Culture - Psychedelia: Gaia and Cybernetics (from Terrence McKenna)

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http://www.johnheckmanwright.com/art...rrence-mckenna

Joe Heckman

In additional to literature, art, literary and political theory, psychedelic philosophy has substantially shaped my thinking over the last few years. The work of great psychedelic thinkers such as Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Dr. Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and many others are too often decontexualized, trivialized, reduced, and mocked by a superficial culture that seeks to deny and infanticize the indelible influence of the 1960’s. The spirit of the 1960’s is very much alive today, as evidenced by the swaths of suburbanites on the train reading Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth.” (Note: Consider what it means that Oprah’s stamp of approval makes these philosophies “safe” enough for consumption by middle America).
Friday morning I was listening to a podcast from the Psychedelic Salon featuring a talk by Terence McKenna at the Palenque Entheobotany Conference in 1999 shortly before his death. In the Q&A portion of the talk, McKenna was asked about robot intelligence and how that intelligence and Gaia are interrelated.
Below is a poorly made diagram of McKenna’s response (see below)

The Earth, Gaia , is a living organism. From the Earth comes Nature, of which man is a part. Man creates civilization and eventually machines. The average machine is capable of processing information at a rate which far surpasses the capabilities of the human brain. Network these machines and you have a creative force greater than the totality of humanity, a singular organized unit that can think and process information at speeds and depths that our great-grandparents could never have imagined.
McKenna proposes that in the very near future we shall have to contend with machines that think for themselves. A networked organism with the potential of the internet will eventually create its own intelligence and in doing so we will have a living creature, made from the elements of Gaia: metal, iron, gold, etc., that will exist in a temporal universe infinitely separated from humanity (think of every machine that is networked via the world wide web alone, now imagine future incarnations of these machines with artificial intelligence and self-governance).
Departing from McKenna’s argument now, following this line of reasoning reveals that Gaia’s ultimate destiny will lie, not in the hands of man as many of us imagine, but with machines. Machines will surpass man as the planet’s most evolved creation, and once this threshold is surpassed man will play a less centralized role in the interconnectivity of the planet.
How will machines deal with mankind and with Gaia? Despite our best cyberpunk efforts, this is a question we cannot imagine an answer to because this machine consciousness will exist in a temporal universe unintelligible to the common man. Even our greatest efforts to speculate in this direction, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, only lead us to models of machines that, for all intents and purposes, function like extravagant, existentially conflicted humans.
We are yet to see, or possibly we are unable to see, how this sort of intelligence would actually function. However, if technology continues on its current trajectory it seems increasingly possible that these concepts will become more than just the products of science fiction speculation.
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See flow chart below: