CSH: Intelligence runs independently of intentionality. We think that intelligence is only operating when “I” am present as a self-aware source of intentionality—as it were, when intelligence is on manual control. But it turns out that both its rules and its ability to combine elements and make inferences are running whether we are consciously attending to and participating in these processes or not. There’s a book by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, that shows how creative reasoning and discovery often comes ready made as symbols to researchers in their dreams.

It’s good to point this out on occasion. I think most of us see intelligence work as something that must be performed by a homunculus, that is, always with conscious effort. You’d think that you’d have to have a person working on a problem in order to get it done.

Rich: I saw a quote today … creativity is unintentional intelligence, or something like that.

CSH: I’m saying that intelligence is unintentional intelligence.

Rich: Yeah, creativity is unintentional intelligence.

CSH: I want to say that intelligence is unintentional intelligence.

Rich: Yeah, when you’re not trying.

CSH: Anyway, I cannot recommend LSD and psilocybin highly enough. Expansion isn’t the right word. Awareness becomes aware of awareness’ role in the manufacture of experience all the time. The meaning and the value of everything you experience in the physical world is 99% something you invent as a narrative when you sense it.

For example, you don’t really receive this physical thing as “a bottle.” All you really receive is a certain collection of momentary sense-pixels—you are the source of the meaning “bottle,” not the bundle of sensations. If I dropped it in Africa, it might be a “weapon” or a “dildo.” Same pixels, different meaning.

The substance or existence of the thing is something that you provide. All the world provide is a pixel array—that’s it. Everything else is linguistic—that is, created by you. When you’re on LSD you realize that you’re this meaning-making puppet master all the time but you’re just unaware of it. On LSD, you’re making meaning and you know you’re doing so LIVE. You catch yourself in the act of constantly pumping the meaning juice behind the pixels all the time.

Rich: Which is exactly like lucid dreaming.

CSH: You realize that you are the very electrons of the shit that you’re playing in. It’s amazing.

Rich: If it allows you to perceive something differently, so you can influence future actions, …

CSH: The goal of the LSD trip is to see your habits and automations from the perspective of the council of the Twelve Olympians sitting around their table inside the mountain. They are discussing you when you walk into their meetings chamber. I sit down at their table with them and feel terrible, marrow corroding shame. Shame for not loving and caring and living a life a love, where I love what I do and who I am and the people around me. Then Zeus stands, looks at me like a loving father, and says, “You’ve really been an ass.”

“You are right, Father. I am sorry for wasting the life you gave me. I feel so sick with self-disgust and regret right now that my body aches with poison. I have wasted two years since our last meeting. I’ve completely forgotten my mission. I am sorry, and will work much harder this time on remembering what’s important. I’ve been selfish, ignorant of my own conditioned responses, the slave of deeply self-handicapping habits, and aiming way too low.

On LSD: you realize how amazingly low you aim and this shocks you because you now see that You (the masterly LSD self) has actually been wielding the power of choice all along. You know and feel that you are always at cause over every content of your experience. And the reason you aim low is also revealed: aiming low is the intentional-ethical counterpart of epistemic self-handicapping (where you invent handicaps in order to explain failure, to make it necessary so you can let go of trying to change that part of yourself).

Our biologic hands us two social priorities: to look good (happy) and to not fail. What a lame set of ambitions that is. We can aim so much higher. LSD puts you in the position of the highest self, the God-self, and you see “I’ve been wasting my life and living in bad faith. I’ve been living as if I had no choice.” The Life Coach is invoked, and you are it. “Tsk tsk! What an unnecessary shame!”

Rich: That’s interesting, because you see most of humanity operating according to the bad faith scheme: you want to look good, and you want to not fail. This is a basic psychological need, like the need for food, water, and shelter.

CSH: Biologic wants to run the whole show. But we have this other little God-self that has a different agenda. The trans-biological self thinks there’s more to life than just biological survival—self-defense and self-Xeroxing by making babies. There’s more to life than my DNA pattern being instantiated in as many DNA cell-colony giants (people) as possible.

Rich: And that’s the difference between humans and other animals.

CSH: Maybe. What about dogs—their love sometimes overrides survival. I think all consciousness contains some quantity of the backwards-falling shadow of the Omega Point at the end of history, where the universe becomes a self-aware brain. At the end of time, God is born; all the matter in the universe is organized into a “motherboard” of robots passing light-signals to each other. All the matter in the universe will be arranged into a giant motherboard which will be God’s brain, and we’ll all be resurrected inside of it as virtual-reality dwellers. I know that sounds crazy but every other alternative is even crazier, because the utility of the universe is never accounted for. A place for morality-testing? So much for the entire animal kingdom. A prison made by an evil archon? Equally unnecessary. A myth that renders the universe frivolous dissatisfies us because it violates the principle of sufficient reason. The MEST universe is heading somewhere.

The only universe-redeeming story is, ironically, the one that makes God’s birth dependent on the universe and what it is doing, including its matter self-organizing into humans. The universe is becoming (locally) organized, and we’re part of the process. Our job: make a computer smarter than us. That (as Kurzweil says) is the last invention a human will ever have to make. For this machine will make one smarter than it, and so on.

Rich: That’s kinda like the whole Skynet (Terminator) deal.

CSH: I think that consciousness is really odd. I think that consciousness is this Thing at the End of History leaking backwards into all negentropic entities—all self-repairing homeostatic biological islands of matter, like amoebas and humans, all of these things contain this backwards-falling shadow of consciousness. That is the otherwise inexplicable thing that violates all genetic and biological imperatives. The body wants to look good and not fail; but there’s this other thing. This is one explanation for this other thing that doesn’t care about the biological fixation on self-protection. It has other goals—ones that don’t seem to go along with the genetic imperative to xerox.

Rich: Do you feel that the most successful people are the ones who don’t care about looking good but take chances and try new things? Like starting a new company, say? Or people who feel that they have a calling that isn’t reasonable?

CSH: Those are the heroes.

Rich: For example, this coffee robot. It was programmed by a human, but I think that eventually it will start thinking for itself. It’s very complicated. Some coffee orders require many steps, and to be efficient the machine has to know when to do what. What actions, in what order?

CSH: The problem with computers is giving them desires and goals. Computers follow instructions, but can they have goals?

Rich: Desires, goals, and the ability to decide things.