McKenna sounds like he could be talking today

The eerie thing about this clip is that if you gave me the transcript without the date, I’d think it was from this week. Then you look up and there’s Terence McKenna in 1998, sitting with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham at UC Santa Cruz.

At one point he talks about how engineers used to design a machine and now they can tell it what they want it to do and leave it to work out how. That stopped me. I spend a fair bit of my day doing some version of that. He also wonders whether we’d even recognise an intelligence that went far enough beyond our own. We’re still arguing about what would count as recognising it.

I wonder how differently we’d remember McKenna if psychedelics hadn’t carried quite so much social baggage. Which is a funny thing to wish for, because take the mushrooms out and how much McKenna do you have left? The stoned ape hypothesis, his speculation that eating psychedelic mushrooms helped shape early human evolution, tells you something about how willing he was to let a thought about a drug wander into a thought about the whole species. He could go from perception and metaphysics to how societies organise themselves, to politics and economics, seemingly without noticing he’d changed the subject. I like that about him.

I think the stigma made it easy to file him away as the psychedelics guy and leave him there. I wonder what we missed by doing that. There’s a public intellectual in this clip who makes me want to put down whatever I’m reading about AI today and listen to the rest of the conversation.

The clip is from a longer conversation. Watch the full discussion on Rupert Sheldrake’s channel.