Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
DJB: Just so that everyone is familiar with your eight-circuit model of consciousness, can you briefly explain the intention behind it and what it expresses?
TIMOTHY: Well, in the late 50s and 60s, a group of a hundred or so select psychologists and philosophers discovered the brain. That is, they discovered how to navigate and explore the brain, just like Magellan and Columbus did for the outer geography of the planet earth. People like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Albert Hofman used psyche-active vehicles to move around in the brain. One of the major philosophic tasks of the late twentieth century is mapping the different islands or hemispheres or continents in the universe of the brain.
I remember Huxley used the metaphor of the fire antipodes of the brain, or the mind--like Australia being discovered by Captain Cook. This is the first task of the psychedelic philosopher. So over the years I've produced dozens of sketch maps of the culvas circles, the circuits or the levels of consciousness. These were crude words to build up a vocabulary or a cartography of inner space. I don't use the notion of eight circuits now as much as I did, but that's why I did it.
RMN: Did you ever develop a holographic or integrational perspective for the model, to get rid of the higher and lower stuff?
TIMOTHY: By higher and lower I think you're referring to the notion of the linear or ordinal system of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There's no implication here that seven is any higher or any better than six. An ordinal system just sets up location--it's the geometry of ideas or thought. Running through all the ordinal systems that we developed was the idea that they're recursive. Eight merges into one, like a double helix, in the sense of the DNA code, which is a wonderful model of an ordinal system.
Although I certainly agree with your rejection of the notion of hierarchy, I strongly defend the notion of ordinal. Because things do end up in chains of neighborhood location, and you have to get to six before seven. When you get to six you have a choice--you could go to seven or back to five, or you could go to north six or west six. But the notion of topography and, not linear, but ordinal relations, is the key to the digital language of computers, which also happens to be the language of the universe. Quantum linguistics is based upon zeros and ones. They're off and on just as computers are.
DJB: Timothy, could you give us a sociobiological perspective on the cyberpunk movement?
TIMOTHY: As a result of the many waves of acculturation and popularization of quantum philosophy in the twentieth century--modern art, jazz, digitizing ideas in the form of telegraph, teletype, telephone, and television--it is inevitable that towards the end of the twentieth century we're developing an entirely new culture. This is going to be an informational culture--a communications culture ;n which most of the values, rituals, and certainly almost all of the laws of the tribal, feudal, or industrial societies no longer hold. We're taking thoughts and digitizing them so they can be hurled around the world at the speed of light. They can be duplicated. That's basically cybernetic or digital reality--digital language.
This new society has been described by Ted Nelson, who gives us the architecture of ideas in his Xanadu System, and Bedwood Fredkin, the quantum physicist, who has described the astro-physical algorithmic nature of reality. William Gibson has spelled it out in the most humanist, down, dirty, gritty, comprehensible, novel fashion. His books Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive spell out some of the most important dimensions of the new culture that's emerging. There's a new theology, new ethics, and certainly a new psychology. The word cyber-punk-to get back to your original question--is an early and wonderfully vulgar concept of the role model of the twenty-first century.
The twenty-first century person is a cybernetic person. He or she accepts the Heisenberg principle that you create all realities. Therefore you're responsible for everything that you experience. This identification of yourself as a quantum entity certainly dissolves most of the identification chords to your former culture, your former nation, your former religion, or any other external structure, even to your family, unless family members are redefined as cybernetic entities. The cyber-punk, or the cybernetic person, is a free agent. By the way, nobody uses that term anymore; it's like one of those words that was wonderful for awhile, then it carried all the freight it could, and it was kind of co-opted by some high-falutin' literary types, and so forth. But no one uses that word anymore, although we certainly hang it up on the trophy shelf as a wonderful bumper sticker.
DJB: What role do you think it's playing in an evolutionary sense?
TIMOTHY: The cybernetic person spends a very high percentage of his or her time and energy in what's now called cyber-space, communicating, mutually creating new realities with other people, on the other side of the screen. The cyber-punk person is a free agent, and the new society is made up of free agents who link-up at a much different level of social connection than family, work, or religious commitment. So the cyber-society is a society of highly skilled, highly courageous, cybernetic people who mutually create what we call "cyberias" or cyber-architectures, on the other side of the screen.
RMN: I hear that you've made arrangements for your head to be cryonically suspended. Could you explain what this entails, what led up to your decision, and what fantasies you have concerning your future recoordination?
TIMOTHY: My motive is the obvious basic human motive that I want to have options as to my future. I have no intention of dying passively. I have not lived in a helpless, submissive, or passive way, and I certainly don't intend to make the next transition as a victim. There are many options to the passive role of just going belly up when your Blue Cross runs out. I've written papers on this subject of the options--the various forms of rejuvenation, and reanimation.
Of course on the negative side we know that death has always been controlled by religious organizations, by state and social organizations, and more recently by medical and legal bureaucracies. Death is the ultimate control mechanism by which human beings can be rendered helpless. It's very reassuring that all the Right people bitterly oppose cryonics and the reanimation option. Every religious person, of course, considers this the ultimate heresy of taking the function of God, to determine your own transition. All state organizations resist the individual’s attempt to control any part of our lives, whether it's physical or neurological, through the medical monopoly.
This is the ultimate taboo, and it's, again, wonderfully reassuring to see how people just freeze, literally, when you suggest to them that there's any option that a courageous, thoughtful person and an industifist can take to avoid just allowing your body to be eaten by maggots or burned. That's called the barbecue or maggot option. Just in the last two years that I have been talking to people about it, I've seen a wonderful openness in people who formerly, two years ago, would have reckoned it a horror.
We went through this same thing with the notion of psychedelic drugs, that you could actually take a drug that would change your mind. Your mind is supposed to be made up by God, by your parents, or by Freud, and the idea that you could take this reckless responsibility shacked people. On the other hand, it can't be acceptable, until it's at least comprehensible. I think you can explain the hibernation-reanimation option very clearly. See, the idea is you don't die, you hibernate, and you try to preserve as much of your body, and certainly as much of your brain as you can. This is a classic philosophic tool. It was used by the Egyptians, who probably produced the most scientific, the most aesthetic, and the most glorious culture, although they had human flaws.
I can explain the notion in three or four sentences. It's well accepted now that we have heartbanks, where people whose hearts are very healthy, but who are brain-dead, have their hearts stored and then given to other people who have healthy brains, but need a heart. We have kidney banks. We have liver banks. We have lung banks. So this concept is that there will be a brain bank. The option there is not cryonics, it is just to store it. It turns out the brain is much easier to store than the heart, because the heart has got all those muscles, and it's a pump, whereas the brain, as you know, has no mechanical parts and no sensation. The brain has no muscles, and there is very little hardware to it. So the maintenance of the brain is a piece of cake compared to the heart. Think of the kidney--ugh, my god, all that plumbing, and all those juices that you have to maintain.
The idea is that we can have a brain bank within twenty, thirty, or forty years--perhaps within five years if we had a crash program. If a healthy person tragically had an accident where they were brain dead, but their body was in good shape, we'djust go to the brain bank and pick up a new brain. If I donate my brain to a brain bank, I can suggest the parameters that I'd like to have. This time I'd like to have it put into a black woman. Everyone probably will have some sort of a medical thing saying that you don't want your brain to be taken over by a Romanian, or a Dodger fan.
There will be all sorts of protections that individuals can have so no one can do anything to anyone that they don't want. Just as now you can sign away your rights to have your organs given to somebody else--it's the same thing. Now, of course, when you transport a brain the consequences are different. Again anything that has to do with the brain stirs up these incredible taboos. Imagine a young healthy black woman running around with Timothy Leary's brain. I mean, think of it.
RMN: After transferring the brain into another body, do you think it will retain all of its memory? What do you think happens to human consciousness then after death?
TIMOTHY: Yes, that's the obvious and wonderful question. We're now getting into the concept of soul. The soul is defined in the dictionary as an immaterial entity which resides in the body--but is not the body, and can leave the body-which monitors, or is responsible for consciousness, thought, memory, emotion, and all that. It's almost the same definition as the brain. The brain is defined almost the same way as the soul, except for the immaterial entity part.
The answer to your question is now just a technological question. Yes. Memories are stored in the brain. Then the question is how can you recover them. Now, there are programs called the Neuro-beurtilities, in which you have these disks, in case you lose a memory on another disk. You see, you can have a computer disk, get all the work you've done in the last six months on it, and it crashes. But then they have these disks that allow you to go back and bring them back, because the memories are frozen in the grooves, or in the molecular combinations in the brain.
But you have to have that way of accessing, or booting it up, which is called life, what you'd call soul, or that which you call animation. But we are speculating about the soul--where does the soul go when it leaves the body? When you begin working in cryonics, and reanimation-particularly reanimation of the mind, memories, or personality--what formerly was you is either dead or alive. It's called irreversible involuntary metabolic coma; that's death.
Once you say, well no, it's reversible, and it's going to be voluntary, then you open up this enormous mid-frontier. We'll just call it No-Man or No-Woman's Land. What percentage of your memory could you get back? See, if we can get less than fifty percent of your memory back, we'd consider that, probably, a failure. But, you have the option. So when you sign up for this, you can say, well don't reanimate me unless you can bring back seventy-five percent of my memory. Because we could bring that back with nanotechnology, which is being taught by Eric Drexler.
We could clone or bring back another David or another Timothy. But then the question--if I had none of my memories, would I be just like a robot? It would be a tragedy and a horror, but it then becomes an option. You know, at my age I can tell you, you lose a lot of memories along the way. Well, of course, you probably lose a lot of the ones you didn't want anyway. So at least we've taken these areas of total taboo and religious fanaticism from the past, and converted them into a scientific discourse, with experimental probabilities, in which you have options, and can share these options.
I'm going to the cryonics center Friday at Riverside--that's ALCOR. I'm going there with Harry Nealson, probably with Ringo Starr, and a group of our friends. We're planning a reunion. We're going to sign up as a group for hibernation, and reanimation, possibly fifty years from now. We're having lunch at the St. James Club Friday with a group of people, and one of the things we're speculating is, we'd like to have lunch again in fifty years. The champagne will be chilled, there's no question of that.
Now what I'm doing there is I'm introducing a very powerful, comforting notion that cryonics is not you're being frozen like a stiff, like a frozen steak in a freezer, and you're popped out in cellophane, and popped in the microwave. We're talking about groups of people who have enjoyed being together in this first life, who would want to reanimate together. Because I don't want to wake up, frankly, fifty years from now, and not have any of my friends there. I'11 be surrounded by these hot-shot scientists from the twenty-first century, and maybe a few of these scientists from ALCOR, who are nice people, but I don't hang out with them. I want my friends around too.