Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  DJB: Well, there's something to be said for networking with other people though-cross-fertilizing and sharing ideas.

  NICK: Yes, it's important to have colleagues, but you have to somehow keep your independence, There's this balance between contact and independence that you have to keep. One of the ways that I currently manage to do this is by living out in the woods, and by not being connected with any institutions, except these private ones that we set up. We've had something going called the Consciousness Theory Group, which Saul Paul-Sirag and a few others started in the early seventies to ruthlessly track down the roots of consciousness. We would go anywhere, talk to anybody, or do anything to find out more about this elusive problem.

  RMN: Einstein spent his life searching for a unified field theory, and many scientists are working towards the same thing. Do you think it's just a matter of time before it is discovered, and how do you think that the understanding of the unified field will effect human consciousness?

  NICK: As I mentioned before, I think we're close to that. It wouldn't surprise me if the unified field were discovered in the next couple of years. Somehow this might just succeed. It would mean that we have a picture of the world that was more compact. It wouldn't take so much talk to describe what the world was made of. You could simplify it. Right now there are four different kinds of forces, and there are a hundred and some different elementary particles. However, they still come in two classes. The classes themselves are quarks and leptons basically, and the force particles. What we would be able to say then is that there is just one kind of entity, and everything follows from that. So, it would be a definite economy of description. But what else? I don't know any practical applications of this, but it'd be definitely easy to describe the world. You could just say it's just made of this one kind of stuff, and that's all--everything else is just various manifestations of this one kind of stuff.

  DJB: Would it make any new technologies possible?

  NICK: Probably not right away. This is all very impractical. It would still leave consciousness out in the cold. It's funny that back in the Medieval days people doing alchemy and ceremonial magic--thought of as the predecessors of science -felt that the mind was connected with what they did. They thought that one had to be in the right state of mind--you had to say prayers and incantations -r the reaction wouldn't work. It sort of mixed up the notion that chemistry, physics, and mental stuff were all together in their mind. So at some point in the development of science, scientists said, "Let's do science as though the mind didn't matter. Let's see how much science we could do that's independent of how you think. Let's forget about the mind, and let's see what we could do with this hypothesis." And, amazingly enough, with all physics--from the elementary particles all the way up to the cosmos--it doesn't seem to matter. There seems to be a lot you can do without bringing the mind into it. Seemingly.

  Now, my fantasy is that we've missed most of the world. That all the stuff that physicists can explain is just a tiny amount of the real world, because there is a real world that physics is a minute part of. But, because of a certain illusion that we have, it looks as though there's an awful lot of matter around here, and not much mind. Mind is confined to little tiny elements in certain mammalian heads. But there's a lot of matter, there's galaxies and quarks, and everything all around, but not much mind. One of my guesses is that's totally wrong. There's a lot of mind, at least as much as there is matter, and we just aren't aware of it. I suspect that physics is just a very tiny part of that world.

  DJB: This really ties in with the next question. Do you see the physical universe as being alive, evolving, and conscious, and if so, does this perspective, in your opinion, have any influence on how physicists approach the natural world?

  NICK: It does fit right in. Up to now physics has, I think as a kind of exercise, asked how much can we explain about the world without ever bringing consciousness into it? Surprisingly, the answer is a lot! Suppose there were chemical reactions that needed to be prayed over before they worked, then physics would have to say we can't explain these reactions, because that involves the mind. Anything that involves intention, where intention is important for its outcome, is outside of physics, by definition. So, we have to call that something else. Either that, or expand the notion of what physics is once the mind begins becoming involved with the world. What I'd like to see are hybrid types of experiments.

  Experiments where the mind is necessary, and where matter is also necessary, kind of a mixing of physics and psychology. But 1 don't know of any such experiments, except maybe psychokinesis experiments, and those are very unreliable. It's hard to get data.

  RMN: The mind is a very unreliable thing. That's probably why physicists have nothing to do with the mind.

  NICK: Yeah, unreliable, that's one way of looking at it.

  DJB: What possibilities for faster-than-light and time travel do you feel offer the greatest potential for actualization, and how do you feel this will effect human consciousness in the future?

  NICK: Well, I think that there are about half a dozen options for faster-than-light travel, but the two I would bet on are the space-warp, and the quantum connection. The former is based upon the ability to warp Einsteinian space-time. You can make short cuts in space-time, and essentially travel faster than light. We don't know how to do this yet, but the equations of general relativity allow it. So. it's not forbidden by physics. We may have to use black holes or something like tongs made out of black holes. It would take that kind of thing. Interestingly, when my book Faster Than Light came out in November of 1988, the same week it came out, there was a paper by three guys from CalTech in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article was about a way to make a time machine, using warped space-time.

  It was actual instructions on how to do it. We can't do it yet--but here's, in principle, how to do it. There are these quantum worm holes coming out of the quantum vacuum. They're little connections between distant places in space-time. They're not so distant actually, as the distances involved are smaller than atomic dimensions. So you have to find out how to expand these worm holes, to make them connect larger more distant parts of space and time. But that's a detail. These worm holes are continually coming out of the quantum vacuum, popping back in again, and they're unstable. Even if you could go into one of these, it would close up before you could transverse it, unless you could go faster than light.

  So, the argument was about how to stabilize quantum worm holes. The way you do that is you have to have some energy that's less than nothing, some negative energy, which is less than the vacuum. In classical physics that would be impossible--energy that's less than nothing. Every time you do something you always have positive energy. But there's something called the Casimer force in quantum physics, which is an example of negative energy. So you thread these worm holes with this negative energy, and it props them open. So then you can use these things as time tunnels.

  This article was prompted by Carl Sagan's book Contact. Sagan got in touch with these physicists, who were experts on gravity, and asked if there was anything that he needed to know, because in his book Contact there were tunnels that go to the star Vega, I believe. You sit in this chair, you go through this time tunnel, and a few seconds later you're in Vega. That's definitely faster than light, as Vega is some tens of light years away. So these aliens have mastered this time tunnel technology. Carl Sagan asked these guys if this was possible, and they said "Well, we'll think about it." So they came up with this actual scientific paper on how one might really build a time tunnel, like Carl Sagan's. So here's a situation where science fiction inspired science.

  DJB: Isn't that the case a lot, actually?

  NICK: Ah, not really. I guess there are some things. Of course Jules Verne wrote about trips to the moon long before we went.

  RMN: Maybe a lot of people become scientists, after reading science fiction.

  DJB: I would just imagine that many scientists had read science fiction when they we
re young.

  NICK: I certainly did. I read a lot of science fiction when I was young. I loved it. Still do. But I don't know about specific inventions coming from science fiction--where someone reads a science fiction book, and then goes out and works on that particular idea. I think the influence is more general. But this is one example where a specific science fiction story--Carl Sagan's Contact--influenced, at least in principal, a time machine. The other possibility for faster than light-travel, aside from using space warps, would be to somehow use this Bell connection. I don't think we can send anything concrete this way, but maybe information or mental influences could go between minds faster- than-light. But, unlike these three CalTech people, there's no demonstration of how one could do that. I spent about three or four years trying to use Bell's connection to send signals faster than light, using thought experiments and such, and every one of them has failed. It looks as though this Bell connection is something that nature uses to further her nefarious ends, but people can't use the Bell connection.

  RMN: How would you test the results of a time travel experiment?

  NICK: Wouldn't that be easy? If you wanted to send something back in time... Ah... I guess, you're right, it would have already happened, wouldn't it? Well, a lot of these time travel experiments depend on what your opinion of the past is. Is the past always the same, or is it changeable? Are there alternate universes? It's a good question. That really depends on your model of the past. If the past is not changeable, then you can't go back in time, or you already have, and you're the results of it. One of my best guesses is that the past is partially changeable--there are things there that are frozen, that you can't change, and there are other things that are up for grabs, that are still in the quantum potentia, and those things you could change. So, when you went back there you could have some funny restrictions on your activities, and basically you could only make changes that were consistent with what we already know to have happened here. We have this present. There's a lot that we know has happened. There's lots of things we didn't care about, and nobody knows whether they happened or not. Those things you could change. But you couldn't change something that some human being knew had happened already.

  DJB: As long as it's an ambiguity, and hasn't become a actuality.

  NICK: Yes, as long as it hasn't become an actuality you could change it.

  DJB: Why do you think it is that time appears to flow in one direction only?

  NICK: God, who knows? That's a good question. It's a psychological reason I think. Einstein said something about how the past and the future are illusions. Physics makes no distinction between past and future. The present doesn't have any special status in physics. In four-dimensional space-time, it's all just a huge block universe that's eternal. So, the fact that time seems to flow is a kind of illusion that our kind of existence gives rise to. It's an illusion of consciousness rather than anything in physics. It's funny that if we didn't know any better, if we just took the equations of physics as truth, we wouldn't even know about this flow of time, this illusion. The universe would seem to be a kind of eternal, ever-present process.

  RMN: You have asked, "Why does nature need to deploy a faster than light subatomic reality to keep up merely light speed macroscopic appearances." Could you venture an answer to your own question?

  NICK: That's the idea that, although Bell's theorem says of Reality that once some things are together they are always connected faster than light, Appearance is not. You don't ever see anything like this. Why does nature bother to go to so much trouble? Underground connecting everything, and yet above ground it's not connected. Why bother? Sounds a little bit like God, doesn't it? This omniscient entity lying behind the phenomena that keeps its kind of divine providence, so that nothing gets lost. I don't know. That's still a puzzle to me, why that is. I would not like to believe in an omniscient divine providence, because it seems such an easy solution.

  I've been spoiled by learning about quantum physics. One of the things that philosophers try and do, is they guess what all the possibilities are for human thought. Try and second guess all thinkable things. Philosophers worry about different categories of mind, monism and dualism, and varieties of that, all the possible ways something could be. People have been doing that for a long time, but they never came up with something as weird as quantum theory. Physicists didn't like quantum theory at first either. We were forced into this strange way of thinking about the universe by the facts, into a way that had not been anticipated by the philosophers. Quantum theory is a strange mixture of waveness and particleness that no one had ever anticipated, and that we still do not completely comprehend.

  DJB: Isn't it similar to what Eastern philosophies have to say about the world?

  NICK: Oh, in some sense, but not in particulars. There's a vague similarity to Eastern philosophy, more than to Western philosophy, that's true. But this notion of probabilistic waves changing into actual particles has never been present in any Eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy talks about connectedness, everything being connected. It talks about the Tao, that's unspeakable, wholeness that envelops everything, and the flavor of that is like quantum theory. There's no doubt about that. More so than a mechanistic clock-work universe. But the details-no one ever anticipated that kind of universe. So, my guess is that, when we get a fuller picture of the world, it will be equally unguessable. It would not have been anticipated, and quantum mechanics was just a kindergarten lesson for how we're going to have to change our minds to make the next step.

  DJB: It wouldn't be fun without surprises.

  NICK: Well, yeah, not only surprises, but that all our guesses have got to be, and are always going to be, too timid. Nature is going to overwhelm us, and surprise us with the next step. Nothing we could imagine will be as amazing as what's actually there. So whenever someone comes up with a simple solution like there's a divine providence underneath it all, it's too simple. Try and imagine something more complex and marvelous than that, please.

  DJB: Nick, one of my favorite ideas in your book Faster Than Light was the notion that time travel may only be possible into the future and back into the past, only so far as to the development of the first time machine. If we were to take a leap of faith, and imagine this scenario to actualize itself, how do you envision that monumental day to occur, when the first time machine is invented, and everyone from the far future comes back to visit the historic day?

  NICK: Big party. Sure, that's what it would be like. It would be very crowded that particular day. From that point on, life would be very confusing, when all of space-time is open to our view.

  DJB: What would that do to human consciousness? How would the progression of events occur? How could people keep track of things?

  NICK: I don't know. I think it would be very confusing. Much more confusing than it is now. We'd ]earn to live with it, though. What it would be like, partly, is that time would just be another kind of space, if you can imagine that. We don't think that traveling back and forth in space is so strange. We have this prejudice that we shouldn't be able to do that in time. So if time becomes another kind of space, what are the consequences of that? I don't know. It's really hard to think about. I have to pass on that one. Another problem related to that is when you go faster than light, time and space, in the equations, they reverse. The roles of time and space reverse when you go faster than light. I don't know what that means. This reversal happens in the math but what would happen in the world? This same time/space reversal happens, by the way, in the vicinity of black holes.

  RMN: What about time travel paradoxes? Like the case of being able to travel backwards through time to kill your grandmother. The parallel universe theory seems to resolve this, but what are your views on this?

  NICK: Yes, the easiest way to resolve that would be to have a parallel universe, where you kill your grandmother, but she's not your grandmother, she's the grandmother of somebody else, who would have looked very much like you, who doesn't get born in
that parallel universe. Another way of resolving that paradox, is this notion I mentioned before about there being fixed things and soft things in the past, and you can only change the soft things. So that things that are fixed like your grandmother's existence, you'd find that you couldn't change. My guess is that when you went back in time, it would be like in a dream, where there were certain things you could do. If you tried to do something that would change the past, you couldn't move that way. You could only make certain moves. It would be like being in molasses. In certain ways you'd find it very easy to move, and others you just couldn't do, because it would be that that had already been definitively done.