500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
The Internet lets me astral travel. This past week I was hired by a company in South Australia and prepped a film shoot in Florida. I have a researcher in Austin who wrapped up a project for me today and an SEO analyst who lives in Oklahoma who’s starting another. It sounds like a lot of bouncing around, the sort of light-speed tasking that drives some people crazy, but I find that I thrive on it because it lets me move consciousness around. But I can see that not everyone’s having fun moving ideas around the world like I am.
The Wikileaks guy, a former computer hacker who makes sensitive information public, seems to be leading a hellish life on the run after leaking information that powerful governments would rather have remained unleaked. I wouldn’t want to be the guy other people want to kill because he has exploited information networks effectively. But I like knowing things, and if that means knowing what brand of beer might be vegan, or that one intelligent individual in a group won’t necessarily make the group smarter, or that Malcolm Gladwell thinks that online activism is a waste of time, that works for me. I even like disagreeing with Gladwell just this once and can easily find others who feel he blew it this time.
This is more than just gadget-porn, more than mind candy, more than realizing how great Skype is or that my phone knows when it’s home so it can turn on WiFi. This is about consciousness.
Consciousness, of course, is the original virtual reality, no goggles or joystick required. Right now we have an opportunity to spread consciousness around the world and work with it in ways only mystics have dreamed about. Stephen Dinan has written about efforts to spread peace using Twitter, and an author friend of mine is using the interconnectedness of all media to tap into the universal truths of creativity and intelligence. Some embrace this opportunity to move information at amazing speed. Others are running away as fast as they can.
I have friends who don’t use email. So I have to call them on the phone, which is ridiculous. I would feel sorry for these friends, but when email becomes obsolete in a few years, they will look really smart because they will still know how to talk. I have clients who need to be told what html stands for and how embedding doesn’t have anything to do with sleeping with supermodels. I know people who have film in their cameras.
Nobody knows where this is going, whether it will ever be worth it again to use film or speak into an analogue device, or learn how to fix a radio. Something surely is lost, but I prefer thinking about what is gained. We now have, in the words of my author friend, a tremendous playroom/shed/hackerspace to mess around in. It used to take a lot of time for information to be transformed into knowledge and finally, to wisdom. I think of scholars studying, yogis wandering, mystics gazing inward for decades seeking insight. In the online world, however, time, like distance, becomes compressed, and I think the distance between information and wisdom will be shorter, too. Especially when you can move consciousness around.
Photo Credit: Roger Price via Creative Commons License
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I’m in New York City spending time in hospital rooms. I have learned two things so far. It’s an outrage that there’s no 72nd Street stop on the Lex Ave line. The closest is 69 Street, which is more of a vague sexual joke than a useful location. The other thing I’ve learned is about the incredible lightness of being.
I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I have it on good authority that you can stop a man’s heart, cut out a malfunctioning aortic valve, pop in a new one, bypass years of accumulated disease and then start up the system like a reliable old car. And I know for certain – I was in the room – that a man might lie in a twilight state among machines, seeming like a machine himself. But no, not like a machine: There was a glimmer of consciousness. It was a paradox to be witnessed with awe, this man-machine breathing slowly, leaking consciousness.
Funny thing, when people hold heavy objects they think they are more important than lighter ones. A big book, say a Bible, seems more important than the slim volume of famous left-handed athletes. The idea resounds in the languages we speak. You have your heavy issues and light entertainment. There’s research on this:
A research team found that they could alter people’s judgment of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard. In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.
That’s good science, because the experiment was simple and the measurement clear. Science works because it measures things and assigns values. Sounds good, till you look at a guy in a hospital bed and ask what weight do you assign to consciousness? What weight do you put to love? As Lotta Alsen has written in her blog, everybody knows that love is good, but what measure can we assign it to prove that it exists? Do you look at the number of Valentine’s Day cards sent? Quarts of chicken soup consumed? Love exists, but there is no measure for it.
In the hospital room the next day the human machine does something amazing. It wakes up. It starts talking. It wants things. “I want you to call Milton.” “Get me some water.”
Miracle? No. This was the work of a heroic guy in green surgical scrubs going seven hours straight in order to take a man apart and then reassemble him. That’s great training and expertise and amazing science. But still, there was something else. The human machine has consciousness. There is a soul, and spirit, stuff for which no measurement exists and therefore no science.
What happened in the hospital has affirmed my trust in scientific work, rattled my position as person who takes nothing on faith, and made me wonder if science, in order to fully understand the world, will need to stretch outside itself.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.
Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.
When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant
movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”
Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.
But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.
Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”
So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?
Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.
Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.
Is somebody with a joy stick guiding my hands as I type this? Are they making me want to go across the street to Starbucks right now? Are we all living in a computer simulation?
With The Sims 3 coming out next month it seems worth pondering. The Sims, to help the uninitiated, is a sophisticated and addictive life simulation game. Millions of people are immersed in it, as well as in Second Life and World of Warcraft.
Will Wright, Sims creator
My kids and I were once avid players of The Sims. Then one day a Sims character got into her hot tub, became drained of life force and never got out. Her flesh-like hand rigor mortised to her silly umbrella drink. I was concerned about her, but more concerned about my children being exposed to this low life force person. Later on that year, I happened to interview the creator of the Sims universe, Will Wright. I told him that a dead Sims lady in her hot tub was freaking out my kids.
He laughed, said it was a just a bug and asked that we try to ignore her. I stopped playing Sims. But perhaps Sims is still playing me.
Nick Bostrom, a researcher at Oxford, argues that we could be living in the Matrix. (Keanu, get me out of here!) As John Tierney wrote in the New York Times:
“Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.”
Why does this totally suck? You could be a Sims lady floating in a hot tub for all eternity, victimized by a programming glitch. You could be compelled by some posthuman somebody to go to Starbucks before you finish writing your blog. Your life could lose a gig or more of meaning because you’d be at the whim of some super-geek future gamer who might go to a movie and then what? Unattended, you walk off a cliff and perish.
But hold on. Just because you’re in a computer simulation doesn’t mean that your feelings are any less than real, and even if life is only pixel-deep it could have meaning anyway. A look at the concept of maya might be helpful here.
In Hinduism, maya refers to life as a dream or illusion, since life is ever changing. The existence of an individual as a separate entity is also considered unreal. As long as you think you’re different from the rest of creation and strive to work for your own ends, protecting and nurturing your own ego, you suffer from the illusion of individual separateness.
I kind of get that. It’s a good thing to see oneself as interconnected to all things. Looking at things that way, you tend to be kinder to other people, treat Mother Earth with respect and know that even your most local of actions has global implications.
Maybe maya isn’t so bad. It might help me stop obsessing about The Sims.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?
Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”
Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.
To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.
It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.
Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.
Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.
Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.
All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.
Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?
“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the 
future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?
