions as an open-ended and ongoing process. And along the way, they tatter the mechanistic control fantasies we have held onto in spite of our most sophisticated inquiries.

Among these visionaries, we find a general agreement on the emergence of emotional machines, but from a more non-dual perspective of the human as both emotional and machine-like, and a recognition of both inner and outer realities. They tend to critique philosophies that consider mind a mere epiphenomenon, or that fail to recognize the role of the speculator in speculation.

They see technology as ideas, and ideas as technology. They question our fanaticism for control in light of progress's runaway complexity, and remind us of the stubborn persistence of the unconscious, the body, and the other. They insistently remind us to see the evolution of humanity and beyond as much in terms of qualia as quanta, and paint the portrait of a future sensitive to psychological, spiritual, ethical, and biological concerns.

The distinctions between this vision and the more common idea of a technological singularity are easily distilled. In their own words, presented as a "virtual conversation" of transcripts and correspondences, here are the core messages of a transhumanist vision informed by the psychedelic experience...



Medium is message, and information is psychoactive.

Information is a more fundamental substrate of reality, an implicate order. "Pattern" replaces "matter."

Timothy Leary: I'm a great follower of a man named Marshall MacLuhan 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, then 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...
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I do wonder what kind of world this would be if LSD, Shrooms, Mescaline and Weed were legal and sold at the corner store. I imagine it would be far more peaceful and less materialistic. People would be far less willing to fall for official bull shit.

The CIA thought they had a mind control agent in LSD. The moment they saw it opened people minds and lade them harder to control was the moment it became illegal.

I do wonder what kind of world this would be if LSD, Shrooms, Mescaline and Weed were legal and sold at the corner store. I imagine it would be far more peaceful and less materialistic. People would be far less willing to fall for official bull shit.

The CIA thought they had a mind control agent in LSD. The moment they saw it opened people minds and lade them harder to control was the moment it became illegal.

I do wonder what kind of world this would be if LSD, Shrooms, Mescaline and Weed were legal and sold at the corner store. I imagine it would be far more peaceful and less materialistic. People would be far less willing to fall for official bull shit.

The CIA thought they had a mind control agent in LSD. The moment they saw it opened people minds and lade them harder to control was the moment it became illegal.