Terence McKenna on the internet as a nervous system

stalk · Jan 3, 2009

Quotes

At a fairly heroic dose of psilocybin a person lying in silent darkness has the impression that they're seeing more art, of higher quality, than the entire western canon has produced in the last thousand years...For artists it's like a magic carpet. The challenge...is to have the experience in an attitude of appreciation and calmness. But the second implication is somewhat political. It's to communicate the vision...because as we communicate it collectively it will become real. This is what's happening on the internet. The internet is a perfect example of a psychedelic technology at the service of psychedelic goals...it's something that hackers, freaks and heads dreamed up, whipped up out of the existing tools of the culture.

How artificial, how alien will the AI be? We don't know because we don't know how superintelligence thinks, if we knew we would be superintelligent. In a way we have called forth into our midst another species of intelligence.
Long before flying saucers land on the south lawn of the White House the alien artificial intelligence that is growing in the primordial soup of the internet will have speciated and conquered the planet.

You won't be able to tell where your body stops and the internet begins. In other words, you'll say, "Gee I wonder what they're serving at so and so restaurant tonight?" and the answer will be hanging there in space because you will have automatically accessed the internet, been to their website, looked at the menu and returned with the data...What the internet is, is a nervous system, it's the collective mind of humanity being hardwired as an artifact that completely encloses the entire planet in a thought.
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http://deoxy.org/media/McKenna/I_Ching-Habit_and_Novelty

Hesh · Jan 3, 2009

McKenna's still goin strong after his passing, i like sitting back and listening to his speeches. weird way of talking though, his voice sounds like a mr. rogers on psychoactives... haha

cataclysmic cognition · Jan 3, 2009

good shit

Adderall_Assasin · Jan 3, 2009

I disagree with this theoretical nonsense. The Internet is not comparable to a nervous system. The nervous system has a central location to process and store stimulus/reaction. The Internet is a collection of networks that are not centralized with a single unit of storage and process.

The Internet is considered a massive mesh topology. Not just restaurant websites, but file sharing, instant messaging, file serving, data collection, broadcasting, routing, and even telephone communications. These services are located at millions of places around the world and may never have anything to do with each other.

Cherea · Jan 3, 2009

detox!

dd3stp233 · Jan 4, 2009

Adderall_Assasin said:

I disagree with this theoretical nonsense. The Internet is not comparable to a nervous system. The nervous system has a central location to process and store stimulus/reaction. The Internet is a collection of networks that are not centralized with a single unit of storage and process.

The Internet is considered a massive mesh topology. Not just restaurant websites, but file sharing, instant messaging, file serving, data collection, broadcasting, routing, and even telephone communications. These services are located at millions of places around the world and may never have anything to do with each other.
Click to expand...

I don't think he meant for that to be taken literally, its metaphorical and also taken out of the context of his lecture. And I think you missed that he is referencing the future, with direct hardwired brain/internet/super AI in real time.

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Terence McKenna on the internet as a nervous system

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Terence McKenna on the internet as a nervous system

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