What would we learn if we could merge parts of the human brain with those of other species? Might we hear the sounds of the past? Live in naked troops, swapping intimate experiences without words? Or build a new social network? Fun and wide-ranging conversation with some genius pals – Lori Marino and Ben Goertzel – published in Xmas 2011 issue of New Scientist.
Among those who have experienced ayahuasca, many claim that under its influence the mind does things no mind is supposed to do. It gives the drinker access to a wellspring of common imagery, so that all drinkers see similar visions and entertain the same kinds of ideas. What’s more, the drug frees the mind from “consensus reality,” so that under its influence drinkers are able to communicate with a whole pantheon of extra-curricular intelligences, from other human minds to alien beings to the spirit of the plant itself. Thus, some reason, consciousness is not strictly bound to the dull matter of the brain; rather, it can travel up and out, and do acrobatic tumbles through multiple dimensions…
“By the end of the twentieth century, scientists had scoured the far reaches of the material world. It was then that a few brave travelers turned in a different direction: inward!”
“They have no future without us, the chimps, the elephant, the whales and the rest. None. The question that we, the keepers, are facing is whether we’d mind a future without them … whether we’d be bothered by an Earth with no living vestiges of our own differently shaped selves.” – Charles Siebert
“There’s a new mind theory out there … The theory is worth paying attention to because, well, it’s about you. Or at least two of you: the careful, analytic you, and your misguided shadow, who spends altogether too much time in the “wrong” section of the bookstore. One of you is a Mechanist. The other is a Mentalist. Though you may not realize it, you are two foot soldiers on opposing sides of a battle that began in utero…”
“Some years ago, in New Orleans, a friend and I helped jump-start a stranded pink Cadillac. Afterwards the grateful owner – a Rockabilly hipster with slicked back pompadour and aviation shades – told us to come visit him at his bar. “I’m Dungeon people,” he said, chewing on a wooden toothpick…”
“Like many grotesquely large things, the modern burrito is an American invention. A pared-down version was imported into the southwestern United States from northern Mexico in the late 19th century. Called the “little burro”, it was a piece of meat wrapped in a flour tortilla … in northern California the mule’s load doubled. Vegetal abundance met the American appetite and the result is a stunning self-contained food object with the size and heft of a WW2 artillery shell…”
“The reader is kept in a state of delicious conceptual vertigo, shifting between images of swarming bacteria at one moment and “pulsing clusters” of human settlement patterns the next…”
Wrote this for The New Scientist - summarizes a few of the states from my book.