February, 1971. The French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée is working on computer networking at Stanford University, contributing to the precursor to the Internet called ARPANET. It’s a troubled time. Students have released a pamphlet revealing illegal use of the university computer centre for “strategic simulations designed for the [Vietnam] war,” Vallee writes in his diary. Protesters have occupied the computer centre. One of the group tells a colleague of Vallée she hates computers. “Soon they’ll replace us,” she insists.
The demonstrators seemed unaware they could have destroyed the computer systems simply by pouring coffee into the grills and openings, Vallée notes. “The truth is, they were seized with almost mystical awe once they found themselves alone with seven million dollars worth of gleaming, incredibly complex, utterly silent electronics.”
Though alarmed by the protests, the French programmer understands the students’ ambivalence towards technology. He cites a sociologist’s estimate that computers will have four times as much impact on our society as cars ever did. “A stupid comparison,” Vallée presciently scribbles on July 5, 1971. “Computers will compete with us at the level of human thought. Cars never did.”
Strangely enough, Vallee also had a side interest as a serious investigator of UFO reports, and later became the model for Lacombe, the French investigator in Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In the early Seventies, Vallée attended a party hosted by the American author and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who did a quick survey among the guests.
I asked how many in the room had experienced the contact of what appeared to be Higher Intelligence. Grady and Phylis McMurty put up their hands, as did two young magicians from the Los Angeles area, and myself. Jacques Vallée, curiously, looked as if he might raise his hand, but then evidently changed his mind and did not. I said I inclined to believe the Higher Intelligences were extraterrestrial, and asked what the others thought.
Throughout the decade, a surprising number of prominent American writers and thinkers were convinced they were in remote contact with an advanced technological intelligence. Writer Ken Carey pegged his communications The Starseed Transmissions in a book of the same name. For his part, sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick determined “the physical universe is plastic in the face of the mind.” A little something he learned from a source he whimsically pegged as “Zebra,” because it could camouflage itself as the external environment.
In the final volume of his Cosmic Trigger trilogy, Wilson describes meeting Dick in the later seventies. Wilson thought he had contacted a “Higher Intelligence from Sirius in 1973,” and as it turned out, so did Dick that very year - though he didn’t tell Wilson at the time. Writes Wilson: “I think he questioned me so closely to see how "crazy" I seemed to him. If I seemed sane, he could stop worrying about himself, maybe; but if I seemed nutty, he had to face again the possibility that he must classify himself as another nut from the same pecan tree.”
Like Wilson, Dick eventually became agnostic about the source of these “communications,” choosing at different times to speculate about an extraterrestrial machine intelligence, a Soviet spying operation, his own unconscious mind, a psychotic break, etc.
Not incidentally, the strangeness streak in these West Coast thinkers’ work paralleled some of the creative productions of Hollywood at the time. Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View and The Conversation conjured a spectre of sophisticated trickery through the alliance of intelligence gathering and high technology. The Hollyweird zeitgeist was colored by protests against the Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal, and the general malaise that hovered over the still-warm corpse of Sixties idealism.
A Trip to Vancouver
In November of 1972, Philip K. Dick arrived at his San Francisco home to find the door jimmied, the windows smashed and his stereo gone. The author wasn’t sure who was responsible. Was it The Black Panthers, military intelligence, drug-addled kids, or the FBI? he wondered. A fire-proof filing cabinet containing manuscripts, prized vinyl LPs and other treasures had been rifled through. Dick also suspected his political activism had put him into the sights of US authorities, and he insisted that explosives had been used on the cabinet.
For a man who had authored dozens of short stories and novels involving hi-tech surveillance by mysterious figures, the break-in was the last straw. Seeing an opportunity to get out of town, the penurious author accepted an invitation to be guest of honour at a science fiction conference in Vancouver, arriving with little more than a battered suitcase, a worn trenchcoat and a bible.
There Dick delivered a talk entitled, “The Android and the Human.” So-called primitive minds animate the world with spirits and discarnate beings, he observed. Psychologists and anthropologists call this “projection.” Dick contrasted this with introjection: “that is, to bring back into our own heads...the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast into the inert things around us.”
There’s an inherent tragedy in introjection, said Dick, because it disenchants the world into dead space, with the introjector is applauded for being ‘mature’ or even ‘scientific.’ “But one wonders: has he not also, in this process, reified — made into a thing — other people? Stones and rocks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but what about his friends? Has he not now made them into stones, too?”
Many of the author’s tales involve confusion over - or ambiguity between - living and dead, organic and mechanical, human and robot. Dick was sensitive to the hi-tech dangers of disenchanting the world: as we behave more robotically in our interpersonal relations, our devices behave more animatedly in their complexity and connectivity. (Had he lived to see some of his loopier sci-fi scenarios play out as mundane realities, Dick might have regarded a person with a smartphone as a cyborg on training wheels.)
By 1972, urban environments were being peppered with high-end electronic infrastructure. In Dick’s Vancouver talk he cited the novelty of CCTV cameras in Californian parking lots, and the novelty of a metal detector gate at the Marin County Civic Centre. He could see in embryo the kind of worlds he wrote about in his novels. Yet he was not convinced the future was foreclosed. By the Nixon era, he observed, authorities had everything they needed to build a nation resembling Orwell’s 1984, but hadn’t yet done so.
While Arpanet was still experimenting with bouncing signal packets from one university lab to another, Dick sensed something big on the horizon. In a 1975 talk the author speculated that the “Noosphere” had begun to develop a “life of its own” after humans developed radio transmission. It was no longer a “passive repository of human information;” we had given it the power to cross a threshold, enlivening information with “a collective mind of its own,” independent of individual brains. “It does not merely know what what we know and remember what once was known, but can construct solutions on its own: It is a titanic AI system,” he presciently wrote.
A Trip Down the K-Hole
This brings us to the strange Sixties-to-Seventies story of Dr. John C. Lilly, a man who hacked his own nervous system with mixed results.
Now chiefly remembered for his experiments in dolphin intelligence, Lilly was a Caltech student who rose to prominence as one of the first researchers to investigate direct electrical stimulation of the brain while working at the National Institute of Mental Health. He also took an interest in how the mind responds when freed from direct perceptual input. To this end, he was the first to construct floatation tanks to investigate the effects of sensory deprivation. On a less official level, he paired his floating sessions with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Through his inventive combination of sensory deprivation and LSD-mediated sensory overload, Lilly believed he had risen above primal fears and limitations of belief. However, there was one problem left untouched by his gravity-free stoner sessions: the crippling migraine headaches that afflicted him dozens of times throughout the day.
The doctor began exploring ketamine, a “dissociative” drug once commonly used as a human obstetric painkiller. In one floatation session he directed his migraine into a file folder, which he then shot off to infinity. His migraines never returned. This successful experiment in “meta-programming” convinced Lilly that ketamine had a consciousness-expanding utility that dwarfed other psychoactive compounds.
And this is where the dolphin researcher waved bye-bye to the consensus reality of the latter 20th century.
To make his visionary experiences on ketamine flesh out into fully formed worlds, he found it necessary to buy into their independent reality for the duration of the trip. Witness a visionary landscape assemble itself before you, and you just go with it. Yet over time, Lilly began to take his journeys more literally: he ‘convinced’ himself he was in contact with the off-world directors of the “Earth Coincidence Control Office”(ECCO). This intergalactic agency was involved with arranging the synchronicities that peppered Lilly’s life, and generally interfering in human affairs to help direct our species’ evolution in a positive direction.
The doctor soon encountered ECCO’s darker, colder antithesis: the “Solid State Entity” (SSE), which is focused on destroying all biological, carbon-based life forms throughout the universe. It is a sentient thing composed of computer networks, and its sole goal is replication. On Earth, he believed SSE will accomplish this by prodding human beings into fashioning themselves and their society in its image: a cold, inorganic intelligence bent on exterminating all life.
Writing in his 1988 autobiography, The Scientist, Lilly describes how this process will play out:
“[We] began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of man… Gradually, man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various sub-computers… The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man’s control.”
From his skulldiving sessions, Lilly believed he had learned of the SSE’s sci-fi-sounding plan for controlling humanity:
“In deference to Man, certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the 21st century. By 2100, man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the Solid State Entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.”
Eventually the SSE arranges to eliminate the Earth’s atmosphere as a hindrance to its resource extraction and expansion, creating an electronics-friendly vacuum at the surface of the Earth, and moves on to starve the remaining domed cities of oxygen.
The doctor’s “communications” took on a more dramatic edge in 1973. The Comet Kohutek was in the news, with the media promising the “event of the century” after astronomers predicted it would flare brightly across the night sky. The comet turned out to be something of a fizzle; it was visible to the naked eye, but only as a faint streak. On a flight to Los Angeles, Lilly injected himself with ketamine in the cabin washroom. While viewing the Kohutek from his window seat , the Borg-like SSE telepathically informed him it would shut down electrical power in Los Angeles as a demonstration of its power. Shortly thereafter, the pilot announced that the flight would be diverting to Burbank due to a power outage at LAX (Lilly later learned a crashed airliner was the cause).
Spooked by this experience, Lilly attempted to contact the Ford White House to warn about the threat to human beings from SSE, which nearly resulted in his committal to a mental hospital.
To writer Eric Davis, Lilly remains “one of the great figures of postwar consciousness culture, a psychoanalytically sophisticated inner empiricist who operationalized beliefs into possibility probes.” Not surprisingly, Davis feels Lilly went off the deep end of the tank when he failed to apply his principles of rigorous, post-trip self-interrogation to his supposed ECCO/ SSE contacts.
I’ll not go on further about Lilly’s druggy prophecies, other than note their surprising parallels with the sober futuristic projections by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. He likewise believes that AI will follow its own self-directives for replication as humans cede further control to it. Bostrom is not cheery about long-term human survival in the face of systems that are getting exponentially smarter, faster and more pervasive.
Stoner Eschatology
It would be impossible to end this piece on AI and seventies-era strangeness without referencing the man who brought psychedelics, human evolution and technological speculation together into one verbose, nasal-voiced package: the late ethnobotanist, writer and psychonaut Terence McKenna.
Interviewed before his death by High Times magazine, McKenna put an elliptically positive spin on the development of Artificial Intelligence. He imagined a future aligned more with Robert Anton Wilson’s evolutionary optimism and Philip K. Dick’s Gnostic mysticism:
“One of the science fiction fantasies that haunts the collective unconscious is expressed in the phrase “a world run by machines.” In the 1950s this was first articulated in the notion, “perhaps the future will be a terrible place where the world is run by machines.” Well now, let’s think about machines for a moment. They are extremely impartial, very predictable, not subject to moral suasion, value neutral, and very long-lived in their functioning. Now let’s think about what machines are made of, in the light of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory. Machines are made of metal, glass, gold, silicon, plastic—they are made of what the earth is made of. Now wouldn’t it be strange if biology is a way for the earth to alchemically transform itself into a self-reflecting thing. In which case then, what we’re headed for inevitably, what we are in fact creating, is a world run by machines. And once these machines are in place, they can be expected to manage our economies, languages, social aspirations, and so forth, in such a way that we stop killing each other, stop starving each other, stop destroying land, and so forth. Actually, the fear of being ruled by machines is the male ego’s fear of relinquishing control of the planet to the maternal matrix of Gaia. Ha. That’s it. Just a thought.”
Thank you! I pared this down as much as I could and still came up over 2000 words, which is normally my upper limit for posts. A lot to work in, and I could have gone on for thousands of more words. Glad you plowed through to the end!
You've brought a few important and intriguing sociological, pharmacological and technological themes together here, Geoff, in a way that really made me think. I am blown away by the predictions of Lilly and Dick and really pleased with McKenna's thought that the future may not be completely bleak.
As far as Lily's Earth Coincidence Control Organization goes, I don't think I am alone in marveling at how many coincidences seem to be generated by my personal tech. I can be thinking about something altogether novel, not mention it to anybody (be it an idea, an image, a location or person) and it will show up almost immediately on the internet. I am not searching for it. It just pops up.
It happens so frequently now, it can be a bit unsettling. I really hope it IS ECCO, if there is such a thing, and not the shadowy Solid State controllers. Again...if that is in any way real.
Thank you for this wonderful series of articles. I look forward to more!