path: root/bookmarks/psychedelics make us human.txt

---
title: Psychedelics Make Us Human
date: 2011-07-06T08:03:13Z
source: http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/6/20/psychedelics-make-us-human-an-interview-with-the-mind-bending-techno-ecologic-scholar-richard-doyle
tags: writing, religion, research

---

This Enchanted Contemplative Experience of Radical Interconnection

Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important
interconnections are to him – and how transformative, bedeviling and
hypnotic his ideas can be. As a professor of English and science,
technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University, he has [taught
courses](/web/20111201085049/http://www.personal.psu.edu/rmd12/) in the
history and rhetoric of the emerging technosciences – sustainability,
space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science,
information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary
contexts from which they sprout. An explorer of the exciting and
confusing rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational
universe, he argues that in co-evolution with technology, we find
ourselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as vital as it is
unexplored.

In [*Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of The
Noösphere*](/web/20111201085049/http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Pharmacy-Evolution-Mediations-Biomedical/dp/0295990945),
the transhumanist philosopher focuses on his favorite technology: the
psychedelic, “ecodelic” plants and chemicals (read: drugs) that can help
make us process more information and make us aware of the effect of
language and music and nature on our consciousness, thereby offering us
an awareness of our own ability to effect our own consciousness through
our linguistic and creative choices. And that, from an evolutionary
perspective, is simply sexy.

**Jason:** *Your new book talks about the relationship between
psychedelic plants and the accelerating evolution of the “noosphere”,
which some define as the knowledge substrate of reality, the invisible,
informational dimension of collective intelligence and human knowledge.
Is this more or less accurate?*

**Rich:** The book features a set of nested claims about the evolution
of mind, psychedelics (or, as I prefer and propose, “ecodelics”), and
the evolution of the noosphere, but all of the ideas can be understood
via two claims:

​1. Ecodelics have been an integral part of the human toolkit, so
suppressing them is like suppressing music, jokes or other aspects of
our humanity.

and

​2. As integral parts of the human toolkit, ecodelics are best modeled
as part of sexual selection – the competition for mates and the leaving
of progeny. A careful look at Charles Darwin’s writings on sexual
selection will show that sexual selection works through the management
of attention – what we would now call “information technologies.” Think
birdsong, bioluminescence (the most widespread communication technology
on the planet), poetry. The peacock is managing and focusing peahen
attention with his feathers, so what we have called “mind” has been
involved in evolution for a very long time. Mandrilles eat iboga before
competing for mates.

### “It is, as always, the challenge of the magus and the artist to decide how we want to customize reality once we know that we can.”

I work with the notion of the noosphere drawn from V.I. Vernadsky, and
propose that we define it as the collective effect of the attention of
ecosystems. Psychedelics seem to draw our attention to the whole.
Ecodelics dwindle the broadcast of the ego – it is not very good at
perceiving the whole, just as we can’t, unlike a butterfly, taste with
our feet. With the ego dwindled, we can become aware of the noosphere –
the message of the whole. This has particular importance as we grapple
with the effects of human consciousness and its externalization in
technology on the biosphere.

**Jason:** *The Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
spoke of the Noosphere very early on. A profile in WIRED said, “Teilhard
imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of
information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness.” He
wrote, “The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in
flesh and bone.” He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing
complexity and consciousness among living organisms was the nervous
system. The informational wiring of a being, he argued – whether made of
neurons or bits – gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification
of nervous connections increases, evolution moves toward greater
consciousness, right?*

Yes. He also called this process of the evolution of consciousness
“Omega Point.” The noosphere imagined here relied on a change in our
relationship to consciousness as much as it did to any technological
change, and was part of evolution’s epic quest for self awareness. Here
Teilhard is in accord with Julian Huxley [Aldous’ brother, a biologist]
and Carl Sagan when they observed that “we are a way for the cosmos to
know itself.” Sri Aurobindo’s *The Life Divine* traces out this
evolution of consciousness as well, through the Greek and Sanskrit
traditions, as well as Darwinism and (relatively) modern philosophy. All
are describing evolution’s slow and dynamic quest towards understanding
itself.

**Jason:** *Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who won the Nobel
Prize in 1965, proposed that “just as the biosphere stands above the
world of nonliving matter, so an ‘abstract kingdom’ rises above the
biosphere.*

Yes, the irony here is that in in his amazing book *Chance and
Necessity*, Monod was part of the rather vicious attacks on Teilhard.
Teilhard was attacked by both the Church and mainstream science. Was he
on to something? Nobody was more mainstream than Karl Popper, the
philosopher of science, and he also talked about the “Three Worlds” of
“objects,” “mental events,” and the “products of the human mind,” with
the last, World Three, corresponding roughly to the noosphere. One
significant difference between my use of this map and Popper and others
is that I do not limit the effects of attention to human attention.
Flowering plants, for example, work on this level of the biosphere that
involves insect attention and perception.

### “Leary called this ‘internal freedom.’ Yet becoming aware of the practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these instances the ‘vertigo of freedom.’"

**Jason:** *This ‘world of ideas’ sounds a lot like the Noosphere… are
these two guys saying the same thing here?*

As I mentioned above, I think there are important differences in our use
of this map, but all of these authors are pointing to the need to model
an aspect of our ecosystems that involves what the plant scientists now
call “signaling and behavior” as well as the collective effects of that
signaling and behavior. I find that the noosphere is a good metaphor and
mneumonic device for doing that and helps us think on a more planetary
and informational scale. Precisely because the noosphere is about
differentials of attention, it matters how we model it.

**Jason:** *In *The Information*, James Gleick writes that ideas
influence evolution. “Ideas have retained some of the properties of
organisms … Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to
breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed
they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an
important role.”*

*The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry also arged that ideas are
“just as real” as the neurons they inhabit, causing new ideas,
interacting with each other and with other brains, and through the
Internet, “to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is
far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.” Do you agree
with that description?*

**Rich:** First, I like [idea
sex](/web/20111201085049/http://motherboard.tv/2010/8/16/ideas-want-to-get-freaky-together-video)
as a meme, and yet I think it is in some way redundant. I am working
with Geoffrey Miller’s hypothesis (which was also, implicitly, Charles
Darwin’s) that the human mind evolves as a courtship device. Thinking
and story telling are like birdsong – they play a role in how we pair
up. Darwin (as well as more contemporary researchers like Nottebohm)
focused on the role of song in courtship and neurogenesis. Nottebohm
observed juvenile finches singing their brains larger!

Gleick’s treatment of the evolution of ideas is strikingly resonant with
Plato’s dramatization of the effect of writing to “get into the wrong
hands” and drift (see the Phaedrus). I honestly think we are still
grappling with the fact that our minds are distributed across a network
by technology, and have been in a feedback loop between our brains and
technologies at least since the invention of writing. As each new
“mutation” occurs in the history of evolution of information technology,
the very character of our minds shifts. McCluhan’s \_Understanding Media
\_is instructive here as well (he parsed it as the Global Village), and
of course McLuhan was the bard who advised Leary on “Tune in, Turn on,
Drop Out,” and was very influential on Terence McKenna.

One difference between now and Plato’s time is the infoquake through
which we are all living. This radical increase in quantity no doubt has
qualitative effects – it changes what it feels like to think and
remember. Plato was working through the effect of one new information
technology – writing – whereas today we “upgrade” every six months or
so. Teilhard observes the correlative of this evolutionary increase in
information – and the sudden thresholds it crosses – in the evolution of
complexity and nervous systems. The noosphere is a way of helping us
deal with this “phase transition” of consciousness that may well be akin
to the phase transition between liquid water and water vapor – a change
in degree that effects a change in kind.

![](/web/20111201085049im_/http://www.viceland.com/viceblog/2809579internet-network-connections.jpeg)

##### A map of the Internet.

### “In ecodelic experience we can perceive the power of our maps, or ‘reality tunnels.’ That moment in which we can learn to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility for it, is what I mean by the ‘ecstasy of language.’”

*Darwin’s Pharmacy* suggests that ecodelics were precisely such a
mutation in information technology that increased sexually selective
fitness, through the capacity to process greater amounts of information,
and that they are “extraordinarily sensitive to initial rhetorical
traditions.” What this means is that because ecodelic experiences are so
sensitive to the context in which we experience them, they can help make
us aware of the effect of language and music, etc, on our consciousness,
and thereby offer an awareness of our ability to effect our own
consciousness through our linguistic and creative choices. This can be
helpful when trying to browse the infoquake. Many other practices do so
as well – meditation is the most well established practice for noticing
the effects we can have on our own consciousness, and Sufi dervishes
demonstrate this same outcome for dancing. I do the same on my bicycle,
riding up a hill and chanting.

**Jason:** *Richard Dawkin’s notion about memes, a replicator that has
achieved evolutionary change faster than genes, for which “the vector of
transmission is language” is very compelling. This insight reminds me of
a quote that describes, in words, the subjective ecstasy that a mind
feels when upon having a transcendent realization that feels as if it
advances evolution:*

> *“A universe of possibilities,\
>  Grey infused by color,\
>  The invisible revealed,\
>  The mundane blown away\
>  by awe”*

*Is this what you mean by ‘the ecstasy of language’?*

**Rich:** One problem I have with much of the discourse of “memes” is
that it is often highly reductionistic – it often forgets that ideas
have an ecology too, they must be “cultured.” Here I would argue that
drawing on Lawrence Lessig’s work on the commons, the “brain” is a
necessary but insufficient “spawning” ground for ideas that become
actual. The commons is the spawning ground of ideas; brains are pretty
obviously social as well as individual. The Harvard biologist Richard
Lewontin notes that there is no such thing as “self-replicating”
molecules, since they always require a context to be replicated. This
problem goes back at last to computer scientist John Von Neumann’s 1947
paper on self-reproducing automata.

I think Terence McKenna described the condition as “language is loose on
planet three”, and its modern version probably occurs first in the work
of writer William S. Burroughs, whose notion of the “word virus”
predates the “meme” by at least a decade. Then again this notion of
“ideas are real” goes back to cosmologies that begin with the priority
of consciousness over matter, as in, “In the beginning was the word, and
the word was god, and the word was with god.” So even Burroughs could
get a late pass for his idea.

Above, I noted that ecodelics can make us aware of the feedback loops
between our creative choices – should I eat mushrooms in a box? – Should
I eat them with a fox? – and our consciousness. In other words, they can
make us aware of the tremendous freedom we have in creating our own
experience. Leary called this “internal freedom.” Becoming aware of the
practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the
words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these
instances the “vertigo of freedom.” What to do? In ecodelic experience
we can perceive the power of our maps. That moment in which we can learn
to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility
for it, is what I mean by the “ecstasy of language.”

I would point out, though, that for those words you quote to do their
work, they have to be read. The language does not do it “on its own” but
as a result of the highly focused attention of readers. This may seem
trivial but it is often left out, with some serious consequences. And
“reading” can mean “follow up with interpretation.” I cracked up when I
Googled those lines above and found them in a corporate blog about TED,
for example. Who knew that neo-romantic poetry was the emerging
interface of the global corporate noosphere?

**Jason:** *Is this Anthropoligist Henry Munn’s “language as an ecstatic
activity signification” in action? Is ecstatic utterance the universe
talking to itself by encoding and transmitting information? Are we the
conduits for the songs of the universe?*

**Rich:** This notion of “ecstatic signification” comes out of Munn’s
experiences with Mazatec curandera such as Maria Sabina in Oaxaco,
Mexico. Maria Sabina is now recognized as a major poet. “Ecstasy” comes
etymologically from the experience of “being beside ourselves.” The
mathematician Brian Rotman has written extensively on this idea that we
can experience “parallel” rather than “serial” reality. If we aren’t the
conduit for the songs of the universe, then who is? I would add, of
course, that so too are the blue whales, and the cardinals, and the
grasshoppers. Mice sing courtship songs too, and Siegel observed a
muskrat in mourning who ate Hawaiian woodrose seeds as a part of it.
Those seeds have LSA in them, a potent ecodelic. I know why the grieving
mouse sings!

![](/web/20111201085049im_/http://www.viceland.com/viceblog/57456822create-the-cosmos.jpg)

### “Sexual selection is a good way to model the evolution of information technology. It yields bioluminescence – the most common communication strategy on the planet – chirping insects, singing birds, Peacocks fanning their feathers, singing whales, speaking humans, and humans with internet access. These are all techniques of information production, transformation or evaluation."

**Jason:** *How do psychedelics and marijuana or other natural ecstatic
states expand our communion with the dimension of the noosphere? Are
these drugs like “modems” that plug us in?*

**Rich:** We really need much more research to answer this question, but
I think a more useful metaphor than “modems that plug us in” would be
“knobs that allow us to turn down the self and tune in the Self.” Great
chemists such as Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols have explored the
“structure/function” relationship of psychedelic compounds, and found
that you can’t reliably predict the effect of a compound from its form.
You have to test it. So in the book I take the perspective of “first
person science” – seeking answers from my own subjective experience as
well as the first person reports of others.

The 2006 Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin (Psilocybin can occasion
mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance) shows pretty definitively that
experiments from 1962 (The Good Friday Experiment) were correct to
associate psychedelics with “mystic experience.” Within the vast history
of mystical experience, a pattern seems to emerge: Perceiving and
experiencing the immense power of processes external to our selves, we
can experience what early researcher Walter Pahnke (among others)
described as “ego death”:

> **“During the mystical experience when the experiencer has lost
> individuality and become part of a Reality Greater-than-self,
> paradoxically, something of the self remains to record the experience
> in memory. One of the greatest fears about human death is that
> personal individual existence and memory will be gone forever. Yet
> having passed through psychological ego death in the mystical
> experience, a person still preserves enough self-consciousness so that
> at least part of the individual memory is not lost."**

If our experiences are highly tuneable by the language we use to
describe them, we might rethink the phrase “ego death” as being rather
easily misunderstood. I suppose that could be a virtue. Now what I call
the “ecodelic experience” is less about “losing the self” than “tuning
to the ecoysystem.” This is what Darwin was doing when, at the end of
the Origin of Species, he “contemplated” the interconnection of all
living things:

> **“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with
> many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with
> various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the
> damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
> so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so
> complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”**

How did Darwin perceive this interconnection? He didn’t simply figure it
out intellectually – he perceived it. And in order to perceive it, he
had to experience something like the ecological contextualization of his
own life. He perceived not only *that* he was interconnected with his
ecosystem (itself veritably “made” of these interconnections”), but he
perceived the *scale* of his being in relation to the scale of the
ecosystem. Most of us feel this when we look up at a clear star filled
sky at night if we are fortunate enough to find ourselves outside of the
light pollution of urban areas.

Intriguingly, the best model I know of for mapping that scalar
difference between humans and their ecosystems happens to be the
psychologist Roland Fischer’s model of what he called the
“hallucination/perception continuum.” Fischer, who studied the effect of
psilocybin (a compound of found in “magic mushrooms” and the compound
tested in the aforementioned Good Friday experiment), described a
continuum between hallucination and ordinary perception that is defined
by the sensory/motor ratio – the ratio between the amount of sensory
information we receive and our ability to act physically to respond to
or verify it. When sensory input increases and there is no corresponding
increasing in motor capacities, hallucination is the result.

### Psychedelics seem to draw our attention to the whole. Ecodelics dwindle the broadcast of the ego – it is not very good at perceiving the whole, just as we can’t, unlike a butterfly, taste with our feet. With the ego dwindled, we can become aware of the noosphere – the message of the whole.

Note in this sense for Fischer the hallucination is a “real” perception
of our breakdown in ordinary modeling tactics. This has interesting
resonances with Kant’s theory of the sublime, and in ego death we may
see the experience of this mismatch between our sensory input and our
ability to organize it. Maybe that is why reality seems to be
asymptotically approaching a psychedelic world view – consciousness
shifts in response to the vast increase of information, changing in kind
on the same scale as the psychedelic “turn on.”

Needless to say, more research is needed.

![](/web/20111201085049im_/http://www.viceland.com/viceblog/47063953london.jpeg)

##### *London.*

**Jason:** *Buckminster Fuller described humans as “pattern
integrities,” Ray Kurzweil says we are “patterns of information.” In
*The Information*, James Gleick says that “information may be more
primary than matter.” Are we just bundles of information, complex
patterns? And if so, how can we hack the limitations of biology and
entropy to preserve our pattern integrity indefinitely?*

**Rich:** First, it is important to remember that the history of the
concept and tools of “information” is full of blindspots – we seem to be
constantly tempted to underestimate the complexity of any given system
needed to make any bit of information meaningful or useful. Caitlin,
Kolmogorov, Stephan Wolfram and John Von Neumann each came independently
to the conclusion that information is only meaningful when it is “run” –
you can’t predict the outcome of even many trivial programs without
running the program.

So to say that “information may be more primary than matter” we have to
remember that “information” does not mean “free from constraints.”
Thermodynamics – including entropy – remains. Molecular and informatic
reductionism – the view that you can best understand the nature of a
biological system by cutting it up into the most significant bits, e.g.
DNA – is a powerful model that enables us to do things with biological
systems that we never could before. Artist Eduardo Kac collaborated with
a French scientist to make a bioluminescent bunny. That’s new! But
sometimes it is so powerful that we forget its limitations. The history
of the human genome project illustrates this well. And the human genome
is incredibly interesting. It’s just not the immortality hack many
thought it would be.

In this sense biology is not a limitation to be “transcended," as
Kurzweil describes it, but a medium of exploration whose constraints are
interesting and sublime. On this scale of ecosystems, “death” is not a
“limitation” but an attribute of a highly dynamic interactive system.
Death is an attribute of life. Viewing biology as a “limitation” may not
be the best way to become healthy and thriving beings.

Now, that said, looking at our characteristics as “patterns of
information” can be immensely powerful, and I work with it at the level
of consciousness as well as life. Thinking of ourselves as “dynamic
patterns of multiply layered and interconnected self transforming
information” is just as accurate of a description of human beings as
“meaningless noisy monkeys who think they see god”, and is likely to
have much better effects. A nice emphasis on this “pattern” rather than
the bits that make it up can be found in Carl Sagan’s formulation, “The
beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way
those atoms are put together.”