Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
organism.earth
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
But now technology throws a curve. And the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out that what you’re supposed to work for isn’t worth having. We figure out that our politicians are buffoons. We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels. We discover that all... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or, isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party,... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Terence McKenna
Not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers everything that is important—color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, appetition—these things are called secondary qualities. In other words, they’re peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding. They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
By Terence McKenna
(This is what he refers to as “qualia”, especially in The Invisible Landscape)
The real hard choice that you’re being pushed toward—and that you might consider making before the yawning grave rings down the curtain on this cosmic drama—is actually intellectual responsibility, freedom, and a devotion to what scientists call elegance of thought. You know, people say, “Well, how can you tell one theory from another? And is... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Reminds me of “quality” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This might also be the thing that LLMs can’t yet work with or towards for a while, at least.
You know, if you read the psychedelic literature, you can tell what psilocybin does to heart beat, sperm count, perception of tone, on and on. They never talk about the real content, you know? Because it’s always individual. And they say, “Well, science can’t handle individual phenomena. We measure the properties of large numbers of people.” Well,... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Terence McKenna
And we are people of immense privilege by any way of slicing the planetary demographic. Even the poorest among us who wheedled their way in here this evening are in the top one percent of the planetary social pyramid. On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving, the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces,... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Terence McKenna on privilege
I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. We are like hardware. The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
I’ve heard Daniel Schmachtenberger talk about the Superorganism running humans as some kind of big computer. And how far away is that from the Earth being a supercomputer a la Hitchhiker’s?
I’ve come to the conclusion—and some of you may have heard me say this before—that culture is not your friend. That’s the final conclusion. This came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical, and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, “You know, in the nineteenth century, most people your age were dead.” And I realized that this... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
This is not a formulation I’ve heard in any other lecture. Pretty cool.
Also, it reminds me of that Game Theory video. I’ll try to find it.
So then, intellectuals—defined as people who figure it out—discover that you are alienated. That’s what “figuring it out” means: it means that you understand that the BMW, the Harvard degree, the whatever-it-is, that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped, and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people who are figuring out which fork... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow talk about the role of the “eccentric”. Never use the word “shaman”, somehow.