TrueLife - The Organic Singularity

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Back to the Wednesday edition of the True Life podcast. I hope that this particular episode finds you doing well. Hope you're spending your time not sweating, the small stuff, hope you are thinking about that which is important, your family, your friends, your life, being in the present moment. Those are all things that should help you live a life

worth living. What are we going to talk about today? There's been something on my mind that I have been quietly contemplating, thinking about, sometimes in my waking hours and sometimes in my dreams and I wanted to share it with you. I wanted to present this idea for you to think about, see where you are leaning to see how you feel about it. So here we go. Let's talk about it. This idea of mechanism versus organism. Let's talk about the mechanistic idea of humanity. Ever since I was a kid, I remember watching the Jetsons with Rosie the Robot and the skypad apartments and flying cars. And growing up as a Gen Xer, it was always thought that we would have these incredible inventions that would free us from the tyranny of labor, and it would allow us to have all this free time. This idea of technology as a savior has been something that,

at least in my mind, has been promised to the people. And as I've grown, you know, obviously been, I have been transformed by the ideas of the intelligentsia and education and society and culture, which is a huge one. In fact, I remember as a kid watching the Transformers. Think about that word. The Transformers, and these were these giant robots that would turn, into kind of robot people from Optimus Prime who was a truck into a robot and Soundwave who was a

radio player that turned into a robot. Megatron was a gun that turned into a robot person. And you can kind of see the path that culture, be it something that was decided or undecided, It has kind of taken us down. And that's this mechanism idea, this idea that we are programmable, hackable people. In fact, I think it was Noel Harari, who spoke recently at the World Economic Forum, who likened people to hackable animals. That is clearly a left-brained, logical, albeit short-sighted and naive point of view, at least in my opinion. I think that people can be stimulus response.

I think that human beings do have the ability to be Pavlovian dogs where they are stimulated and then respond. For those of you that are unaware of the Pavlovian dogs, right, wasn't that the bells ringing, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, dog salivating. So we can be that. And there has been lots of money and there has been lots of cuts of. conditioning put in place to make people be like that. If you look at traditional elementary schools or public school education where kids sit down in a classroom, they have an authority figure stand above them, there's bells ringing, you've got to raise your hand for permission to go to the bathroom. All these sort of conditioning techniques have made us into a mechanistic society. And when we look at

culture. We see the computer that has gone from vacuum tubes in a 500 or 1,500 square foot building be condensed all the way down to a desktop, which gave way to a laptop, which gave way to a mobile phone, which gave way to wearables, which are kind of synonymous with charge. trackables, and you can just see that pace if that particular mechanistic pathway continues to move forward. It's not too much longer before the computer or the chip or the mechanism gets inside of us. In a way, it's almost like an alien trying to befriend us and then get inside our body and then take us over. I think there's actually a theory about that.

That's pretty interesting. However, I think it is a crude attempt to the original. The original is us. We're the organism. And here is this idea of people preferring the copy to the original. So I've given you the idea of what the mechanism is. this idea that we can make life better by making crude copies of it

and the idea continuing with the mechanism the idea is oh if we can just get more information than we can figure out what it does oh if we could just get a bigger sample size or if we could just create this new technology and the thing with technology is it's always five years away

it's always three more years away, maybe seven more years away. In fact, I would argue that this idea of mechanism and technology has led us down into a evolutionary cul-de-sac. Look at the world right now. Like, where is the technology? Where is it? Where are the driving trucks on the road? You know how long ago they said, oh, yeah, these driving semi-trucks are going to do away with all truck drivers? Where are they? I see tons of self-driving cars on the road, but I don't see any of those self-driving cars driving themselves. I don't see the infrastructure for it, but I see tons of money being appropriated for it. When you look at the United States, you see billions of dollars being proposed for infrastructure.

You see tons of people, tons of talking heads, politicians and executives and academics talking about How glorious this future of technology is going to be. But it never shows up. It never shows up. In my mind, what you have seen is the ultimate con. You have seen large multinational corporations with Wiz kids going into boardrooms and dazzling the shareholders, or at least a board of directors, just baffling them with bullshit. Look at this magic thing I can do.

to do. Look at this thing. It's going to change everything. All you have to do is give me millions of dollars and I will change the world for you and you will be rich too because you're investing in this technology that's going to change the world. It's all bullshit. It never shows up. It never shows up. Ever. Where is it? Starlink? Is that what it is? Maybe. Maybe. There's a pretty interesting idea that says if you took all the screens out of your room, the TV, your phone, your iPad. If you took out all the screens in your room, your room would be no different than the room in 1950. Yeah, you got a cool telephone. Congratulations. You can look up an online dictionary. Wow, that's amazing. But where is the technology that helps the people? So the reason I bring this up is you can continue to see this happening with the idea of wearable technology. You can continue to see this idea with the future of medicine. Hey, look, we're going to give you this pill,

and it's going to release these statins into your blood to help you monitor your own blood sugar. We're going to allow this machine to be operated by doctors in a foreign country, and it can do surgery on you. We're going to put this particular trackable thing inside your kid's body, so they'll never get lost. Really? Is that what you're going to do?

It doesn't seem to be working. And it seems to be just another layer of technical jargon to get these quote-unquote financial fintech slash entrepreneurial technologies. Just a few more million dollars. And it's just five more years down the road. In three more years, you won't even recognize this place. I think it's bullshit, which leads me. me to the organism.

Okay? Let me just go back for one more second. There's this idea of the singularity where man merges with machine and they become one and you can download your soul onto the internet and Ray Kurzweil can bring his dad back to life and they can go get ice cream.

It's going to be glorious. How ridiculous is that though? If you just say it out loud, you're going to bring your parent back to life and then tour the world with them? No, you're not. You're not going to do that. You could bring back a, you could bring back a 3D image of them

and maybe animate it, but that's not your parent. That's not even alive. It's a video. You're better up just watching a video of them. Or better yet closing your eyes and vividly remembering a time with them. Okay, so that's the singularity.

Man merges with machine, and we become a giant mechanism and whatnot. the singularity, I would argue that the organism is vastly superior to the mechanism. And here's what I mean by that. We can already do everything that the machines are promising us that we can do. Especially in the future of medicine, I think the organism, if we look at plant-based medicines, be it ayahuasca or psilocybin or cannabis, or any of these particular medicines that we have had for centuries.

These are vastly superior to the, at least in my opinion, I'm not a doctor, but I'm just giving you my opinion. These are vastly superior than Elon Musk's brain chip. Think about, you want someone to cut off part of your head and put in a microchip that will tell part of your brain to stimulate another part of your brain to release a certain neurotransmitter that'll tell your body to move its arm.

Well, the same thing I think can be done with a different programming language. It's called therapy. Or pick your native language, English, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish. You see, the great thing about the organism is that it already knows these languages. And if you use therapy and you have potentially, like I said, it's just my opinion.

But I think that in the future you're going to see therapy and psilocybin and other potential biological medicines vastly superior to any sort of technological medicine. And I think the organism is already a piece of technology that is incomprehensible to most people. I think when you look at the mechanism, it's just so short-sighted and narrow. It is this idea of the human being as a computer. And it's just, it kind of makes me sad to think that any group of people would reduce life to this such short-sighted and narrow silliness. I think the organism, especially when you take the idea that you as an individual are part of a larger organism called the earth.

Like we're one organism. So to think that a computer could download one part of the organism and provide you with a life worth living, is out of control? I once saw a great sculpture and I will try to use my words to paint you a picture Imagine a platform of polished wood And it's about 10 feet across And on one side

There's a giant mirror It's a one-way mirror So you can see through the mirror And it stands in the middle of the platform And on one side of the mirror is a sculpture made of technological parts like circuits and blinking lights and wires and transistors and all these parts that you would see inside a computer or any type of electronics. And the sculpture is the sculpture of a man and he is pushing on this mirror in the pose of, you know, someone strenuously pushing. And on the other side is a similar sculpture, and it's made out of sticks and leaves. And it, too, is in the shape of a man, and it is pushing on the opposite side of the mirror,

and they're pushing this mirror together. It's a beautiful picture, and it paints this idea of mechanism versus organism. Now, I know what you're thinking. George, why do we have to fight mechanism versus organism? Well, we don't. However, it seems that the current culture is on the side of pushing our future towards mechanization. If you look at the last 100 or 200 years of industrialization, you've seen dehumanizing aspects of it like assembly lines. You know, abstract ideas like quantitative easing.

and just these, you know, abstract, logical materialism. And they have dominated for quite some time. And look at our world. Look at the way we live in this world. We live in this weird materialistic abstraction. However, I think with this new form of, you know, plant medicine, I think. I really think that plant medicine is this new way of convening, at least for us in the West,

is a new way of reimagining what the human condition is. So the idea for me is instead of the singularity being man merging with machine, why don't we have a new singularity that's man merging with nature? That's a vet. Man merging with nature. Woman merging with nature. Mankind merging with nature is vastly superior to any sort of man merging into mechanism. I ask you, do you want to be a machine?

Do you want to be a robot? I am robot. I get up, go to work, make money, come home. That sucks. That is a horrible, stupid way to live your life. and so few people actually get to live life when they are pigeonholed and to becoming these labels of, I am a worker, I am a trucker, I am a banker, I am a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is dumb.

We need not do that anymore. We should understand that we are all greater than any one label. And we should deny the mechanistic urge to be part of this banality of evil, this idea that we just have to go along to get along. And in doing so, we were creating this machine that just steam rolls over resources and people. It is this idea of waking up and becoming or merging with that which is already given to us. It leads me to this other idea that I had, this idea that, You know, there's all this talk about aliens, right?

I know, I know. What are you talking about, George? You're going to get into aliens now, you weirdo? Yeah, a little bit. Listen, I think that these alien encounters are just us humans realizing a part of us that has been forgotten. Like, that's how far we've gone down the mechanistic road is that whenever we catch a glimpse of our own human nature, it's so weird we call it alien. Think about that. That's how far we've gotten from who we are as beings.

That when we come into this place where we are bewildered by a natural phenomenon, we call it an alien. I had an alien encounter. What happened? I hugged a tree. And I really think that the use of psychedelics can inspire. it can reignite the fire

in the minds of men and women around the world to produce this new organic singularity. I think I'm going to call this podcast the organic singularity. Let me know what you guys think. I would love to hear from you

and I am so thankful that every one of you are taking a moment to listen to this. You know, there's a... I have quite a few friends that I'm so lucky to have. I get to speak to them from time to time. They all have so many, such a wide range of, such a wide range of different jobs and ways of looking at life.

And I hope that you take a moment to think about all your friends and family and think about why you value their perspectives. And I think that should help you re- rethink your life. You know, I hope that you think about this podcast, and I hope that you want to become part of the organic singular. That's all I got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for spending time with me. Let's get up and get at them. Aloha.