This is a recording of a live radio interview recorded on Tuesday, 27 October 2009. Ed Yersh, the host of the Tuesday Morning After program on CKUT in Montreal interviewed KMO, host and producer of the C-Realm Podcast.

You can hear the full hour of programming in which this interview was embedded here:

http://secure.ckut.ca/128/20091027.08.00-09.00.mp3

KMO plays the second half of AyasminA’s interview with Dr. Stephan V. Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Steve details the importance of the auditory aspect of the Ayahuasca experience, and then the conversation turns to the paternalism and condescension of First World defenders of indigenous peoples. Later in the episode, KMO plays a clip from the It’s Not Us, It’s You! podcast about the totalitarian aesthetic of Wal*Mart’s new generic product packaging.

Music by Zarathustra.

KMO plays the first half of a conversation between AyasminA and Dr. Stephan V. Beyer. Steve is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, and in the conversation Steve details his lifelong odyssey into the deep regions of consciousness and spirituality which include fifteen years spent in the upper Amazon with the Mestizo keepers of the Ayahuasca tradition.

Music by Joseph A.


The excerpt from Steve's book that I read appears on Reality Sandwich:

http://www.realitysandwich.com/singing_to_plants



Here's the link to the YouTube video that Doug Lain put together that I mentioned at the end of the program:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzf4r4QMQNA&feature=player_embedded

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted the following as part of a comment on this essay by Robin Hanson:

Happiness is a legacy of a reinforcement architecture that existed before brains were powerful enough to implement general cross-domain consequentialism. A reinforcer is a crude approximation of the abstract knowledge that a particular category of activities is likely to lead to terminal value achievement.

In short, happiness is a legacy and only creatures with the luxury for legacies will implement it. Memories of the distant irrelevant past are a luxury – even if you have them stored somewhere, you wouldn’t recall them unless necessary. Storytelling is a luxury.

Thanks to Eric Boyd for the link to the Overcoming Bias essay.

AyasminA returns to the C-Realm to help KMO plumb the darkness for landmarks along KMO's invisible path. In response to an email from the world's only credentialed "creative urbanist," KMO quotes from Kevin Kelly's blog entry about the fatal flaw in the anti-civilizationists' agenda. At the end of the program KMO enlists the words of Charles Eisenstein to anchor the over-arching theme of the episode.

Music: Reggae Drift by Adam of the Psychonautilus.

KMO welcomes Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine to the program to discuss minds and the memes that make them, Buddhist meditation, the value of psychedelics, and the fabricated reality of the self. Music by Z deScathach.



Musical interlude by Z deScathach: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=817450

Here's the Straight Dope on legislating the value of pi: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/805/did-a-state-legislature-once-pass-a-law-saying-pi-equals-3

In my discussion with Sue,I mentioned Leonard Shlain's book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. You can learn more about the idea that the transition from a pre-literate to a print-based culture involves a period of ideological mania and accompanying mayhem on the website devoted to the book: http://www.alphabetvsgoddess.com/

New blog post from Neil Kramer!

http://thecleaver.blogspot.com/2008/06/go-your-own-way-gnosis-and-fractal.html

Here's a snippet:

Interfacing with reality is more instructive than purely theorizing about it. We have long since reached the saturation point of the narrow scientific method with its reliance on separation, measurement and reductionism. Such materialist inferences, no matter how scrupulous, are at odds with the holistic multidisciplinary attitude required for actual conscious evolution. They only obstruct efforts to perceive beyond the particulate cloak of Maya.

For my North American brothers and sisters who go on to read the entire article, yes, quieten is a proper word. It's just one that didn't take root in our colonial soil.

James Hughes interviewed me for an episode of his Changesurfer Radio program. In that interview I told him that in my teens I was a hard-core atheist materialist. After some unexpected experience arising from my admittedly reckless and largely recreational use of psychedelics in my late teens and early twenties my certainty gave way to a general agnosticism on the topic of the relationship between mind and brain. In response, Michael Anissimov wrote:

As a young teen who was an atheist, rationalist, materialist, and reductionist, my experiences experimenting with psychedelic drugs did nothing but reinforce these positions. Taking these "drugs" demonstrated to me how the interpretation of external reality is contingent upon the physical arrangement of neurons in the brain. It also shows how the brain can easily be fooled into being overconfident about non-deterministic realities, whereas experiments strongly support a deterministic reality. The fact that human conscious is occasionally cited as the only exception from deterministic reality is actually indicative that consciousness is just the last holdout of deterministic explanation.

My conversion was certainly not a thunder clap event. Well into my late 20s I continued to take a definite side in the Churland/Searle debate. I hewed to the position that conscious is "substrate neutral," which is to say that consciousness can be sustained in mediums other than squishy gray matter. That pre-supposes a materialist basis for consciousness.

Actually "substrate neutrality" doesn't necessarily pre-suppose that consciousness arises from its physical substrate. One could hold that consciousness is substrate neutral and that the organismic brain serves as a "reducing valve" for universal consciousness, but I suspect that fewer than one in a hundred advocates of "substrate neutrality" would have any tolerance for talk of "reducing valves for universal consciousness."

In any event, in re-reading Micheal Anissimov's comment, I've tried to tease out some meaning from it other than the very obvious: He and I started with basically the same belief system, and while my certainty in the correctness of that belief system softened into agnosticism, he started off certain and ended up dead certain.

That raises the question of why psychedelics would erode my certainty yet buttress his, but this formulation of the situation is so simplistic as to be completely useless. Our use of psychedelics is one of an unknowable number of influences that affected our attitudes about belief in general and about the merits of reductionist materialism in particular. While the same set of labels applied to both sets of beliefs and attitudes, we probably didn't really share the same head space going into our psychedelic experiences. Most likely we came to our atheistic materialism via different routes. Our belief systems had distinct causal histories, followed distinct developmental trajectories, and, unsurprisingly, eventually flew in different directions.

What's more, it is unlikely that we took psychedelics under identical conditions. Certainly we were in different locations, different decades, and with different people. Likely the substances we ingested were not chemically identical to one another, and likely the dosages varied as well.

Finally, I return to the content of my statements in the Changesurfer interview. Without going back and listening to that conversation again, I can't be certain whether I told J. Hughes that my belief system changed after my psychedelic experiences or whether my experiences with psychedelics caused me to relinquish my certainty. The latter treads dangerously close to the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.

I had some really weird experiences in my late teens and early twenties, and over the subsequent years, my belief system and attitudes changed. Even if I hadn't had those weird experiences I doubt that I would have championed the exact same belief system at 28 or 38 that I did at age 18. I'd certainly hate to think that at age 18 I had the universe sussed and that I've just drifted away from Truth as I've aged.

`

"C" stands for consciousness

Episode 100: Interfacing with the Panopticon



In this 100th episode of the C-Realm Podcast, KMO welcomes SF author Charles Stross (AKA autopope) to the program to discuss the convergence of massively multi-player online games, live action role-playing games, and the emerging infrastructure of the surveillance society. After that he considers listener feedback on the topic of whether human intelligence is somehow privileged or more important than that of other forms of life.

Charles Stross is the author of many books including Accelerondo, The Jennifer Morgue, and Halting State. He has also written an essay entitled The Panopticon Singularity which provides much fuel for thought for anyone concerned with the future of civil liberties and privacy.

http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/4787204/510011/87821593/PUB_87821593.mp3

more later

I'm wrestling with an idea that as yet remains so nebulous that I can only make reference to it by posting excerpts from essays written by clearer minds. The first, by Erik Davis, from an essay on his website called "The Omega Network" that he describes as a remix from his book Techgnosis

Teilhard [de Chardin]’s appeal to Christians wrestling with the theory of evolution is clear. John Haught, a Roman Catholic theologian who aruges in a number of influential books that church teachings are not incompatible with Darwin, holds up Teilhard as a model for understanding how a purposeful God might be working through the apparently wayward, and sometimes obscenely cruel, development of material forms. The key for Haught, as for Teilhard, is consciousness: the world of human experience and its forms of understanding overlaps the objects and processes described by physics and information theory, but is not identified with them. The material world produced by Darwinian forces is thus layered with human meanings and perceptions exactly the way that Teilhard’s physical planet is layered with the noosphere.

The second comes from an article called Consciousness is Nothing but a Word by Henry D. Schlinger:

As the title of my article suggests, consciousness is not a thing, a place, or a cognitive process (whatever that is); it's only a word that we use in a variety of ways. For example, we can say that an organism is "conscious" if it is awake and/or alert (versus asleep or in a coma). We can then study the behaviors associated with wakefulness and the underlying neural structures that mediate them. Or, like Francis Crick and Christoph Koch, we can use "consciousness" to refer to visual perception, which is acceptable as long as it points to actual behaviors involved in perceiving and their ultimate evolutionary and learned causes. But wakefulness and visual perception are not what most scholars are referring to with the word "consciousness."

So, what the heck is consciousness? Given the title of my podcast, you might reasonably expect me to keep a provisional definition at the ready. Well, all I can say to that is that we're out of toilet paper and I need to make a run to the grocery store.

Ken Wilber puts his integral spin on the proliferating categories of people predicting cataclysm.



I'm not conversant in Wilber's system of consciousness classification, but Wikipedia (not surprisingly) seems to provide a pretty good entry-level summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber#AQAL:_.22All_Quadrants_All_Levels.22

Edit: Actually, the Wikipedia entry doesn't explain Wilber's use of color or his references to altitude to describe styles of consciousness. If you know of any good ("good" meaning free and concise) references that would help someone not already versed in Ken Wilber's jargon make sense of his talks, any and all links would be most appreciated.

This is from Robert Grudin, author of Time and the Art of Living (one of my all time favorite books):

...only the word 'vulgarity' can describe the particular combination of gullibility, ignorance and self-indulgence that characterizes the American marketplace, and only the word 'vulgarizing' can describe the various hucksters who exploit it. I also believe that the real opposite of vulgarity is not some highbrow notion of Sophistication (a word already vulgarized by marketers), but rather consciousness, pure and simple. Consciousness, the ability to be alert to important things and literate in them, is a kind of mental oxygen: an element without which people lose track of their own lives, and societies cannot renew themselves. Consciousness, to be sure, has its liabilities. When we focus only on the vulgarity of others, and without self-scrutiny, our consciousness can be as dangerous as ignorance. Figures as well known as Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence have erred in this direction. But consciousness is well worth the risk, especially in times like these, when essential liberties - including even our access to information - are threatened by corporate greed and political interest.

Link: http://rgrudin.googlepages.com/

And now I'm going to get off the darned internet and get down to editing tomorrow's podcast.

Episode 49 - Part 1: The Dharma of Conscious Creativity



In this episode, KMO welcomes Digital Crusader, Eric Boyd, back to the
program to talk about Transhumanist perspectives on the environment
and sustainable living. Later we hear from Philip Horvath of the
Center for Conscious Creativity, and finally KMO talks with BrainPaint
creator, Bill Scott, about the potential of EEG biofeedback technology
for ADD therapy, meditation, and self-improvement.

Guests

Eric Boyd is a co-founder of Stumbleupon.com, and he shares his forward-looking mindset with brainy readers in his Digital Crusader blog. This is Eric's second time on the show. You can listen to his first outing in episode #34 of the C-Realm Podcast: Principles of Precaution.

Philip H. Horváth, co-founder of the Center for Conscious Creativity and an independent agent, is a multi-talented compulsive creative and synthetic systems thinker. A counselor, coach, and consultant, all his activities are marked by three key components: immersion, integration, and innovation. Complete bio

Bill Scott is the principal investigator and first author of an addiction research project that yielded a 79% success rate with Native American alcoholics. This study was with Dr. Eugene Peniston (in press). An interview with Bill by the Psychiatric Times was published as a feature article. Bill Scott has also presented research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science with Dr. David Kaiser. Bill trained the researchers Dr. John Gruzelier and Dr. Tobias Egner (members of Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Behaviour, Imperial College Medical School) in the use of alpha-theta protocols. The results of this research project so improved music abilities among Royal Conservatoire of Music students that the Conservatoire has made these protocols a mandatory part of the school’s curriculum. Complete bio

EEG Biofeedback Links:

Bill Scott's Brain Paint technology:

http://www.brainpaint.com/

EEG Spectrum:

http://eegspectrum.com/

Open Source EEG:

http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/