Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery."

"Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined."

"What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense."

"As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate."

"Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo."

"While we've been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy."

"[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation."

"Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second."

"Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values."

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.]

"The very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory."

"In the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible."

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