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Post tags: collapse, comedy, energy, peak oil, podcast

Toby goes on to speak about evidence regarding the hunter gatherer lifestyle vs. the sedentary agriculturalists lifestyle and presents the usual evidence that our ancestors were in better health than we thought. Well worth a listen even if you are familiar with many of the cases for permaculture.

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Post tags: audio, farming, food, permaculture, Podcasts, sustainability

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Post tags: economic crisis, economy

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Post tags: interviews, Podcasts

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Post tags: interviews, me, Podcasts

Terence McKenna has had a tremendous influence on the way I’ve developed since I first discovered him back in 2004. One of my first books to buy was a print copy of his trialogues with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake. But even if you aren’t familiar with him or his ideas, you don’t have to be because I’ve discovered the one two hour podcast that will absolutely blow your mind and introduce you to him. This is the best talk I’ve ever heard by Terence McKenna.

If you truly devote two hours of your attention to this piece of audio, it has the potential to change the way you think about everything.

Even if Terence’s description of human brain development clashes with your ideology too much to even conceive it possible, the topics he covers will get you to re-think the most basic ways you approach your brain and society.

This isn’t to say that I believe wholeheartedly everything he says. Quite the contrary. In fact, doing so would be an insult to his legacy. But what I do think is that Terence gives a plausible description for something we have no feasible explanation for: the origin of human consciousness. And if you this narrative is crazy or off the mark, you can easily do some of your own research.

I’ve listened to this podcast several times now and below are the notes I’ve taken, in which I broke Terence’s thesis into several pieces. Thanks to Lorenzo at the Psychedelic Salon for putting this track out and for putting audio out on a regular basis.

Notes on Terence McKenna’s Evolving Times

The Origin of Consciousness

1. The commonly accepted notions of human evolution can explain many aspects of our world but humans emerged too quickly and our brain grew too fast
2. Lumholtz called this, “the most dramatic transformation in the history of life”
3. Evolution can’t explain us, the creatures that created the theory in the first place
4. Consciousness appeared in a creature that had reached an evolutionary climax, we were monkeys living the canopy and we made out pretty well
5. The best scientific explanation for consciousness: our need to throw led to a bigger brain with more capabilities (and from this complexity and number of connections consciousness emerged?)
6. Evidence is strong: our ancestors developed in Africa
7. Very little of biology pushes forward
8. Strife/environmental changes catalyze species change
9. Africa has been slowly drying
10. Simple animals die of starvation
11. Complex animals try new things
12. The drying of Africa led to our ancestors leaving the canopy to try new food sources
13. This was the era of knuckle walking, etc…
14. A recent paper said that monkeys leave the canopy for one thing only: mushrooms
15. Our ancestors tried eating everything, sometimes to terrible consequences
16. In the act of eating everything, they certainly encountered mushrooms containing psilocybin
17. Psilocybin can perhaps explain the rapid growth of the simian brain at a rate 10x faster than evolution seems to allow

Effects of Psilocybin

1. Can psilocybin explain human development? Let’s look at its effects.
2. Our ancestors would have certainly encountered psilocybin mushrooms, the ones that grew in Africa are big and shiny and attractive
3. At low doses: edge detection is improved; a highly competitive grassland environment selects for this, can avoid predators
4. At a higher dose: the primate gains an urge to reproduce in, “successful instances of copulation”
5. Thus from the above two points, monkeys that eat psilocybin are outbreeding their counterparts that may be allergic to it, don’t want it, etc…
6. At even higher doses, something happens that we can’t explain: a full blown “psychedelic experience”
7. Language like behaviour is common at this stage, glossolalia, i.e. speaking in tongues
8. Lingustics spontaneously organize
9. Language would have been entertainment before it had meaning
10. Eventually, an enterprising creature connected the “words” and meaning

Social Structure of a Society Like This

1. A dynamic balance likely emerged between land and creature
2. A mushroom that was widely available eventually became scarce
3. These creatures likely tried to preserve, probably did so in honey
4. Honey preservation forms alcohol
5. Alcohol promotes a different set of social values
6. All monkeys develop a set of heirarchy of dominant modes
7. Psilocybin inocculated against against male dominanted heirarchies and dissolved boundaries towards monogamy
8. Likely, group mushroom parties that “got out of hand… regularly”, mardi gras is a modern example
9. Orgiastic style dissolved lines of paternity and led to collectivist behavior
10. Men began thinking of “our children” instead of “my children”
11. During this stage, all the things that make us humans were developed
12. But as the mushroom went away, we had language and social structures
13. When the mushroom went away, we lost a sense of who we are and gained a sense of “why can’t we be as we weren’t were”
14. To replace this utopia, humans addict
15. We addict to everything: ideology, other humans, substances
16. Knowledge of the mushrooms were lost to all humanity except for remote groups in other areas
17. Was rediscovered in Mexico in 1955 and was outlawed by 1966; they are dangerous to our society
18. Science didn’t explore this and then move on; its never been there; we don’t know what it is

Consequences for our Social Structure

1. We structure our society so that people can get their thrills jumping out of planes and off bridges
2. In general: psychedelics dissolve boundaries
3. All societies are about boundaries
4. Anything that introduces questioning of boundaries is threatening
5. Our society is just the current download of the linguistic enterprise
6. We need our ego to ensure that at a restaurant we put food in our mouth, and not just our guest
7. However, the ego becomes like a cist or tumor that keeps going and becomes chronic; its incurable except…
8. Except for the use of non-perscription drugs; psychedelics dissolve this ego
9. They promote values other than the bottom line and value acquisition
10. This theory outlined above, ends up having tremendous social consequences; a political debate
11. What society should we build if its all arbitrary?
12. We are addicted to things
13. Not enough petroleum, heavy metals, etc.. too keep giving things to the ‘thing addicts’
14. We’ll have to accept major catastrophe or re-order society
15. We simply do not know what the psychedelic experience is
16. It connects you to nature
17. Nature only sees us as a giant gene swarm
18. The earth is a thermostatic, self-regulator
19. A kind of mind
20. The early humans worshipped the feminine b/c they connected to an intelligence they felt as feminine
21. Our intelligence is harmful to the world if we don’t acknowledge this
22. Our social creative space is incredibly impoverished
23. We can create more art in 20 minutes with our brain
24. There are no political solutions, only technological ones
25. All ideology is toxic b/c it is an insult to human free thinking
26. Technology is an extension of man
27. The difference between psychedelics and computers is that computers are too big to swallow
28. The old paradigm cannot continue; as the old paradigm changes we must act as sitters for society; spreading calm

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Post tags: consciousness, evolution, human beings, humanity, thinking

The United States balance sheet is looking like a weaker and weaker attempt at recovery. Some might even make the argument that the US is insolvent, unable to pay back its debts.

What does all this mean?

This issue has long been at the attention of fringe economic commentators but as it has begun to enter the mainstream, I’m becoming more concerned. This week saw more attention to the issue with two fantastic podcasts on the US Federal Deficit which are absolutely crucial for understanding an approaching crisis.

NPR Talk of the Nation, Samuelson Warns U.S. Could Go Broke

EconTalk, Hamilton on Debt, Default, and Oil

James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, and blogger at EconBrowser talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the rising levels of the national debt and the growing Federal budget deficit. What is the possibility of an actual default, or an implicit default where the government prints money to meet its obligations and causes inflation? What might signal an impending default? And what is the long-range forecast for the U.S. government’s obligations? Later in the conversation, the subject turns to oil prices, an area of Hamilton’s research. Hamilton explores the causes of the increasing price of oil over the last decade and the implications for the economy.

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Post tags: collapse, economic crisis, economy, united states

Sander’s talk started by covering the history of innovation. By adapting the environment and the brain to tackle new challenges, humans are one of the greatest success stories in nature’s history, all because we can adapt and innovate. Eventually, humans began focusing their innovation centers in cities. Cities are not more energy efficient but are better innovation engines.

This centralization comes with a requirement: as centralization increases, the rate of innovation that must occur to support the structure has to increase. Food and energy must be brought from further and futher away because the ecological footprint of the city grows. Once fossil resources became harnessed, innovation became fundamentally necessary to support the collapse of society. As more of our society depended on oil for growth, that growth continued because of innovation. Technology has allowed us to harvest more oil faster and from more remote places. This supported more population growth and further innovation. At this point in the talk Sander makes a shocking claim: perhaps innovation is the greatest ponzi scheme of all, the rate of innovation must increase at all times to prevent the collapse of civilization.

And the more I think about it, the more I think he is right. How could I prove him wrong? If we stopped innovating, would we destroy humanity with the state of our current technology? All signs point to yes, especially in the United States.

Sander continues by pointing out two views of humanity and its relation to nature.

1) In the cohesion of nature, strangeness and force are emphasized. That change is attributed to nature but people are passive and resistive to change. Nature and change are viewed as dangerous because they are outside the realm of human control.

The opposing view is that,

2) Humans are overly agressive, forcing change on our environment to support our war-like culture and nature is passive receiver of our exploitation.

These two views interplay to create a critical approach to human decision making: natural dangers are exaggerated, human dangers are underplayed.

This can be seen in the climate change debate. We fear the response of nature to our actions but ignore the many other problems humanity is creating through our technological program.

Sander continues by stating the inevitable result of technological innovation. We intervene more and more in our environment, thinking that we reducing our risks but all we do is change the spectrum of risks, not the overall quantity of risks. The end state is that we lose control because we lose the ability to understand the complex chain of events resulting from our interventions.

Human changes are rapid and shallow attempt to replace and begin to outweigh the natural changes which are slow yet all encompassing. Risk spectrums shift over time with respect to their environments. We tend to overemphasize the frequent risks, try to reduce them and substitue completely unknown risks at larger scale over a longer time period. This accumulation of long term, large scale risks build up and collapse the civilization.

At some point, Sander believes that every social system will go out of control. The system pushes itself into a trap, the cost of problem solving goes up, flexibility goes down, the outcome is included in the way it was started, our exploitation of our environment creates the weaknesses we must contend with at the end.

Oil has provided us a shockingly stable environment but this environment has reduced our ability to adapt. Now, we can only innovate within the structure we create for ourselves, aggravating the situation even further, reducing our ability to break with the overarching problems. Climate change isn’t bad for humanity, it is bad for the status quo, our social structure. The fall of the Roman Empire resulted primarily because they used up all their wood, their primary energy source, shipping it from further and further away. This collapse was not a “solution”, it was simply the inability to maintain innovation at the rate necessary to extract new energy sources. After the fall of Rome people migrated from urban areas to the rural environment. The city was the keeper of information, the archivist was the maintainer of civilization. Perhaps we are in a slightly better position now because the internet helps us maintain our global knowledge, yet is even more dependent on energy than the city.

Sander stated that he thought the urban situation will explode, it is fragile and we invest more and more in our cities and less in a resilient rural environment.

He shared my sentiment: optimistic for humanity, pessimistic for society.

So what if we can accelerate our innovation to maintain the pace required to avoid collapse? Unfortunately that acceleration also rapidly adds up in unintended consequences. Technology must be implemented at faster and faster rates to avoid collapse but prevent the long term viewpoint. Many immediate problems add up and then you can’t focus on the long term problems.

Sander compared our situation to a tribe in the Southern hHghlands that saw deforestation and decided to counter with a ceremony of slaughtered pigs. The tribe raised continually more and pigs to slaughter, converting the entire valley to mud. Eventually the pigs piled up and died of disease. The land was ruined because of the mud and the tribe was left in the mess they’d created.

Hardly a mainstream view, it is much more attractive to spout the promises of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Assuming that rates of technological innovation will continue or exponentially increase as technological determinists like Ray Kurzweil do, is turning a blind eye to the role energy plays in civilization. By considering energy do we have to conclude our industrial civilization will unravel over the next few decades? Perhaps all our 20th century innovation is built on the high energy environment provided to us by cheap oil, if that’s the case it’s going to be an interesting ride down the back side of Hubbert’s peak.

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Post tags: history, technological program, technology

The first podcast I subscribed to when I bought my Creative Zen Vision: M in 2006 was Mysterious Universe. One of the things that got me through the work week was listening to Ben Grundy’s reports on the mysterious and the paranormal.

After his mysterious exit from the podcasting world, pledging to record a final episode and then never recording it… he’s back!  The new podcast has has retained its slick production value and Australian accent. My favorite excerpt from this episode were the accounts of grinning man sightings.

I’m happy to have this show back in my weekly playlist.

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Post tags: excitement, mysterious, paranormal, Podcasts

There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let’s get clear on what constitutes a “good” or a “service”. In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don’t count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, “I watched my neighbors kids this morning, so please give me food.” But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a “service”. GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes “good” when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation — and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right?

Basically, this podcast from KEXP’s Sustainability segment sums the idea up nicely as David Korten speaks with Diane Horn about his most recent book Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. The idea which I relayed from Charles above is that modern American society has money but little wealth, wealth has mainly been imported from other countries. Is the only way to fix the economic crisis is to deflate the currency to match the actual value of society.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: economy, ideas